Gustave Boulanger (paris, 1824-1888), The Nymph Echo (circa 1885)

GUSTAVE BOULANGER (Paris, 1824-1888)
The Nymph Echo
Around 1885
Oil on panel
24 x 18 cm
Red stamp with Boulanger's signature at the bottom right (this stamp was created for the Boulanger sale in 1889)
Mark on the back of Lefranc & Cie, a caduceus and an anchor crossed with an L and an F, dating between 1880 and 1890
Label on the back, very damaged, but Boulanger's middle name "Clarence" is legible
Probably n° 56 of the Boulanger sale, described as "L'Appel" and annotated by hand as "Echo". Sold for 110 livres
Literature: Gustave Boulanger, Sale, member of the Institute, Professor at the School of Fine Arts. Hôtel Drouot, March 14-16, 1889, Paris 1889

This moving figure by Gustave Boulanger offers an interesting comparison with the Echo by his colleague Alexandre Cabanel, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Where Cabanel's Echo is decorative ("easily consolable" as Georges Lafenestre said in 1889), Boulanger's figure dissolves before our eyes, in short it is a painting that truly represents the pathos and agony of the story of the nymph Echo.

In relation to the small format of this Echo painting we can quote Boulanger himself: "We can treat a large subject in a small format, since we concentrate it, but we feel that by developing a small subject in a large frame we only dilute it. What is true in one art is true in all." (Gustave Boulanger, For our students, Paris 1885, p. 7.)