Portrait d'Ernest Renan (1823-1892), philosophe

Jean Béraud's portrait of Ernest Renan (1889) depicts the philosopher and historian who was among the most important and controversial French intellectuals of the nineteenth century — his 'Life of Jesus' (1863) had caused a sensation by treating Christ as a historical human figure, and he remained a target of Catholic conservative hostility throughout his later career. Renan was photographed in extreme old age (he died in 1892), and Béraud's 1889 portrait captures him near the end of his life — a venerable, controversial, and intellectually formidable figure. The portrait is a historical document as much as an artistic work.

Béraud renders Renan with the psychological directness of his best portraiture — the aged philosopher depicted with honest attention to the physical marks of old age rather than the conventional idealization of academic portraiture. His handling of the aged face — the changes in skin, the depth of wrinkles, the particular quality of the aged intellect — is sympathetic without being sentimental. The compositional setting focuses attention on the face as the seat of Renan's remarkable intellectual life.