Background: Who cares about the sons of Clovis?

Recently, I was chatting with the Kestrel, and it turns out that we both have had a lasting fascination with a certain painting in the Art Gallery of NSW. It is called "The Sons of Clovis" and depicts two dead bodies, adrift on a floating raft, which looks like a bed. So, on a whim, I turned to the eternally-evolving web and gleaned some of the historical background to the subject matter of the painting, if not what prompted the artist to do the work…

After looking at the reproduction of the painting, I saved it as wallpaper, then over the next few days, 'improved' it. My wallpaper image is shown below: feel free to copy it as wallpaper (on PCs, right click the image and choose 'save as wallpaper')(Apparently, it is so easy to do this on a Mac that I shouldn't have to tell MacPeople how to do it. {Yes it is true, I have lost my Mac race memory}) and be part of the latest fad.

My search 'sons of clovis' on google.com turned up:

At www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collects/

From www.britannica.com/

France, history of

The conversion of Clovis

Clovis came to believe that his victory at Tolbiacum in 496 was due to

the help of the Christian God, whom his wife Clotilda had been

encouraging him to accept. With the support of Bishop Remigius of

Reims, a leader of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, Clovis converted with

some 3,000 of his army. Clovis' conversion assured the Frankish king

of the support not only of the ecclesiastical hierarchy but in general

also of Roman Christians--the majority of the population. It also

ensured the triumph in Gaul of Roman Christianity over paganism and

Arianism and spared Gaul the lengthy conflicts that occurred in other

Germanic kingdoms.

The sons of Clovis

Following the death of Clovis in 511, the kingdom was divided among his four sons.

This partition was not made according to ethnic, geographic, or administrative

divisions. The only factor taken into account was that the portions be of equal value

(defined in terms of the royal fisc, which had previously been the imperial fisc, and tax

revenues from land and trade, which were based upon imperial practices). Boundaries

were poorly defined. The territory was divided into two general areas: one was the

territory north of the Loire (the part of Gaul that was conquered earliest); the other, to

the south in Aquitaine, was a region not yet assimilated. Theodoric I, Clovis' eldest son

by one of his wives married in Germanic style before Clovis married Clotilda and

converted to Christianity, received lands around the Rhine, Moselle, and upper Meuse,

as well as the Massif Central; Clodomir, the Loire country to the other side of the Rhine

(this kingdom was the only one not composed of separated territories); Childebert I,

the country of the English Channel and the lower Seine and, probably, the region of

Bordeaux and Saintes; Chlotar I, the old Frankish country north of the Somme and an

ill-defined area in Aquitaine. Their capitals were centred in the Paris Basin, which was

divided among the four brothers: Theodoric I used Reims; Clodomir, Orléans;

Childebert I, Paris; Chlotar I, Soissons. As each brother died, the survivors partitioned

the newly available lands among themselves. This system resulted in bloody

competition until 558, when Chlotar I, after his brothers' deaths, succeeded in

reuniting the kingdom under his own rule.

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and here is a fragment from:

australis.org/castro/stead.html

...'gritty city' writing, but Stead was there before them -- from Watson's Bay (or Fisherman's Bay as it appears here) to Woolloomooloo. And while the inner city may have changed immeasurably in the intervening years, the diligent can find a few lingering traces of that time. Like the haunting painting 'Sons of Clovis' which still hangs in the old part of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Michael Baguenault and Kol Blount are drawn to this grand salon painting showing the king's sons 'hamstrung, deathly pale, floating bound on a barge down a ghastly grey river' as an image of themselves: dispossessed, tortured, and cast adrift.