Achille Devéria

portrait by Louis Boulanger, 1837

drawing of relief-sculpture medallion portrait by David d'Angers, 1828

Achille Devéria exercised a multifaceted influence over the first generation avant-garde, in his roles as artist, teacher, and organiser. He and his brother Eugène, long with Louis Boulanger and Eugène Delacroix, formulated and innovated French Romanticist painting in its most extreme and self-conscious form. He taught painting many of the founders of the Petit-Cénacle group, in which he played a central role. His students include Louis Boulanger, Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Auguste Glaize, and others, not to mention his own brother Eugéne. He was an important organiser and model of the movement's radical wing, attending Romanticist events dressed as a 17th Century Spanish aristocrat, and leading thus a cohort of his Romanticist students at the 'Battle of Hernani'. In the meantime, while his brother pursued large-scale history painting, Achille instead concentrated on avant-garde erotica distributed privately through the Libertine network, much of it heavily politicized and involving fornicating nuns, demons, soldiers, and copious entanglements of lesbians and voyeurs.

Achille Devéria played a profound role in the formation of the ultra-Romanticist avant-garde both in his capacity as educator (the teacher of Louis Boulanger, Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Auguste Glaize, and others, as well as his own brother Eugéne) and as co-founder of the seminal Petit-Cénacle group

Devéria was also instrumental in developing the first technology for creating affordable colour lithographs in large volume, a development which allowed him to make a living with innocuous genre and household scenes made for the commercial market, while his more challenging work was made in much smaller volume.

Charles Baudelaire wrote on these commercial works in his review of the Salon of 1845:

 

    “But how comes it that no one thinks of tossing a few sincere blossoms, of plaiting a few loyal tributes to the name of M. Achille Devéria? For long years, and all for our pleasure, this artist poured forth from the inexhaustible well of his invention a stream of ravishing vignettes, of charming little interior-pieces, of graceful scenes of fashionable life, such as no Keepsake—in spite of the pretensions of the new names—-has since published. He was skilled at coloring the lithographic stone; all his drawings were distinguished, full of feminine charms, and distilled a strangely pleasing kind of reverie. All those fascinating and sweetly sensual women of his were idealizations of women that one had seen and desired in the evening at the cafe-concerts, at the Bouffes, at the Opera, or in the great Salons. Those lithographs, which the dealers buy for three sous and sell for a franc, are the faithful representatives of that elegant, perfumed society of the Restoration, over which there hovers, like a guardian angel, the blond, romantic ghost of the duchesse de Berry.”