The dilemma of the French history painter, 1870-1914: Jean-Paul Laurens, Paul-Albert Besnard, Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse

The genre of history painting (la peinture d'histoire) in France was noted by many art world observers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century as being in steep decline. Nonetheless, as an elevated category of art (la grande genre) subsidized by the state, history painting came to embody France's cultural eminence in the visual arts and to serve state ideological needs. After 1870-1 history painting was quickly and deliberately infused with new purpose under the Third Republic, proliferating more than has been generally acknowledged. It would remain a chief instrument of national cultural policy through the end of the century.;Three artists have been selected to typify the period's diverse approach to history painting, ranging from Laurens' sobriety and sincere Republicanism, through Besnard's visually exuberant Secessionist aesthetic, to Rochegrosse's sensationalist and gargantuan canvases.;The social context of these artists is examined. A group of early Third Republic artists, prominently including Laurens and Rochegrosse, exhibited history paintings rife with violent imagery, a phenomenon traceable in part to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the violently suppressed Paris Commune. While Laurens continued to affirm the moral and didactic precepts, even gravitas, of history painting, Rochegrosse set aside many of these characteristics in favor of melodramatic theatricality, thereby detaching history painting from its traditional hierarchical vision as defined by the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.;Prix de Rome winner Besnard typifies a group of Ecole-trained painters who abandoned the usual narrative mode. In many of his public commissions, Besnard returned to the grand allegorizing manner of Baroque art yet wedded to the intensely coloristic approach drawn from his Impressionist contemporaries.;Also described is the advent of such technologically innovative visual media as the panorama and the cinema. Though less hieratic and more populist, the cinema, in noteworthy instances, appropriated history painting imagery for its spectacle value and audience appeal. Though depleted of the moralizing elements first envisioned for it by Nicholas Poussin and Charles LeBrun, examples of history painting on canvas did survive as late as 1914 and beyond, in much-mutated form.