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She is the young heroine of a romantic novel that once rocked the whole of France and she is also the star of a charming portrait housed at London’s Wallace Collection. Now, thanks to an art-house hit – a film delighting critics and winning five-star reviews – the spotlight has swung once again on to Julie D’Etange, the enigmatic subject of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s little painting The Souvenir.
His picture shows a young woman in a luxurious pink satin dress carving her lover’s initials into a tree, in a scene drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 book Julie. Written in letter form, the story charts the path of her illicit love for Saint-Preux, a former lover and tutor, reintroduced into her life by her unsuspecting husband.
This summer the painting of Julie carving into the tree, completed by Fragonard in 1778, has given its name to British director Joanna Hogg’s new film The Souvenir, starring Tom Burke and Honor Swinton Byrne. The film is a disconcerting and subtle tale about life in Britain’s upper middle classes. Set in London in the 1980s, it has won rave reviews. For the Observer’s Mark Kermode, “Hogg’s work with actors has always been exceptional, but here she is at the top of her game”; in the Evening Standard David Sexton hailed it as “the best British film for a long time”, while in the Sunday Times Tom Shone called the film “exquisite” and “unforgettable”.
The Wallace Collection has also felt the impact of its release. A pile of information sheets placed next to Fragonard’s painting last month quickly disappeared as new visitors homed in on the enchanting image. “We are excited to see new audiences captivated by Fragonard’s intriguing masterpiece, which is currently the focus of a ground-breaking conservation and research project led by the Wallace Collection’s curator of French paintings, Dr Yuriko Jackall,” the gallery’s head of communications, Eleanor Nimmo, said this weekend.
Described by Nimmo as an “intimate” example of Fragonard’s skill, The Souvenir measures only 25cm by 19cm, yet its sentimental mood has been described as embodying “the fragrant essence of the 18th century”.
In Hogg’s film, a small print of the painting is given by Burke to Swinton Burne after they have studied the image together.
The scene is the most recent example of the way a celebrated artwork can suddenly gain new fans. In 1999 the Tracey Chevalier novel Girl with a Pearl Earring did the same thing for Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s alluring 1665 masterpiece. Then in 2003 the film of the book won it still more admirers.
And six years ago, when the American novelist Donna Tartt focused on a Carel Fabritius painting in her bestseller The Goldfinch, visitor numbers at the Mauritshuis, the gallery in The Hague where it hangs not far from Vermeer’s masterpiece, suddenly leapt up.
The release of the new film of Tartt’s book this month is likely to pique public interest again. Directed by John Crowley and starring Nicole Kidman and Sarah Paulson, it tells the story of a boy whose trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, where the painting is on show, changes his life in a dramatic and irrevocable way, linking his future to the fate of the work until the novel’s final pages.
Curators at the Wallace Collection hope all the fresh affection for Fragonard’s work will boost their restoration campaign, FixingFrago, which is designed to raise funds for the conservation of five of the gallery’s eight Fragonards. But Hogg’s film may also send more readers in search of Rousseau’s original novel. It is a work historians have claimed may well have been the biggest seller of the 18th century: the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer regarded it as one of the four greatest novels ever written, a title that for him could hold its own alongside Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Rousseau wrote Julie while he was living in retreat at Montmorency, a few miles north of Paris, and it promptly made him a celebrity. He had initially called it “Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps” and he set it on the shores of Lake Geneva, the site of a romance in his own life. The novel’s surviving subtitle “The New Heloise” refers to another bit of literary history, taking the links in the chain of inspiration leading to Hogg’s new film still further back. The story of Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard is a medieval story of conquered passions and Christian renunciation.
The first three sections of Julie – the part containing the scene later depicted by Fragonard – centre on the shared passion of Saint-Preux and his pupil Julie, who come from different social classes. The last three sections of the book turn to a moral argument about the benefits of sacrifice and of the consolation to be found in fulfilling duties to family.
In Rousseau’s preface to the novel, he wrote that he felt his story was full of “the subtleties of the heart”. And certainly when it was published, the French reacted with extreme emotion. Overcome readers wrote to Rousseau in their hundreds. One even claimed that Julie had almost drove him mad.
The writer was said to have been especially gratified to hear an anecdote about a reader who had been so compelled to finish his novel that she had missed an opera, in spite of the fact that she had already ordered an expensive horse-drawn carriage to take her to the theatre.
Perhaps the greatest tribute, however, is that certain of Saint-Preux’s phrases soon became secret passwords, or a coded language, among French lovers. In one enduring passage, for instance, Saint-Preux says of Julie’s grand home: “That place alone is inhabited; all the rest of the universe is empty.”
Hogg’s complex film may be far from a simple celebration of young love, but Fragonard’s pretty painting and the romantic story behind it are well-matched with her delicate narrative when it comes to subtlety and moral ambiguity.
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