The Pearl and the Wave (1862)

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry: The Pearl and the Wave

Charlotte Corday (1860)

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry: Charlotte Corday

 

This very famous painting depicts Charlotte Corday after her murder of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most radical leaders in the French Revolution.

The death of Marat was first depicted artistically by Jacques-Louis David in 1793 (below). Among later works, the Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, painted in 1860, during the Second Empire, when Marat's "dark legend" (the angry monster insatiably hungry for blood) was widely spread among educated people, depicts Charlotte Corday as a true heroine of France, a model of virtue for the younger generations. [Wikipedia]

Jacques-Louis David: The Death of Marat (1793)

Diana Reposing (1859)

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry: Diana Reposing

The nude goddess, identified by the crescent moon in her hair and the bow and quiver at her side, reclines on a blue drapery in front of a recumbent stag in a wooded glade. An early inscription identifies this painting as a variant sketch for an overdoor in the hôtel of Achille Fould, the Minster of State. The hôtel, on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, was acquired by the Duc d'Aumale in 1872, and its decor was transferred to the Château of Chantilly six years later. The overdoor, "Diane au repos," and another, "Venus jouant avec l'Amour," were both mounted in the Galerie des Cerfs. The actual overdoor is painted in "grisaille" unlike our sketch which is in naturalistic colors. In the overdoor the majestic stag is an integral part of the composition, whereas in this sketch he is barely discernible in the right background. This composition illustrates the artist's practice of imparting to his traditional subjects an air of modishness or coquetry, that may have resulted from his occasional use of professional beauties as models. The figure of Diana reposing in the sketch and the overdoor bears a striking resemblance to Blanche D'Antigny, an actress who at the age of eighteen modeled for Baudry's famous "The Penitent Madeleine," painted about the same time and acquired by the State at the 1859 Salon for the Nantes Museum. [The Walters Art Museum]