Nicolas Toussaint Charlet
Géricault Life
1843 The Conventionnel Merlin de Thionville with the Army of the Rhine (detail) Nicolas Toussaint Charlet.
“Monsieur, the colonel de La Combe, who consecrates all his time in his retirement in Touraine to the study of art, is lovingly preparing a great study of Charlet, excerpts of which L’Artiste very much hopes to publish… M. de La Combe possesses not only a complete collection of this much-missed artist, but also all that has been published about him… Mr. de La Combe knows Charlet root and branch. Among the precious documents…” A.H.
L’Œvre de Charlet (excerpt) by Arsene Houssaye from L’Artiste,1849, Volume 2, Series V, p. 214 (March, 13th issue).
Arsene Houssaye, editor of L’Artiste, was keen to publish passages of colonel de La Combe’s anticipated biography of Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, (1792-1845). Those who knew something of the life of Théodore Géricault were also interested. Charlet was for a time a close friend of Géricault; the two collaborated while in England together in 1820. We will return to Charlet and his role in Théodore Géricault’s life in the months to come, and offer here just a few introductory remarks.
Géricault and Charlet shared a common interest in art, military subjects, good food, and drink. But in other respects, the two men were very different. Géricault grew up surrounded by wealth. Charlet, who was a year younger than Gericault, was born poor and raised himself out of poverty. Charlet attended college and after finishing his education studied art in the studio of the painter Gros. Charlet was a “working” artist, a caricaturist and a satirist – he painted signs, decorations for buildings, and produced a great many prints and lithographs. Charlet drew patriotic portraits of soldiers often, as well as children and scenes from daily life.
Indeed, in some ways Charlet was closer in temperment to Gericault’s teacher, Carle Vernet, than to Géricault. (See Charles Blanc’s biography of Vernet in this issue.) Even more than Vernet, Charlet thumbed his nose at convention. Charlet’s “battle” painting of 1843, above, is as much an attack on the genre of history painting as it is on the “hero” he depicts – Merlin de Theonville, an important politician during the French revolution. Rather than paint a standard battle scene with a heroic officer leading the charge, as almost all history painters would, Charlet portrays Theonville as a kind of grinning clown, blindly riding a blinkered cart horse into battle, quite delighted with himself, and utterly oblivious to his absurd mount and his own place in the charge. Theonville looks backward. But if we compare this battle scene with Géricault’s Charging Chausseur of 1812, the contrast between the two paintings could not be more dramatic.
Charlet’s painting above also stands in sharp contrast to Charlet’s grenadier print below, a print which is much closer to Géricault’s own work in this media. In this print, Charlet crafts an elegy to the common man, as he so often does – the solid citizen who leaves hearth and home to defend his family, his liberty, and the nation. The grenadier stands on guard, resting his foot upon corpse of the enemy as his wound is bound; he is alert, and yet relaxed and composed with his pipe in one hand and his musket in the other. The nameless hero is also proud, to be sure, and deservedly so. Even wounded, he stands on guard for France, always ready to fight hard and bleed for the nation. Yet, there is also a kind of levity in the Charlet figure, a levity which is often emphatic in much of his work. A sharp, emphatic levity also informs the caricatures of Carle Vernet, especially his muscadins, or dandies. We find a subtler form of humor in some of the marine paintings of his father Joseph Vernet. Yet, levity very rarely appears in any of the art of Théodore Géricault. In that respect, Géricault is more the companion of Jacques-Louis David, than of Charlet and the Vernets.
An 1865 copy of an earlier Charlet print.