Art: Artistic Eaglets

The Manhattan art firm of Michael Knoedler & Co., quiet, old and svelte, has a quasi-institutional aura which many dealers envy. At least once a year Knoedler’s puts on a “prestige show,” a big loan exhibition of masterwork in which no single item is ostensibly for sale. Last week, Knoedler displayed against the black velvet of its inner rooms 58 borrowed pictures by three French artists of the early 19th Century: Gros, Géricault, Delacroix. The gate receipts were to go to a society called “La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français

The Safeguard of French Art is the creation of a rotund, twinkling Frenchman, the Due de Trévise, whose great grandfather, one of Napoleon’s marshals, was killed by an infernal machine in 1835 while riding beside King Louis Philippe. In gratitude to the family, the King gave their name to a street, the Rue de Trévise near the Folies-Bergère. When the Folies first opened it was gaily called the Folies-Trévise, a name which the furious family succeeded in getting changed. The present Duke likes to talk about this regretfully. “My grandparents,” says he, “should have settled for a permanent box.”

In 1921 the Duke founded the “Sauvegarde” as a socialite, money-making organization to eke out Government care of French art treasures, of which he is a noted connoisseur. The particular passion of the Due de Trévise is for painting of that period when Napoleon’s eagles had deflected the operatic ardor of the French revolution into the ardor of Empire.

Schoolboys who retain from their history books an image of a pale, young Napoleon seizing the tricolor at the Battle of Arcole know the work of Baron Antoine Jean Gros. A pupil of David, the court painter and classicist, Gros took the field after he met Bonaparte at Milan and accompanied his army during the first Italian campaign. Charged by the Emperor with the duty of selecting artistic booty, he is responsible for the nucleus of the Louvre’s vast treasury. Little known in the U. S., Gros was represented last week at Knoedler’s by 17 pictures, six of them lent by the Due de Trévise. Best battle picture: Murat Beating the Egyptians at Aboukir.

Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault’s most famous canvas, The Raft of the Medusa,* was painted in 1819, four years after Waterloo. Géricault belonged to the swank Jockey Club and the swank Bourbon Musketeers instead of to the army of Napoleon. But among 23 of his pictures exhibited last week were several such as The Three Trumpeters (see cut), which showed the gift for color and the clangorous Romantic imagination which made Delacroix mourn his early death: “Poor Géricault, I will think of you very often. I imagine that your spirit will often come to hover about my work.”

The finest paintings in Knoedler’s show, however, were those by Eugene Delacroix, whose monumental Journal was first translated into English last year by Walter Pach (TIME, Nov. 1, 1937). Last week’s visitors saw his superb painting of the great violinist, Paganini; studies for some of his famous murals; colorful pictures of the Moroccan subjects by which he introduced the Exotic to French art—in all, 18 works by an artist whom Frenchmen consider as important in painting as Beethoven was in music.

*The Medusa, a ship bearing a French governor and military colonists to Senegal, ran on a reef off the coast of Africa, was abandoned by a set of cowardly and incompetent officers who loaded 152 of the passengers on an improvised raft. Nearly the whole company perished—one of the most gruesome horror stories in French history.