Into light: French masterworks from the Musee de la Chartreuse, Ballarat

These works repay attention with unexpected pleasure: they represent a range of evolving styles yet there is a coherence.

Henri Le Sidaner, Le Dimanche (1898). All images from Into Light: French Masterworks from the Musee de la Chartreuse, showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

Australians visit many places in France, but Douai is not prominent among them. Indeed, if you meet someone who is aware of the city, it may be because of the English Colleg­e set up there in 1568, in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, for the education of English Catholics who had been driven from England as the Anglican Church leaned increasingly toward­s Protestantism, and with the ultimate aim of restoring the church in England itself.

Playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe is alleged to have visit­ed the college, temporarily moved to Rheims, when he was a student at Corpus Christi, Cambrid­ge, in the 1580s. ­Suspected of having Catholic sympathies, he was awarded his degree at Cambridge only after assurances from the Privy Council that he had performed unspecified services for the government, perhaps working for Sir Francis Walsingham’s notorious secret service as a double agent. He seems to have been murdered by the same organisation in 1593, at Deptford tavern — “a great reckoning in a little room”, as Shakespeare appears to call it in As You Like It, a play written circa 1599 in which he elsewhere ­certainly alludes to Marlowe’s death.

Catholics remained barred from public office and excluded from Oxford and Cambridge in the 18th century, so historian Edward Gibbon was sent down from Oxford when he converted to Catholicism in 1753. Charles Townley, whose extensive collections of antiquiti­es later formed an important part of the British Museum’s sculpture holdings, was a Catholic and was sent by his family to be educate­d at Douai, for Catholic emancipation was a process that began — against much popular resistance — only in 1778 and was not substant­ially complete until 1829.

Camille Corot, Impression d'Italie (c.1848).

So Douai, originally a Flemish city before its conquest by Louis XIV in 1667, had a singular importance for English Catholics for centuries. It was also a prosperous textile centre in the Middle Ages but by the 19th century, in the age of the Industrial Revolution, it became the centr­e of coalmining in France. It also had ­several important religious institutions, includ­ing the Charterhouse or Chartreuse, a monastic order in which the individual monks live as ­hermits in a collective, each with his own ­private cell and garden, rather than in the true communal style of a Benedictine monastery.

Like so many regional art galleries in France, the Chartreuse of Douai owes its origins to the French Revolution. The original artworks were collected from suppressed religious houses, while the Chartreuse building itself was confiscated by the state when the monks were driven out. But the pieces were not put together until after World War II, when the Musee des Beaux-Arts of Douai, whose building had been bombed, was looking for a new home, and the Chartreuse, occupied by the army for more than a century, was converted into a museum.

Henri Harpignies, Soleil couchant (1893).

The collection that has been leant to Ballarat – a fellow mining town – represents a significant group of works from the museum’s 19th century holdings. This is not an orgy of name-dropping with no overall shape or direction like the current MoMA exhibition at the NGV, but it is a lot more enjoyable to visit. These works repay attention, in many cases, with unexpected pleasure, and although they represent a range of evolving styles within the 19th century, there is a certain coherence between all the pictures, rather than the hyperactive discontinuity of the 20th century.

The earliest works in the exhibition are large studies by Jacques-Louis David: three of the Sabine­s, one of a horse’s hoof, and one of an academic nude, presumably from the artist’s student years and perhaps in Rome. It makes an interesting contrast with another male nude study, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who could be sentimental as a painter but was a very fine draughtsman. David’s drawing shows him coming to terms with the conventions of his great Renaissance and baroque precursors, including Michelangelo but more directly Annibale Carracc­i. The end result, though, is something rather closer to the style of Louis XIV’s official painter, Charles Le Brun. There is a certain stolid­ity in David’s treatment of form and contour­, while Greuze has a deft, even virtuosic, combination of lightness and decisiveness.

There is a fine, if modest portrait of a young man by Eugene Delacroix, although portraiture is dominated by the intriguing minimalism of Eugene Carriere, who was a close friend of Rodin. Carriere seems fascinated by the evanescent, almost disembodied, quality of his ­sitters’ identity. His pictures are monochrome, and it is as though he had simply rubbed on, perhaps with a rag, the features of his subjects in a darker tone of the underpainting with which the canvas has been prepared.

Carriere’s paintings are at the opposite pole of photographic realism, and they can be seen as an expression of revulsion against the material­istic objectification of identity in photo­graphy. Yet the self-portrait with his wife seems to owe something, in its layout as well as its shadowy dimness, to the experience of early photographic portraits.

Henri Le Sidaner’s La Nappe rouge (1931).

Another figure painting that interestingly allude­s to the new technology of the time is Hippolyte Fournier’s Reverie (c. 1889). Ostensibly, this is simply a picture of a girl sitting alone and staring pensively at a fireplace, but the room, which a century earlier would have been lit by candles, is now illuminated by a gas lamp standing on the table. It is not only more mechanical and less alive than a candle but considerably brighter: it reminds us that new technology is changing our relation to the cycle of the day, and to waking and sleeping.

Whereas most of the population once slept when it was dark and was awake when it was light, now it was possible to stay up much later and even to work by night. Indeed, although gas had been used for several generations, the inventio­n of the gas mantle a few years earlier had made gas lamps far brighter and more effic­ient. Reading alone for long hours at night became much easier; so did simply being alone and awake, like this girl, so that the new technol­ogy seems to open a correspondingly new space for solitude and loneliness. Gas lamps were a part of the sensibility of the century. Even Baudelaire alludes­ to them, and their association with dreams and imagination, in his poem Le Voyag­e: for a child who loves maps, he muses, que le monde est grand a la clarte­ des lampe­s — how big the world is by lamplight! But elsewhere, in prose, the poet of The Flowers of Evil observes that true civilisation does not consist in gas lamps or steam power but in the reductio­n of the traces of original sin.

Detail from Henri Morisset’s La grande soeur (1906).

Another late 19th-century interior is called La grande soeur: a young woman, perhaps about 20, reclines on the ground playing with her much younger sister, who holds a doll. At first this just seems a quiet, intimate but rather intense moment between two sisters that is made slightly incongruous by the considerable age difference between them. But then you real­ise the older sister is dressed in black, implying that she is in mourning. Could the suggestion be that their mother has died and that she must now be the mother to her own little sister?

Or is it that she has been unexpectedly widowe­d? This interpretation may be the more plausible, considering that the child is holding a doll and that her toy cradle is so prominently inclu­ded on the left: the little girl is playing at being a mother while her older sister has lost her husband before having a child of her own — unless the implication, in this deliberately ambiguo­us picture, is that she has been left pregnant in her widowhood.

Some of the exhibition’s most attractive pictures are landscapes, starting with Alphon­se Andre Giroux’s Vue d’Arco Scuro (1829). Giroux was a pupil of David and was in Rome as a pensionn­aire of the Villa Medici between 1826 and 1829. Since the end of the previous century, Rome had been the centre of plein-air painting, before it was introduced to France and event­ually evolved into impressionism.

Giroux’s painting has the charm and freshness typical of Roman plein-air work, and the subject was one that attracted many others, includ­ing Turner 10 years earlier: a picturesq­ue road going down to a dark archway, close to Villa Giulia and with a view to St Peter’s and the Vatican in the distance. His style seems indebted to that of the most important of the French plein-air painters, and the one who was instrumental in acclimatising the practice in France: Camille Corot, who was in Rome in the same years (1825-28) and with whom Giroux went out on painting excursions.

Andre Giroux, Vue d'Arco Scuro (1829).

There is no Corot painting from this period but there is a large Impression d’Italie from 1848, beautifully conceived if seemingly a little carelessly painted in parts and perhaps in need of cleaning, but animated by a remarkable sense of the dawn light striking the trees and other motif­s from the left. And there is a charming littl­e picture from 1871, which exemplifies the artist’s late style as defined by Kenneth Clark. It is a silvery, dreamy picture, very different from the earthy palette of the early Roman paintings, but above all one in which the artist’s process has become quite transparent, so that we seem to be able to follow the thought and sensibility behind each brush mark.

There are numerous other interesting landscapes, such as Henri Harpignies’s early seascape at Sorrento (1854) and his much later Soleil couchant (1893), in which he seems to be moving towards a symbolist vision: the compos­ition is suffused with the golden light of sunset, but its focus is the little figure of a wayfarer, coming towards us along the path, and who will soon be walking in the dark and cold.

The much younger Henri Le Sidaner, in contrast, starts in a symbolic vein and moves toward­s a rather indefinable, mildly modernist style, which is intimist in general approach but more colourful than Vuillard. His Le Dimanche (1898) is a symbolist vision of virginal maidens in dawn light, but he has deliberately laid on the background in silvery-pink patches of paint to create a mosaic-like effect, while La Nappe rouge (1931) plays on the counterpoint between light and space and the flat pattern of colours.

In Sodom­e et Gomorrhe, Marcel Proust cites Le Sidaner as an artist who is not great but yet distinguished: the same could be said of many artists in this collection. But while great is preferab­le to distinguished, distinguished is much better than merely self-important.

Into Light: French Masterworks from the Musee de la Chartreuse
Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Until September 9.