Émile René Ménard

Émile-René Ménard was the son of the painter and art historian René Joseph Ménard (1827-1887). His enthusiasm for Greek antiquity was awakened in his parents’ home in Barbizon. During an apprenticeship as a decorator, his interest in mural painting became apparent. He received further training in the studio of Henri Lehmann (1814-1882) and from 1880 at the Académie Julian.

Ménard joined the group “La Bande Noire”, founded around 1895. In the following years, he traveled frequently in the Mediterranean (Italy, Greece, and N Africa) for study purposes. In 1904, he was appointed professor at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He was made a Knight In 1900 and an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1910. In 1911 he moved to Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy.

After beginning with biblical and mythological subjects, in the 1890s Ménard turned to idealized landscapes in oil and pastel in which he evoked a dreamlike antiquity. These scenes combined an austere and clear classicism with a mystical and elegiac atmosphere. He intensified their effect with ominously puffy cloud formations and a characteristic technique, partially scraping off the applied paint to such an extent that the prepared canvas shone through.

Ménard’s rapid success brought him significant government commissions to paint public buildings beginning in 1900, including a 1906 cycle for the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne in Paris. This was followed by a commission, executed in 1908-13, for wall decorations in the Faculty of Law there and for three diptychs in the Salle des Actes, which are considered exemplary for his Symbolist-idealist style. In addition, he painted austere portraits, which appear lost in reverie, and from 1911 also the landscapes of Varengeville-sur-Mer.