Thomas Couture was a student of Baron Gros from 1830 to 1835, entering the École des Beaux-Arts in 1831. After a further period of study with Paul Delaroche, he became an independent master. He gained a considerable amount of notoriety with some of his first submissions to the Salon, such as his debut painting of Young Venetians after an Orgy, shown at the Salon of 1840. Couture achieved his first great public success, however, at the Salon of 1847, where his grandiose painting of The Romans of the Decadence won first prize and was purchased by the State; it is now in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Soon afterwards he began work on a second monumental canvas, entitled The Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792. Intended for the Assemblée Nationale but never completed, the painting survives today in its unfinished state. Among his other important public commissions was the decoration of the chapel of the Virgin in the church of Saint Eustache in Paris, executed between 1851 and 1856. Couture failed, however, to complete a number of other large-scale decorative projects, notably in the Pavillion Denon of the Louvre. In 1847 he established his own private art school in Paris, where he rejected the staid principles of the academic system in favour of an emphasis on freedom of brushwork, the use of pure colour and the importance of the preliminary oil sketch, or ébauche. He also published a book outlining his ideas, the Méthode et entretiens d’atelier, in 1867. Highly successful as a teacher, he counted among his pupils Puvis de Chavannes and Edouard Manet, as well as several American painters, such as Eastman Johnson and John La Farge. Much of Couture’s work was destroyed during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, and the largest surviving groups of his paintings and oil sketches are today in the Musée Nationale du Château in Compiègne and the Musée d’Art et Archéologie in Senlis.
Beginning in 1857, Couture treated the theme of the adventures of the French commedia dell’arte stage characters Pierrot and Harlequin in seven paintings. Both sides of this drawing are preparatory studies for the head of the masked figure of Harlequin in one of these paintings; The Trial of Pierrot, painted in 1863 and now lost. The composition of the picture is known, however, from a number of finished drawings, as well as a smaller replica painted in oils, executed between 1864 and 1870 and today in the Cleveland Museum of Art1. The scene is set in a courtroom, with Pierrot seated at the centre of the composition. He is accused of stealing food and wine from an innkeeper and his cook, who are seated at the left, with the stolen goods on the floor between them and the accused. Pierrot is defended by his master, the masked Harlequin, who gestures at the pair of dozing magistrates.
A large number of preparatory studies for the Cleveland painting are known, including drawings for each of the figures as well the room and its furnishings2. Another chalk study for the head of the masked Harlequin is in the collection of the Musée Nationale du Château in Compiègne3. A finished compositional study for (or ricordo of) the painting was on the New York art market in 19964, while another is in the Brandegee Charitable Foundation, Boston5.
1. G. Bertauts-Couture, Thomas Couture (1815-1879): Sa vie, son oeuvre, son caractère, ses idées, sa méthode, par lui-meme et par son petit-fils, Paris, 1932, illustrated facing p.88; Senlis, Musée de L’Hôtel de Vermandois, Thomas Couture: Dessins (1859-1869), exhibition catalogue, 1993-1994, illustrated p.11; d’Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.173-177, no.65.
2. Several preparatory drawings for the painting are illustrated in Senlis, ibid., pp.10-14, nos.5-16. A list of the known preparatory drawings for the painting is given in d’Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit., Vol.I, p.176.
3. Senlis, op.cit., p.12, no.9.
4. Molly Klobe (Chamberlin Gallery, Inc.), Nineteenth Century French Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1996, no.7.
5. d’Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit., Vol.I, p.174, fig.65a.
Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision, New Haven and London, 1980, pp.318 onwards...
