A naked woman lies supine in languid repose, her white body defined against a velvety black background. But this contrast of colour is the only trace of violence in La Femme au divan noir (1869) – if the figure’s pallid skin and complete stillness render her corpse-like, this is death refined to an incorruptible perfection; beauty raised to a metaphysical ideal. The latest exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Face à l’impressionnisme: Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905), is full of such stock Romantic images. Whilst the Impressionists were shocking the academy with technical innovations, Henner retreated into the past, inspired by the masters he studied during his stay at the Villa Medici after winning the Prix de Rome in 1858. However, the painter’s outmoded sensibility is saved from mawskishness by the beauty of its execution. His nudes, faces half-lighted or turned away, breasts exposed in sensuous vulnerability, are a perfect marriage of form and subject. Rendered in a palette of muted vibrancy, they allow the viewer to enter a hazy reverie, compounded by the use of sfumato, a technique in which tones are subtly blended. In Dormeuse (1893) the sleeper’s swathes of deep orange hair blur into the background, taking over the entire painting as if her sensuality risks overwhelming the canvas itself. Yet these classical compositions retain a stultified quality that leaves the modern viewer impressed but unmoved.

Henner won official approbation and state commissions, but his work is dated by its conventionality. In 1868, at the prompting of Manet and Degas, the artist experimented with a more modern subject, La Toilette. It was poorly received at the Salon: Henner destroyed it. Perhaps had he been less concerned with contemporary praise he would have been free to paint with more of the conviction evident in the landscapes of his beloved native Alsace. As it is his pictures offer the gratifications of a dream – pleasurable, but ultimately insubstantial.

Until 13 January. €3.50-7.
Closed Monday
‘Face à l’impressionisme: Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905), le dernier des romantiques’. Musée de la Vie Romantique, 16, rue Chaptal, Paris 9. Mº Blanche. 01 55 31 95 67. http://vie-romantique.paris.fr