MADAME RECAMIER THE VIRGIN VAMP JACQUES LOUIS DAVID S PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER, THE LOUVRE, 1800 In 1792 Juliette, the only child of Jean Bernard, the King's counsellor and his wife, Marie Julie Matton was married at the age of 15 to Jacques-Rose Récamier (1751 1830), a banker nearly 30 years her senior. This is the only early event in her life that Clio, the muse of history (albeit a hopeless archivist), records, and we know nothing of her childhood and youth. Rumours abounded that Monsieur Recamier was in fact her natural father. Some of her biographers subscribe to this theory, others do not, and none have produced any decisive proof. The very idea of a 15 year-old girl incestuously marrying her own father seems utterly preposterous, however two factors support the idea of the father/daughter alliance. Firstly, the
marriage was never consummated. Secondly Recamier was the longstanding lover of Juliette s mother, and thus it is even more probable that he was in fact her father as effective contraception had not yet been invented. Their marriage occurred at the height of the revolutionary Terror, and paradoxically new legislation dictated that if Recamier died, Juliette, as his wife, would inherit his entire fortune without having to pay death duties, and, in fact, after her marriage Juliette found herself to be the wealthiest woman in Paris. Recamier wrote to a friend describing his prospective wife: "She possesses germs of virtue and principle such as are seldom seen so highly developed at so early an age; she is tender-hearted, affectionate, charitable and kind, beloved in her home-circle and by all who know her." Such was Juliette s character, or so her husband believed. Their union endured thirty eight years until Monsieur Recamier died in 1830. History does not record what the helpless Juliette felt about her husband and marriage de convenance which was obviously hastily arranged, without her consultation by her parents and her middleaged husband-to-be. Astonishingly - despite the Gallic tolerance for brief flings and long-standing affairs within wedlock - Juliette remained a virgin until she was in her forties which would seem to indicate some degree of conjugal concord. To quote the words of Cole Porter, did Juliette s heart belong to Daddy? She and her putative Papa soon launched out as stalwart patrons of avant-garde art and design. The furnishings and decorations of the Recamier s impressive hotel particulier (town house) in the Rue de Mont Blanc came to epitomize the Directoire style for their mansion was restored and decorated by Percier and Fontaine, the leading architect and ornamentalist of the day. Later the twosome were patronized on the most lavish scale by Napoleon when the tentative style Directoire evolved into the full-blown style Empire in all its weighty majesty. The Recamier s furnishings were supplied by the great menuisier (master carpenter), Georged Jacob who in pre-
revolutionary days had been favoured by Marie-Antoinette and many members of the royal family and prominent aristocrats. THE CABINET DORE (GILDED STUDY) OF MARIE ANTONETTE AT VERSAILLES WITH CHAIRS COMMISSIONED FROM GEORGES JACOB
SOME OF THE RECAMIER S FURNITURE LAVISHLY ORNAMENTED WITH GILT-BRONZE MOUNTS ON EXHIBITION IN LYON Percier and Fontaine s décor provided a glittering backdrop for Juliette who, despite her shy retiring disposition, gradually blossomed into one of France s greatest salonnières. Everything favoured such a development. Not only was she rich beyond measure, she was also one of the most celebrated beauties of the era, highly accomplished, witty and charming with a great passion for literature. All the leading literary and political eminences of early 19 th century France, frequented her salon, and as her fame spread across the entire continent, so distinguished foreigners swelled the throng. Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand - two of France s greatest writers - fell passionately in love with Madame Récamier - and became permanent fixtures of her salon. Much later both Napoleon and his arch-enemy, the Duke of Wellington, vainly competed for her favours.
AN ANONYMOUS MINIATURE OF MADAME RECAMIER: Théophile Gautier wrote of her "indescribable attraction, like the poetry of the unknown.
MADAME RECAMIER BY FRANCOIS GERARD: A lady s magazine of the period lauded the elegance of Juliette s couture. The thin white cotton gown, also seen in David s portrait, became iconic, and was widely imitated although it demanded a perfect figure. The featherlight garment emphasized Juliette s flawless complexion, arms and cleavage while the coloured shawl contrasted with the terra-cotta and red draperies and the lavender upholstery of her al antica chair
which at the time struck people as ultra-modern although it was firmly based on antique prototypes. Juliette used to entertain her guests, rather like Lady Emma Hamilton, with Terpsichorean capers using her shawl, and she is seen flushed after these activities in a far more flattering portrait than David provided, hence her preference for it. A DETAIL OF THE ABOVE: La Recamier s coiffeurs were quite the reverse of the towering, highly elaborate, powdered hairstyles of the Ancien Regime. A careless simplicity is the keynote of her selfpresentation, and she is always portrayed barefoot with minimal jewellery (Here a pair of inconspicuous pearl earrings) and costly adornments.
LADY EMMA HAMILTON AS A BACCHANTE BY MARIE LOUISE ELIZABETH VIGEE-LEBRUN: One of the great beauties of an earlier era, Emma Hamilton, through necessity rather than choice, started life as a poor and totally uneducated kept woman largely in order to support her family. Despite her humble origins, she was later to do Lord Hamilton and Horatio Nelson proud. She proved a fluent linguist, a gracious hostess, a wonderful singer (the Madrid Opera house attempted to engage her, but she had better fish to fry) and a loyal and treasured friend of the King and Queen of Naples. Emma captured the imagination of the European elite through what were termed her attitudes the mélange of static pose, dance and mime inspired by ancient Greek vase paintings and Greek and Roman statuary she performed, rather like Madame Recamier, to entertain her guests all of whom were part of the crème de la crème of society.
Nevertheless this extremely gifted, amiable and kind lady later died in abject poverty. PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER BY FRIMIN MASSONT, 1807. Madame Recamier never followed fashion. There was no need, for she was the fashion. The Recamier salon became the rallying place for many of the authors, intellectuals and politicians opposed to Napoleon. Two circumstances brought Madame Recamier under suspicion and rendered her persona non grata in her homeland. The first was her refusal to act as lady-in-waiting to Napoleon s consort Joséphine de Beauharnais. The second was Juliette s intimate friendship with Germaine de Staël, a blue-stocking, writer known throughout
Europe, and a virulent critic of Napoleon who expelled both her and Juliette from Paris. Juliette took refuge in Italy whilst her husband remained at home. (SORRY RUSHHIE, THE LAST BIT OF TEXT SHOULD BE BLACK WITHOUT UNDERLINING) During the years of her absence from France she visited Madame de Stael at her Swiss home. There at the age of thirty - she met and fell in love with Prince Augustus of Prussia, a nephew of Frederick the Great. Juliette wrote to her husband to ask for a divorce, but at the time his finances were in a calamitous state and he failed to act. Writing years later about her purely Platonic affair, Madame Recamier said, We were convinced that we were going to be married, and our relationship was very intimate; even so, there was one thing he failed to obtain. The one thing was of course her unpunctured hymen on which she set such great and tiresome store.
PRINCE AUGUSTUS OF PRUSSIA: The Recamier s did not divorce, and Prince Augustus never married. Ten years after he fell in love with Juliette Recamier, he had his portrait painted standing in front of a copy of her portrait above the mantelpiece in testimony to his lifelong devotion to her. Although a bachelor, two of his long-time mistresses bore him eleven children. Juliette returned to Paris following Napoleon s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 when she found herself in a very different position. Political and economic changes had impoverished her husband, and the couple were forced to sell their house, their silver, and Juliette s
jewellery. Even though she was living in straitened circumstances, her salon remained as popular as in days of yore. It is believed she finally lost her virginity at the age 40 in about 1818 when she was still a respectably married woman for her husband only died 22 years later in 1830. Her amant-en-titre (recognized lover) was the 50-year-old author, Chateaubriand, who had had several careers as a diplomat, a historian and author. Today he is mainly remembered as one of the lynchpins of the Romantic Movement in French literature. Francois-Rene Vicomte de Chateaubriand to give him his full name and title, hailed from a venerable old Breton aristocratic family of devout catholic and royalist sympathies. His memoirs bear the hauntingly poetic title Memoires d Outre-Tombe - or memoirs from Beyond the Grave - and they were only published posthumously. Chateaubriand became Juliette s constant companion, and the master of the house until he died in 1848 in a separate apartment at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, an old Paris convent to which Juliette had retired.
CHATEAUBRIAND MEDITATING ON THE RUINS OF ROME BY ANNE-LOUIS GIRODET, 1808: Romantic melancholy was a la mode and the Byronic-looking Chateaubriand with his dreamy eyes and fashionably tousled hair personifies it as he muses on the vanished glories of imperial Rome.
PORTRAIT OF CHATEAUBRIAND IN 1828 Juliette outlasted him by one single year. Even as an almost blind elderly lady in poor health, Juliette never lost her carefree charm and continued to receive many visitors.
MADAME RECAMIER TOWARDS THE END OF HER LIFE The diaries, memoirs and correspondence of the period offer two differing accounts versions of Madame Recamier s character. To some she was a bold opponent of Napoleon, a champion of liberal ideals and a lady of the utmost purity. To others she was a frigid coquette, or, in modern parlance, a cockteaser, who directed her sensuous flirtations on virtually every man who came to her salon,
and captivated them by her beauty and voluptuous charm. The novelist and political philosopher Benjamin Constant said, Madame Recamier takes it into her head to make me fall in love with her... My life is completely upset. For the next fourteen months, he was tortured by his unrequited love for her, but he was merely one of many. Lady Bessborough, one of the many English aristocrats who flocked to Paris in 1802 after the signing of the short-lived Treaty of Amiens, provides this account of her visit to Madame Recamier in her own language. I must tell you tho, a nasty and an indelicate story, but how distress d I was at Mad. Recamier s. We went there and found her in bed that beautiful bed you saw prints of muslin and gold curtains, great looking glasses at the side, incense pots, &c., and muslin sheets trimm d with lace, and beautiful white shoulders expos d perfectly uncovered to view in short, completely undress d and in bed. The room was full of men. This hostile description of la Recamier as an exhibitionist and minxy flirt smacks of jealousy and Anglo-Saxon prudery, and certainly no woman of the period would expose themselves in the buff as Lady Bessborough claims in her truly nasty and indelicate story.
JACQUES LOUIS DAVID S PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER, THE LOUVRE, 1800 In 1800 Jacques-Louis David began his portrait of Juliette and he proved to be the one exception to the rule who certainly did not yield to the lady s charm. She was of course a dedicated socialite and she irritated the artist by always arriving late for her sittings. These took place in his studio which was exclusively furnished with antique reproductions of ancient furniture excavated in Pompeii as well as the lamps, footstools and sofas seen in Greek vase paintings. These studio props were designed especially for him by Georges Jacob who set great store on archaeological exactitude.
THE DAYBED IN DAVID S STUDIO ON WHICH JULIETTE SO ELEGANTLY RECLINED: Jacob s piece survived the centuries and was recently exhibited at an exhibition at Lyon. It was in mint condition but had been reupholstered in a sky-blue fabric. After David had completed his portrait, the piece became known as a Recamier. Relations between the sitter and artist were uneasy, and finally in a fit of pique David left the portrait unfinished because he was deeply offended that Juliette had commissioned yet another portrait from his pupil, François Gérard. The unremitting austerity of the décor, particularly the unornamented back wall, clearly indicate that the work was abandoned. This permits the viewer to inspect David s handiwork before his lively preliminary brushwork and murky background rubbings were covered in layers of translucent glazes which would have endowed the portrait with far greater lustre and sparkle. (SORRY THIS SHOUD NOT BE IN HEAVY TYPE BUT IN NORMAL TYPE LIKE THE REST, PLEASE CORRECT. WHY OH WHY DO SO MANY THINGS GO WRONG ON COMPUTER???) What typified the period was Juliette s hatred of any form of ostentation as a reaction to pre-revolutionary aristocratic excess.
Juliette, clad in a white antique-style sleeveless dress, turns her head towards the viewer as she gracefully reclines upon Jacob s scholarly recreation, and nothing in the room or her couture indicates either her status or her fortune. The antique-style sofa, stool and candelabra are severe and without pronounced colour contrasts, and the surrounding room strikes one as punitively stark, empty and bare. There is no carpet upon the floorboards and no decoration softens the oppressive gloom of the dark spongy walls. Juliette is viewed from some distance, and as a result her face occupies little space, but what David chose to produce was less a portrait of her as a personality, than an epitome of feminine elegance and frugality. An odd feature is that Juliette certainly does not appear comfortably at home in her own portrait. There is a note of perturbation in her gaze which Anita Brookner considers a result of the confrontation between the sitter and the artist. One of my favourite novelists, Anita Brookner taught at the Courtauld for many years, and produced one of the finest books on David. A propos of the portrait she writes; David was intrigued by Mme Recamier who was married straight from her convent in Lyon to a rich banker thirty years her senior who may have been her unacknowledged father. Her flawless looks caused scores of men to fall in love with her, but although her head was turned by their adulation she appears to have resisted them all. Her famous virginity which she preserved into middle age, was publicized by the simplicy of her toilette, which consisted of a white dress and a simple band in the hair. Contemporaries saw her either as an angel of beauty or an extremely knowing coquette. Whatever the truth of this, it seems she was of passive, even inert temperament. David has perceived unerringly, the hint of sexual fear, even of inhibition, which is echoed in the tense emptiness of his cruelly revealing studio. Mme Recamier is thus a masterpiece on several levels. The child-bride, incredibly alone, does not charm; secure in her beauty, she is as bewildered by her isolation as we are.
When Gerard painted a portrait of her which was far more to her taste, David wrote the society beauty a reproving letter. Madame, ladies have their caprices: so do painters. Allow me to satisfy mine: I shall keep your portrait in its present state. This is a gesture of some significance: the right of the artist to prefer the unfinished to the finished work, to regard the work as his property rather than that of the sitter, was unheard of in the field of portraiture which was traditionally the painter s most assured source of income. It was a gesture destined to have enormous consequences for the Romantic generation and for those painters and poets who considered themselves superior to their material by virtue of their calling as artists. Their relationship thus concluded in a tiff and Mme Recamier never took possession her portrait. Jacques-Louis David has always received a bad press in Englishspeaking countries because his revolutionary fervour impelled him to vote for the execution of King Louis XVI. This is a typically English mixture of snobbery, sentimentality and conservatism, as the dimwitted King helped spur the revolution on through his inertia and inability to grasp the meaning of current events. Only reluctantly did he and Marie-Antoinette pretend to support the revolution, and eventually they betrayed it by surreptitiously corresponding with other monarchs who attempted to invade France in a futile effort to restore the ancient regime. The flight to Varennes obviously brought the royal family into further disrepute as it was viewed as treason, particularly as the royal pair intended to join forces with the Republic s enemies.
JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID S SELF-PORTRAIT, THE LOUVRE, 1797 David was the greatest European exponent of Neo-classicism both in his sternly patriotic history paintings and his portraiture. A volatile and highly neurotic personality, he was deeply involved in Revolutionary activities and pageants. The softer, more appealing side of his personality emerges from his female portraits which reveal how when he was confronted by flesh and blood personalities, rather than disembodied abstract principles, his natural warmth and humanity came to the fore, so that the artist conveys an affection and intimacy that are withheld in his likeness of Madame Recamier.
The MARQUISE DE PASTORET (1792) who was imprisoned, and MME CHALGRIN who was guillotined, both elicit all David s sympathy. Both were intimate friends of the artist, and a sense of an unspoken dialogue between sitters and painter who were all too terrified to voice the fears they shared during the Great Terror still clings to the portraits. Despite his zealotry David too fell under suspicion and risked losing his life.
THE MARQUISE DE PASTORET: David s portrait of the threatened Marquise immediately arouses our sympathies as she appears so calm and resolute, the epitome of the tender mother doing needlework for her infant in the cot. Brookner writes the former aristocrat appears as a woman of the people, sewing her own linen; her rudimentary décolletage indicates that she has no wet-nurse for her baby. Her expression has the blankness of the desperately selfabsorbed and the dangers of her life are projected in the eerily vibrant lilac aura which sets off her roughly-dressed brown hair with particular emphasis. What lilac aura, Miss Brookner? The reproduction from which the illustration was taken was irreproachably accurate quality.
MADAME DE CHALGRIN: Perhaps it is the gaze of total disorientation and grim foreboding together with the abstract background of rough clotted red impasto that so effectively conveys the sitter s feelings as she faces what she knew might be her imminent demise.
DAVID S HASTY SKETCH OF MARIE-ANTOINETTE Even David s sketch of Marie-Antoinette being transported in a tumbril to the guillotine, reveals that although haggard and ravaged after her many ordeals, she faced death with a proud dignity that the anti-royalist painter could not but admire. Extreme politesse had become a reflex, as she advanced towards the scaffold she unwittingly trod on the foot of her executioner Sanson. Pardon Monsieur, I did not mean to do that were the last words she uttered before the blade of the guillotine descended.