The Artist: Biard made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1824, and his success was assured through the awarding of a second-class medal in 1827 and a first-class medal in 1836. The Salon would be a mainstay of Biard’s career and he treated it as the subject of what is arguably his most emblematic painting,
The Salon, 4:00 in the Afternoon (1847, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 2347), which depicts visitors to the exhibition and its guards losing attention and their sense of decorum at the end of a long day. Infused with humor, the picture showcases Biard’s efforts as a painter of the
juste-milieu, a term that refers to art and artists who straddled academic and Romantic stylistic tendencies to address bourgeois mores and ambitions under the July Monarchy of French King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (r. 1830–48). Biard traveled widely, and he incorporated into his art the diverse people, wildlife, and landscapes he encountered throughout the Mediterranean, the Arctic, and the Americas. Though traditional in style, the artist’s paintings reveal a breadth of subject matter unusual for his time, extending through eras associated with Neoclassical, Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist art.
The Painting: A young, bearded Black man is depicted bust-length in a three-quarters view. Biard conveyed the model’s physical presence through an emphasis on tone and the materiality of paint rather than line. His chest and shoulders are treated summarily, but the modelling of the head, which faces forward, is carefully observed.
The same model posed in a similar position for another study by Biard, which shows him nearly full-figure—he is cropped mid-shin by the bottom of the canvas—and clothed (see fig. 1 above). In that work, he sits on a sort of platform, with an open shackle and chain beside him. The picture is inscribed “1848,” which must reflect the year in which both studies were painted. It was common for artists to sketch an entire figure before producing more careful studies of specific details, and, in the case of these two works, it is probable that The Met’s head-and-shoulders study came second.
The production of studies of unaccessorized, often unclothed, human figures was a core feature of nineteenth-century artistic practice and considered an essential step in the development of complex, multi-figure compositions. In 1848, a year of revolution and hope for liberal reforms across Europe, Biard received a state commission to paint
Proclamation de la liberté des noirs aux colonies, or
Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies on April 27, 1848 (fig. 2). Slavery was abolished in France and its colonies in 1794, during the Revolution, but Napoleon reintroduced it in the colonies in 1802. The vast composition, measuring approximately eight-and-one-half by thirteen feet, was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1849 (no. 167). Although a Salon had taken place in 1848, the 1849 iteration was the first official exhibition to fully reflect reforms introduced under the short-lived Second Republic (1848–52). The present study was not adapted directly for any single figure in the large painting, but the model is almost certainly the same as the one employed for its central male protagonist. However, the majority of figures in the Salon picture have generalized features. The composition must have required many other studies, but today, none has been traced.
In both the study dated 1848 and The Met’s study, the model’s upturned gaze seems natural enough. Given the theme of the abolition of slavery, however, it is ultimately related to the Christian conception of grace, as represented in such works as
The Tears of Saint Peter, painted by Jusepe de Ribera about 1612–13 (The Met
2012.416). In the present case, a more relevant and recent example is
The Enslaved Man (Ira Aldridge), by John Simpson (fig. 3), as well as the reproductive engraving (fig. 4) that disseminated the image immediately after the painting’s completion, in 1827, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In the context of Biard’s
Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, the devotional nature of grace would also be adapted to a secular context, with the beneficence of the imperialist French state and its citizen colonists taking the place of the divine. Biard’s painting is duly celebratory. However, to the extent that it gives no hint of formerly enslaved people’s own struggle for their liberation in France’s overseas colonies (notably the revolution in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture from 1791 to 1804), the picture is decidely one-sided.[1]
In this way, while The Met’s study is objective as a rendering, it is also encoded with the values of the time and place in which it was made and part of a living tradition of art making and construction of meaning. Biard first expressed abolitionist sympathies in such works as
The Trade in Enslaved People (Wilberforce House Museum, Hull), set on the west coast of Africa and exhibited at the Salon in 1835, the year it was completed. A later example, based on an 1858–60 journey to Brazil, the United States, and Canada, is
Sale of Enslaved People in the Southern United States (1861, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). Reliably datable to 1848, the present work was produced at the midpoint between these two paintings.
History of the Painting: The Met’s picture was acquired at an unknown date by Pierre Dubaut (1886–1968), who formed a great collection of works by Théodore Gericault (1791–1824) in the interwar years. It had long been thought to be identical with a painting once owned by comte Frédéric-Christophe de Houdetot (1778–1859), which was described in his estate sale (Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 9–10, 1859, postponed to December 12–14, 1859, no. 58), as “Tête de Nègre avec barbe,” or
Head of a Black Man with a Beard, as by Gericault.[2]. The source for the connection between the study owned by Houdetot and this one cannot be verified based on currently available information.
The study was first published as a work by Gericault by Philippe Grunchec (1979), but the attribution was challenged by Lorenz Eitner (1980). An alternative was recognized prior to its sale in 2021, when it was given to Biard. The basis for the attribution was its similarity to the figure study (fig. 1), occasioned by the latter work’s inclusion in the first monographic exhibition devoted to Biard, held at the Musée de Victor Hugo, Paris, in 2020–21. Both paintings were demonstrably the result of the same session.
The present work has not yet been identified with any document as being in Biard’s studio. The artist held an atelier sale during his lifetime that included many figure studies labeled by geographical origin, but the present whereabouts of these works is unknown (
Catalogue de tableaux et d’études peintes d’après nature par M. Biard en Amerique, en Laponie, en Orient, en Espagne, en Suisse et en France . . . . , Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 6–8, 1865). Nor have the sixteen lots comprising “vingt-sept études,” described as
Types espagnols et sauvages under the heading
Études in his posthumous atelier sale been identified (
Catalogue des oeuvres de M. Biard: Tableaux, Études, Aquarelles, Dessins . . . . , Hôtel Drouot, Paris, January 22–23, 1883, nos. 65–80). Further research may shed light on these studies as well as The Met’s, and may even lead to assigning a name to the model.
Asher Miller 2022
[1] I am grateful to Denise Murrell for emphasizing this point.
[2] Houdetot was a French politician. His upbringing was unconventional: following the death of his father, he was raised “in the colonies” by his grandfather. Houdetot held an interest in art that led him to study first with Jean-Baptiste Regnault and then Jacques Louis David, and which he later indulged as a collector.
