Joseph Beaume

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joseph Beaume was born in Marseilles on the 27th of September 1796, and he spent decades painting battle scenes and royal history for the walls of a French royal palace. In 1836, one of his paintings, already scheduled for that year's Salon, was pulled from view after a failed political coup. Who trained a painter well enough to win a royal commission for the Palace of Versailles, and what became of the painting the public never got to see that year?

• 2. A Pupil Of Gros

  ›

  Antoine-Jean Gros counted Joseph Beaume among his favourite pupils. Beaume built a long public career on that training, sending work to the Salon in the years between 1819 and 1878. That span, nearly six decades, kept his paintings before Salon audiences with little interruption.

  During the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe I, the French state commissioned Beaume to paint several large battle pieces for the Palace of Versailles. One of his other works, Henri III on his Death-bed, was held in the Luxembourg by 1903, decades after Beaume painted it. Its presence there shows how long his work kept circulating through French public collections.

  That same string of Versailles commissions would soon collide with a very different kind of episode, in 1836, involving a painting the public would not get to see at the Salon that year.

• 3. The Withdrawn Elba

  ›

  Napoleon's Departure from Elba, produced for Versailles, was scheduled to hang at the Salon of 1836. The painting never reached the exhibition that year. It was withdrawn following the Strasbourg Coup, led by Louis Napoleon.

  That same year, 1836, Beaume was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, even as his painting for Versailles remained withdrawn from Salon view. A state distinction and a political withdrawal landed in his career within the same twelve months.

  Beaume died in Paris on the 11th of September 1885, eighty-eight years old, sixteen days before what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.