After attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, Pierre-Amédée Marcel-Béronneau won a municipal scholarship in 1890 to pursue his study of art in Paris, where he initially enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In 1892 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts as a pupil of Gustave Moreau, his classmates there including Henri Evenepoel, Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. He shared a studio with Rouault on the Boulevard Montparnasse from about 1897 to 1907. In that year his address, as given in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the Salon des Artistes Français where he had been showing his work since 1896, became Impasse Ronsin 11, the very same address penned on the back of our painting’s oval stretcher frame.
The Symbolist subject inspired by the legend of Orpheus was a theme of which Béronneau had been fond since 1897, when he was invited by Gustave Moreau to take part in the last Salon de la Rose-Croix where he showed his Orphée en Enfers,1897, an oil on canvas now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille.
The subject of Orpheus perfectly reflected the mystic ideal underlying the Salons de la Rose-Croix promoted by Joséphin Péladan from 1892 to 1897, international venues at which Symbolist artists of the calibre of Delville, Khnopff, Toorop and Hodler showed their work. These salons were to become the fulcrum of the spiritualist idealism of the Rosicrucian confraternity which proposed to purify art of the dross of positivist materialism, assimilating the cult of art to the sacred nature of Catholic ritual, yet veined with esotericism. In that context, the figure of Orpheus, who tamed wild beasts and enchanted the gods of the underworld with his songs, embodied the ideal of the artist as interpreted by the Symbolist creed inspired by Baudelaire, in other words a person capable in the temple of Nature of seizing correspondences, of penetrating the mystery of pulsating life through his ability to merge with it as though in a sacrifice. That is why artists depicted Orpheus as a “martyr, saviour, mediator between heaven and earth, and archetype of artistic genius” (see V. Greene 2017). Numerous French works of art exalted the tragic, human ideal and the ideal of divine grandeur, from Puvis de Chavannes’ Orphée, 1883, oil on canvas, (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and the Lamentation d’Orphée, 1896, oil on wood, (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) by his pupil Alexandre Séon, to La Douleur d’Orphée, 1897, by Léon Printemps, a pupil, like Béronneau, of Gustave Moreau.
The Orpheus in our oval composition is shown in the moment of despair following the disappearance of Eurydice. He has abandoned his lyre, the instrument that accompanied his singing, and lies prostrate on the ground, his open arms outstretched in a pose that helps to liken him to the crucified Christ, almost as though the intention were to underscore the value of his sacrifice. He is immersed in a Nature now reduced to a mere multiplied, reflecting intensity of colour midway between bright, shining red and blue.
Our painting should probably be dated to some time between 1907 and 1912.
It was precisely at the start of 1909 that Khali Gibran, future author of The Prophet who was devoting his energies at the time to the study of painting, frequented Béronneau’s workshop as a student. Béronneau had gathered about a dozen pupils about him at that time, and Gibran said of him: “He is a great artist and an outstanding painter, as well as a mystic”.