Among Venezuela’s most distinguished academic painters, Michelena achieved transatlantic success during a short but illustrious career. With his father, the painter Juan Antonio Michelena, he founded a school of painting in Valencia in 1879. He began to paint portraits and other commissions during this period and was soon recognized with a second prize at the Exposición Nacional in Caracas in 1883. Two years later, Michelena received a government scholarship to study in Paris, and he set sail in May 1885 in the company of the Martín Tovar y Tovar, the outstanding Venezuelan history painter of the time. At Tovar y Tovar’s suggestion, Michelena enrolled at the Académie Julian under the noted French academic painter, Jean-Paul Laurens, a Salon master known for large-scale public works. Fellow pupils included the Venezuelan painters Cristóbal Rojas and Emilio Boggio, to whom Michelena dedicated the present portrait. Among Michelena’s accolades from this time are a Gold Medal, second class, for El niño enfermo at the 1887 Salon and a Gold Medal, first class, for Carlota Corday at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. Michelena returned to Venezuela in 1889 and, after a final stay in Paris (1890-92), settled permanently in Caracas, where he lived and worked until his untimely death from tuberculosis.
The present portrait dates from Michelena’s first sojourn to Paris and pays homage to his teacher, then fifty years of age and at the height of his career. An earlier pencil sketch, En la Academia Julian: Retrato de Jean-Paul Laurens (c. 1886), had shown Laurens from the side, giving a critique, but here Michelena portrays an aged and venerable master, his arms resting on a table and his gaze weary and yet forbearing. Backlit by a bank of tall windows, Laurens is cast in a warm, roseate glow that permeates the space of the studio from its dark red walls to the mauve-brown tabletop. The spontaneous, vigorous brushwork, uncommon in Michelena’s portraiture, suggests the influence of Impressionism and perhaps the audacity of the student to portray his teacher not in the grand tradition of academic painting but rather in a modern, expressionist mode. Daubs of paint capture the flickering of light through the glass, framing Laurens’s head in a halo of pure white pigment; quick brushstrokes similarly describe his dark coat and folded hands, rendered almost abstractly, which merge into the table.
Michelena had achieved meaningful success in Paris already by 1888, and Portrait of Jean-Paul Laurens may have signaled both the nearing conclusion of his studies and his gratitude to his teacher. He and another student at the Académie, the great Chilean painter Juan Francisco González, made portraits of each other that same year (Retrato del pintor chileno Juan Francisco González), an attestation of their shared experience and of the fraternity among students at the school. Michelena gave the present portrait to his friend Emilio Boggio, who exhibited alongside him in the Venezuelan pavilion at the 1889 Exposition Universelle and later dedicated himself to Impressionism. In tone and style, Portrait of Jean-Paul Laurens relates to other notable portraits from this period, among them Campesino bretón en la iglesia (1887), Retrato de la patrona (1889), and Trinidad (1889).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park