The hostages

"The Hostages" (1896) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon, depicts a medieval or ancient subject — the practice of taking hostages from defeated peoples or treaty partners as guarantees of compliance — a subject that allowed Laurens to explore the theme of power, submission, and human dignity that ran through his entire career. By 1896 Laurens was at the height of his influence, having completed major decorative cycles for the Panthéon, the Capitole de Toulouse, and the Luxembourg Palace. A canvas of this type for a provincial museum represented the mature, retrospective quality of his late exhibition work — large-scale, historically authoritative, and focused on the psychological drama of political power exercised over individuals. The Lyon museum, as a major regional institution, acquired work by the leading academic painters of the Third Republic as part of its program of assembling a comprehensive collection of contemporary French art.

Oil on canvas at exhibition scale allows Laurens his full range of compositional strategies for large group figures. The hostage subject requires careful differentiation of the powerful and the powerless through posture, gesture, costume, and spatial position. His palette in the 1890s was somewhat cooler and more restrained than his earlier work, reflecting the influence of the Symbolist aesthetic on academic painting.