Laure de Chatillon (1826 - 1908)
The Slave (allegory... Lot 103
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Laure de Chatillon (1826 - 1908)
The Slave (allegory of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine)
Original canvas
79 x 58 cm
Signed lower left
(Misses and accidents)
Probably Salon of 1875, n°433 : the Slave.
Related work: photogravure Goupil & Cie reproduced in Eugène Montosier, " Laure de Chatillon ", Les Artistes modernes, n°17, 1882.
Our painting is related to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the young German Empire in 1871. Our female painter shows a chained heroine waiting for her liberation based on the classical model of Andromeda, in a post-romantic and post-ingresque style. One notices that the swirl of the wind makes the drape turn and fly away in a black veil forming the Alsatian knot whose symbolism refers to the hope of a deliverance of this region.
In the year of Châtillon's death in 1908, the magazine La France Illustrée presented the engraving of the above-mentioned painting on its front page. The title of the latter was "L'esclave ou la liberté dans les fers".
Born Delaune, wife of Jules-François de Châtillon, sub-prefect of Châteaudun and a man of letters, Zoé Laure was a pupil of Léon Cogniet and worked between 1850 and 1868 as a copyist of religious paintings. From 1848, she decided to exhibit at the Salon under the name of Laure de Châtillon. She presented no less than sixty paintings between 1848 and 1897. In 1869, Napoleon III commissioned her to paint a historical picture: "Joan of Arc dedicating her arms to the Virgin". Thereafter, she knew a certain posterity by painting on many occasions patriotic scenes referring to the defeat of Sedan and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine.
A member of the Société des Artistes français, she joined the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1887. Six years later, she joined the delegation of French women artists presented at the World's Fair in Chicago. In parallel to her artistic career, Laure de Châtillon committed herself to campaigning for the accessibility of drawing classes in schools and demanded through a petition (signed in 1892) a job as inspector of drawing schools in the department of the Seine and directed a painting school between 1893 and 1897.
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