GUÉRIN, Pierre-Narcisse

This painting, which recalls the work of Fuseli as well as David, depicts the moment when Clytemnestra is about to murder her unsuspecting husband Agamemnon with the aide of her lover Aegisthis. In Gu�rin’s composition, Agamemnon slumbers, his weapons laid out beside him, unaware of his imminent death while his assassins creep into his room. Gu�rin employs a rich palette of burnt orange and crimson to highlight the partially drawn curtain aglow with candlelight.

Dido was, in Roman mythology, the queen of Carthage. She was the daughter of a king of Tyre. After her brother Pygmalion murdered her husband, she fled to Libya, where she founded and ruled Carthage. According to one legend, Dido threw herself on a burning pyre to escape marriage to the king of Libya. In the Aeneid, Vergil tells how she fell in love with Aeneas, who had been shipwrecked at Carthage, and destroyed herself on the pyre when, at Jupiter’s command, he left to continue his journey to Italy.

In this painting Gu�rin depicted the scene when Aeneas narrates the destruction of Troy.

Henry Purcell (c. 1659-1695), the English composer and organist, composed an opera from the story of Dido and Aeneas. Listen to the MIDI version of the overture of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The memorial portrait of Henri de la Rochejaquelin, painted in 1817 by Gu�rin as one of a series of anti-republican heroes commissioned by Louis XVIII for the chateau of Saint-Cloud. This handsome general astride a barricade, with the white Bourbon flag behind him and the order of the Sacred Heart pinned on his breast, was plucked from the early history of royalist resistance as a deliberate counter to the republican icons of David and Gros.

Morpheus, the god of dreams, is the son of Hypnos, the Greek personification of Sleep. The Kingdom of Sleep was once visited by Iris, the messenger of Juno, with order to send Morpheus on errand. She is shown descending on bright wings from a rainbow and rousing the sleepy god.

Gu�rin is best known in art history as the teacher of G�ricault and Delacroix. His works are dominated by the mood of quiet contentment typical of the official art of the Napoleonic empire. Paintings such as this adorned the imperial residences, and the subject is ideally suited to luxurious private apartments.

Gu�rin’s Napoleon Pardoning the Rebels at Cairo has a grain of truth, since Napoleon had shown clemency to the Mamluk leaders of the 1798 rising - but only after the slaughter of most of the insurgents. Gu�rin burnishes Napoleon’s myth subtly, placing his hero to the rear and rather dwarfed by those he has pardoned, in a sort of inverted modesty. If the rebels are allowed dignity in defeat, it is to emphasize the magnanimity of the victor.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 51 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) in E Flat major op. 55 (1803)

In this painting Gu�rin gave a theatrical depiction of a tragical historical (although invented) subject. Sextus, returned from exile, is seated in a stoical pose beside the deathbed of his wife. His fixed gaze reflects his inner questioning of the meaning of life. The scene is of heathen times, but it makes concealed use of the old Christian iconography. The cruciform in which the grieving man and the dead woman are so strikingly composed underlays the painting with an additional metaphorical significance, and the position of the daughter, who is clinging to her father’s knee in pain, recalls the old Mary Magdalen motif in Christian art.