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Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada

Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada (French: Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade) is an oil on canvas painting by Henri Regnault. Completed in 1870, it was acquired by the state from Regnault’s heirs for display at the Musée du Luxembourg. It is currently in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay.[1] A study for the figure of the executioner is also in the collections of the British Museum.[2]

Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada

Subject

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The subject is a scene of decapitation that takes place in an architectural setting based on the Alhambra, suffused throughout with a sunset glow. An executioner stands on a flight of marble stairs, calmly wiping the blood off his scimitar after striking his victim down. The brilliance of the colours contrasts with the repulsiveness of the subject.[3] The low angle at which the scene is depicted, effectively placing the viewer at the executioners feet, gives his life-sized figure an imposing presence.[4] His emotional detachment and relaxed gesture contrast with the gruesome foreground in which the blood drips down the steps from the lifeless body lying at his feet to its just-severed head.[1][5][6]

A fascination for arbitrary punishments carried out in settings of great splendour far from Europe was a common theme of Orientalist paintings. The power of these works drew on the contrast between what was depicted and contemporary European ideas about reducing the scope and barbarity of judicial execution, thus making the representation of the act both thrilling and terrifying.[5][7] They were also part of a wider tendency in orientalist art to choose disturbing subjects such as slave markets or acts of violence and present them in a style that was both “real” and escapist.[8]

In the late nineteenth century, the North African male body became the subject of homoerotic fascination for some Europeans. A hint of homoeroticism underpins the elegant, muscular figure of the executioner, suggesting fascination and threat.[4]

Style and technique

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In technical terms, there is an extreme contrast between the meticulously detailed depiction of the architectural interior in the background and the gruesome realism of the spattering blood in the foreground. Regnault’s studio assistant Clairin reported that he literally threw the red paint at the canvas in order to get a completely natural effect.[5] There is also a tension between the “hyper-real” detail of the setting and the figures - Regnault made extensive and detailed sketches in preparation for the work, as well as working from photographs of the architectural motifs - and the fictional, fantasy world represented in the scene.[4] Regnault himself described the painting as showing “the richest civilisation and the keenest cruelty coexisting in titanic, frightful splendour.”[9]

History

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The painting was Regnault’s third of his annual despatches to Paris after winning the Prix de Rome and it is possibly Regnault's most celebrated work.[3][10] Painted in Tangiers, it was first exhibited at 'Les Envois de Rome' at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1871.[2] It has been exhibited on loan many times:[1]

Critical reception

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Roger Marx [fr] wrote that Regnault was often drawn, while in Rome, towards the unusual and the bizarre, such as the beheading in Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa. He also commented unfavourably on the painting’s lack of sympathy or pity.[11]

Henry Roujon admired the painting’s technical virtuosity and use of colour, but, like Marx, deplored what he considered the gratuitous horror of the subject, rendered without “emotion, anguish or pity.”[12] Gustave Geffroy considered it “vulgarly melodramatic.”[11]

John Charles Van Dyke’s view was that “people rather like the Regnault Execution scene, not because of its color and handling, but because it hints at a ghastly story, and they like the humanized monkeys, not because of any pictorial quality, but because they are funny.”[13]

References

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  1. ^ a b c "Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade". musee-orsay.fr. Musée d’Orsay. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  2. ^ a b "Museum number 1910,0218.20". britishmuseum.org. British Museum. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  3. ^ a b Hooper, Lucy H. (1875). "Henri Regnault". The Art Journal. 1: 378. doi:10.2307/20568814. JSTOR 20568814. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  4. ^ a b c Gartlan, Luke (26 February 2014). "Blood and Paint: Henri Regnault, Orientalism and the French Empire". imagesanalyses.univ-paris1.fr. Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Archived from the original on 28 September 2020. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  5. ^ a b c MacNamidhe, Margaret. "Book Review: Marc Gotlieb, The Deaths of Henri Regnault". 19thc-artworldwide.org. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  6. ^ Pitman, Dianne (1998). Bazille: Purity, Pose, and Painting in the 1860s. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. p. 25. ISBN 9780271044330. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  7. ^ Morra, Joanne; Smith, Marquard (2006). Visual Culture: Spaces of visual culture. London: Routledge. p. 31. ISBN 9780415326445. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  8. ^ Lombardi, Laura (2009). From Realism to Art Nouveau. New York: Sterling. pp. 35–36. ISBN 9781402759260. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  9. ^ Irwin, Robert (2012). The Alhambra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 171. ISBN 9780674063600. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  10. ^ Beaulieu, Jill; Roberts, Mary; Thomas, Nicholas (2002). Orientalism's Interlocutors Painting, Architecture, Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 137. ISBN 9780822328742. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  11. ^ a b Gotlieb, Marc (2016). The Deaths of Henri Regnault. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 11, 234. ISBN 9780226276045. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  12. ^ Mansfield, Elizabeth (2005). Art History and Its Institutions The Nineteenth Century. Taylor & Francis. p. 168. ISBN 9781134585038. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
  13. ^ Van Dyke, John Charles (1893). Art for Art's Sake Seven University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of Painting. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. p. 20. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
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