Gustave Courtois in the Paris Salon
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            Gustave Courtois was born in 1852 in the tiny town of Pusey in eastern France, about 35 miles north of Besançon. He was raised by his single mother, Jeanne Jobard, a laundress who hardly made enough money to pay the bills. Thanks to his remarkable artistic talent, he received a scholarship in the spring of 1869 to join the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a renowned Orientalist painter and professor at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although Courtois went on to reach the upper echelons of Parisian society as one of the most sought-after portraitists of his time, his story has been largely forgotten or erased. In fact, he might be the queerest 19th-century French painter about whom the least is known. This is because part of his work was destroyed or altered by early owners of his paintings to hide this aspect of his life and work. Similarly, in the only extant biography of Courtois, written by his former student Robert Fernier and published in 1943, the author goes to great lengths to justify his subject’s bachelorhood, blaming it on his extremely timid nature. Nevertheless, Courtois’ interest in men has been firmly established, and he had a lifelong relationship with another man, the Bavarian artist Carl Ernst von Stetten, whom he met in the 1870s while studying in Paris at Jean-Léon Gérôme’s atelier, and who posed for many of his paintings.

           In 1907, when Courtois’ portrait of Maurice Deriaz’ was publicly shown in the Paris Salon, the Swiss athlete was only 22 years old, 33 years younger than Courtois. Deriaz was born in 1885 in the town of Baulmes in the Swiss Alps just over the French border. The portrait itself hangs today in the city hall of this village together with two other paintings by Courtois representing Deriaz: Hercules at the Feet of Omphale (1910) and Perseus Freeing Andromeda (1912). His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but the young Maurice was more interested in physical jousting than oratory debates. He followed in the footsteps of his six brothers, who were all involved in sports. He moved to Paris at age eighteen to join one of them, Émile, who managed a gym in the French capital. Like many bodybuilders of the time, Deriaz became a popular showman, with engagements and wrestling matches all over the world, reminiscent of Eugen Sandow’s career.

Although the timing and circumstances of their first encounter remain a mystery, the portrait of 1907 is only one of several depicting the “Swiss Lion,” confirming a professional relationship that spanned several years, at least from 1907 to 1912. That said, the encounter between a flourishing painter and an athlete was not uncommon at the time: strongmen such as Deriaz were sought after to become models for artists. Actually, Deriaz’ brother Adrien had been used as a model and posed for sculptures. In a similar vein, as Jim Elledge pointed out in this magazine (July-August 2011), early in 1887 Sandow “found himself stranded and jobless in Brussels. To make ends meet, he modeled nude for established and up-and-coming artists, some of whom paid for more than his ability to stand still.”

We don’t know if Deriaz actually did more than just “stand still” for Courtois, but the portrait establishes a connection between “deviant” sexualities and the bodybuilding craze that ran from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th and beyond. After the Oscar Wilde trial had set off a “queer panic,” the more suspect ephebic and feminized representations of the male body were replaced by muscular, virile strongmen who embodied national ideals of manhood. At the same time, such representations served as screens behind which a homosexual audience could remain closeted while enjoying the sight of ideal masculine bodies referencing classical antiquity.

Maurice Deriaz had actually graced the September 15, 1906, cover of La Culture Physique, a very popular culturist magazine published in France from 1904 to 1967 (with notable hiatuses due to world events). When compared to Courtois’ work of 1907, there are striking resemblances between the photo and the treatment of the body in the painting. The shadow on the right, the bulging vein on the right forearm, the right clavicle all mirror each other, giving the portrait its photographic quality. In this way, Courtois violates several unspoken rules of academic portraiture. Whereas most athletes featured in artworks were presented either in the midst of performing an athletic feat or as a mythological hero, he chose to humanize Deriaz by giving him a name and a face that would be recognizable to those acquainted with the wrestling world and La Culture Physique magazine. Rather than focusing on sartorial details—a long staple of portraiture to define the sitter’s psychology—Courtois presents Deriaz half naked. The lack of any other props (aside from the sash) to contextualize the subject further emphasizes the corporality of Deriaz as a real person. Furthermore, by alluding to the cover of La Culture Physique, the portrait functions as a winking reference to the numerous photographs by both famous athletes and private individuals published in the pages of the magazine.

In fact, every issue was peppered with illustrations of what we could call “selfies” of half-naked (and sometimes fully naked) men, including those of professional and amateur athletes. These photographs were at times combined into collages and presented as part of bodybuilding competitions for amateur readers, accompanied by vital statistics of the contestants. From our vantage point, these collages eerily resemble modern-day dating apps—Grindr avant la lettre—with body pics and stats. A young Maurice G. from Franconville, for instance, submitted his picture along with a letter, published in the November 1904 issue, in which he detailed his “stats,” including his height, weight, waist size, and age. For other readers living in his area, it wouldn’t have been difficult to recognize Maurice G. as the subject featured in the magazine. These “selfies,” in turn, mirrored Courtois’ portrait, establishing a wider unspoken network of those “in the know” who were connected through the figure of Maurice Deriaz as displayed in the pages of La Culture Physique.

Courtois’ portrait also references the “classicizing” mania brought about by the physical culture fad. By that I mean the quoting of classical sculptures to justify the new masculine values associated with national virility as inscribed in a muscular body. Athletes posing in the magazine usually recreated the poses of famous statues and incarnated mythological heroes. In the portrait, Courtois lightens Deriaz’ skin and completely removes the chest hair that’s visible in photographs of the wrestler, thereby transforming him into a statue. This cosmetic tactic was often used by models at the time, going as far as to remove hair from armpits, chests, and pubic areas, or even the whole body, as well as oiling the skin. The classical veneer allowed the models to appear to embody æsthetic ideals rather than erotic intentions, yet the possibility of the latter was always at the viewer’s discretion.

It remains difficult to deetermine whether the relationship between Courtois and Deriaz remained strictly professional. A recently discovered 1910 photograph of Courtois standing next to Deriaz’ portrait is dedicated to the strongman in the following way: “To Maurice de Riaz, a souvenir of his painter and friend, Gustave Courtois.” It is telling that the artist chose to call him “friend” and to stage a photograph with erotic undercurrents. The pose of the artist is suggestive of sexual prowess, the phallic maulstick pressed firmly against the pelvic girdle, creating a bulge in the front of the pants and directing the gaze of the recipient of the photograph—in this instance, Deriaz—toward the crotch. Furthermore, Courtois deliberately chooses to stand between the portrait of Maurice on his right and a lost work of 1904 representing Apollo playing the lyre on his left. As we know, Apollo’s exploits include many forays into same-sex love. Hidden from view by Courtois’ body is an image of a young boy playing the flute, perhaps an allusion to Cyparissus, the beloved of Apollo. Given the 33-year age difference between Courtois and Deriaz and the positioning of the paintings, the “unspeakable” vice of the Greeks inhabits the staging of the photograph.

Whatever the nature of their relationship, the 1907 portrait of Maurice Deriaz certainly raises questions about the representation of the male figure in art and its homoerotic—if not outright homosexual—potential when placed in the context of the physical culture fad of the period and Courtois’ known proclivities toward men. Courtois offers the viewer—who was assumed to be male in the times—a delectable portrait to be consumed either for its æsthetic or erotic content, recognizably similar to the images in La Culture Physique magazine. It is precisely its ambiguity in this respect that could produce a state of “homosexual panic” like the one experienced by the art critics quoted at the top of this article. By redefining and repackaging the image of Maurice Deriaz, Courtois transgressed the accepted boundaries between licit and illicit forms of visual pleasure and sexuality. It’s high time that we rediscover the works of this forgotten painter and re-evaluate his output within the context of masculinity and queer studies. In the meantime, we can continue to appreciate the immortalized beauty of Maurice Deriaz captured in this stunning portrait by Gustave Courtois both as an æsthetic object and a seductive work of art.