Szene aus der Sintflut

Joseph-Désiré Court showed this at the Paris Salon of 1827, the year the old guard of French classical painting and the younger Romantics were openly at odds on the walls. Court had trained the classical way and won the Prix de Rome, but here he reached for raw feeling. The subject is the biblical Flood, though he narrowed it to a single knot of figures on a last patch of rock. A young man strains to carry his aged father up out of the rising water, while a mother with a child at her breast clutches at him, begging him to save them too, and there is plainly not the room or the strength for all of them. The French state bought the picture for 3,000 francs and sent it, in time, to Lyon.