Chapter Guides | Sacré Bleu Chapter Guide

Chapter 7 – Form, Line, Light, Shadow

A drawing class from the 19th Century, although this would have been more the size at the E’cole de Beaus Arts at the Acadamie, which was the Salon’s sponsored school. Typically, a student might spend the morning in the studio, the afternoon in the Louvre, copying old masters, then the evening in cafés or cabarets. (Strangely enough, the Academie’s school for painting was in Rome, not Paris) Full Scale Class-Alexy Venetsianov- 1824. There is a foot-bridge across the Seine, called the Bridge of Artists, which was and is used by the students to go from Classes to the Louvre.

For the first week, as the poor girl posed, Lucien battled the urge to stand up and yell, “For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?”

A Roman Studio_Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1877

They were large canvases. And Monet had attempted his own luncheon on the grass, a great, twenty-foot-long canvas that he dragged, rolled up, all over France with a pretty model named Camille Doncieux whom he’d met in the Batignolles and his friend Frédéric Bazille to pose for all the male figures. “But don’t let your ambition become too large too early, Lucien,” Monet had told him…

“Luncheon on the Grass” – 1865, Claude Monet – This is the painting Monet wanted to make after seeing Manet’s “The Bath”, later titled, “Luncheon on the Grass” in 1863. Note the guy in gray in the middle, and the one in black on the left, is the same guy, Frederick Bazille. And the women are all Camille. More about this later, but it is a really huge canvas if you consider they were toting it all over Normandy, on trains, with wet oil paint on it. It’s at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, now, where all of the Louvre’s Impressionist paintings live. More about that later, too.

Olympia – Edouard Manet – 1863

“You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.”

What a completely disturbing thought. Olympia did look remarkably like Goya’s Nude Maja regarding the viewer, daring him,

But there’s a good chance that this was the compositional inspiration for Manet, Titian’s, Venus of Urbino, from 1538. One of the few where there’s a girl upchucking in the background.