Figural
BERNARD BOUTET DE MONVEL (1881–1949)
Four Trompe l’Oeil Paintings of Roman Deities for the Home of Mary Benjamin Rogers, Paris, 1928–29
Each, oil on canvas mounted on Masonite, 60 5/8 x 31 1/2 in.
The set of four includes (left to right):
Ceres I
Signed (on pedestal, at lower left): BERNARD / B. DE MONVEL
Pomona
Signed with monogram (on pedestal, at lower left): BMB
Ceres II
Signed with monogram (on pedestal, at lower left): BMB
Bacchus
Signed with monogram (on pedestal, at lower left): BMB
These trompe l’oeil paintings of Roman deities were painted for a decorative-arts commission to fill the niches of a circular vestibule in the neoclassical Paris townhouse of Mary Benjamin Rogers (1878–1956). In 1929, after years of discord and essentially separate lives, Mary Rogers divorced Henry Huddleston Rogers, Jr. Married since 1901, they had been a New York society couple. Mary was the granddaughter of Parke Benjamin, a prominent mid-nineteenth century New York journalist, editor, and poet. Her husband, was the son of Henry Huttleston [sic] Rogers, an enormously wealthy vice president of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, involved eventually in the copper, steel, gas, coal, and railroad industries. In 1902, Rogers personally financed the Virginian Railway, an engineering marvel that linked the mountainous coal fields of West Virginia with tidewater Virginia at Norfolk. Rogers, Sr. was a close friend and financial advisor of Mark Twain and, after her marriage, Mary Benjamin Rogers entered into a lighthearted correspondence with the lonely author. Mary Benjamin Rogers lived as discretely as her ultra-rich status allowed. Not so, her daughter, Millicent Rogers (1902–1953), a high spirited and beautiful young woman who attracted press notice even before her “official” debut. Millicent, stylish, extravagant, and a fashion icon, provided racy fodder for society pages in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s as she went through numerous high profile beaus and three marriages before settling in Taos, New Mexico, where championed southwest Native Americans and their arts and crafts.
The commission for Rogers’ Paris house was entirely consistent with the fabric of Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s career. In addition to being a premier society portrait painter, he never gave us his interest in interior design, providing decorative paintings for mansions and estates in Europe and the United States. He had exhibited a “decorative panel,” as early as the French Salon of 1905. Denying the “artificial” distinction between fine and decorative art, he applied his modernist aesthetic of simplicity based on geometry coupled with an emphasis on flatness and linearity to all of his projects. In 1925, he painted eight panels for a dining room near Biarritz, that “depicted statues in white stone of Venus and Cupid, Pan, Abundance, Apollo, Diana the Huntress, Bacchus, and Hebe and Hercules." Boutet de Monvel, a pioneer of the Art Deco style, here combined the simplicity, geometry, and order so prized in the wake of the Great War with neoclassical references to ancient culture that promised a reassuring continuity of civilization from the cavorting immortals of the ancients to their all-too-mortal modern descendants.
The choice of deities (all Roman versions), for Mary Rogers’ vestibule was thematically appropriate. Bacchus, the God of Wine, admires a cluster of grapes he holds aloft in his left hand. Pomona, Goddess of Fruitful Abundance, cradles a basket of fruit resting atop a plinth. Ceres (in both versions), one of the twelve Olympians, was the Goddess of Agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. She cradles her attribute, a sheaf of wheat and holds a small sickle, a harvest tool, in her right hand. All of these deities promise a generous welcome. (Diana, the fourth of the deities, but not included in the present group, was also associated with female strength and independence, appropriate for a newly unmarried woman.) Boutet de Monvel’s conceit in these paintings is that, in fact, they represent the juncture of modern style with the venerated tradition of trompe l’eoil, two-dimensional paintings intended to “fool the eye” into seeing terra cotta sculptures standing in architectural niches.
