Marie Auguste Emile René Ménard
(1862 - Paris - 1930)

Après le Bain

Pastel on canvas
75.9 x 75.9 cm

Signed lower left E. R. Ménard
Bearing a label on the verso Exposition René Ménard, 16 Juin au 25 Juillet 1914, Après le Bain

Provenance:
M. Laguionie

Exhibited:
René Ménard, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 16 June - 25 July 1914, no. 69 (listed as: ‘Après le bain. Pastel. Appartient à M. Laguionie')

Emile René Ménard was born into a Parisian family with strong intellectual and artistic interests and this led to a lifelong preoccupation with the ideals of classical antiquity. His grandfather was a bookseller and his father, René Ménard, a painter, art historian and director of the art journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts. As a young man Emile René Ménard was greatly influenced by his uncle, the philosopher, writer and Hellenist Louis Ménard, the author of Polythéisme Hellenique, published in 1863.

Emile René Ménard's earliest contacts with artistic circles came about through family friendships with Barbizon painters like Millet, Corot, Diaz, Daubigny and Rousseau. He studied under Pierre-Victor Galland at a time when Galland was working on commissions for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98). Ménard completed his studies under William Bouguereau at the Académie Julian, a private art academy in Paris. He later set up an artists' group as a counterpoise to Impressionism. It was known as La Bande noire or Les Nubians.

Ménard made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris in the summer of 1883. He later joined the Société des Pastellistes, founded in 1885. The following years marked his most fertile period which lasted right up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His public commissions included a monumental work for the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris (1906) and a painting titled Illustrations pour les Idylles de Théocrite (1909). The present pastel is dateable to the same period. It was exhibited in 1914 under the title Après le Bain at a solo exhibition of Ménard's work at Galerie Georges Petit, one of the leading Parisian galleries of its day. Numerous exhibitions in other European cities followed, and starting in 1909, annual exhibitions in North America.

A distinguishing feature of the literature and art of the Symbolist movement in the late nineteenth century is the yearning for an aesthetic and immaterial world removed from political frustration and industrial acceleration. Ménard did not, however, associate himself with such leading French Symbolists as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon who had drawn their particular strain of esoteric Symbolism from Symbolist sources in Belgium, Holland and Austria. Many of the French Symbolists exhibited at the Salons de la Rose + Croix, a series of exhibitions organized by the Rosicrucians between 1892 and 1897. Ménard's oeuvre has closer affinities with the art of Puvis de Chavannes, whose pictorial vocabulary evokes nostalgia for a Golden Age - an age represented by classical Greece, a world in which mankind and nature meld in harmonious unity. One fine example is Ménard's Judgment of Paris (1906, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe).

Ménard's oeuvre is one example of the continuity with which the vocabulary of classical antiquity provided inspiration for artists from the Renaissance to Neo-Classicism and Symbolism.