Joan of Arc weeping at the sight of a wounded Englishman

Princess Marie showed little inclination for drawing, which she learned like her brothers and sister from Ary Scheffer. In 1834, her teacher had the idea of introducing her to modeling, which from then on occupied all the young artist's thoughts. Steeped from childhood in the art of the new Romantic school, which Scheffer infused into his protégés, but which her father and elder brother, Ferdinand-Philippe, supported and encouraged with commissions and purchases, she produced forms reminiscent of those of the Romantic sculptors Barye and Moine. The bas-reliefs La Résurrection du poète and Ahasvérus (Chantilly, Musée Condé), inspired by the poems of Edgar Quinet, demonstrate her affinity with poetic subjects, in the tradition of Scheffer. With her first ronde-bosse, Joan of Arc weeping at the sight of a wounded Englishman, she turned to a character she had discovered through her history lessons with Jules Michelet, who was then preparing a History of France, one of the volumes of which was devoted to the Hundred Years' War. Reading Guillaume Cousinot's Chronique de la Pucelle, written in the w° century, moved the princess. Following in the footsteps of Delaroche and Devéria, and concerned with historical truth, she portrayed Jeanne as a cavalier, with short hair and men's clothes, but imbued with a religious sentiment that completely renewed the iconography of the Pucelle. This same religious sentiment would be at the heart of Joan of Arc at Prayer, which her father commissioned the following year for Versailles, and of which he offered a cast to the City of Orléans on the sudden death of his daughter in 1839. Although Joan of Arc at Prayer was printed in numerous editions, this composition was only circulated in the private sphere, and in a limited number of copies. The plaster cast donated by Marie-Amélie to the Société Archéologique et Historique de l'Orléanais in 1851 is all the more precious, and continues to weave the link between the Orléans and their city of apanage.