Gabriel Guay

Gabriel Guay (October 14, 1848 – September 15, 1923), whose full name was Julien Gabriel Guay, was a French painter and teacher. From 1873 he exhibited works at the annual Paris Salon. He painted portraits, and also scenes inspired by literature, mythology, the Bible, and Christian martyrdom. His reverence for nature and especially for trees, combined with his affinity for the female nude, resulted in his most distinctive and widely exhibited paintings, depicting dryads in the woods.

Personal life

Guay was born in 1848 in a northern Parisian suburb, the village of La Chapelle; in 1859 it was incorporated into the 18th arrondissement of Paris. His parents were Jules Antoine Guay and Louise Joséphine Cottin. After his death in 1923 he was survived by his widow, Virginie Alexandrine Lequin.

His circle of friends included the artists Édouard Debat-Ponsan, Edmond Debon, Adrien Demont, Virginie Demont-Breton, Octave Jahyer, Henri Pille, Tony Robert-Fleury, and François Thévenot; the painter Edmond Yon, in whose garden at Rue Lepic, n° 59, Guay painted nature studies; and the author Léon Roger-Milès, who dedicated to Guay his story "Une Vision d'Allori", which imagines a dream of the Florentine painter Cristofano Allori as a starting point for a rapturous meditation on the transcendent beauty of the female nude.

The popular singer-comedian Ernest Gibert (who was to die before a large crowd in a spectacular accident a few weeks later) entertained at an 1892 New Year's Eve party chez Guay. One of Guay's paintings of a rustic farm house, in Vosges, is inscribed, "à Gibert, souvenir amical."

Career

Guay was a student of Justin Lequien and of Jean-Léon Gerôme, from whom he learned the exacting skills of French Academic painting. In 1873, at the age of 24, he had a painting accepted for exhibition at the annual Paris Salon, the traditional starting point for the career of a French artist of the 19th century; the work was Ulysse suspendu sur le gouffre de Charybde, inspired by a passage in Homer's Odyssey. (In 1909, Guay gifted the painting to the City of Paris, which agreed to exhibit it at the Lycée Turgot, where Guay was a professor.)

His Academic training is evident in his meticulously detailed and scrupulously finished early works which treat mythological and religious subjects, including Latone et les paysans (1877), Le Lévite d'Ephraim (1878), and Le Tullianum pendant la persécution; martyre de Sainte Pauline (1880). Despite the traditional subjects of these works, Jules Laforgue (in 1882) would count Guay among the Impressionists.

By 1877 some of his paintings had made their way to San Francisco, where the art dealers Snow and May sold two of his works at auction, The Anglers and A Fishing Party. Another work by Guay created a sensation in San Francisco at the 15th Mechanics' Fair of 1880.

The Awakening showed a nude woman, life-size, lying on her side and just waking up. The figure was gracefully posed, the drawing faultless, the flesh tones soft and lucid. In short, wrote the Californian, it was "a splendid study of the female form." Even so, the moralists had reservations.…The nude in The Awakening was too realistic, "the work of a Zola." She was too contemporary, a modern-day woman, "the very embodiment of flesh, blood, and passion," portrayed after what some said was surely a night of debauchery.…Alarmed, the fair managers hung an unsightly red drapery over the offending nude as they tried to decide what to do next.…Gallery visitors, young and old, took to peeping behind the drapery [which] kept falling down, so a policeman was posted next to the painting to ensure public safety until…a vote would be taken among gallery visitors to determine whether The Awakening should stay or go. On the day of the vote…it soon became obvious that The Awakening had more admirers than adversaries. "Speaking in a general way," wrote the Chronicle the next day, "all the good-natured, sleek and healthy people appeared to be in favor of allowing the picture to remain and all the dyspeptic and melancholy ones determined to have it removed."

On the day of the vote, 12,808 people bought tickets to the fair. The vote to unveil The Awakening prevailed in a landslide.

Guay's interest in the female nude, often seen from the back, continued throughout his career. Farniente (Lazing), from 1911, shows a sleeping nude, and in 1912, his submission to the Salon was simply titled Nu (Nude); both images were issued as souvenir postcards, presumably acceptable for delivery in the French post.

The whereabouts of a number of his paintings are unknown. His Cosette of 1882, depicting the character from Les Misérables, is known today only from reproductions, one of which, an albumen print now at the Maison de Victor Hugo, he inscribed to the author: "A Victor Hugo, notre illustre poète national, Hommage de son grand admirateur, Gabriel Guay." His genre painting En l'absence du maître (While the Master's Away) of 1877 is also known only from reproductions, including a full-page engraving published in L'illustration: journal universel.

At least one of his paintings is known to have been destroyed in the carnage of World War II: La mort de Jézabel, exhibited at the Salon of 1888, where it inspired the critic Henry Houssaye to write a vivid description:On the hard slabs, at the foot of a massive square tower covered at its base with blue tiles, lies with its head in front and arms outstretched the corpse of the Queen of Israel. In Jezebel's supreme struggle with her murderers, her dark green dress of shimmering velvet was torn and half-destroyed. Her beautiful white body is naked above the belt, and her red hair spreads over the granite like a flood of molten copper. On the left, in the crepuscular twilight, a street recedes in perspective, creating a singular optical illusion. Packs of carnivorous dogs approach, mouths gaping and eyes ablaze. Despite the murder that has just been committed and despite the carnage about to occur, we are less moved by the drama than we are struck by the power of the execution and seduced by the charm of the coloring. This supple white body, with golden halftones and gray-blue shadows, still throbs with life. It stands out with surprising relief and incomparable brilliance.

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Gabriel Guay」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。