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Émile-Jean-Horace Vernet, known as Horace
Vernet, was son of Antoine-Charles-Horace
(known as 'Carle') he and grandson of
Claude-Joseph Vernet, one of the leading French
landscape artists of his period. The painter was one of the most
prolific of French military painters,
specializing in scenes of the Napoleonic
era. Horace Vernet remained an ardent Bonapartist, and
his chief work was the huge Gallery of
Battles at Versailles, painted for Louis
Philippe. A portrait of Horace Vernet Napoleon and four battlepieces by him are
in the National Gallery, London. He also did animal and
Oriental subjects. From 1828 to 1835 Horace
Vernet was
Director of the French Academy in Rome. His
sister married the costume-history painter
Paul Delaroche.
Having obtained the king’s permission to
leave Rome, in 1833 Horace Vernet made the first of
many voyages to Algeria, in the company of
the English painter William Wyld. Vernet felt that Africa was the continent of
the future, "a gold mine for France", and he acquired a
vast area at Ben-Koula. Convinced that the
gestures and behavior of the Arabs had not
changed for hundreds of years and that
Horace Vernet painter was watching live representations of
Biblical scenes, he set out to paint religious scene paintings after the lives
of the nomads he saw. Starting with the Conteur
Arabe (‘Arab Storyteller’) executed towards
the end of 1833 for the Count of Pembroke,
Horace Vernet pushed aside the romantic, violent and supple technique in favor
of the precision and fidelity of ethnographic detail with which the painter imbued his oriental and
biblical scene Horace Vernet paintings. This practice of
dressing biblical personages in modern Arab
clothes displeased the public and Horace Vernet had to
defend his ideas in front of the Academy
with the help of documents collected during
his journeys. In 1848 he published an
article in the Illustration journal: "The
connections which exist between the costumes
of the ancient Hebrews and the modern
Arabs". |
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