The Cautionary Tale of Constance Mayer

 

The Soul Breaking the Bonds of Earth
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1821-23 

The Louvre is almost mandatory on one's first trip to Paris, so off we went on a Sunday morning last month. Had I visited the Louvre on my first day in Paris, my impressions of the city might have been very different. I'd already had three days of Paris as open, intimate, and unexpected. The Louvre is a literal fortress full of looted treasures, crowded with people who feel obligated to be there and are apparently incapable of looking at art except through a phone screen. Why, why does anyone need to take a cellphone photo of an artwork? Will they ever look at it again? Could a cellphone photo possibly be better than the postcard that costs a single Euro in the museum gift shop? Je n'ai aucune idée, non, et non.

The irony is that I did try to take a photo of this painting — and somehow my phone did not save it. (Of course the Louvre is haunted. It's probably as crowded with ghosts as it is with people.) I'd never seen this painting before, nor heard of the artist. This image is from the Louvre's website, but does not do the painting justice. What caught my eye was the brightness of the white paint used for the central image and the cascading water below. The painting in real life is bluer and darker than it looks here, and the white is correspondingly brighter. 

This was Prud'hon's last work, left unfinished when he died. It seems to have been a response to the suicide of his collaborator and longtime companion, Constance Mayer, who slit her throat with his razor in 1821. Mayer, 16 years younger than Prud'hon, had been his pupil, then became his housekeeper and raised his children after Prud'hon's wife was committed to an insane asylum. When Prud'hon's wife died, Mayer understandably assumed that she would become the next Madame Prud'hon. Prud'hon made it clear he had no intention of marrying again, sending Mayer into a suicidal depression. After she died, Prud'hon organized an exhibition of her work, returned to paints to create this remarkable image, and died himself — of alcoholism, apparently, though some say it was a broken heart — less than two years later.

Scholars agree that Prud'hon and Mayer worked closely together from 1804 until her death, and that Mayer painted some, most, or all of several works credited to Prud'hon during that time. Prud'hon preferred to work in pencil and chalk; Mayer was a painter. He would draw an image, and she would paint it. His was the more famous name, though she exhibited her own work, and that work hangs in galleries around the world. Paradoxically, her paintings seem to have survived better than his have; he was apparently bad at mixing pigments, and his paintings have darkened. Except for these flashes of white on the painting he left unfinished.