01 Work, The Art of War, Evariste Vital Luminais's Captives, with footnotes

Evariste Vital Luminais (French, 1822–1896)

Captives

Oil on canvas

56 x 46.3 cm (22 1/16 x 18 1/4 in.)

Museum of Fine Arts Boston 

In a dramatic scenery, where the sky is darkened by the smoke of a burning and pillaged temple, two Gaul horsemen grab their bounty: young Greek or Roman women, who will become their slaves. Evariste Luminais shows here the full extent of his talent in the historical genre. Passionate about archeology, he is also obsessed with meticulousness and accuracy. He belongs to those French artists of the IIIrd Republic whose esthetic was inspired by subjects from French national history. Exhibited in the 1872 Salon under the title "Invasion", this work was immediately perceived as an allegory of the French defeat of 1870. "The allusion is transparent, even though the scene is set in another time", wrote the critic for Le Journal Amusant, before adding this was a "major canvas". More on this painting

Évariste Vital Luminais was a French painter. He is best known for works depicting early French history and is sometimes called "the painter of the Gauls".

Luminais was born in Nantes into a parliamentary and legal family. His great-grandfather Michel Luminais was an official in the Vendée; his grandfather Michel-Pierre Luminais represented the Vendée in parliament from 1799 to 1803; and his father, René Marie Luminais, represented Loire-Inférieure from 1831 to 1834 and Indre-et-Loire from 1848 to 1849. Aware of his natural artistic talent, his family sent him to Paris when he was 18 to study with the painter and sculptor Auguste Debay. He also studied with Léon Cogniet, a historical and portrait painter whose pupils included Léon Bonnat, and Constant Troyon, who painted landscapes and animals.

He married twice. By his first wife, Anne Foiret, he had a daughter, Esther. After Anne's death in 1874, he remarried in 1876 to one of his pupils, Hélène de Sahuguet d'Amarzit d'Espagnac; she had been married to Claude Durand de Neuville but had been widowed in the War of 1870.

He made his official début at the 1843 Paris Salon, where two of his paintings were hung. He won medals at the Salons of 1852, 1855, 1857, 1861 and 1889. In 1869, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. He won the gold medal at the 1889 Exposition, and was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Français. For more than forty years, he divided his time between his Paris studio at 17 boulevard Lannes and his summer house and studio in the village of Douadic, in the Brenne region. Among his students were Albert Maignan and Emily Sartain; he was one of the few Academy painters who would teach women.

Luminais died in Paris at the age of 75 and was buried in the little cemetery in Douadic. His native city of Nantes has a street named for him. More on Évariste Vital Luminais

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