Esquisse pour le Panthéon : La mort de sainte Geneviève

This 1876 sketch for the Panthéon cycle depicting the death of Saint Geneviève represents a critical phase in one of Jean-Paul Laurens's most important public commissions. The French state's decoration of the Panthéon — reconverted from a church to a secular mausoleum for national heroes under the Third Republic — was a project of profound ideological significance, and Laurens was selected alongside Puvis de Chavannes to paint its interior walls. Geneviève, patron saint of Paris who according to tradition rallied the city against Attila the Hun in 451, was a figure the Republican government was willing to retain in the iconographic program as a symbol of Parisian resilience rather than specifically Catholic devotion. Laurens's preparatory sketches reveal his working method: compositional ideas tested in rapid oil studies before committing to the large-scale wall paintings. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris preserves this sketch as documentary evidence of Laurens's creative process on the commission that would cement his official standing in Third Republic France.

The sketch retains visible pentimenti and looser brushwork than the finished mural, revealing Laurens's thinking about figure placement and tonal relationships. Warm amber light dominates, consistent with the devotional atmosphere Laurens needed to evoke even within a secular institutional framework. The composition's spatial clarity was clearly established at this early stage, indicating Laurens worked out his architectural framing before resolving individual figures.