Some Evangelical Roots for Hébert's Toujours et jamaisa

Abstract

Toujours et jamais created a sensation at the Salon of 1859 as a riveting enigma. Is its subject lovers forever joined in death, drawn from a contemporary poem? This article argues instead it is a generic vanitas based upon an ancien régime evangelical passage, and intentionally avoids any single reading in the interest of poetic mystery. Its provocative appeal to the imagination caused critics like Baudelaire to praise it for the discursive vitality that seemed lacking in new sculpture, suggesting an art in decline.

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Notes on contributors

Suzanne Glover Lindsay

Suzanne Glover Lindsay, a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art, contributed to the exhibitions “The Second Empire” (1978), and “Berthe Morisot: Impressionist” (1987), and was curator of “Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia” (1985) and author of its catalogue. She is responsible for the nineteenth-century section of the forthcoming volume on French sculpture at the National Gallery of Art [Department of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104–6311].