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Henri Lehmann

EROS TRIOMPHANT ou LE CHAR DE L’AMOUR

Henri Lehmann’s career coincided with a period of unprecedented For the composition of Eros Triumphant, Lehmann may have harked
prosperity in France during the Second Empire. As a student of back to his own source from 1839 when he won a First-Class Medal
Ingres and a leading proponent of Academic art (he became a at the 1840 Salon for St. Catherine of Siena carried to her Tomb
Professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1875), Lehmann embodied (Musée Fabre, Montpelier). Each work shows a colorful figure
the traditional style that was popular with the country’s reigning group suspended in the sky and hovering in space; one sacred and
elite, including the Emperor and his wife, Eugénie. He was also one one profane. The palette of the two works is very similar and may
of the most sought-after portrait painters of the time, depicting such owe something to Lehmann’s exposure to the German Nazarenes,
luminaries as Chopin, Franz Liszt and Stendhal. when he was in Rome with Ingres in the 1830s. However, it was
the monumental 16th century fresco cycle, The Love of the Gods by
Painted in 1862, Eros Triumphant, with its mythological subject, Annibale Carracci installed at the Villa Farnese, which Lehmann
sensual female nude and polished surface, was representative of would have seen while in Rome, that most likely provided the source
the genre of painting that decorated the opulent private residences for the subject and composition of Eros Triumphant (see L’art en
that were springing up in Paris’s most prestigious neighborhoods. It France sous le Second Empire, Paris, exh. cat, 1978, pp. 379-380, no.
was also the type of painting that was always a winner at the annual 244). In addition, Madeleine Aubrun in her 1984 catalogue raisonné
Salon. In fact, it was at the Salon of 1863, that Alexandre Cabanel commented that Lehmann’s painting may also have been inspired
and Paul Baudry each exhibited paintings of luscious female nudes; by the following text from Voltaire, which appeared at the base of a
Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was purchased by the statue of love (1726) to warn against the destructive powers of love:
Emperor himself, while Baudry’s The Pearl and the Wave (The Prado,
Madrid) went to Eugénie. Even landscape painter, Jean Baptiste- Qui que tu sois voici ton maître
Camille Corot submitted a female nude to the 1861 Salon (Le Repos, Il l’est, le fut ou le doit être
The National Gallery, Washington, DC).
The first owner of Eros Triumphant was Lehmann’s brother-in-law,
Lehmann’s 1862 Eros Triumphant should be seen as the culmination Edmund Ernst Leopold Schlesinger Benzon. He and Lehmann’s
of decades of training for Academic perfection; after all, Lehmann sister, Elisabeth resided in London at 10, Kensington Palace
was one of Ingres’s most gifted students. High above the clouds in a Gardens, where we may assume the painting graced the walls of their
blue sky, Lehmann shows a young Cupid astride a lion, which serves residence.
as his airborne chariot. He is pulled through the sky by a couple
embracing (Venus and Mars?), their hands bound together by the
reins of the chariot that harnesses them. With this subject, Lehmann
found an excuse to paint a beautiful female nude, in keeping with
the trends of the time. A golden border, opulently decorated in a
type of grisaille, frames the figure group. This type of decorative
detail corresponds to the opulence of contemporary furniture
design, which was a major section of the 2016 exhibition at the
Musée d’Orsay, Spectaculaire Second Empire. One can easily imagine
Lehmann’s painting installed over a table by French furniture maker,
Frédéric Roux.

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