By simplifying the craft of painting, by insisting on freshness and vigor in his results, on the development of a manual know-how or dexterity, and on the importance of technique, he ideally equipped his pupils with a basic and solid craft. There was determination, a self-assurance, and a conviction about his pronouncements which are also manifest in his art. In the essay that follows Levitine’s remarks, Alain De Leiris emphasizes the importance of Couture’s technique, and concludes: “I believe Couture did make a positive contribution to a renovation of tradition. The young artists did not have to approve their masters’ ponderous clichés, but they left their studios, imbued with an old and rich tradition which lent itself to inexhaustible rediscoveries and revolutionary interpretations.” Admittedly, these ingredients were most often preserved in a little recognizable, somewhat dehydrated form, but the ingredients were there, nonetheless, ready to be revived. illustration in his famous Romans of the Decadence.” Levitine notes that just as Manet was Couture’s student, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Bazille studied under Gleyre (“less well known than Couture, but certainly a pompier”), while Géricault and Delacroix worked in the studio of Guérin, “who deserves to be called an early pompier.” And he suggests, partly following Dorival, that “the technical clichés of pompier art preserved some of the ingredients of the great tradition of French painting. At any rate, it is certain that many of Couture’s paintings beg for this epithet, which finds a perfect. was ever called a pompier during his lifetime. In a brief Introductory Note to the Maryland Couture catalog George Levitine resurrects the argot term pompier which, he explains, refers to “any kind of artist whose productions are marked by a pretentious and turgid banality, rooted in the stereotypes of the official academic establishment.” 2 He adds: “It is not known whether Thomas Couture. The remarks that follow take their impulse here. But the exact nature of Couture’s ambition in these works has resisted definition and largely as a result his role in the painting of mid-century France has been misconstrued. 1 The question would be important even if Manet had not been Couture’s student: the manifest ambitiousness of the Romans of the Decadence and of what has survived of his work towards the Enrollment of the Volunteers makes sure of that. ![]() ![]() WHAT IS THE POSITION of Thoams Couture in 19th-century French painting? This question was raised most recently by the University of Maryland Art Gallery’s exhibition of paintings and drawings by Couture from American collections and by the informative catalog that accompanied it.
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