Artwork Title: Fatherly Roof (Poem of the Soul 6),1854)

Fatherly Roof (Poem of the Soul 6),1854)

Louis Janmot

The painter who came closest to creating an epic in his works must be Louis Janmot (1814–1892), whose series Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul) consists of no less than 34 images, of which the first 18 are painted in oils, and the remaining 16 are in charcoal. Miraculously, the complete series is still together, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France. ...[Janmot] painted traditional narrative and religious works to start with, and started work on his epic series as early as 1835. All 18 oils were completed in time to be shown at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, after which he continued work on the charcoal drawings until they were completed by 1881. ...Like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Janmot was an accomplished poet, and the series is accompanied by an epic poem of nearly 3,000 lines.,,, Janmot had a deep Catholic faith, and both the poem and the paintings are framed within his beliefs..... The series opens in heaven, with the mystical formation of a human soul, shown in symbolic form as a baby. In Fatherly Roof, the child’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by the flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of 30) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window. (https://eclecticlight.co/2016/12/07/the-story-in-paintings-louis-janmots-epic-le-poeme-de-lame-1/)
Uploaded on Nov 21, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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