Louis Janmot : Le Poème De L'âme

Exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 12 September 2023 - 7 January 2024

The Lyon painter Louis Janmot (1814-1892), a pupil of Ingres and admirer of Delacroix, was at the crossroads of several 19th-century artistic movements.

Le Poème de l'âme, to which he devoted almost half a century, is a work that is both pictorial and literary. In two cycles of 18 paintings, 16 drawings and 34 poems, he retraces the initiatory journey of a soul incarnated as a young man on earth, its path through temptation and suffering, to the reunion with its beloved in heaven.

The painter-poet summons Fra Angelico, Dante, Blake, the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites to produce an astonishing, mysterious and romantic work, a veritable spiritual epic in which Baudelaire noted "an infinite charm that is difficult to describe, [...] an unconscious, childlike mysticism".

This exhibition catalogue presents Le Poème de l'âme in its entirety. While the first cycle is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the second, more fragile cycle is rarely shown.