Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret

Collection of M. Quennouëlle, in 1930;

Thence by descent to the present owner.

Paris, Salon de 1878, no. 622;

Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Dagnan-Bouveret, 5-31 May 1930, no. 6 (as belonging to M. Quennouëlle).

'Rétrospective des œuvres de Dagnan-Bouveret', in Le Monde illustré, Paris, 24 May 1930 p. 363;

Dagnan-Bouveret and the transformation of the academic tradition, exh. cat., Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, September-December 2002, mentioned p. 48.

The painting illustrates a scene from the famous novel by the Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut, published for the first time in 1731 with the title Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, an account of the unhappy love affair between Manon Lescaut, a young woman of loose morals, and the Chevalier des Grieux. Dagnan-Bouveret depicts the dramatic scenario following Manon’s death in Louisiana. The catalogue of the 1878 Salon describes the scene precisely: ‘I (des Grieux) took the decision to bury her and await my own death upon her grave. It was not difficult to break the earth in that place: the soil was sandy in those parts. I broke my sword in order to dig with it, but it proved less useful than my hands’.

While the literary subject borrowed from the eighteenth century and the tragic end of the heroine are redolent of Romanticism, the painting is closely connected to Naturalism – an artistic trend that prevailed in the 1880s – in the simplicity of its composition, the precise brushstroke and the search for psychological truth. The clear colours and the high horizon reveal the influence of the undisputed master of Naturalism in painting, Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Despite this double influence, or perhaps because of it, The Chevalier des Grieux burying Manon Lescaut is a profoundly original and surprising work. Manon’s outstretched body and the grave awaiting her, being dug in the foreground, is rendered even more macabre by the even light that illuminates the lifeless desert landscape, the elegance of the figures’ attire and the beautiful warm ochre of the sand. The scene’s power also resides in its neutral quality. Nothing suggests mourning, not even the Chevalier des Grieux’s restrained demeanour. Only his fixed, bewildered gaze expresses his despair.

There is a known preparatory drawing, in which the Chevalier has a rugged face and short hair (it was the artist’s brother, Gabriel, who posed for him), paradoxically closer to Naturalism than the idealized image in the painting. An autograph replica in oil, measuring 70 x 99 cm, signed and annotated in the artist’s hand ‘Réduction d’après l’original exposé au Salon de 1878 Paris’ [‘Reduction after the original exhibited at the 1878 Paris Salon], was sold to a collector by the Galerie Stair Sainty. An 1881 photo-engraving by Goupil after the Salon painting was published in the series Masterpieces of French Art in 1882.

Although the Abbé Prévost’s novel was regarded as scandalous and banned in France when it was published in 1731, it won over the public when a new edition came out in 1753. Its popularity has never waned, as is attested by the many editions of the novel (more than 200) and operas (three of them at the very end of the nineteenth century, by Jules Massenet in 1884 and 1894 and by Giacomo Puccini in 1893). In painting, the novel is recalled in Manon Lescaut by Maurice Leloir, dated 1892, whose composition is inspired by Dagnan-Bouveret’s work (Dahesh Museum of Art, New York). The first of many film adaptations appeared in 1912.