Last Portrait

This exhibition evokes the practice of portraying the deceased either on his death bed or in his coffin, before burial. This "final portrait" - death mask, painting, drawing or photograph – would normally remain within a narrow circle of relatives and friends, but, in the case of famous personalities, it could also be widely circulated in public. This practice, extremely common in Western countries in the nineteenth century and until the first half of the twentieth century, has more or less disappeared, or at least remains strictly private.

About two hundred artworks are exhibited, ranging from the end of the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, from the supposed death mask of Battista Sforza, made in 1472, to the photograph of Mother Theresa, taken at her death in Calcutta in 1997. The purpose of the exhibition is to show how far back the tradition of the "dummy" goes; the print that took the place of the deceased's corpse in royal funerals or the private and bourgeois tradition of the painted death -bed portrait, as found in 17th-century Netherlands. The end of the 18th century is explored in detail, a time when beheading was in vogue (Robespierre, cast by the future Mme Tussaud), as was the display (Marat) or exhumation (Henri IV)of corpses.

When Napoleon died in 1821 and Gericault in 1824, their last portraits were widely circulated, giving rise to an intense commercial exploitation and also to surprising interpretations. The artworks, taken out of the reserves of the Malmaison and Rouen museums, will give an idea of the scale of this phenomenon. Contrasting with these public practices, a number of artists took to their pencils or paintbrushes to capture the final picture of a loved one. The most famous example is no doubt that of Madame Monet sur son lit de mort (Mme Monet on her Death Bed), but Scheffer, Delaroche, Henner, Regnault, Seurat, Rosso and Ensor did the same with their mother, sister or aunt.

What for some painters was a mere instinctive reaction seems nowadays shocking: how can one think of creating an artwork at the time of the deepest mourning? Yet, in reacting this way, they were only repeating the illustrious example of the Tintoret painting his dead daughter, a legend revived by Léon Cogniet in his moving painting exhibited at the Salon of 1843 (Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts).

The Third Republic saw the apogee of last portraits: one can hardly underline the extent of the publicity surrounding the last moments of great men and their last portraits. This was true of Victor Hugo in 1885, as no fewer than twelve artists, sculptors-modellers (Dalou), photographers (Nadar), painters and draughtsmen were summoned to his bedside. This type of image was used as covers for L'Illustration. A gallery of fame will include politicians, writers, composers and artists.

The visitor will hopefully find many surprises, as well as familiar faces: Gambetta, Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, Proust and Rodin, down to those of Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau, who died on the same day in October 1963.

For a long time the privilege of an elite, last portraits became more popular thanks to photography: very early on, daguerreotypes were made, in most cases by anonymous photographers. Modest but impressive pictures, attesting to the high level of mortality of women and children while conferring to these anonymous individuals a posthumous dignity. Thanks to these shots, those who remained could contemplate the picture – often the only one they possessed – of those who were gone and via these images could accomplish the necessary mourning.

Two painters, each in his own way, turned their private suffering into the medium of their art: Munch, who lost his mother and sister early on from tuberculosis, obsessively treated this theme with artworks that, however original, took their roots in the pictorial and photographic tradition; and Hodler, who accompanied his friend Valentine Godé-Darel through her illness, painting her portrait every day until the last moment. These pictures, far from being painful, show on the contrary a pacified image of death. The deceased often look younger and more beautiful than alive: they seem asleep, radiant in serenity.

Some of these "beautiful deaths" were the objects of all kind of fantasies, such as the mask of the Unknown Woman of the Seine, passing for the cast of the face of a drowned young woman, made at the Morgue around 1898-1900. This pure and virginal face caught the imagination both of Aragon and Man Ray, to the point of becoming, in the inter-war period, a visual and literary myth.

But there are also artists ready for sacrilege: in the late 1970s, Arnulf Rainer took photographs and death masks of great men - Beethoven, Frederic II - to paint over, stain and scratch them. Did the metaphor of the taboo of the representation of death appear during the 20th century?
Today, by exhibiting these artworks, we hope to show that a multidisciplinary reading is possible, feeding in particular on recent developments in the history of taste and thought and that these pictures can still induce a contemporary resonance.