Portrait of Louis Pasteur
Albert Edelfelt
ALBERT EDELFT, 1885. OIL ON CANVAS.
Edelfelt took the techniques of the past to a distinctly contemporary scene. As one of the founders of the Finnish Realism movement, he painted the world as he saw it, adding no adornment and instead trying to depict the beauty in the everyday. In this, his most famous work and the most significant representation of the great scientist Louis Pasteur, Edelfelt found his perfect subject. Depicting Pasteur in his laboratory, surrounded by the cutting edge technology of the day, Edelfelt was able to depict the inherent beauty of modernity, and how the elegance of functionality and labour could be as aesthetically significant as the loftiest subjects. Though Pasteur was already revered when this portrait was painted, in fact he is depicted holding a rabbit’s spine that helped him develop the vaccine for Rabies and save untold lives across the centuries, there is a humbleness to the reality of the scene around him. The lighting, though reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance, is realistic, and the generosity paid is only to detail, Edelfelt is able to at once elevate the man and place him firmly within reality, depicting the simple truth that an everyday man and a genius can be one and the same.