page_title: Ossian
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Ossian / In art / France
context_page_description: Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson from 1760. Macpherson claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in Scottish Gaelic, said to be from ancient sources, and that the work was his translation of that material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a legendary bard who is a character in Irish mythology. Contemporary critics were divided in their view of the work's authenticity, but the consensus since is that Macpherson framed the poems himself, based on old folk tales he had collected.
  The work was internationally popular, translated into all the literary languages of Europe and was highly influential both in the development of the Romantic movement and the Gaelic revival. "The contest over the authenticity of Macpherson's pseudo-Gaelic productions," Curley asserts, "became a seismograph of the fragile unity within restive diversity of imperial Great Britain in the age of Johnson." Macpherson's fame was crowned by his burial among the literary giants in Westminster Abbey. W.P.
context_section_description: In France the enthusiasm of Napoleon for the poems accounts for most artistic depictions, and those by the most famous artists, but a painting exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1800 by Paul Duqueylar (now Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence) excited Les Barbus ("the Bearded Ones") a group of primitivist artists including Pierre-Maurice Quays (or Quaï) who promoted living in the style of "early civilizations as described in Homer, Ossian, and the Bible". Quays is reported as saying: "Homère? Ossian? ... le soleil? la lune? Voilà la question. En vérité, je crois que je préfère la lune. C'est plus simple, plus grand, plus primitif". ("Homer? Ossian? ... the sun? the moon? That's the question. Truthfully I think I prefer the moon. It's more simple, more grand, more primitive"). The same year Napoleon was planning the renovation of the Château de Malmaison as a summer palace, and though he does not seem to have suggested Ossianic subjects for his painters, two large and significant works were among those painted for the reception hall, for which six artists had been commissioned.
  These were Girodet's painting of 1801–02 Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes, and Ossian Evoking ghosts on the Edge of the Lora (1801), by François Pascal Simon Gérard. Gérard's original was lost in a shipwreck after being bought by the King of Sweden after the fall of Napoleon, but survives in three replicas by the artist (a further one in Berlin was lost in 1945).  One is now at Malmaison (184.5 × 194.5 cm / 72.6 × 76.6 in), and the Kunsthalle Hamburg has another (180,5 × 198,5 cm). A watercolour copy by Jean-Baptiste Isabey was placed as frontispiece to Napoleon's copy of the poems.
  Duqueylar, Girodet and Gérard, like Johann Peter Krafft (above) and most of the Barbus, were all pupils of David, and the clearly unclassical subjects of the Ossian poems were useful for emergent French Romantic painting, marking a revolt against David's Neoclassical choice of historical subject-matter. David's recorded reactions to the paintings were guarded or hostile; he said of Girodet's work: "Either Girodet is mad or I no longer know anything of the art of painting".
  Girodet's painting (still at Malmaison; 192.5 x 184 cm) was a success de scandale when exhibited in 1802, and remains a key work in the emergence of French Romantic painting, but the specific allusions to the political situation that he intended it to carry were largely lost on the public, and overtaken by the Peace of Amiens with Great Britain, signed in 1802 between the completion and exhibition of the work. He also produced Malvina dying in the arms of Fingal (c. 1802), and other works.
  Another pupil of David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, was to depict Ossianic scenes over most of his long career. He made a drawing in 1809, when studying in Rome, and in 1810 or 1811 was commisissioned to make two paintings, the Dream of Ossian and a classical scene, to decorate the bedroom Napoleon was to occupy in the Palazzo Quirinale on a visit to Rome.  In fact the visit never came off and in 1835 Ingres repurchased the work, now in poor condition.
caption: Malvina or The Death of Malvina, by Ary Scheffer (see literature), c. 1802, musée Auguste Grasset, Varzy
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