Part Three
GERMAINE DE STAËL by Vigée Le Brun
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| Painter: Vigée Le Brun. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva. Image source: Web Gallery of Art "Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love." |
Germaine
de Staël (1766-1817), writer of fiction, political propaganda, moral
and feminist essays, literary criticicism and autobiography, held the
most influential salon in France during the Directoire, was committed
against the principles of Empire and became one of Napoleon's most
eloquent opponents, moving her centre of power to her family home in
Geneva after he exiled her from Paris.
Ambitious and passionate, a profuse lover and loyal friend, she was an intellectual of international significance, who analysed the prevailing cultural and political trends of her age in the eye of the storm, and identified the whole of humanity's frailty in her own emotional needs - "We cease to love ourselves if no one loves us". She felt and lived in the C-minor key of Romanticism in all its anguished yearning and exhilarating self-assertion, writing in Réflexions sur le suicide: "Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love."
The classical motifs of this painting of her in the role of her own literary heroine Corinne, do not conceal either the subjective Romanticism of de Staël, daughter of Necker, the Swiss Protestant outsider appointed to reform the finances of the ancien régime, or the playful Rococo sophistication of Vigée Le Brun, who had achieved prominence through the patronage of Marie-Antoinette. Neither artist nor subject look fully at ease with the disciplines of neoclassicism from which de Staël's irreppressible energy bursts out in rebellion, making her the main force of nature in the landscape. She said she would rather suffer than be bored.
Turbans of various kinds, simple or decorated with plumes and jewels, that had reappeared as informal headwear for fashionable women, for the first time since the Renaissance, in the pre-revolutionary 1780s, became a craze after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798 -1801).
Ambitious and passionate, a profuse lover and loyal friend, she was an intellectual of international significance, who analysed the prevailing cultural and political trends of her age in the eye of the storm, and identified the whole of humanity's frailty in her own emotional needs - "We cease to love ourselves if no one loves us". She felt and lived in the C-minor key of Romanticism in all its anguished yearning and exhilarating self-assertion, writing in Réflexions sur le suicide: "Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love."
The classical motifs of this painting of her in the role of her own literary heroine Corinne, do not conceal either the subjective Romanticism of de Staël, daughter of Necker, the Swiss Protestant outsider appointed to reform the finances of the ancien régime, or the playful Rococo sophistication of Vigée Le Brun, who had achieved prominence through the patronage of Marie-Antoinette. Neither artist nor subject look fully at ease with the disciplines of neoclassicism from which de Staël's irreppressible energy bursts out in rebellion, making her the main force of nature in the landscape. She said she would rather suffer than be bored.
FASHION and EMANCIPATION
Madame de Staël's Turban
Turbans of various kinds, simple or decorated with plumes and jewels, that had reappeared as informal headwear for fashionable women, for the first time since the Renaissance, in the pre-revolutionary 1780s, became a craze after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798 -1801).
The headdress acquired prestige among intellectuals through its association with Madame de Staël, who wore enormous, attention-grabbing turbans of brightly coloured silks:
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| Germaine de
Staël in one of her famous turbans, c.1810, in a detail of a painting
attributed by different sources to François Gérard or, more likely from
the style and background, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson. |
