page_title: Charles Gleyre
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Gleyre / Life
caption_attribution_description: The Dance of the Bacchantes, the last painting by Gleyre exhibited publicly in Paris (at the Salon of 1849), came as a surprise to enthusiasts of bacchanals, which had been a traditional subject since the days of Titian and Poussin. Bacchus, Silenus and the satyrs are all absent, and the painting is therefore neither mythological nor fabulous, but rather historical and religious. Gleyre paints a mysterious, wild and exclusively female ritual, captured in very precise draughtsmanship and a smooth technique producing what one critic calls the strange effect of a “choreography, which is both noble and unbridled, frenzied and rhythmic”.Following in the footsteps of A l'instar de Pentheus, The Dance reveals a new, popularised reading of the roots of ancient Greek civilisation and its forms of worship in the 1830s. Contrary to the solar, masculine and Apollonian vision which had been extolled by Winckelmann since the mid-18th century, Gleyre depicts the primitive, eastern and Dionysian Greece, posited in the works of the philologist and historian Friedrich Creuzer.Subjects drawn from Antiquity provided the painter with the opportunity for a personal and unusual meditation on the origins of the arts, omitting any reference to either Apollo or Orpheus. In The Dance invented by the Bacchantes, the music played to animals in Minerva, the art of spinning taught to an absurd Hercules by the beautiful Omphale, and the love poetry composed by Sappho - the secret of the arts seems to be the preserve of women, acquired through a mysterious and intuitive affinity with the divine powers of creation.
context_page_description: Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre, was a Swiss artist who was a resident in France from an early age. He took over the studio of Paul Delaroche in 1843 and taught a number of younger artists who became prominent, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Auguste Toulmouche, Louis-Frederic Schützenberger, and Henry-Lionel Brioux.
context_section_description: Gleyre was born in Chevilly, near Lausanne. His parents died when he was eight or nine years old, and he was brought up by an uncle in Lyon, France, who sent him to the city's industrial school. He began his formal artistic education in Lyon under Bonnefond, before moving to Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts under Hersent. He also attended the Academie Suisse and studied watercolour technique in the studio of Richard Parkes Bonington. He then went to Italy, where he became acquainted with Horace Vernet and Louis Léopold Robert. 
  It was through Vernet's recommendation that he  was chosen by the American traveller John Lowell Jr. to accompany him on his journeys round the eastern Mediterranean, recording the scenes and ethnographic subjects they met with.  They left Italy in spring 1834 and visited Greece, Turkey and Egypt, where they remained together until November 1835, when Lowell left for India. Gleyre continued his travels around Egypt and Syria, not returning to France until 1838. He returned to Lyons in shattered health,  having been attacked with ophthalmia, or inflammation of the eye, in Cairo, and  struck down by fever in Lebanon.
  On his recovery he proceeded to Paris, and, establishing a modest studio in the rue de Université, began carefully to work out the ideas which had been slowly shaping themselves in his mind. Mention is made of two decorative panels Diana leaving the Bath, and a Young Nubian as almost the first fruits of his genius; but these did not attract public attention until much later, and the painting by which he practically opened his artistic career was the Apocalyptic Vision of St John, sent to the Salon of 1840. This was followed in 1843 by Evening, which received a medal of the second class, and afterwards became widely popular under the title Lost Illusions. It depicts a poet seated on the bank of a river, with his head drooping and a wearied posture, letting his lyre slip from a careless hand, and gazing sadly at a bright company of maidens whose song is slowly dying from his ear as their boat is borne slowly from his sight.
  In spite of the success of these first ventures, Gleyre retired from public competition, and spent the rest of his life in quiet devotion to his artistic ideals, neither seeking the easy applause of the crowd, nor turning his art into a means of aggrandizement and wealth. After 1845, when he exhibited the Separation of the Apostles, he contributed nothing to the Salon except the Dance of the Bacchantes in 1849. Yet he worked steadily and was productive. He had an "infinite capacity of taking pains", and when asked by what method he attained to such marvelous perfection of workmanship, he would reply, "En y pensant toujours". Many years often intervened between the first conception of a piece and its embodiment, and years not infrequently between the first and the final stage of the embodiment itself. A landscape was apparently finished; even his fellow artists would consider it done; Gleyre alone was conscious that he had not "found his sky".
  Gleyre became influential as a teacher, taking over the studio of studio of Paul Delaroche – then the leading private teaching atelier in Paris –  in 1843. His students included Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Louis Hamon, Auguste Toulmouche, Whistler and several of the Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. He did not charge his students a fee, although he expected them to contribute towards the rent and the payment of models. They were also given a say in the running of the school.
  Though he lived in almost complete retirement from public life, he took a keen interest in politics, and was a voracious reader of political journals. For a time, under Louis Philippe, his studio had been the rendezvous of a sort of liberal club. To the last—amid all the disasters that befell his country—he was hopeful of the future, "la raison finira bien par avoir raison". It was while on a visit to the Retrospective Exhibition, opened on behalf of the exiles from Alsace and Lorraine, that he died suddenly on 5 May 1874.  He 
caption: La Danse des bacchantes, 1849
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