Charles-Baptiste Schreiber (1847-1902) Pompeii, the Street of the Tombs (Via dei Sepolcri)

Charles-Baptiste SCHREIBER
(Paris, 1847 – Paris, 1902)

Pompeii, the Street of the Tombs (Via dei Sepolcri)

Oil on canvas

H. 26 cm; W. 35 cm

Located and dated lower right
June 1875

Located in the north-west suburbs of Pompeii, the street known as the Street of the Tombs starts from the city gate and extends in the direction of Herculaneum, for nearly 250 metres. Apart from funeral celebrations, the Pompeians liked very much to walk among the tombs, in the shade of the cypresses, or to sit on the tombstones and play dice or knucklebones.

In our painting, the point of view goes from North to South; on the left one distinguishes the junction with the Via Superiore. In the background stands out the silhouette of the Herculaneum Gate, which allows entry into Pompeii proper, with, a little before on the right, the villa of Cicero.

This view is rather little represented by painters at the beginning of the 19th century, even if Prosper Barbot and Caruelle d’Aligny made some sketches of it, respectively in 1821 and 1822; on the other hand, at the end of the century, it is very often chosen by photographers.

In 1843, Alexandre Dumas gives a description of it in Le Corricolo: “This street of the tombs is a magnificent peristyle for entering a dead city; then all these funeral monuments placed on the two sides of the consular road at the end of which the gate of Pompeia opens wide, not rising above the layer of sand which covered them, have been preserved intact as on the day when they came from the hands of the artist: only time has deposited on them in passing that beautiful dark tone, that varnish of centuries which is the supreme beauty of all architecture.”

Our luminous painting, with as its only horizon an immaculate blue sky covering an assembly of constructions with almost geometric forms, evokes at first glance the open-air studies carried out by Corot and his friends in the years 1825-1830, and in particular Caruelle d’Aligny; it also bore an apocryphal red signature “COROT” lower right.

But its author, Charles-Baptiste Schreiber, is in fact a pupil of Edouard Brandon (1831-1897), the latter rather well known for his interiors of synagogues or portraits of rabbis, but who stayed in Italy, in Rome, between 1856 and 1863, and then produced traditional scenes with luminous skies, with which the style of our work presents reminiscences.

Of modest origin, Schreiber used his artistic gifts to produce “subsistence” painting between the ages of 11 and 15, having had as his first master his godfather. In 1862 he decided to train in a more academic way by entering for six years the National School of Drawing, receiving there in particular the advice of the sculptor Pierre-Louis Rouillard. It was in 1869 that he became the pupil of Brandon, who directed him towards a first success at the Salon of 1870 (he had already exhibited two portraits, including his own, in 1868), with Pious Reading; this painting allowed him to meet Léon Bonnat, who wished to become his professor.

In 1873 Schreiber left for Italy in order to study the masters there more closely, a stay which lasted three years. Based in Rome, he visited the region of Naples in the spring of 1875; apart from our painting, another view of Pompeii is known, dated 31 May 1875, and one of Capri, dated 12 June 1875. But it is picturesque and poetic Italian subjects, similar to the genre scenes of Brandon, that he sent to the Salons of 1874, 1876, 1877, 1878 and 1879.

His career was now launched, and Schreiber exhibited at all the editions of the Salon until his death, more than fifty works in total, essentially genre scenes representing ecclesiastics, which place him alongside painters such as Jean-Georges Vibert or Henri Brispot.