The Knight of the Flowers

Le Chevalier aux fleurs (The Knight of the Flowers), sometimes listed as The Knight with the Flower Nymphs, is a monumental canvas by the French painter Georges Rochegrosse (1859–1938), shown at the Paris Salon of 1894 and bought by the French state. At 235.5 × 374 cm it is a true Salon "machine," and it belongs today to the Musée d'Orsay (inventory RF 898). Its subject comes from Richard Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1882).

What you're looking at

A young knight in polished plate armor strides toward us through a flowering meadow on a hillside. He is bareheaded, with shoulder-length brown hair, and he looks straight ahead and slightly upward, past everything around him. The armor is the coolest, hardest thing in the picture: silver-blue steel reflecting the sky, with small touches of the flowers' reds and greens caught in its curved plates.

Around him, the meadow is alive with women who are half flower. Each wears a headdress that is itself a giant bloom: a pink peony, a purple iris, a red poppy, a crimson rose, a crown of pale petals. They are nude or nearly so, and they rise out of the grass, kneel, recline and reach for him from every side. One at the upper left drapes her arms around his shoulders; another at lower left lies on her back among the stems; others stretch their hands toward his legs and arms. Several have their faces turned up to him in open invitation.

The detail that matters most is what does not happen. No one actually holds him back. Rochegrosse paints the knight in mid-stride, his armored legs and hands already moving through the crowd, and the eye follows him up the slope toward the open sky. The flowers are real ones, closely observed, scattered through the grass in the same species the maidens wear, so that the women seem to grow out of the field itself.

The color is unusually bright for Rochegrosse, who was better known for violent, dark history paintings. Here the palette is spring-like: fresh greens, whites and sky blues set off by points of saturated red and violet.

The composition is wide and shallow, like a frieze. The horizon is a long diagonal of hillside rising from left to right, with a strip of pale blue distance at the far left, so the knight seems to be climbing out of the crowd toward higher, emptier ground. Rochegrosse signed the canvas at the lower right, half hidden among the grasses.

The opera behind it

In Act 2 of Parsifal, the sorcerer Klingsor conjures a magic garden filled with Flower Maidens (Blumenmädchen), seductive spirits whose task is to ensnare the knights of the Grail. Parsifal, the "pure fool," wanders into the garden after defeating Klingsor's men. The maidens surround him, caress him and quarrel over him, but he remains innocent of their meaning and moves on; his greater test, with the enchantress Kundry, comes later in the act.

Rochegrosse condenses that scene into a single image of resistance. Parsifal is not named in the title, which keeps the picture open: it could be read as any chaste knight walking through temptation. Wagner was enormously fashionable among French writers and painters in the 1880s and 1890s, and Parsifal's theme of redemption through renunciation appealed strongly to Symbolist taste.

Meaning

The painting is about chastity and the refusal of desire, a favorite theme of fin-de-siècle art, which often imagined women as beautiful, dangerous forces of nature. The armor is the knight's physical defense, but his real protection is his gaze, fixed beyond the scene. Critics at the 1894 Salon praised the canvas for this moral clarity as well as its color.

Modern viewers often notice the tension Rochegrosse could not avoid: a picture that preaches resistance to sensual temptation is itself an elaborate display of nude bodies. That double message, high-minded subject and sensual surface, is typical of academic and Symbolist painting of the period.

The artist

Georges Rochegrosse was born in Versailles in 1859 and raised by his stepfather, the poet Théodore de Banville. He trained with Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger and made his name at the Salon with large, gory scenes of ancient history, such as Andromache (1883). Le Chevalier aux fleurs shows a gentler side. In later life he settled in El Biar, in French Algeria, where he died in 1938.

Related works

For other knights and temptations, compare La Belle Dame sans Merci by Frank Dicksee and Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse, where the hero is less fortunate. For nymphs in a darker mood, see Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute. The wider context is in Symbolism and Academic Art.

Where to see it

Musée d'Orsay, Paris, which received it from the Musée du Luxembourg, the state museum of living artists where it was first displayed after its purchase. The painting is in the public domain.