Thalia chased by Painting

Charles Coypel was a born into a revered dynasty of French painters, the son of Antoine Coypel (1661-1722), nephew of Noel-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734) and grandson of Noel Coypel (1628-1707), history painters all. Something of a prodigy, he was accepted into the Académie Royale aged 21 with the submission of Jason and Medea (1715; Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), and achieved the highest levels of official success when he was appointed First Painter to the King and Director of the Académie in 1747. He was also a man of the theatre, a critic and author of some 40 plays – mostly three-act comedies and farces – which he regularly staged and directed, often casting himself in leading roles. In one of these plays, La Poesie et la Peinture (Allegory of Painting), an allegorical comedy, characters debated the virtues and failings of both arts.

The present painting – Coypel’s best-known and most extensively studied – is a witty allegory concerning his dual careers as painter and playwright. The painting depicts an artist’s studio that has been designed like a stage set and overflows with paintings, sculptures and a tumble of books, each of which makes reference to the 40-year-old artist’s own life. Casts of ancient and Renaissance sculptures – the Farnese Hercules, Belvedere Torso, and Giambologna’s Architectura – attest to Coypel’s deep learning and classical training at the Académie. His self-portrait gazes out at the viewer from the side wall. Two large paintings – a modello for Coypel’s tapestry cartoon of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia hanging on the back wall and a large landscape (featuring a helmeted Minerva) resting on an easel – are evidence of Coypel’s accomplishments as a painter. The jumbled still life of bound manuscripts in the foreground represents an array of Coypel’s plays, each bearing the title and date of production.

At the back of the room on the right stands the personification of Painting holding a palette and paintbrushes and pointing her mahlstick threateningly at Thalia, Muse of Comedy, whom she orders from the painter’s studio. As Thalia flees, her drapery whipping through the air, the Muse of Comedy turns to cast a final look upon Painting, and gathers in her skirts several volumes of plays that have been handed her by agitated putti. An angry génie running beside her, swaddled in leopard skin with a leopard skin toque, pulls with him a broken chain that had previously bound him. In the lower right corner of the painting is collaged a small scrap of paper on which, in Coypel’s own hand, is written a verse comparing Thalia to a mistress spurned: `Muse, I have had enough of your affair/ Leave, and take prose and poetry with you./ To turn one’s head/ Painting is quite enough'.

The painting had long been mistakenly interpreted as representing Coypel’s decision to abandon the theatre – his plays had not always been enthusiastically received – to devote himself to painting exclusively. However, a drawing of the subject in pen, ink and gouache (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) that is dated ‘1727’, five years before the painting was executed, was first employed by Coypel as the frontispiece of the Les Folies de Cardenio – the only one of his plays published in his lifetime – before he repurposed it as the design for the present canvas. Furthermore, as Eric Zafran noted in a seminal article (loc.cit.), Coypel continued to write plays after 1732, the year in which the painting is dated. Indeed, a close reading of the titles and dates inscribed on the bindings of the folios reveals that several postdate the painting, indicating that Coypel continued writing and continued revising his most inventive and original painting.

So enduring was the painting’s fame in 18^th-century France that Chardin included Bernard Lépicié’s engraving after Painting Ejecting Thalia in the background of his own final genre scene, La Serinette (Lady with a Bird-Organ; 1753; The Frick Collection, New York), twenty years after the print’s publication.