Fernand Desmoulin 1853-1914

Born in 1853 in Javerlhac, Dordogne, Fernand Desmoulin completed his secondary studies in Angoulême before moving to Paris at the age of eighteen to study medicine. It was in the capital that he suddenly discovered an artistic vocation, initially turning to illustration, which allowed him to survive with difficulty. After several challenging years, during which he alternated between commerce, traveling across Europe, and studying nature and its landscapes, he achieved his first success in England, which convinced him to dedicate himself fully to art. Back in Paris, he studied under William Bouguereau and Luc-Olivier Merson, and later met Félix Bracquemond, who trained him in engraving. Desmoulin exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1883, before focusing on the new Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1891, where his portraits of Pasteur, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Théodore de Banville, and Émile Zola earned him a solid reputation. He developed a particularly close friendship with Zola, illustrating Les soirées de Médanand participating in the drafting of the famous letter J’accuse, published on January 13, 1898 in L’Aurore during the Dreyfus affair.

The pastel we present belongs to the rare and unusual corpus of Fernand Desmoulin’s so-called “mediumistic” works, produced over a brief period of two years between 1900 and 1902. Obscure and little known even to those close to him, these works were only revealed after the artist’s death, when his widow Emma van Oosterom donated some of the sheets to the Musée de Brantôme in the Périgord, alongside archaeological objects collected by her husband. Originally a positive-minded and rather skeptical individual, Desmoulin turned to spiritualism following the death of his first wife, Gabrielle Génie, in 1894, and his separation from a subsequent partner in 1899. Created on the margins of his official career, his mediumistic work began one evening in June 1900 after a séance at the home of the writer Catulle Mendès. During a lecture, the artist himself explained the origin of his approach: “I placed myself before a blank sheet and took up the pen. Immediately my hand began to move, and I drew, without knowing what I was doing, strange figures that bore no resemblance to anything usual[1].”

Without any control, Desmoulin allowed his hand to tremble and jerk, ultimately racing across the paper in a frenzy, scratching the surface with concentric and tangled lines. Integrating fully with the drawing, the red signature “Ton” in the lower right is equally involuntary and occult. It appears incomplete when compared with a recurring signature on this type of drawing, “Astarté, ton vieux maître,” referring to the ancient Phoenician deity with whom Desmoulin’s spirit was believed to communicate unconsciously. Emerging at the center of the semi-circular fan shape like an apparition, the face of a woman with closed eyes and blonde hair is here paired with the cloudy effects of a sunset, as if to suggest an allegory of sleep, providing a calm graphical counterpoint to a more turbulent nocturnal occultism.

[1] Jean-Louis Lanoux and Djohar Si Ahmed, Fernand Desmoulin: Œuvres médiumniques (1900-1902), Paris, abcd et Galerie Messine, 2002, pp. 17–18.