A Study He Calls the Siesta

The Académie asked its pensionnaire for a body painted from the model. He sent back a Roman girl asleep at noon in the furniture of a Venetian Venus. The picture is superb wherever it stays a study and weak wherever it tries to be a picture — and its critics, from the Académie’s rapporteur to the sailors who supposedly tiptoed out of a Paris drawing-room in 1871, were all arguing about the same thing.¹

The Phrase

In October 1859 the Académie des Beaux-Arts, reporting on the year’s work from its pensionnaires in Rome, came to the second-year painter and opened his paragraph with a small, dry phrase: Clément sends “a study-figure that he calls the Siesta”.² Everything that has been said about the picture since is contained in that calls. The regulation required a figure painted from life; the young man had painted one and then given it a title, a couch, a colonnade, a view of the Campagna, two doves and a fan, as if a nude asleep in a life class had been carried outside and laid in a Venus’s bedroom. The Académie approved and reserved judgement in the same breath. A crowd at the École des Beaux-Arts stood in front of it. The Gazette des Beaux-Arts called it “the success of the little exhibition of the Roman school” and then spent a paragraph on the model’s legs. Two years later it won a medal at the Salon under a new name, went to a duke — or so it was said — and vanished into a dealer’s drawing-room. Nobody has seen it in public since 1897, and the argument the Académie started has never been settled: is this a study or a painting, and which would be better?

The Picture

Start with what Clément could do. The woman lies on her back across the whole width of the canvas, head to the left, and the light falls on her from the upper left so that her near side — her own right, since she faces up and a little towards us — is the lit side. Her right arm is thrown over her head, bent at the elbow, the hand hanging loose into her hair; the hollow of that armpit, shadowed, is painted with more attention than her face, and the torso beneath it, turned a fraction towards us so that both breasts show, is the best thing in the picture: firm, warm, weighted, the belly slightly rounded above the striped cloth, the skin ivory going to pink at the cheek and the nipples and the knees. The critics of 1859 and 1861 agreed on nothing except this, and they were right. Paul Mantz, who disliked the picture, granted “the roundness of the throbbing breast, the intimacy of the warm damp armpit”; Gautier, who loved it, said the flesh was “true, firm and full of sap”, with blood circulating in it and bones and muscles under it, “and has nothing whatever to do with the whipped cream, white and pink, of which boudoir nudes are kneaded”.³,⁴ The Académie’s own word was vérité: flesh “of a great truth of colour”.⁵

Then the face, which everyone thought less of. It is thrown back on the pillow, chin up, seen from below and almost in profile, eyes closed, mouth closed or nearly, a flush on the cheek, black hair spread loose with a wisp of it trailing onto the lace at the edge of the couch. On the near ear hangs a gold earring, a disc with three pendants. It is a real face, a particular one, and that was the complaint: the Académie “would have wished for more distinction in the character of the head”, so that the figure might match “the richness of the accessories”; Mantz saw “a model of robust, lively but common outline” and a young Roman “who seems to bear without much melancholy the weight of her twenty years”.⁶,⁷ What they wanted was a type. What Clément painted was the girl who had come to the Villa Medici to be paid by the sitting and had fallen asleep, or been told to. The face is not idealised because it is not doing anything; it is the one part of the picture that is simply a study, and the picture is at its most honest there.

The legs are another matter. They run off to the right and cross at the ankle — the near leg, her own right, lying in front, its toes pointing right, the left foot tucked behind the right ankle with its sole turned towards us — and they are stiff. The near shin is a tube, the crossed feet are a knot the painter has not untied, and Mantz’s verdict, that the young Roman “has sad legs and lamentable feet”, is cruel and correct.⁸ The sculptor Antoine Étex, who watched the Sunday crowd, put the fault more usefully: the head is not on the same perspective as the body, the breasts are seen from one viewpoint and the belly and legs from another, and the legs “lack grandeur and simplicity”.⁹ He was describing a figure assembled from separate sessions of looking, and that is what a study-figure is.

Around her, the furniture. She lies on a white sheet pinched into a fold at the foot, over a crimson bolster with bands of gold brocade, with a white lace cloth thrown over the pillow end; across her hips a heavy striped silk, cream and crimson with paired turquoise lines, that runs off in a heap beyond her feet; in her left hand, resting on the silk, a fan held so loosely that a critic in 1859 saw it slipping from her fingers.¹⁰ Behind the couch a plain stone parapet, lit along its top, with the signature written in red across its shadowed face; three columns of green-veined marble, unfluted, cut off by the top of the canvas before they reach a capital; a dark green curtain looped up at the upper left; and through the colonnade a Roman view — a meadow with two black cypresses, trees turning orange, water just beyond the parapet, a violet mountain with a long ridge running off to the right, a small temple front among the trees at the left with a long white building beside it, and a big evergreen hanging over everything from above. On the parapet, behind her knees, sit the two doves.

Étex, in 1860, itemised where the furniture came from, and he was right: “the fragment of green curtain at the left, the fragment of grey architecture, the fragment of a day-bed, of a red mattress with black flowers, the fragment of white drapery on which the body of the sleeping young woman lies” are all, he said, pieces of “the Venus of Titian in the Tribuna at Florence”, with the striped stuff and the landscape added “to hide the theft”.¹¹ The Venus of Urbino has a green curtain at the left, a grey wall, a red couch and white sheets, and Clément, who could see it in Florence, took the lot. What he did not take is the pose. Titian’s Venus is propped, awake, looking at us. Clément’s woman is flat on her back with an arm over her head, and the model for that is across the river in the Vatican: the Sleeping Ariadne, the marble that was called Cleopatra until Visconti renamed it, lying with her right arm over her head and her legs crossed at the calves.¹² The crossed ankles may be the statue’s crossed calves, brought down the leg. One reviewer in 1861 thought Clément had gone to Italy only to come back and copy “the beautiful odalisque of M. Ingres”; he did not say which, but the Odalisque with a Slave had been painted in this very house in 1839, while Ingres was its director, and it has a fan.¹³

Two of the accessories give the game away, in opposite directions. The earring is not antique. It looks to me like the archaeological jewellery — gold discs with pendants after Etruscan and Greek models — that the Castellani workshop by the Trevi Fountain was making for Roman ladies and foreign visitors in exactly these years, a fashion that museum curators date from about 1860.¹⁴ If so, it is not period costume; it is what a Roman model with a good eye might have worn to the studio in 1858. The fan, by contrast, is an antique that never existed: a white turned handle, two volutes at the junction, and a leaf like a half-open palmette with gilt fields between its ribs. Ancient fans, the handbooks told painters, were “stiff and of a fixed shape”, of feathers or linen or birds’ wings, and were waved by slaves; this one is a painter’s reconstruction, or a studio prop made by someone who had looked at Greek vases.¹⁵ The critic of 1859 did not take it for a fan at all. He called it “an elegant fly-whisk” — the thing you need at a Roman siesta — and Martial supplies the scene, at a rich man’s summer dinner: the concubine lying on her back with a green fan, the boy driving off the flies with a myrtle switch.¹⁶,¹⁷

The landscape is the part nobody defended. The Académie called the background hard; Étex thought it painted “in the manner of MM. Troyon and Jadin”; Edmond About, who admired the figure, wrote that he was sorry the painter “had spoiled his picture with that old background of old second-hand trees”, and that Clément was “certainly no colourist, certainly no landscape painter”.¹⁸,¹⁹,²⁰ The columns read as cipollino, the green-veined marble of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum; the temple in the view is the kind — a pedimented front on a handful of columns, by water — that the Villa Borghese next door had built in its lake garden in the 1780s; and the whole vista, with its white building and its mountain, belongs to no real prospect.²¹ It is scenery, and it is painted like scenery.

Which leaves the doves, the second-best passage in the picture. The white one stands with its tail towards its companion, body turned to the right, its head twisted back over its shoulder and buried in its own feathers, preening, one wing lifted and spread back over the other bird; the grey one is hunched low beside it with its head turned down and away. Their bodies are back to back. The critic of 1859 wrote that “two turtle-doves caress each other on the marble of the balcony”, and Pliny, from whom painters take their doves, says the male “falls to billing” and sidles round the female with his feet.²²,²³ Clément painted neither. He painted two doves in the heat, doing what doves do on a ledge at midday, and the one open eye in the picture is the white bird’s. It is the only passage in the setting that looks observed rather than assembled, and I would guess it was observed on the Villa’s own parapets.

Making

The figure is life-size because the rules said so: the second-year painter owed the Académie “a nude figure, of natural size”, and Director Schnetz’s dispatch list of April 1859 records what Clément sent — “La Sieste (study-figure)” and a drawing after Daniele da Volterra’s Deposition, the drawing arriving late.²⁴ The canvas was painted in 1858, signed early in 1859 with the pensionnaire’s formula of city and year, shown at the Villa in April, and shipped to Paris on 22 June; Ernest Hébert’s second-year figure of 1842, a sleeping slave under a temple portico, 210 by 132 cm and signed “Rome 42”, shows the scale and the signature convention Clément inherited, and also the habit of laying a study-figure under antique architecture with a view behind.²⁵

The Académie’s report is the best technical description the picture has ever had: “This painting has firmness without dryness, modelling without stiffness, and the flesh is of a great truth of colour”; some hardness in the background could have been avoided; “in spite of these observations, the Académie is pleased to acknowledge all the qualities by which this painting recommends itself”.²⁶ Mantz added that the painter “assuredly knows his trade”, that his brush was “firm and sure” and the flesh-tones “learnedly studied”, and then accused him of having painted the girl “pourtraicte au vif”, portrayed from life, in the old phrase, when he should have “ennobled these vulgarities” and stamped “the powerful seal of art on this prosaic image of a woman in good health”.²⁷ Étex’s charge was the same in a newer vocabulary: Clément had “pinched off a morsel as with a daguerreotype”.²⁸ Between them they describe a method. The body was painted from the model, session by session, with a truthfulness that the whole Roman school of the 1850s was trained to produce and then trained to be ashamed of; the setting was painted afterwards from other pictures. Léon Lagrange, in 1861, was the one critic to see that the shame was misplaced: the modelling of the torso, “by its solid reality, departs from the habits of the school”, and so does the tone, “at once transparent and firm”, that colours the flesh.²⁹

No Commission

Nobody commissioned it and nobody could. An envoi was an obligation, not a sale; the picture went to Paris, was judged, was shown for a week with the year’s prize competitions, and came back to the painter. Clément was thirty when he won the Prix de Rome in 1856, a late winner after three attempts, trained at Lyon and then in Paris under Drolling and Picot; he entered the Villa Medici on the last day of January 1857 and stayed until the end of 1861.³⁰ His first-year envoi, a boy drawing a donkey on a wall, was bought by the duc de Gramont, the ambassador; the second was this.³¹ It had no public life for two years except the autumn week at the École, where, Étex says, the crowd pressed so thick on a Sunday “that there were eyes for nothing but this picture”.³² Then it went to the Salon of 1861 as Femme romaine endormie, with the painter’s address still given as the Villa Medici, and won a third-class medal.³³

Reading

The subject is the hour. To a Frenchman in Rome in 1859 the siesta was a fact and a literature at once. About, in Rome contemporaine, watched the cannon of Castel Sant’Angelo sound noon and every corner of the Piazza Montanara fill with sleepers; Taine decided that a young Roman was a man permanently taking a siesta, “inert, hating effort”, and added that “the siesta predisposes to love”.³⁴,³⁵ Behind them lies the oldest pastoral warning, the goatherd in Theocritus who will not pipe at noon because that is the hour Pan rests, “and he’s one o’ the tetchy sort”.³⁶ Noon belongs to the god; the sensible mortal sleeps through it.

But she is a Roman girl, and that is the picture’s other subject. Between 1859 and 1861 the title changed from an hour to a nationality, and the critics followed. Gautier saw “a true Roman, a daughter of the she-wolf”, stretched on white linen “like a Venus of Titian”; Lagrange saw an Italienne endormie “which another would perhaps have called a Venus”.³⁷,³⁸ The type was being manufactured that very season: Charles Cordier came to Italy in 1858 to portray the people he met, and his marble Romaine du Trastévère of about 1860 gave it a bust; About’s working women of Rome wore “a striped jacket” and framed their sunburnt faces “in a drapery of very white linen”.³⁹,⁴⁰ On the couch lie a striped silk and a heap of white linen. One is tempted to say that Clément has undressed the Trasteverina of her two garments and laid them beside her — though a painter who took his bed from Titian may simply have taken his stripes from a shop.

The doves are Venus’s birds and the only thing in the picture that says Venus at all. In Pliny they are the chaste bird, faithful to one mate; in Ripa the turtle-dove is the attribute of Conjugal Chastity, teaching by example “never to defile the honour and the faith of marriage”.⁴¹,⁴² Two turtle-doves on the ledge of a bed are a marriage emblem, and the bed has no husband in it. The fan, in Ripa, is not a goddess’s attribute but the sign of heat, carried by a thin, lightly clad figure “for the annoyance and distress of the hot weather”.⁴³ The cypresses are the tree Horace calls hateful, because it alone of a man’s trees follows him to the grave; the laurel, if the shrub by the doves is laurel, is the herb the dream-interpreters prescribed for sleepers, since laurel laid on the head makes the dreams come true.⁴⁴,⁴⁵ I do not think Clément meant any of this. He wanted a Roman noon, and every object a Roman noon required came in carrying its old meanings.

Beneath the Surface

Three traditions say that sleeping at noon is a fault, and one says it is sacred; the picture is caught between them, and so is anyone who looks at it. The Platonic one is a joke at the sleeper’s expense. Socrates, under the plane tree at midday, imagines the cicadas looking down on two men who, “like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering at mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think”, and taking them for slaves who “like sheep lie asleep at noon around the well”; the cicadas report to the Muses who has honoured them and who has slept.⁴⁶ Plotinus makes the failure metaphysical — “the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed” — and the desert fathers make it a demon: the daemonium meridianum of the Psalm is, for Cassian, acedia, the listlessness that seizes the monk “about the sixth hour” and drives him “to sink into slumber”.⁴⁷,⁴⁸ On those terms a nude asleep at noon under a temple is the soul at its lowest ebb, painted as beautifully as possible.

The Renaissance thought otherwise, and its view is the one the picture actually inhabits. The sleeping nymph of the fountain, the statue type and the epigram that went with it — I am the nymph of this place; I sleep to the sound of the water; drink in silence or in silence leave — made the sleeper the guardian of a sacred place and the viewer an intruder who must not wake her; Millard Meiss argued that sleep in Venetian painting was a contact with the supernatural, and Rona Goffen that the Venus of Urbino, the very bed Clément borrowed, was a marriage picture.⁴⁹ Put those together and the doves make sense as Ripa’s marriage birds on a marriage bed, and the picture’s one real subject comes into focus: not the woman but the viewer’s relation to her, which is the relation of someone who has walked in on a sleeper. Clément cannot have read Meiss, and nothing in the record says he read Ficino or Plotinus. He did not need to. The tradition had done the reading for him, and the furniture carried it. I will add one speculation and mark it as mine: a white bird and a grey one on the ledge of a sleeper’s bed recall the two children on the Chest of Cypselus that Pausanias describes, one white and one black, “Sleep and Death, with Night the nurse of both”.⁵⁰ Nothing connects that to Clément, and any Roman dovecote held a white dove and a grey one; but the picture would not be worse for it.

What Isn’t There

There is no Venus in it — the birds are the only attribute; no Cupid, shell, mirror or myrtle — and the title never claimed one. There is no odalisque: between 1859 and 1897 the picture was called La Sieste, Femme romaine endormie and Italienne endormie, and only once, as an insult, a copy of Ingres’s; the harem label that clings to it online drifted back from the Cairo and Circassian subjects Clément painted after his Egyptian years.⁵¹,⁵² There is no named model; Mantz saw one “common”, and nobody wrote down who she was.⁵³ The doves, as we have seen, are not caressing. The signature is not “A. Clément”, whatever both Haro sale catalogues print; the canvas reads “F. Clement.”, with a full stop and no accent that a photograph can show, over “Rome 1859.”⁵⁴ The duc de Morny’s ownership, repeated by Clément’s biographer and by both catalogues, is unproven: the Morny sale of 1865 contains no Clément, and the picture’s next documented appearance is an anonymous estate sale at Drouot on 26 December 1868, lot 3, “Femme romaine endormie. Capital picture.”⁵⁵,⁵⁶,⁵⁷ And it is not by Giacomotti, Clément’s fellow pensionnaire, whatever Jules Claretie wrote three times in two books of the 1870s.⁵⁸

Afterlife

The picture had three seasons of fame. The first was the week at the École in 1859, when a second-year study outdrew everything else in the room and the Académie allowed itself “a just hope for the future of this pensionnaire”.⁵⁹ The second was the Salon of 1861: Gautier’s “What an excellent morsel of painting”; About’s admission that “this fine and powerful nudity is not merely a bait offered to the covetousness of old men” but “an excellent figure, such as the Academy of Rome, or indeed the Academy of Paris, does not produce every day”; Louis Leroy in the Charivari calling it “the capital work of the Salon of 1861”; a Catholic reviewer wishing he had left it in the studio; and the medal.⁶⁰,⁶¹,⁶²,⁶³ The third was private, and it is the best. Maurice Champavier, Clément’s biographer from the Drôme, says that after Morny’s death the picture passed to Étienne Haro, the dealer and restorer of the rue Bonaparte, who kept it in a salon of his house in the rue Visconti behind draperies that hid the frame, “so that, skilfully lit, this painting gives the perfect illusion of a woman who might be sleeping quite naked in the tranquillity of her solitary room”. And he tells the story — “it is said” — that in 1871, after the Commune, sailors searching the house for Communards came upon the sleeper, were “seized with a sudden respect before the confidence and the abandon of the sleeping woman”, went no further with their search, and “went back on tiptoe, avoiding the least noise, for fear of waking her”.⁶⁴ It is a legend. It is also the best criticism the picture has ever received, because it says what the picture is for: you have walked in on her, and you must not wake her.

The poet Sully Prudhomme owned a reduced version, Champavier adds; I cannot find it. The big canvas came up at the Sedelmeyer gallery on 30–31 May 1892 as lot 65, “the most celebrated in the artist’s work”, with the Morny provenance and the dimensions, in the sale that followed a death in the Haro family, and again — so it had not sold — in Haro’s own estate sale at Drouot on 2–3 April 1897, lot 107, his son Henri acting as expert.⁶⁵ After that, nothing. The INHA’s database of the envois records the location as unknown and cites only an old photograph at the École des Beaux-Arts; the modern photograph reproduced here shows the whole canvas, so somebody has it.⁶⁶ Clément himself left the Villa at the end of 1861, went to Egypt in November 1862 as painter to Prince Halim at Shubra, spent years suing him, taught at Lyon and died in Algiers in 1888 — other pictures’ stories.⁶⁷

The Phrase Again

So: study or picture? The Académie wanted a nobler head, Mantz better feet, Étex a whole; About wanted the trees gone. They were all asking the study to be more of a picture, and they were all wrong, because the picture is at its best exactly where it is least composed. The torso, the armpit, the hanging hand, the crumpled sheet and the two doves are painted from things in front of the painter; the temple, the columns, the fan and the crossed feet are painted from other pictures and from the wish to make one. Lagrange saw it in 1861 — the solid reality of that torso “departs from the habits of the school” — and the school, in the person of its Académie, had said the same thing a year and a half earlier without noticing it was praise. “A study-figure that he calls the Siesta”: the phrase was a reservation. It is the best title the picture has, and the best thing about it.

Things You May Not Have Noticed

1. The fan was taken for a fly-whisk. The reviewer in the Revue des beaux-arts in 1859 saw “an elegant fly-whisk” slipping from her hand — the instrument of a Roman noon, as in Martial’s dinner, where a boy drives off the flies with a myrtle switch while the concubine lies back with a green fan.
2. The Haro catalogues misread the signature. Both the 1892 and the 1897 sale catalogues print “Signed at right: A. Clément”; the canvas reads “F. Clement. / Rome 1859.” The same entries give the only recorded dimensions, 118 × 197 cm.
3. Her crossed ankles may come from the Vatican. The Sleeping Ariadne lies with one arm over her head and her legs crossed at the calves; Clément’s woman lays her own right leg across in front of her own left foot.
4. The earring may be the newest thing in the picture. A gold disc with three pendants, of the archaeological type the Castellani workshop in Rome was reviving in these years, worn by a girl otherwise dressed as antiquity.
5. The Académie’s phrase. Its report of 1859 opens on “a study-figure that he calls the Siesta” and wishes for “more distinction in the character of the head”; Mantz, less kindly, gave her “sad legs and lamentable feet”.
6. Titian’s furniture, itemised. Étex listed the borrowings in 1860 — the green curtain at the left, the grey architecture, the day-bed, the red mattress, the white drapery — as “fragments” of the Venus of Urbino, with the striped stuff and the landscape added “to hide the theft”.
7. The sailors who would not wake her. Champavier’s story of 1871: sailors searching Haro’s house for Communards found the picture skilfully lit behind draperies and tiptoed out. Told as “it is said” — a legend, not a record.
8. A duke, maybe. The Morny provenance rests on Champavier and the Haro catalogues; the Morny sale of 1865 has no Clément, and the picture surfaces instead at an anonymous Drouot sale on 26 December 1868 as a “capital picture”.
9. Thieves through the roof. Georges Bizet, a fellow pensionnaire, wrote home on 26 November 1859 that burglars had got into Clément’s studio at the Villa “through the roof” and stripped it, the pensionnaires arming themselves with “tongs, sticks, brooms”; the Siesta was already in Paris.
10. Not Giacomotti. Jules Claretie three times gave the Femme romaine endormie to Félix Giacomotti, Clément’s fellow pensionnaire, in the 1870s — one of the reasons the picture dropped out of the literature.
11. The striped silk and the white linen are, in About’s description of 1861, two of the garments of the working women of Rome — “a striped jacket” and “a drapery of very white linen” — laid here beside a woman wearing neither.

Sources

About, Edmond. Dernières lettres d’un bon jeune homme à sa cousine Madeleine. Paris, 1863. — Rome contemporaine. Paris, 1861.

Académie des Beaux-Arts. Rapport sur les travaux des pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome, séance publique du 1er octobre 1859. Bibliothèque de l’Institut, 4° AA 34, t. 29.

AGORHA (INHA), Envois de Rome database: records for Clément and for La Sieste.

Champavier, Maurice. “Félix Clément, peintre d’histoire.” Bulletin de la Société d’archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme, t. VII.

Étex, Antoine. L’Institut : l’Académie des Beaux-Arts et l’École des Beaux-Arts. Paris, 1860.

Gautier, Théophile. Abécédaire du Salon de 1861. Paris, 1861.

Haro sale catalogues, Paris, 30–31 May 1892 and 2–3 April 1897.

Lagrange, Léon. “Salon de 1861.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, t. X, 1861.

Mantz, Paul. “Les concours. — Les envois de Rome.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, t. IV, 1859.

Revue des beaux-arts, tribune des artistes, t. X, 1859.

Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia. Perugia, 1764–67.

Not consulted (not accessible online): Émile Cantrel, L’Artiste, 1 October 1859; A.-J. Du Pays, L’Illustration, 8 October 1859 and 8 June 1861; Hector de Callias, L’Artiste, 1 June 1861; the règlement of 1846 of the Académie de France à Rome; the ENSBA photograph Ph 20433; the 1996 Clément exhibition catalogue, Musée de Valence; the annotated Haro catalogues’ prices.