Among my own people, I was called Jehanette;
since my coming to France, I am
called Jehanne. — Joan of Arc (1431)
Jeanne d’Arc does not belong to France alone, but also to all those whose
thoughts are elevated enough to grasp the superior and the beautiful among goodness.— Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1913)
We know what she was like, without asking--merely by what she did. . . .
She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever
produced. — Mark Twain (1904)
WASHINGTON, DC - The Corcoran Gallery of Art presents Joan of Arc, an exhibition
that celebrates the cultural legacy of the French medieval heroine Joan of Arc
(c. 1412-1431). Her extraordinary life has inspired generations of writers and
artists, and her image has been used for centuries to promote a variety of political,
cultural and religious views. Devoted to one of the most fascinating and best
known figures of the Middle Ages, the exhibition and accompanying publication
explore the life and times of this amazing person and present the history of
her image in France and in America over 500 years. The first exhibition on this
theme, Joan of Arc features more than 200 works in a wide variety of media. The
exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
from November 18, 2006 — January 21, 2007.
Joan of Arc, otherwise known as “Jehanne la Pucelle” or “Joan
the Maid,” has been admired for centuries in France and around much of
the world. The story of her transformation—from an illiterate provincial
peasant girl, to a victorious army commander, to a martyr condemned of heresy
and burned at the stake, to Catholic saint—remains singular and compelling
to a wide international audience.
Central to the exhibition are two treasures from the Corcoran’s permanent
collection created during the height of Joan of Arc’s popularity by the
great French artist-illustrator Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913). He
created a series of six highly decorative oil and gold-leaf paintings based on
the life of Joan of Arc and a brilliantly illustrated deluxe picture book, Jeanne
d’Arc (1896). These works inspired the curators of the exhibition, Laura
Coyle, art historian and independent curator, formerly at the Corcoran, and Nora
M. Heimann, Associate Professor of Art History at The Catholic University, to
investigate the complex historical, social and artistic contexts for a range
of Joan of Arc representations, including those found in paintings, sculpture,
illustrated books and manuscripts, textiles and popular art.
Images of Joan of Arc range from icons of martial ascendancy and nationalist
unity to paragons of humble piety and maidenly purity. Her likenesses have
been deployed not only as symbols for the power of the people, but also to
support the divine right of kings. A model of female fortitude, Joan has contrarily
been represented as defiantly androgynous. She has further personified sentiments
as varied as independent-minded patriotism and saintly devotion to the Church.
Representations of Joan on view in the exhibition vary in scope and purpose
from a doodle in the margin of a fifteenth-century manuscript chronicling Joan’s
lifting of the English siege of Orleans, to major nineteenth-century paintings
for the Paris Salon calculated to appeal to specific, often politically powerful,
audiences, to documents such as photographs, postcards, programs and other
memorabilia related to the elaborate processions and pageants in France and
the United States celebrating Joan’s canonization in 1920.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with some of the earliest
known images and descriptions of Joan. These images include illustrated manuscripts
and rare books from the collections of the Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College,
Columbia University and Harvard University. Also on view are facsimiles and
partial translations of the earliest surviving trial transcripts. These revealing,
detailed documents record two trials, the first, the condemnation or inquisition
trial that sentenced Joan to death for heresy in 1431, and the second, the
rehabilitation trial, held twenty-four years later, which overturned the earlier
verdict. The trial transcripts are the main primary source of information about
Joan of Arc and the reason we know so much about her life.
Laura Coyle, one of the exhibition’s curators, said, “Joan of Arc
was without a doubt one of the most intriguing women who ever lived, and her
image is as varied as it is powerful.” Ms. Coyle continued, “Not
long after her death, literary and visual representations of her began to circulate
widely and set important precedents for how she would be portrayed in the centuries
to come. The bold warrior; the pious Catholic; the fashionable courtier; the
loyal subject; the doomed prisoner—Joan appears in each of these guises
time and again. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new
types of portrayals joined more traditional ones. These representations included
Joan of Arc as a willing martyr, a robust peasant, a courageous patriot, and
a resolute adolescent. Interest in Joan of Arc was and is universal, but the
meaning of her image is specific, inflected by its time and place.”
Nora Heimann, the exhibition’s co-curator, said, “In tracing the
many representations of Joan of Arc’s image over time, it is evident
that her persona has served as a resonant site of symbolic meaning. In assessing
the achievement of Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel in describing this remarkable
young woman’s life, it seems clear that the artist and illustrator’s
greatest achievement was in recognizing the complexity and richness of her
enduring symbolic potential, at the same time that he celebrated her very real
humanity.”
The exhibition features work in a variety of media. Of particular interest
are authentic fifteenth-century arms (Metropolitan Museum of Art); rare illuminated
manuscripts and illustrated books (Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College Library,
National Gallery of Art); several illustrated volumes of Voltaire’s provocative
and satirical epic poem, La Pucelle (The Maid; Library of Congress and private
collection); rare nineteenth-century French toile textiles with Joan of Arc
motifs (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution); paintings,
including William Hamilton’s Joan of Arc and the Furies (1789; Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Art Center, Vassar College), based on Shakespeare’s vitriolic
portrayal of Joan, and Alphonse Mucha’s art nouveau masterpiece of the
American star of the stage, Maude Adams, as Friedrich Schiller’s Maid
of Orleans (1909; Metropolitan Museum of Art); posters by Eugène Grasset
of French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Joan of Arc in Barbier’s Paris production
(Courtesy the Trustees of the Boston Public Library); a recently restored,
gilded reduction of Emmanuel Frémiet’s monument in Paris (Bryn
Mawr College); documentation relating to Anna Hyatt Huntington’s famous
bronze equestrian monument of Joan of Arc erected in 1915 in New York City
(Maier Museum of Art, Library of Congress, The Hispanic Society of America),
a site that became a rallying place during World War I in support of the allied
troops; war bond posters and anti-German propaganda (Library of Congress);
and French and American memorabilia related to Joan’s beatification in
1909 and canonization in 1920 (Columbia University, Boston Public Library,
Catholic University).
In addition, an entire section is devoted to the Joan of Arc watercolors (Memorial
Art Gallery at the University of Rochester), illustrations, books and paintings
by Boutet de Monvel. Included are breathtaking, rarely exhibited watercolor
studies for the artist’s Jeanne d’Arc. Although Boutet de Monvel
is under-recognized today, he was one of the most talented artists of his generation
and was widely admired in the United States, as well as in France. Senator
William A. Clark (1839-1925), one of the Corcoran’s great patrons and
one of the most important collectors of French art in America during the Gilded
Age, commissioned the Joan of Arc paintings (now at the Corcoran) directly
from the artist to hang in the smoking and billiards room of his mansion on
Fifth Avenue in New York City. Now, with the groundbreaking exhibition on this
subject, the Corcoran presents its impressive Boutet de Monvel holdings in
a fresh and thought-provoking light and offers an opportunity for audiences
to understand better the life and times of the historical Joan of Arc and the
lasting power of her image.
BIOGRAPHY OF JOAN OF ARC
Joan of Arc’s life and deeds are very well documented, mainly because
of her testimony at her Trial of Condemnation in 1431, and the testimonies
of many of her contemporaries at her Trial of Rehabilitation in 1455-56, have
been preserved. Born to Jacques D’Arc and Isabelle Romée in about
1412 in the small village of Domremy in eastern France, Joan grew up surrounded
by the constant skirmishes and violent raids of the Hundred Years War between
the French Armagnacs and the English, who were allied with the French Burgundians.
Joan and other members of her village were fierce partisans of the Armagnacs.
In 1418, their weak leader, the Dauphin Charles, fled English-occupied Paris
for Chinon, a town south of the Loire.
Joan began to hear voices in about 1424 that ultimately urged her to perform
two deeds: first, to raise the siege of Orleans, laid by the English against
the French Armagnacs on October 12, 1428, and second, to bring the Dauphin
to the Cathedral in Rheims to be properly crowned Charles VII, King of France.
The besieged city of Orleans, on the Loire River, was crucial strategically
because it was the last major city still held by the French between the river
and the Mediterranean. Bringing the Dauphin Charles to be crowned Charles VII
at the Cathedral was also significant because the coronation would bestow much
needed legitimacy on his claim for the throne.
Although Joan was a peasant who could neither read nor write, she convinced
the King’s agent in Vaucouleurs, a town near Domremy, to provide her
with horses and escorts to go to Chinon. From that time on, she donned men’s
clothing and kept her hair cropped short, in the style of a fashionable young
man. She arrived in Chinon in March 1429, met with the Dauphin and by the end
of the next month she had left with an army for Orleans. After several battles,
Joan and her soldiers drove the English from Orleans, lifting the siege. After
more successful campaigns, Joan convinced the Dauphin to travel with her and
her army through enemy territory to Rheims, rightly predicting that the sites
along the way held by the English would fall as they approached. The coronation
of Charles VII took place on July 17, 1429. This was the highpoint of Joan’s
success.
Joan of Arc continued to fight the English, but she lost several battles and
eventually was captured and held for ransom, a very common practice. King Charles
VII, however, refused to pay for her release. After spending eight months in
various prisons, she was transferred to the tower of Rouen in 1430 on Christmas
Day and to the custody of Bishop Cauchon for an inquisition trial, begun in
January 1431. The trial lasted for months, and finally, completely exhausted
and threatened with death by fire, she signed a retraction she could not read
and was sentenced to prison for life. One of her crimes was wearing male apparel.
Within a few days of the verdict, Joan put on men’s clothing that was
left in her cell. The court ruled she was a relapsed heretic, and the next
day, May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake.
Twenty-four years later she was exonerated in a Trial of Rehabilitation. She
was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1920.
BIOGRAPHY OF LOUIS-MAURICE BOUTET DE MONVEL (1850-1913)
“To see on paper a representation of Joan of Arc that matches the image
the heart makes of her, one must open the book by Boutet de Monvel.” (1913)
Jean-Louis Vandoyer, who wrote Boutet de Monvel’s obituary for a major
French journal, was writing about the captivating illustrations in his book Jeanne
d’Arc (1896), an enormously popular picture book written and illustrated
by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913), that by the time of the artist-illustrator’s
death had been translated into several languages. One of the most influential
illustrators of children’s books, Boutet de Monvel was also a successful
painter. He studied with a number of the leading artists of his day, including
Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) and Charles Emile Auguste Carolus Duran (1838-1917),
and beginning in 1874 he often participated in the annual Paris Salon. In 1881,
he illustrated his first publication, a book about France and its history intended
for French schoolchildren, Le France en-zigzag by Eudoxie Dupuis. From that
time on, he drew winsome illustrations for children’s books such the
fables of La Fontaine (1888) and for numerous French and American magazines.
Boutet de Monvel’s one-person exhibition in 1899 of more than 90 works
at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was a
tremendous critical and popular success, and he was a highly sought-after portrait
painter at home and abroad. He is best known, however, for his works about
Joan of Arc, which include extraordinary watercolors (1895), trade and luxury
editions of Jeanne d’Arc, a picture book (1896), a 22 1/2 foot long mural
with life-sized figures depicting Joan of Arc appealing to the Dauphin Charles
VII (1899; now lost), and the finely executed cycle of six paintings in oil
and gold leaf (1905-1911) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
The enormous mural, which won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris
in 1900, was intended to be one of several for a new basilica dedicated to
Joan of Arc near her village of Domremy. Boutet de Monvel was forced to give
up the project because of his failing health, but in 1905 he accepted a commission
to paint a cycle of six paintings about Joan of Arc from American millionaire “Copper
King,” Senator William A. Clark of Montana. Clark’s paintings decorated
the Gothic-style “Great Hall” for smoking and billiards in his
mansion of more than 130 rooms on Fifth Avenue. Exhibited as they were completed
at the Salon to rave reviews, the Joan of Arc paintings for Clark were installed
in Clark’s enormous French-inspired pile in 1912. When Senator Clark
died in 1925, he left his collection to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Since
the paintings went on view in 1928 with the opening of the Clark Wing, they
have remained among the most popular and unusual works in the Corcoran's collection.
The titles of the Joan of Arc paintings at the Corcoran are: The Vision
and the Inspiration (c. 1907 — early 1909), Her Appeal to the
Dauphin (1906),
On Horseback: The Maid in Armor (c. 1908 — late 1909), depicting Joan
of Arc and her army setting out to raise the siege at Orleans, The Turmoil
of Conflict (c. late 1909 — early 1913), featuring the Battle of Patay,
The Crowing at Rheims of the Dauphin (1907) and The Trial of Joan
of Arc (c.
late 1909 — early 1910).
The luxury edition book is Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Jeanne d’Arc,
no. 77, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie. (1896). Each of the 48 pages is a separate
color lithograph; the lithographs are housed in a folding, fabric-covered cardboard
portfolio, tied with a silk ribbon. The Corcoran also owns several early French-
and English-language trade editions of this publication.
EXHIBITION SPONSORSHIP
Joan of Arc is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and generously supported
by the Knights of Columbus and anonymous individual donors.
The Corcoran thanks the Katherine Dulin Folger Publication Fund, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and The Andrew W. Mellon Research and Publications Fund for their support of the related publication,
Joan of Arc: Her Image in France and America, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Association
with D Giles Limited, London (available November 2006).
CURATORS
The curators for the exhibition and authors of the publication are Laura Coyle,
art historian and independent curator, formerly at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art, and Nora Heimann, Associate Professor of Art History at The Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Coyle has organized several important exhibitions with publications for
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, including Antiquities and Impressionism: The
William A Clark Collection at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2001) and The
Shape of Color: Joan Miró’s Painted Sculpture (2002).
Dr. Heimann is Chair of the Department of Art at The Catholic University of
America and author of Joan of Arc in French Art And Culture (1700-1855):
From Satire to Sanctity (Ashgate Press, 2005).
PRESS PREVIEW
A press preview of the exhibition is scheduled for Wednesday, November 15,
2006 at 10 am. For more information or to RSVP, please call 202.639.1867
or email PR@corcoran.org.
PRESS IMAGES
High-resolution digital images are available to the press via the Corcoran’s
Press Image Site.
::
View images and further details from this exhibition
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CONTACT:
Kristin Guiter
Manager of Media Relations
(202) 639-1867,
kguiter@corcoran.org
Media Resources:
Curator Laura Coyle and Nora M. Heimann
Advance Exhibition Schedule
Archived
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