Charles-Caius Renoux (born in Paris, 1795; died in Paris, 14 March 1846) was a French painter, lithographer, and illustrator. He first achieved success with paintings of medieval churches, particularly the ruins of cloisters and monasteries destroyed during the French Revolution, works for which he is still best known. Renoux also painted landscapes, large-scale battle scenes, and historical subjects, works which uniquely prepared him for the final phase of his career, the creation of spectacular dioramas, the "moving pictures" of the era. He also taught at the in Paris; his notable students included Narcisse Berchère and Hector Hanoteau.
Early success and patronage of du Sommerard
The contemporary scholar Alfred Maury gave this romantic but sparsely detailed account of Renoux’s early life and beginnings as an artist:
M. Renoux was barely reaching his fifteenth year when he lost his master [teacher], the only one he had ever had; painting had for this very young man a powerful, indefinable attraction, which the violent opposition of his family could not erase. Desperate to overcome the antipathies of his parents, Renoux leaves the paternal roof; he travels through towns, visits monuments rich in masterpieces; from that moment on, his resolution was unshakable, and the day he took the palette to reproduce the interior of the church of Louviers and the casemates of Château Gaillard, that day, Renoux was able to exclaim with Correggio: "Anch io son pittore! And I too am a painter!"
Maury does not name Renoux’s "only" master (teacher). Catalogues of the Paris Salons typically name a painter’s instructor, but never do so with Renoux. A newspaper of 1825 called him the "student and emulator" of Charles Marie Bouton and Louis Daguerre. Whether or not Renoux took formal instruction from them, these two older artists played an important role in his career.
Whatever his training, by 1822, the year Renoux turned 27, his talents as a painter had attracted the patronage of the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, whose collection of medieval art and artifacts would become the Musée de Cluny. Du Sommerard included lithographs of four works by Renoux in his highly influential Vues de Provins. The book, an illustrated tour of medieval churches and abbeys, many of them reduced to ruins in the violence of the French Revolution, was part of an artistic and literary movement, the troubadour style, that romanticized the Middle Ages in France.
Art historian Pierre Bénard, describing Renoux's Vue du Souterrain de l'Église du Refuge from Vues de Provins, says the image epitomizes the "pleasure of ruins": "Two contemporary figures visit the storied ruin invaded by a great light. And what miracle is it this I see, through the opening from which all these sunbeams fall, the blue sky? In the background, a cheerful half-light swarms behind an archway. Lianas hang gracefully and come together on a blooming scree. This is the…pleasure of ruins where nothing comes to sadden the 'harmony of chaos' praised by Du Sommerard."
That same year, Renoux debuted at the Paris Salon of 1822 with four paintings that garnered him a Medal of the Second Class. These included the two paintings cited by Maury, Vue prise dans l'église de Louviers and Ruines des casemates du château Gaillard, the latter described in the catalogue: "As a result of the persecutions he was experiencing, Nicolas Poussin, forced to leave his country, comes to take a last look at his birthplace."
Two years later, at the Paris Salon of 1824, Renoux exhibited nine painting, all of which were purchased before the exhibit closed. L'interieur de l’Église Saint-Etienne-du-Mont à Paris was acquired by the state and installed at the Luxembourg Palace. (It is now in the collection of the Musée Crozatier in Le Puy-en-Velay.) Seven painting were bought by du Sommerard. One of these was La Confession; figures italiennes, depicting one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. By 1827, Renoux had produced paintings depicting each of the seven sacraments; du Sommerard purchased the entire series.