Art and artists: August 2025

The musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, has a room dedicated to Louis Janmot's series titled "The Poem of the Soul." This post includes photos I took of the paintings and explanations.

Here's a brief overview:

The Poem of the Soul is a series of oil on canvas paintings by Louis Janmot, produced between 1835 and 1881 and totalling eighteen paintings and sixteen charcoal drawings, all inspired by a 2800 verse poem by Janmot himself. The first works in the series were exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle. The series tells of a soul's life on earth, incarnated in a young man, accompanied by his female double. His companion then disappears and he spends the rest of his life alone, as did the artist. The series is now in the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.

The Lyon museum's website includes this description from the temporary exhibition in Paris.

https://www.mba-lyon.fr/en/fiche-programmation/louis-janmot-and-poem-soul

Started in Rome in 1835 by the Lyonnais artist Louis Janmot (1814-1892) and continued up until 1881, The Poem of the Soul is a pictorial and literary lifetime project. Conserved in its entirety at Lyon’s Museum of Fine Arts, its 34 compositions illustrate the initiatory journey of a soul on Earth. Formed of two cycles composed respectively of eighteen oil paintings and sixteen charcoal drawings, Henri Focillon described it as “romantic spiritualism’s most remarkable, most coherent and strangest series”.
The first cycle, composed of eighteen oil paintings produced between 1835 and 1854, tells the story of a soul’s first years in Heaven and on Earth, the soul being depicted in the form of a young boy, accompanied by a young girl. We follow the stages and vicissitudes of their journey: birth, childhood, the dangers of a bad education, back on the straight and narrow, dream of the ideal, and then experience of the most terrible reality with the young woman’s untimely death. Théophile Gautier and then Baudelaire were drawn to these canvases when they were exhibited for the first time in 1854 and then admitted to the 1855 Universal Exhibition on Delacroix’s recommendation.
The second cycle, composed of sixteen charcoal drawings on paper mounted on canvas, on which Janmot worked until 1881, tell how the boy, now alone and grown up, is confronted with all the human soul’s temptations and misfortunes: loneliness, doubt, denial of God, and the final the fatal fall. It has a happy ending though, with the advent of divine deliverance and mankind’s redemption. The second cycle was never exhibited in its entirety during the artist’s lifetime, but all the works were reproduced by the photographer Félix Thiollier in 1881, using the carbon print process.
A poem two thousand eight hundred and fourteen verses long, titled The Soul, accompanies the works. Written by Janmot himself and published in two parts, the first in 1854 and the second in 1881, it serves to reinforce the paintings’ “message” and meaning, and is indissociable from them. The Poem of the Soul is neither exactly a simple painted cycle nor an illustrated book; it is a hybrid work, both literary and pictorial, an invitation to contemplate, listen and wander.

The series was on display in 2023-4 in the musée d'Orsay in Paris, which has a nice explanation on its website:

https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/presentation/louis-janmot-poem-soul

That site also links to Janmot's written poem.