Emile Friant: a forgotten realist of the gilded age

Magazine Antiques, April, 1997 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

The first work of art to greet a visitor entering the front hall of Clayton, the imposing late Victorian Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residence of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), is a small anecdotal painting signed by Emile Friant and dated 1898 (Pl. III). One could be excused for finding this an improbable work of art for the entry to such an important art collector's house.

The subject of the painting is two girls, presumably sisters, with the elder embracing the younger, who glares petulantly outward. The figures are set against an empty background and there is no clue to the cause of the little girl's chagrin.

A grand portrait or a brooding landscape might better fit preconceptions of both Clayton and Frick. Instead, the Friant painting is as modest as the entrance hall itself. The frame represents a further incongruity for it is painted gold, not gilded, and it is assertively art nouveau - a style not found elsewhere in the entrance hall. Few visitors would be inclined to suspect that Friant was at one time a star of the Paris Salon exhibitions, and that Frick had gone to some lengths to obtain the painting.

Friant was born in the small town of Dieuze, twenty-five miles northeast of Nancy, in eastern France. His father was the foreman of the locksmith's shop at the saltworks for which the town was known. His mother was a dressmaker who had a prosperous client, the widow of a chemist named Parisot, with a fondness for the Friant household, especially the little boy. When Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, Madame Parisot fled to Nancy, taking the seven-year-old Friant with her and assuming responsibility for his education.(1) She hoped the boy would become a successful chemist like her late husband, but Friant manifested greater talent for drawing, and before he was fifteen he was allowed to quit the lycee and enter the studio of Louis Theodore Devilly (1818-1886), the director of the school of drawing in Nancy and an exponent of realism.

When Friant made his debut at the annual Salon in Nancy in 1878, it was clear that the fifteen-year-old student had mastered the basics of portraiture, still life, and landscape. A year later he was awarded a municipal scholarship for study in Pads, and he entered the studio of Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), one of the most honored academic painters of his day. However, after a year of nonstop work in the academic style, a disenchanted Friant returned to Nancy.

The young artist struggled to reconcile orthodox academicism with an objective rendering of everyday objects that Cabanel would have considered beneath contempt. If Friant's inclination toward naturalism originated with Devilly, it found reinforcement in the friendships he struck up in Paris with three other sons of Lorraine: Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), Aime Morot (1850-1913), and Victor Prouve (18581943). The powerful influence of Bastien-Lepage, who by the late 1870s was much i.n vogue, surfaced in Friant's own naturalistic approach.

In 1882 Friant, encouraged by Morot, made his debut in the Paris Salon with two very different entries: The Prodigal Son and Studio Interior (Pl. IV). The former, purchased by the state for the museum in Roubaix, was a fairly standard academic exercise. The latter, on the other hand, embodied the objectivity that was gaining the upper hand in Friant's work, and it is the earliest of his paintings to treat the rapport between two figures.

In 1883 Friant finished second in the competition for the Prix de Rome and he exhibited again at the Salon. His portrait of Prouve at work won a third-class medal at the Salon of 1884,(2) and his entry in 1885 won second-class honors. He now worked part of the year in a rented studio in Pads to satisfy the growing demand for portraits, and he even attracted the notice of George A. Lucas (1824-1909), a powerful art agent.(3)

About this time Friant formed what became a lifelong friendship with the brothers Ernest Coquelin (known as Coquelin Cadet; 1848-1909) and Benoit Constant Coquelin (known as Coquelin Aine; 1841-1909), then at the peak of their acting careers in Paris. At least a dozen portraits painted for members of the Coquelin family survive, and Benoit Constant, an inveterate collector, owned various other works by Friant at one time or another. A small portrait he painted of the Coquelins' mother (see p. 562) perfectly conveys the tender feelings the artist reserved for the family It also reveals the influence of his travels through the Netherlands in 1886, which were made possible by a grant from the Salon that year.

Friant's Salon entry for 1888, La Reunion des canotiers de la Meurthe (Reunion of the Meurthe boating party), gained him no honors, but it announced his mastery of genre painting on a large scale (Pl. VI). Ten rowers and two women have gathered for a festive lunch at an outdoor restaurant. This was the good life as prized by the Third Republic. Parallels with Pierre Auguste Renoir's Dejeuner des Canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) of 1880-1881(4) spring to mind, but the similarity ends with the subject. From today's perspective, Friant's excessive naturalism is all prose, no poetry. However, in 1887, when Canotiers was painted, it upheld the standards of a prosperous bourgeois clientele.