‘Lacordaire au noviciat’

Pierre Harispe (1854–1929)
Lamennais et Gerbet: édition ornée de 15 portraits et manuscrits hors texte et contenant des lettres inédites de Lamennais et Lacordaire
Paris: Société déditions Française et Étrangère, 1909
78.d.90.74, p. 217

Henri Lacordaire was a young lawyer when he converted to Christianity and Catholicism in the early 1820s. Ordained as a secular priest in 1827, he gained fame as a journalist and eloquent preacher at Notre Dame in Paris. It struck him that such preaching was best advanced by a renascent Dominican Order. His Essay on the Re-establishment in France of the Order of Preachers (1839) articulated a cogent post-Enlightenment defence of religious life. Religious obedience was an intelligent and free decision to co-operate in a common life and mission. It was predicated upon the individual’s freedom of association. Voluntary poverty and chastity enabled the equality and fraternity of the brethren. Lacordaire became a novice that same year in Italy. Other Frenchmen were soon moved to make the same journey. In 1840 Lacordaire returned to France. He preached at Notre Dame wearing the Dominican habit – a defiant gesture, the legal status of which was uncertain. Within a few years houses were opened at Nancy in 1843, Chalais in 1844, and at Paris in 1845. The Province of France was formally re-established with Lacordaire as Provincial in 1850. He enjoyed great renown over many years as a preacher and writer. Elected to the Académie française in 1860, Lacordaire died the following year aged fifty-nine.

The plate of ‘Lacordaire in the noviciate’, taken from a book published in 1909, is based upon an earlier painting made in 1840 by the French Romantic artist Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856). The painting, now in the Louvre, shows the friar as a novice in the cloister at Santa Sabina in Rome. The artist had personally requested the sitting. Lacordaire, who thought he had been given a rather too austere aspect, had agreed to the request as a way to make the black-and-white Dominican habit (religious dress) better known.