REGNAULT, Jean-Baptiste

The story depicted in this painting is a well known story from Greek mythology. One of the characters in this painting is Chiron who is noted as being a brave and noble centaur. He is also noted as being the teacher of many great Greek men who had been sent as children to be the students of the centaur Chiron. One of the people sent to train under him was the boy Achilles. Among others, Chiron taught Achilles how to wrestle, sword fight, and the painting above shows how to shoot a bow well.

The artist produced two larger versions of this subject in 1791 and 1810.

This altarpiece was commissioned for the chapel in the Château de Fontainiebleau.

Regnault was not a prolific painter and he never completely freed himself of the Baroque ideal of Guido Reni and the Carraccis. But his subjects are usually taken from Antiquity, as in his first successful work, which won the Rome prize in 1776, the Education of Achilles.

The Genius of France between Liberty and Death is one of the works in which the influence of David is still evident, particularly in the rendering of the material. But the recourse to Baroque models is undeniable in the composition of this allegorical scene which has a complex set of references to Christian iconography.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century there was a widespread vogue for paintings that evoked the origins of art. Instead of the usual allegories or emblematic paintings of tools of the trade, two anecdotal subjects were often handled: “Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd” (the supposed origin of painting) and “Pygmalion and Galatea” (sculpture). In both cases, love was at the heart of the work. The former subject, extraordinarily popular during the last third of the century, concerned the legend of a young woman from Corinth, who outlined the shadow cast on a wall by her beloved. It was held to be a valid illustration of the origins of art, combined with the amorous motivation required by that sentimental age. The anecdote was cited in art manuals as early as 1760, and was familiar to every studio.

Regnault used to theme for an overdoor in the queen’s Grand Cabinet at Versailles, at the same time painting a Pygmalion for her bedchamber. There are numerous examples of this subject up to about 1820, culminating with Fuseli and Girodet.

The representation of the Three Graces attests to the painter’s fondness for mythological themes and for adolescent female nudes. In this piece he copied a carved antique sculpture (Siena Cathedral) that had previously inspired one of Raphael’s works, and enabled Regnault to pay homage to female beauty from several angles, in a subtle blend of idealisation and realism.

This monumental canvas depicting Venus and Adonis can be counted among the small number of extant large scale mythological works by Regnault. These pictures were often executed for the artists own artistic satisfaction as no public commissions for works of this size are recorded, and many private homes of the time could rarely accommodate such large pictures.