born on March 9, 1775 in Chauny, Picardie, France
died on May 26, 1821 in Paris, France
French painter
250th birthday on March 9, 2025
Biography
On May 27, 1821, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the 46-year-old painter Constance Mayer-La Martinière said a particularly heartfelt goodbye to her student Sophie Duprat. Then she took a sharp knife and cut her throat. Her long-time partner, the famous artist Pierre Paul Prud'hon, was working on a painting in his studio just a few rooms away, completely oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding. This horrific suicide marked the harrowing end of a long relationship between the two, throughout which Constance Mayer had been viewed less as an artist in her own right than as the woman who supported the famous painter Prud'hon.
Constance Mayer was a promising artist who already at the age of 21 had begun to participate regularly in the Paris Salon exhibitions, primarily with portraits and self-portraits. Five years later, she left her first teacher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in order to work with Prud'hon. The artist, about 17 years her senior, found the arrangement that soon arose between pupil and teacher extremely practical: Mayer brought with her a considerable fortune, took care of his five children (their mother had been committed to an asylum for “scandalous behavior”) and she also used her charm, tact and persistence to establish important contacts for Prud'hon with wealthy clients (including Empress Josephine). Previously not very good at business, the artist soon became one of the most famous in his genre. Above all, she placed her own artistic productivity entirely at the service of his success. They worked in the same style and on the same themes - lyrical portraits and sentimental allegorical representations (love seduces innocence, pleasure and remorse follow). To this day it is difficult to distinguish Mayer’s works from his, as the two would often market paintings that were hers as “genuine Prud'hons” since that allowed them to demand higher prices.
In all this, they maintained appearances; each had their own studio and apartment at the Sorbonne where they could live near each other as “teacher” and “pupil” with no damage to their reputations. We can only guess at what shattered the idyll – fear of the future because the Ministry of Culture had terminated the leases of the studios? disappointment because Prud'hon made no move to marry her? Or the bitter realization that her talent had been “repressed” (Germaine Greer)? She was deeply mourned by Prud'hon, who organized a retrospective of her work for the Paris Salon in 1822. When he died the following year, it was said to be of a broken heart.
Constance Mayer's most famous painting, The Dream of Happiness (1819), hangs in the Louvre. In it, a young family is bathed in moon light – the mother asleep and cradling her child, both tenderly supported by the father – and shown gliding down a river on a barge, the boat of life, with Fortune rowing and Love steering. Perhaps it also shows how she had dreamed of happiness for herself.
(Text from 1995; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025. Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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