Beaume enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1817, and later entered the studio of Gros. He then embarked on a successful career as a history painter, which included several commissions from king Louis-Philippe, but later he began producing genre works, many of them in the style of Greuze. He received several medals at the Salons, where he first exhibited in 1819. Beaume was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1836.
This watercolor is an identical, reduced copy of the painting La sortie de l’église, which Beaume submitted to the Salon of 1846. A painting exhibited in 1846 was bought by the state, but works such as La sortie d’église were also extremely popular with private collectors. It is a typical specimen of the moralistic genre which had been grafted onto the stylistic and thematic tradition of the sentimental art of Greuze, Watteau and Chardin.
The title in the 1863 Fodor catalogue (Two girls giving alms to beggar children as they leave church) emphasized this moral aspect. The theme not only illustrated the behavior expected of all upright, God-fearing citizens, but also harked back to the days of Pre-Revolutionary France (when the poor still had t rely on charity), a period which the middle classes of the nineteenth century took as their model. Fodor also had a painting by Beaume wih charity as its subject. It was described in the 1863 catalogue as Monks of Mont St Bernard Bringing Relief to a Woman and Child Caught in the Snow and Overcome by Cold (Amsterdams Historisch Museum).
Beaume undoubtedly based the two winsome young girls at the church door on the figures of the bride and her sister in Greuze’s The Village Bride, and it is clear from the contemporary Salon critiques that Beaume’s work was regardes as a pastiche of Greuze’s. In 1846, for instance, Thoré wrote of La sortie d’église: “M. Beaume a copié deux jeunes filles de Greuze,” while a reporter for L’Artiste uttered the heartfelt cry: “M. Beaume veut imiter Greuze. M. Beaume a du talent; mais Greuze: où etes-vous?” In fact, Greuze’s popular painting had served as a model for countless artists ever since 1782, when it had hung in the Louvre.
Neither this drawing nor the painted version are dated, so it is impossible to say which is the repeat of the other. However, as noted in the Introduction here, nineteenth-century collectors were eager to own watercolor versions of famous Salon works.
The Fodor collection also contains a small pencil drawing by Beaume, which is either a preliminary draft for this work or an aide-memoire for the artist’s own use.
( Wiepke Loos)
