“[W]hat you see now does not resemble anything you have encountered elsewhere.”
The famous Paul Gavarni was born Sulpice-Guillaume Chevallier. He only took the name Gavarni after having traveled multiple times through the Pyrenees, notably in Gavarnie. Coming from a modest background, the young man worked as a mechanical laborer before realizing the importance of his gift with the pencil. Highly appreciated for his caricatures and illustrations, his talent was soon recognized among his contemporaries. His compositions, translated into lithographs, were destined for numerous journals, where he became a regular contributor alongside Honoré Daumier, such as Le Charivari, La Caricature, La Mode, L’Illustration, and Le Journal des gens du monde, which he co-founded in 1833.
The 1840s marked a turning point in his career. From then on, Gavarni was called to illustrate novels and regularly attended literary and artistic salons. The army of romantic writers he mingled with in Montmartre included Balzac, Sand, Nodier, and Victor Hugo. Thanks to his drawings, novelists saw their works brought to life under the artist’s pencil, which humorously depicted the manners of the bourgeoisie and the bohemian life under Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire.
It was with Victor Hugo, whom he met during one of his stays in the Pyrenees while passing through in 1843, that Gavarni seemed to maintain the greatest rapport. Both attentive observers of the world around them, the two men developed a friendship that resulted in many affectionate testimonies. In 1862, Gavarni was invited by the publishing house Albert Lacroix and Verboeckhoven to the banquet held in honor of Victor Hugo to celebrate the success of Les Misérables. Gavarni was then considered “the eminent artist whose name and talent were appointed to illustrate this great work.”
Our painting is an excellent example of these affectionate exchanges. In 1829, the artist created for the journal L’Illustration a lithograph depicting his friend seated in a Louis XVI bergère in a cozy interior (ill. 1). This lithograph was made after an oil painting that the artist intended for his friend, with a dedication visible at the bottom right of our composition. Our portrait should thus be dated shortly before the lithograph, between 1827 and 1829. In this portrait, Hugo, aged between 25 and 27, was already leading a significant literary production. His latest publication was Cromwell (1827), which would become the manifesto of Romanticism.
Our painting is all the rarer in the artist’s oeuvre as it was executed in oil—a technique Gavarni rarely practiced and reserved for intimate works in which light plays a major role. This portrait, depicted in a warm atmosphere, belongs to this small body of work. Thanks to a porcelain-like and extremely precise touch, echoing his career as a draftsman and lithographer, the light is ingeniously directed onto the model’s face, where a small touch of white can be seen on the bridge of the nose.
The resemblance to other portraits of Victor Hugo from the same period—slim and slender as represented in our portrait—is striking. The works of Deveria in 1829, Maurin in 1833, and later Chatillon in 1836 highlight the psychology of this piercing, determined, and intense gaze, which inspired fascination and respect among his contemporaries (ill. 2, 3, and 4).
A keen observer of Parisian society under Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire, decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1852, Paul Gavarni enjoyed notoriety until the end of his career in the 1860s. More than a simple portrait, our painting bears witness to a professional, and even more so a friendly, relationship. The future leader of the Romantics is depicted calm and serene, at the dawn of a prominent career.
M.O
