Benouville made his debut in the Netherlands at the Amsterdam exhibition of Works by Living Masters in 1856, one year after his success at the Paris Exposition. E.L. Jacobson, the Rotterdam collector, loaned one of his paintings for the show, and the artist himself sent two watercolors. One of them was the present work, which Fodor presumably acquired at that exhibition.
It is quite unlike any of the other sheets by Benouville in the Fodor collection, being neither a sketch nor a preliminary study, but a reduced replica of his Le Poussin sur les bords du Tibre, trouvant la composition de son Moïse sauvé des eaux (location unknown) of 1855. Benouville exhibited this canvas at the Salon of 1857, and prints made after it show that it was identical to the watercolor apart from the size. The coloring also appears to have been similar, judging by Gautier’s description of the painting in his Salon review.
Benouville’s “play” is a combination of an anecdotal history piece and a genre scene, with the seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin in the leading role and Italian washerwomen in nineteenth-century folk costumes as the supporting cast. The scene is set on the banks of the Tiber in the picturesque Roman campagna, with the Monte Polle in the background. Benouville’s model and subject for this composition was Poussin’s The Finding of Moses. Some of the borrowings are literal, such as the setting, but the naturalistic interpretation is distinctly nineteenth-century. The figure of Poussin is based on his self-portrait in the Louvre. Benouville would also have been able to draw on his own impressions of the Italian landscape, formed during his sojourn in Italy from 1846 to 1851 as a pensioner of the Prix de Rome.
Episodes from the lives of famous painters were a popular theme in the nineteenth century, and there was a particular interest in the life and work of Poussin, and his empirical method of composition. His excursions in the countryside around Rome in search of motifs for his paintings frmed an important element in nineteenth-century iconography. Two places in the Roman campagna were even named after him: the Fabrique de Poussin, a ruined folly, and the Promenade de Poussin, the spot near the Tiber which is the setting for The Finding of Moses.
The theme of the Promenade de Poussin first appeared at the Paris Salon around 1840, and in 1843 Paul Flandrin went one step further by depicting Poussin himself in that setting. Benouvile followed his usual practice and made numerous preliminary studies for the Poussin. Aubrun lists no fewer than 21 separate studies of the washerwomen, and six of Poussin.
( Wiepke Loos)
