Faust

Laurens's "Faust" canvas, held at the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art in Porto Alegre, engages with one of the defining literary subjects of European Romantic and post-Romantic culture. Goethe's Faust (Part I published 1808, Part II 1832) had inspired an enormous body of visual art — from Delacroix's lithograph series to Ary Scheffer's paintings and beyond — and remained a live subject for painters throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. For Laurens, whose historical paintings drew on a broad repertoire of Western literary and historical subjects, Faust offered the same combination of moral drama, psychological intensity, and historical costume that he brought to his ancient Roman and medieval French subjects. The Rio Grande do Sul museum's holding of this canvas reflects the significant French cultural influence on southern Brazilian elites in the late nineteenth century, who collected French academic painting as part of their cultural self-fashioning.

A Faust canvas by Laurens would likely focus on the key dramatic episode that appealed most strongly to painters: the pact with Mephistopheles, the seduction of Gretchen, or the conjuration scene. His academic technique — careful tonal modelling, controlled brushwork, historically referenced costume — would be applied to the Gothic German-medieval setting that Goethe's drama implied.