Louis Janmot

Louis Janmot (1814–1892) was born in Lyon to devoutly Catholic parents and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts there before going to Paris in 1833 to take lessons from Victor Orsel and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. After a stay in Rome in 1835 he returned to Lyon, where large religious paintings shown at the Paris Salon drew the attention of critics. Later years took him to Paris, Algiers and Toulon before he settled again in Lyon, where he died. His life's work was The Poem of the Soul, a cycle of eighteen paintings and sixteen drawings with accompanying verse that occupied him for forty years; its failure at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 disappointed him. He carried out many church decorations, and he is now seen as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism, joining the finish of Ingres to a mysticism close to that of the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites. Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon and Maurice Denis all admired his work. Three works here: The Golden Stairs, L’Idéal (Poem of the Soul - Ideal) and Le Passage des âmes (The Poem of the Soul).