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JOSEPH-LOUIS-HIPPOLY BELLANGE
1800 - 1866
(b Paris, 17 Jan 1800; d Paris, 10 April 1866).
French painter and printmaker. He was enrolled briefly at the Lycée Bonaparte, Paris, and at 16 he entered the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, where Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, R. P. Bonington and Paul Delaroche were also pupils. Influenced by Charlet in particular, in 1817 Bellangé worked as a commercial illustrator, employing the still new process of lithography, notably for the publisher Godefroy Engelmann. Bellangé's independent works can only be traced, however, from 1822 onwards. Between 1823 and 1835 he published 15 albums of lithographs devoted to the patriotic military subjects that had long attracted popular favour, and he turned increasingly to representing them in oil. The narrative appeal of his depictions of the veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns-the Old Guard or grognards-soon won him official and commercial approval: he was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon of 1824. Ten years later he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur for the Return of Napoleon from Elba (1834; Amiens, Mus. Picardie), a composition widely lithographed by Bellangé himself. Further successes soon followed with Battle of Fleurus (exh. 1835) and Battle of Wagram (exh. 1837; both Versailles, Château). Bellangé also produced humorous genre scenes, such as Mistress of the Household (exh. Salon 1838; untraced), in which a soldier is being dragged home from his wayward pleasures by his wife.
In 1837 Bellangé left Paris to head the Museé des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, where he remained for 16 years before returning to Paris in 1853. His much admired Eve of the Battle of Moscow (untraced) was painted at Rouen; Napoleon is depicted being shown Baron François Gérard's portrait of the King of Rome, which he orders to be removed because it is too soon for his son to see a battlefield. Bellangé's theatrical sense is also apparent in such works as the Field of the Battle of Wagram (1857; untraced), in which Napoleon tends a fallen carabinier. For these qualities, as well as for his capacity to render scenes of massive encounters, as in the Taking of Malakoff (1858; untraced) by Marshal MacMahon's forces, Bellangé earned the admiration of contemporaries, who compared him with Auguste Raffet and Charlet as a master of his chosen genre. At the end of his life he took up lithography again to create a series of scenes from the Crimean War.
Bellangé's paintings are rather dryly detailed, while his drawings are apt to be freer and hence more attractive to the modern viewer. They were often sketched in crayon broadly toned with watercolour and pen-and-ink, but other media were also used, sometimes with elaborate hatching. His reputation faded after his death, but he remains an informative witness to the enthusiasms of an age when the military role in society was the subject of popular satisfaction and approval.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Catalogue de l'exposition des oeuvres d'Hippolyte Bellangé à l'Ecole Impériale des Beaux-Arts (exh. cat. by F. Way, Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A., 1867)
J. Adeline: Hippolyte Bellangé et son oeuvre (Paris, 1880)
H. Beraldi: Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, ii (Paris, 1885), pp. 5-24
FRANK TRAPP
© Oxford University Press 2007
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