Painted Love Quotes

“Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world."

The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room").

The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these:

With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on
The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed;
In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror
Made him tremble to the bone.
Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night
He had spent his last coins.
His friends knew it. And he, on arriving,
Had taken their hand and given his word that
In the morning no one would see him alive.

When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs,
He went and leaned out the window.

Rolla turned to look at Marie.
She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep.
And thus both fled the cruelties of fate,
The child in sleep, and the man in death!

It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.”
― Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era

“For the naturalist novelists, there was an in-between category: the adulterous "respectable" woman. Whether writing fiction, diaries, or newspaper articles, they observed — sometimes fretted — that the honest woman could turn into a loose woman at a moment's notice (one need only recall Madame Bovary or Therese Raquin). But their nonliterary writings are also laced with a belief that women were indeed potential adulteresses. The society woman's propensity for infidelity was a favorite theme of the Goncourt brothers' journal: "Adultery is really contagious, just like those crises of hysteria"; and "Those poor society women sometimes end up being treated like the whores that they are." In a Figaro column, Zola claimed to find adultery rampant among all bourgeois women: "Among the bourgeoisie, a young girl is kept pure until her marriage; only after the marriage does the effect of her spoiled surroundings and poor education throw her into the arms of a love: it is not prostitution, it is adultery, the difference is only in the words. For, one must really insist, adultery is the plague of the bourgeoisie, just as prostitution is the plague of the people.”
― Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era

“Regulationist thinking about sexuality and the severe nomenclature that accompanied it may not be altogether unfamiliar, for to this day the tendency is to define sexuality as a state of being rather than a historically specific social practice. Most people consider sexuality to be the principal constituent of the "private sphere." When we address tolerated prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris, we confront an intense struggle between the private and the public spheres, between the individual and the polity, because while licit sexuality was generally assumed to be a private matter, prostitutional sexuality was understood to be the property of the state.”
― Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era

“Beginning in the early July Monarchy (1830-48), the prostitute became a regular presence in paintings, poems, prints, and novels and remained so through the end of the century and beyond. It would appear, then, that nineteenth-century French art on the subject of contemporary prostitution mimetically paralleled the rise of a "prostitute problem" in the capital city. This study of a group of such images concurs that the artworks depended upon the events and ideas of their time. That real prostitutes were constant points of reference for artists in the nineteenth century is undeniable. Indeed, in most instances later in the century, artists attempted to depict observable practices. Yet although it is clear that the prostitution problem and the outpouring of images of prostitutes coexisted, the precise correlation between these two phenomena is less certain. Explaining that relationship will be the principal goal of the present work, which focuses upon art made during the 1870s and 1880s.”
― Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era