La sainte cène du patriarche
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| Dinner of the Philosophers (La sainte cène du patriarche) (detail) |
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| Jean Huber , around 1772/73 |
| Oil on Ln |
| 60.0 × 80.5 cm |
| Voltaire foundation, Oxford |
La sainte cène du patriarche , also known as Diner der Philosophen or Souper des philosophes , is an oil painting by the Swiss painter Jean Huber , known as Huber-Voltaire, who dedicated a large part of his artistic work to the French philosopher Voltaire . The picture shows a round table of the philosopher in his castle in Ferney near Lake Geneva.
Historical background
Huber, who had served in a grenadier regiment from Hessen-Kassel , was a member of the Geneva Council of Two Hundred , self-taught as an artist, and had first visited Voltaire in Ferney in 1756 . Voltaire had quickly made friends with him. The painter drew caricatures of his famous host, painted his portrait several times, he cut silhouettes of the philosopher, as well as of guests of the house, works that sold well to European royal houses.
Voltaire ran an open house in Ferney, entertaining guests who made pilgrimages to him from all over Europe and whom he also accommodated in the absence of an inn in town. Sometimes up to 40 guests stayed in the castle, Voltaire called himself "host of Europe" ( hôte de l'Europe)
Around 1768, through Melchior Grimm's mediation, Huber received from Catherine II , who had begun an exchange of letters with Voltaire in 1763, the commission for a cycle of pictures about the everyday life of the philosopher, who was highly valued by Katharina. In “La Voltairiade” Huber depicts Voltaire's everyday life with an ironic look, from the “ lever ” to breakfast, the kick his horse gives him, playing chess, as an actor on stage, planting trees or receiving guests. According to contemporary sources, there is also a picture of Voltaire's round table in the series, which has not survived. The paintings in the cycle are all 53 × 43 cm in size, most of them are now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The painting La sainte cène du patriarche has a format of 60 × 80.5 cm and does not belong to this series.
description
The picture shows a dinner party visiting Voltaire under his chairmanship. The meal takes place in a sparsely furnished room. On the left, a wide passage opens into a room in which several women are employed and through which a servant is removing a tray. On the right, a slightly opened wing door allows a view into another room. The two passages flank an imposing round arch niche with a fluted column with a capital and a plinth vase, which gives the room a stately appearance.
Not all people at the table can be reliably identified. In the middle, Voltaire sits with an allonge wig and a red woolen hat on his head, which is puffed into a crown-like structure. With his left arm raised as if to draw attention to himself, his gaze is directed at Diderot on the far right of the table, the only one in the group without a wig. To his right sit d'Alembert and La Harpe . The young La Harpe was one of Voltaire's favorite protégés and, with his beautiful wife, visited Voltaire several times. D'Alembert and Condorcet visited Voltaire in Ferney from September 25th to October 10th, 1770 , after he had prolonged the trip to the displeasure of Voltaire. Condorcet is suspected to be in the person who sits with his back to the viewer. The writer and encyclopaedist Marmontel sits between Diderot and Condorcet . Marmontel had visited Voltaire in June 1760 and reports about it in his memoir. Next to him on the outer edge of the picture sits Diderot , who is verifiably never to Ferney.
Sitting on the left outer edge of the picture, dressed entirely in black and with a hat hat on his head, is the former Jesuit Père Adam (Antoine Adam, * 1705), whom Voltaire had taken into his household in 1763 when the Jesuit order was banned in France until 1776 was his housemate and preferred chess partner. He is absorbed in a conversation with Melchior Grimm . Grimm was the editor of the exclusive Correspondance littéraire , in which he wrote rave reviews of Huber's pictures and which reliably procured him commissions at European courts. Jean Huber himself sits on Voltaire's left. The following two people, more or less hidden by Condorcet, are the Salonnière Sophie d'Houdetot and the poet Saint-Lambert . Saint-Lambert, who had once unleashed M me du Châtelet from Voltaire , was Sophie's long-time lover, with whom Rousseau had a romance when Lambert was absent from Paris because of the Seven Years' War. Sophie d'Houdetot and Saint-Lambert were never guests at Voltaire either.
Huber did not finish the picture, the background and secondary characters are only fleeting and sketchy.
The title
The title of the painting - La sainte cène du patriarche - comes from Friedrich Melchior Grimm , who called it that in a letter to Princess Amalie von Gallitzin .
With this, Grimm alludes to a pictorial tradition in Western Christian art of depictions of the Last Supper of Jesus , and Nicolas Cronck speculates in his essay whether Voltaire himself did not help determine the selection of the subject and the connotation it contained . The blessing gesture of Jesus mutates in the picture into a gesture of lecturing or the call for attention, the number of " apostles " is limited to eleven, one Judas is missing.
Provenance
There were only reliable sources for this picture in the 19th century, when it appeared in England, provided with the work slip of an English restorer. The writer Lytton Strachey acquired the picture around 1920 and hung it in his study. After his death in 1932, the picture passed to his heirs, most recently to a relative of Stracheys who lived in the Oxford area. In 1983 Giles Barber, librarian at the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford, was able to purchase the picture for the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford.
literature
- Nicolas Cronk: Voltaire et la sainte cène de Huber: Parodie et posture . In: Philosophy des lumières et valeurs chrétiennes: Homage to Marie-Hélène Cotoni. L'Harmattan, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-296-05034-1 , pp. 23-34.
- Nicolas Cronk: Le pet de Voltaire . In: La figure du philosophe dans les lettres anglaises et françaises. Ed. Alexis Tadié. Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest 2010. ISBN 978-2-84016064-9
- Jon R. Iverson: Le dîner des philosophes. Conviviality and Collaboration in the French Enlightenment. In: Seth Adam Whidden (Ed.): Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. several authors, one pen. Ashgate, Farnham et al. 2009, ISBN 978-0-7546-6643-1 , pp. 25-34.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Larousse, Francois Marie Arouet, dit Voltaire
- ↑ a b c University of Oxford. Voltaire Foundation. La Cène du patriarche
- ↑ All personal identifications Voltaire Foundation, Oxford
- ^ Ian Davidson: Voltaire. A life. London 2010, p. 395.
- ^ Condorcet: Selected Writings on Elections and Votes. Mohr, Bamberg 2011, p. 3.
- ^ Memoirs of Marmontel, written by himself. Vol. 1, 1807, pp. 193-194.
- ^ Kaethe Schirmacher: Voltaire, a biography. Dogma, Bremen 2013, p. 418.
- ^ Letter from Grimm to Adelheid Amalia von Gallitzin dated May 24, 1773. [1]
- ^ Nicolas Cronk: Voltaire et las sainte cène de Huber: Parodie et posture . In: Philosophy des lumières et valeurs chrétiennes. Paris 2008.