All photos in this post are my own, taken in 2020 and 2024 (hence the different backgrounds).
Sarah Bernhardt was a popular French stage actress of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who performed internationally, primarily in dramatic roles.
Lesser known is that she was also an accomplished sculptor who exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Chicago World’s Fair, as well as in London, New York, and Philadelphia. She never went to art school, but she studied privately under Roland Mathieu Meusnier, and she had a studio in Montmartre.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, permanently displays Bernhardt’s most celebrated marble, Après la tempête (After the Storm), which shows a grieving grandmother cradling on her lap her dead grandson, who drowned in a fishing accident.
Full of pathos, the sculpture was inspired by a real-life tragedy Bernhardt witnessed while in Brittany. Seeing the older woman on the shore mourning, Bernhardt felt compelled to honor her story in stone—the love, the loss.
The composition deliberately evokes Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà, in which Mary holds the body of her son Jesus after his crucifixion.
(Related post: “A Breton Prayer”)
Stunned by what the winds and rains have taken from her, the grandmother looks down with disbelieving eyes and a partly open mouth to the limp body of the boy, maybe nine or so, she used to dandle on her knee, and whose innocent laughter rings fresh in her ears from just yesterday. Her cloak and chemise are blown from her shoulders, heightening her vulnerability.
Notice all the different textures Bernhardt renders from a single material: sand and surf, hair and skin, draped fabrics and coarse netting.
Although the boy on whom this figure is based did in fact die, here, his right hand clutches his grandmother’s garment, a sign of life, perhaps, suggesting that he may yet be revived.
After the Storm is a poignant lament whose sting, I’d imagine, is felt especially by those who know the pain of losing a grandchild, or any child in their life.
Art & Theology 