Le triomphe de Marie de Médicis

This sketch on cardboard depicting the Triumph of Marie de Medici reflects Carolus-Duran's sustained engagement with the iconographic programs of the French royal tradition, and particularly with Rubens's celebrated cycle of Marie de Medici paintings at the Louvre — one of the most admired ensembles in French artistic consciousness. Carolus-Duran was primarily a portraitist and figure painter, but his facility with the grand tradition of decorative allegory is documented by works like this. Marie de Medici, who commissioned Rubens's cycle as a self-glorifying historical narrative of her life and regency, was herself a complex figure in French history — a foreign queen who played a significant role in seventeenth-century French politics while patronizing some of the most ambitious decorative painting of the era. The Smart Museum's acquisition of this oil sketch places it in an American university collection where it functions both as a document of Carolus-Duran's practice and as a point of comparison with Rubens's source material.

As an oil sketch on cardboard, this work reveals Carolus-Duran's compositional thinking without the finish of a public painting. The handling is appropriately loose for a study, with broad indications of figure masses and color relationships rather than completed forms. The sketch medium allowed the painter to work quickly through ideas about the allegorical figures and their spatial organization before committing to canvas.