Perspective | Henri Regnault's sumptuous Salom, at the Met, wowed all of Paris
Édouard Manet was in his pomp. Edgar Degas was making his first great pictures of the Opera’s orchestra pit. Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot were making their first forays into Impressionism. All managed to have their works selected to show at the Paris Salon of 1870.
But the star attraction — the painting that captured everyone’s imagination — was by Henri Regnault, a 26-year-old painter with an athletic build, a long, pointed beard and hair that coiled in tight, glossy waves.
Working in Rome, at the Villa Medici (he had won France’s prestigious Prix de Rome), Regnault had set out to make a simple portrait study from a live model named Maria-Veronica-Concetta Latini. At first, he set the smiling, slightly disheveled-looking Latini, who had jet-black hair, against a red background. He adorned her in jewelry and exotic garments, including a translucent skirt embroidered with gold. As Regnault progressed, he decided to enlarge the canvas not once but twice. Finally, he changed the background from red to a sumptuous gold, creating an overwhelming effect of saturated yellow.
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French art was in the dying throes of a vogue for Orientalism. Regnault had used his Prix de Rome scholarship to travel to Spain and North Africa, and he now played up the North African vibes with a leopard-skin rug laid over a tribal carpet. He placed a shallow bronze dish in Latini’s lap and in it a small, sheathed sword, supported lightly in her left hand.
Almost as an afterthought (as Marc Gotlieb explains in his splendid book “The Deaths of Henri Regnault”), Regnault called the picture “Salomé.” And even though at least five other painters exhibited interpretations of the Salomé story at the same Salon, the general astonishment at Regnault’s effort was unmissable: “This fantastic Salomé,” wrote the critic Paul de Saint-Victor, “bewitched all of Paris.”
The critic Théophile Gautier, who had coined the term “art for art’s sake,” described it as “magical” — a “symphony in yellow major.” The painting, he wrote, “sparkles, it glistens, it melts in the light, it dazzles.”
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Part of the effect was attributable to its inauthenticity. Latini’s sly, intimate grin has nothing to do with an attempt at biblical veracity. No one was being asked to believe that she had just danced for a king to get her wish — the head of John the Baptist — on a platter. Regnault hadn’t tried to hide that the painting was a studio improvisation. Although the picture was more conventionally modeled than Manet’s work, it nonetheless had the same air of knowing make-believe as Manet’s 1860s renderings of Victorine Meurent in various costumes.
Regnault had a partner, Genevieve Breton, who would soon be his fiancee. But because he was handsome and talented, his painting inspired a lot of excited speculation. Breton wrote in her diary about standing in front of “Salomé” at the Salon and being addressed by a stranger: “And you haven’t heard about what they are saying?” she was asked. “He wants to marry that ugly and vulgar Salomé, a painter’s infatuation. He’s known her since he arrived in Rome and is mad about her.”
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The Salon had opened in May. France ill-advisedly declared war on Prussia in mid-July. Holders of the Prix de Rome were excused from military service, but Regnault chose to enlist. In October, during Prussia’s long siege of the French capital, which had reduced Parisians to eating pigeons, rats and pet cats — he proposed to Breton, who gamely said yes.
He received his marching orders on Jan. 17, 1871. The defenders of Paris were making a final attempt to break through the Prussian lines. Not even their commander believed they had any chance.
Sure enough, sometime after the order was given to retreat, Regnault was killed. No one knows whether it was by a Prussian bullet or friendly fire. But diarists all over the city made note of it, and the story of Regnault’s last day rapidly acquired the luster of legend.
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