Remembering Regnault
Adored by contemporaries; almost forgotten by posterity.
Henri Regnault, Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, 1868, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew”
ADONAIS. vi, 7.
“Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck in thunder?
Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible.
He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength : he goeth on to meet the armed men.
He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted ; neither turneth he back from the sword.
The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield.
He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage”
JOB. 30: 19-24.
In the spring of 1868, an enormous parcel arrived at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. Within was a canvas, more than 10 feet by 10 feet in size, the first envoi of a prodigiously talented, temeritous painter training at the Académie de France à Rome. The painter was the 24-year-old Henri Regnault. The painting was the dolorously majestic Automédon ramenant les coursiers d’Achille des bords du Scamandre.
Or we might begin with the horses. These “unruly jades” are Xanthos and Balios, “horses that flew swift as the blowing of the winds: they were borne to the west wind Zephyrus by Podarge the Storm-mare, as she grazed in a meadow beside the stream of Ocean.”
We could even begin with their tears, those huge drops of human sorrow they shed at the death of their “great-hearted” charioteer, Patroklos, “the brave son of Menoitios.” Cavafy would certainly have us begin there:
“When they saw that Patroklos had been slain,
that one so strong, so young and so valiant,
Achilles’ horses began to weep;
their immortal spirits enraged to witness the handiwork of death.
They reared their heads and shook their manes,
scarred the earth with their hooves, and mourned
Patroklos, rendered lifeless, gone,
now useless flesh, his soul no more,
defenceless, never more to breathe,
cast out of life into nothingness.”
C.P. Cavafy, The Horses of Achilles, trans. Stratis Haviaras
And what of the muscular young man desperately clutching the reins of these spirited steeds? Why is there such a pathos in his attempts to retrieve the horses? All in good time.
Then there is the forest of Buzenval. After dinner, on a warm August evening in 1866, Regnault, the poet André Theuriet, and the composer Augusta Holmès ambled through its moonlit trees, gazing at the silver catkins. Theuriet recalls how Regnault sang “under the light of the stars,” his voice “filled with youthful verve.” Did the painter glimpse the low yellow wall creeping through the woods? Four years later, he would be killed by a Prussian soldier hiding behind that ancient fortification, in a now withered and snow swept Buzenval forest. Like W.H. Auden’s Achilles, “he would not live long.”
But it would be banal to begin at the end. After all, so much has been written (and invented) about that tragic, premature end. So, let us begin with the envoi and the man who submitted it.
Alexandre Georges Henri Regnault was born on October 31, 1843. His father was Victor Regnault, one of the foremost chemists of his generation, a recipient of the Copley and Rumford medals, a professor at the Collège de France, the founding president of the Société française de photographie, and the Director of the Sèvres porcelain works. Victor ensured that his son received a classical education and took the bachelier ès lettres, the basic French undergraduate degree. Regnault’s first Anglophone biographer, the renowned Paris-based art-historian, P.G. Hamerton, reports that the bachelier required “a very thorough knowledge of French, much Latin, and a little Greek.” As we shall see, this classical education had an enduring influence on Regnault, with both his correspondence and his work betraying an intimate acquaintance with antiquity.
Henri Regnault, Autoportrait avec un appui-main, circa. 1863, Wikipedia.
Nevertheless, it was patently clear that from a young age Henri was, above all, interested in drawing. His innate propensity for drawing and the precocious artistic talent that accompanied it are captured in Victoire Tinayre’s 1882 Henri Regnault, enfant. This livre de poche was one of a series of books written in simple, childish French with the aim of introducing children to some of the great republican intellectuals and cultural figures of the Deuxième République and Second Empire, including Raspail, Hugo, Michelet, and Quinet. The volume begins with Madame Regnault knitting by the fire in the family’s apartment at the Collège de France. She is entertaining the prolific orientalist painter, Antoine-Alphonse Montfort, a friend of the family who will later become one of Henri’s most important mentors. Her eldest son, the 9-year-old Léon, is conscientiously translating a Latin passage, while the 6-year-old Henri is drawing. The clock sonorously strikes 10. “All right,” says Madame Regnault, “all right, my little Henri. It’s 10 o’clock. Time to go to bed.” Henri stares at his mother pleadingly, like a kitten begging his owner for another bowl of tepid milk. “Just another minute, please, mummy, please. I’m nearly finished… I just want to draw a little longer. Please, just one more minute. I want to draw some more.” Sighing at her son’s endearing persistence, Madame Regnault asks what Henri is drawing; “it’s about the story you told me, you know, about Joseph – Joseph, that poor little boy who was sold by his brothers, a long, long time ago, in a land far away where the sky is always blue, where there are camels and lions – oh, how I would like to go there,” replies Henri. Eventually, Madame Regnault’s patience runs dry and she curtly orders Henri to go to bed. However, we are told that just before she whisks her son off to his bedroom Madame Regnault “went over to the table and examined little Henri’s drawing. She and Montfort looked at each other without saying a word. And then she put her hands to her eyes. She was crying! She wept out of happiness.”
While the veracity of this anecdote’s precise details is debatable, Tinayare’s story illuminates the traits that would shape Regnault’s life and celebrity. His obdurate entreaties reflect an intrinsic proclivity for drawing bound with a grudging unwillingness to adhere to instructions. The silence of his mother and Montfort, followed by Madame Regnault’s joyous tears, are a marked indication of Regnault’s singular talent. Less conspicuously, his dreams of travelling to Africa are a sign of a nascent orientalism that would produce tableaux as varied as Alhambra de Grenade – Entrée de la salle des Deux Soeurs and Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade, and culminate in his golden Salome, the “little yellow girl” that, in Paul de Saint-Victor’s words, “bewitched all of Paris.” But these dazzling paintings are not our chief concern. Regnault’s enthrallment with the Orient and the Salon’s greedy fascination with his depictions of it will have to wait for another day.
Henri Regnault, Salome, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1861, Regnault enrolled at the famous École des Beaux Arts. The École’s cluttered and paint-smeared ateliers had already nurtured the gifts and refined the techniques of David, Ingres, Delacroix, Géricault, Flandrin, Hébert, Bouguereau, and Degas. The company was truly illustrious, and the bar was exceptionally high. Regnault spent the first three years of his training under the rigidly Neo-Classical eye of Louis Lamothe, before transferring to the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, whose La Naissance de Vénus had just been purchased by Napoleon III for his private collection. It was under Cabanel’s tutelage that Regnault finally triumphed in the prestigious Prix de Rome.
He had unsuccessfully entered the competition, whose former victors included Peyron, David, and Ingres, on two previous occasions, in 1862 and 1864. Undaunted by his failures and buoyed by the knowledge that his tutor had himself won the coveted prize, Regnault decided to participate for a third time in 1866. That year the theme was Thétis apporte à Achille les armes forgées par Vulcain, a scene taken from the opening of Book XIX of the Iliad. In the scene the nereid Thetis beseeches her crestfallen son to stop mourning Patroklos, accoutre himself in the “glorious armour” forged by the smith god, end his vitriolic feud with Agamemnon, and revenge himself on the Trojans. Although Regnault began the contest with great zeal, he grew dissatisfied and disaffected as the weeks rolled on; with less than a fortnight remaining before the competition’s deadline, it seemed as though he would fail for a third time in five years. His great friend, Arthur Duparc, recalls that at one stage Regnault “foresaw yet another failure, abandoning his incomplete work and seeming to give up on the contest.” According to Duparc, only a serendipitous encounter with the sharp-nosed pianist and fledgling composer Augusta Holmès (remember that moonlit stroll in the Buzenval forest?) rekindled his determination:
“The competition was nearing its end; a few more days remained before the contestants emerged from the small studios, when Henri, who had come with me to spend an evening at a friend’s house, met a young girl whose expressive lineaments and unusual physiognomy had a profound effect on him. He immediately made two sketches of her, and we saw him become pensive. The next day he resumed work on the painting…giving his Thetis the fine and distinguished profile of the young lady he had met the previous evening.”
Regnault worked feverishly after meeting Holmès, completing his painting in just 12 days. The tableau was awarded the Prix de Rome by a unanimous decision of the prize’s judges; it was feted for its daring composition, the poignant counterpoint between Achilles’s vigour and Patroklos’s lifeless pallor, and Regnault’s consummate use of line, which rendered Thetis both dignified and alluring.
Henri Regnault, Thétis apporte à Achille les armes forgées par Vulcain, 1866, Wikipedia.
Victory in the Prix de Rome not only earmarked Regnault as one of the Continent’s most promising young painters, but entitled him to a four-year residency in the palatial 16th century surroundings of the Villa Medici, the home of the Académie de France à Rome. As a resident, or pensionnaire, at the Villa, Regnault was obliged to annually submit an envoi to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In his first year, the règlement stipulated that his envoi had to be a single nude figure, known as an académie; it was for this task that Regnault painted the immense Automédon ramenant les coursiers d’Achille des bords du Scamandre. Well aware that a multi-figure study was a brazen contravention of the règlement, Regnault ensured that the Académie’s Director, Ernest Hébert, did not catch wind of his irreverent plan until the painting was near completion. Meanwhile, he described what he hoped to achieve in the tableau in a letter to his close friend Henri Cazalis:
“It is a free translation. Automedon can be anything you want, and I have aimed, in my horses, not at the cut of the mane typical of Thessalian horses, but at that which is most noble and most terrifying in a horse, at that which might make the horse historical, the horse that spoke, the horse that foresaw the death of his master Achilles. The sky is overladen with storm clouds; a leaden sea begins to stir, furtively, although on the surface it still seems asleep. A ray of lugubrious sunshine casts a pale light along the horizon upon an arid, rocky shore. The horses, aware that their master is leading them into battle, that this battle will be his last, and will cost him his life, struggle and wrestle against the servant who has come to fetch them from their pasture. One of them, a dark bay, rears like a great dark spectre silhouetted against the sky. I wanted to give the painting a foretaste of disaster.”
Henri Regnault, Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, 1868, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Although Regnault’s letter does not contain any direct references to the passages of the Iliad that inspired his Automédon, it is obvious that the subject is greatly influenced by two memorable moments from the poem. The first is the scene in which Xanthos and Balios stand immobile on the battlefield, weeping for Patroklos, as the ferocious battle for his body rages on around them:
“Meantime, at distance from the scene of blood,
The pensive steeds of Achilles stood:
Their godlike master slain before their eyes,
They wept, and shared in human miseries.
In vain Automedon now shakes the rein,
Now plies the lash, and soothes and threats in vain;
Nor to the fight nor Hellespont they go,
Restive they stood, and obstinate in woe:
Still as a tombstone, never to be moved,
On some good man or woman unreproved
Lays its eternal weight; or fix’d, as stands
A marble courser by the sculptor’s hands,
Placed on the hero’s grave. Along their face
The big round drops coursed down with silent pace,
Conglobing on the dust. Their manes, that late
Circled their arched necks, and waved in state,
Trail’d on the dust beneath the yoke were spread,
And prone to earth was hung their languid head”
Iliad, Book XVII, trans. Alexander Pope
The nature of the horses’ sorrow in these lines is crucially important. Aphrodite and Apollo may demonstrate compassion for the dead Hector by ensuring that his body is not defiled by Achilles or corrupted by the passage of time. Zeus may take pity on the bloodied, dust-covered body of his son, Sarpendon, after he has been slain by Patroklos, and instruct Apollo to “carry him far away and wash him in the running stream of a river, and anoint him with ambrosia, and dress him in immortal clothing.” However, none of them mourn their beloved heroes as viscerally as Achilles’s divine coursers lament the death of Patroklos. None of them shed a single tear. None of them are so consumed by grief that they assume the sepulchral stillness of Xanthos and Balios: “restive they stood, and obstinate in woe:/ still as a tombstone, never to be moved.” Thus, the horses are liminal creatures, straddling both the divine and human worlds, reaping the boons of ageless immortality, and sharing in the woes of “unhappy mankind.” The tears that roll down their strong necks and stain their magnificent manes are an incarnation of the same human grief displayed by Regnault’s “frisky” steeds. Unlike the callously capricious gods, who kill men for their sport, Regnault’s Xanthos and Balios value Achilles’s life. Their flared nostrils, dishevelled manes, froth-soaked bits, tensed muscles, and almost audible neighing are all unmistakable signs of despondency. Despondency at the knowledge that they will soon be forced to carry another lion-hearted Myrmidon to his grave.
Henri Regnault, detail of Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, 1868, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Henri Regnault, detail of Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, 1868, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The second scene that undoubtedly inspired Regnault’s composition is the melancholic moment at the end of Book XIX, when Achilles thunderously lambasts Xanthos and Balios for failing to safely return Patroklos to the Achaean ships, ordering them to serve him better than they served his late friend. Bowing his head in an ominous presage of what he is about to tell his master, Xanthos responds:
“Achilles! yes! This day at least we bear
Thy rage in safety through the files of war:
But come it will, the fatal time must come,
Not ours the fault, but God decrees thy doom.
Not through our crime, or slowness in the course,
Fell thy Patroclus, but by heavenly force”
Iliad, Book XIX, trans. Alexander Pope
“But come it will, the fatal time must come”; Pope’s rendering of the Greek is a poetic gem that epitomises the plaintive magnitude of Xanthos’s reply. The chiasmus that begins and ends with “come” creates a sense of sinister inevitability; it traps Achilles in the nets of Fate – nets from which there can be no escape. The caesura illustrates the sympathy felt by the horse for its master: Xanthos understands the gravity of his words and recognises that he is powerless in the face of the cosmic order, just as he was when Apollo stripped Patroklos of his armour; he pauses not for breath, but because his prophecy emotionally overwhelms him. Most importantly, the long, plangent vowels in “fatal” and “time” transform the line into a dirge, a threnody intoned not by mortals, but by immortal creatures. Regnault’s depiction of the horses struggling against Automedon, Achilles’s loyal charioteer, invokes Xanthos’s prophecy. The horses resist Automedon’s attempts to bring them back to Achilles’s tent precisely because they possess the powers of prescience that he does not; because they know that he is unwittingly expediting his master’s death. This epistemic chasm between man and beast is the pathetic apogee of the painting. Its tragic visual grandeur is truly Homeric. It arrests us and reminds us of a lost world. A world of unadulterated beauty and ideals. A world “where promises were kept” and “one could weep because another wept.”
Regnault’s envoi was a triumph with the Parisian crowd. That year, people flocked to the typically quiet exhibition of the pensionnaires’ work with the sole objective of seeing the painting. Its massive size, the expert use of light and shadow on Automedon’s legs and torso, the sombre, barren landscape that compounds the sense of impending catastrophe, the singular intensity of Regnault’s tones and brushstrokes, and his daringness in openly defying the règlement’s specifications all astonished viewers. “There is not, today, a single painter in the French school who has a work of such brilliance, ardour, and power within him… Monsieur Regnault has begun [his artistic career] as many painters would want to be able to finish [theirs],” effused the art critic Marius Chaumelin.
Particularly lofty compliments were paid to Regnault’s fiery horses, and in the space of a few weeks the painter had been declared the heir to Géricualt and Delacroix. There is, indeed, something of Delacroix’s Combat du Giaour et du Pacha and Géricault’s Officier de chasseurs à cheval de la garde impériale chargeant in the colouristic violence of Regnault’s depiction of Xanthos and Balios. However, whilst Regnault’s coursers are redolent of Delacroix’s and Géricault’s, they are not derivative of them. They are a pictorial embodiment of Regnault’s personal brand of equine naturalism, which began with him drawing horses that he had seen in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in the margins of his school textbooks and later became so extreme that he cracked his skull whilst learning to ride an unbroken horse. Coincidentally, he had chosen that untamed Arab, who he knew had almost killed the French commandant to whom it belonged, specifically because he wished to better understand how Achilles’s horses would have moved and behaved.
But what of Buzenval? What of that moonlit mosey and the yellow wall? There is little to say. Less than three years after his Automédon mesmerised Paris, Regnault was killed in the final battle of the Franco-Prussian War. He was just 27.
I have deliberately avoided dwelling on either Regnault’s death or his later, orientalist works because relatively little has been written about the early stages of his brief but brilliant career. My hope is that my examination of this formative period and the Automédon, its chef-d’oeuvre, engenders a curiosity in Regnault’s paintings and an appreciation of the perennial beauty and significance of the subjects he chose to depict. For it would be a tragedy on the colossal scale of Automédon if Regnault’s masterpieces hung in an empty room, their coruscating colours slowly blackening.
January 19, 2021 will be the 150th anniversary of Henri Regnault’s death.