The subjects Pils chose to illustrate there, in agreement with Charles Garnier, are The Triumph of Apollo, The City of Paris Receiving the Plans the New Opera, The Combat of Minerva and Brute Force before Olympia, The Charm of Music. Its steps hug the curve of the onyx balustrade and 30 marble columns accompany the viewer’s gaze towards the ceiling decorated in its four vaults with allegorical compositions painted on mounted canvases, lit by the skylight of a lantern. The staircase proved to be the true “condensing” point of the project presented by Charles Garnier, who wrote about it: “The Opéra, it’s the staircase, like at the Invalides, it’s the dome, at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, the rood-screen!” Polychrome, comprising the most precious marbles, it is designed like a theatre and is intended for a public that is itself performing. As a professor, he had many pupils including Clairin and Renouard who assisted him for the ceiling of the grand staircase of the Opéra and finished his work when he had to take to his bed, suffering from exhaustion.

A history painter who had trained under Guillaume Guillon Lethière and François Edouard Picot, Pils was equally interested in religious and current subjects, especially military ones, as well as, influenced by his travels, Orientalism. In addition to the inevitable sojourn at the Villa Medici in Rome, he had visited the Crimea and the Orient where he had followed the French troops and had gone to Algeria from 1863 to 1865, just after his appointment as professor of painting at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts. Despite his fragility, Pils had been a great traveller. Having always been in poor health, it is likely that this final work finished him off.

This was the artist’s last major work, which he managed to finish hardly two months before the inauguration of the opera house. When in 1871 Charles Garnier, who had been working on the completion of the Opéra since 1865, asked Isidore Pils to decorate the grand staircase of the Opera Garnier, he was asking a well-established artist who was however more accustomed to “painting an entire regiment than the torso of a Venus”. On the verso, later inscriptions caisson est du grand escalier. Inscribed lower right with red chalk Opéra.

Three Studies for the Grand Stairs decors in the Paris Opera a hand holding a stick, a left foot and crossed legsīlack, red and white chalk on beige paper.

Paris opera house stairs