Charles de Steuben

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles de Steuben stood before the Salon de Paris in 1812 and unveiled a canvas of Peter the Great fighting a storm on Lake Ladoga. The painting caught the attention of the professional world. It launched the career of a man born Carl August Wilhelm von Steuben, on the 18th of April 1788. He was a German-born French Romantic painter and lithographer, active from the Napoleonic era through the Second Empire. He would die in Paris on the 21st of November 1856. Yet the name on that Salon canvas hid a childhood spent far from France, raised inside the courts of Russia and the German duchies. How did a boy trained for a military or administrative career end up devoted to the brush instead? Who pushed him toward paint when duty pointed toward the battlefield? And what became of the family he built once the easel finally won out?

• 2. A Page's Political Education

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  Carl Hans Ernst von Steuben served as an officer for the Duke of Württemberg, a rank his son was expected to follow. At twelve years old, Steuben moved with his father to Saint Petersburg, where the elder von Steuben had entered Russian service as a captain. There he studied drawing at the Imperial Academy of Arts as a guest student, an early brush with the craft that would define him.

  In the summer of 1802, family connections at the court of the Tsar sent fourteen-year-old Steuben to Weimar. He accompanied Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, granddaughter of Frederick II Eugene, Duke of Württemberg, to the Thuringian cultural city. Two years later, in 1804, the Tsar's daughter married Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. At the ducal court Steuben served as a Page. It was a post meant to lead toward the military or civil administration his father had always assumed for him.

  Friedrich Schiller, the poet, was a friend of the family in Weimar. He recognized Steuben's artistic talent at once and instilled in the young page a political ideal: free self-determination, regardless of the constraints of court life. That idea would travel with Steuben far beyond the ducal household he was meant to serve.

• 3. The Humboldt Letters

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  In 1803, Steuben set out for Paris carrying a letter of introduction to the painter François Gérard. Gérard was known for taking in penniless aspiring artists, and he accepted the young Steuben for training. After two years of preparation, in February 1805, Steuben enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. There he studied under Jacques-Louis David and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, both renowned teachers at the school.

  Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, met Steuben while the young art student was working in a studio. Humboldt's brother Wilhelm had founded the University of Berlin, and Alexander himself became an unlikely champion of the Steuben family's artistic ambitions. He wrote long letters soliciting work for Steuben. He appealed to figures including the Prussian Minister Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein and Duchess Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Those letters bought Steuben the footing he needed before he ever stood in front of a Salon jury.

• 4. Painting History's Kings

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  In 1820, Steuben married Eleanor Trollé, a portrait painter he had met during his own training. The couple already had a son, Joseph Alexander, born in 1814, before the wedding took place. Historical paintings became his steady output through the decade that followed.

  At the request of Pierre Fontaine in 1828, Steuben painted La Clémence de Henri IV après la Bataille d'Ivry. The work shows a victorious Henry IV of France at the Battle of Ivry. Between 1834 and 1837, he completed Bataille de Poitiers, en octobre 732. It depicts Charles Martel triumphant at the Battle of Tours, also called the Battle of Poitiers. Around the same period he painted Jeanne la folle. Louis Philippe later commissioned him for a series of portraits of past Kings of France.

  In 1840, Steuben received a gold medal at the Salon de Paris for paintings that critics found highly acclaimed. It was the high point of a career built on French royal and military history rendered in oil. Recognition, though, did nothing to settle a conflict that had shadowed him since he first arrived in Paris.

• 5. Between Two Loyalties

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  Paris itself was a repeated source of internal conflict for Steuben. Its bohemian pull sat uneasily against the military-minded upbringing his father had given him, leaving him caught between two loyalties. In 1823, he settled the question of national allegiance, at least officially, by becoming a French citizen as a formal commitment to his adopted country.

  Freelance painting paid unevenly, and that irregular income clashed with Steuben's own sense of duty and social responsibility. To steady his family's finances, he took a teaching post at the École Polytechnique. Gustave Courbet was briefly among his students there, one thread in a career that kept pulling Steuben between the studio and the classroom.

• 6. Return To Russia

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  In 1843, Steuben went back to Russia for 11 years. In Saint Petersburg he completed seven paintings for Saint Isaac's Cathedral, the same cathedral that would later occupy his son's own career.

  A stroke ended that Russian chapter, and Steuben returned to Paris in 1854 as a sick man. Two more strokes followed, and eventually he lost the ability to work altogether. He died in 1856 at the age of 68, in the Paris he had adopted as home, and was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

  Steuben's son, Joseph Alexander, had been taught painting by his father and leaned on the family's close ties to the Russian art scene. He studied in Paris, spent two years in Rome, then followed his father's path to Saint Petersburg. There Tsar Nicholas I commissioned him directly, and he too painted for Saint Isaac's Cathedral.

• 7. Contours And Color

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  Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the French Romantic school, was a close friend of Steuben's, and Steuben portrayed him several times. Steuben belonged to that same Romantic movement, which was displacing classicism in French painting, even while he kept a lifelong love of classical painting.

  David, whom his students called "The painter of the Revolution," had joined art with politics in his own work. The subjects of Steuben's historical paintings carried a similar charge, favoring scenes that supported historical change. Steuben himself worked mainly in sharp color contrasts, with heavy solid contours and clear outlines.

  The severity of that style pushed many contemporaries, including Prud'hon, toward a softer, more romanticized counter-movement. They preferred the shadowy gentleness and gradual color shifts found in Italian Renaissance painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio da Correggio. They studied those masters intensively. Steuben, who had trained inside that same rigid school, came to see it as increasingly dogmatic himself.

  Critics praised Steuben's deliberate compositions, his excellent brushwork, and his striking color effects. His pursuit of dramatic, high-society subjects, though, sometimes tipped into the histrionic. That same pull between restraint and spectacle had run through his life since his days as a page at a German ducal court.