Camille Benoît

Henri Fantin-Latour: Autour du piano , 1885, Camille Benoît is the third man standing from the left

Camille Benoît (born December 8, 1851 in Roanne , † July 1, 1923 in Paris ) was a French composer , music critic , musicologist , art collector , art historian and patron .

Life

Camille Benoît studied composition with César Franck . Vincent d'Indy and Ernest Chausson were among his classmates and friends . Like them, Benoît admired the music of Richard Wagner . Together with Ernest Chausson and Vincent d'Indy, he attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 and saw the first performance of the entire tetralogy of Der Ring des Nibelungen under the direction of the composer. From 1882 he published translations and analyzes of Wagner's works, including the motifs of the Mastersingers of Nuremberg . The painter Henri Fantin-Latour immortalized some of the Parisian Wagnerians in 1885 in his group portrait Autour du piano , in which you can see Emmanuel Chabrier at the piano as well as d'Indy and Benoît.

Through the mediation of his friend Henry Roujon , he worked from 1888 as an assistant to the conservator for paintings and drawings at the Louvre , although he had no art-historical training. Around the same time he started building his own art collection. In 1889 his musical work Prelude pour les Noces Corinthiennes , a dramatic poem inspired by Anatole France , was premiered . France also wrote the foreword to Benoît's 1891 new translation of Goethe's Faust .

From 1892 to 1909, Benoît undertook eleven trips through Europe on behalf of the Louvre in order to initiate acquisitions of works of art and to collect information for inventory catalogs. In particular, he worked on the compilation of an inventory of old Dutch painting in the Louvre, where his contacts to the German art historians Wilhelm von Bode and Max Jakob Friedländer helped him. From 1894 he worked as a deputy curator for painting at the Louvre.

A focus of his work was on French painting of the 14th and 15th centuries, on which he wrote numerous articles in the magazines Gazette des Beaux-Arts , La Chronique des Beaux-Arts , La Revue de l'art ancien et modern , Les Monuments Piot and Revue de Paris published. It reached its peak in 1904 in the exhibition Les français Primitifs, which he helped to organize . During his work for the Louvre, the museum acquired several works from the primitifs français et flamands , i.e. late Gothic painting from France as well as the Dutch and here in particular the Flemish school. For this he was criticized by numerous art historians of his time, as they took the view that the museum should concentrate more on Italian painting. Benoît defended his acquisition policy by pointing out the special influence of Flemish painting on the development of painting in France.

Towards the end of his life, Benoit went blind. In 1918 he donated a considerable part of his private collection to the Louvre. The museum in his hometown Roanne received further donations. In 1922 he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor for his services . He died in 1923 and bequeathed the works of art still in his possession to the French state.

collection

Hieronymus Bosch: The Ship of Fools , 15th century

Cornelis van Dalem: Farm with Beggars , around 1560

Camille Benoît's art collection contained only a manageable number of works of art, but some of them were of particular quality and importance. Typical of a French art collector of the 19th century, Benoît collected works by his contemporaries. So, in his collection of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot , a view of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome , by Eugène Delacroix work The archangel Raphael leaves Tobias and Susanna and the Elders and Gustave Courbet image Landscape with resting man . Other works by French artists of this time are Marechal Molitor on the deathbed by Isidore Pils , Odalisque by Henri Gervex and the two paintings The Bay of Naples and La Mort de l'espion Morris by Camille Roqueplan .

In addition, Benoît owned two early Italian works with The Stigmatization of St. Francis by Mariotto di Nardo and St. Antonius the Master of Osservanza . In addition, there was a work by El Greco with Saint Francis . From the Dutch school, Benoît had compiled Landscape with Canal by Jan van Goyen , Portrait of an Officer by Abraham de Vries , The Surgeon by David Ryckaert and Farm with Beggar by Cornelis van Dalem . The most important work in his collection, however, was Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools .

Publications on music and poetry

• Lettres inédites en France de Richard Wagner . Paris, 1882.
• Richard Wagner. Souvenirs traduits de l'allemand pour la première fois par Camille Benoît . G. Charpentier, Paris 1884.
• Musiciens poètes et philosophes: aperçus et jugements, précédés de lettres inédites en France et traduits de l'allemand pour la première fois . G. Charpentier, Paris 1887.
• Les Motifs typiques des Maîtres-Chanteurs de Nuremberg, comédie musicale par Richard Wagner: étude pour servir de guide à travers la partition, précédée d'une notice sur l'œuvre poétique . Schott, Paris 1888.
• La Grande Messe en si mineur de Jean-Sébastien Bach . Imprimeries de l'art, Paris 1891.
• Uvres de JW Goethe. New translation by Camille Benoît. Imprimerie A. Lemerre, Paris 1891.

Essays on art history

• Le Triptyque d'Oultremont et Jan Mostaert . In: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1899, XXI, 3e période, pp. 265-279, 369-380.
• Les Écoles de peintures dites primitives dans les Pays-Bas (XVe et XVIe siècles) . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, pp. 47-48.
• Nouveaux Portraits du XVIe siècle au Louvre . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, p. 48.
• Corneille de Lyon et les portraits des cours royales de France au XVIe siècle . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, p. 56.
• La Peinture primitive des Pays Bas au Louvre: La Chute des réprouvés attribuée à Jérôme Bosch . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, Volume XV, IV, pp. 132-133.
• Le Panneau de la Chute des réprouvés et le Jugement dernier de Bouts . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, pp. 143–144.
• Les Peintres primitifs des Pays-Bas: I. Le Jugement dernier de Louvain; II. Un Jan van Eyck à Paris au XVIIe siècle; III. Kolin de Koter et le Maître de Mérode-Flémalle . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1899, pp. 150–152, 152, 160-161.
• La Peinture française à la fin du XVe siècle . In: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1901, XXVI, 3e période, pp. 89-101, 318-332, 368-380.
• La Peinture française à la fin du XVe siècle . In: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1902, XXVII, 3e période, pp. 65–76, 239–251.
• Un chef d'œuvre de la peinture hollandaise du XVe siècle au musée du Louvre: La résurrection de Lazare par Gérard de Haarlem . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1902, pp. 139–140.
• Quelques remarques à propos de la peinture primitive en France et en Hollande . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1902, p. 181.
• La Résurrection de Lazare par Gérard de Harlem . In: Monuments et mémoires (Fondation Eugène Piot), Volume 9, 1902, pp. 73-94.
• L'École néerlandaise primitive au Louvre . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1903, pp. 2–3.
• La Peinture néerlandaise primitive au Louvre et around du Louvre . In: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1903, pp. 104-106, 152-153.
• Les Primitifs français: la peinture du XVe siècle . In: La Revue de Paris, May 1, 1904, pp. 189-214.

literature

• Blandine Landau: Un homme, une collection: Camille Benoît (1851-1923) . In: La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France 2007, No. 5, pp. 86–93.

Web links

Commons : Camille Benoît  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Biographical information from the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (French)