Eugène Ernest Hillemacher

Salon de Paris, 1845, no. 837;

Salon de Marseille, 1851, no. 163.

A. de Savignac, 'Salon de 1845 – Troisième article', in Journal des Demoiselles, June 1845, no. VI, p. 185, repr. as frontispiece.

A prolific painter mostly active during the Second Empire and the Third Republic, faithful representative of a middle way that will stay away from Courbet's realism, Ernest Eugène Hillemacher began his career, after spell in Cogniet’s studio, at the 1840 Paris Salon. Fortune and the Young Child, exhibited by the artist at the 1845 Salon, was therefore painted while he was relatively young.

He was inspired, as the Salon livret usefully reports, by La Fontaine, and Fable XI of Book V, an extract of which follows (trans. Walter Thornbury, 1886):

Beside a well profoundly deep,

A schoolboy laid him down to sleep

(…)

Happy for him, just then came by,

Fortune, and saw him heedless lie.

She woke him softly, speaking mild:

‘I’ve saved your life, you see, my child.

Another time you close your eyes,

Be just a little bit more wise.

If you had fallen down below,

’Twould have been laid at me, I know. 

Hillemacher gives us a literal version, painting Fortune, in the tradition of classical iconography, as a young blindfolded woman dressed all’antica.

After being exhibited in Paris Salon of 1845, the painting was displayed in Marseille, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, in 1851. While it does not seem to have received much critical attention, it was nevertheless reproduced and described by Alida de Savignac in the Journal des Demoiselles in June 1845: 

‘The engraving in this journal will give you an idea of the composition of the charming painting by M. Hillemacher. Couple it with precise drawing, which the reduction cannot render, brilliant colour and lifelike expressions, and you will get an idea of one of the exhibition’s best works’. (Savignac, op. cit., p. 185).