Sans titre

Left unfinished so that it could be included in the April 1838 exhibition, the marble and plaster versions did not arrive in Paris until July.

Brian, who completed it in 1840, exhibited it that year at the Paris Salon and won a first-class medal.

To protect the clay Mercury he was working on from freezing, Jean-Louis Brian died of exposure in January 1864, in the small room that served as his studio, after having wrapped it in his clothes.

A bronze model was cast from this unfinished sculpture, which earned him an honorable mention at the 1864 Salon. It was exhibited in 1889 at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

However, although the controversy accepts it as a "Self-Portrait" by Domenico Capriolo, particularly due to the presence of a medallion depicting a kid ("capriolo") in the lower right corner, this attribution cannot be definitively established.

It is the quality of the execution, which Capriolo was subsequently unable to replicate, that fuels the doubts of scholars.

Nevertheless, one can form an opinion of this virtuoso skill with his "Ritratto di Giovane in armatura,"from 1520, in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin.

Robert, Haymaking, June 1940

The poet Gustave Roud (1897–1976) experienced his homosexuality as both a blessing and an incurable suffering.

It was in the often platonic company of his farmer friends that he found solace for the unfulfilled desire for male beauty, whose image he celebrated in his journal, both in his writings and in the photographs he took of his friends, Olivier (his great ideal love), Fernand, and Robert, as seen here.

He was still Philippe, Duke of Anjou, known as "the Little Monsieur," receiving the special education imposed upon him by the queen, who feared the child might harm her elder brother, Louis XIV. Dressing the young boy in girls' clothes, his mother nicknamed him "my little girl" to make him appear naturally effeminate, because, having already had a son, she had longed for a daughter.

The young gentleman (here in a robe on the right), with his brother Louis XIV.

Since masculinity was directly linked to power, Philippe d'Orléans had to renounce it against his will, his homosexuality being a product of his upbringing.

A boy of his own age, François-Timoléon de Choisy, was regularly brought to Philippe d'Orléans by his mother, whom his mother also dressed in a gown, to please the Little Monsieur.

But it was Philippe Mancini (1641–1797), Mazarin's nephew, who "initiated the young Duke of Anjou into Italian vice," an expression used at the time to refer to homosexual practices.

Philippe-Julien Mancini-Mazarini, Duke of Nevers and Donzy (1641-1707), Captain, Lieutenant of the Musketeers

However, Philippe, a homosexual forced into marriage by his rank, became known for his libertine lifestyle. A lover of extravagant finery, he led a lavish lifestyle. His circle of favorites, and his bed, were constantly changing, including the Marquis de Châtillon,

the Count de Guiche,

the Marquis de Beuvron, the Marquis de Manicamp, the Marquis d'Effiat, and, most notably, for thirty years, the Chevalier de Lorraine.

As handsome as he was scheming and manipulative, he obtained all sorts of favors, including the best apartments in each of Monsieur's residences.

He collected his share while also providing sexual partners for his princely lover.

Vilhelm Hammershøi was sixteen years old when he started this drawing.

Sixteen. Standing in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, charcoal in hand, staring at a naked man on a platform, trying to translate flesh into tonal gradients on paper. “Standing Male Model” dates from 1881-1884 - Hammershøi’s student years, the period nobody talks about because everyone’s too obsessed with those empty grey rooms he’d paint later. But this is where it all began. Not with silence and absence, but with a body flooded with light.

You can already see it - the thing that would define him. Look at where the light falls: the left side of the chest catches far more light than the rest, while the right side dissolves into deep black shadow. The face is barely there - tilted down, half-hidden, already withdrawing from us the way every figure in every Hammershøi interior would later turn away. The model’s left arm extends out, resting on a horizontal support, and that tension against the vertical body creates a quiet architectural geometry he’d spend his whole career refining.

He didn’t know it yet. He was just a kid in a cold studio, learning to see. But the silence was already there, folded into the charcoal.

Hammershøi's work conveys a certain melancholy through the absence of joy and dialogue, but is filled with silence.

This is why his art is often compared to that of another painter of silence and solitude, an American and somewhat later artist: Edward Hopper (1882–1967).

This silence, which he already sought to "capture" in the studio of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, was very quickly translated in 1898 in Interior with Young Man Reading.

It is possible that the model posing in the corner of a window is his brother Svend (1873–1948), whom he painted in 1892.

A rarity in his work, dominated by women, is the absence of men, and even more so of children and adolescents.

Except in Artemis, inspired by the frescoes of Masolino da Panicale,

which depicts on the right a hermaphroditic figure and three women, whose "unusual awkwardness in the execution of the drawing" Poul Vad emphasizes, "as if Hammershøi had been unable to reconcile the ideal with reality."

Nils Forsberg Jr. is ostentatiously seated on a plaster model of one of the most famous works of art from classical antiquity: the Venus de Milo, representing the values ​​that art academies championed, while the artist's son embodies the future.

To the right in the foreground, Forsberg poses with a ceramic piece by the Swedish artist Nils Barck (1863-1930), known for his innovative work with glazes on stoneware.

Dated c.1900 and titled "Urna med hänklar i form av grenverk" Urn with handles in the shape of branches, Forsberg and Barck were trained in Paris.

The shepherd Paris, a Trojan prince, chosen as arbiter, presents Venus with the golden apple inscribed "To the fairest." Venus had promised him Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world, with whom Paris was in love, thus sowing the seeds of war. But for now, Paris's flock and his dog bask in peace and abundance: fur clings to flesh, silk to petals, and sumptuous seashells mingle with the light grasses.

Lake Annecy

Hôtel de l’Abbaye de Talloires in 1896

that he painted one of his iconic works, Lake Annecy, also known as The Blue Lake, now housed at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Deeply moved by the light and reflections of the lake, Cézanne painted the Châteauneuf-du-Duingt, isolated on a peninsula.

Apart from a few rare watercolors, the only other painting from his palette was "The Child with the Straw Hat," the son of a gardener at the hotel, Monsieur Vallet.