Honoré de Balzac and Natoire’s The Expulsion from Paradise

Abstract

The nineteenth-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850) has a well-documented reputation for drawing on the conventions of art to add depth and nuance to his literary work. Intrigued by a wide range of biblical, mythological, and genre subjects, he peppered his novels with references to scores of paintings that would have been familiar to his audience.1 He was also a passionate collector, who, like a character in one of his novels, frequented the establishments of art dealers in an effort to fill his home with paintings, drawings, and decorative arts.2 Yet, notwithstanding his evident appreciation of art and his ability to conjure up the rich iconography of well-known painters, he seems not to have been a sophisticated collector. Toward the end of his life, he noted in a letter to art critic Théophile Thoré that, although he enjoyed hunting for additions to his “petit musée,” he was not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of paintings.3 While he professed to own pictures by or attributed to such artists as Holbein, Domenichino, and Rubens,4 no work by or even after these artists has ever been associated with his collection. To date, only two pieces have been identified: Bacchante in a Landscape by Jean-Baptiste Mallet, now in the Louvre, Paris, and The Expulsion from Paradise by Charles Joseph Natoire (1700 – 1777), belonging to the Metropolitan Museum (Figure 1).5 Research indicates that Balzac purchased the Natoire in 1846 with his future wife, Eve Hanska (1804 – 1882), and that it remained in their collection for thirty-six years.6 The history of Balzac’s engagement with the painting can be traced through the letters he wrote over a period of almost seventeen years to Hanska — a noblewoman of Polish descent who had married Wenceslas Hanski (1782 – 1841) in 1819 and lived in western Ukraine at Wierzchownia, then part of the Russian Empire.7 The two began corresponding in February 1832, when Hanska sent Balzac an admiring yet critical fan letter, referring to herself simply as “L’Étrangère” (the foreigner).8 After an epistolary courtship interspersed with extended periods of shared travel and stopovers in Wierzchownia, the two were married on March 14, 1850. Tragically, Balzac died of ill health on August 18, only five months later. Balzac and Hanska first saw the Natoire on a trip across Italy, Switzerland, and Germany in 1846.9 On March 16 of that year, the writer boarded a mail coach in Paris for Rome, where he met up with Hanska. In mid-April, the two set sail for Genoa, continuing by way of Lake Orta and the Simplon Pass to Switzerland. On May 16, a few days before the writer’s forty-seventh birthday, they arrived in Basel, where they stayed at the luxurious Hôtel des Trois Rois to celebrate the feast day of Saint Honoré.10 At Miville-Krug, a local dealer in antiquities, they saw a number of items of interest, including The Expulsion from Paradise, which depicts the liminal moment when Adam and Eve come to terms with the severity of their situation, as an angry God emphatically casts them out of the Garden of Eden. Balzac, describing the work in an 1846 letter to Hanska, recognized its pathos: “Among the serious paintings in my cabinet, the Natoire makes a pitiful sight.”11 At the time, Natoire’s legacy was not without controversy in France. On the one hand, he was known as an accomplished painter and teacher, serving as a professor at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and director of the French Academy in Rome, a post he held for nearly twenty-five years. Some of his most esteemed paintings decorated the Château de Versailles, Hôtel de Soubise, and Chapelle des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris, while the Louvre was said to hold three of his mythological compositions: Juno, The Three Graces, and Venus Demanding Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas.12 On the other hand, the preservationist Alexandre Lenoir revived, in 1837, the longstanding debate on the relative values of Rococo and Neoclassical art, arguing that Natoire and his contemporaries François Boucher, Honoré de Balzac and Natoire’s The Expulsion from Paradise