Mephisto from the Opera Faust

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli · 1870–86

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

38.5 × 26.2 cm (15 1/8 × 10 5/16 in.); Framed: 59.1 × 46.4 × 6.4 cm (23 1/4 × 18 1/4 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

"Mephisto from the Opera Faust" catches Monticelli at his most theatrical — a figure conjured from darkness and operatic spectacle, rendered in the richly encrusted paint that made his canvases unlike anything else being produced in nineteenth-century France. Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli spent most of his working life in Marseille, at a deliberate remove from the Parisian mainstream, building his compositions in dense, jewel-like layers of pigment applied with palette knife and brush. His figures tend to emerge from shadow rather than inhabit it, their forms suggested rather than precisely defined, which lends a subject like Mephisto an appropriately supernatural ambiguity. Both Van Gogh and Cézanne were profoundly shaped by Monticelli's approach; Van Gogh and his brother Theo actively collected his paintings, and Van Gogh credited him in letters as a direct forerunner of what we now call Expressionist colour. The hand-painted oil reproduction on panel honours the layered impasto and chromatic intensity of the original, giving you the physical presence of the paint surface — the quality that makes a Monticelli feel genuinely alive — rather than a flat printed image.