BOURDON, Sébastien

It is assumed that the scene depicts Antony and Cleopatra.

Among the few painters who managed to shake themselves free from Roman monumentality - despite studying there - was S�bastien Bourdon, whose silvery colour is seen to good advantage in this Adoration of the Magi.

Bourdon, a talented imitator of other painters, took several details from Titian’s Bacchanal (Prado, Madrid).

The elegantly dressed woman holding a wreath of flowers, shown three-quarter length before a plain, dark background, is Ebba Sparre (1626-1662), lady-in-waiting to Queen Christina of Sweden. She was one of the queen’s favourites, her closest friend. S�bastien Bourdon painted the portrait while he was in Stockholm as First Painter to the Queen from 1652 until Christina’s abdication in 1654.

The painting is in a poor state of preservation, it was originally a much more sumptuous image.

The story depicted in the painting is from Virgil’s Aeneid (4:362-392). The lovers, Dido and Aeneas, passed a whole winter in each other’s company, until Aeneas was suddenly visited by Mercury, the messenger of the gods, with sharp orders from Jupiter to be on his way. He took his leave amid scenes of passionate pleading, vituperation and tears. When Aeneas had departed Dido built a funeral pyre in the palace and slew herself on it, using her lovers sword.

Henry Purcell (c. 1659-1695), the English composer and organist, composed an opera from the story of Dido and Aeneas.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, Dido’s Farewell

This is an early work by the artist. It shares a similar compositional structure and use of heavily robed, leaning figures, as found in his other early religious works. A smaller autograph replica of the composition, of smaller dimensions and horizontal in shape, is located in the Mus�e Fabre, Montpellier.

The scene painted by Bourdon shows Solomon surrounded by a number of his wives, in the midst of making offerings to a sculpted likeness of a goddess.

Bourdon executed at least two further versions of the subject (now in private collections).

S�bastien Bourdon represents the classicist and idealizing trend initiated by Nicolas Poussin, his contemporary and the leading French artist of the 17th century. Like Poussin, and like many other French and European artists, Bourdon made the obligatory study trip to Italy - to Rome, where he met Poussin, and to Venice, all of which influenced his style. In Venice he specialized in genre painting and in landscape in imitation of Claude Lorrain. Around 1640 he returned to France, and after some years in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, he settled in Paris, where he acquired a great reputation. His painting of these French years shows its most obvious debt to Poussin.

In Rome the young Bourdon was exposed to some of the greatest portraits of the Renaissance in the collections there, as well as to the constant experiments of artists as diverse as Bernini, Lanfranco and Domenichino, who all painted portraits. from all these influences Bourdon compounded his own style, which inevitably became a formula, but a successful one. He often painted his sitters three-quarters on, in a soft and even light, and preferred waist-length portraits and a feeling of relative informality. With his curious mixture of Italian influences, Bourdon set the style for middle-class French portraiture for almost the rest of the century. One of the best examples is his Portrait of a Man at Montpellier, which is a “tour de force” of subtle modelling and lighting. Indeed, almost all the surviving middle-class portraits of the time in France, that are not by Philippe de Champaigne and his followers, copy this type.

The sitter of this portrait is unknown.

Ren� Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher whose work, La g�om�trie, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry. His work had a great influence on both mathematicians and philosophers.

Bourdon went to Sweden in 1652, where he entered the service of that redoubtable monarch Queen Christina, who eventually gave up politics for art. During his years in Sweden, Bourdon mostly executed portraits, characterized by their elegance and subtlety. They are usually bust-length with the face slightly turned, a type of portrait that was to be extremely influential on the next generation of painters, especially Le Brun and Mignard, and a whole host of more minor portraitists.

In this portrait the informality of the treatment of the sitter is striking.

The painting was presented by Queen Christina of Sweden to Philip IV of Spain.

Toward 1637-38 Bourdon brought to Paris the fashion of the ‘Bambocciata’, the genre scenes of popular life in the suburbs of Rome made popular by the Netherlandish painter Pieter van Laer (known in Italy as Il Bamboccio).

Bourdon was the one French painter who came under the influence of Poussin in Rome but who also retained his individuality. He is one of the few French painters of the 17th century who was equally adept at portrait, landscape, mythological and genre painting. This versatility, noticed by his contemporaries, has meant that only in recent years have a number of his pictures been identified. His mythological pictures are confused with those of other Poussin followers, his landscapes with those of Dughet, and his genre pictures with those of the Netherlandish Bamboccianti.

In representing this Biblical tale of compassion for the helpless, the artist, concerned with providing a historically accurate setting, has included palm trees and ancient temples in the background landscape. Trained primarily in Rome, Bourdon spent most of his successful career in Paris and Stockholm, where he was court painter to the Queen of Sweden. An eclectic, he worked in a variety of contemporary styles and here the artist has adapted and elaborated a composition by Poussin, who represented the subject at least three times. The translucent colour is, however, unique to Bourdon and presages the lighter hues of the early 18th century.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: Moses, Moses’ Prayer

The Holy Family is portrayed in an imaginary landscape surrounded by angels and cherubim. The classicist and idealized treatment of the scene reflects the idealist tendency which developed in France at the hand of Poussin and which remained widespread throughout the 18th century.