The Artist: François Joseph Navez was a leading painter in Brussels at the time of Belgium’s founding in 1830, and he remained an eminent figure in the arts for the rest of his life. Navez was prolific as a portraitist and a highly original interpreter of scenes of everyday life, but he also painted allegories, and he regarded traditional historical subjects as the highest expression of his art. His life and career were strongly shaped by the geopolitical and social shifts of his time.
The artist’s family was from the town of Charleroi in the province of Hainaut, part of the French-speaking region of Wallonia. Few places in western Europe have changed hands more often. When Navez was born on November 16, 1787, Charleroi had been an Austrian dominion for nearly four decades. In the ensuing years, Charleroi passed back and forth between Austria and revolutionary France, which governed present-day Belgium continuously from 1794 to 1814. After being recognized for showing promise under Pierre Joseph Célestin François, known as Joseph François (1759–1851), at the Fine Arts Academy of Brussels between 1803 and 1813, Navez moved to Paris to study with Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). David led the most influential painting studio in Europe. He was renowned not only for paintings of historical subjects, but also for training hundreds of artists, many of whom assisted him with his canvases and went on to illustrious careers of their own.
Navez formed a close bond with David. Despite the forcefulness of David’s artistic vision, rooted in classical antiquity and the study of nature, David encouraged his pupils to find their own balance between the two. Navez would develop an independent style, yet it is also significant that he was David’s last important interlocutor, one in a line of painters extending back to Jean Germain Drouais (1763–1788) and continuing with Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824), François Gérard (1770–1837), Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835), and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867).
Two factors that distinguished Navez from these elder artists were his geographic origin and his late entry into David’s studio. The triumph of the international coalition of armies arrayed against Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo (thirty miles from the artist’s birthplace) on June 18, 1815, spelled defeat for the French Empire and, consequently, a political restructuring of Europe that had a direct impact on Navez. He was no longer French. Rather, he was now a subject of the Kingdom of Holland, which encompassed Belgium until the latter achieved independence. Since David was unwilling to pledge allegiance to the restored Bourbon monarchy under King Louis XVIII (whose brother, Louis XVI, David had condemned to death in 1793), he instead left France in 1816 to live in exile in Brussels. Navez, having lost French citizenship, joined David and drew ever closer to him in Brussels. In his first year there, Navez completed notable commissions for pharmacist Auguste Donat de Hemptinne (1781–1854), the
Portrait of the de Hemptinne Family (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 3362) and
Saint Veronica of Milan (see fig. 1 above), two paintings that would set the mark for his subsequent work in terms of subject and style.
Though brief, the 1816–17 Brussels period was fruitful for Navez, who, with David’s support, was able to secure funding to travel to Rome, where he studied from 1817 until 1821. Navez came into direct contact with ancient art and architecture and befriended contemporaries from France and elsewhere. These included former David pupils François Marius Granet (1775–1849), Jean Victor Schnetz (1787–1870), and Léopold Robert (1794–1835). At least equal to the impact of these factors on Navez was the art of Ingres, who was then widely regarded as the leading French artist in Rome. Navez also admired the purist streak of the Nazarenes, German Romantic painters in Rome who invested their work with a spirituality they found lacking in Neoclassical painting.[1]
Navez was much sought after, especially by Belgian and Dutch clients, following his return to Brussels in 1822, and he exhibited regularly until 1851. He was appointed director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1830, a position he retained until 1859. He never abandoned the Neoclassical foundation of his training, but the edginess of the Romantic tendencies that imbued his early work with a strange electricity gave way, from the 1840s onward, to a sentimentality that grew outmoded with the rise of Realism about 1850.
Style: In many of his works Navez adopted a distinctive pictorial idiom wherein multiple half-length figures overlap, are pushed up to the picture plane, and brought near the edges of the composition. A peculiarly charged emotion takes the place of action that would otherwise be represented by full figures. The figures’ expressions are dramatic in spite of a certain stillness, and the figures are closely grouped together yet seemingly in their own worlds. This is evident in
Saint Veronica and also in drawings, for example, the undated sheet known as
A Woman and a Turbaned Man in Despair with a Young Child (The Met,
2013.607). Initially, the figures may register as Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus, yet their anxious expressions are not those of a typical depiction of the Holy Family. Rather than provide sufficient context to enable a definitive reading, the drawing is suggestive. In this way, it is comparable to examples produced by David in Brussels that he called
caprices, and it is by way of those works, and the artists’ close relationship in Brussels, that Navez’s own approach to picture-making is to be framed. In his
caprices, David tended to extract heads from earlier works and to recombine them in provocative, highly imaginative juxtapositions, revealing a poetic strain that was, until recently, not widely understood to be present in the paintings serving as their antecedents. Much of Navez’s most ambitious work of his first maturity, including
The Massacre of the Innocents, derives from his own exploration of this idiom.[2]
The Painting: The Massacre of the Innocents is a story from the life of Christ. As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16–18), Herod the Great, King of Judea, ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two in and near the town of Bethlehem. Herod’s larger aim was to kill the infant Jesus, who had been heralded as King of the Jews. In Navez’s painting, this violence transpires in the distance, at the upper left corner of the composition, rendered in a sketch-like manner in the townscape glimpsed through the gap in the wall that shields the principal figures from Herod’s forces. The cramped foreground space is filled by a tight cluster of five lifesize figures, interwoven and compressed into shallow relief, with light falling from the left. The bereft mother at the center holds her mortally wounded son in a position echoing a Pietà or Lamentation of Christ, common Christian devotional subjects (for example, The Met, 2000.68). A girl, having washed his wound with her right hand in an unflinchingly tender act of mercy, touches the cut with her left, an act of purification that implies saintliness. Her gesture reconceptualizes the central motif of Navez’s
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas painted in Brussels in 1823 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007.716), which was in turn inspired by Ingres’s major altarpiece for the church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti,
Christ Giving the Keys to Peter (Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban, MID.59.1.1), painted while Navez was in Rome. Immediately above and behind the first family, a second mother stifles her child’s mouth to prevent his cries from revealing their hiding place.
Beneath the figures, in the lower right corner of the canvas, is a lifeless gray fragment of acanthus from a fallen column capital—a foil to the living architecture and tree at the upper left of the painting. The Roman architecture bespeaks Navez’s familiarity with European artistic convention since the Renaissance, and it also reflects his firsthand experience of Italy.
The artist’s signature and the date appear as engraved characters under the lip of the polished brass bowl at the lower left of the painting, a device that recalls David’s
Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 87.PA.27), which is dated and inscribed 1818 / BRUX on the brass horn hanging from a cord between the two figures.
The nearly square composition is a departure from the conventional horizontal pictorial field employed for history paintings. Navez exploited the shape as a device to constrain the figures, thereby heightening their vulnerability and the potential for empathy among them, as well as on the part of the viewer. The forms are crisply delineated, their surfaces smooth, and the colors are cool yet vibrant. Navez relegated bloodshed to the background of his composition, and instead foregrounded the victims, thereby elevating their stature. In this way, he intensified the story’s emotive power by locating its source in martyrdom and redemption rather than rampage. In this respect, an incipient Romantic sensibility may be seen to merge with the classical underpinnings of Navez’s style. These are all signature features of group portraits, allegories, and highly idiosyncratic Italian peasant subjects that Navez painted throughout the 1820s, and which found cogent expression in The Met’s painting.
Massacre of the Innocents was executed in the Neoclassical style prevalent throughout Europe for fifty years beginning in the 1780s. It falls very much within the broad scope of the school of David but manifests strains of Romanticism that pervaded European art of the time. Witness the serpentine line that runs through the arms of the girl in the blue dress, which Navez extended through the arms of the bereft mother in the yellow blouse. The elegance of the line linking these female figures, broken only by the lifeless limb of their brother and son, derives not, say, from the anguished followers of the protagonist in David’s 1787 painting
The Death of Socrates (The Met, 31.45), so much as from Canova’s marble
Cupid and Psyche of 1787–93 (Musée du Louvre, Paris, MR 1777), and perhaps from David’s own
Cupid and Psyche of 1817 (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1962.37).
In a number of ways, then,
Massacre of the Innocents is a summation of artistic influences that Navez absorbed from gifted comrades in multiple locations, under circumstances that shifted between real-life displacement and professional opportunity.
Ambitions, Exhibitions, and Collectors: After Navez’s return to Brussels from Rome in 1822, demand for his work reached a fever pitch, fed by attention garnered at exhibitions in prosperous northern cities: Lille, Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, and Ghent. Although the artist was tempted to return to Rome, his devotion to David bound him to Brussels, as did proceeds from commissions that would enable him to build his own studio, into which he moved in 1825, and, in the same year, to marry Augustine-Flore de Lathuy (1798–1867). Thus, despite David’s repeated encouragements to seek success in Paris, Navez settled permanently in Brussels.[3]
Massacre of the Innocents’s date of inception is unknown, and no preparatory studies for the painting have been identified. Yet it would appear to have been underway by the time of a visit to Paris, the date of which, unfortunately, remains unknown, perhaps in the first half of 1824. It was on that trip that Navez visited Léon Cogniet, who had been awarded the
prix de Rome for history painting in 1817, and whose residency in Rome, from 1817 to 1822, coincided with Navez’s own. In his atelier, Navez learned that Cogniet was also working on a
Massacre of the Innocents (fig. 2) and that his intention was to display the painting at the most prestigious exhibition in Europe, the annual state-sponsored event held in Paris known as the Salon, which, in 1824, opened on August 25 and ran until January 1825.[4]
At the Paris Salon in 1824 Navez exhibited two portraits, two genre subjects, and a
Sainte Famille; costumes de Sonnino, but not
Massacre of the Innocents. By then, it had already been committed to the Amsterdam private collector Abraham Jacob Saportas (1776–1836), a member of the board of directors of the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. On July 24, 1824, the architect Tilman-François Suys (1783–1864) wrote (presumably to Navez) from the Dutch capital: “since I received your letter, I have not been able to meet Mr. Rootham, but Saportas told me that the painting
The Massacre of the Innocents was for him, that the [painting of] the hermit had come before the exhibition, and that the third was sold to Mr. Anker.”[5]
Massacre of the Innocents was evidently then on view in the annual Amsterdam Salon. Subsequently, the painting was exhibited at the Brussels Salon, with Saportas named as the lender in the catalogue. It was well received by the critics (see References).
Whether or not it ever was his hope to feature
Massacre of the Innocents at the Paris Salon, Navez’s sale of the painting accrued to his commercial success, but it may also have contributed to a certain ambivalence on his part. In a letter written from Brussels on October 16, 1824, Navez complained to the Parisian sculptor Jean-Baptiste-Louis Roman (1792–1835) about private collectors’ reluctance to lend to exhibitions, making it difficult for him to display his work publicly. In the same letter, he reported: “I’ve done a
Scene of the Massacre of the Innocents. The same idea found in Cogniet’s painting is also in mine; but in mine there is only one episode, because my painting is composed of two mothers, two children, and a little girl who tends to the wounded child. Bénard has undoubtedly spoken to you about this painting. Pérou, the painter from Paris, saw it at my place. He was very pleased with it. M. David, too, and he told me multiple times that it’s my best work, and that it is a beautiful painting; he left nothing out by signaling the qualities of my painting to all his acquaintances. I will bring you a sketch so you may see whether there are similarities with Cogniet’s painting.”[6]
Despite Navez’s mixed feelings about his patronage, there are details that raise interesting questions about its acquisition. Abraham Jacob Saportas’s father, David Saportas, was the scion of a prominent Sephardic family established in Amsterdam since the seventeenth century; his mother, Adriana Curtain, was Catholic. Abraham Jacob, the eldest of five, was raised in his mother’s faith. In 1816, complications during childbirth left the recently married Abraham Jacob childless and a widower. However, in 1823, Abraham Jacob had a son with Catharine Gertrude Smit (recently divorced from Joannes Antonius Heintzen, a maternal relative). Another son followed in 1824, and in 1825, shortly before Abraham Jacob and Catharine Gertrude had a daughter, they were married and had their sons legitimized. Abraham Jacob may have reverted to the Jewish faith by this time.[7] It was into the home of this family that Abraham Jacob Saportas introduced Navez’s
Massacre of the Innocents.[8] Might the subject have held personal resonance for a first-born son who, having lost his first wife and child, now enjoyed a positive shift in his family prospects?
Currency of the Subject: The Massacre of the Innocents was a staple of European art. To take just one example, the earliest treatment of the subject in The Met is an enameled copper-gilt plaque made in Germany about 1150 (17.190.444). The textual narrative is adaptable to multi-figure compositions riddled with action, often set in a townscape, as in seventeenth-century renditions by Nicolas Poussin (for example, see Musée Condé, Chantilly, PE 305) and Peter Paul Rubens (for example, see Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2014/1581). Those paintings epitomize the foregrounding of acts of unbridled violence capable of holding viewers in thrall. However, the Massacre of the Innocents and similarly brutal Christian subjects did not suit the propagandistic aims of the French government during the Revolution or Empire, when the Catholic church was held in check and battlefield deaths were commonplace. A parallel is found in equally savage scenes from ancient history: a comparison of Poussin’s
Abduction of the Sabine Women, probably painted in 1633–34 (The Met, 46.160), with David’s
Intervention of the Sabine Women of 1799 (Louvre, 3691) underscores the shift toward a more measured portrayal of violence and its consequences in art that was taking place during Navez’s youth. Even so, the most salient element of subjects like the Massacre of the Innocents was evoked indirectly from time to time, as in posthumous portraits of persons deemed martyrs to the national cause, such as David’s
Death of Bara of 1794 (Musée Calvet, Avignon, 846.3.1).
In 1815, with the return to the pre-revolutionary order that followed the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, overtly religious subjects were once again normalized, regaining their former ubiquity; this phenomenon extended to the Kingdom of Holland (present-day Belgium and The Netherlands). In addition to the
Massacre of the Innocents by Cogniet, the painter Charles-Emile Callande de Champmartin (1797–1883) also showed the subject (Louvre, 20555) in Paris in 1824. Still another painting exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824 reinterpreted the underlying theme of the Massacre of the Innocents in a contemporary setting: Eugène Delacroix’s
Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824, Louvre, 3823). Its subject was the 1822 battle for the island of Chios, a notoriously brutal chapter of the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire. Although this was not a religious painting per se, visitors to the Salon knew that the Greek victims were Christians and that the Ottoman Turkish perpetrators of the violence were Muslims. Even with his career in full swing, Navez regretted the absence of
Massacre of the Innocents from his debut at the Paris Salon. He wrote to Léopold Robert on December 11, 1824: “I made, as I told you, a Scene of the massacre of the innocents as well as a Saint Cecilia; I put much care into these two paintings. Mr. David and others, among yet many other people in Paris, wanted me to exhibit these paintings in Paris, but I didn’t; I was wrong.”[9]
Asher Miller 2023
Portions of Navez’s correspondence are reprinted in a number of publications, but many letters remain unpublished, and, in this regard, the present text benefits from the generous contribution of Dr. Alain Jacobs, who graciously shared his research.
[1] The influence of the Nazarenes may be seen in a painting Navez executed in Rome in 1820:
Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, oil on canvas, 87 x 67 3/8 in. (221 x 171 cm), Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Inv. 144. The painting remained with the artist from his return to Brussels in 1822 until he gave it to the museum in 1840, shortly before its administration was transferred from the city of Brussels to the Belgian state. Artists treating this subject typically include a sign of imminent salvation such as the angel who will point the way to a spring, but the only evident source of hope in Navez’s bleak depiction is the standing figure of the mother, tantamount to a physical demonstration of strength and devotion in a moment of mortal peril.
[2] Two recent treatments of David’s artistic milieu in Brussels are especially illuminating: Thomas Crow,
Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812–1820 (The A . W. Mellon Series in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Bollingen Series XXXV: vol. 64), Princeton, 2018, ch. 5, “The Laboratory of Brussels, 1816–19,” pp. 126–51, 193–94; and Mehdi Korchane, “The Brussels Caprices,” in Perrin Stein, ed.,
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman, exh. cat., The Met, New York, 2022, pp. 250–59, 288, nos. 78–81.
[3] Coeckelberghs et al. 1999, pp. 56, 170 n. 120.
[4] Coeckelberghs et al. 1999, pp. 77, 171 n. 148.
[5] “[D]epuis que j’ai votre lettre, je n’ai pas pu rencontrer Mr Rootham, mais Saportas m’a dit que le tableau le Massacre des innocents était pour lui, que l’hermite était venu avant l’exposition et que le troisième était vendu à Mr Anker.” Royal Library, Brussels, Ms II 70-1, no. 278.
[6] “J’ai fait une
Scène du Massacre des Innocents. La même idée que Cogniet se trouve dans mon tableau; mais chez moi, cela n’est qu’une [sic] épisode, car mon tableau est composé de deux mères, deux enfants et une petite fille qui soigne un enfant blessé. Bénard t’aura sans doute parlé de ce tableau. Pérou, le peintre de Paris, l’a vu chez moi. Il en a été très content. M. David aussi, et il m’a répetté [sic] plusieurs (fois) que c’était ce que j’avais fait de mieux, que c’était un beau tableau; enfin il n’a rien homis [sic] pour faire remarquer à toutes ses connaissances les qualités de mon tableau. Je t’en porterai le croquis pour savoir s’il y a du rapport avec celui de Cogniet.” Navez October 16, 1824, reprinted with editorial corrections in Nimal 1894. “Bénard” may be a reference to the painter Adélaïde Binart (1769–1832), wife of the the antiquities specialist Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839) and a friend of David’s; “Pérou” may be a reference to the painter Louis Alexandre Péron (1776–1855), a former pupil of David’s.
[7] On the history of the Saportas family, see I. H. v. E., "Jacob Willem van den Biesen en Abraham Jacob Saportas,"
Amstelodadum vol. 54, no. 2 (February 1967), pp. 25–29, and [Dr. W. M. Zappey], "Nogmaals de Familie Saportas,"
Amstelodadum vol. 54, no. 8 (October 1967), p. 180. See also https://gw.geneanet.org/pipjes?lang=en&n=saportas&oc=0&p=samuel.
[8] “1824. Scène du massacre des Innocents, tableau de 5 figures grandeur naturelle, à mi-corps pour Mr Sapportas, d’Amsterdam [prix] 2950.” See Navez after 1824.
[9] See Navez Dec. 11, 1824. The
Saint Cecilia (1824) is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Mons.
