Benouville first exhibited at the Salon in 1838, after studying under Picot, and he remained true to the academic tradition throughout his life. In 1845 he won the Prix de Rome. In 1852, after his return from Rome, he began submitting anecdotal history pieces and religious paintings to the Salons. He collaborated with Amaury Duval on the decoration of the church of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye.

It is not entirely certain that this stury of a standing man is actually related to Les Martyrs. The haughty, erect figure in the second row of sears has a bears, is posed differently, and has fewer folds in his toga. Auburn suggests that Benouville used friends and relatives as models for some of the Roman spectators, which might explain why the faces in the painting differ from those in the earlier watercolor. It is not clear whether the sheets in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum relate to the watercolor or the painting. One possible clue is provided by the relative sizes of the studies and the figures in the completed works. The male figure in this sheet, for example, is approximately one-third the size of the standing man in the painting, but exactly matches the corresponding figure in the watercolor.

The Amsterdam Historical Museum has ten drawings by Léon Benouville, a diehard exponent of the academic tradition. With the exception of one watercolor they are all preliminary sketches for paintings, and thus form a distinct stylistic group within the Fodor collection. The subjects of most of the sheets have been identified with the aid of M. Aubrun’s catalog of Benouville’s oeuvre, although not one of them is listed here. The question of provenance is rather more difficult. Two of the sheets were definitely purchased at the studio sale held after Benouville’s death in 1859, and the history of the watercolor is also known. The other studies were probably bought at the same sale, although the auction record printed in Aubrun is not absolutely conclusive on this point.

Benouville’s work may well have been brought to Fodor’s attention by A.J. Lamme, his adviser and agent, who had been introduced to the artist by Lamme’s nephew, Ary Scheffer. Lamme was certainly present at Drouot’s on 3 May 1859, when the large collection of drawings and sketches from Benouville’s atelier came under the hammer.

The first five drawings in this group can all be identified as preliminary studies for one of Benouville’s best-known history paintings, Les martyrs conduits au supplice (Martyrs Entering the Arena). Benouville worked in Rome from 1846 to 1851 as a recipient of the Prix de Rome, and it was there, in 1848 or 1949, that he evidently produced the first sketch for Les martyrs. In 1851 he submitted a watercolor of the scene for exhibition in the 1852 Salon (now Paris, Musée du Louvre). This in turn led to an official commission for the large version in oils for the 1855 Paris Exposition.

The ainting shows a group of Christians emerging from a dark tunnel into the glare of a Roman amphitheatre, where they are to be thrown to the lions. The spectators are already seated, waiting for the barbaric spectacle to begin. The best seats are occupied by senators and their wives, who, “having exhausted all sensual pleasures, have come to intoxicate themselves with the scent of blood and to enjoy a brief diversion from their long tedium.” The figures leaning over the balustrade on the left bear a certain compositional resemblance to the corresponding group on Raphael’s Mass of Bolsena.

All told there are some fifty extant preliminary studies for this composition, the majority of them being distinctly Raphaelesque drawings of individual figures. They were the product of Benouville’s painstaking method of working which the critic Burty described in detail in his report of the Benouville sale. “He was forever experimenting, repeatedly making smack sketches of the overall composition until he achieved the result he was seeking.” He then began on the studies of individual figures, and when he was satisfied with the poses and drapery he squared the pencil drawing and scaled up the figures in charcoal on blue or gray paper. The figure studies in the Fodor collection are typical examples of this procedure.
( Wiepke Loos)