NARRATOR:
This canvas by the French painter Louis Ducis, with its precise contours, refined finish, clear colors and ordered composition, sums up the ideals of neoclassical painting. It recalls an event in the life of Sappho, one of the few known female poets of the ancient world. Born in Greece in the early 6th century BC, she had fallen desperately in love with a young man named Phaon. Failing to gain his affections, she flung herself off a cliff in the hopes that a “Lover’s Leap” would cure her hopeless passion.
Here, she is brought back to life by the magic of music. An accomplished composer, Sappho wrote her poems to be accompanied by a lyre, here played by a beautiful, almost naked youth. A scroll has dropped from her hand… a fragment of her famous poem in praise of the elusive Phaon.
SAPPHO [ACTOR]:
“Phaon, O my lover …
I alone of all things
Fret with unsluiced fire.
And there is no quenching
In the night for Sappho,
Since her lover Phaon
Leaves her unrequited.”
NARRATOR:
A renewed interest in the art of classical antiquity had been spreading throughout Europe since the mid-18th century, prompted by the discovery and excavation of the ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its values fit in perfectly with the ideals of the French Revolution, and neoclassical painters like Ducis found their themes in tales of high ideals and civic virtue.
Sappho Recalled to Life by the Charm of Music
c. 1811
Louis Ducis (French, 1775-1847)
On View
Louis Ducis became a student of Jacques-Louis David in 1795. Ducis is best known for his paintings derived from historical and literary episodes, as in this work exhibited in the 1812 Salon. Interest in the Greek poetess Sappho was high in the early 19th century. A popular tragic opera, named for the heroine, was frequently performed. The well-known playwright Jean-Francois Ducis (1733–1817), Louis Ducis’s uncle, referred to Sappho’s ill-fated love in an anthology of poems. In the visual arts, her story inspired paintings by both Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1801) and David (1809). These various expressions of the same subject likely influenced Ducis’s selection.
This elegant and highly finished rendering of Sappho Recalled to Life by the Charm of Music shows the poetess stirring from the deep melancholy that befell her after her lover Phaon’s abandonment. The rhythmic and decorous choreography of her attendants and the arrangement of the drama close to the picture plane recall a stage performance. A bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, alludes to the strength of mind needed to withstand the pangs of love.
Details
- Artist Name: Louis Ducis (French, 1775-1847)
- Title: Sappho Recalled to Life by the Charm of Music
- Date: c. 1811
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 45-3/8 x 57-5/8 in. (115.2 x 146.3 cm)
- Credit Line: The Norton Simon Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
- Accession Number: F.1983.10.P
- Copyright: © The Norton Simon Foundation
Object Information
General Count Rapp, original commission: by 1812 (sale, Paris, 15 June 1830, lot 2, to);
Plailly, rue du Sentier 6, Paris;
[Artibus, Geneva, Switzerland, consigned by 10 January 1977 to];
[Heim Gallery Ltd., London, sold 1 June 1979 to];
Norton Simon, Malibu, California, gift 1983 to;
The Norton Simon Foundation.
Plailly, rue du Sentier 6, Paris;
[Artibus, Geneva, Switzerland, consigned by 10 January 1977 to];
[Heim Gallery Ltd., London, sold 1 June 1979 to];
Norton Simon, Malibu, California, gift 1983 to;
The Norton Simon Foundation.
Salon
- Paris, 1812 to
Forgotten French Art from the First to the Second Empire: Autumn Exhibition
- London, Heim Gallery Ltd., 1978-11-23 to 1978-12-22
A Revolution of the Palette: The First Synthetic Blues and their Impact on French Artists
- Norton Simon Museum, 2015-07-17 to 2016-01-04
Reinstallation of South Wing
- Norton Simon Museum, 1993-10-07 to 1995-08-13
- Bordes, Philippe, Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exhile, fig. 71 p. 210
- Annales de musée et de l'école moderne des beaux-arts, 1812, pl. 12 pp. 26-27
- Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture et gauvre, des artistes vivans. Salon de 1812, 1812, no. 327 p. 35
- Fère, Guyot de, Nouvelle biographie générale, 1868, p. 8
- Bellier de La Chavignerie, Emile, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française depuis l'origine des arts du dessin jusqu'à nos jours, 1882,
- Beaumont, Charles de, Réunion de la Société des Beaux-Arts des Départments, 1900, no. 25 p. 544
- Daniels, Jeffrey, Art and Artists, 1977, fig. 1 pp. 18, 19
- Herrmann, Frank, Selected paintings at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, 1980, p. 86
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 113
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1606 p. 426
- Joan Mut Arbós, SAPPHO RECALLED TO LIFE BY MUSIC: Feminine emotion and raison d'État in neo-classical Napoleonic painting, 2018, 1 pp.21-48
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