The New Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology, and Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, which were designed by Charles-Louis-Ferdinand Dutert and inaugurated on July 21, 1898, became part of an institution renowned for its contributions to science. Art had long played an important role at the Museum,¹ and the painter Fernand Cormon received the commission for the “pictorial decoration of the Classroom of the new galleries of the Museum of Natural History” on April 18, 1893.² In addition to an allegorical ceiling composition, he created ten wall paintings depicting prehistoric animals, the beginnings of human industries, and the development of humanity from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age.³ This painting cycle was distinctly designed to engage viewers and offer lessons in keeping with the lectures that were to be given in the amphitheater by the Museum’s professors. Moreover, the subjects of the canvases were carefully chosen to create an overall narrative about progress. The novelty of Cormon’s paintings, however, lies not so much in what they depict, either individually or as a group, but in how they were positioned in the room to create a series of interesting parallels and contrasts. Directly influenced by the Museum’s collections and the comparative and evolutive manner in which they were displayed, Cormon’s program, in addition to being decorative, was didactic due to both the iconography and the arrangement of the paintings.

Dutert had specifically asked the Fine Arts Administration to select Cormon for the classroom project.⁴ This decision was viewed as “an act of great intelligence,” and several critics noted that the choice of Cormon was assuredly due to the reputation the artist had earned as a result of Cain (1880, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and Return from a Bear Hunt; Age of Polished Stone (1884, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée d’Archéologie Nationale), two earlier paintings with Stone Age themes.⁵ In addition, Cormon was an established academic painter, who had studied with Alexandre Cabanel at the School of Fine Arts in the 1860s and had won both the 1875 Salon Prize and the Grand Prize at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. Elected to the Salon jury in 1884, he would become a member of the Academy of Fine Arts on December 17, 1898.⁶ Although Cormon’s oeuvre encompassed a wide variety of genres, his representations of the distant past have predominantly defined his reputation. In many ways, the New Galleries commission seemed tailor-made for the artist, leading his biographer Jules de Saint-Mesmin to write:

The painter of the prehistoric ages thus found there, as it were, the opportunity to summarize all his science, all his philosophy, and to devote himself to a subject that seems … to be his mission in life.⁷

While he would go on to create related works, including The Age of Iron (1914, Paris, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris) and Funeral of a Chieftain, Heroic Gaul (1917, location unknown), Cormon’s painting cycle for the New Galleries was clearly his most elaborate statement on the subject.

The commissioning of these ten wall paintings also underscores the fact that the end of the nineteenth century was something of a heyday of such artistic representations in France. In addition to Cormon’s decorative program, the sculptors Emmanuel Fremiet and Paul Richer created bronze images of, respectively, a prehistoric bear hunter and a Paleolithic artist for the Museum in the 1890s.⁸ The painters Léon-Maxime Faivre and Paul Jamin were also active at this time and created multiple canvases with Stone Age themes, many of which were shown in the annual Salons. While artists had, over the course of the century, produced images whose subjects were increasingly distant in both time and place, prehistory offered fresh and exciting territory for painters and sculptors interested in portraying the past.⁹ This new and unprecedented subject matter, which was of growing interest to the public, also helped reinvigorate history painting and historical sculpture.¹⁰ But Cormon was given a unique opportunity to create a unified series of paintings depicting prehistoric animals, humans, and industries. Moreover, Cormon’s visualizations of contemporary knowledge about the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages were perfectly situated to join the artifacts and fossils on display nearby as conveyors of information about these distant eras.

For nearly five years, Cormon worked almost exclusively on the extensive New Galleries project. Along with the ceiling decoration, the ten wall paintings—Beginnings of the Quaternary Period: Megatherium, Machairodus, and Glyptodon; Ice Age: Mammoth and Cave Bears; Pottery: Age of Polished Stone and Dolmens; Bronze and Iron: Gallic Workshop; Primitive Man; Flint: Man Has the Idea for a Tool and He Makes That Tool; Hunters: Ice Age; Fishermen: Age of Polished Stone; Bronze Age: Farmers; and Iron Age: Gauls—were more or less completed by December 1897, when they were shown at the Circle of the Artistic Union at 5 rue Boissy d’Anglas in Paris along with numerous studies for them.¹¹ The paintings and related preparatory works were then displayed in their own room at the 1898 Salon of the Society of French Artists before being installed in the amphitheater of the New Galleries at the Museum.¹² Cormon was paid a total of 60,000 francs for his work on this project, which he estimated had cost him 20,000 francs.¹³

In developing his paintings for the New Galleries, Cormon considered the design of the architectural space and collaborated closely with Dutert to make sure his works augmented the amphitheater aesthetically as well as intellectually and iconographically.¹⁴ The classroom is a small, almost intimate, space with an instructor’s desk at the front that is surrounded on three sides by three rows of wooden benches. In order to increase visibility, the third row of benches is higher than the second, which, in turn, is higher than the first. While those attending lectures would necessarily have had their backs turned to certain of the paintings lining the walls, other paintings would have been visible, and the overall percentage of wall space given to these decorations would have made them impossible to overlook. Set in wooden borders that match the room’s paneling, wainscoting, doors, and trim, as well as the sills of the windows with which they are interspersed, Cormon’s paintings further blend with their surroundings due to their predominant earth tones. Because the artist had respected the reflective atmosphere of the classroom and had not created works whose presence is overwhelming, Emile Michel, who was a painter, critic, and member of the Academy of Fine Arts, declared Cormon’s program to be a success.¹⁵ Cormon also met the standards set by Léonce Bénédite, the curator of the Luxembourg Museum, criteria that were very similar to those of Michel. Bénédite believed that public wall decorations should respect the architecture surrounding them and generally serve the goals of commemoration, consecration, or higher education.¹⁶ In the end, the success of Cormon’s painting cycle was due to the aesthetic and instructive unity of the works.

The amphitheater was intended for courses in anthropology, comparative anatomy, paleontology, and zoology, instruction covering both past and present fauna as well as fossil flora.¹⁷ The dedication of a separate space for instruction within the New Galleries was in keeping with the fact that teaching had, along with scientific research and the conservation, development, and display of its collections, been one of the primary missions of the Museum since its creation by a decree of the National Convention on June 10, 1793. In particular, the Museum was noted for offering free classes to the public on a variety of subjects relating to natural history.¹⁸ As a teacher himself, and one who took his instruction very seriously, Cormon was acutely aware of the purpose of the classroom and was concerned with the accuracy of his images and the way in which they worked as an ensemble.¹⁹ As Fine Arts inspector Henry Havard wrote in his report to the minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts after examining Cormon’s sketches for the amphitheater in April 1894:

These diverse paintings, which have for their subject the First ages of the world, appeared to me to be happily composed and to present a link, a sequence, a series that gives them the value of a history lesson.²⁰

Due to Cormon’s efforts, the very walls of the classroom would offer, in the opinion of Michel, “the most eloquent commentary on the sciences to be taught there.”²¹ Other contemporaries also saw Cormon’s paintings for the amphitheater as working together to present a didactic message, and their perceived educational merit is reflected in the fact that several of these images were subsequently reproduced in French schoolbooks.²²

Although he already possessed some knowledge of prehistory from his work on Cain and Return from a Bear Hunt, Cormon’s research for the Museum program was quite extensive. According to Michel, Cormon read works by Charles Darwin, Albert Gaudry, Ernest-Théodore Hamy, Albert-Auguste de Lapparent, John Lubbock, and Gabriel de Mortillet. Moreover, believing, as did many of these celebrated scientists, that people akin to those who had lived in prehistoric times still existed in remote parts of the world, Cormon interviewed explorers and naval officers about their travels and about the customs and habits of the peoples they had encountered. In addition, he studied and drew potters, blacksmiths, and a variety of other workers whose crafts were similar to what they had been when first invented in the distant past. He also observed fishermen, bargemen, peasants, and others who labored in direct contact with nature.²³ In other words, since he was obviously unable to sketch people who had actually lived in the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and as he preferred to work with live models, Cormon made do with those whose lifestyles and activities most resembled those in these bygone eras.

Cormon additionally studied relevant scientific collections, both public and private.²⁴ Most fittingly, given the destination of his paintings, Cormon immersed himself in the objects found at the Museum. As Antonin Proust, who was both a politician and an art critic, stated:

He so set in his mind the dead vestiges contained by its galleries, while adding the desire to give them life by the scrupulous contemplation of the model, that he succeeded in giving us with these elements a striking reconstitution of that which he desired to put before our eyes.²⁵

As it were, Cormon brought the collections of the Museum to life on canvas by putting flesh on the bones of the fossil animals and humans, and creating vivid scenarios of their lives in the distant past.²⁶ Moreover, those who saw his paintings in the amphitheater may well have been inspired to extrapolate, in a similar manner, from other fossils and artifacts that they saw in lectures and in the galleries. Such a process was directly related to what nineteenth-century archeologist and ethnologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers referred to as “the orthodox scientific principle of reasoning from the known to the unknown.”²⁷

The way in which the various animal skeletons had been installed in the temporary gallery of paleontology in 1885 and were being situated in the New Galleries was clearly a source of inspiration for two of Cormon’s paintings. In Beginnings of the Quaternary Period: Megatherium, Machairodus, and Glyptodon (fig. 1), the megatherium is shown standing on its hind legs and reaching toward a tree with its front paws. This is similar to the positioning of the megatherium skeleton in the paleontology section of the New Galleries, which was shown with its two front paws leaning on a tree broken by lightning. Moreover, glyptodon bones are located near the megatherium in Cormon’s painting, just as two glyptodon skeletons were placed beside the skeleton of the megatherium in the paleontology gallery.²⁸ While the megatherium and glyptodon skeletons, which had been found by François Seguin in the pampas of the Argentine Confederation, influenced Beginnings of the Quaternary Period, the Museum also owned fossils related to Cormon’s Ice Age: Mammoth and Cave Bears (fig. 2).²⁹ Although the Museum did not possess the skeleton of a woolly mammoth, it did have the skeletal remains of the so-called “Elephant of Durfort,” an ancestral mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis, which had been excavated between 1869 and 1873 in the Gard region of central France.³⁰ And an entire cave bear skeleton, which had been discovered in the country’s Ariège department, had been given to the Parisian institution by Henri Filhol, the director of the Natural History Museum in Toulouse.³¹ Cormon, by echoing the scientific displays in the nearby galleries, reinforced the pedagogical nature of his paintings, which, like the exhibited objects themselves, complemented many of the courses taught in the amphitheater.³²

Cormon may have additionally studied the bears, elephants, and other inhabitants of the zoo located in the Museum’s gardens, as Proust noted that the carriage of the animals in both Beginnings of the Quaternary Period and Ice Age recalled that of the “living animals of the Museum.” Proust drew particular attention to the fact that the cave bears in Ice Age “saunter with that gait full of bonhomie” characteristic of the ursine family.³³ In addition to underscoring the close relationship of paleontology and zoology, Cormon’s interest in modern-day animals is comparable to his concern with contemporary “savages” and laborers, with the present being used to interpret the past in both cases.

While Cormon drew on the Museum’s paleontology collections and on the animals in the menagerie in creating Beginnings of the Quaternary Period and Ice Age, the Museum’s anthropology collections were extremely pertinent to his other eight wall paintings. In an 1898 article on the New Galleries in a popular science magazine, it was noted that “anthropological studies take man at the moment of his appearance on the earth, and they follow him up to the present day in his physical evolution and in the diverse manifestations of his activity.”³⁴ Charting this development was the guiding principal of anthropological collecting at the Museum, which housed, among other things, a wide variety of fossils and artifacts referenced by Cormon in creating his paintings. The objects in the collection were generally organized according to the three main subdivisions of prehistory—the Stone Age, further split into the Paleolithic and Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age—and Cormon chose the subject matter of his paintings according to these chronological divisions. As the artist himself recounted, he generally placed two or three figures in the foreground participating in some sort of activity characteristic of the time period depicted and tried, in the background, to express the nature of the environment in which they lived.³⁵ Two of the paintings portray the invention of human industries: pottery and metallurgy, which are affiliated with the Neolithic and with the Bronze and Iron Ages, respectively. The six other paintings represent the development of humankind by showing increasingly “civilized” endeavors as the various prehistoric ages advance chronologically. Cormon’s fairly uniform compositional strategy was thus applied to carefully selected scenes that recount an overall narrative of progress.

Progress was similarly underscored in the evolutive manner in which the Museum’s comparative anatomy, paleontology, and anthropology collections were arranged at the New Galleries. Auguste Pettit, a scientist affiliated with the comparative anatomy chair at the Museum at the end of the nineteenth century, noted that the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy as a whole was primarily meant to offer “in a way the vision of the evolution of the organic world.”³⁶ In the Gallery of Paleontology, which already at the time of its opening was barely large enough to house what was arguably the best assemblage of fossil mammals in the world, animals were exhibited in the order in which they had appeared on the earth. The oldest beings were situated near the entrance to the gallery, while the most recent, including humans, were to be found at the far end. With this installation, paleontology chair Gaudry hoped to show that the earliest life forms were “puny, not very differentiated,” while those to be seen as the visitor advanced through the gallery were “more and more advanced.”³⁷ In terms of the Gallery of Anthropology, anthropology assistant René Verneau remarked, “Before classifying the actual races it was necessary to consider those that had lived in the past; the fossil races, the prehistoric races had to come before those inhabiting the globe at present.”³⁸ Embedded in that chronological approach was the distinct perspective that there had been progress over time. As historian Steven Conn has more generally discussed in regard to both museums and their displays in this period:

A trip through the galleries followed a trajectory from simple to complex, from savage to civilized, from ancient to modern. The form that museums developed in the last half of the nineteenth century made this lesson inescapable to anyone who strolled their galleries. Museums functioned as the most widely accessible public fora to underscore a positivist, progressive and hierarchical view of the world, and they gave that view material form and scientific legitimacy.³⁹

The New Galleries were thus yet one more example of the way in which evolutive displays had come to dominate museology by the late nineteenth century.⁴⁰

In his amphitheater paintings, Cormon particularly focused on the cultural, social, and technological advancements that had been made over the course of prehistory, with the degree of human progress being judged by the development of both industries and complex societies. For example, Cormon was clearly reflecting contemporary societal ideals when he depicted increasingly organized social groupings—first the couple, then the nuclear family, and finally the tribe—contributing to more productive hunting, agriculture, and the like. Meanwhile, constant improvements in tools and technologies differentiated humans from other animals to an ever greater degree.

As represented by Cormon, the development of tools, weapons, crafts, and industries, as well as modes of communal living, allowed humans to combat the harshness of the natural world successfully. Overall, Cormon paid great attention to the relationship between his figures and their surroundings, with the humans defined both by their environment and by their ability not to be completely beholden to it.⁴¹ The idea that history, as well as prehistory in the case of the paintings for the Museum’s amphitheater, was the story of the emancipation of humans from nature was central to the thinking of many great modern minds, including Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Jules Michelet.⁴² As Michelet wrote in his Introduction to Universal History (1831):

With the world began the war that must finish with the world, and not before; that of man against nature, of the spirit against matter, of liberty against fate. History is nothing other than the story of this interminable struggle.⁴³

While Michelet saw the battle of humans against nature as both a reality and as a metaphor for more metaphysical combats, Louis Figuier, at the end of his popular science book Primitive Man (1870) had commented on the very literal efforts of prehistoric humans:

Thanks to the progresses of a continual labor, thanks to the development of intelligence, which was the consequence, the empire of man over nature grew still bigger, and his moral improvement followed the same progression.⁴⁴

In fact, even today, the crucial moment in the history of humanity is often considered to be the moment when hominids first went from being “of nature, not in nature” to “in nature, not of nature.”⁴⁵

Cormon was a product of his era and was not immune to standard beliefs then circulating concerning the human conquest of nature over time and the continual advancement of humankind, but he did contrive a rather unique arrangement for the Museum paintings. Perhaps most importantly, the works do not simply proceed chronologically from one side of the room to the other, although they do recount an overall narrative of progress. By utilizing the familiar trope of progress but rejecting a strictly linear chronological presentation, Cormon created a program that truly engages viewers. The painter did this by creating scenes that he believed would “mutually highlight one another by the analogies and contrasts that they would create between them” and by carefully positioning the paintings within the amphitheater to make sure that this was even more true.⁴⁶ Comparing and contrasting was, of course, one of the basic tools of comparative anatomy, paleontology (which has been called “the comparative anatomy of extinct life”⁴⁷), and anthropology, so Museum students would have been able to apply scientific methodology to the interpretation of the amphitheater paintings as well as to the study of natural history. Cormon thus chose, in these paintings created for a classroom setting, to invite those looking at them to be active participants in both the viewing and the learning process. In his own teaching, Cormon respected the individual temperaments of his students and tried to help them develop their own styles rather than mechanically copy his own, and his amphitheater paintings were likewise designed to encourage the Museum students to think for themselves.⁴⁸

When facing the front of the classroom, Beginnings of the Quaternary Period: Megatherium, Machairodus, and Glyptodon and Ice Age: Mammoth and Cave Bears are, respectively, placed to the left and to the right of the teaching desk and its flanking doors. As one “reads” from left to right, from Beginnings of the Quaternary Period to Ice Age, one progresses chronologically through time from the very start of the Quaternary to the Ice Age, or most recent glacial period.⁴⁹ One also moves from flora and fauna primarily associated with South America to plants and animals generally identified with Europe. Beginnings of the Quaternary Period and Ice Age form a pair not only because they are of the same format, are located on the same wall, and represent a chronological progression, as well as a contrast between South America and Europe, but also because of their subject matter and related compositions. They are the only two canvases in the amphitheater that concentrate on animals, and these animals are shown as being very much a part of their environments. Moreover, the megatherium and the mammoth, which are positioned in roughly the same place in their respective paintings, help create a dialogue between the two works. The megatherium faces toward Ice Age, and the mammoth is shown moving in the general direction of Beginnings of the Quaternary Period.

Directly across the room from Beginnings of the Quaternary Period, on the back wall of the amphitheater, is a painting of the same dimensions entitled Flint: Man Has the Idea for a Tool and He Makes That Tool (fig. 3). In this work a standing, bare-breasted woman supporting a small child on her back watches while a seated man, with a look of extreme concentration on his face, is about to strike the flint that he holds in his left hand with the smaller stone that he grasps in his right fist. This scene is a celebration of human intelligence, made visible, in this instance, by the fabrication of tools. In the late nineteenth century, according to anthropologist Joan Gero:

Spearheads and axes, weapons and implements fashioned out of stone, were identified as the essence of man’s rude beginnings, savage, indeed, as beginnings must be, but also full of the clever promise that makes them appropriate hallmarks of human ability.⁵⁰

In addition, the rather long title of the painting emphasizes the passage from idea to act and underscores the making of tools as a cultural achievement.

Also on the back wall of the amphitheater, in this case across from Ice Age, is Primitive Man (fig. 4). These two paintings, of exactly the same size, form a pair in that both are set on desolate, curving, wintery coastlines. In addition, both show prehistoric pachyderms, as Cormon depicted a mammoth in Ice Age and included a herd of mastodons in the background of Primitive Man. These pendants equate humans and animals to a large degree, as both forms of mammals are forced to forage for food under harsh conditions.

Primitive Man shows a prehistoric man and woman on a barren beach. The bestiality of the man, who is standing in the left foreground, is particularly emphasized. His stomach is somewhat distended, suggesting that he is near starvation, and his hair is long and wild. His face is partially obscured by his hands and by the live crab that he is in the process of devouring. Meanwhile, the woman crouches on a rather large rock at the man’s feet, her face largely hidden by her hair, as she searches for food under the boulder.⁵²

Primitive Man has frequently been examined in order to help determine Cormon’s beliefs regarding transformism, with several art historians viewing this work as proof that he was an evolutionist. For example, Maud Charasson sees the figure of the man as depicting:

what the evolutionists and transformists named “fossil man.” An inferior man, different, who disappeared, overcome by superior races, victim of constant evolution.⁵³

Meanwhile, Chang Ming Peng concentrates on the simian characteristics of the male figure, which she views as a direct reflection of Darwinian ideas.⁵⁴ This opinion is echoed by Martha Lucy, who writes, “Cormon would eventually present prehistoric man with explicitly ape-like features in his 1898 cycle for the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle depicting the evolution of man” and goes on to mention the growing acceptance of Darwinism in France by this time.⁵⁵ At the Museum, however, anthropology chair Hamy, like his predecessor Armand de Quatrefages, was skeptical about the descent of humans from apes and about Darwinian evolution more generally.⁵⁶

In my mind, and to my eye, Primitive Man does not make a clear statement in support of evolutionary or transformist theories. First of all, there is certainly nothing “primitive” about the body of the woman, which resembles that of an idealized Salon nude. The man’s physique, in turn, while undoubtedly based on that of a model whom Cormon found to be wild and “primitive,” is still modern.⁵⁷ Rather than intimating an archaic anatomy, his swollen stomach serves as a sign of hunger, while his flat-footed stance conveys a lack of grace. In addition, while both figures have long, flowing locks of hair on their heads, neither has pronounced body hair as in the vast majority of other images of truly simian fossil humans.⁵⁸ The man does, however, appear to have heavy brow ridges, intimating a Neanderthal physiognomy. But, because his face is largely obscured by his wind-blown hair and the crab that he is eating, his features cannot be definitively interpreted. Consequently, while Cormon created figures whose behavior is clearly bestial, their physical appearance is not so dissimilar from that of contemporary Parisians.⁵⁹ The equivocal nature of this image in terms of human evolution is perhaps due to conflicted feelings about this topic on the part of the artist.⁶⁰ Or he may have chosen a guarded stance as did Gaudry, who, while practicing, teaching, and displaying evolutionary paleontology at the Museum, felt it was best for his career to skirt or avoid the subject of human evolution.⁶¹ In the end, however, Cormon was allowing viewers to make up their own minds by producing a work that did not make a definitive statement on the subject, yet offered elements to satisfy both proponents and opponents of tranformism.

Primitive Man and Flint form a pair, which again “reads” temporally from Primitive Man on the left to Flint on the right, with these two paintings marking the first steps in the development of humanity. According to Cormon, primitive man was a “simple animal, still similar to the other animals.” He had no means of defense, and eating was his only real need. He ate what he found on the beach, namely shellfish and mollusks. In Flint, on the other hand, “man is no longer a simple beast.”⁶² He has the intelligence to devise and fabricate tools and weapons, an ability that differentiates him from the rest of the animal kingdom.

These two paintings are also similar in terms of their compositions. The humans—one standing and one crouching—loom large in the foreground of both images, and there is a group of mastodons in the right background of Primitive Man and a herd of deer in the right background of Flint. Such formal similarities would have encouraged viewers to draw comparisons between them, as was the case with objects in the typologically arranged vitrines in the neighboring galleries.⁶³ Furthermore, there is a sense of a bond between the humans within each painting. The two figures in Primitive Man can be interpreted as a couple, while the man making the flint tool, the woman who stands behind him watching, and the child on her back seem to represent a nuclear family. Writing in 1870, anthropologist Clémence Royer asserted that a man and a woman would form a union for the sake of their child, with the mother caring for the child while the father provided food, shelter, and protection.⁶⁴ And for numerous past and present theorists, society is simply “an aggregate of basic families, each formed by a man, a woman and their children.” As anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss further notes, for many social scientists:

It is a fact of nature that the two sexes are attracted to each other, that an instinct drives them to reproduce, that another instinct urges the mother to feed and raise her children, etc. From this point of view, the basic family, founded as it is on natural requirements, forms the hard core around which any social organization revolves.⁶⁵

Considered in this light, Primitive Man and Flint represent the first two steps in the development of increasingly complex societies, such as those shown in other paintings in the amphitheater.

Between Primitive Man and Flint are two slightly wider paintings, Pottery: Age of Polished Stone and Dolmens and Bronze and Iron: Gallic Workshop.⁶⁶ Thus, on the back wall of the classroom, the “beginnings of the two oldest human industries”⁶⁷ are flanked by Primitive Man, which shows an early human couple without tools, weapons, clothing, or shelter, and by Flint, whose subtitle indicates that the development of culture, and specifically the ability to make tools, was due to the powers of the human intellect. While all four of these works show people in the foreground, Pottery and Bronze and Iron also include people in the background and invoke the importance of community and cooperation. Consequently, in viewing these four paintings together, one gets the overall sense that human progress was due to the ability of men and women to overcome nature by working together and by creating tools and other elements of culture.

In Pottery: Age of Polished Stone and Dolmens (fig. 5), Cormon depicted a small potter’s workshop in the foreground and a funeral ceremony in the background. A kneeling woman holding a red clay vase is located in the center foreground, but the viewer can only see the back of her head, as she turns to watch the funeral proceedings. Meanwhile, a warrior stands to the left and examines the small vase that he holds in his left hand while resting his right hand on his upright shield. The combination of a standing male figure and a crouching female figure whose face cannot be seen is similar to the composition of the nearby Primitive Man.⁶⁸ In the right middle ground of the painting, inside a hut, an elderly, bearded potter sits, holding one of his wares in his lap. This potter seems oblivious to the funeral, which is for a leader whose body is being carried to a dolmen for burial. The participation in this ceremony of much of the tribe indicates a hierarchical society in which the chieftain was particularly venerated.

Cormon spoke of the people in Pottery as being members of a race asiatique, or Asiatic race—that is, a race from the East.⁶⁹ When considered in relation to the anthropological beliefs of the day, this appellation was obviously synonymous with race aryenne, or Aryan race. According to anthropologist Bert Theunissen, most nineteenth-century European anthropologists believed that Europe had been invaded by Aryans from Asia at the end of the Paleolithic or beginning of the Neolithic, the very “age of polished stones and dolmens” represented in Pottery. While the inferior European indigenes were considered to have primarily been hunters, the superior Asiatic invaders were believed to have domesticated animals and grown their own food.⁷⁰

Bronze and Iron: Gallic Workshop (fig. 6) further supports the idea of an invasion of Europe from the East. In the foreground, this painting depicts a nomadic Hindu blacksmith in the process of pouring molten metal into a mold as a woman, whom Cormon identified as his wife, helps. Groups of Gauls are clustered around two forges and two furnaces in the middle ground. There is what appears to be another forge and furnace in the background, and, even further back, there is a group of tent-like structures representing a small village. The many figures laboring around the forges and furnaces help provide a sense of common purpose, of a community working together. In regard to this painting, Cormon stated, “I admitted the hypothesis that was suggested to me by a scholar that it must have been nomadic Hindus who had propagated the art of metals.”⁷¹ Bénédite added that these blacksmiths were “sorts of half-sacred sorcerers for the superstitious populations of the West whom they initiated into the secrets of the casting of metals.”⁷² According to Lubbock, writing in 1865, “it appears most probably that the knowledge of metal is one of those great discoveries which Europe owes to the East.”⁷³

Pottery and Bronze and Iron can be viewed as pendants because they both illustrate the supposed Aryan influence on western culture. In addition, they are of the same format, and both show the beginnings of important human industries. The works, however, do not “read” chronologically from left to right, as the Bronze and Iron Ages, shown in the painting on the left, came after the Neolithic, depicted in the canvas on the right.⁷⁴ Moreover, a visual disjunction is created between these two works because the blacksmith and his wife in Bronze and Iron turn their backs to the man and woman holding earthenware vessels in Pottery—and vice versa. In addition, the direction in which the blacksmith is facing draws attention to the nearest side wall, the one displaying Hunters: Ice Age and Fishermen: Age of Polished Stone. Together, these three paintings depict the ages of both stone and metal. Similarly, the placement of the figures in Pottery seems to direct attention to the other side wall where Bronze Age: Farmers and Iron Age: Gauls both hang. Thus, once again, these three paintings represent both the Stone Age, albeit only the Neolithic, and the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The two inner images on the back wall of the amphitheater are in dialogue with the paintings on the side walls in other ways as well, just as the two outer images on the back wall create parallels with the paintings on the front wall. In particular, just as Primitive Man and Flint can be paired with Ice Age and Beginnings of the Quaternary Period, respectively, Pottery creates analogies with Fishermen: Age of Polished Stone while Bronze and Iron can be constructively compared with both Bronze Age: Farmers and Iron Age: Gauls. This is because both Pottery and Fishermen depict the Neolithic and show Eastern or Aryan people. Cormon even noted that the people in Fishermen were contemporaries of the dolmens, such as the one seen in the background of Pottery.⁷⁵ Meanwhile, Bronze and Iron and Bronze Age show that the Asiatic invasion brought agriculture as well as metallurgy to the West, while Bronze and Iron and Iron Age both depict Gauls.

On the right side of the classroom, when facing the front of the room, are Hunters: Ice Age and Fishermen: Age of Polished Stone. Hunters is located next to the front wall’s painting of Ice Age animals, creating a chronological continuum between the two works. Fishermen, meanwhile, is situated beside the back wall’s Primitive Man, demonstrating how humans developed the means to catch fish rather than having to depend on what could be scavenged on the shore. Moreover, this side wall shows a temporal progression from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic as one “reads” from left to right, and both images depict humans who had advanced further than those shown in Primitive Man and Flint.

According to Cormon, the people of Ice Age Europe, as represented in Hunters: Ice Age (fig. 7), belonged to a powerful, intelligent, and fearless race. They lived in caves and knew how to defend themselves against ferocious animals. They had perfected the making of stone and bone tools and weapons, and hunted ruminants and birds. They also had a sense of ornamentation and luxury, and some of them were artists.⁷⁶ Furthermore, by placing a fur-clad couple in the foreground—he holds a bow that he is fitting with an arrow, and she carries a dead deer and string of fowl while making an odd, angular gesture with her left arm—as well as showing several clusters of figures in the background, Cormon suggests a certain level of social organization.

The figures in Fishermen: Age of Polished Stone (fig. 8) are shown beside a lake in Switzerland. Near the center of the composition, a bearded man with long brown hair and an earring in his left ear wears a fur garment. He and the red-headed younger man to his right, who wears only a loincloth, pull together on a rope attached to an underwater net. Behind them to the left stands a woman wearing sandals, a skirt made of woven cloth, a necklace, and an elaborate halter-top, which is tied behind her back rather than around her neck and accentuates rather than covers her breasts. In her left hand she holds a distaff, while, in her right hand, she grips a wooden spindle on which is wound the thread she is spinning. By her right side, a child with disheveled blond hair sits cross-legged on the ground and sticks his left thumb into the mouth of the small fish that he holds in his right hand. Behind the woman and child, two additional men pull on a rope attached to the other end of the invisible net. In the right middle ground, a man approaches the shore in a pirogue, which he steers with a pole. Behind him in the distance is a lake-dwelling village on pilotis with mountains beyond.

Lake-dwelling villages and their inhabitants had been the object of much speculation—and the subject of numerous French and Swiss paintings and drawings—since the remains of such communities had been unveiled in the winter of 1853-54 after a dramatic drop in the water level of several alpine lakes.⁷⁷ Many of the objects in Cormon’s painting were based on artifacts that had been retrieved from these sites. The mud and peat at the bottom of these lakes had preserved not only durable objects made of stone and bone, but also pieces of fabric, rope, and nets. In addition, pirogues such as the one depicted by Cormon had been raised from some of the lake bottoms.⁷⁸

Bronze Age: Farmers and Iron Age: Gauls hang on the side wall opposite Hunters and Fishermen. Again “reading” from left to right, these paintings similarly show a progression in time. In fact, taken together, these four canvases, the largest in the amphitheater, show the four ages of prehistory: the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. At the same time, Bronze Age and Iron Age also relate to the paintings on the front and rear walls of the amphitheater. Bronze Age is situated next to the back wall’s Flint, drawing a distinction between a single nuclear family and a community. However, there are certain continuities between the two paintings. While the woman in Flint supports a child on her back, a woman in the center foreground of Bronze Age holds a baby on her right hip. Moreover, just as it is the man in Flint who is making a tool, it is predominantly the men in Bronze Age who are shown with tools.⁷⁹ Meanwhile, Iron Age: Gauls is next to the front wall’s Beginnings of the Quaternary Period, so the wild South American mammals are juxtaposed with the domesticated dog, horse, and oxen in Cormon’s image of the Iron Age.

Bronze Age: Farmers (fig. 9) shows a community of men, women, and children. In the foreground next to a cowshed, women distribute the bread they have cooked to workers who have returned from the wheat fields, which can be seen in the background along with herds of cattle. At right, a forlorn matriarch, seated with her back against the shed, tends a fire. A woman in the center foreground wears a blue dress and carries a red-headed baby. To her right stands a man, his back to the viewer, wearing only a loincloth and a necklace and carrying some sort of tool in his right hand. A younger woman, wearing a shorter dress, also of blue material, is standing at the left edge of the group and appears to be giving an older man, who has a tool hanging at his waist, something to drink.

Cormon explained Iron Age: Gauls (fig. 10) as representing the emigration of a horde of Gauls whom he refers to as “our fathers.”⁸⁰ With this last painting, as Michel notes, “we border on history proper” as opposed to prehistory.⁸¹ In the left foreground, a helmeted Gaul sits astride a horse, which faces directly out at the viewer and has an elaborately decorated breastplate.⁸² Beside the horse in the center foreground is a dog that has evidently been domesticated. The man looks over his left shoulder at a cart being pulled by six oxen. A woman sits atop the cart holding reins in her hands while a man walks alongside and helps guide the first pair of oxen. A convoy of other wagons can be seen winding through the background of this marshy landscape. In addition to serving as the chronological endpoint of his painting cycle, Iron Age also contributed to the growing iconography of Gauls in nineteenth-century France, a time when Gallic themes became increasingly popular due to recent archeological findings and the writings of influential historians Henri Martin and Amédée Thierry.⁸³

The overall message of the ten wall paintings in the amphitheater, as in the evolutive displays in the neighboring galleries, is one of progress. As critic Louis Enault noted in regard to Cormon’s efforts:

We follow with confidence the path of this guide, always on the right track, and we witness the progress of primitive man, fabricating weapons and tools, then sensing awakening in him ideas of luxury and the need for decoration and ornamentation; those are the first stages and the first glimmers of civilization at its dawn.⁸⁴

Nonetheless, Cormon’s program in the New Galleries does not represent an absolutely strict progression from Primitive Man to Iron Age: Gauls. While he clearly believed in some degree of linear development, Cormon, perhaps due to his awareness of contemporary “primitives,” recognized that various peoples attain different stages of culture at diverse times. Thus, while France at the end of the nineteenth century was becoming increasingly industrialized, there were people in other parts of the world who were still living in the Stone Age, as suggested by Flint in particular. Implicit in this recognition was the belief that the French had inherited the legacy of progress charted on the walls of the amphitheater and could now help “civilize” present-day “natives” and “savages.” This was a clear justification for French colonialism, and the Museum was purposefully involving itself in colonial activities in the late nineteenth century.⁸⁵ Thus, as preoccupied as Cormon’s program was with the past, his paintings also reflected the time in which they were created and offered great promise for the future of France.

Just as prehistoric humans and modern-day “savages” could be productively compared, Cormon paired his paintings in a number of different ways through his use of composition and iconography. Again, this was similar to the way in which objects were displayed in the New Galleries, and in other anthropological and ethnographic museums of the time according to anthropologist Nélia Dias, in order for visitors to uncover similarities and differences through close and repeated viewing.⁸⁶ At the same time, because Cormon’s paintings fleshed out the artifacts and fossils on display, they gave viewers a more holistic sense of life in the prehistoric past.⁸⁷

Due to the themes of his works and the research that went into them, Cormon to some degree acquired “the status of men of science.”⁸⁸ For example, according to minister of Public Instruction Léon Bourgeois’s inaugural address at the New Galleries, Cormon had masterfully recreated the lost ages in his paintings for the amphitheater. As the government minister explained:

One would say that he had lived then, so much has he truly understood not only the exterior aspect of clothing, costume, and things, but the interior sense of the intellectual life, I was going to say the moral life of these epochs.⁸⁹

The understanding of the distant past conveyed by Cormon’s canvases would have been augmented for viewers who considered them in relationship to various objects in the galleries. For instance, “an artifact may be viewed as a record of the process of its manufacture, as an indexical sign,”⁹⁰ and Cormon’s representations of early tool-making, pottery, and metallurgy illustrated how ancient stone, clay, and metal objects on display elsewhere in the building had been made. Cormon thus provided a context for known artifacts in some of his canvases while similarly showing fauna in its natural surroundings in others.

Critics actively debated the merits of Cormon’s program for the New Galleries. Despite the fact that the paintings were destined for an instructional venue, some critics were disparaging of what they saw as the strictly scientific aspects of the work. For example, Henry Bidou remarked, “These are the figures of an anthropology treatise. It is the schema and not the vision of an age.”⁹¹ Maurice Hamel, on the other hand, felt differently and stated that Cormon had rediscovered “the spirit which sees the poetry of distant ages in front of bizarre skeletons and obscurely deciphers the ages of the world in the hieroglyphs of nature.”⁹² Meanwhile, Louis de Fourcaud believed that Cormon had achieved a certain balance between his intellect and aesthetic sensibility, writing, “If the brain of the artist played a role, the work of the painter is far from having suffered.”⁹³ And Justin Lucas similarly touched on the combination of science and artistry in this painted program when he referred to it as an “anthropological poem.”⁹⁴ Perhaps the best summary of Cormon’s work at the Museum, however, was one commentator’s remark that it was “neither scientifically exact, nor frankly unreal.”⁹⁵

There is much less evidence of what those who actually used the amphitheater—the Museum’s professors and their students—thought of these ten wall paintings. But, at the inauguration ceremony for the New Galleries, which took place in the classroom, Alphonse Milne-Edwards, then the Museum’s director, noted that “one can admire the so remarkable paintings of Cormon, who, through artistic intuition, brought the prehistoric times back to life in the handsome paintings that surround us.”⁹⁶ Although Milne-Edwards stressed Cormon’s “artistic intuition,” the painter clearly applied many of the same scientific principles that were utilized in the galleries to his decorative program. In the end, it was not just prehistory, but the National Museum of Natural History’s collections and display techniques that Cormon brought to life in his painting cycle for the amphitheater of the New Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology, and Anthropology.