Eugène Burnand

Eugène Burnand: The Realist Who Painted Faith as Motion

The canvas is not large — 83 by 135.5 centimetres — and it shows two men in profile, running, in the half-light of an early morning. That is all. *The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection* was painted in 1898 and bought by the French state straight off the walls of the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts the same year. It has since passed through the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Jeu de Paume, the Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre again and finally the Musée d'Orsay, where it is currently not on display — six national collections in a hundred and twenty years, for a picture famous chiefly through reproduction.

A Protestant Childhood and a Detour Through Architecture

Eugène Burnand was born on 30 August 1850 at Château Billens near Moudon, in the canton of Vaud, into a prosperous Protestant family. His father, Colonel Édouard Burnand, was a forestry inspector who drew and painted all his life without ever attempting to make a living at it — the household's first lesson being that art was serious and also not a career.

The family moved to Florence in 1860, and the ten-year-old's eye was formed on Italian painting. At his father's suggestion he studied architecture in Zurich from 1867 to 1871 before concluding he had been aimed at the wrong discipline. He worked briefly under Barthélemy Menn in Geneva, then entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1872 under Jean-Léon Gérôme — the arch-academician, and precisely the training that would put Burnand on the losing side of the argument breaking out over Impressionism.

He married Julia in 1878 and settled in Versailles. Her family were the Girardets, a dynasty of painters and engravers, from whom he picked up printmaking skills that mattered enormously later. They had eight children, including two sets of twins, and moved repeatedly between France and Switzerland.

The Realist of Fields and Animals

For his first twenty years of practice Burnand was a realist painter of the countryside: animals, weather, agricultural labour, the peasantry of Vaud and the Midi observed without sentiment. *Donkeys in the Midi* dates from 1873, *The Fire Engine* from 1879, *The Gleaners* from 1880, *Bull in the Alps* from 1884, *The Peasant Farmer* from 1894, *Labour in the Jorat* from 1915, when he was sixty-five.

He also took large historical subjects, notably *The Flight of Charles the Bold* of 1894–95, and around 1900, at the height of his reputation, contributed Mont Blanc seen from Clergère to the ceiling of the Train Bleu buffet at the Gare de Lyon. The official honours arrived on schedule: a first-class gold medal and the presidency of the Swiss Fine Arts Commission at the Paris International Exhibition in 1889, the Legion of Honour in 1893, the Institut de France in 1912.

1898, and the Religious Turn

From the mid-1890s the Protestant upbringing surfaced in the work. *Return of the Prodigal Son* came in 1896–97, then the running disciples in 1898, *Invitation to the Feast* in 1899, *The High Priestly Prayer* in 1900–01, *Via Dolorosa* in 1904–05.

What makes the 1898 picture extraordinary is a decision about editing. The Gospel scene is inherently undramatic — two men are told the tomb is empty, and they run to see. Burnand paints only the running, and only the faces, in strict profile. There is no vision, no angel, no revealed miracle: the entire content is what hope and terror look like on two ordinary faces at speed. It is a realist's solution to a supernatural subject, and it works precisely because Gérôme's academy had taught him to render a face with forensic accuracy. The painting has escaped the fate of almost all Salon religious art, which is to look ridiculous within thirty years.

The Parables and the Prints

Across Europe, Burnand was best known not for oils but for a book. His illustrated *Parables* — 32 parables carried by 76 paintings, drawings and sketches — began appearing in 1908 and was published in French, German and English editions over four decades. He also illustrated Frédéric Mistral's *Mireille* in 1884, George Sand's *François le Champi* in 1888, and the *Little Flowers of St Francis* in 1919. The Girardet training paid off: reproduction, not the Salon, is what carried his images into ordinary houses.

The Allies: 104 Faces

His last work is his strangest and, arguably, his best. Between 1917 and 1920, working in Paris, Montpellier and Marseille with Wolff pencils and Hardtmuth hard pastels, Burnand made 104 portraits, each around 46 by 53 centimetres, of combatants from the Allied side — men drawn from 45 nations and colonies as the alliance stood in 1918. The tally runs to 51 from the French Empire, 22 from the British, nine Americans, four Italians, a Japanese officer, and a handful each from Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Romania, Greece, Portugal, Montenegro, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

He was sixty-seven when he started, and he insisted on knowing each sitter; the art historian Louis Gillet said the sittings had the atmosphere of a confessional. Eighty were shown at the Luxembourg Museum in 1919 to considerable acclaim, and the book *Les Alliés dans la Guerre des Nations* followed in 1922 with a preface by Marshal Foch. In 1924 the American philanthropist William Nelson Cromwell bought 101 of the originals and gave them to France; seventy-two hang permanently in the Museum of the Legion of Honour in Paris.

Why Eugène Is Called a Genius

Burnand is not a name in the standard narrative of modern art, and any honest account has to concede the reason. He was trained by Gérôme, he stayed a realist through the decades when Paris was inventing Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism, and the art-historical machine has consequently filed him under competent nineteenth-century conservatism. His masterpiece is in the Orsay's stores rather than on its walls.

The claim for him is a claim about a specific and rare skill: he could paint interior states from the outside. Two profiles in motion carry the entire theological weight of the 1898 canvas because Burnand could put belief, doubt and physical urgency into the set of a jaw and the direction of a glance, without a single symbolic prop. The war pastels are the same faculty at industrial scale — 104 individual human beings, from four dozen nations, drawn one at a time under conditions the artist deliberately made intimate, each recognisably a particular person rather than a national type. That is not a conceptual achievement; it is a craft achievement of a very high order, closer to what a great portrait photographer does than to what a modernist does, and it requires an unglamorous combination of technical drawing ability and genuine attention to strangers.

The counter-case: he invented nothing. He remained deliberately outside every important formal development of his lifetime. Much of the religious work is pious in a way that reads as period taste, and his popular reach came through reproduction, which the twentieth century took as evidence against seriousness. He is celebrated in Switzerland — there is a dedicated Musée Eugène Burnand in Moudon — and largely unstudied elsewhere; the recent reappraisal has focused narrowly on the religious paintings and the war portraits rather than on the work as a whole.

Legacy

Burnand died in Paris on 4 February 1921, at seventy. His paintings sit in the Orsay and the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and in the museum that bears his name in the Vaud town where he grew up. But his real audience was never in those buildings: it is in the seventy-two faces on the walls of the Legion of Honour Museum, and in the countless printed copies of two men running toward a piece of news they cannot yet believe.

Achievements

• Notable work: The disciples Peter and John running to the tomb on the morning of the resurrection
• Movement: Naturalism