Sérénité

This canvas is enormous, well over five metres across, and it was built to stop crowds at the Salon of 1899 in Paris. Its subject comes from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid: the Elysian Fields, where the blessed dead are led by music toward Arcadia, a land of calm and unbroken happiness. Martin painted it in small, separated touches of colour, the divided brushwork he had taken partly from Seurat and partly from the Italian painter Segantini, whom he had met years earlier. In other hands that technique chased real sunlight. Here it makes the whole scene shimmer like something remembered rather than seen. The year matters. In 1899 France was tearing itself apart over the Dreyfus affair, and into that noise Martin sent this vast, cloudless vision of serenity. The figures don't hurry anywhere. They drift after the musicians into the light.