Louis Janmot (1814-1892) - Preparatory Study For The Painting Fleur Des Champs, Circa 1845

Louis Janmot (1814-1892)
Study of woman and arms; preparatory to the painting Fleurs des champs, circa 1845
Graphite pencil on paper
Annotated “C12” lower right
Dimensions of the work: 25 x 12 cm
Dimensions of the frame: 40 x 30 cm
Good condition - slight trace of diagonal fold

Poet and mystical painter born in Lyon in 1814, Louis Janmot was admitted to the School of Fine Arts in his hometown in 1831 where he obtained the highest distinction, the Laurier d'Or (Self-portrait, 1832). He moved to Paris two years later where he followed the painting course taught by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres before staying in Rome in 1835. He then completed his dual philosophical and artistic training alongside other emulators of the master such as Lyon artist Hippolyte Flandrin. Back in France, Louis Janmot entered the 1836 Painting and Sculpture Salon where he presented several large compositions. His Fleur des champs panel exhibited in 1846 aroused the interest of critics of his time and the admiration of Charles Baudelaire.

Raised in the Catholic faith, Louis Janmot became friends with the main actors in the renewal of Catholicism in Lyon. A singular artist who resists classification, he evolves among the mystics influenced by the German Nazarenes and foreshadows the French side of British Pre-Raphaelism. From the end of the 1850s, Louis Janmot received several orders for the decoration of churches and buildings in Lyon (Saint-François-de-Sales Church, decoration of the dome). In addition to the execution of these large sets, he designed a pictorial and literary work with a complex iconographic program that would occupy him all his life. Entitled The Poem of the Soul and presented in part at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 thanks to the support of Eugène Delacroix, this vast cycle traces the transmutation on earth of two soul mates to return to their celestial homeland. It consists of a set of eighteen paintings illustrating his ambitious poem. The development of such a program led to the execution of numerous detailed sketches at the graphite mine. The themes, marked with the seal of strangeness, also herald the symbolist current that appeared in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century.

Our study sheet is part of the period before 1845 during which the influence of Ingres is patent in the work of Louis Janmot. The search for perfect beauty and the precision of the design with flexible and pure lines evoke particularly the teaching of the master. This preparatory drawing testifies to the artist's research relating to the posture of the female figure in the painting Fleur des champs executed in 1845. The inclination of the forearms and the arrangement of the fingers of the left hand vary, however, with that of the composition. final. We find this same concern for precision in the position of the hand and the arrangement of the fingers of the model in the Self-portrait of 1832 as well as in Virginitas from the Poem of the soul, circa 1854.

Public collections
Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Paris, Musée du Louvre
Saint-Étienne, Musée d’art moderne
Versailles, Musée national du château de Versailles et de Trianon
Montbrison, Musée d’Allard

Main exhibitions
Louis Janmot, Le Poème de l’âme, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1950
Le Temps de la peinture, Lyon 1800-1914, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2007

bibliography
Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Louis Janmot, Lyon, thèse, 4 vol., 1969
Wolfgang Drost, Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Louis Janmot, précurseur du symbolisme, Heidelberg, C. Winter, 1994
Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Le Poème de l’âme par Louis Janmot, Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne, La Taillanderie, 2007
Le Temps de la Peinture, Lyon 1800-1914 , catalogue d’exposition., Lyon, Fage éditions, 2007 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon), p.78