BENJAMIN CONSTANT (Also called Benjamin-Constant)

Benjamin Constant, not to be confused with the author of the romantic novel Adolphe (1767-1830), was one of the influential teachers of many American students who chose to be trained in Paris.  The painter-teacher was born in Paris on June 10, 1845.  A visiting professor at the Académie Julian, he taught Theodore Robinson and many others who passed through Julian’s doors.  Milner (1988, pp. 22-23, 150) describes and illustrates Constant’s private studio on the boulevard de Clichy.  First he had teamed up with an English student named Rawlins who had organized an informal atelier.  William Rothenstein (1931, p. 39) remembered his teacher Constant as a “powerful, brutal painter, with florid taste.”  Alphaeus Cole called him “a clean-shaven pleasant looking man, very smart in his dress and wearing spats – to me the height of fashion.” Constant’s chief colleagues were Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, Gustave Boulanger, and Lucien Doucet.

Constant’s career began in Toulouse at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, then he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  He also studied with Alexandre Cabanel and debuted at the Paris Salon in 1869 with Hamlet and the King (Musée d’Orsay), which created a sensation, according to Pattison (1904, p. 227).  Later, Constant defended the Salon and remarked how painters “acquire honour, money [and], glory” through that institution. “For many of us [the Salon] provides our livelihood, and without it more than one of the great masters that we admire today would have died wretched without anyone knowing.” (Equivoques, 1973, pp. 21-22).  In 1870, Constant entered military service during the Franco-Prussian War.  After the war he did not return to study in Paris but instead chose to travel.  His visit to Morocco inspired him to turn from the typical academic Greco-Roman subjects to deal more with exotic Northern African themes. The subject matter proved successful for Constant, who won a third-class medal at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, the same year in which he was awarded the Legion of Honor. The Museum of Fine Arts in Carcassonne has a stunning example of Constant’s orientalism, Les Chérifas, dated 1884.  However, Constant had his critics, including one who referred to the painting just mentioned as “a mass of mangled corpses.” In addition, Gustave Larroumet, in Le Figaro (18 June 1896) made it clear that while Delacroix rendered history with “a few strokes of genius, in Benjamin-Constant there is drama and opera.”

About 1880, Constant decided to concentrate on portraiture.  One example portrayed a major French politician,  Emmanuel Arago, whose daughter became Constant’s wife.  In the United States and England, Constant painted members of the highest level of society: Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra sat for him.  The last year of his life, Constant painted the striking Judith (Metropolitan Museum of Art).  In addition to his Eastern pictures and portraits, Constant is known for his ceilings at the Paris Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) and the Opéra-Comique.  During his mature years, the body of his work gained him a reputation as part of the backbone of the old Salon system.  Finally, he was elected a member of the Institute de France in 1893, the supreme achievement of a French artist, writer, or intellectual.  The artist died in Paris, on May 26, 1902. 

Sources:
D’Igny, Pierre, “The Salon Forty,” Arts and Letters 2 (June 1888), p. 358; Pattison, James William, Painters since Leonardo. Herbert S. Stone and Co., 1904, pp. 227-228; Eaton, D. Cady, A Handbook of Modern French Painting. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1909, pp. 312-313; Rothenstein, William, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein. New York: Coward, McCann, Inc. 1931, p. 39; Equivoques: Peintures françaises du XIXe siècle. Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1973, pp. 21-22; Cardis-Toulouse, Régine, “Benjamin-Constant et la peinture orientaliste,” Histoire de l’Art, no. 4 (1988): 79-90; Milner, John, The Studios of Paris: The Capital of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, figs. 27, 166, pp. 22, 23, 48, 125, 150; McWilliam, Neil, “Limited Revisions: Academic Art History Confronts Academic Art,” Oxford Art Journal 12 (1989): 71-86, fig. 10; Weinberg, H. Barbara, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991, pp. 127, 212, 223, 226-228;  Peltre, Christine, Orientalism in Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998, pp. 223, 229, 242; Rosenthal, Donald A. “Constant, Jean-Joseph Benjamin,” in From Monet to Cézanne: Late 19th-century French Artists. The Grove Dictionary of Art Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 100-101 (with important bibliography).

Submitted by Richard H. Love and Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.