Poème de l'Âme - Louis Janmot
Introduction
Freely translated and adapted from
Poème de l’âme – un œuvre intempestive
(Poem of the Soul – a timeless work) by Patrice Beghan
Poème de l’âme is a cycle of painting and poetry that is unique in French art. It tells the story of the earthly tribulations of a soul, embodied in an androgynous young man, confronting and evading the forces of evil. Amidst ‘a permanent rustle of wings the soul and its guardian angel undertake the human journey in diaphanous clothing surrounded as-it-were by celestial music within the serene and familiar landscapes around Lyon illuminated in a supernatural light which caresses the pastel whites, saffron, oranges, purples and emeralds. Taking the figure from the safety of home as far as the “wrong turning,” where the menacing figures of a dark nightmare await pilgrims. Thence one pathway, the “Golden Ladder” of arts and sciences, ascends to God; whereas the other descends to a tomb.’
Louis Janmot himself is all but unknown today, but he was part of an authentic Lyonnais culture that remains as alive and independent of Parisian fashion as it ever was. Born to devout parents in 1814, Anne-François-Louis Janmot was profoundly affected by the childhood deaths of his siblings – an experience that probably lies at the heart of this cycle of paintings to which he devoted much of his life. Another influence was a life-long friendship with his fellow student at the Collège Royale in Lyon Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, who was to found a lay religious order—initially Le Conférence de Charité, later La Société de St. Vincent de Paul— whose role in French Catholicism was ultimately recognised with his beatification by Pope John-Paul II in 1997.
In 1831 Janmot entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, winning its highest honour, the Golden Laurel, before going as part a cohort to study in Paris with Ingres and Victor Orsel.
Two years later, after graduation, many of the Lyonnais cohort joined Ozanam’s newly founded Conférence and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where they were to meet fellow Lyonnais, Hippolyte Flandrin, a Prix de Rome scholar a few years their senior and another student of Ingres, renowned for his elegant and precise execution.
Following his return to Lyon in 1836 Janmot began to attract the notice of Parisian critics with large paintings on religious themes exhibited at the Salon in 1839/40. Five years later his work was praised by Baudelaire, and the influential Théophile Gautier was impressed by his portrait of Lacordaire – whose æsthetic is evidently a precursor of the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood.
Janmot had begun Poème de l’âme in Rome, and between other commissions he occupied himself with the first series of 18 paintings over the next decade. After the work was exhibited in Lyon in 1854 the reaction encouraged Janmot to take it to Paris in May 1855 during the Exposition Universelle in hope that some official recognition might lead to commissions.
“So, it takes or it doesn’t? Who knows? But this is not the end, either way" Janmot wrote to Ozanam. Alas when exhibited at Exposition Universelle the result was not what he hoped for; yet several critics noticed the Poème, among them Gautier who concluded a favourable article saluting Janmot’s ‘rare courage’ and linking him to the contemporary Viennese Lukasbund or ‘Nazarene’ movement. Baudelaire visited too, and while being skeptical about the verse, wrote: ‘it must be acknowledged that as pure art the composition of these scenes and their restrained colours has infinite charm, difficult to describe, but something of the sweetness and solitude of the sacristy or cloister – an unconscious, childlike mysticism.’
The following year an intervention by Eugène Delacroix, then at the height of his fame, saw Poème de l’Âme presented along with Janmot’s new Fleur des Champs at a temporary Palais des Beaux-Arts on Avenue Montaigne. Unfortunately, as the critic from La Revue du Lyonnais records, the 18 paintings were ‘perched at a height where no one could be expected to see them.’ Once again, Janmot’s intimate œuvre did not appear to advantage amid retrospectives of the large-scale paintings of his master lngres, Delacroix himself and Alexandre Decamps.
Nevertheless Delacroix confided this perceptive judgment to his journal after their first meeting which Janmot had requested: ‘this really interesting personality may be drowned out by the vulgar chic that dominates everything here. […] There is a remarkable Dantesque fragrance to Janmot that makes me see the famous Florentine’s angels in the purgatory. I love the green dresses like meadow grass in May, and the heads, inspired or dreamt, like memories of another world. I fear we will not give this naïf the justice which is his due. His primitive style places him beyond convention, for he speaks his own language—perhaps it is does not even count as a language—since we must view his ideas through the confusion and the primitive naivety of his expressive technique. Nevertheless a very singular talent is presently among us.’
In December of that year Janmot married Leonie Saint-Paulet of a noble family in Carpentras. Several fresco commissions followed including the new Lyon town hall, and he was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1861 Janmot decided to move his family to Paris having been promised a religious fresco; but after three years the project had failed to materialise. Finding himself in dire straits, he was forced to take a teaching post at the Dominican School of Arcueil. The family settled in Bagneux, and here he made many beautiful portraits of them, of which only photographs exist in the public domain. He now extended Poème de l’Âme with a second series of eight large charcoal drawings, enhanced by white gouache, representing the torments of a soul who has cast aside hir guardian angel. This was followed by a third and final series in 1868.
By now the rise of historically-informed religious painting by the Lukasbund or ‘Nazarenes’ in Vienna and the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood in London gave added focus to the first series of Poème, but no comparable movement arose in France, and interest in Janmot’s two later series seems to have been dissipated by their austere monochrome. As he used colour elsewhere in his paintings of this period we must conclude that he intended the monochrome symbolism of the later series to be an allegory of a soul—and indeed a society—which had cast off its spiritual heredity in favour of industrial materialism.
But in 1870 catastrophe struck. Léonie died after the birth of their seventh child; and Prussian troops menaced Bagneux. Janmot fled to Algiers where he occupied himself with landscape paintings. (Presumably the children were looked after by his wife’s family?) When he returned the following year his house had been wrecked and there was little work to be had. After producing a fresco for a Franciscan chapel, work dried up entirely.
Managing to procure some commissions in Toulon, Janmot moved there to be reunited with children. He was also fortunate to find a patron in the person of Félix Thiollier, an industrialist who financed the publication of the complete painting and poetry of Poème de l’Âme but it did not arouse much interest.
After living in Toulon for 15 years Janmot, now 71, returned to Lyon to marry his former student Antoinette Currat. For the next two years he occupied himself with charcoal drawings on the theme of the After Life, which were in effect a kind of continuation of the Poème. In 1887 a 500-page anthology of his writings Opinion d’un artiste sur l’art was published in Lyon and Paris. He died in 1892 at the age of 78.
In recent decades by the art historian Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier has written extensively about Janmot, and presents him as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism, whose work, like Flandrin’s is characterised by an immaculate finish they both learnt from Ingres. While Janmot’s intense mysticism links him stylistically to the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, he was, as Delacroix noted, sui generis and without interaction with either movement. The influence of his ideas is evident in later Symbolists like Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, tho their work exhibits a more universalist spirituality than Janmot’s ardent Catholicism.
After the fairly limited uptake of Thiollier’s publication the paintings entered obscurity, preserved in the painter's family. Selected in 1921 for an exhibition devoted to the pupils of lngres, the artist-critic Maurice Denis described Janmot’s paintings ‘marvels of invention and poetry.’ Later in that decade, Henri Focillon, a director of the Lyon Musée de Beaux Arts, wrote in La Peinture au XIXme Siècle that Janmot's Poème was ‘the most remarkable, coherent, and strangest work that spiritual romanticism gave birth to in Europe.’ Adding ‘In [it] there is a depth of poetry and an expressively enigmatic power which far exceeds Blake and the English Pre-Raphaelites.’
But not until 1950 was the full cycle once again exhibited at the Lyon Beaux-Arts by its director René Jullian, who cited Janmot’s virtues as ‘the feeling of fantasy and the feeling of grace still capable of attracting lovers of symbolism and the catchers of dreams.’ When a total re-hang of the Beaux Arts collection took place in 1968, Philippe Durey decided to devote a complete room in the museum to this remarkable cycle, which it has occupied ever since.
In the year he completed the third series of Poème de l’Âme Janmot wrote “I sometimes find myself, like everyone else, smiling at my obstinacy in completing a work begun 40 years ago: I will be long dead before people discover it. So my work really is quite similar to that of the Chinese who spending part of their lives decorating their own graves.” It was as if throughout his existence Janmot had been preoccupied with erecting for posterity son propre Tombeau.
