Admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1874, Paul Baudouin studied in the studio of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and also trained under Charles Gleyre and Jules-Élie Delaunay. Known for his Symbolist-style decorative paintings often inspired by Antiquity, featuring representations of allegorical figures set within landscapes, Baudouin excelled in the fresco technique and founded a workshop dedicated to the teaching of this medium. He notably produced the vast frescoes of the Maison Hannon, a masterpiece of Art Nouveau in Brussels. The artist also received a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition for L’Abreuvoir and Les Blanchisseuses. He also executed the frescoes of the vault of the peristyle surrounding the garden of the Petit Palais in Paris, composed of three large sections punctuated by the female figures of the Seasons and rhythmically structured by medallions depicting the months alternating with the hours of the day and night.
Baudouin also carried out commissions for other public buildings in the Paris region (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Town Hall), which are still preserved today.
Our painting, for its part, is preparatory to the decoration of the Rouen Theatre, forming part of the eight large panels sketched for this project around the following themes: Orpheus, Melody, The Symphony, Heroic Music, Dramatic Music, Dance, Song, and Pastoral. The ensemble, now lost, was destroyed in the fire of June 28, 1887. The brushed handling visible on the rock and in the lower part of our painting is characteristic of the artist’s manner, executed using a dry brush and the handle of the brush. Baudouin indeed produced large painted sketches on canvas in the manner of a drawing before executing his compositions as frescoes. The use of oil paint testifies to the painter’s intention to place himself under the same conditions as those of the final work. The artist chose this technique in order to obtain the same effects of materiality and brilliance as in the final mural paintings, also executed in oil.
The artist’s touch, the impasto, and the streaks left by the stiff bristles of the brush are very visible on all his sketches as well as on his finished works. The scale of these marks may vary. Paul Baudouin used brushes ranging from approximately four centimeters wide for his mural paintings to four millimeters for his sketches, yet the ratio of ten between the two is always maintained. In our Symphony, the paint is more or less thick depending on the area; the impasto is irregular and the pictorial layer is opaque. The colors are obtained through mixing before being applied to the canvas (without glazing).
