E

H E N

F.

ElSENMAN

NINETEENTH

CENTURY ART

A CRITICAL
HISTORY

THOMAS CROW

BRIAN LUKACHER

LINDA NOCHLIN

FRANCES K.POHL

Nineteenth Century Art

A Critical History

Nineteenth

A Critical
With 369

illustrations, 51 in color

STEPHEN

F.

EISENMAN

Century Art
History

THOMAS CROW
BRIAN LUKACHER

LINDA NOCHLIN

FRANCES

K.

POHL

THAMES AND HUDSON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of individuals have generously assisted in the eompletion of this book: the contributing
Thomas Crow, Brian Lukacher, Frances Pohl, and Linda Nochlin have been unstinting with
am very grateful to them. David Craven has
their time, their helpful criticisms, and their kindness.

authors

offered

encouragement

of the composition of the book; he alone knows

at crucial stages

of the ideas about method are indebted to him, and

Eric Frank,

my

art historical

how

well or poorly they have

for a

number of the works

has been a smart and stimulating debater about matters that

live-in editor

and interlocutor of

collaborators' regard for

intelligence,

me

colleague and friend at Occidental College, has been generous in helping

and iconographical sources

me and

companionship,

about nineteenth-century

Graduate Program

in

first resort,

loyalty,

and

Mary Weismantel

love. Finally,

would

University of

has by her efforts both preserved

measurements are

in

my

cannot adequately thank her for her

thank the people

like to
at

who

taught

me

Albany, the Williams College

Robert Kinsman, George Heard Hamilton,

Thomas Crow.

Daniel Robbins, Albert Boime, and

In the captions to the illustrations,

discussed. Abigail

New York

Art History, and Princeton University

identify the

Solomon-Godeau
concern women and Paul Gauguin. As my

propelled forward the entire effort.

art at the State

how many

been represented.

inches (centimeters in parantheses), height before

width, unless otherwise indicated.

Any copy of this book

not by

way of trade

issued by the publisher as a paperback

is

sold subject to the condition that

it

shall

or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

similar condition including these

(C)1994
First published in the

which

words being imposed on

Thames and Hudson

United States of America

500 Fifth Avenue,

New

in

York,

Ltd,

Library of Congress Catalog Card

it is

published and without a

subsequent purchaser.

London

1994 by

New

Thames and Hudson

Inc.,

York 10110

Number

93-61271

ISBN: 0-500-23675-5 (hardback)

0-500-27753-2 (paperback)

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

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Printed and

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Slovenia

CONTENTS
Introduction: Critical Art and History 7

Classicism and Romanticism

1

Thomas Crow
2

Thomas Crow
3

The Tensions

Brian Lukacher Nature

Young

Ingres 14

Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix 51

Goya 78

of Enlightment:

Lukacher Visionary History

4 Brian
5

Patriotism and Virtue: David to the

Historicized:

Painting: Blake and His Contemporaries 98

Constable, Turner, and Romantic Landscape

Painting 115

New World
6

Frances K. Pohl Old World,

New

World:

Frontiers

The Encounter

of Cultures on the American

Frontier 144
7

Frances K. Pohl Black and White

in

America 163

Realism and Naturalism

8

The
10

The Generation

of 1830 and the Crisis in the Public Sphere 188

Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde 206

The Decline

of History Painting: Germany, Italy, and France 225

Modern Art and

11

Manet and

Life

the Impressionists 238

12

Linda Nochlin

13

Mass Culture and Utopia: Seurat and Neoimpressionism 274

Issues of

Gender

in Cassatt

14 Abstraction and Populism:

15

Symbolism and the

16

The

and Eakins 255

Van Gogh 288

Dialectics of Retreat 304

Failure and Success of Cezanne 337

Chronology 351
Selected Bibliography 365
List of Illustrations 368

Index 373

GUSTAVF. COURBET

Portrait of Baudelaire ca. 1848. 20 7s x 24 (53 x

61). Detail

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL ART

AND HISTORY
ART DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK
THE
Europe and North America during

WAS MADE

a period

profound

social

and

epoch of change
not, of course,

political transformation.

now almost

IN

of rapid and

The close of that

hundred years distant

end the drama of modernization. In

did

fact, far

from slowing down, the dynamic of change begun

in the

nineteenth century was accelerated in the twentieth. Soon the

terms "imperalism," "assembly line," and "mass culture"

entered

modern European and American

the

lexicons,

century, the social upheaval that had begun with the bloody

dispatch of the French Bourbon monarchs in 1793

the event

that appears in retrospect as the exclamation point at the

of the feudal sentence

cratic,

and

end

was becoming more mature, demo-

inclusive. In 1848, the increasingly self-cognizant

working classes of France, Germany, Austria,

England rose up

in

arms

Italy,

and

(or in the latter case organized

themselves into a political movement) to combat the vestigial

aristocratic,

and the new bourgeois,

who maintained

elites

supplanting an earlier vocabulary that included "nation,"

economic and

"industry," and "the popular." Yet

soon followed by profound failures to transform the economic

shifting their arenas

facts

and changing

if actions

and words were

their meanings, the basic

of crisis and everlasting uncertainty remained the same.

Indeed,

if the

history

compelling today,

and culture of the nineteenth century are

it is

largely because the twentieth century

accepted and embraced their legacy of political and cultural

The rudiments

revolution.

of that historical

legacy

are

generally familiar but bear retelling.

The end

and

political status quo.)

final

was overturned by

women and men

By

boom and

agricultural

and

in the politics

stood a capitalist and bourgeois economic and social

edifice.

This epochal reconfiguration of European economy

and society

long

in

coming but no

for its gradual preparation

revolution in

dramatic

in the

inspired

for a generation,

in 1776,

wars of colonial indepen-

by Enlightenment principles of

consent and social contract

were

political

waged and won

in

new

city alike,

and the

efforts of

women

rival in intensity the

to achieve

ongoing

class

and

ethnic struggles. In the United States, the genocide of Native

Americans was nearly completed by 1890 (the year of the

Wounded Knee

Massacre), even while large numbers of new

European and Asian immigrants arrived

Pacific

harbors.

restlessness

at

and violence that had characterized

ary century was

Atlantic and

As the twentieth century dawned, the

becoming

imperialism that reached

internationalized.

its

apogee

in the

revolution-

The new

age of

decade before 1914

the

accomplished the dividing of the non-European world into

turn

colonies for the benefit of a half-dozen Western states, yet

the core nations of Europe, accelerating already

notably failed to secure either peace or generalized prosperity.

Americas, the Caribbean, and Mexico. These victories

rebounded

end

marked by outbreaks of

Europe and the Americas. Beginning

and continuing
dence

was

less

become

and culture of the West. Economic

and industrial technologies transformed country-

side

now

driven at times by moral

bust followed close upon each other,

emancipation began to

survived for seven centuries. In the place of feudalism, there

a half later, the slave

the last quarter of the century, change itself had

entrenched

and rigidly hierarchical productive and

had

decade and

outrage and at others by economic calculation.

dissolution of feudalism in Europe, a primarily agricultural

social order that

plantation system of agriculture in the southern United States

cycles of

of the eighteenth century marked the

dominance. (Quick successes were

political

in
in

existing

demands

political

enfranchisement. By the middle of the nineteenth

for social justice,

economic equality, and

Indeed, imperialism soon generated

vastly destructive wars

its

own

antinomies:

between the imperialist nations were


among

fought, broad (though fragile) alliances were forged

and formal perfection passed down, generation

politan bourgeois culture itself was on the point of being

from archaic Greece

dethroned.

enlightened France. Yet

The

century

nineteenth

was

punctuated

thus

beginning, middle, and end by revolutions

trial,

and

cultural

and

by the

less

workers,

women, and indigenous peoples

The

its

indus-

political,

freedom and

for

suggests that

to

modern,

examination of the

a close

same time the

represents at the

it

to generation,

Middle Ages,

to the Christian

picture-

cultural

and

between the past and

ethical divide increasingly felt to exist

the present.

Exhibited

epoch were also indelibly

(the

and insurgency; they too were

art),

visual arts of the

restiveness, change,

at

violent struggles of

equality.

marked by

1827

in

at the

most prestigious venue

Salon Carre of the Eouvre palace

in Paris for the display

The Apotheosis depicts the blind

of works of

lomer, enthroned

shaped and figured by the irruption of classes and interests

before an Ionic temple and crowned with laurel by a winged

formerly excluded from the domain of national culture. (The

Victory (or Fame). At his

insight into a link

of a society and

elites, art

between the

its art,

we

ethics, politics,

shall

soon

see,

and material

life

was an achievement

No longer the reliably pliant vehicle of entrenched

of the age.)

was often now the contradictory, unpredictable, and

of diverse individuals, subcultures, and interest

critical voice

groups.

The

figures of

prints, drawings,

and paintings of the English William

postures that recall the

feet, in

Day and Night from

Tomb

Michelangelo's

of

Giuliano de' Medici, are seated allegorical representations of

The Iliad (beside

resting

on her

sword) and The Odyssey (with an oar

To Homer's immediate right are

lap).

Phidias (with

Pindar (offering the

lyre)

arm extended, holding

left

the three

and Euripides, and

great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles,

his left the poet

to

and the sculptor

a mallet).

Ranged

Blake and the Spanish Francisco Goya, for example, offer

around and below these Greeks are other ancient and modern

clear instances of the responsiveness of artists to the cultural

luminaries indebted to

crises of the early nineteenth century. In Blake's illustrated

hand, Virgil guides Dante, Moliere (holding the mask of

poetic books such as America (1793) and Europe (1794), he

drama) stands beside Racine, and Shakespeare accompanies

lamented the

country to embrace the

failure of his native

Poussin

(in the left

Homer: Apelles

leads Raphael by the

foreground, pointing to Homer). Omitted

revolutionary upwellings in the United States and France. In

from the picture, but everywhere

Goya's

included himself in a preliminary version),

series of etchings called

condemned

Los Caprichos (1799), he

the prevailing ignorance and prejudice of the

Spanish monarchy and clergy, and espoused the emancipa-

French Enlightenment. Yet more than

tory principles of the

simply proclaiming the value of democratic and Enlighten-

ment

ideals,

and Goya

Blake

found

ways

embody

to

revolution in the forms and subjects of their

Each

art.

implicit,

Ingres (he

is

who

as recent

Academician and proud recipient of the Legion d'honneur, saw

himself as the honored
the Greeks.

especially,

matters of Art,

In

to

1818,

Poussin,

Raphael, and,

Ingres proclaimed: "In

have not changed. Age and reflection have,

hope, strengthened
still

heir

my

taste,

without diminishing

worship Raphael, his century, and above

all

its

ardor.

I
I

the divine

represented the political and social crises of their day in the

Greeks." For Ingres, therefore, ancient Greece represented

language of solar and Manichean metaphors: Light erases

both the childhood of Europe

Darkness,

Day combats

Night,

God

confronts Satan, Master

opposes Slave, Ore (Blake's personification of desire) battles

Urizen

(his

figure

of reason), Truth

(Goya's

allegory) tries to vanquish Ignorance. Perhaps

able of all, however,

their

is

the fact that Blake and

themes and protagonists

dialectically

preferred

most remark-

Goya

represent

that

is,

they

describe them as various and mutable. Neither light nor dark,

reason nor unreason, neither

and

eternal; like the

God

nor the devil are singular

dawning revolutionary age

itself,

they are

the origin of European

culture from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries

and the

full

swell of a maturity that could never be superseded.

Commissioned

for the ceiling of the

newly decorated room

of Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre, The Apotheosis of

Homer proclaims Classicism an indisputable canon guaranteeing a stable cultural foundation for the present. The painting
suggests that present French and European culture

is

the

culmination of a continuous line of development beginning

archaic Greece, and passing through the

Roman

in

empire, the

multiple and protean, contingent upon the political and social

Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the time of Louis

perspectives of the spectator.

XIV, and

William Blake and Francisco Goya were surely exceptional,

among nineteenth-century
political perspicacity.

critical

artists,

figures,

facts of

modern

static

painter and critic

and retrospective

such as

Journal des debats when he praised Ingres for dispensing with

active,

social change.

Ingres's The Apotheosis of Homer (1827), for example, appears

INTRODUCTION

Etienne Delecluze described the

The

aspects of the Apotheosis in his Salon review for the 1828

D. Ingres, often manifested an

engagement with the

the present age of Charles X.

and

for their radicalism

Yet even conservative

the arch-Classicist J. A.

63

canon of physical beauty

to represent Classicism as a timeless

oppressed European and non-European peoples, and metro-

the pretension of artistic originality in his painting and instead

graciously accepting the formal "archetypes" provided by

the great personages he represents. Delecluze writes:

all


The

men

individual originality of these

but what placed them beyond

and circumstances under which they

himself

Dante

traditions;

Homer found

lived.

point for giving

at the ideal

incontestable,

is

comparisons were the era

all

mythological

life to

for fixing the poetic theology

born

in the

century; Shakespeare for transfusing the ideas of the

fifth

south into northern brains; Phidias for clothing symbolic

man's image; and Michelangelo

idols with

the

Middle Ages. But once

these great combinations

all

have been fashioned and fixed,

modify the archetypes

for incarnating

all

that can be

done

is

to

modern works

according

of "archetypes,"

was

Delecluze,

to

Ingres's

achievement. Yet this was in fact an achievement more of a

negative than of a positive kind:

and

historic

and dissonance and the

difference

artistic

involved the erasure of

it

and Apelles gives way

of Dante (as he leaves behind his guide Virgil on the threshold

of Paradise), the alienation of Hamlet, and the stunning

what remains

anticlassicism of the aged Michelangelo;

is

only

and sardonic

Bryson's word for this representation of absence or loss

but

"desire,"

the

am more persuaded

and

seems

term

of the

passivity

that

what

is

at

work

change

much

Precisely such a knowledge of cultural crisis and

it.

featured

in the art

work of

as in the

of conservatives such as Ingres as

radicals such as Blake

century Gustave Courbet

is

and Goya, or

the distinguishing

of the most salient art of the nineteenth century; this

the art

am

Taking our cue from the

of the period

art

itself,

the authors of this book intend to consider

Although

this

approach has been adopted

in

therefore,

it

critically.

many

of the

the Classical past and present

previously been used in surveys of nineteenth-century

vitality, Ingres's

it

complexity and

Apotheosis comes to resemble an attack upon,

more than an homage

to,

the legacy of

Homer, and

it

should

not surprise us that most critics of the painting found

it

if

we now

look again at the Apotheosis of Homer,

how much more

notice

it

bands echoing the horizontal and

foreground and columns

but

fail

to

grotesquely

or

interact

abbreviated

we

resembles a crude pastiche than an

paradigm of Classicism. Figures are ranked

ideal

in the

in rigid

steps

vertical

in

the

background; they hold hands

engage the
repoussoirs

the

the

poignantly,

breakdown

tradition in the

in

flatness,

of the Classical

modern world?

of The Apotheosis

less to the

relief to the

its

painter's technique as

laws of linear perspective than to laws

of a perspective that one could

more

modern

call

figures

chronological ... in giving

and gradually weakening

colors as he reaches the semi-fantasy figures of

Linus,

who

his

Orpheus and

are on the furthest plane of the picture." In the

hands of Ingres, the ancient world

shadows, and
arc destroyed

authors of most earlier surveys, beginning with Richard

Muther (1907) and Leonce Benedite

(1910),

and extending

loss;

the great

the

is

to

Rosenblum/Janson (1984) and Lorenz Eitner (1988), were

upon

the

model of investigations

art historical data

names and biographies, anecdotes,

and subjects, key

dates,

methods

in the natural sciences.

proceeded by induction, collecting

titles

They

artists'

of artworks, genres

developments, and the

stylistic

documented responses of patrons,

critics,

and the public

the confidence that "there can be nothing so remote that

cannot reach

Even

nor so recondite that we cannot discover

it,

Fritz Novotny's idiosyncratic

one of blindness,

monuments of Greek

antiquity

Athena Parthenos, the Colossus, the

volume

we
it."

for the Pelican

History of Art (1960) generally conforms to this model.

Although he frames

when he described

art.

and then assembled them into "long chains of deductive

reluctantly, perhaps even help-

the authority

has not

reasoning," in the words of empiricism's parent, Descartes, in

Delecluze himself half understood the problematical nature

"submitting

it

the

despite

awkwardness, and stiltedness of the picture than that Ingres

lessly

volume,

extreme fore-

viewer,
in

ground. Can there be any other explanation for the

was recording

that inform the writing of this

empiricists in the sense that they based their research

objectionable.

Indeed,

The

is

calling critical.

monographs

that gave

felt

of the Classicism of his day and could not avoid

febrility

depicting

costume, cliche, and hollow splendor. In thus purging from

all

an

is

Ingres saw and

critical intelligence.

is

me

to

(however much he may have lamented) the weakness and

trait

pessimism of Euripides, the devastating loneliness

to the ironical peering

'smile of reason' of Voltaire [at the lower right corner]."

later in the

irrational

you

Norman Bryson

as the art historian

expressions, at their nadir in the busy scribbling and sarcastic

from the Classical tradition

Ingres's painting are the

no comparable

are

generality of countenance evident in such figures as Phidias

substitution of a bland and conflict-free Classicism. Banished

in

there

has written, elaborating Delecluze, "the more the nobility and

active, restless,

This subtle crafting and modification of the Classical corpus

and

to take their place. Indeed, the further

modern world,

enter the

misleading;

indefinitely.

of Apelles

oeuvre

entire

his chronological survey (1780- 1880)

with references to the "spiritualization" of art in the hands of

the philosopher
less

Kant and

speaks of his

entails,

own approach

in empiricist terms: his

book

he says, the study of the "laws which govern the

development of art" and

ment." Indeed
subject

the painter Cezanne, he neverthe-

for

its

"prevailing lines of develop-

Novotny, scholarly

matter are

perfectly

(scientific)

method and

merged, since he sees the

nineteenth century as "defined |by| the study of the external

appearance of nature.

|It is|

the century of Naturalism."

Empiricism has dominated studies of nineteenth-centurv

1VIROIH CTION


art

but has rarely been explicitly acknowledged as

logy.

An

exception to this silence

methodo-

John Rewald, who

is

questioning what they see as the myth of an interest-free

science and scholarship.

Art history

especially

itself,

art

popular and indispensable

history of the nineteenth century (with the notable exception

History of Impressionism (1946; 4th revised edition, 1973). In

of its basic survey texts), has been significantly transformed in

honestly champions

his introduction,

it

his

in

Rewald approvingly

nineteenth-century

French

Coulanges: "History

is

science,

it

not an

art,

it is

Fustel

historian

political

the last two decades by this

new

de

been especially redefined

in

all

structural linguistics in the late

words of the

pure science.

Like

consists in stating the facts, in analyzing them, in

drawing them together and

The

cites the

bringing out their connections.

in

deducing from the

historian's only skill should consist in

documents

that

all

is

them and

in

in

adding nothing they do

manner not

dissimilar to Rewald, Robert

in the introduction to his

Rosenblum

and H. W. Janson's Nineteenth-

Century Art (1984; Art of the Nineteenth Century, English

and absolutist

edition), rejects "the purist tyranny of abstract

systems," insisting that "art historians should be as flexible,

various,

and comprehensive

and be willing

as possible in their approaches,

to consider anything

from the history of

technology to the abiding mysteries of genius and psychology

as potentially illuminating their ever

more

Rosenblum and Janson

to their words,

the role of the artist or author as the isolated genius inventor

a

modernist

fiction

and

in the

as a dispassionate observer

overturning the
history

could

formerly

be

told

prevailing

as

ideology of

artists,

The word

Among

art history.

audiences, and

By ideology

requires brief elaboration.

lists

the Bible,

bodies of knowledge, belief, imagery, and expression that

unified art historical

and

friction,

is

it

mechanism
in

to construct a

more

or less

that functions noiselessly

and

which contradiction and superfluity

as nearly as possible eliminated. Like earlier writers, too,

these authors remain deeply

committed
1

analysis, seeing in the details of artists lives

is

there and

view the large

social,

production,

biographical,

economic, and

class,"

while

and patronage

factors

still vital

in

pass

before

the

empiricist attitude maintains a traditional Cartesian

much

recent scientific and theoretical investigation.

Rarely, indeed, have as

many

critics

and researchers

from

the fields of literature and philosophy to jurisprudence and

physics

10

Friedrich Engels (the

first

political

Louis

theorist

to

The

Althusser

example of one of the ideologies

dawn of the nineteenth century but which

is

ideology of freedom, the bourgeoisie

to] the

existence: that

is

to say,

it

comprehends

its real

the laws of a liberal capitalist economy), but incorporates

into an imaginary relation (the idea that

all

of

relation (to

people are

it

free,

including "free" workers).

By

this

(somewhat tendentious) example of the way

in

which

the ideology of freedom masks the severely circumscribed

separation of facts from values, an approach which goes

against

Marx and

power, and are an

"The ideas of the ruling

to class stability today:

[According

formal,

scholarly gaze.

political

lives in a direct fashion its relation to its conditions

determin-

small

group by another. Ideologies both

offered a brief but compelling

and commissions,

the

to

wrote Karl

mid-twentieth-century

which holds back from

permitting

and are

theorize ideology), "are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

that arose at the

political forces

class or

from economic and

instrument for achieving that control.

must be accepted," instead of the

acts as a kind of sieve

reality,

thus an effective (because surreptitious) instrument for the

conscious and unconscious "activities of society as a whole."

Empiricism thus

to their subjects

coherent image of their lived relation to social

1937 described the harvest of empiricism, "a sum-total of

facts [which]

in

about the world. They provide their possessors with a

to a micrological

Max Horkheimer

as the Frankfurt School social theorist

is

all

unbeknownst

moment

workaday assumptions or commonsense notions

follow

similar to that of survey

it

meant the character-

are created by a particular social class at a given

domination of one

authors that came before:

is

istic

sources and

descriptive

in the 1960's,

more

many

in-

art

has already been used several times in this introduction;

graphy. Yet, however open-minded the authors are, their

is

movement

True

the relevant themes for

that

critics.

cultural criticism during the student

opera, ballet, tuberculosis, syphilis, prostitution, and photo-

and achievement

straightforward,

are certainly

study cited in his introduction, Rosenblum

The

not wholly

confidence

vast subject."

wideranging discussions of the

documents of

art

if

"ideology," which re-emerged as a term of

as a set of

ing

critic or historian

narrative independent of the interests, politics, gender, or

history. Ideologies arise largely

without

view of the

today questioned

is

inclusion of diverse artists outside the established canon and

overall goal

960's and the emergence of

various critical successors. Previous scholarly confidence in

catholic than their predecessors in their near encyclopedic

in their

discipline has

of the revival of

light

rejected. Marxist philosophy has also played a signal role

not contain."
In a

its

The

attitude.

the

joined their voices together as they

INTRODUCTION

now have

in

liberties of

workers in

a liberal capitalist

seen that ideology perse

is

economy,

an imaginary representation of social and

and an actual lived relation

mimetic works of art
represent

reality

can be

it is

both

material relations

to reality. Ideologies are thus like

in their

in

it

powerful precisely because

dualism of illusory and

conventional

and

an

real;

they

historically

They

contingent fashion.

which

history

solely

is

are

what

is

concerned with

person are other than those of the non-social person. Only

out of an art

filtered

detail

and

through the objectively unfolded richness of people's

objectivity.

Althusser's use of the term ideology, however, was polemical

essential

and often mechanistic; as

sensibility (a musical ear,

a Structuralist Marxist,

he rejected

altogether any link between imaginative representation and

material

An

art history that

an eye for beauty of form

senses

practical

acknowledges ideological forces need

sense

the

love,

(will,

humanness of the senses

The forming

of humanized nature.

labor of the entire history of the world

Structuralist, or
critical;

it

and material conditions, and

expression in class and gender ideology. In

and regardless of the

a passive attitude

impossibility

all

cases,

their

however,

specific critical perspective of the author,

of scientific dispassion

since

it

assumed

is

is

seen to be an

the

that

situation

of

The
new

even

discussion above has summarized a few of the tenets of

critical as

if

opposed

to a purely empirical art history.

Yet

these recent scholarly transformations had not taken

more

the firm hold that they have, the need for a broader and
critical

approach to nineteenth-century

art

should have been

apparent empirically through close attention to the material

itself.

For

if

the nineteenth century saw the

first

flowering of

the application of empiricism in the humanities,

it

also first

divined and theorized the critical interconnections between

seeing and knowing and between vision and society.

From

Hegel to Marx, from Carlyle to Ruskin, from Baudelaire to

Bergson, nineteenth-century authors and
links

critics

explored the

between perception and history. The most complete

discussion of the question

effectively
It is

is

found

in the writings

of Marx,

summarized by Horkheimer when he wrote:

not only in clothing and appearance, in outward form

and emotional makeup that humans are the product of

history.

Even

the

way they see and hear

the social life-process as

The

is

inseparable from

has evolved over the millennia.

which our senses present

facts

preformed

it

to us are socially

through the historical character of the object

perceived and through the historical character of the

description

by Marx of the historical character of

perception in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts oj

1844

is

more complex. He wrote

alien, objective

that the transformation of the

world into a subjective world of consoling

"human reality" depends upon

the human senses:

of the five senses

down

is

to the present.

that while

humans by

the state of development of

which only occurs

society in

which the person

in

the senses are

all

lives: a capitalist society in

is

which does not subscribe

And

finally,

society

Marx

literature

in

sensual

Communist

society

to the concept of private property.

stands his argument about the impact of

upon the human senses on

cultivation of the senses

or

which

its

clearly different in

or perceptual capacities from a feudal or

its feet

by arguing that the

in the

form of art, music,

whether

turn plays a significant role in the

its

historical unfolding of a society.

Giving material form

to

our

sensual instincts or capacities, both theoretically and practically, "is

required," he writes, "to

as well as to create the

human

sense

make

people's sense human,

corresponding to the entire

wealth of human and natural substance."

similar if

return later

(I shall

to this question of the active or formative role

making of modern

of art in the

society.)

somewhat narrower formulation of the

between history and material culture, or between

ideology, was achieved a decade after

and esthetician John Ruskin.

revival of the arts in

An

Marx by

art

and

the moralist

important figure

mid-century Britain and

link

in its

in

the

medieval

"On the Nature of

Workman therein" (1853)

revivalism, Ruskin wrote in his essay

Gothic and the Function of the

that:

"The

art

of any country

political virtues.

You can have

The

under laws

is

the exponent of

art or general
is

its

social

and

productive and formative

an exact exponent of

its

ethical

life.

noble art only from noble persons, associated

fitted to their

time and circumstances." Ruskin's

observation led him to compose a body of art history and

criticism that

is

at

once finely tuned

to the subtlest formal

nuances of the works of architecture, painting, or sculpture

under

his

sides

this reason the senses of the social

Moreover,

historically.

purview and unabashedly partisan

ing of those works that

for the

humans

differently developed according to the nature of the particular

opinions.

most beautiful music has no sense

their nature as

the absence of their specific development and cultivation,

and

unmusical ear ... for

virtue

have senses and perceptions, these are rude and unformed

Just as music alone awakens in people the sense of music,

just as the

is

energy of any country,

perceiving organ.

The

Marx's point

the sense of having dominates

spectators affects their perspective.

the

empirical and

has implicitly argued for a simultaneous consider-

ation of observable facts

.)

to

historical scholarship

Structuralist, Post-

word, human
come be by
in

etc.)

not be as doctrinaire as Althusser. Indeed, the best recent art

whether Marxist,
Feminist has been both

For not only the

senses but also the so-called mental senses

five

volition.

human

of subjective

richness

the

is

either cultivated or brought into being.

and he denied the existence of human

truth,

autonomy or individual

being

conformed

to his

in its

champion-

moral and ethical

closer consideration of Ruskin reveals that the

of his critical

practise

are

both

informed

by

two
his

appreciation of art as a form of labor. Ruskin's insight was

INTRODUCTION

summarized

later

sentence by his student, the author,

in a

"Yet the

designer, and political activist William Morris:

essence of what Ruskin then taught us was simple enough, like

all

great discoveries. It

was

really

epoch must

that the art of any

this,

nothing more recondite than

of necessity be the

approach that recognizes and highlights the ideological

between present and

to

tion has

two functions:

human

shaped past

art,

expression, which on the other hand our social

of

that the social life of the

forbids

life

him."

At about the same time that Marx,

his essay

German, was writing

concerned with the historical character of the senses,

and the Englishman Ruskin was publishing

that every age
to

had

own unique vision and

its

peculiar ethical and social

its

life,

corresponding

French poet and

was suggesting much the same thing.

journalist

Baudelaire

who

view

his radical

art

It

was Charles

provocatively argued that artists and writers

more

links

of this recognition can

be-

more

the present, in a sense,

simultaneous familiarization and aliena-

distant. In turn, this

ing of the

and

social life,

its

make

bring the past closer and

Middle Ages allowed the workman freedom of individual

expression of

The effect

past.

first, it is

to heighten our understand-

choices and cultural contingencies that

and secondly,

it is

to assist in the

achievement

"distanced" reckoning with

the

contradictions and potentialities of our present culture.

The

objective or

contemporary culture and ideology,

art historican, situated in

cannot easily separate these two operations; indeed, the one

informs the other.

Only the course of subsequent events and developments,

makes

often dozens of years later,

artists,

and monuments

historical.

moments,

certain earlier

Thus an

art history that

seeks to understand causes cannot be content to

let

the

The uniqueness

of,

for

own time; it was he who established the

critic who is profoundly and passionately

example, the revolutionary paintings of J.-L. David or Goya

any notion

cannot be understood by the facts of patronage or the

of Classical "archetypes," as found for example in Delecluze,

circumstances of exhibition alone. Without a reckoning with

be resolutely of their

model of the
engaged with

his subject

and setting the tone

modernity, he wrote

be the one

quality,

future

who can

"The

how

great

may

its

Next year

let's

hope that

thinkers as

all

forms that are

time, but

changing, historical factors.

early

is

its

itself,

sensual embodiment,

is

contingent upon a host of

Thus empiricism, born

in the

Enlightenment and maturing alongside positive science

in the

nineteenth century, had already begun to shrink in

stature beneath the wilting gaze of nineteenth-century critical

consciousness. As a

method of understanding the world

was dependent upon

experiments,

it

a stationary observer

that

and controlled

could not withstand the social and political

itself.

the larger ideological sea-change, apparent only in distant

of which

retrospect,

these

pioneers,

the

are

artists

the

extraordinariness of, say, David's Brutus (1789) or Goya's

10

Courtyard with Lunatics (1793^4) may be seen only as the

80

anomaly or even denied altogether. By

result of psychological

the

same token, the contradictions

movements, such

subsequent history:
includes

its

that

marked

critical

cognizance of the movement's

in the case

of Impressionism, this legacy

ubiquity

museum

in

exhibitions,

scholarly

we

shall dis-

publications, and advertising. Impressionism,

cover,

was

challenge to

later art

as Impressionism nearly a century after, are

unobservable without a

Morris and Stephane Mallarme, discovered that vision

not given for

our

that followed, Baudelaire, as

well as such later nineteenth-century critical

as well as the artistic

in

epic

newV

and others

this essay,

845

grant us the extraordinary delight of

celebrating the advent of the

With

of today

life

and poetic we are

cravats and our patent-leather boots.

the true seekers

to

true painter we're looking for

snatch from the

feel

encomiums

critical

conclusion of his review of the

at the

and make us

his epoch. Jettisoning

for

Paris Salon exhibition:

will

and

record speak for

historical

matter and forms both a radical

in its subject
official,

academic conventions and an expression

of the highest aspirations of an enlightened bourgeoisie

who

increasingly dominated the French political and economic

arena.

The

very duality, however,

is

only understood by

considering the contradictory development of modern popular

culture and leisure

a subject clearly outside the limited

chronological frame of the Impressionist

movement

proper.

Similarly, an art history that attends only to primary

revolutions that jolted the century.

sources and documents

inadequate

if

not in

The critical method employed in this survey of nineteenthcentury art therefore receives much of its authority from the

sense impossible. Equally dubious, however,

is

the status of a

nineteenth century

would be

itself.

To

claim more than this, however,

to fall victim to the very

the scholar

is

empiricism

the

memory

that

society's unbiased

myth
is

that

being

criticized.

Remembrance,

even as

records the past; just as memories are aroused by

it

recent events, so history

like history, exists in the

is

stirred

by contemporary

Although based upon empirical research,

rejects the interest-free claims of

12

INTRODUCTION

present

this

History of

"Social

is

at least

Modern Art"

seeks

include

to

comprehensively, as the scholar of nineteenth-century art

Albert

Boime has

Mozarts] of the

written, "the 'Salieris' [as

been ranked according

arbitrary

to

and even capricious standard."

book thus

enormous, the method

in fact

if

the

Although

the

admirable, and Boime's research

is

achieve:

to the

who have

what only can be considered an

democratic sentiment

possibly

opposed

art world, the so-called mediocrities

life.

empiricism in favor of an

that

a literal

purports to a breadth

entirety

it

cannot

of an epoch's cultural

production

nightmare

how can

equally worthy of study,

is

ever have boundaries?

terror,

(a

the project

How can the writer avoid the historicist

we

shall

frequent

see,

among

the

nineteenth-century revivalists) of simply re-presenting the

entirety of the historical record

endless? In addition,

which the

unchanged,

art historian,

of

all

scholars,

attend: the discrimination of major

and

undistilled,

Boime would abjure the

responsibility to

asked most of all to

is

from minor, primary from

secondary, instrumental from incidental, and

critical

from

accommodating.

By

formal quality, the social

this relative indifference to

historian of art

bathwater.

baby with the

guilty of throwing out the

is

Boime

is

right, of course, to criticize the pretension

of generations of scholars and artists

who claimed

work was beyond material

pecuniary influence. In

or, indeed,

the work of connoisseurship and

fact,

ments

the

of

all

its

that their

accoutre-

catalogue raisonne, the searching for provenance

or pedigree, the formal analysis that reads like stocktaking

accurately described as the proper

But

in

dismissing judgments of artistic formal

significance as merely "arbitrary"

one

is

and "capricious," Boime

reverting to the neopositivist (or empiricist) position

of dichotomizing content

(seen

primary)

as

Boime himself undercuts

(secondary).

introduction to the

first

social content.

reproducing pre-existing ideas, then,

determinant of

just

what

is

language of art

Far from merely

artistic

form

Marx wrote

No

an

in 1844, in the

greater

role

in

about

bringing

(or,

at

least,

compellingly addressing) historical change.

By

contesting

received

visual

institutionalized relation to

advanced modern

its

well

as

ideas,

as

art's

public, formally or technically

was alienated from the prevailing

art

way

ideology of society in such as

as also to challenge the

existing social orders. This survey of nineteenth-century art,

therefore,

works

upon canonical modernist

mainly

focused

is

mostly paintings made

in

"canon" represents

and

politically alienated works.

cite the useful

retains

the

potential

represent conflicts and contradictions

Indeed, what
here

is

in the belief that

embrace and

to

still

forceful today.

most extraordinary about the art under review

the degree to which the

questions

artistic

own

is

The "modern tradition," to

oxymoron, alone among nineteenth-century

traditions

artistic

just

France

such a body of formally advanced

this

it

same contentious

political

and

addressed continue to reverberate in our

day; these issues include the debates over the value of

local versus national,

and popular versus

elite cultures,

the

question of the existence of a "canon" of great authors and

and concerns with the

artists,

sexuality, social class, gender,

century

artists also

artistic

representation of

and ethnicity. Nineteenth-

confronted for the

first

time in the history

of art the emergence of techniques for the mass-reproduction

and distribution of their works

as well as the vexing question

of the politics of public exhibition and

museum

display. In

addition, the critical modernist project they initiated

was

intimately engaged with the forms and imagery of mass and

non-European culture
tration
It

is

for example, with

magazine

illus-

and Native American Mandan hide paintings.

of course possible to

commonalities between

insist

art issues past

too strongly on the

and present, but the

constellations are often convincing. Indeed,

we

believe that if

mere obedient servant

our texts raise contemporary political questions concerning

passive mirror) of ideology, artworks are one

representation, whether of class, gender, ethnicity, or sexua-

instrument with which humanity makes and remakes

this

is

expressed, and thereby

evolution of society and history.

less,

his

languages are

all

plays a formative material role, as

(even

in

art as "essentially a

social constructions, the formal

must be imbued with

essential

view

this

language of signs that transmits ideas." Since

by definition

from form

volume of A Social History of Modern

Art (1988) when he describes visual

too

is

art

and auction houses rather than of independent

dealers
scholars.

for

domain of commercial

played

way, formally innovative works of visual art

may

itself.

in fact

they will have succeeded in more closely approaching a

In

lity,

be

nineteenth-century

judged more significant than conservative ones because they

historical

and

art

critical

in

which

there

emerged

new

consciousness of society and culture.

IVI'ROIH CTION

13

Classicism and Romanticism

1

PATRIOTISM AND VIRTUE:

DAVID TO THE YOUNG INGRES
THOMAS CROW
THE CULT OF CIVIC VIRTUE

be slavishly adjusted to the contingent habits and costume of

one's country; to mirror one's compatriots as one found

NO ONE

FRANCE HAD THE SLIGHTEST IDEA

INthat1781,
a revolution would begin before the decade was out, an

would be merely

upheaval of every social institution which would not spare the

republics of ancient Greece and

IN

traditional fine arts.

But

were ready

artists

advance to

in

to

reproduce and endorse

An

unequal society.

ideal

Rome

live

French public would confront

civic

virtue worthy of comparison

the artist's vocation:

a novel idea

no longer the dutiful servant of the

and the church who defines success

in

of

state

new-model

his

independence from the dictates of royal patrons and

artist (invariably

assumed

to be male) vaunts

postures of conformity; he speaks over the heads of insiders

and bureaucrats

to

make contact with

the large audience

who

thronged the spaces of the public exhibitions, the so-called

Salons, which took place in the old palace of the

By

two

years.

this

audience begins to change.

and passive crowd,

it

Where it had been

becomes the embodiment

public opinion, a palpable force with a role

one

Louvre every

virtue of this appeal, the perceived character of

even

of active

dominant

common ground between

artist

and audience can

be defined by two terms: patriotism and virtue.

stand them, however,

power and use

it

is

To

under-

necessary to reconstruct their

in the period. Patriotism did

the chauvinistic overtones which

encumber

the

with the self-denying

The

philosophical and political debates of the 1760's and

had separated the inheritance of Classical antiquity from

'70's

normal

its

the

role of providing

symbols of authority and

previous century, Louis

XIV

rule. In

had customarily been

likened both to Alexander the Great and the sun god Apollo;

Classicism was a catalog of

pomp and

magnificence. But in

these years approaching the Revolution, Classical culture was

more

likely to call to

mind

toughened citizen-soldier or

stoic philosopher living in voluntary poverty with

ordinary

Frenchman with some education might

whom

an

identify.

The very words patriotism and virtue summed up this change.

This growing gap between the Classical tradition and the

determining the success of painting or sculpture.

in

This new

specific

a floating

heroes of antiquity.

terms of official favor,

the

An artist who

demands would thereby demonstrate

could

eight years, the

were called on to

corrupt present.

overturn old norms and customs of art-making. Over the next

to these

them

the defects of an

was therefore required, and the

provide a counter-example to

up

all

not carry

word today;

needs of the ruling order created a new space

could operate.
exploited

it

The

artist

who

which painters
first

and

with the greatest power was Jacques-Louis David

(1748-1825). In 1781, he was 33 years old,

young and

in

recognized this

relatively untried artist.

still

considered a

He had undergone

the

nor did virtue connote a priggish or self-satisfied private

lengthy and laborious training required of any ambitious

morality. Devotion to the nation, to la patrie, represented a

aspiring

painter,

which included years of long sessions

universalized allegiance to one's fellow citizens and to the idea

devoted to drawing from prints, then from plaster casts of

of the general welfare, usually at odds with obedience to the

ancient sculpture, and finally from the live model. This

dictates of the state

and accepted

social

custom.

The duty

of

the artist was to set an example of individual emancipation, to

break

free, at least subjectively,

from government patrons who

represented only a self-seeking minority.

14

Nor was

one's art to

sequence of study elevated the inheritance of Classical

the direct evidence of living nature, which the

art over

young student

could only approach once he had thoroughly absorbed an

idealizing abstraction. All of David's formal artistic education

Jacques-Louis David

took

place

within

Belisarius Begging

the

Royal

Alms

7
1781. 9'5x io'2 8 (287.3x312.1)

Academy of

Painting and

Sculpture, which had been established under Louis

XIV

to

were given their

surrounded

final

at first

induction into the great tradition,

hand by the remains of ancient

organize and perpetuate a clear hierarchy of ambition and

exemplary classicizing

honor among

had extended his stay

artists.

Only those painters capable of producing

complex narrative compositions on Classical themes

('history-

in the

rewards that the state could

loyalty

The

culmination of a successful youthful career, which

David reached

at

the age of 26, was the

Rome

Prize.

This gave

the winner a scholarship period, lasting three years or longer,

at

the French

Academy

in

Rome. There

the best

young

artists

now

and the

of the Italian Renaissance. David

for nearly six years,

and when he

returned in 1781 he seemed more than ready to take his place

paintings' as they were called) could aspire to the highest

offer.

art

art

and

normal succession of history painters, one whose

would be

its

His

duty

first

to

to the established traditions

of the

first

Academy

embellish the aura of the monarchy.

painting for the Salon, however, began to probe the

potential of traditionally Classical subject matter to exploit the

new

dissenting constructions of patriotism.

CI

He produced

LT OK CIVIC

1R II

15

officials

who

believed that reform was necessary in order to

put the French monarchy back on secure social foundations.

The character of Belisarius thus

two camps

to put his feet in

provided

)av id with a

power and

patriots outside the corridors of

means

both that of dissenting

at once:

that of a small

group of reforming bureaucrats who were themselves

isolated

and on the defensive within the government. David needed

happened

appeal to this latter group, as

it

administrator responsible for the

Academy and

David obligingly put

sentimental regret, his hero's misery and

Pierre Peyron The Death ofAkestis

1785.

its

contrast with an

mute appeal

exalted former state constituting a

success of the Belisarius with both

how

the Salon exhibitions, with their free and open access to

camps demonstrated

everyone, could put vivid images of the virtue of the ancients

10'8 x 10'6 (327 x .125)

on the theme of the blind Belisarius begging

responsible for the

According

Emperor

for

general largely

Justinian's extensive conquests.

to legend, Belisarius

became the victim of jealous

intrigue at court. Falsely believing

Emperor ordered

Roman

him

that he be blinded

David's painting, an old soldier

guilty of treason, the

and dispossessed. In

who had

incendiary.

The

The

reduction of a complex story to a

few figures and eloquently simple gestures was

alms. This character was the actual

for a renewal

and nothing more

CALL TO ORDER

into public circulation.

large canvas

the visual arts.

on emotions of pity and

his stress

of lapsed royal benevolence

to

to include the

itself viewed as

reproach to the profusion of subsidiary figures and ornament

in older

academic

art,

which seemed more about the vanity of

display than the communication of moral truth. In terms of

David's career,

it

had the effect of securing the first of a regular

succession of state commissions for large-scale narrative

paintings: he had arrived as a history painter.

With

that arrival

came

number of students attracted

a large

by his synthesis of daring

leader in

his

command

dependent condition. The painting amplifies

this

received their formal training in drawing at the Academy, they

veteran's shock of recognition through the contrast between

acquired their practical instruction in making paintings in the

the magnificent triumphal arch, redolent of glory and rule,

studio

victorious
pitifully

with the

campaigns recognizes the

fall

from glory enacted

of charity from a passing

The theme

had published

exiled

general

denouncing the
eroding the

in a beggar's abject

acceptance

woman.

is

The

writer Jean-Francois

novel with that

made

to

title in

deliver

1767, in

of the French

lengthy

state:

official

were

religious

and the domination of favoritism over merit.

company of his
faithful general,

himself comes in secret, in the

heir Tiberius, to listen to his once

who

and ever-

can no longer see him.

This hopeful parable of the ruler coming

was

own

students, he

as a whole.

life

In contrast to the

a far more open, egalitarian atmosphere. At a time

when most young artists abandoned formal education in their

early 'teens, he laid

students

down

know Latin and

the requirement that

Academy, would provide

all

of his

thus have independent access to

Classical learning. His studio, rather than the

their

hidebound

primary locus of intellectual

discussion and moral identity. Together they began to act on

artists

modern French

of the Greeks,

novel had attracted the support of certain embattled state

their

CULT OF CIVIC VIRTUE

his

encouraged

creative liberty

With

authoritarian hierarchy observed by other masters, David

not ungrounded in political reality. Marmontel's embattled

16

his

concerns to include the philosophical and practical

the belief that

to his senses

David had served

took devotion to the example of the ancients beyond strictly

organization of studio

monologues

artists

apprenticeship with the most rigorous Classicist of the older

artistic

Eventually, the sanity of his message induces the mighty again

to seek his counsel: Justinian

master.

individual

Marmon-

intolerance, a parasitical nobility, the reign of luxury over

civic virtue,

of an

which the

social evils that his creator believed

vitality

of the Classical tradition. While aspiring

generation, Joseph-Marie Vien.

of Belisarius was not just any item from the

catalog of ancient virtue.

tel

fallen

political allusion with

impeccable

served in his

who

artists

(so

it

could behave as had the

was argued) were granted

and thus were inspired

communities

to express the ideals

in perfected physical form.

of

JACQUFS-LOL'IS DAVID The Oath of the Horatii Between

the

Hands of Their Father 1785.

In a short time, David's studio began to preempt the

functions of the Academy.

When his most favored apprentice,

Jean-Germain Drouais (1763-88), came

Rome

to

compete

for the

Prize in 1784, both master and pupil treated the result

as a foregone conclusion.

When

Drouais was predictably

successful, they effectively declared themselves independent

of the state by financing the journey from their

The bond between them was so

him

to

Rome and

students also

made

close-knit studio

During

tight that

own

resources.

David accompanied

touchstone of Classical drama

person
the

in the

way

that

English-speaking

concerns the
settle the
city's

triplet

known by any educated French

Hamlet or Macbeth would be known

world.

The

narrative

of the

champions of early Rome, summoned

war with neighboring Alba by combat with

champions, their own cousins, the likewise

Curiatii. In the tangled ties of kinship that

in

play
to

that

triplet

gave Corneille his

other

tragic material, the wife of the

the trip, so that something of the

same

warrior of the six to survive, was sister to the Curiatii, while

for nearly a year.

environment could be transferred

his time in

to Italy.

Rome, he completed, with Drouais's

breakthrough to dominance over French painting for the

life:

the seventeenth-century tragedy Horace by Pierre Corneille, a

Two

remained

assiduous assistance, the work that would give him his

of his long

10'9J x 13'1 1J (329.9 x 424.8)

The Oath of the Horatii Between

Their Father (1785). His subject matter

came

the

rest

Hands of

indirectly

from

his

own

sister,

Camilla, was betrothed to one of his victims.

She became one

in

her turn

mourning her beloved and

As

youngest Horatius, the only

kills

when Horatius

finds

her

her on the spot.

fixed in a surviving preparatory drawing, the subject

which had been assigned David was the father of the clan
successfully defending his son before the

Roman

M.l.

people for

TO ORD1.K

i:

4 ELISABETH-LOUISE

18

VlGEE-LEBRUN

ENTERPRISE OF

WOMEN

Marie-Antoinette With Her Children 1787. 9'ixX4 (275x215)

the latter crime. This

scene,

a free adaptation

is

where the elder Horatius pleads

before the king of

Rome. But

of Corneille's

for his son's

murderous

victor

by the three sons

is

forgotten; the

triumph or die

to

pardon

the final composition does not

The

depict the event described in his commission.

the

final

new

subject

defense of
is

pledge

mutual recognition between them,

combat (this oath appears nowhere

any

in the play or in

to offer

no release

space beyond the starkly symmetrical colonnade

contemporary standard, these were

into

deep

by every

daring and dissonant

all

simplifications.

honor of Rome, an

for the

event imagined by the artist to have occurred before the

fateful

the male and female groups with no mediating transitions or

It

was through

this rhetoric of style that

David's painting

spoke most forcefully to feelings of patriotic discontent with

the established cultural order. In the eyes of

admirers,

its

its

of Corneille's ancient sources). In order to equal the visual

harsh notes and impatience with compositional subtleties

impact of any other painting

elevated the

he enlarged without

in the Salon,

permission the previously agreed dimensions of the canvas by

fifty

percent.

Thus David was

also taking over responsibility for setting

mind and moved

private emotions

away from

center stage; the pride and inflexibility of the early

Romans, so

foreign to

modern mores and

had come

alive

so telling a reproach to them,

on canvas.

the scale and subjects for his paintings, despite their being

paid for by the state. This went hand in hand with calculated
defiance at the level of style. His invention of the oath-taking

allowed him to

striking unity, an almost primitively elemental configuration

of bodies.

would demonstrate how much strength history

It

The

of David and his group depended on a large

initiatives

and secure

level

of state subsidy for history painting, the sheer

painting could gain from an austerity of means that seemed at

scale of which left

one with the stoicism of these early Romans. At the same time,

had been

David took advantage of the inherent problem faced by

communicating

history painters in

the heights of the

room

Like no one

else's painting,

the spaces of the

memory

in the

of

exhibition,

its

its

narrative across

and leave

male bodies

its

starkly

permanent

as a

dialectical sharpness of the

new

austere and declamatory voice, stood in pointed

its

contrast to the intricately embellished pictorial rhetoric of his

An example would

academic colleagues.

shown

Alcestis,

Peyron

is

a wife's self-sacrifice so that her

David's innovations

atmosphere, seem
involved to

mode of composition

group of female

figures,

the

darkened, softening

in the civic arena.

retained a similar

all

husband might

thing of the past, too subtle and self-

make an impact

That David

in his self-contained

but exclusively there,

made

the

more emphatic.

income from private commissions

From

works.

talents of the

new generation were drawn

this left a

vacuum

the admission

in painting.

inseparable from

violations of

his audience's habitual expectations as to

compositional
press

all

skills

into the production

in the other

genres of art. Almost instantly a

places for only four)

Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749

its

how such

implicitly rejected

a scene

the developed

of generations of academic painters.

To

of the figures into the same foreground plane, to join

1803)

and Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842). In terms of

both quality and patronage

on

to

at the highest levels, they

dominate portraiture during

Regime

including

this final

would go

decade of the Old

which were

portraits of the royal family,

virtually equivalent in status to Classical history paintings.

The

latter artist,

had the easier path

had been
Saint
1

5,

28 years old

at the

to recognition.

a portraitist

and teacher

Luke (the survivor of the old

time of her reception,

Her

Louis Vigee,

father,

in the lesser

artists' guild).

Academy of
By

the age of

her precocious talent was attracting well-born and wealthy

clients,

and

in

1779 she sealed what would be

married a successful

her

conventions of narrative

It

and decorative

women came to the fore. The year 1783 saw

of two women to the Academy (there were

to overturn the accepted

should be organized.

for portraits

on

of highminded (and usually mediocre) public paintings, and

ducted herself as

is

artists relied

1775 onwards, however, the ambitious male

relationship with the

David's withdrawal from Paris and his gathering of the

painting

a decade. Previously

sponsorship of the highest genre had been more often a

independent forces of his studio helped strengthen his resolve

The impact of the

Such support

for dissenting gestures.

no longer than

matter of lip service rather than actual funds;

made Peyron's compactly interwo-

ven grouping of figures, emerging from

contrast

be The Death of

his principal rival Pierre

1744 18 14), whose theme, taken from the drama of

Euripides,
live.

same Salon by

in the

official

room

in place for

cohort of talented

viewers.

The abrupt transitions and

painting,

were hung near the

contemporary engravings).

would beam

it

crammed

calligraphic configuration of

image

Salon audience from

to the

large canvases

(all

distant ceiling, as can be seen in

THE ENTERPRISE OF WOMEN

the complexities of the story into a

distill

continuing

young Queen Marie-Antoinette. She

art dealer, J.-B.-P.

Lebrun, and con-

a significant figure in society,

own soirees and attracting regulars from

presiding over

the upper spheres

of Parisian culture and state administration.

The

reigning

tone was one of elegant simplicity on antique models.

Vigee-Lebrun and David maintained

ship; the latter's education

colleague, but his patriotic

and

style

war) social relation-

made him

commitments

natural

occasionally caused

ENTERPRISE OF

\\o\ll.\

1<)

This was not

but

a didactic history painting,

Queen with her

of the

By

children.

a state portrait

the middle years of the

decade, Marie-Antoinette had become a focus for popular

resentment

against

took

dissent

and

policies

state

endless crisis of indebtedness.

advantage

delighted

the

government's

tide of published political

of her

reputation

for

unprincipled extravagance and scandalous public behavior,

particularly in the

brother-in-law, the

company of her rakish and reactionary

Comte d'Artois. Vigee-Lebrun's portrait

displays the traditional

pomp of regal

portraiture, provided by

the setting in the Versailles Palace with the magnificence of

the Hall of Mirrors visible to the

properly upright, and the

artist

left.

The Queen's

pyramid ordained by the most

the solid
teaching.

pose

is

has arranged the group into

sanctified

academic

That seriousness of bearing and self-presentation

was crucial

in the

intended effect of the painting,

in that the

King's foreign wife was widely seen to have distracted the

amiably simple monarch from his paternal devotion to the

nation.

The

portrait's stress

on her

Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun

Daughter 1789. 41J x 33 (105 x

Portrait of the Artist With

The

studied precariousness of the baby's seat in her

by gestures of loving emotion from the older

show

children, was designed to

Her

grown

84)

mother

into her role as

good mother

in the natural,

the

Queen

from her cosy

to recoil

portraits indeed served as a

certain

of the

alliance with the royal house.

medium

for the incorporation of

Enlightenment attitudes into the

ruling

elite.

Her

style

and self-image

She moved the genre away from

artist's

state,

competence

to the royal heirs but as being a

from the

positive benefit

empty space

and

looming

station,

toward

a cultivated disdain for affectation

and

self-

portrait with her daughter (1789) set a kind of standard in this

new

pursuit of innocent candor. In

it

she defines herself in

first

It

was no

fault of the

rendering this balancing act that the

out of fear of a negative public response, withheld the

portrait

conventional attitudes and costume intended to convey rank

corresponding emphasis on individual feeling. Her

in

as not only having

nurturing manner celebrated by

the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility.

him

official

opening of the Salon of 1787. Any

was annulled

in the

fiscal deficit.

in the general ridicule,

Vigee-Lebrun herself left France

The

career of Labille-Guiard

followed a substantially

from that of her more luminous

demonstrates the widening options that opened up

precise social location but serve to suggest an imaginative

grudgingly and briefly) to

community of grace and

She was

at

feeling; the natural freshness

of skin

one with the natural spontaneity of the embrace.

The compression and

compact oval

at the

a survival

of one of

the favorite devices of Rococo decorative artists from the early

decades of the century: a familiar old form

a

new

duty.

And Vigee-Lebrun's

is

made

to

perform

version of the natural

six years older

is

the

commissions of the 1780's.

20

ENTERPRISE OF

WOMEN

she was

delicate public-

She achieved

rank not unlike

King's unmarried aunts, but her sense of vocation

This she projected with confidence and conviction

six feet in height, the

handed one of the most important and most

(albeit

this decade.

displayed a greater intellectual and professional gravity.

absence of the unexpected. Having already demonstrated that

in her career,

during

it

Vigee-Lebrun's, in 1785 becoming portraitist to Mesdames,

self-portrait

performance early

artists

and

and had received her most important

specialist in the portrait genre.

characterized throughout by a reassuring consistency and

sort of reliable

women

rival,

training from a history painter, F.-A. Vincent, rather than a

intertwining of the two figures into a

same time represents

at

princely courts throughout Europe.

The

is

at the

outbreak of the Revolution and found an eager clientele

different course

no

and the

hanging was quickly equated with the

terms other than those of her energetic professional prowess.

clothes are simple and unpretentious; they belong to

to

failed in her conjugal

lap, flanked

duties.

mother was meant

role as

answer further charges that she had

which she submitted

to the

in the

Salon of 1785. At over

canvas presents her on a queenly scale of

her own. Instead of any comforting domesticity, she advertises herself as

already a teacher and master of her genre: two

attentive students hover behind her chair.

The

setting

is

6 Adki.aidi.

LABILLE-GUIARD

Self-Portrait With

Two

Pupils 1785.

83x

59J

(210.8x

151

fERPRISE

()1-

\\

OMEN

21

unabashedly

a place

tacked canvas
severe

make

of work, as the prosaic stretcher bars and

plain.

Roman mode (from

sculpted bust of her father in the

an actual work by Pajou) looks on,

but no living male intrudes on the studio's enterprise. This

would have been

point of some importance to the

since

artist,

both she and Vigee-Lebrun were subject to the slander that

men had actually produced

galling tribute

from

their paintings, a

back-handed but

a sexist culture. Labille-Guiard's link to

Vincent remained intimate

they would marry

1790

in

she was especially vulnerable to this reflex suspicion.

and

finery of her dress

hat,

so

The

perhaps incongruous to modern-

which

style

and more

was

less the

mark of an artist's unique

personality

a considered adjustment to the demands of the

subject matter and the occasion. This smaller canvas, offered

emblem of

as an

personal

friendship, called

for

more

harmonious and interwoven compositional order.

In philosophical terms,

it is

more complex theme than

moral questions
nationalist

brushed

place of Corneille's broadly

in

legend.

It

catches the ambivalence Trudaine

would display toward any expansion of the principle office

expression to incorporate popular participation in political

day eyes, would have been deemed an expected and correct

(he would go to the guillotine in 1794 for that reluctance).

outward sign of status and accomplishment. At the same time

suicide

worthy simplicity

she encourages a

in

the dress of her

This

self-portrait stands as a

pedagogy

reminder that enlightened

as a feature of the artist's

new

intellectual

indepen-

dence was not necessarily limited to the erudite pursuits of

male

Classicists.

part in the

known

of Socrates

the

is

Labille-Guiard herself took a sympathetic

coming Revolution and painted one of the few

of a

result

life

The

and more

prior

fundamental renunciation of political action under conditions

moment of his indictment

of democratic sovereignty: from the

students.

the

of the Horatii, emblematizing subtle constitutional and

tale

forward, he accepts without resistance the judgment of the

democratic assembly the better to reject the legitimacy of the

authority behind
the

it.

What more

man who would go on

fitting

purchaser to have than

American

to translate the

Federalist

Papers into French, including James Madison's strictures

against unrestrained factions and the potential "tyranny of the

portraits of Robespierre.

majority" in democratic legislatures?

The

THE CIRCLE OF MEN

treatment of the male body

masculine bonds
After his return from

reorganizing

the

from making

a start

though he had
capitalized

Rome, David was some time

collective

combination of injury,

work

illness,

in

his

own

commission

on new friendships

in

little

or

to the Horatii,

keep his name

named Trudaine de

la

most distinguished

families of royal administrators, presented himself as the

patron of David's Socrates at the

Moment of Grasping

Hemlock (1787). He paid more than handsomely

of commissioning

it:

7000

livres to

one report, augmented to 10,000

for the

the

honor

begin with, according to

the end as an

livres in

expression of his delight with the results (this for a cabinetsized picture

when

full-scale historical

in

its

scale,

as a

balancing element of the composition equal in weight to the

Ganymede

of Socrates himself, a

figure

assisting at the

passage to immortality. In Plato's account of the suicide, the

jailor

bearing the poison

is

only a minor, anonymous presence,

but this prominence given to the physical for

its

own

sake

of the beautiful male body

enlightenment.

The

is

enlisted for the purposes of

speeches of the participants in Plato's

Symposium describe the contemplation of the

beautiful male

adolescent by the mature citizen as a potential means to lead

the

mind upward from

the realm

understanding of universal good.

of the sensual to an

Though

Socrates

is

allowed

his "philosophical" refusal of the sexual seductiveness of

Alcibiades, there

is

a great deal of

humorous carousing and

canvas

wealthy Athenians present.

a retelling of the suicide

classify all

functions

cupbearer

delicious reminiscence of erotic feeling on the part of the

like the Horatii).

The story comes from the writings of Plato, who had been

sacrifice,

of the anonymous

the state was paying only 6000 livres for a

student of the martyred philosopher, and more recently from

Diderot. Despite

figure

evokes another facet of Plato, one in which the contemplation

Sabliere, a scion of one of the country's

in Platonic thought.

placement, color, and sensual attractiveness

no lessening of impact.

Early in 1786, a wealthy young jurist

and

studio.

before the public at a lower cost to his time and resources but

with

society

changed from the

that corresponds to

The

hand. In the end, he

in order to

Greek

in

also

way

in

and indecision prevented him

on an equivalent successor

a royal

is

strained austerity of the Horatii in a

its

by the French philosophe Denis

stark prison-setting

and theme of

self-

the Socrates calls into question the tendency to

of David's history paintings of the

780's under the

abstinence of Socrates

is

And

in

the

end the sexual

meaningful only because of the

palpable desire stimulated by the proximity of the beautiful

male beloved. In David's painting, Socrates reaches

cup and

for the

Later, in his

boy

in the

same

monumental

for the

gesture.

history painting

Leomdas

Thermopylae (1814), David would put on display

his

at

under-

heading of an austere and militant virtue. His formal choices

standing of the central place held by same-sex eros in the

were made within

warrior culture of ancient Greece.

22

a rhetorical

CIRCLE OF MEN

conception of painting, one in

The

Socrates likewise

is

30

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID

meant

to

Socrates at the

be a Greek painting, not a

Moment of Grasping

Roman one, imbued

sophisticated scholar's appreciation of

"Greek

daine was the center of a circle famous for both

sophistication and

its

lavish entertainments;

which the serious pursuit of

with the cultivation

of

the

political

lightly

it

love."

Hemlock 1787. 5U

with a

Tru-

its

intellectual

was

a milieu in

wisdom was bound up

carried

erudition amid

x 11\ (129.9 x 195.9)

Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824), painted

background figures

in

the

number of

the

and other talented

Socrates,

students were in the wings. But David's aspirations for his

and many observers

were centered on

group
ing

in his

for

the

hope of French paint-

who was engaged

the distant Drouais,

own

struggle to assert his independence against the

Rome.

multiple temptations of the table and the bed. David plainly

constraints imposed by the French authorities in

enjoyed the attention of this company, and his painting

practical terms, however, a lone student isolated in a foreign

tribute to

and document of one

And

these points

it

many

points in

the beauty of the Socrates

manages

ideal of leisured, disinterested

masculine fellowship, which had

with Plato's.

is

is

common

how many of

to touch within such a

compactly

environment was dependent on the Academy, and

Roman

painting conformed to the

first

of

painted study of the male nude to be submitted to the

judgment of the academic elders back

in Paris.

genre of narrative historical painting, he

this obligation to the

VIOLENT PATRIMONY

same exalted

Barred by

internal

David's most important bonds remained the working rela-

the entire

arrival, the

twenty-year-old

which

it

drama. As depicted, the wound

Despite the distractions of such erudite and worldly company,

A new

set

about elevating

plane.

Drouais's Dying Athlete, completed in 1785, transformed

the balanced studio pose on

tionships of the studio.

his earliest

requirements:

entrenched authority from devoting his talents to the highest

legible image.

its

In

body

is

is

based into

is all

tense

but inv isible, but

organized to mark the spasm of pain that

energizes the figure.

Although the bodj

IOI.I

as a

\T

l>

whole seems

\TKI\1()\N

fullv

drawn out along

its

continuous lower contour,

it

is

in fact

twisted unnaturally at the center along a harshly incised

transition. Its languid extension

violated at the center of the

is

torso in a contraction that reads as an involuntary one of pain.

The

raking light further throws that area into shadow so that

body

the

is

divided by zones of light and dark as well as by

disposition in space.

The

light

is

the zone of control; despite

the wrenching pain, the warrior's reaction to

dark zone; he resists and contains

overall

composure of

costs the warrior

right

is

his figure

its

is

it

it is

limited to the

so thoroughly that the

undisturbed.

The

effort

it

registered in the contrast of the supporting-

hand with the

left.

What had been no more

than the

definition as artists.
carrier of

They would

complex meaning

had attempted
impatient to

at

test

the

-develop

beyond anything

far

their elders

also

himself directly against his master's example.

his obligatory student

beyond

potential as a

same stage of life. Hut Drouais was

With David's encouragement, he worked

project

its

work

his years

and

in

in secret,

neglecting

order to throw himself into

station,

one plainly intended

for

the public arena of Paris.

The subject which

life

they chose together was a

moment in the
late Roman

of Caius Marius, a general and consul of the

Republic. This episode comes

Marius's

career

into

in

Roman

fact

from the decline of

and tyranny.

corruption

Under a
down his

model's fatiguing effort to maintain the pose, becomes an

sentence of death by the

inner determination to hold the body upright to the end, to

executioner by the sheer force of his presence; in the next

refuse collapse into unconsciousness.

moment the soldier drops his sword and flees. The malign side

This

is

the

mark of the

hero,

and

it is

meant

to enlarge the

of the

"hero"

is

not,

Senate, he faces

however,

immediately

apparent,

aura of heroism beyond exploits of the fictional warrior to take

resembling as he does the severe but benevolent patriarch of

achievement as

the Horatii. Its minimalist pairing of two soldierly male

in the suffering artist's

would became a pattern

figure as a

24

for

Drouais,

it

young artists to use the single male

primary focus for their early ambitions and

Jean-Germain Drouais The Dying

well. After

VIOLENT PATRIMONY

self-

Athlete 1785. 49}x7i}(i25xi82)

characters extended David's Corneillian esthetic

tical

the dialec-

sharpness, abrupt transitions, self-aggrandizing utter-

Jean-Germain Drouais Marius

at

Minturnae 1786.

9' x 12'2

(274.3 x 370.8)

ance, and single-minded stress on pride and inflexibility in the

mores of ancient

Rome

to a degree that eliminated even

David's small allowances for prevailing

But the Marius ( 1 786)

at the

same time

artists. It is

young

reveals something of

figured most of all in the cloak with which the

soldier shields his face,

which Drouais uses

to turn his painting diametrically against

Horatii.

The theme

its

as a device

model

in the

of the latter painting was one of solidarity

between the generations, the authority of the father passing

his sons along with the swords:
in rapt attention to the tense

same

intensity.

is

of the painting, and

all

end

to

went into

advantage. Despite

its

impression

it

conveys of

making, worked

its

in the

moral ambiguities, the

its

a bristling, barely

contained energy

could readily be understood as the sign of virtue condemned

to perpetual struggle in an unjust society.

was put on display

in the

When

Drouais family home

the Marius
in the early

spring of 1787, public response was wildly enthusiastic.

The

David's heroes were engaged

triumph without the necessity of a Salon. Thomas Jefferson

point of contact between them,

But when that same spectator puts himself

blindness and isolation.

at the heart

painting was capable of creating the excitement of a Salon

or herself in the place of either protagonist in the

effect

unresolved

to

and the vision of the spectator was vicariously engaged with

the

left

the visible signs of the strain involved in controling the

refractory materials that

taste.

the tense emotional and psychological interplay between the

two

blindness,

The

Manus,

the

deceptively noble face of

Marius was one that Drouais refused

to contemplate; he put

joined the stream of spectators and

by the experience: "It fixed

hour, or half an hour,

me

like a statue a

do not know which,

of time, even the consciousness of

intensity of the painting,

unresolvable

which

banished

visage and himself.

otherwise eminently capable of

rational

is

from

reflection

for

my

quarter of an
I

lost all ideas

existence.''

in large pari a result

of

contradictions

an abyss, a cancellation of vision, between that implacable

This simultaneous affirmation and denial, vision and

came away overwhelmed

meaning,

its

temporarily

one spectator

least

at

The
of

it.

Drouais never had the opportunity to overcome this anxietj

101.1

i>

imio\i

of influence in a comparable painting, not could he

smallpox while

Rome. His death

in

still

fulfill

the

1788 he died of

hopes of his Parisian admirers. Early in

the age of 26 was

at

ment of Brutus' sons

unit

virtue;

David was inconsolable. Those unrealized

and

expectations

of his

circumstances

the

romanticized into legend that had

were

death

powerful effect on several

generations of young artists

who

would want success

and on terms guaranteed not by

early

followed him. Like him, they

training and experience but by special inner qualities

set the artist apart

from the routine existence and dulled

perceptions of others.

modern

the

artist

which

It

would henceforth be the burden of

perpetually to be called on to demonstrate

glossed over

By

widely ascribed to his zealous overwork in pursuit of ideal

artistic

is

the unseen event which defines

dismemberment of

the living figures, and the

in the Horatii

and composition, the painting can be decidedly ambivalent

about the costs of the hero's

women

as a

The

grieving

light), the

unheard

political resolve.

group (who alone catch the

protest of Brutus' wife (whose outstretched

entire composition), are treated with as

sympathy. The painting allows room

Greek
that

hand

much

for

a truly tragic recognition that the social

the condition of humanity

violates the

There was an unintended coincidence between David's grief

for the Salon of 1789,

and

engagement with the subject even more

this surely

made

intense. In his Lictors

new

political order. It

of their mother,

who was

the monarchy.

Under the law

him

to deliver

it

and

order for

was through the

who must contemplate

it

is

their

end

And David

in the

former

is

exploits an even

The immobile

central actor

shadowy

of the canvas, most conspicuously the grief-

stricken female nurse at the far right.

One

great gap occupies

the opposition between male and female,

between clenched angularity and supple, curvilinear form,

verges on disassociation. Meaningful connections are

not so

much

rather in the

in the actions

mind of the

be the closest the art of painting has

its

own,

pictorial

it

terms

same

questions one of the fundamental assump-

drama going back

to Aristotle:

that great

The nurse, isolated

own private world of

passions are the property of the well-born.

at the far

sorrow,

edge of the composition

is

in

her

the chief formal and thematic counterweight to

Brutus himself.

histrionic

corner; other key elements of the action are likewise scattered

it,

may

rendering tragedy in

The

tension visible in her jawline, neck, and

making the response of the noble matron seem somehow

vacates the center of the composition and sits in a

the center; across

its

was mandatory, and the law

starker syntax of disassociation in order to call the categories

to the sides

have

oppose the smooth, uninflected rendering of Brutus' wife,

the sacrifice of his male offspring for

of male heroism into question.

will

had himself brought

to witness the execution.

ignominious.

as the existence of society

shoulder, the lean and austere grandeur invested in her body,

good of the country. But where

the

heroic, here

body can

rather than merely illustrating those of the stage. At the

made

and expressions depicted, but

viewer, which

and silences between separate and

is

activated by the gaps

distinct elements.

The

and inadequate by comparison.

The power of that

Like the Horatii, the painting concerns the rigor of a father

It

in the plot to restore

that Brutus

into being, a sentence of death

obliged

own

related to the expelled

two sons had been enlisted

king, that the

to

tions of tragic

corpses of his two male heirs, executed at his

ties

come

time, however,

Caesar's assassin), as he might have received the beheaded

treason against the

David's Brutus
ever

the

is

and

to say,

transgression of

continuum of nature, so nature

Republic, Junius Brutus (namesake of

Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, the hero

Roman

his

itself;

is

revenge.

over the loss of a virtual son and the theme of the painting he

blood

same time

human community.

EQUALS

to

his action,

praised," that Brutus' character was at one and the

come into being only by means of a temporary

founder of the

not greater

"cannot be sufficiently condemned or sufficiently

it

encompasses

Returning

if

both halves of the

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF

was preparing

stabilizes the

famous judgment on

historian Plutarch's

simultaneously above and below the

10

consequence.

is its

virtue of its disruptions of normative order in technique

"that of a god and that of a savage beast," which

that exalted state.

of

all

the family

light of evidence that

figure
it

becomes even more

recruit to the studio, Francois

as crucial a detail as the

striking in the

was not painted by David but by

new

Gerard (1770 1837). Likewise,

head of Brutus may have been painted

by Girodet. In any event, the two young painters had been

drawn

into an intimate collaboration parallel to that

David and Drouais on the

Horatii. It

is

between

today an old-fashioned

expression to refer to the students or followers of an artist as

constituting a "school." But

meaning of the word

it is

important to restore the basic

in this instance:

no

Trudaine, David's studio had become

less

than the circle of

a place of collective

learning and experiment within the Classical tradition, but

with the added pressure and risk of a high-stakes project

to

be accomplished and tested in public.

And

the practical

character of their interaction generated a different kind

of

art,

an interrogation of the idea of civic virtue which

is

formal dismemberment of both composition and surface

world away from the comfortable philosophical pieties of

becomes not only means but metaphor,

the Socrates.

26

for the

dismember-

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS

io

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID

These were lessons

attending

Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons 1789.

to

which Girodet

in

particular

was

the concentration of bodily eloquence within

10'7J x L3'10| (322.9 x 422)

admirers

in the press

between

the

found

shadowed

much

to praise in the contrast

background

with

its

suggestive

contours of a compact geometric simplicity, the evocation of

mystery and the vividness of the foreground group of figures

inexpressible sorrow and loss through absence and a drastic-

with

reduction

of pictorial incident. Through his aristocratic

family he gained a commission, unusual for such a

artist, to

paint a large-scale

work (11}

feet in height)

young
on the

startling

its

of color and unsettling

juxtapositions

naturalism in the treatment of Christ's body.

Girodet's painting was on a directly analogous subject and

was almost as

large.

His conception both pays homage to

and challenges him

subject of the Virgin with the dead Christ. In so doing, he was

Regnault, his master's

responding to the other major event of the 1789 exhibition,

Davidian terms of austere rhetorical grandeur. The

which had seen something of a revival (temporary of course)

subject from the public scene of deposition and lamentation to

large-scale religious painting.

in

Twenty-one canvases, more

the private

mourning

of the

than half of those in the "historical" category, had been

elements of the story to

commissioned by the

Marius,

Christian subjects.

state or

by various church bodies on

Lamentation of Christ by Jean-Haptiste

it

plays

saturated

its

rival,

a laconic

large

minimum. Like Drouais's

figures,
field

marked by

narrow beam of illumination. For both

Regnault, a state commission intended for the main altar of

penetrated

fledgling history painters, this device allowed

attention before the late arrival of the Brutus. Enthusiastic

the complications that

vividly

of indistinct gloom

the chapel at Fontainebleau, received the largest share of

by

the

Virgin allows him to reduce the

two highlighted

hues, against

in

shift in

come with

large

them

to avoid

complement of

TRAGEDY VND THE REPUBLIC OF EQJ MS

1:

had been. In

a Classical

manner, Girodet boldly carves

his

signature in a Active inscription at the foot of the sarcophagus,

proudly appending his age of 22.

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE

The

curtailment of religious painting was but one effect of the

changes

in the

French

Bastille in 1789.

art

world

set off"

by the taking of the

David and the painters

in his circle

sympathetically engaged with the Revolution from the

but decisive changes

minded

in their art

artists in Paris

put their

were slow
initial

would take place

the

momentum

The

first

in Italy rather

si

art,

coming. Reform-

energies into a drive for

Academy, including open

egalitarian reorganization of the

access to the Salons.

in

were

important

artistic

innovation

than France, generated out of

established in David's studio in 1789.

Girodet, having

won

his

Rome

Prize, left Paris in 1790

determined to extend the independent identity he had staked

out in his Pieta. In order to live up to the ideal of precocious
genius, he had to contend not only with David's powerful
influence on him, but with Drouais's example as well.
intransigent attitude he displayed in

contempt

12

JEAN-BAPTISTE REGNAULT Lamentation of Christ

II

1789.

figures

13'Il*x91j- (425x233)

and

at the

same time gain the

instant sense of gravity

and profundity conveyed by darkness and

Even

isolation.

more than Regnault, he has forsworn obvious Christian

symbols; there are virtually none in the painting.

The

shroud, sarcophagus,

accessories are Classical or natural:

cavern, dawn. Girodet has fused the bodies of Virgin and

Christ into one continuous outline, a union of

And

expressed in basic bodily terms.

sorrow

in

Regnault's Virgin

inclination

of the

conforming

to

head,

the

is

life

and death

the open expression of

transformed into

eyes

in

an oppressive horizontal

veiled

shadow, the neck

line, in a direct

echo of

the veiled form of Brutus' grieving servant.

But
10

for all

of the painting's indebtedness to rhetorical ideas

present in the Brutus, the

Pieta represented a

moody gloom and

quiet of Girodet's

marked departure from what anyone

would have expected of the Davidian group.

precocious and risky painting, particularly in

its

was

It

effective

manipulation of a vast area of virtually featureless painted

surface,

28

and was

as impressive in its

way

as Drouais's

Marius

TRAGEDY AND THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS

for the

Academy and

Anne-Louis Girodet

its

Pieta 1789.

Rome,

The

his expressions of

teaching, followed the path

x 92* (335 x'235)

13

ANNE-LOUIS GlRODET The

laid

down by

Sleep of Endymion 1791.

And

his late colleague.

19 x 24+. (49 x 62)

Drouais, he had to

like

manifest that resistance while meeting the requirement that

he paint the male nude.

How then

example of independence and

was he

to imitate Drouais's

transformation of the

his

academic nude into an emblem of that independence without

dependent imitation of

falling into a

He found

13

his subject in a

his predecessor?

realm of mythology

far

immediately after his work on the picture, that

work owing absolutely nothing

would spare no

removed

by an

artist.

And

is

expiessed

he evolved

to a systematic reversal of

its

salient traits of Drouais's prototype in the

Roman

athlete

Endymion, the
Selene

His painting, completed

fell

beautiful boy with

whom

into desperate infatuation. In

in

1791, depicts

the

moon goddess

some accounts she

put him into perpetual sleep so that he would always be

had been tense, maximally

suffering, yet ready with his

is

to

be

independence.

so

modern

vividly

and

form through what

almost every one of the

from the vigilantly martial world of David's and Drouais's

heroes.

was

instance in which that very

form of youthful rebellion

amounts

this

David's example and that he

effort necessary to achieve this

It is difficult to cite a prior

insistently

to

Dying Athlete. The

alert,

disfigured

and

weapons. Endymion, by contrast,

drained of tension, never conscious, physically flawless and

in a

perpetual state of

The

bliss,

with weapons discarded in the

available to her nocturnal visits. Girodet has rendered her as

foreground.

immaterial moonlight, whose passage through the overhang-

athlete with an unnatural clarity; the soft moonlight envelops

ing branches

combined

He

is

traits

stated

facilitated

by

smiling figure with

the

of Eros and Zephyr.

repeatedly,

in

letters

the

hard

clay light

body of Endymion with

delineated the body of the

diffuse but entirely natural

obscurity.

written

during

and

More

than Girodet realized, his painting reached beyond

C.

RES OF

Rl.\

()l. I

TK>\ \RY

1R II

29

14

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The Oath of the

the

Tennis Court 1791. 26 x 41 (66 x 105)

Brutus back to the philosophical

Socrates.

apparent androgyny

Its

narrowing of a

male realm,

world of David's

more

precisely

the

of human beauty into an exclusively

total ideal

is

move which pays homage

not only to the

trasts with

David's simultaneous immersion of his art into the

flow of living history back in Paris. In 1791, in the

first

Salon

of the Revolution, his master showed a highly finished

drawing which predicted

new kind of history

painting. This

moment

homoerotic bias of ancient Greek culture but also to the bonds

was the Oath of

of exclusively masculine fellowship within the studio

during the Estates General of 1789 when the delegates of the

Girodet had

itself.

out to prove that the internal complexity of

set

the Tennis Court, celebrating the

Third Estate pledged themselves

to

remain

in

potential appropriate to the hero could be articulated even

assembly until they had achieved

without Drouais's intercutting between the poles of grandeur

"die rather than disperse until France was free."

and beauty, that

latter category.

it

could be accommodated entirely within the

The

result

yet never decays; that

sensual pleasure yet

like

is

is

is

body

that

is

removed from

never exhausted by them; that

is

trained

an athlete of antiquity for war yet remains forever

untouched by violence, knowing death only

ecstatic

in the

midst of

animation of the nerves, muscles, blood, and skin.

As he was completing the Endymion, Girodet was

becoming an

He would
between
artist's

also

active participant in the Revolutionary process.

go on to lead Republican

with the Vatican. So

30

life

subject to perpetual repetitions of

political

it is

difficult to

artists in violent clashes

draw obvious connections

and esthetic commitments. The younger

preoccupation with ideal mythology markedly con-

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE

permanent

a constitution: they

To

would

capture

moment David conceived a vastly multiplied oath of the

Horatii, which now bound the assembled representatives of
the

the nation to a

The

new foundation of civic

order.

source of the commission was not the state, but an

unofficial political

body

calling itself the "Society of the

Friends of the Constitution," more

the old monastery in which

it

commonly known,

held

its

after

meetings, as the

Jacobins. Its commission to the artist was organized as an

expression of the national

with

its

life-sized

will:

three thousand subscribers,

image

in return.

Assembly

itself,

the gargantuan final picture,

foreground figures, was to be paid for by

The

who would

receive a print of the

canvas was to hang

in the

National

to hold before the nation's legislators both the

14

foundation of their authority and an ideal model of the general

the great Revolutionary festivals, with their myriad floats,

will in operation.

Both

and image hark back

act

patriotic fervor

and

self-sacrifice

But

vividly in his- earlier work.

moment

the primal
less a

to the antique

models of

which David had figured so

this literal

when

lesson of David's experience

is

the distance of metaphor,

the actual

that

To

finish

organization of political pageants and ceremonies turned into

The

the artist forsakes

public sphere will

impossibly stable political consensus. After the King tried to

flee

France

Jacobins

to join the external

factions (the

enemies of the Revolution, the

into antagonist monarchist

split

more

and republican

group retaining the name); the

radical

dream of accord emblematized

year-round industry. But he would eventually return to

painting at the behest of his political

came

in the

Oath of the Tennis Court

and

allies,

in

doing so

to affirm the value of his pupil Girodet's concentration

on the eloquent male body.

would have required an

it

political leadership,

proved to be

life

perpetually escape representation. This was the fate of the

project.

David, as he was drawn into the radical

took on the role of supervising this entire apparatus as the

cul-de-sac for history painting.

temporary architecture, and sculptural props.

costumes,

bonding of art and

of Revolutionary public

way forward than

Tennis Court

and enormous enterprise of symbol-making: the creation of

Early in 1793, following the King's execution, a royalist

soldier

had murdered

who had

a deputy, Lepelletier

memorial

to paint a

to the political

conventional

rather

de Saint-Fargeau,

voted for the death sentence. David was called upon

martyr and produced

image of the Classical hero on

deathbed reminiscent of his own

fallen

his

Hector from 1783 (and

had vanished. Amid the growing factional struggles, perpetual

gave over most of the actual painting to Gerard). That

economic

summer another, more incendiary assassination took place.

The extreme populist writer and deputy Jean-Paul Marat was
attacked in his bath by a counter-Revolutionary zealot named

crisis,

and panic induced by military attacks on

France, today's hero was likely to become tomorrow's

This process of

historical

change would not stand

traitor.

to

still

accommodate the atemporal and time-consuming medium of

By 1792 David had

painting.

all

but abandoned his canvas

with only a few of the central figures sketched in the nude. His
pupil Gerard

won

a state

competition with

memorialize the effective

fall,

moment

10 August 1792, but likewise never

working

it

a similar project to

of the monarchy's

moved

down-

to the stage

of

up on canvas.

Charlotte Corday. Marat was the hero of the organized sansculottes,

movement of

the

neighborhoods of the

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY DEATH

demands of

the popular

virtually

making, and viewing

every

Both the

art.

aspect

David put

of conceiving,

practical

and esthetic

summoned

to

produce

The

was worried about

movement and

propensity to

its

The Terror was about

view terror had to be

strictly controlled

to begin,

is

but

in

from above.

that ambivalence into paint. In his

Last Breath, the martyr

affecting

poor

in the

major symbolic tribute was

leadership, of which the artist was a part,

their

upheaval

painting to stand in for the lost martyr. But the Revolutionary

the

vicissitudes of these projects were part of a general

and workers

artisans

city.

required, and David again was

spontaneous violence.

The

Marat

at

His

the saintly "Friend of the People."

papers on the edge of his rude writing stand show that he

had been dispatching some money to

surprised by his killer (whose

own

a soldier's

false letter

widow when

requesting an

ambitions of painters and sculptors had been formed for

audience he

generations within stable governing institutions that took

metaphorical and actual mark of heroic stature, in that he

responsibility for training, advancement, housing,

the most favored artists

assuring

a livelihood.

and

That

for

tradition

and those institutions were suddenly overturned, and by 1792

a

new Republican government was instructing young artists to

The

despise everything for which the old order had stood.

church, long
puritanical

increasingly

source of patronage, was under siege.

austerity

in

enforced

as

private
a

sign

life

A
a

still

carried

typically

holds). His nudity could be read as both a

on

his

duties

through the pain of an

excruciating skin disease, which he could soothe only by

immersion

in a

medicinal bath. While the subject's passion for

equality and fraternity

image

meant

is

is

plain, he

past

is

to console its viewer far

all

action and the

more than

incite

Marat's pose, the instruments of violence, the inscriptions,

the plain

wood of the upright

box, the insistently perpendicu-

succession of revolutionary regimes asked artists to invent

lar

forms for philosophical and ideological messages wholly new

without leaving the factual realm of secular historj

to public art. Unfortunately, those

money

to pay for

back on their

regimes lacked the

what they required, and

own

artists

will

and

were forced

resources in the midst of a shattered

economy.

Some artists and craftworkers found employment

him

or her to a rage for vengeance.

was encouraged and

of civic virtue, while

compositional order,

guidance

in this delicate task,

experiment

in religious

conjure up Christ's sacrifice

all

For

he called on the absent Girodet's

painting from

790, in w hich his pupil

had already diminished overt Christian trappings

in

favor of

atmosphere and the body's own eloquence. Amid numerous

in a

novel

15

borrowings, the most obvious sign of David's reliance on

IK,

RES OF

Rl

oil Tl()\

\m

1)1. \

III

16


Girodet's Pieta

is

the tracing of the contour along the head and

shoulders of the Virgin into the line of the sarcophagus; in a

startling transposition, this has
line

of Marat's head and body as

become almost
it

precisely the

emerges above the bath

the key division of the composition between a lower zone

of incident and

an

full

upper zone of shadowy, meditative

stillness.

For the third of

his

Revolutionary martyr portraits, the

Death of Barn (1793), David returned

imagine

boy-victim

of the

to the Classical

canon

counter-Revolution

as

to

an

unblemished, eerily beautiful ephebe, suffering but without

wounds, dreaming more than dying, near

visible

within the fury of combat.

we are invited
do with

to identify,

The regard of the artist,

but not

to

with which

appears to have scandalously

little

to

civic virtue or battlefield heroism, despite the charge

to the painter.

The sensuality of the body seems to go beyond a

youthful beauty appropriate to

its

age and innocence, and

commentators have assumed with near unanimity

that the

painting suffers from an overbalancing from public to private

preoccupations.

But

15

ANATOLF. DEVOSGF.

after

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The

Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau 1793.

16

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID Marat

18^ x 15J (46.7 x 40)

at His Last Breath

1793. 63| x4<^ (160.7 x 124.8)

32

FIGURES OF REVOLUTIONARY DEATH

his response first of all

must be understood

in

terms of

17

i7

Jacques-Louis David The Death of Bara

the special circumstances of the 1793 commission.

who had

Joseph Bara,
stances,

to

ennoble what was

How was he to find a

Lepelletier and Marat

known

unlucky act of bravado?

for the abstract stereotypes of

outraged innocence and the sacrifice of youth with which he

was forced

work, following Robespierre's unreal dictum

French alone have thirteen-year-old heroes?"

that "the

Once

to

again,

when

tional assignment,
this instance,

in

privileged

demanding and unconven-

he looked to the work of his students. In

own

emblem of

followers, the late Drouais

In

their

virtue

and

particular.

hands,

and

had become a

it

self-sacrifice in youth,

their vision of physical perfection carried with

it

and

statement of

anti-authoritarian originality in style and conception.

If
13

David had needed

received one in the

was

a vivid

reminder of

summer of 1793 when

he

Girodet's Endymion

finally seen, to great success, in the Paris Salon.

His

is

not to say that the translation was

Bara could be

said to have

functioned as a legible icon of Utopian virtue. In fact one can

see in

collapse of this intimate dialogue within the

it

inherited rhetorical codes of Classical art.

Certain aspects of the painting have undeniable power: the

nervous scumbling applied simultaneously to the body and

continued

gestural

freedom

portraits of

David's recent
in

Madame

ventures

the remarkable Revolutionary-period

Chalgrin and

Madame

Pastoret.

it

porous rather than maximally sealed technique, Girodet's

atmospheric unity of figure and ground. But when
the suppression of the genitals

mandate
was

imperative

in

it

came

to

view of the

the

that

David represent outraged innocence

less

happy. The overall illumination and blond

light

deprived David of Girodet's device of veiling shadow; his

response was to take the boy's body and break

simultaneously to figure

its

realm of abstract and ageless beauty would have corresponded

wrenching discontinuity, which marks the body's

is

the bayonet

twisted unnaturally

wound

it

suffering and to downplaj

The body

combination of ideas, and conditions bound up

Here

maximally

pupil's inspired interplay of conceptual oppositions in the

to the difficult

its

extreme

into

permitted him to appropriate, by means of

result

this potential,

this

entirely successful or that the

setting

he was responding to the nude academic study as

transformed by his

Girodet

faced with a

Though

citizens.

personally to the

unknown boy? How was he

at best a trivially

form

had made concrete the longstand-

It

achieved by the ancients and their free society of equal, active

historical actors,

fresh

Bara commission.

How was David to move from

the representation of an

artist, to

in the

ing ideological association between the physical perfection

the celebration of mature victims

who were significant

The young

4(4x61(118x155)

ambiguous circum-

actually died in

was a contrived martyr.

1793.

at its

two,

in
its

sex.

center, subjected to a
violation,

to the midsection that killed the boy.

This

\m DEATH

.v

FIGURES or

Rl.\

oil TK)\

had gone into the collective work of the old studio

that

apart.

Without the

commitment of the

early '90's, these dispersed elements

more obvious and

narrower,

express

to

the great consensus success was

Gerard. This painting (now

qualities of David's

own

first

new

came
more

usually

conservative interests. In the Salon of 1795, the

new order,

split

of the 178()'s or the political

critical spirit

under the

Belisarius by

harked back to the pathetic

lost)

version of 1781, but exaggerated that

pathos by imagining that the blind outcast's young guide had

been

killed

by

a snake; Belisarius is left

without aid, carrying

the boy's corpse through a deserted wilderness.

Gerard was painting

generation of young

by war

in

for the Salon because he,

artists,

had seen

and

all

of his

their career interrupted

The French Academy in Rome had been

Romans early in 1793 (Girodet had narrowly-

Europe.

sacked by pious

escaped the scene with his

since.

The

meant

that painters

life)

and had remained closed ever

Revolutionary reforms of the exhibition system

who would normally have been continumake precocious careers

ing their studies in Italy were free to

in Paris.

The

ineffectual efforts of the

government

program of public commissions meant

professional survival

This

state

depended upon

18 after

Francois Gerard

Belisarius 1795.

isj-

13H46.5 x

34.5)

their

own

to sustain a

the

artist's

early public recognition.

of affairs encouraged a volatile, speculative

approach to subject matter and

Belisarius

that

encouraged

style.

The

success of Gerard's

number of young

similar elderly victims.

As

artists to

that success

produce

was seen

as a

matter of emotional effect rather than reflection on history and

device, along with the

shadowed abdomen,

directly recalls the

virtue, the identity of the outcast could be altered at will.

abrupt inner displacement of Drouais's Athlete, which David

Fulchran-Jean Harriet gave the theme

superimposed over the undisturbed imaginary wholeness of

landscape sublime in 1796, offering an Oedipus at Colonus in

the Endymion.

Much of the strangeness of the image is derived

from the clash of these two incompatible bodies

which

dead guide

Belisarius'

Antigone. Despite

in one.

its

turn

the

into

19

replaced by an unconscious

is

source in the tragedy of Sophocles, the

harsh, windswept environment

unrelieved by the presence

is

of Theseus (the hero of the Athenian polis) or any other sign of

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

the blinded exile's final reconciliation with civic culture.

There was no opportunity

one element

In David's Brutus, the sorrow of any individual actor

for a public response to David's

Bara because Robespierre's government was overturned

the

summer of

in

1794, one day before the scheduled festival in

honor of the child-martyr. This Thermidorian Reaction (socalled because of the

which

it

month

in the

Revolutionary calendar

in

took place), ended the period of radical change, and

republican France entered a five-year phase of indecisive

collegial

government. David, as

a close associate

of the fallen

Jacobin leader, had narrowly escaped the same sentence of

death.

As

it

was, he was sent to prison and remained in

more than

confinement

for

late in 1795,

David soon recovered

teaching studio,

34

Gaining

his full

his lost position

freedom
and large

but his circle would no longer be the

dominant nexus of practice

Without David

a year.

it

had been before Thermidor.

to provide a center, the various

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

components

in

larger

complex of causes and

is

only

effects

addressed to the viewer's active understanding; emotional

responses are elicited

and

deepened

through

cognitive

apprehension of the inevitability of that suffering. In these

paintings of the 1790's, by contrast, individual pain and loss
are isolated
cult

and exploited

of emotion

savored

compatibility with

for sheer intensity of effect.

for

its

own

sake

This

revealed

its

the politics of reaction in the painting that

enjoyed the most enthusiastic response

in the

1799 Salon.

Pierre-Narcisse Guerin (1774-1833), seven years younger

than Girodet, was the

first artist

of the period to come to

prominence who had not studied with David.

his training in Regnault's studio

1797. Still unable to travel to Italy, he set to

of Belisarius

to

his

He had received
Rome Prize in

and won the

work on

Return

Family for the Salon. The subject

20

corresponds exactly to

ment

novel,

the same

passage in Marmontel's Enlighten-

text

on which David had drawn

for his

public debut in 1781. But Guerin went further than had

Gerard

in

suppressing the earnestly political implications of

his source, to the point of effacing the identity of Belisarius

altogether. After the painting

had been completed, he altered

the identity of his hero by the simple

sight

and inventing

whole

new name and

measure of restoring

cloth.

Now the subject was one Marcus Sextus, proscribed

dictator

Sulla

during the

Republic. After the

find his wife

fable

in

fall

civil

late

of his persecutor, he returns

by the

Roman
home to
to this

1799 was overwhelming; crowds surrounded

poems

with laurel garlands.

ate emigres

who had

return under the

The

after

Marcus Sextus, read

the

moder-

Revolution but were beginning to

lenient

and conciliatory regime that

Thermidor. In order that nothing cloud

meaning, the

artist

it

allegory was patent to everyone: for

fled the

more

it;

to its frame; art students decorated

Sulla, read Robespierre; for

that

avoided choosing a hero whose complex

character and fate would be well

artistic

wars of the

dead and family shattered. Public response

visitors attached

came

his

personal history out of

known from

literature

and

precedent. Here there were no troubling ambiguities;

the concept was simple and designed for a predictable effect.

19

Fui.chran-Jfan Harriet Oedipus

at Colonus 1796. 6i}x52

(156 x 133)

20 Pifrrf-Narcissf.

Gufrin

The Return of Marcus Sextus 1799.

85x95H217x243)

LEA\

l\(i

TKRROR

lU.lllM)


allegory of the persecutions suffered by those

still

loyal to the

patriotic cause.

who was

Hennequin,

Drouais's

of

After

unhappy time

a brief,

own way

in

and was imprisoned

in the

made

Revolution

1795 for his part

in

his career.

David's studio, he

Rome, was caught up

to

had

generation,

remained something of an outsider throughout

in

his

Lyon,

in the ultra-leftist

"Conspiracy of Equals" led by Gracchus Babeuf. Only on

his

release in 1797 did he begin his career as an exhibiting artist in

the Paris Salon. Both of his prize-winning canvases

demon-

strated that his loyalty to a learned Classicism as the natural

expression of popular democracy was as dogged as his

Jacobinism. At the same time his irregular training manifests

itself in

naive awkwardness in drawing and a tendency

toward labored handling and an undisciplined accumulation

of figures and incidents. In the densely packed, agitated

composition

of the

the

Orestes,

worked much more

terrifying impasse of

to

his

shortcomings

technical

advantage

conveying the

in

hero. Orestes suffers the torments of

its

the Furies because he has fulfilled his divine obligation to

avenge the murder of his father;

mother was the

in that his

murderer, he has nevertheless committed a crime abhorrent to

the

human community. As an

suffered by the followers of

in general),

PHIUPPE-AUGUSTE HENNEQUIN

21

88x68| (224

Allegory of io August 1799.

it

allegory of the persecutions

Babeuf (and by

that contrasts with Guerin's avoidance of any

x 175). Detail

that

democrats

leftist

uses the complexity of its tragic source in a

might complicate

his message.

known

way

referent

Hennequin makes

his

complaint, to be sure, but shares with his viewer a recognition

that necessity never

removes the moral stigma of murder.

That Hennequin could enjoy success with such defiance of

In stylistic terms, Guerin's painting was a recycling of David's
signature devices from the previous decade (David was heard

Guerin "had been listening outside

to say that

my

door"),

with something of a Girodet-style nocturne thrown in for

melancholy

effect.

violation of what

But

in

moral and intellectual terms,

had been the most deeply held

it

was

beliefs within

is

a sign

artist

splits

malaria

Girodet and

plagued by

and dangers from enemies of France

years. Finally reaching Paris in

simple

1795, he found himself unable to capitalize on the high

reputation that his Endymion had prepared for him. Wealthy

conspicuous triumph. Even

medal

as

would be misleading, despite Guerin's

to see the Directory period as leading to a

first

previous honors an

former's arduous return from Italy

consumed more than two

victory of reaction

Any

between former close friends such

delays,

the

of the disarray and fragmentation that

recognition and support. Intense competition brought about

interrogate and translate the

specifics of its

even normal standards of com-

might have received could not guarantee continued

The

complex inherited

and

characterized culture in this period.

Gerard.

But

in that Salon, the jury

to Philippe-Auguste

awarded

Hennequin (1762-1833),

speculators and military contractors were

command and

direct the

work of artists

now

for

in a position to

whom little public

an unreconstructed Jacobin, for his massive Allegory of 10

support was forthcoming. There was as a result a correspond-

August. This canvas (now sadly mutilated) memorialized the

ing license in matters of painterly style that rendered

insurrection which brought about the final overthrow of the

freedom and individual distinction that Girodet had struggled

monarchy
transferred

as

"The Triumph of

the

festivals into the

22

petence

orthodoxy

David's circle about the responsibility of history painting to

themes.

21

political

36

so hard

to

attain

within

official

structures.

In

fact,

the

symbolic language of the Revolutionary

cultivation of originality

had largely passed from the culture of

medium

art into the fashions of

an extravagant, youth-conscious and

have a similar success

mythological

the French People," and

moot the

in

narrative

of painting. That

artist

went on

to

1800 with his Remorse of Orestes, a

that

was an equally transparent

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

apolitical elite.

Gerard proved himself

far

more adaptable

recording the carefully constructed images of

its

in

leading

22 after

PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE HENNEQLIN The Remorse of Orestes

figures, as in his portrait

style

was

for dress

Public

and

life

Madame Recamier

its

its

perhaps the

last

to

The

Republic of Virtue.
to

witness

the

superficial

appearance of his Endymion establish a corresponding fashion

the

Endymion

His

rival

Gerard led the way

vicissitudes of political orthodoxy.

landscape setting

beings.

to

The

invisible

is

The
in the

in

stillness

and

to a

latter's

Cupid and

Salon of 1798.

Its

outside of time; the bodies exhibit the

temporal corruption appropriate to mythical

innocent Psyche

is

about to

feel

Cupid, and the erudite viewer

pleasure

it

sought a place beyond the

Psyche was the center of attention

immunity

capturing

sealed envelope of flesh and delivering

strain of precious eroticism that

23

in

this
all

metaphysical

conceit,

the
is

first kiss

meant

while

the

of an

to take

frozen

of the hovering on the edge of physical contact

and of awakening carnal desire amount

to a heightening of the

sexual tension inherent in the subject.

Girodet's contribution to the same exhibition clashed with

to mythological refinement. In

of the great Revolutionary portraits, fully

David's Marat, he depicted Jean-Baptiste

the colony of Saint-Dominique (present-day Haiti).

be better to say that this

living

is

25

French National Assembly from

Belley, representative to the

a willed forgetting of the rigors

Girodet was forced

in history painting.

companion's recourse

comparable

this

association with civic virtue.

was marked by

his old

was

but

after the antique,

austerities of Robespierre's

resentful

The

(1805).

15i x 22J- (39 x 56.5)

elegant simplicity and flattering

and coiffure

Classicism exploited for

eroticism, not for

of

1800.

It

would

double portrait contrasting the

and the dead, the African and the European, the force of

action and the force of ideas. Belley leans against a splendid

commemorative bust of Abbe Raynal,

ment advocate of

political

reform,

the great Enlighten-

which the

artist

has

imaginatively erected on a hilltop of the Caribbean island.

Raynal's liberationist ideas and his arguments against colonial

exploitation had prepared the ground for Belley's decisive

intervention in the Assembly in 1794,

for the abolition

when he won approval

of slavery in the colonies and

full

citizenship

for blacks.

The

Belley

painting

celebrates

heroic

triumph

of

Enlightenment ideas and the principle of equality. The

rhetorical antitheses of the paired portraits raise
to the intellectual

unlike the Marat, Girodet's work was

exercise,

and

its

ambitions

and moral standing of historv painting. But

lonely one.

It

willful, individual

found no echo even within the

LEAVING TI.RKOK

HI lll\l)

37

16

1826) were a crucial instrument in the separation of the

Classical tradition

present.

That

from

Odyssey, produced for

political

and moral

Roman

reflection

on the

of Homer's Iliad and

illustrations

artist's

patrons during the

179()'s,

24

were

distinguished by an austere reduction of pictorial description

of contour and two-dimensional pattern. Neither

to the play

he nor his English sponsors saw Classicism as bound up with

the recovery of republican liberties in the present; his imagery

belongs to

And

realm before history even begins.

the

admirers of the abstract intelligence of his designs tended to

view
a

subsequent compromise with empirical experience as

all

corruption of the pure origins of the tradition.

Gerard showed conspicuous attention

to

this

esthetic

current in the Cupid and Psyche. Constance Charpentier

(1767-1849) was one emergent

who was able to take its

number of other women,

artist

potential further. She, along with a

had taken advantage of a Revolutionary loosening of the rules

in artistic instruction to

develop

skills in

the allegorical realm

of history painting. In the past, they would have been barred

from the study of the model and so from academic

training.

Before 1789, David had unsuccessfully fought against that

restriction,

been able

but

to

in the

new environment, Charpentier had

study with him and with Gerard, establishing

herself as a regular exhibitor in the Salon. In a

work

entitled

Melancholy, which met with ah enthusiastic public reception

in

1801, she found a striking

way

to translate

Flaxman's

graphic linearism into painting. She accomplished this by

23

FRANCOIS GERARD Cupid and

Psyche 1798.

73J-

x 52 (186x 132)

building the work out of two opposed conventions of illusion

and by
reconstituted studio of David.

There the

shift

away from

a manifest inconsistency

of illumination.

The

single,

dejected female figure, garbed in a simple Greek gown,

is

contemporary history had taken an even more exaggerated

saturated with light to the point that internal modelling and

turn toward an archaizing Classical culture and the simplified

details are suppressed.

graphic conventions of Greek

the darkly atmospheric forest setting concentrates

and early Renaissance

frescos,

art.

vase

the English sculptor and draftsman

24

John Flaxman, "The

Body of

.18

Fight for the

Patroclus," from Illustrations to

Homer's "Iliad" 1793.

painting,

The

6 x 13 (16.8 x 33.6)

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

Pompeiian

graphic innovations of

John Flaxman

( 1

755

pictorial stress

between

THIS

light

The

startling

and unreal contrast with

all

of the

onto the contours of the figure. That boundary

and dark

is

the passage which effects an

FIGHT FOR THE BODY OF l'ATROCLUS.

26

25

ANNE-LOUIS GIRODET

Portrait ofJean~Baptiste Heller 17(17.

63

(160x

114.3)

\\

[NG TI.RROR H1.111M)

39

CONSTANCE CHARPENTIER

26

ingenious reconciliation

Melancholy 1801. 52x66(132x167.6)

between

subjective

poetics

of

lover,

he causes the god's discus to swerve and

kill

the

beautiful Hyacinth. Broc's concentration on ideal adolescent

Enlightenment equation between nature and

nudity continued what Gerard had begun three years earlier

up

to date the

the forms of ancient

background

in

art).

which

As

a viewer,

one

is

given the vague

to indulge in reverie oneself; at the

same

time the figure provides a surrogate with which one can

identify,

but

less

as

full-bodied

presence than as an

interruption in the field of dreaming. It bends physical form

in the

Cupid and Psyche, and he adopts the same low viewpoint

that reduces the

background

to

simple bands of meadow and

sky in a poetic never-never land. But the backlighting has the

effect of reducing

of

flesh:

even further the weight and surface texture

the edges of the bodies are

drawn with

light rather

toward signifying the essentially mental condition of melan-

than the dark tones that normally indicate the recession and

cholic reverie.

disappearance of three-dimensional form.

In the same year, a painting appeared from one of the

27

boy

ambiguity and the control of Classical rationalism (bringing

male Davidians, Jean Broc's

Hyacinth

in the

Arms ofApollo,

(ca.

that likewise manipulated

to suppress plasticity in pictorial illusion. Its

best

the

40

known from

new

1780-ca. 1850) Death of

light

mythic source,

the Latin poet Ovid, recounts the jealousy of

wind Zephyr:

filled

with unrequited passion for Apollo's

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

This

is

a device already exploited

by Girodet in the figure of

Zephyr who hovers over Endymion; Broc went further by

making it the governing logic of his entire composition.

him the means

to solve the

Charpentier, that

medium

is,

how

It

gave

same conceptual problem faced by

to

make

the obdurately empirical

of oil painting approximate the elemental simplicity

13

of the

decoration

drawings.

The

on Greek ceramics or of Flaxman's

rippling sequence of fingers on Apollo's right

hand, joined to the faces of the lovers in double profile,

is

the sort of collaboration and

trust

enjoyed by the

first

generation of pupils. Their cultivation of virtue was an

inwardly directed and exclusive

affair.

David, on the other

passage of conspicuous virtuosity in this regard. In terms of

hand, never wavered from his commitment to public art and a

the painting's theme, reversal as a formal procedure under-

public role for the

scored a frankness in celebrating the reversal of normative

sketches for his next great history painting. But at the same

heterosexuality.

Socrates

It

transforms

that same-sex desire

the

Platonism of David's

among males

is

path to

mental concentration and knowledge of abstract truth

its

own anti-naturalistic visual idiom.

The proponents of these ideas formed something

into

artist;

even while

in prison

he was preparing

time he was as attentive as Gerard had been to the ideological

force of this newly purified, Hellenic Classicism.

The

result

was

massive canvas, completed

Intervention of the Sabine

Women.

It

in 1799, the

was very much David's

of a self-

intention that this subject be distinguished from the better-

contained sect within the studio (variously called the Primi-

known rape of the Sabines, famously depicted by Poussin and

Rubens among countless others. That prior event was the

tives,

27

Meditators, or the Bearded Ones) and did not share in

JEAN BROC The Death of Hyacinth

Arms of Apollo

1801. 70 x

49i-

in the

(177.8 x 125.7)

\\ l\(i Tl

RROR

lil

lll\|)

41

28

28

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The

Women

Intervention of the Sabine

1799.

12'8 x 17'J (386 x 520)

beginning of the narrative trajectory which David captured

The early Romans, a rough and exclusively male

needed women in order to perpetuate their community; to

near
lot,

this

its

end.

end they employed

neighbors.

mount a

It is

a ruse to steal the

three years before the Sabine

wives of their

men

are able to

successful counter-attack, and in that time marriages

have been established between the Romans and their captives

new

and

and

their respective leaders

generation has been born. As the two armies meet

Tatius for the Sabines

Romulus

for the

Romans and

prepare for single combat, the

women throw themselves into the midst of battle,

reconciliation

wife of

pleading for

between the two states. At the center

Romulus

is

Hersilia,

10

Horatti and Brutus, the existence of irreconcilably divided

loyalties here guarantees a

happy ending. The Sabines was

conceived at David's most desperate hour as a bid for

rehabilitation,

42

and

it

saturated the scene with screams, shouts, and

confusion, making the spectator's experience approximate

that of spectacular

melodrama. In place of tragic parsimony of

incident, the composition offers profusion of detailed illustration

and tempts one's attention toward

setting.

The most

deep landscape

sentimentally affecting element of the story,

the children deliberately placed in harm's way, stare directly

out at the spectator.

All of this finally

is

in

message of the painting and

tion:

keeping with the premeditated

its

essentially strategic

none of the copious incident and

conclusion one

is

to

draw from

concep-

detail serves to alter the

Hersilia's plea for peace

between Romulus and Tatius. The message of harmony

himself.

In a pointed reversal of the value system which governs the

3,

He

appeal.

was designed

LEAVING TERROR BEHIND

for

maximum

public

given in advance; everything else in the composition

illustration of its necessity. In its

French Republic had come

Hersilia

is

most

is

radical phase, the

to be personified as a

that personification resurrected as an ideal

of healing and nurturing, clad

all

in white.

is

there as

new

woman;
mother

The suspended conflict appears all

more as a suspension

successful product of that alliance was the portrait (1800) of

of history itself by virtue of David's startling decision to depict

the general, calmly seated on a rearing charger, crossing the

his warriors in the

nude. While this was believed to conform to

an ancient Greek practice,

Roman

it

had no

But he took the

subject:

the

development of the painting,

historical pertinence to a

Alps over the Saint-Bernard Pass.

The

more prosaic

affair

on the back of

rhetorical requirements of leadership

to appropriate the idealizing

accuracy: carved in the stone are the

The

design of the

actual crossing was a

donkey, but plainly the

step, late in the compositional

Hellenism being promoted by his students.

were

to prevail over

names of Hannibal and

Charlemagne, who had followed the same route to

The

Italian

principal triad of figures could be a vignette from Flaxman.

conquests.

The effect of its paradoxical delicacy and formalized balance is

to remove the memory of actual conflict and violence to a safer

more than serve

realm of myth.

lend action and drama of an irrational kind to the sheer

mode

David's

of exhibiting the painting achieved

a further

setting of natural sublimity of course does

commemoration:

historical

meant

to

At the same time, however, the wind-blown cloak and

broken clouds remain superficial

altogether and arrange an independent showing of the

ately stable

effects laid over

an obdur-

and Classical substructure. Even the perilous

his own space, charging an admission fee to every visitor.

Owing to this isolation and personal control over its display,

slopes and shafts of light arrange themselves in a rigid

David

the republican painter discovered that his deeper moral and

time was able to present one of his large-

for the first

crowded

scale paintings at eye-level rather than at the top of a

Salon hanging.

by placing

He

further exploited these

a standing

new circumstances

The

mirror opposite the painting.

spectators were invited to use the reflection in order to achieve

view of the narrative;

a distanced, totalizing

at the

same time

they would see themselves as participants in the action behind

them. This

the

is

first

shaped armature which

artistic

fixes

Napoleon firmly

in his seat.

X-

Soon

preoccupations were at odds with the Bonapartist

vision of public art.

major new

By

David had begun work on

1802,

historical canvas.

The

subject was Leonidas at

Thermopylae, the hero being the leader of that small band of

Spartans

who

army

held off the entire Persian

Greek

pass, but at the cost of every

soldier.

at a

He

narrow

chose the

of more than one trick he would later

play with mirrors in his private exhibitions in an effort to

and spectacularize the

mystify

act

Having

of viewing.

designed a work that maximized the potential for such effects

and that reinforced rather than tested the

made

he

audience,

the

beliefs

move

next logical

in

of

He was
on view

for five years

for his effort: the painting stayed

and financed the purchase of

The

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID Napoleon

8'10f

x7'7H270.8x

at the

Saint-Bernard Pas

1800.

231.8)

its

handsomely repaid

country house and land.

29

financially

speculating on the successful appeal of his strategies.

a substantial

entrepreneurial artist of the

nineteenth century was well and truly launched.

THE SUBLIME OF AUTHORITARIANISM

A month
Sabines

before the opening of David's exhibition of the

the

in

government had

last

month of

fallen in the

new regime was

as leader of a

republican forms, his faction

it

at

this

first

constitutional

preserve

to
title

of First

of the

Roman

the

office

Emerging

young general

point

came up with

evoked the chief executive

Republic, one

the

18 Brumaire.

the charismatic

Napoleon Bonaparte. Careful

Consul;

1799,

coup of

occupied by Brutus. Napoleon was no

stranger to David: he had visited the artist's studio in 1797 and

given a mighty impression as an exemplar of martial virtue.

On assuming
David

to the

power, he made an immediate

new government

as

its official

effort to

painter.

The

19

presence of the main actor.

funds for the support of art was to ignore the Salon of 1799
in

as in Harriet's

Oedipus, the wild terrain and turbulent weather are

gathering of power to himself. His response to the lack of state

work

29

bind
first

SUBLIMI-.

<>l

I'HORI

\KI \\IS\l

43

30

30 JACQUF.S-LOLIS

DAVID

Leonidas at Thermopylae
12'll|x 17'5 (395.6x530.9)

1814.

moment

of reflection and preparation before the battle, and

continued the pre-Revolutionary line of ancient leaders

who

Gerard, typically, was

Consul's

known enthusiasm

take

advantage of the

for the Ossian

poems. These were

first

to

and the welfare of the

claimed as the rediscovered epic cycle of an ancient Celtic

seeing the picture in preparation,

bard of that name, though they had actually been produced a

dismissed the entire idea as a painting of losers. David

half-century earlier by the Scottish writer James Macpherson.

decade and soon was

Because invented to eighteenth-century requirements, true

everything

sacrificed

for

community. Napoleon, on

virtue

suspended work on the Leonidas

for a

diverted into the wearying and esthetically thankless task of

glorifying the

new Emperor's

of coronation in 1804.

rite

The

outcome was an overbearingly enormous canvas enumerating

every dignitary present at the

pompous ceremony

Dame

(and though he

crowning

itself,

made

Notre-

in

study of the arrogant

David ended by

shifting his

self-

moment away

from any suggestion of usurpation to the aftermath when the

freshly

Imperial Bonaparte turned to crown his consort

believers could take the Ossianic as

even than the poetry of archaic Greece, and the primitifs of

David's studio put them on a level with the works of Homer

Even those who doubted the announced

and Hesiod.

provenance of the verse appreciated

modernity:

its

This was painting

as duty,

and

it

was performed

as such. It

it

precisely

for

its

evocations of a dark and primal northern world

inhabited by heroes and spirits corresponded to a growing cult

of subjectivity and irrationalism. In

Bonaparte's country retreat

Josephine).

more pure and primitive

Ossian a

at

painting destined for

Malmaison, Gerard makes

blind and bereft old man, conjuring from

his

his lyre the

returns to a conception of rhetorical elevation as copious

memories of lost parents and children, who surround him

magnificence in the accumulation of ornaments and witnesses

ghostly spirits in a moonlit miasma.

to

glory.

But much Napoleonic painting was conceived

without this sort of clear

brief.

As

political

devolved into the charisma of one man,

presented with a qualitatively

convinced that

situation.

art mattered, the ruler

exactly sure of what he

self-image

new

general

wanted

until

to statesman,

legitimacy

painters

himself could not be

he saw

Consul

it.

to

His identity and

Emperor

were

continually subject to change. Artists' initiatives were

to take

on

a speculative character,

easily turn out

44

wrong

were

Although he was

bound

and speculation could

as right.

SUBLIME OF AUTHORITARIANISM

as

eerie

nocturnal

imaginings

in

as

setting,

and subject matter of fevered

lighting,

an

With the wild

elderly

survivor,

developments of the 1790's into

Gerard

distilled

the

cloudy fantasy uncon-

strained by Classical logic or structure.

Girodet had

good claim

to being the

most experimental

painter in his generation, and his rivalry with Gerard was

intense.

He

Malmaison

seized
as a

on the

chance

painter, seeking at the

studio-mate

in the

First Consul's decorating plans for

to rehabilitate his career as a history

same time

to surpass his old friend

Ossianic stakes.

Not content with

and

replicat-

31

ing the other-worldly setting and

mood

of the poems, he

sought to incorporate Napoleon's contemporary concerns into

32

the

mythology.

invented

commanders,

In

killed in recent

1802

his

French

painting,

campaigns, arrive

breaking point with ghosts and

spirits.

dominated by elements of overt allegory

more suavely handled)

in

The upper zone

after

^p

in a Valhalla

presided over by the blind Celtic bard and packed to the

Hennequin

is

jfe*

(if
<fl

the floating personification of

republican liberty and the victory of a Gallic cock over an

i^fe^,

Austrian eagle. These are only the beginning of a catalog of

allegorical

events,

correspondences to persons and recent

ingeniously

conceived

but

political

impossible

nearly

decipher without the guidance of a detailed inventory. In

to

^P^J^

B^ui^fc^B

i*kl^fl

further burst of conspicuous invention, Girodet conceived the

entire

atmosphere and lighting of the scene according

to his

understanding of electric luminosity, using recent discoveries

of science as a spectacularly vivid equivalent to the
All of Girodet's prodigious natural ability

M HP %-

afterlife.

was on show

z^SBB

in

the painting, which deploys the resources of illusionism to

construct a dense tissue of physical impossibilities.

packed accumulation of figures

is

who

but dismissed

The

relieved by a translucent

delicacy in their rendering: "figures of crystal," in the

of David,

words

32

ANNE-LOUIS GIRODET

37x73H93.9x

Ossian Receiving the Napoleonic Officers 1802.

186.7)

praised his old pupil's originality to his face,

it

to others as outlandish

Contemporary evidence suggests

and undisciplined.

that Gerard's

more

straight-

forward illustration of strictly Ossianic themes found greater

favor both in public and with the First Consul.

adherents

Davidian

of the

Franque, would

later

primitifs,

the

Two

twin

former

brothers

adopt the same arrangement as

formula to depict Napoleon himself being beckoned by

in a

dream

to return

from Egypt

in

1799 and save France by

The

setback

may

that he turned

away

well have been beneficial to Girodet in

for a time

to the ruler's

from

Ossian 1801. 72$ x76 (184.5 x 194.5)

emotional drama in

matter

political subject

immediate

interests.

Salon of 1806, he prepared an immense Deluge,

Francois Gerard

spirits

assuming power.

and from appeals

31

-W-

J'^.-jt

For the

a terrifying

turbulent and darkly primitive world. In

contrast to his Ossian Receiving the Napoleonic Officers, he

reduced the drama

to a configuration of elemental simplicity

and unmistakable meaning. This subject, centered on the

burden of

strong young father, struggling to support a

parent, a spouse and a child simultaneously, had

become

popular one in the immediately preceding period. Rcgnault

had shown

Lamentation

in 1789; there the

back and

is

small canvas on the subject alongside his

man

carries his father

on

his

therefore unable to seize hold of his wife and son as

the current sweeps

them away. Contemporary viewers were

prepared to overlook the curiously sluggish current, and

it

became one of his most popular works: he eventually painted

several replicas to
first

meet demand from

collectors.

Not

for the

time, of course, Girodet took cues from the success of this

artist

and pushed the same material toward

more extreme

and ambitious statement.

Regnault's conception of the scene,

emotion of irretrievable
sentimental subjects, and

loss,
its

fits

in that

it

stresses the

within the category of

compact dimensions are those of

si hi.imi; oi' \l riioKi r \ki

\\1s\1

45

33

34 Jacques-Louis David and Francois

GERARD Aeneas Carrying Anchises From the Ruins of
Troy late 1790s. 9J x 6^ (24.5 x 15.5)

33

Anne-Louis Girodet The Deluge 1806

14'ljx 117} (431x341)

cabinet picture. Girodet, by contrast, wanted to maximize

both the drama and the physical impact of terror in a canvas of

outsized, aggressively public scale.

grander than

ponds

life.

He

to the perilous

The

of his figures

size

is

stacked them vertically, which corres-

along the

fall

cliff"

face

and allows the

from the burning ruins of the

Gerard

the later

1790's (in which both he and

collaborated).

obligations. If

conform

form

moment when

requirements of high drama, he chose a

his central

on the wife and

child.

male figure has not yet

The aged

father has

embodiment of dead weight, already

inert

lost his grip

become

the very

and corpse-like,

in

filial

devotion to one of

then this painting

is

generations

is

about to

fail,

and

support of the

all

vital

younger

the characters are poised on

the brink of oblivion in the rushing torrent.

the motif of the

Trojan hero Aeneas carrying his father and leading his son

46

in

any

of
art

The

artist

has stretched the internal

man's arm

is

heroic actors had been

just

The

terrified

norm of composure,

a quality

being pulled to

its

limits.

assumed always

extreme pain. Muscles bulge and tendons

to exhibit
strain.

An

even

in

outsized,

funereal cloak swirls in a freakish whirlwind.

Consistent with his public ambition, Girodet took advantage of an established Classical prototype

fatal conflict

contrast of age and youth virtually to the breaking point

expressions defy every Classical

frail

also

maximally dissonant within the conven-

tions of history painting.

as the

death grip of the past, the

34

terms of departure from a settled sense of harmony,

from

withered body that seems beyond age. Thanks to this

Aeneid in

David had

one defines expressive dissonance

clutching a futile bag of gold; he exerts monstrous strength

a

rendered by

But Girodet has reversed the meaning of the

motif from one of

canvas to tower over the spectator. So that the scene would

to the

city, precisely as

for a series of printed illustrations to Virgil's

SUBLIME OF AUTHORITARIANISM

To compare

the Deluge to David's conception of the

Spartan leader Leonidas

is

to see

how thoroughly Girodet had

seized and transformed the conventions of heroic nudity. For

30

David, the hero gathers and contains his strength within

himself in order to exert
as

he remains,

it

Girodet, the hero, such

at will; for

victim, his strength arrayed as a conduit

is a

Davidian project. At the beginning of the epic, the greatest

warrior

among

war after

a petty

the Greek

army

argument with

at

his

Troy withdrew from

commander. Both

Achilles

across

which uncontrollable, nonhuman forces exert them-

and

selves:

among these

grace appropriate to noble bodies that have withdrawn from

mate and

him

the sexual desire which binds

is

to the next generation.

The

larger

But

to his survival.

this is less a

to his

community, with

veneration of constraining authority and wealth,

its

is

a threat

motif of youthful rebellion

than a figure for the finality of human isolation. At this point

had

Girodet

set

finally

his

communitarian precepts of

art

the

against

rationalist,

his formation in David's circle.

This was recognized by conservatives

in the fine-arts division

his

companion Patroclus display the languidly ephebic

the fray and are therefore free to manifest the homoerotic

them

attraction that binds

transitional figure

and the

in

comradeship. Patroclus, the

first to

reenter the battle, playfully

sports the helmet of Achilles, an anticipation of the disguise

that will lead to his death at Hector's hands.

The

entreating

warriors, driven by the Trojan forces to the very brink of

defeat,

display

the

hardened musculature and indented

marked

Such competition

of the Institute, the umbrella cultural organization under

contours of bodies

Napoleon's Empire, who despised the Jacobin associations

paintings had to be completed in a matter of weeks with no

that

clung to the Classical canon. In a competition to

still

select the best works of art produced during the

first

decade of

in

strife.

models or preparatory drawings permitted

individual studios.

As

in the cell-like

consequence, few could stand up to

Bonapartist rule, the jury preferred the Deluge to David's

exacting judgment; but Ingres's entry achieved a deservedly

Sabines.

high reputation.

DREAMS BEYOND HISTORY

35 JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQL'E
Throne 1806. 8'8f x 63 (265.7 x 160)

In the

same year

Not only did

it

contend successfully with the

INGRES Napoleon

on the Imperial

that Girodet exhibited the Deluge, an artist of

the next generation

made

his

favor.

Repeating the former's

Ingres

( 1

own dramatic
own tactics in

bid for

official

1802, J.-A.-D.

780-1 867) sought to appeal directly to the self-regard

of Napoleon and to distinguish himself from the competition

by
35

conspicuous display of esthetic originality.

was Napoleon on

the Imperial

Throne (1806). In

The

its

painting

conception,

Ingres sought to actualize in esthetic terms the kind of

pedigree which David had etched into the rock of the Saint-

Bernard Pass, one extending back through the Emperor

Charlemagne and the origins of Frankish kingship

antiquity.

As Bonaparte had clothed

to

Roman

usurpation

his

of

absolute power in ancient formalities, so Ingres proceeded to

represent his body within pictorial conventions appropriate to

ancient times.

The painstaking precision

of detail, which gives

the symbolic accessories a weight equal to the

likened at the time to the
the

Van Eycks. The

displays a

waxen

man, was

manner of Flemish "primitives"

hieratic frontal pose

manner of Byzantine and

quasi-divine rulers.

is

arranged

like

in the

early medieval ivory carvings of

The Emperor's

face

pallor; the figure as a

within a rigid geometry that finds

mask-like and

is

whole

its

is

imprisoned

ultimate point of

reference in ancient renderings of the colossal statue of Zeus,

sculpted by Phidias from gold and ivory as the cult image

at

Olympia.
Ingres had been a pupil in David's studio during the late
36

the

1790's.

His winning

Rome

Prize

Ambassadors of Agamemnon Visiting

striking

command

painting of 1801,
Achilles,

The

had displayed

of the rhetorical distinctions basic to the

OKI.

WIS

lil.l

()\l)

HISTORY

JF.AN-AUGLSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES The Ambassadors of Agamemnon

36

24

authority of Flaxman's

Homeric engravings, the English

artist

himself saw and praised the result.

By

repertoire of

imposed
change

from

in a

coincided with the reopening of

Rome, and Ingres was

up the scholarship he had won

five years

able belatedly

before (and he

contrived to remain in Italy for the next fifteen years). His

first

of distinctions derived from the historical

extracted the Classical prototype from beneath the Bonapar-

a set

over time, including nonclassical ones.

this logic, if

a particular period or

enthroned

Napoleon

one were treating subject matter

was

art.

It

Ingres

stubborn

reputation

as

tist

trappings and expanded

masculine power.

The

it

into an

overwhelming totem of

subject matter of his jfupiter and Thetis

it,

(1811) concerns the divine intervention that lay behind the

The pastiche of styles in

desperate entreaties of the Greek warriors to the reluctant

evoking ideas associated with

demonstration

of this

did not find immediate favor, earning the

approach.
a

direction: over the

in

painting of the nude, to be sent back for inspection in Paris,

one would adopt the manner of its

his

new

to take

this setback

Academy

body types derived from antique models, he

in artistic styles

According to

form

43^x61(109.9x154.9)

Conveniently
the French

the middle of the decade, Ingres had extended the

rhetorical conception of

Visiting Achilles 1801.

young

an eccentric medieval

Achilles.

The

latter's

divine mother

is

shown supplicating

the

chief of the gods to strengthen the Trojans and teach the

Greeks

a lesson for

Agamemnon's high-handed mistreatment

archaism of his claim on power embarrassing when projected

The jealous Juno looks on and plots her revenge.

The common source in the Olympian Zeus makes a pair of
Ingres's enthroned Napoleon and his Jupiter. They illustrate

with such scrupulous fidelity by the powers of

the double-sidedness of artists' subservience to an absolute

revivalist.

48

Bonaparte's negative reaction completed the paral-

with Girodet in 1802: the

lel

Emperor found

DREAMS BEYOND HISTORY

art.

the naked

of her son.

37

37

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES

and Thetis 1811.

l'4f

8'5J-(347

The dependent

authority.

Jupiter

257.2)

adoration of a dominant political

figure easily transmutes itself into a personal fantasy of

power

and domination, and both are equally aspects of isolation and

domination

vulnerability. In this case, as so often, that

exercised over a
into

an

woman,

impossibly

who is turned
and compliant emblem of

diminutive figure

sinuous

into self-conscious archaism

which

practises within

was an ingenious extension of the

his education

historical circumstances

were such

had taken
that,

in

place.

David's sharpening of Classical rhetoric in the Horatii,

not trigger a

new

collective dialog.

As

But

contrast with

Nor could any

it

did

more

accomplished

encouraged by the cult of the First Consul/Emperor, helped

detached and competitive, career patterns began to show the

remove the

strains of maintaining an entire tradition

rational constraints
its

approach

on the linear Classicism of the

to the

human

inner substance in favor of pliable outline,

figure devalued
it

resistance to the compulsions of private desires.

on silhouette

in the figure

achieved by Charpentier
is

offered

little

The emphasis

of Thetis differs markedly from that

in

her figure of Melancholy,

in that

it

not a product of the signifying structure of the painting as a

whole; rather

it

proceeds from exaggeration and distortion,

and the suppression of internal anatomy

is

just

diminishing of the body's structural resistance to the

command.

that,

artist's

this.

individual

artists

painter have

became

submission. Ingres's imagination of untrameled strength,

period. Because

26

is

Certainly Ingres's personal expansion of pictorial rhetoric

by means of the

frail

emotional and intellectual resources of any single individual.

Girodet's technical innovations in the Endymion had probably

had the greatest individual impact on the

decade, but his

own

between

styles

and themes. The

audience

left

him

art

feeling bitter

benchmarks of

responses of his

baffled

and misunderstood. Ingres, on

to

favorite

community and

Classical practise by refusing the very

principle of development and change, lie

return

of the next

veered erratically and unpredictably

the other hand, dealt with the erosion of

stable

art

motifs

would obsessively

and compositions, seizing an\

l)RI.

WIS

WW ONI) HISTORY

4')

13

opportunity to try out small refinements

in

replieas

and

repetitions in other media. In one

famous instance of this, he

inserted the torso and head of his

anonymous nude study of

1808, the so-called Vapinqon Bather, almost without alteration

38

crowded Turkish Bath, painted more than

into the midst of his

50 years

later,

by which time the context from which

it

took

its

Girodet and Ingres were

remarkable for
acter,

its

its

revelation

That these

Romanticism

in art

the
art

most committed
of both remains

highly subjective and idiosyncratic char-

insistent

personality.

among

Empire, yet the

of the irreducible creative

are traits

which have come

to define

should be enough to underscore the point

38

DREAMS BEYOND HISTORY

later Classicism

by

in

fact

artists

who were determined to remain faithful to its traditions,

who could not imagine a serious art outside of those

indeed,

Both

traditions.

technique

cultivated

artists

in finishing the surfaces

an exactinglv polished

of their paintings, building

as to banish as far as possible individual gestural

imprints in the paint.

"licked" finish would become one of

the cliches of conformist academicism later in the century, but

in the cases

sealed

of

its

surface

two

reads

originators, their obsessiveness with a

as

holding action,

determined

imposition of an impersonal discipline over the involuntary

exposure of the

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIOJUE INGRES The

Diameter 42* (108)

50

Romantic legacy was

engendered within the project of

up glazes so

meaning had changed enormously.

Classicists of the early

that the greater part of the

self.

Turkish Bath 1862.

CLASSICISM IN CRISIS

GROS TO DELACROIX
THOMAS CROW

FORCE OF ARMS

on returning

lished his reputation

to Paris in 1801.

The new

Consulate decided to undertake a program of large-scale

Romantic style in the usual sense of the

The
term
brushwork,
way
linear order giving

energetic

to

the impact of color, elevation of contemporary and exotic

subject matter to epic intensity

the nineteenth century. But
translations

it

arrived in the

was

much

as

first

decade of

product of the

and distortions of the Classical inheritance

as

was

the art of Girodet and Ingres. Its chief innovator, Antoine-

Jean Gros (1771-1835), was likewise

loyal to

Davidian values

all

of his

life.

painting glorifying the successes of the French

that

end proposed

commemorate
against

took the prize.

depicted action. General Junot himself

shown

in

individual

under the pressure of

composition

political contingencies.

between Girodet and Ingres, and

decisive impact on his formation. Girodet had been

last

had

this

among the

of the Old-Regime students to have at least the better part

of the normal period of training in

Rome. Ingres was

belatedly to enjoy his after the French

dated control of Italy. Gros's time came just at the point

Rome was

closed to the French in 1793.

travel to Italy,

spending time

in

He

Florence and

manage

command

made up

of the

is

well to the rear,

Mameluke horseman
operation. The entire

of such vignettes, the unifying

coming from strong notes of color

repeated at intervals and rhythmic interlacing of the episodes

achieved through surface handling of the paint.

The absence

of a more solid underlying structure was not

simply Gros's choice;

it

proceeded

in part

ment's lacking any precise account of the

to

coherent verbal overview,

Genoa while

individual acts of bravery,

did
in

when

is

combat with

principle of the painting

able

Empire had consoli-

it

from the govern-

battle. In place

more

often by

common

soldiers

mode

than by officers. This sort of record conformed to a

time with a weary Girodet recuperating on his long journey

celebrating French victories that had persisted from the

was denied the crucial opportunity

hone

to

his

supportive institutional environment amid the

Rome. In order
as he did

to

remain safely

drawing

in a

monuments of

in Italian territory for as

long

he needed protection, and the Bonaparte brothers

looked after him; for a time in the late 1790's, he held a

noncombatant's post with the army that

practise his art (from

this

exaggerated reputation as

Gros has

left

him ample time to

latterly

acquired an

a soldier-artist).

That myth of Gros's early

life

would, however, have

followed naturally from the painting with which he estab-

of a

provided some anecdotes of

those cities remained friendly territory (in the latter, he spent

back to France). There was plenty to see and absorb, but he

of

they could not grasp was

The most

distinctive

at the Battle

to the consternation

the absence of a clear center to the composition and to the

rather than in overall

fits

What

student of David and

achievements of his career were attained against that loyalty

In age Gros

competition in 1801 for paintings to

massed Arab cavalry numbering 6000

critics,

to

the victory of a small party of 500 French

Nazareth two years before. Gros's sketch,

of many

army and

of

more

demociatic phase of the Revolution: the success of republican

arms was attributed

to the

commitment of the

citizen soldier

fighting out of patriotic devotion rather than coercion or

greed. Within this propagandist^-

mode, Junot's valor would

be equal to that of the anonymous soldiers

and so Gros

faithfully

two scenes of

his

own

rendered

it.

in the

foreground,

He augmented

these with

invention designed to proclaim a basic

humanity and idealism underlying the French adventures

abroad:

vignette of Arabs about to decapitate a helpless

European was contrasted

a

to

one of a French soldier protecting

surrendering captive from being shot.

51

39

39

ANTOINE-JEAN Gros The

Nazareth 1801.

40 ANTOINE-JEAN

GROS

Napoleon

Plague House at Jaffa 1804.

(532.1

The

inventive artistic solution he devised for knitting

this together

had the further

effect

all

of

of conveying, through

rapid gestural notation and the liberation of color, an exciting

sense of the fury and confusion of battle.

that

novel

this

category

contemporary event

heroic

It

was important too

history

not be confused with

painting

of a

the meticulous

description deployed by traditional painters of battles, an

approach which had always placed their

lower genres.

Had Gros more

efforts

among

the

deeply internalized the routines

of Classical drawing, he might well have lacked the necessary

flexibility
brief.

52

As

and improvisatory

it

flair to

was, his success put

FORCE OF ARMS

him

deal with this complicated

in a

commanding

position

to

Battle of

53$ x 76} (135 x 195)

in the

17'5J x 23'7}

x720)

respond to escalating demands for contemporary reportage

in history painting.

The commission

for a full-scale version of the

subject never in fact materialized.

Directory's citizen

army

ideal,

it

As

it

Nazareth

looked back to the

was out of step with the

Bonapartist cult, according to which French victories were

guaranteed by the charismatic

Three years
Napoleon

later

in the

command

Gros made good

this

of one individual.
discrepancy with

Plague House at Jaffa (1804).

The

actual

conquest of the Palestinian city was again the success of

another general, so this time there was no question of the
painting dealing with the battle

itself.

Instead Gros exploited

40

an outbreak of plague which spread from the city's Arab

defenders to the victorious French. Bonaparte

is

shown

touching the sore of one of his suffering soldiers

fearlessly

while his aide anxiously holds a handkerchief to his face.

ostensible subject matter

The

eminently rational: fear was

is

thought to advance the spread of the disease, and the general

is

here by personal example attempting to arrest the idea of

and death. But the effect

inevitable contagion

among

irrational: the sick

in the painting is

the French seem almost to rise by

make contact with

is

not challenged by simultaneous appeals to two sides of his or

her moral character.

The

split rather

represents a reassuring

division between European Enlightenment,

in the

person of

the conqueror, and the darkness of the Oriental vanquished,

who

are inured to death

and impassive

in its presence.

On

ruin of David's critical examination of republican virtue,

the

Gros

constructed an immutable division out of Christian eschatology, in

which the radiant presence of Christ

in

Limbo

is

Dominating the

contrasted to an Arab Hell (the seated figure in the left-hand

foreground, by contrast, are the shadowed figures of those

corner, the stand-in for Brutus, mimics representations of the

magic

to

their leader.

dead and dying deprived of that touch.

now

powerless.

To

The ordinary soldier is

the extent that heroic nudity had been a

bearer of republican ideals, Gros reversed

ings in transforming

it

into a sign of

nowhere more emphatically than

soldier

on

who

horrific sensory

impact of the plague house.

in that this

painting was required to return to a traditionally hierarchical

arrangement with the hero

its

at its center.

The contemporaneity
Gros met

fact that

challenge by appropriating a touchstone of the

Classical tradition
crucial

more

useful in view of

the disturbing reports that the French, on Napoleon's order,

had themselves

visited a hellish

unarmed defenders of the

massacre on the surviving,

city.

Ambitious painting under the empire has perhaps been

misleadingly typified by such propagandistic and questionable glorifications of Napoleon.

comparative

stability

freedom of movement on the Continent, which came

wake of French conquests, allowed

for

more

and

in the

pacific develop-

unfamiliar aspect and profusion of pictur-

esque detail should not obscure the

The

This conflation

Inferno).

the

AN IMPERIAL ANTIQUITY

good deal more control was required, however,

of the scene,

of conquest and redemption was

all

of Nazareth, Gros has exploited animated

in the Battle

and the

Ugolino from Dante's

away from

looks

surface and punctuation with vivid color to convey the exotic

locale

cannibalistic

his diminutive, tightly

commander.

clothed

As

grotesquely outsized

in the

Arab physician toward

normal mean-

its

dependent helplessness,

his knees in the foreground,

his attentive

10

between the divided parts of Gros's composition; the viewer

David's

device

this

modern

41

ANTONIO CANOVA

Perseus 1801. Height 86f (220)

Brutus.

by which

articulated the irresolvable conflict

painting

teacher's

his

between public duty and

private devotion had been the great divide in the composition,

the formal interruption that split the civic from the domestic
sphere.

The two were

pried apart in such a

way

that

enormous

tension remained between them: the engaged viewer would

find

no

settled position for his or her sympathies; the

meaning

of the work consisted in his or her mental reenactment of the

Gros deployed

conflict.

architecture and

his

divided his

figures in order to reproduce almost exactly David's

positional scheme.

The Arab

doctors at the

left,

com-

with their

desperate charges, occupy the same position as the grouping

of Brutus with the procession bearing the corpses (down to a

repetition of the litter-bearer's sidelong glance). Bonaparte

and

his

men, bathed

in light,

clustering of Brutus's wife

pattern of bare limbs.

far right

And

correspondingly reproduce the

and daughters with

their ascending

the delirious French soldier at the

introduces a darker note of isolation and blindness

directly analogous to David's (and Gerard's) grieving nurse.

But the utter transformation

powerful scheme

is

in the

meaning and use of this

the most revealing sign of the impact of

absolutist priorities on history painting.

There

is

no tension

IMI'KRI KL

AN

riQT

in

53

42

ANTONIO CANOVA

Pauline Borghese as Venus 1808. Length 79 (200.7)

merits as well. Patrons from across

talents of the

French

Classicists,

Europe competed

for the

and the most favored manner

was the precious, mythological Classicism that had been

incubated under the Directory.
43

ANTONIO CANOVA Magdalene

1796. Height 37 (94)

One patron in particular, Giovanni Battista Sommariva,

this current

led

of taste and thematic interest. After 1806, he was

resident in Paris and

known under

various

titles,

Marquis de Sommariva, though he had begun

including

his career as a

barber's assistant in norther Italy. Subsequently trained as a

lawyer, he arrived in Milan in 1796 just at the

moment when

the victorious General Bonaparte had arrived and begun his

organization of a French puppet republic in the region.

The

upstart lawyer astutely and unscrupulously negotiated a path

through the shifting tides of war, retreating

fortune

By

dictated.

Napoleon's surrogate

the
in

to

France when

of the century,

turn

Milan and

an enormous fortune, a showplace

in that capacity

villa

he was

amassed

on Lake Como, and

commensurate number of bitter enemies.

Even before

his definitive

fall

from power, Sommariva was

deliberately attempting to gain prestige

unsavory parvenu
art.

His

first

rehabilitate his

reputation by enlightened patronage of

instrument in this regard was the immensely

influential sculptor

Antonio Canova (1757-1822). This

of Venetian origins, had

Roman

and

come

milieu which supported

to

prominence

Flaxman

artist,

in the

in the 1790's.

same

As

native-born Catholic, he was in line for the sort of sculptural

commissions

54

IMPERIAL ANTIQUITY

to

which

his English

contemporary could never

44 PIERRE-PALL PRUD'HON Crime Pursued by

Vengeance and Justice 1808. 96 x 97 (244 x 292)

aspire.

These included the monumental papal tombs

consolidated his position as the preeminent

official

that

sculptor of

customarily taking

visits

shadow of

Canova himself favored

same

the age. His prestige had originally been established, however,

torchlight.

with smaller compositions on Classical themes which manifest

in displaying his

an esthetic analogous to the purified linearism of Flaxman's

nocturnal viewing by

Homer. The

avenue by which sculpture was assimilated to modes of

his

Perseus

80 1 ),

( 1

mid-career work, demonstrates

paradoxical ability to communicate a sculptural idea

through the abstract element of

plastic

volume and mass. Viewed

rear, the

profile

line rather

directly

than through

from the front or the

high information-content conveyed by the indented

with

contrasts

the

comparatively

lower

articulation in the polished surface of the stone.

contrast allowed

Canova

clarity with subtle

to

combine

of

level

This internal

a strong intellectual

and luxurious refinement

in his tactile

The combination came to appeal enormously

The Emperor's sister, Princess

Bonaparte family.

their legitimation as the

the client herself

who

Venus Victorious, and

was

requested that she be represented as

in his portrait

( 1

808) Canova obligingly

of a patrician

Roman matron and

whom

mortal opinion

would have been cause

to those

the careless nudity of a

is

nothing. In public,

for scandal, but its intended

whose sophistication

in

it

audience

such matters

could be assumed. Only some guests of the Borghese family

fashion for

characteristic of two-dimensional

represen24
13

group of Canovas formed the core of Sommariva's

collection,

display.

and he gave similar dramatic emphasis

These he housed

first at

his Italian villa,

transformed into a shrine to classicizing

art,

to their

which he

then in an

imposing Parisian townhouse, where they provided fresh

(1796),

It

The

represented yet another

artificial light

linearism and closer to the chiaroscuro of Girodet's Endymion.

among

new pan-ELuropean dynasty.

theatrical device

was further from Flaxman's

the

to

imagined her as simultaneously displaying the dignified pose

was limited

more

this

to prospective clients.

tation, but in this case the effect

Pauline

Borghese, had been married into Italian nobility as part of

goddess for

illusion

work

stimulus to mythological fantasy

values.

42

were conducted to see the work, their

place at night in the dramatic illumination and deep

art.

His proudest possession

in

which the sensuality of the revealed body

reclaimed for orthodox piety only by the

economy of means. This

improbably

to

our eyes

was one of

prestige.

For

its

The

furnishings and

Canova's
artist

art

lit

by

made

it

novelist Stendhal

brought

its

owner

Sommariva had

was surrounded by

a single alabaster
a

it

installation,

special shrine constructed where

perhaps

the most acclaimed works

was one of its most ardent admirers, and

tremendous

43

is

artist's Classical

sculpture

particular

of art of the early nineteenth century.

French

Magdalen

these was a single figure of the penitent

direct impact

violet

lamp.

on the work of the

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758

[VIPER]

\l.

1823) in his Crime

UMTIQl

111

SS

44


rhetorical

preoccupations.

manner, highly individual

He

-developed

for the times,

dialectical clarity in favor of a calculatedly

hazy merging of

objects with their atmosphere (he painted

chrome, then introduced color

characteristic

which deemphasi/.ed

in

first

in selected areas,

the whole with a series of translucent glazes).

As

in

fantasies of Boucher in the previous century, this

mono-

overlaying
the

Rococo

emphasis on

surface lent itself to fantasies of freedom from the constraints

of gravity.

Two

such mythological subjects, hoth personifying the

among

wind, were

the best-known of his paintings

Carried by Zephyrs

to

Cupid's

Domain

Zephyr (1814), shown as

single

momentarily suspended

just

above

(also 1808)

playful

Psyche

46

and the

preadolescent

his reflection in a glassy

pond. Both returned to themes made fashionable by the

Davidians under the Directory, his unorthodox technique

giving

them

new currency, and both were commissioned by

Sommariva. As with Canova,

this collector

was conspicuously

signaling the affinity of his taste and of his person with the

Bonaparte family, Prud'hon having painted portraits of the

Emperor, the Empress, and Napoleon's son and

fated
45

JEAN-BAPTISTE REGNAULT

His portrait of the Empress Josephine

Liberty or Death 1795. 23|x 19} (60 x 49)

the

44

Pursued by Vengeance and Justice

( 1

808), an allegorical subject

painted for the principal chamber of the Napoleonic criminal

The fleeing
The other

court.

Italian.

figure

is

modeled

after a sculpture

elements come from

by the

comparable reper-

the airborne deities follow the pattern of one of

toire:

Flaxman's outlines, and the nude male victim, divided by

shadow and
13

Endymwn.
twilight

allegories

at the

That

effect

of clarity

Republican
earlier

moonlight,

which underscores

retribution.

45

brilliant

All of this the artist

its

impartiality

light

it

a greater
it

tribute to

in a general

threat,

and

which had characterized

In that an exemplary effort in the

height of the Terror,

same time, however,

upended

message of menace,

mode, Regnault's Liberty

conception exhibits

flexed,

was markedly different from the

and

official art.

is a

melded together

or Death,

had been conceived

could be argued that Prud'hon's

realism about state power. At the

drains any vision of idealism and

from the conduct of

justice

and replaces those

standards with an imaginary regime marked

by violent

sensuality.

The Empire years

who was

Prud'hon,

represented a great rehabilitation for

older

than Girodet and

Gerard,

contemporary of Hennequin whose career had likewise

followed an unorthodox and uneven pattern. Supported by a
provincial fellowship in

Rome, he had remained

outside the Davidian circle and resisted

56

IMPERIAL ANTIQUITY

its

defiantly

esthetic

and

heir, the

King of Rome, over the course of the Imperial

pomp

1808.

805), turns

away from

of her recent coronation (memorialized in the

46 PlERRE-PAUL

Domain

( 1

ill-

period.

PRUD'HON

Psyche Carried by Zephyrs

76} x 61J (195 x 157)

to

Cupid's

47

gargantuan canvas by David) to

strong illumination of the

like

with

sitter,

among

contemplative pose

the woodland surroundings of her park

its

Malmaison. The

at

emphatic, Canova-

contour, exteriorizes the state of mental reflection in the

contrastingly dark and undefined setting, which extends far

beyond the confines of the frame. Prud'hon transformed

26

Constance Charpentier's abstract personification of psychodepth into one aspect of the new iconography of

logical

produced

rulership. In 1814, he predictably

commensurate

likeness of Sommariva himself, exhibited in the

shows him suspending

the Zephyr, which

well-thumbed book amid

Canovas which seem

to

emanations of Nature

Other
artists

collectors,

twilit

same Salon

as

his attention to a

parkland, flanked by two of his

emerge from the shadows

as totemic

herself.

domestic and foreign, pursued the same

and supported the same

sensibility. Prince

Yusupoff, a

high Russian nobleman, commissioned Guerin in 1811 to

48

paint a replica of a picture, Aurora

had supplied

Sommariva

to

and Cephalus, that the artist

the year before, and a matching

pendant on the subject of Iris and Morpheus

both of which show

homage

to the

The pair,

unconscious mortal male

a beautifully

subject to a goddess's infatuation,

13

as well.

amounts

to an elaborate

Endymwn

continuing authority of Girodet's

under the culture of the Empire. The destination of the

paintings demonstrate

how completely

Girodet's Revolution-

it

had been associated

shows the degree

and daring of

48 Pif.rre-Narcisse
(254

Guerin Aurora and

Cephalus 1811. 8'4ix73

x 186)

celestial

which the singularity

to

model had been reduced

his

Portrait of Empress Josephine 1805. 96x704.

in the 1790's.

Guerin's mechanical handling of the clouds and the

illumination

PRUD'HON

(244 x 179)

humar

ary utopianism had been divorced from the image of

perfection with which

47 Pif.RRF.-Paul

to

conformist

formulae.

At

this point,

however, Girodet himself would have been

the last to object to the embrace of his signature esthetic by

such patrons.

He had grown

firmly and

cantankerously

conservative since the turn of the nineteenth century.

the time of his miscalculated Ossianic painting for

would go on avidly courting those

he

son,

^a

From

Malmai-

in

power.

Sommariva had garnered wide public acclaim when he

43

arranged for the inclusion of Canova's Magdalene in the Salon

49

of 1808; for the same exhibition Girodet produced a painting

which played on the

Italian collector.

the

sensibility so expertly orchestrated

He drew

neo-Catholic

writer

the

is

preserve

who

*Hi.

2^.

Chateaubriand, a
in

phenomenally
America: the

~3*j!

the aftermath of the suicide by the violated heroine of

title,

~.

by the

from the novel Atala by

his subject

popular fantasy about Christian converts

scene

"ISiL*

^w

has honored a Christian childhood pledge to

her virginity or die.

His

stilled

and brooding

treatment of this morbidly sensational subject, structured

around the contrast between the

ideal

^r^^^^iA

beauty of Atala and the

exotic male physicality of her bereaved lover Chactas,

made

it

the one unalloyed public success of Girodet's mature career.

[MPERl

\l

INTIQJ

in

57

49 ANNF.-LOUIS GlRODF.T fltala

1808. 77^ x8'6J (197x260)

at the

Tomb

Charles Landon after Anne-Louis

GlRODET Pygmalion and Galatea 1819. 5 x
50

3}

(13x9.5)

This may be precisely because

it

was

far

from

his

most original

naturally courted him, but the result of their

collaboration was probably the least

collector's initiatives. In 1812
treat

50

happy of any of the

he commissioned Girodet to

one of the central myths of artistic creation, the story of

the sculptor Pygmalion

who

love with his

falls in

and successfully entreats Aphrodite

True

to his previous instincts,

own

creation

to bring the statue to

Girodet sought

life.

to introduce

stunning originality which would go beyond

effect of

an
all

previous approaches to the subject: the marble statue would

be captured at the precise instant

when an electric spark of life

coursed through previously inanimate matter.

The

story itself recalls that of

symmetrical reversal of

its

Endymion by means of

terms: there a divine being was

smitten by love for a mortal and had both robbed him of

consciousness and given him an unchanging, eternal beauty

(like a

work of art);

in the

Pygmalion myth

mortal

by an image of undying beauty and brings about

transformation into mortal flesh and

human

is

smitten

its

divine

awareness. As

it

happened, however, the fashioning of the painting entailed an

altogether

unwelcome

reversal of the sureness

and

facility that

had graced his youthful masterpiece. Working largely

under lamplight, isolated from daytime

visitors,

Where

six years.

power by

still

period of

carries extraordinary

illusion

is

embedded, the surface of the Pygmalion

and uneven, bearing witness

obsessive,

58

Endymion

night

virtue of the seamless, uninflected surface of paint in

which the
clotted

the

at

he was said to

have entirely effaced the painting three times over

13

lies

behind Balzac's famous story of the Unknown

Masterpiece of 1831, in which the fictional master Frenhofer

or inventive work.

Sommariva

surely

dissatisfied

reworking

IMPERIAL ANTIQUITY

(its

to

indecision

is

and

protracted gestation

futilely

attempts to give the painted image of

ultimate

illusion

of

life,

effacing

woman

the

magnificent likeness

through obsessively dissatisfied reworking). Girodet's concentration of the spectacular effects of metamorphosis

came

at

Si

ANNE-LOUIS GiRODF.T The

Revolt at Cairo 1810.

ll'8x 16'4f(356x 500)

the expense of any equivalent attention to the action, which

remains

stiff

and insipid by comparison

to all of his previous

work. His failure to find adequate form for his subject turned
its

theme of the ultimate

commentary on

creative act into a bitterly ironic

the artist's declining powers.

campaigns that had supplied Gros with

his early subject

matter. Girodet isolates one concentrated scene of quasi-

anonymous

struggle, choosing the

Arab onslaught
single

French

is

just

officer

moment when

a rebellious

being turned. In the foreground,

appears single-handedly to be forcing

back an insurgent phalanx of claustrophobic density. That

imbalance conforms to the ethnocentric patriotism of Gros's

THE ARTIST HERO

IN

THE FACE OF

Plague House at Jaffa, but Girodet's characterization of Arab

EMPIRE

resistance does not reproduce his colleague's ascription of

resignation and passivity to the colonized. At the right side of

The

implicit negative

judgment contained

Girodet's Pygmalion was not of course on

summed up

its

maker

of

alone. It

the condition of Classicism, once shared social

metaphors had been withdrawn from the

antiquity.

in the failure

The

artist

himself,

in

visual repertoire of

the years just

prior

to

beginning Sommariva's commission, had completed what was

perhaps the most confident and inventive painting of his

51

entire later career, the Revolt at Cairo, for the Salon of 1810.

In

it

he found an appropriate object for the idiosyncratic

which had betrayed him

in

the Ossian.

The

skills

subject was an

event of twelve years before, during the same Middle Eastern

the composition

is a

magnificently defined rebel whose stance

precisely parallels that of the charging European. It

is

the

Arab who exhibits heroic nudity, which allows exertion

extreme
detail.

peril to

What

is

in

be manifested sensually in every anatomical

more,

of resistance finds sufficient

this leader

strength to support a fallen comrade.

Underneath the tumult of the

action, one can

basic planar grid of Classical composition,

answered the demands of

a traditional

where the hero must be tested against

much

as

he has answered

the

make out

the

and Girodet has

painting of action

worthy

opponent as

demands of propaganda.

ARTIST HERO IN fHE FACE OF EMPIRE

59

40

enacting the myths of artistic individuality current in his

time. In an environment

own

awash with mercenary temptations,

he managed convincingly to revive the Revolutionary ideal of

the independent, public-minded artist, impatient for glory

and indifferent

Under
ingly

to

merely monetary rewards.

the Empire, the biography of Drouais was increas-

taken

exemplify

to

this

His

ideal.

legend

falsely

condensed the objective circumstances of a precocious career

mythology of a miraculously singular

into an enduring

sweeping

all

financial

and

before

And

it.

who

Gericault,

advantages

social

talent

possessed similar

none of Drouais's

but

professional pedigree, formed his ambitions in the shape of

He

and 1814.

that legend in 1812

rejecting any sustained

application

during brief stints

in the studios

he attempted

substitute

soundness

in

to

believed in

it

to the point of

learning his craft;

to

of Carle Vernet and Guerin,

spontaneity and

drawing and composition

bravura for

(to the point that

among

acquired the nickname of 'pastry cook'

he

his fellow

students). Despite such uncertain preparation, he nonetheless

chose to put his

single figure,

name

before the public in 1812 with a heroic

one that would manifest,

in

unexpected ways,

ambitions for psychological and narrative complexity of a kind

normally encountered

in multifigured narrative machines.

At the age of 21 and using

own

his

resources entirely, he

prepared a canvas of monumental dimensions for the Salon of

52

THEODORE GERICAULT

1812.

ll'5f x 8'8J

The Charging Light Cavalryman (chasseur)

1812.

(349x266)

The Charging Light Cavalryman (chasseur)

portrait

and

battle painting:

equestrian portraits in that

it

its

differed

announced subject

Dieudonne) was unknown and

effectively

Without there being any known dissenting intentions on the

individual;

part of the artist, that overriding allegiance to tradition upset

military heroics in

the normal ethnic hierarchies of Napoleonic battle painting.

potential within an isolated figure.

The

sketches passes a crucial point

private,

patrons like

contemplative themes encouraged

Sommariva represented by

by new

contrast a narrowed

and comparatively impoverished version of the Classical

tradition; for

Girodet

futile recollection

it

meant having

little to

draw upon but

During the second decade of the nineteenth century, the

most convincing revival of the larger ambitions of Davidian

possibilities

came from the

exploitation of marginal

allowed within contemporary Imperial subject

matter. Its author,

rearing horse

from previous descriptions of French

differed

is

its

Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), was an

(a lieutenant

an anonymous

very Classical investment of heroism as a

The development

when

changed from leftward

gesture and attention of the rider,

remain directed toward the

left as

of his

the direction of the

if

to rightward, while the

not actually his seat,

This uses the body,

before.

movement, and even the expression of the horse

of past youthful glory.

Classicism likewise

it

both

is

from previous Imperial

internal complication within the action

to

convey an

and thoughts of the

rider.

This

is

realized

assurance, but

it

the

in

final

painting with

enormous

should be recognized that the eloquence and

complexity of his body

is

only implied, translated into external

unconventional outsider

in the increasingly professionalized

surface equivalents spread outwardly in two dimensions.

An

ranks of younger

He

energetic and unfinished application of paint

the

great Romantic,

artists.

and of his

personality there can be

quality that

has

come down

no dispute. But

singularity

must be put together from

already existing models.

ambitious young

artists

to us as the first

startling singularity as an artist

bits

itself a

and pieces of

And the more one knows about the

who came immediately before him,

the less idiosyncratic Gericault's impulses seem.

begin to see him constructing his

60

is

and

own

One can

autobiography, re-

ARTIST HERO IN THE FACE OF EMPIRE

instills

excitement of the theme across the physical surface of the

canvas. Every directional form leads one's attention

from the torso of the

figure,

any capacity for action

perpetual

distraction

might be argued

within

itself.

effective

away

volume,

This necessitates

and displacement toward outthrust

extremities, ornaments,
It

which lacks any

and turbulent, luminous atmosphere.

in reply that the elaborate

modern

52

uniform

prevents exposure of the body and that the

itself

nature of the subject matter prevents anything approaching

But the

the expressive nudity of Classicism.

rider's tight

and breeches only reveal how two-dimensional and

sleeves

pattern-like Gericault's understanding of the figure remains,

neither modeling nor contour conveying strength in the grip

of his legs or the sweep of his sword arm.

that

work

The signs of strength

ones displaced to the ends of

effectively are isolated

limbs: the boot in the stirrup and the clenched

reins. It

comes

worked out

no surprise

as

fist

around the

to learn that the painting

was

through color sketches without prepara-

largely

tory drawing. Worries over drawing

would probably have

prevented the painting ever being realized

at all.

Works of startling genius can come about through compenand the overcoming of self-imposed

sation for deficiencies

difficulties.

work

is

In this instance, the imbedded weakness in the

an inescapable mark of the social on the singular

identity of the artist, that

mark of those

the

is,

which he must somehow answer

existing

he

is

to

complete his own. Because Gericault was not yet ready

to

identities to

match the example of a Drouais on

body

was

that

Cavalryman

emblem

its

as an absence, a

its

own

terms, the heroic

registered

is

if

the

in

Light

non-body which generates the

painting's spectacular compensatory invention by

very

its

unrepresentability.

The

would

that a Salon

of Napoleon from power in

first fall

Waterloo

in 1815. It

it

had

to

was decided

mark the return of

hastily be held to

monarchist culture, but

took

advantage of the opportunity to double his representation

the exhibition by including the Light

in

Cavalryman along with

whatever new work he could prepare in time. Again his bid for

renewed attention was

monumental

Wounded Heavy Cavalryman, which he

work.

to the earlier

the effect of the

new

The

meaningful work normally reserved

single

The

figure,

plainly intended as a

object would be to deepen

painting (and give the old an enhanced

complex

for the

internal

narratives of Classical history painting.

For purposes of balance between the paintings, the addition

be exceptionally open in

number of works. Gericault

order to obtain an adequate

pendant

The Wounded Heavy Cavalryman

H'9x9'7 (358x294)

temporary return of the Bourbons before their

definitive restoration after

53

Theodore Gericault

(cuirassier) 1814.

year 1814 saw the

France and

53

And

of a mount was necessary.

the soldier's need simulta-

neously to keep his feet and to maintain his grip on the animal
in

turn

justifies the

dramatic contrapposto of his pose.

has been

made of

ing

result of a restricted format

the

Much

the horse's strange, occluded foreshorten-

most

as the painting's

serious failing. But this seems less serious than Gericault's

failure

to

articulate

the

key areas of muscular exertion

necessary to complete the action.

resonance and timeliness) by setting up a quasinarrative

where the costume permits the

interplay of antithesis between them: light versus heavy,

The

And

these again are passages

closest

approach

to the

nude.

thighs of the figure are massive without their underlying

mounted versus earthbound, vigorous

structure being sufficiently defined; they cannot convey the

versus debilitated. Gravity rules in the second painting, in

strength required to keep those heels planted in the ground

passenger had been

and the body braced against the descent and the horse's

active versus passive,

contrast to the

first

where the horse and

its

connected to the earth by only one spindly, springing limb.

panicky movements. Worse

The most obvious

of the right arm, which offers no discernible sense of

commentary,

of these antitheses has always dominated

that

is,

the

one

provided

by

Napoleon's

intervening reversal of fortune in the snows of Russia. While

Gericault doubtless

one part of
qualities

made room

a grandly

for that reading,

rhetorical construction of

between the two paintings, and

with enlisting the

it

modern

this

single figure to

was

opposed

had more

do the

just

to

do

sort

of

sufficient force

These

is

is

the flaccid, perfunctory shape

how

being applied to the grip on the bridle.

failings of execution are

overwhelmed

in

the end by

extraordinary passages elsewhere, the daring e\pansi\ eness

the painting's conception, and

predecessor.

Gericault's

major Salon canvases

\RTIST

at

its

early

the

last

lll.RO IN

complex

procli\it\

possible

THE

dialectic with
tor

undertaking

moment made

OF

of
its

MIMRI

their

(.1

54

LOUIS HERSENT

Distributing

Alms

Louis

to the

XVI

Poor 1817. 70

>

9()J

(178x229)

H
impact

all

the

unavoidable.

more

The

startling but their

his schooling, painful

honor of a

state

conspicuous short-cuts

pressure and the ambitious scale gave him

though

it

was.

Having been refused the

purchase of either canvas, he could do nothing

but return them to his studio and

later,

unable to bear the sight

of them, have them rolled and put away.

RETURN FROM THE WRECKAGE

In 1816, in the wake of this experience, Gericault

concerted attempt to win the

Rome

made

Prize and retroactively

acquire the traditional formation he had denied himself as a

young student. After

round

a predictable failure to gain the final

in the competition,

resources,

he again

back on his

fell

own

making the rounds of Florence, Rome, and Naples,

throwing himself into a new discipline of Classical drawing

and command of the nude.

On

his return to Paris the following year,

he

felt

himself

ready to compete on the supreme level of multi-figured

narrative.

But the range of available options had altered

considerably since his departure.

The

Bourbon monarchy was by now firmly

by the
tional

allied

armies of Europe.

restoration of the

established, enforced

correspondingly conven-

iconography of praise for royalty and the counter-

Revolution was

now

in place.

Among

those

responded was Louis Hersent ( 1 777- 1 860),

who

eagerly

contemporary of

Guerin's and likewise an ex-student of Regnault. This

artist

had early turned away from the Classicism of his training

62

RETURN FROM THE WRECKAGE

for

55

PlERRE-NARCISSE Guerin Henri

Rochejaquelein 1817. 85

x"

56 (216 x 142)

de

56

Francois Gerard Entry

of Henri

IF into Paris

16'7Jx31'4 (510x958

1817.

more picturesque subject matter. To honor the new King,

Louis XVIII, he turned

to the sentimental

mode

teenth-century genre painting to depict Louis

of eigh-

XVI

(older

features the practised beauty

and composure of the young

Classical warrior, the better to underscore the

sacrifice

The

brother of the reigning monarch) distributing alms to the poor

and inborn

ease with which such opportunistic transformations

much

during the harsh winter of 1788. Conservative commentators

could be effected did as

waxed

authority from the Davidian figural canon.

lyrically

King's habit of secretly

about the old

performing such charitable acts in the neighborhood of

Versailles

and compared the figure

in

Hersent's maudlin

Marcus

steeped in
accessible.

its

as anything to drain the

Even

tradition, other stylistic options

moral

for artists

were equally

Gerard greeted the returning Bourbons with

a vast

historical canvas (1817) depicting the seventeenth-century

composition to those of beneficent rulers of antiquity

Trajan, Titus, and

themes of self-

nobility.

monarch Henry IV being greeted by

Aurelius.

Gericault also saw the genre of the heroic single figure in

in

the civic leaders of Paris

an atmosphere of popular celebration. Henry IV was the

to celebrate the leaders of the

founder of the Bourbon dynasty, and even during the

ultra-Catholic and Royalist resistance to the Revolution in the

Revolution he had been held up as the virtuous monarch,

Vendee region of the west of France. Some half-dozen

solicitous of the welfare of the people,

battle

preempted by the regime

were given these commissions

Guerin was one of the

first

to

in

1816.

complete

It

is

in the

subsequent rulers had disastrously departed. His accession to

of Henri

the throne, symbolized in his acceptance by Paris, put an end

Salon of the

striking to see the ease with

which

Republican conventions of celebrating individual courage

in

to a terrible period of protracted civil war.

thus in

historical precedent

substitution of different iconographical props: the white flag

directed against the monarchy.

of Royalism, the sacred heart pinned to the chest. This

ties

'general'

was the most

group, which included individuals

than opportunistic bandits.

according to his apologists

whom

He had

aristocratic of the

who had been

little

more

died in 17 (M, murdered

by duplicitous Republicans

in that the

was more exact and powerful, while

new regime

allowed the

Vendccn

Gerard's choice was

some ways more canny than Hersent's,

the thick of battle were turned to opposite ends through the

particular

from whose example

enterprising

his, a portrait

deRochejaquelein (1817), which he showed

following year.

The

artists

to exploit a current of criticism

He also exploited

it

once

the possibili-

of historicism, as opened up by Ingres, but without any of

the latter's tendency toward preciousness and esolcricism.

The Entry of Henry

II

expertly recalls the teeming magnifi-

cence, the multiplied subsidiary characters, the rich costume,

to

he had offered clemency. Guerin lends to his pose and

detail,

and color of Peter Paul Rubens and other masters of

pomp and circumstance from

the founding age of Absolutism.

RKTl'RN FROM THE

WRECK

\Cil.

63

56

57

Horace Vernet

City Gate at Clkky

1822. 38x51J(97.5x 130.5)

Gerard had renewed

each

now vying

to be

his longstanding rivalry with Girodet,

named

to the revived

of First Painter to the King.

It

was

Old-Regime

a contest in

office

which the

former easily prevailed, untroubled as he was by any concern

to restore the authority of Classical

mythology. His Henry

approach to

lectic

IV set

historical

form from within

its

core

a pattern for a stylistically ec-

drama, emphasizing costume and

spectacular effects, which a group of younger artists would

carry through the 1820's. It was this group

less

than

was

Paris, he

murder of a

Ary Scheffer and Horace Vernet (1789-1863)

The young

as

Vernet, a friend

easily carried over into a

first

attracted to

which carried bizarre

and

tism,

than

ritual

a series

which

newspaper accounts of the

liberal official in the provinces,

a certain Fualdes,

details of secret conspiracy, transves-

murder.

He

took his meditations no further

of drawings, having subsequently found a subject

significance: the

well as uncomplaining Royalists.

demonstrate that his

personal fascination with violence and victimization. Back in

designate as 'Romantics', and

included avowedly liberal

and drama

interest in pictorial action

in

it

Rome

ambition. His drawings from

Gericault or Eugene Delacroix) that contemporaries would

painters like

57

(much

him, was what kind of subject matter would carry his exalted

horrific suffering

was redeemed by

shipwreck

in

far clearer public

1816 off the West African coast

of the frigate Medusa.

In

its

essentials, the story of the survivors of the disaster

of Gericault, would apply this approach to a celebration of the

would not have seemed

Imperial army's resistance to the Allies at the gates of Paris

ambitions for Classical grandeur.

The

and the military successes of the Revolutionary forces (The

manded

had run aground

City Gate at Clichy and The Battle ofjemappes, both 1822).

notorious shallows of the Arguin bank.

Vernet's studio became a social center for young, disaffected ex-officers

and

artists,

bored and antagonistic

to the

Restoration (he himself painted a group portrait of the studio,

full

of in-jokes and putting the practise of art no higher than

fencing and riding). Gericault found a natural

he lacked
as

its

insouciance about artistic matters. Having begun

something of

skills,

home there, but

a dilettante in the acquisition

of technical

he sought now, perhaps alone in his generation, to

reinvest formal values with the moral import they had carried

vessel

vehicle

flagship of a small fleet

was

a returned

for

Gericault's

privileged

commandeered

precarious,

soldiers

As the

the inadequate lifeboats, a large

Some

150

crowd together on

this

was lashed together from the masts and

seamen and

in the

The commander of the

emigre aristocrat who had spurned the

advice of the experienced naval officers under him.

raft

new

incompetently com-

were forced

to

spars.

openwork platform; there was no room

for

them

to

do anything but stand and the structure was so overloaded

that the water

As soon

came

to their waists.

as the officers in the boats

(which also carried the

under the Republic.

cruelly impatient governor of Senegal) realized that towing

He now possessed a command of Classical drawing that was

doubly remarkable in an artist who remained essentially selftaught. The question, given the depressing examples around

the raft was slowing their

64

RETURN FROM THE WRECKAGE

line,

leaving

its

own

progress to a crawl, they cut the

occupants to their

then struck from without by

fate.

The

castaways were

storm and from within by

58-9
62

58

THEODORE GERICAULT

Severed Limbs 1818. 20x25

(52 x 64)

horrific episode of despairing delirium

among the enlisted men

which factions

violently attacked the officers with the

up the

intention of breaking

in

raft

and committing

collective

The latter killed and wounded large numbers of the

mutineers. The fighting, along with accidental or voluntary
surrender to the waves, reduced their number to less than
suicide.

thirty within six

The

remained on the

possible

Senegal. Five

59

of the Medusa 1818.

more died

there; only ten

were ever to reach

details of the story only

became known because

group of the hardiest and most

lucid,

was leaked

killings

pitiful

THEODORE GERICAULT

the Raft

and the blackened, emaciated

confidential report written by Savigny to explain his conduct

policy

the

accidental pass by a search vessel

sight,

which

opposed

stretch

in

France.

by organizing deliberate
to

raft

survivors were taken to the primitive French capital in

including the ship's surgeon Savigny, augmented this horror

order

moment, an

brought the

eat the flesh of the corpses

began to

raft.

last

The

days of the abandonment.

living soon

expedients, fifteen survived for another week. At virtually the

of those nearest death in

provisions.

Through

these

service.

to the press

by elements within government

to the Minister of the

of excluding

The wounded

Marine, and particularly

experienced

Imperial

to his

officers

from

naval administration concentrated

its

Despair and Cannibalism on

1

x 15 (28 x 38)

RETURN FROM THE WRE(

K Uii.

65


revenge on the bearer of the news,
a

who

then went public with

book on the disaster (written with Correard, another

survivor

more

recently returned from Africa) to vindicate

around

himself. Their cause found ready support in the circle

Vcrnet, where the same grievances toward the Restoration

were keenly

and

commitment

to

far

from unchallengable, and

both the governor of Senegal and the naval authorities had

been quick to seize on the grim

the isolated hero which had preoccupied the artist in his

of cannibalism and

first

public paintings.

His catastrophic indecision over the hanging

in the

Salon of 1819 was

a direct

ot the

manifestation of

he chose instead to have

wall,

painting

its

double

low on the

it

elevated over the portal of the

it

vast exhibition space in the Louvre.

But even

he stayed to

as

watch his painting being hoisted into position, he recognized

had made

The

grievous error.

elevated position was

the one he automatically

felt to

historical composition:

the highest genre of painting was

woman on

confederates to

his

board, the canteen attendant, had

was among those

broken thigh and

killed).

viewing so that

painted his eerily evocative studies

of severed heads and limbs as a counterpart to the charnel-

completed

full

mayhem

greatest horror, the

quent cannibalism. But

ambition

to

raft

had become.

equal

historical painting

in the

the

on

his

and events are

compact of

grandeur of Davidian

clarified

exactly coincided with

own unaided

its

moment of the first, agonizing sighting

when no one knew if they had been seen
the

group

is

galvanized into one

attract its attention;

Compromising

it is

He chose

of the rescue ship,

last collective

as if the

powers.

in return

and the

action in order to

dependent plague victims of

Gros's Plague House at Jaffa had suddenly found the inner

own redemption.

resources to take over their

It is crucial to

cates

its

recognize that the painting

( 1

8 9)

communi-

Were

remotely true to the

it

facts,

the

bodies would be starved and disfigured by sun poisoning,

and open wounds. Instead Gericault seized the oppor-

tunity to display

all

of the impressive

command

of the athletic

male nude that he had achieved since departing for

and he could do

this

on

a scale that

was larger than

notoriously difficult challenge to draftsmanship.

figures, including three blacks, to

composition.

The unconscious

middle-aged protector,

is

Girodet, Broc, or Guerin.

life,

answer the needs of

his

Athenian ephebe out of

finished painting

hybrid of the hyper-traditional

(a

is a

centralized

complex

pyramidal

arrangement of nude figures) and the unexpected (building

on

66

pitching sea

with

He added

cast

of contemporary,

RETURN FROM THE WRECKAGE

it

semi-

local detail

and

tradition, but Gericault

The

bodies in

away

to the viewer.

his friends

as

The

it

were

was removed

direction of the

compositional decisions had been to push the figures

forward into the viewer's presence, until bodies seem to

spill

out of pictorial space altogether. Without crucial details being

immediately present, as they are today are

the Louvre, contact with the

One such

drama was

which can stand

detail,

hand of the unconscious youth

everything in the painting,
the effect of making
be,

however near

the Raft

is

that

it

to the painting

its

in

its

in

for

all, is

in

the extended

lower

the

as close as

Like

left.

life;

has

this

one expects

one stands.

colossal size both creates

is

low hanging

in its
lost.

twice as large as

seem twice

intimacy of approach that

The

it is

it

to

The paradox

of

and demands an

normally the province of an easel

tender pathos of that open palm

emotional invitation that, once

it

is

is

so involving

accepted, any

disinterested vantage point outside the composition disappears.

The

chain of mingled bodies, uniting the races of

Europe and
in a state

Africa,

becomes the equivalent of one

of transformation;

its

single

body

internal quickening proceeds

from the group of moribund figures

upward through rekindled

youth, cradled in the arms of a

a beautiful

The

Rome

distance of

and

imposing generality

the

all

right to see the painting's force drain

painting.
1

subject matter as an idea rather than anything

resembling reportage.

sores

demanded by

humanity, redeemed by suffering and

achieving salvation through

with

painted

are

Raft

artist's

sacrificed in the interests of a purified

common

the

from an intimate proximity

own terms

a certain

legible'

reduced to suitably subordinate importance.

of the mutiny and the subseartistic

would be

its totality

end the demands of his

the moral vindication of the raft survivors.

facts

He

compositional studies of the two episodes of

be appropriate for an imposing

decorum normally demanded

sion; its

castaways' ordeal; he was said to have visited hospitals to see

men at first hand and

defined by expansiveness of effect and breadth of comprehen-

Gericault famously immersed himself in every detail of the

house of dismembered bodies which the

40

same problematic of

the

in

that he

dying

62

same time

figures continued at the

is

many

murder which had allowed him and

suffered

59

most startling paradox

Savigny's particular responsibility for the deliberate policy of

survive (the lone

58

fact

its

character: finding that the organizers had placed

Savigny's and Correard's account of their actions.

Their version of events was

victims). But perhaps

the degree to which this grand narrative involving

combined

Gericault's seizing on the subject

felt.

an attraction to the events in themselves

anonymous

at

the

left

across and

alertness at the center onto the

ecstatic vitality of the frantic signaling at the pinnacle of the

group.

The only figure which

on an opposing diagonal
distributes the physical

is

obviously beyond reviving

to this unified

lies

movement, which

and moral awakening of one body over

the variations of nineteen individuals. This collective body

has a brain

mast

but

its

the four cooler heads clustered around the

salvation

is

sinews, and blood. In this

a public artist,

remained

overwhelmingly an

way

affair

of nerves,

Gericault, in his production as

a painter of the heroic single figure.

Through

the Raft's inspired anomalies of theme and scale, he

managed

drama

to recast historical

in

terms, pushing

its

painting to an extreme of gigantism in order to generate a

paradoxical intimacy with one generalized, eloquent body.

PUNISHMENTS OF THE DAMNED

By

the time the Raft went on display, the scandal had done

its

work: the captain had been disgraced, the governor and

minister had been removed.

ranks to those

himself had

harming the

who had

recognized
state.

that

this aim,

Still,

work
Ill

were

policies

would be honored by

state purchase.

in fact (contrary

by the Academy and awarded

France and his disappointment was profound.

in

and physical, aggravated by horse-riding

would cause Gericault's early death

of 33. Although he planned

on openly

liberal

themes

But even here

new

more modest

A sojourn

he successfully showed the Raft

in a

in

at the

scale.

in

England, where

paying exhibition, led to

drawing and printmaking. Taking

up the new medium of lithography, he produced prints

wider market, documenting scenes of
sports, disability

And

age

were immense, commensurate

with those of his Salon painting.

remarkable experiments

1824

of the slave trade), his

work only on

his innovations

in

compositions (now

historical

like the evils

limited energies permitted

hanging.

there was no possible private destination for such

health, mental

injuries

exclusionary

though the painting was

to legend) rated quite highly

medal.

law opened up military

Gericault believed that his celebration of

the catalyst for reform

He failed in

A new

served under the Empire: the King

common

life

and alcoholism, the indigent poor,

for a

labor,

a public

in his primary medium, he manifested similarly

broad sympathies

in five

of the most remarkable exercises in

portraiture ever painted.

These have come down

insane," and there

They were

to us as his "portraits of the

may have been

as

many

as ten of them.

discovered almost a half century after the

artist's

death, and any original data concerning their motivation and

purpose has been

came

lost; all

after the Raft.

one knows of their dating

There

is

some evidence

is

that they

that suggests

Gericault underwent psychiatric treatment himself within

advanced medical

60

where new, humane forms of

Theodore Gericault Pity the

Man 82 1. 12frxl4J (31.7x37.6)

Old
61

circles

Sorrows of the Poor

THEODORE GERICALET

Portrait of an Insane

Man

1822-3. 24 x 19 (61.2x30.2)

I'l

NISHMENTS

(>!'

THE DAMN1

l>

(.7

61

treatment had been pioneered. French psychiatry in this

modern therapeutic approach

period had developed the

which mental
one

seen as continuous with normal

is

whom

aristocracy in

life;

as a kind of

argument even presented the insane

line of

modern

illness

in

the Revolution's democratic

acquainted there

slumped boys

in 1817,

in the left

and Delacroix posed

for

foreground of the Raft.

one of the

When

older artist received a state commission for a Sacred

Jesus, he surreptitiously passed

it

on

the

lean of

to his grateful protege.

Hut the ambition of the younger very quickly surpassed such

He

emancipation of individual thought and feeling had simply

routine

reached an insupportable extreme.

painting for the Salon of 1822 in place of competing for the

Gericault's surviving portraits display a sympathetic objectivity

which

According

attitude.

congruent with

is at least

to

late

this

new

nineteenth-century testimony,

each represents a particular psychological malady,

mania'

contemporary parlance. Each sufferer

in

scientific

'a

is

mono-

depicted

Grand

works.

pressed himself to complete a major

Rome. The

Prix dc

was

result

exercise on a literary theme, the

a strikingly original

Bark of Dante and

irgil,

depicting the passage of the two poets across the marshes

surrounding the
His

first

fifth circle

of

hell.

Salon entry demonstrated that he would absorb his

according to the portrait conventions of the time, particularly

Italian

culture outside the normal institutional channels.

dress and technique which David had

Where

Gericault had only postponed his pilgrimage to Italy,

the plain dignity in

developed

(and self-portraits) of the Revolu-

in his portraits

tionary period. Gericault conveys the underlying texture of

muscle,

fat,

and bone

each face with startling economy and

in

with a mobile technique which he

effect

is

able to vary to surprising

an occasion for the simultaneous

is

discovery of an individuated person and of the uncertain

traces

would

development of any ambitious painter (he

of North Africa,

later travel to the exotic territory

following French colonial expansion, as a kind of substitute).

The

from subject to subject.

For the viewer, each

Delacroix would forgo the passage that once had been deemed
essential in the

considerable intellectual and technical

highest genre had, nevertheless, to be

recourse to the Divine

met

Comedy marks one

demands of

in other

the

ways. His

solution: cultivation

of impersonal, objective conditions; each prompts

of the most advanced literary taste, which in this period was

which knowledge of other selves

elevating alternative poetic traditions over the legacy of

reflection

on the degree

to

always entails the unstable convergence of the two. In their

French Classicism: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron over

way they answer the same demands

Racine and Voltaire. Delacroix would

for

elevation

and

complication in the single figure which Gericault had pursued

Reversing the Raft's passage through the

in his public art.

of these

illustrate all

foreign writers during the 1820's.

Searching for the means to make

painting of such literary

more

colossal to arrive at the intimate, each portrait begins within a

sources, however, he turned to a

confined and homely approach to one isolated figure but

mode: Gericault's Raft. Indeed almost all of his major work of

deploys

its

plain-spoken manufacture and modestly sus-

prompt

pended judgment

to

commensurate

scale

in

in the

viewer mental events

with those elicited by the most

paintings pursue one latent implication of the Raft's

construction of heroism, that

is,

the heroic subject

may

necessarily be an effective actor in the world; heroism

subjects

and vulnerable individuals. One's approach

is

through

not

may

which overwhelm

well be manifested in resistance to forces

isolated

decade can be read as

to such

simultaneous diagnosis of the threaten-

slough, Delacroix chose to

turbulent sea.

He exploits

punishments of hell

the

nude

young Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863),

would move toward the

latter

of these two poles.

same tense combination of

filiation

existed within the circle of David.

father in infancy

and

his

mother

in

and

The

rivalry that

latter

had

adolescence.

He

had

lost his

shared

Gericault's background in the upper bourgeoisie (his legal

father Charles
early

his

68

had been an important diplomat) and also took

training

in

Guerin's studio.

The two became

PUNISHMENTS OF THE DAMNED

calm and misty

vessel threatened

by

the Inferno to recall the predictable

Gericault himself had quoted Dante's

man cradling

mind

The damned

souls clinging to the bark

the bodies on the fringe of the

a mindless,

devouring hunger.

of bodies, Delacroix has constructed

On

raft,

and

that platform

compositional pyramid

capped by the poet's beckoning gesture toward

a distant

horizon.

Gericault and Delacroix had between them something of

the

(as

adolescent).

one exhibits

innovative project in historical painting of the

show the

cannibalistic Ugolino in the vignette of the older

mind induced by confrontation with

a hostile external world.

him

equation of the Medusa survivors' suffering and sins with the

call directly to

1820's, that of the

meditation on one or another

virtually the entire previous tradition of historical painting. In

ing conditions and identification with the extreme states of

The most

and immediate

aspect of that work, which concentrated and filtered for

spite of Dante's description of passing over a

sweeping narrative.

The

this

local

If the painting lacks the Raft's

movement

into depth, this

can perhaps be explained by the differences

in

stages of

competence between the two

its

summary

technical

artists.

In

application of paint, compression of space, and emphasis of

surface pattern, Delacroix's Dante and Virgil exhibits
the

same

Where

traits as

confident

some of

Gericault's Charging Light Cavalryman.

command

of drawing

is

lacking, there

is

66

62

THEODORE GERICAUET

63

Jean-Alglsi

The Raft of the Medusa 1819. 16'lx23'6 (490.2x716.3)

e-I)o\iim(ji

1.

INGRES Tht

tpotheosis /

Homer

1S27.

L2'8

urn

(386

^1 5 6)

PI

\1s11\11.\ is

of THE

i)

\\1\1

i)

(,<)

70

64

EUGENE DELACROIX

The Death of Sardanapalus 1827.

65

EUGENE DELACROIX

The 28th ofJuly: Liberty Leading

PUNISHMENTS OF THE DAMNED

12'lli- x 16'3 (395 x 495)

the People 1830.

8'6J x 10'8 (260 x 325.1)

corresponding effort to compensate through emphasis on

and the multiplication of arresting incidents and

texture

the

across

effects

Unlike

surface.

his

mentor, however,

France

consistent pictorial idiom out of

at

In

one capable of organizing

it,

coming

to

understand this

art,

us as the essence of Romanticism,

ways

which has come down

it is

important to see the

which Delacroix's practise represents the

in

precocious Salon success

when

logical

into the 1790's

Guerin established

and

Gerard

beyond.

to

and

model of

the

Rome Academy was closed

the

by war and the Revolutionary exhibitions removed the old

on entry. Their

restrictions

ability

to

on that

capitalize

opportunity, dignified by the Davidian notion of the artist as

exemplar of virtue, helped remove the old

self-creating

from an

artisanal associations

artistic career.

This is turn made

painting seem an attractive and feasible venture to a quasiaristocratic

amateur

young Gericault. And

like the

normal routines of training and socialization played

part

development,

his

in

next

the

step

was

Rome-Prize procedure, with

its

but

who chaffed against the repressive regime of

who lacked any effective avenues of resistance

home. As the government was constrained

Holy Alliance

in favor

to follow the

of the Turks, liberals were

safely able to present themselves as defenders of core

Western

values against a brutal Oriental despotism.

Some two

years before, the population of the island of

Homer and

Chios (the legendary birthplace of

of

a seat

Hellenic learning) had been subjected to a brutal campaign of

retaliatory terror, its

sent into slavery.

As

murdered

or

was of a piece with the Raft

as

towns razed,
a subject

it

its

inhabitants

well as with those unrealized projects of Gericault's later

years, the victims of the slave trade

and the prisoners of the

Spanish Inquisition released by democratic insurgents in

him

1820. In the year of his mentor's death, Delacroix paid

homage

and

laid

claim to his legacy

with

his

own crowded

as the

scene of collective martyrdom arranged into a canted pyramid

minimal

of dead and suffering bodies set against the sea's sharp

move

to

permanently outside of the confining discipline embodied

the

The

a rallying point for disaffected liberals

as well,

policy of the

outcome of developments reaching back

in

controlled stages of

horizon.

The Massacre

however, made plain the

at Scio,

difficulties

entailed in trying to build so directly on the Raft of the

Medusa

progress, humiliating submission to repeated judgment, and

without bringing to the task the same degree of immersion in

years of subservient conformity.

the subject and lengthy

As Gericault had quickly recognized, there was

able price to be paid for such abstinence, but

The

Delacroix was willing to assume.

artist

a considerit

was one

would have few

composition.
vertical

find a

The

trial

and error

principal group rests

in

achieving a

final

awkwardly within the

format (over 12 feet high), in that Delacroix could not

way

to treat the large

upper zone

As the

more than

in

learned routines on which to rely, a diminished fund of

perfunctory, space-filling way.

concrete knowledge once so patiently, even subliminally

noted with near unanimity, the painting lacks any focus of

absorbed over years of artistic exercise

of

No

Italy.

demands

for high erudition

intellectual resources that

and

institution: they

any single individual could com-

rapid, cost-effective execution.

new-model

had

it

the inevitably limited

corresponding pressure for immediate

artist

to be tested

The

were not secured by any

and proven

Each major painting was

outing.

some

meant

this

credentials of this

which

and elevation of thought, but

would now depend upon

mand. And there was

results,

among the monuments

ambitious painter could as yet forgo traditional

these qualities

in

every public

a speculative exercise in

was imperative that public attention be seized with

effective

combination of the familiar and the strikingly

Delacroix's Dante and Virgil fulfilled nearly

requirements

in a

of plague and disaster, do

the Turks.
captivity

by fragmented

Most of these, derived from generic iconographies

vignettes.

little

One mounted

and prepares

to evoke the specific outrages of

warrior carries a naked

to slay her

more than

into

male defender, but

haughty demeanor, splendid costume, and easy

spirited horse fascinate

woman

repel:

his

command of a

this

cavalryman

seems an orientalized cousin of Gericault's flamboyant

chasseur.

In

its

defense,

it

could be said that the confusions of the

painting are the same confusions of philhellene sentiment in

France of the period.

The

stock images to which Delacroix

The

subject

all

of these

fashion inspired by eastern Mediterranean dress, frequently

digressed into admiring tributes to the beauty of the Turkish

comes from the

recent events of the

Greek

war of independence from the Ottoman Turks, which had

in

1821 and would go on through most of the decade.

was the struggle

the massacres. Polemics in favor of the Greeks, along with

moved to capitalize on its public success

truly monumental scale, thelMassacre at

with a painting on a

begun

effective action, leaving one's attention divided

of the Salon

canvas of relatively modest dimensions. For

the Salon of 1824, he

Scio.

critics

resorted were current in journalistic and literary responses to

novel.

67

in

Charles

most complex narrative structures.

perished at Missolonghi in that same year.

Greek cause provided

Delacroix would essentially remain at this stage and forge a

the

66

who

Byron,

that

was famously

It

to enlist the English poet

physique and costume. Delacroix and

not

know enough about

celebrating.
liberals

in

In

the

many

simply did

the people and cause they

manner of

later

his friends

frustrated

were

and disaffected

times and places, they substituted

imaginary identification with

a distant colonial resistance for

PUNISHMENTS OF THE DAMNED

71

52

66

EUGENE DELACROIX

The Bark of Dante and

Virgil 1822.

the struggle they were unable to pursue at home.

could not magically provide by

the level of

its

itself

74x941(188x241)

The

painting

the coherence lacking on

Virgin in an appeal for divine assistance in defeating the forces

of the French Protestants.

The

uncertain political motivation.

entire picture

is

in

fact

an extreme extension of

Ingres's well-rehearsed historicist approach, executed with

his customarily precise professionalism. Since 1820

SUICIDE OF THE DESPOT

The year of Delacroix's public setback over the Massacre at
Sao was simultaneously one of belated vindication and Salon

motif

success for Ingres, returning from his long sojourn as an

the painting

expatriate in Italy.

He

had labored

for the previous four years

an undisguised pastiche of various versions of the

is

motif by

its

High-Renaissance master, Raphael. As a

is

of fictionality.

The

Virgin and Child are ostensibly either a

vision or an unseen divine presence, but the effect

home

idolatrous one of a

Montauban. The subject combined

normal

devotional motif, the Virgin and Christ child, with a piece of

ultra-Royalist historicism, the

the painting

its title).

vow of Louis XIII (which gives

The monarch of the seventeenth century

appears in the position normally occupied by an adoring

The vow
72

in

saint.

question was a dedication of the kingdom to the

SUICIDE OF THE DESPOT

tation,

result,

an unstable concatenation of parts and degrees

over one large painting commissioned for the cathedral of his

city of

he had

spent most of his time in Florence, and the central religious

known work

of

art, a

being addressed and adored.

signify an earthly unveiling or the

is a

rather

material represen-

The

parted curtains

boundary of

a theatrical

stage set. Reversing the old relation between royal patron and
artist,

divine right

is

shown seeking

blessing of a painter's genius.

its

confirmation in the

67 Eugf.nf. Df.i.acroix

The Massacre at Sew 1824. 13'8Jxll'7J (417.2x354)

SUICIDE OF THE DESPOT

73

genealogy leading back through the French Classicism of

Louis XIV, High Renaissance, and Periclean Alliens

its

pure source

Commentators of the
political significance

continuing the

time,

Revolutionary esthetics, tried

around

to place a

habits

many

of

frame of moral and

artists' stylistic choices.

construction has persisted into

to reach

of Greek culture.

in the archaic origins

One such

present-day accounts,

pitting the backward-looking conservatism of Ingres's

man-

ner against the liberating quality of Delacroix's gestural

colorism. But the latter could just as easily be turned to the

One

support of the prevailing social order.

of the great

official

Eugene Deveria's (1805-

successes of the Salon of 1827 was

65) Birth of Henry IV, in which royal pageantry

is

rendered

69

with conspicuously open brushwork, high-keyed color, and

profuse invention in

This work pushed

details.

its

to

conclusion the infantilization of royal power which Ingres had

begun

1817 with Henry

in

IV

Playing With His Children, a

small cabinet picture executed in the delicate

manner of

Flemish miniature.
Deveria's success, which brought a rain of prizes and

commissions

his

of the

leader

Republicans

way, made him for

'Romantic'

school.

time the recognized

This confirmed many

view that rapid, gestural technique and

in their

the stress on color over line represented a craven, unpatriotic

acceptance of English

styles, in particular that

Lawrence. Romanticism
the hated

of

Thomas

them was the signature

for

Holy Alliance and

of the glorious

betrayal

style of

achievements of French painters under the Republic and

Empire, which had paralleled the conquests of French arms

68

Jean-Alglste-Dominique Ingres The Vow of Louis XIII

and

elicited

was

as strong a position as that

admiring imitation by

artists across

which linked the new school

with opposition to authority (as in the Greek struggle for

1824.

independence), but

13'9Jx 8'8^ (421 x 264.5)

commanding

it

was

fatally

weakened by the absence of a

artistic personality to give

it

form. Ingres was a

living refutation of any necessary connection

None
warmest
Joseph
68

56

of this stood in the

official

way of the painting

welcome. There

Heim showing

Charles

distributing prizes at the

Salon of 1824: Ingres's

Vow

the figure of the King.

As Gerard had understood with

is

tellingly placed directly

above
his

camp

Greek mythology.

An enormous

in 1824.

most assiduously

to

moments of glory. The

meet the needs of the regime

end produced the most profound exposure of

and

artificiality.

Where

modern forms of state power,

precisely right for the Restoration.

monumental
osis

74

its

who

in the

shallowness

Ingres had missed the mark with

Napoleon, who believed that he had created

ancient and

artists

allegory for the

new

SUICIDE OF THE DESPOT

new synthesis of

his instincts

He moved on

royal

of Homer, which famously

museum,

fossilizes

were

to his

the Apothe-

rigid

cultural

frustration of this

procession gathered for the burial, and

unscheduled apology

past

Much of the

came out in the emotional responses to Girodet's death

dynasty, propped up by foreign powers, would necessarily be

show of

between Repub-

himself, in exile in

Brussels since 1815, devoted himself to portraits and esoteric

exercises in

Gros stepped forward

tried

Even David

licanism and Classicism.

Entry ofHenry IV, the outward forms of the restored Bourbon

a theatrical

63

receiving the

painting by Francois-

is a

Europe. This

in tears at the graveside to

for

make an

having abandoned the true path of

correct drawing in favor of the shallow gratifications of color

and splashy execution.

From

the early 1820's on,

Gros attempted

to be true to his

word, but his born-again devotion to firm contours and

antique subjects could not quiet the claims that the Davidian

manner was

a straitjacket for

such effort was doomed

any modern

ended with

and

that any-

start. The belittling

own growing feelings of

from the

responses to his painting and his

failure

artist

his suicide in

1835. Despair over the

70

general

impasse of the

artistic

late

Restoration took on

powerful imaginative form in the huge painting on the theme

64

of suicide

with

Deveria

1827

in

which Delacroix challenged Ingres and

the Death of Sardanapalus.

In terms of official and critical responses, the challenge was

decidedly unsuccessful. In terms of the

artist's ability to

render a teeming scene of death and destruction into a

statement,

coherent
67

it

nevertheless

represented

great

advance over the Massacre at Scio of three years before.

link to

Byron remains, now

terms.

The

The

in literary rather than biographical

story of the last Assyrian king,

committing suicide

rather than submit to conquest, was the subject of Byron's

poem

verse

of 1821, which was translated shortly thereafter

and performed on stage

in Paris.

In taking up the theme,

Delacroix increased his difficulties by a wholesale magnification of the story's nihilistic implications. Byron's hero

accompanied

death only by

in

voluntarily accepts his fate.

The

painter returns to the ancient

legends which portrayed Sardanapalus as a licentious

ster;

he

is

shown

is

concubine who

favorite

mon-

indolently observing the execution of his

orders that the destruction of his possessions and the

women

of his harem take place before his eyes as the massive pyre

is

set alight.

62

His assimilation of Gericault's model

through

diametric reversal of

canted pyramid

outward

is

to save his

no longer

its

is

meaning:

this

time secured

at the

peak of the

a lowly black sailor reaching

companions; instead the occupant

is

an

absolute ruler at the height of arrogance, looking inward to

will

the death of everyone in his vicinity.

The

painting's

ambiguities of space, which externalize the riot and disorder

in the

mind of the

architect of the scene, are brought into line

by that strong underlying design (cover up the one

visible

corner of the bed and the composition collapses into the

undisciplined hotchpotch

its

detractors said

it

was).

The same

could be said of the dispersion of eye-catching incident across

the entire surface and of the sustained intensity of hue, which
artfully conflates

blood with

fire

and enforces an overwhelm-

ing feeling of claustrophobic menace.

69

FXGFNF DEVERIA

The

painting compels

The Buth of Henri

II

1827.

15'10}x 12'10 (484x392)

70

Jfan-Alguste-Dominiquf. Ingres Henri IV

Playing With His Children 1817. 39x49j

SI

ICIDE

()!'

Till

(99.1 x 125)

Dl

SPOT

conviction through

abandonment of all compromise with

its

the public values of the Davidian past or the Royalist present:

the social

own

compact implodes, and Delacroix comes into

his

In an essay published shortly afterwards, Delacroix wrote

of a time in Michelangelo's early career when, so

believed, neglect by patrons brought

Later in

life,

him

was

it

close to giving up.

he would paint the sculptor in

a state

of idleness,

his past creations but with his chisel

thrown

to

the studio floor, and he gave to his painted Michelangelo the

and the pose he had

traits

making

earlier given to his

Sardanapalus,

plain an understanding of the ruler's destructive

despair as metaphor for the artist's condition.

His extravagant projection of

futility in the

women conceived entirely as objects

The regrettably automatic sexism of

Sardanapalus

illegible

distance to the rear.

approach

allegorical

at the level

of form,

fantasies acceptable, cannot be set aside.

But

possibility.

statement

as

painting

this

was,

it

maker's sense of

its

Like David in his movement from Horatii to

Delacroix was capable of better, even within the

Brutus,

same year (1827), he returned

struggle, but chose to

solidarity

one,

into

condense

to the

his

monumental

theme of the Greek

city

walls, destroying

This prompted

it

its

against the uncertainty of his draftsmanship.

together, for

On

of their incongruity, forecast directly his

all

when upheaval

home

at

July

1830 discontent across the entire social

28,

Revolution, was quickly

allegorical

of the

for the help

defenders blew up the

agitation for the

Greek

which ended the siege of

Missolonghi made lurid fantasies about ancient despots seem

With

constitutional monarchy.

Greece,

he

conceded

that

and

ken and the capacities of his

art,

so he sought

another solution within the neglected resources of Western

As

turn to explicit allegory allowed

body of the

in Girodet's Revolt at Cairo,

nakedness to an exotic victim

erotic appeal to

woman

oriental

as heroic

him

to

emblem.

an anecdotal ascription of

while

retaining a potentially

some viewers, both male and female

cannot

help conveying the connotations of moral superiority indelibly linked to the ideal

nude.

The

disordered clothing, a

conventional sign of distress, discloses the breast of an

inviolable goddess; the
a stain of blood

and

He was no

radical

But the demands of

his artistic

a painting,

The

The

of these allegiances

first

is

public potential of the Raft of the Medusa. Liberty's barricade,

heaving up in the foreground,

is

the raft itself turned ninety

degrees to the right so that the bodies tumble off

rather than
is

its

shifted

lower

more or less

left,

The

model.

trailing edge. Gericault's

precisely

straining

intact

its

leading

sprawling barelegged

from the lower right corner

marking the way he transposed

his

pyramid of figures now pushes toward

the viewer rather than toward a distant horizon.

The most

pressing question would have been what to place

peak of the

emblem

rising. Gericault

who

had selected

black man,

could serve simultaneously as an

of the African locale and as a condensed personifi-

cation of

all

oppression and every desire for emancipation

from intolerable conditions. The anonymity of the

figure,

turned away from the viewer's regard, the magnificent

description of the nude torso, along with

made

it

subject.

its

ethnic exoticism,

key device in universalizing the import of the

Delacroix

turned

personification of the

his

to

immediately

same urgent demands:

previous

change

in

headgear to the Phrygian cap of the great Revolution (the

freed slave in antiquity) and Greece

becomes

mark of

severed limb.

Marianne, emerged from the long darkness of royal tyranny to

SUICIDE OF THE DESPOT

a figure

would

also have

65

of course the unrealized

male victim by contrast appears only as

For any French observer, such

76

came

finish his

comfortable status quo.

bare to the waist,

The

behind when the deposed King's

caused him to produce

skills

beyond both

reintegrate the

left

painting in honor of the revolt until 1831.

at the

tradition.

revolt,

and would personally have had no argument with moderate

representation of such total carnage in the real world was

his

brought on violent

Monarchy. Delacroix did not

to be called the July

to the

by comparison.

That moment of

cousin, Louis-Philippe, was installed at the head of what

corpse

paltry

France ended the

in

which so vividly recalled the great "days" of the 1789

months.
terrible collective suicide

figures

Restoration regime.

cause, and Delacroix completed the large canvas in only three

The

The two

28th ofJuly: Liberty Leading the People, quite at odds with the

an

and themselves rather than surrender.

new wave of Western

artificial,

way of building

figure

had again been the object of a Turkish

one so overwhelming that

well be a

allegiances

personification of Greece standing at the site of Missolonghi

assault,

may

laste

may

renewed expression of

(where Byron had died), mutely appealing

West. In 1826 the

The

cognitive complexity into a painting that ran with rather than

insurrection in the streets of Paris.

made such extreme

it

case of Delacroix experimenting with an overtly

spectrum with the reign of Charles

the

51

some

soldier at

explain this lapse of convincing illusion, but

of erotic posses-

complete

partisan

forces appear only in a curiously flattened Egyptian

the time, which

masculinist assumptions he would never have questioned. In

71

Ottoman

sion.

as

the female symbol of

1792. This cast

in

against

represented only a temporary swing in

10

mind "Marianne,"

of Louis XVI's overthrow

response

was played out most centrally through imaginary violence

to

the Republic adopted by the Jacobins in the immediate wake

Republican light on the aspirations of the Greeks.

as a history painter.

surrounded by

brought directly

fight for France. In that she

is

woman, she completes

the

62

among

She

the living and dead.

calls

up certain colorful

women who

contemporary accounts of working-class

their compatriots

more

idealized,

on the barricades. If she were the

more evidently

would revert

the painting

of the order of symbol,

a part

to

rallied

least bit

curious juxtaposition of

reportage with arbitrary allegorical accompaniment.

But the body of Liberty hovers between actual physicality

and

a different

arm

is

defined by
flag

Her leading

kind of pictorial order altogether.

dark silhouette deprived of persuasive foreshortening,

its

behind;

abstract

difference from the white expanse of the tricolor

it

exists as

an interruption of the continuity of that

Her head turns unnaturally

sign.

directly reminiscent of inner transformation

body

to

goddess

in

present a

to

way

similarly flattened outline to the viewer. In a

that

is

from mortal

Canova's allegorical portrait of Pauline

Borghese, the figure stands simultaneously as a sculptural

presence and as a mental abstraction.

the link between matter and understanding, the

medium

of passage from fact to meaning and back again.

discreet departures

impose

carrying with
in the legacy

legacy

from

a naturalistic

governing conceptual

collection of bodies
it

is

that
Greece on the

Rums of Missolonghi

it

was

The

embedded

imprint of that

to a trace, but that

it

could work

continuing power. That the

its

of Classicism could function only

was

treated with such extreme discretion

Eugene Delacroix

are sufficient to

and actions surrounding her, that order

a sign of

artifice

The

on the disparate

the ethic of purposeful civic virtue

may have been reduced

conceptual

norm

order

of Revolutionary Classicism.

so effectively

71

makes

Delacroix

Woman

at the point

of being

lost as a

when

just as clear a sign

resource for

art.

In fact, a crisis in Classicism was evident in other national

1827.

83J x 56 (213 x H2)

cultures as well during the

quarter of the nineteenth

first

century. In Spain and England (states in which the grip of

antiquity had never been as powerful as in France), Francisco

whole of humanity;

in that

she can be nude, she represents a

natural condition of humankind, suffocated by oppression but

plebeian

modesty

at

the time, Liberty seemed

sun-browned,
who would

barefoot,

to be

and

merely

careless

the chief rhetoric employed was Majism, a subcultural

and tradition derived from the Spanish pueblo;

robust

style

of

of Blake

naturally have leapt into the fray.

all

She

is

it

was chiliasm, borrowed from English

millennarian sects. These two

indeed this character to a sufficient degree that she belongs

appears to have been

with the surrounding sociological enumeration of male types

cultural

engaged

cism

in

the struggle,

all

ages and classes represented

others set different unifying

myths against the legacy of Greece and Rome. In the case of

Goya

revealed again in revolt.

To some

Goya and William Blake among

artists'

in the case

radical

and

contributions to what

widespread Western movement of

nonconformism and

political

must now be considered

SI

insurgency

Romanti-

in detail.

)l

OF THE DESPOT

77

THE TENSIONS OF
ENLIGHTENMENT: GOYA
THE

WORK

expresses

GOYA

FRANCISCO

OF

most vividly the revolution

(1746-1828)
in

that

art

occurred during the three decades following the political

Goya was indeed

upheavals of 1789.
his age,

and

whose

both

reveal

art

the archetypical artist of

triumphant and tormented

alternatively

freedoms and

dizzying

the

life

brutal

coerciveness inaugurated by Enlightenment and revolution.

Shaken and divided by the

conflicting

demands of patrons, by

and pueblo

loyalty to the Spanish elite

alike,

and by the

shattering of previously secure divisions between public art

and private
tic in

desires,

Goya,

it

could be argued, was paradigma-

ushering in the epoch called Romanticism, which was,

some argue,

the

cultural expression of the

first

modern

age.

may

Just as an examination of Goya's complex genius

therefore shed light on the cultural crises that

and influenced our own, so

marked

his age

a consideration of the political

turmoil of Goya's Spain can illuminate aspects of his art and

the

new

Goya

global order that then emerged.

critical history

which arose

the following developments: nationalism,

as the justification for,

and the defense against,

Imperial war; guerilla armies, formed in Spain to fight the

name of the nation; and

who emerged as significant actors in the

Caprichos

1797:

Frontispiece; and Caprichos 43, "El sueno de

la

monstruos" (The sleep of reason produces monsters"). The

Frontispiece self-portrait reveals a cynical and disdainful

prosperous and wary, with doughy cheeks, puffy

artist,

eyelids,

and sharp

seems

eyes; he

fully

superiority and of the value of his

and corruption contained

stupidity,

"The

plates.

author's

banish harmful beliefs

indictments of

Goya wrote on

Goya

of Capricho

commonly

is

held,

and with

is

will just as surely suffer

The Goya

elitist

Goya; he

nic France

Goya was

and

its

southern neighbor.

No

artist

other than

so intimately involved in these complex world-

historical matters;

no other

man

or

woman

suffered and

of "El sueho," however,

down of

his

own

work

is

is

very different.

melancholic and frightened,

The atmosphere

self-portraits

78

from

life

his

and

art

is

provided by a glance

com-

at

two

1799 collection of satirical etchings and

table, the artist is

of Goya's print

accompanied by
his left shoulder,

The

artist.

vigilant

dark

a cat

(predatory

bats (symbols

diagonal of Goya's body and crossed legs

point toward an overlarge lynx

whose

is

a pedestal or

and surrounded by

swarm of mocking owls (symbols of folly) and

of ignorance).

the

Goya's

fool

reason and, perhaps, expects others to

symbol of the night) near

and, in a sense, transcended them.

introduction to the psychological and historical

Goya,

no

unstable and lacking confidence; he has suffered the break-

night

An

is

Recalling the distraught Brutus in David's painting of 1789

(see p. 26), the artist here

expressed them so intensely or so conspicuously, yet survived

plexity of

The

none.

with foreboding: resting his head and arms on

change and modernization. All of these

work of

ilustrado (enlightened)

experience the same.

historical

this

thus assertive, self-satisfied and

He

afrancesado (Francophile) Goya, and

and

the

study for Caprichos 43, "is to

caprichos to perpetuate the solid testimony of truth."

confidently up-to-date.

sin,

ensuing

in the eighty

intention,"

margin of a sheet containing

own

convinced of his

many

the pueblo (the people)

phenomena are the product of the struggles between Napoleo-

I,

razon produce

invading armies of Napoleon in the

drama of

723

conceived in

of 80 prints originally

of

times must therefore include consideration of the

in his

artist's life as well as

album

aquatints called Los Caprichos (The Capriccios), an

crossed paws

another

mimic

creature of the

the posture and hands of

Unlike him, however, the lynx

will

remain on

guard against the monsters of greed and stupidity.

Placed

at the

beginning of the second part of the Caprichos,

"El sueno" thus functions as

a suitable introduction to a

72

FRANCISCO GOYA

Caprichos

1799. 8f x6(21.9x 15.2)

1 frontispiece,

73

FRANCISCO GOYA

Caprichos 43 "El sueno de

la

razon produce

monstruos" (The sleep of reason produces monsters") 1799.

(21.

number of plates which mock

lust, folly,

form of witches and demons, such

maestra!" ("A fine teacher!"). Yet

and ignorance

it is

in the

"Linda

as Caprichos 68,

by no means clear that

the cloud of monsters that darkens Goya's self-portrait

is

that

of popular ignorance, soon to be dispersed by the artist's

satiric

Goya

pen and sunlit powers of reason. Just as

is

reflecting

mind and upon

fact,

upon the

likely

is it

distressing antipodes of his

the janus-face of Enlightenment

itself.

flirtation

questioned

the

in

ideas

of absolutist politics and

hierarchized religion, embracing in their stead

matter painted

in

innovative

new

styles.

new

subject

Desiring, however, to

maintain the former emotional impact and historical stature of

their work, artists
their
effect

were now required

to exercise to the

utmost

powers of independent invention and imagination

to

draw

their art directly

from

their

own

in

psychic

x 6

the violent or erotic narratives from

the penitent Magdalen, the

beheading of John the Baptist, the Bath of Diana, David with

the head of Goliath

once

served the purpose of safely

channeling libidinal desire toward

same

a socially

stories

sanctioned outlet,

were now valued only insofar

exposed the emotional depths of their

More than any previous

Enlightenment was a time when artists

received

Where

own

with madness.

period in history, the

wellsprings.

ancient history and religion

these

For

8J-

15.2)

that

the very creation of art in an age of Reason entailed a

dangerous

6x

Without the measured psychic

human

release that these

as they

protagonists.

once revered

narratives provided, the violence and eroticism that are part

and parcel of the creative process (and which

mirror of Enlightenment
in a flood.

The

itself)

were now

exist as the

liable to

pour forth

price to be paid for this artistic genio (genius),

therefore, could be high indeed; in times of war, civic strife, or

emotional distress,

it

could include madness. In the "Sleep of

Reason," Goya announces that he

price. Imagination,

he

fears,

he claims,

resurrects

Monsters. Goya's

is

wed

Ignorance;

artistic

is

to

prepared to pay

this

Nightmare; Science,

Reason

itself

engenders

vision in the Caprichos

and

TENSIONS Of ENLIGHTENMENT

his

79

subsequent

art

was dark, we

shall discover, hut prescient in its

imagining of the modern century's union of Enlightenment

and barbarism.

Goya was born near Saragossa

Aragon, Spain, some 75

in

miles from the French border; his father was a goldsmith and
his

mother

birth

minor

proximity

aristocrat.

craftspersons and nobles

and

his life

would

facts of the artist's

and

filial

both

ties to

the unique trajectory of

fix

career.) After studying painting in Saragossa

Madrid, Goya traveled

little

more than

fully

known, though

several

(These three

to enlightened France,

months

a year.

in

to Italy in 1770,

His

it is

activities

and

remaining there for

during

fairly certain that

this

time are not

he spent

at least

Rome, studying Classical statuary, as well as

works by such Baroque masters as Domenichino and Reni.

Back

in

Goya remained

by mid- 1771,

Saragossa

(executing a few local religious commissions) until

summoned to Madrid by
Anton Raphael Mengs to create

he was

774,

there

when

the Neoclassical painter

designs

for

the

Royal

Tapestry Factory. For another two decades, Goya would

continue to receive (what he increasingly saw as onerous)

commissions
portraitist

for tapestry cartoons, while his career as a court

and

a religious

painter blossomed.

Among

his

important portraits from this time are Conde de Floridablanca

(1783) and The Family of the Infanta

Don Luis (1784); both

bold and innovative. Each possesses

and

dramatic chiaroscuro

a surprising informality, recalling at

Jacob

Van Honthorst and

Hogarth. Another

artistic

mentioned, however:

it

was

the

clearly

once the lighting of

composition

influence

are

of William

must immediately be

Velazquez who presided

over Goya's art historical pantheon. Goya's inclusion of

74 FRANCISCO GOYA Conde de Floridablanca 1783.

81^-x42(207x 106.7)

75

Francisco Goya

1801. 9'2x

80

I l'J-

Charles

IV and

His Family

(280x335.9)

TENSIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

74

76

Francisco Goya The Family of the Duque

it Osuna 1788.

mj

(225.7 x 174)

TENSIONS

()!

ENLIGHTENMENT

81


himself in both of the above portraits
75

the later Charles

IV and

as well, of course, as in

His Family (1801)

his

embrace of

and compositional ambiguity, and most of

spatial

psychological incisiveness,

his

all

remind us of Velazquez, the

all

and with the newly

In recognition of Goya's talents as church

and palace

76

handbook

veritable

seemed

ensure that the

to

(Painter to the King) in 1786.

Soon

he

after,

at this

moment, Goya's

In Spain the shock of 1789 and

aftermath essentially

its

picture of the enlightened, noble Spanish family. Patron of the

aim of the Reform King and

and

letters,

Madrid Economic-

president of the

member of the Spanish Royal Academy and generous

renowned

host of a tertulia (salon) attended by the most

artistic

and

intellectual ilustrados

seen posing informally beside the

Standing

in

of Madrid, the Duque

Duquesa and

an indeterminate space, he

lists

is

their children.

gently to one side,

supported on his right by the back of his wife's carved-gilt

armchair and balanced on

daughter.

shown

The obvious
and the

children,

his left

affective ties

fact that the

between the parents and

two boys

at the

lower

left

library

in the

known

is

to

( 1

759

88).

The

with the Marquis of Esquilachc (1759 66), was to modernize a

country whose power and worldwide influence had

behind

of

that

European

its

the

to

rivals

fallen far

The

north.

population of Spain would need to be expanded, agriculture

and the economy revived according

agronomic
cleansed
especially

and
its

rebuilt,

to the

French

of the

principles

new

free-trade and

physiocrats,

cities

and the power of the Church

Holy Office of the Inquisition

curbed

not

if

destroyed. Progress in each of these areas was often halting or

slow;

more than once the Holy

Office aroused sufficient

popular opposition to prevent important reforms. Yet despite

ideals

these setbacks, and despite the extreme numerical inferiority

and the

of the ilustrados compared with the bloated population of the

education of their children.

"useless classes" (nobility, clergy, and state bureaucracy),

special innocence of childhood

important role of parents

are

1 1 1

Prime Ministers, beginning

his

fact

new French and Swiss pedagogical

which emphasized the

The Osuna

his eldest

Duque and Duquesa were in

at play, reveal that the

advocates of the

by the hand of

career was

halted the pace of Enlightenment that had been accelerating

since the beginning of the reign of Charles

Society,

others,

horizons would remain

artist's

very

painted The Family of the Duque de Osuna (1788), the very

arts, sciences,

among

reformers),

liberal

for

disrupted by the storms of the French Revolution.

decorator and portraitist, he was appointed to the post of

Rev

Caspar Melchor de Jovellanos

(author of a report on Spanish agriculture thai became

forever cloudless. Yet

great master of the Spanish Baroque.

Pintor del

influential

have contained the works of

Rousseau, Voltaire, and the French Encyclopedists, and their

Ramon

Enlightenment had made serious inroads

in

Spain by the time

Charles Ill's reign ended: economic societies were formed,

Cruz and the poet

educational scholarships permitted ambitious students to

and dramatist Leandro Fernandez Moratin, whose didactic

study in France and England, and the proportion of the

works were thoroughly afrancesado, or French

"unproductive classes"

friends included the satirist

Indeed, the

latter's

de

la

in inspiration.

mocking commentary on the proceedings

of the 1610 witchcraft

trial at

Logrono (an important

Voltaire's

By

mockery of the Inquisition

Candide (1759).

in

the end of the decade of the 1780's, the successful

Goya

was receiving more commissions than he could handle,

including portraits for the

queen, Maria Luisa.

He

new

king, Charles IV,

and

his

received as well additional tapestry

and Church commissions, honors,

appointment by Charles III

titles,

to the post

The

literary

source for several works of Goya) was probably inspired by

and wealth. After

his

of Pintor del Rey, he

in the population

was reduced by

royal decrees and expropriations.

extent of Spanish

Bourbon France, was

reform, however,

classes

whose power and wealth was

nobility

and clergy were hardly

likely to

themselves out of existence, and

is

it

to be curbed.

likely that Caroline

France essentially put

its

any

case,

a stop to the

was one thing, revolution

clearly another:

later, in

properties, nor a Declaration of the Rights of

April 1789, he was promoted to the post of Pintor de

Camera

Citizen, nor the regicide.

(Royal

Academy of Fine

Bellas Artes de

Arts of San Carlos, one of the most

progressive art academies in Europe) and

member

made an honorary

of the prestigious and enlightened Real Sociedad

Aragonesa (Royal Society of Aragon). Goya's

fortune, spurred by his
talent

San Carlos

that

rivaled

his

own

rise to

fame and

vaulting ambition as well as by a

much-admired Velazquez, seemed

unending. His friendships with Floridablanca, the Osunas,

82

TENSIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

even

at

most farsighted, popular democracy had never been part of

King's Painter with 15,000 realesV Just three years

Academia de

in

whole enterprise. Reform,

now I'm

elected to the Real

The

reforms had reached their outer limits when the Revolution

in

of

support modernizing

proudly boasted to his friend Zapater, "Martin, boy,

(Court Painter) to Charles IV. In the following year he was

that

like

limited by royal dependence on the very

the

Spanish Bourbon

plan,

nor

the

of church

seizure

Man

and

Each succeeding French revolution-

ary event or initiative caused the Spanish monarchy and

nobility to recoil;

by

late

1792

Enlightenment would have

flood-tide of

to

it

was

The former

French publications would now be

dammed

the border, French residents of Spain would be

Spanish students
Jesuit order

head,

all

in

Spanish

clear that the

be postponed.

France would become

exiles,

and the

and Inquisition would once more be given

in

an effort

revolutionary incendio.

to

extinguish

the

at

silenced,

spread

their

of the

Spanish foreign and domestic policy was now in turmoil as

valued

became enemies and enemies

allies

the

friends;

longstanding treaty with France was in shreds and a hasty

made

(and temporary) marriage of convenience was

England. In the midst of the scramble

with

in 1792, the 25-year-old

Emmanuel Godoy the King's favorite and the Queen's

lover
was named First Secretary of State to the royal office.
The king had chosen Godoy precisely for his youth and

shocked the conserva-

loyalty to the crown, but the selection

tive clergy as well as the enlightened reformers

appointment

who saw

in the

and perversity that

a return to the corruption

had marked the years of Spanish decadence. At the same time,

many other blows. Those

who had once received royal support
or sanction for their reformist ideas, now shrank from public
view or switched sides. By early 1793, Spain and France were
the afrancesados were reeling from

ilustrados or luces (lights)

and the afrancesados were torn between national

at war,

loyalty

and allegiance

ment; Goya

to the international torch of Enlighten-

suffered in kind, and from 1792 to 1793 barely

survived a grave illness which,

when

it

confidence and mental stability and

deaf.

was over, shook

left

his

him permanently

For the next three decades Spain would be pitched

forward and back in

and

international

a torrent

war,

civil

of revolution and reaction,

military

coups and popular

mad quests for a mythic national essence

that could somehow give meaning to it all. Goya, born of the
pueblo but now inextricably linked to the ilustrados, would
insurgencies, and

witness and represent this paroxysm of national schizophrenia

and violence.

As the

ilustrados retreated in the face of attacks

from church

and crown, popular resentment toward new enlightened

Spain began to gather strength as

been only

well.

The

luces

had always

for

"land

reform" on the whole meant enclosure and capitalization of

common

lands,

and

their ideas of democracy did not

generally entail universal suffrage or radical redistribution of

wealth.

To

the Spanish pueblo, therefore, the Enlightenment

was largely an unwanted afrancesado

undermine the

traditional

affair that

threatened to

and (marginally) sustaining

culture that had been developed over the centuries.

odd

alliance

traditional

entrenched

its

life

and

Thus an

was made between the pueblo and the forces of

conservatism
civil

servants

the crown, the clergy, and the

against the ilustrados

sought to reform the organization of the

and

educational system in the

state, its

name of the

who had
economy,

very same pueblo.

conservative union described above was inherently

spawned would extend

unstable (and the crises and violence

it

into the late twentieth century), but

its

class levels

and

in all

effects

were seen

example,

Luisa Wearing a Mantilla 1799.

at all

forms of cultural production. Thus, for

in the

decade before and the two decades

outbreak of war with France, there occurred

Spanish popular culture, with

spirits),

its

after the

a great revival

of

theater of duende (ghosts or

monsters and grotesques, and

its

legends of rebellious

bandits, smugglers, bullfighters, and other picaro (rogue)

types. Equally popular

These proletarian
distinctive
strata of

was the

cult of the majas

and majos.

aristocrats, or plebeian nobles, with their

manners and

dress,

were quickly imitated by

all

Spanish society, including the "true" aristocrats,

who admired them

for their

pure Castilian blood and

presumed embodiment of the

spirit.

Goya

often depicted the

hereditary nobility in the guise of majas and majos, including

the artist's lover, the

model

In Spain nationalism was at war with modernization.

The

FRANCISCO GOYA Queen Maria

82}x5H(210x UO)

small fraction of a population that remained

overwhelmingly poor and peasant; their proposals

formerly

77

for the

Duquesa de Alba, and the unknown

Naked and Clothed Majas

even the Queen herself

Mantilla (1799).

(ca.

1798 1805), and

Queen Maria Luisa Wearing

The French Ambassador

Hourgoing, offered
in his

in

a vivid description

to Spain, J. F.

</

de

of the majas and majos

1788 account of his travels on the peninsula:

TENSIONS OF ENLIGHTENMEN

83

78
77

The Majos

are beaux of the lower class, or rather bullies

whose grave and

whole

exterior.

under

brown

frigid
.

stiff

pomposity

is

announced by

their

and which
mistress.

is

which,

pleasure.

not softened even in the presence of their

The

Majas, on their parts

study of effrontery.

The

seem

licentiousness of their

to

make

manners

in

wanton form,

the epithets which admiration can inspire

are lavished
picture.

all

upon them. This

But

if

is

is

clothed with every

the disagreeable side of the

the spectator goes with a disposition, not

very scrupulous, to the representations in which the Majas

figure,

when he becomes familiarized

manners very

Clothed

1798-1805. 37$ x74J

(94.9 x 189.9)

if it

inspires not love, at least promises

was a rehearsal

little

for the racist

and

significantly,

reveals

clearly

it

aristocracy of both France

the

degree to which

democratic and insurgent potential of their nations' workingclass subcultures.

As the

art historian Francis

Majism, the frivolous imitation of the

by the smart

set,

is

symptom

real

majas and majos

of the encanatllement

[keeping of bad company] of the court aristocracy

them the most seducing

of destroying

TENSIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

no more than

Klingender has

observed:

would have been wiser

is

as

the

and Spain underestimated the

on the edge of the abyss the aristocracy has

priestess that ever presided at the

much

sexist ideology of Orientalism

inspiring ours with favorable sentiments, he sees in each of

Their impudent affectation

Maja

would soon erupt across Romantic Europe. Just

conformable to the virtues of the sex, and the means of

altars of Venus.

84

to

Francisco Goya

ca.

when lewdness

persons

79

Bourgoing's focus upon the bewitching eroticism of Majism

that

appears in their attitudes, actions and expressions; and

their

(94.9 x 189.9)

poignant allurement, which introduces into the senses a

bonnet, called Montera, bears the

brave persons the most proper to awe them into respect,

Francisco Goya Naked Maja

1798-1805. 37$ x 74$

delirium that the wisest can scarcely guard against, and

Their countenance, half concealed

character of threatening severity, or of wrath, which seems

to

78
ca.

its

to conceal their degradation.

who

When

a curious habit

moral defenses by toying with the ideology

of the enemy. Blind to the implications of the bourgeois

8o

Francisco Goya Courtyard with

cult of nature, the

Lunatics 1793-4.

French nobility applauded the milk-

I7jx 12J

(43.8 x 32.7)

among

the

first

of the subcultural styles that would play

powerful role

grandees were similarly heedless of the democratic roots of

revolution and

majism, when they perverted

talented artists. Like such later

its

moral freedom.

239),

in the

in

Majism was

the imaginations of the epoch's most

a fashion

phenomena

of dress and

isflaneurie (sec p.

a style

of

life,

Soon, the majas and majos of Spain, the sans-culottes of France

however ultimately contradictory

and the "free-born Englishmen" of Britain would wage

helped organize people into collectives able to act (for

guerilla

wars

(literally "little

the clamor for a

wars"), erect barricades or lead

new democratic

charter.

Majism was thus

drama of nineteenth-century culture and

maid fashion of Marie Antoinette, and the Spanish

its

political

and

filiations,

it

time)

with a single purpose. For artists such as Goya, without fixed

class

identity,

and increasingly without the economic or

TENSIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

85

ideological security supplied by reliable religious

and

political

the

ductule, the witch, the

monster, the donkey, and the majas and majos. As

frequent representation ofMajism,

man

his tapestry cartoons

more than

(The

individuals

in his portraits as well as in

thus represents

Picnic, ca. 1778),

simple keeping abreast of fashion;

identification with

and psychological

political

who

it

indicates a

groups and

predominating aristocratic and exploitative vision of workingof exoticism. Indeed, painted for

class sexuality as a species

Godoy, the two Majas

positively

was the eventual undoing of the upstart Prime Minister

that

and putative nobleman. By

Naked Maja

the

sion [of]

its

marked the
the painting
as

trumpet the encanaillement

peculiar anatomical geography,

its

aristocratic reception of

unknown, but her

pronounced

and

man

of the ilustrados eager, for example, to

master and practise his French, Goya was clearly divided

in his attitude

toward refulgent nationalism (cuslumbnsmo)

ular" and enlightened Spain

is

compellingly revealed

of works

sequence

extraordinary

"pop-

his shifting allegiance to both

Courtyard with Lunatics (1793

that

begins

includes

4),

the

80

The Witches'

83

Sabbath (1797-8) and the Caprichos, and culminates

Executions of the Third of

an

in

with

in the

May, 1808 (1814) and the Disas-

of War.

ters

Majism.

it,

which

The model

for

face possesses a uniqueness

THE IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO: THE LATER

ART OF FRANCISCO GOYA

as her body's ordinariness. In fact, the key to

between head and

Consideration of Courtyard with Lunatics must begin with an

body, an absence marked by the vague treatment of neck,

account of Goya's nearly contemporaneous physical and

the picture's irony

lies in this

shoulders, and hair.

lack of

fit

With her pubic region

the center of the painting, she

is

located directly in

an expression of that perfect

and vulgar metonymy that substitutes an organ

human

being. Like the

women

in

Boucher and J.-H. Fragonard, she

and shamelessly

to spectatorial

is

for a

complete

paintings by Francois

given over completely

consumption. Yet unlike

them, as Andre Malraux has written, "she

calls attention to

mental breakdown.

war on Spain

his

far as

it

ever would in the nineteenth century. Later in France

Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cezanne would

793, Goya's illness was discussed in a

is

illness is

his friends

unknown, but the conclusion

unavoidable.

psychological antidote, has "progressed" as

head and the deafness have not improved, but his vision

worsened

its

few weeks after France's declaration of

much better and he is no longer suffering from the disorders

that made him lose his balance." The exact nature of Goya's

Goya's Naked Maja, the masculinist objectification of female

and

March

in

between

the least physiological aspects of her sex, her personality." In

sexuality,

in

Martinez and Zapater: "the noise

letter

by

the

virulent

Now

in

political

that

was

it

at least

seems

environment

self-imposed exile in Cadiz,

Goya

gradually recovered sufficient strength to return to his work

Madrid, and by January 1794 had nearly completed

and

to

set

of eleven small pictures painted on

tin.

Intending to

Academia de San Fernando,

look back in fright and admiration at Goya's achievement,

submit the works

to judges of the

finding there just that unique combination of physical and

Goya wrote to his

friend at the Academia, Bernardo de Iriarte:

psychological, or real and allegorical, that expressed

"In order

all

temper of modern

life

and sexual exchange.

To claim to see irony, or at least allegory,

be an exercise
but

it

in

the

pornography may seem

must be remembered

paintings were conceived,

in

to

to be overreading,

that at the very

moment

these

Goya was lampooning Godoy and

the epicurean excesses of the nobility in his drawings in the

Sanlucar Album

A and Madrid Album B (1796-7), as well as in

the Caprichos. Ultimately, the question of Goya's intentions

here, like the question of specific parodic intent in the
portrait of Charles
able,

IV and

His Family,

is

famous

probably unknow-

both because of the lack of relevant documents on the

subject and because of the inherent difficulty of ever fully

discerning artistic intention

itself.

to distract

my

mind, mortified by

misfortunes, and in order to recoup

what appears

Some things, however,

can

have occasioned,

which

reflection

on

my

some of the expenses they

executed a series of cabinet pictures

have managed

to

make observations

missioned works ordinarily do not allow, and

in

that

in

com-

which fantasy

and invention have no place." These eleven pictures of

"fantasy and invention" inaugurate Goya's second career.

The works

that have so far been identified with this group,

of which Courtyard with Lunatics

profound change
terrifying,

the

still

in

Goya's

art.

is

certainly one,

mark

Dark, dramatic, sometimes

Goya's new vision seems

century removed from

Rococo refinement and wit of the tapestry designs and

portraits created only a

few years

earlier.

No

longer merely

representing the world of popular carnival, fantasy or night-

how

be asserted with confidence: as the decade closed, and the new

mare,

century dawned, Francisco

increasing

equivalences of these realms. "It was the discovery," Malraux

frequency the pueblo as well as the grotesque and marginal

has written, "of the very meaning of style; and at the same

86

Goya represented with

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

Goya

82
89-93,

especially, ironically celebrates that "perver-

moral freedom," as Klingender termed

is

once

at

of the pueblo whose tastes ran to bullfighting and street

festivals,

and rationalism. Indeed,

exist on the margins of the ruling society.

Goya's Naked and Clothed Majas express more than the

78-9

75

figures of Spanish popular culture

patronage, subcultural style was a powerful attraction. Goya's

has discovered instead

to create pictorial

8i

Francisco Goya The

Knife Grinder ca. 1808

12.

2Sf x 19f (65 x 50)

[MAGE OF THE

IH l.lil.O

87

82

FRANCISCO GOV A The

Executions of the Third of May, 1808 1814. 8'8} x \\'i\ (266 x 344.8)

time, of the peculiar strength of painting, of the

broken

line or the bringing together of a red

and

power of

a black over

and above the demands of the object represented." Courtyard

we

does not offer an operatic representation of madness, as

find in the Carceri (prisons) engravings of the Italian

Piranesi, or a conversation-piece

Hogarth's engraving of

madness

G. B.

we discover

as

"The Madhouse"

for

Progress (both of which were probably seen by

Goya

There can be

little

insanity. Until the reforms instigated

France and Samuel Tuke

his picture as

in

England

by E.

J.

Georget

in

in the late 1810's, the

insane had generally been confined with criminals, the sick,

in

and the indigent

Rake's

petriere in Paris,

in the

doubt that Goya intended

an indictment of the widespread punitive treatment of

in vast

warehouse asylums such

as Salt-

and the hospital of Bethlehem (Bedlam)

London. Inmates

at these institutions usually

in

received no

and

treatment whatsoever, but were put in iron manacles or

horrifying vision of the loneliness, fear, and anomie engen-

subjected to physical punishment and back-breaking labor.

dered by mental

The purpose

collection

of Martinez),

illness

but

and

instead

imaginary

an

social alienation.

Occupying the

foreground of a courtyard sealed off by heavy masonry blocks

ment was

and an iron gate

periods

warden

sit,

at the rear, a

stare,

posture,

discipline themselves.

sunlight, rendering

The

all

the

dozen "patients" and

implore, grimace,

top of the picture

or

evaporated by

more monstrous the nightmarish

scene below.

88

is

a single

wrestle,

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

of this irrational-seeming generalized confine-

in equal

when

parts

economic and

political.

During

labor was in short supply, asylums provided a

large ready pool of workers

whose gross exploitation had the

added advantage of depressing the

outside; during periods

when

salaries

of those on the

labor was abundant, asylums

absorbed great numbers of the unemployed, keeping them

subdued and under watch. The

purpose of confinement

perhaps

is

or ideological,

political,

harder

pinpoint

to

may have been

derived from a discussion of witchcraft in

account of the seventeenth-century auto da

precisely, but the philosopher

Michel Foucault has plausibly

was intended

for the chastisement of the

fe (execution of the judgment of the Inquisition) of Lograno,

"immorality of the unreasonable" and for fending off the

but numerous other popular sources were available. Particu-

revolutionary threat

larly

argued that

it

represented by madness of

absolute

and personal freedom.

political

virtues of liberie, the reform of prisons

essential goal.

The

Moratin's

satiric

relevant here was the widespread and longstanding

association

Indeed, to an enlightened generation that extolled the

subject was

and asylums was an

common

Beccaria, Voltaire, and Condorcet,

in the writings

among

of

and was

others,

of witchcraft with

freedom,

female sexual

summarized by Moratin when he wrote: "The he-

tradition

goat was a very respectable personality in Antiquity, and

much esteemed by women

endowments]." The

for his fine prendas [jewels or

beast's bountifulness

in fact revealed

is

surely a frequent topic for discussion in the enlightened

by his long horns and by the visual pun created by the agitated

which Goya moved. Condemnation of brutality

yellow shawl at his loins. Created during a brief interlude of

tertulia in

toward prisoners
the subject of a

criminals and the insane

was

explicitly

number of Goya's later paintings and drawings

as well as the subject of

works by the English

artists

Francis

relative self-confidence

for a king

wit and irony

shown exposing

is

or disinfecting the brutality of

ideology. Yet like Capricho 43,

is

"The Sleep of Reason,"

there

Courtyard with Lunatics an oppressive sense of forebod-

in

ing and despair, especially in the standing and seated figures in

the
if

left

and right foreground; there

Goya and we were among

Charenton who paid

watching the

such a witness

Iriarte

uncertain of his

own

at Saragossa,

watched

have

to

own

a sous for the privilege

of

animals in a menagerie the

like

better to reassure us of our

just

also a sense of sadism, as

those spectators at Bethlehem or

penny or

mad behave

is

reason.

above

reason must

in a letter to

performance.

Goya have been

to

How
watch

How he must have recoiled at his own pleasure to

such a scene!

paint such a picture!

attraction to the dark Spain of popular culture

84

Caprichos 68,

is

"A

and super-

Goya

once

satires

ruary

6,

a far

five

gall.

corruption

other paintings

Duquesa de Osuna, becomes more

On

Feb-

in the Diario

de Madrid, announcing the publication of a "collection of

of extravagant subjects,

prints

and etched by

invented

Francisco Goya:"

The

author

convinced that censuring

is

although
poetry may
vices

The Witches' Sabbath (1797-8)

errors and

worthy object of painting. As

also be a

subjects appropriate to his work, he has selected from the

society,

common

to every civil

and from the ordinary obfuscations and

condoned by custom, ignorance or

fit

lies

self interest, those

to furnish material for ridicule,

and

he
at

to exercise the author's imagination.

one of

it

Despite the

artist's disclaimer,

which went on
reales each,

sale

were

Duquesa de Osuna

embraced the work both

by young and old

ruling troika
others,

at

the modest cost of 4

and superstition of modern Spain and not

simply "every

the center of the small canvas appears a seated he-goat or devil

clear that these Caprichos,

on February 19

licentiousness,

for the bedroom of her country house. In

it is

specifically intended to ridicule the cupidity,

six

is

human

seems the preserve of oratory and

it

cry from the

and celebrations of the new

Encircled

new century;

and

license

1799 there appeared the following notice

paintings on the subject of witchcraft commissioned by the

leaves.

in the

rancorous and more complex in Los Caprichos.

same time

crowned with vine

rare for

of sexual

created in 1797 8 for the

the

at

Prime Minister. Such self-assured

apparent in The Witches' Sabbath and the

Fine Teacher!" Both are coarse, vulgar, and

popular penchant for witchcraft and the licentiousness

betokened.

The condemnation

deemed most

refinement and wit that are the usual tokens of Enlightenment

Both are

while also,

would gradually be replaced by helpless negation and

has

grotesque in subject and execution and thus

culture.

a gigolo for a

would become

The Witches' Sabbath and

equally apparent in

stition

it

and

multitude of stupidities and errors

Goya's growing ambivalence toward Enlightenment and

83

humor

Goya was probably

where he claimed

the

the ilustrados, Goya's satirical

perhaps, alluding to a decadent regime overseen by a cuckold

Gericault. Goya's small painting, in which the light of reason

prejudice below, thus seems fully consistent with afrancesado

among

painting indulges the artist's broad pueblo

Wheatley and George Romney and the French Theodore

above

73

half dozen circling bats are seen in silhouette. Goya's painting

Indeed, Goya's contemporaries

civil society."

as a kind of r Oman a

Godoy, Maria Luisa, and

were

particularly

clef, in

the

lampooned, and

which the

King
as

among

broader

witches, he conducts his service with raised cloven hooves

indictment of

while receiving offerings of live children from the two witches

rampant Inquisition. The Duque and Duquesa de Osuna

on the

The

right,

light

and dead children from the witches on the

from

a crescent

phosphorescent blue

pall

moon

at

the upper

left

left.

casts a

over the macabre landscape, while a

were smart

to

official

corruption, Majism, witchcraft, and a

purchase four sets before publication;

just

two

days after their appearance, the albums were withdrawn from

sale,

probably because of

a threat

from the Holv Office.

\1 \(il. ()!

THE

I'L

EBLO

89

expresses the view that nobles

own

who are preoccupied

aristocratic geneology (symbolized

with their

by their oversized

coats of arms) are blind (eyes closed) and deaf (ears padlocked)
to

understanding, accepting only the food of Ignorance

(represented with blindfold and donkey ears).

porary explanation of

"The

One contem-

Chinchillas" ran as follows:

"Fools that pride themselves on their nobility surrender to

indolence and superstition, and they seal off their understanding with padlocks whilst they arc grossly fed by Ignorance."

Despite

ready readability, however, Goya's image

its

is

not

straightforward allegory of the value of Enlightenment over

Ignorance or aristocratic decadence; as with his Courtyard

"The

painting and

appears

embrace aspects of the

to

superstition

it

who

Ignorance

Sleep of Reason," "Los Chinchillas"

and

darkness

very

otherwise condemns: the disturbing face of

wields his spoon like a dagger, the grotesquely

pastiched bodies of the "nobles," and finally the oppressive

weight created by the aquatinting of the upper half of the

plate, all suggest the

more

madhouse

nightmare world of unreason

than the enlightened

Canizares. In Goya's Caprichos, in other words,

hard to determine whether the

artist

of

the

theatre of

satiric

it

is

often

deplores or delights in his

disturbing subject matter.

similar ambiguity

Caprichos

series,

10,

apparent

in

an earlier print in the

"El amor y

la

muerte" ("Love and

is

Death") which ridicules the exaggerated pride and bravado of

Majistn.

83

FRANCISCO GOYA The

Witches' Sabbath 1797-8.

A mortally wounded

embrace of his

in the

majo, sword at his feet, collapses

Their faces are pressed together

lover.

in

pain and anguish, as a dark cloud above seems poised to

I7J x 12J (44 x 31)

descend upon and envelop them;

all

the chivalric

romance of

dueling has been chilled in the cold night of death. Here as

elsewhere in the Caprichos,

Los Caprichos, we have already seen,

85

is at

least superficially

"Los Chin-

the product of ilustrado ideology. Caprichos 50,

chillas"

("The Chinchillas"), depicts two

spoon-fed by
their ears

a third.

The two have

and are wrapped

in coats

being

figures

closed eyes, padlocks over

which resemble noble coats

of arms; the reclining figure at the bottom clutches a rosary,

while the one at the right grips a sword as he

middle figure with blindfold and donkey's

jackass obtains his delicious gruel

Caprichos,

"The

Chinchillas"

former sense,

it is

is

This

latter

from the great two-handled

cauldron in the center of the print. As with

in the

ears.

by the

fed

is

many

of Goya's

both allegorical and

awkward and

literary:

unnaturalistic, recalling

the plates in such iconographic encyclopedias as the

Iconologia (1593) of Cesare Ripa; in the latter sense,

famous

it

has an

Goya

of ilustrado ideology. Yet

that

however

elites

critical

he

is

of Spain, that have

Moreover,

must

it

of them,

Death," the

Lucas de Chinchilla. In

90

his

print,

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

as in the play,

Goya

preoccupation.

man and woman

sympathy and pathos. The same sympathy

Caprichos 42,

"Love and
is

"Tu que no puedes" ("You who

found

in

cannot"), in

which two members of the pueblo are burdened by asses

perched on their back, and
sastre!"

("What a

tailor

in

Caprichos 52,

cowled monk. This

latter

is

draped to resemble

image mocks popular belief

miracles and witchcraft, but the focus

her psychology that

"Lo que puede un

can achieve!"), in which a pious crowd

kneels in worship before a tree that

is

and pomposity of its noble protagonist,

same time be noted

the pueblo, and not the

are depicted with extraordinary

reverence and awe of the kneeling

satirized the ignorance

it is

now become Goya's

Indeed, the specific literary origin of Caprichos 50 is found in

popular comedy of manners by Jose de Canizares that

at the

for all the bourgeois moralizing in

anecdotal character that suggests a larger narrative context.

a

ridicules the foolishness or

self-destructiveness of the popular classes in a clear expression

is

woman

is

clearly

in the

compelling, just as

on the

foreground;

it is

in

it

the maja's

expression of mourning in "Love and Death" that provides

the image

pueblo

its

make

drama and

conviction. In the hands of Goya, the

their first heroic appearance in the visual record

86

84

FRANCISCO GOYA Capnchos 68 "Linda

1799.

maestra!" ("A fine teacher'

8JxSJ (21.3x15)

86 Franc:isco

Death") 1799.

Goya

8J

85

FRANCISCO GOYA Capnchos 50 "Los

Chincillas"

("The Chincillas")

1799. 8J-x5|(20.8x 15.1)

Capnchos 10 "Kl amor

x6{21.8x

15.3)

la

muerte" ("Love and

87

Francisco G01

tailor

can achieve!")

\
1

Caprit hos ya

7><>

si

"Lo que puede un

sastre!"

("What

6 (21.7 x 15.2)

\l

Hil.

OF THE

1*1

l.lll.O

<M

of European culture: they are not types, but individuals, and

alienation which the

thus are not consistent, but contradictory, not passive but

would both

active

indeed

times revolutionary.

at

Goya's embrace of the pueblo

cartoons and witchcraft paintings but

the Caprichos

soon

This orientation,

by

became a dominant theme in

his art.

must be acknowledged however, was the

it

result of economic

after

in the tapestry

clearly revealed

first

circumstance as well as

and emotional temperament:

political conviction

after 1801, the artist's public

and

own

insights

all

modern

in

artist

1799

Goya

in

to the confines

was exhibited, we

in

of his

order to create an essentially

private art intended to please or succor himself alone.

his art

artists

time

had been designated

withdrew

and imagination

first

shall see,

When

was largely ignored or

it

disdained; Goya's greatest reknown would be achieved after

his death.

We

have noted some of the

political

and cultural transfor-

with the court were largely severed after the completion of the

mations that created the conditions for Goya's alienation

portrait of the family of Charles IV, perhaps because of

the conflict in Spain between Enlightenment and traditional

dissatisfaction with the portrait, but

renewed campaign against the

more

likely

The

ilustrados.

because of a

liberal

prime

minister Urquijo was deposed and jailed in 1801 at the same

culture, the ideological struggle

and popular

geois,

"Spanishness,"

or

identity,

among

classes over

aristocratic,

bour-

the question of national

economic and

the

political

time that the great ilustrado Jovellanos himself was exiled and

turmoil generated by the Revolution in France, and the slow

then imprisoned. Other shocks soon followed:

demise of an

Duquesa de Alba died suddenly, followed

in 1802, the

year later by

Goya's great friend Zapater. By 1805, Goya's distance from his

former noble patrons was increased

still

further by virtue of his

son's marriage into a prominent family of Saragossa mer-

own

chants, and by his

and

articulate

fierce

friendship with Leocadia Zorilla, an

opponent of absolutism who would

become Goya's companion. From

this

moment

on,

later

Goya

depicted the Spanish bourgeoisie (a rare and threatened

and increasingly the pueblo. In great

Spain),

species in

artistic tradition

more or

less passive,

more

Goya remained

it

was

still

seen,

was

dialectical,

but

generally the dispassionate product of that cynical

in

the

frontispiece

and curled

lip

in

was no more;

1870-71,

like

Goya

David

Goya was now

in

a participant in,

artist

Goya portrayed

and

their victimizers

The Goya

its

Goya would

life,

War

Godoy,

led to the abdication of the

and

his son,

Ferdinand VII. In 1807 Napoleon,

of Spanish Indepen-

(ca.

1820-23)

is

1810-20), the

very different from the artist

who

once painted tapestry cartoons and portraits. Whereas the

earlier artist

was

public figure

who

in pursuit

of his

policy of isolating England from the rest of Europe, had seized

the opportunity to occupy the Iberian Peninsula and in

destructive aftermath.

War

King and the crowning of

focus

his private reflections

of the Disasters of

(ca.

and the private man could now no longer be separated.

Charles IV and especially for the intrigues of his minister

his

Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (1814), and the "Black

Paintings"

the hereditary nobility, soldiers, and

concerning the horror of the

dence (1808-14) and

89-93

and

public

In 1808, widespread revulsion for the corrupt court of

upon the pueblo while recording

fears

The

proletarians, beggars, prisoners

two decades of

recorded, however

men and women of

the later artist was a private man who represented the

May

1808 placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of

Spain. Appealing to ilustrado and pueblo alike, the

monarch immediately proclaimed

a policy

eration, modernization, secularization,

new French

of national regen-

and Enlightenment.

Distrustful, however, of such afrancesado reforms

when put

presciently, the appearance of the leading

forward under successive Caroline regimes, the plebeians of

his time,

Madrid and elsewhere were

unknown and unheralded

pueblo; whereas the earlier painter

drew upon an existing vocabulary of

moral
tions;

verities, the later painter

and

finally,

religious, political,

and

had no such secure founda-

whereas the earlier Goya directed his

art to

an audience he knew and whose expectations he could predict,

the later

Goya

painted, drew, and etched for no audience of

dictates of the hated

up

short, that the later

92

Goya experienced and represented

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

in

the

and

in

the city was

bloody and confused guerilla conflict that would

until

the

3,

Ferdinand VII and Spanish

crushed, but the war had migrated across the countryside

restoration of the Spanish

Isolated and

may be said,

May

arms against the French and

independence. Within days the uprising

reason to expect punishment than reward.

it

in

their mercenaries in defense of

years

certainly not going to accept the

French invaders. Thus, on

1808, the madrilenos rose

whom he could be certain, or for one from which he had more

vulnerable, independent and experimental

72

France after 1 792, or

1808-12), and especially in the almost innumerable drawings

prints,

the

of the arched brow

victim of, the earthquake of war and revolution.

and

from

self-portrait

Caprichos. After 1808, however, the

Courbet

we have

art,

complex, and perhaps even keenly

seen

regard

or less aloof, observer and recorder

of this turmoil and these events. His

insightful,

based upon shared beliefs and

standards of excellence. Yet, until 1808,

canvases such as The Water Carrier and The Knife Grinder (ca.

clergy. In the last

82

Court Painter

First

private sources of patronage began to dry up. Goya's close ties

81

major public

history, a

suggested

Romantics and indeed

and enjoy. For perhaps the

suffer

in a

last for six

surrender of Joseph Bonaparte and the

monarchy.

Goya's great Executions of the Third of May, 1808, like

its

82

companion The Second of May, was paid for by the Crown and

88

FRANCISCO GOYA The

painted in 1814.

Uprising of the Second of May, 1808 1814. 8'9 x

was intended

It

man

in

huddle of people

white with arms outstretched

is

faced by

phalanx of executioners. His eyes show fear and resignation

as

he awaits the same bloody end as befell those of the pueblo

sprawled obscenely

company, he

is

in the dirt in front

of him. Although he has

alone this night on the

hill

the outskirts of Madrid; like Christ on the

bears the stigmata and

light.

as

The

of Principe Pio on

hill

of Golgotha, he

illuminated in death by an unearthly

colors and light in the picture are coarse and garish

Goya continues

style,"

is

with

the

to

experiment with "the very meaning

metaphorical

of

between,

for

fear, illumination

and

relationship

example, paint and blood, darkness and

pathos. All of the artist's subtle skills of composition, coloring,

and characterization are marshaled here

consecrate the

and

pitiless

martyrdom of the pueblo

French centurions.

(266.7 x 345.8)

In evaluating the meaning of Goya's Executions,

as a testimonial to the courage

and suffering of the Spanish pueblo. Amid

and bodies,

ll'-H-

in

at

order to expose and

the hands of faceless

remembered

that

it

was painted

Ferdinand VII and the

in

arrest, expulsion or

the Spanish afrancesados and liberates,

among the artist's

in

friends.

1812 and two years

to

undergo

must be

imprisonment of

many of whom counted

Goya himself had

tried to flee

Spain

was hauled before the restored

later

Inquisition to explain his "obscene"

Majas and

it

1814 after the restoration of

Naked and Clothed

lengthy "purification." His request to

the Council of Regency early in 1814 for an allowance to paint

the Second and Third of May was therefore clearly an effort to
get back in official

provide

good graces by painting pictures

that could

dramatic justification for the recently concluded

war, and sanction for the restored regime of Ferdinand. In

order to regain his good

name and

position,

Goya would

represent the nightmarish chaos of the previous six years as

coherent battle of the pueblo against atheist invaders

in the

name of Church and King.

M VGE OK THE

l>l

BIO

93

78-9

FRANCISCO GOYA The

The

story of the

Disasters of

War

War 26 "No

se

pucde mirar" ("One can't look")

of Spanish Independence was not, of

course, so simple, but neither were Goya's pictures very

convincing as propaganda.

was

The

initial

uprising of the pueblo

anti-elite as well as anti-imperialist,

became quickly fragmented and

and the

"godless"

liberates or to install a

popular democratic constitution.

indeed passed by

effect;

power.

it

A
it

in efforts either

new

secular and

liberal constitution

Cadiz government

the context of national civil war,

82

bands

radicalized. Guerilla

and juntas of "right" and "left" were formed

to repel

conflict

in exile in 1812,

had

little

was

but

significance or

was quickly overturned when Ferdinand returned

Thus Goya's

realistic horror,

Executions of the Third of May, for

was an

effort to

in

to

all its

provide a mythic integrity to

the Spanish war by exalting the heroism and sacrifice of the

pueblo. In this function,

28

Intervention of the Sabine

it

may be compared

Women, painted

at the

ca.

1810-20.

5| x 8^ (14.4 x 21)

national sacrifice, too sincere in

its

pathos, too

literal in its

equivalence of flesh, blood, and paint. Indeed, the pueblo

themselves embodied the contradictoriness of Goya's enter-

though they welcomed

prise:

rule of
it is

in

1814 the restoration of the

Church and Crown (chanting

said,

"Long live our chains!"),

in the streets

the

of Madrid,

same pueblo was often

source of profound social radicalization. Perhaps the pueblo

and the war

itself (like

the U.S. war against Vietnam) were

thus simply inconducive to heroic and propagandist representation.

In any case,

upon

its

completion, the picture was

quickly secreted in the Prado basement, not to be seen or even

acknowledged
If

for

two generations.

The Executions of the Third of May, 1808 was Goya's

public, righteously indignant response to

War

French imperialism,

was his private, ambivalent response.

with David's

the Disasters of

conclusion of

Drawn and engraved between 1810 and about

1820, these

Goya's lifetime due

another extended period of civil conflict and international war

plates could not be published in

and likewise intended

emotional intensity and political and moral ambiguity; except

to

unify

an

audience behind an

undemocratic regime. Yet unlike David's, Goya's painting

for a small

did not bring

appeared

its

author wealth and renewed acclaim. Goya's

Executions was perhaps too frank in

94

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

its

representation of

When

in

number of artist's proofs,

1863, some thirty-five years

to their

the Disasters only

after

Goya's death.

they were conceived in 1808, however, they were

89-93

90

FRANCISCO GOYA The

sin ella"

Disasters of

("Whether Right or Wrong")

War

ca.

"Con

razon 6

1810-20. 6[x8

(15.5x20.5)

91

FRANCISCO GOYA The

verdad" ("Truth
92

is

dead")

Disasters of

ca.

FRANCISCO GOYA The

1810-20.

Disasters of

War 79 "Murio

la

7 x 8| (17.5 x 22)

War 80

("If she were to rise again?") ca. 1810-20.

7x

"Si reucitaria?"

8 (17.5 x 22)

93 FRANCISCO GOYA The Disasters of War 84 "La seguridad

de un reo no exige tormento" ("The custody of a criminal does
not

call for

torture") ca. 1810-20. 4y x 3J (11.5 x 8.5)

\1

\(il

OF

1111

I'l

EBLO

95


Executions,

intended, like the

be a publie display of

to

patriotism and nationalist zeal. Their genesis

Goya was

within months of the outbreak of hostilities,

upon by General Palafox

and examine," the

see

failed

Saragossa "to

to travel to his native

artist

as follows:

is

wrote, "the ruins of that eity in

order to illustrate the glories of

its

from which

citizens,

am so much interested in the glory of

cannot excuse myself as

my

thus accepted the commission,

native land."

Goya

made

from the

plates

("Truth

These depict the

burial of a

an allegory of the Constitution) by

clerics,

verdad"

decomposition. In the

first

print, her

emblem of reason and

to

rabble of grotesque

of

in a state

body emits strong beams

truth; in the second, her light

is

along with her youth and beauty. Probably conceived

sketches and drawings that served as preparation for the prints

in 1819,

during the bleak nadir of the ilustrados and

Bonaparte.

And other emphatic caprichos,

in

Spam against

but which are

known

today as the Disasters of War. Far from representing heroic

resolve and singularity of purpose, however, these prints

express revulsion at the horror and brutality of war.

They

expose the savagery of the pueblo as well as the French and

condemn

the Spain of the restoration as

much as the regime of

The

82 plates of the The Disasters

into three groups

(plates
li

2+7),

may be

generally divided

which depict: the victims and horrors of war

famine, death, and burial (plates 48-64), and

caprichos enfaticos" (literally, "emphatic capriccios," plates

65 80), that

is,

nightmares and scenes of corrupt

clerics,

and grotesques. Most of The Disasters were

monsters,

liberates,

who has
who remains condemned
images that Goya intended for

these plates express the pathos and alienation of one

seen the collapse of Reason and yet

forever to hope.
his Disasters

The

very

last

(though not included

posthumous

in the

of 1863), reveal a similarly poignant dialectic.

and

chained

tortured

prisoners,

recalling

edition

They show
world

the

Courtyard with Lunatics and the Caprichos. Like these

works, Disaster 84,

Bonaparte.

"The custody

of a criminal does not

of

earlier
call for

unlike them, there

Enlightenment.

is

The

no irony, or
prisoner

crushed between the margins of

prison walls.

satire, or

even the prayer of

slumped and manacled,

is

this small plate as

Goya undoubtedly saw

between

or heard of such tortures

during the period of Spanish guerilla war and French

He would

"counter insurgency" between 1810 and 1814.

were probably made during the period of monarchical

or hear of them again in 1814 1

reaction and Inquisitorial virulence after 1814 but before the

of White Terror unleashed against popular radicalism and the

coup of 1820.

Disasters

"Con

2,

Among

the prints of the

first

group are

razon 6 sin ella" ("Whether right or

wrong") and Disasters

"Lo mismo" ("The

3,

same"), both of

which, significantly, show the Spanish attacking the French

with axes, pikes, knives, and even teeth. Disasters 26,

puede mirar" ("One can't look"), undoubtedly

The Executions of
brutality
pueblo;

it

the

Third of May,

and shows the French

1808,

"No

model

se

for

reverses the

pitilessly slaughtering the

also offers a particularly vivid

example of Goya's use

of brief captions both to illuminate and undermine the

meaning of his images. Spanish men, women, and children

gathered in a cave in order to be shot.
their faces,

and turn

They

the ends of their

rifle

barrels

appropriate subjects for

art,

must

see the brutality

in

artist left

1823

4-.

Spain for

in

1825 and died there, in relative peace, three years

reason Goya's despair was so great was that he had

seen the barbarism of Enlightenment itself in the person of

Napoleon

as well as the defeat of

The works
They

of Goya's

last

Enlightenment by Spain.

decade are not uniformly bleak.

include several portraits, religious paintings, the robust

and experimental Bordeaux Milkmaid (1825-7), and

number of

lithographs, a

new medium

a small

for the artist.

Most

remarkable and perplexing, however, are the so-called "Black

whom

suburban Madrid residence, the Quinta del Sordo (Deaf

in

from the

Are such horrors

as these

suitable vehicles for esthetic

"One

aged

The

France
later.

second restoration of Ferdinand

a fate for himself, the

Paintings" created to decorate the walls of two rooms of his

and bayonets jutting

pleasure; should one look at them}

Fearing such

see

and again during the period

are

their backs to the executioners at

right margin; they cannot be seen.

liberates after the

5,

beg, crawl, cover

they cannot bear to look. Their killers are visible to us only by

can't look"

and yet one

and senselessness of war. Disasters 28 and

29 again reverse the polarity of horror and show the pueblo

torturing and killing a single victim, a bourgeois

who

is

Man's House) between 1820 and

1823. Painted during a brief

constitutionalist interlude, these frescos

(now transferred

to

canvas) cannot, however, be considered confident celebtruth and reason.

rations of revived

They

grotesque or macabre, and any allegorical or

they

may

earliest

possess

is

are primarilysatiric

content

extremely recondite, and was so to

viewers. Saturn Devouring His Children and

Sabbath may,

like the Caprichos, allude to the violence

now without

its

The

and

probably also an afrancesado, and thus a "traitor" to Spain.

superstition of the Inquisition, but

And

reform. Nightmarish and even lurid, these are private images,

so the

horrors

compound

in

image

after

shootings, stabbings, famine, rape, and death.

96

IMAGE OF THE PUEBLO

image

93

torture," expresses the reforming zeal of the ilustrado; yet

completed by 1 8 1 4, but a few, especially from the third group,

liberal

91

rise-

young woman (perhaps

and the same woman, unburied, perhaps

of light,

la

dead") and "Si reucitaria?" ("If she were

is

again?").

group of "caprichos

final

79 and 80, "Murio

dimmed

Saragossa, and began to make the

he called The Terrible remits of the bloody war

89

the

oil

the hazardous journey to

90

Among

enfaticos'" are the bleak Disasters

the spirit of

lacking public purpose, lacking even an audience apart from

94

the artist himself, his son, his

companion Leocadia, and the

few surviving friends courageous enough to

home

the

visit

of

an ancient ilustrado reprobate. Given the dark emotional

timbre of these fourteen paintings, the question must

Goya any longer an

The "Black
by Goya

arise: is

of the Enlightenment?

artist

Paintings," like the late Disasters, were created

himself during an epoch when reason

for

slept.

Disdaining public meanings, conventional forms, and scru-

Goya appears

table iconography,

abandoned, his reason

the Black Paintings.

in

anyway

to have lost, or

They

are

painted with unprecedented boldness and breadth and are

and

alternately sober
logic to these

Goya, such

and

as the

French popular

Gwyn

Yet there

shrill in their coloration.

is

works of

to the other, less disturbed late

Milkmaid or the many drawings of the

classes

it

( 1

824 6).

when he

wrote:

from Album

Williams detected

The historian
"As

for the

grotesque, the maniacal, the occult, the witchery, they are

precisely the product of the sleep of

human nightmares. That

the

point.''''

human

these monsters are

reason; they are

human

indeed,

is,

Goya's very focus upon the grotesque

an

is

expression of his continued fascination with ordinary people,

with the Spanish pueblo, and (after 1825) with the French

menu peuple

in all its

complexity. For Goya, as for other artists

since Breugel, the grotesque and the popular define

occupy

world opposed to order, rationality, the

aristocratic.
artists,

and the

Yet unlike the popular grotesques of

earlier

Goya's are not decorative or picturesque. They are

defined,
their

and

ideal,

we have

combined

seen, by their contradictoriness, that

brutality

virtue, their blindness

and

and

nobility, their

is

by

unreason and

vision; they offer the artist

and the

viewer no comforting homilies about loyalty or truth, but

then, neither are they as frozen or static as the project of

Enlightenment had become. Although they are primarily

94

Francisco Goya Saturn Devouring His

Children ca. i8zo. 57 x

(145x82.9)

vehicles of a profound artistic pessimism and alienation,

Goya's pueblo reveal

new

direction in the history of art

proclaimed unity of purpose and perspective

among

artists

and the

socially or culturally marginal,

France by Gericault and Delacroix;

in

was championed

England

and the insane, the alienated, the dissident, and the popular.

represented principally by William Blake, to

This perspective, belonging

now

to the radical, the

nonconformist

it

in

would be

whom we

shall

<>7

turn.

Uil.

or THE

IH

HI

VISIONARY HISTORY PAINTING:

BLAKE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
BRIAN LUKACHER

BLAKE'S REVOLUTION

from, and yet directly engaged with, the esthetics and politics
of his day, our attention will be focused on his self-sponsored,

WHILE

DAVID AND GOYA WERE ALTERNATELY

advancing and reprehending the ideologies of Enlightenment, Revolution, and Empire during the course of
their

artistic

careers,

printmaker, and

the English poet,

one-man exhibition of
most decisive

effort

1809, an occasion that

to

marked Blake's

the attention

solicit

audience. Exhibiting sixteen of his "Poetical and Historical

Inventions"

at his brother's

London

residence (also the

painter William Blake (1757-1827) was producing a highly

the

imaginative and hermetic art that was no less responsive to the

promoted

impact of these same historical forces and events

Britain in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. In

in Britain.

of a public

family

hosiery

an

shop,

unusual

art

venue),

site

of

Blake

his self-appointed calling as the artistic reformer of

some

verses

Unlike his French and Spanish counterparts, however, Blake

written around the time of the exhibition, he imagined an

dwelt for the most part on the margins of artistic activity in his

angelic annunciation instructing him, " 'Descend thou

country, effectively cut off from the preeminent fine arts

Earth/

institutions
late

and

and the most respected avenues of patronage

in

Georgian London. If David and Goya took on celebrated

visible

roles

sometimes

dangerously

nations' premier artists during times of

and

social upheaval, Blake's situation

best

summed up by

his

own

so

pronounced

was quite

admission, "I

am

their

as

political

different, as

hid." Blake's

proclaimed devotion to creative and spiritual self-definition

through mystical revelation,

in opposition to

any and

him exemplary of an
notion

that

alienated, countercultural

certainly

Undoubtedly, "Blake" has become

how

else

is

life

own

could he be claimed by some as a visionary,

and conveniently heterogeneous, precursor

to Karl

Marx and

Carl Jung? For our purposes, Blake's contribution to the

visual arts
fate

around

vital to

understanding the

of history painting and the question of national cultural

identity in English

To
98

800 proves most

Romantic

dismissed,

art.

appreciate Blake's predicament as an artist "hidden"

if

"Advertisement" and Descriptive

acknowledged

Madman's Scrawls"

radicals

who had

as little

at all,

(his words),

redemption of

his

more than "a

Blake looked forward to the

artistic

stature:

an

esoteric

struggled within an artisan subculture of

and mystics was ready

empowered

assume

to

history painter assuaging

his position as

an

and redirecting the

misguided energies of war-torn empires.

Blake's career began

kind of cultural

palimpsest for the social and psychological Utopias of our

century:

clear in the published

engraver

later

and recognition, something

Catalogue for his exhibition. Resentful that his art had been

Romanticism,

seems overburdened with

nevertheless borne out by the specific conditions of Blake's

art.

made

eventual

twentieth-century values and misconceptions but that

and

for the political efficacy of his aft was, paradoxically, cast as a

nationalist appeal for patronage

makes

authoritarian standards (artistic, religious, or social),

all

upon

Renew the Arts on Britain's Shore,/ And France shall

fall down & adore./ With Works of Art their Armies meet,/
And War shall sink beneath thy feet.' " Blake's pacifist hope

in

the

1770's as an engraver of

antiquarian and reproductive fine art prints, his lifelong work

in

commercial engraving serving

income

that did

little

to save

as an intermittent source of

him and

his wife,

Catherine

Boucher, from abject poverty (friends and infrequent patrons

would express

their surprise at the physical squalor

economic deprivation of the Blakes'

received brief instruction in
established

Royal Academy

life

and

living conditions). Blake

drawing

at

the recently

of Arts (chartered by King

George
and

and submitted watercolors of

III in 1768)

biblical subjects to the

Throughout

however,

career,

his

annual

Academy
he

would remain an

adversarial outcast of the Academy, condemning

and yet

tive,

at

its

in

esthetics

was nonetheless dependent on the

artistic principles

of the Academy. Typically for

and redefining

values within the imaginative program of his

whether

own

art

and

be the rational empiricism of Enlighten-

it

ment philosophy,
tutional

the self-contradicting authority of consti-

monarchy, or the emergence of industrial capitalism,

of which were to be the subject of scathing commentary in

and writings.

his pictures

unique approach

frequent contact with the radical, intellectual circle of the

Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.

feminist republicans

These

associations, along with his social

and professional

to

producing his illuminated books of

His poetic books America (1793) and

political credentials.

Europe (1794), both subtitled

"A Prophecy," chart the travails

of political liberty against the despotic, royalist authority of

church and

clothed in seemingly obscure

state, the contest

imagery of god-like powers battling over the soul of Albion

humanity of England). Blake's writings

(Blake's figure for the

during the 1790's register with some urgency the emergence

and repression of

social

and

disillusionment,

in

the French

war against France

in 1793,

social dissent, the

The

decorative,

and

emblematic,

visual imagery, far

from simply

narrative

illustrating or

supplementing the poetry, could simultaneously amplify and

contradict the content of the verse, the

dynamic between word

Revolution and the

any organized expressions of

country became increasingly embroiled in

government censorship. As the decade

grain shortages, and

closed, the rise of Napoleon ensured that the nationalism

required

militarism

for

of England

defense

the

continue to preempt or suppress any

about the very processes of reading, seeing, and interpreting.

reform.

Figurative elements sometimes occupied separate plates or

Revolution that would never come to pass.

text.

The books

climate of political paranoia, spurred on by invasion scares,

and image often undermining epistemological assumptions

were integrated into the design of the

the

and with Prime Minister William

printed the handwritten scripts of his poetic sagas graphically

with

among

establishment of the Republic. With England's declaration of

Pitt's repressive policies against

embellished

protest

political

English Jacobin movements that had found inspiration, and

poetry. Experimenting with the technique of relief etching, he

motifs.

embrace the

publisher Joseph Johnson, which included the political and

later

was during the early 1790's that Blake developed

It

to

English Jacobinism during the 1790's, affirm Blake's radical

institution of power also entailed incorporating

all

failure

supremacy of history painting and, more generally,

art.

indicting or negating a system of thought or an

beliefs,

on England's

centering

revolutionary fervor of America and France. Blake was in

roots in the urban artisan milieu that was the wellspring of

propounded
Blake,

history,

Blake's

idealist

its

restric-

hypocritical failure to encourage a

genuinely progressive English school of historical

faith in the

its

times overly eclectic, pedagogy and exhibition

and especially

policy,

historical

exhibitions.

Much

calls for

and

would

revolutionary

of Blake's art and poetry addresses the English

of

poetry were printed in small numbers and hand-colored, often

Catherine

with

Boucher responsible

for

the

tinting.

medieval craft esthetic was thereby conflated with repro-

BODY POLITICS AND RELIGIOUS

MYSTICISM

ductive printing techniques, Blake seeking to reconcile the

autographic

singularity

of his

illuminations

with

their

intended multiplication.
Blake's poetic books from this period can best be characterized as spiritual allegories of revolutionary politics. Creating
their

own mythic

personifications of

human

desires, habits of

mind, and world views, designated by primitivizing, onomatopoeic

often

names such

seem

as

Ore, Eos, and Urizen, Blake's writings

like a strangely

invented form of biblical science

fiction,

though the abiding influence of Miltonic and Ossianic

verse

ever at hand.

is

The demiurgic struggles recounted in

his

poetry appear to transpire in either a cosmic or cellular void,

Blake's hopeful testimony to this nascent English revolution-

seen in one of his most renow ned images, the

ary impulse

is

color print

known

is

as Albion Rose (ca.

human

sketches for the

1794-5).

figure date back to

The

first

around 1780, and

it

thought that the concept of the picture commemorates

Blake's experience of the

Gordon

Riots of that year

anti-

London that ignited

Blake was among the crowd

Catholic and anticolonial war protests in

into widespread
that

famous

The

mob

violence;

stormed and burned Newgate Prison, an episode made

in

Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841).

youthful male nude of Albion seen alighting on a sloping

summit

gives us the essentials of Blake's visual language: the

ominously on the brink of eschatological destruction. In

human

figure

lamenting and exhorting over the cycles of oppression and

intellectual,

or,

geographically speaking, in an

liberation

and of persecution and

English nation poised

resistance under

which

his

mythic characters labor, Blake's "Giant forms," as he would

call

them, perform epic psychodramas of contemporary

employed

and

as

corporeal sign of spiritual,

political positions.

The

presentation of the body in Albion Rose

diverging,

Vitruvian

balletic, self-exalting

derived, while

also

from Renaissance proportion diagrams of the

Man,

as well as

liODY POLITICS

from Neoclassical engravings of

WD RELIGIOl

Ml STICISM

99

would

"Naked Beauty Displayed." Like most of Blake's

call

nudes, Albion seems

embodiment. He

is

knowing contradiction,

disembodied

of the flesh and plainly physical, but he

also functions as an ethereal blueprint for

some regenerated

model of a Utopian humanity, Christ-like and Apollonian

all al

once. In America (1793), Blake envisioned the infectious,

American Revolution on the

liberating impact of the

British

people, "Leprosy London's Spirit" cured and reawakened as

"a naked multitude." Elsewhere

poem, he writes of a

the

in

dawning freedom: "The morning comes, the night decays

Let the slave grinding

him look up

at

the mill run out into the

into the heavens

and laugh

in the bright air."

from oppressive darkness

transition

from imprisoned labor

field,/

to revealed

Let

This

radiance,

to pantheistic release, in turn recalls

Paine's solar metaphor for political freedom in his The Rights

of Man (1791): "But such

that

all it

and

asks,

all it

wants

sun needs no inscription

The
this

is

the irresistible nature of truth,

the liberty of appearing.

is

The

him from darkness."

to distinguish

self-illuminating figure of Albion, likewise, announces

resplendent visibility of liberty. Using the most canonical

feature of Classical humanist art

nude

the idealized

Blake

fashioned a revolutionary icon, a pictorial entreaty for social

and

spiritual transformation; as

in the preface to his later

O Young Men

of the

New

Much more common,

95

WILLIAM BLAKE

1793-

he would implore his readers

poem Milton

(180408), "Rouze up,

Age!"

however,

in Blake's art

of the 1790's

was the imagery of subjugation and enslavement. In the

frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Album

solemn and tormented frontispiece

6^x41(17x12)

to his

poem

Visions of the

Daughters of Albion (1793), Blake delineates the constricted

sculptural antiquities excavated at

Herculaneum

mented by the glorious burst of colored

Arms extended and

the figure.
is

posed

in

triumphant

to a

hair aflame, the

comple-

surrounds

body of Albion

Blake attenuates and

frontality.

minimum

is

light that

human

protagonist of the poem, Oothoon,

cowers and withdraws into himself on the cavernous ledge

above the enchained

figures.

The poem,

sexual and economic exploitation, denouncing the trade in

its

form,

prismatic aureole. This

body

is

counterpointed to the

flesh that

commodifies both "the swarthy children of the sun"

and "the virgin joys of life." The

social

mottled darkness of the hillside and the eclipsed black of night

of freedom

seen in the lower portion of the print. Although Blake

constraints of his

espoused an unswerving Neoclassical purity of line

tions

on Michelangelesque nudes

style.

The

coloristic

explosions

in

his

in artistic

work

often

signifying a perceptual and sensual materialism against which

Blake declaimed

are vital to his pictorial designs

dialectical play of esthetic (and implicitly ethical

and

their

and meta-

is

translated, visually,

bound

figures

and moral perversion

by Blake into the physical

these miniaturized varia-

that typified his figurative

agonized subjection of the figures

only through their poses and gestures

is

conveyed not

opposing,

for ex-

ample, the taut frenzy of the male with the bowed resignation
of the female

but

also

through their formal definition, with

the lineaments of their anatomies harshly and schematically

physical) contraries.

The

broadly speaking,

with the contour lines strongly

linear definition of the refulgent

the

seen manacled to her

intertwines abolitionist and quasi-feminist arguments against

demarcating the figure within

execution,

is

slave-master/rapist, while her jealous and inhibited lover

its

simplifies the anatomical structure of the

modeling kept

body language of mental and physical bondage. The female

not simply a Neoclassical exercise in

rendered, their massive bodies contained and reduced to

than the body of

compact diagrams of human despair. In keeping with Blake's

England, obviously divested of the outward signs of social

aversion to the conventions of pictorial illusionism, the bleak

figure of Albion

is

antique heroic nudity. Albion

class

and

is

nothing

less

historical identity: refined yet elemental, chaste yet

sexualized, and ennobling yet leveling, in a state of what Blake

100

BODY POLITICS AND RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM

landscape setting in this design

rather than

objectively

is

expressively metaphoric,

descriptive.

The

grotto entrance

95

frames

a disconsolate vista

of sea, clouds, and darkened sun,

the realm of nature treated as

flat

patterns of unnaturalistic

color shades, resisting any logical sense of graduated spatial

recession.

This mental landscape inverts into

a skull-like,

anthropomorphic profile that only reinforces the malevolent

Concurrent with these

plight of the incapacitated titans.

mythic abstractions of oppression were Blake's more documentary, engraved illustrations of the inhumane actuality of

contemporary slavery that he prepared

Captain John

for

Stedman's book entitled Narrative ofa Five Years' Expedition

against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild

Coast of South America (1796). Based on Stedman's eyewitness drawings that recorded the varieties of torture and

punishment meted out

96

by their colonial

to rebellious slaves

masters, Blake's engravings, like the one depicting a black

man bound and hung by

his torso to a gallows, are unflinching

in their portrayal

of the repressive violence connected with the

traffic in slavery.

The

slaves are often

shown,

as in this plate,

with expressions of stoic restraint, their quiet fortitude meant

to elicit civilized

compassion

while

suffering,

impervious

also

almost

for their

unendurable physical

making them seem

inhumanly so

more

the

all

circum-

to the brutal

Suspended hopelessly between

stances of their punishment.

the grim skeletal remains of past victims and the distant slave

ship visible in the harbor, the tortured slave

the

objectify

synonymous with the perpetuation of slavery

Blake's

is

made

to

perpetuation of death that was necessarily

preoccupation

with

the

itself.

96

powers of

conflicting

revolution and oppression was inseparable from his Christian

religious mysticism.

He embraced,

assimilated,

and critiqued

WILLIAM BLAKE "A Negro hung

alive

by the Ribs

to the

Gallows,"

from John G. Stedman Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the

Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South

America 1796.

7 x Si (18 x 13.5)

eighteenth-century mystical systems with habitual regularity,

ranging from the apocalyptic hermeneutics of the Swedish

Emmanuel Swedenborg to the Neoplatonic scholarof the English mystic Thomas Taylor. Using self-

mystic
ship

induced trances as

source of artistic inspiration, experiment-

ing occasionally with an antinomian lifestyle as a

way of

recapturing prelapsarian bliss (William and Catherine had

Adam and

been espied nude, emulating

Eve, in their cottage

garden), and frequently entertaining visitations from the

spirit

world (often from his deceased brother and fellow

artist

century.

As the

historian

E.

P.

Thompson observed

in

analyzing the concomittant rise of religious enthusiasm and

political radicalism that

marked the English reaction

French Revolution, "Chiliasm touched Blake with

it

walked abroad

artisan

among

its

to the

breath;

the Jacobins and Dissenters of

London." With the century

perilously

waning and

with revolutionary events on the Continent inciting political

and

social

appeared

discord within England, contemporary historj

promise the impending fulfillment of

to

biblical,

Dante and

apocalyptic scenarios, especially in the collective imagination

Milton), Blake had constant recourse to the otherworldly in

of the ever growing, religious nonconformist sects and their

Robert or from more celebrated guests

like

his struggles against the prevailing structures

and mystical tendencies

art.

These nonconformist

his

work and temperament make him

and compelling

to

religious

some, and

all

the

of society and

all

more

the

more

in

fascinating

irrelevant

and trying

With

One such
who

"Prince of the Hebrews"

prophet, Richard Brothers, the

foretold the

imminent collapse

of all monarchies, along with the destruction of London, "the

modern Babylon", was even

arrested for seditious treason in

1795 and confined to a lunatic asylum where he drew up

to others.

his art consistently cast in

"prophecies,"

self-styled prophets.

Blake

was

terms of "visions" and

participating

in

widespread

published plans for London's promised resurrection as the

New

Jerusalem, the influence of which

millennial anxiety that swept through significant segments of

Blake's

own

English society during the closing decades of the eighteenth

(ireat

l/hion

later poetic epic Jerusalem,

(1S04

HODV POLITICS

20).

The

may

be delected on

The Emanation of the

proliferation of these chiliastic

\\I> RI'.I.IGKH S

MYSTK

ISM

97

102

WILLIAM BLAKE The

Spiritual

Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan,

BODY POLITICS AND RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM

in

whose wreathmgs are infolded the Nations of the Earth 1809. 30 x 24f (76.2 x

62.5)

predictions of historical destruction and spiritual renewal

during

this

period was deeply symptomatic of both social

disenchantment and

disenfranchisement, to which

political

the increasingly obscurantist and prophetic quality of Blake's

imagery bears striking witness. Those modern scholars most

attuned to the social formation and historical specificity of

work,

Blake's

particularly

Erdman, have noted

religiosity

was

that

brought with

and

social

by

Bronowski and David

1800

a certain

it

in part necessitated

dominating

Jacob

that

imaginative

Blake's

degree of political quietism

by the conservative nationalism

England.

political discourse in

BLAKE'S PUBLIC ART

As noted

earlier, Blake's

his galvanizing

career.

1809 exhibition was to have signalled

re-emergence from the obscurity of

his early

Although Blake's "Advertisement" and Descriptive

Catalogue for the exhibition often evince a dutiful patriotism

in his solicitous claims for public attention,

away from

his

more

typically invective

Blake does not shy

commentary on

suffering of art in "a corrupt state of Society."

the works he exhibited as

He

"Experiment Pictures," primarily

new

because they were executed in tempera on canvas, a

medium

the

referred to

for Blake that he also described as "fresco painting"

and that he saw

as a pointed challenge to

what

in his estimation

was the commercial and esthetic vanity of

(unfortunately,

exhibition have themselves badly deteriorated).

ment pictures were meant

oil

painting

tempera pictures from the

the surviving

to

serve as

These experi-

mere models

for

John Flaxman, engraved by William Blake "Design for

Monument to British Naval Victories with a Statue of Britannia,"

98

the

1799. 8j-x5}(21 x H.6)

gargantuan frescos that Blake hoped would be commissioned

97

by the government for the adornment of national monuments.

by Blake

Representative of these delusively ambitious frescos was the

obsession with designing vast, memorializing public spaces

picture listed in the catalog: The spiritual form of Nelson

first

guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations

of the

Earth.

Admiral Lord Nelson,

commander who

the

British

naval

died at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805,

certainly a topical

and popular hero

was

in the public conscious-

ness during the Napoleonic Wars, and contemporary artists

were quick

to capitalize

commemorative

on the nationalist cultural craze for

military

monuments, most of which were

endlessly planned and debated by governmental committees

and

in the art press,

but were rarely ever

built.

Even before the

death of Nelson, John Flaxman had proposed plans for an

allegorical

naval

monument

with an

imposing statue of

Britannia to be set within a sepulchral precinct on Greenwich

Hill,

dedicated

to

public

commemoration

England's naval triumphs against the French.

98

this antique-inspired,
tic

in

honor of

The designs

megalomaniacal project

for

characteris-

of Flaxman's severe and reductive graphic style that would

prove so influential

among European

artists

were engraved

in

799. Flaxman's

scheme reflected the Neoclassical

where spectacles of national power could be celebrated

in a

modernized Greco-Roman ambience. Blake's own dream, ten

years later, of having his modestly scaled pictures
talized

and venerated

conformed
artistic

as a

monumen-

public art of national import

to the prevalent cultural politics that called for the

aggrandizement of British contemporary history.

Blake was hardly insensitive, however, to the compromising

logic that

would render the purposefulness of

art entirely

subservient to nationalist and imperialist causes; as he wrote

in

1810, "Let us teach Buonaparte,

concern, That

it is

Empire, but Empire that attends upon

another draft of this statement,

"Englishmen"

for

& whomsoever

it

may

not the Arts that follow and attend upon

&

follows the Arts." In

Blake would substitute

"Buonaparte."

Blake's divided attitude toward the strained allegiance

between

art

and

empire

interpretation of Nelson.

clothed only in

As

is

apparent

in

his

befits his "spiritual

allegorical

form," he

loincloth and a halo, the mortal hero

BLAKE'S

PI

BLIC \RT

is

now
KM

deified within a mandala-like pattern of highly abstracted rays

of

light.

The

naval warrior's aloof and calm expression, and

the almost automatistic

which he lassoes the

with

ease

interminable sea monster that encircles him, makes him seem

women and men

divinely oblivious to the futile struggle of the

trapped within the serpentine coils (one figure with sword

hand, just beneath Nelson's

As

dragon's maw).

conquest, the picture

left

arm,

already caught in the

is

image of dominion and

terrifying
is

in

especially attentive to these dread

casualties ("the Nations of the Earth") that have fallen

under

Nelson's imperial sway. At the base of the composition, the

figure of an expired slave

is

prominently shown, liberated

from the stranglehold of the sea serpent, but only

lifeless

biblical leviathan, a

title

alludes both to the

monstrous opponent to divine

Thomas Hobbes's famous

to

The

castaway on the narrow shore of freedom.

leviathan referred to in the picture's

as

to be left as a

corrupting power of the ship of

will, as well

trope

political

As Nelson's

state.

for

the

beastly

and by extension English society's and the

promote "public taste"

private

and

interest

for history

and

social

him

historical

Academy

pursue

to

and

allegorical subjects, Barry's career

that

ended

in

poverty and disillusionment, making him the unquestioned

martyr

much

to the lost cause

of history painting

in

England

so that Blake planned to write "Barry, an Epic

so

Poem."

history painting, Barry, along with other artists of the period,

often

King Lear Weeping Over

inspiration. His

the

body of Cordelia

(1786-7) depicts a Shakespearean scene that was significantly

late

eighteenth-century stagings of

body of his only

faithful daughter, with the corpses of the other conspiratorial

hand, was deemed too transgressive for

Albion; but in this later picture, the physical freedom of the

daughters close

human form is not so certain, the body of Nelson appearing

much less taut and energetic, having now become more
encumbered and restricted by its supernatural task. One must

Georgian theatre audiences. For Barry, the deranged fury of

an aged king cursing over his internecine family implied

wonder whether Nelson guides the

and

and perhaps even enslaves, the transcen-

sea creature guides,

dent hero.

The

of Blake's picture

artistic traits

anti-illusionism,

its

human body, and

at

political questions

about the

stability

of monarchical power

potentially irrational conflict of private

its

passions. Lear

and

his

claustrophobic

figures divulging a

and public

male entourage of mourners dominate

the foreground stage of Barry's picture, the

its

monumental

profound range of emotional reactions to

denatured and contorted treatment of the

the spectacle of their despairing king. Lear himself, with his

overall fascination with heroic supernat-

windswept mane of white hair and prophet-like grandilo-

its

uralism and ritualized violence

more innovative currents

poetical paintings.

connects

in recent

his

work with the

English historical and

Blake saw his art as belonging to an

quence

of the day complained of his Semitic mien),

(critics

would provide

a figurative

and psychological model

for

many

of Blake's looming patriarchs and domineering gods, as well as

Ossian and his

abortive tradition of progressive history painting that, in his

for later artistic renditions of the Gaelic bard

opinion, had already fallen victim to the purely commercial

mythic heroes that were so popular among painters from

vicissitudes afflicting art patronage in England.

David's

The

atelier.

landscape background of Barry's com-

position, offering visual escape

dramatis personae,

BLAKE AND CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

ART OF THE SUBLIME

Druid

trilithon

is

most notable

Irish-born

painter

artistic

heroes was the

James Barry (1741-1806). Barry had

received early encouragement and support from such promi-

nent and influential

esthetician

men

Edmund Burke and

for its inclusion of primitive

temples, evoking the ancient history and

project underwritten by the

was part of

as "the

Shakespeare Gallery," a

London

publisher and alderman

John Boydell who had commissioned most of Britain's leading

artists to paint

Shakespearean episodes for public exhibition,

and

the pictures later to be engraved in large stocks for public sale.

the founding President and

Since history painting was not receiving direct encourage-

Academy,

ment through

as the Conservative statesman

leading portraitist of the Royal

from the massive array of

religious civilization of Britain. Barry's Lear

commercial enterprise known

Foremost among Blake's contemporary

Sir Joshua

Rey-

royal patronage, these speculative financial

nolds. Although Barry rose quickly through the ranks of the

ventures submitted the future of British narrative art to the

Academy

uncertain and variable forces of the marketplace.

carried

104

on

to
a

become

its

Professor of Painting in 1782, he

rancorous crusade against the Royal Academy's,

BLAKE AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE SUBLIME

<

turned to Shakespearean and Miltonic themes for

the play: the grim pathos of Lear cradling the

leviathan, or whether the

In his effort to promote a distinctly national school of

censored and rewritten for

nude

to

hectoring

sponsorship

connotations for the maritime supremacy of Britain. Blake's

to his revolutionary prototype, the

lis

ambitious painting cycles of

his

agent of war, the leviathan has, at very best, ambivalent

Nelson harks back

led to his expulsion in 1799.

found other institutional

he

had

representative of

national history painter).

criticism of the Royal

allowed

art

had even turned down an invitation

egalitarian values (he

Although

factionalism

political

destroyed the civic ideal of a truly public

become America's

state's, failure to

painting; in his view,

Barry

was

also

an

accomplished

printmaker

whose

101

9<)

WILLIAM BLAKE

Albion Rose ca, i7<>4

5.

K)Jx7J(27.l

20

I)

lil.Akl.

AND CONTl.MI'OR

\RY ^RT

OF THE SUBLIME

105

100

106

HENRY FUSELI

Thor Battering the Mtdguard Serpent 1790. 51J

BLAKE AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE SUBLIME

x 36 (131 x 92)


illustrations of

Miltonic subjects demonstrated, often better

102

lished his dual career as a painter of occult, mythological,

had earned

poetical

Blake's admiration. Barry's etching Satan and His Legions

Among

than in his paintings, a heroic figure style that

Hurling

Toward Heaven

Defiance

1792)

(ca.

was most

Edmund Burke had

emphatically a visual essay in the sublime.

formulated the esthetics of the sublime in a treatise from his

student days,

A Philosophical Inquiry into

the Beautiful (1756).

the Sublime

Here the sublime was defined

and

as a

pleasure of terror, esthetically mediated of course, in which

ditions

and

all

while

the

states of sensory

illusions of

identifying

with

obverse con-

and psychological overstimulation

omnipotent power. For Burke, Milton's

could be counted the influential

physiognomic science

theorist of

art collector, banker,

and

J.

C. Lavater, the Liverpool

abolitionist

William Roscoe, and the

revolutionary feminist and political activist

craft (she

Mary Wollstone-

had reportedly become infatuated with Fuseli and

wanted him

to join her

on

tour of Republican France in

1792).

At once admired and scorned

the imagination revels in thoughts of fear, privation, and

subjection,

subjects and also as a

his closest colleagues

for his cynical libertinism

he was renowned for his colorful blaspheming and overbear-

manner

ing

Fuseli enjoyed testing the limits of artistic

decorum. His pictures consistently

fix

upon the human

Paradise Lost was the creative work that exemplified the

in extremis, as

sublime, particularly the passage in which the fallen Satan

and scandalous painting, The Nightmare (1790),

rises out of the fiery lake of Chaos to curse the heavens

visualized the disturbing torments of a sleeping

the

Drawing from

composition responds to Burke's stipulation in the Inquiry

and the supernatural carnality of dreaming,

most compellingly

inspire these sublime affections. Barry's Satan

and directing

his warriors

is

seen rousing

their rebellious attention

upward

to

figure

seen in the second version of his most celebrated

precise episode illustrated in Barry's etching. In fact, Barry's

that only poetic, not pictorial, images could

traditional folklore about

demonic

work

woman.

as well as

of

human

sleep, Fuseli depicted the nocturnal intrusion of a

grimacing incubus and his

electrified, spectral

nightmare into

woman's bedchamber. The dreaming woman

below creating rich patterns of chiaroscuro that accentuate the

supine and vulnerable, surmounted by the peculiarly

visuality of the

sublime

from

eighteenth-century medical theories on the psychophysiology

The

that

visitations

the celestial realm, the eerie light from the infernal depths

vigorous modeling of the figures.

and

reviewer.

literary

prolific

looking fiend that

meant

is

is

shown
fetal-

to serve as a vengeful personifi-

conceived by Barry as a masculine realm of physical

cation of her desires; the psychical disables the somatic,

strength in which the swelling and extended bodies of the

resulting in the occult rape fantasy of the female protagonist.

is

fallen angels,

congested along the precipice of a flaming abyss,

strain to break

The
operates on many

through the very boundaries of the image.

insurgent theme of the Miltonic illustration

levels: the pictorial assault

on the poetic sublime, the radical

Barry challenging the conservative Burke (and the entire

and

artistic

and the

social establishment for that matter),

It is

of course

more accurate

to say that the fantasy

as

internal

to

the feminine so as to

projection of masculine desire: that

direction, the

virginal victim gives birth to the

libidinal

from Milton with,

originally associated this scene

words,

"the

in his

and the revolutions of

of monarchs,

ruin

kingdoms."

Fuseli (1741

it

impulses,

herself.

tion

seemed

art

culture

1825) with

gnomic offspring of her

sexual imagery discernible in

the vaginal parting of the

curtains and in the phallic end of the bolstei that supports the

poised abandon). Although the

whom

(1781)

Blake most closely identified

may have employed

first

this

version of The Nightmare

imagery of supernatural

whose excessive imagina-

persecution in veiled allusion to the diminished status of

to contest, while also appealing to, the mercantile

Britannia after the war with the American colonies and in the

of late

eighteenth-century

London.

Fuseli's

background was remarkable: he emerged from the

and philosophical

(storm and stress)

in

maintained

civil

disorder of the

a lifelong

Gordon

dreams, and with what he referred to as (paraphrasing

Shakespeare) "the undistinguished space of women's will."

His famous aphoristic remark about having

epoch

consulted with and written

commentary on Rousseau and

turned to painting as

Fuseli

of the Sturm und Drang

Greek

art into English,

Riots,

obsession with the feminine realm of

Zurich and Berlin; by 1770,

circles

movement

wake of the

he had translated Winckelmann's art historical writings on

his

a critical

moral philosophy, and

a professional pursuit

on the

encouraging advice of Reynolds. After an eight-year

Roman

finally

As though

the visual displacement of suggestive

was the Swiss-born painter Henry

as a fellow, underappreciated artist

literary

mask the demonic

under Fuseli's stage

dreamer's body (the upper torso revealingly thrown back in

Along with Barry,

intellectual

is,

dreaming woman victimizes

suppressed energies of political revolt finding an irresistible

dark heroism of Satan. Burke himself had

Fuseli's,

part of a Sadean reenactment of a spooky Nativity scene, the

embodiment

in the

is

the dreaming delirium of this implied sexual violation posited

sojourn, Fuseli settled in England in 1780 where he estab-

of

progressive advocacy for

circle.

to

endure "the

viragos" betrays obvious misgivings about the

women's

rights in the Wollstonecraft

In his later private, graphic erotica from about 1810,

however, Fuseli was prone

domination, the scenario

BL VKE \\!>

to inverting the

in these

terms of sexual

drawings often involving

CONTEMPOR \m \RT OF THE

SI

BLIME

1(17

103

JAMES BARRY King Lear Weeping Over

ioi

the

Body of Cordelia

1786-7. 8'10x 12^(269x367)

JAMES BARRY Satan and His Legions Hurling

ca. 1792-4. 2% x 19J (74.6 x 50.4)

102

Defiance Toward the

Vault of Heaven

Promethean male being sexually suffocated by

restrained

muscular grouping of ornately coiffed courtesans.

feminine

is

104

The

seemingly liberated from the oppressive breeding

of dreams, but only to minister to the masochistic fantasies of

the artist.
Fuseli's credo that "the forms of virtue are erect, the forms

of pleasure undulate," can properly be taken as the guiding

principle behind his

more heroic

species of history paintings.

Blake's image of Nelson subduing a serpentine monster

many ways
that

a hieratic

is

in

reworking of the conquering male nude

dominated Fuseli's forceful Diploma painting

for the

Royal Academy, Thor Battering the Midguard Serpent (1790).

Along with subjects from Milton and Shakespeare, Fuseli

favored epic myths from Nordic legend and the Ntbelungenlied

108

BLAKE AND CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE SUBLIME

this

new emphasis on

the Northern

European mythic

100

canon

in

accordance with current speculations on the cultural

geography of nations espoused by the German philosopher of

history J. G.

Herder (who had praised Fuseli

in

1774 as "a

genius like a mountain torrent"). Inspired by the strained and

expressive exaggeration of human anatomies in late Michelangelo and in Giulio

Romano,

Fuseli's figure of

Thor

assuredly a concerted study in "erect virtue."

is

most

With the

masculine body shown flexed and towering (Fuseli was fond

of low vantage points and drastic foreshortening),

remains highly sexualized

in his

Thor

supreme moment of physical

exertion. His genitals at the center of the picture are barely

kept from view by the shadow of his projecting

pronounced swathe of shadow

leg;

but this

also connects his sex to the

bloody head of the sea serpent that he has just snared from out
of the misty waters.

The

subsidiary figures of the massive,

103

HENRY FUSELI

104

HENRY FUSELI Symplegmu (Man

The Nightmare 1790. 30 x 24J

(76 x 63)

and Three Women)

ca. 1810.

7} x9|- (18.9x24.5)

fci

t I08-><^1

75,J-<

BLAKE

i '

k->-x:

ywY//v<<

.*/

WD CONTEMPORARY

Al-_fT

VRT OF THE

SI

BLIME

Kt'l

aged boatman, shrinking away

Wotan observing
more

in fear,

and the ancient god

the struggle from on high

feeble version of the incubus in the

picture

only

serve

heroism of Thor. As

fearless

superhuman

the

swell

to

perched

and

scale

youthful deity with power over

associations than

Thor

(conservative, royalist) Party, even though the vehe-

mently anti-Jacobin themes of

own

political

dismissed by
as the

his prints did not reflect his

While Blake's 1809 exhibition

beliefs.

work of "an unfortunate

lunatic,"

it

was Gillraj wh<>

held

actually spent his final years debilitated by insanity. In his

crowded and complex etching Phaeton Alarm J! (1808),

noble and venerable gods from the Eddie pantheon.

characterizing the revolutionary tremblings of

Europe

In

in late

Gillray casts the

Canning

as the

new Phaeton,

the

"Sun of Anti-Jacobinism,"

coursing through the heavens above the war-torn earth

impact of his figure of Thor, as when he wrote of "an age

(aflame and surmounted by a tiny Napoleon), his path beset

pregnant with the most gigantic efforts of character

by astrological personifications of his

seemed

whilst

opponents.

political

The

Tory government

an unexampled vigour seems to vibrate from pole to pole

mythical, God-like defender of the

through the human mind, and

challenge the general

challenged by the monstrous clutter of Whig parliamentarians

any direct

social

through their exceedingly grotesque armature. Blake's Nelson

or anyone

could easily claim Gillray's Canning as a fellow'luminary from

to

whose cartoonish

sympathy."

But Fuseli was generally reluctant

or moral function to

modern English

art, his

own

In his role as Professor of Painting at the

else's.

Academy
fierce

to grant

position he

(a

assumed

in 1801),

Royal

he asserted, with

candor, that the very existence of academies and public

exhibitions "were and are

symptoms of Art

in distress

and

portraits

remain distinctly

legible,

even

portrayed as the Tory father figure of Apollo in the lower

shadow of the Gillray

was

print,

is

who

the nationalist firmament (the recently deceased Pitt,

Form" by

left

also given his "Spiritual

Blake in a companion picture to the Nelson

painting for the 1809 exhibit). Gillray's parodic and allusive

shadowy voids were

appropriation of

reminders of the absence of

insistent

which he meant the

interests

esthetic

patronage

of private

and

diffuse

commercial

collecting habits that militated against the creation of "great

The Romantic

works").

poet and philosopher Samual Taylor

myth and

allegory was an obvious strike

against the pretense and hyperbole of history painting.

challenges to what Fuseli derided as "that Micromania which

infects the public taste" (by

In mythologizing the daily politics of England, Gillray's

prints often explicitly

the Royal

lampooned the imagery of high

Academy, showing

that the moral

art at

and esthetic

exclusivity of history painting could be brought

unceremo-

His Phaeton

niously to the print culture of the streets.

Coleridge came closest to recognizing the contradictory sexual

Alarm d! knowingly refashioned the apocalyptic uproar of

and cultural pessimism of Fuseli's own great works

Benjamin West's The Destruction of the Old Beast and False

politics

when he judged them

finally

to

be an

art

of "vigorous

official

religious history paintings that

chapel

PROPHECY AND PREHISTORY

at

Windsor

Castle.

when West, an American

as President of the

Blake's

more Utopian

effort to

redeem contemporary society

through his eternalizing icons of modern history

like Spiritual

Form of Nelson ironically brought his art in close alliance with

most transient and unelevated type of visual culture,

that

political caricature.

Although Blake once chastised

tive patron's artistic taste

your Eye

is

prospec-

by remarking "I can perceive that

perverted by Caricature prints," the overwrought

conjunction of modern history and cosmic allegory in

many

of

his

own

to

the teeming fantastical imagery produced during this

pictures from the 1809 exhibition was not dissimilar

period by the brilliant caricaturist James Gillray (1757-1815).

Gillray received instruction in drawing at the Royal

and was well versed

By

110

in

the 1790's he had

Academy

both Old Master and contemporary

become

art.

a prolific caricaturist for the

PROPHECY AND PREHISTORY

Academy

Prophet, exhibited at the Royal

painting belonged to an

impotence."

<

is

the decay of Taste." His epic male figures exploding out of

heroic grandeur in contemporary society and culture: futile

105

Tory spokesman and propagandist George

to be anticipating the visual

1789, Fuseli almost

97

w.is

reviewer from the liberal journal The Examiner

most of the more-

the elements of nature and the cultivation of land,

more plebeian and popular

like a

upper corner of the

Tory

The

fell

out of royal favor,

III suspected him,

and

politi-

Academy, of "democratick" sym-

Many of the works from this planned cycle illustrated

passages from the

with the King

called

who succeeded Reynolds

Royal Academy,

cized factions within the

for a series of

to decorate the royal

ambitious project went awry

expatriate

presumably because George

pathies.

commission
were

1804. West's

in

Book of Revelation,

who

criticized

a point

"Bedlamite scenes from Revelations"

comment

in the light

of contention

West's propensity for what he

of George Ill's

own

(itself a revealing

bouts of madness).

West's apocalyptic spectacles nevertheless proved extremely

popular with exhibition audiences

in

both London and Paris.

In the religious painting cribbed by Gillray,

his

own

West

practised

more typical style of academic eclecticism, the

triumphant stampede of equestrian Christian warriors treated

in

gleaming, Neoclassical profile, while the vanquished armies

of the false prophets and the lionheaded demonic adversaries

106

yi'lif/:.

"

105

Phaeton

nJarmr// _

JAMES GlLI.RAY Phaeton Alarm

-M/:cr::J^;,ir^ X',*, ,*,,

d! 1808.

13 x

tihtr/ i tr fiij

-..,l 1,

HHiar:

I...

14^(33 x 36.8)

Confrontatie van twee

stijlen: neo-classicisme
of
pousinistisch voor de
goeden en rubinstisch
of barok voor de
slechten.

106 IJknjamin

WEST

7"Ae

Demi,

tion oj the

OH

Beast and False Prophet 1804.

39

SM

(99 x 143.3)

PROPHECY

WD

PR KM

IS

TORY

111

107 VV'II.LIAM

112

BLAKE The

Great Red Dragon and the

PROPHECY AND PREHISTORY

Woman

Clothed With the Sun: "The Devil

is

Come Down"

ca. 1805.

16^ x 13} (40.8 x 33.7)

of God, seen retreating into tenebrous chasms and windswept

Rubens and

clouds, are indebted to

The

allegory.

the trappings of Baroque

appeal of West's pictures of this kind lay not in

accomplishment, but rather

their learned artistic

contemporary

resumption of the Napoleonic Wars

Amiens and with

their

in

and millennarian overtones: with the

historical

the Treaty of

after

the recent turning of the century, such

apocalyptic paintings were redolent of widespread fears for

England and the

the future survival of

Despite the dichotomy between the

of Europe.

of West

prominent academicist) and Blake (the

(the professionally

insular engraver

fate

artistic careers

and

poet), their art shared in the nationalist,

religious fervor of these early years of the nineteenth century.

While West was exhibiting

destruction, Blake
for a

was

epic machines of biblical

his

also illustrating the

Book of Revelation

group of scriptural paintings that had been com-

missioned by his only steady patron,

government munitions clerk whose

Thomas

politics

Butts

(a

and occupation

were strikingly antithetical to those of Blake). Eschewing the

yards of canvas and cast of thousands required by West,
Blake's apocalyptic designs have a figurative conciseness,
gestural eloquence,

107

and compositional equipoise that allowed

him

to translate the religious

the

Book of Revelation

qualities are

most evident

Devil

is

Come Down"

in his

Woman

Great Red Dragon and the

103

mystery and copious allegory of

into terse visual epigrams.

(ca.

These

stunning watercolor The

Clothed with the Sun: "The

1805), a

work

design for The Apotheosis of Nelson 1807. 39}x29

that could also be

described as an eschatological refrain of Fuseli's Nightmare.

Roughly contemporary with Blake's spiritualization of Nelson

for

108

BENJAMIN WEST,

108

(100.3x73.8)

1809 exhibition

the

was West's own project

monumental painting of The Apotheosis of Nelson

for

(1807), a

design replete with architectural and sculptural surrounds

that

were

altarpiece

to

have made the entire ensemble into

commemorating

his

a secular

power and the

Although West was most renowned

religion of nationhood.
for

British maritime

grand-manner history paintings of contemporary

events, especially death scenes of

prominent military and

political figures, here he invents a composite allegory in

Nelson's draped corpse

gigantic

is

which

being conveyed heavenward by

and mournful figures of Neptune, Britannia, and

his

own mental

had seen the

travels ("taken in vision") he

lost

sacred art of the Jews that had adorned the palaces, temples,

and

city walls of the ancient world,

instances

of public monumental

formed the basis

Greco-Roman
character

for all

subsequent

or "Asiatick."

of Spiritual

and that these originary

and painting

sculpture

artistic traditions,

The

whether

and archaizing

auratic

Form of Nelson was indebted

to

for

example,

in the illustrations

of relief sculptures from the

Shiva

Temple at Elephanta

ville's

comparative study of ancient

that appeared in
art

and myth, Researches

on the Origin, Spirit, and Progress of the Arts of Greece;

on

the Antique

may be

version of the visionary

Egypt (1785), a study which purported to reveal the primacy

expand upon with

of sexual and occult symbolism to the cultural and mythic

more

national artform that Blake

official

was trying

to

the 1809 exhibition.

forms of

Blake sought to legitimize the conception of his

by comparing them not

but

to, as

he wrote

own works

to the acclaimed, patriotic art of

in his Descriptive Catalogue,

West

"compositions

Monuments of India,

earliest

commentary
dite

Persia, the Rest

worldwide.

of Asia,

in

modern

tradition

art

and posited

encompassing "the

and

Blake's catalog

also spoke of reviving mythological

meaning

artistic

civilizations

and recon-

a syncretic

finest

theory of

specimens of

of a mythological cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian,

Ancient Sculpture and Painting and Architecture, Gothic,

Hindoo, and Egyptian Antiquity." Inspired by

Grecian, Hindoo, and Egyptian." In preparing his later

late eigh-

teenth-century mythographic and antiquarian speculations

engraving

on the origins of art and religion, Blake asserted that through

the history of art by reattributing the

(ca.

820) of the Laocoon, Blake summarily rew rote

PROPHECY

lellenistic

WD

109

Baron d'Hancar-

Victory. Ponderous, erudite, and reverential, the painting

seen as the

97

eighteenth-century engravings of Indian antiquities, as seen,

sculpture

PRI'.IIIS

TORY

10

German

paradigmatic artwork that had been central to the

Enlightenment esthetic debates of Winckelmann and Lessing

With

copy of a

as a

its

from the Temple

lost original

Solomon.

of

array of inscribed mottos lamenting the corruption of

art

by war and money,

tal

piece of ancient statuary

reproductive print ofa fundamen-

this

transformed into

is

didactic

proclamation about the divine origins and modern plight of

Although Blake saw the panoply

art.

unified by "a spiritual agency,"

to

Judeo-Christian

incorporating

all

The

origin.

of ancient

was one

that

world

art as

remained

tied

fantasy of

antiquarian

of world culture within a renewed Knglish

grandeur cannot

of national

art

it

imperialist fantasy that

is

from

be divorced

the subject of Blake's picture

the

the

transfigured Nelson (culled from both Shiva and Laocoon,

construed

both

as

demi-god of Albion

protective

and

militaristic Antichrist) enfolding the nations of the earth

within

its

primordial serpent.

Mythic accounts of national

colonial encounters were

exhibition. Paintings

origins

much

(now

and exotic dreams of

in evidence at Blake's

lost)

1809

of "savage girls" aboard a

missionary vessel and of the Sanskrit scholar Charles Wilkins

among Indian Brahmins could be seen along with The Ancient

BARON D HANCARVILLE

109

Progress of the Arts of Greece;

Persia, the Rest

Researches on the Origin, Spirit and

Britons,

on the Antique Monuments of India,

of Asia and Egypt volume

I,

whose catalog entry included Blake's

picture

account of Druidic and Arthurian legend given as proof that

6x8

plate 10, 1785.

Albion and the English nation had originally descended from

(15x20.5)

the lost continent of Atlantis and from the lost tribe of Israel.

The
r

-?

U,. i-epented tkl' He

hM uiiJt

redeemed by virtue of

(jjMif

.Adam

sSTT,,,,,^,,.^

?i

B.

colonizing future
cretic,

.^f rprs-

?r^::f.,,\

national identity of Blake's

the

its

more

England could only be

visionary

and

prehistory

conjectural, global,

its

and syn-

the better. Thus, while scorning the veristic and

documentary demands of contemporary history painting,

Blake would argue that "the history of all times and places

v \<

,fe

,;
-

^&i"

"

"

"

V;'.".?^,'.';.",

'\\SV'"'

; A

e;

&s;
s,?v,ri.E....-.*?5

dilemma surrounding

figuring the

work was

once

at

Writing
ledged his

H1

r*2

2 is

pate

Is

1 S SP;

J,

?,<

5^ ^^
1W "J 11-

K>- i

j"'

Mih

of and constituted by

critical

announcing

itself as

fully

opposition

i"P &. his two Sons $lly\&i Adam. as they were copied fromthc OUernbim
Sodiums Temple by three Rhodlans fcapphed toNaliu-al Fa,et or Hi story oil lturo.

o(

in

the

creation

yet again
to

that

his

of

nationalist

culture.

-IK.,dWirC..r,...|,i,U

114

Laocoon

ca. 1820.

iojx8j- (25.2 x 21.2)

PROPHECY AND PREHISTORY

He

on the longstanding opposition of

standard of "Republican Art," an

was not

in

the

least

overcome by the
on disas-

a
I. fir

sociating himself from any illusion of social and cultural

PI-"'

unanimity within England and from the generic defining of its

g ?

ia

"

1>S^

national identity, Blake looked back over his lifetime and

concluded: "since the French Revolution Englishmen are

Intermeasurable

no William Blake

own

both powerless and

nationalist strains of his 1809 exhibition. Intent

l]

its

inability, or rather unwillingness, to partici-

"Englishmen"

"ill

AitDr,

of

Blake's

few months before his death, Blake acknow-

own

commented

'

art,

transcendent, victimized and prophetic.

l*^*
I

later manifestations

primitivism and mysticism in nineteenth-century

historical experience,

>

is

nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities." Pre-

Agreement

to

One by Another,
I for One do

which

all

Certainly a happy state of

not Agree."

IK)

NATURE HISTORICIZED:
CONSTABLE, TURNER, AND
ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE PAINTING
BRIAN LUKACHER

LANDSCAPE INSTINCTS AND THE

PICTURESQUE

took surprisingly
sensitivity

little

KNOW,
Ti'HERE DOES NOTEXIST,ASFARASI
example
good
world

of a

a single

the production of

it

a task

is

may propose

century

Ruskin, from the third

IN

THE

historical picture;

which the closing nineteenth

This comment by John

to itself."

volume of his

treatise

Modern

Painters

instinct

was

had reached

apogee in the

its

The predominance

nineteenth century.

of this landscape

him symptomatic of the current degeneration

to

"Of Modern

of humanity of what he described in his chapters

,

Landscape" and "The Moral of Landscape "

crisis

human

solace in his assertion that

landscape

to

as "the present

of civilization." Responsible for the making of this

were Ruskin's

betes noires

of modern

crisis

society: faithlessness

in the spirit

of a

bred by the scientific objectification of nature; untoward faith

lament. But the failure of history painting, and the

dim

in

(1856),

might

easily be

mistaken as being

the redemptive promise of technology and utilitarian

remaining decades of

reform; and moral insensibility brought on by excessive,

the century, was not an issue of overriding concern for Ruskin.

materia Lj ejf-interest in an industrializing world. With space

possibility of its successful revival in the

As the most

prolific

and profound commentator on

society during the Victorian epoch,

ing and

facilitating

art

and

Ruskin was both identify-

the eclipse of historical

painting by

landscape painting, in effect signaling one of the more

important
practise.
v

transformations

His

that

its

84.1 tn I860,

was devoted

justifiably believed

cultural

character of the

whether

Painters,

artistic

whose

to the

five

study of

author called "the lanrkrapp instinct " an instinct

Ruskin

modern

in

monumental Modern

olumes spanned

what

nineteenth-century

life

had come to prevail over

and that had determined much of the

Romantic imagination

earlier in the century,

in literature or painting.

Although the raison d'etre

for

Modern

Painters was to put

artist, J.

M. W. Turner,

the

scope of Ruskin's study eventually encompassed not only an

entire history of

European landscape

into the scientific

and

spiritual

art

but also an inquiry-

conditions of the

human

pe rception of nature, and of the primary interrelationship

between natural environment and

railroad

social

development. Ruskin

as

and the telegraph, the refuge humanity needed

world was

in the natural

itself

nineteenth-century search

for,

'the

scape esthetics

his

is

of,

the

elements of

progress and decline being strangely mingled in the

mind." Although

the

to find

no longer guaranteed. In the

and seeming conquest

landscape, Ruskin detected, in his words,

modern

own merging of social criticism and land-

frequently qualified as being an anxiously

Victorian misreading of Romanticism, Ruskin recognized that

the

Romantic experience of nature

as a presentiment for spiritual

also

forth a passionate defense of the lifework of England's leading

and most controversial landscape

and time vanquished by such modern inventions

had an inescapably

social

(the landscape encounter

and psychological

reflection)

dimension, one

which the

Romantic landscape could be revealed

contested
In

site

English

in

as an ideologically

of material progress and historical struggle.

art

criticism,

the

national

preference

for

landscape painting over history painting had been remarked

upon

well

Writing

in

before the time of Ruskin's Modern Painters.

1807,

an anonymous

critic

Panorama applauded the emergent, native

art,

but

in

doing

so,

also

felt

for

The Literary

taste for

compelled

to

landscape

make some
US

distinctions based on the academic hierarchy of the genres:

designers.

"The

side

own

landscape scenery of our island

and these afford scope

features,

is

distinguished by

its

for the sublimest efforts

of art. History Painting has not been the forte of this country.

Our

a branch of art not suddenly brought to perfection.

It is

artists

seldom allow due time

to their works; they

them by perscverence and study. What

tions suggest they execute instantly

no friend
argues

to histor i cal excellence ^,'

genre

the

that

their

seldom ripen

m ental concep-

but instant execution

By

of landscape

was more-

painting

were

often cited by art critics of the day as the chief inhibitions to

painting

here

of history

that

is

characteristic of artistic traits in England, while

also allowing the country's painters to

service

Landscape

painting).

accommodated the impulsive mental freedom

deemed

perform

public

by displaying the indigenous esthetic wealth of the

this

and on the other,

nsisted that th cjiicturesque vista had to bejeept free of scene s

of rural labo r and industrial pro duction

those very sources

of economic growth and national strength on which England

The

depended.

resistance of picturesque sightseeing and

landscape design to the agrarian demands and social relations

of the countryside was

itself

of

the subject of satirical

comment,

Thomas Rowlandson. As

late as 1834, the art critic

Anna

Jameson recounted her somewhat uncomfortable experience

of trying to

the esthetic interests of "an independent

elicit

English yeoman"; after describing the picturesque beauty of

unsigned

critic

spoke of the English recovery

scenery met with this riposte from the farmer, " 'PicturesqueV

he repeated with some contempt;

picturesque, but / say, give

at

time revolved around the notion of the picturesque J Made

during

the

late

eighteenth

century

by

the

you have something

for

'I

don't

know what you

me a soil, that when you

turn

call

up,

it

your pains.' " Judging from

this

anecdote, the cult of the picturesque, of such popular appeal

published travelogs of the Reverend William Gilpin, the

precisely

picture squ_Sthetic encouraged discerning tourists to eval-

cultural pretensions of landscape appreciation, could not

uate and classify the scen i c qualities of topographic locales

overcome the

^rm-rjjngtn

pictorial

mnHps nf lsnrkrspp pajnting_Fnglih

scenery could be exoticized (and acculturated) in the eye and

mind of the picturesque

by virtue of

tourist

its

resemblance to the seventeenth-century landscape

passing
art

of

Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, the picturesque imagina-

and

tion often seeking to reconcile the contrasting styles

moods of these

Italianate

models (the pastoral serenity of the

former with the rugged violence of the

latter).

The tourist well

The

because

it

appeared to democratize the

social divisions of class, profession,

picturesque,

whether touching on

elitist

and gender.

the

formalist

connoisseurship of the landscape or on the social engineering

of

life

within the landscape, was often restrictive in

its task.

Treatises on the picturesque invariably employed illustrative

plates to demonstrate, through contrast

and comparison,

modifying esthetic principles. In Gilpin's

Essays:

On Picturesque Beauty, On

summa

Picturesque Travel,

its

Three

and On

Sketching (1792), two landscape etchings are set opposite one

The

shows

unmodulated compo-

versed in the playful formalism and classifying criteria of the

another.

picturesque could take visual possession of a prospect and

sition,

thereby entertain an illusory dominion over nature: the land

nature that Burke had designated earlier in the century as "the

transformed into

landscape through the refining and

encompassing act of perception.

all-

As Gilpin advised

his

readers, "the_pro yince of the

nature; not to
in a

p ictur esque eye is to survey

anatomize matter. It throws its glances around

broad-cast

stile. It

comprehends an extensive

tract at

each

grand sweep."

first

a symmetrical,

embodying the maternal, orderly protectiveness of

The second shows

beautiful."

Gilpin's

picturesque

re-

arrangement of these primary landscape features: the terrain

and

foliage

now

seen with irregular outlines and variegated

surfaces, a serpentine path directing the eye through the

interlocking,

shadowy

From its initial project of cultivating the visual semantics of

receding passages of the scenery, and two

figures plotted in the foreground

perhaps
who

in "pursuit of the object" (to quote Gilpin)

travelers

are in turn

nature-seeking tourists (both from the landed gentry and the

echoed compositionally by the paired outcropping of ruins on

burgeoning middle

the distant promontory above them.

classes), the

became the subject of

theorists,

116

<

of Jane Austen and the caricatures

as witnessed in the novels

popular terminology for the esthetic claims of landscape

fashionable

cultural

picturesque

landscape park of ever varying visual pleasure, particularly so

of nature in terms of "the sublimest efforts of art," the most

this

the surrounding landscape, her admiring remarks about the

national scenery.

Although

reform,

imperative for promoting rural England as

during wartime. Gilpin and other landscape estheticians

c ommercial vagaries of artistic taste (both of these factors

cultivation

agrarian

scientific

land and

inference, this writer

habits which were themselves due in part to th

British

common

through accelerated enclosure of

yield

since travel to the Continent had to be drastically curtailed

absence of an established academic tradition and to th e

the

the locus of conflicting interests: on the one hand,

there was an economic imperative for increasing agricultural

is

conducive to the capricious, instantaneous habits of_E ngljsJi

artists.,

With the Napoleonic Wars, the English country-

became

tireless

associationist

picturesque esthetic soon

polemical debate

philosophers,

and

among

art

landscape

LANDSCAPE INSTINCTS AND THE PICTURESQUE

Here one finds the kind of

permutational interplay between the natural and the

that

was so central

to

artificial

arguments about the picturesque. As the

111-12

William Gilpin, plate from Three

On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque
Travel, and On Sketching 1792. 6J x 9

1 1 1

Essays:

(15.5x22.5)

William Gilpin, plate from Three

On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque
Travel, and On Sketching 1792. 6Jx9
112

Essays:

(15.5x22.5)

literary historian

the picturesque
art wrestling

Martin Price has observed, "The drama of

is

readily cast into the

commerce," VRepton's^ proposals

form of the energies of

landed estates rarely strayed

far

the

for

from

improvement of

domesticated pictur-

esque idiom. In preparing his garden designs for prospective

with the materials of nature, or the alternative

form of the genius of nature and time overcoming the upstart

clients,

R epton would also utilize "before" and

achievements of a

of th e

sam e landscape,

Within

this

fragile,

but assertive art."

picturesque contest between nature a nd

equipped with

art,

and between land andjandscape, the outward signs ofjociaL

diversity^

device in the 1816 design for his

pragmatic and professionally active of picturesque landscape

Humphry Repton

own

Street, Essex.

(1752-1818), was sometimes

troubled by the unsightly impingements of rustic

designs for estate parks and villages.

More

his elaborate watercolor

village scene

The

life in his

so than most

drawin gs

and overlays that would help dramatize

the transformation of the view at hand.

were not particularly welcome. Even the most

gardeners,

flaps

"after" scen es

He made

own garden

use of this

prospect in Hare

Repton amends the prosaic character of the

by distancing and obscuring

village green,

once

common

its

unseemly

details.

for grazing livestock,

appropriated by Repton for his private garden preserve,

is

its

landscape gardeners swept up by the picturesque tide, Repton

curving, hedged boundary replacing the rigid linearity of the

attempted to reconcile the social and economic requirements

fence

of a property with

its

scenic potential; consequently, he spoke

his writings

often expressed

weathervane

of

on the theory of landscape gardening

favored

by

"successful

sons

that

had barely kept crippled

bay (the loitering figure

episode

most

in

probablv

Rcpton's "before"
identifiable

as

an

indigent war veteran). Flowering shrubs and arboreal trestles

disdain for the picturesque as a faddish

taste

at

improvement

of "humanizing as well as animating beautiful scenery."

Although

along his property

vagrants

protect the eye from the distractions ol passing stagecoaches

and

ol

local

shopkecping.

The

picturesque garden functions as

VNDSCAPE INSTINCTS VND THE PICTl RISQUE

117

113

14

ii3

HUMPHRY REPTON

own

cottage, in Essex," before, 1816. <H x 9^

"View from my

(17x24)

114

HUMPHRY REPTON

own

cottage, in Essex," after, 1816. 6 x

"View from my
9J-

(17x24)

series

of projecting screens that removes the social actuality of

village life

from

his

from view. Even

garden

rather than

vista (one is

"humanizing"

after eradicating these eyesores

tempted

it),

to say,

"dehumanizing"

Repton could

still

write of an

affection for "the cheerful village, the high road,

constant moving scene which

the lonely parks

would not exchange

and that
for

any of

have improved for others."

alike,

to

medium

specialize

in

topographic watercolor painting, a

that lent itself to both

formulaic compositional

techniques and innovative experiments in landscape sketching out-of-doors. For the most advanced landscape watercolorists of this period, the tenets of the picturesque

were

to

be

quickly mastered, and just as quickly superseded, a develop-

ment

that

is

best exemplified by the

work of/Thomas Girtin

(J775- 1802). Gjrjin^sjmojlejy^u^^

for the landscape artists j)f his generation, jn_arc hitectura l

RUINS AND CITIES

The

late

eighteenth-century vogue for the picturesque also

encouraged many landscape

lis

drafting an din the coloring of topographic engravi ngs of

RUINS AND CITIES

artists,

amateur and professional

Gothic antiqu ities and country

he was employed by Dr.

seats.

During the mid-1790's,

Thomas Monro,

a physician

and an

115

THOMAS GlRTIN

Kirkstall

Abbey 1800.

12x20(30.5x50.8)

unscrupulous proprietor of lunatic asylums,

who also oversaw

from the burning and clearing of brush). The

or

may seem

landscape of rural

London townhouse. I n

1799, Gir tin was at the center of t he

landscape of antiquarian and philosophic meditation. But this

Sketchin g Society

group of watercolor painters who

apparent incongruity

pursued not only picturesque motifs culled from tours of

Wales and the Lake

District, but also historical landscape

utility at first

is

odds with the

more purposeful than not

remnants of Britain's national

historical

and esthetic associations

poetical

at

past,

rife

the

with

for the cultivated viewer,

subjects from Ossianic legend and other poetical sources.

alongside the purely external traces (figures and buildings) of

Censured by some

the workaday

for his republican political

dissolute lifestyle, Girtin

his
115

kilns

an informal landscape drawing academy that convened in his

sympathies and

was widely recognized

at the

time of

premature death as the most promising landscape painter

of the English school. His watercolor of Kirkstall Abbey { 1800)

demands of

rural Britain.

tively present

draftsman and a landscapist to a relatively novel form of

much

early nineteenth-century visual

abbey

this period. Girtin's vista strands the

the middle distance of a predominantly

in

structure distinguished from the undulating

18.0 2, his

umber

cityscape,

valley (the ruins

sweep of the

remain cushioned somewhat within

darker

culture the pan orama In

.

"Eidometropolis," a panoramic view o f the London

ruined

landscape, the jagged outline of the bleached architectural

is

and productive.

tural

of the landscape imagery in the outpouring of prints and

landscape

Girtin also applied his considerable talents as an architec-

epitomizes the picturesque topography of ruins that pervaded

drawings during

The

conceived as nostalgic and retrospective, as well as unreflec-

opened

to gr eat critical acclaim.

Although pano-

ramas, dioramas, and other kinds of mechanized scenic

exhibits and light

shows were

initially

received as exclusive

entertainments of fashionable society, these visual spectacles

Picturesque devices are evident in the formal

became increasingly popular within the emergent urban mass

correspondence between the cloud masses and the inter-

culture of the period. iPanoramas] were often devoted to

spersed areas of foliage, and also in the serpentine path of the

sensati onal kinds of su bj ects: dramatic scenes of terrifyin g

copse of

river

trees).

accepted

the excursion

directs

that

However,

landscape.

notions

Girtin's

of the eye through the

diverges

watercolor

of the picturesque

in

its

from

conspicuous

laborers straggling along

the

muddy

ironical, the faded

is

seen

not

ramshackle

and even render more

grandeur connoted by the medieval ruins.

r ising

from the

terrain,

labor operative within the landscape (whether

it

with the British Empire and

its

sense, contain

similarly

military conquests within an

and incorporate nature within

its

metropolitan

domain. Interfusing the procedures of both science and

and technology and culture (thereby adumbrating the

art,

later

development of photography and cinema), the panorama and

related visual

media also remained

human

of the everg ro wing metropolis

be from firing

cosmopolitan populace required

an ndication of
i

and

these elemental and remote landscapes, the city could, in a

In the distance, at the visible terminus of the river's winding,

smoke

waterfalls,

road in the

to the picturesque taste for quaintly

cottages) that only serve to accentuate,

(volcanos,

expanding global arena. Through the panoramic recreation of

foreground^ wjtlM:he^ cob and timber farm buildings

conforming

^phenomena

uncontrollable sublimities) and of exotic places connected

life:

inclusion of thejnujidane and unromantic aspects of rural

rusti c

natural

fixed

upon the

The modern

specularity

city

and

its

naturalized and heightened

Rl [NS

WD CITIES

ll>

116

vision of

and

As the

itself.

critic

early twentieth-century philosopher

Walter Benjamin remarked on the widespread

appeal of the panoramic urban vista (paraphrasing an earlier

discussion from Marx):

"The

superiority over the country

is

city dweller,

expressed in

whose

political

many ways

in the

view appears through

fires

contemporary reviewer wrote:

a sort

of misty

medium

arising

"the,

from the

of the forges, manufacturers, &c."

Girtin's
rusticity

engagement with picturesque scenes of

dual

and ruin and with the panoramic spectacle of the

course of the [nineteenth] century, attempts to introduce the

metropolis points to the almost indivisible relation of the

In the panoramas the city dilates to

countryside to the city in the social and cultural fashioning of

countryside into the

city.

become landscape."
116

industrial landscape; as a

nineteenth-century landscape esthetics.

The "Eidometropolis" was

with

city,

its

circular

both for

its

feet in its

oil

painting,

now

circumference and was admired

ing watercolor sketches for the

panorama

One

its

of the surviv-

affords a view of the

prominent residential development where

Girtin had worked at Dr. Monro's) and Somerset

site

The seeming

in the pictorial

and

dicholiterary

than oppositional. Nevertheless, the prevailing ideology of an

subtle observation of atmospheric effects.

(a

and the urban

the commercial artery signifying

following

wealth of topographic and anecdotal detail and

Adelphi Terrace

rural

production of landscape imagery was perhaps more dialectical

maritime prowess. Girtin's original

measured 108

lost,

London

tomy of the

the

survey of

embankment of the Thames,

Britain's

primarily a river view of the

House

(the

urban perspective on the natural world,

in

which nature and

the rural landscape are construed as a cultural resource

offering moral respite

commentator
inform

much

from what one early-nineteenth century

called "the guilt

and fever of a city

life,"'

would

of the artistically progressive, though often

socially regressive, landscape painting of the century,

British watercolor school to

from the

French Impressionism.

of the Royal Academy), landmarks attesting to the civic

and cultural identity of

Georgian London. But the point

late

of view taken from the south bank, visible in the

left

CONSTABLE'S RUSTIC NATURALISM

foreground, also encompasses the rapidly developing indusquarters of the city, with

trial

its

nearby clutter of foundries,

breweries, and quays. Girtin's nuanced watercolor technique,

especially in the

complex overlapping of rooflines and fuming

smoke and vapor as

well as in the abbreviated calligraphy used

and

to notate the passing skiffs

worked

Even

their

wake on the Thames,

effectively in capturing the breadth of the

in the finished

urban

vista.

panorama, where one would generally

expect to find a highly delineated visual register, Girtin was

credited with sustaining a

was deemed

that

120

all

the

more

diffused, atmospheric style

more appropriate

RUINS AND CITIES

to the urban/

Writing from London

in 1802, the aspiring

landscape painter

John Constable (1776-1837) would complain: "Panorama

painting seems

all

the rage

[but] great principles are

neither expected nor looked for in this

mode of

describing

nature." Throughout his artistic career as the most innovative

exponent of

a rustic, naturalist

landscape

art,

Constable was

often troubled by the theorizing of "great principles" in

painting. His

many

opinions on the function of landscape art

(recorded in his voluminous correspondence and in a series of

lectures he delivered late in his

life)

are in

some ways most

n6

(left)

THOMAS GlRTIN

Somerset House

watercolor for "Eidomctropolis," 1802. 9|x21|

(24.4x54)

117 John Constable Goldmg Constable's

Flower Garden 1815. 13 x 20 (33 x 50.8)

118

JOHN CONSTABLE Goldmg

Kitchen Garden 1815.

13 x

Constable's

20 (33 x 50.8)

On

remarkable for their self-contradicting claims.

he could bluntly pronounce: "In such an age as

one hand,

this,

painting

should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, nor

considered only as a poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit,
legitimate, scientific, mechanical."

wax poetic about

his

And on

own attachment

the other, he could

to his native landscape of

the Stour Valley as being the very wellspring of his art (this

is

the most oft-quoted passage from Constable's writings): "Still

I

should paint

word

my own

for feeling,

that lies

and

places best; painting

associate

is

but another

'my careless boyhood w ith

1

on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made

painter ...

am

fond of being an egotist

in

all

me

whatever relates

to

and sentiment, between

a vision

of nature that was objectify-

ing and transparent and yet also subjective and solipsistic.

Constable's art
its

is

most instructive and compelling because of

very effort to overcome any disparity between this positing

of landscape as an apprehensible form of knowledge with

undiluted truth content and also as an expressive recollection

of a fantasized, autochthonous union of self and nature.

This admixture of observational detachment and personal

investiture

is

often recognized as being fundamental to the

achieveme nt of Constable's landscape painting. From bSOM

onward. Constable decided
landscape

art

painting." Constable's landscape painting would seek to

surrounding and including

negotiate a rapprochement between the antipodes of science

Be rgholt

in Suffolk,

to restrict himself to a regional

focused on the canals,

East Anglia.

ONSTABLE'S

fields, mills,

and cottages

his lather's property

Rl

If,

near East

in his decision to

STK

pursue

VLISM

121

117

IS

Constable had resisted his familial obli-

Conforming very much

to a georgic

gations to take over the milling and farming business, he could

these pictures point to

an

artistic career,

at least

repossess this patrimony, repeatedly, through repre-

senting

landscapes portrayed in his art were not simply

it.

The

disinterested objects of picturesque beauty redolent

of a

vaguely updated pastoralism. Instead, the lay of the land and

memory and

the stretches of scenery were inscribed by

personal

which

in

history,

and even

socio-economic,

promoted

kind of imagery; as the literary historian John

in this

Barrel! has

commented: "No painter

offers us a

and emotional

landscape,

is

best

documented

of small paintings

in his pair

fjxnn_L815 depicting his father's gardens,

outbuildings. Painted from the upstairs

of that

fi

and rural

elds,

window of the

family

house, Constable's site-specific orientation to the landscape

and the sweeping embrace of the

vista are

indebted to the

unprincipled principles of panorama painting that the

had disparaged

during his student years

earlier

the rural setting of this

manding of any overarching

write,

in

mere task

pure, unde-

esthetic formulae. Constable

self-heroizing

own

of his

terms,

dedicate d search for a jiaturaL incormpt vision of landsc ape:

disavowing
the

faithfulness

precedent and pronounced

artistic

painter

advocated

idiom,

and dogged

an unmediated rapport with

establishing

in

stylistic

sincerity

guileless

These pictures

human

of the

incident:

harvesters, gardeners, and threshers are present, but only just.

Reduced

to distant highlights or

chromatic accents within the

landscape, the laborers are deftly integrated into the painted

fabric of Constable's well-ordered vision of nature. Just as

these figures are

shown tending

the property that

is

not theirs,

Constable's landscape in turn tends to them, almost suppressing the

human

presence as a mere visual cipher amid the

productivity of the natural world.

During the

820's, Constable

worked

to create a

monumen-

version of the naturalist landscape of a rural society that

tal

was legitimized,

at least in the artist's

connections with his

own

past.

mind, by

Although

its

associative

his artistic inspir-

ation lay in the Stour Valley, Constable's artistic career was

centered in London. Intent on

commanding

from the Royal Academy and from those

guardedly

commended

greater respect
art critics

who

his art for its ^pOTtraittrre^-ef naturei

Constable began exhibiting largescale pictures (the so-called

"six-footers") of the agrarian and waterway landscapes of his

nature.

In the views rendered from his family's estate house, the

illusion

civilised

men who

has for the most part to be inferred from the

family property are not without considerable

London. In

the

made

of describing nature was redeemed and

would often

in

more personal landscape,

artist

more

landscape than Constable, but the existence of the

their effort has achieved."

home), and the

labor

productive balance

and imagined harmony of nature and society celebrated and

it

optical

of this undeclamatory naturalness of vision was

predicated in great part on the highly cultivated and controlled character of the agricultural landscape that

described.

With

their attention to the patterning

was being

and demar-

home county

of Suffolk. Ranging in

Hay Wain

(Landscape: Noon) (1821)

119
121

exhibition landscapes sought to shore

England

during

format from

turbulence ofiDedham Valel(\828), these

the epically placid The

to the disquieting

mood and

when

period

upjm image

social

relatio ns

of rural
in

the

cation of the agrarian property, these paintings maintain a

countryside were being strained by economic depression and

casual orderlin ess in th eir presentation of the landscape the

civil

parterres, hedgerows, fences,

and paths

that subdivide the

diagonal wedges and the horizontal bands of the scenery attest

to the proprietary pleasure taken in

surveying and recording

unrest on the part of the agrarian working class. As

presumed

as Constable

actuality

to

much

be unconcerned with the social

of the rural scene (the effects of nature were

absorbing enough), his six-footers nevertheless betray an

of sustaining

these prospects. Visually, the pain ting s reconcile acute clarity

ambivalent awareness about the

with atmospheric_diffu sion of detail^ brush work

some quasi-empirical mythology of rural England. Just before

is

at

once

incredibly descriptive of specific landscape features and yet

also broadly textured

and summary

in its indication

of such

sending The

Hay Wain

urban insensitivity to

motifs as livestock, windmills, and distant gates and rooflines.

the

"Londoners, with

more

irregular

geometry of the landscape

transient,

though no
light: the

less closely

is

set against the

observed, effects of

deepening shadows that lengthen

across the well-kept lawns and gardens, and the amassing

/clouds that are captured with a meteorological precision and

yet are also

made

to

and outline of the

122

respond compositionally to the density

trees

and

foliage

on the ground below.

CONSTABLE'S RUSTIC NATURALISM

to the

Constable lamented, almost as

The

atmosphere and

',

to secure the

image of what

alertness to the local particularity

human

pictorial treatment of the

have civilised

father's property (an exile not abroad, but at

/,

its

was necessarily required

knowledge of "nature."

Constable's self-imposed exile within the countryside of his

'

that

psychological, identification with the landscape served as a

virtual precondition for the artistic

117-18

Constable's art in

conception of landscape,

contradition thai runs throughout

all

Royal Academy exhibition,

if to

his

anticipate and rationalize

Stour

Valley

landscapes:

know nothing
of landscape." The

their ingenuity as artists,

of the feelings of country

vivid optical

difficult task

life,

the essence

immediacy of The Hay Wain implied an

effort to

render perception itself more unsullied and refreshed through

its

intensification of both the intangible atmospheric effects of

light

and shadow and the more palpable textures of moisture,

plantlife,

and

earth.

The

painting's

mood

tends toward

JOHN CONSTABLE

119

Hay Wain

The

bucolic lassitude, seizing a

that

is

(Landscape: Noon) 1821. 51J x 73 (130.5 x

moment

of routine uneventfulness

compromised somewhat by the

tremulous

stream, and the thickening clouds

(hence the appeal of Constable's facture to French Romantic

painters and critics

when

Salon of 1824). If The

perceptual

this picture

was shown

it

shows

rural

labor

sluggishly and unselfconsciously performed.

the

wagon

stalled

in the Paris

Hay Wain makes wonderful work

attentiveness,

by Willy Lott's cottage

resident of the Constables' property

as

One wonders
(a

renowned

of

almost
if

neighboring

for his

having

never ventured far from the environs of his shaded habitat)

will

ever emerge out of the watery mire and return to the sunlit

harvest

wagon

meadow glimpsed
is

in

the distance, where another

seen already burdened with hay and ready to depart

for the barn. This, then,

is

CONSTABLE AND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND

activated paint surface,

of the landscape, especially in the glistening foliage, the

reflections in the

185.5)

Constable's feeling for country

life,

The outbreaks of Luddite

insurrection and rural arson in East

and the

market prices during the post-

Anglia,

War

Napoleonic

failing

remote

social

nightmares when looking

of Constable's six-footers.
the landscape

is

made

to

seem more demanding than

social

Hay

Wain.

experience of the

ambitious exhibition paintings of the 1820's.

1828 exhibit o ff Dedha m
picture as "perhaps
artist's

my

F/V/_( Constable

"native scenes" which he had

Wordsworthian recurrence of

world.
its

With

its

The tremendous
referred

to

the

best") rehearses yet another of the

reflexive inquiry into his

it.

The

countryside can nevertheless be discerned in Constable's

temporal span of one's

landscape

at

The incommensurability between

imagery and the

with habitual indolence, and where seeing and representing

harvesting

status

Such was the function, whether consciously or unconsciously,

where the inevitable cycle of rural labor becomes synonymous

the

undermined the economic

years that

of rural gentry like Constable's family, seem like unthinkably

life

first

painted in 1802, this

familiar landscape over a

indicative of the painter's

own comprehension

more

of the natural

Claudian proscenium of framing foliage and

serpentine river view

measured out and broken

CONSTABLE AND THE

RI IN

at

OF ENGLAND

kej

123

121

i2o

124

Samuel Palmer A

Hilly Scene ca. 1826.

^ x 5H20.6 x u.3)

CONSTABLE AND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND

recessional junctures by the topographic landmarks of mills,

cottages,

and bridge, and further on, of the church tower

standing guard over the village, the painting tentatively

many

retains

of the picturesque principles of design that

Constable had hoped to disinherit through his development of

an

artless,

unaffected

The moral and

naturalism.

iconography of the landscape,

its

social

cherishing vista of a faithful,

hard-working agricultural community,

complicated by the

is

suggested by the presence of the vagrant figures from

The

art.

The

late

drastic

mood-swingjn Constable's work during the

toward a solemn and yet agitated expression of

1820's

landscape

is

wife had died in late

(his

ment

brush

in

poignant contrast to the well-tended vista of

village stretching off into the distant valley.

Here

is

into his landscape, albeit obscuring

recesses of the

overgrown furrow. One might be led

that this pathetic intrusion

meant

is

Royal Academician

the resentment he

felt

1828), his

artworld), and his social alienation from an agrarian setting

that could

to think

to be overlooked, the eye

no longer

protest

from the divisive forces of

offer shelter

and

(throughout the '20's

conflict

class

Constable increasingly voiced jinhappiness with the changing^ p^L-_

face of the social landscape of the countryside, culminating

with his rare outburst of political paranoia over the national

The

diverted easily into the expansive valley beyond. But ills also

debate of the Great Reform

hidden so as to be revealed. .Reluctant to sentimentalize

descriptive naturalism gave

excessively over the ordeals of pauperism, Constable perhaps

vigorously executed painting style in which the effects of

saw

chiaroscuro and the tactile manipulation of pigment were both

this

foreground passage as a primitivist episode

formation of rural England that finds

its

in the

or

fulfillment

Bill of_183 1-2).

way

Later, in 1836, while lecturing on the history and theory of

heroic and symbolic strains of ruin and storm imagery, as seen

in the exhibition oil painting

provides an interesting gloss on the problematic foreground of

Thames

Describing

Vale.

drawing he had made of

Hampstead

(he feminized the landscape

motif as "this young lady"), Constable digressed: "some time

afterwards,

saw, to

my grief, that a wretched board

on which was written

nailed to her side,

had been

in large letters, 'All

vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.'

tree

seemed

to

have

felt

the disgrace, for even then

The

some of the

top branches had withered ... In another year one half became
paralyzed, and not long after the other shared the

and

this beautiful creature

enough

to hold the

was cut down

Dedham

left

stump,

just

to

suffer

feel

And

so his trees

compassion

for a

in

the ruined tower of Hadleigh Castle with

shadow answered by the diagonal

across the

Thames

cathartic

its

vertical

high

authority were

futile,

reminder of an

historical past

more watchful and

a feudal,

in

bearing the cruel and

literally

for

that

to loving trees
I

trees are

which society cannot.

ale

more than

are

burdened with a

plight that the artist

to conceal or repress.

people.

would otherwise

Constable often spoke

as

its

ruins and the scudding clouds,

letter

conveniently

insulates

any

of humanity,

moral

.1

conflict

and

protective of England.

oil

sketch,

the

is

not as

animated

is

taken to

new extremes.

In a

of 1830, Constable even worried that his distinctive

painting style had

become

too expressively mannered, "a

species of self-worship," as he phrased

visibility

of nature

in

it.

The

fluctuating

Hadleigh Castle conveys the mutable

emotiveness of the picture,

from despairing to

ranging

hopeful, from negational to exhilarated.

Similarly, the watercolor of

picture explicated in the

ills

The

rendering of forms, both inert and shifting in the moldering

ness"; nature redresses, at least at the level of expressive

sentiment and natural metaphor, the social

large

of

when power and

anxiously

marked

wound

private and public connotations

remnant of recollected desire and

endurance and

that

its

shafts of sunlight flooding

estuary and the distant coastline.

sentinel-like ruin has

perhaps

mimic and gesture

123

these works dwell on nature's'blighting of human history,

of equating nature with "moral feeling" and "moral aware-

strategy

(1832). Instead of the

less

Dedham

human

seem predisposed

art,

122

dominated Constable's

and the slender, though no

demeaning signs of impoverished homelessness, the

Constable once admitted

Sarum

Although the surface of the finished painting

Without

and

watercolor and mezzotint Old

cultivated agrarian scenery that had

fate,

empathetic response to the "disgrace" of the figurative scene

made

Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the

After a Stormy Night (1829) and his

and

involuted, coulisse of trees on the right

that they surround.

Morning

Vale, the blasted

board." In

tortured tree to the

to a

same

from the by now exhausted

drastically deepened. Straying

landscape painting, Constable recounted an anecdote that

beautiful tree in

pretense to a

more urgently and

to a

topography of the Stour Valley, the pictures broached more

resolution in the unfolding landscape of the Stour Valley.

Dedham

(A

1829 did

in

toward the London

fields

within the shadowy

it

(his belated election as a

little to alleviate

political

artistic establish-

a rare

instance in which Constable admits a scene of rural poverty

\\tf-

usually ascribed to his psychological despon-

dency of mourning

mother and her child can be discerned,

and

temper of Dedham Vale predicts the more

stylistic

foreboding and abstracting qualities of Constable's later

ongoing professional estrangement from the

encampment within the tangled thicket of trees and under-

more

truly social origin.

foreground ridge of darkness wherein the figures of a vagrant

their makeshift

its

loss,

the

Old Sarum speaks of both

more programmatic aspect of the

accompanying text to the print in

which Constable comments on the

significant

historical

associations of the vanished city: here, according to the artist.

CONSTABLE IND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND

125

123

i2i

126

John Constable Dedham

Vale 1828.

574-

x 48 (145 x

122)

CONSTABLE AND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND

f*

i**c-|

V\CtLl "Pe^-*

122

JOHN CONSTABLE

Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames

'

Morning After

Stormy Night 1829.

48 x 64J (122 x 161.9)

M:^
:

^viB&BM
123

John Constable Old Sarum

1832.

njx

i9j (30.1 x 48.6)

CONSTABLE

WD THE RUIN OF ENG] WD

127

was the originary

order,

parliamentary law and feudal

site of"

monumental battlements reclaimed by

its

civil

the land-

panel

cene [Ci
S>V(7/c
ca..
Jj

Hilly

alchemical

1826)

is

transmutations, the

the

outcome of one of these

Shoreham landscape con-

scape only to serve eventually as the counterpastoral haunt of a

tracted into a prelapsarian vision of supernatural bounty that

on Tory Anglicanism

scorned the agricultural and technological improvements of

solitary shepherd. Fearful of the assault

signaled by the

Reform

and

crisis

Bill

democratizing

its

mission for parliamentary reform, Constable sees the active

ruination of the present-day government reflected in the

abandoned ruin of the

Old Sarum

past.

nature and

desolate, twilit earthwork in

prophecy of what can go wrong

most authoritative of times,

the

stands

history inextricably united

as a kind of retrospective

even

The

apt

its

in

political

modern farming.

In Palmer's landscape, the dense harvest

field

threatens to overtake the cottages and village church;

with

its

Gothic nave of framing trees and

alignment of neatly quilted

its

symmetrical

the composition of

hillsides,

nature adheres to a divine ordonnance that pretends to

transcend mere
star

human

design.

The

sickle

moon and evening

almost touch the nearby awning of foliage, the celestial

Thomas LawRoyal Academy, who advised

realm magnified and brought close to earth. Although Blake

Constable to dedicate the plate to the House of Commons (the

expressed admiration of some foliage sketches by Constable),

borough of Old Sarum was

also notorious for the very political

the influence of his archaizing anti-illusionism

corruption that the Reform

Bill

contemporaneity recognized by the portraitist

rence, also President of the

proposed to remedy), an irony

probably not appreciated by Constable during his time of

political reaction.

Toward

the close of his career, Constable

asserted that landscape was

no longer only "the child of

history"; his ruin images set out to elaborate this

of history by landscape.

The

was

in

become implicated

fragmenting debates over the

political

and

sexualized, anthropomorphic fecundity of the landscape

"egotistical"

of the natural world.

social destiny

of

nations.

felt

internal

illumination of the tightly contoured landscape motifs, the

show the imprint of Blake on Pa lmer's miniatu re

and even disfigured by the

in

strongly

The

opalescent and vibrant containment of every form, even the

all

abstractions

A landscape like A^HilLyJiLcene isjd most claustrophobic and

project of Constable's landscape painting, however, could not

help but

is

Palmer's Shoreham landscapes of the 1820's.

subsumption

introspective,

once

relatively uninterested in landscape painting (he

exclusionist in

its effect.

Even though the beholder

through the open gate to

to enter

is

invited

Blakean "green and

this

pleasant land," the path through the overscaled field of grain

quickly narrows and

is

compressed by the suffocating richness

of the landscape. While Palmer drew inspiration from Blake's

VISIONARY LANDSCAPES OF PALMER

visionary pastoralism, his

AND MARTIN

own

politics

were closer

to the self-

interested conservatism of Constable than to the radical

religious utopianism of his mentor. Just as Constable believed

For

more exaggerated conception of the English

far

Romantic landscape

as an imaginative refuge

struggles of contemporary

(1805-81)

is

even more

than that of Constable,

life,

telling,

The

the

from the

Along with

a small

less involving,

London

antiquarian

fell

under the

group of young, unknown watercolor-

and engravers who declared themselves "the Ancients,"

his idea of art-making as

mystical craft and spiritual vocation. Retreating to the village

of

Shoreham

in

Kent,

this sect

of

artists

transformed the

specific locality of the countryside into otherworldly land-

scapes filtered through literary images of agrarian

Psalms and the Georgics of

naturalist

power

to

earth," so Palmer, in an election pamphlet he wrote in 1832

son of

Palmer lionized Blake and advanced

deliver governmental

work of SamueLPalmej"

though much

influence of the elderly and neglected William Blake in 1823-

ists

Reform Act would

"the rabble and dregs of the people, and the devil's agents on

bookseller and Baptist lay preacher, Palmer

24.

that the

social

Virgil.

life

from the

Untrammeled by

the

scientism that Constable had pursued, Palmer,

addressing the recent rise of incendiary rural protest, warned

of the political enfranchisement of "a crew of savages and a
thoughtless rabble."

If,

in

1826, sequestered in

Shoreham

reading the scriptures, Palmer could write, "towards evening

the

dawning of some beautiful imaginings, and then some of

those strong thoughts that push the

to

mind

...

on the right road

truth," by 1832, the evenings were not so translucent and

inspirational, as

Palmer evoked the more ominous night vision

of the reform movement: "Their optics are adapted to

radicals

now a very dark night in Europe. The

elated." The concentrated fantasy of rural

And

darkness.

are

it

is

England secured by Palmer

in paintings like Hilly

would not endure much past the

Scene

early 1830's; the atemporal

emerged from

subjected what he called "generic Nature" _t o an imaginative

and misleadingly benign landscapes

recasting; as he wrote, in a characteristically rapturous letter

Palmer's condition of visionary blindness could no longer

from Shoreham, of "midsummer scenes, as passed

withstand the impact of the darker optic of social discord.

thro' the

intense purifying separating transmuting heat of the soul's

The

infabulous alchymy/' His compact tempera and watercolor

sought to

128

VISIONARY LANDSCAPES OF PALMER AND MARTIN

that

regressive intimacy of Palmer's landscapes plainly

forestall the social dissidence

of

life

and culture

in

20

124

JOHN MARTIN

The Fall of Ninevah 1829. 36

The

early nineteenth-century England.

Palmer may be found

landscapist

in

x 26}

(91.4x68)

Martin's images were ne\ertheless supremely modern

very antithesis to

work of the apocalyptic

the

character, transposing the social

whose paintings and prints were an unavoidably

industrial Britain into primeval

popular sensation in post-Waterloo England, John Martin

cultural fantasy.

(1789-1854). Specializing in historical and poetical land-

journal

scapes,

most often of biblical and Miltonic scenes of cataclysm

and destruction, Martin closed the gap between the high

his art as vulgar

Highminded

and

saw

and unrespectable, William Hazlitt,

for

principles

[with]

this

craving

after

England

in

morbid

as in his architectural extravaganza

The Fall of Ninevah

mezzotint that Martin's deranged brother, Jonathan

(incarcerated for an incendiary assault on

and the

literary

and

fine arts press alternately

would knowingly rework

be the divine emanations of an untutored

genius (Martin's training was as

scapes,

were widely replicated both

growth and

and

in

dioramas and

stage sets). Although the narrative content of his art

drawn from the ancient

spiritual

history of eastern empires

was

the

tribulations
its

York Minster),

as a vision of the conflagration of

modern London. In Martin's popularizing

coach and china painter) or

the cheap tricks of a crowd-pleasing entrepreneur (his works

in prints

acts of

nature and divine justice visited upon long-vanished empires,

mous

art to

sublime

urbanism into imagery of omnipotent and catastrophic

(1829), a

success,

Both the

its

sublimation of the impact of industrial capital and rampant

affectation." Constable resentfully belittled Martin's enor-

judged his

"Bentham,

1834,

appeal and the affront of Martin's art lay in

example, declaring that Martin's work, "has no notion of

moral

in

the self-interest, the crowds, the stifling population."

art of

critics

artists

and antiquarian arenas of

the historian Jules Michelet noted in his

arriving

after

in

crises of

Malthus, and Martin are the true expression of Great Britain:

academic landscape painting and the popular culture of the

theatrical nature spectacle.

As

and environmental

of contemporary

historical land-

society

(urban

attendant problems of population and disease

control as alluded to by Michelet) were displaced into the

and the

remotest epochs of sacred and natural history.

One

prehistory of humanity as described by Milton,

of Martin's more quiescent and reflective landscapes.

ISIONARY LANDSCAPES OF

l>

\I.\II.R

\\l)

\l

\K

TIN

12')

124

though no
125

less

concerned with abject destruction

the edge

at

of history, was his watercolor The Last W,(ca. 1832). Martin

was responding

vogue

to the literary

for this dystopian

them e

architectural vistas in Utopian (and money-losing)

renovating the

Thames embankment

schemes

ing the city sewage system and purifying the water supply.

in Roma ntic poetry and fiction: Byron's "Darkness " (1816),

These

Mary S helley's novel T^t' Last Man

Campbell's poem of the same title and

by his work as an illustrator of natural history, particularly

Thomas

(1826), and

date were his sources.

the earth and civilization by plagues and ecological disasters,

abandoned maritime

last

man

bearing-

remains. In The Last Man, the stilled waters and

fossil

warn of the contemporary

city

dilemmas

solve the industrial/urban

witness to the end of historical time and the death of natu re

when

Martin's watercolor, the geology assumes

of the social anxieties of the period.

It

also

supplied the Romantic landscapist with the ne plus ultra in

ruin imagery; the last

surveying

global

explained:

"Time and

from which

way

all

after

all,

things

mellowing the lurid

tragic pleasure of

Shelley's

experience have placed

it

The

me

reemerging

gi gantic

at

monstxous_a.spect

mold of reptilia n creatures

ca n be seep

the end of human history. Prehistory reawakens

and the

bound

on

together in this geological landscape of historical extinction.

height

whole, and

in this

the voiceless solitude of the once busy

tints

though the

underfoot

which hems

the viewer looks at the profile of projecting rockfaces in

protagonist

vast annihilation that has

earth, the lonely state of singleness

am

had the

Mary

as

can comprehend the past as

must describe

swallowed

man,

ruin,

as

failure to

modern England. And

of

played_upon

al l

his

imaginative reconstructions of extinct dinosaur species based

on

nineteenth-century topos of the

urban reform were counterbalanced

efforts in futuristic

Like latter-day science fiction that envisions the ravaging of

this early

for

London, consolidat-

in

me

in,

at the closure

of time, the

first

last

f^T^iiAt^^ --RETURNER'S MEANINGFUL OBSCURITY

and

of past anguish with poetic hues,

able to escape by perceiving and reflecting back the

Whether

contrastively

embodied

Constable's

in

georgic

naturalism or in Martin's science fantasy, Romantic landscape

grouping and combined colouring of the past." Martin's

painting in England was being developed as an artform of

watercolor also tints and glazes in this eerie combination of the

historical reflection.

lurid

and the

poetical:

the miasmic streaks of color washed

across the sky, obscuring the pallid sun and pressing

down on

the parched terrain, the atmosphere itself appearing like the

strata

of the earth. Deep shadows bleed back into the distance

this enterprise

No

was more deeply involved

artist

of advancing the expressive and

of landscape painting than

I.

M. W. Turner

(177.5-1851

chief rival to both Constable and Marti n. Although

evangelical Ruskin

who most

in

range

stylistic

),

the

was the

it

enthusiastically defended and

of the mountain and harbor view, the depopulated remains of

defined the significance of Turner's incomparable contribu-

the architectural landscape receding into the darkness. In the

tion to nineteenth-century landscape painting,

foreground, enormous rock spurs jut over the wasteland,

the

broken by the flowing gorges

in the terrain,

suspending the

viewer over what Campbell referred to in his "Last

Man"

profound

Turner's

1862.

rupture in time, a visual trope for the proleptic

ment

accomplishment of the scene before

the last

man on the promontory

is

us.

The

isolated figure of

vaguely Christ-like, though

divested of any redemptive promise; he offers this glimpse

into the future as a cautionary object of fateful instruction,

addressing the viewer with a rhetorical gesture of lamentation.

In the depiction of the prominent geological fragments,

Martin suggests the

flow of time

petrified

embedded

movement of earth

in the landscape.

history, the

Etched into the

surface of the earth are waves of human corpses, their skeletal

outlines already swept up into the geological current.

The

natural world services civilizati on for one last time, as the mass

grave of

human

history.

Despite the fantastical nature of this and other pictures by

Martin,

was

preoccupied

with

different

scientific inquiry, especially hydraulic

engineer-

the

branches of

artist

also

art are best

and

He

art theorist

meaning and disorienting sensation

130

his

epic

landscapes

and

VISIONARY LANDSCAPES OF PALMER AND MARTIN

in his

By degree

the sensation of the eye, the optical effect,

appeared

Turner of secondary importance; the emotions

and

to

reveries

of the

speculative

obtained the empire over him.

and reasoning brain

He

felt a

wish to paint

gigantic and philosophic and humanitarian epics

works compose an extraordinary jumble,

in

fog, in the

His

litter

man

in a

midst of a storm, the sun in his eyes, and his head

swimming, and depict

canvas

wonderful

which shapes of every kind are buried. Place

these are the

if

you can,

gloomy

his impressions

upon

visions, the vagueness, the

delirium of an imagination such as Turner's

To

elevate and

make more complex

narrative p ossibilities

new

the signifying and

oLhyidsc_aj3e_pajnnng.,

heightened se nsory experience-of the

after

in

depiction of landscape, especially in the artist's late works:

arrive at a

of prints

Hippolyte Taine

immediately alighted upon Turner's dual attach-

to discursive

from

sale

of

an appreciation written

in

ing and paleontology. Martin invested the fortune amassed

the

something of

contradictions

internal

summarized

by the French philosopher and

poem as "the gulf of time." The abyssal depth of these chasms

signifies a

difficulty

artistic

visuality that
fl

and yet

also to

would transmit the

ux of nature these two

:

I2j

JOHN MARTIN

The Lust Mtin

18$ x 27$ (47.6 x 74)

ca. 1832.

seemingly contrary impulses perpetually inform and challenge one another in Turner's
rarely explicit, in either

or didactic iconography.

imagination

is

art.

Turner's landscapes are

outward description of natural

The ambiguity

effect

of perception and

openly registered and experienced

makes

landscapes, an ambi guity that simultaneously

his

in

visible

and obscuresjhe human instrumentality of the natural world

that

is

so often at the center of his art. At

all levels,

Turner's

art

and the swelling of the

cities

with crowds of workless

labourers."

Although

his

worked

career

artistic

same

watercolorist in the

began

Pr MonroIs_T'irn p r soon

at

as

after

produce ambitious exhibition landscapes

topographic

with

circle as Girtin.

whom

he

1800 began to

in oil that

encom-

passed grandiose historical themes, ancient and modern.

Unlike Constable,

who

pointedly tried to screen out art

implies at once an alienating submission to and a prideful

traditions

overcoming of the forces of nature: the landscape presents

the work of those

nature as a relentlessly animate power that threatens to

he admiringly dubbed "a stay-at-home people"), Turner

subsume human purpose and

ranged

yet

that

also

reflects

and

from

far

his evolving naturalist landscapes (excepting

Dutch seventeenth-century

and wide across the history of

painters

art,

whom

carrying on

determines the historical ambitions of society and civilization.

painting competitions with the earlier landscape art of Claude,

Commenting on

Rembrandt, Poussin, Wattcau, Canaletto, and

underlies
nature,

the larger social and epistemic shift that

Turner's atmospheric and cnergi/cd

his

finest

written:

"The

Turner|

at

the

of

than cultivating an

imitative

electicism,

this

study only

strengthened the visual breadth and experimental adventur-

An

sense of deepened alienation from nature [in

ousness of his landscape painting.

moment

with an encyclopedic in terest in p^ etryand the sciences (from

optics to geology), Turner constantly required the stimulation

of increased mastery links in the social

and economic spheres with the advent of the

first

industrialism and the mechanistic science which

first

vision

modern biographer, Jack Lindsay, has

others. Rather

it

phases of
needs, the

phases of expropriation of the peasantry on a large scale,

indefatigable traveler

of seeing the natural world under changing conditions, alwaj

bringing associative forms of knowledge to his interpretation

II

RNER'S MEANINGFUL OBSCURITY

of nature.

Shunned by some patrons and members of

the

painter's unfinished epic

Turner nevertheless maneuvered through the academic and

moralizes

commercial

plundering the alpine villages as lhc\ make

art

worlds with great success, garnering collectors

from across the

social

and

political

spectrum, and merchan-

dizing his art assiduously through his

own

private gallery and

through the distribution of engraved reproductions.

Even

is

For

program of the landscape imagery he

his
his

exhibition

own

picture TLondon] 1809),

poetic passage to the

title

of the

painting, the verses directing the spectator's attention

away

from the pastoral foreground, even beyond the Greenwich

Naval Hospital

in the

middle distance, to the faroff cityscape

crowned by the dome of St.

Paul's.

Emulating the eighteenth-

century nature poetry of James Thomson, the

artist's literary

"Where

tag brought a moralizing subtext to the painting:

burthen'd

Thames

care and busy

reflects the

toil prevail,/

crowded

Whose murky

Commercial

sail,/

aspiring to the

veil,

Obscures thy beauty, and thy form denies,/ Save where

skies,/

thy spires pierce the doubtful

air,/

of

lope,"

arm)

Iannibal's

waj to

theil

tin

will finally falter.

visible in the

answered by the natural violence of the elements

sublime landscape

treating.

scene

This senseless s urplus of human violence, most

described as "abstr actions o faerial perspective/' was insepar-

was

narrative

Fallacies of

where the military campaign

Turner has

Turner appended

As gleams of hope amidst

so grandly orchestrated.

ominous sun
and the

The

style inaugurated here

that

signal devices of a

the overcast and

disk, the parabolic gyres of atmosphere

and

light,

between the cavernous,

visual continuity created

storm-torn sky and the massive reaches of alpine geology

would recur throughout Turner's

art.

The

painting's trans-

gression of narrative and compositional legibility (reducing

the heroic protagonist Hannibal to

speck ajflP_ajnicroscopic

elephant barely visible on the far rearhe sjj f the valley

and creating
picture

a turbulent

that

basically

vacuum along the diagonal

evacuates

the

floor,

axis of the

landscape of fixed,

definable motifs) was noted by a bewildered Constable: "It

so

ambiguous

The

some

as to be scarcely intelligible in

those the principal), yet, as a whole,

liberal journal of the period,

it is

is

parts (and

novel and affecting."

The Examiner, went

to the

world of care." Althoughjthe landscape distances the urban

heart of the picture in observing, "the moral and physical

turmoil of London, the j)oetr y reminds

elements are here

churning

life

that

seems

to

pervade the

poetic language with

the denial

ajid

mood
its

art.

wartime.
here in

capital,

initially

subverted by the
toil,

obscurity,

dynami c and

that proceeds apace

of doubt introduced
also reappear with

If Turner's

England^his breakthrough

ill-

London

historical

and His Army Crossing

the

decisively crisis-riddefl^ahmiLth e future

of the nation and_a_Napoleonic Europe.jObsessed throughout

.

his life with the

human

so,

but in

history assimilated

into cyclical patterns of natural destruction,

Turner absolves

history of its possible moral lessons, as though to suggest that

nature will always be there to sweep up after the tragic failure

of

human

events.

of

yet grinding

cataclysm enveloping the

landscape,] Snow Storm: Hannibal

more

powerful unison." Perhaps

TURNER'S LATER WORK

even in the midst of

fated historical exploits of humanity.

attests to the survival of

much

in

having the crimes and hubris of

nationalist^statement about the

its

far greater intensity as a natural

is

calm that

is

modern urban incarnation would

\Alps (1812),

atmosphere

visual properties of so

The form-denying atmosphere

its

city's

invocation of doubt,

iLondon! is also

life

relative

he view er of the

of form, lan guage that encapsulates the

flourishing of the

commercial

The

of the painting

predominant themes and

Turner's

embroiled within the

is

spreading across the horizon.

127

plains of Italy

the

poem "The

figurative action along the foreground ridge of the landscape,

of the Napoleonic Wars,

as early as the period

over

Turner's penchant for atmospheric obscurity, what Hazlitt

able from the thematic

126

picture, cited in his exhibition catalog as an extract from the

Royal Academy because of his lower-class Cockney manners,

Punic Wars and the suggestive analogy he

The

convulsive turbulence of landscape and the moral and

philosophical quandary about the meaning of history and

progress would be fundamental to Turner's innovative art of

the 1830's and '40's.

As

part of a series of watercolors for a set

of engravings to be entitled Picturesque Views in England and

Wales,

Turner created some of his most probing landscapes of

contemporary

social observation.

While encompassing many-

scenes of purely natural splendor, these watercolors also

depicted detailed episodes from the political and economic

The

life

could sketch out between the vanished maritime empire of

of the nation, at least as construed by Turner.

Carthage and the modern maritime empire of Britain, Turner

ofj

here depicts the alpine passage of Hannibal's army into Italy, a

view of a manufacturing town in the famous_lLBJack Country^"

legendary strategic invasion that nonetheless ended in defeat

so-called because of its inordinate concentration of industrial

In this instance, the Carthaginian invaders are

more probably

watercolor

Dudley, Worcester shire (c a. 1831-2) pr^ejit^ajTOCturnd

activity

and the resultant blighting of the surrounding

Napoleonic than John Bullish, though Turner was not

landscape. In showing a canal approach to the manufacturing

anxious to restrict or delimit the contemporary allusiveness of

heart of the community, with

the historic episode.

132

Once

again, his poetic adjunct to the

TURNER'S MEANINGFUL OBSCURITY

its

array of blast furnaces,

foundries, and steam boilers flanking the waterway into the

128

126

Joseph Mallord William Turner /.oWww

1809. 35} x 47} (90 x 120)

t^-v^-Vr

127

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Irmy

Crossing the

lips

._

1812.

<^r

i_<? o T>ef

57x93(144.8x236

II

~T>>n

C~i^yZ^*Z.\

<^~\

!)

RNER'S

II

WORK

133

town, Turner emphasizes both the production and distribu-

goods

of industrial

tion

in

modern England, while

alluding, not without irony, to his

harbor scenes of the

that he

rise

and

fall

had exhibited as didactic

and 1817. Following

in

own

earlier,

also

Claudian

of the Carthaginian empire

historical landscapes in 1815

the tradition of late eighteenth-

century landscapists of industrial scenery whose work he

admired, Joseph Wright of Derby and Philippe de Louther-

bourg

in particular,

its

that

might

broad washes of deep blue and

luminous orange-red, Turner's watercolor

sets

up

chromatic

opposition in the very temperature of color and the topo-

graphic features that these washes describe, the active

fires

of

the architecture of industry set against the cool moisture of the

night landscape, the crescent

above the

moon
restless

virtually resting

town.

The

on the

industrial

landscape has transcended the diurnal cycles of nature, the

for constant productivity separating the

timetables of factory

life

from the temporal patterns of the

natural world (travel books of the period often remarked on

the ceaseless

human

industrial districts

To

activity in these night landscapes of the

and

their almost otherworldly appearance).

would be employed by Thomas Carlyle and Augustus Pugin

in their invective critiques

modern jumble of the

a

This

destructive.

modern landscape

Now

it is

abandoned by

Black Country.
penetrated by

when

was keenly

down

below, the more vaporous and insub-

of these medieval antiquities foiled against

and massive skyline of

kilns,

boilers,

and

smokestacks (signifying, one could be led to speculate, the

owners, and surrounded by the

collieries

The

sometimes tremble-

castle walls

bowels of the mountain beneath.

is

surrounded

modern
looking

rendered,

the

all

more

the olden type of building confronting the

down on the elevated part of the ruins, and

down upon the extensive district, with its roaring
...

sat

and blazing furnaces, the smoke of which blackened the

country as
price

far as the

we pay

for

eye could reach

and

our vaunted supremacy

thought of the

manufac-

in the

ture of iron.

on the conveyance of such sentiments,

nevertheless

artist

elicits

similar

reflections.

has not stationed himself on the heights

of the historical past, like

Nasmyth and Martin's

last

man, but

positions himself and us within the present-day experience of

industry.

And

byproduct of

for

Turner, his own

this

mode

of vision was

itself a

technological conception of nature and

128

Joseph Maixord William

Dudley, Worcestershire a.

TURNER
11

TURNER'S LATER WORK

and even

impressive by the coal and iron works with which they are

Admittedly, the

134

contrasts

undermined by

a blast occurs in the

an adjacent church steeple on the hillside that embraces the

an historical

its

Their melancholy grandeur

picture

as

It is

a canal.

insisting

incisive

of historical

site

a living ruin,

productive and

both

is

within the

condition of the castle ruin:

Without

the

one finds

industrial setting

during the

life

also suggests that

manufacturing landscape that

Turner's

stantial outlines

of modern industrial

But Turner's view

1830's).

landscape, Turner silhouettes the castle and priory ruins and

appreciate this

industrial fury

coming of

the

he recalled his 1830 tour of Dudley, commenting on the

otherwise be expected. With

economic demand

spiritual order with

rhetoric of contrasting historic epochs thai

which the conflicting

in

overcome the quiet of the night

hill

and

civil

a social

observed by the engineer and inventor James Nasmyth when

sources of artificial light seem to blaze forth with even greater

crest of the

progress,

Turner has exploited the nocturnal drama

of the incandescent factory landscape,

intensity as if to

passing of

x 16^(27.9x41.9)

1831-2.

Ay

I2Q

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER

Slavers Throwing Overboard the

15>-^>'JO

and occluded atmospheres

in

which past and

late

marines and landscapes of Turner, culminating

with such extraordinarily radical paintings as Slavers Throw129

ing

Typhoon Coming On
Speed The Great Western

Overboard the Dead and Dying

(1840) and Rain, Steam, and

3SJ x 54J (91 x 138)

once more pits the callous inhumanity of humanity against the

vengeful moral authority of nature. Although the abolitionist

movement

pr esen t contest one anot her.

The

Typhoon Coming On 1840.

5|\AS-.^Nv.#2A5_. OCT^\jfe^
pI>crA-j ^uPiiZTT"
Groot verschil met Duitse romantiek = betrokkenheid van/op de mens.

temporality, an activated visual field of historically transitional viewpoints

Dead and Dying

in

England had already succeeded on the domestic

front, the colonialist slave trade

would patrol
while

their waters for

Chartist

agitators

still

flourished (British vessels

Spanish and French

began making pointed

between the exploitation of child labor

in industrial

Railway (1844), strained the discursive and visual boundaries

and the slave-supported plantation system

of landscape painting. In these works the dichotomy between

the Americas.

signification

and sensation

in

Turner's

art, as

recognized by

Taine, was most strongly tested. In Slaversj Turner's

lifelong

passion for nautical disaster and blood-red sunsets found

perfect expression in a near

contemporary subject of moral

outrage and social conscience. Inspired by

a late

century account of a slave ship that jettisoned

cargo

at sea for

its

its

eighteenth-

ailing

the purpose of collecting insurance

(slavers could collect insurance only

human
money

on those slaves "lost

sea," not those that died from neglect

and

disease),

at

Turner

slavers),

parallels

England

in the tropics

In Turner's painting, the turbulent ocean

is

and

already littered

with the manacled bodies of the victims of the slave trade,

their

hands straining above the sea

swells,

responded

to only

by diving gulls and monstrous schools offish that prey upon

the

human

flesh. In the right

foreground waves, Turner draw

attention to the torments of a female slave, the treatment of the

figure's swelling breast

and

belly

and extended leg meant

to

appeal to the social and sexual prerogative entertained bv the

London viewer over

these hapless victims, no matter the

Tl RM.R'S

VII R

WORK

135

appropriate guilt and compassion that the painting was also

meant

to inspire through the inclusion of such horrific details.

Like the grotesque, leering

body of the

the

gathered round to feed upon

fish

slave (critics

would compare the

figurative

elements in Turner's art to the mutational caricatures of

nature

of death enacted in this animalistic

being "like the

in the picture as

bosom by deep-drawn breath

sensualized

movement of the

ocean. Ruskin even evoked the swelling

lifting

of

sea

[the ocean's]

its

after the torture of the

storm";

he displaces repressed sexual horror onto the tormented,

maternal

sea,

perhaps an appropriate rhetorical move since in

Turner's painting the body of the

sea,

and

fierce aquatic

its

The

progeny, consumes the rejected body of humanity.

upended

leg of this slave

is

echoed formally by the bowsprit of

the slave ship in the distant waves, the vessel driven toward
the fury of the

oncoming typhoon

(the

foaming mist and the wall of cloud

wedge of gray-blue

to the left

of the ship).

Lampooned mercilessly in the contemporary press with a

kind

of nervously outrageous humor, the picture would gain

its

more sympathetic and compelling reading from Ruskin. His

prose picture of Turner's Slavers, in
is

justifiably

famous

Modern

Painters (1843),

for its passionate interleaving of form

and

content, as in this oft-quoted passage:

upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low,

advancing

like the

shadow of death upon the

labours amidst the lightning of the sea,

it

written

upon the sky

condemnation

in

lines

in that fearful

horror, and mixes

its

thin masts

of blood, girded

with

hue which signs the sky with

flaming flood with the sunlight, and

its

picture's

This

cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves,

incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

which

title,

"Hope, Hope,

locate fixed

meanings or

to find

in

system's

new

bridges

traversing

graphy of the landscape

is

guilt are

finally

part of nature as refracted through

Turner's omniscient mastery _of-th-seaseape (and Ruskin's

secondary mastery of those effects through language).
social

The

and economic conditions that provided the theme of the

He

also evident

is

of the

the

The

commanding form

of streaking sun and showers, the

railway viaduct imposing

linear

its

its

engine car, the train bears

with

manic

down upon

its

velocity (or at least an illusion of such

and the plunging

spatial

draws the eye

depth of the

rail trestle,

to the surface of the canvas, to

up

the slack for humanity, answering

for its profit-driven amorality only with further violence,

solemn and frenzied

136

all at

once.

The

TURNER'S LATER WORK

retributive function of

its

rich

textures of pigment with luminous transparencies set opposite

deep passages of shadow. The steam engine that now propels

through the swirling landscape may be taken as

technical model,

power,

maybe even

which

in

fire,

a scientific allegory,

of natural

water, and mist are recombined to

produce locomotive power. While the dark and pronounced

forms of the railway

isolate

from the fluctuating, atmos-

it

pheric realm of nature, Turner's painting also shows

blurring of sight, this animation of space and time,

new mode of perception

Within

artistic

its

is

how

this

the result

facilitated

by the motive and

Through

the visual metaphor

medium, nature and machine are strangely

sweeping

insistent dissolution

of

effects
its

of light and mist and the

forms, the picture veils small

representational signs that call into question the historical

status of the railway

and

its

technology of travel.

A rowboat is

seen drifting in the river; aplowman_is just visible to the right

comic

canvas, effectively takes

given),

the painting

the waves and the mists, the slaves already

sky and sea, thickening and staining the very pigment of the

is

receding into the mist. Despite the expansiveness of the vista

itself, a

the blood-stained sun that splinters the

the

the coaches of the train rendered as a compressed blur rapidly

may appear

To Ruskin,

til

perspectival path

outdashes^ the oncomingjrain. These

shadow."

topo-

picturesque terrain. With scumbled pigment on the front of

of the train bridge; and on the bridge

disembodied, haunting and enveloping the vessel as "ghastly

at

and

geometry upon the once

sees the desperate

dismembered and

rail

Thames Valley

series of antitheses

hands and limbs of the victims only through the gesturing of

painting are not Ruskin's real concern.

1840's,

obscured by the unsettled weather

analogized.

and

market hope, to

correspondences between nature and technology.

of a

content of the picture. Blood, death,

tin

is

moral certitudes within the

Maidenhead, the painting establishes a

very interested in expressing empathy

is

hopeless

Brunei's Great Western Railway, specifically one of the

propulsive energy of the train.

he

refusal to

and Speed \ Depicting an engineering wonder

of Turner's

human

the

Turner's greatest technological landscape,\ Ram, Steam,

an element of Turner's seascape with meaning and moral

for the disturbing

an

it,

appended

Hope!/ Where

often destructive dialectic of nature and society,

Allegorizing as he goes, Ruskin invests each phase describing

inflection, not that

with

closes

fallacious

and disjunctive

ironical

this train

guilty ship as

Slavers has an almost nihilistic futility to

market now?"

still

Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers

are cast

the

to

question,

Grandville), the viewer can both relish and be repulsed by the

s pectacle

in

idea articulated as well in Turner's verse fragment

sleights of

hand and

coursing hare
to be like

eye; but in part because of their

graphic fragility and visual tentativeness, these wry picto-

graphs recollect the preindustrial

human

relations_t o the

natural world, undisruptive and almost passing unnoticed

within the technological landscape.

Concerned with the

mutable fabric of being and being seen, these stray signs

reward the viewer with another

fallacy of hope: that

one

\M)

130

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER

should look

all

the

more

and industrial change

is

Ruskin did not want

showed what

The

critic

Rain, Steam, and Speed

intently at the landscape

about to overtake
to think

a great artist could

about

do with

social

it

only

degraded subject.
after

guaranteed that the

"The world has never

The Impressionists later
world would see many more of its kind.

Turner's Rain, Steam,

Ruskinian painting

its

it.

critical

in

an

theorist

updated

Theodor Adorno has observed,

spirit

of Ruskin's

earlier

social

philosophy of landscape, "In every perception of nature there

is

actually present the

whole of society."

that the spectator look quickly at the picture

seen anything like this picture."

formed

35| x 48 (91 x 122)

humorously

before the train vanishes, concluded,

instinct"

century

almost

it.

this painting;

and novelist W. M. Thackeray,

recommending

when

The Great Western Railway

and the

in

and Speed remains

its

exploration

thoroughly

of the "landscape

social imperatives that

The Romantic modernity

LANDSCAPE ART AND ROMANTIC

NATIONALISM IN GERMANY AND
AMERICA

accompanied and

of the picture resides in

contradictory accommodation of "progress and decline"

The

capacity of landscape painting to enfold contradictory

ideologies about national and cultural identities in the early

nineteenth century was equally significant for Romantic

Germany and America. The elevation of landscape

art in

painting as

and culturally symbolic artform was fundamental

(Ruskin's phrase) that was to be the most representative

a spiritually

aspect of the nineteenth-century cultural effort to historicizc

to the shared mission of the

nature and to socialize the landscape. As the twentieth-

Runge(1777

German

artists

Fhilipp Otto

8 10) and Caspar David Friedrich( 1774 1840).

ROMANTIC NATURALISM

IN

CiKRMANY

WD

WII.RK

137

131

PHILIPP

OTTO RUNGE

Morning 1808. 42|x33g

(108.9x85.9)

132

Caspar David FRIEDRICH Abbey

1809-10. 39x67J (100.4

138

ROMANTIC NATURALISM

IN

GERMANY AND AMERICA

x 171)

in the

Oak

Forest

133

THOMAS

Both

COI.E The Course of Empire: Desolation 1836.

39J x

63H99.7 x

conceived of landsca pe painting as the art o fthe

artists

German

future through which a rejuvenated and unified

state

coukLgflmmunicate bot hjt s sense of heritage andjjf^egtjny

Fostering

pantheism

mystical

in

their

evocation of the natural world, these

often

ethereal

German Romantic

landscapists saw their art as one of highly subjective self-

expression

fragmented,

unfulfilled,

and yearning

both

in

theory and practise; and yet this art was also to serve as a

fulcrum of collective hope for

nationalistic
spiritual

political

unity^ especially in the wake of the Napoleonic

invasion of the

condition of

German

modern

states.

religious

Writing of the moribund

and

historical

Runge

art,

come

cautiously predicted in 1802, "Perhaps the time might

when

and

beautiful art could again arise, and

it

would be

Rungc's Romantic prospectus

in his

(Times of Day),

rhythms of

life

Although begun

version

for this

new landscape

art

is

ambitious project known as the Tageszeit

a cycle

of designs allegorizing the temporal

(human and

natural, material

as a series of linear outline

03, this unfinished project

131

of Runge's

propounded by the seventeenth-century theosophist Jakob

Bohme (whose

ideas were being revived in the

philosophie of the
artist

been

Dresden Romantic

circle

new Natur-

whom

with

was sometimes affiliated)/Runge's Morningtv/as

read

as

kind

of hieroglyphic

spiritualized natural world, both sacral

overall effect. Its iconic

abstraction

and decorative

the

have
of a
in its

symmetry and frame-within-frame

device also signaled the status of the image as

altarpiece,

to

one without sectarian limitations,

'new-age

which the

in

claims of mysticism and science, and of intuitive feeling and

empirical insight, were to b e harmonized This light-suffused
.

landscape of

meadow

dominated by, figurative

at

dawn

genii

fairy folklore (floral sylphs),

is

and

attended

to,

and almost

spirits, syncretic vestiges

of

pagan myth (the presiding figure

of Aurora), and Christian mystery (infant Christ born from

landscape painting."

exemplified

160.7)

came

painted

and

spiritual).

drawings

in

1802

closest to fruition in the small

design

(ofJMormng

(1808).

Influenced by the mystical semiotics of natural elements

the fecund earth). In the borders,

Runge

intertwines botanical

and cosmological motifs, the tendrils and globular minutiae of

plantlife

merging and interchangeable with eclipsed sundisks

and galactic
color
zeit

spirals.

Overburdened with

theoretical systems of

symbolism and numerical proportion, Runge's Tages-

sought to transform landscape painting into

compound of regenerative nature-images

a signifving

infused with occult

meaning and instrumental knowledge.

ROMANTIC NATURALISM

IN GERMAN"!

VND AMERK

139

140

DURAND

134

ASHER

135

FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH

B.

Landscape, Progress 1853. 48x72(121.9x182.9)

Twilight in the Wilderness i860. 40x64(101.5x 162.6)

ROMANTIC NATURALISM

IN

GERMANY AND AMERICA

Like Runge, Friedrich's symbolic and expressive develop-

ment of landscape

art

was profoundly responsive

Napoleonic occupation of the German

to the

But while

states.

Runge's Morning was redolent of a liberating reawakening of

nationalist sentiment

and pantheistic optimism, Friedrich's

was more often sepulchral and solemnly meditative

art

in

sentiment and subject. Although more outwardly descriptive

of the

world

natural

than

that

of Runge,

Friedrich's

landscapes also sought to go beyond the materiality of nature,

to treat the

topographic data of landscape in transcendent or

painters

emergent school of landscape

America, centered around the English-born

in

(180 1 48), /contended with, and often propa-

/Thomas Cole
gated, cultural

myths about the

futurity of the nation

and the

primeval vastness of the North American wilderness. Even in

his early topographic landscapes of the

Hudson River

Valley

and the Catskill Mountains from the 1 820's, Cole explored the
peculiar paradox of the

American landscape

as a national

.symbol of both unspoiled nature and unchecked cultivation.

His painting Sunny Morning on the Hudson River (1827)

is

of

dominated by the looming shadows of the Catskill Mountains,

landscape painting: "Art stands as the mediator between

the narrow foreground plateau of the landscape occupied by

immanent terms. As he remarked on the

nature and humanity.
for the

The

original

is

objective

too great, too sublime,

while meant to signify a savage, untamed domain of nature,

between

nature and humanity, as well as that between nature and

between mind and

spirit,

art,

and even between subject and

Friedrich's landscapes are often most compelling

object.

because of their knowingly acute failure to make visible

pure

picturesque repertoire of landscape motifs assumes an

remarkable painting Abbey

in

distinctly patterned

imparting

European

art historical authority to a

American topography. More importantly, the

tion of the geology

America

is

forma-

suggestive of the sanctified status of

new "Promised Land";

as a

passage of

altarlike

the biblical providence

American landscape, however,

the

entails

supercession of the indigenous Indian culture, and so, this

earth sculpture

may

also be recognized as an Indian antiquity

Forest (1809-10), due in large part to the haunting

(from Thnrnac Jpffprs"" nnwarH American antiquarians and

of the composition and to the unerring linearity of the

natural historians were fascinated by Indian tumuli and ritual

Oak

stasis

in Friedrich's

it is

after the Italian landscape style of Salvator Rosa, thereby-

of the North

metaphysics of nature.

edgy poignancy

has manifold historical associations:

Even when depicting the presumably incorrupt

painting technique. Here one witnesses a funeral procession of

stones).

monks amid

wilderness of the American landscape, rvle allied tn hnth

snow-covered graveyard, the earthbound

shrouded

religious ritual

in a

broad band of

fog.

Only the

past and future civilizations.

Beyond

the sublime obscurity of

ruined Gothic portal and the gesturing oaks reach above the

the mountainscape in this painting, the undulating ribbon of

gloom

the

into the atmospheric ellipse of twilit sky. In keeping

with mimetic and organic theories of the origins of the Gothic

style

promoted by Goethe and Hegel, Friedrich's painting

draws the

parallel

between the religious edifice and the natural

Hudson River

vessels

and the

on

its

is

seen in the distance, sunswept and with

placid waters. Cole's treatment of this scenery,

rising popularity of his

own

art

devoted to the region,

the commercial and touristic development of a

testifies to

architecture of the heroic oakyard, both types of

monuments
The broken tracery of the Gothic
window also echoes the crescent moon faintly visible in the sky
above. The remnants of religious faith are thus reflected in the

changing landscape that could no longer sustain

rooted to Germanic

wilderness status.

forms of nature, as though to offer spiritual solace from the

national growth

soil.

ravages of historical decay that otherwise

the

estranged

mood

come

to

determine

of the painting. This landscape of

interment typifies Friedrich's esthetic of mourning.

being interred, and mourned,
brethren monk, but religion

is

God is
redeemed German

sanctuary of

nation (Friedrich was anxiously despondent,

spirit,

is

not only the corpse of a

itself (the

already in ruins), and also the hope for a

usual, over the

What

more

so than

French occupation). The entombment of

whether of the individual soul or of the collective soul of

the fatherland, resonates throughout the whole of nature.

commemorative imagery of

history and nature in the melan-

its

own

Cole's disenchantment with the populist politics of Jack-

sonian democracy and

both

in his art

expansionist rhetoric of unlimited

its

became increasingly apparent

and

which he meant
in

in the 1830's,

his writings. After a trip to

pursued what he called "a higher

and

historical

Europe, Cole

style of landscape,"

by

allegorical landscape painting

emulation of the contemporary works of Turner and

Martin. His group of

five

paintings The Course of Empire

(1836) surveyed the rise and

of

fall

a civilization

barbaric hunting and gathering phase through

cultivated state and into
style

its

seeming apogee as

empire of lavish splendor,

enough, by

In telling contrast to the predominantly retrospective and

136

and the rocky outcrop-

trees

concept primary to the philosophical esthetics

(a

inevitably led to a tragic recognition of the impasse

the

and withered

frail

ping of a geological ruin. This curious area of the landscape,

of the Jena Romantics) in the artistic rendering of nature

The

expressively

multitude to grasp." For Friedrich, this central task of

"mediation"

132

cholic art of Friedrich, the

swept up

in

its

from

its

pastoral,

Greco-Roman

succeeded,

predictably

scene of the once-flourishing architectural vista

war and violence. The

final painting, entitled

Desolation, envisions nature's reclaiming of the ruin land-

Ko\l\N'l'!C \

K \1.1S\1 l\

(,l

KM

>

\ND AMERICA

141

133

136

THOMAS COLE

Sunny Morning on

scape, an almost

the

Hudson River 1827.

welcome episode

18} x 25^ (47.6 x 64.1)

the historical cycle

in

rapid material progress of American society; as a writer for

proposed by Cole's five-painting set-piece. Influenced by

The Knickerbocker commented

cyclical theories of history postulated in a

called

treatise

on the corruption of civilization and

de Volney's

popular Jacobin
religion,

Comte

The Ruins of Empire (1791), and also by

philosophical ruin imagery in Byronic verse, Cole's final

painting of the series

may

be interpreted as an image, not of

"The Downfall
we have yet to

territory

home
her

to the oppressed.

gifts.

coal have

opened

ojiAmeric an Scenery,! Cole expressed

in the pathless

concern over

much less preferred form of desolation in the modernjictuality

of the

American landscape,

in

which, as he observed, "the

most noble scenes are made desolate

called

desecrated by what

improvement." Regretful over the expanding

ment of the

frontier

and the spreading railway

nonetheless resigned that "such

travel."

The contemporaneity

cyclical history

is

is

lines,

is

settle-

Cole was

the road society has to

of Cole's pictorial saga on

also evident in editorial

commentaries on the

inexorable bond between the American landscape and the

142

ROMANTIC NATURALISM

IN

Cole's

"What an extent of
Our range of forests offers a

of Nations":
people.

The

landscape has been bountiful in

their veins to

our view, as

immense destruction which

the

his

an 1835 essay, appropriately

Metallic ores abound in our mountains and beds of

outright despair, but^of renewed promise. In his 1836 "Essay

'

in

if in

anticipation of

future generations

may

effect

landscape."

successors

and students openly addressed

this

simultaneous despoliation and fulfillment of the American

wilderness

in

their

epic

landscape

paintings.

Asher B.

{Durand's Landscape, Progress^lSSl) and Frederic Church's

134

uniqueh

135

Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) were received as

national landscapes of quintessentially

Durand's painting indulges

American experience.

in a technological pastoralism, in

which the broad prospect of an imaginary Hudson River

Valley landscape plays host to the

GERMANY AND AMERICA

modern improvements

disparaged by Cole: railway viaducts, telegraph poles, steamships,

and growing communities are

safely nestled within the

sweeping panorama of the morning landscape. Viewed from

foreground

precipice

Claudian coulisse thrown

is

with

littered
in for

observed by two Indians

who

blasted

trees

(and

but rather as

its

the centrally receding river, propels the eye into the far

inclusion of

the Indian figures brings an historical aura to the landscape of

promise and settlement; they

beholder's point of view

is

are, quite literally, history.

The

aligned to that of the Indians, but

only to give greater distance to the spectacle of national power

and

its

pleasurable integration within the natural order.

is

reaches of the mountain view. As Cole's most loyal and

accomplished student, Church retained

commitment

alleg orical concepti on of landsca pe painting

cluttering this landscape

elements,

at

And

to the

while not

with figurative and emblematic

Church does include

branches poised

cruciform assemblage of

the end of a blasted tree trunk, the shape

silhouetted in the foreground against the glowing

body of

water. Divine providence both guards over and threatens the

security of the wilderness scene.

Painted on the eve of the American Civil War, Church's

overcome by, and predicated on, the prospective

Twilight in the Wilderness allegorizes nature as history, the

mastery of the vista

c?~ Uniting
lity

The

in

of sentiment sounded for the vanishing Indian

fateful note

race

of contemplation before this pristine landscape, the

atmospheric drama of scarlet-tinged clouds, eerily reflected

look on, Qhviously^_not_as^ the

The

the viewer has settled into a tranquil

good measure), the landscape

few surviving victims.

moment

when

beneficiaries of American progress that the painting wishes to

exalt,

the landscape. Just

in

which the viewer

is

meant

to take pride.

a scientific naturalism with the pictorial theatrica-

of the sublime, Church's

Twilight in the

Wilderness,

landscap e divested of human ityand yet also transformed into

a

visible

sign

of national

As

struggle.

prepositional slippage in the painting's

if

title,

to

invite

the

twilight of the

moment

dispensesjmtirely witn any traces of humanity^ neither white

wilderness, the landscape's immobilizing

man's progress nor the Indian's fading presence disrupts the

sience betrays the national mythology of a wilderness esthetic.

breathtaking vista of the wilderness

sacrificing

atmosphere,

clear-eyed
foliage,

empiricism

and mountainous

painting brings a sanctimonious

awe

Without

landscape.
in

its

delineation

terrain,

of

Church's

to_the presentation of

And

in

rendering

landscape free of humanity and yet

animated with intimations of providential power, Church's

vision of the twilit wilderness landscape

frontier: the twilight, not of nature,

hush or an apocalyptic turbulence prevailed over the

populations of Native Americans.

of

dims the recognition

_of the violent and traumatic experience of the American

nature. Critics of the day were divided over whether a divine

spirit

of tran-

but of entire cultures and

ROMANTIC NATURALISM IN GERMAN"!

\\l> \MI

KK

L43

New World Frontiers

OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD:

THE ENCOUNTER OF CULTURES ON
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
FRANCES

THE BUCKSKIN JACKET AND THE

PARKER PEN

K.

POHL

peoples and their cultures continued to exist, to adapt and

change, and exert their

own

influences on the Europeans

who

came to subdue and record them (the two processes often went
1941 THE ANTHROPOLOGIST CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
INdescribed
a particular encounter in the American room of

the

New York Public Library:

"There, under

its

arcades and between walls paneled with old oak,

neo-classical
sat near

an

hand

in hand).

The

complexities of these juxtapositions, these encounters

between the Old World and the New, need

when looking

at

nineteenth-century U.S.

mind

to be kept in

art.

The U.S.

in the

Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket

nineteenth century was not a homogeneous society, but

who was

taking notes with a Parker pen." Levi-Strauss

neither was

marveled

at

these unexpected juxtapositions

the feather

headdress and the Neoclassical arcades, the beaded buckskin

jacket

and the Parker pen, the French anthropologist and the

it

a collection

of separate entities embodying the

pristine cultures of Native America, Africa, England, Ireland,

Spain, or China.

Italy,

The

anthropologist Eric

argued that "the world of humankind constitutes

Wolf has

a manifold, a

Native American researcher. Earlier in the century the U.S.

totality

photographer Edward Curtis responded to similar juxtaposi-

investigate certain aspects of this totality of interconnected

tions in a different

manner.

He

retouched his images of tribal

peoples in order to remove such "impurities" as suspenders,

parasols,

The

integral

part of the daily

who have

experiences and cultural representations of those

inhabited the North American continent since the arrival of

European

settlers in the sixteenth century.

juxtapositions or brush
static

them away

To

ignore these

results in a deceptively

and one-sided view of the encounters between these

European

settlers

and the indigenous populations,

most often presents Native Americans

as

view that

having

been

systematically conquered and their cultures subsequently

preserved in a "pristine" state in the

collections of
trolling

the

certainly a central

New
144

World,

museums and

private

Euro-Americans. While conquering and conindigenous

this

processes

century

as

they

manifested

will

themselves in nineteenth-

representations

pictorial

This chapter

processes."

of encounters

between

Native Americans and Europeans.

and alarm clocks.

juxtapositions outlined by Levi-Strauss and brushed

away by Curtis have been an

of interconnected

peoples

of North

America was

component of the European agenda

in the

conquest was never complete. Native

The

following pages contain only a few examples of the

thousands of such images that appeared

century.

The

in the

nineteenth

questions raised in these pages, however, can be

applied to the larger body of images and can lead to a greater

awareness of the central role they played

play today

and

its

in the

peoples.

Most of the works in

"violent" encounters

U.S.

Native Americans

show

to

this

chapter do not depict

soldiers shooting or stabbing

Native Americans or vice versa. Rather,

portraits of Native

and continue

formation of popular concepts of the U.S.

Americans by white

in their villages or in

have focused on

artists or

scenes of

classrooms in order to

that these seemingly non-violent encounters also have a

coercive aspect to them, that they reveal a social system that

relies

on

pictorial representations as well as physical force to

control or subdue a people.

The works by Native American

artists also

show how Native Americans resisted the extinction

of their culture, or

by recording

collections of static artifacts,

their

museums as
their own visions of

preservation only in

its

pictorial representations

Euro-Americans appeared

of Native Americans and

many forms

in

engravings, lithographs, drawings, paintings,

They

appeared

also

(particularly in the

many

in

photographs,
and
home
sculptures.

the

different places

form of popular magazines and

sets of

community

centers

stereoscopic photographs), art galleries,

(which were often the

sites for traveling exhibitions),

business

establishments, government archives, and public plazas. Just

as

it

mistake to think that separate, pristine cultures

is

existed side

too

is it

fine art

by side

in the

U.S.

a mistake to think that

in the

nineteenth century, so

popular or commercial art and

occupied completely separate spheres. For example,

while the venue for the display of each category of objects

might

differ (the art gallery versus the

who worked

magazine page), those

popular magazines often drew upon the

for

conventions of fine art in composing their images while fine

artists, in turn,

world

in the

commercial
for

often looked to popular culture for inspiration.

many artists who came

Indeed,

became sturdy and independent. Once the

had

coast

been

disappeared,

on

lived

it

and the

reached

Turner

for

Some

to create illustrations
artists

had

did so for financial reasons, others for

made more

depended upon where

accessible to a larger, non-artworld

it

meaning of

a particular

image

who viewed it. For

have meant one thing when seen
gallery and quite another when

appeared and

may

well

hanging

in a

painting

art critic

seen by a garment worker in engraved form in a magazine.

Acknowledging the

effect

meaning of an image

results in a fuller

of venue and audience on the

understanding of the

wideranging and varied impact of pictorial representations

in

marked the national

because

it is

able to encode the "lessons of history" in easily

graspable stories or catchphrases;

disguised as archetype.

The enemies

history

successfully

is

of the U.S. become the

"Indians," the noble or ignoble savages, while the U.S.

These "cowboy and

military dons the persona of the cowboy.

Indian" stories appear throughout the mass media

comic books, novels

television,

and

movies,

are acted out time and

again by young children in playgrounds and backyards across

Such

the nation.

the

is

power of this myth

that challenges to

its

"truthfulness," which were particularly evident during 1992,

yet such critical challenges

must be undertaken

unravel the complex layers of meaning

THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER

to the historian

Richard Slotkin, the oldest and

most enduring national myth

in the

U.S.

is

the

myth of

the

Since colonial times, this myth has underpinned the

rhetoric of pioneering progress, world mission,

battle against the forces of darkness
in the materiality

of frontier

people had ceased to live

life,

in frontier

and eternal

and subversion. While

it

it

continued long after

conditions. The historian

Frederick Jackson Turner articulated the major elements of

myth of the

frontier in an address in 1893 at the

World's

arrival in

in

embedded

order to

in the tens

of thousands of images of the frontier that were produced in

the U.S. in the nineteenth century.

While Native Americans were constantly represented

as

actors on the frontier stage in the nineteenth century, they had

earlier

been used as the very embodiment of the frontier

of that

wild

land

needed

that

to

American

New World

as the

itself,

be tamed and

appeared most

"productive." This geographic personification

made

the Native

often in the

form of the semi-naked "Indian Queen" with classicized

features.
arrival
as a

This emblematic figure had been used since the

New World to represent this world

of Europeans in the

whole

North, Central, and South America but she

actively sought by the

the

spirit.

The frontier myth, according to Slotkin, endures to this day

a primary organizing principle of U.S. historical memory

in the late eighteenth century,

began

character of the

in the

also briefly enjoyed the status of a national

the nineteenth century.

frontier.

Pacific
literally

and inquisitiveness and aggressive

nation, in the ruggedness

individuality that

had

"unAmerican." And

and often continued

the nation. In addition, the

According

frontier

U.S. over the century began their careers as

audience in order to improve the esthetic and moral fiber of

took place and were resolved and where

civilization

Columbus'

prominence

political reasons, believing that the work of "fine artists"

by an

itself.

the Americas in 1492, are often labeled

been established.

example,

the U.S.

was here where the successive meetings between savagery

citizens

as

Chicago. For Turner, the fron-

in

was synonymous with

the year marking the quincentenary of

artists

to be

"West"

or the

in the fine art

into

popular magazines after their reputations as fine

needed

It

and

changing world.

The

Columbian Exposition
tier

be found

in

Here the

figure of

ing

Europe

new

symbol

in the

nation.

Such

representation can

Augustin Dupre's The Diplomatic Medal (1790).

(the

Mercury, the winged messenger represent-

Old World), greets the female personification

of the U.S., wearing a feathered headdress and skirt (the

World). She

is

filled

Thus,

in

New

seated beside packaged objects, toward which

she gestures with her right hand. In her

horn

U.S.

when such symbols were being

left

hand she holds

with fruits which she extends toward Mercury.

exchange

for

manufactured goods from Europe, the

newly formed United States of America would provide food

and raw materials. In order more clcarh

packaged objects

to

connect the

to the left of the female figure with

MY

I'll

Europe,

OF THE FRONTIER

145

137


symbol of the American eagle festooned with
containing the stars and stripes of the
identify

new

.1

medallion

national Qag,

her as a representation of the United States of

America. Her association with the indigenous peoples

of the

New World

in the

has also not totally disappeared.

remains

It

form of the childlike figure with Native American features

who accompanies

her. It

is

this childlike figure

the feathered headdress and skirt

diplomatic medal. While the female figure

does retain two token feathers attached

arc

much more

According
from

who now wears

worn by the woman

in the

to her

in Un-

engraving

headband, they

elegant than those in the child's headdress.

to the art historian

Barbara Groseclose,

this shift

strong central character bearing Native American

referents to an ancillary childlike Native figure parallels the

enforced dependency of Native peoples on the U.S. federal

government during the nineteenth century. Native physiog-

nomy

or clothing

now

refer to "condition, not

race instead of place." This

is

born out

in the

geography

engraving by the

placement of the native figure behind the shield and by the

AUGL'STIN DUPRE The Diplomatic Medal

137

figure's
1790. Diameter 2f

(6.7)

adoring gaze in the direction of America.

subservience of this native figure

138 "America,"

an anchor

is

placed in the foreground, which corresponds to

the ship behind Mercury.

commemorative date on
1776

which

marks

U.S. rather than the

above the figures

And

finally,

in addition to the

the lower portion of the coin

July

4,

female figure as representing the

this

New World

as a whole, are the

"To Peace and Commerce."

words

In the early years of the nineteenth century, this "Indian

138

Queen" was replaced by a

figure

greater emphasis, as in an

anonymous engraving, "America,"

of 1804.
the

The bared

breasts

whose "Greekness" received

and feathered

medal are replaced

diplomatic

reminiscent of the clothing worn by

Yet
her.

this figure also has a

skirt

by

women

a
in

of the figure on

simple

gown

ancient Greece.

decidedly "contemporary" look to

The Greek world was

major source for designers of

female clothing in the early nineteenth century, particularly in

France. "America" also wears an elaborate cloak elegantly

draped across her shoulders, and against her

long pole with a liberty cap on
the

its

left

arm

rests a

top end, a reference to both

American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution

of 1 789. Indeed, one could almost imagine her attending a ball

in Paris in

Emperor

honor of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose coronation

the

same

brought an end,
experiments

year

the

at least for the

in revolutionary

engraving

was

as

produced

time being, to the political

republican rule brought on by

the French Revolution.

While the

title

of the engraving might suggest that this

female figure represents the

New World as a whole, the liberty

cap and the shield, on which

146

is

emblazoned the new U.S.

MYTH OF THE FRONTIER

is

further evident

anonymous engraving from The Four

13^x9} (34.6x24.6)

The
if

Continents 1804.

we

compare the compositions of the diplomatic medal and the

The

engraving.

relationship between the U.S.

and Europe

is

presented in the medal as an exchange of gifts between equals.

Mercury

powers of Europe

offers the gifts of the

who

enthroned Indian Queen,

and

features)

New World

to the

both Old World (classicized

is

(feathered skirt and headdress).

Both are presented within

composition as

horizontal

mutually interdependent. Both are shown with heads in

profile
size

and frontal

both are approximately the same

torsos;

and on the same

level;

both are "dignified" by Classical

The New World

referents.

gendered

is

associated with the land or nature; the

will

and

female

Old World

is

male and

is

transform the products of nature offered to

by the

it

female figure into products of culture, manufactured goods.

The

relationship articulated

the engraving between

in

Euro-Americans and Native Americans

as

opposed

The composition

equality.
figure

to foreign relations

itself is hierarchical.

located at the base of a triangle

is

of America.

The

native figure

the distance.

is

The

The

whose apex

native figure

is

is

erect

is

native

the head

and gazes

more

associated with the land in terms of skin color

and

relations

half the size of America and

upward, while she

leans toward her, gazing

off into

domestic

one of subservience, not

is

closely

and costume

the compositional counterpart of the moose-hunting

is

139

JOHN VANDF.RLYN

The Death of'Jane McCrea 1804.

32J-

x 26

(82.5 x 67.3)

scene to the right of America (the place occupied by the ship in

the medal

again, domestic production versus foreign trade).

The native figure is also not clearly gendered; s/he is a child,

use of colonial

women

in this

way

symbols _of

as

be protected by Mother America and by the shield of Euro-

colonial vulnerability^is particularly evident in narratives

American governance.

documenting the

The

decreasing presence of Native Americans as central

emblematic representations of the U.S.

ing

classicization

parallels the increas-

of national symbols, and of narrative

pictorial representations in general, in the early nineteenth

century

when

1804,

promoted the U.S.

national spokespeople

new Greek democracy

139

The

to

or

Roman

republic. In another

as a

work of

John Vanderlyn's (1775-1852) painting The Death of

Jane McCrea: the

classicizing elements appear in the phys-

iques and poses of the two

scalp the

young

Mohawk warriors, who are about

colonist Jane

McCrea.

It

to

was commissioned

who
poem

Americans which

captivity
first

of Europeans

appeared

in written

among Native

form

end of

at the

the seventeenth century, and in engravings and paintings like

Vanderlyn's

By

in the late eighteenth century.

the beginning

of the nineteenth century, the captivity narratives which

received the most attention were those in which the captor was
a

Native American

woman. These

man

or

men and

the captive a

European

narratives cannot, of course, be read simply as

records of the general historical practise of captivity in the

They

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

tion, for

give

little

indica-

example, that Native American men, women, and

by Joel Barlow, President Jefferson's envoy to France,

children formed the largest body of captives on the British

had commemorated the event

Colonial frontier or that such native captives were treated as

The Columbiad.
that

The

painting

is

in his anti-British epic

meant

allegedly occurred during the

when many Mohawks were hired by

the

rebellious

colonists,

cruelly

American Revolution,

authored captivity narratives. Indeed, the Native American

the British to help defeat

than

rather

constitute,

like

the

engraving "America," an emblematic representation of the

nation as a whole. Yet the blond Jane
as a

symbol,

large, for

this

one

time of colonial

McCrea can

women and

justification for the

also be read

as

woman who

received

literature, the early

tas,

the

attention

greatest

in

white-

in

art

and

seventeenth-century Powhatan Pocahon-

was presented most often not

as a captive (which she was),

but as a symbol of the Christian salvation of Native American

at

"savages" and the legitimacy of colonial appropriation of

decimation of the Native-

Native land through her various roles as John Smith's savior,

of the nation

population was the threat they posed to colonial

thus, to the nation's future.

were those white captives depicted

to illustrate an incident

women

and,

the

mediator

between

and

people

her

the

colonists

at

Jamestown, and the Christian wife of the tobacco planter John

\1Y

II

OF

III

RON Tll.R

147

Rolfe. This

certainly the case, for example, with

is

John

and the almost bared breasts of the supplicant Jane McCrea.

Gadsby Chapman's The Baptism of Pocahontas (1837 40),

located in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building in

These elements,

Washington, D.C.

arouse
of European

Representations

Americans were,

Chapman's

like

structed narratives

meant

among Native

captives

painting, consciously con-

to further the interests of the British

who produced and/or promoted them. As

colonists

the

anthropologist Pauline Turner Strong has recently pointed

the captivity

in

out,

narratives promulgated

by colonial

clergymen (who often edited or wrote the accounts):

New

World, where they are

preyed upon by the brutish and diabolical forces of the

wilderness which destroy domestic and
threaten

between

The

seduce or devour them.

to

order and

civil

opposition

vulnerable female Captive and a male Captor

unrestrained

his

in

savagery

fundamental

is

this

to

interpretation.

^Vanderlyn's painting graphically

European female

that

many

well. In the

appeared

narratives

in

New

male, as having
course, the
able

that

marked so

captivity narratives as

century (for example, that of

made him more

European returns

among Native

toughened the European

more masculine. Of

virile,

to his

own

who

people,

appreciate the transformation.

to

are then

Yet not everyone

returned. In the Reverend John Williams' earlier account of

his

own captivity and

once he and
his

daughter Eunice,

were freed, he was unable

who was

if to

figure of

McCrea's

other cities across

emphasize the power of the Native men,

European manhood

is

represented by the tiny, ineffectual

fiance in the distant right

background

his loved one.

While Native Americans no longer played an emblematic

symbols

role as national

remained closely

in the

nineteenth century, they

tied to the land in

still

both literary and pictorial

representations, a land that Europeans viewed with covetous

eyes.

From

their arrival in the

New World onward,

colonists believed the key to prosperity

and

new

European

life

lay in the

acquisition of greater and greater quantities of land. Yet the

land they desired was already occupied, and by a people

it

who

communally, rather than individually. There was no

necessary to sustain the tribe. This

to

"reclaim"

7 years old at the time of her

Mohawk who

communal ownership and

lack of "productivity"

was deemed "uncivilized" by Euro-

peans and even, in the

late

tic."

The taming and

nineteenth century, "communis-

"civilizing" of Native

Americans and

the taming and "civilizing" of the land, accomplished by the

forcible

removal of the former from the

latter,

were thus

crucial elements in the material establishment of the nation

and

in the

confirmation of the concept of "America" as a

country whose very existence depended upon private ownership and the rights of the individual, in particular the right to
exploit the land.

For most of the nineteenth century, the richest land yet

that of his family in 1704, he records that

his family

As

the nation.

New Orleans, and

mining, nor did they make the land produce more than was

it

documenting male captivity that

as having

York, Baltimore,

also reveals the

Yet

Daniel Boone), the experience of captivity

Americans was presented

and others

lyn's pay-as-you-enter exhibitions of this painting

not practise European techniques of intensive cultivation or

some of the written

in the early nineteenth

attended Vander-

private property, no individual ownership. Native peoples did

as vulnerable captive.

in

who

and the

paintings of Native Americans by Euro- Americans and

was present

enrage and

to

strike fear into the hearts of the

illustrates this oppositio n

as diabolical force

complex play between attraction and repulsion

many

and

white viewers, both male and female,

held

between the Nati ve American male

(in a sexual sense)

running vainly toward

the figure of the female captive represents the vulnerability

of the English colonies in the

conjunction with the impending blow

in

from the tomahawk, worked simultaneously

to

be exploited by European colonists and their descendants lay

west of the Mississippi River. This was the area most

converted to Catholicism by the French Jesuits and remained

commonly conjured up in people's minds when they heard the

term "the West." One highly visible image of this uncon-

community of Caughnawaga. She was thus doubly

quered territory was Emmanuel Leutze's (1816-68) Westward

capture. Eunice eventually married a

in the
lost

to Catholicism

and

to a

Eunice's story was soon buried, however,

Native forces through divine intervention

through death

Vanderlyn's

forces.

wedded

the Course of Empire Takes Its

Native American male.

among

numerous accounts of female deliverance from

lyn's painting,

had been

at the

Mohawk

the

in

male

Leutze had studied and worked

Vander-

hands of these same

warriors

are

not

1861-2 for the Capitol building

more

diabolical

or, as in

Way (Westward Ho!),

Catholic

and

in

1859 and was contacted in

commission

in

Washington, D.C.

Dusseldorf between 1841

1854 about a possible

to decorate the Capitol building.

Leutze's work

drawn from

is

painted

poem by

The

title

of

the Irish idealist

women,

philosopher Bishop George Berkeley entitled "Verses on the

but fearful savages threatening to "seduce or devour" Jane

Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America" (1752).

McCrea. The

The poem was

converts

male

is

in a Christian

ceremony

to white

attraction, or "seductiveness," of the Native

present in

the

painting's

sexual

charge,

in

powerful, "manly" physiques.ofjtheJ'Jadve American

148

MYTH OF THE FRONTIER

the

men

inspired by Berkeley's efforts in

establish an experimental college in

American Indians

Bermuda

1726 to

to convert

to Christianity. Its final stanza reads:

141

Westward the course of Empire

The

four

first

fifth shall close

the

Drama

Time's noblest offspring

Housed

that they

expand

European

had

its

Way.

way;

in

last.

Leutze's painting articulated

colonists since the sixteenth century

and influence. This belief was codified

the U.S. in the nineteenth century in the doctrine of

in

lower right-hand corner of the

in the

Unlike Daniel Boone

Christian duty and an inalienable right to

their territory

appears in the medallion portrait of the explorer

It

William Clark

with the day;

the

is

in the Capitol Building,

the belief of

takes

Acts already past,

in the left-hand portrait,

who

study.

oil

dressed

is

recognizably European clothes, Clark wears a buckskin

jacket

and animal-fur headdress, clothing that would have

been

immediately

with

associated

dress

the

of Native

Americans. These medallion portraits were transferred to the

vertical

frame segments

in the final

and hunting,

agriculture,

composition. In their place

were painted symbols of mining,

border

lower

the

in

activities

which would transform

Manifest Destiny, which was used to justify the conquest and

the land from a state of wilderness into one of civilized

colonization of the western frontier. In conquering the west,

productivity.

the final

New World frontier, Euro-Americans would bring to

The sun-bleached bones and

burial scene in the center of

the painting attest to the hardships that the pioneers endured

whose natural power and

in crossing the vast continent,

beauty

is

evoked by the towering, snow-capped mountains,

the broad expanse of plateau land, and

Golden Gate Bay, the

port of San Francisco. Yet Leutze chooses to

references

to

The

Indian attacks.

only

such attacks in the central scene are the

bandaged head of the young man

the

downplay one of

most written-about hardships encountered during the

the

journey across the continent:

bow and arrows

of oxen (the latter

is

in the center

who

held by the boy

composition, caught up

among

in

foreground and

drives the

missing from the early

Leutze places Native Americans

oil

first

team

study). Instead,

the margins of the

the plant tendrils of the

painting's border along with wild animals, which, like Native

Americans and the land

itself,

must be conquered and

subdued. Native Americans are thus marginalized, both

literally

and

figuratively, functioning as a

framing device for

included

in

the

painting's

men

practise of white

border are

roundels

containing such figures as Moses, the spies of Eshcol bearing

the fruits from Canaan, and Hercules. Yet these

Old World

dressing up as Indians in the

uncommon. For

explorers like

Clark, wearing Indian clothes and learning Indian ways was

often essential for survival. For white
centers, dressing

up

as Indians

men

was often

urban

living in

way

to express

symbolically a dissatisfaction with the material results of the

government's

expansionist

policies

decimation

the

of

Native peoples and of the forests

in

the very idea of Progress

This form of dissatisfaction

was

literally

acted

itself.

which they lived

or with

out in various plays throughout the

nineteenth century, one of the most popular of which was

Metamora:
Tragedy

The Last of

or,

the

Wampanoags; An Indian

Five Acts (1828) by John Augustus Stone. Native

in

peoples represented a time of innocence and nobility before

the development of urban centers and industrialization.

mentioned

earlier,

now caught up

Native

life

also represented, for

urban professions,

in

As

many men

more "manly"

environment.

There were

certain white

men, however, who were not

with simply donning the clothes of Native Ameri-

satisfied

cans; they also

the exploits of the U.S. pioneers.

Also

The

nineteenth century was not

culmination the progress of civilization.

wanted

to re-dress the

Native Americans

themselves, to define through pictorial representation what

meant

to

be or to look "Indian."

painters Charles Bird

Two

such

men were

it

the

King (1785-1862) and George Catlin

The works

of King and Catlin can only be

figures are not presented as the equals of the Native figures or

(1796 1872).

even as occupying the same world. Rather, they occupy their

understood

own

pronouncements about and actions against Native Americans

separate worlds contained within the leafy borders of the

roundels instead of being caught up

among

the vines like the

animals and Native figures. These Old World

reinforce the sanctity

men

serve to

and significance of the central scene.

Like them, the U.S. settlers are embarked on

journey of discovery marked by

trials

and

momentous

in the

in the first half

context of the U.S. government's

official

of the nineteenth century. In 1803 President

Jefferson signed an agreement with France to purchase for $1

million the region of Louisiana, which extended from the

Mississippi River to the

Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf

of Mexico to British North America, thus effectively doubling

tribulations.

the size of the U.S. This territory was inhabited, however, by

THE STAIN ON A PAINTER'S PALETTE:

CHARLES BIRD KING AND GEORGE
CATLIN

numerous North American

became

one other reference

to

Native American

life

in

Leutze's painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes

Its

is

tribes.

Their removal, therefore,

of U.S. Indian policy.

What could

not

be settled by treaty or trading was settled by force or by

disease.

There

a central goal

The removal

facilitated

of Native peoples from this territory was

by pronouncements by government

officials that

Native peoples were already doomed, that their disappearance

11

ARI.I.S HIRI)

KING AND

Gl.ORCiK

C'.ATI.I

149

was inevitable not beeause of the actions of the U.S.

government but because of

The

their inherent inferiority.

popular literature of the period also abounded

who had

"Last Indian," of noble savages

in stories

to step aside

of the

because

of the inevitable advance of civilization.

were approaching extinction, despite the

numbers were

still

significant.

Many

composite that he hoped would draw

from

response

artists

fact that their

responded

to this

claim by hastening to paint what seemed to be the

last

white

This

audience.

sympathetic

was

type

facial

interpreted by at least one observer, the English traveler

who saw

William Faux

that

"of large stature, very muscular, having

Roman

ances, with the real noble

manners, and peaceful and quiet

the

Roman

D.C, as
men w ere

the delegation in Washington,

Roman. Faux noted

that of the ancient

In 1824 the U.S. Secretary of War declared that Indians as

a race

facial

of the

all

fine

open counten-

nose, dignified in their

in their habits."

Yet while

noses and the peace medal around the neck of War

generation of Native Americans. In 1856 the editor of the art

Eagle reinforce the nobility and "peacefulness" of the

magazine The Crayon wrote:

men, the

It

seems

to us that the Indian has not received justice in

American

art. ... It

that he

fast

is

Absorbed
truthful,

and always thoroughly

all

other

be, for justice sake,

King

sioning artists like

King studied

in

in

life.

eminently
he stands

As such

representation by

to paint portraits of

London

at the

let

many

set

tribal
in

hairstyles

evidence

as

of a

facial paint,

"noble savagery,"

late

twentieth-century scholars have begun to read them, instead,

as clues to a

American

complex

tribes.

The

visual language used

and often

The way

by many Native

painted facial designs related to certain

in

signified a personal

which

a person's buffalo

protective

robe was

conveying robe positions are currently known, two of which

which ceded large

He was

in 1819,

able to record the likenesses of

in

many

negotiated with the U.S. government

of land for western expansion.

tracts

of these delegations often sat for their portraits,

which were subsequently included

in the

Department of War

collection or sold through private galleries.

The

portraits thus

part of a series of documents that recorded the "legal"

transfer of the

ownership of land from Native peoples

to the

government, a transfer that signified the "civilizing"

of the "untamed" frontier.

Eagle, Little Missouri,

While the

an image of

title

five different individuals, all

has suggested that the five

features of

and Pawnees, painted

in

of this multiple portrait suggests that this

resemblance to one another.

two Pawnee

involve baring one shoulder, which was either a courtship sign

or a message of admonition. Hairstyles

Pawnee

among the Omaha and

The peace medals

tribes signified tribal affiliation.

distributed by government officials were often prized possessions

and signs of status. Thus while some contemporary

historians have questioned

art

whether King's portrait contains

accurate likenesses of five specific individuals, others have

seen

nevertheless, as providing valuable pieces of an

it,

historical puzzle

now

being reconstructed by contemporary

scholars in their attempts to understand the dynamics of

nineteenth-century tribal culture, even

through

the

of nineteenth-

eyes

if

only as filtered

and twentieth-century

Euro-Americans.

of the earliest of such portraits was King's Young

Omahaw, War
is

While most mid-nineteenth-century viewers of King's

multiple portrait would have read the costumes,

1842 completed approximately 143 portraits of

'30's to sign treaties

1822.

and the subsequent adoption of the signs of

the clothing and habits of Euro-Americans.

medicine.

Native delegations traveled to the capital in the 1820's and

One

religious rituals

studio as a

the comfort of his studio in Washington, D.C. because

142

civilization

up

Native Americans and thus capture the frontier experience

federal

signs of difference

positioned also carried a specific message. Nine message-

Native Americans.

became

Eagle's neck) signify their differ-

and between

Washington, D.C.

portrait painter in

Members

five

blade

peoples could be assured only through the abandoning of such

Benjamin West
a

War

at

(its

ence and, ultimately, their savagery. Survival for Native

and

commis-

Royal Academy and

He

before returning to the U.S. in 1812.

pointed ominously

and war club

sometimes represented.

the studio of the U.S. expatriate painter

1821 and

remembrance

earnest,

known savage

The government encouraged such

chiefs.

in dutiful

in his quiet dignity, brave, honest,

grandly apart from

him

should be held

passing away from the face of the earth.

face paint, jewelry, hair styles,

bear a striking

The art historian Julie Schimmel

men were based on the facial

chiefs,

Petalesharro, chief of the

In 1830, two years after he was elected president,

Jackson secured the passage of the Indian Removal

Andrew
Bill.

By

1838, seventy thousand Native Americans had been forcibly

removed from
area west

their

homes east of the Mississippi

ing these people the right to their lands.

during

to the Plains

of the river, despite treaties signed earlier guarantee-

this forced

Thousands died

march. In the early 1830's the governor of

Pawnee Loups, and Peskelechaco, chief of the Republican

Georgia summarized the general attitude of white negotiators

Pawnees. King had painted these two chiefs when they had

toward

visited

Washington, D.C. with

Perhaps

in

individuals,

150

treaties with

Native peoples:

a tribal delegation in 1821.

attempting to emphasize the nobility of these

Treaties were expedients by which ignorant, intractable,

King has

and savage people were induced without bloodshed

sacrificed their individuality, creating a

CHARLES BIRD KING AND GEORGE CATLIN

to yield

140

GEORGE

up what
of that

CATI.IN The Last Race, Pari ofOkipa Ceremony (Mandan) 1832.

civilized people

command

formation

be

and subdue

had the right to possess by virtue

of the Creator delivered to

fruitful, multiply,

man upon

his

and replenish the earth,

23J x 28f (58.8 x 71.3)

make

American

justification,

which formed the moral basis of

the ideology of Manifest Destiny,

and again

in dealings

would be

called

upon time

with Native Americans. White Euro-

peans were the chosen people, Native Americans the heathen

savages, agents of the devil

who had

to

be converted or

destroyed.

Unlike King, George Catlin did not wait

capital for

Native Americans to come

to

in the nation's

him

to

have their

portraits painted. In 1830 he left his position as a successful

portrait painter in

Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia

frontier city of St. Louis.

Over the next

six years

for the

he would

west of the Mississippi. In

life:

it.
I

This religious

five trips into the territory

1832 he explained his reasons for wanting to paint Native

have, for

red

some years

men who

are

and boundless
civilization.

past,

now

contemplated the noble races of

spread over these trackless forests

prairies,

melting away

Their rights invaded,

their lands wrested

at the

from them, their customs changed, and

therefore lost to the world; and they

at last

sunk into the

earth,

and the plowshare turning the sod over

and

have flown

to their rescue

their race (for they are

may

not of

doomed and must

rescue of their looks and

acquisitive world

approach of

their morals corrupted,

their

their graves,

their lives or of

perish), but to the

modes,

at

which the

hurl their poison and cverv

destruction, and trample

besom of

them down and crush them

CHARLES BIRD KING VND GEORGE CATLIN

to

151

death; yet, phoenixlike, they

painter's palette",

and

may

rise

from the "stain on

upon canvas, and stand

live again

come, the living monuments of a

forth for centuries yet to

noble race.

paper exactly what he saw

American

were

life

in front ol

individuals

who viewed

"imperialist

nostalgia"

him, his images of Native

by himself and by the many

filtered,

work, through the lens of an

his

that

celebrated

Americans, he also believed that they were "doomed and must

perish. "

He does not attempt

but only

race"

to rescue "their lives or

and

looks

"their

Americans can survive only

through the eyes of a white

their

their

modes." Native

as representations constructed

artist.

Catlin engages in what the

anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls "imperialist nostalgia," a

yearning

for

participated

modes"

that which one has directly or indirectly

destroying,

in

the

in

preservation of "looks and

of the "unfortunate but necessary"

face

Catlin produced over five

hundred scenes of Indian

life,

140

including The Last Race, Part ofOkipa Ceremony (Mandan) in

143

1832 and Clermont, First Chief ofthe Tribe (Osage) in 1834.

organized

many

found

in

He

of these paintings, along with costumes and a

collection of native objects, into an "Indian Gallery,"

which

London

Beneath the engraving

Chief

a tribe

whose "looks and modes" Catlin

a

plague

like

the caption

"The Author

and

scalping

specific items

and

knife

a belt containing a

wearing

women and
tipis

bear

tribe,

tomahawk

claw

necklace,

The

scene has been shifted

have been located behind the group of

figures.

What is the significance of these changes? How do they alter

the

meaning of the image? Removing some of the chiefs

him appear

as a warrior

less threatening,

itself and to the

and

makes

spiritual leader

and bear claw necklace

knife,

the

both to Catlin within the image

reader of Catlin's memoirs.

Moving

the scene

this event

would greatly increase the value and importance of

are witness to his recording of the features of the

his son's

works

chief.

men

as well as

for they

him and commented

would, indeed, be one of the few

reminders of a once flourishing

The

The prophecy

tribe.

demise of Native Americans seemed

due

that

to

of the

be coming true.

what Catlin presented was an

affirmation of an already well established conception of the

about the

am

Dry den

New World

first

entitled

free as nature first

servitude began,
ran."

used

When

this

The

children, attests to the importance of the event

achievements.

artistic

expressions of fear and wonder on the faces of the spectators

also attest not only to Catlin's
artist,

own accomplishments

but also to those of European

made man, Ere

the

Mandan

villagers.

While he has chosen

figures in the reductive graphic style of the Neoclassicist

woods the noble savage

Flaxman, whose drawings of Greek vase figures were often

as

desirable

described as "neo-primitive," Catlin's figures are

more three-dimensional than the elementary

on the sides of the

what they viewed

as corrupt

contempor-

ary French morals and practises. While Catlin's images were

particularized than earlier

European representations of
still

participated in a larger

discourse about an "innocence" or "purity" that, while

desirable in

many

ways, was part of a past that, in the end,

could not be recreated.

civilization,

The "noble

savage," untainted by

was destined to make way

for

its

inevitable

152

that represent

tipi

to

reproduce on canvas or

CHARLES BIRD KING AND GEORGE CATLIN

still

much

stick figures

Mandan

artistic

expression.
Catlin's familiarity with the pictorial art of the

recorded
a replica

in his

of his

memoirs. In

own

fact,

Mandan

Ma-To-Toh-Pa gave

is

Catlin

painted buffalo-skin robe on which he had

recorded his military exploits. While the whereabouts of this

robe

is

unknown

today, another robe (collected in

closely resembles Catlin's

own

tions of the one he had been given.

Yet they are

much more

1837)

written and pictorial descrip-

The

figures are certainly two-dimensional

arrival.

Thus, despite Catlin's attempts

to render his

the base laws of

Rousseau, Voltaire, and other French Enlightenment thinkers

the generic "noble savage," they

in

likeness of the chief on canvas as an act of magic in the eyes of

condition was again promoted in the eighteenth century by

more

as an

mimesis

artistic

phrase in 1670 in a play

This concept of "noble savagery"

in their criticisms of

The

general. Catlin represents his ability to capture the physical

British poet

The Conquest of Granada: "I

wild in the

This larger number, which now includes

women and

and

Native American as "noble savage."

dramatist John

outdoors allows Catlin to increase the number of figures

and the significance of Catlin's

success of Catlin's "Indian Gallery" in Europe was

in part to the fact that

<

children. In the frontispiece these

have been removed.

outdoors and two

memoirs he

Mandan

second chief of the

Mah-To-Toh-Pa, indoors with

painting a
in Catlin's

who
Mandan

of smallpox. Catlin's father wrote to

144

.,

us to believe

Rocky Mountains". Yet

states that he painted the

tomahawk, scalping

Mandan,

would

written description of this scene in the text of the

symbols of power

had "rescued," was nearly completely wiped out by

is

the base of the

at

toured the U.S. from 1837 to 1840 and then traveled to

started, the

in 1841. Catlin

that this frontispiece records a scene that actually occurred.

London and

Paris in the 1840's. In 1837, the year the tour

intentionally

of this can be

the frontispiece to his memoirs, Letters and Notes

published in

surrounded by

destruction of a people.

One example

altered a scene or composition.

"noble

ideal

when he

savage." There were also instances

While Catlin thus sympathized with the plight of Native

an

horses and

human

and highly schematic.

sophisticated in their rendering and

145

EMMANUEL LEUTZE

141

study for Westward the Course of Empire Takes

design than the stick figures on the

tipi.

These

its

stick figures,

with their triangular torsos and frontal heads, actually more

closely resemble the designs

on an

earlier

Mandan

buffalo

robe sent to President Jefferson by the explorers Lewis and

Clark in 1805.

The

later

sureness in the handling

Mandan robe reveals an increasing

of human and animal bodies and a

greater concern with decorative patterning. Artists in various

Plains tribes

would continue

to develop this narrative artform

throughout the nineteenth century and use

it

as a

means of

Way (Westward Ho!)

33i x 43J (84.5 x 110.2)

1861.

the display of Native

two major

American imagery, but

also connects the

figures in the composition, Catlin

Toh-Pa. The

lines

marking the sides of the

through the heads of the two

figures,

and Mah-To-

tipi literally

run

anchoring them within

the pyramidal composition and suggesting a certain equality

between them. The

easel located

echoes the shape of the

between the

stick figures located

mimetic portrait resting on the

between the two figures

also

reinforcing the comparison

tipi,

on the sides of the

easel,

tipi

and the

between the "childlike"

written communication, incorporating knowledge they had

record of gun-toting exploits and the European celebration of

gained from observing the work of artists like Catlin while

noble individuality. But the inclusion of the

maintaining their

own

major change

materials occurred in the middle of the

in

distinctive style

and iconography.

century with the widespread introduction through trade of

paper and new pigments.

will

Some examples

of these

new works

The

tipis

may have been included

The central tipi not only provides

themselves

is

puzzling

for
a

compos-

surface for

in

spherical earth structure,

tipis

in

view of the fact Catlin

quite well that the distinctive architecture of the

a

not a bison-hide

this

knew

Mandan was
tipi.

These

spherical structures are evident in his painting The Last Race,

Part ofOkipa Ceremony.

be discussed below.

itional reasons.

particular scene

The

argued that by locating the

art historian

Mandan

in

katlmn

light lias

front of tipis, the

dwelling structures of nomadic Plains tribes, rather than

II

VRLES HiRI) KING \ND GEORGE

\ll l\

in

153

140

154

CHARLES BIRD KING AND GEORGE CATLIN

It

interesting to

is

painting based on

Toh-pa

Mandan

removed the

tipis

it,

compare

this

engraving with

In this painting Catlin has

and shifted Mah-To-Toh-Pa closer

center of the painting, increasing the

located behind the chief.

He

later

Mah-To-

Catlin Painting the Portrait oj

(1857-69).

to the

number of Mandan

has also replaced the European

easel of the earlier engraving with a makeshift structure of

branches

tied

which

together,

framework of the

tipi.

roughly attached to

its

hide coverings of the

the

replicates

structural

In addition he leaves the canvas only

frame, suggesting the loosely attached

tipi.

Thus, the

engraving have been collapsed together

tipi

and

easel of the

in the painting.

The effect of these changes is to heighten the presence of

Mandan chief in the composition and the connection
between the Mandan and nature, and to locate Catlin the artist
more clearly within the Mandan world. The emphasis on
the

and

Catlin

his

talents

as

painter

of "Indians"

was

appropriate for the frontispiece of his memoirs. In his Indian

Gallery, however, where he claimed to be recreating the

"looks and

modes" of various Native American

would have been more interested

.

particularities of

tribes,

viewers

in the physical features

Mah-To-Toh-Pa and Mandan

general and in the surrounding landscape. Yet Catlin

front of the spherical earth structures of the

Mandan,

agricultural

more sedentary,

Catlin participates in the creation of a

generalized view of Native Americans, one which erases their

differences

and

particularities (the tipi soon

even

"Indian"),

as

he

claims

to

a sign for

recording

these

is still

present as artist and creator in this image, and

perhaps even more so than

in the engraving, for in the painting

Catlin presents himself as literally repainting the surfaces of

the "Indian"
chief,

and of

tipi, as

redefining the significance of the

pictorial representation in general, in

Mandan
Mandan

culture.

particularities.

142 (left, above) CHARLES BIRD

KING Young Omaham, War Eagle,
Missouri, unit

be

became

much

very

and

culture in

Pawnees 1822. 36J

Little

x 28

(91.8x71.1)

143

below)

(left,

First

George

Cati.in Clermont,

Chief of the Tribe (Osage) 1823. 29

x 24

(73.7x61)

144 (above)
Notes
a

George Catlin
frontispiece,

Letters

"The Author

i.JrfKvVUUJUy

and
painting

Chief at the Base of the Rocky Mountains,"

1841.

91 x

6(24

145 (right)
in 1837.

>

IS)

MANDAN

buffalo robe, collected

Width 82J (210)

Mi

rn

"^

X$-

CHARLES BIRD KING VND GEORGE

VII l\

ISS

146

146

GEORGE CATLIN

Catlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-To-Toh-Pa

ALTERNATIVE REPRESENTATIONS:
PHOTOGRAPHY AND LEDGER ART

Mandan 1857-69.

15J x 23| (39 x 60.6)

immediacy or presence of Keokuk himself. Paintings

Catlin's

were able

to sentimentalize, to romanticize,

At the same time that Catlin was drawing on the conventions

subject. Easterly's photograph, like

and

century photographs, did not do

image of Native

and thus

between the viewer and the

to create a comfortable distance

tools of easel painting to construct his

like

this.

many mid-nineteenthInstead

it

presented in

Americans, others were utilizing a different medium, one

black and white the impassive, the stony-faced, rendered in

which they claimed was better able accurately

sharp detail yet emotionally inaccessible.

faces of the frontier

faces differed

photography. How

by comparing Catlin's Clermont,

147

Thomas

First

Chief of

Easterly's Keokuk, or the Watchful

seated on a rock,

is

portrait painting.

He

is at

Fox

his face.

His skin and clothes are painted

the pictorial counterpart of the real imprisonment of his

in British

head slightly

warm red-brown.

viewer's eye wanders freely over Clermont's body,

people on reservations (as

Americans saw photography

Keokuk was

well

with government

known

officials.

Sauk and Fox claims

as the

for his

to their

is

sense of complicity between the viewer/

expose himself to such scrutiny.

The

opposite

is

true of Easterly's photograph of the

Sauk

and Fox leader Keokuk. Confrontation replaces complicity.

Rigidly posed in a stark interior setting, eyes staring straight

ahead,
lity

156

Keokuk

forces the viewer to acknowledge the artificia-

of the posing process even as the viewer

PHOTOGRAPHY AND LEDGER ART

is

struck by the

portrait

was painted by King.

King

1827

in

diplomacy

decade

Washington, D.C. with

and Fox, Iowa and Piankashaw

reliance on the

wonder Native

work of the

devil.

in negotiating

Iowa land holdings against

had traveled

painter and the sitter, a willingness on the part of Clermont to

It is little

In 1837 he succeeded in protecting

club cradled in his arms or the peace medal hanging around

to

as

indicated earlier, conquering and

recording often go hand in hand).

counterclaims by the Sioux. Over

There

captured the

It

encounter between

white photographer and Native American chief. Keokuk's

stopping to examine the jewelry or feathers or painted war

his neck.

this

(1847).

eyes looking off into the distance, the hint of a smile on

tilted,

in

imprisonment within the photographic frame can be seen

common

ease, legs crossed,

underlying hostility embedded

the Tribe to

with a loosely painted

landscape behind him, an arrangement

The

render the

from the painted faces by Catlin can best be seen

143

Clermont

to

these photographic

leaders.

earlier, in 1824,

a delegation

During

he

of Sauk

this visit his

A copy of this portrait, made by

Keokuk, Sac {Watchful Fox)

same European

reveals King's

portrait tradition that Catlin

The same contrasts exist,

therefore, between King's painting of Keokuk and Easterly's
photograph. In the painting Keokuk is at ease, a slight smile
on his face, his gaze directed beyond the picture frame. The
drew upon

in painting

Clermont.

148

i47

Thomas Easterly

Keokuk, or the Watchful Fox 1847

Charles Bird KING

148

'.

Keokuk, Sac (Watchful Fox) 1827.

17J-xl3|

(44.4 x 34.9)

trees

and sky

in the

background locate the

in

illusionism.

Keokuk

sits in

Keokuk

Rowe

is

the

Sometimes the magazine

illustrator

image; other times s/he copied specific paintings or drawings

It is difficult to

who met him

engages

The bulky

in

figure of the

body

imagine that the painted

that the ethnologist

in 1825,

Henry

described as "like

another Coriolanus," "a prince, majestic and frowning.

The

wild, native pride of man, in the savage state, flushed

by-

success in war, and confident in the strength of his arm, was

never so fully depicted to

copied. This was also the case with certain

literally

front of a blank backdrop, directly

same young man

Schoolcraft,

were

paintings and drawings.

utilized general painterly conventions in creating his or her

Easterly

also contrasts with the slender, almost boylike

of the young Keokuk.

ill-

was

no such

King's studio.

engaging the viewer with his gaze.

older man

an

belying the fact that the portrait

defined landscape,

painted

tribal chief in

my eyes." While Schoolcraft

played

upon the savagery of the "noble savage," King chose

to

in detail.

Page forty-one of the January

Weekly contains

a series

16,

1869 issue of Harper's

of images taken from the worlds of

both painting and drawing, and photography. This page

is

part of a larger article recounting General Custer's surprise

attack

and victory over the Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle

at

Washita River, Oklahoma, on November 27, 1868. After

killing the chief and 102

of his warriors, Custer and his troops

proceeded to the undefended

years old and

village

where

all

many of the women and younger

The lodges and winter stores

men

over 8

children were

emphasize the nobility, downplaying any sense of threat or

also

aggression.

ammunition were then destroyed, leaving those who survived

Many

of the photographs of Native Americans taken by

Easterly and others appeared in sets of stereoscopic photo-

graphs sold throughout the

latter

half of the nineteenth

century for viewing in the home. Photographs were also added

to official

government records of transactions between Native

American peoples and government representatives and were

translated into illustrations that appeared in popular
zines and novels.

Sometimes

maga-

these photographs provided only

general inspirations for such illustrations; other times they

killed.

to die a slow death

and

of food

from starvation or exposure

to the cold.

Custer also destroyed 875 Indian ponies.

The
arc

three

wood engravings

meant both

as the

to illustrate

and

that take
justify

up most of the page

w hat came to be know n

Washita River Massacre. The top and bottom images

were engraved versions of draw ings produced by Theodore R.

Davis,

well-known

reporter on the Harper's

illustrator

While Davis had spent

six

1867, he had been back Kast for

I'lK)

OGR

staff.

months with Custer out West

\ 1*1

at

least

WD

.1

year

when

LEDGER MM'

in

the

144

whites, were responsible for the massacre

The U.S.

weapons

in

tribe oil against another,

exchange

caption

the

that

Custer's soldiers engaged in an

describes

worthless horses." Again there

nature

at

is

close range.

and Native Americans

be the

Thus, the horses

are equated. This

untamed
would not

Americans.

The animal

in

however, was usually the buffalo. Just as the

Cheyenne horses

destruction of the
to

down

time that the destruction of animals was seen as

first

parallel to the destruction of Native

question,

"shooting

as

an opposition between the

and the calm soldiers who shoot the

wild, terrified horses

horses in the head

promising land

for cooperation.

The bottom image shows

activity

Washita River.

took advantage of existing rivalries between

and played one

tribes

or

Army

.11

(certainly not "worthless"

them) was part of the military strategy of the 1868 9

campaign, so too was the destruction of buffalo part of a larger

military strategy. "Kill every buffalo you can," advised one-

army

officer.

The

"Every buffalo dead

is

an Indian gone."

frantic activity contained in the

sketches

is

in

The words

upper and lower

sharp contrast to the stasis of the central image.

in

parentheses after the caption

Hunter" explain

this contrast

"The Scalped

"Photographed by Wm.

S.

Soule." Photographic technology at that time required the

subject to remain

from

five to thirty

for long periods

still

of time

anywhere

seconds. Photographs of military ventures,

therefore, often included images of burned-out buildings or of

corpse-filled battlefields.

This

is

particularly evident in the

War that was

Mathew Brady and

extensive photographic record of the Civil

Theodore R. Davis

149

Weekly, January

and

William

Soule, Page

S.

produced by photographers such

41, Harper's

Alexander Gardner. While the sketch could capture the action

16, 1869.

of war, even
artist,

Washita River Massacre occurred. His experience with

made him

Custer undoubtedly

the most logical person to be

The drawings Davis produced

had actually been present
is

at

if

only as conceived of in the imagination of the

the photograph could clearly capture only

give the impression that he

Washita River, an impression that

reinforced by the very fact that they are "sketches," quickly

executed, and by the phrase "Sketched by Theo. R. Davis"

This wood engraving

man did not die as a consequence of the Washita River

The source of the photograph is included in the
Harper's article. The hunter Ralph Morrison was murdered

white

battle.

and scalped by Cheyenne warriors

Dodge, Iowa, on December

Davis did not portray the actual battle

at the Fort, "availed

The

that

top engraving

is

itself,

scouts

is

happened immediately afterwards.

civilized white soldiers

firelight,

soldiers

The

and the savage Indian

Kaw scouts, who perform

less

than

mile from Fort

1868. William Soule, stationed

7,

himself of the opportunity to benefit

science and gratify the curiosity of your readers by taking a

counterfeit presentment of the body, literally on the spot."

This was, according

to the

author of the

picture ever taken on the Plains of the

photographed from the corpse

the deed was done."

The

itself,

article,

"the only

body of a scalped man,

and within an hour

after

author continues:

and the impassive faces and poses of the white

who

watch.

The demonic

further reinforced by the

tails

that

aspect of the scouts

is

form part of their costume.

This sketch also suggests that Native Americans,

158

opposition

spelled out in the wild gestures, face paint, and

costumes of the group of Osage and

by

but instead

captioned "Custer's Indian Scouts

Celebrating the Victory Over Black Kettle."

between the

photograph by William Soule

after a

included in parentheses after the captions for each image.

showed two events

more

its

deadly aftermath.

contains the one dead person on the magazine page. But this

assigned the task of illustrating the article.

149

as

PHOTOGRAPHY AND LEDGER ART

as

much

as

The

pose of the remains

is

delineated exactly as

left

by the

savages, the horrible contortion of the ghastly features, the

apertures

left

by the deadly

bullet, the reeking scalp, the


wounds, the despoiled pockets of the victim,

anomalous

life

as the

are true to

all

may seem.

presentment of death

these artists

white

imprisonment and

The gruesome
titillate

of this description serves not only to

detail

the reader but also to reinforce the veracity of the

visual account.

This aspect of truthfulness

teed by the scientific

photography

method used

is

further guaran-

includes elements not readily visible, or not visible at

("horrible contortion"), in the engraving.

body had been photographed exactly

the dead

found, the two figures behind

a

it

who would avenge

his

as

it

man and
death. The

even

if

had been

were obviously posed

connection between the dead

soldiers

Of course,

all

to create

the actions of the

death of one white

new

situation of

new audience can be

seen in the

effect

this

of both this

changing subject matter: scenes from daily

now added

to

war and hunting exploits

the fort were

life at

which

led to

new

representations of the encounter between whites and Native

Americans. At

capture the scene

to

despite the fact that the written description

tourists rather than fellow warriors or

members. The

tribal

Cheyenne Howling
European

one of the Fort Marion

least

Wolf, also

during

traditions

artistic

medical treatment, which resulted

in his

the

artists,

had extensive contact with

a

Boston for

to

trip

in certain stylistic

changes

work, notably an increased painterliness that countered

the two-dimensionality of his earlier ledger

art.

In Fort Marion Prisoners Dancing for Tourists (1875-7) the

Cheyenne warrior Cohoe presents

his

own

interpretation of

Euro-

hunter thus becomes the justification for the Washita River

the

Massacre and

Americans" that had been represented by Davis approxi-

its

aftermath, as captured in the images at the

top and bottom of the page, despite the fact that the hunter

was

days after the massacre

killed ten

The

battles

itself

had occurred.

between Native American warriors and the

U.S.

Army

'70's,

with the former suffering increasing numbers of defeats.

continued throughout the

late 1860's

and early

In the spring of 1875 seventy-two Southern Plains chiefs and

Marion

striking differences

Harper's sketch. There are

between the two images. While Davis

places the viewer at eye level, within the circle of

Cohoe presents

officers,

double perspective.

The

army

viewer

simultaneously on the same level as the group and above

The overall

feeling

is

is
it.

of distance, or removal, as opposed to the

inclusiveness of Davis' piece. While Davis creates a sense of

three-dimensionality through the use of shading and perspec-

criminals"

by

U.S.

the

government

aggressions and were held in Fort

Marion

wartime

their

for

to ensure that their

people would adjust more peacefully to the reservation

had been imposed upon them

in the

During

conventions,

tival

Cohoe emphasizes

of his image through the use of

flat

the two-dimensionality

areas of color

clearly

outlined figures placed in a space devoid of ground lines or

other orientational markers. Davis pays great attention to the

aftermath of the

costumes of the dancing scouts while Cohoe pays equal

attention to the costumes of the white tourists, particularly

their three years of incarceration at Fort

of these chiefs and warriors

Marion,

drawing books with

filled

those of the

indeed, to

women. The

lie

identities of

in their clothing rather

Cohoe's figures appear,

than their

Such drawings

for their faces are left completely blank.

on paper were not unique to Fort Marion, but had appeared

Both Davis and Cohoe were creating

brightly colored images of Plains Indian

life.

earlier in the century after the introduction of paper and

drawing materials

and

life

Southern Plains wars.

many

six years earlier in his

Augustine,

in Saint

Comanche, and Caddo Indians were deemed "dangerous

that

mately

civilized

These leaders of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho,

warriors were imprisoned at Fort

Florida.

theme of "the savage Indian entertaining

to the Plains Indians

by white traders. By

They

however,

were,

The

positions.

white

creating

artist

facial features,

for white audiences.

from strikingly different

Davis was creating within the

an employer committed to the

the last third of the century this "ledger art," so-called

conventions of Western

because the paper often came from accountants' ledgers,

sensationalization of information and for an audience eager to

began to replace the traditional pictorial surface of buffalo-

experience

hide robes within tribal culture.

The imagery

that filled these

ledger books continued a long tradition of narrative pictorial

art that

and

had developed within Plains

after the arrival

tribal culture

The

of Europeans.

figures

filled in

with

flat

The

areas of color.

vicariously of course

audience that, for the most part, had accepted the

between "savage" and "civilized" that

exploits of warriors

and

battle.

Pratt encouraged the artistic efforts of

sell their

works

There was thus

to the tourists

new audience

embed-

other hand, was drawing upon the conventions of Plains

prisoners by providing them with drawing materials and

visited the fort.

is

prisoner Cohoe, on the

were highly

in

Davis's image.

Indian hide painting to create images for white tourists

wanted

to take with

colony, where

allowing them to

The Cheyenne

ded

art

his

drama of the

frontier, an

were often taken along on hunts or into

II.

the

distinction

hunters were the primary subject matter of these works, which

Captain Richard

some of

both before

were carefully

two-dimensional, with clear, dark outlines that

art for

who

for the

often

work of

historian Janet

warriors

enacts

them

Bcrlo describes as an "idealized penal

miniature but representative socictx of Plains

scaled-down

and

warfare for their captors' pleasure."

ality

who

souvenir of their trip to what the

sanitized

The

simulacra

of

three-dimension-

and mimetic nature of Davis' work read

as "real" to the

white viewer: the two-dimensionality of Cohoe's work read as

IIOTOdR

M'm

WD l.l.lHil.R

\R

159

150

150

childlike, naive.

COHOE

The

Fort Marion Prisoners Dancing for Tourists 1875-7.

tourists

who

left

Fort Marion thus took

with them, again in Berlo's words, "a

memento of

their

voyeuristic experience, secure in their privileged insight into

'the Indian

Problem' and

its

differently.

having

may

Having experienced, themselves, the indignity of

don

to

"traditional dress" to perform for tourists, they

well have read the scene as one of humiliation rather than

pleasurable entertainment.

The two-dimensional style would

own art trad-

have signified not "childlikeness," but their

itions,

while the tourist audience arranged in rigid order

around the dancers would have conveyed

dancers'

own entrapment, both

literally at

complete.

The

this

of the

Fort Marion and

Yet the gaps between the

figuratively within a foreign culture.

groups of tourists suggest that

a sense

entrapment was

far

from

prisoner

Wo-Haw

depicts, again in the

flat,

two-dimensional Plains

schoolroom scene where nine warriors,

hair shorn, attentively

But

group

this

is

American with

a feather in his

imposed white order. Through

their ledger

drawings the

imprisoned chiefs and warriors represented their experiences

Fort Marion not only for themselves and for white tourists,

but also for other members of their

tribes: the

Fort Marion

forcibly

them

removed,

a culture that their

the ghostly

amusement of

tourists.

In the late nineteenth century two solutions had been

proposed

to the

"Indian problem": extermination ("the only

dead Indian") and assimilation. The need

June 25-26, 1876 by the Sioux

in southeast

of Frank

Montana. An

after the defeat of Custer

at the Battle

article in the

of Little Big

September 1876

for

on

Horn
issue

Leslie's Popular Monthly suggested that reservations

and the Indian way of

life

should be abolished and Indians

given trousers and shirts instead of blankets. This blueprint

promoted

for survival

received similar pictographic responses in return.

of the Indians, which included

PHOTOGRAPHY AND LEDGER ART

is

white captors wanted

to forget or to replicate only for the

prisoners often sent drawings to their families as "letters" and

160

suits with

in the center.

by another white

long hair. Here

became even greater

resistance to the

Wo-

style, a

presence of that culture from which these warriors had been

is

means of

Western

also being watched, not

good Indian

image

teacher or soldier but by the spectral form of a Native

a "solution"

undoubtedly functioned as

in

watch the female teacher

no matter how compromised

a form,

also created an

entrapment of Native Americans within

continuation of their ceremonies and their

visual arts traditions, in

at

artist

white culture. In Reading Class at Fort Marion (1875-7)

Haw

solutions."

Yet Cohoe's fellow prisoners would have read the image

150

The Kiowa

that spoke to the

was

also

decade

many

later

by The Friends

wealthy philanthropists

151

?h

WO-HAW

151

Reading Class at Fort Marion 1875-7. i

and Protestant clergymen, who

felt

1H

Native Americans should

be given membership in U.S. society in exchange for a

repudiation of their Indian ways.

support of the

Dawes

The

Friends lobbied

in

Act, passed by Congress in 1887, which

offered an allotment of land

and

eligibility for full citizenship

who

to every

Native American male

his tribe

and adopted the habits of "civilized" Euro-American

willingly cut his ties with

(22.2 x 28.5)

Wounded Knee, South

battle

Dakota, on December 29, 1890,

Native Americans

lost.

The image

Yet the author of the

Monthly

also

article

in

Frank

Leslie's

Popular

acknowledged that there had been greater

success in assimilating Africans and Chinese than there had

been

in assimilating Indians,

primarily because the former

had been removed from their homelands and cultures, making

immediate survival

their

upon

assimilation.

But

in this

this

new country more dependent

was not

"new" country

for

Native Americans, and their sense of entitlement to their

ancestral lands

successful

and ways of life was strong. Assimilation was

only

after

large

percentage

of the

Native

Benjamin Johnston
1900).

commissioned

Johnston had been

a larger series

to execute of the

Hampton

Institute, a co-

educational school for African Americans and Native Ameri-

The series was shown

tracing the rapid progress of African Americans since the

of the Civil War. Here again, as in

Americans

in

Western European garb with cropped

Native

American

in

"traditional" Native
scientific
is

medium

"traditional"

American

is

dress.

not a ghostly presence

of photography did not

present in the flesh and blood

evidence of a living culture.

traffic in

but

Rather, he

is

decade after the

final

major military

encounter between Native Americans and the U.S. military at

the print of gunslinging

heads of the children and

ghosts.

He

presented as

reminder of their culture and their history.

in

the

not, however, as

as a

This time the

culture done away with by the forces of "progress"

image captured almost

hair, this

time accompanied by African Americans, are pictured with

land on which they lived, and continue to

to this process of assimilation, an

end

Wo-Haw's drawing, Native

The

Another image speaks

at

the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900 as part of an exhibit

"history" and as artifact, a symbol of

functioned

American History (1899-

entitled Class in

was part of

It

population had been killed, and then only partially successful.

live,

is

photograph by the Washington, D.C. photographer Frances

cans founded just after the Civil War.

life.

in question

noble yet "savage"

embodied

cowboys or U.S. cavalry above the

in the

very clothes of the children

themselves.

Both Wo-Havv and Johnston present,

PHOTOGRAPH!

in their

WD LEDGER

images, the

\R T

161

152

152

Frances Benjamin Johnston

Class in American History 1899-1900.

7^x9Hi9x24.i)

juxtapositions marveled at by the anthropologist Levi-Strauss

national conscience trying to reconcile the near-destruction of

and brushed away by the photographer Curtis. They mark the

coming together of two worlds

Haw's image, and others

development of

that

visual culture

was so crucial

and of

a part

of the

a sense of national

identity in the U.S. in the nineteenth century.

Wo-Haw

people with the establishment of a democratic nation.

brought

remained

ghostly one) in the daily lives of his people; Johnston presents

Recognizing

as a curiosity, an

example of what needs

lived experience, yet, at the

through endless pictorial representations.

is

\hl

to be left

behind as

memory
This living memory

same time, kept

alive as a

necessary, according to Slotkin, in order to assuage a

PHOTOGRAPHY AND LEDGER ART

it,

to the fore in order to

American culture did not

presents Native American culture as a living presence (albeit a

it

like

American

resilient

Wo-

however, also need to be

remind us now that Native

die in the nineteenth century, but

and dynamic force

this allows us to read the

in

Native

many images

life.

of the

frontier critically, not as records of unchallengable

facts or truths

but as the products of individuals perpetuating

or resisting the material and ideological processes of colonization

and conquest.

BLACK AND WHITE

FRANCES
AMERICA AS AN AFRICAN INVENTION

K.

IN

AMERICA

POHL

need of care; on the other, they were savage and

disciplining (they were not, however,

WHEN

EMMANUAL LEUTZE'S

course of

appeared

in

its

Empire Takes

Washington, D.C.
141

form

final

in

December

changes from the

significant

Its

in

oil

WESTWARD

THE

Way (Westward Ho!)

building

Capitol

the

in

1862, there were certain

study of 1861.

changes, already mentioned in Chapter

One

of these

was the addition of

6,

symbols of mining, hunting, and agriculture.

second

change, and perhaps the most important, was the inclusion of

man

an African American

in the center

woman and child on a mule.

The historian Lerone Bennett, Jr.

foreground leading

has argued that "it

impossible to understand white America,

Thomas

Jefferson or

it

is

is

impossible to

gift to

New

the

World. And what that means ...

is

America, contrary to the generally accepted view,

African as well as a European invention.

'

The

that

an

is

presence of

numbers of peoples of African descent on the North

large

American continent since the sixteenth century has had

profound

effect

on the development of

economic structures
labor

made

South

in

in the

social, political,

and

U.S. For example, African slave

to perish" for

economy). Pictorial

beliefs

and

and perpetuation of these

of a national culture. But they also

in the defining

played an integral part in the challenges to these beliefs and to

this definition of national culture, challenges

number and
and led

to

intensity

armed

This chapter

in

between the North and the South.

conflict

will look at

both kinds of representations, those

to enforce the

condemned

those which

which grew

by the middle of the nineteenth century

it

myth of the

child savage,

and

and offered alternative visions of

Africa(n) as America(n).

Leutze received his Capitol commission

a

in

June 1861, only

One of
many causes of this war was disagreement over whether or

few months after the opening salvo of the Civil War.

the

not slavery should be extended into the new

Secretary of
initial

territories.

War Simon Cameron, who approved

Leutze's

study, was an expansionist opposed to the emigration of

African

Americans into the western

inclusion of an African

territories.

American man

in

such

Leutze's

prominent

position in the final version of his celebration of western

in the

expansion indicates that he differed with Cameron on this

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while

point (Leutze's pro-abolitionist sentiments were well known).

possible the growth of a plantation

economy

African American wage labor contributed to the expansion of

industrialization in the

And

integral part in the construction

George Washington or the

U.S. Constitution, without some understanding of Africa's

"doomed

to the country's

representations of Africans and African Americans played an

which attempted

white

understand

was central

their labor

need of

in

just as colonists

North

same

nineteenth century.

from Northern Europe attempted

justify their destruction

construction of the

in the late

to

of Native Americans through the

myth of

the "noble savage," so too did

Instead, he suggests that African Americans, like their white

counterparts, might experience a new freedom in the West.

The

inclusion of the African American

group on
the

loly

mule

man

also suggests a parallel

Family from persecution

at

as part of a family

between the

flight

of

the hands of] lerod and

try to justify their

the opening

up of the West. .eutze therefore provides another

enslavement and exploitation of Africans and African Ameri-

gloss on the

theme of Manifest Destiny,

cans through representations of them as inferior to white

the morally charged arguments of the abolitionist

these

Europeans.

colonists

On

and their descendants

the one hand, Africans were childlike and in

The Civil

War

forced

this

time marked by

movement.

re-evalualion of the image of the

163

153

JOHN LEWIS KrIMMEL

Quilting Frolic 1813.

16f x 22| (42.8 x 56.8)

African American in the art and literature of the U.S. Prior to

War

the Civil

the dominant nineteenth-century stereotype of

African American

happy and

"darkie,"

contentedly in the
his white

men was

the high-stepping, banjo-playing

childlike,

fields,

who, when not working

performed either

owners. African American

for his family or for

women were "mammys,"

protective of their white charges and proud of their place as

servant,

maid,

free

Quilting

the wall

contains

Frolic

belongings of

them, recorded the looks and

detailed

classes.

inventory

of the

middle-income household. The paintings on

a portrait

scenes, one of

like

merchant, and artisanal

of Washington flanked by two maritime

which involves

a battle

attest to

both the

who were

Other objects hanging on the walls or resting on the tops of

as

"good"

for Africans,

them, therefore, would actually do them

cupboards indicate the

The

black servant

girl

social status

and lineage of the family.

and the black

fiddler also

mark

this

they would lose their childlike innocence

family's social status, the girl through her role as a servant and

(which some argued was achieved through enslavement and

the fiddler through his shabby clothing, which contrasts so

others claimed was "innate") and revert to savagery.

markedly with the finery of the white figures next to him.

disservice,

for

Such stereotypes appear

153

foibles of the peasant,

William Hogarth

cultured and patriotic character of the household members.

inherently "savage" and had to be domesticated through

To

and David Wilkie and,

artists

and nanny within the white household.

Enslavement was seen

slavery.

admirer of the works of the British

in

John Lewis Krimmel's (1786

1821) painting Quilting Frolic (1813).

Germany and

Krimmel was born

studied with the genre painter Johann Baptist

Seele before coming to the U.S. in 1810.

164

in

He was

AMERICA AS AN AFRICAN INVENTION

also an

According to the
also

among

the

art historian

first

Guy McElroy, Krimmel was

"to utilize physiognomical distortions

[toothy grins, oversized lips] as a basic element in the

depiction of African-Americans; his comic portrayal was

probably

meant

to

scenario,

but

profoundly

it

the

regarding

establish

humorous

good-natured

developing

reinforced

ideas

humorous, even 'debased' appearance of

African-Americans."

While the stereotypical depictions of African Americans

produced by Krimmel and others dominated the artworld
the

first

unchallenged, particularly after the establishment of

totally

American Anti-Slavery Society

the

in 1833.

American anti-slavery organizations such

Society, founded in 1787,

founded

tion,

in

half of the nineteenth century, such images did not go

Free African

and the General Coloured Associa-

American Anti-Slavery Society

1826, the

in

Joining African

as the

became one of the key organizations

U.S. abolitionist

in the

movement. Led by both African Americans and whites,

it

flooded the southern slave-holding states with abolitionist

literature

and lobbied throughout the U.S.

slavery. It

was fueled by the

which called

1820's,

for

an end to

for

of evangelical religion in the

an end to sinful practises and allowed

African Americans to enter

movement

rise

its

ranks.

The

early abolitionist

also revived the charges of political hypocrisy that

had been leveled

at the rebel revolutionaries

How

the end of the eighteenth century.

claim independence in the

by the British

name of freedom and

and writers belonged

of the abolitionist

when

liberty

they themselves were enslaving a whole race of people?

artists

at

could revolutionaries

Many

One such

artist

translated

its

Nathaniel Jocelyn

(1796-1881).

fire.

In 1839 he produced

commemorates an event

men and

of that year in which Cinque, one of fifty-three

captured by Spanish slavers in the Mendi region of

Africa, led a rebellion against the slavers

The Spanish had

on the

ship La

transported their slaves to Havana,

The

despite a treaty forbidding slave trading in British waters.

rebellion occurred after the slaves

and were being transported

to

had been sold

Havana

in

Puerto Rico. While Cinque and

the others

demanded

altered

course at night and managed to bring

Long

that the ship return to Africa, the

Island. U.S. forces arrested the mutineers

it

crew

ashore on

and freed the

crew, but abolitionists defended the cause of the mutineers.

After two years of legal proceedings, the
the

Africans

had been

illegally

Supreme Court

seized.

ruled

Cinque and

his

of him

as

presence." Phrenologists had also carefully analyzed Cinque's

head

in

an attempt to understand his daring behavior and had

reported that the shape of his head indicated "great vigor of

body and mind

liberty."

ships,

many Euro-Americans

Krimmel

in his

produced

physiognomical

distortions

used

by

depiction of the black fiddler, Jocelyn has

highly individualized, noble portrait of an African

assumed

love of

despite well-

that,

on board slave

slave rebellions
still

that "ambition,"

"independence," and the intelligence necessary to plan

successful

revolt

were anomalies among Africans. Their

obsession with his physical features, recorded in Jocelyn's

portrait, also suggests that they

thought his intelligence could

be due to the fact that he did not "look

like

an African": in

other words, he did not look like the stereotype of Africans

that

had been created by white

artists in the

U.S.

Jocelyn has also rejected the ragged clothing of Krimmel's

fiddler

of the

ambition, independence

Such inquisitiveness suggests

ancient Greece and

in 1841.

known accounts of numerous

ous anti-slavery meetings, before returning to Africa

place

manner. But he was also

"of magnificent physique [and] commanding

compatriots then toured the Northeast, appearing at numer-

In

in this

que's activities in the popular press that included descriptions

a large oil portrait entitled Cinque. It

its

Cinque

his decision to depict

in

New Haven area

a portraitist in the

of his career after a disastrous studio

Amistad.

major role

abolitionist sympathies played a

undoubtedly influenced by the numerous accounts of Cin-

of Connecticut, although he returned to engraving at the end

women

(76.8 x 64.8)

messages into

man. Jocelyn's

was

Cinque 1839. 30J x 25}

an engraver, he turned to painting in 1820

and became well-known as

154

Nathaniel Jocelyn

or were inspired by, the efforts

to,

movement and

written or painted form.

Initially trained as

154

and instead has clothed Cinque

Rome. By

from European Neoclassical painting

Jocelyn creates

a parallel

Cinque and African

AMERICA

in the

conventions

the pose, the toga

between the struggles

slaves in general

\s \\

white toga of

utilizing certain

for

freedom of

and the struggles of

Rl( \\ l\\!.\TI(>\

16S

Robert Scott Duncanson

i55

and

ancient Greeks and

African clothing

is

Romans. Cinque

thus re-dressed

is

displaced to the palm trees in the background

make

his

message more palatable

accustomed

to conceiving of the

political ideas

The

to

U.S. as

The U.S. had supported

Many

to 1830.

order to

Rome.

more contemporary
Greek

from 1821

lasted

who

at

least

contemporary

often trafficked in slaves.

one reference, however,

reality

this

Greeks and the

to

the

sugar-cane fields of the Caribbean where Cinque and

of cane, a reference

movement

also

resulted

support for the education of African Americans.

African

American writers and

financial

and moral backing they needed

chosen

field.

One such

artist

in

both the

received

artists

in

growing

A number of

order to succeed in

was Robert Scott Duncan-

son (1821 or 1822-72). Duncanson began his career as a

painter of

still lifes

and "fancy pieces"

in Cincinnati,

Ohio

and, with the help of funds from the Anti-Slavery League and
private patrons, was able to

make

three trips to

Europe (1852,

1865, 1870) where he studied

European landscape

He

number of landscape

subsequently produced

with

titles

traditions.

paintings

such as Valley Pasture (1857), Falls of Minnehaha

(1862) and Landscape with a View of Vesuvius and Pompeii

166

the

Europeans Claude Lorrain and

Duncanson produced only two paintings

that dealt directly

with African American subjects, one of which was Uncle

and

Eva

Little

(1853).

Located

in

Tom

AMERICA AS AN AFRICAN INVENTION

155

the foreground of a

landscape that combines a luminous harbor scene with an

overgrown arbor are the two central characters

in Harriet

Beecher Stowe's popular abolitonist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin;

or,

Life

Among

was patterned

the

Lowly (1852). Duncanson's composition

after a

wood engraving by Hammatt

Billings

(1818 74) that appeared in the illustrated edition of the novel

(1852), as well as

on the coversheet of the popular song

Little

Eva; Uncle Tom'sGuardian Angel by John Green\ea.fWhhuer

a stalk

the other fifty-two African slaves were to have labored.

their

Thomas Cole and

J. M. W. Turner.

(1852).

to the

abolitionist

Tom

of African slaves. Instead of a

Cinque holds

The

Uncle

1853. 27J x 38J (69.2 x 97.2)

hand

spear,

in his left

Eva

(1871) that reveal the influences of the U.S. landscape painter

audience

white

the Greeks in the

civilized, heroic

barbarous, heathen Turks,

specific

in

U.S. politicians and abolitionists viewed

one between the

Jocelyn included

his

a continuation of the

War of Independence against the Turks that

conflict as

of democratic Greece and Republican

reference to Greece also had a

relevance.

removed and the suggestion of "otherness"

Little

engraving illustrates a scene

Billings'

Chapter 22

at the St.

mossy seat,

in

Clare family's

an arbor,

at the foot

of Lake Pontchartrain.
Little

Eva

is

It is

opening of
little

of the garden" on the shores

sunset on a Sunday evening and

reading from the Bible to her humble and faithful

servant and friend Uncle

drowning.

at the

summer home, "on a

The

scene

Tom, who had earlier saved her from

illustrates Little

commitment

Eva's

to

educating the family's black servants and, ultimately, to using

her inheritance to buy a

home

in

the servants could be liberated.

one of the

free states so

It also attests to Little

all

of

Eva's

(and thus Stowe's) belief that both spiritual and physical

salvation for African

Americans would be found through

devotion to the Christian God.

The

little

blond Eva thus

represents the best of abolitionist sentiment and Christian

love, although she dies shortly after the scene

by the lake and

156

AJS

thus leaves the task of freeing African American slaves to those

who
The

have been inspired by her example.

'C

engraving are unmistakable: the blond, white child

iWA;

IL2TTILI

patronizing tone of both the written passage and the

will lead

man out of darkness and ignorance into salvation

The passivity and devotion of Uncle Tom was seen

the old black

and

light.

by white abolitionists as evidence of his humanity and of the

While such portrayals

Tightness of their efforts to free him.

may have been necessary in order

movement to make political headway,
heartedly accepted by

the

for

abolitionist

they were not whole-

African Americans. "Uncle

all

Tom"

soon became a derogatory label, used by some African

Americans

to criticize others

who

felt their

salvation lay in

working with, rather than against, white people and their

interests.

Stowe herself reaffirmed her commitment

Tom"

"Uncle

slavery novel,

approach

to liberation in her

Died (1856),

in

to the

second anti-

which she condemns the idea of

U1U.

II

II

B B B

I?

African Americans achieving freedom through retaliation

against whites.
the

book

who

is

The character of the

African American rebel in

<-

II

II

II

11.

obviously patterned after Nat Turner, the slave

M A \

led a rebellion in 1831 in Virginia that resulted in the

i:

I.

n.

Price,

killing

of fifty-five whites before the rebellion was crushed and

Turner caught and hanged. Turner's was only the

latest in a
puliiinjjfti

the tension between southern plantation owners and their

growing slave population.

V
>.

-*

1.1. Vl'.I.

1M

'jnurtt,

}V 3tmftt

3oJjn

bi;

planned insurrections that had increased

series of revolts or

ii

mi

25 cents

net.

S T

11

II

II.

I.

mii}i

fc

(i.

tilling! mi.

IV' a

Duncanson's painting maintains the patronizing tone of the

and the Stowe

Billings engraving

suggesting that he

text,

Stowe's sentiments regarding the "Uncle

shared

approach

of slaves.

to the liberation

more dramatic than the

placing Little

Eva

in

He

has

made

Tom"

Hammatt Billings

Uncle Tom, standing and

The

There

sixty-year-old white

a sense of Christlike prophecy in her pose, suggesting

her impending death, and an equal sense of religious devotion

Tom. This

interpretation of the scene

draws, once again, upon Stowe's text: "[Uncle

her as something
as

frail

Tom]

and earthly, yet almost worshipped her

He

something heavenly and divine.

gazed on her as the

on his image of the child Jesus,

Italian sailor gazes

loved

with

Those,

like

Nat Turner, who

two men,

rejected the

"Uncle

Tom"

five

to slavery

might come about through

massive slave uprising,

which might well spread beyond slavery

to an attack

on the

enslavers and the privileged classes in general. While the Civil

War

is

connected

in the

African American slaves,

controlling the

way

in

minds of many
it

was

as

to the liberation of

much,

which they were

to

if

not more, about

be liberated.

year, the

group of twenty-

Harper's Ferry

in

West Virginia

of slaves throughout the South. His

the approval of the federal government.

Many

in the

South

were convinced that northern abolitionists and politicians

behind

Brown's actions and

committed not only

arming of southern

end

led a

That

plan tailed and he was executed by the state of Virginia with

also, if necessary,

to confront the real possibility that an

man John Brown

set off a revolt

Indeed, the rebelliousness of southern slaves had forced the

government

in 1859.

of whom were African American, in an attempt

approach to the problem of slavery advocated open rebellion.

federal

southern states

to the

to seize the federal arsenal at

and then

were

mixture of reverence and tenderness."

was once again

possibility of a massive slave revolt

brought home

on the part of Uncle

1852. 3j-x5J

the scene

gesturing toward the setting sun with eyes turned upward.

is

Tom and Little Eva

Uncle

however, by

Billings engraving,

front of

156

(8.9 x 14)

The

critical

to depriving

that

North

the

was

them of their property, but

of carrying out their objective through the

slaves.

reception of two different images produced in

1859 gives an indication of the tensions surrounding the issue

of slavery in the U.S.

at this

Yale-trained engineer

John Rogers (1829

who turned

I850's, created

many

duced

and sold

in plaster

time.

small genre scenes which were reproin great

numbers. The

Rogers mass-produced and offered

Wll.KK

1904), a

to sculpture in the late

\S \\

for sale

on

first

work

that

mail-order

AFRICAN INVENTION

167

more

positive response, was

Negro Life

in the

The

19(H))

South, later renamed Old Kentucky

Home

Stephen Foster popular song written

after the 1853

dialect.

Eastman Johnson's (1824

painting was exhibited

the National

at

in

black

Academy

1859 spring exhibition and portrays African

of Design's

Americans engaged

of leisure-time activities

in a variety

playing the banjo, dancing, socializing, playing with children.

In style and subject matter

it

shows the influence of Johnson's

studies in Dusseldorf and Holland from 1849 to 1855. While

there he had been impressed by the minutely detailed studies

of peasant and small-town

Dutch

that

life

The

had been recorded by

seventeenth century.

artists, particularly in the

most part

figures are arranged for the

groups

in front

of a ramshackle house.

look out of the top

discrete-

in

A woman

and child

window at the scene below But they are not

.

the only ones gazing

upon these

activities.

Stepping through

hole in the fence between the slave quarters and the slave-

owners house

is

Krimmel

in the

young white

clothing of the slaves.

young

girls,

dressed in a finery that, as

girl,

painting, contrasts sharply with the ragged

Her presence

one of whose skin

is

is

much

acknowledge by two

darker than the other.

While the varying shades of skin color contained

the

in

painting could be accounted for by the varying skin colors of

West Africans themselves,

this variety

could also be caused by

another avenue of contact that was quite

male

slave-owners

and

their

female

common between
rape. The

slaves

offspring of such violent encounters were always considered

African American, and thus slaves.

The

painting was an instant success

before the public, due to both

its

style

when

and

its

it

appeared

content.

The

scene was painted in painstaking detail, achieved in part

John Rogers

i57

Slave Auction 1859. Height 13J

through Johnson's

(33.7)

use

and household

of the backyard

servants of his father's house in Washington, D.C. as models.

This
157

basis

was

his

Slave Auction (1859), put on the market only

few weeks after the execution of John Brown.

The group

includes a white auctioneer in the center, calling for bids,

while a slave family

is

located in front and to the right and left

The male

of the podium.

slave

assumes an angry and

aggressive stance, arms crossed, a scowl on his face.

woman

cradles one child in her

behind her
is

an

skirt.

affront

The message

to

the

arms while another hides

of the piece

dignity

The

is

twofold: slavery

and humanity of African

men are not passively going

to accept this consignment to slavery. The work did not sell as
well as Rogers had expected, prompting him to comment at
the end of the year: "I find the times have quite headed me

Americans, and African American

off.

for the Slave

Auction

of the stores will receive

it

tells

such

strong story that none

to sell for fear of offending their

168

1859, which received a

AMERICA AS AN AFRICAN INVENTION

much

engaged viewers and convinced them of the

talents.

The

artist's

scene was also noncommital on the

issue of slavery. Abolitionists in the

North interpreted the

scene as a condemnation of the dismal living conditions of

southern slaves while slaveholders

in the

South were con-

firmed in their belief that, despite somewhat "uncomfortable"

living conditions, southern slaves

were basically

happy

lot.

The contrast between the delapidated slave quarters and the

home of the white slave-owners could also be read in two
ways

as evidence of the future prospects of a liberated

people on the one hand, or as evidence of the peaceful

coexistence of master and slave on the other.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIVIL

WAR

What was

southern customers."

The second work produced in

detail

consummate

others

the relationship between this image

like

it

and many and

showing happy, dancing slaves

the

the

158

material conditions of slave

life in

freed slave, helps us formulate

John

Little, a

answer:

say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are

They

merry.

myself and three or four others, have received two

hundred lashes

in the day,

the rattling of our chains.

We did

it

keep

to

and had our

sing and dance, and

we would

night

down

look at

it,

it

make

others laugh at

been!

trouble, and to keep our hearts from

is

as true as the gospel! Just

must not we have been

myself

feet in fetters; yet, at

Happy men we must have

being completely broken: that

done

the South?

at least a partial

very happy? Yet

have

have cut capers in chains.

dency

Union, with

up

Abraham

of 1860,

in the fall

more

five

six

labor.

slave

them

The northern

Their goal was

later.

industrial

months of the war was

to set

all

that

of which

if it

would not

issued his preliminary Emancipation Procla-

158

to the

House of Representatives followed with

North.

The January

1,

1863 Emancipation

The

a vote of approval in

January 1865.

Many

of the paintings of African Americans during and

War

immediately after the Civil

families.

focused on the flight of slave

These images were often based on events

artists

had

witnessed while serving in the army or accompanying Union

The

treatment of escaped

had become

slaves

particularly volatile political issue in 1850, the year California

fifteen slave states.

The

this,

there were fifteen free states

addition of California threatened

to tip the balance in favor of the free states.

A compromise was

worked out between the North and the South

of escaped

slaves

reinforced by the

South.

the

to

that allowed

One element of this compromise

was the Fugitive Slave Act, which called

Union, even
he

Senate adopted the

the

1864,

lines.

declaring an end to slavery.

wanted

economy and

mation, he promised to leave slavery intact in the states that

came over

Amendment

fighting

more all-encompassing

California to join the Union.

dismantle the institution of slavery. As late as September

when he

and, in April

Thirteenth

for a

success

main aim during the

to preserve the
states

its

states

manufactured goods,

meant assuring the southern

1862,

declaration

and

joining

tariffs for

pushed

abolitionist forces

applied for statehood. Before

the southern states opposed. Lincoln's

early

Union

But

Lincoln's election to the presi-

economic expansion, wage labor, a free market

high protective

the North but said nothing about slaves behind

southern states seceded from the

control their agricultural economy, which relied for

on

in

sovereign nation that would allow them to

a separate,

still

forces.

But the singing and dancing could not keep down trouble
the South. After

Proclamation declared slaves free in those areas

for the forced return

This Act was further

Supreme Court's Dred

1857 which confirmed that a slave's arrival

Scott decision of
in the free

North

did not automatically give the slave his or her freedom. Three
justices also held that an African

slaves

had no rights as a U.S.

in court. It

was not

American descended from

citizen

until the Civil

and therefore no standing

War

and, in particular, the

January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that

North

signified

freedom

arrival in the

for slaves.

Eastman Johnson Old Kentucky Home

(Negro Life

in the

South) 1859. 36 x 45

(91.4 x 114.3)

AFRICAN

\l

I.

I)

II.

\\

!(>*)

Two examples of images depicting the flight

1

59

160

North are Eastman Johnson's

Slaves

(1867). Johnson's

from

1862-3) and Theodor Kaufmann's

(ca.

his earlier

the U.S. in the early 185()'s. In his painting

of slaves to the

Kaufmann

Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive

Ride for Liberty

is

On

American women and children, although

Liberty

to

anecdotal

strikingly different

Old Kentucky Home. In place of

meticu-

enjoying themselves, one finds

a sketchily

scene of flight from danger.

The

horse, along with the horse

itself,

against a gray, smoke-filled sky.

are

The

mere dark

southern plantations. This fleeing family,

141

Leutze's

Westward

the

Course

Union

on the

scene

silhouettes

like the

of Empire,

also

life

on

also

to

contains

Union Army

in 1861

writings, lectures,

170

and thus were

the

Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIVIL WAR

to the painting,

Army

left

boy

his shirt. lie

undoing the

so that her breasts are

of adult

men from

the group

male slaves were often conscripted

to

less likely to

work

as laborers during the

war

be fleeing with their families.

African Americans were also enlisted in the war effort by

in his

the North.

Munich and Hamburg before coming to

EASTMAN JOHNSON A

The absence

While the

provides some comic

to the right, the older

adds an element of voyeurism

partially revealed.

and paintings. German-born, he received

his artistic training in

159

and advocated the Union cause

in

children head toward

Kaufmann

group of children

by the Confederate
enlisted

much more

is

Rule for Liberty. Emerging out of a

women and

with tension,

attests to the fact that adult

Egypt.

Theodor Kaufmann (1814-after 1877)

blouse of the female slave to the far

Christian connotations, suggesting a parallel with the flight of

Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus

it

dragging the younger one along by the back of

scene in

to Liberty,

detailed rendering of costumes and facial

lines in the distant right of the painting.

is filled

relief in the

scene certainly belies the

southern claim that slave families were happy with their

its

features than Johnson's

rendered nighttime

faces of the family

in

dark forest, the group of

lously rendered anecdotal scene of slave families contentedly

On

creates a dramatic scene of the flight of African

the

ca.

first

There were two categories

in

which they appeared,

as "war contraband," or escaped slaves, the second as

1862-3. 22 x 26| (55.8 x 66.6)

160

THF.ODOR KAUFMANN On

to Liberty 1867.

36x56(91.4x142.2)

enlisted soldiers. In both capacities they carried out the

menial tasks of the war

effort,

troops, building roads, driving

more

including cooking for the

mule teams, and burying the

dead. Until 1864, African American soldiers were also paid

less

than white soldiers. While the institution of slavery

may

not have existed in the North, racism certainly did.

The

lives

of African Americans in the Union

home. Their

ment

and

eclectic clothing indicates their

their solemnity

not sullenness

if

physical and psychological distance between

viewer.

The image is a far cry from

them and the

slaves of earlier paintings.

Army were

Another stereoscopic view,

this

time produced by Taylor

As was the case with depictions of Native Americans,

American

photographs tended

"attempted

image of wartime

place-

the dancing, banjo-playing

and Huntington Publishers, shows the

to portray a starker

contraband

and

middle ground of the composition suggest both

in the

portrayed in both photographs and paintings or engravings.

soldier in
to

the

commit

The

fate

of an African

Union Army accused of having

rape on a white

woman"

near

whose name was Johnson,

experiences than paintings or engravings. During the war

Petersburg, Virginia.

many companies began producing sets of stereo views of the

war for the home front audiences. As photographic techno-

was

logy was

photograph, entitled Execution of a Colored Soldier (1864),

still

unable

aftermath of war. In

accompanied by

motion, most

to depict clearly objects in

of the photographs included scenes of

162

their

status,

many

a written

camp

life

or of the

cases each scene in the set was

explanation so that the viewing of

tried

soldier,

by courtmartial, found

information

is

guilty,

shows the dead

soldier hanging

from the

covered by a white cloth. Union soldiers

tree to the right.

and hanged.

All this

included on the back of the image.

The

The

scaffold, his face

rest in the

shade of a

descriptive paragraph on the back of the

"A

these images could constitute an educational experience.

photograph also included the following:

A Croup of "Contrabands" (ca. 1861 5) was produced by

the War Photograph and Exhibition Company. It shows a

of the Rebels, under a flag of truce, that we might be permitted

group of African American teamsters or mule drivers lined up

in front

of a large wagon and a shack which

is

described as

to

hang Johnson

lines.

The

in plain sight

made

of both armies, between the

request was granted, and this

him hanging where both armies can

AFRICAN Wll.RK \\S

request was

is

photograph of

plainly see him."

\\l> Till.

t.l\ II.

\\

\R

The
171

163

161

WlNSI.OYV

HOMER

Prisoners

From

educational value of this photograph lay in

freedom

for African

24x38(60.9x96.5)

the Front 1866.

its

assurance that

Americans would not be achieved

at the

expense of "white womanhood." While the description

suggests that Johnson was fairly tried, few,

were ever acquitted when charged with

person.

The

if

any, black

men

crime against a white

public display of his hanging for both armies also

suggests that the white

men on both sides of the war saw this as

an occasion for racist entertainment.

The

of African American

life

captured by the

was born
was

in

filled

Boston

men

up work

fine artist in

836 and grew up

camp was

at a

time

1859

at the
first

National

Homer joined

the

year.

reproduced
164

One

After the

He was
in

also

1863

of campaign sketches which were

in lithographic

Homer produced was Bivouac

which appeared

discussed in Chapter

by Davis
6.

as a

is

life

similar to the scene

for Harper's

Weekly that was

This time, however, an African

American, rather than Native Americans, dances around the

fire for

the pleasure of the white

all

African

Union

soldiers.

Homer

has

of the stereotypes then in place for the depiction of

Americans

shabbily

the

Such

antics

clothed

high-stepping

and physiognomical distortions had become even

more entrenched
minstrel

both popular and fine art imagery with the

in

introduction in the

show,

840's of a

and

its

Performed by white men

and broad, grinning

lips

wood engraving

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIVIL WAR

in

new genre of entertainment,

subsequent
in black face,

widespread

the

success.

with tattered clothes

painted on their faces, minstrel shows

were, according to the art historian Albert Boime, "a white

fantasy projected

upon black people

familiar vision of the grinning black

through thick and thin had

form.

of the earliest images

Fire on the Potomac,

172

He was

Union campaign

Weekly.

later

The image

fiddler sitting at the edge of the fire playing for the dancer.

commissioned by the publishers Louis Prang and Co.

to design sets

drawn eight years

As was the

one focuses on camp

when the city

Academy of Design, where

an artist-reporter for Harper's

rather than the battle front.

this

dancer with corkscrew curls, and the grinning, fat-lipped

and then training as

work the following

outbreak of the Civil War,

and 1864

also

21, 1861 issue of Harper's Weekly.

most of his war images,

Homer

1910).

lithography shop in the mid-1 850's before

as a freelance illustrator

he exhibited his

as

in

with abolitionist debates and controversy.

apprenticed in
taking

in

December

case with

utilized

Winslow Homer (1836

artist

the

no wonder
who

the safe,

could 'hoof

it

off

powerful and lasting appeal for

American whites."

An

even more grotesque caricature of the dancing African

149

165

American appears

Homer's lithograph Our Jolly Cook

in

(1863), while the grinning musician, this time a banjo player,

is

found once again

Inviting

entitled

in his

1864 painting of Confederate forces

Shot before Petersburg,

adopting such stereotypes,

Homer

Virginia.

By

162

War Photograph and

"Contrabands"

ca.

Exhibition

Company A Group of

1861-5.

163 Taylor and Huntington Publishers Execution of a Colored Soldier

1864.

reinforced the subservient

place of African Americans (and their satisfaction with this

whether as contraband, enlisted men, or slave laborers,

place),

within both the

One

Union and Confederate Armies.

of Homer's

first

moves away from such

stereotypical

depictions of African Americans during the Civil War, a

direction he
166

would increasingly

follow, can be

small painting The Bright Side (1865).

mule

five

against the
is

visible,

drivers, four of

sunny

whom

side of a tent.

The

found

in his

painting depicts

are caught asleep, leaning

Only the head of the

appearing out of the opening

claims to have sketched the scene from

man
Homer
fifth man
fifth

in the tent.

life,

with the

appearing from inside the tent just as he had finished drawing

the

first

When

four.

the painting was

first

exhibited at the

Brooklyn Art Association's Spring Exhibition

and

at

the National

April of the

same

in

year,

it

in

received favorable critical and

popular reviews. This favorable opinion was at

responsible for

March 1865

Academy of Design Annual Exhibition

Homer's acceptance

into the

least in part

Academy

in

May

1865.
Critics praised

and
lazy,

its

The Bright Side

"humor." One

critic

nodding donkeys, the

for

both

wrote:

"The

lazy,

lolling

its

"truthfulness"

lazy sunlight, the

negroes,

make

humorously conceived and truthfully executed picture." For

this critic,

and

for

many

others, a "truthful" depiction of

AFRICAN AMERICANS \\ I)

II

(1

1.

\\

\R

173

164

Winsi.ow

Potomac

86 1.

Homer A Bivouac Fire on the

131 x 20 (34.') x 50.8)
i

165

Winsi.ow

Homer

Our Jolly Cook

1863.

13Jx lit (35.2x28)

African Americans was, inherently, humorous. According to

the teamsters, complicating elements are also there that

the scholar Robert F. Lucid, "the convention was that

require

negro, as such, was funny."

He was

also lazy, despite

ample

more than

the central teamster

chuckle in response."
is

The

direct gaze of

one such complicating element. The

men as closely observed

record of the often brutal labor that was involved in the work

depiction of all five

of a teamster. Teamsters were frequently compared with the

than stock characters

mules they drove, animals regularly described

abandons the physiognomical stereotypes of African Ameri-

gent, stubborn

and

despite, again,

lazy,

as unintelli-

evidence to the

contrary.

The

critical

response to The Bright Side shows

how

critics

often see what they want to see, rather than necessarily what

Many

there.

viewing this painting did not want to give up

their stereotypes.

tent door

The man whose head

was repeatedly described

despite his serious expression

recalls those

and

appears through the

comic and grinning,

as

direct gaze, a gaze that

of the teamsters in the photograph

"Contrabands," taken around the same time

composing
this piece.
tales
a

his scene.

Not

that

humor

Homer was undoubtedly

is

of teamsters and their mules and

of philosophical playfulness in the

But

it

The Bright Side

Group of

Homer was
from

totally absent

quite aware of the comic

knew

that painting such

scene would produce a few laughs. There

surface,

is

is

also an

element

of the painting.

title

On the

sunny side of the

refers to the

tent.

could also be read as a commentary on the occupation of

the five

Union

men and

their physical location.

forces behind

a slave in the

Union

lines

Driving mules for

was preferable

cotton fields of the South, although

have been well aware of the

were often immediately

fact that

killed if

to laboring as

Homer must

contraband teamsters

captured by Confederate

forces.

According to the
seemingly

174

racist

art

historian

humor can be found

Marc Simpson,
in

"if a

Homer's painting of

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIVIL WAR

is

individuals rather

another. However, while

Homer

166

WlNSLOW HOMER

cans, he
to

still

them

in a setting that

allowed most viewers

deny the individuality of the figures

in

favor of the

that

acknowledges the presence of African Americans

who fought
War. Once Lincoln's

Union

soldiers

in

many

as active-

of the major battles of the

generalizing stereotypes.

Civil

who covered the Civil War for Harper's

Weekly was Thomas Nast (1840-1902), best known for his

of African Americans

scathing political cartoons of the late nineteenth century. Born

records indicate that approximately 185,000 African Ameri-

Another

in

artist

Germany, he came

Kaufmann,

U.S.

to the

later entering the

in

1846 and studied with

National

Academy of Design.

the

numbers

joining

in the

initial

resistance to the enlistment

Union Army had been overcome,

up increased throughout the war.

Official

cans joined the Union Army. Over 200,000 African American

civilians also

worked

in

Union camps. Historians now agree

numbers of African Americans

After working for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly and the

that the presence of such large

New York

in the

northern Ibices turned the tide against the Confederate

Army

in

Weekly

167

places

The Bright Side 1865. 13Jx 17^(33.7x44.4)

Illustrated News,

in the

Nast was engaged by Harper's

summer of 1862

to cover the Civil

War. In 1865

1864 and 1865.

The

African American in the center

he produced an image that was strikingly different from the

foreground of Nast's drawing, therefore,

majority of portrayals of African Americans during the war.

pleasure of Shaw,

Entrance of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment

at

into Charleston,

South Carolina, February

shows the volunteer

all-black

Fifty-fifth

21,

1865 (1865)

Regiment from

who

The

is

into

graphically present

in

the ruins towering over the regiment, ruins that are remini-

many burned-out

scent

Robert Gould Shaw. Nast's drawing

photographs taken

one of the few images

for the

American regiment

price of their victory

Massachusetts under the leadership of the white Colonel

is

dancing not

confronts him on horseback, but in joy

the arrival of the heroic African

Charleston.

is

of the

\IKI( \\

at

buildings

that

tilled

the

the end of the war. Indeed, there

WI1KU \\S

WO

III!

l\ II. \\

\R

is

ITS

speculation that Nast's drawing

is

based, at least in part, on a

During the

War

Civil

over half a million slaves fled the

South. Four million remained, yet

many

before

it

was only

matter of time

of them would also escape to the North.

African American activist and scholar

W.

E.

DuBois

13.

them, use them to

fight the

must help them

to

General Ulysses
five

S.

North

that the

defend slavery as

General Robert E. Lee chose the

Grant

at

was never

politicians

officially

it

slaves, free

to the

war

after the

had before.

latter route,

marked.
the

alter a battle. In mart)

restored in the South, white

new ways

the

left,

The vanquished kneel

guarded by members

The

A good example

7505(1810).

significant

Homer but he has made certain

To the left of center stand threewho have just surrendered. Two Union

alterations.

Confederate soldiers

soldiers stand to the right

and

is

behind

just

Union

officer.

at a distance are
flag.

this

group. Facing

He

stands alone,

more Union

They all stand

the advancing armies for firewood and

to

as the

men were
Many

office.

The Confederate soldiers have indicated their surrender by

rifles on the ground. They do not, however, bow
down in submission. The prisoner closest to the Union officer
stands defiantly, hand on hip, staring directly at his

and

new

laws and organized groups such as the

Klan (founded

in 1866) to terrorize

prevent them from exercising their

the

positions. Discrimi-

Union Army remained

were protected to

a certain

in the

Ku

Klux

African Americans and

new freedoms. As long

as

South, African Americans

degree from these attacks. But in

Union

counterpart. Both appear to be in their twenties or thirties.

Rights Act of 1875. Southern whites, however, did not accept

these

the most submissive of the three, standing with his.

is

hands clasped

in front

of him.

To

the

left

of the old

man

hands

in his pockets, the slightly

face belying his attempt at nonchalance. It

Confederate soldier

who

is

dominates, however.

the defiant

He

occupies

prisoners,

if

southern Democrats

enough

electoral college votes for

him

to

become

1883 the Civil Rights Act was nullified by the

which found the Act unconstitutional.

with a

Supreme Court

by precedent,
white

if

all

It

president. In

Supreme Court,

was replaced

in

decision allowing railroads, and thus,

the segregated facilities were "equal."

By 1900

all

southern states had written into law the disenfranchisement

and segregation of blacks.

Homer produced
176

number of

their

two guards and the Union

positioned above the others.

level in a horizontal

They are all arranged on

band across the

the

officer

is

same

the

front of the picture plane,

the high horizon line cutting through the head of each figure,

locking

them

in place.

While the painting was well received when

896

other public services, to segregate black and

worried expression on his

which Republicans agreed not

would give the Republican presidential candidate Hayes

is

very young man, probably in his teens, standing with his

the center of the painting. Yet none of the figures

to interfere with the reestab-

The

ages.

white hair

1877 troops were withdrawn as part of a larger political deal in

lishment of white control of the South

the

placing their

The other two prisoners are of markedly different

old man in the middle sports a full white beard and

and federal

barren

facilitate

nation in the use of public facilities was outlawed by the Civil

local, state,

soldiers

in a

movement of troops.

Reconstruction Period, education was opened to African

were elected to

Gros's

by

maintained

been

4,

is

landscape, the young trees and bushes having been cleared by

known

South, and African American

The

general outlines of this compositional scheme have'

with their horses and a Division

given the vote and allowed to run for political

clearly

of the victorious army.

The Capitulation of Madrid, December

the Confederate soldiers

In the decade after the end of the Civil War,

is

bow down on

or dramatically

his military retinue.

although behind him

IMAGES OF RECONSTRUCTION:
PRISONERS FROM THE FRONT AND
VISIT FROM THE OLD MISTRESS

such as the campaigns of

victor stands to the right surveying the vanquished, often

1865,

9,

subservience of African Americans.

in the

](>l

which generally take place

Napoleon, the designation of victor and vanquished

surrounded by

surrendering to

Appomattox on April

counterparts in the South to reinforce in

Americans

This

work draws upon the well-established compositional convenbetween the vanquished and the victor

the North did, in fact, collude with their

in

the Front, painted in 1866.

tions of confrontation scenes,

days before the assassination of President Lincoln. While

slavery

One such

"reconstruct" the South.

to

From

Prisoners

to specific military enterprises,

its

bondsmen; or they could surrender

as

is

The

North and thereafter no longer

North with the assumption

painting

major European paintings of confrontation scenes connected

make terms with

Either the south must

them

accommodations produced by the end of the

later

wrote in Black Reconstruction (1935):

treat

the tensions and

war and by the attempt

photograph.

at the

National

it

was exhibited

Academy of Design Annual Exhibition in 1866

and, along with The Bright Side, at the Paris

World Exposition

of 1867, critics had some difficulty categorizing the work.

it

Was

a figure painting, a genre painting, or a history painting?

History paintings usually contained symbolic representations

paintings which addressed

IMAGES OF RECONSTRUCTION

of lofty ideals or permanent truths or, at the very

least,

167

THOMAS NAST

Entrance of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment into Charleston, South Carolina, February 21, 1865

865.

14| x l\\

(36.2x53.9)

commemorated

particular victories or heroes. Prisoners

the Front does

none of these

things.

recognizable as General Francis

whom

cousin of Homer's
the war,

The Union

Channing Barlow,

he had visited

From

privilege of being

commemorated

is

a factual

recording of one event that took place during

was

officer is

the war. In this sense

a distant

anecdotal genre painting.

at the front early in

but the identity of the Confederate soldiers

unknown. The taking of prisoners

simply

is

usually only accorded the

in paint if the prisoners are

it

It

a history painting rather

was seen

as a history painting for

other reasons as well. In an 1869 article entitled "Historical

Art in the United States," the art

critic

Eugene Benson argued

that history painting should not be about events before the

painter's

lifetime

but should

with

deal

events

that

high-ranking and well-known figures, such as in Fhe Sur-

contemporaneous. History painting should "give us

render oj General Burgoyne at Saratoga, October 16, 1777 (ca.

shall

1822) by the American artist

certain

John Trumbull (1756-1843). In

ways Trumbull's painting more closely follows

European confrontation scene conventions,

it

yet like

Homer's

downplays the distinction between the victor and the

become

What, then,
Civil

War

the

in

complete

break

with

of

the terms under which

England,
in a

or

intended to be so."

the two sides would conduct

the nature of

From

lite

Iomer's commentary on the

Front'?

The

for

Benson) wrote the following

New York

Fretting Post regarding the

however, did sec Prisoners From

critic

Sordello

in April

(a

1866 for

meaning of the

painting:

On

the one side the hard, firm-faced

New England man,

without bluster, and with the dignity of a

symbolic commentary on the Civil

He

example of such

renegotiation

business.

Many critics,

is

in Prisoners

between the North and the South, the American Revolution

not

is

as a perfect

are

art that

history painting.

pseudonym

subjugation of one country by another, but

historical; not art that

saw Prisoners From the Front

vanquished and the drama of the scene. As with the war

resulted

than an

lite

War as a whole

Front as

rather than

life

animated bj

principle, confronting the audacious, reckless

impudent

young Virginian, capable of heroism, because capable of

l\l

Uil.S

()!

RE(

ONSTRl

H)\

17:

impulse, but incapable of endurance because too ardent to

not completely sketched

be patient; next to him the poor, bewildered old man,

that

perhaps a spy, with his furtive look

poor white," stupid,

stolid,

back of him "the

yielding

helpless,

magnetism of superior natures and incapable of

authority.

Mr. Homer

know why

resisting

shows us the North and South

confronting each other; and looking

easy to

the

to

at his facts,

The

the South gave way.

resistance was ignorance, typified

very-

it is

basis of its

"poor white,"

in the

its

front was audacity and bluster, represented by the young

Virginian

two very poor

things to confront the quiet,

reserved, intelligent, slow, sure North, represented by the

prosaic face and firm figure and

unmoved

look of the

Union

it is

is

his presentation

possible, at first glance, to read this figure as a white

shadow. Yet there

soldier cast in

shadow.

So unfinished

in.

The

no source

is

such

for

bodies of the Confederate prisoners are the only

possible source visible in the painting and their positioning

makes such

complete blocking out of the sun impossible.

Recent x-radiographs of the painting reveal

was absent from

after the

ground

same

Confederate prisoners had been

filled in

that this soldier

lomer's original composition.

Is

American?

this soldier, therefore, African

was added

le

and the brow n

laid in

around them, but he was not worked up

in

the

remains

detail as the other figures. Instead, the face

marked by the color of the brown ground. Perhaps Homer had

intended to create an obviously white counterpart of the other

officer.

Union guard. Yet

who remarked on

Sordello was not the only critic

the

in the

painting he submitted as "finished"

Academy of Design

to the National

in

866, the soldier behind

contrasting class and breeding of the central characters.

the prisoners remained dark-skinned and only faintly articu-

Another commented that "the Southern

lated.

Northern

officer

are

representing

contrasted,

well

and the

officer

very

accurately the widely differing classes to which they belong."

The main

more

characters in the painting were thus read

as

types than as individuals, and, as types, they were "keys" to

the

meaning and causes, and ultimately the outcome, of the

Civil

War. The defiant Confederate soldier

in the center

of the

painting thus represents the defiance of the South in the face

of defeat by the North.

The Union

officer's

contemplative

gaze, in turn, represents the North's evaluation of how best to

deal with this implacable southern defiance. According to one

"the

critic,

men

are both young; they both understand each

other." In 1888 another wrote that "the influence of this

picture was strong on the side of brotherly feeling."

was

It

this

Union
tary

on the war and

would provide
Americans

reference to the presence of African

Union

forces

and

to the extent to

however, the confrontation

between

American

slaves.

woman

is

is

located indoors and takes place

woman and

white

In

her former female African

From

Visit

the

Old Mistress (1876) the

Union

dressed, like the

officer in Prisoners

the Front, in black. In addition, as in Prisoners

Front, she confronts three adult figures.

like at least

ragged clothing. Homer's manner of execution

supposedly fought

1865 and
Prisoners

1866, the years in which

From

name

the Civil

African Americans. As

the Front, vagrancy

Homer was

early as

creating

and apprenticeship laws

From

The former

concessions to northern industrialists and politicians. Those

out in this deal were those in whose

which they

The second painting by Homer that addresses the Civil

War and its aftermath is also a confrontation scene. This time,

whites to maintain political and economic control through

who lost
War was

would

commen-

aftermath. In other words, the figure

its

a subtle

in the

North and the South.

From

be created that allowed southern

American

Confederate prisoners

the

would be sold out by "brotherly" negotiations between the

between the North and the South discussed

A new Union would

behind

soldier

heighten the symbolic significance of the work as

white

above.

applying the general form of the figure, he

after

realized that the ghostly presence of an African

"understanding" and "brotherly feeling" that ultimately led

to the deal struck

Perhaps

the

slaves,

two of the Confederate prisoners, are dressed

"unfinished"

in this painting

costume of the white woman. This

to the African

in

even more

than in Prisoners From the Front,

although the greatest finish appears

compare her

is

is

in the face

and upper

particularly evident if we

American woman

closest to her

were being passed by southern legislatures (the Black Codes)

whom

which restricted the rights of freedmen.

of the Union guard in the earlier painting, are only barely

Does Homer represent

betrayal of African Americans

figure

who could

War the
painting? The one

this aspect of the Civil

in his

possibly function as such

is

the dark-skinned

soldier standing behind the three prisoners.

He

figure in the foreground of the composition

features are not clearly articulated.

There

is,

is

the only

whose

facial

instead, merely

the faintest suggestion of eyes, nose and mouth. Indeed, the

facial features

are

178

more

of the figures in the distant right background

clearly discernible.

Even the boots of the

IMAGES OF RECONSTRUCTION

soldier are

she confronts directly, whose facial features, like those

articulated. Indeed, this adult

woman

the guard not only in her schematic

also in the shape

in front

of her echoes

manner of execution, but

and positioning of her head. If the African

American has emerged from the shadows of the Confederacy,

therefore,

it is

as a

woman

in the

home

rather than a

man on

the battlefield.

What
here?

is

Who

the nature of the confrontation being depicted

is

the victor and

who

the vanquished?

the painting might suggest that the

women on

The

title

of

the left are the

168

68

WlNSLOW HOMER A

Mistress 1876.

victors.

The

From

Visit

Old

the

18 x 2-H (45.7 x 61.3)

white

woman

is,

after

the "old" mistress. Yet

all,

"old" could also be read as referring to the age of the woman,

for her hair

white

woman

slight smile

distinctly gray. In compositional terms, the

is

located in the position of the victor.

is

on her face and looks directly

front of her. Yet, as in Prisoners

From

at the

She has

women

the Front, there

is

in

no

show of obeisance on the part of the African American

women. Rather, there

is

sense of suspicion and

a distinct

mistrust, particularly visible in the gesture

and

expres-

facial

woman on the far left. In historical terms,

the African American women are the victors. This was 1876,
over a decade since the end of the Civil War and of the
institution of slavery. The fact that the woman on the left
sion of the seated

remains seated rather than rising

woman

is a

entrance of the white

at the

now

sign of the changed relations that

women and

between white

their

former

slaves.

existed

Yet the

following year northern and southern politicians struck their

deal to put

Hayes

Reconstruction.

in the
It

White House, thus

was

fitting

that

effectively

this

deal

ending

was made

immediately following the nation's centennial celebrations,

for

it

marked

fathers,"

1876 issue of Harper's Weekly. Eytinge,

was one of

engraving

up scenes from "the good old days" when

their place

their masters

Jr.'s

August

of similar images that appeared in the

a series

1870's calling

knew

in the

slaves

and appreciated the benevolent gestures of

and mistresses. The engraving

also

marks the

hierarchy that existed within the slave community, with the

personal servant of the master distinguished by dress and
attitude.

In creating an enclosed, almost claustrophobic, space for

the

women

in

Visit

From

Old

the

Mistress,

Homer

acknowledges the intimate nature of the contact between

white
for

women and

them

the African

American

slaves

who worked
men also

mansions. While white

in the plantation

had personal servants, most of their contact with African

American
places of

women,

slaves occurred in the fields or potteries or other

work separate from the home. The world of white

particularly middle- or upper-class white

the nineteenth century, was the home.

sphere that white

women

It

was

women

in

the domestic

in

exerted their control

over

their

many of whom had owned slaves. From this point

made by African Americans over the previous

servants engaged in tasks that directly involved the health and

would be systematically dismantled.

children.

cut victory or defeat in

of a white

woman

Visit

slave-holding period, as

same year

as

From

the

is

visits

were

is

no clear-

Old Mistress. Even the

to her slaves' quarters

an act of capitulation. Such

the

which appeared

children and over their African American servants. These

Like Prisoners From the Front, therefore, there

visit

19,

Jr.,

"founding

a reaffirmation of the interests of the

on, the gains

ten years

Years Ago, by Sol Eytinge,

cannot be read as

common

in the earlier

indicated in an engraving produced

Homer's painting,

'irginia

One Hundred

wellbeing of the family

As

is

servants often
charges,

if

cooking, cleaning, and

suggested

in

became the

not of the older

raising the

Uncle Tom's Cabin, household

friends

of their young white

members

of the household. Such

friendships created the basis for an understanding of the

inequities of slavery

whole.

The

and

willingness to end slaver]

potential for understanding

appeared to be greater

\l

in

.1

between the two races

the female sphere of the

U.I.N

as

OF RECONSTRl

TIO\

home.

179

i6>
I7J

170

Harriet Hosmer

HARRIET HOSMER

Height

therefore, than in the

male spheres of business and

Yet the potential for violence was also great

indicated by the

numerous beatings of household

by the attempts made by these same

murder

in the

their masters

forced

the

slaves

and mistresses. While the work of the

a constant surveillance

wearing of

continuous

according to Lerone Bennett,

Jr.,

field slave,

of slaves refused to play the

public

mask.

Yet,

court records of the mid-

game of

neither smile nor bow. Other slaves

deliberately

it

by whites that

nineteenth century "yield ample evidence that a large

smile." Others

as

and

slaves, often successful, to

household slave was generally lighter than the

was accompanied by

politics.

home,

bowed and smiled

number

slavery: they

would

bowed but would not

but, at the

same

time,

sabotaged the system from within, breaking

utensils or staging

slowdowns. The close proximity of the

female figures in Homer's painting and their demeanors

suggest both the potential for understanding and the potential
for

harm. The physical and psychological distance between

the white and African

American women, while

tension and mistrust,

also bridgable

is

by

with

filled

a single gesture.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTIST AT

HOME AND ABROAD: EDMONIA LEWIS
AND HENRY OSAWA TANNER
As was mentioned

earlier,

to bridge this distance

many

white abolitionists attempted

by encouraging and supporting the

educational and professional pursuits of African Americans.

artist who
The sculptor Edmonia Lewis

Robert Duncanson was one African American

benefited from such patronage.
(ca.

1845-after 1909) was another. Born in upstate

in the early 1840's

African American father, Lewis

ISO

New

York

of a Chippewa Indian mother and an

originally

named Wild-

EDMONIA LEWIS AND HENRY OSAWA TANNER

Beatrice Cenci 1857.

x41J x 17 (43.8 x 104.7x43.1)

4')

(124.5)

Zenobia in Chains 1859.

fire

was orphaned

at four

and raised by her mother's

tribe

was twelve. At thirteen, with the help of her brothers

until she

and of various

Young Ladies

abolitionists, she entered the

Preparatory Department of Oberlin College, adopting the

name of Mary Edmonia Lewis. While

Christian

at Oberlin,

Lewis was accused of attempting to poison two of her white

Brought

schoolmates and of stealing.

to

was

she

trial,

defended by the well-known African American lawyer John

Mercer Langston, and acquitted of

charges. Yet she was

all

not allowed to graduate and, with the help of the abolitionist

William Lloyd Garrison, settled in Boston where she came

Edward

into contact with the sculptor

Brackett.

He

lent her

Anne

sculpture fragments to copy and, along with the sculptor

Whitney, helped her develop her

Lewis's

first

skills as

an

artist.

works were busts and medallions of various

and heroes, including Garrison, Charles

abolitionist leaders

Sumner, Maria Weston Chapman and Colonel Shaw. The

portrait of Shaw (1865) impressed his family

group of friends
each.

to

buy

hundred copies

who

organized

This money, and the help of her benefactors the

family, allowed

Lewis

to finance a trip to Italy in 1865,

she joined the group of

women

Story-

where

Rome around

gathered in

the

American sculptor Harriet Hosmer. These women went

Europe

in search

and trained carvers who would teach

They were encouraged by

case with Lewis, friends

them

financially.

liberal

parents or, as was the

could wholly or partly support

and devoted

single

not only with

In

rebellion.

1857

Hosmer had carved

was

the

a late-sixteenth-century

with her mother Lucretia, killed

women

were condemned to death and beheaded, despite numerous

Hosmer shows Beatrice

execution, having come to terms

pleas for clemency.

asleep the night

before her

with her actions

in chains,

years

later

The Greek Slave's prurient,

to

than one
the

new

critic

Hiram Powers'

tions,

Hosmer produced Zenobia

in

Chains

Zenobia was the third-century Queen of Palmyra who

women

Americans against the

Woman and Her

male-defined institu-

to the struggles of African

institution of slavery in the U.S.

Child (now

titled

and personal

political

men and

against

Lewis turned her attention

Originally

More

womanhood."

ideal of

While Hosmer focused on the

struggles of

nudity.

if allegorical,

lost)

She

Rome, The Freed

and Forever Free (1867).

The Morning of

Forever

Liberty,

Free

was defeated and captured by the Romans. Hosmer presents

attempts to capture the emotional impact on African Ameri-

her defeat; she gathers up her

can slaves of Lincoln's proclamation, on the morning of

Zenobia

as

noble and resolute

in

chains along with her robe, grasping

as she
in

contemplates her future.

the U.S. in 1863,

it

them firmly

for a

historian
in

country

in the throes

Whitney Chadwick notes

striking

contrast

to

hand

When the statue was exhibited

was received with great enthusiasm

example of moral rectitude and resistance

symbol

in her

of

that

as an

to defeat, a fitting-

a civil

war.

The

art

Hosmer's work stood

another equally

well-known and

January
still

1,

1863, that

all

persons held as slaves

fighting the North) "are,

free."

A woman,

the manacle

still

(in those areas

and henceforward

be,

shall

around her ankle, kneels and

clasps her hands in thanksgiving while a

her,

man

stands above

one hand on her shoulder, the other raised and holding

pro mush attached

the manacle and chains that had been

his ankle.

Another manacle remains attached

EDMONIA

171

lauded Hosmer's figure as an embodiment of

created two works on this subject while in

through prayer.

Two
(1859).

woman

as captives, but "Zenobia's resolute dignity stands as a rebuke

her abusive and tyrannical father Francesco. Both

170

popular sculpture of a

examples of images that addressed the issues of

Roman noblewoman who,

fate

The Greek Slave 1846

1843 original). Height 65J (166.4)

(1805-73) The Greek Slave (1843). Both figures are presented

reclining Beatrice Cenci. Cenci

and

HIRAM POWERS

Rome, but

and

slavery

171

(after

their

endeavors.

Hosmer (1830-1908) provided Lewis

supportive environment within which to work in

also with

169

who

Almost all remained

lives to their artistic

Harriet

to

of good marble, historical collections of

Classical sculpture,

them.

at fifteen dollars

I.I.W IS

AM) Ill.\m OS

\\\

to

to his wrist.

\\\1

1S1

172

172

EDMONIA LEWIS

(104.8x27.9x

173 EDMONIA LEWIS Hagarinthe Wilderness

(133.6x38.8x43.4)

Forever Free 1867. 41^x11

17.8)

however, indicating that freedom has yet to be

fully achieved.

as field

52jx 15J x

it

17

workers and domestic workers, but also as sexual

Both gaze upward, acknowledging the existence and help of a

servants by their white male masters. Lewis chose to focus her

higher power

artistic

(it

was around

this

time that Lewis converted to

The subservient position of the woman in

Forever Free

have been a subtle commentary on the struggles that

for African

American women within

Such struggles paled

African American

182

attention

on

at

least

one subject

in

combination of racism and sexism was present.

Catholicism).

in

their

lay

own community.

comparison, however, to the

women

in slavery,

may

ahead

who were used

fate

of

not only

EDMONIA LEWIS AND HENRY OSAWA TANNER

completing Forever Free, she produced Hagar

ness

(1868),

tribute

to

the

Abraham's wife Sarah, who was

Egyptian

which

this

year after

in the

Wilder-

maidservant of

cast into the desert to escape

the rage of Sarah after having borne

parallel to the situation of African

Abraham

a child.

American women

The

in the

173

U.S.

is

Lewis wrote,

clear.

strong sympathy for

in reference to this

women who

all

work, "I have

have struggled and

1916 the African American writer Freeman Henry

Morris Murray wrote of Forever Free and of the time

it

which

in

re-enslavement,

Reaction
.

had almost said

Miss Lewis and "her people" had

Emancipation which had risen

reached

felt

it.

had

Amendment

Her manners

prohibiting slavery. But already

The Sun

of

was being

it

and abundant.

is
.

and most winning and

the proud spirit of her Indian ancestor,

she has more of the African in her personal

if

appearance, she has more of the Indian in her character.

1863, had seemingly-

in

are child-like, simple

She has

pleasing.

type, black, straight

set

zenith in 1865 with the passage of the 13th

its

below the medium height, her com-

plexion and features betray her African origin; her hair

and

had been executed:

in.

is

more of the Indian

suffered."

In

Edmonia Lewis

Thus, despite the

fact that

and an accomplished
was

written, she
attributes

still

Lewis was

artist at

in her late twenties

the time this description was

seen as childlike, winning and pleasing,

which made her success and independence

and single

woman

men and

as an

obscured by the clouds. Already the sheriffs handcuffs

artist

were taking the place of the former master's chains; already

women who

the chaingang stockade was supplanting the old slave

inity" even as they entered professions previously closed to

pen

The freedwoman was

being told that

better for her children, even in

"separate" schools; and

conveyances and

would be

late 1860's

Rome and made

and early

only brief

the "proud"

Native American and the "child-like" African American

in

She was gravely assured

wonder, therefore, that despite

It is little

to those

believed in the need to maintain their "femin-

them. Bullard also combines two stereotypes

in all

of this.
174

throughout the

threatening to

accept "separation" on public

in public places.

was no degradation nor detriment

that there

it

the North, to go to

less

'70's,

growing reputation

Lewis remained

EDMONIA

Lf.WIS Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter

1872. Height 27(68.6)

in

the U.S. to promote her

visits to

work. In October 1869 she visited Boston to present Forever

Free to the Reverend L. A. Grimes at

Tremont Temple. In

1873 she traveled to California where five of her works were

exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association.

Boston

in

She was

in

1876 around the time of the Philadelphia Centennial

Exposition, which included her Death of Cleopatra (1876).

According

to

Boime, she "often took her show on the road,

participating in western fairs to avoid the competition in

York and

setting

up booths

in

the

New

form of wigwams,

emphasizing the links between the West and her Native

American heritage." She

74

also created at least

two small works

marble directly addressing her Native American heritage,

in

one of which

is

Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter

(1872).

Lewis's financial success attested to her

the type and quality of

buying public

in the late

producing
art-

nineteenth century. Yet, even in

Rome, she was continually confronted by

art

skill at

work expected by the American

the prejudices of an

world accustomed to acknowledging only male members of

the white race.

She was often viewed

as a novelty, as "exotic"

because of her gender, her dress (often described as

nish") and her skin color.
negress,

"man-

Henry James described her

whose colour, picturesquely contrasted with

as "a

that of

her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame." In

other words, her success was the result, not of her artistic
talent,
trast

but of her novelty, which James sees in terms of a con-

between her dark

she worked.

The

critic

skin and the white marble in which

Laura Curtis

Billiard

wrote

in 1871:

l.l)\l()\l

I.I.W IS

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OS

\\\

T WM'.R

183

175

THOMAS EAKINS

Will Schuster and Black

her patronizing description of the

Man

Going Shooting (Rail Shooting) 1876. 22^ x 30^

known of

artist. Little is

(56.2 x 76.1

whatever the color of their

Tanner's father was

skin.

Lewis' career after the mid-1880's. She disappeared from

writer and intellectual, producing

exhibition records and art journals and

Methodism (1867),

the last printed

reference to her appears to have been in the Catholic Rosary

magazine, which noted

in

1909 that she was aging but

"still

with us."

life in

Tanner was born

with his family

and

in

Pittsburgh and

when he was

later a bishop, in the

who

spent most of his

a child.

first

His father was

The independent

movement began

founding of the

moved

to Philadelphia
a minister,

African Methodist Episcopal Church

(A.M.E.), founded in 1816.

can church

artist

Europe was Henry Osawa Tanner (1859-1937).

in

the late

African Ameri-

1770's with the

African Baptist churches in South

the

Negro's Origins and Is the Negro Cursed? (1869).

later

gathering place for

leading African American

many of

intellectuals

stern belief in the Christian

God and

as a unifying force in the African

in the

American community, one

which could help achieve the dignity of

184

power of religion

all

human

beings,

EDMONIA LEWIS AND HENRY OSAWA TANNER

also

and

the country's

politicians.

Tanner entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

1880

in

order to study with

had achieved

in

Thomas Eakins (1844 1916), who

widespread reputation as a painter of portraits

and genre scenes. Yet the

latter

were not the nostalgic revivals

of antebellum or preindustrial America that had become

political

Tanner a

He was

founded the A.M.E. Church Review. The Tanner

household was

popular after the Civil War, when the

instilled in

the

newspaper the Christian Recorder and

century, providing a source of spiritual, political and educa-

and leadership. His father

between

schisms

Carolina and continued to grow throughout the nineteenth

tional strength

a prolific

Apology for African

African American and white Methodist churches, and The

editor of the A.M.E.'s

Another African American

adult

describing

An

upheavals caused

many

social,

to wish

economic, and

for a

return to

"simpler" times. Eakins eschewed the more popular anecdotal rural scenes

and chose, instead,

to focus

and on an emerging socioeconomic group

middle

class.

He was

on the present

the professional

particularly interested in the

work and

176

THOMAS EAKINS

Negro Boy Dancing

18x 22f(46x57.7)

1878.

leisuretime pursuits of the

men

of this class, painting images

of surgeons in the midst of operations and

on the Schuylkill River

sculling

He

collaborated

also

Muybridge

Eakins included

African

One such

painting

paintings.

still

photography

Americans
is

in

several

Eakins

by many white middle-class

skill,

employment of

and

another

discipline.

figure

is

aiming

is

rowing

in

activity

African American has been

is

the

in this instance, is

the painting, the

fired gun.

named only

in

While the

terms of his race,

rendered suggests that he,

is

like the

earlier

room containing two

a small oval portrait

chairs, a small

on the

wall.

The

younger man, probably

man

at the apex.

in his teens,

To the left sits

playing a banjo, while

on the right the youngest figure dances. Again, each figure's

physical features and clothing are carefully rendered. So, too,

face of the old

man, the

The

banjo player.

silent

the tight-lipped

encouragement on that of the

three figures constitute a self-contained,

self-supporting unit. As in Will Schuster and Black Man,

concentrate intensely on the task at hand.

room

The

allows us to focus on the actions and attitudes of

inhabitants.

all

bareness of the
its

While the top hat and cane on the chair suggest

that this private lesson will lead to a public performance, for

the

moment

the concern

is

learning

knowledge from one generation

Education, both

skill,

passing on

to the next.

formal schooling and informal trans-

mission of cultural traditions, was of utmost importance to

Negro Boy Dancing, originally

is

Study of Negroes (1878),

Will Schuster and Black Man and
titled

exhibited in that year's American Society of Painters of Water

in

bench, and

with the old African American

a

a portrait

Another painting by Eakins depicting African Americans

Color Exhibition

from

concentration of the youngest boy, the pleased smile on the

other figures in Eakins' outdoor paintings,

executed two years after

American males occupy

table, a

that differs significantly

involved

of a specific individual.

176

way

also

watching the bird as well while steadying the boat

the detail with which he

in a

are the expressions on each figure's face

painted with the same

from the

it

Johnson's Old Kentucky Home. Three African

like

that involved

somewhere outside of

for the recoil

works

men

terms of clothing and physiognomy. Each

the bird

and preparing

many

It

Man

also thoroughly engrossed in his task, the hunter in

at

boatman

in

in his

leisuretime

boatman guide who,

African American. Each figure

meticulous care

of his

Will Schuster and Black

paintings,

presents

up the theme of the dancing, banjo-playing African American,

yet presents

objects and figures are arranged in a pyramidal composition,

engaged

concentration,

to

animals.

Going Shooting (Rail Shooting) of 1876. As

in

Eadweard

photographer

the

humans and

or

in Philadelphia (see p. 259).

using sequential

in the 1880's,

study motion in

175

with

men rowing

New York City.

In this

work Eakins takes

former slaves, who had been systematical!)' denied access

education

the South.

in

Man]

to

portrayed scenes of

artists

African Americans pouring over books

the

in

home

or in

roughly constructed schoolrooms. Eakins refers to this formal

book-learning

I)

MOM A

in the small oval portrait

LEWIS

WD

l.\m OS

of Lincoln and his son

\\\

T \\\l R

185

158


"Tad" examining

book together, taken from

Brady Studio photograph of 1864,

The

of his painting.

in the

top lefthand corner

focus of the painting, however,

passing on of a broader cultural knowledge

playing the banjo

Mai hew

from one generation

pride and sense of hope and

is

the

dancing and

and the

to the next

self-fulfillment attached to the

acquisition and maintenance of this knowledge.

Eakins'

Boy Dancing may

Negro

well

have

inspired

Tanner's own tribute to the transmission of knowledge from

177

one generation to the next, The Banjo Lesson (1893). This

painting speaks to the theme of education on three levels:
the education of

Tanner

1)

as an artist; 2) the education of the

and

child by the grandfather;

education of the art-

3) the

viewing public by the painting

itself.

While Tanner had benefited

from

artistically

his lessons at

Academy of Design, he could not escape the

forced so many artists of color either to abandon

the Pennsylvania

racism that

their pursuits or to leave the

work Adventures of an
attended the

U.S. In his autobiographical

Joseph Pennell, who

Illustrator (1925),

Academy at the same time as Tanner, described a

scene where a young "octoroon, very well dressed

and modest," with short cropped "wool" and

was
a

tied to his easel in the

quiet

moustache,

middle of Broad Street one night by

group of white students "when he began

to assert himself."

my only experience of my colored

brothers in a white

"This

is

school," remarked Pennell, "but

name Tanner,

Pennell does not

matches photographs of Tanner

In 1891

Tanner

Academie Julian

was enough." While

it

the physical description

where he entered the

traveled to Paris

study with

to

177

at the time.

artists

HENRY OSAWA TANNER

The Banjo Lesson 1893. 48x35

(121.9x88.9)

such as Jean-Joseph

Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens, and joined the

1

American Art Students Club of Paris.

He

also

made

trips to

the village of Pont-Aven on the Brittany coast and enjoyed the

company of

fellow

artists

in

an

environment that was

substantially less racist than the one he had left in Philadelphia.

Tanner's early paintings were primarily seascapes,

landscapes, and animal paintings. It was not until the mid1890's that he began to take

up the theme

that

would become

the major focus of his work in the early twentieth century

religion. Before that,

number of genre

he took a brief detour and created

paintings that addressed the

Americans, the best-known of which

Tanner returned

is

life

small

of African

summer

recover from a bout with typhoid fever.

of 1893 to

In August he

delivered a paper at the World's Congress on Africa, part of

the World's

Columbian Exposition

American Negro

in Art."

in

Chicago, on

This paper, plus

"The

his return to

Philadelphia and the inevitable re-encounter with a racism

that he

had

fled

two years

earlier,

may have prompted him

turn his attention to African Americans as subject matter.

to

He

gives a further indication of his reasons for painting African

186

EDMONIA LEWIS AND HENRY OSAWA TANNER

in a

statement the following year, referring to

himself in the third person:

Since his return from Europe he has painted
subjects, he feels

newness of the

drawn

field

to such subjects

life

to represent the

among them, and

thought that other things being equal, he

sympathy with
his

many Negro

on account of the

and because of a desire

serious and pathetic side of

life

The Banjo Lesson.

to Philadelphia in the

Americans

who

it is

his subject will obtain the best results.

mind, many of the

artists

who have

his

has most

To

represented Negro

have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of

have lacked sympathy with and affection for the

it

warm

and
big

heart within such a rough exterior.

Tanner may
such

as

How

well have been thinking of paintings by artists

Krimmel and

who saw
American

only the "comic" or "ludicrous" side of African

life?

While Johnson drew on the anecdotal genre

scenes of peasant
artists,

the early Johnson.

does Tanner's painting differ from the work of artists

life

Tanner looked

painted by seventeenth-century Dutch

to

another seventeenth-century Dutch

artist

for inspiration

Rembrandt

van Rijn. In adopting

Rembrandt's looser brushwork and

objects in the painting,

Tanner

down

paring

in

the

American

costume or physiognomy. In addition,

his

culture.

The 1884 dime

forces the viewer to focus on

the central figures in the scene and on their activity rather than
the details of their

connection to the "unofficial," off-limits world of African

novel by S. S. Steward The Black Hercules,

or the Adventures of a Banjo Player shows,

many
new way of

however, that

African American banjo players soon mastered the

use of a golden light entering from the side, which marks so

playing and, like Horace

Weston and

many of Rembrandt's

performed

throughout the U.S. and England.

faces

and sharpens the outlines of the figures against the

background, adds

sense of solemnity and religiosity to the

Tanner would develop

painting.
light

paintings and which highlights the

even further

this

brushwork and use of

in his biblical paintings

of the subsequent

decades. Here, however, the sense of devotion

the daily

life

focused on

is

of African Americans, on an elevation of the lives

of the poor. In this respect Tanner once again reflects on

Rembrandt and

his

own

respect for the poor in seventeenth-

Following Eakins' example, Tanner portrays the two

absorbed

The Banjo Lesson

in the task at

hand.

a stringed

Africa. In her 1990's

culture,

Karen

as to facilitate the

new banjo

upward plucking motion

technique. Tanner's painting could

have been read as

a reaffirmation, therefore,

distinctly African

and African American instrument and of

the ability of African Americans in this

others, to master

One

new techniques and

of the banjo as a

many

field, as in

new knowledge.

acquire

could add musicians, therefore, to the painters and

conduit, a

painters and sculptors, and claimed that actual achievement

represents

proved negroes

to the

in

American popular

the

changing

and

banjo as a result of

its

integration into national commercial culture after the Civil

to possess ability

and

talent for successful

competition with white artists."

Tanner's The Banjo Lesson was exhibited

instrument brought over from

work on the banjo

War

on the

in a report

It also

banjo becomes

Linn has traced

S.

on Africa, which was described as follows

The

meanings attached

conflicting

involved in the

Congress: "Professor Tanner (American) spoke of negro

bridge between Africa and America, for the banjo was

developed from

Indeed, the boy in Tanner's The Banjo Lesson has his right

hand positioned so

as distinct individuals intensely

connection from one generation to the next.

a

Bohee brothers,

the

sculptors referred to in Tanner's talk at the World's Congress

century Holland.

figures in

in concert tours

at Earle's Galleries in

the annual Paris Salon.

in

October 1893

Philadelphia and the following year in

was purchased by Robert C. Ogden,

It

John Wanamaker's dry-goods business and

a partner in

promoter of African American public education who,

a
in

November

1894,

African American instrument. In the late nineteenth century,

Institute. It

was appropriate

however, urban entrepreneurs attempted to introduce the

education of Native American and African American children

War. Before the

banjo into
its

elite

the banjo was seen as primarily an

white culture and, in the process, to downplay

connections

Americans.

Civil

with

One way

the

lives

and culture of African

of doing this was to promote a

of playing. Instead of continuing the

downward

new

style

strokes and

chording of minstrel performers whose songs grew out of

African American culture, the
the strings separately and

play the

new

"new" banjo

upward,

like a guitar, in

Many

parlor music of the day.

youth social clubs took up the banjo

players plucked

in the 1880's

part because of the

promotion of the instrument

able to the guitar

and piano, and

in

order to

white colleges and

and

'90's, in

as

compar-

part because of

its

donated the painting

should come to possess

that a school

the

to

to the

painting that presented in such a

compelling and dignified way the role of education

American

Hampton

committed

in

African

undoubtedly helped counteract the display

life. It

of cowboys and Indians so graphically present in Johnston's

photograph Class

in

American History. Rather than an image

of cultural assimilation, which relegated Native American and

African cultures to the past, Tanner produces a testimony
to the

changing and

vital

nature of cultural traditions and to

the persistence with which African Americans (and Native

Americans) would pursue the knowledge necessary

to

con-

tinue their struggles for equality into the twentieth century.

i)\io\i

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1ST

152

Realism and Naturalism

8

THE GENERATION OF 1830 AND THE

CRISIS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
ROMANTICISM AND THE CRISIS OF
MEANING

remarks suggest, the Romantics were not proclaiming unfettered artistic abstraction and license. Art

Eternally Exists" and

THE

POPULARITY

NINETEENTH-

EARLY

OF

century landscape painting would probably have sur-

prised

creators;

its

"The

expression.

it

is

now admired

great vice

Constable himself

in

is

abstraction and

of the present day," wrote

generation

later,

Friedrich

the [unfortunate] taste of our time to relish strong

colors. Painters

cheeks and

1802, "is bravura, an attempt to do

something beyond the truth."

wrote: "It

for precisely those

were once most disparaged

qualities that

outdo one another

applying make-up to

in

lips in their paintings; the

landscape painters carry

exaggeration even further and put make-up on trees, rocks,

water and

aims for
this

air.

subject." In contrast to

nineteenth-century unease, the twentieth century has

in

landscape; Turner,

forerunners of the Impressionists and the Expressionists, and

seen as

its

own

justification.

moved, and assured of Constable's

we

are

when

in

Indeed,

integrity,

Hadleigh Castle (1829) he loosens his hold on mimesis and

paints his feelings;

convinced he
"Painting

More

is

is

for

we

receive a shock of recognition, and are

speaking to posterity

me

when he

writes in 1821:

but another word for feeling."

the
gift

in a sense

on the natural instead of the

them with
virtuosity
tional

and

a public

human world

was

and expressivity. Ruskin exemplified

idealist

tasked by

moral and ethical imperative beyond both

this tradi-

view of art; he judged the landscape art of

Turner "invaluable

as the vehicle of

thought but by

itself

nothing." In Modern Painters (1843) he wrote that "all those

excellencies

which are peculiar

to the painter as such, are

merely what rhythm, melody, precision and force are

words of the orator and the poet, necessary

test

of their greatness.

It is
is

in the

to their greatness,

not by the

mode of

represented and said,

that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer

is

to

be finally determined."

Ruskin's view that the

artist

had

a responsibility to imitate

and not
was shared even by those with

the essential truths of society, as he elsewhere wrote

just the

appearance of nature

very different politics and tastes. Although Constable was a

Tory and Ruskin an

critic's

belief in

early Socialist, the painter shared the

the

landscape painters.

It

moral and ethical responsibility of

was

his

ambition,

we

have seen,

p urposes of instruction and moral

suasio n, his vision of England as richly productive, a land of

creative orig -

socjaLp eace and hierarchic stability. Indeed, Constable's "six-

Conceiving themselves independent geniuses above

footers" were intended to carry the ideological burden of

common

mien, they claimed to possess the almost divine

history paintings: they were to enshrine for future generations

"A

the conservative social vision of the class of industrious rural

of Imagination,

which offered,

as

Blake wrote:

Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really and Unchangeably." As Blake's, Constable's, Ruskin's, and Friedrich's

188

the genre most free of moral implications by virtue of its focus

sci entifically to record, for

than any previous generation of artists and writers,

the^Rom antics prized personal autonomy and

inality

and personal expression. Even landscape painting

representing and saying, but by what

its

must engage "what

more than sheer mimesis

conception of

Constable, and Friedrich have been celebrated as prescient

122

also be

but not the

embraced bravura and exaggeration

is

must

Landscape painting these days no longer

a spiritual

their virtuosity

it

gentry to which the

In

artist

belonged.

Germany, the landscapes of Friedrich were

also

intended to offer moral lessons; the

described his works

artist

as transcendental exercises with the potential to help over-

come

the spiritual alienation of individuals within society.

"Close your eye," he instructed painters, "so that your picture

appear before your mind's eye.

will first

of day what you

light

first

saw

Then

be reflected into the minds of others."

The

and socie ty

and

let it

task of the pai nter

was thu& agatn^-as-with Con stable^to reconcile

self

bring to the

in the inner darkness,

and other,

self

nature and society through the unique

procedures of landsca pe mimesis and idealization~The

the nature-philosopher F.

W.

draw himself from [nature]

artist,

Schelling wrote, must "with-

but only

himself to the creative energy and to seize

[it]

in

order to raise

spiritually.

Thus

he ascends into the realm of pure ideas; he forsakes the

creature, to regain

it

with thousandfold interest, and in this

sense to return to nature." Schelling's language

generation

earlier)

through the

medium

principles of liberty

and

patrons,

artists,

public

debate, and

informally assemble to discuss,

of works of art

could

negotiate

new Enlightenment

the

and equality, the hierarchies of class and

gender, the roles of public and private authority, and the

political structures

among

of state and empire,

Artworks of every genre and description

painting but also landscape

exchange,

discursive
solidarity,
taste

for

and ultimately

and

art

interpretation,

played

helping

parts in this

political

its

by

class

of

skills

measure of one's status within the

bou rgeoisie, and thus too an instrument of

Ideally suited

drama of

hegemony. (A_

and the requisite

literature ,

was

other issues.

especially history

cement bourgeois

to

to secure

cultural powe-Frf-

virtue of its simultaneously empirical and

commodity character

to its role within the bourgeois public

abstract,

sphere, painting played a pivotal cultural part in the unfolding

unmistakable: they must show

of world historical events in the eighteenth century. That

us that transcendent truths do exist by creating works that are

elevated cultural status, however, could not outlive the public

but his injunction to artists

in equal parts ideal and

m ade

can be

is

real. ^Art js a

means by which p eople,

sum

In

we have seen

then,

and original

that

may have

it

was also expected

that painters

gap

bet ween

to play

however experimental,

and

in th e/Romantic

and public meaning

reveals thatj_cultural crisis_was already

"simple minded"
artists

(in

were uncertain

fact

wereT)eginning to notice a_widening

critics

from

age

in the

and morality. Yet the very

artistic ^ expressiveness

ingly estranged

German

an important discursive role

politics, ethics,

a bourgeois public

sphere cannot tolerate

whose

un derw ay. Increas-

attitudes contradict

common

sense.

its

own

and

cherished notions of reason and

This was precisely what began

England and France

the

is

beliefs

to occur in

second and third decades of the

in the

nineteenth century. >By_arou nd 1820. the temper of public

in

life

England had indeed changed: trade unions, working-class

corresponding (debating)

Utopian socialism, dis-

societies,

senting churches, feminism, and an expanding radical press

were signals of the decline of consensual

politics

and the

public they viewed as capricious and

breakup of the bourgeois public sphere that had prevaile d

the English poet Shelley's phrase),

(though not without significant strains)

whom

to

exactly they

owed

allegiance.

Increasingly subjected to the thrall of a market they saw as

vulgar and factious, artists grew unsure about precisely

measure

itself.

What

intrusion of cultural and class factions

been, English and

and also American landscape painting

\4f unfolding of

sphere

understand th at their freedom resides

to

precisely in jheir jiubjnission to morality

virtuosic

is

and

their successes

how to

At once freed from

failures.

for a

hundred

ebate^negotiation,
The task of the bourgeois public sphere
an d consensus building among like-minded men-^ had

be come a paralyzing and debilitatin gjmrdfii in the midst of a__

The later
symptom of

socialjota lity fractured by working-cl ass dissent.

may

oppressive structures of patronage and cut off from supportive

landscape paintings of Constable

communities, Romantic

the crisis. In the midst of rural revolt and economic hard times

were unsure about

artists, finally,

just

what values, morals, and precepts should be represented

their works.
led

This

crisis

to the creation

century

of cultural meaning, which ultimately

of

was nothing

art,

in

modern and

less

than a

crisis

critical

nineteenth-

of the public sphere

ip The'"public sphere, j] writes the

Habermas,

is

critical

"that realm of our social

philosopher Jiirgen

life in

which something

approaching public opinion can be formed. Access

teed to

"Though
and
have

am
a

all

citizens.

portion of the public sphere

is

guaran-

comes

into

being in every conversation in which private individuals

form

assemble

to

Academy

exhibitions, established in 1768, were important

public body." In England, the Royal

be seen as a

Constable wrote to his friend Archdeacon Fisher:

in 1823,

am

here in the midst of the world,

am

out of

it,

happy, and endeavour to keep myself unspotted.

my own, both
my children." Indeed,

kingdom of

landscape

itself.

years.

and

and populous

fertile

it

was

my

precisely

Constable's attempt to keep his art "unspotted" by the

plagues of insurrection and

Luddism

earlier chapter, precipitated the

and abstraction

in his last

that, as

we saw

in

an

dichotomy of representation

works. That division, prefigured

nearly a generation before in the recondite and mystic imagery

of William Blake, would soon

especially

arenas for the formation of a progressive bourgeois public

for the

sphere; there (as in the French Salon exhibitions inaugurated

is

come

phenomenon

whereby

VNTICISM

dominate English and

art.

The ac cepted name

the truth of a representation

doubted and_jLhc_jnalexialitv of

R()\l

to

French nineteenth-century

its

form embraced is

WD THE CRISIS OK

Ml

VNING

l,v>


well-entrenched set of

of the French and European general provisions of bread and

cultural traditions (for example, those associated with the

circuses intended to secure working-class and petit-bourgeois

j"modernism)';

arose wherever

it

term Classicism) collided with

new complex of

social

and

Constable's

artistic

was

artists,

historical situation

His

and painterly response may be summed up

consensus

political

was marked

by the

political

long

in

Hollywood director Cecil

and

or less straight line runs from the

later in this

Monarchy"

demands

for

enfranchisement. In the face of these

stylistic variety

and

art will

next chapter

the

in

of this

under "Individualism and

(9),

Jatyralism in French Salon Art."

keasserting cultural authority and political engagement,

|2)

few

embraced

artists

newly emergent "counter-public

sphere." RyrejTresent ing; the interests of audiences, consti -

andjatrnns from outside of

tuencies,

^bourgeo isie^^that

t hj

challenges, the Tory Constable retreated more and more into

is,

an expressive, confessional, and idiosyncratic "kingdom of

sie^artists once again created works that

[his]
a

own." Yet

quixotism was soon judged by

his

critics to

be

cipher of the very alienation Constable sought so desperately

"Nature

to fend off.

[in

Constable]," wrote the author of an

1837 obituary, "is one vast factory and every element in

condemned
to political

and cultural dissidence,

How

seen as dissident.

in other

words, was

was judged by

his

itself

could the painter not retreat

further into the emotional sanctuary of "bravura"

it

response

to perpetual toil." Constable's defensive

still

even he

if

from

lfijeasantry, proletariat, and petit bourgeoi-

ar

become

vehicles for

public and political debate, contest, and consensus. This

ambitious direction in

art, especially

because of the salience of

fraught

with

generally

fell

and professional

personal

it

risk,

because

and

critical

described

wherewithal. As

below

In Constable's personally logical, but culturally ambig-

A^ant-Garde^was

as

bility or subaltern

empowerment. Avant-garde

art arose in

sphere, appears a premonition of the subsequent directions of

a postle was the Realist Gustave

At once defensive and aggressive,

conservative and radical, traditional and modern, Constable

when

art

was undergoing an epochal

transition.

After the collapse of the bou rgeois public sphere, painters a nd

scu lptors

elsewhere
.risji^filled

England,

in

in the

and

France, the- UnitedState*,

West pursued

several different but inevitably

many

artists settled for a

new, culturally diminished

role for themselves. Ideologically plaint, culturally

cent,

and

stylistically eclectic, the art

sponsored by the church or

Regardless of

would always

its

state, or

they

compla-

made might be

and entertain.

It

knew they were supposed

today to this varied art

Academic anpK Official

to believe.

Painti ngs

in

The names

given

France with Louis-

(The former

supported by the Academie des Beaux-Arts, the

hindsight,

Academic and

early instances of

190

is

the art

latter the art

sponsored by the successive state administrations

were generally, but not always,

movement

Risorgimento.

the two

in basic agreement.)

Official Painting

may be

With

seen as

"mass culture" or "kitsch;" they were part

ROMANTICISM AND THE CRISIS OF MEANING

its

gr eat

re-emergence

Its

the Impressionists

the Macchiaioli was coincident with the

of the Second Empire (1870) and with the

for unification

and independence

Moments of avant-garde

called the

volition are, however,

visible (avant la lettre) earlier in the century

as

we have seen

Goya and Gericault and later, as in the works of

Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and perhaps Paul
Gauguin.
^ 3) Seeking no social or political role at

all

neither within a

counter public sphere" nor within the domain of Official and

number of artists pursued

Philippe and became anachronistic within two generations

are.

Italian

among
fall

Cour bet.

among Manet and

Academic entertainment

might inform audiences

which arose

in Italy

decline and

years later

work

of what they already knew, or cynically remind them of what

they

and

some

produced "on spec."

origin or destination, however, this

flatter

there

with

and_contradictory strategies

JJ_\Accepting without plaint the breakdown of the public

sphere,

in

a result, this

Fxance^durin g the Second Republic (1848-5 1 );

died at a time

it

and military authority,

uous, response to the breakdown of the bourgeois public

art.

France

in

sought to address an audience lacking

political, financial,

mode

pronounced

revolutionary history, was

foul of cultural, political,

and because

artistic

its

generally pursued only during periods of bourgeois vulnera-

contemporaries to be radical?

nineteenth-century

the

to

historical origins

be explored

of working-class "combi-

rise

The

B. DcMillc).

chapter under the subheading "Art of the July

bust cycle of the

nations," the growth of rural radicalism, and

economic and

as

many subsequent European

coming but accelerated by the boom and

1820's

see

also a public sphere crisis.

breakdown of

as follows: the

which

therefore,

crisis,

foreshadowing the exigencies of

and American

more

allegiance to capital. (A

French Academician Paul Delaroche [1797 1856]

political hierarchies.

small but gradually expanding

the chimera of autonomy. Carefully

cultivating their posture of expressive

terest,

and ideological disin-

they were sponsored by few and criticized by

once embracing and disdaining modern

sought sanctuary

in

life,

all.

At

these artists

remote places or among people without

clearly fixed class allegiances or ideological identities

the

lumpen-proletariat, the petit bourgeois, and foreign and

domestic "primitives." This

which, as indicated above,
Blake and Constable
It

is

artistic

route

the origins of

may be traced back at least to Goya,

conventionally called

^modernism j"

flourished in periods of historical transition, political stasis,

or cultural pessimism, especially during the Second

Empire

'

178

HORACE VERNET

The

Dm

d'Orleans Proceeds,

to the

Hotel-de-l

die,

July 31, 1830 1833. 89} x

hoped

for

and expected, thxpicjjuxe_wasjittle short of a pub lic

8'

4^

(228 x 258)

with Manet, and during the fin-de-siecle with the Symbolists.

(The

art of

Edouard Manet, we

shall discover,

three of these strategies.)

Surrender, defiance, and withdrawal

gamut of critical responses

represent the

engaged

and fourth deca des of the

alike,

brought

sustaining

myth

to the crisis

ni neteenth

in the

century/ Academic

of the century

with

Liberty was too

workers,

that the July Revolution

the classes of Paris acting in harmony.

all

Delacroix to embrace, as the

Vernet did

officially

The Due d'Orleans Proceeds

in

students,

and

a depiction of the

literal

was the creation of

It

was one thing

sanctioned
to the

for

Iorace

Hotel-de-l

tile,

of the

July 31, 1M30 (1833), comforting homilies about solidarity,

they also provide a

but quite another thing to see Liberty herself wearing the

vi sraal arts

vantage point from which to view the expanding

consciousness of nineteenth-century

labels

populated

trtcoleur,

bourgeois

provide a framework for examining the

late years

Boldly painted with the discordant colors of the

these terms broadly

"ImcTOfficial/ ^Vvant-Garde, /and Modernist-/-these

middle an d

disaster

French

about by the decline of the bourgeois public sp here

third

all

critical

dissh eveled costume of the proletariat:

rabble

art.

,"

asked

Dumas,

"Was

there only this

"at those famous days in July?"

Although purchased (cheaply) by the French Interior Ministry

and exhibited

THK JULY MONARCHY AND THE ART

OF JUSTE MILIEU

incite sedition.

In France the crisis of the bourgeois public sphere grew acute

Paris workers

years following the revolution of July 1830. Striving to

reinvigorate
65

created

ir/it'

he genre of history painting J

F.ii

gene I )clacronj

28thjjfjuly : Liberty Leading the Peoplel n time for

exhibition at the Salon of 1831. Far from the triumph he had

Musce Luxembourg

was thereafter secreted from sight out of

No
in the

at the

T hc_conccrn
who

proletaires (the

Revolution

was

fought

not

only

constitutional charter usurped by the

would

it

fought on the barricades in July were

modern sense by Augustc Blanqui

|l

fear that

was not unreasonable.

longer the social melange, or sans-culottes of 1789, the

becoming self-conscious
its

in 1832, Liberty_

'i

\t()\\K(

111

\\l) \IM Ol

term was

in 1832).

for

fust

used

in

For them, the

of the

restoration

Bourbon Charles \, but

|l

Nil

Mil

II

I'M

178

179

HONORE DAUMIER

Rue Transnonain April

'13,

1834 1834. llf x I7f

(29.2 x 44. S)

180

PAUL DELAROCHE

Artists

of All Ages 1836-41. 12'5x82'

(388.6 x 2499.4)

for the right to work, the right to a fair

wage, and the right to

organize trade unions. Within a year of the Revolution, a

round of insurrections had begun:

workers of Lyons were on strike
laissez-faire

and

in

November

new

1831, the silk

in protest against

economic

low tarif (scale of wages for piece-work);

in

1832, workers in Paris rose up in rebellion after the funeral of a

popular Bonapartist general;

in 1834,

it

was once again the

turn of Lyons workers who, backed by a local Republican

party, fought police
battle

which

left

and national troops

in a six-day

pitched

hundreds dead. Within days of the Lyons

uprising in April, workers in the French capital rose in anger

at the closure

of a radical newspaper and the arrest of the

leaders of the proletarian Society of the Rights of

Man. On

April 14, barricades were erected by the workers to block the

passage of troops through the proletarian faubourgs of Paris.

The

tactic

was unsuccessful, however, and within

a short

time, the uprising was defeated and dozens of workers were

dead on the streets or

in

their

homes. The government

massacre was depicted by the young caricaturist Honore

192

JULY MONARCHY AND ART OF JUSTE MILIEU

Daumier (1808-79)
179

window

in

in a large lithograph exhibited in a

October, Rue Transnonain April

few months

later, a series

15,

shop-

1834 (1834).

of strict press censorship laws were

genre painting," succinctly exposing

intimate (despite

its size)

essen-

its

and antiquarian character.

Just as the Classical tradition of art was giving

way

to

antique costume drama during the regime of Louis-Philippe,

history paintings like Delacroix's, nor even political carica-

so too history painting itself {tableau d'histotre) was giving

Daumier's " You have

the floor, explain yourself''

(1835), created during the trial of the rebels of 1834,

would be

F,or nearly

to a hybridized historical

two decades following the July Revolution,

Seeking to discourage the creation of large-scaled, politically

the state and the

French painting and sculpture were severely circumscribed

and

by the policies and preferences of the French Academie and

patriotic,

the regime of Louis-Philippe.

The

Classical tradition

once

way

genre painting (genre historiaue).

tendentious subjects taken from Greek and

permitted to engage the public sphere.

Academy encouraged

sale of easel-sized

history.

and

familial

Roman

antiquity,

instead the exhibition

pictures representing nationalistic,

themes drawn from past and present

This new genre histonque,

as

critics

called

it,

the grand, metaphoric language of enlightenment and revolu-

consonant with the historical writings of Francois Guizot,

(bourgeois his toricism , as in

Adolphe Thiers and Jules Michelet, emphasized the achieve-

tion

was now compromised by

Delaroche's semicircular mural painting Artists of All Ages

ments of the grands hommes of French

( 1836 4 1 ). Created for the hemicycle auditorium

depicting the beliefs, manners, habits, and conditions of the

in the

Ecole

des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the work (more than eighty feet wide
at

its

base) depicts seventy-five figures representing the

progress of art from ancient to

63

tially

passed, and the facade of constitutionalism dropped. Neither

tures such as

180

a "scholarly

Apotheosis of Homer,

modern

inspiration, Delaroche's hemicycle

tory.

Here

artists

times. Unlike Ingres's

however, which was

from

is

Cimabue

its

ostensible

anecdotal and conciliato

Puget

are

seen

relaxing and kibitzing as if they were gathered during a theatre

intermission.

The Romantic sculptor David d'Angers called

it

everyday people of the

such

works,

past.

represented

The

history, as well as

political

impetus behind

by Ary Scheffer's (1795-1858)

sentimental St. Augustine and St. Monica\

Leon Gerome's (1824-1904)

( 1

846) and Jean-

lubricious Cockfight (1846),

course profoundly conservative.

While the Scheffer,

example, enshrines Catholicism and the

Gerome

is

of

for

masculi-

nism, both occlude historical change by implicitly arguing

that the difference

JULY

\1()\

\l<(

between the past and the present

in

is

\ND ART OF JUSTE MILIEl

only a

!'.?

181

sculptor herself,
participation

who was

in

briefly

imprisoned

Bourbon

1832 for her

in

Legitimist

plol

against

Louis-Philippe.

More
is

representative of July

Monarchy

sculpture, however,

work of Antoinc-Louis Barye (1796

the

of the

sculptors

Barye came

period,

background and maintained strong

decorative arts traditions.
slightly

older

He was

David d'Angers)

sculpture, and was

among

the

from

ties to

a
in

1875). Like most

an

artisanal

the industrial and

pioneer (along with the

of bronze

the revival

reproduce his

first serially to

designs in order to reach a large middle-class audience.

Barye's

class

longstanding

background,
association

technical

innovativeness,

unionized

with

and

bronze-foundry

workers, however, did rmt~aflD^t_hjs_thoroughly Orleanist

political

allegiances.

which won

for

His Lion Crushing a Serpent (1833),

him the Legion

as an allegorical celebration of the July Revolution;

interpreted as the

183

d'honneur, was widely regarded

it

could be

French people crushing the Bourbon

dynasty, or alternatively as Orleanist law destroying Republi-

can anarchy. (Both of thesem essage s wereJ\t!!yj^onsonajit

with Louis-Philippe's promotion of himself as the promulga-

te

of

mor al

order a ncLnatiojiaj prosperity.) Although Barye

thereafter only rarely ventured into the

allegory, his

many bronze

mode

of political

sculptures of animals in combat

appealed to the regime's taste for melodrama and scientific

181

ArySchf.ffer

St. Augustine

and

St. Monica- 1854.

53^x41}

naturalism. Partly derived from ideal ancient and Renaissance

(135.2 x 104.7)

prototypes, and partly from naturalist observation at the Paris

Cabinet

d'Anatomie Comparee (established

the

in

late

eighteenth century by Georges Cuvier), Barye's bronzes are

matter

Unlike

costume.

of

previous

intended to function as exemplum

was intended

paintings

history

virtutis,

the genre historique

Like Barye, most

artits

Monarchy compromise.

of the July Monarchy sought to

the present by diminishing the

achieve in their works the samejuste milieu (golden mean) that

and

the king was seeking to achieve in matters of state. Louis-

in this latter

Philippe saw his state as the preordained reconciliation of

Couture's Romans of the

1789 with the Restoration; his regime would pay homage to

Decadence [1847, see pp. 202-05], the Classical vocabulary

the memory of the heroic Bonaparte even as it set store by such

men as the stolid bourgeois M. Louis-Francois Bertin,

and

splendor

to

elevate

distinctiveness

of the

past.

Academic painting was completely successful

regard: by the time of

was

suited,

for the

Thomas

most

part,

(Official

only to irony, satire, and

melodrama.)

The

182

thus the products of typical July

Freedom and

painted by Ingres in 1832.

genre historique

may

be observed in the

medium

of

and

stability, science

sculpture as well as painting during the July Monarchy.

usual

Although exhibited

the pre-revolutionary Salon of 1827,

paralleling

Felicie de Faveau's (1799-1866) plaster Christina of Sweden

traditions.

Refusing to Give

at

Mercy

to

Her Squire Monaldeschi

(ca.

1827)

and

faith,

these were the paired

France's

dual

democracy

progress and business-aspillars

of the juste milieu,

revolutionary

Thus the king and

order,

and monarchical

his ideologues (the

term had been

coined by Napoleon) courted both eclecticism and synthesis

and economic

policies alike. Alongside the

exemplifies the tendency in the 1830's for relief sculpture to

in their cultural

become

portable, anecdotal, historicist,

and intimate. Her

new

industrialization

work

however, a remarkable example of the genre, because

new

national banks arose domestic tarifs and foreign protec-

is,

of both

its

treatment and

restrained in
distinct but

background.

its

its

theme.

The

relief

is

serious and

dramatic action and setting, consisting of two

proximate figural groupings

The

subject

is

no

less

set against a

blank

compelling, representing

an act of militancy and resolve, not unlike the actions of the

194

JULY MONARCHY AND ART OF JUSTE MILIEU

grew parochial monopolies; among the

tionism. Together with the Classicism of Ingres was the

Romanticism of Delacr oix; beside the

official,

Romantic

idealism of Scheffer was the academic, Neoclassical verisimili-

tude of Gerome.

AsTBoime has~sKown, the

politics

and

art generally

pursued

184

"mJt

V
182 FEI.ICIF. DF. FAVF.AU Christina of Sweden Refusing

183

ANTOINE-LOUIS BARYE

to

Give Mercy

to

Her Squire Monaldescht

Lion Crushing a Serpent [883.

ca. 1827.

15$ * 22$ (40 x 58)

Length 70 (177.8)

JULY M(>\

\l<( IIY

WD

VRT OF JUSTE MILIEl

195

Pantheon was an

effort to

engage the imagination and energy

of a progressive and patriotic bourgeoisie. Like the painting,

the relief combines real and allegorical figures in a stirring but

ensemble. Like the painting too, the colossal

heteroclitc

sculpture was received by political moderates and conserva-

anger and incomprehension, revealing

tives with

schism

Beneath the

in the public sphere.

inscription

which announces

its

widening

appears an

relief

theme: "aux grands

la patrie rf.connaissantf." ("In gratitude to the

HOMMES
great men of

the Fatherland"). At the center of the pediment stands the

La

allegorical figure of

handed

to her

Patrie, distributing laurel wreathes

by Liberty, seated

at

her right. History

Patrie's left, inscribing

on

hommes of

civic affairs

Military
the

military

and

men occupy

names of

a tablet the

who

sits at

La

the grands

are to be honored.

the right half of the pediment, led by

young Bonaparte, who reaches past History

crown. With the exception of the legendary

to take his

drummer from

the battle of Arcole, the remainder of the military figures are

anonymous soldiers of the Revolution and Empire, assembled

left to right, in

decreasing order of rank.

cultural affairs

fill

the

left

The men

of civic and

half of the pediment, and represent a

Enlightenment canon. They include Rousseau and

liberal

Voltaire (seated

by side on

side

bench), J.-L.

David

(standing, with palette and brushes), the jurist and victim of

184

the Terror Malesherbes (standing, with counselor's robes),

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQJUE INGRES M. Loms-Fran^ois Bertm

and behind him the deputy Manuel, expelled

1832. 46x37^(116.8x95.3)

Chamber
tion

on behalf of the monarchy

Cuvier,

who was

Lafayette,

Louis-Philippe but

socialist

and cynic Pierre Leroux

the Restoration or

cism." "Genius
proportion

[of]

t\\t

is a

in 1839,

juste milieu,

"and you

and that

will

beau

et

du bien

(1853). "This union

however,^/?

and unstable.

be eclecti-

is

Two

milieu art

in

Du

vrai,

du

the perfection of art:

it."

Like juste milieu

was ultimately contradictory

cases in point, dating from the beginning

in Spain.

Fenelon,

thereafter

For the most

represents the range of his

political

own

Orleans regime

(Even the inclusion of the

at its inception.

politics:
lettres

de cachet as for advocating the

in

1830, the year Delacroix was painting Liberty

1%

David d'Angers's pediment of the

PARADOX OF PATRIOTISM

life

of Louis XVI.) Yet

the unanimity of artist, patron, and audience that underlay the

program

for the

pediment would not survive 1830. As the

summer

passed into a repressive winter and

like

Delacroix's

was

increasingly seen as tendentious, incendiary, or simply inco-

1832-4

made by

to block

actual unveiling of the

relentless,

work was postponed

however,

display his work, and in

in

successive ministers of the

completion of the project, and the

bably out of nervousness over

was
Leading the People,

left

he was as renowned for helping to end the issuance of

herent. Attempts were

Begun

pantheon

monarchist Malesherbes does not detract from the overall

interior in

THE PARADOX OF PATRIOTISM:

D'ANGERS'S PANTHEON PEDIMENT

patriotic

generally liberal-to-Jacobin

spring, d'Angers's cast of characters

for the

Marquis de

sympathies, as well as reflecting the liberalism of the

pediment

Pantheon and Couture's painting

the

became disenchanted

David d'Angers's

part,

revolutionary

for the

Among the others are

and

instrumental in conferring the crown on

who soon

and end of the July Monarchy, are David d'Angers's sculpted

Salon of 1847, The Romans of the Decadence.

from the

with the monarchy.

have

the ideal and the natural, form and thought,"

masterpieces are produced by observing

politics,

will

ready and sure perception of the right

wrote the influential philosopher Victor Cousin

187

Archbishop

blended these irreconcilables. "Take

portion of aristocracy and a portion of democracy," wrote the

185-6

the

during the July Monarchy were those which harmoniously

a portion of monarchy, a

in 1823

of Deputies for his opposition to French interven-

its political

in his

in July 1837,

content.

pro-

D' Angers

determination to finish and

September 1837 he

finally

succeeded

having the obscuring canvas and scaffolding removed.

185

THOMAS COUTURE

Romans of the Decadence

During the succeeding months and

pediment was vehemently

criticized

1847.

15'6Jx 25'10 (473.7 x 787.4)

Pantheon

years, the

from the Legitimist and

Ultramontane right and the Orleanist center of the

political

hommes was consonant with the

the Orleans court and

historicist

its official

preoccupations of

historian, Francois Guizot.

(We have already considered Delaroche's Artists ofAll Ages as

For another, d'Angers's

spectrum. D'Angers's depiction of the atheists Voltaire and

one juste milieu result of that

Rousseau among others, on the facade of a building originally

creation of a bourgeois Enlightenment martyrology repu-

consecrated in honor of Sainte-Genevieve (built 1755-80),

diates

was anathema to conservative Catholics, who included Queen

proletariat in the revolutionary process,

In addition, his embrace of the principles and

Amelie.

personages of the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 was seen in

official circles as

nistic

because

both anachronistic and provocative: anachro-

King had already

the

revolutionary principles that brought

because

provocative

economic

series

of recent

ministerial

new

and quietism were now most wanted

As might be expected, therefore, the

muted by press

restrictions)

very

to power,

crises threatened to precipitate a

reconciliation

the

rejected

him

emerging radical ideas about the centrality of the

Augustc Blanqui, represented by

Stylistically,

too,

the pediment

compromise, combining

as

it

such as those held by

his friend the artist in 1840.

is

marked by

juste milieu

does Baroque Classicism with

elements from the genre historique. Like his freestanding

and

monument

and

the majesty and hierarchism found in works by the greatest

uprising;

in the arts.

left (its voice,

interest.)

however,

was much more favorably

to

Cuvier (1845), d'Angers's pediment possesses

sculptors of the late anaen regime

Pigalle,

and Pajou

especially

Bouchardon,

yet individual figures also display an

informality, particularism, and even homeliness suggestive of

works by Delaroche, SchefTer, and Gcromc, among others.

In one significant way, however, David d'Angers's version

condemnation of Catholic rcvanchism, Orleanist authoritaria-

of juste milieu stands apart from that of his contemporaries,

nism and bourgeois corruption.

and anticipates an emerging attitude of avant-gardism:

disposed toward the pediment than the right, seeing in

Yet

it

pediment
orbit.

would probably be incorrect

as existing

For one thing,

to

it

view d'Angers's

wholly outside ihcjuste milieu ideological

its

representation of the concept of grands

best

sculptures achieve their power and

embracing popular

artistic traditions

perspicacity

outside of the

his

by

official

mainstream. The proportion, physiognomy, and placement of

\K \D()\

OF

IRK)

ISM

l')7

187 Pir.RRF.jEAN

DAVID DANGERS,

the pediment of the Pantheon, Paris, 1830-37

pediment were probably influenced by the

figures in his

popular prints then being issued in great numbers from the

town of Epinal
pediment and

France.

northeastern

in

d'Angers's

In

Georgin and J.-B. Thiebault's woodcut

in F.

The Apotheosis of Napoleon (1834), for example, the Academic

188

canons of graceful

human

proportion are rejected in favor of

more squat or compact formulae. In addition, both works

employ perspective only minimally;
ately

but

this flatness is

immedi-

apparent in the serried ranks of soldiers in the woodcut,

it is

also visible in the sculpture. Instead of conceiving the

domestic tranquility, Rude's

violence and humor.

The

marked

is

War above

at

once by

emits a blood-

curdling alarm while the soldiers below react with confusion;

their

dishevelment and deshabille lends the scene

nism that

is

at

variance with

combination of high and low, or

may be

ostensible heroism.

its

ideal

quotidia-

similar

and anecdotal, elements

seen in the work of Preault,

who was

for a

time

student of d'Angers.
In Preault's plaster relief Slaughter (18334, later cast in
bronze), the artist represents the massacre of a family by a

as

with

coextensive

the

actual

space of shallow planes in which figures are

overlapped or superimposed, one above another. To some

extent,

this

approach

to

composition

dictated

is

by the

peculiar triangular format, but d'Angers's stylistic populism

is

equally apparent in his rectangular relief panels, such as The

Motherland Calling Her Children

(1835) in the vault of the Arc de
in Marseille.

to

the Defense

Triomphe

at the

of Liberty

Gate of Aix,

Here the heroic plebeians are jumbled together

shallow relief and comic cacophany, at once recalling the

in

paintings of Pictcr Breugcl the Elder and anticipating the

frescos of

Diego Rivera.

David d'Angers's
traditions

the

July

synthesizing diverse styles and

Monarchy Francois Rude

Preault

(1809 79).

(1784-1855)
In

and

Rude's famous

The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, 1833

on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the sculptor depicts war

Marseillaise (or
6),

skill at

helmeted warrior and

a black

Detail of Plate 185

if

upper

at the

left.

there was one, remains

unknown.) Though partly inspired by

by the Baroque

reliefs

sculptors Pierre Puget and Alessandro Algardi, the work

remarkably abstract and experimental.

The composition

is

has

the compactness of an ancient "episodic fragment of a low

relief" (in the artist's words),
prints.

Yet there

is

nothing

two-dimensionalism

is

and the flattened space of F.pinal

static

about Slaughter: indeed,

almost Cubist

in

its

jostling

its

and

juxtapositioning of forms and figures. (A century later, the

screaming mother provided

model

Guernica.) Preault's Slaughter did not find

audience; after exhibiting

it

at

for Picasso's

sympathetic

the Salon of 1834 (the year of

the slaughter of Transnonain), he was excluded from Salon

exhibitions for the next fifteen years.

Less confrontational and better connected than his pupil,

David d'Angers did not

suffer a similar exile

I'

i8f(

man shown

(The precise subject of the work,

figure of the

was shared by two other outstanding sculptors of

Antoine-Augustin

<

relief

figure of

dimensions of the lived world, d'Angers had created a

space

telescoped

191

and arms.

Part of an elaborate sculptural program intended to promote

three

pedimental

190

as an ugly siren calling the volunteers of '92 to order

\K \l)()\

()!

I'

from patronage.

IKK)

ISM

I'M)

189

M^OVHiDSM DM

188 F.

189

200

GEORGIN

and J.-B.

THIEBAULT The

AnTOINE-AL'GUSTIN PrEAULT

PARADOX OF PATRIOTISM

ItilIP(DIL!&l)il

Apotheosis of Napoleon 1834.

16 x 23 (40.6 x 58.2)

Slaughter 1833-4. 43x55(109.2x139.7)

igo Pierre-Jean

David dangers The

Motherland Calling Her Children

Liberty 1835.

191

to the

Defense of

53J x 10'llf (135 x 333)

FRANCOIS RUDE The

Marseillaise (The

Departure of the Volunteers of 1792) 1833-6.

Height 42' (504)

I'

\K \l)()\ ()!

I'

TRIO

l'lSM

JO

However,

after the

Pantheon

to grapple with the political

paradoxes

remainder of his career

for the

pediment he was forced

of puhlic sculpture. Indeed,

become untenable

project had

conceived.

The

would seem

it

that his very

in the era in

which

it

was

construction of an Enlightenment canon, the

embrace of

celebration of the principles of 1789, and the

alternative or popular art traditions,

were acts that engaged

progressive bourgeois public sphere that for the most part no

The

longer existed.

had put an end

behalf of

insurrectionary events in Paris and

to the

myth of

From now

liberie.

between

solidarity

Lyons

classes

on

would either have

on, artists

abjure highminded political principle or else embrace

it

to

and

thereby unleash the very divisive ideological forces that the

July

Monarchy sought

The

to control.

public sphere and the

bourgeois juste milieu, in others words, were incompatible.

D'Angers's

last

years were

marked by

(he was elected a departmental deputy during the Second

Republic) and

artistic

hope. His dream of a great

Monument

to destroy public,

attempt to save

to

after

Roman costume

dancing, embracing, or,

amphoras.

On

ground are the bulk of the

Classical columns, arches,

am very much afraid that the figure of Liberty that

am sending you will be confiscated by the German customs.
The rulers of all countries fear it even in painting. They are

work of the Renaissance

artists Bellini, Titian,

Raphael,

of Gericault, Ingres, and

in the painting

Two

others.

are Delacroix's

apposite

especially

Women of Algiers

(1834)

192

and Dominique Papety's (1815-49) The Dream of Happiness

193

(1843).

Together

provided

they

basis

Couture's

for

Liberty: "I

attempted unification of Romantic color and Classical drafts-

manship, as well as

right because Liberty

is

the sword of

continually above their heads. It

humanity that

will

is

Damocles suspended

the powerful voice of

be heard some day from one end of the

earth to the other." Within a decade, that voice would indeed

be heard again

born

in

France, and a new, avant-garde art would be

combination of sensua-

his idiosyncratic

lism and moral rectitude.

Delacroix's picture,

Moroccan harem

in

by the

inspired

artist's

1832 (which in turn was

the recent French occupation of the region)

of "Oriental" indolence.
servant are the

The

three

embodiment of

visit

is

and

irrational.

The

third

dream image

harem women and

the

to

made possible by
their

European masculinist

image of Middle Eastern and North African people

in response.

woman from

the

as sensual

who

left,

is

the

source for the nude in profile at the center of Romans, holds

THOMAS COUTURE: CLASSICISM AND

the tube of a hookah, suggesting the timelessness of intoxica-

THE WOMAN QUESTION

tion

and sexual

At the end of the July Monarchy, Thomas Couture (181 5-79)

made

painted Romans of the Decadence (1847) in an effort to revive

and cultural

monumental

history painting for the public sphere. In

ways, as Boime has argued, the picture

milieu culture,

the Salon of 1847

it

and Orleanist

ingratiation.

achieved a success as vast as

ambition, and was soon

century. Yet for

summation ofjuste

and Romanticism, eroticism and sexual

repression, political criticism

and

combining history painting and the genre

historique, Classicism

discussed,

is

many

among

reproduced
all its

size

and

the most widely admired,

paintings

celebrity,

its

At

of the

Romans was

as

nineteenth

much an end as

beginning; like d'Angers's Pantheon pediment, Couture's

painting was contradictory and paradoxical, and

202

CLASSICISM AND THE

may

actually

WOMAN QUESTION

delight.

Unlike Delacroix's Liberty Leading the

which honors the

People,

185-6

niches, cornices, and

pilasters,

Couture's bacchanal has formal and thematic antecedents

Romans

of

the center of the picture. In

friezes.

among many

statuette

and

courtyard or atrium, articulated with

is

sources for

terracotta

and

flowers,

fruit,

columns and statues of august

Romans, including Germanicus at

Delacroix,

small

of

figures, organized into large

are alternating Corinthian

bronze medallions in commemoration of grands hommes would

at

Surrounding the revelers and bordering the chamber

plane.

multiply to more than five hundred. In January 1841 he wrote

concerning

men

the intarsia marble

small groups and appearing as a frieze parallel to the picture

and Veronese and

(1789-1869)

some

hall,

the triclinium (three-sided sofa) in the middle-

exception of a few drawings and models, while his small

physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus

On

a still life

is

columned

of the two standing

in the case

foreground

floor in the

debauched morning

are seen lounging, sleeping,

the right, casting censorious glances.

in the

German

the

an orgiastic night before. Within

forty figures in

Emancipation, however, would remain unfulfilled with the

to the

monumental, and Classicizing

it.

Romans ofthe Decadence represents

the background

engagement

political

have helped
art in the

the July Revolution,

artist as a

classes

and heroic individuals that

Women

passivity: the Orient

is

of Algiers celebrates social

vividly represented

by the

land of erotic freedom and languor outside of

politics, history,

and

class.

"It

understand," Delacroix wrote

must be hard

in his diary

for

them

to

from Tangier, "the

easy-going ways of Christians and the restlessness that sends

us perpetually seeking after

new

ideas.

We notice a

thousand

things in which they are lacking, but their ignorance

foundation of their peace and happiness.

Can

it

is

the

be that we

have reached the end of what a more advanced civilization can

produce?"

For Delacroix and

in the

a succession of Orientalists

culminating

Symbolist Paul Gauguin, "the East" functioned as an

EUGENE DELACROIX Women

192

ideal

of Algiers 1834. 70Jx 90^(180x229)

from the dispiriting sexual and ideological

respite

conflicts that existed in "the

West." Whereas

in Paris

women

had begun articulating demands for the reform of property,

child-custody, and divorce laws, in the East
to

women

appeared

be chattel slaves; whereas in Paris, the feminist and radical

Flora Tristan (1803-44) published several tracts and a novel

(Mephis, 1838) describing the liberation of

proletaire as necessary

women and

the

and interrelated projects, in the Orient

gender and class hierarchies appeared stable and timeless. Yet

however
Algiers

racist

is

and

sexist

it

Utopian

also a

might be thought today, Women of

tract.

philosopher Prosper Enfantin

"beautiful

by

Like the Saint-Simonian

who dreamed

army" of prostitutes destined

in

1832 of a

to sanctify the flesh

Delacroix imagined

both

a testimonial to

sculpture and architecture.

whose

1837),

a place for painters,"

Delacroix wrote from

much
of man

to criticize here,

from the point of view of the rights

and equality before the law, but beauty abounds.

will see a

you

nature which in our country

will feel the rare

gives an intense

life

is

...

[ere

you

always disguised, here

and precious influence of the sun which

to everything." Delacroix's

Women

is

thus

The

picture

treatise Unite unaerselle

men and women

Salon
rest,

is

explicitly indebted

read by the young

is

who worked

the lower right. Couture,

at

beside Papety in the studio of their teacher Delaroche,

borrowed the motif of the young man offering

statue of a flute player, for his

Algiers,

is

at the

to the Utopian socialist doctrines of Charles Fourier (1772

Women

"This

model

lounge, read, sing, and cavort in a bower framed by Classical

colored Oriental Utopia of feminine sexual pleasure in

Tangier. "Economists and Saint-Simonists would find

Dream of Happiness, exhibited

In Papety's The

the statue of

oj Algiers.

of 1843, some two dozen men, women, and children

vividly

natural desire,

condemnation of the "advanced

of sexual blame and praise.

fulfilling

and

[European] civilization" of its day. In offered Couture

Germanicus

The Dream

European

history;

in

own semi-nude male

Romans. Like the

of Happiness

is

Papety represents

located
a

future

abundance, peace, and pleasure modeled on an

that

a toast to the

toasting

Women

of

outside

of

Utopia

of

idealized past

combines the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of

the Classical age with the sumptuousness and indolence of the

French ancien regime. The Dream

oj

milieu nudist colony, at once ascetic

Couture

Happiness

and

is a

libertine,

model marriage of conformism and

ssi (is\i \\l)

III

\\0\1 \\ Ql

kind ofjuste

which gave

liberalism.

ESTION

203

DOMINIQUE PAPETY The Dream

193

of Happiness 1843. 12'!} x 20'8 (370 x 635)

Although inspired by these and many other works, Romans

of the Decadence has

own

its

specific content

and

origins. Its

subject was taken, according to the 1847 Salon catalog, from

Roman

two verses of the

"Against

writer Juvenal's sixth

Satire,

Women," which compares the "plague" of feminine

Woman

is

the repository of bourgeois fear and

masculine loathing; by her erotic independence she

threat

to

male

prerogatives

political

and

is

both a

mockery of

masculine sexual desire. At the same time as these

artists,

the

poet Charles Baudelaire was beginning to sketch the theme of

"Now we suffer the evils

the vicious courtesan for his The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du

and

loyalty in an earlier time:

of long peace.

avenging

Luxury hatches

worse than war,

terrors

world beaten down." Juvenal's misogynist paean

is

succinctly represented at the center of Couture's picture by a

crucial

Germanicus. Just
the might of

for her

of the

so the

(identified

marketplace,

journalist's

modern argument went

is

the

Classical tradition has been brought low,

Mistresses"

sexuality

it

is

the fault of

feminine

Couture's reclining courtesan, along with the other sexually

usurpatious
the

women

increasingly

in the picture,

is

an important instance of

widespread representation of the erotic

female as the embodiment of modern decadence and death. In

Romans, as

in the exactly

contemporaneous

Woman Bitten by a

Snake by Jean-Baptiste Clesinger (1814-83) and Two Young

204

CLASSICISM AND THE

to

be the

prostitute's

is

sexuality

ago,"

one of the old roues

says

from

possession of a

Paris

like

the

mere sham of freedom. Irony

Spleen,

woman who was

"Fate

in

"Not

so many-

"Portraits of

granted

me

the

without doubt the sweetest,

the most submissive, and the most devoted creature in the

figured as tragic decadence.

is

what he takes

thus the rhetoric of Baudelairean sexuality:

years

in short,

the

independence

courtesan threatens the nobility and honor of France. If the

modern women. In Couture's Romans,

to revel in

resemblance to himself. Subjected to the vicissitudes

demanding women destroyed

who appears

sexual freedom of the harem, Baudelaire hates the prostitute

courtesan) beneath the erect statue of

the reclining

as sexually

Rome

woman

Mai, 1861) and Pans Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869). Unlike
Delacroix,

by

juxtaposition:

contemporaries as

194

(1806-65),

by the Belgian Antoine Wiertz

sexuality and betrayal in his age to the "blessings" of feminine

chastity

186

Girls or The Beautiful Rosine

WOMAN QUESTION

world, and who was

The woman in the
contrast,

is

center of

And

without enthusiasm!"

Romans of

the Decadence,

not lacking enthusiasm: her ennui

of her insatiety.
critic

always ready!

"What

is

by

only the result

impossible sensuality," asked the

Theophile Gautier, "does she dream of after that night

of orgiastic passions?"

194

JEAN-BAPTISTE Cl.ESINGER Woman

Bitten by a

Snake 1847.

Length 31 (78.7)

195

ANTOINE WlERTZ Two Young

1847.

55Jx39|(140x

Girls or The Beautiful

Rosme

100)

year after the exhibition of Romans, the cliche of the

temptress undermining virtue and ridiculing masculine desire

would be supplemented by

modern

prostitute

origins of the "red

earlier

than

1848;

still

would be

proletariat leading society

The

more

virulent allegory: the

identified

with

the

radical

headlong to chaos and perdition.

whore" motif

certainly

are to be found

may be

it

detected

much

in

the

conservative response to Delacroix's Liberty, described by the

German

poet and critic Heinrich Heine as an "alley- Venus."

But amid the generalized panic of the months following the

proletarian rising of June 1848, the

the barricades

became seared

in

image of the prostitute on

bourgeois memory. Jean-

Francois Millet depicted the subject in a lost pastel, as did a

host of reactionary caricaturists. Indeed, for the generation
that followed the 1848 Revolution, the
tute

which

in fact

class

and image

would become

body of the
a

prosti-

battleground upon

and gender struggles would be waged. Couture's

Romans of the Decadence stands

at

the threshold of that

new

period of sexual and political antagonisms, just as surely as

it

stands at the close of an epoch in which the Classical tradition

was the preferred metaphoric language

for contest

and

debate-

within the bourgeois public sphere.

CLASSICISM

WD THE WOMAN OJ

ESTION

205

THE RHETORIC OF REALISM:

COURBET AND THE ORIGINS OF THE
AVANT-GARDE
RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND

The

POLITICS

hitherto honored and looked

bourgeoisie has stripped of

up

halo every occupation

its

to with reverent awe. It has

converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,

GUSTAVE

COURBET

BELONGED TO THE

(1819 77)

Post-Romantic generation of French

that included
bert,

Honore Daumier,

artists

J.-F. Millet,

the

and writers

Gustave Flau-

and Charles Baudelaire. They were born

at the close

of

common

utionary idealism, and the growing division between artists

their maturity, they

All that

and man

language of Classicism, the dissipation of revol-

and public. In

Constant

and

social conditions, everlasting uncertainty

all

tation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from

of

an heroic age. In their youth, they witnessed the breakdown of

a

man of science into its paid wage-laborers.

revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance

is

solid melts into air, all that

is

at last

of

real conditions

compelled
life,

and

is

all

holy

agi-

earlier ones.
is

profaned,

to face with sober senses, his

his relations with his kind.

saw the abandonment of

Enlightenment principle and widespread accommodation of

Marx's words are redolent with images from Realist

authoritarianism. At the end of their lives, they beheld the

literature. Physician, lawyer, priest, poet,

promise and threat of Communist insurrection and the

are veritably the cast of characters in Flaubert's bitter satire of

complete collapse of

bourgeois public sphere. Together,

country

combined

for

these crises and caesuras

to

convince the

artists

and

writers of the mid-century that they were living through a

cultural rupture of unprecedented dimension: the
for that

name
"I

post-Romantic generation was

Realist.

not only a socialist," Courbet wrote provocatively to a

newspaper
well

given

broad epoch of change was "modernity," and the

for that specific

am

name

in a

in

word, a partisan of all the revolution and above

means

a sincere lover

all

of the honest

truth."

The

manifestos or to France;

Europe,

it is

not confined to

artists'

written across the age and across

in its politics, literature,

writers mentioned above

is

may

and painting. The

artists

and

not have read Marx's Manifesto

of the Communist Party (1847), but their works shared with

it

depiction

desacralization:

206

of epochal

anxiety,

transformation,

and

are

exposed

and

(1857); the depressing results

in

The

Daumier's

social

Third-Class

196

The Gleaners (1857), and

197

Courbet's The Stonebreakers (1850); the poet stripped of his

206

Carriage

halo

(ca.

1862),

Millet's

the subject of Baudelaire's ironic prose-poem

is

Loss of

Halo"

"The

in Paris Spleen (1869).

In the art and literature of Courbet and Flaubert, reverence

for the ideal

and honor of the Classic have no

place: the

former

depicted gross wrestlers, drunken priests, peasants, prostitutes,

rhetoric of Realism, however,

Madame Bovary

humankind of the "uninterrupted disturbance of all

conditions"

1851, "but a democrat and a Republican as

Realist ... for 'Realist'

life,

art

and man of science

and hunters; the

latter

described

common

scribes,

pharmacists, journalists, students, and adulterers. In the

caricatures of

appear no

Daumier and

Romans

the

poems of Baudelaire,

in togas (except for

purposes of

there

satire) or

medieval knights in armor: they preferred to honor ragpickers

in their

shreds and patches, country bumpkins in their

fitting city clothes,

is

and bourgeois men

ill-

in their black suits. "It

true that the great tradition has been lost," wrote Baudelaire

HONORF. DALMIER The

ig6

Carriage

197

dawn of this new

age, in

"On

the

Heroism of Modern

Life" (1846),

native
age,

Is

is

not yet established.

much abused

this

it

garb

its

But

public soul
all

the

own beauty and

its

not the necessary garb of our suffering

which wears the symbol of a perpetual mourning even

upon
coat

charm?

its

is

a x 44

thin black shoulders? Note, too, that the dress-

and the frock-coat not only possess

their political

(mutes

an

which

in love, political

to

is

an expression of the

immense cortege of undertakers' mutes

mutes, bourgeois mutes

are each of US celebrating

Compared

Gleaners

(8.5.8 x 111.8)

an expression of universal equality, but

also their poetic beauty,

and that the new one

same, has not

beauty, which

Third-Class

25* x 35^ (65.4 x 90.2)

Jean-Francois Millet The

1857.

at the

ca. 1862.

modern men

some

in

.).

We

funeral.

"frock-coats," like those from

Balzac's novels, the poet then explains, "the heroes of the Iliad
"
are but pygmies

Kill

TORK

OF RE Ml SI ART

WD

I'OI

III s

207

Hegel remarks somewhere

185

A KIIKCIM.AM'M.
J'avais lu /'Art d'uimcr d'Ovidc;

<lc

La

du

poussiere

entrai

dans un

unc glace a

la

Forum

cafe\

le

the

time

first

as

all

it

great, world-historical

tragedy,

as

He

were, twice.

second

the

forgot to
as

farce.

Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the

gosier

Mountain of 1848

m'ccrini-jc, apportez-moi

Nephew

rhum.

des HespeVides et au

that

and personages occur,

add:

retirai.

m'avait dessttehe'

Piter!

pomme

respect

me

beau sexe, et plus poli que Sextus, je

le

plcin

facts

51 for the

for the Uncle.

And

Mountain of 1793 1795, the

the

same caricature occurs

in

the circumstances in which the second edition of the

Eighteenth Brumaire

is

taking place. [18 Brumaire

is

the

date in 1799, according to the Revolutionary calendar,

when Napoleon

No longer can

assumed supreme power.]

Classical antiquity be plausibly invoked,

argues, to cloak from the

men and women

Marx

of 1851 the real

nature of their unheroic deeds and attitudes. Neither the

bourgeoisie nor their proletarian interlocutors can any longer

have recourse

such

to

idealist "self-deceptions."

served to liberate only the bourgeoisie and not

Because 1789

all

of humanity

from oppression, Marx writes, the revolutionists of that day

"required world-historical recollections in order to drug

themselves concerning their

own

content." Since, on the

other hand, the present revolution was being waged bv the

proletariat

Absorbe par un flamine qui pajait

vestales, le garcon

la

on behalf of
to

content,"

Marx

century must

demi-tasse a deux

all

humanity,

it

required absolute

means and ends. "In order

clarity as

let

to arrive at

its

"the revolution of the nineteenth

says,

the dead bury their dead.

There the phrase

went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the

ne prenait point garde a moi.

phrase."
In England no less than France, the style and phrase of
Classical antiquity
198

GRANDVILLE "Apple

Autre

Monde

of the Hesperides and

rum

ice,"

from Un

1844.

there only recently embraced

gave way to an art and literature that emphasized

honesty to natural appearances.

Grandville

anachronism

198

fidelity to the

materiality of things, directness of emotional appeal, and

In contrast to Baudelaire's irony,

caricaturist

quickly

to

satirize

Gerard,

(J. -I. -I.

the

Daumier and

"real

his fellow

1803^7) chose

conditions"

of their

The

man Hunt

who formed the

1848 William Hol-

artists

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in

(1827-1910), John Everett Millais (1829-96), and

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)

were

inspired by the

"suffering age." In the 1840's, they highlighted the dubious

revolutionary events on the Continent and by the English

heroism of the present by depicting the stylishness of figures

working-class

from the Classical

Daumier's lithograph "The

past, as in

Abduction of Helen," from Le Charivari (1842), and Grandengraving of

ville's

Romans

"apple of the

ordering an

movement

for a People's Charter, to

reform of British art. Rejecting the

Raphael as

PRB

much

attempt

mannerism of

as the formulas of the

the later

Royal Academy, the

turned for inspiration to fifteenth-century Italian and

Hesperides and

rum ice." In the latter sheet, from the

Un Autre Monde (1844, see pp. 203 and 298), a
modish menage wearing Roman sandals are seated in a bistro,

Flemish painting and to early nineteenth-century German

Fourierist

by Runge, Friedrich, and the Nazarenes. (The Nazarenes, so

being served drinks by a surly waiter standing in Classical

Catholic-converted

contraposto.

may be

Once again the rhetorics of Realist art and

seen to overlap. Anachronism and caricature were the

linguistic

weapons of choice

when he sought
bourgeoisie

on December

208

for

Karl

Marx

to describe the hypocrisy

and

few years
servility

who permitted Louis Napoleon (nephew

Napoleon)

first

politics

to destroy the

2,

Second Republic

in a

later

of the
to the

coup d'etat

1851:

RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS

called for their beards

They included
and Franz

PRB

and long

German

hair,

were

artists active in

art

brotherhood of

Rome after

1810.

Peter Cornelius, Johann Friedrich Overbeck,

Pforr.)

From

these near and distant sources, the

sought the bases for a regeneration (the group's journal

was named The Germ) of British culture and

society.

Millais dispensed with Classical costume and architecture

as well as with

High Renaissance grace and timelessness

Christ in the House of His Parents (1850).

The

in

genre scene of

199

IQ9

JOHN EVERETT MlLLAIS

Christ in the

House of His Parents

200

1850. 33^ x 54 (85 x 137.2)

WILLIAM Holm an Hunt The Awakening

Conscience 1853. 29} x 22

(74.9x55.8)

the boy-Christ and his working-class family instead enshrines

matter-of-factness, physical labor, and the unidealized body.

Derived from his observation of a carpenter's shop on Oxford

Street in

London,

of metier

details

Millais's interior
tools

is

filled

with accurate

connoting

and wood shavings

the

human and spiritual worth of sweat and handcraft.

By contrast with Millais's Christ, the interior of Hunt's
200

The Awakening Conscience (1853)

of Victorian
the

gewgaws and

moment when

is

with

filled

bric-a-brac.

The

young woman, "with

all

manner

picture records
a startled

holy

resolve," in the painter's words, determines to escape her

sinful, fallen life.

Like the

drawing-room has

woman and man

physiognomy

themselves, the

that tells a story

Ruskin wrote, "common, modern, vulgar

which
.

is,

Furniture, rugs, curtains, tapestry, book, clock, and picture

possess

"terrible

lustre"

and

"fatal

as

tragical."

newness"

all

which

bespeak, in Ruskin's words, "the moral evil of the age in which

it

is

painted." As with Couture's

Romans of the Decadence,

Hunt's Awakening Conscience argues that the issue of moral

and material degeneracy
question,"

heedless agent of

her as

its

is

inseparable from "the

woman

but whereas the one depicts a female as the

modern

society's corruption, the other sees

guileless victim.

RHETORICS OF REALIS1 MM'

WD POLITICS

_>()<)

Like Millais's Christ

Madox Brown's
207

ing

Work (1852-65) preaches

work

House of His Parents, Ford

the

in

(1821-93) monumental and complex paintthe Christian Socialist gospel of

as the cure for the social unrest

and moral iniquity that

plagued mid-Victorian England. (Both paintings,

in fact,

were

commissioned by the same evangelizing patron, the Leeds

Edward

stockbroker and philanthropist

former painting, however, Brown's

is

Unlike the

Plint.)

as navvies

"representing

Hunt, and Brown's pictures,

PRB

their associates in their

the

and

were disdained by

many

like

first

scene

is

the outward and visible

Brown wrote in his extended explication of

shown digging a trench into which a new

others b\

decade and

a half,

critics precisely for their insistent particu-

contemporaneity, and topicality, regardless of the

larity,

subject depicted. Indeed,

almost the same

at

moment when

condemned

men

known

Millais,

The

afternoon at Heath Street in Hampstead; a group of

not on biblical narrative.

would otherwise degrade

filthy lucre.

Courbet's paintings of proletarian labor and

mid-

life,

them, and enslave them to

based on contemporary
set in

London

souls in the face of a system thai

were

ritual

the Paris Salon for their ugliness and vulgarity,

at

Millais's Christ at the Royal

Academy

attacked by Charles Dickens for

its

Exhibition was being

rejection of "all elevating

name of "what

type of Work," as

thoughts

the picture

mean, odious, repulsive and revolting." Brown's painting was

is

waterworks main

be

will

laid.

To the left,

carrying a basket of

wildflowers for sale, stands a "ragged wretch," a represen-

of the lumpen (ignorant and disenfranchised) pro-

tative

work and loves

his
.

he "has never been taught

his beer,"

[and] doubts and despairs of every one."

has

handed

just

returns a skeptical glance.

stand "two

men who

"sages,"

in

Denison Maurice

right

at

"reactionary socialist" (as

Carlyle at

to

to think

is

and

who

criticize,

others."

in

These

Frederick

Socialist

and the great polemicist and

Marx wrote

1848)

in

Thomas

"not the smallest [of which] has been

details,

considered unworthy of thought and deep study" (as the

artist's

granddaughter noted), the presence of Carlyle

especially significant. In his Past

condemned

the loss of affective

is

and Present (1843), Carlyle

human bonds

in

contempor-

ary British society, and their replacement by a cold and

The

impersonal "cash-payment nexus."

present

crisis,

he believed, lay

went beyond the phrase,"

both politics and

France

solution

in leadership

to

the

by an aristocracy

in

Germany,

shops

making instead of

pestilent

swamp,

meadow." In Work, Brown made

concrete and
historian
to

real.

the

Brown and

human
210

streams

filthy

and

Carlyle believed,

nature

green

itself; it

is

that

fruitful

His navvies are laying pipe, as the

fetid

neighborhoods into

the Carlyle metaphor

Gerard Curtis has discussed,

replace

its

aftermath.

Marx's formulation,

in

A cataclysmic, European-wide economic

art

February 1848. Uprisings quickly followed

Hungary, Poland, and

Austria,

whose

The

to

human

health and

ennobles people and cleanses their very

RHETORICS OF REALIST ART AND POLITICS

more

still

Workleft

On

massive proletarian rising on June 23.

the

following day, barricades rapidly ribboned through the old

waged

twisting streets of Paris and a pitched battle was

between working-class insurgents and the National Guard

supported by a bourgeois and peasant "party of order."

By the

26th, the workers (and such intellectual fellow-travelers as

Baudelaire) were isolated in their faubourgs, their defenses

were

in tatters,

and

their cause

three days of battle, 3000

was doomed; 1500 died

more were slaughtered

immediate aftermath, and many thousands

imprisoned,

The June

and

transported

in the
in

in addition

to

distant

the

were
penal

days, the conservative political theorist

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, were "a struggle of class against

class";
first

Marx was

great battle

society."

The

in
.

agreement, calling the insurrection "the

between the two classes that

revolution was defeated in

else in 1848,

split

modern

France and every-

but the image of the quarante-huitard,

armed and brimming with revolutionary

essential to

other

recent establishment had been a half-hearted

turned

Hard work,

in

France,

in

second and

where

pestilential slums.

among

closure of the National

to provide fresh water

working-class

Italy,

attempt by the Provisional Government to placate the

colonies.

draining off the sour, festering water

to repeat

however, was succeeded in June by

dug and

labor, he wrote: "[is like] ... a free-flowing channel,

.

art.

significant insurrection.

arrested,

in the nineteenth century

and kingdoms. The February revolution

states

of talent, and in the cleansing power of hard work. Physical

torn by noble force

and

part, bj

In the exact middle of the nineteenth century, "the content

led

left.

and

most

during the European turmoil of 1848 and

Indeed, amid the extraordinary welter of persons, anecdotes,

At no time

finally finished

for the

national political crises, led to an outbreak of revolution in

Christian

the

alike.

was

the far right of the painting

appear to have nothing to do," but

are

and public

it

were the visual cultures of England and France closer than

Above him, on

tract to a

work and happiness

fact,

critics

when

was ignored

it

does

"sages in ancient Greece," thereby helping to assure

ordained

"well

exhibited in 1865; instead

decline during the years 1846-8, coinciding with a series of

are in fact "brainworkers." Their job

like the

subjected to no such obloquy

is

navvy who

temperance

To

or beautiful associations" in the

work

with umbrella, bonnet, and downward-

One of them

cast eyes

to

who "have no need

horseback and on foot, are the idle rich

work."

who

In contrast to the "fully-developed navvy

letariat.

...

ardor, informed the

rhetoric of the age.

During and
(the

after 1848, artists

names of the

and revolutionaries

latter include P. -J.

in

France

Proudhon, Louis Blanc

"

doubt. Such diverse writers as Flaubert, Baudelaire, and de

Tocqueville, and such varied painters as Courbet, Millet,

Octave Tassaert, and Isidore

Pils

shared

The

joy about a pending revolution.

perception of social

past,

and concern or

Realist

Daumier, who

from the Classical

dislocation, alienation

lived at this time in the

midst of the working-class 9th

Arrondissement of

described and depicted in his

Paris,

paintings and caricatures, contemporary urban street

and

life

and the domestic hardships and joys of working

leisure,

who

people. TJhe Realist Millet,

Paris in 1849 for the

left

peaceful rural village of Barbizon, represented in The Gleaners

and The Sower (1850) the virtue of agricultural labor and the
biblical nobility of rural poverty.

common

virtue of their
class

and

life

and

urban

commonality of

focus

Yet

conflict.

very

the

of Realism should serve as a

of an ideology whose

in the presence

function was to obscure as

by

artists are Realists

upon contemporary working-

rural

this rhetoric

warning that we are

Both

much

as

was

it

to reveal "the

content beyond the phrase" of 1848. Indeed, by 1855 the

dictator Louis

Napoleon had succeeded

conservative school of
saert, Jules

others

official

realism

in establishing a

including

Pils,

Tas-

many

Breton, Rosa Bonheur, Theodule Ribot, and

Realism of Courbet.

in opposition to the insurgent

Th us, what was hidd en beneath the Renliscconsen sus was a

201 JF.AN-FRANCOIS

MILLET The Sower

fierce struggle
1

850.

39} x 32^(101 x 82.5)

among artists and a rjjnsjkuuorts-a^cr precisely-

the measures to be taken in either advancing or retarding the

great historical changes then

underway irrJLrance and

rhe

<\Vest__-

and Auguste Blanqui)

felt

compelled as never before "to face

with sober senses [the] real conditions of

relations with his kind."

Many now

life

and [man's]

believed that, regardless

of the immediate outcome of the insurrection, a

European evolution had been reached

in

new

stage in

which working

The
fore,

key question about Courbet and the Realists, there-

does not primarily concern his and their particular

toward modernity:

attitudes

Daumier's credo

all

Realists

ilfaut etre de son temps;

with the novelist,

and

critic, folklorist,

more or

all

less

shared

more or less agreed

political

chameleon

and form
pressed by circumstance
opinions of
own were on the point of overturning

everyday

transforming not just single policies, ministries, or even

the actual position and function of Realist works within the

people

to forge alliances

or

their

governments, but society

itself.

On

strange unanimity between right and

and wisecracking

politicians

this point there

left,

was

and between sober

artist journalists:

tense interregnum between February and

writing in the

June 1848, the

right-leaning de Tocqueville exclaimed that he saw "society

who possessed nothing united in a common

who possessed something in common terror." At

cut into two: those

greed; those
the

same time, the left-wing Daumier depicted

between
1

to

me, what

common sense?'
Of the existence
art

and

is

(May

5,

communist?' 'They are people who

common, work in common and land in

fine, but how can it happen if they have no

keep money

common.' 'That's

French

conversation

peasant and his local mayor in Le Charivari

848): " 'Tell

want

in

Champfleury (Jules Husson)

mode and

literature of mid-century, there can be

little-

of

common

relations

must represent the

people. Rather, the issue concerns

"This

of production of their time.

question," Walter Benjamin writes, "is concerned, in other

words, directly with the

the

will

technique of Gustave Courbet

the

day

propelled

political

be

Thus

of works."

[artistic] technique

argument made below

that

the

innovative

more than any other

artist

of

change by challenging the

existing institutional relationship between art and the public.

Like Jacques-Louis David before him, Courbet employed

technique alien to the established traditions and audiences for

art.

For the Enlightenment David,

his rejection of

Rococo and

this alienation arose

aristocratic hon

embrace of Neoclassical and bourgeois

Realist

of a dominant rhetorical timbre to the

life

that art

Courbet,

this

alienation

academic and bourgeois juste

formal principles found

in

noblesse.

entailed

milieu,

ton,

from

and

his

For the

rejection

and an espousal

of

ot the

nonclassical and working-class

RHETORICS OF REALIST \RT

WD

POLITICS

211

201

Wan With Leather

1844 54)

and The Wounded Wan

(ca.

of

the

contemporary portraits by,

Neoclassical

example,

tor

lincansni

of

Hippolyte-Jean

Flandrin and Theodore Chasseriau {Pur trait Drawing of de

Tocqueville, 1844), Courbet's self-portraits reveal a

combined with

painterliness

compositional tnformalit) or

genre paintings by the emerging

in

such as

Realists,

official

Tassaert, Ribot, and Pils {The Death of a Sister of Charity,

Courbet's paintings convey

plexity, physical proximity,

precedents

in

Man;
for

and eroticism

that has

perhaps

is

its

With Leather

Wounded

source for The

Belt).

By 1848 Courbet was

museums,

his

own

atelier

dividing his time

among

the Paris

on the Left Bank, and the bohemian

Brasserie Andler; at the Brasserie he

some of the most progressive and

came

into contact with

idiosyncratic figures of the

day, including Baudelaire, the anarchist Proudhon, the

202

GUSTAVE COURBET Man

With Leather Belt

en. 1845.

a relatively

Paris

39 x 32

new and

composed

in

contradictory subcultural stance in

equal parts of estheticism, asceticism,

defiance, and sycophancy

(100x82)

leftist

Bohemianism

balladeer Pierre Dupont, and Champfleury.

was

only

(The former's

the latter's "portraits of the insane" are likely sources

Man

and

it

functioned as

kind of

laboratory for testing the various rhetorics of Realism. In

January 1848 Courbet wrote

popular

art.

By

means, Courbet attempted to turn

this

formerly neglected peasant and proletarian Salon spectators

into artistic collaborators, thereby potentially ennobling

empowering them

at the

make

it

any time now, for

to his family: "I

am surrounded

am

very influential in the newspapers and the arts, and

and

the course of the decade following 1848, Courbet enacted an

interventionist cultural role that has since been defined as

chapter,

is

exceptional

exceptionally fragile.

mutated into

By

art,

shall

the

in

a nearly quietist

nineteenth

century,
life,

it

and
had

modernism.

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF
Courbet was born

argue at the end of this

the end of Courbet's

in the village

1849-50

of Ornans, near Besancon in

the region of central-eastern France called the Franche-

Comte. His father Regis was a wealthy farmer who

son's decision to

way

become an

to Paris in 1839.

artist,

resisted his

but nevertheless paid his

There, Courbet studied

in the private

studios of a succession of mediocre academic masters, learning

at first a

somewhat labored Romanticism which

recalls the

"Troubador Style" practised by Couture and others

1840's.

Yet even as

young

artist,

in the

Courbet demonstrated

independence and self-assurance: his self-portraits including

212

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF

1849 50

203

Theodore Chasseriau

de Tocqueville 1844.

11J x

9J-

Portrait

(30 x 24)

about to

by people who are

expense of their putative betters. In

avant-garde. Avant-garde

204

com-

psychological

Caravaggio and Gericault.

Ecstasy of Saint Francis

203

Romantic

even awkwardness. In place of the sentimentality found

1850),

20]

kind of liberation from the reigning

place

In

milieu.

juste

Belt (ca. 1845)

mark

in fact

Drawing of

who

are

61

204 ISIDORE PlI.S The Death of a Sister of Chant}

1850. 95 x

ID' (241

x305)

01

Kill

T'S

TRILOGY

()!

1S4<>

50

213


my

very excited about

a

new

school, of

which

painting. Indeed,
I

we

are about to form

will be the representative in the field

of painting." Courbet was correct in his predictions, though

known

he could not have

to help

him accomplish

According to his
during

establishment of

though

1848,

was

he

overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the

Republic. In June, too, he kept a safe

distance from the shooting, stating in a letter to his family: "I

do not believe
ten years

wars fought with guns and cannon.

in

now

have been waging

would be inconsistent

for

me

war of the

to act otherwise."

For

intellect. It

Despite this

expression of principled pacifism, Courbet's abstention from

battle

was probably the result of strategic

calculation:

brutality

many

like

others,

as

much

as

moral

he quickly recognized the

and implacability of the bourgeois and peasant

"party of order," and understood that a war fought for "the

democratic and

social republic"

barricades of June.

On

could not be

won on

the

the contrary, the struggle for labor

then

The

Disdaining

such

a battle,

bayonets,

Courbet became

therefore,

combat with images; the time was

and he would not waste

ripe for

his chance.

secondly, After Dinner

in the

liberalized, permitting

Courbet

Whereas he had managed

to

free access for the first time.

show only

previous seven years, he exhibited

3 paintings in the

works

in

848 and

1 1

the

following year, including the peculiar After Dinner at Ornans.

An ambitious and
oversized for

its

provocative picture, After Dinner was oddly

genre, indefinite in

its

lighting

and compo-

for

is

a precise

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF

1849-50

two

for

it

184')

in

mirror of Courbet's interest

concurrent crises of French rural and urban

definitions

were up

and

political allegiances of

for grabs,

and any picture

life.

In the

both country and

that treated

both realms could have been incendiary.

Dinner might as well be bohemians

the

home of the artist's Ornans

The

cit\

ambiguously

figures in After

the Andler as peasants at

at

friend Cucnol, thus potentially

calling into question the opposition

between worker and

peasant that had ensured the failure of the insurrection of

June. After Dinner was not scandalous in 1849, but

and returned

Paris

it.

to

its

subject

Therefore, in October 1849 Courbet

Ornans

in

order to reflect upon and

am a little like a
friends the Weys

plan his future "intellectual" interventions. "I

snake

... in a state

at the

end of October. "In that

Yet

will

of torpor," he wrote to his

sort of beatitude

come out of it

."

one thinks so

Indeed, in the course of

the next eight months, Courbet painted three colossal pictures

that

changed the history of

troyed),

From

The Stonebreakers (des-

206

Burial at Ornans, and Peasants of Flagey Returning

209

the Fair.

as will be

As the

art

art historian

summarized

here, each

T.

J.

Clark has shown, and

work constituted an

upon the technical foundations of bourgeois

quisition

upon

class

and

political

206

GUSTAVE COURBET

art

and

attack
a dis-

antagonisms of the day.

1850. 63 x8'6 (160x259)

214

garner praise

to

it

wake of agrarian recession and urban insurrection, the

well!

After February, the exhibition policies of the Salon were

automatically entitled him to free entry to the 1850 Salon;

left

resolved to wage his

these

particular artistic weaknesses or merits:

its

enfranchisement for workers and peasants would require

ment.

all

and the award of being

critics

medal Courbet received

was and Courbet knew

move-

For

significance of After Dinner lies in

factors outside of

gold

subject.

resembled Dutch genre

state.

historical

the

mood and

renewed vogue

in

number of Salon

first,

in its

sufficiently

it

cooperatives, fair wages, housing, debt relief, and full political

organization, propaganda, and a broadly based mass

205

paintings

from

purchased by the

Courbet remained on the sidelines

February

in

at the

would be necessary

his goals.

letters,

fighting

the

immensely pleased

that a revolution

and indeterminate

sition,

anomalies, however,

The Stonebreakers

210

mm
Ford Madox Brown Work

207

The Stonebreakers,

its

machine grown

him

is

stiff

author said, "is composed of two very

from

pitiable figures," taken

1852-65. 54x78(137x197.3)

life.

"One

with service and age.

young man about

an old man, an old

is
.

The

one behind

fifteen years old, suffering

from

scurvy." Stonebreaking for roads was a rare, though not

unprecedented, subject for

but

it

approximate

profile.

Their gazes are averted from

view, their limbs are strained by effort,

tatters.

The

and

their clothes are in

colors and surface of the picture (such as can be

surmised from
study) are

had never been treated

Two nearly lifesize figures are set against a

nearly 5j by 8 feet).
hillside, in

art,

and so monumentally (the painting was

so unflinchingly

its

prewar photograph and the surviving

earthen and clotted, and

uncomplicated.

words suggest,

The predominant
is

of

humans

the composition

oil
is

impression, as Courbet's

acting as machines:

hands,

elbows, shoulders, backs, thighs, knees, ankles, and feet are

all

treated as alien

wrote

in

appendages

that only serve, as

The Stones of Venice (1853),

to

"make

Ruskin

a tool

of the

For

fifty-one

Burial at Ornans, Courbet gathered together

feet long.

some

men, women, and children on the grounds of the new

The mourners

include the

canvas almost 22

artist's father

and

sisters,

the town mayor, Courbet's late grandfather, and a spotted

dog.

The

coffin,

draped

in

white with black teardrops and

crossbones, belongs to one C.-E. Teste, a distant relative of

Courbet; the ostentatious pair dressed

No

noses are beadles.

one

bulbous

in red with

paying

in the picture is

much

attention to either the coffin or the future resting place of the

deceased; indeed, the crowd

discrete groups

bearers at
right

is

composed of

women mourners

left,

that

are

and

a bourgeois

at least three

and

at right, clergy

and mongrel dog

pall

center

at

compositionally and emotionally

discon-

(How

different

nected from each other and the funeral

ritual.

from the postures and expressions of rapt piety among the

mourners

in

Pils'

exactly contemporaneous and acclaimed

The Death of a Sister ofChantyl) Adding

artifice

and distraction

in

Courbet's work

to the
is

coffin), as well as the

impression of

the insistent black

and white of the canvas (compare the dog's coat

over the

creature."
209

cemetery, and painted their portraits on

to the

drapery

odd supcrimposition of figures

above one another.

Tonal

simplicity, compositional fracture,

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF

and emotional

1S4'

50

815

204

GUSTAVE COURBET

208

The Studio of the Painter:

Real Allegory Summing

210\ opacitv^alfi o charact e rize the -Peasants of Flage y. Like the

Burial,

its

subject was conventional (for example,

Gainsborough's Roadfrom Market,

was

certainly

not.

The

Peasants

ca.
is

767) but

its

Thomas

treatment

made up of

discrete

groupings of figures and animals unified only by a dull

repetition of color

and

tonality:

ground planes awkwardly

extending from lower

collide

left to

foreground and middleat

middle

the edge of a road

right; a

boy and two

women are oddly insinuated among the inconsistently

horses and cattle; a man being led by a pig seems to float

peasant
scaled

Bonheur( 1822

across the surface of the picture. Unlike Rosa

99),

whose Plowing
records

(1849)

of

practises

cultural

in the

with

Nivernais: The Dressing of the Vines

patriotic

particular

the

specificity

region,

Courbet disregards the

and physiognomic particulars of

animal subjects

in Peasants.

agricultural

his

human and

(Are those Jersey or Charolais

Up Seven

Years of

indefinite,

My

Artistic Life 1854-5.

and contingent

as the

ll'IOx 19'8 (360.7 x 599.4)

immigrant

city

of Paris.

Like the Stonebreakers and the Burial at Ornans, therefore,

the Peasants of Flagey Returning

awkward antagonisms and

From

the Fair

two peasants, reduced

Stonebreakers,

is all

in its

Sunday bourgeois

funeral; in Peasants, a motley

waistcoat

in

walking

his

fair,

pig.

ungraceful form and subject of Courbet's

triology
It

shown

in Paris at the

would be easy

caricaturists

to

meet

a rural

This

was the

much

attacked

Salon of 1850-51.

expound further

of 1851 did

peasant

best, celebrates a

group of men, women, and

animals, returning from an agricultural

bourgeois

In the

to penury, resort to

stonebreaking in order to survive; in the Burial,

community, got up

about the

injuries of social class.

upon

as the critics

and

the strange formal and

thematic disjunctiveness of the Peasants, the Stonebreakers,

and the Burial. Yet to do so would be

to risk overlooking a

new

cows under yoke?) Unlike Jules Breton (1827-1906), whose

and provocative coherence

in the works. In place of the old

The Gleaners (1854) depicts the poor peasants of Marlotte as

academic and

based upon Classical mimesis and

faceless herd,

idual

and

Courbet provides

class identity, albeit

his protagonists with indiv-

ambiguous.

(Is the

man

peasant smock and stovepipe hat the same Regis Courbet

wears

sant

216

city/country,

bourgeois/peasant,

Courbet proposes

a countryside that

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF

1849 50

as

clear class difference,

Courbet has erected an alternative

coherence based upon popular culture and social or class

who

ambiguity and opacity. As Meyer Schapiro and T.

official

proletarian/peais

political logic

with

bourgeois greatcoat in the Burial?) In place of the

reassuring binary oppositions that will soon dominate

realism

awkward,

J.

Clark

have shown, the formal touchstone for Courbet's trilogy was

the "naive" artistic tradition

Epinal woodcuts and popular

broadsheets, catchpenny prints and almanacs, chapbooks and

songsheets

then being

revived and contested across France


as

component of

Especially in the

December

2,

the political and class

war of 1848.

months before the Napoleonic coup

1851, popular culture

as the unofficial culture

d'etat of

best defined negatively

of the non-elite

was

weapon used

by peasants, workers, and their urban, bourgeois

Courbet was
cult

ality

its

ingenuous and anonymous

explicitly rejecting the hierarchism

style

and person-

fostered by the regime of President and

Emperor Louis Napoleon, and represented

in

then

Flandrin's

allies to

help

Napoleon III (1860-61).

secure the egalite promised but not delivered by the

first

exhibiting his works in Paris during the winter of 1850-51,

French Revolution. Courbet was

was

trilogy

In

its

his

a soldier in this

rality,

war and the

weapon.

lack

of depth,

its

shadowlessness,

stark

color

and emotional neut-

the Burial especially recalls the style and aspect of

popular woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs, such as those

used to decorate the

to help rural

many

generic souvenirs mortuaire printed

communities broadcast and commemorate

local

deaths, or the woodcuts that illustrated the traditional Funeral

of Marlborough or other
to the

Weys from

tales

and

ballads. (Indeed, in a letter

1850, Courbet cites the nonsense refrain

teers

who

In

Paris,

too,

the

popular

pantomimes, he

illustrated a

broadsheet of songs dedicated to

the Fourierist apostle Jean Journet in 1850, and a decade later

executed

two drawings

for

Champfleury's Les Chansons

populaires de France. Further examples of the artist's interests

in

popular culture are his 1853 depiction of a wrestling match,

and

his

employment,

Wandering Jew

a year later, of

an Epinal print of the

as the basis for his autobiographical painting

The Meeting (1854).

In embracing popular art and culture

209

Gustave Courbet A

Burial at Ornans 1849.

clowns,
were viewed by

entertainers

musicians, mountebanks and saltimhanques

street

the police and the Prefects as the natural allies of subversives

and

Socialists; their activities

were curtailed

after

1849 for

being inconsistent with order and social peace. In this feverish

when

context,

political

celebration of the popular was

understood as an expression of support for the "democratic

were received with fear and

and

the

they judged were active in the revival of popular

ough.) Courbet was fascinated by popular culture during this

several folk ballads

down

culture and the establishment of a radical, peasant solidarity.

and

composing

even as Courbet was

of a legion of colporteurs, balladeers and pamphle-

"mironton, mirontaine" from the popular ballad of Marlbor-

period; in addition to

Indeed,

Bonapartists in the rural provinces were clamping

activities

contrasts, superimposition of figures,

213

and even

subjects,

social republic,"

critic said

it is

not surprising that Courbet's works

hostility. "Socialist painting,"

one

of Courbet's Salon entries in 1851; "democratic and

popular," said another; "an engine of revolution," exclaimed

a third.

What

appears to have most disturbed conservative

about Courbet's
charges,

was

art,

"deliberate

its

embrace of both
(working-class)

critics

and what prompted these and other

ugliness,"

which meant

popular ("ugly") content and

Salon

audience.

Artwork

and

its

popular

audience

waltzed in a strange and morbid syncopation, critics of the

its

audience,

its

Salon suggested, and vainglorious Courbet was dancing-

io'4 x 21'9 (315 x 663)

Ol K

HI.

IS

TRII.OCiN

()!'

IS4"

50

212

210

GUSTAVE COLRBF.T

Peasants of Flagey Returning From the

Fan

1849.

81J-

9'!^-

(206 x 275)

"~*g
211

218

ROSA BONHFX'R

Plowing

COURBET'S TRILOGY OF

in the Nivernais:

1849-50

The Dressing of the lines 1849. 69 x

8'8 (17S.3

264.2)

master. After surveying the critical response to the artist's

T.

trilogy,

"He

ment:

J.

something of
art.

proud

Clark summarized Courbet's historic achieve-

exploited high art

its

He made

title

sophistication

its

techniques,

in

its size

and

order to revive popular

an art which claimed, by

its

and

scale

its

of 'History Painting', a kind of hegemony over the

culture of the

dominant

classes." It should be

mentioned that

the claim was fragile, and turned out to be short-lived, but that
to

many

at the

time

it

appeared powerful enough

the stability of the public sphere.

to threaten

Courbet's grand and

sophisticated popular art could not survive intact the coup

d'etat

and the inevitable dissipation of revolutionary con-

sciousness that followed. Nevertheless, his trilogy has sur-

vived until the present as a model of artistic activism.

212 HlPPOEYTE-jEAN Fl.ANDRIN Napoleon III 1860-61.

83J-

(212 x 147)

213

GUSTAVE COURBET

The Meeting 1854. 50J x 58| (129 x

149)

COURBET'S TRII.Ocn OF

IS4>

SO

Indeed,

it

may be argued

that Courbet's three pantings

and

and

clarity,

popular

flatness of

art as

found

nineteenth-

in

the scandal they precipitated proved to be the historical point

century broadsheets, chapbooks, Epinal prints, and trades-

of origin of avant-gardism as a cultural stance of ideological

men's

The

opposition and political contestation.

goal of the

artistic-

balladeers,

new technique

intervene in the domain of real

the

by changing the language

life

many

Like the

Courbet sought
"popular," that
the

who

artists

Van Gogh,

nists,

followed

is

the Impressio-

by recourse

to effect this intervention

to the

and ruling-class

legitimacy

Courbet was

authority. Yet like those artists too,

unable to pursue his ambition to

its

ultimately-

promised end

events

was

means and

new

to carve out a

such forms

such

position for art within

and thereby

relations of production of the day

potentially to turn formerly alienated or passive working-class

The

spectators into active participants.

modernism

form or tradition from without

to a cultural

canon of cultural

fixed

Manet,

Seurat, and the Russian avant-garde

To employ

and cafe singers.

avant-garde, from Courbet to the Surrealists, has been to

of art so as to turn passive spectators into active interlocutors.

performances of saltimbanques,

signs, as well as in the

entailed

many

cool self-regard of

of the same formal strategies, but

the absence of an oppositional

in

public of like mind, the

techniques were no more than vestiges of the dreamed

After

interventionism.

marched

in virtual lockstep.

Courbet noticed

modern

and

avant-garde

1852,

this

and made an

allegory on the subject in 1855.

overtook him and the overwhelming assimilative powers of

the

dominant culture won

modernism

onset of

Thus

out.

as a formal

his trilogy also

marks the

procedure of esthetic

reference and political abstention.

The

loss

self-

COURBET'S THE STUDIO OF

PAINTER

TffE

of an active and

engaged oppositional public following the consolidation of the

On May

Second Empire

Salon of 1854 was canceled, but that a colossal art exhibition

(especially after 1857) led to the abstraction

and generalization, as Thomas Crow has described

it,

of the

8,

1853 a decree was published announcing that the

would be included among the exhibits of

The

a great Universal

antagonistic pictorial strategies adopted by Courbet in 1850.

Exposition to be held in 1855.

From

display to the world the marvelous industrial, cultural, and

the interventionist goals of the

this point forward,

avant-garde faded before the ultimate aim of modernism

which

from Courbet

to

Frank

Stella

was

the achievement

idea of the fair was to

progress achieved in France since Napoleon

social

assumption of dictatorial powers

As

in 1851.

Ill's

a demonstration

Emperor had

of artistic autonomy. Indeed, for Courbet, political insignifi-

of his liberalism and magnanimity, the

cance always lurked just the other side of popular engagement.

Intendant des beaux-arts, the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, invite

In July 1850, while crating his pictures for shipment to Paris,

Gustave Courbet

he wrote to the Weys:

artist

The

my sympathy. I must turn

must get my knowledge from them,

people have

directly,

must provide me with

living.

Therefore

to

them

and they
have

embarked on the great wandering and independent

just

life

of

Don't be mistaken,

flimflammer

is

am

an

not what you

idler,

call a

flimflam-

he has only the appearance

cooperate with his government's plans, and submit to

Emperor would approve. In

naked

members of the
who have their own

overture

artists,

up

as for later ambitious

French and European

to a whole; the

one connotes community, the

other individuality; the one implies engagement, the other an

ivory tower; the one invites bohemianism, the other flimflam-

mery. In

same

fact,

however, avant-garde and modern possess the

specific gravity since the technical

possible the

first

the second.

My

procedures that make

are the very ones that inevitably conjure

argument

in

sum

is this:

up

the interventionist

first,

my

did not feel that

went on

painting; that
I

to

him

tell

win

alone, of all the

the

power

my

personality and

Courbet's

to represent

letter

and

my

went on

me
I

mine

was the

a painter

my

that he

was

in

that

French

could

sole judge of

but a

order to

human

make art

intellectual freedom,

had managed to

was a

any way

in

too was a government

had practiced painting not

for art's sake, but rather to

that

that

was not only

and that by studying tradition

it;

defied his to do anything for

being; that

of

flew after such an

because he was stating to

of that government; and that

accept. ...

avant-garde and modern are the two sides of a coin that

doesn't add

what rage

into

government and because

and that

carriages and handle gold.

the

and patron

effort at cooptation:

a part

toothdrawers

Comte and

a letter to his friend

Bruyas, Courbet described his indignant response to this

Academy and

like

order to propose that the

in

the Exposition jury a work of which the

of what he professes to be, like the

For Courbet

luncheon

You can imagine

the bohemian.

mer.

to

his

artists

of

free

my

translate in an original

myself

time, had

way both

society.

to describe the rest of his tense

abortive luncheon with Nieuwerkerke

and

additional sparring,

stance of the avant-garde entailed a rejection of established

dressings-down, and protestations of sincerity and pride

academic procedures and an embrace of the formal simplicity,

and the

220

COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER

artist's

intention to press ahead in his artistic project

full

about the

program
that

208

knowledge of the

"with
salient

letter,

for future

What

facts."

however,

that

is

it

perhaps most

is

announces

a kind of

work, in particular for the very painting

According

to his

noticed the fountain that

think

these machines are very depressing.

all

hate

Real

these contrivances that look as though they were producing

Life.

remarkable effects entirely on their

remarks above, Courbet was seeking

in his

painting to explore the social and cultural position of the

Afterwards

went

own

volition.

He

Courbet exhibition.

to the

reduced the price of admission

to ten sous.

has

stayed there

to cast off "art for art's sake" while nevertheless

alone for nearly an hour and discovered a masterpiece in

maintaining independence; and to explore the complexities of

the picture they rejected ... In [The Studio] the planes are

artist;

and translate

reality in order to "represent

and

my

for

it

to

my personality
was underway

is

accompanied

(in perfect

Nochlin has said) by

admiring glances.

a small

To

holders," as he called

(at

them

bohemian

Napoleon

thirty-odd

woman who

is

who

in profile).

live off

less clear,

(seated,

is,

These include

but

the

To

death."

it

accompanied by

the

left

exploited

described by the artist as "a Jew

Lazare Carnot

(in

is

really

is

atmosphere, and

ambiguity.

It

some passages

in

remarkable, especially the thighs and

hips of the nude model and the breasts.

it,

The only fault

seems

is

an

to contain

looks as though there were a real sky in the

middle of the painting. They have rejected one of the most

remarkable works of our time, but Courbet
to be discouraged by a

is

not the

man

thing like that.

little

The

Delacroix's chief insights occur at the beginning and near the

end of this passage. His remark about the "machines

on

entirely

their

years later by

Marx

are "the

"social relation
relation

identification

spaniels), the Minister of

left,

and

whom I saw in England"), the

white coat and peaked hat), and

own

acting

term coined and defined

few

in Capital (1867) as the disguising of the

between men

between

volition" constitutes a succinct account

of "commodity fetishism,"

and the

appears to include Louis

State Achille Fould (standing with cask, at far

late regicide

cast

Champfleury, that

friends.

wealth,

poverty,

exploiters, the people

of this group

its

the far right, reading), Champfleury (seated),

misery,

the execution

Oedipal fashion, as Linda

boy and nude

in a letter to

and Bruyas (with the beard,

people,

and

seen painting a landscape

is

well understood, there

that the picture, as he has painted

and somewhat

the right are the painter's "share-

various artistic and

Baudelaire

time

divided into two parts with the

He

painter himself in the middle.

later, just in

feet)

artist's atelier

The composition

occupants.

his

jury.

by 20

a vast (almost 11

is

lugubrious depiction of the

is

months

six

be rejected by the Exposition

The Studio

and

society." Courbet's manifesto in paint

by November 1854 and finished

the fantastic form of a

[in]

The

things."

1855

Exposition,

which

consisted primarily of the mass display of consumer goods and

the machines that

produced them, was indeed an early

important landmark

in the fetishization

of commodities.

It

heralded the beginnings of a world that would increasingly

progress with the rationalization of production,

identify

liberty with the

freedom to consume standardized goods, and

perhaps the European revolutionaries Garibaldi, Kossuth,

human

and Kosciuszko. The upper half of The Studio, above the

appears to have understood something of this historic aspect

heads of

210

where

artificial flowers.

Artistic

My

Summing Up Seven Years of

Allegory

to the Exposition,

spouts

Courbet would make and then insinuate into the heart of

the Exposition grounds, The Studio of the Painter:

August

Paris, 3

Went

all

of the figures, consists of an expanse of brown

intimacy with the market exchange of sex. Delacroix

of the Exposition, and found

it

(with unusual understatement)

paint ("a great blank wall") that inadequately covers the ghost

depressing. Courbet's picture was thus judged a triumph in

of The Peasants of Flagey.

opposition to this sobering exhibition of modernity.

Denied the chance

to display the puzzling Studio alongside

Delacroix's other insights into Courbet's The Studio of the

My

Painter:

"Pavilion of Realism," in the form of a circus tent, on land just

Artistic

Life

opposite the entrance to the Exposition. There he would

"remarkable" execution of the thighs, hips, and breasts of the

his

other

display his

older

accepted

new

works,

Courbet decided

works,

to

erect

paintings as well as his most controversial

and

steal

the

thunder

sanctioned Ingres, Delacroix, Vernet,

from

the

officially

and Descamps, among

are

contained

nude and the "ambiguity

picture."

In

these

few

comments about

his

in

the

[of] a real

sky in the middle of the

the

Romantic painter has

lines,

encapsulated the woman/nature dyad that constituted Courbet's personal response to the dispiriting forces of moderniza-

others.

With

Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of

the financial assistance of Bruyas, the "Pavilion of

Realism" was indeed quickly

was not what Courbet hoped

poor and the

critics

for

on display

at

the Exposition. For Courbet,

woman and

nature are the "real" touchstones for the personal and political

and planned: attendance was

"allegory" that began in 1848 and ended with the exhibition of

were largely indifferent.

considered response to Courbet's Studio, in

the private diaries of Delacroix:

tion

but the public response-

built,

The most

fact, is

found

in

1855.

The nude woman

both wrote)

is

in

The Studio

(as

Delacroix and Courbet

model and nothing more: she

COL'RHi: T'S S'll DIO

()!

I'lll.

is

not Venus.

PUVIT.R

221

222

214

GUSTAVE COURBET

The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine 1856-7. 68^ x 81^ (173 x

215

GUSTAVE COURBF.T

Sleepers 1866.

53J x 78} (135 x 200)

COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER

206)

216

GUSTAVE COURBET

217

Gustave COURBET G>(/W Panorama

Seaside 1866.

2H

x 25J (53.5 x 64)

of the

tips

With

the Denis Ji<

Midi 1X77.

01

59J

82j (151

KM. T'S STl

210)

l)l() ()!

THE

I'

\l\


She
is

is

not

muse

or Source, as in Ingrcs's painting of 1856; she

not the allegory of Liberty, the Republic, Spring, Misery,

War and

Tragedy, or

annes's paintings of 1867. At once

freed of the allegorical

burdens placed upon her by innumerable academic

the

Chav-

Peace, as in Pierre Puvis de

of

artists

Second Empire, and stripped of her only sources of

cultural power, she

holds,

is

instead a blank canvas, like the cloth she

upon which the modern male

painter will figure his

authority and independence. In painting after painting until

including The Young Ladies on the Ranks of

214

the end of his

215

the Seine (1856-7)

life,

and The Sleepers (1866), Courbet

re-

enacted this dialectic of the feminine. Divested of any but

sexual power, Courbet's

women

vehicles of painterly dexterity

burden of allegorization,
in the history of

sexuality.

(The

women

Western

art

are reduced to

mere passive

and authority; relieved of the

are for perhaps the

shown

first

time

actually to possess a

politically incendiary aspect

of this

emancipation would be strikingly exposed in the

response, a decade after The Studio, to

latter

critical

Edouard Manet's

Just as Courbet's nude model functions as a cipher of

artistic volition, so too

Delacroix's

words,

autonomy. For the

does the landscape and "real sky,"

function

as

Realist, landscape

constituted the

especially the type of

it,

Herding has

of social reconciliation. In landscape painting

after landscape painting,

216-17

artist's

dream space of personal freedom, and

the idealized locus, as the art historian Klaus

described

in

an anchor for painterly

rugged and inaccessible woodlands represented on the

Seaside (1866) to the

from the Chateau d'Ornans (1850)

Grand Panorama of the Alps With

to

the

Dents du Midi (1877), Courbet represented his dreamed

224

the genre.

lis

COURBET'S STUDIO OF THE PAINTER

was

too

("I

of the traditional formulas of

who

landscapes, like those ol 'the Impressionists

compositional

lacked

followed,

equality

social

his rejection

internal

focus,

framing

devices, repoussmr elements, atmospheric perspective, and

coloristic sobriety

and balance. They were instead painterly,

sketchy, vibrant in color, bright in tonality, spatially

and

(though

texturally

meaning

that the painter paid nearly equal attention to

parts of the picture

three-dimensional),

flat

democratic,
all

the sides, bottom, top, and corners, as

well as the center of the picture.

Courbet's The Studio of the Painter

foretelling of the painter's future as

In addition,

it is

is

thus as

much

summary of his

past.

an early instance of the modernism

is

it

represented by the nude, the landscape, and the great swathe

of brown
painting

paint
that

Modernism

is

that

would
the

upper half of the

constitutes

the

flourish

succeeding generations.

name

for

in

the

visual

increasingly de-emphasize representation

integrated material surface;

Olympiad)

easel

autonomy and

personal

government") by

engagement

name

in the

it is

that

art

in

would

favor of the

the art that would avoid direct

ongoing battle of classes and interests

of individual and pictorial autonomy. Another

describe the development of modernism

is

in the

way

simply to say that

to
it

involved the rejection of allegory and the embrace of the real in

all its

contradictoriness.

Studio of the Painter:

"The

people

who want

Real Allegory}" Courbet wrote

Champfleury, "will have their work cut out

numerous,

conflicting,

to judge [The

for

and often convoluted interpretations

of the painting (not excepting this one) bear out the

words, but

it

may

to

them." The

artist's

be that Courbet himself supplied the

painting's best gloss in

its title.

10

THE DECLINE OF HISTORY

PAINTING: GERMANY, ITALY, AND
FRANCE
THE RISE OF NATURALISM

IN

GERMANY

the painter Peter Cornelius in 1867, though

had been apparent

DURING

THE TWO DECADES FOLLOWING THE

Exposition

Universal

the

(1855),

of history

status

fact,

the Classical revivalism that had dominated

painting since the rise to power of Ludwig

painting declined precipitously in Europe. Indeed, by the

and Friedrich Wilhelm

time of the

to

creation

first

Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874, the

and display of complex narrative paintings of

Classical or religious subjects

had nearly ended

other European

replaced

countries,

contemporary history, daily

decline and

fall

life,

was

from

fully liberated

its

all

concerned) but

dependence upon an

complex of cultural hierarchies, academic

David and the Revolution

Now

for the

were free

of representing

the

and moral betterment. Hereafter, painters

to focus their attentions

ephemera of modernity, which

that,

like

other

petty

is

upon the transience and

just

another way of saying

manufacturers,

as subservient as that position implies:

they were individuals

autonomy from

who sought

bit as liberated

on the one hand,

(and to a degree achieved)

dominant bourgeois society

cultural production to the

narrow ends of

that tailored

profit,

other, they were the very mirror of that society

their masculinist

vidualism.
toriness

history painting

In

Germany,

all

and on the

by virtue of

and entrepreneurial stance of heroic indi-

Modern

arose

were now

artists

independent commodity producers, and every

and

in

art

in all its

complexity and contradic-

France and elsewhere from the ashes of

and the seeds of modern

history painting

may

Munich and

France. In

memory and

No

view.

Neoclassicists, like the

longer

and

Berlin, private

would

capital.

be said to have died with

be

there

Danish-born Carstens,

living in

heroic

Rome,

who protested against an official summons to Berlin: "I belong

to Humanity, not to the Academy of Berlin." In their place
would
1905)

arise naturalists

such as Adolph von Menzel (1851

who employed what one contemporary

reotypical reality" in his depictions of the

bourgeois Enlightenment dream of an infinite advance toward

intellectual, social,

in

Carstens, and the subsequent Nazarenes was fading from

time, too, painting was freed from the responsibility

implicit since

which arose

enlightened ones, as the generation of Winckelmann, Mengs,

regulations, and codified ancien-regime tastes.

first

was succumbing

The

still life.

for the first time, painting

parasitical

III of Prussia (1797),

both naturalism and ajuste-milieu historicism similar to that

by the depiction of

(and the end came as something of a relief to

anachronistic

German

of Bavaria (1825)

parochial values and sentiments were replacing public and

landscape, and

Now

in

France and

in

of history painting had been long in coming

was nonetheless momentous.

morbid symptoms

By mid-century,

for nearly a generation.

life

called "daguer-

of Frederick the

Great, such as The Roundtable ofFrederick II at Sanssouci

(ca.

1857).

No longer, either,

would there be committed Romanticists,

such as the Nazarene Cornelius or his student Wilhelm von

Kaulbach, whose many grandiose murals

state buildings in

religious

and

Munich were

historical allegory

would emerge Munich

Piloty (1826 86),

scenes from

and symbol. In

at

and

their place

artists like the celebrated

whose

German

for religious

replete with the trappings of

Karl von

once idealizing and anecdotal

history, such as Sent Before Wallensteiri

Corpse (1855), were derived from Dclarochc's bathetic genre

historique. Piloty's

many

pupils, including Gabriel von

Max

(1840 1915), Franz von Defregger (1835 1921) and Wilhelm

Eeibl

(1844 1900) continued their teacher's tendency

sentimentality, but gradually

history subjects altogether.

to

abandoned the depiction of

Indeed, Leibl

an admirer of

Courbet and painter of such ingenuous works

as the

1ST"

225

218

226

RISE OF

218

Karl von Piloty

219

WlLHELM LEIBL Town

NATURALISM

IN

Seni-Before Wallenstein's Corpse 1855.

Politicians 1877

GERMANY

30x38J-(76x97)

10'2| x ll'llj

(312x365)

220

219

ADOLPH VON MENZEL

Town

Politicians

expressed
when he

history painting

written the

Iron Rolling Mill 1872-5. 60^x991(153x253)

same year

as the

the

now widespread

above work: "You know that

used to painting according to nature, and that

indifference to

rejection of

cheerfully confessed in a letter

me whether

it is

am

matter of

paint a landscape, people or

animals."

By

the

Munich

and genre painting was well established.

critic

Anton Springer, Classicism and

antiquarianism were no more than feeble ruses through which

to escape the present.

"If our history painters only possessed

half the courage of our landscape painters," wrote Springer in

his 1858 review

of the All-German Historical Exhibition in

Munich, "if they had the courage

and

to forget

the

young

without prejudice

about worn out aesthetic concepts, the

value of contemporary
differently."

to look

The

life

artistic

would soon be looked upon

Berlin painter von Menzcl, in addition to

artists in the

Munich

Piloty school, apparently took

the critic's words to heart; between his The Flute Recital

220

(18S2) and

the

monumental

Menzcl gradually
embellishments"

rid

that,

his

Iron

Rolling

Mill (1872

work of the anecdotal

Springer believed, stood

5),

"stylistic

in the w,i\

of

German

people.

In the latter painting, Menzel memorialized and mythol-

ogized Germany's refulgent industrial capitalism

world industrial production was growing

rival

Upper

share of

expense of its

Silesia as a kind of rationalized Vulcan's

forge. If anecdotalism

however, Classicism

is

is

diminished

poses are derived from,

Battle of

despite

in

Menzel's naturalist

art,

not: his workers are disposed in space

like the disciples in Tintoretto's

like

at the

(its

Great Britain's) by depicting the Kdnigshiitte iron

rolling mill in

the time of Leibl, a critical discourse in support of

naturalist landscape

To

the historical self-realization of the

Last Supper, and their heroic

among

other works, Pollaiuolo's

Nudes and Velazquez's Triumph of Bacchus. Thus

thematic modernity, Menzel's Iron Rolling

its

nearly

Leibl's

exposes the limits of

contemporaneous
artistic

Town

modernization

Will,

Politicians,

Germany

in

during the second half of the nineteenth century. Historj

painting in

Germany may have ended

with the death of

Cornelius, but the naturalism that arose and flourished

place

in its

drew upon many of the same academic conventions and

Classical

sources.

elsewhere,

we

Naturalism

shall discover

was thus

in

Germany

as

an art of compromise between

an insurgent, modernizing Realism and

a persistent,

academic

Classicism.

RISK

()!'

II R \I.IS\t l\

(IKRM

\M

227

221

Stf.FANO USSI The Expulsion of the Duke

of Athens From Florence 1861. I0'6x

14' 10

(320 x 452)

THE ITALIAN MACCHIAIOLI

In Italy, history painting was faring only a

hurrah was probably sounded in 1861

little

at the

better; its last

Fine Arts section

of the Esposizione Nazionale held in Florence. There, amid

nationalist

and entrepreneurial celebration, were exhibited

the works of three generations of Florentine history painters,

including Pietro Benvenuti (1769-1844), his pupil Giuseppe

Bezzuoli (17841855), and his pupil's pupil, Stefano Ussi

The

The Expulsion of the Duke of Athens

221

(1822 1901).

222

Borrani's (1833-1905) The 26th of April 7559(1861), were the

From

Florence

latter's

(1861),

with

along

the

young Odoardo

sensations of the show, and represented the past and future of

Italian art. Ussi's painting,

which depicts the

final

dispatch of

the French usurper Walter de Brienne from the Palazzo

Vecchio
in

in 1343,

was rendered with the dramatic focus found

works by Bezzuoli, and the

coloristic radiance of those

by

the Italian "purists" Luigi Mussini and Enrico Pollastrini

(who,

in turn,

Borrani's

were influenced by the

on

painting,

the

depicting an act of patriotism

tricolor flag

Nazarenes).

while

II

composed out of sharp

(macchia) of color.
the

was

small, domestic, intimist,

tonal contrasts

By

virtue of

work represented

its

was there such an empty, slovenly

critic,

style

technique and
stern

scale,

rebuke to the

"Never

of work," complained

upon viewing the history paintings and landscapes

of Borrani and the other painters

228

and

and luminous patches

established academic tradition of history painting.

one

similarly

the sewing of the Italian

on the day before the expulsion from Florence of

Grand Duke Leopold

therefore,

German

hand,

other

ITALIAN MACCHIAIOLI

who

the following year

222

Odoardo Borrani

The 26th of April 1839 1861. 29}

x 221- (75 * 58)

223 Giuseppe

Abbati

Cloister 1861-2.

would be dubbed the "Macchiaioli." Yet

hammer-blows of these same

artists that

painting in Italy to collapse and

fall,

Selvatico wrote in 1861, "as a dead

body

it

7^ x 10(19.3x25.2)

was the persistent

life,

as the critic Pietro

contrast,

falls

under the blows

To Selvatico and many others at the

time, the only hope for

the future of a unified Italian art lay in "another kind of

is

historical with respect to the daily life of

but does not depict particular events except as

society,

revelations of the feelings, affections,

our time."

The

who would

artists

and modernist

academic

stickler Selvatico in fact

call

and

special tendencies of

principally answer this

were the Macchiaioli, though the

naturalist

questioned their tendency

to elevate painted, chiaroscuro sketches

and compositional and mimetic relaxation.

employing mezza-

former work,
Florentine

(the Risorgimento)

Michelangiolo,
political

Telemaco Signorini,
Raffaello Sernesi,

smoke

at the

meet

at

upper

eaves,

and chimneys beneath

The

left rests

latter painting,

on top of

chimney-pipe or

the middle or back-

in

only 7f by 10 inches, represents a

row of cream and gray-colored marble blocks

set against a
a

brown

white, dolphin-shaped cloud or puff of

low

vest

in the

upon which

cloister wall

and pants and

is

middle-

perched

The

cool-blue cap.

and loosely brushed areas of cool tan and warm sienna,

D'Ancona,

the

painters

Giovanni

Fattori,

1855,

and Silvestro Lega, among others, began

to

the cafe to discuss Risorgimento politics and an art

By

roofs,

and habitues of the Gaffe

characterized by what Signorini called a "violent chiaros-

curo."

4j by 1\ inches, depicts a compact cluster of

smoke-stack ambiguously located

ground.

The

lower and upper thirds of the painting are dominated by broad

Beginning about
Vito

223

(1860-61)

Sunlight

in

independence and

for

hotbed of Florentine bohemianism and

radicalism.

just

walls,

brilliant blue sky.

boy with

unification

225

Roofs

brushed, but monumental in scale and fully completed.

These young painters (most were born around 1830) were

movement

( 1

the best Macchiaioli paintings: they are very small and quickly

ground,

Italian

and

836-68) Cloister (1861-2) are typical of

(1838-66)

Sernesi's

macchia ("half-effects") to the status of finished works of art.

veterans of the

and ceremonies of bourgeois and working-class daily

through an equally informal vocabulary of tonal and color

Giuseppe Abbati's

of prosaic realism."

painting which

activities

would doom history

the end of the decade, they had created a

paintings remarkable for their depiction

body of

of the informal

representing a vacant foreground and

sheltered background.

Both paintings articulate a dialectic of flatness and depth.

The

and midday shadows

insistent geometries of walls, blocks,

echo the very shape and materiality of the cardboard panels

upon which the scenes

chiaroscuro in each
to the

are

painted;

the

dominance

of

indeed, the reduction of tonal contrast

simple on/off of mezza-macchia

the two-dimensionality of the

IT

similarly reiterates

medium and
\l.l

\\

\l

the basic terms of

III

MOI.l

229


pictorial

facture.

shadows

in the

At the same time, however, the deep

two paintings, combined with the

oblique viewpoint

slightly

Macchiaioli device found

a characteristic

"immorality" and "irreligion"

Gatherers (Le Macchiaole)

spatial

1861)

(ca.

create a

compelling

convicted.)

The censorious cultural

Napoleon and

policies of Louis

his

ministers were accepted by working class and bourgeoisie

alike with

depth and physical breadth.

Madame B ovary and

Flowers ofEvil. (The former was acquitted while the latter was

Cristiano Band's uncompromising painting The Brush

in

for their

more

or less complaisance

the one was exhausted

Boime has persuasively

from revolution and the other was hushed by money gained

argued, the formal structures that underlay the grand fictions

from bribes, industrialization, and speculation. Indeed, the

In paintings by the Macchiaioli,

of mimesis

unambiguously

are

many

discussed here, and

and

surface

color,

the

and dark,

others, light

works

and

line

and composition,

impression

depth,

In

revealed.

French bourgeoisie of the Second Empire

by

tured

Daumicr

effectively carica-

of the

sculpture

his

in

duplicitous Ratapoi/(ca. 1851)

jaunty

swapped

willingly

its

and

Revol-

discovery and understanding are unguardedly exposed in

utionary artistic and political inheritance for "the protection,"

utter disregard for the formal injunctions of the Florentine

as

Academy on

government.

from

their

the need for finish. Yet in estranging themselves

academic predecessors and contemporaries, the

Macchiaioli were in fact seeking the revival of an Italian art

that

had once been marked by

a dialectic of individual genius

of

Marx venomously
its

own

wrote, "of a strong and unrestricted

declared unequivocally that

It

political role in

dangers of ruling." (The two decades following the Napoleo-

expansion and modernization

and preconceptions that underlay

overall industrial production

who

these Risorgimento artists were celebrating their unique

age of people

individuality within a national culture that they themselves

forestry, or fishing

were forging, both by their

and by

political activity

their

depictions of workers, bourgeoisie, soldiers, fields, farm-

houses, cloisters, and city streets.

The

was short-lived

1860's

by

the

late

Macchiaioli

were

compromised by an excessive embrace of the Quattrocento

but

it

Italy,

had already succeeded

and inaugurating,

painting which

is

in

ending history painting

as Selvatico wrote,

"another kind of

[only] historical with respect to the daily

life

the percent-

dropped below
industry,

in

percent, and the

fifty

transport,

trade,

and

banking reached nearly forty percent.)

Thus, with

political

and cultural authority vested

as never

before in the person of a vain and parochial Caesar, French

artists

in

France; during that time,

in

more than doubled,

gained their livelihood by agriculture,

number who worked

movement

dialectics

its

tremendous economic

nic coup d'etat were in fact a period of

and national consensus. By honestly exposing the techniques

pictorial representation,

longed to get rid

it

order to get rid of the troubles and

and authors were discouraged from engaging the public

culture and moral

life

Daumier kept

of their nation.

his

sculpture of Ratapoil hidden during the Emperor's reign (the

former

shared

the

extravagant

latter's

moustache)

and

generally pulled punches in the lithographs based on the

of society."

figure. In addition, the legion of history painters trained at the

Ecole lowered their sights, often enough, from Grand

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM IN

FRENCH SALON ART

to

Grand Guignol,

93) allegory of
Procuress,

In France, history painting had been distressed since at least

the

Romantic generation of 1830, but

combined

attacks of Courbet

early years of the

demise.

The

Second Empire

elite class status

drama was

to

of the genre by employing

its

and ambitiousness

scale, sophistication,

that accelerated the art's

Realist painter's role in the tragic

undermine the
creating

was probably the

it

and Louis Napoleon during the

new and

politically

for the

contentious

purpose of

popular

intended for an audience of workers and peasants.

dictator's part

was

to forbid the free expression

The

upon which

1860's,

wake. Indeed in 1857, the same year

his ironically titled

(and scandalous)

Attempting

the

young

fate

had arisen, we

shall

soon discover,

this

unprecedented

and cultural impoverishment,

Jules Castagnary described the current sad

of history painting as the natural result of the aging of

certain

outmoded

social institutions. In his

"Salon" of 1857

he wrote: "Religious painting and history or heroic painting

gradually

lost

strength

and monarchy

to

as

the

social

which they

weakened. Their elimination, which

is

organisms
refer

become

almost complete today,

leads to the absolute domination of genre, landscape,

Baudelaire were brought separately to

contemporary

230

Salon of 1861. By the

put a positive gloss on

to

critic

portraiture,

on charges of

at the

ambitious history painting was

late;

in its place

situation of political evacuation

The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, Flaubert and

trial

into debauchery, Misery the

bewildering variety of uniformly depressing substitutes.

theocracy

its

was too

it

have

Courbet exhibited

women's descent

shown and acclaimed

moribund, and

progressive and enlightened bourgeois public art depended

that

Manner

Auguste-Barthelemy Glaize's (1807-

time of Louis Napoleon's political liberalizations of the

and, further, to criminalize even the marginal avant-garde

culture that arose in

214

art

as in

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM IN FRENCH SALON ART

which are the

society,

and

result of individualism: in art, as in

man becomes more and more himself."

224

James Abbot McNeill Whistler The White

l\l)l\

Girl 1X62. x+i

n\

[DUAL ISM AND NAIL

(2i4.6x

i<)7.<>)

K \I.IS\I l\

IRKNCH SM.ON \RT

231

Castagnary's

final

confident phrases, which he developed

series of incisive published

in a

"Salons" extending into the early

years of the Third Republic,

may be taken as a summary

artists.

Individualism

landscape, or portraiture

whether

was

public art of history painting;

in the

form of genre,

alike,

and

used against Jacobins, Romantics, and

its

Liberals,

it

had largely

negative cast by the time of Castagnary's usage in

many respects,

individualism was developing

one of the most important ideological paradigms of the

into

Second Empire and the subsequent Third Republic. Seeking

or outflank

to enfold

all

exhibitions, however,

dissident or insurgent cultural

tendencies in a vast authoritarian structure called "eclecti-

persuade the Academic jurors to be more

his

Proudhon

began

apologists

to celebrate

an emerging

alism in politics, philosophy, and

the

word

interests

commercial and
said to

art.

but more importantly

ating the

ranging

from the

Ernest Renan to the anarchist P. -J.

historian

religious

diverse

By

spirit

of individu-

the 1860's and '70's,

the concept of subordin-

of the social whole to the particular

affective interests of the

have become hegemonic;

it

individual may be

was basic

to the

emergent

ideologies of entrepreneurial capitalism, political liberalism,

and even revolutionary anarchism. In addition,

basis for the

by,

among

Zola, and
for

new, naturalist

art theory

others, Castagnary,

it

offered a

practising

common

artists.

and

Edmond

it

provided a

criticism practised

Duranty, and Emile

vocabulary and studio jargon

"Individualism

is

the

of the

idea

century," wrote the historian Hippolyte Castille in 1853, and

its artistic

of history painting did not diminish the

popularity of the Salons or the other state-sponsored exhibi-

to

This

selective.

be more successful than was perhaps

year by 3000 artists,

more than seventy percent were

occasioning the need for

including

Latour,

J.

unexpected,
visitors

M.

A.

the

sanctioned anti-

officially

Edouard

Theodore

Manet,

Whistler, and Camille Pissarro

Fantin-

was an

modest, success, attracting 3-4000 rictus

if

on Sundays, and much

The most

at

more than 600 paintings by dozens of

Salon, consisting of
artists

rejected,

Salon des Refuses

a special

nearby Palais de l'Expositions. This

shrill publicity.

discussed and abused painters at the Salon des

Refuses were undoubtedly Whistler (1834-1903), whose The

White Girl (1862) was conspicuously hung near the entrance

and Manet, whose The Bath (better known

to the exhibition,

as

Le Dejeuner sur

[Luncheon on the Grass]) was judged

I'herbe

"shameless" and "slipshod" by the reviewer Louis Etienne,

among

The

others.

socialist critic

Theophile Thore, on the

other hand, applauded these artists for their very "barbarity,"

comparing them
Catlin.

Americans, George

to the painter of Native

remarks

In

anticipate

that

the

origin, without

been able

to

Thore

artists are taking art

conti-

back

to its

men have

having to worry about what civilized

do before them." Thus the Salon des Refuses,

according to the

populism: "It

is

critic,

marked

a kind

even good to descend,

of return of Realist
or, if

to the classes that scarcely ever

you

will, to rise

had the privilege of

being studied and put into the light of painting.

portrait of a

of the

writings

Impressionists and especially Paul Gauguin,

nued: "It seems that these

once more

correlatives were first visible at the Salons.

The demise

for the

intended: of the approximately 5000 works submitted in that

cism," as the art historian Patricia Mainardi has shown, Louis

Napoleon and

was not always greeted with equanimity

by their sponsors. By 1863, the number of submissions

"reform" turned out

neologism that

term of disparagement

into parlance in the 1820's as a

1857. Indeed, in

generally massive scale of these Salons and other

quality inferior; thus an effort was undertaken by the state to

Although the word individualism was

shed

The

vengeance

soon became the dialectical basis of modernism.

came

might pass through the Salon

Salon was judged by authorities to be excessive and their

Salon and unofficial avant-garde venues

at official

visitors

what replaced the grand

was pursued with

it

more than 50,000

turnstiles.

of the

ambitions and self-perceptions of a subsequent generation of

French

free,

worker

in his

smock

is

certainly worth as

The
much as
.

On the contrary, exhibitions of contemporary

the portrait of a prince in his golden costume." Public

painting and sculpture were mass cultural attractions during

discussion and implicit political debate, such as between

tions of fine art.

the

Second Empire and early Third Republic

as they never

Etienne and Thore over the relative merits of pauper and

when

had been before and never would be again. At the 1855

prince, were certainly never sanctioned by

Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts, nearly 2000 works by

he decreed the establishment of an exhibition of rejected

700 painters were seen by almost

a million visitors

during a

six-month run. In 1857, the biennial Salon des Beaux-Art

exhibition held at the

same

Palais de l'lndustrie, included

artists.

In

fact,

Napoleon

the Salon des Refuses turned out to be a

one-shot deal (though there was a half-hearted reprise in

1864): despite repeated pleadings, cajolings

and even har-

almost 3500 works by 500 artists and was seen by more than

rassing petitions by rejected artists (such as the

100,000 people during two months. In 1868, 4200 works were

Cezanne)

exhibited at the Salon. In 1870, a

more conservative

accepted just 2000 works for display, but by 1880 the

number

had climbed back to over 7000 works, seen by perhaps

million people.

232

On

jury

a half-

any given Sunday, when admission was

III

isters

for the rest of the decade, the

young Paul

Emperor and

his

min-

never again repeated this experiment in cultural demo-

cracy.

As the controversy over the Salon des Refuses

Second Empire

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM IN FRENCH SALON ART

arts policy

was often

indicates,

matter of experiment,

224

225 R.AFFAELLO SERNESI Roofs

in

Sunlight 1860-61. 4Jx

improvisation, misstep and correction.

From

7|-

(12.3 x 19)

1855 until the

end of Louis Napoleon's regime, there were frequent changes

be expected, they emphasized precise drawing, contour, and

finish in their paintings,

and

strict

adherence to the rules of

number and

anatomy, perspective, academic modeling and physiognomic

type of acceptable submissions, exhibition frequency and

expression. Their works often represent Classical, mythologi-

of rules governing the selection of judges, the

duration,
variations

and even admission

Yet none of these

excepting perhaps unique experiment of

appears have had any
the

Salon des Refuses

upon the

to

With

history

the

porary history.

The

latter three subjects, for

example, are

represented in Gerome's Reception ofthe Siamese Ambassadors

on display; a

by Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie at Fountainebleau,

masked an underlying uniform-

painting approaching

or Orientalist themes in addition to contem-

cal, allegorical,

significant effect

actual type or quality of the art

superficial diversity, in short,

ity.

price.

obsolescence,

as

June

27,

1861

( 1

861 4). This grandiose work was

missioned by Nieuwerkerke

in 1861 in

com-

commemoration of an

meeting between Louis Napoleon

Castagnary observed, Salon painting was dominated by genre,

historically insignificant

landscape, and portraiture; with the authority of the Aca-

and

demic des Beaux-Arts

following the conclusion of several minor trade agreements.

in decline, artists

could be roughly

divided, he said, "into three principle groups: the classicists,

the romanticists, and the naturalists."

The

Classicists,

included H.

J.

J.-J.

group of Siamese ambassadors

Henner (1829-1905),

in the

Salon d'Hercule

Deriving the composition of the Reception primarily from

David's Coronation of Napoleon,

descended largely from David and Ingres,

Flandrin (1809-64),

Imperial

nephew with

at the far right

the

Gerome

same grandeur

strives to

imbue

the

as the uncle: seated

beside the Empress, Napoleon receives tribute

Jean-Leon Gerome, Alexandre Cabanal (1823-89) and Wil-

from the

liam- Adolphe Bouguereau (1825

crawling in obscene supplication before their French master

were

in fact pupils

bly grouped

1905) (the latter two artists

of F. E. Picot but Castagnary understanda-

them with

artists

of like temperament). As might

first in a

double

line

of Siamese ambassadors seen

and mistress. The ambassadors'

gifts,

rendered with the same

painstaking exactitude as the costumes, the carpets, the

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM

l\ IK

X CM

SALON ART

Ul

226

226 JEAN-LEON

GEROME

Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by Napolean III and the Empress Eugenie at Fontamebleau, June 27, 186 1

861-4.

50x8'6 (128x260)

chandeliers, and the Primaticcio-frescoed ambience, are piled

scientific, political,

up

dote.

in the right

foreground as

if in allegorical

expression of the

benefits of France's imperialism. (In fact, the painting

is

an

exercise in colonialist wishful thinking since Britain remained

dominant

in

Siam

until 1893,

when France

seized control of

trade in the eastern part of the country, a region adjacent to

its

sum
it

or moral lessons through narrative anec-

by

like the genre historique

its

combined highmindedness and vulgar anecdotalism

tended to bathos; indeed,

it is

and Orientalist circumstance

the very glut of Imperial

in

the Reception, like his representation of Arabs and Black

seriousness

Africans in Slave Market (1867) and other pictures,

ideological instability, resulting

may have been

by the Bonapartist ideologue

influenced

Arthur de Gobineau's

it

Human

by Cabanal and Bouguereau,

Races (1853-5). In that

Romanticists discussed next.

described people of the "yellow race" as apathetic, material-

and respectful of order,

Gerome represented them

just as

The second group

but

Scheffer,

sessed of "an intensity of desire

This

terrible."

indifference

to

"strength

human

capricious, and

violent,
.

which may be called

of sensation"

life

among

pos-

resulted

the Hamites,

embrace of slavery and prostitution, such

in

an

and an

as depicted in

Gerome's Slave Market.

Not

all

Imperialist

governing

is

apparent in works

as well as in the paintings of the

number and

in

spirit,

influence. Chasseriau,

Descamps, Vernet, and Delacroix would

by the year's end, and

artists that

their places taken

by

a small

especially

all

be dead

number of

included, for lesser and greater periods of time,

Leon Bonnat (1833-1922), Fantin-Latour (1836

the

1904), and

Gustave Moreau (1826-98). Moreau's Oedipus and

Sphinx (1864), shown

at the Salon of 1864, well represents

Gerome's, but most acceded to

(Castagnary's "rain of sulphur") that characterized the earlier

gender, and racial hierarchies, employed a

Romantic generation of Hugo, Goethe, Delacroix, and Ingres.

highflown (and anachronistic) rhetoric of

and physical gesture, and strove to impart

234

from the awkward combi-

the tendency toward the exotic, the violent, and the grotesque

ideology as
class,

in the

similar

to

Classicist painting

was so nakedly subservient

of artists described by Castagnary in his

now much reduced

and people of the "black race" ("HamiArabs

as

pictures.

not in actual training, from Gericault, Gros, and Delacroix,

in the Reception,

of these

1863 Salon review was the Romanticists, descended in

if

tic")

including

authority

nation of grand style and vulgar subject,

work, a veritable primer in European racial theory, Gobineau

istic,

and

undermines our confidence

of humanity in his

tripartite division

Essay on the Inequality of the

that ultimately

pomp

Gerome's Reception and Slave

Market

racist;

in

of the July Monarchy before

other Indochinese holdings.) Gerome's depiction of Thais in

is

Second Empire,

Classicist Salon painting of the

facial

expression

religious, historical,

Notwithstanding these

Moreau

differs

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM IN FRENCH SALON ART

basic,

common

themes, however,

profoundly from the earlier authors and

artists

227

in his sacrifice

228

of dramatic breadth and panoramic viewpoint

of the evocation of psychic and spatial claustrophobia.

in favor

Compared with

Ingres's prototypical Oedipus

and

combined physical and

eau's

painting

ideal

of a

intellectual self-prepossession,

Mor-

about sexual terror and emotional

all

is

Sphinx

the

(1808), which celebrates the Classical Greek

impenetrability. His archaic Oedipus, pressed against a cliff

and threatened by the Sphinx

the eagle), shrinks at

once from

(like

Prometheus tortured by

woman and knowledge

body and mind. "[The

threatens the frigid integrity of his

Sphinx]

is a

chimera," Moreau wrote

terrestrial

notebooks, "as

... [it offers]

promises of the

monster, of the carnivore

who

subsequent Salon successes

Hercules and the
ingly

ideal,

culminating

concern for Orientalist

and blame of Moreau from the

in his

likes

winged

Moreau's

Salome and

were

increas-

as well as

by

The

later praise

of Odilon

Redon and

detail.

Edgar Degas are indicative of the general

fate of the

"What admirable

Empire Salon Romantics:

his

but with the body of a

tears prey to shreds."

misogyny and bloodlust

his

one of

woman, with

Hydra of Lerna (both 1876)

dominated by

his obsessive

in

matter and equally bewitching,

vile as earthly

represented by that charming head of a

body

each

wrote Redon, "in the accessory effects!"

Second

virtuosity,"

"He would have

us

believe," quipped Degas, "that the gods wear watch chains."

By surrendering

to the lure

of "accessory effect" and surface

accoutrement, Romanticism succumbed to the thrall of a

superficial Naturalism.

More than
according to

Classicism and Romanticism,

many

critics, that

it

was Naturalism,

represented the future of art at

227 GUSTAVF.
H(>|

MOREAU

Oedipus and the Sphinx 1864.

x 41 (204.7 x 104.1)

the Salon. Inaugurated, the Republican Castagnary wrote, a

generation

earlier

included Jules

by

Dupre

(1812-67), Constant

(1808 76)

new

Barbizon

the

(181 1-89), Millet,

landscapists

Troyon (1810-65) and Narcisse Diaz

Naturalism was claimed by him

principle of equality

"which, by taking for

from our

false hierarchies

a desideratum,

and

he wrote,

of individuals
has banished

and lying distinctions." The

basis for Castagnary's linkage of Naturalist art

was

in society

politics,"

a principle the equality

and the equality of conditions as

politics

to represent a

and individualism

culture: Naturalism "springs

from the mind

who

Theodore Rousseau

his belief, especially

and democratic

widespread during the

first

decade of the Second Empire, that nature, particularly the

unspoiled

Barbizon of the eponymous painters,

or

the

untrammeled Franche-Comte of Courbet, represented the

only remaining

during
ism.

loci for

personal fulfillment and independence

time of mass urbanization and Bonapartist absolut-

As such,

it

was the fundamental principle upon which

artistic creations, regardless

all

of genre, must be constructed.

Indeed, Castagnary and other critics increasingly applied

the label Naturalism to

more

artists

Courbet and the Barbizon group,

than just the insurgent

228

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINQUE [NGRES

example, the

and

the

citing, for

Sphinx 1808.

74j

Oedipus

56J (188.9 > 143 s)

INDIVIDUALISM \ND NATURALISM IN FRENCH SALON \RT

235

Bonapartist animal painter Rosa Bonhcur and the Catholic

peasant

Louis Cabat (181 2 93). Thus the rubric, despite

artist

defining "principle of equality," was in fact increasingly an

its

of that

expression

profound hierarchism

The

Naturalists

at the

but

masked

Salons of the Second Empire.

who were most

favored by patrons and jurors

during these years were not the radicals

and Millet

which

eclecticism

official

Courbet, Rousseau,

the idealists, like Alexandre Antigna (1817

78) and Jules Breton, who upheld the superiority of the ruling
notables, the value of simple peasant virtues,

229

proletarian subservience. In Breton's

the

Wheat

in the Artois, for

example, shown

the rural laborers literally

bow

and the need

at the

Employing

226

Ornans and anticipates Gerome's Reception of

composition that echoes Courbet's

Ambassadors, Breton depicts

foreground kneeling
representing
suits),

Church

in

A
the

Burial at

Siamese

ragged group of peasants in the

before a

supplication

(priests),

1857 Salon,

before higher authorities.

209

for

award-winning Blessing

Commerce

procession

(the bourgeoisie in

and State (the uniformed gendarme). Few works of the

period represent

more

clearly the tripartite foundation of

Second Empire authority, or the tendency of Salon Naturalists to

adhere to class and ethnic idees

The extreme

from

earlier

achieved

animal painters and

considerable success

the Nivernais:

Horse Fair (1853), shown

Exposition Universelle,

mere

gains in power every year, but here

which she would do well

art

menagerie

of the nineteenth century (she was

Legion d'honneur in 1865), Bonheur maintained a

at

her

By

estate

precisely

in

order to avoid

unpleasant interactions with society. Despite her misanthropy, however, celebrity and wealth

came

Encouraged by her Saint-Simonian

become an independent woman and an

229 JULES

BRETON

Blessing the

Wheat

in the

early to Bonheur.

father
artist,

to consider.

"This lady

1855:

in

one stern
.

fact
.

concerning

No

painter of

who shrank from

human face; and

... In the Horse

clearly does shrink

Mile.

the

Bonheur

Fair the

human

faces

painting

from

were nearly

it.

all

dextrously, but disagreeably, hidden, and the one chiefly-

shown had not

Bonheur was

the slightest character."

exempt from

largely

dispensation

police

to

retreated to her estate

dent of

critical or

French Salon

came

dress

By now, however,

criticism: granted a special

as

man, she contentedly

and sold her works

privately, indepen-

Salon sanction.
of the Second Empire, in conclusion,

art

in countless

shapes and

sizes,

and

critics

past and

present have sweated over the best labels. History painting,

reques.

of Naturalist reticence about depicting social

artist

is

animals ever yet was entirely great

historical genre, Orientalist, eclecticist, academicist, Classi-

have been used

John Ruskin objected

operatives,

animal painter Rosa Bonheur. Undoubtedly the most cele-

woman

mere appen-

horses. Observing Bonheur's transformation of people into

cist,

brated

1853 Salon and the 1855

are reduced to

Raimond

to

she copied both

Artois 1857.

NDIVIDUALISM AND NATURALISM

Romanticist, Naturalist, and Realist are

all

terms that

whole or

parts.

in

Perhaps the only safe conclusion that can be drawn

is

that

Salon art was a mixed and variable body of work that

nevertheless

purpose

shared

reducing

single

fundamental

aspect

and

the act of vision to seeing only what has

been seen before.

Indeed, more than anything

else,

reveled in stereotypes and cliches;

51 x 10'6 (129.5 x 320)

IN

to describe this art in

FRENCH SALON ART

Salon painting positively

it

211

The

dages beside the yokes of cattle or the magnificent Pcrchcron

complexity and contradiction was probably achieved by the

awarded

Vines. In that work, as in

at the

humans

had

184 ( )

the Salon for her Plowing in

at

The Dressing ofthe

and by

life,

consistently displayed

230

230

ROSA BONHF.UR

The Horse Fair 1853.

9+J-

x 16'7j-(239.3 x 506.7)

an attitude of tongue-in-cheek and wink-and-a-nod, inviting

spectators to believe that they were being

someone
else

else's

expense. (As

was usually

ideological

the object

power

we

woman.) Salon

work not by

soon

shall

whether through

a joke at

alienation of society

see, that

someone

Second Empire.

performed

its

audience absorption

in

art therefore

facilitating

illusionistic tricks or narrative

but on the contrary by encouraging

diffidence

stance of

and self-consciousness before the work. In

this

way, Salon spectators were encouraged to exercise and

gratify their individual

connoisseurship
with

the

powers of esthetic delectation and

become experts

to

particular

received

idea

positively discouraged at the Salon

the better to identify

on

view.

with

the

outmoded

What was

was the exercise of any

"social

justified

by

at the

Salons of the

crude ideology of Naturalism

masked
was what

Germany,

Italy,

and France

around the middle of the nineteenth century. In Risorgimento

Italy,

the

Macchiaioli

upon

intruded

briefly

this

bleak

horizon by depicting non-elite classes, occupations, and

locations in a style that

was honest about

fictitiousness. In France,

society

where

was profoundly rooted

its

a critical

in three

own

facture and

consciousness of

quarters of a century of

insurgency and revolution, Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists offered a

Salon paradigm.

is,

promoted

replaced history painting in

organisms," as

that

was

Individualism and commodified consciousness

and

any

insurgent, collective, or class consciousness:

identification

individual retreat into nature, not collective resistance to the

on

let in

still

more compelling challenge

Among

these artists,

to the

new

individualism was

Castagnary wrote, that might interfere with the development

dialectically redefined to include

both personal autonomy and

"man becomes more and more

the popular collectivity: thus was

modernism born,

of a

society

himself."

in

which

Individual consumption,

not class solidarity

the close of the

I\l)l\ll)l \I.IS\1 \\I) \

in Paris, at

Second Empire.

IK

\I.IS\I 1\

Rl \(

II

\I.O\ \RT

237

Modern Art and Life

11

MANET AND THE IMPRESSIONISTS

EDOUARD MANET AND
HAUSSMANNIZATION

Faubourg Saint-Antoine, among other

of Paris was thus a strategic as

endeavor, and while

EDOUARD

MANET WAS BORN

IN PARIS IN 1832

AND

died there in 1883, a lifespan largely coincident with the

modernization of the French

capital. Until 1850, Paris

was

many respects medieval: its streets were narrow and

twisting, many houses were made of wood, and water and
still

in

sewage

facilities

the city

grew

were inadequate
it

As the population of

reached one million by 1836 and one and

by 1856

half million

at best.

city squares, parks,

and cemeteries

were

built over, seriously restricting the healthy passage of

light

and

air

progress of

commerce and

industry and the battle against

compromised

at

may

much

had already witnessed three revolutions

Indeed, those

ations.

efficient use

fine,

to

change

in

1852. Within days of the

Emperor announced

massive

Commune

defeat of the Paris

shown by Manet

in his

The

social

and

new water and sewer

which

lasted for

resulted in the construction of

systems, the cutting of

new boulevards

and the straightening and widening of old ones, the

lation of street lighting, the creation of parks

tation

instal-

and transpor-

hubs and the building of new, speculative

residential

and commercial structures.

in the late

intention of the

Emperor and

to

much

as the

be called) were tremendous. Within

his superintendent

was

to secure

laced

economic and

a city

urban syncretism;

of fashion, elegance,

class

segregation replaced social

Where rich and poor had once lived in relative

now increasingly separated from each
the former in the smart new apartment blocks lining the

other,

grands boulevards on the right bank of the Seine, and the

in the

Menilmontant,

Whereas

in

Belleville

and La

Villette, outlying the city.

former times the center of the

city

the confused crush and din of carriage

clothes

was marked by

traffic,

travelers,

up

the radical communities that existed in the Cite and the

was now,

class,

men, crockery menders, dog barbers, and others

as Baedeker's wrote, "a far

tranquility."

of massive unemployment, and the urban renewal broke

latter

houses and tenements of the communes annexees, such as

many

time

came

a generation, Paris

integration; a blase public attitude replaced a changeable and

works program provided employment for thousands

at a

(ca.

and detachment. Architectural homogeneity rep-

popular consent or obedience to undemocratic rule: the public

238

Spring of 1871, as

beggars, entertainers, and street hawkers of every kind

In addition to improving health and transportation, the

gener-

strategic, effects of Haussmannization (as the rebuilding

proximity, they were

Second Empire

a city that

many

drawing called The Barricade

cultural, as

energetic mien.

the entire

in as

1871).

Implemented under the supervision of a

Baron Georges Haussmann, the campaign

at the

during the mass executions that followed the

public works project to redesign and rebuild the city of Paris.

city superintendent,

many

avenues were put to

straight

became the place we know today,

d'etat, the

was an economic

wholly absent from the minds of the governors of

effrontery,

began

rebuilding

of canonballs, the idea cannot have been

facilitate the flight

infrastructure of Paris.
All this

it

not be strictly true, as

mid-century, by the occluded urban pattern and decrepit

Napoleonic coup

as

The

time believed, that the boulevards were straightened to

and the movement of people and goods. The

tuberculosis and cholera were thus seriously

it

places.

other

large

cities

Whereas

occupation,

in a

...

[a

less

place

old-

it

noisy place than

of]

comparative

previous age, the signs of social

and sexual

availability

were instantly

readable in costume and deportment, the mass-produced

231

new department

clothes sold in the

a

proletarian,

made such

became

The

more

difficult.

The

city

by strangers, orphans, and refugees.

Second Empire can

during the

Paris

The

fear

are integral parts of

modern

Raymond Williams

Plowman

if

culture

itself,

be

easily

and disparagment of modernity,

traced, as

after

and can be

has shown, to the time of Piers

not before. Alarms concerning urban desecration

and alienation
the preface to

in Paris

were being issued by Victor

later.

in

Nevertheless, the appear-

number of strange and

of a

in Paris

Hugo

Notre-Dame de Paris from 1 830 and by Balzac in

Les Petits Bourgeois a decade

ance

combined with the

extent of the erosion of the rich and complex symbolic

exaggerated.
all,

identifications

a place inhabited

in

life

stores,

lower middle class between bourgeois and

growth of

neurotic

symptoms at

approximately mid-century would seem to point to the

uniqueness of the changes that overtook the capital

Flaneurie and

time.

examples of

at this

modernist painting are two related

symptomatology.

this

Seeking to cushion themselves against the shocks of capital,

or to carve out an identity in an environment increasingly

number of

bereft of social markers, a

subcultural stance of the flaneur.

modern male

individuals, including

and the painter Manet, adopted the

the poet Baudelaire

individualist

The

very

embodiment of the

"become more and more himself,"

the flaneur was a perpetual idler, browser, or

who saw

window-shopper

the city of Paris as a spectacle created for his

entertainment, and judged commodities to be icons

"The

his veneration.

is

becomes

much

as

citizen

is

home among

at

in his four walls.

for

painting

the facades of houses as a

To him

signs of businesses are at least as

oil

made

good

the shiny, enamelled

a wall

to a bourgeois in his salon.

is

ornament

Edouard Manet

The Barricade

18| x

ca. 1871.

are his libraries

The

done. That

of variations

life,
.

Music

in the

Tuileries (1862), or

on

Balcony (1868-9).
In Music in the Tuileries, perhaps the "earliest true example

the art historian and curator Francoise Cachin wrote,

many

has interspersed his

among

The flaneur

household after his work

tances

and inexhaustible wealth

himself stands

at the far left,

in lost profile,

coincident with the largest tree at middle

beneath him

sit

among

the grey cobble streets

slowly strolled the streets of Paris, scrutinizing

a larger cross section

the

tion;

Eugene Manet

brush

of elegant society.

in

hand; Baudelaire stands

him solve

seated just to the right

mysterious crime. In such

difficult cases,

every

piece of evidence counts: the cut of a sleeve or trouser, the

of satin, the trim of whiskers, and the depth of

plunging neckline are

all

prerequisite for the discovery of

identity in a city of strangers.

was

all

the

And

the

work of detection

more subtle and rewarding given

in

the

largest tree at
a

is

the

also stands in

the middle right foreground;

composer Jacques Offenbach,

right.

The

I'.DOl

will

painting constitutes,

elite rotnatl a clef,

costume and features

points!)

Manet's

left in

turned upon the flaneur; now he

and tan and

in the Tuileries park, in

middle

kind of Parisian,

meagerness of the signs of social and psychological difference

example,

the painter's brother

with moustache, no beard, and neatly circumscribed by the

on display,

as, for

left;

Mmes. Lejosne and Loubens, dismen in government and educa-

bowing and facing

profile,

a piece

Manet

his

everything he saw, like a detective searching for clues to help

a

Manet

fashionable friends and acquain-

in all its variety

[thrived]

balcony, as in his

tinguished wives of notable

Paris

x33.4)

of modern painting in both subject matter and technique," as

and against the grey background of despotism.

(->6.5

walls are the

and the terraces of cafes are the balconies

from which he looks down on

sheen on

LU

as an

desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands

is

231

a dwelling place for the

Walter Benjamin has written:

flaneur,'''

he

street

is

in

subject to perusal;

hidden beneath

in brief,

which the table

now

is

his

blur of w hite, black,

confused tangle of phallic trees (or exclamation

be spied for signs of class and temperament.

VRD M

wi

WD

II

\l

SSMANNIZATION

:;

232-3

232

Edouard Manet

Music

in the Tuileries 1862.

A similar reversal of the

Balcony (and

232

in

260

see pp. 263+). There,

accessories, a

upper

left

left, all

man

4W

30 x

(76 x

position of seer and seen

in Cassatt's

Woman

in

two women dressed

in black

is

18)

Black at the Opera:

in

white with green

with blue cravat, a servant in the

shadows, and an uncertain breed of dog

at the

lower

pose behind a green iron balcony and between green

shutters.

The

woman

seated

is

Artists

effected

the painter Berthe Morisot

Manet and

like

the painter and graphic artist

Constantin Guys (1802 92)

worked outside of the

Academy

were

natural

had no fixed occupation and hardly even

flaneurs; they

abode,

settled

who

framework of the

institutional

traveling

vagrantly searching the city for models and motifs.

crowd

is

his

"The

domaine," wrote Baudelaire about Guys, author

(1841 95), whose particular keenness of vision and insight

of the vacuous drawing The Champs-Elysees (1855), "as the

would be revealed

is

for birds

is

to

pp. 253-4).

They

in

her paintings of the next decade (see also

cast their eyes left, right,

and center

who

imitation of the shifting gaze of the bewildered spectators

saw the work

at

attitude [of the

the Salon of 1869.

women

two

wrote, "bewilders me.

painting each figure

in

"This contradictory

The Balcony},'" Castagnary

Like characters

must be

in

in a

comedy, so

in a

and water

is

for fish.

artist-flaneur

was

a politically

deadpan

style

and humor, the flaneur was

He

and no cheerleader, and was

He pursued

the

much vaunted

principle of individualism even at the cost of public incompre-

hension, comforted that he lived and worked

minded

artists

bohemia and high

240

among

like-

and writers on the borderland between

society.

EDOUARD MANET AND HAUSSMANNIZATION

By

virtue

Yet he was

at

the

minor thorn

in the

on the pageant of

was, for the most part, no patriot

manipulated consent.

Manet

characters or for himself.

contradictory figure.

side of a despotic regime that survived

contribute to the expression of the general idea."

women

air

his profession

of his furtive insinuation into the middle of the crowd, and his

and so

role for his

His passion and

marry [epouser] the crowd." Like Baudelaire, the male

in place, play its part

would accept no such circumscribed

between home and studio and

totally lacking in

ingenuousness.

same time an eager propagandist

modernity and thus of some

use:

by believing with

for

his entire

heart and soul that the mass-produced clothes slung across the

mannequins

in

the

Au Bon Marche department

store or

draping the sloped shoulders of the good bourgeois on the

Boulevard des Capucines contained the clues to

unique


identity,

he was accepting and propagandizing the commodity

fetishism that buttressed both the dazzling facade of the

Second Empire and

"grey background of despotism."

its

was both phantasmagorical and

Paris

dictatorial;

perpetual-motion machine that seemingly worked

as Delacroix

own

had noted

volition

at the

1855 Exposition

was

it

its

magic

entirely of its

and independent of the labor of workers or the

struggle of classes and genders. Paris, with

its

gaslighted

boulevards and omnibuses, glass-fronted stores that functioned like reliquaries, glass-roofed arcades that resembled

Gothic cathedrals, and mock festive cafe-concerts with names

like Alcazar, El

city

Dorado, and Ambassadeurs, was

modern

born of the commodity and dedicated to keeping that

a secret. Flaneurie

and intrigue,

as

was complicit

was the

artist

in

commodity

Manet

fact

fetishization

in these pictures.

OLYMPIA
At times, however, Manet appeared

to

resist

the given

structures of class and gender ideology, thereby achieving

something of the individualism or autonomy which he and

235

his

contemporaries claimed to seek. Olympia (1863, exhibited

1865),

which immediately eclipsed

his

own

Dejeuner sur

Fherbe (1863) as the most notorious painting in the history of

art,

is

the case in point.

It

depicts a naked white

woman

reclining on a bed gazing at the viewer, and a clothed black

spectator's line of sight,

woman holding a bouquet of flowers and gazing at Olympia. A

dressing-gown

black cat arches

its

drawn back

at the

meet

middle

in the

back

upper

at the

left,

lower right, a green drape

and

a partition

and curtain

behind Olympia permitting

into an alcove or waiting area beyond.

upon which the protagonist lies

is

The

fail

is

to

glimpse

plane of the bed

almost exactly parallel to the

The

painting's

composition

balanced between

left

and

highlighting by contrast

The

and the bedclothes

at

lower

left

and

lower right cascade into the viewer's space.

at

right,

its

handling of paint

is

thus

mechanically

and top and bottom, further

immodest

in

rather

Olympia

or imbalanced subject.
is

as discordant as its

contents and composition. Whereas academically approved

233 EDOUARD MANET

66x 491(169 x 125)

234

Balcony 1868-9.

Constantin Guys The

Champs-Elysees

1855. 9J x 16J (24.1 x41.6)

U\.\ Ml'l

241

235

EDOUARD MANET

Salon

painting

brushstrokes

Olympia 1863. 51Jx 74J

(130.5 x 190)

was generally highly polished, with

invisible

and

its

its

forms smoothly modeled,

again this year," wrote the usually sensible Jules Claretie,

"with two dreadful canvases, challenges hurled

Olympia presents something of the appearance of an ehauche

mockeries or parodies,

(preliminary, rough underpainting), with

is

its

clearly distinct

touches of color and abrupt contrasts of tonality, as for

example on the nude's shoulders, breasts,

belly,

early

all

hard and angular,

Flemish painters.

refusal of

The

like the

hips. In

nude body, and

addition, the bedclothes, dressing-gown,

paper are

and

drapery

in

works by the

overall pictorial effect of this

modeling and subtle chiaroscuro,

as well as of the

mechanically poised compositional elements and angularity,

is

a flatness

and ungainliness such

as

found

in "primitive"

children's art or in Epinal prints. Like Courbet, then,

and

lies his

different

avant-garde suit to the Salon public, one very

from the disingenuous entreaties of Academic and

The
the

242

times were inauspicious for popular

1865 Salon was lambasted by

OLYMPIA

Odalisque with

art,

however, and

exhibited alongside his Christ

the critics:

Mocked

"We

find

at

him

can one

tell?

at the public,

Yes mockeries. What

yellow stomach, a base model picked

know not where who represents Olympia?

critic,

cited

by T.

...

A courtesan

Clark in his

J.

indispensable study of the picture, spoke of Olympia as "a

courtesan with dirty hands and wrinkled feet

her body has

the livid tint of a cadaver displayed in the morgue; her outlines

are

drawn

to

be provoking the public, protected

in

charcoal and her greenish, bloodshot eyes appear

all

the while by a

hideous Negress."

Manet indeed provoked

by

critics

and bourgeois public

his subversion of the genre of the

the received ideas of sex and race.

nude and

To

France.

alike

his rejection of

depict nudes, "fallen"

and alluring women, was, we have seen,

nineteenth-century

Official art.

Manet's Olympia

no doubt." Another

Manet

has sought refuge and resource in the naive and the popular:
therein

this

up

how

common enough

in

who was Manet's

had made a courtesan the

Couture,

teacher between 1850 and 1856,

Romans of the Decadence, and by 1865

would have seemed half-bare without their

focus of his 1847

the

Salon walls

full


complement of

dissolute

Venuses, Bacchantes, Nymphs,

Sapphos, Salomes, Dianas, and Odalisques, by the

likes

of

Bouguereau, Cabanal, and Paul Baudry. In addition, before

decade ended, the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

the

(1827-75) arid the painter Claude

Monet (1840-1926) ven-

tured to create what they believed to be

representations of female figures
245

246

ensemble.

both Carpeaux's

In

Monet's Women

naked,

naturalistic

clothed, and in

The Dance (1867 -9) and

Garden (1866-7)

in the

more

women

are repre-

The practise of depicting "negresses" in

common, was nearly as longstanding and
women:

representation of "fallen"

appear

though

order to signal the presence of

less

revered as the

women began

black

and the decorative

in painting, sculpture,

middle of the eighteenth century

By

art,

to

arts in the

as allegories of Africa or in

or animal-like sexuality.

illicit

when

the early nineteenth century,

racist

theories of

polygenesis (the notion of the separate biological origins of

humans)

represented

they

prevailed,

and

lasciviousness

whose

sented in counter-clockwise orbit around a central axis; in the

evolutionary

Monet, the fashionable women encircle

colorism and expressive drawing style profoundly influenced

and

tree,

personifying

"the Genius of Dance."

it

caused

When

new

sculptural group on the facade of the

unveiled in 1869

slender and animate

Carpeaux around an adolescent male

the

in

Carpeaux's

Paris

Opera was

scandal by what was seen as

"immodesty," "realism," and modernity;

in

fact,

it

its

was

profoundly influenced by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini,

and formed part of the decorative ensemble of the very

building that symbolized the regime of Napoleon III with

its

all

imperial and Classical pretensions. Monet's early Impres-

sionist

Women

in the

Garden was

also rejected,

the Salon, reportedly because of

youthful
structured

artists,

despite

composition.

culture of the

its

potential

Classical

Images

modern

sculpted, academic, and

visual

its

by the jury of

of

to corrupt

and hierarchically

women

positively

painted,

dominated the

Second Empire, but none was so

Manet, had depicted

in

Orientalist

example,

for

Women of Algiers. By
women became almost

pictures of Ingres,

Eugene Fromentin, among

the early Second

which

Laura

woman

a black

Gerome, Chasseriau, and

In

others.

(last

lower

at the

left

name unknown) who posed

1870,

from the central

La

perhaps
Manet

woman

group of Courbet's

burial.)

Unlike these

same

shown

is

in the center.

as well perhaps as the subject,

figural

Toilette

the

derived

is

of the

Toilette

1865, which depicts the preparation of a

Bride,

young

the

for

dressing a naked and voluptuous white

(The composition,

body

for

however, Manet offered his male

artists,

spectators neither secure art historical moorings nor anypatriarchal consolation in Olympia.

of Olympia lacked pliancy and suppleness,

suggesting instead an independent sexuality which emerged,

as a critic wrote,

"[from beneath her] hand flexed

in a sort

of

shameless contraction." She was not a grand courtesan paid to

236

FREDERIC BAZIU.E La

Toilette 1870.

83x79(211x201)

confirm the myths of masculine desire, but a proletarian

owned only her

labor

power and her

argued, she was subhuman:

on a bed," wrote one, "a

corpse
third.

sex.

And

"A sort of female gorilla

monkey," wrote

who

as such, critics
.

a second,

ape[s]

and "a

from the [working-class] Rue Mouffetard," stated

The

repeated references to Olympia's blackness and

simian aspect suggest that

a critical elision

between the nude

and the West Indian maid has occurred. The body of the

body of the Afro-Caribbean

lower-class prostitute and the

woman, according
their

common

to

inferiority. (Black

stood,

Manet's interlocutors, were linked by

degenerescence,

intellectual, physical,

that

is,

by their combined

and moral depravity, morbidity, and

women and

prostitutes were widely under-

according to the science of the day,

to

congenitally deformed genitals that preconditioned

hypersexuality.) Each was judged

other

and

harbingers

of the

possess

them

more grotesque than

feared

degeneracy

to

the

which,

according to the respected doctor Benedict Augustin Morel

author of the Treatise on Degeneracy (1857)

French society

as

whole.

something of thai decay, and

192

ubiquitous in the

Impressionist Frederic Bazille (1841 70) painted

in

woman

turbaned black African serving

hothouse

his

Empire, black

The body

controversial as Manet's.

Delacroix,

retardation.

was infecting

Manet's picture represented

for that reason

as well as for

OLYMPIA

its

24.?

236

overall pictorial strangeness

cated, fantastic,
its

and

precipitated the very compli-

art as solely a field

enlightened bourgeois detached from the

idiotic chain of criticisms that constituted

In the end,

must be observed

it

probably more modern than

that

women, they were of

proletarian

lumpen variety; though

still

art,

it

it

it

in the

senses

represented two

the politically

ambiguous

employed the two-dimensionality of

did so within the confines of a genre

that was, for

all its

the

rebarbativeness in Manet's case,

constitutive of the old class and gender hierarchies; and

though Olympia incited

finally,

antagonism,
social

class,

it

did so in the

frenzy of shrill critical

particular

oppositional

ideology.

principle,

political

name of no other clearly

or

Manet

did not succeed in fashioning a new, artistic public

sphere

in 1865; still less

did he create a

painting to replace the once exalted and

"You

are only the

first in

new

sort of history

now moribund

genre.

the decrepitude of your art," wrote

Baudelaire to him in 1865 and, indeed, Olympia was a suitable

end and beginning of painting.

It

marked the conclusion of a

heroic tradition of art for an enlightened bourgeois public, and

the origins of a

modern

art that instead denies or negates the

of that class's rule. In addition,

verities

signaled

it

the

(temporary) end of the Courbetist dream of a Realist art for

the masses, and the beginning of an equally idealist

an autonomous

art

dream of

intended for a society of free individuals.

The

<>l

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

Romantic

world-historical ambition,

European

to discover for

themselves a semblance of the individual

fervor,

lacked the

and avant-garde

Born around 1840, they were too young

artists.

in

shock and horror (mostly from

dismemberment of France
massacre of

own

its

Commune that

Prussian

a safe distance) the

1870-71, and the French

in

citizens during the suppression of the

followed.

They beheld

the industrialization of

agriculture in the provinces and the Haussmannization of

urban space

in Paris,

and understood that the old France of

agrarian autarchy and distinct urban quartiers was no more.

To all of these events and transformations, they responded

the

most part with the

approved mix of nostalgia

officially

the old and complacency at the new.

thus in the main passive witnesses

for,

the emerging and

The

of,

modern "forms of bourgeois

the depth of their enthusiasm was such that they nevertheless

managed

to precipitate a crisis of representation that

ended

only with the severance of the formerly existing relationship

between

and

art

its

public.

artists,

which Emile Littre defined

pronounced

less

after

1874 to define the

derives from the

word

impression,

in his Dictionnaire (1866) as

effect

upon the sense organs." In 1870, the word was applied by

critic

Theodore Duret

to

coloration; each

summed

is

up,

nuance or

in

his

eyes,

distinct color

the existing urban, and especially the suburban, spaces of

tone, a particular note of the palette."

modernity

two aspects of Manet's

quest.

"Early

Impressionism," as Meyer Schapiro wrote:

first,

its

the

Manet: "He brings back from the

Unlike him, they generally lacked irony and guile, seeing

that

"the

which exterior objects make

Everything

of

re-

creation" of their day, but the acuity of their observation and

tuted the Utopian legacy of enlightenment and revolution.

dream-terrain

for

Impressionists were

vision he casts on things an impression truly his own.

the

for

or willing propagandists

freedom, self-determinacy, and sensual pleasure that consti-

in

to

be firebrand quarant-huitards, but were old enough to watch

more or
flaneur Manet, the Impressionists were determined

who

convictions of the two previous generations of French and

The term Impressionism, used

the.

official beliefs

Impressionists were indeed individualists

group of eponymous

Like

an

for

Manet's Olympia was

was avant-garde,

it

those terms have been used here. Although

nude

his class.

scandal.

popular

of individual enjoyment

art that

utter individuality,

in

variant of

becomes

a definite

Duret thus described

have already been considered:

and secondly,

its

structure of

discrete color "notes" juxtaposed against, but not blended

had

moral aspect. In

its

discovery of a constantly

The

dual nature of Impressionism

also underlay Castagnary's celebrated description of the thirty-

depended upon the momentary position of the casual or

artists

mobile spectator,

name

there

was an

implicit

symbolic social and domestic formalities, or

opposed

to these. It

is

remarkable

at least a

how many

sociability, of breakfasts,
trips,

picnics,

who

exhibited together for the

first

time under the

norm

Anonyme at the Paris studios of the photographer Nadar in 1874: "They are Impressionists in the sense that

we

they render not the landscape but the sensation produced by

criticism

pictures

of

have in early Impressionism of informal and spontaneous

promenades, boating

holidays and vacation travel. These urban idylls not

Societe

the landscape.

[The Impressionists] leave

into full idealism."

By "idealism,"

reality

and enter

as the art historian

Richard

Shiff has shown, Castagnary meant the individualism of the

down

only present the objective forms of bourgeois recreation in

artists, that

the 1860s and 1870s; they also reflect in the very choice of

mosaic of colors and forms determined by the peculiar

subjects and in the

244

with, their adjacent tone.

changing phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes

new

aesthetic devices the conception of

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

corresponded

to their

technique of laying

impression of the exterior world upon their sense organs.

^vrmmmmm**mmfi*^*mmHm*~

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mmtmmmmmmmm9KflHW^9tW^S.WW m

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bbr

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237

CLAUDE MONET

238

CAMILLE PlSSARRO

Regatta at Argenteutl 1872.

Hoarfrost 1873. 25j

19 x 29J (48 x 75)

x 36J (65 x 93)

IMl'RI

SMOMSM AM)

Till.

COMMODITY

245


In 1874, therefore, the term Impressionism connoted a

light.

Painted almost entirely en plein air (the

vaguely defined technique of painting and an attitude of

dug

trench into which he could lower the work so as lo paint

individualism shared hy a group of allied artists unofficially

its

led

hy Manet

(who, however, never exhibited with them).

Indeed, the two definitions are aptly conjoined, since the

formal and technical innovations of the
served

an

represent

to

of personal

effectively

and

pleasure

These innovations may be summed up

individualist freedom.

under three rubrics:

ideal

movement

the rejection of chiaroscuro; 2) the

1)

depiction of the interaction of light and color en plein air; and

of brushstrokes across the surface of the

3) the equalizing

Academic painting depended upon chiaroscuro

modeling of form and space through

and contrast)

light

(the

and dark gradation

drama and putative three-dimensionality.

for its

In the early stages of their paintings, academically trained

artists

employed

a dark, often

reddish brown underpainting in

order to establish a deep pictorial space even before they

painted anything
thinly painted
colors

else.

By proceeding

to leave areas of shadow

and areas of mass thickly painted with bright

and highlights, they were able

and

contrasts between dark

light,

to establish strong

shadow and mass, and

237

and near. In Monet's Regatta

238

Pissarro's (1830-1903) Hoarfrost (1873),

toned underpainting
the second

in

at Argenteuil(\S12)

creamy yellow

far

and Camille

by contrast,

in the first case

a light-

and grey

employed instead of the conventional

is

artist actually

his point of view),

of warm and cool hues to achieve modeling of faces and hands.

The

woman

dress of the

filtration

on the dress of the seated

are

made

violet

faces

and hands,

tinted green

is

woman

light

and especially

red/green, blue/orange, and

all

across the surface of the picture.

changes from academic practise,

with others noted below,

is

in

The

conjunction

greatly to reduce tonal contrast in

the pictures and thereby to flatten them. Although

Monet and

yellow/

The

the use of thick, broad patches of paint.

of complements, which are pronounced in

effect

Regatta at Argenteuil (red/green) and Pissarro's Hoarfrost

was described by Monet

(yellow/violet),

in

88,8:

"Color owes

brightness to force of contrast rather than to inherent

its

qualities;

primary colors look brightest when they are

brought into contrast with complementarities."

3)

had

Most

paintings submitted for exhibition at the Salons

a surface that

was smooth,

most paintings shown

held

and impersonal, whereas

clean,

Impressionist exhibitions

at the eight

between 1874 and 1886 had coarse,

idiosyncratic surfaces. Indeed, as

chiaroscuro and
notable in

its

its

day

much

embrace of plein

artists

air,

Impressionism was

for the use of discrete patches (taches) of

To be sure, a
from the

and

irregular,

as for its rejection of

loaded brush and impasto technique were

deployed by Rubens and Rembrandt among

effect of these

The

of the sun.

bouquets of flowers,

as well as their

color.

applied in a fairly

from the

foreground are tinted

in the

vivid by the juxtaposition of similar,

and by

optical

left

complement of the yellow

violet, the

women's

at

of light through the canopy of trees, and the shadows

from the mixtures of hue, and paint

is

Women

Garden features colored shadows and the juxtaposition

in the

reddish brown. In addition, dark tones are largely eliminated

uniform thickness

past,

many

other

but rarely had they covered their works

with such a density of paint regardless of the subject depicted.

In Pissarro's Corner of a Village

Bal du Moulin de

la

in

Winter (1877) and Renoir's

Galette (1876) the entire canvas surface

is

Pissarro include fore-, middle-, and backgrounds in their

densely clotted with paint. Individual brushstrokes are varied

Regatta and Hoarfrost, their elimination of chiaroscuro causes

in width, breadth,

us to see

all

three zones as lying on approximately the

same

shallow, foreground plane.

2) Before the nineteenth century,

painted out of doors.

By

Barbizon school, and

Eugene Boudin and

Normandy. Yet

drew but

artists

rarely

the middle of the century, the

painting of small outdoor etudes was

to the

common to Corot and

the

"Pre-Impressionist" painters

J.-B. Jongkind,

who were

active in

these artists seldom painted fully finished

compositions out of doors, and equally rarely exhibited their

etudes at the Salons.

especially

Monet,

1919), Morisot,

The

Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841

and Alfred Sisley (1839-99)

air,

painted many

and discovered

technique for evoking the interaction of light and

Monet's Women

in the

air in nature.

Garden, considered earlier for the

conservatism of its subject and composition, was nevertheless

almost unprecedented in

246

its

depiction of colored shadows and

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

and direction, and the

pictorial field

uniformly animate, agitated, and immediate.

is

The complex

and dynamic Impressionist tache was

largely responsible for

the incomprehension and anger of the

critics:

[Pissarro's landscapes] are incomprehensible

"Seen up

close

and hideous;"

wrote Leon de Lora in 1877, "seen from a distance they are

hideous and incomprehensible." "I

recommend

Renoir's The

Swing [1876]," wrote Bertall (Charles Albert d'Arnoux) in

1876, "sublime in
la Galette,

which

its
is

grotesqueness

in

no way

and Bal du Moulin de

inferior to his other

work

in its

incoherence of draftsmanship, composition, and color."

Impressionists, on the other hand

of their most ambitious works en plein

246

upper reaches without changing

complementary, colors

canvas.
1)

In the face of the reigning formal and technical paradigms

of Salon

art,

Impressionism offered nothing

redefinition of the pictorial. If the Classical

less

than a

and academic

tradition insisted that a picture should be a recreation in

dimensions of the three-dimensional world, that

was previously conceived

as first

Impressionist art was

of

first

all

is,

two

if painting

and foremost mimetic,

optical. In 1876, the poet

239

AUGUSTE RENOIR

239

Bal du Moulin de

Galelte 1876. S1J x 68J (131 x 175)

la

Stephane Mallarme wrote an essay entitled "The Impressionists

and Edouard Manet,"

Impressionism

as

the

which he precisely described

in

of

return

to

art

"simplest

its

scope and aim ... of

But what, except

its

his followers

cause, and

its

is

that

relation

of

to decorate the ceilings

saloons and palaces with a crowd of idealized types in

magnificent foreshortening, what can be the aim of

painter before everyday nature?

To

imitate her?

Then

his

best efforts can never equal the original with the inestim-

able advantage of
artist]

life

and space.

[That] which

preserve through the power of Impressionism

is

[the

not

the material portion which already exists, superior to any

mere representation of

but the delight of having

it,

recreated nature touch by touch.

tangible solidity to

its fitter

leave the massive and

exponent, sculpture.

content

myself with reflecting on the clear and durable mirror of

painting,

is

Mallarme's ideal Impressionist argues,

not. It can only focus

mirror of painting," that

which perpetually

that

moment, which only

constitutes in

exists

my domain

merit of nature

lives

by the

yet

will

dies

every

of Idea, yet

the only authentic and certain

the Aspect.

Although sculpture may be

fit

reproduce the

tactile

clear

and durable

flattened, optical screen

of vision; the Impressionist

and delight

is

reproduce nature's

to

"aspect" touch by touch.

The

Impressionist world, according to this view,

is

one

which cannot be manipulated, grasped, or even touched,

except with the eyes.

It is a

world where use-value has been

banished, and exchange-value

which

equality of things

instead.

painter, nature

enshrined

and the

built

modity-forms, or fetishes

posits the universal

For the Impressionist

environment appear

(as defined

as

com-

by Marx), alienated

from the biological processes or human labor that brought

them

into being. Indeed, Impressionist optics

and

style

defined by their negotiation and compromise between hues

across the

flat

expanse of the picture surface

may be

said to

repeat the mistaking of illusion for reality that constitutes

the basis of

commodity

Capital (1867)

Marx

fetishism.

In the

first

volume of

described the "mysterious character"

of the commodity-form as consisting in the fact thai

(mis)rcpresents the social and class relations of the
labor that produced

to

upon "the

upon the

is,

artist's field

painter's responsibility

Manet and

painting shall be steeped again in

to nature.

painting

which constitutes the

perfection:"

The

qualities of nature,

it

as an

autonomous

il

human

relationship between

things:

IMI'RI.SSIOMSM \\|)

1111.

COMMODITY

247

Through

this suhstitution [by the social relations

between

objects for the social relation between producers], the

products of labor become commodities, sensuous things

which are

at the

same time suprasensible

or social. In

same way, the impression Lichteindruck] made

|

on the optic nerve

is

perceived not as

he-

b\ a thing

subjective excitation

of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the

eye.

Impressionist art

is

precisely concerned with the bestowal of a

phantasmagorical reality upon "the objective form of thing|s|

outside the eye." In 1883, the poet Jules I.aforgue described
the magic of Impressionist color:

In a landscape flooded with light

where the academic-

painter sees nothing but a broad expanse of whiteness, the

Impressionist sees light as bathing everything not with a

dead whiteness, but rather with

thousand

vibrant

struggling colours of rich prismatic decomposition.

Where

the one sees only the external outline of objects, the other
sees the real living lines built not in geometric forms but in
a

thousand irregular strokes, which

at a distance, establish

life

240 Gt'STAVE
ca. 1880.

CAILEEBOTTE A

The

Haussmann

26x 24 (67.9x61)

241

248

Balcony, Boulevard

CAMIIXE PlSSARRO Edge

is,

of the Woods

or.

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

Undergrowth

in

Summer

Impressionist sees and renders nature as

wholly

in the vibration

1879. 49f x 63} (126 x 162)

of color.

No

it is

drawing,

that

light,

242

(left)

EDGAR DEGAS

Portraits at the Stock Exchange ca. 1879.

39x 32^(100x82)

244

Edgar DEGAS

The Dance School 1873.

i>>

* 24J (48.3 x 62.5)

MI'RKSSIOMSM

WD Till COMMODITY

249

remain circumscribed by the narrow confines of the trade.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the forms and

imagery of Impressionism have informed and invigorated the

publicity apparatus of

industries of Kurope,

many

of the key culture and leisure

North America, and (more

lately)

Japan,

including suburban, vacation, and retirement homes, travel

and tourism, automobiles, home gardening, sportswear, and

The modern

health and exercise products.

may be claimed
itself

bourgeois world,

it

with only slight exaggeration, has modeled

upon the "aspect" of Impressionism.

But the

gift

The triumph

of ideology has not been

one direction.

all in

of modern tourism and leisure has also tended to

inform prevailing interpretations of Impressionism, masking

the genuinely counter-cultural and even subversive aspects of

movement. Indeed,

the

between

in the years

(1874)

its first

and third (1877) exhibitions, the self-proclaimed Societe

Anonyme was often dubbed

a

in the press

term from the contemporary

shown elsewhere, meaning

"At

first

"the Intransigents,"

political lexicon, as

radical, anarchist or

have

communist.

they were called 'the painters of the open air'," wrote

the critic Marius

Chaumelin

in

"They were then given a

876:

generous name, 'Impressionists,' which no doubt brought

pleasure to Mile Berthe Morisot and to the other young lady
painters
title

245 JEAN-BAPTISTE

CARPEAUX

The Dance 1867-9. Height

U'%

gents.
(420)

who have embraced

these doctrines. But there

which described them much

.

They have

better, that

is

is

the Intransi-

a hatred for classical traditions

and an

ambition to reform the laws of drawing and color.

They

They demand an
of whom M. Manet was

preach the separation of Academy and State.

amnesty
modelling,

perspective or chiaroscuro,

childish classifications:

none of those

these are in reality converted

all

into the vibration of color

and must be obtained on the

canvas solely by the vibration of color. ... [In the work

Monet and
little

color

The
living

Pissarro, everything

dancing strokes

all

in vital

in

lines"

by

history.

As

every direction like straws of

of Impressionist

which "establish
its

obtained by a thousand

competition for the whole impression.

fetishistic character

revealed

is

of]

life,"

art,

with

its

"real

has of course been

for the 'school of the taches,'

the founder and to

whom

all

indebted." With

less

irony, the critic for the official Moniteur Universel flatly stated:

"The

Intransigents in art holding hands with the Intransi-

gents in politics, nothing could be

At the same time that these

Impressionists

as

more

critics

natural."

were condemning the

Intransigents,

political

Mallarme was

applauding them for the same reason. In the essay cited above,
he forthrightly argued that Impressionist art was an expression of working-class
ration of the newly

not bourgeois

vision,

and

a celeb-

emergent ideology of collectivism:

subsequent commercial and institutional

early as the mid-1 880's, the

French dealer Paul

At

time when the romantic tradition of the

Durand-Ruel, backed by the financier Charles Edwards,

century only lingers

succeeded

time, the transition

in establishing

an international market for Impres-

sionist works, with exhibitions

New York,

they are

and

sales in Berlin,

Rotterdam, and London, as well as

Boston,

Paris. Indeed,

dreamer

among

first

The

half of the

few surviving masters of that

from the old imaginative

to the energetic

Impressionism.

modern worker

is

artist

and

found

the key years for the transformation of French art dealers from

people in the political

petty tradesmen to international entrepreneurial capitalists

honour the whole of the close of the nineteenth century.

coincided with the rise and success of Impressionism. (To this

parallel

day, works by

common

Monet, Renoir, Degas, and the others are

tender in the international art market.) Moreover,

the exchange-value represented by Impressionist art did not

250

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

is

found

in

participation of a hitherto ignored

life

of France

is

a social fact that will

in artistic matters, the

way being prepared

by an evolution which the public with rare prescience

dubbed, from
political

its first

appearance, Intransigent, which in

language means radical and democratic.

CLAUDE MONET Women

246

in the

Garden 1866-7. 8'4x

81

(255 x 205)

i'

IMPRESSIONISM

\\l> Till.

OMMODin

251

248

EDOUARD MANET A

To

Mallarme, therefore, Impressionism marked

in the social

Bar

at the Fohes-Bergere ca. 1882.

and cultural evolution of France;

"truth, simplicity

affirmed and paid

it

51J

new

was an

(%x

stage
art

of

and child-like charm," he wrote, which

homage

to the

mode

new and

of vision of a

surging working-class "multitude [which] demands to see

with

own

its

Two

eyes."

other

early

sports,

offer:

thus

one situates the movement beside the

manifestations

vaudeville

World's Fairs, and Sundays

shows,

in the

spectator

country

of

the

emergent culture of commodity capitalism; the other locates

the

movement

within the radical confines of the avant-garde,

by
was

accepting Mallarme's contention that Impressionism

rejecting Classical
vision

and

confident
validity,

voice

mimesis and Romantic fantasy

of an

proletariat.

In

increasingly
fact,

both

self-conscious
interpretations

the

and
have

because modern capital has consistently fed from the

plate of the avant-garde.

252

nized Paris, to

From

its

shaky origins in Haussman-

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

its

swaggering maturity today, mass (com-

modity) culture has learned about what desires

from observation of the ways

in

it

can exploit

which avant-gardes and other

subcultures devise strategies for self-fulfillment and individual expression. Impressionist leisure and vision
easefulness,

conflicting interpretations of Impressionism

appear to be on

130)

strategy for sensual emancipation

could not be ignored.

It

was

was one such

and personal pleasure

not,

and

world was eventually made over into

its

that

a certain part of the

image.

for the artists themselves, they resisted labels of

kinds;

by the mid-1880's, the shifting

women
Societe

its

unproductiveness, ephemerality, intangibility,

luminosity, colorism, and overall opticality

As

with

that first coalesced in 1874

Anonyme,

Impressionist,

alliance of

all

men and

had rejected the names

Intransigent,

and even

Independent, preferring to designate the various group and

solo exhibitions simply

by the word "Exhibition." Indeed, the

group's struggles over nomenclature signal the presence of a

specifically modernist, formal strategy of evasiveness, dis-

placement, effacement, and abstraction. In their art as well as

their

margins or
city

Impressionists sought refuge on the

the

ideology,
in the

and country

shadows: they cultivated the borderlands of

Montmartre or Gennevilliers (where the

at

was spread

solid waste of Paris

247

manure), as

as

Wash

sketchy Laundresses Hanging Out the

woodland

from balconies or crouched in

848-94)

A Balcony,

240

Caillebotte's

241

1880) and Pissarro's Edge of the

( 1

Summer (1879); and

ballet, or

Gustave

glades, as in

Boulevard Haussmann

Woods

(ca.

Undergrowth

or,

in

they secreted themselves backstage at the

amid the crowd outside the Bourse,

for others

Degas's

as in

it

common

him

for

as

too functioned as a disguise, hiding class and

gender antagonisms behind

brotherhood built upon

a false

hatred.

Fortunately, Impressionist evasiveness and disguise was

Morisot's

in

(1875); they spied

Degas ever wholeheartedly embraced, but

label that

rarely so paranoid

often

and humorless

preposterous boating clothes

Masked Ball
times,

as

it

was with Degas. More

involved mysterious masks at fancy-dress balls and

it

it

at the

dockside as in Manet's

Opera and Argenteuil (1874);

at the

other

at

took the form of bathing costumes worn by the petit

bourgeois

at

Ea

Grenouillere, a popular bathing spot on the

Monet and

244

(1834-1917) The Dance School (1873) and Portraits at the

Seine, near Bougival, painted in 1869 by

242

Stock Exchange

or else of garishly illumined evening clothes at cafe-concerts

(ca. 1879).

In the latter two works, exhibited respectively at the third

and fourth Impressionist Exhibitions

in

1877 and 1879, Degas

displayed his peculiar naturalist and conspiratorial penchants.

The dancers are so many

they

species;

diverse examples of a single

bend, stretch, gaze vacantly, scratch, bite

thumbs, practise

and stand on

at the bar,

character of Degas's dancers

is

toes.

The

alien

perhaps even more apparent

in

work,

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,

shown

major

in his last

the Salon of 1882.

at

which were popular hang-outs

Indeed, cafe-concerts,

for

precisely in order to

accommodate

disguise:

"Here

[at

the cafe

Eldorado] amid volumes of smoke," the guide-book author

Galignani informed the tourist in 1862, "the blouse and the

made between

frock-coat are conspicuous, interspersed here and there with a

muslin cap and merino gown, listening to the comic scenes, or

wax

Fourteen

monster

the only sculpture by

(ca. 1881),

was described by

lifetime,
.

[from] a

ballet

him exhibited

museum of zoology."
modern

in his

"monkey," and "a

critics as a

has chosen to examine another

exotic

figures he

no

less

and marked with degenerescence than the world of the

the Stock Exchange.

"A

few minutes before noon,"

writes Baedeker's (1882), "the Place de

present a busy scene

into the building.

[as]

la

Bourse begins

to

the money-seeking throng hurries

[Inside], amidst the Babel of tongues, are

heard the constantly recurring words 'J'ai

aui-est qui
a
? je prends;je vends!' " Standing on the threshold of the
.

Bourse, the Jewish banker and art collector Ernest

shown receiving

a note

from

man

May

is

of him (actually

in front

only a detached hand and profile head), and a conspiratorial

tap on the shoulder from a

snatches from favorite operas, retailed to the audience by the

performers."

The Bar by Manet,

In Portraits, Degas

institution

man behind (Nochlin

has defined

with

its

refractory barmaid, reveals a

and gender that

is

recalcitrant mirror

also apparent in

fails

barmaid who confronts the spectator

whereas her mirror image

woman

is

is

that the mirror

is

in

unsavory

painted study in

curved, whereas the reflections of the bottles

The

flat

it is

Amsterdam has

the creation of a peculiar tension

brows connote

as

Clark writes

between

ambiguity (the

the reflection approximately

and of Manet's studied indifference

J.

or parallel to the

result of this purposeful

two more figures whose prominent noses and abbreviated

T.

More-

barmaid and reflected dandy implies

and the marble-top bar suggest that

picture surface.

The

upright and poised

bent forward

conversation with the top-hatted customer at right.

over, the location of the

stands

accurately to reflect her.

right),

to the

works by Berthe Morisot.

In the Bar, as in Morisot's The Psyche (1876), a

before a mirror that

and equally

complex understanding of class

the gesture as "confidential touching"). In the wings at left are

according
physiognomic and psychoday both degeneracy and Jewishness.

to face painting,

is

sense of "detachment,"

the barmaid and her glittering

logical theories of the

modern ambience. Unlike Galignani's

(Indeed, in 1881 Degas depicted a similar pair of heads in

patrons, she wears her costume and expression uneasily, and

pastel

and called them Criminal Physiognomies.) In Portraits at

the Stock Exchange, therefore,

Degas has indulged

pernicious and consequential of

by the

modern myths

that

announced

"Young Hegelian" philosopher Bruno Bauer

reiterated

generation

by Marx, and espoused as gospel by

of anti-Semites

that

included

most

the

in 1843,

subsequent
notorious

Frenchman Edouard Drumont and Degas: "The Jew, who

may

be entirely without rights in the smallest

the destiny of Europe."

"Anti-Semite" was

state,

securely classed cafe

the (male) spectator responds with doubts about the stability

of the

game of class and gender which he

plays.

In Morisot's painting, too, the empirical validity of "the

mirror of painting,"

woman who

in

is

challenged.

The

stands bunching her loose peignoir before the

psyche mirror, exposes

cast eve,

Mallarme's phrase,

seductively supple shoulder,

and pout) mouth, whereas the image

in the

downmirror

decides

reveals no such conventional signs of coquetterie (save the

only

Olympia-like neck ribbon). Instead of celebrating the mascu-

in fact the

248

Degas, Manet, and the young Georges Seurat, were devised

approximately 1870 and his death. His Little Dancer Aged

the dozens of mostly small

243

common

such as the Folies-Bergere, painted by Manet

Renoir,

IMI'KI

SSIOMSM

WD Till.

0\l\IOI>IT\

253

249

249

and the feminine responsibility

line prerogative to see

to

expose the

be

one

seen, therefore, Morisot's toilette paintings such as this

and irony of modern painting made by

artifice

woman. To paint

a picture,

more, but also no

less,

Morisot seems

to claim,

is

than artistically to adorn one's

temptation and desire

insight. Cafe-concert

are crossed

and produce

and boudoir are thus

Paris; they are the places

where

knowing

class

and gender

lights,

make-up, and

trapeze,

commodities

to

lace

be bought and sold

at

of
once

electric

made over into

many bottles of beer

Impressionisme

is

masculine noun, Larousse

intimacy with fashion and the commodity

feminine.

Indeed,

among

the

greatest

it

tells us,

but

in

was gendered

practitioners

charm,

women

sensuousness, and lightness of touch were deemed

ness,

essential to
in

women's nature and

Impressionist works by

marginality

of

and

therefore wholly appropriate

women. Thus
described

elusiveness

transgressive feature of Impressionism

like

contemporary

Salon

reiterate the prevailing

painting,

in addition to the

above,

final

must be noted: unit

did

not

wholly

gender stereotypes about artmaking.

Impressionisms's chief practitioners were either males

painted in a style judged appropriate only for

women who

or bolts of chiffon.

its

possessing

for

and delicacy, paintings by the two

works, that they were merely unfinished sketches. Impulsive-

are

like so

movement. Praised

no

own

modern

hidden and revealed by the fashionable dazzle of

the

sensibility, grace,

were exempted from the usual charge against Impressionist

a spark of

alike in

at

The Psyche 1876. 25J/X21J (64x54)

body. In both The Bar at the Folies-Bergere and The Psyche

the established circuits of sexual seeing and

flung

BERTHE MORISOT

which

it

painted

with

the

who

women,

or

ambition and conviction

was then thought could be found only among men.

Cassatt, however,

the liberation of

went

still

women, and

further:
in so

she actually painted

doing helped turn Amer-

Impressionism, only Berthe Morisot and to a lesser extent

ican painting from a local into an international achieve-

Mary

ment.

254

Cassatt

managed

to escape the withering criticisms

IMPRESSIONISM AND THE COMMODITY

12

ISSUES OF GENDER IN CASSATT

AND EAKINS
LINDA NOCHLIN

GENDER AND DIFFERENCE

reveal (Cassatt's of 1878, Eakins' of 1902). Cassatt

a

TENSIONS, OPPOSITIONS, AND ACHIEVEMENTS

THEAmerican
painting of the late nineteenth century can

of

wealthier and

more

came from

prominent family than

socially

Eakins; she learned in Paris not from the relatively conservative

Gerome but from

the pictorial radicals

Manet and Degas;

best be approached through an examination of two of its major

she did not return to conservative Philadelphia to pass the rest

practitioners

of her

Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins. A

analysis of their

work

also reveals the difficulty of

careful

making

clear-cut stylistic distinctions in high art based on either

Of

national origin or gender.

question of national origin

can art?

course, until recently, the

what

is

might have loomed much

American about Ameri-

life,

as a loner, like Eakins, but stayed

the

most

Equally important

in 1879, 1880, 1881,

the two

Nancy Mowll Mathews and Griselda

historians as

Yet

it

seems

to

me

that there

is

Pollock.

no better way of exploring the

vexed issues of American-ness versus the cosmopolitanism

painting

and 1886.

in establishing the difference

This gender difference seems

more complex and

where

faithful participants in the Impressionist exhibitions,

showing with the group

In recent years, on the contrary, the fact that Cassatt was a

has been central to the

in Paris

movement of her time, Impressionism. Indeed, she was one of

woman

artist

on

she actively participated in the most advanced

larger than that of gender.

problematic readings of her work by such revisionist art

between

man and Cassatt a woman.

me of prime importance in

the fact that Eakins was a

is

to

the interpretation of the salient characteristics of their work.

Gender

difference,

directly expressed

however, must not be interpreted as

in

the

work

in

terms of some formal

structure or inevitable iconographic choice; nor should gender

represented by the French vanguard of the period or male

be understood in terms of essential, fixed, timeless, inborn

versus female production than in exploring, in detail, the lives

qualities of masculinity or femininity. Rather,

and works of these two artist-contemporaries, so

envisioned as a social construct,

ambitions and stature, so unlike

in their choice

alike in their

of milieu and

gender must be

mediated by historical

conditions and the specific practice of painting.

It

can only

their pictorial language.

signify through the concrete qualities of pictorial language in

Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins had a good deal in

common as far as biography goes. Both were born almost mid-

specific situations. In other words, the readings

century, in the year 1844; both were born in Pennsylvania;

sex of the artist be seen as always and in every circumstance

neither had to

depend on painting

later in

Europe, Eakins

in

make

in 1866.

the

French

figure,

extraordinary

the determining factor. Both Eakins and Cassatt, for example,

France with Gerome from 1866 to

notion, taken for granted at the time, that the portrait of a

in

a living;

her orientation, settling in Paris

to the representation of

primarily the portrait.

differences

inscribed in their work

once incisive and subtle; forceful yet complex. Nor must the

strikingly reject (whether completely consciously or not) the

Academy of

Both were painters dedicated

human

at

the Fine Arts and

to

1870, Cassatt traveling to Spain, like Eakins, and to Italy as

well, yet basically

must be

both

studied at the Pennsylvania

250-51

much

between them,

itself,

Yet there are

too,

differences

as their self-portraits clearly

woman,
in

especially a

commissioned

order to be successful. Both

portrait,

artists

seem

must be

flattering

resolutely to refuse

to idealize or prettify their female sitters. In Cassatt's pastel

portrait

of her

suffragist,

friend,

the

important

Louisine Elder Havemeyer

art

collector

(ca. 1896),

and

the sitter

is

represented as uncompromisingly unglamorous and serious.

255

253

250

THOMAS EAKINS

Self-Portrait 1902.

252

256

30x25(76.2x63.5)

THOMAS EAKINS

GENDER AND DIFFERENCE

The Swimming Hole

251

ca.

MARYCASSATT

1883-5. 27x36(68.5x91.4)

Self-Portrait 1878.

23^ x 17H59.6 x 44.4)

253

MARY CASSATT

Portrait of Louisine Elder

Havemeyer

254

ca. 1896.

29x24(73.6x61)

Thomas Eakins

Portrait of Mrs. Edith

Mahon

1904.

20x16

(50.8 x 40.6)

255

MARY CASSATT

Five O'Clotk- Tea ca. 1880.

25j *

.,)

(M.7

x 92.7)

(.1

NDER

WD

DIFFE RENCE

257

256

John Singer Sargent Lady Agnew

Lochnam

Mrs. Havemeyer

is

middle-aged, dark, powerful. Despite the

swimming naked out of doors

in Eakins'

39J-

of

(125.7 * 100.3)

Swimming Hole

(ca.

diaphanous white butterfly wings of her puffed-sleeved, low-

1883-5) versus ladies taking tea in an elegant parlor in

necked dress, or perhaps

Cassatt's Five O' Clock Tea (ca. 1880).

in

purposeful contrast with them, the

somber, square-cut head with

yet sensitive

its

deep-set eyes and irregular

mouth conveys a sense of that

character usually reserved for the male

forceful individual

sitter,

rather than the

conventional beauty and elegance considered appropriate to

the upper-class female one; the

degree,

of the

unbeautiful

same might be
head,

rather

said, to a lesser
like

that

of

sympathetically introverted bull-dog, and lack of coquettish

2S4

1892-3. 49 x

ca.

self-consciousness of the sitter in Eakins' Portrait of Mrs.

Edith

Mahon

of 1904.

similar. Often,

and female

Gender

it is

artists

difference

to

created by the subjects male

were encouraged, or permitted, to paint.

is

easiest

opposition in iconography

258

me more strikingly different than

a difference

is

to

discern

involved:

GENDER AND DIFFERENCE

when

simple

young men and boys

it is

simply a question of quintessentially "male" versus "female"

subject matter, the issue

men

is

complicated. Are Eakins' naked

versus Cassatt's tea-drinking ladies reducible to a mere

question of gender, to what

acceptable for the

male

artist

is

permitted to or socially

versus the female one? Isn't the

issue of class also implicated, or even the artist's relationship

to the social order as a totality?

Eakins'

from

Yet the two artists seem

But even where

Swimming Hole

social constraint

youthful

male

nudes,

projects a heady sense of escape

through sheer bodily freedom.

including

Eakins

himself in

The
the

foreground, are represented modestly, from the back or with

strategically bent leg, in the classical

Dying Gaul posture, and

evoke moral qualities of honesty and purity

doors context.

in the out-of-

In other words, in the Eakins painting,

252

255


democratic freedom

by the youthful male Ameri-

signified

is

can body in the American landscape: to be American

to

be natural and to have

a privileged relation to

Cassatt's Five 0' Clock Tea, a

once

is at

Nature. In

worship

the

revitalization

of force

values of discipline and productivity

seemed the perfect antidote

conveyed through the

and excessive mental work."

is

refinement and elegance of pose, setting, and accoutrements.

Rejecting the timelessness of the nude, or

more

accurately,

deprived of access to the representation of unclothed bodies,

moment,

Cassatt deploys fashion to define a specific historical

concrete social milieu within the supposed a-historicity of

presented

Cassatt,

to

much

less its

beret.

member

a portrait:

members of the upper

the artist's

The

to celebrate the

is

hired help,

is
is

one can only glimpse his face

prominent

certainly not

in

this rower's effort is constructed as part of a scene

of leisure, of

decorated Parisian drawing-room, with

dressed mother and child in the front of the boat. Yet even

made

in

1813 for

grandmother, Mary Stevenson, prominent

in the

these differences in intention and iconography cannot account

for the striking dissimilarity in total effect created

by these

foreground. Not freedom, but what the poet William Butler

works, a dissimilarity in which the construction of gender

play only a partial role.

here in

significant detail.

all its
is

as

in profit perdu. Rather,

Yeats described as "the ceremony of innocence"

difference

the

meant

which the "real" subjects are the charming and fashionably

an heirloom which had been

a silver tea-set,

class.

Outdoor exercise

a visitor, is set

painting, featuring the artist's sister Lydia

in Cassatt's tastefully

and

of the working classes by his sash

Although the oarsman

the social milieu: these are not "just folks", not "natural"

but refined

her painting: on the contrary, her oarsman

and

class

prophylactic qualities, in

foreground of the painting, the figure

women

on the other hand, cannot be said

heroic virtues of sport,

distinguished as a

to

'morbid self-consciousness'

the female domestic realm. Fashion and objects also specify

country

paths

the mania for sport reinforced bourgeois

more cosmopolitan sense of the

operations of- social convention

unrest,

One might

is

recorded

say that gender

For Eakins,

more

may

traditional painter, the canvas functions

always overlaid with and intersected by other

kinds of difference as well in the paintings of these two

American

artists.

The complex

nature of the differences between the work of

Eakins and that of Cassatt becomes even more obvious when

257 JOHN SINGER SARGENT Ena and Betty, Daughters of Mrs. and Mrs.
Asher Wertheimer 1901. 73 x 51J (185.4 x 130.8)

the subjects in question are extremely close or indeed almost

Max Schmitt

258

identical, as they are in Eakins'

259

of 1871 and Cassatt's The Boating Party of 1893\

oarsman

in a boat

on the water. Eakins,

was constructing an image

not just a hero of

theme he was
Schmitt was
time

to

modern

much

life, a

of his career.

of Eakins and a prominent oarsman, at a

when rowing was becoming

the United States and France.

by the

an

democratic hero,

but of American modern

pursue throughout

a friend

a Single Scull

in this early painting,

to represent the

life

in

increasingly popular in both

The

painting, one of nineteen

representing the sport of rowing, celebrates a

artist

champion. Yet

same time

at the

amateur hero of sport,

it

may

that

it

is

a portrait

of an

also be said metaphorically to

celebrate Eakins' recent return from France to his native turf,

specifically the Schuylkill River

Park. Schmitt had just

and the banks of Fairmont

won an important and

victory, but in the larger sense

physical virtues of rowing

as a

it

well-attended

commemorates

race of single sculls, so the portrait

also celebrates the

above

all,

demanding sport which provided

single-scull

American

citizen.

The

rowing

much-needed

from the crowds and urban confusion then seen

the

a specific

moral and

social historian

Jackson Lears has

pointed out the prominent position occupied by sport

putative redemption of the decadent
late

feeling

enervated

and

in

the

American male psyche

nineteenth-century medical and social discourse:

bourgeoisie

respite

to threaten

fearful

"To

in
a

of lower-class

GENDER AND DIFFERENCE

259

window through which wc

as a transparent

sec a vividly

obligation

body

to

their respective

forth

artists'

reconstituted three-dimensional space, with a vanishing point

identities, these portraits also constitute iconic

drawing our eye to the horizon. Near, middle, and distant

identifying

space are constructed within this illusory world: brushstrokes

woman.

of clouds, the diaphanousness of

trees, the flufhness

air,

the

and blood of the portrait subject himself, isolated

solid flesh

We,

the Active solitude at the center of the painting.

in

the

versus

aristocrat"

for

"working-class"

the

Did the American-born cosmopolite John Singer Sargent

are rendered modestly invisible in their task of conveying the

glassy surface of the water, the fuzzy texture of autumnal

"the

stylistic

models

(1865

women?

1925) accept commissions to paint only lovely

Or was

of glamor he

the veil

cast over his female subjects

merely an essential element of the imaginaire of upper-class

appearance of his time, an element contravened,

must be

it

viewers, are positioned at a seemly distance from the subject;

added, by the portraiture of both Eakins and Cassatt? In

we move

portraits of

into the pictorial world over a period of time.

Cassatt's work, on the contrary, taking

its

cue from Manet's

Boating of 1874, erases space and eradicates the temporal

factor

by Eakins'. Cassatt erases

suggested

meaningful,

of spatial

implications

narrative

as

well

the

depth and

temporal endurance produced by shadow, modeling, and

linear

and

aerial perspective, in favor

of surface, immediacy,

and focus on the formal means of construction. Boat and

figures are tilted

up onto

the surface of the canvas:

Manet and

Japanese prints rather than nature rendered through traditional perspective

almost,

is

behind

lie

but not quite,

this construction; the

obliterated

the

in

horizon

of

interest

destroying depth. Shapes, forms, and color-areas are boldly

reiterated as focal factors: the cut-off sail

triangular shape of the boat's

lines

bow and

woman's

hat; the

of the thwarts reiterate horizontally the diagonal of the

oar; the varying blue shapes of the

bottom of the boat and the

create interrelated
is

related both to the

is

the

flat,

oarsman's

the

resolutely antidepth, whether

we

opposed

take this

word

to Eakins,
literally or

metaphorically, and thus her project must be related to that of

the French avant-garde of her time in a

way

that Eakins'

most

definitely cannot.

aristocrats, like

Mr. and Mrs.

Phelps Stokes (1897), Sargent skillfully established

beauties,

women whose

of those young

ancestors

from Brooklyn

to give girls

Vassar half a century

the upper classes

is

later.

like

me

tact

marginal

when

of vision"

seems

to

Jewish,

example

for

order about the portrait in

obliterated by dazzling

Ena

like

born

rich, not

is

raised but quickly

aristocrats.

Sargent stirred up
ingredients

a rich pictorial

brew, concocted from

drawn from the European

tradition of aristocratic

and high bourgeois portraiture of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries
spiced with

Velazquez^ Van Dyck, and Hals and

more up-to-date precedents,

teacher,

fashionable

the

as well as,

more

French

like those offered

portraitist

mere

likeness. In the

the physicality of the

Agnew's throat

is

waist and the

bows on her

Renaissance, obviously

tells

us as

much about

period when, the place where he or she

who commissioned
it

does about the

the

sitter

social

respectively,

295

Berceuse (La

260

the

working, the patron

as

represented.

class

of the

sitter is

almost

The

sleeves; this pale simplicity

silk fabric

of the chair she

well as the exotic pale blue Chinese hanging

back plane of the portrait, adding

is

sits in as

which marks the

a touch of esthetic

refinement to the scene.

sitter,

as

it

The

sitter's class position is signified

through the sheer

does most

physical grace of her being as well as by dress and decor: her

Gogh

impossibly slender waist, her lovely dark eyes set beneath

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (ca. 1892-3) and La

Mere Rouhn) (1889). Aside from fulfilling the

THE PORTRAIT

exemplary case of

body of the

repeated in the mauve-violet sash about her

enlivened by the printed

the portrait genre could also

preeminently in two works by Sargent and Van

256

the image or the free choice of subject

By the late nineteenth century,

establish

is

the artist

who

amethyst of the huge but simple jewel about Lady

by the

initiated

clients

denied, dissolved by pale, diaphanous or silky fabrics.

its full

which reached

on individualism

Manet

his portraits up-to-date esthetic value for their

as well as a

Lady Agnew,

by

Carolus-

discreetly deployed, those of

The Western

stress

25'

Betty,

of setting and costume. But of course, these people are merely

delicate

tradition of the portrait,

and

brushwork and overpowering elegance

general and the portrait in the nineteenth century specifically.

development with the

to as his

the subjects were even slightly

smallest hint of a thick waist, a short neck

money
in

have had to

Daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Asher Wertheimer (1901). Here, the

commissioned

words are

at

the lesson these suavely painted portraits

work harder deploying what Henry James referred

"pure

'

no ugly members of

are

and Monet. Clearly, he was offering the wealthy

portrait painters, a few

sheer

an inferiority complex

That there

teach, although admittedly, the artist

Duran,

Before turning to a detailed analysis of Eakins and Cassatt as

N.

new

physical confidence, not to speak of social self-assurance, were

his

THE PORTRAIT

I.

iconography of elongated, fine-limbed, casually superior

textured surface of the water

patterns. Cassatt, as

flat

suit, his sash,

American

perfectly
a

modeled dark brows, her

cloud of tastefully coiffed dark

delicate features haloed

hair.

The

by

frankness of her

258

THOMAS EAKINS Max

Schmitt

259

in

a Single Scull 1871.

Mary CASSATT

32J x 46} (81.9 x 117.5)

The Boating Puny

S<> ^

4.

35j

46J (90.1 117.1)

THE PORTR

\1T

261

260

MARY CASSATT Woman

3H

Black at the Opera

in

261

x 25+

THOMAS EAKINS

The Gross Clime 1875. 96x78(243.8x198.1)

(80x64.8)

glance reveals

nothing.

nothing away. Her pose

The

woman

gives

Van Gogh, on
credentials of La

first

decade of the nineteenth century, the

emphasized by her asymmetric

structed pictorial configurations to establish gender difference

as an easily readable variable: in the case of the portraits of a

All of this bespeaks wealth

woman:

early as the

asymmetry which nevertheless does

nothing to lessen her casual dominance of the pictorial space.

high-class

As

inspired and inventive French portraitist Ingres had con-

destnvolture of her posture

placing on the chair, an

well-brought up

once dignified yet relaxed, the

at

is

and breeding,

a classy portrait

of a

the portrait of a lady, in short.

Mme.

Riviere,

like the

Riviere couple (M. Riviere and

both 1807), by means of relatively subtle but

telling differences in pose, relation to space,

the contrary, establishes the working-class

Mere Roulin by emphasizing

husband and wife

the proletarian

drawing style, and

elaboration of decorative texture.

Eakins too,

powerful

in his portraits, established subtle yet

maternal stockiness of her body, the angularity and awkward-

signifiers of difference for the representation of

ness of both her pose and his draftsmanship, the crude,

female sitters (Miss Van Buren, 1891, and Portrait of Professor

burning oppositions of the color relationships and the honest

Rand, 1874). Miss Van Buren

expressive directness of the material application of the paint

thoughts, a representative of the inner world rather than the

itself.

in

La Berceuse

is

indeed one of the

which he explores the

classes

were as

much

group of works

artist's

relatively novel notion that the lower

entitled to the

commemorative homage

of portraiture as their "betters." Following the precedent

established

announced

by English graphic

specifically

time,

he

in his view,

engaged that

of individual appearance and character, as well as

that aura of spiritual dignity,

262

of the

his intention to create "portraits of the People,"

uncommissioned images which,

specificity

artists

up

to this

time deemed a

middle- and upper-class privilege.

THE PORTRAIT

is

male and

being wrapped in her

own

outer one of practical intellect represented by the professor.

She muses or meditates, without

specific focus, diffusely,

resting her head on her hands, her posture slightly off balance;
he,

on the contrary, thinks,

trated.

Professor

Rand,

his attention studiously

physician,

chemistry and physics teacher

Dr. Gross
character

ment.

at Jefferson
is

The

in

had

been

concenEakins'

high school and later joined

Medical College

in Philadelphia.

His

defined by his intellectual and worldly achieve-

painting crackles with energy, as though charged

with the intellectual concentration of

its

subject. Details like

264-5

the microscope and

Dr. Rand's

the test-tubes establish

professional credentials: this

His

a portrait a I'apparat.

is

studiousness and concentration are attested by his glasses,

slightly wrinkled forehead,

and

his forefinger pressing

down

the pages of the book he reads with such relentless single-

mindedness, and by the firmness of his grasp on the cat (pet or

object of scientific observation?

we

are unsure just which) on

the table before him.

If,

paraphrase the

to

of the art historian Elizabeth

title

Johns' study of Eakins, the

artist's

some sense "heroes of modern

contributors

male

sitters are

professionals, artists, religious dignitaries

the welfare of democracy and humanity, then

subjects, like those represented in

Mrs. Edith
a

Mahon

burden of inwardness, of diffuse

ness

if

of martyrdom,
The same

depredations

women

to

1908) or

(ca.

On them

laid the

is

life

and

its

depreda-

inner anxiety, an air of longsuffering-

even

veiled appeal

self-withdrawal seems to characterize

sitters.

women

subtle emotionality, of

passive acceptance of or resistance to

A common

his

(1904), act as a kind of counterweight,

contrary and supplementary force.

tions.

in

The Coral Necklace, The

Old Fashioned Dress (Portrait of Helen Parker)

254

indeed

conceived of as active

life,"

all

tinged with

of Eakins' female

half-conscious awareness of time and

its

the past for the mature, the future for the

sitters

scars

them

all,

holds them in wistful yet

262

uneasy bondage.

CASSATT AND THE GAZE

Nothing would seem more
264

263

different in pose, glance,

The Concert Singer (WeJa Cook) 1892.

(191.4 x 138.1)

AUGUSTE RENOIR

The Loge 1874.

3H

x 254 (80 x 64)

and the

spatial setting associated with refined femininity in Eakins'

Miss Van Buren than the image created by Cassatt

260

THOMAS EAKINS

7SJx54i

young woman

in

her 1880

( Woman in Black at the

woman is all active, aggressive looking. At a
when women were rarely understood to possess what

portrait of a

at the opera

Opera). Cassatt's

time

recent psychoanalytic theory has denominated as "the

of the gaze," Cassatt has given

it

forcefully

power

and completely

to

her opera-goer. She holds the opera-glasses, that prototypical

instrument of male specular power, firmly to her eyes; even

her fan

is

somewhat raised

in the tense

excitement of her active

looking (as opposed to the relaxed horizontal position of the

fan locking Eakins' Miss

Van Buren

into the enclosure created

by the arms of her overpowering chair). Energy, control, the

vividness of active looking, even the suggestion of veins

standing out beneath the glove on the wrist of the hand which
grasps the opera-glasses;

all

this

and the forcefulness of the

dark silhouette against the light of the house behind: one can
sec this portrait in

modern woman
This

is

some way functioning

as a self-image of the

artist herself.

not to say that Eakins never represented what one

\ss

VND

llll

(.

VZE

263

might

"heroines

call

women

modern

of

most notably

singers,

life."

in

on the

stage, she

in

is

did paint portraits of

The Concert Singer (W'cila

Cook) (1892). Hut although Cook

ing,

le

is

some sense

shown

262

actively perform-

figured as less active, less

self-propelled than Cassatt's spectator of the performance in

Woman

Black

in

at the

pose of the singer

than

posture

Opera. As Johns has pointed out, the

a relatively pliant,

is

wavering one rather

command. She seems

of easy

To

put

it

have

to

surrendered her separateness to the spell of what she

is

doing.

another way, Eakins interprets the female singer as

the instrument of the music that flows forth from her rather

than as a creator in her

instrumentality

hand

is

lower

to the

own

Indeed, this notion of

right.

carried further by the presence of the male-

meant

left,

as a synecdochal reference to the

otherwise invisible orchestra leader. Yet the hand can also be

read as a sign of masculine control and dominance;

Weda

the hand of

Cook's teacher, Dr. Schmitz:

unseen masculine presence figures as the

it is,

in fact,

his almost

active, generating

force of the artistic creativity bodied forth in the painting.

Cassatt's painting stands out as something of an

anomaly

even within the context of (male) Impressionist painting

Renoir's vision of a lovely young

woman

at the

itself.

opera in The

263

Loge (1874) positions her clearly as the object of the masculine

viewer's gaze, both within the paintings and outside
264

THOMAS EAKINS

Miss Van Buren 1891. 45x32(114.3x81.2)

In the same

glasses.

artist's First

Cassatt's painting in
265

THOMAS EAKINS

it; it is

the

male companion who has the privilege of wielding the opera-

Portrait of Benjamin

Howard

Professor

1874. 60x48(152.4x 121.9)

Rami

woman

its

the opera,

at

Evening (1876), similar to

profile representation of a

the subject

is

young

depicted as though

relegated by youthful shyness to a sheltered position in

relation to the viewing audience, rather than pressing tensely

forward to

satisfy her

own

visual concerns. Cassatt, in fact,

emphasizes the novelty of her construction of the feminine

subject here by including in her painting the conventional

male viewer watching the young woman; but he has no

effect

on her independence or self-motivation.

EAKINS AND THE AMERICAN HERO

Eakins, on the contrary, in his major portrait of a hero of

modern
in the

look,

The Gross Clinic (1873), positions the one

life,

composition as the one

who

will not look.

woman

the only one who cannot

As the mother of the young victim

undergoing the operation, she functions both as the repository

of feeling and as the signifier of a momentary, irrational
reaction to the event: the figure

whose

loss of control, as she

swept away by emotion,

hysterically

is

opposed

to

is

the

reasoned, longterm attention to ends and means embodied in

the

sober

audience,

and

all

restrained

the business at hand.

264

EAKINS AND THE AMERICAN HERO

male

medical

personnel

and

of whom have their eyes fixed dispassionately on

261

In this, possibly his greatest portrait, specifically a group

portrait,

and certainly

his

most ambitious attempt

to depict

the heroic quality of American professional achievement,

Eakins obviously turned to the precedent established by

Rembrandt

in his

famous

portrait of a professional group, the

Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632). But aside from the fact
that Eakins is representing a more philanthropic and practical
activity in line with nineteenth-century

of heroism

a life-saving operation

on

American standards

a living

person rather

than an anatomical demonstration carried out on a corpse

he

has changed the format of his illustrious prototype from

horizontal

to

vertical,

thereby changing the focus from

concentration on the group of observers and the corpse to the

isolated, light-revealed hero,

Dr. Samuel D. Gross,

represented performing an operation

of dead bone from the thigh of a child

in the

amphitheater of Jefferson Medical College

The

scene

color,
its

cavernous

in Philadelphia.

its

intensity

is

highlighted by Eakins'

manipulation of his pictorial means

brushwork

to focus on the

moral overtones.

his

light,

meaning of the

The dominating

good doctor who turns from

his

is

an extremely dramatic one, perhaps even

is

melodramatic, and
skillful

who

the removal of a piece

work

figure

is

to explain

space,

action and

of course the

some

detail

of

procedure to an audience of future physicians and

surgeons: heroes of modern

the frightening, even the
feat are directly

life in

the making, as

morbid aspects of

it

were, and

this challenging

conveyed not so much by narrative descrip-

amphitheater as well as the blood-stained dressings on the

of the tables;

more red

Franklin West on the

in the

left, in

sawdust box and red

Eakins'

own pen on

in the

left

pen of

the right, and

the all-over presence of the color red,

again on the shirt cuffs of the assisting surgeons and on

suggesting blood, token of mortality as well as the life-force at

Gross's coat, in the patient's incision, and, as a kind of climax,

tion as

by color

stake.

Johns has pointed out that the underpainting

there

is

red

in

the

doorway and

in

the

is

red,

depth of the

on Gross's hand and

scalpel.

of artists (to which this

may

266
41

As
in

in portraits

some sense

MARY CASS ATT

and

self-portraits

refer), the paint, as

Reading Le Figaro 188

x 33 (104x83.7)

267

Mary Cassatt

Lydia Working at a

Tapestry Frame ca. 1881. 2Sj x 36j (65.5

I:\K1\S

WD Till

WII.KU \\

III

RO

>1)

265

268

MARY CASSATT

ca. 1890.

the art historian Michael Fried has shown,

vivid here, at the site of the

is

densest and most

working hands of the protagonist.

she

is

The

First Caress

30x24(76.2x61)

portraying her sister or her mother absorbed in reading

or a family friend presiding over one of the rituals of genteel

sociability.

Her mother

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

table

For Cassatt,
fessional

modern

world of public performance and pro-

this

achievement

life

did not

the

male-coded

there

is

formal language

world

is

at

means she uses

to

friends,
its

bound by

may have

embody

been,

it.

Cassatt's

once forceful and sophisticated, whether

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

both of these older

dignity

and

are neither

pictorial

absorbed

in

women

of considerable presence and

overwhelmed nor oppressed by the

settings.

Her

sister

Lydia

is

her tapestry work, or crocheting

(Lydia Working at a Tapestry Frame,

Crocheting

in the

Garden

at

ca.

shown calmly
in the

garden

1881, and Lydia

Marly, 1880).

Yet from the 1880's on, Cassatt did focus on

theme which

might be considered the female equivalent of the notion of

modern heroism

266

Tea Table (Mrs. Robert Riddle), 18835)

passage of time or the ominous shadows of interior space, but

nothing conventional or restricted about her concep-

tion of it, or the formal

266

this

at her

are constructed as firmly in control and at ease in their social

members,

relationships rather than public and heroic. Yet

of

(Lady

world of

world private and intimate in

convention and restriction though

pose of the

Her world

their children, a

cultivated, well-bred, upper-class family

and acquaintances

"heroism"

exist as a subject for painting.

women and

was the world of

in the dignified, concentrated

thinker (Reading Le Figaro, 1883) or Mrs. Riddle at her tea

modern motherhood. In

a series of

works

267


and

pastel,

in oil,

she invented and constructed a

print,

gendered alternative for the masculine hero

Two

nurturer and her offspring.

tations of the

268

the female

motherhood theme, Emmie and her Child (1889)

and The First'Caress

(ca. 1890), reveal Cassatt's

to capture the

ability

relatively early represen-

Impressionist

momentary, the intimate, and the

playful; her gift of observation

and

for creating fresh pictorial

equivalents for what she has observed are striking. Later

examples from the beginning of the twentieth century

269

(like

The Caress, 1902, and Mother and Child, 1908) are more
formal,

more highly

finished, with perhaps certain

Symbolist

overtones and muted references to the art of the Italian

Renaissance which she had admired earlier in her career. In

Cassatt's passionate devotion to the nude, childish body,

senses the presence of desire, but a different desire.

one

One might

almost speak of Cassatt's lust for baby flesh, for the touch,
smell,

and

feel

of plump, naked smooth-skinned bodies, kept

carefully in control

by both formal

emotional diffidence, in rare cases

and

strategies

the less successful ones

displaced and oversweetened as sentimentality.

analytic terms "displacement," "repression,"

tion" inevitably creep into the discourse

sexuality

is

broached

a certain

in relation to the

The psycho-

and "sublima-

when

the subject of

works of both Cassatt

and Eakins. Yet we must be wary of anachronistic readings of

the mobility of desire and

its

objects.

269

MARY CASSATT

270

Thomas Eakins

Mother and Child 1908.

36J-

x 29 (92.1 x 73.7)

For the nineteenth

century, the naked bodies of children were often envisioned as

simultaneously pure and desirable, as exemplified in the

seductively

nude or nearly nude photographs of little

the English
Carroll.

Reverend Dodgson, otherwise known

Although

nude babies

as

it

is

girls

by

Girl With Cat 1872. 62} x 48j (159.4 x 122.6)

Lewis

as

tempting to see Cassatt's lusciously

examples of Freudian "displacement"

to

assert that in the absence, in the representational codes of the

time, of socially acceptable

mature objects of female desire she

simply displaced that desire onto immature ones

not be the case at
different historical

decide what

our

peril.

is

all.

Desire takes

moments and

many

this

may

different forms at

in different situations

and we

"normal," what "displaced" or "repressed"

What Eakins and

his

at

contemporaries might have

envisioned simply as healthy male bonding in the out-ofdoors, in his various representations of naked
adolescents,

may

men, boys, and

well be read as homosocial or even repressed

homosexual desire today.

closer to the surface in

some of Eakins' proto-Balthusian

troubling female sexuality seems

representations of pubescent or pre-pubescent girls like

Home

Scene of 1871 (surely based on Courbet's renditions of the

daughters of P. -J. Proudhon

270

in his portrait

of the anarchist

philosopher of 1865) or his Girl With Cat (1872), where the

young woman, drenched

in

shadow,

is

teasing the animal

crouched

in

reiterated

by the suggestive shape of the open fan

her outspread lap, her burgeoning sexuality

Perhaps nowhere

is

the

in

her hand.

theme of mother and child

treated

WOMI

WD (llll.l)RI

267


/'

271

271

The Bath

39x26(99x66)

ca. 1892.

272

KITAGAWA UTAMARO A Mother

Edo

period, eighteenth century.

Bathing Her Son

141 x 9J (37.5 x 25)

with more formal boldness, more emotional restraint than in

aquatint in the beginning of the '90's, at the height of her

Cassatt's representations of mothers bathing their children,

career (Maternal Caress, ca. 1891, and The Mother's Kiss,

like

two works

1892).

One

titled

The Bath

(a print

of 1891 and an

oil

ofca.

has only to think of all the adult female Bathers of

the period, from Courbet through

Degas and Cezanne,

to see

These

1891).

encapsulate

prints

constituting the daily

woman

life

the

of the upper-class

of refinement and leisure.

They

sentimental cliches natural to this theme, and not always

letter-writing; visiting;

completely expunged from

latter

Utamaro's

it

by Cassatt

herself, are canceled

like

Mother Bathing Her Son (eighteenth century),

and Cassatt's respect

for the formal

demands of the

carefully deployed in pattern, texture,

moves our eye up and

surface

and color

which

across the canvas rather than into

in the case of the print, the

demands of the

it,

or,

technically difficult

drypoint and aquatint medium.

Indeed, one might say that Cassatt's masterpiece was the

series

of color prints she executed in etching, drypoint, and

268

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

the

body or

clothing;

and riding on the omnibus. In the

the

despite

cases,

woman,

include: playing with

the baby; the private preparations of the

by the lessons of the Japanese Ukiyoe,

273

undramatic events

how Cassatt makes this theme particularly her own. Any of the

in these cases

272

MARY CASSATT

*jesr'.

fact

that

the

subject

demands

venturing into the outside world of a great city, the female

subject

always represented existing within a protected and

is

enclosed

even encapsulated world. The

world of genteel
stylized

and

womanhood

elliptical

is

closed, protected

daringly filtered through the

rendering of reality characteristic of the

Japanese print, whose lessons her friends and fellow Impressionists

Degas and Pissarro were

same time; the

criticism

The

artists often

Coiffure,

also taking seriously at the

shared ideas, technical data, and

89 1 and The Fitting, 1891). Cassatt

,

274

transposes the Ukiyoe idiom into her

Western terms, terms

in

inventions.

provide an admirable formal scaffolding for the composition,

which feminine experience functions

complete language system, with

as a

own modern and

its

own

is

tropes and

narrative implications of temporality, traditionally produced

signifiers of the

itself,

locus of so

much

Impressionist attention, functions as a mere backdrop for the

Here Cassatt completely erases the meaningful

by shadow, modeling or deep space,

figured like a traveling parlor for elegant mother, baby, and

nursemaid, and the city of Paris

domesticated interior.

unfolding

of time in painting, in favor of surface, presentness, and

CASSATT, EAKINS, AND THE MODERN

antinarrative surface in a series of subjects, which, because of

their

275

very unimportance,

their

antiheroic qualities,

themselves perfectly to the idiom of

1891, and The

Lamp,

1891).

The

spaces into formal elegance by

sophisticated patterning

ALLEGORY

Letter,

Like Eakins, Cassatt also created an allegorical painting, and,

transformation of intimate

means of bold reduction and

like his,

one of Cassatt's many achieve-

calling

works, like Afternoon Tea Party (1891) or The

276

ments

277

Omnibus (1891). Worldly

in these

is

modernism (The

lend

sociability, the tete-a-tete of

pleted in 1809 for the city of Philadelphia.

which

is,

The Omnibus,
protected

273

that

trip

the

MARY CASSATT

into the world

public vehicle,

The Mother's Kiss (5th

is

In

by means of

its

shadowy

which

the

artist

sets

darkness, transforming

represented as so

whose open windows

state) 1891

is

an allegory

The

com-

painting

evokes the history and the deeper meaning of artistic creation

and compositional subtlety, playing the black

itself.

craft, or

of the past, commemorating a sculptural commission

two

of the visitor's jacket against the white of the hostess's gown,

of course, created by the white of the paper

an allegory referring to their trade, or

the creation of art. Eakins' William Rush Carving His

Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1877)

fashionably dressed ladies, can serve as the basis of a print of

great coloristic

it is

in general,

mxiu

274

and setting

Mary Cassatt

spatial setting with a glinting light

himself in

him

into a

vague and enveloping

mere metaphor of the

artist

his source of inspiration in relative

The Coiffure (5th

state) 1891.

19 x 12

(48x30.9)

(43.5 x 30)

wi*

*?

VSSATT, EAKINS, VND THE

MODERN

\l

lie.

OKI

269

278

275

MARYCASSATT

The Letter (3rd

276

MARY CASSATT

Afternoon Tea Party (4th state) 1891. 16} x 12}

state)

89 1. 13} x

9 (34.7 x 22.8)

(42.5x31.1)

277

270

MARYCASSATT

The Omnibus (^th

state) 1891.

18 x 12} (45.7 x 31.4)

CASSATT, EAKINS, AND THE MODERN ALLEGORY

278

THOMAS EAKINS

brightness. Color

is

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River 1877. 20J x 26

muted, surface dissolved into suggestive

adumbration. Cassatt's, on the contrary,

is

present and future. Prepared for the North

Woman's Building

at the

so that she could raise and lower the canvas as she needed

tympanum

By

Modern Woman. Cassatt became involved

monumental

project through

society in

Managers

of the

in

The

the

Woman's

Building.

of high

like

Cassatt in Paris in 1892, admired her work, and commissioned

other,

more

traditional,

allotted to the

theme of "Primitive

Honor

Woman"

58

feet,

Cassatt had a glass-roofed studio constructed

summer house

(the

in Bachivilliers; as

Monet had done

feet
at

time.

young women

"Young Women

allegorizing the notion of

garden; to the

running

little

winged

Arts,

Music,

lost, a

by

left, in

after

what looks

in these activities.

sketch provides

represented

are

It

is

clear

works of [he period (Baby Reaching

Cassatt conceived

for his

\ss

IT,

an Eden-

rather

but

humor-

is

actually a

To

the right,

by young

women

Although the originals have been

some notion of

color in the final version.

her

and

like a kite

figure, with geese at their heels.

Darning

in

Young Women Pursuing Fume, young

represented allcgorically

ously

engaged

being

more academic Mary Fairchild MacMonics).

For the large-scale canvas, which measured about 12

fruit,

women were

Mrs. Palmer met

her to do one of the two murals for the Hall of

same

Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge and Science"

the intermediary of Bertha

member

at the

central panel represented a scene of

picking

this

to.

so doing, she secured the advantages of plein-air painting

and those of monumentally

Chicago who was President of the Board of Lad)

for

she had a trench dug in the studio

an allegory of the

World's Columbian Exposition of

Potter Palmer, a prominent suffragist and

Women in the Garden,

earlier

1893 in Chicago, Cassatt's mural (later lost or destroyed) was

entitled

(51.1 x 66.3)

Modern Woman

EAKINS, IND THE

the brilliance of the

from examining related

for

an

//>/>/<,

1893) that

boldly, as a large-scale

MODERN ALLEGORY

271

27 ()

decorative project.

It is

charm,

equally clear from textual evidence of

approximately the same time that she intended to demonstrate-

garden the picking of the

that in her

women was

condemned

not a

be strongly encouraged.

to

activity:

fruit

then

The promoters

of the

Building had stated their purpose as follows:

it

hateful to us.

We

"We [women]
become

workers not cumbercrs of the earth." Nevertheless, Cassatt

refuses to

make her

allegory grim, moralistic or formally

old-fashioned: on the contrary, her style

is

that of the van-

guard of the day, Postimpressionist or Symbolist. She was

aware of the modernity and innovativeness of her

fully

project and emphasized the seriousness of her

to

formal aspects.

its

commitment

At the same time, she wrote

to

Mrs. Palmer of her work-in-progress as follows, using words

and phrases that

stress her belief in a

new, strong role

for

women:
I

have tried

to express
I

the

modern woman

fashions as accurately and in as

the

much

detail as possible. I

is

Cassatt had

tone the

An American friend
other day "Then this
.

relations to

man?"

are painted in

all

told

him

it

their vigour

me in rather a huffy
woman apart from her

asked
is

Men

if I

suit.

begin

shall

pursuing Fame. This seems

The other

panel will represent the

to

\i is

St. Cecilia).

radical in her politics

felt

at

the

herself allied with

the cause of feminism. Writing to Mrs. Palmer, she declared:

"After

all

give

me

recognition here
positively to

something.

France.

if

Women

women's determination

She participated

about

the, to

New York in

in

benefit

1915, and wrote

Mrs. Havemeyer, "You know how

me, question of the day, and

to take place,

to fight for

to be someone rather than

enthusiastically

exhibition for the suffragettes in

to her activist friend

do not have

they do serious work," and she refers

wish

it

if such

feel

an exhibition

to be for the cause of

Woman

Suffrage."

Eakins never engaged

in politics so overtly: his late

in fact, rather conservative.

to

in

is

difficult to

work

is,

imagine him

such outspoken terms, although he

have encouraged some of his female students and

have demanded greater

classes.

It

availibility

Yet together, these two

to

of the nude model in his

artists,

so different in their

have no doubt

formal conceptions and their notions of human existence and

on the wall of the other

the social order inscribed by painting, transformed American

was.

buildings; to us the sweetness of childhood, the

womanhood,

Ciirls

time of the Affair and, increasingly, she

seems

have place on the

become more and more

supporting feminism

Knowledge and

will still

with the passage of time. She was a supporter of Dreyfus

took for the subject of the centre and largest composition

the Fruits of

have not been absolutely feminine

...

Young

Young Women Plucking

Science

272

in

have tried to represent those

if

and Music (nothing of

is

fashions of the day, and

failed

me very modern

Woman's

claim our inheritance, and are

word

immediately

was

have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge and the Eden of Idleness

is

in a

have

panels for two compositions, one which

of knowledge by

on the contrary,

charm of

have not conveyed some sense of that

CASSATT, EAKINS, AND THE

MODERN ALLEGORY

art

from

a provincial, rather limited pursuit into a world-class

enterprise.

279

MARYCASSATT

Young Women Picking Fruit

rfya.

52x36(132x91.5)

\SS

r I,

\KI\S. \\|)

llll.

MODI.KX

Al.l.l

CiORV

273

13

MASS CULTURE AND UTOPIA:

SEURAT AND NEOIMPRESSIONISM
THE ANTINOMIES OF GEORGES SEURAT

his entire brief life in Paris, either in the

in

apartment

their

136

at

company of his

family

boulevard Magenta (halfway

THE BRITISH CRITIC ROGER FRY WROTE THAT

INthe1929,
art of Georges Seurat (1859-91) was stretched between

between the new Gare du Nord and the old Saint-Lazare

the poles of "photographic literalness" and a condition "as

daughter of a coachman turned jeweler, and his father was a

...

abstract

antinomy,

pictorial

as

art

ever attained." This basic

believe, accurately describes the efforts

and

Prison) or in his

minor

civil

and spent

own

apartment-studio. His mother was the

servant and real estate speculator

his free time at a

suburban

who retired early

Le Raincy. The

villa at

achievements of Seurat and his Neoimpressionist followers.

success of Antoine Seurat permitted Georges to take up an

Born nearly

artist's career

generation after the Impressionists, these artists

sought to return Impressionism to

tic roots,

its

collective

and democra-

while at the same time maintaining their personal

without financial worry, but the young

by more than

clearly affected

circumstances

of his

man was

just the fortunate financial

he

upbringing:

must

have

been

and expressive autonomy. The goal was largely impracticable

impressed as well by the modernity of the section of Paris

given the social and cultural constraints of the age, and

which he

life at

Le

resulted in an art of paradox: Neoimpressionism was guided at

Raincy, and by the power of his father's capital; these are

all

once by the lessons of science and by an often abstruse

subjects represented in his mature

idealism;
elite art

at the

it

was influenced both by popular culture and the

of the Classical and Academic tradition;

same time

politically tendentious

represented together the alienation of

Utopian dream of a

life

it

aimed

to be

and formally pure;

modern

life

it

and the

of leisure and unending pleasure; and

it

was, in sum, intellectually rigorous and an "armchair for the

tired

businessman,"

therefore,

the

art

in Matisse's

words. By these antinomies,

of Seurat and

his

followers

laid

the

by the cultural novelty of suburban

Initially trained in the industrial

applied

for,

He

(his

called

fellows

compulsory military
a

him

political ostracism

communard). After

and immediately proceeded

Seurat largely dispensed with

element of

to

Aman-Jean (1860

develop and refine a

among many
line,

previous drawings.

all

dispensed with meaning

280

other works,

281

in

the one indispensable

In so doing, he also

the work of

its

only

portrait

is

drawing

large (24|

in conte

art,

as

formerly

by 18^ inches) independent

crayon on rough Michallet paper.

genius) was undoubtedly Georges Seurat. Apart from a few

The male

summers spent on

directed to the lower right. His right hand

274

Aman-

understood.

Aman-Jean

Normandy

year of

of drawing that was utterly without precedent. In

jean (1882-3) and Echo (1883),

the

service, Seurat returned to Paris, rented

studio with his friend Edmond-Francois

style

leader of Neoimpressionism (and

to the Ecole des

studied in the atelier of Henri

Lehmann (181 482) for a little more than a year before leaving

mies are named Picasso and Matisse, Mondrian and Miro,

The founder and

and decorative arts, Seurat

on account of boredom, poor grades, and

1935),

SEURAT'S DRAWINGS AND THEIR

DISPERSION OF MEANING

art.

and was granted, admission

Beaux-Arts in 1878.

foundation for twentieth-century modernism, whose antino-

Albers and Rivera.

lived,

in

or Brittany coasts, he lived

subject

is

depicted in half-length profile with gaze

is

extended and

280

GEORGES SEURAT Aman-Jean

1882-3. 24t*

holds a small brush with which he makes a

mark on

nearly coincident with the right margin. Echo

the size of
282

Seurat's

The boy

4).

Aman-Jean, and

first

in the

drawing

is

is

shown

close

and bottom margins of the paper;

isosceles triangle,

and

his

cupped around

his

up and

his cap

( 1

in profile.

echoes the

shaped into an

is

mouth

lower right. His hands

left to

in

order to amplify

subtle

all

over the surface of the paper

continuum of dark and

contour of a
is

line.

light

in

order to create

to this exclusion of line

the reinforcement of the profile of

Aman-Jean.) Relief

They

in a sense, not representations at

are useless as interrogations of

human

is

between figure and

ground, and they are valueless as renderings of the

personality or psyche.

By abjuring line

in his

thus more closely approached pure abstraction than any

we have considered
central

to

so

before

far.

an understanding of Seurat's break with the

we turn

must be considered

a little further

to his equally epochal paintings.

Since before the Renaissance, the art of drawing was based

upon the control and manipulation of

ment, direction, volume,

dependent upon

it.

To

light,

contour, move-

line:

and expression were

Fedcrico Zuccaro

at

all

status: as the material expression of the Platonic Idea,

relief,

modeling, and volume

Aman-Jean. Yet

in these

drawings

simultaneous evanescence and tangibility

areas of mass as

much

is

is

to speak of

was the

misleading;

divine within the

present here in

as in areas of shadow. Physical presence

and absence commingle

in a single,

haunting rhetoric. Aman-

si ail

b\

ncarh divine

draw ing

essential instrument for the representation of the

human. Lines

for

him were both

which bodies were physically manifested

{disegno esterno),

in

the

means

works of

art

and the material traces of the imagination

and genius of the

\T\S

judged

the end of the

the boy in Echo, and by contrasts of light and dark, as in the

jacket lapels of

artist

Because these drawings are so

sixteenth century, linear drawing had attained

and

artist's

drawings, Seurat

created by the absense of crayon, as in the bare shoulders of

shirt collar

all.

character, they

reveal nothing of the physical nature of the subjects they

uninterrupted by the hard

(The only exception

Jean and Echo are thus,

Classical tradition, they

a shout.

In both of these drawings, Seurat rubbed the greasy black

crayon

The Echo 1883. 12x9H31.1x23.4)

depict, they refuse any clear distinction

883

nose and right forearm create a

diagonal extending from upper

are

Asnieres

"L" which

His back and extended arms form an

left

a surface

exactly half

highly finished study for

A Bathing Place,

major painting,

is

Georges Seurat

281

(62.2x46.4)

18J-

artist

{disegno interne).

DRAW [NGS Wl> DISPERSION OF

Thus, the

\n \\i\i,

art

of


drawing with

lines

value that allowed

had
it

to

moral, as well as a representational,

blocks east of his family's apartment, further easl was his

become

father's retreat at

the foundation for seven-

teenth-century history paintings concerned with the great

men and deeds

By

of history, mythology, and religion.

and

early nineteenth century, this Classical

the

idealist tradition

who

of linear drawing was principally upheld by Ingres,

instructed his pupils (including Seurat's teacher I.ehmann):

does not simply mean to reproduce contours;

"To draw

drawing does not simply consist of

drawing

line:

expression, the inner form, the surface modeling.

why

among

the painters of expression

have been the greatest draftsmen

also

is

That

moderns happen

the

witness Raphael!"

is

to

drawing came from Charles Blanc. An

line in

esthetician,
arts

championing of the

its

and pedagogue, Blanc wrote

du dessin (1867), "that lines

and oblique

role of

influential critic,

in his

Grammaire

des

straight, curved, horizontal

are directly related to our sentiments,

lots for

display in the

when he and some

spaces of Paris,

spend time

at

well-known

and can

rank, nevertheless found

movement and

it

exalted

indispensable for the creation of

Yet

plasticity in drawings.

Seurat the tradition of linear drawing

is

its

in the

ended and

is

hands of

in its place

substituted the abstraction of what the art historian

Growe

by

18

relaxing and

somewhat down-at-heels

on

bathing

at a

the

bank of the Seine. The picture, composed out of

left

ture,

if

resort

was refused by the Salon judges, and was instead shown

twice

1884

in

Indepcndants,

handful of Naturalist writers,

who would form

Bernd

art critic,

however, as the

was acclaimed by

it

and

critics,

the nucleus of

artists,

including

movement dubbed

and anarchist Felix Feneon "Neo-

The "manifesto"

new movement,

of the

Maurice Hermel

critic

Artistes

group which included Gdilon Redon

and Paul Signac (1863-1935). There

Signac,

of the

exhibitions

jury-free

at

a large

impressionism."

from

men and boys

to

Grande

a heroically scaled (79

is

inches) depiction of working-class

Manet, both of whom sought

line

on

began

of his friends

Clichy, Asnieres, and the Island of the

Bathing Place, Asnieres

Jattc.

Seurat

class

Iaussmannized urban and suburban leisure

by the writer,

dethrone

Thus

middle-class "villas."

was already familiar with the complex signs of social

themselves be expressive and eloquent." Even Delacroix and

to

suburban area only recently

regularized and systematized Impressionist palette and fac-

In addition to Ingres and his pupils, support for the tenets

of Neoclassical art theory with

subdivided into

Le Raincy,

called

it,

appeared two

years later at the eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition, in

the form of Seurat's

Sunday Afternoon on

the Island of the

Grande Jatte (1884-6).

has called a "light-dark continuum." Solid bodies are

dissolved by the light emitted from beneath a carpet of conte

crayon; light

which the
class

is

given material substance by the ebb and flow of

In Aman-Jean and Echo, the unseen canvas upon

tonality.

artist labors

and the unheard shout of a working-

boy are perhaps Seurat's

real subjects.

these drawings of Seurat, as in others,

beyond the ragged and

is

"Meaning"

in

thereby dispersed

indefinite edges of the Michallet paper

into a spectatorial space that

is

dynamic and contested. In

way, Seurat's drawings are very

like his paintings:

"MANIFESTO PAINTING": A SUNDAY

AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF THE
GRANDE JATTE
A

this

they are

Seurat's Grande Jatte

at a

the banks of Asnieres.

are got

up

exchange between the artwork and the diverse classes and

Sabbath noon.

meaning

as

it

was formerly conceived

scribed frame of the artwork

therefore

meaning

mark an attempt
to the

work of

art.

to restore social

Now

Even

as

the

works

Neoclassical art theory, they

and

their significance

community of spectators responsive

art.

within the circum-

Seurat's drawings and paintings

determined, almost as never before, by

of

their rejection of

is

to

be

monkey poses

Women, men, and children of all classes

to picnic,

upper

left.

Cythera,

The

island

and

its

swab

floats across the

the

form an

trees

habitues constitute a

with this difference:

but

extremely vitiated.

sunny,

pug gambols, and

Above,

the foreground.

intermittent canopy while a cotton

promenade, boat,

this particular

black labrador grazes, a

in

idyll

sky at

modern
appears

pleasure

The critic Henri Fevre wrote in May

1886:

broad and diverse

to the formal imperatives

reject

mark

political

of a Sunday

narrow island opposite

a small,

and gaze upon one another on

fish,

By

life-sized depiction

good clothes

in their

unusually, and radically, critical in their effort to spark an

cultures the artist saw and depicted.

is a

suburban park located on

important aspects of

a return to the values of

Little

by

little,

one understands the intention of the

painter; the dazzle

and blindness

familiar with, divines, sees

lift

and one becomes

and admires the great yellow

Revolutionary, Neoclassical history painting as practised by

patch of grass eaten away by the sun, the clouds of golden

David exactly one hundred years

dust in the treetops, the details that the retina, dazzled

earlier.

Seurat studied and understood the contested spaces and

cultural diversity of the city that lay

beyond the frame of his

canvas and studio door. In his youth he frequented the newly

built

276

working-class park of the Buttes-Chaumont just a few

"MANIFESTO PAINTING": GRANDE JATTE

light,

cannot make out; then one understands the

ness of the Parisian promenade, stiffand distorted; even

recreation

Chavannes,

is

affected.

a coarse

...

summary

It

is

materialist

by-

stiltedits

Puvis de

of nature, savagely colored.

284-5

282

GEORGES SEURAT A

Another

Bathing Place, Asnieres 1883-4.

Alfred Paulet, wrote:

critic,

"The

% * 9 ''0 (200.9 x 299.7)

painter has given

automatic gestures of lead soldiers, moving

his figures the

about on regimented squares. Maids, clerks, and soldiers

move around with

Grande Jatte

Seurat's

all

similar slow, banal, identical step."

is

thus

once

at

an

ingenuously

Impressionist image of suburban recreation and leisure, and a

critical Realist

class society.

picture of the artifice and alienation of modern

His mentors are

at

once Monet, the author of La

Grenouillere (The Frog Pond), and

Manet, the painter of Le

Even

cursory glance at the picture, however, reveals that

style differs

painters.
icians,

markedly from works by either of these two

Unlike them, but

Seurat

Pan-Athenaic

is

rigid

Frie/.e

in

common

and systematic

with some academ-

in his

method. "The

of Phidias [on the Parthenon] was a

procession," Seurat told his friend the poet and critic Gustave

Kahn

in

1888, "I want to

figures on that

frie/.e, in

make

the

moderns

file

past like

their essential form, to place

them

in

compositions arranged harmoniously by virtue of the directions of the colors

Pierre Puvis de

Chavannes

Grove (1884) was exhibited

whose The Sacred

(182-198),

the Salon in the very year the

at

Grande Jatte was begun, Seurat has subjected

and especially

schema based upon Vitruvius: heads are

and faces are turned precisely

from the back, or

application

his landscape

his figures to a strict proportional

full

full frontal, |

back. Seurat

of color,

though

is

in

and Classical

the height of bodies,

view,

full profile, |

equally rule-bound in his

this

case

the

source

is

contemporary color theory written by Michel-Eugene Chev-

Dejeuner (Luncheon).

its

accordance with one another." Like the Academic muralist

and

lines,

line

and color arranged

in

reul,

Charles Henry, and especially

Ogden Rood. Atop

thin

underpainting consisting of broad, rectangular strokes of

few closely related hues of local color, Seurat carefully placed

curved,

horizontal,

unmixed

or partially blended paint.

or

vertical,

crisscrossed

Above

this

strokes

of

he applied

myriad, nearly identically sized dabs or points of mostl)

unblended complementary and adjacent colors, animating the

surface and causing

Rejecting

employed

the

this

it

to take

relative

on the qualil\ of a mosaic.

tonal

sobricn

of I'm

is,

Seurat

technique of "Chromo-luminarism," as he

"MANIFESTO PAINTING" GRANDE JATTE

277

283

called

it,

order to achieve a luminositj that would exceed

in

even that in Impressionist paintings. Feneon was informed by

Seurat of his methods in 1886 and published them that year:

These

colors, isolated

retina:

we have,

on the canvas, recombine on the

therefore, not

mixture of material colors

(pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of

Need we

light.

recall that

even when the colors are the

same, mixed pigments and mixed rays of light do not

same

necessarily produce the

results? It

is

also generally

understood that the luminosity of optical mixtures

always superior to that of material mixture, as the

follow ing year,

many

M. Rood demonstrate.

equations worked out by

The

is

Seurat and his colleagues Signac, Lucien Pissarro (1863-

Luce (1858-1941), Charles

Angrand (1854-1926), and Albert Dubois-Pillet (1845-90),

whose works were on display

at the third

annual exhibition of

the Societe des Artistes Independants. Calling

286

( 1

brightly

lit

shadows.
to

them "Neoim-

areas,

master the "laws" of colored

definitive

produces].

aspect
.

Step back a

these variocolored

spots

The Dining

to "synthesize the landscape in a

bit

the

sensation

[it

[from their pictures] and

all

melt into undulating, luminous

masses; the brushwork vanishes, so to speak; the eye

is

no

longer solicited by anything but the essence of painting."

Even

the

mature

Camille

Pissarro

Chromo-luminarism, practising

283 Pierre Puvis

278

it

for

was

intoxicated

approximately

DE Chavannes The Sacred Grove

lie

in the

light,

and

to produce, as Ik

In

fact,

Feneon,

however,

Seurat,

and

his

followers

misunderstood the color theories of the American physicist

Ogden Road,

believing he had claimed that every material

mixture was deficient

in

luminosity

when compared

to color

achieved by optical mix. This misunderstanding resulted

colors in the

Grande fatte

"almost entirely lacking

that

in

Emile Hennequin, as early as

by
five

1884. 36^x91(92.6x231)

"MANIFESTO PAINTING". GRANDE JATTE

in

luminosity," especially in those

areas, such as the trousers of the reclining

foreground or the dress of the

woman

man

in the left

with the fishing pole,

where complementary dots or strokes of paint have been

intermingled. Nevertheless, Seurat continued in his pursuit of

and was soon convinced that he had

a scientific esthetic,

indeed discovered, as

perpetuates

wrote, "a robust art, based on sensation."

experience of art

which

in

divided brushstrokes were an attempt

pressionists" for their rejection of Impressionism's "fugitive

Room, Breakfast (1886-7),

UsL'Ile Lacroix, Rouen, Wiu

and complementary orange and blue

Its carefully

appearances," he described their attempts, in such works as

Signac's The Gasometer at Clichy (1886) and

888) employs a subtle palette of white, pink, and green

1886, correctly perceived to be "dusty or lusterless" and

Feneon again expounded the technique of

1944, Camille's son), Maximilien

years between 1885 and 1890.

Kahn

wrote, "scientifically, with the

the law of pictorial color."

In a short letter of 1890, Seurat described his method.

Under
Art

the rubric "Esthetic," he wrote:

is

Harmony.

Harmony

is

the analogy of opposites, the analogy of

similarities of tone,

of

tint,

of

line,

taking account of a

dominant, and under the influence of the lighting,

combinations that are gay, calm or sad.
Further on, beneath the word "Technique," he wrote:

in

287

284

GEORGES SEURAT A Sunday

Given the phenomenon

Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte 1884-6. 81} x

[.

luminous impression on the

Synthesis

is

The means

of the duration of the

.]

retina,

[.

of tints (of local color and the illuminating color: sun,

lamp, gas,

oil

of the lights and their reactions

etc.), that is,

(shadows) following the laws of contrast, of gradation, of

The frame

[.

and

.]

is

lines

in a

harmony opposed

of the

[.

.]

and the darkened theater

basis

of Seurat's method,

to those of the

By means of

he wrote,

"contrast" and "synthesis;" his motto "Art

is

was color

Harmony" was

thus a proclamation that beauty arises from a continuous

process of opposition
colors,

values,

primarily to

and

mean

and resolution among contrasting

lines.

(Line must here be understood

direction.)

Le

Crotoy,

landscape

his

This dynamic relationship,

288

at

"is

continued and extends

itself to

Seurat's scientific and dialectic approach to

which the barriers between artwork and world are

broken down, he sought to restore to painting the cultural

significance

picture.

as

frames,

meet the eye of the spectator."

Academic

The

painted

Bayreuth, in which the contrast between the illuminated stage

painting, in

irradiation.

tones, tints

by

represented

his

Upstream (1889), to the stagecraft of Wagner's opera house

the optical mixture of tones,

is

Emile Verhaeren, Seurat compared

spectacularly

.]

logically the result.

of expression

10'IJ (207.6 x 307.9)

it

had

with the demise of Classicism and

lost

The artist's only known comment

down much later by Signac, should
an indicator of his respect for the Da vidian

history painting.

about the Grande Jatte,

be taken as

set

paradigm: "In another vein

would

painted the struggle between the

means of his

relentless focus

just as willingly

loratii

and the

have

C.uratii."

By

upon the laws of harmony, Seurat

sought as well to return to the enterprise of painting the social

moreover, was extended by Seurat beyond the limits of the

and collective meaning

canvas to the frame, and then beyond the frame to the world of

have seen, of Courbet's project of Realism. Indeed, Courbct's

the spectator. According to the testimony of the poet and critic

Burial at OrnatlS, despite the differences

it

had

lost

with the destruction, as we

"MANIFESTO PAINTING":

(iR

in color

and

tonality,

WIM. JATTE

279

2() ( >

285

280

GEORGES SEURAT

Final study for Chahut 1889. 21} x 18^(55.6x46.7)

"MANIFESTO PAINTING": GRANDE JATTE

is

by the Grande

recalled

both are large, indeed

jfatte:

and ambiguously classed,

and

Idealist

may

Jatte

few

awkward,

heroically, scaled pictures depicting occasions of

female dancer,

rituals.

and modernist, the Grande

Realist, Classical

thus be said to possess, like

its

author, in

Schapiro's words, "an earnest democratic spirit;"

it

and worker,

artist

when asked by
289

fine

recognizable by his hands and instrument in the lower

Octave Maus the

would

Jfatte,

figure his wages:

"one year

The audience

"They

No.

apply

[writers

and

right to

When

my method and that is all."

between

the

physical

and

"pig-snouted," but otherwise nattily

runway

else

about the picture

is

the gas lamps at the top and those suspended in

the vertical bar or pole approximately one

left,

quarter the distance from the

left

margin, the location of the

arrangement of seating for audience and

rear wall, the precise

intellectual

from

woman wearing a crown like the Statue of

woman wearing a feathered toque, and a man with

mid-air at the

cognition of the artwork was nearly absolute. Painted in

orchestra, and the curious vignette-shape of the picture itself

discrete dots of color, applied according to a preconceived

within

system, Neoimpressionist pictures are a kind of exaggeration

or parody of the very type of industrial

depicts both a

product.

To

The

subsequent

was

isolation

critics

picture

rationalized,

perceived

this: that

discover and

employ

which sought

esthetic

formula

to

for

and pleasure. Short of a revolution

a

the

mood

of

would seem, Seurat paradoxically

dream of unrestrained pleasure and

nightmare

opposition was observed and ascribed political signifi-

at the

time by

at all costs for a

Kahn when he

wrote: "If you are looking

'symbol,' you will find

in the contrast

it

between the beauty of the dancer, an elegant and modest

it

and the ugliness of her admirer;

sprite,

structure of the canvas and

of

representation

the

and labor, these two halves could not make

result

cance

by contemporary and

of the Grande Jatte? Precisely

idleness, quietness,
life

the sense of

what, then, can be attributed

and

it

is

vision of vulgarity.

ship between their individual work-gesture and the final

alienation

painted frame. Equally mysterious

its

the picture. In Chahut,

and alienated labor

then expanding in France, in which workers see no relation-

ignominy." Signac had

in daily

expressed

whole; the

its

in

the

hieratic-

contemporary

view of the picture, which he

a similar

in 1891, just a

subject,

He

few months after Seurat's death.

wrote that by painting images of working-class

was parody.

still,

life,

"or better

the pleasures of decadence like dance halls, chahuts and

circuses

as the painter Seurat did,

who had such

a vivid

MASS CULTURE AND THE PARADOX OF

perception of the degeneration of our transitional era

PLEASURE:

Neoimpressionists] bring their evidence to the great social

The
290,293

as

head and beard. Everything

obscure

do.

Indeed, for Seurat and

creation

Chahut, seated in the parterre or pit beside

left,

Liberty's, a
a bald

the Neoimpressionists, as for few other artists of the time, the

division

with raised head,

three other figures on the opposite side of the

in the

poetry in what

critics] see

in profile

dressed in hat, cane, and overcoat with flowered lapel, and

asked by Angrand about the significance of his works, Seurat

replied:

in

Kahn

described by

selling

day."

at 7 francs a

shown

is

left

the musicians, consists of a gentleman in the lower right,

value like a day laborer

its

is

the flute player

left;

the presence of their raised bows.

a depiction of working-class

Seurat computed

is

arm, baton, and moustache; and two fiddlers are indicated by

to

art. It is significant that

models relaxedly posed against the starched bourgeoisie

Grande

corner; the conductor

legitimate and

and industrial

his friend the critic

bass player

instrument pointed upward and to the

the distinction between

The Models (1886-8),

price of

like a great erotic parenthesis; the

affirms

down

follow, Seurat sought to break

of the

Meyer

many modernists

Like

spectators of painting.

critical

become

in the picture itself, to

The members

seen in the extreme foreground with his back to us and his

the right and opportunity of a diverse audience, like the

Sunday crowd

high kicks for the crowd.

last

orchestra are embraced by the extended legs of the foreground

CHAHUT

paradoxical nature of Seurat's quest for

harmony

is

trial

that

way

to

is

taking place between workers and Capital."

Kahn,

unmistakably manifest in his pictures of popular cntertain-

Chahut

Montmartrc cabarets where Chahuts

(1890-91)

all

shown

at

exhibitions

of the

Salon

men and two

women performing

as the

the vulgar quadrille

on

is

almost certainly the cafe-concert

stage in a dance hall like those he

Japonais

at

75 rue des Martyrs). In

known

knew

in

known
fact,

we

climax of the performance, or the tHrtain

dancers break out of their square, form

a line,

as

bad food and

when

may

arc

that

in

the

in

performed, the

the audience

spirits,

is

subjected to the dystopia of

seed} surroundings, and lewd displaj

just as casilv

be claimed.

say, following Signac, that in the Parisian

mere automata;

In

We

dance called

Chahut, the performers arc no "sprites," but are reduced

the

and perform

following

say,

tut, however, the opposite can

(it

Le Divan

are seeing the

call,

simply

movement while

Chahut

Montmartrc

is

to

dancers experience the Utopian delight office and expressive

des

Indepcndants. In Chahut Seurat depicts two

One

understand the opposition of dream and nightmare

mentsSideshow

(1887-8), Chahut (1889-90), and Circus

[the

their limbs, buttocks, breasts, crotches,

to

and

smiles are \isibl\ alienated from their bodies and their minds

\l

\ss

(.1

III

Rl

\\l)

THE

1
I

\K \D()\

or

I'M \Sl R!

281

286 PALI.

SlGNAC The

Dining Room,

Breakfast 1886-7. 35 x 45J (89 x

287 Camii.i.e

\
1

282

MASS CULTURE AND THE PARADOX OF PLEASURE

15)

Pissarro L'hle

Lacroix, Rouen, Mist 1888.

(44 x 55)

18J x 21J

288

Georges Seurat Le

Upstream 1889. 28* x 36J

289

Georges Seurat

Crotoy,

(73 x 93.3)

The Models

79 x 98| (200.6 x 250.8)

MASS CULTURE

WD Till.

1'

\R \l>()\

()!'

I'll.

ASl

Rl.

283

2qo

Georges Seurat Cha hut

66x55H 168.9

in a

dystopia of fetishism and objectification. At the same

time, the spectators are treated to the Utopian pleasures of

music,

light, frenetic

dance, and sexual stimulation.

Each of these antinomies

how can

sible:

is

their

equally plausible and implau-

movement when we know

that

dance was designed precisely to subordinate expressivity

in favor

of crude sexual display?

the performers have

felt

On

alienated

kicks are so clearly exuberant

the other hand,

how can

hand,

and so splendidly

how can we assert

their

they have suffered

the dystopia of degradation and exploitation,

clearly enraptured

how can

and degraded when

and they wear such broad

smiles? Regarding the spectators,

when they are so

attired?

On

the other

that the audience has experienced the

joyous Utopia of sensual stimulation and erotic delight,

when

they themselves are barred from the dance and, apparently,

284

from human companionship? Everyone came alone

Chahut. (The bald

man

with the beard and the

to the

woman

with

the toque might just belong together, but they are separated

the performers actually have experienced the

delight of free and expressive

1889-90.

x 140.9)

MASS CULTURE AND THE PARADOX OF PLEASURE

by the neck of the bass

viol

and anyway make an unlikely

couple.)

The

question which arose in considering the Grande fatte

must be considered

again:

is

Chahut

why

a satire? If so,

did

Seurat go to such lengths to include tonal, linear, and

coloristic devices that,

he believed, would guarantee that his

picture would stimulate feelings of joyousness in his audience?

The predominating

high luminosity,

warm

hues, and

pointed angles and accents (lines) were believed by

conducive

upward

him

to

be

to happiness. In the letter cited earlier, Seurat

wrote: "Gaiety of tone

is

warm dominant, of line,

the luminous dominant, of tint, the

lines

above the horizontal." Chahut

contains just this vocabulary of gaiety. In Chahut,

it

would

contradictory.

Upon

entering

Degas's Cirque Fernando

(in

Divan Japonais,

Seurat's
his

Miss Lola

Cirque

at the

Fernando, 1879), Manet's Folies-Bergere, or the hundreds of

other theaters and places of entertainment depicted by French

and European

of the late nineteenth century, things

artists

were not what they seemed. Take the question of the theater
audience, for example. Occupying "the center seats in the

under the chandelier or lustre" writes Baedeker's

pit,

in 1888,

"the claque, or paid applauders, form an annoying, although

characteristic feature in

most of the theatres

and are

easily

recognized by the obtrusive and simultaneous vigor of their

exertions.
class

There

are even entrepreneurs de succes dramatique, a

of mercantile adventurers

who

furnish theaters with

claques at stated terms."

At the many Paris

cafes chantants, or nightclubs, the guide

continues, "the music and singing

while the audience

of

is

alluring display of the

chantants

is

is

never of

high class,

very mixed character.

words

The

entree libre outside the cafes

a ruse to attract the public, as

each visitor

is

obliged to order refreshments (consomniation), which are

generally of inferior quality." If the innocent visitor chooses

292 JULES

Henri

291

df.

Toulouse-Lautrec Le Divan jfaponais

CHERET

Le Bat du Moulin Rouge 1889. 23^x16^(59.7x41.9)

1892-3.

31Jx 24 (80.8x60.8)

seem, Seurat set out to make a democratic and happy picture.

And
theories

yet,

no matter what we know of Seurat's esthetic

and

inescapable

practise,

when

imputation

the

of satire

actually viewing Chahul.

even further strengthened

if

we compare

The

remains

conviction

is

the painting to Henri

de Toulouse-Lautrec's (18641901) lithographed poster of

291

the

same cabaret, Le Divan jfaponais (1892-3). Toulouse-

Lautrec depicts uncritically the Parisian world of fashion and

celebrity; the

popular chanleuse Yvette Guilbert

shown on

is

stage (her head audaciously cut off by the top edge of the
poster),

above the dancer Jane Avril

(in

one of her famous and

outlandish hats) and her companion Edouard Dujardin, the

dandified founder of the avant-garde Revue Wagnerienne.

such celebrity and playful in-joking

picture. At

some

level, then,

their perception of social

is

in

evidence

in Seurat's

Kahn and Signac must

and

political criticism in

No

be right in

Chahut. As

with the Grande Jatte, Seurat has created a painting which

records the paradox

modern

leisure

both the

alienation

and the delight

of

and mass culture.

Indeed, mass culture in Seurat's day was, as

already begun to understand (see Chapter

11),

we have
new and

GRANDE
M \ss (l III

Kl

ERCREOIS & SAMEOIS

\\D

rill.

1>

\K \l)()\

()!

PLE \si RE

285

instead to attend one of the innumerable balls or dance halls of

no

Paris, things are

The

which take place

balls,

all

the year round at public

dancing rooms, may be regarded as one of the specialities

Many

Paris.

some years

ot

of these entertainments, however, have for

up"

past been to a great extent "got

numbers of

benefit of strangers,

for the

the supposed visitors

being hired as decoys by the lessee of the saloon. ... At the

Bal Bullier ... a famous establishment in

way, the

its

dancing of the students and artisans with their etudiantes

and

ouvrieres

character.

generally of a wild and Bacchanalian

Here the famous Can-Can may be

Chahut,

In

is

Seurat

appears

to

seen.

have depicted

professionalized performance, and not a

fully

mock amateur can-

seems genuine enough (they are not applauding), and no

from

inducements are

his painting

in evidence.

But

if

Seurat omits

any obvious clues as to the put-on nature of

the audience, the location, and the performance,

understood

he

because

sufficiently effective
guile.

entertainments

these

that

only

is

it

were

and insidious even without ostentatious

His knowledge and respect for the power of mass

culture

is

revealed, for example, by his admiration

and even

occasional emulation, as the art historian Robert Herbert has

292

shown, of the cabaret posters of Jules Cheret {Le Bal du

Moulin Rouge,

1889,

for

example).

In

described Seurat's affinity for Cheret:

1891,

"The

Verhaeren

poster artist

Cheret, whose genius he greatly admired, had charmed him

with the joy and the gaiety of

his designs.

He had

studied

modern

dance

and circuses were alienating,

halls

Perhaps some sense

collective.

desire for freedom

this

providing

smiling

was

yet the alienation

camaraderie, some collective

and autonomy could be salvaged from

perhaps the

world;

of

of

factory, the sideshows,

could

artist

be

e\ en

instrumental

new (harmonic) vocabulary through which

freedom could be

felt

and even acted upon by everyone"'

At Asnieres, the Grande

provided by

in

this

and the other new haunts

Jatte,

growing culture industry, Seurat understood

that he

was witnessing the very Utopia of which he dreamed,

well as

its

as

opposite. This dialectic was succinctly described by

I

Marcuse

Ierbert

in 1937, in

terms that might have been inspired by the pictures of Seurat:

In suffering the most extreme reification,

humans triumph

over reification.

The

effortless agility

and relaxation, which can be displayed

of the beautiful body,

artistry

its

today only in the circus, vaudeville and burlesque, herald

the joy to which
the

being liberated from

will attain in

Once humankind, having become

ideal.

[independent]

matter

humans

succeeds

subject,

when

the

in

sensuality, in other words,

released by the soul, then the

first

true

mastery
is

of

entirely

glimmer of

new

culture emerges.
In the very degradation of the performers at these venues, in
the very objectification of the body, in the very focus
erotic at the

expense of the

anticipations of the world of

ideal,

upon the

Seurat must have seen

harmony and pleasure of w hich

he dreamed. Indeed, modern mass culture, of which the

them, wanting to analyze their means of expression and

parks, cabarets, and circuses of Paris are early examples,

uncover their aesthetic secrets." Cheret had apparently

construed from just this dialectic of alienation and freedom:

understood the secret allure of mass culture and found a recipe

for representing

lesson from

it

Perhaps Seurat could take

in his posters.

him and

also discover

what underlay the hypnotic

power of the nascent culture industry.

highly cultured and circumspect

"the notary"), Seurat must have

felt a

and

Circus, his last painting.

deplored

its

vulgarity

On

the pleasures

anticipatory

man (Degas

called

him

profound ambivalence
in

Chahut

the one hand, he surely

and reduction of the spectator

to the

scientistic

a place of refuge

even

MASS CULTURE AND THE PARADOX OF PLEASURE

literal,

joy

of "effortless agility"

art

that

was

dialectical.

itself

at

and the

to explore this

The

once relentlessly

formalist and naturalist. Along with the

works of Van Gogh,

century.

286

Utopian

and ingratiatingly popular; they are by turns

abstract and

saw

working people

once the result of the extremely

drawings and paintings of Seurat are

among

as offering

offers are at

paradox through an

condition of passive spectator, but on the other, he probably

it

it

is

circumscribed act of commodity consumption and of the

"mastery of matter." Seurat's achievement was

about the world of artifice and contrived pleasures

293

sense of honor; notice the serried ranks

the social critic and philosopher

can danced by ersatz students and workers. The audience

particular

perhaps

spectators in Circus. Like the

better:

to

which we

shall

now

turn, they were

the last such synthesizing efforts of the nineteenth

293

Georges Seurat

The Circus 1890-91. 73x60(185.4x152.4)

MASS CULTURE \ND THE PARADOX OF PLEASl RE

2S7

14

ABSTRACTION AND POPULISM:

VAN GOGH
SEURAT AND VAN GOGH COMPARED

to Neoimpressionist principles of divided

portrait contains a

CLOSE
times

CONTEMPORARIES WHOSE PATHS SEVERAL

Van Gogh (1853-90) and

Vincent

crossed,

Georges Seurat are nonetheless often seen

Whereas the Dutch-born

man

artist,

it

said,

is

opposites.

as

was essentially

of blue, red,

green, orange, yellow, and purple, with a predominant blue/

orange complementary pairing. Van

Gogh employs

divided

color everywhere in the painting: in the red/green comple-

ments of the

floor

Madame

and

Roulin's ample skirt and

sweater, in the orange/blue

complements of her

Whereas the one was

and sleeves and especially

in the hallucinatory wallpaper,

unsettled and passionate in his

temperament and

his art, the

other was generally calm and dispassionate in both.

And

whereas Van Gogh's painting was romantic and self-expressive, Seurat's

was

and disciplined. The

classical

list

of such

oppositions could easily be lengthened to include those other

binaries

Baroque/Classical, Modern/Ancient,
have provided comforting structure

Rubenistej

Poussiniste

294

Seurat's

color.

tints

of nature and the countryside, the Frenchman was

archetypically urban and cosmopolitan.

295

complex mixture of

that

to

composed of flowers of
floating
field

above

of dark

the wallpaper pattern in Dubois-Pillet's Portrait of Mile.

M. >., 1886).
Van Gogh's portrait of his friend Madame
him succor during

clearly intended as a

can immediately be seen

a sea

(The peculiar wallpaper may have been derived from

offered

false, as

green and yellow paisley above a

of black ovals surrounding orange dots above

green.

Yet the dichotomy

mostly

pink, white, red, green, and yellow,

a pattern of

nineteenth-century and subsequent art historical thought.

is

eyes, collar,

Roulin,

who had

a period of convalescence,

composition

was

and harmony,

in restfulness

Madame

orchestrated with the instruments of Chromo-luminarism, or

Augustine Roulin, called by him La Berceuse (1889), and

what Seurat called "the harmony of opposites." In January

by

comparison

of

Van Gogh's

portrait

of

Seurat's portrait of his mistress, Madeleine Knoblock, called

Young Woman Powdering Herself (188990).

889,

Van Gogh described La

Dutch

friend the

painter

Berceuse in a letter written to his

Koning

in Paris:

Both paintings are three-quarter-length seated portraits of

women. Each woman's body and gaze

while her preponderant bulk

Each

is

is

anchored

rope attached to an unseen cradle

title.

Flowers are

at the

left,

lower right.

make-up and
which determine

accompanied by an attribute

picture's

oriented to the

is

kit,

the

prominent part of the decorative

ensemble of each painting, serving

at

once to disperse the

have

At present

portrait of a

woman.

Dutch
It is a

in a

The complexion

The hands

the background

bottom the background

are

found

only

upper

but

left,

while in the

spectacularly

wallpaper. Each painting, moreover,

288

is

in

Van Gogh they

the

background

structured according

or as

we

say in

rocking the cradle."

is

The

hair

chrome

is

quite orange and in

yellow,

worked up with

naturally broken tones for the purpose of modeling.

some

at the

woman

easel, the

green dress (the bust olive green and the

malachite green).

reinforce an overall flatness; in the Seurat, flowers are seen on

framed mirror

"La Berceuse,"

I call it

viewer's attention across the surface of the picture and to

wallpaper and reflected in the bamboo-

my

mind, or rather on

"our lullaby or the

woman

skirt pale
plaits.

in

holding the rope of the cradle, the same. At the

tiled floor or else a

is

vermilion (simply representing a

stone floor).

wallpaper, which of course

The

wall

is

have calculated

with the rest of the colors. This wallpaper

is

covered with
in

conformity

bluish-green

with pink dahlias spotted with orange and ultramarine.

Whether

really

sang

something

a lullaby in colors is

leave to the critics (Letter 571a).

A few weeks later, Van Gogh

his intention to

296

art,

make La

crafted (as he

would

wrote to his brother

Theo about

Berceuse into a work of truly popular

later say

a "Seurat-like simplicity."

of his Bedroom

Such

a picture,

in Aries)

with

he wrote, could

soothe the hearts and souls of even coarse fishermen:

I

Gauguin

that following those intimate

of ours the idea came to

me to paint the picture in such

have

talks

way

just said to

that sailors,

seeing
feel

it

who

in the cabin

are at once children

the old sense of being rocked

remember
like a

their

own

and martyrs,

of their Icelandic fishing boat, would

lullabys.

chromolithograph from

Now
a

come over them and

it

may be

said that

cheap shop.

it is

A woman

in

green with orange hair standing out against a background

of green with pink flowers.

Now these discordant sharps of

crude pink, crude orange, and crude green are softened by

flats

of red and green.

picture to myself these

same

canvases between those of the sunflowers, which would

thus form torches or candelabra beside them, the same size,

294 Gf.ORGF.S

Hi
295

Vincent Van Gogh La

Berceuse 1889. 36} x

28J-

(92

SEURAT Young Woman

Powdering Herself 1889-90.

x 34^ (70.4 x 86.6)

x 73)

and so the whole would be composed of seven or nine

canvases (Letter 574).

"Perhaps there's an attempt," he

all

later

the music of the color here into

In

emulation of musical

stated

his

added

to

La Berceuse"
effect

Theo, "to get

(Letter 576).

and quest

for

Wagnerian scope, Van Gogh must again be compared with

Seurat,

who

works and constructed

painted mural-sized

chromatic gesamtkunstwerke

works of

(total

with his

art)

elaborate painted frames.

Comparison of La Berceuse with Young Woman Powdering

Herself, in short, reveals a quite

K/* ^Sar
v^jf1

^^^^T^p^^^^^g^^^^^

fM

'"^kSEH
^H^^^^^^B

TV

successful

among

genre of portraiture (they were

painters to

do

so) but

through

modern

expanded

its

the

modern

last

parameters and range of

"science" of Chromo-luminarism.

sought to stimulate

/'~^^^PB

painting. Both artists accepted the validity of the traditional

affect

B ^^t^^k

profound agreement between

what constitutes

their authors as to

in their

which was meant not

Each

audience feelings of harmonj

just a feeling

by

of peace but an ideal and

musical consonance that was both conducive to present social

Br

aJ
^iB

amity and predictive of

achieved

in

democratize

Utopian concord that could be

the future. In addition, each artist desired to

through the "high" cultural adaptation of

art

"low" cultural forms, such

and

popular

SI

prints.

Yet

\\l)

as

here

\\

cheap chromolithographs
a

distinction

(i()(ill

COM P

must

\RI

1)

be

289

"T-r

VINCENT VAN GOGH The

296

announced, which

will

Artist's

Bedroom

in

Aries 1888.

28^ x 35^ (79 x 90)

be elaborated in the following pages.

The Young Woman of Seurat is a modern, fashionable woman

of the sort we have met before in paintings by Manet, Degas,
Morisot, and Cassatt; La Berceuse of Van Gogh is the nononsense wife of a proletarian, akin to the heroic working men
and women in the Realist art of Daumier, Courbet, and
Millet.

Whereas Seurat admired

his art the

Paris

as well as sought to capture in

promised pleasures of the new mass culture of

the cabarets, circuses, and suburban

Gogh remained wedded

to the ideal of

autochthonous popular culture, more or

uncontaminated by

was

at

the

Antwerp
Bergeres;

in
I

modern

Cafe-concert

1885

found

it

to

parks

Van

an indigenous or

less traditional

and

culture industry. "Yesterday

Scala,"

Van Gogh wrote from

Theo, "something

like

the

Folies

very dull, and of course insipid" (Letter

same

letter,

he wrote: "I also have the idea

for a kind of signboard,

which

438). Later in the

instance, for a fishmonger,

still life

vegetables, for restaurants.

want

290

my

hope

to carry out.

of

One

mean

for

fishes, for flowers, for

thing

things to be seen."

TWO MYTHS ABOUT VAN GOGH

is

certain, that

TWO MYTHS ABOUT VAN GOGH

Two myths about Van Gogh

must

at

once be dispelled.

First,

he was not insane. His progressively worsening mental

condition (culminating in suicide), and intermittent institutionalization at the

end of

his

was almost certainly the

life,

result of an organic dysfunction, probably

psycho-motor or

symptomatic epilepsy or perhaps some other inner-ear or

metabolic disorder exacerbated by liquor, medicines, or poor
diet.

to

His doctor

Theo

in

May

at the

Hospital of St.-Remy near Aries wrote

1889:

"You

probable cause of his

being

will not

serious as

illness.

make any

is

my opinion

must

tell

regarding the

you that

prognosis, but

have every reason

he has had

ask for

for the time

fear that

it

may be
which

to believe that the attack

the result of a state of epilepsy and

if this

should

be confirmed one should be concerned about the future."

Vincent Van

Gogh

apparently agreed with his physician's

general assessment, writing at the time to his brother: "I think

Dr. Peyron

mad,

for

is

right

my mind

is

when he

says

am

not, strictly speaking

absolutely normal in the intervals

but


during the attacks

it is

then

terrible,

lose consciousness of

Van Gogh obviously could not paint

everything" (Letter 610).

during his seizures or their aftermath, and his art was mature

on

(or well

its

Thus, though

way

to maturity) long before his first attacks.

his desperation in the face of

what was

to

him

mysterious and sometimes disabling illness was undoubtedly

we

great,
little

conceived by him as

tormented

soul.

Van Gogh's

to see,

and

went about

languages

work with

his

Van Gogh read

abreast of local, national, and international

He

was dedicated

to dialogue, expression, decisiveness,

more than

Theo

five

and

hundred published

progress reports to a beloved brother and main financial

and complex body of

upon

a vast,

ambitious,

dawn of his

career as an artist (after a decade as

among

other

Van Gogh wrote to Theo concerning his desire to form a

jobs),

community of artists, and

his

simultaneous realization that the

like to

speak [with the authority

of] the

people

of '93 [the year of the French Revolution's Reign of

Terror]: this and that

then those, then the

must be done,

last

ones,

and nothing more need be

But

Or
like to

for

this the

these have to die,

duty, so

it is

unarguable,

sleep

many have

fallen asleep,

and do not

months

alone liable and responsible, so that those

may go on

later,

sleeping and resting? (Letter 248)

Van Gogh spoke again about

artistic collectives: "I

am

one belong

to

'48,

privileged above

many

wrote again to

imagine that you and

just

had lived

in

[During the revolution of 1 848] we might

Neither you nor

part of

now

it is

all

one party or to

know

try to

To

and

As an

...

humanity. That humanity

its

moulin n'y

'84, "le

is it

own

one's

makes

opposite. Well, then

est plus,

mais

le

it

was

vent y est

where you

for yourself

is

free will,

no longer there, but the wind

know

as

it

meddle with
society,

in

group themselves.

How much

blows.] But try to

I

behind

the fatality of circumstances which

is

belong, as

world,

the

in

live

encore." [The mill

still

really

that for myself. (Letter 379)

explore social "ranks" or classes, to depict the

life

and

culture of peasants and proletarians, to construct an art that

at

is

once an expression of the individual and of his or her

community, and
these are

among

dream of Utopia

to represent a beautiful

the subjects of

Van Gogh's mature

art, first

1882-4.

in the years

In

March

1882,

Van Gogh's

by a commission from

professional career was launched

his uncle, C.

M. Van Gogh,

of drawings of The Hague, where the

artist

for

two

great tradition of

sets

had that year taken

up residence. The works were undoubtedly expected

to

draw

Dutch cityscape painting of the

seventeenth century (especially by Jan Ycrmccr and Pieter de

Hooch) and upon contemporary Hague School Realism

by George Breitner (1857 1923), Jacob

practised

(1837-99),

Isaac

(1838 88),

among

set,

be aroused, to try to stick to things one can do alone,

is

is it

said.

time to combine and speak out?

better, as so

is it

which one

who
Six

is

it is

first

is

how much

upon the

times were probably not ripe:

One would

He

file?"

determi-

in his

EARLY ART IN THE HAGUE AND NEUNEN:

THE POTATO EATERS

VAN GOGH'S FIRST STATEMENTS OF

PURPOSE
In 1882, at the

we

but

announced

art.

an art dealer, school teacher, and evangelist,

his

are not primarily a personal diary; they are

backer, as well as a selfconscious gloss

divided into parties.

Far from being purely instinctual and reclusive,

action in the world. His

848.

individual one

and

Van Gogh was unusually learned and communicative, and

letters to

or

any

news and events

art

involuntarily, ranks of people

kept well

and was completely current about contemporary

literature.

wish you could

politics,

voraciously in four

Latin and Greek.

in

Van Gogh was confirmed

years later,

a revolutionary or rebel.

Dutch, French, English, and German and had

modest competence

of the rank and

the barricades as a soldier of the government,

of

much

as

shouldn't more painters join

like soldiers

have confronted each other as direct enemies, you before

he became

intellectual resource as

might have the courage, the

Why

work together,

the year

for his

in pursuit

his brother:

of the same goals, as other great nineteenth-century

other artist of the century.

to

nation to act as a kind of cultural insurgent.

was not

art

balm

as a

sorts of reasons,

more conscious diligence and

art

Two

form of therapy

same

painters. Indeed, he

hands

art.

As we have already begun

artist for all the

many

energy to undertake.

are probably safe in assuming that his sickness had

or nothing to do with his

Secondly, and consequently,

an

cannot do everything which

Israels

(1865

1934),

others. Vet in a

as

Maris

and Anton Mauve

drawing from the second

such as Carpenter's Workshop and Laundry (1882), Van

Gogh

has rejected the comforting balance of land, religion,

and working-class industriousness found,

Maris's

The

Bleaching

Yard

(1870).

lor

example,

Whereas

the

in

latter

combines panoramic landscape, church, and laundress

in

order to embrace Dutch bourgeois pieties. Van Gogh's work

the need for

oilers

others, but

small-scale

\\

l
2 >7

an

unsentimental cross-section of wage labor and

Van Gogh's patron was apparent!)

factories.

GOGH'S FIRS

ST vn Ml NTS

(>l-

I'

Rl'osi

291

2 l )S

297 VlNCF.NT

VAN GOGH

Carpenter's
1

Workshop and Laundry 1882.

298

JACOB MARIS The

Van Gogh

paid

far less

set, for

he

Although drawn with the aid of a perspective window, such

by Albrecht Diirer, Carpenter's Workshop and

as devised

Laundry

is

nevertheless

marked with

perspective and proportion.

and

The

you can

willful violations

of

diagonal lines at the upper

cranny.

It still

(Letter 205).
light,

Bleaching Yard 1870.

see, there are already several planes in this

and one can look around

than he promised.

1| x 18* (28.5 x 47)

(41x57)

16frx22j-

disappointed with this and the other drawings in the

it

lacks vigor

The

and through
.

but

it

it,

will

in every

drawing,

nook and

come by and by"

purposeful exaggerations and distortions of

atmosphere, and anatomy (notice, for example, the

angular contours of the idle washerwoman in the right

which recede so rapidly toward the horizon

foreground), as well as perspective, which would become so

belong to a different pictorial order from the lazy dipping and

significant a feature of the later oil paintings, are thus already

right

left

swelling of the foreground zones, as

if

the space of

labor had to be distinguished from that of nature and

"I have tried to

draw the things

Gogh wrote Theo,

292

EARLY ART

"exactly as

IN

human

its

as naively as possible,"

laws.

Van

saw them before me. ... As

THE HAGUE AND NEUNEN

announced

in this

Prompted by

drawing with pencil, pen, and brush.

his acquisition of a collection of popular

wood

engravings by the English illustrators Luke Fildes, Hubert

van Herkomer, Frank Holl, and others, Van

Gogh proceeded

299

Vincent Van Gogh The

Burden 1881.

time to explore working-class

at this

of over
local

Bearers of the

17 x 23f (43 x 60)

fifty

and labor

life

single-figure drawings of men

in a

group

and women from

almshouse, as well as in dozens of more complex

trace a staggered path through the snow.

Neunen, Van Gogh continued

years later at

dozen drawings and small paintings of weavers

ians in several

amid

hand-powered

compositions depicting miners, navvies, agricultural workers,

trapped

and weavers. The

represented peasants in a major work, The Potato Eaters.

artist's

perception of these workers

is

Composed

revealed in a letter from 1880, in which he described an

excursion from his

home

in

the Borinage (a coal-mining

region of Belgium) to a small village of weavers:

The miners and

the weaver

still

other laborers and artisans, and

them.

should be happy

that those

if

constitute a race apart from

I

feel a great

someday

sympathy

could draw them, so

unknown or little known types would be brought

The man from the depths of

the abyss, de profundis

dreamy

his

air,

somnambulist
find

that

is

the miner; the other, with

somewhat absent minded, almost

that

is

the weaver.

And

something touching and almost sad

of
most despised who
obscure laborers

increasingly

a
I

in these poor,

the lowest order, so to speak, and the

are generally represented as a race of

criminals and thieves by a perhaps vivid but very false and

unjust imagination (Letter 136).

Van Gogh's words of sympathy

paternalism

that

dominated

looms.

sents

Van Gogh's most accomplished work

grays, browns,

to Paris in 1886. It

begun and depicts

and black

was completed

home

The Potato Eaters repre-

just three

prior to his

move

weeks

it

after

art

and thought

at

the

was

poor family from the Brabant consuming

humble meal of potatoes and

furnished

he

1885,

out of a somber and restricted palette of earth

In

coffee within a meagerly

or bakhuis (a small cottage separate from a

peasant family's main house, kept exclusively for cooking and

An

casts highlights

on men's and women's

knuckles, cheekbones, and noses, and

upon the various tokens

eating).

oil

lamp

of family wealth: at the upper

and

left

are a clock with

framed crucifixion scene, and

rack and a clog

filled

with spoons.

his subject-family (the

De

at

pendulum

the upper right a tool

Van Gogh's many

visits to

Groots), dozens of large and small

studies in several media (including lithography), and written

description of the project, reveal an almost anthropological

perspective; his analysis below, for example, exposes

reveal the stance of Christian

his

their

tones

for

before the eyes of the people.

299

Two

his representation of proletar-

self-consciousness

at

odds

with

his

earlier

a critical

Christian

allegorizing:

beginning of his career. In The Bearers of the Burden (1881),

Van Gogh mimics Breugel's parable painting of The Blind

Leading the Blind (1568), in depicting

down

with sacks of coal trudging

procession.

A narrow band

women

in

in rags

a blind

weighed

and dejected

of sky above presses

down upon

these lost and despised souls, while sooty clog-prints below

have tried

emphasize

to

that these people, eating their

potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those

very hands they put in the dish, and so
labor,

speaks of manual

and how thej have honest!) earned their food.

wanted

it

to gi\c

\RI

an impression

\R

l\

111

II

oi

.1

Uil

w.n

oi life

have

quite different

VND NEUNEN

293

300

Vincent Van GOGH The

300

from us

civilized

human

serious thing, and

to

make

Potato Eaters 1885. 32} x 44J (82 x

beings.

14)

Painting peasants

is

should reproach myself if I did not try

pictures which will arouse serious thoughts in

who think seriously about art and about life. Millet,

De Groux and so many others have given an example of
those

character, and of not

minding criticisms such

coarse, dirty, stinking, etc., etc., so

it

would be

fatherless family;

and whereas William-Adolphe Bouguereau

depicted feminine leisure and coquettishness in The

Gatherers (1880),

meager reward

Van Gogh shows cheap food

Nut

to be the

for peasant hard labor.

Yet despite Van Gogh's

from bourgeois

relative distance

as nasty,

peasant painting, he was unable completely to rid his art of

shame

convention. For one thing, his vision was filtered through

to

waver. No, one must paint the peasants as being one of

innumerable

them, as feeling, thinking as they do (Letter 404).

to Breton,

art historical sources,

from Rembrandt

and Potato Eaters shows

it.

More

to Millet

importantly, as

the art historian Griselda Pollock has demonstrated, the

There

299

is

no doubt that Potato Eaters is profoundly different

"us

from other peasant paintings Van Gogh would have known.

urban bourgeois

Whereas Jules Breton emphasized the timelessness of peasant

wrote. In Potato Eaters,

ritual piety, in

(1857),

such works as Blessing ofthe Wheat

Van Gogh has

image of

in the Artois

relegated Christianity to the crude

framed crucifixion; whereas Jozef

Israels

1824

1911) depicted a wholesome and well-washed nuclear family

301

intended interlocutors of the painting are not peasants but

in

The Frugal Meal (1876), Van Gogh represented the

awkward and unclean men and women of an extended and

294

EARLY ART

IN

THE HAGUE AND NEUNEN

bourgeois public in an

civilized

artistic

the soot and soil of peasant

efforts

human

Van Gogh

beings," as

Van Gogh

tried to address a

vanguard

language born, so he thought,

life itself.

Not

in

surprisingly, his

were received with indifference or disdain, and he

thereupon undertook
entailed a

move

to

still

another self-refashioning. This

Antwerp and then

an emerging dream of Utopia.

Paris,

and the pursuit of

302

3oi

Jozef Israels

35x54f (88.9 x

302

The Frugul Meal 1876.

138.7)

Wiluam-Adoi.phe Bouguereau

The Nut Gatherers 1880. 344

* 52J (88 x 134)

ACADEMIC TRAINING AND AVANTGARDE EDUCATION IN ANTWERP AND

PARIS

and the most

worse,
just three

months

time he attended art classes

in

how

flat,

at the

woodblock
Beaux-Arts.

His experience

prints.

frustrating, as

it

was

and how

Like David, or even

Willem] Pieneman |1779 1853]

Theo:

to

in

Academy of Fine

independent and romantic temperament, Odilon Redon

Arts,

at

the

Academy was

many others at the Paris Ecole des

make a contour," Van Gogh was

Chapter

15),

had

few years

a similar

experience

Geromc: "I was tortured by

were vehement
upset

my

earlier,

at

All

was

in vain.

full

of

artist

(sec-

the Paris atelier of

the teacher. ...

lis

corrections

to my easel
He recommended that

to the point that his very

comrades.

another

approach

won't

enclose in an outline

form

you do your modeling before having seriously

drew with authority

stone, a shaft or a column, a table,

instructed by his teacher, "your contour isn't right;

if

|Jan

lifeless

bloom." (Letter 452).

for so

"First

like

how

Antwerp, during which

studied the paintings of Rubens, and began to collect Japanese

it

to see

insipid the results of that system are

Van Gogh spent

correct

Van Gogh then exclaimed

difficult."

"And now you ought

fixed your contour.

Color and modeling aren't much, one

can learn that very quickly,

it's

the contour that

is

essential

that

saw palpitating.

chair, an inanimate accessor), a rock

and

nature. The pupil saw only the expression,

all

onh

WTW ERP WD

[He]
a

of inorganic
the expansion

I*

295


deeply, was he not as simple as

and so sensitive

The

to all the miseries

exposes

letter

at

his life,

all

of others? (Letter 453).

once Van Gogh's solidarity with the

movement and

working-class

workingman

and

his bourgeois fear

and

his political progressivism

guilt

his paternalistic conservatism.

His solution to the dilemma of

was akin

class conflict

to the

Utopian one proposed more than two generations before bv

Henri de Saint-Simon, who wrote

brothers," adding that his

new

Nouveau Chnstia-

in his

men should

nisme (1825) that "all

one another

treat

religion would,

the moral and physical well being of the poorest class

prosperity to

classes of society

all

greatest possible speed."

be understood

More

and

broadly

one of the many

as

philosophers of the nineteenth century

of romantic

anticapitalism.

marked

especially

This

Van Gogh's

in

Van Gogh's
59x41} (150x

Dress ca.

105)

this

already

may

be recog-

economic and
for vision of

to

He grew

modern

Academic Classicism was

token of an

at

once moribund pedagogy and the

and discredited

elite

and bourgeois and

artists,

social

and

class hierarchy; for

both, Classicism was opposed by what they considered the

naive and naturally expressive art of Delacroix, Millet, and

Corot. Shortly after describing his academic instruction in

Antwerp, Van Gogh wrote again

art

and
I

politics

to

Theo, but

this

time about

and the economic depression:

do not think

it

him the

confident

decisive lessons of

treatment

his

in

They

will certainly

prove

not to have been useless for the following generations, for

then they will have proved a success.

against the bourgeois

is

as justifiable as

against the other two, a

thing to do
side,

is

and we

the end.

to

keep

silent, for fate is

shall live to see

296

The

laborer

was the third estate

not on the bourgeois

more of it; we

are

still

far

from

how many thousands are

Corot, who after all had
anybody else, who felt the spring so

So although

serenity than

hundred years ago. And the best

it's

spring,

wandering about, desolate.

more

ANTWERP AND PARIS

of

undertook

new skills

life,

urban and suburban entertainments,

petit

bourgeois sociability. In addition, he

thorough study of Japanese Edo Period wood-

block prints, exhibiting his personal collection of them at the

Cafe Tambourin

in

March

1887. In his collecting,

Van Gogh

was manifesting the Japonisme that had become widespread

in the

two decades since the display of Japanese

at the Paris

arts

and

crafts

Universal Exposition of 1867. Yet for him, unlike

for the dealer

Samuel Bing or the Belgian-born painter Alfred

Stevens (1823-1906; see, for example, his The Japanese Dress,

exaggerated to be pessimistic about the

various strikes, etc., everywhere.

critical

sunlight and prismatic color (lessons gleaned from works by

to portray

triumphant feeling of forms." For both

February

established

Seurat as well as by Renoir and Monet) and used his

of the

is

and thought.

Paris period taught

Impressionism.

ALFRED STEVENS The Japanese

which

perspective,

favorite romantic authors

from February 1886

in Paris,

would accelerate

trajectory of his art

303

an attitude

always the reflection of an imagined past. Van

is

Gogh's two years

1888,

and

writers,

artists,

who shared

For the romantic anticapitalist, the longed

the future

bring

from i^he perspective of precapitalist cultural

social order

values.

Van Gogh must

still,

critique of the nineteenth-century

its

nations with the

all

including Carlyle, Dickens, and Michelet

nized by

as

by "improving

ca.

1880), Japan

exoticism:

it

was not simply

sign of chicness

303

and

was also a dream-image of Utopia. Japanese prints

appear as the backdrop for his most extraordinary painting of

the Paris period, the Portrait of

Tanguy was an

who was

art dealer, color

Tanguy (1887-88).

merchant, and ardent

socialist

especially kind to the often scorned artist, extending

him friendship and

They

Pere

hospitality as well as considerable credit.

shared, according to their friend the painter Emile

Bernard, both poverty and

dawn of

a sustaining faith in the

Utopian "era of happiness

coming

[and]

social

harmony." Van Gogh depicts Tanguy seated with eyes

304

304

Vincent Van Gogh

Portrait oj

Pin Tanguy

1887

X.

36j

29j

(92x75)

\\

r\\

ERP VND PARIS

,l
- :

305 Emii.f,
Portrait of

Bernard

Self-Portrait With

Gauguin 1888. 18ix21|

(46 x 54.9)

downcast and hands somewhat

stiffly

interlocked,

posture of a Japanese bonze (Buddhist monk). Behind

in

the

him

are

VAN GOGH

IN

ARLES

February 1888, Van Gogh moved

rendered Japanese prints depicting geishas

Thus,

in

and landscapes (by Yoshitara, Toyokuni, and Hiroshige),

renew

his health

Mount Fuji, which seems to rise like a crown from

Tanguy's hat. By its Chromo-luminarist color and its
fashionable "japonaiserie" (a term Van Gogh discovered in
Edmond de Goncourt's novel Cherie, 1884), the painting is a
kind of summary of the artist's assimilation of Parisian avantgarde fashion. Yet in many ways, it is also an announcement,

establishing an artist's

at least five freely

including

Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock have written, of the

as

artistic life

dream of Utopia

the

that

was beckoning from

Aries in the South of France.

Feeling that his art and

by the reigning

scribed

to Aries.

and solaced by

There, warmed by

and constricting

would pursue

and landscape painting.

painter's paradise,"

Fourierist phalanstere (socialist colonies described in the

writings of Charles Fourier), would be sustained by the

as

by the modest

financial support of

Paris. Inspired

by the example of other avant-garde subcul-

such as the Barbizon school, the Impressionists, and the

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and by fantasies of a primiti vistic

Oriental paradise in the Occident,

Van Gogh wrote

all,

Aries "would be the

in a joyful

moment,

"it

By the "japonaiserie"
Van Gogh expressed his

543).

young Emile Bernard (1868-1941), who was

Pont-Aven

in Brittany.

exchange of artworks (Bernard's Self-Portrait With Portrait

of Gauguin [1888], which he inscribed to Van Gogh, was sent
in reply),

and

to

persuade Bernard to come to Aries:

For a long time now

were

as wise as

Buddhist monks.

IN ARLES

own Utopian fantasizing at

Van Gogh wrote to encourage an

then engaged, with Gauguin, in his

Japanese

of sun-filled peace and pleasure whose artists

VAN GOGH

about

particularly the

298

set

Provencal sun

of Japan
all

Van Gogh

a brilliant

Utopian hope of creating in France the Orientalist ideal world

a land

Theo, who had become

an important Impressionist impresario for Goupil and Co. of

enlisting the participation of several of his artist friends,

All in

would be absolute Japan" (Letter

warm

dry breezes and timeless popular culture of Provence, as well

contemplate a

his twin generic ambitions of

of the Portrait of Pere Tanguy,

dream of

called the Studio of the

to

community of generous and like-minded

artist-friends, he

portrait

institutions

Van Gogh had begun

sociability of Paris,

move

art

were too narrowly circum-

commune,

to Aries, eager to

to realize his

South. This esthetic settlement, part monastery and part

tures,

life

and imagination, and

artists

very often.

it

touching that the

used to exchange works

among themselves

It certainly

have thought

proves that they liked and upheld

305

306

307

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Yellow House at Aries 1888. 28J x 36 (72 x

Vincent Van Gogh The

Night Cafe 1888.

N 36j (72.4 x

91.5)

92)

\\

GOGH

IN

ARMS

299

tomy, and subtle

16) to designate

Gogh

use of 'color modulation (see Chapter

in their

both spatial planes and emotional tenor. Van

described The Artist's Bedroom

tries in a letter to

in

Theo:
This time

it's

simply

just

my bedroom,

do everything, and, giving by

style to things,

is

its

only here color

is

to

simplification a grander

to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in

general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the

brain, or rather the imagination.

The

floor

is

red

tiles.

The wood

The

of"

walls are pale violet.

the bed and chairs

is

the

yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light

greenish citron.

The

The
And

toilet table

orange, the basin blue.

that

there

is all

closed shutters.

and

a towel

nothing else

will

room with

on the

walls,

and

its

must

mirror

The frame as there is no

The shadows and
be white.

clothes.

shadows are suppressed;

tints like the

in this

lines of the furniture again

rest. Portraits

and some

white in the picture

the cast

is

The broad

express inviolable

The window green.

The doors lilac.

coverlet scarlet.

it

is

painted in free

flat

Japanese prints (Letter 554).

Indeed, in spite of the uniformly high-key colors, the painting

does achieve balance and restfulness.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

308

Self-Portrait With

Bandaged Ear

is

kept

flat

The

buttery yellow bed

by exaggerated foreshortening, reminiscent of the

23J x 19} (60x49)

each other and that there reigned

a certain

harmony among

them; and that they were living

in

some

sort of fraternal

community, quite naturally and not

we

are like

them

in intrigues.

in this respect, the better

it

will

appears that the Japanese earned very

It also

and lived

like

workmen

simple

At about the same time he wrote

to

(Letter

Theo:

The more
be for

little

us.

money,

18).

"Come now,

isn't

it

almost a true religion which these simple Japanese teach us,

who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?

And you cannot study Japanese art, it seems to me, without
becoming much gayer and happier, and we must return to
nature in spite of our education and our work in a world of

convention" (Letter 542).

By September
306

1888,

Van Gogh was

settled in his Yellow

House at Aries (1888), the planned center of what the

historian

Tsukasa Kodera has called the

art

artist's "primitivistic

Utopia." At this time, he was painting with an unprecedented

rapidity

and

imminent

virtuosity,

perhaps

in

anticipation

arrival of Gauguin, the only artist

who

came

and work with him. Van Gogh's The Night Cafe (1888)

307

to live

296

and The

Artist's

Bedroom

in

Aries (1888) are two of the

than three dozen paintings created during the late

and

of the

finally

fall

of 1888.

They

more

summer

are simultaneously crude in their

disregard of conventional perspective, modeling, and ana-

300

VAN GOGH

IN

ARLES

309

Vincent Van Gogh

Joseph Roulm 1888. 32 x

253- (81.2

x 65.3)

3io

Vincent Van Gogh

Eugene Both

\i

23fxl7j- (60x45)

vertiginous distortions in works by the Flemish "primitives"

(see, for instance, the central
ca.

panel of the

1425-8, by Robert Campin).

held

similarly

recessional

spatial

in

lines,

while

The warm

equilibrium

the

Merode

red-tiled floor

by the cool

blue."

The window

green.

The

toilet table

"The

is

blue

remainder of the picture

constructed out of balanced complements:

scarlet.

Altarpiece,

is

coverlet

orange, the basin

few large elements on one side of the picture (the

in

Arks has the aspect of

humbly

placement of furniture and accessories

conceived,

Van Gogh

writes, "in

harmony

Dutch

artist Piet

Mondrian (1872-1944), who shared Van

Gogh's understanding that the

determined

by

its

in part

by

its

quantity. Yet for

affective quality of color

proximity to other colors and

all its

subtleties,

The

Artist's

is

in part

Bedroom

of a Seurat-like

Precisely such a workmanlike simplicity was sought as well,

we have

seen, in

Van Gogh's

portrait

La

December 1888 during

the

simplicity."

Gauguin, the work was only completed

mirror, rush chairs), anticipating the abstract compositions of

The whole was

samplers or other pieces of homespun.

smaller ones on

dressing-table,

the

composition and

the thick impasto suggest the ingenuousness of needlework

door and bed on the right), are balanced against several

the other side (window,

crafted object;

in the

his recovery

his

Portrait With

Gogh

at Aries

from October

Begun

period of collaboration

from the famous and

mutilated and hospitalized

Berceuse.

in late

2?>

until

relatively little

December 26

\\

after

him

be seen in his Self-

Bandaged Ear (1889). (Gauguin's staj with

about which

1888.

is

known

tiOtill t\

\RI

an

lasted

Van Gogh's

295

with

January

terrible seizure that left

as can

in

letters

;>os

Vincent Van Gogh

3ii

to

Theo during

artists got

Starry Night 1889. 29x36| (73.7x92.1)

this period indicate,

however, that the two

along very poorly; their relationship was marred by

mutual suspicion, jealousy, and misunderstanding.) Besides

landscapes, portraits and self-portraits

Gogh's

art;

future,"

of his

effort

physiognomy of a person,

for

a class, a culture,

with the group portrait of the

309-10

record

to

De

posterity

to signs of class

and

stiff in his

1925

Groot family

like the

and Eugene

policeman

in

is

posed proud

August Sander's

photograph. Yet unlike the neue sachlichkeit (new

objectivity) photographer,

Van Gogh employed

as well as objectivity to achieve

302

in Potato

in their attentiveness

and occupation. The postman

uniform,

the

and an epoch. As

Eaters, the single portraits of Joseph Roulin (1888)

Boch (1888) are nearly anthropological

VAN GOGH

IN

ARLES

(Letter
to

13).

He

of portraiture"

described his portrait of Boch in

a letter

Theo:

now dominated Van

they were, he wrote to Bernard, "the thing of the

part

... by means

the painting of humanity

abstraction

"the great simple thing:

What

mistake Parisians make in not having a palate for

crude things, for [paintings by] Monticelli, for

common

earthenware. But there, one must not lose heart because

not coming true.

Utopia

is

Paris

leaving me, and

is

the country before

am

my

eyes,

express myself
I

should

only that what

learned in

returning to the ideas

had

reproduce exactly what

to

use color

forcibly.

more

great

in
.

have

arbitrarily, in order to

like to paint the portrait

man who dreams

knowing the Impressionists.

Because instead of trying

before

It is

dreams,

of an

artist friend, a

who works

as

the

nightingale sings, because

as

he

as faithfully as

is,

But the picture

is

his nature. ...

it is

not yet finished.

going to be the arbitrary colorist.

of the hair,

So

paint

him

To

finish

it I

am now

exaggerate the fairness

even get to orange tones, chromes and pale

not a return to romantic or religious ideas, no. Nevertheless,

by going the way of Delacroix, more than

can, to begin with.

citron-yellow.

color and a

595).

mean room,

paint infinity, a plain background of the

In his painting of Starry Night and in his brief explication

of

it

Theo, Van Gogh

to

this

much

as a

simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue

tation

is

richest, intensest blue that

background,

can contrive, and by

get a mysterious effect, like a star in the

depths of an azure sky (Letter 520).

romantic

behind an empirical
politics,

class,

upon the

insisted in his letters

necessity of

Gogh now was

drawing and painting from models, Van

revealed as a critical modernist as

is

Van Gogh

exactly because

it

obscures

the historically contingent conflicts of

veil

and ideology that were so keenly

by the

assumption of a

artist

critical

throughout

stance

as

his

life.

we have seen

felt

and

Yet

the

repeatedly in

Goya to

the lives and works of nineteenth-century artists from

finding mimesis inadequate to his expressive ends. Disson-

Turner

ance and abstraction are loosed in the clash of complements

old rules of representation (and they have been almost entirely

and the collapsing of foreground and background

disregarded in such

and landscapes from the

last

year of his

in portraits

1890),

life.

to

Courbet

final

works as Roots and Trunks of Trees,

comprehensibility be upheld?

"At one time," Vincent wrote

STARRY NIGHT AND CRITICAL

MODERNISM

to

me a charmed

man, and one soon

Gogh

as for so

Classical order

Starry Night

( 1

889)

is

of the eastern night sky seen

a depiction

from the window of Van Gogh's barred

cell

on the upper

floor

of the St.-Remy mental hospital in the monastery of St.-Paul-

de-Mausole, some

fifteen miles northeast

was confined there for one year between

1890, during which time he painted

of Aries. Van

May

Gogh

1889 and

May

numerous views of

the

asylum grounds and the surrounding countryside. Starry

Night

is

in

many ways

compendium of the

and preoccupations. Thickly painted

in a

artist's interests

kind of whorling

chain-stitch, the picture has the crafted surface of the

things"

"crude

Van Gogh admired most: "common earthenware,"

rush-seated

chairs,

and

old

Symbols are drawn from

romantic anticipitalism:

pairs

of workmen's

well-thumbed dictionary of

mournful cypress

steeples, peasant cottages with

shoes.

glowing hearths,

and planets. Indeed, the work

is

church

trees,
hills

and

in part a reverie

stars

upon

Utopian future based on the imagined social integrity of a

simpler past. Yet

at

the

same time

it is

a modernist rejection of

the pictorial conventions of Realism and Naturalism.

The

dichotomy was remarked on by Van Gogh: "[Starry Night /

is

Without the

entailed considerable risks.

how can coherence and

seemed

311

of represen-

anticapitalist. "Precision"

"delusive" to

understood

Having always

a countryside

compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris" (Letter

Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of

the

one could express the purer nature of

cision,

apparent, by

is

more spontaneous drawing than delusive pre-

path.

finds oneself

many of

Theo

to

But

it is

in 1889, "abstraction

bewitched ground, old

up against

a wall."

For Van

his fellow avant-gardists, the old

was dead, but the new modern one could not

be born; the goal of creating an

art at

once radically democratic

and completely modern would remain

dream

for at least

another two generations. Van Gogh, however, would not be

part of that continuing quest: for reasons that remain obscure,

may have been

but which

related to despair over his illness,

Van Gogh shot himself on July

27, 1890 outside the village of

Auvers-sur-Oise, where he had not long before moved.

died in his bed two days

As much

as Seurat,

He

later.

Van Gogh

created an art of antinomy.

Traditionalist and revolutionary, he has achieved greater

reknown than any other

artist

of his century, yet

at the

same

time been construed as inscrutable and reclusive. Realist and

Symbolist,
barriers

Van Gogh succeeded

between popular and

was taken

breaking

to exemplify the unbridgeable

common

person and the

and

of

art

in

elite art, yet at

Van Gogh

the

down

the

same time

chasm between the

A summary of the
also a summary of

artistic genius.

life

thus

the

is

contradictions of modernism, and especially of the simul-

taneous

"charmed path," and

"bewitched

ground,"

of

abstraction.

STARRY NIGHT

WlM

RITICAL MODI

103

15

SYMBOLISM AND THE DIALECTICS

OF RETREAT
MODERNISM VERSUS SYMBOLISM

words, the health and restorative forces that

see in the

country" (Letter 649).

THROUGHOUT

t:modern

"The

of today

poetic

we

its

it

now

is

who can

make

epic quality, and

we have heard

snatch from the

us feel

how

great and

and our patent-leather boots."

are in our cravats

Modernism,

their links to the

true painter we're looking for,"

Baudelaire proclaim, "will be the one

life

CENTURY,

sought to assert their connection to the

by continually strengthening

Classical past

present:

NINETEENTH

THE

artists

possible to state in

summary,

as

it

evolved in Europe and North America over the course of the

much

nineteenth century, was not so

European forms
to

as a radical (and

more or

keep the Classical tradition alive

we were

"All

authority.

a rejection

less last-ditch) effort

and imperial

in all its epic

after,"

really

the

Impressionist

Renoir declared, "was to try to induce painters

get in line

and follow the Masters,

if

painting definitely go by the board."

of older

in general to

this

modern

Van Gogh's primary genre

landscape

were

Ruisdael. Indeed, for

of "arbitrary" color,
312

Crows In

all

his

Gogh

and

portraiture

to the

Chromo-luminarism and use

the Wheatfields (1890) paid

such

paintings as

final

homage not

so

much

to

the landscapes of Seurat as to the rural allegories of Breugel:

"They
"and

to

Theo

in July

to bring

them

to

you

hope you
in Paris as

think that these canvases will

304

addition,

and peasants were

physiognomy of

dawning twentieth century; by

employment of dissonance

his

efforts to reveal the

their

or chromaticism, moreover, they

suggested the recent music of Wagner. Since the early 1880's,

Wagnerism
especially

had

among

gained

numerous

adherents

the artists and writers

in

Paris,

who clustered around

the poets Jules Laforgue and Stephane Mallarme, and the

Edouard Dujardin and Theodore de Wyzewa,

journalists

founders in 1885 of the Revue Wagnerienne. For this coterie

also included the painters

Gustave Moreau, Odilon

Wagner's

music rep-

resented the long sought esthetic and philosophical unity of

and

vie totale de I'univers."

intellection,

what Wyzewa called "/#

Van Gogh

too was infatuated by

Wagnerism, apparently believing

that

it

offered

him

means

made a
the summer

to revitalize an otherwise stultified artistic tradition. "I

vain attempt to learn music," he wrote to

of 1888, "so

much

did

colour and Wagner's music." Indeed, in

Van Gogh's

Theo in

already feel the relation between our

La Berceuse we saw

modification of the normal harmonic scale

Van

progression through the introduction of color accidentals

almost to the point of abstraction. But this was an abstraction

did not need to go out of my

extreme loneliness.

Academic descendants. In

its

1890 concerning these works,

are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies,"

Gogh wrote

Renaissance and Baroque

portraits of workers

sensation, emotion,

cultural strategy.

in

painting and

late

which

interests

Van Gogh

and hierarchies of

Redon, and Henri Fantin-Latour

of Van

Flemish and Dutch Golden Ages of Breugel, Rembrandt, and

Van

landscape subject and facture implicitly criticized the Classical rules

The work

forms that harked back

traditional

expressed
times. His

they did not wish to see

revealed as clearly as any other the simultaneous conservatism

and revolutionism of

Gogh

work the revolutionary stamp and tenor of his

Despite his traditionalism, however, Van

in his

way

will see

for

soon as possible, since

tell

and

that

was intended not

hope

save

it,

to express sadness

them soon

you what

almost

cannot say in

of

that

human

is,

to

to destroy the art of portraiture but to

make it once more a

vehicle for the revelation

character, the recording of social station, and the

expression of feeling.

Van Gogh's

project of reconciling

295

VINCENT VAN GOGH Crows

312

in the

19$ x 39i- (50.5 x 100.3)

Wheatfields 1890.

expression and representation, therefore, like the modernist

project as a whole,

was complex and fraught with

and engendered an anxiety: how could he keep

touch both with modern
falling victim to either

life

difficulty,

his

work

in

and with the masters, without

complete abstraction or historicism,

pessimism and disenchantment stemming from

artistic

symptom

of a structural

It

crisis.

was an inward-

directed art, antihistorical, intensely personal, and sometimes

even confessional. Not daily

life

but the arcadias of Puvis de

both of which signaled to him meaninglessness and the death

Chavannes

of

painter Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) inspired

art.

At

least

some of Van Gogh's contemporaries, including

the

(see p. 277)

and the funereal dreams of the Swiss

marked, therefore, the conclusion of

French Gauguin, Auguste Rodin, and Redon, the Belgian

tradition of representation

James Ensor, the Russian Mikhail Vrubel, the Norwegian

mimesis, and the end of

Edvard Munch, and the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler had much

less

anxiety about abstraction.

prerogatives of
society

To

modernism were

them, the subtle

critical

useless ingenuities

tumbling headlong into decay and perdition.

painting and sculpture might as well

become

"Symbolist" as imagination demanded, since

in

To them,

as abstract or

reality itself was

a capitalist

depression lasting nearly a generation, Symbolism was the

American

art

Elizabeth

period described by the

Gilmore Holt

"the

as

Yet Symbolism was not only

from representation and public meaning; by rejecting

triumph of art
retreat

Symbolism

it.

four-centuries-old

founded on Classical concepts of

a fifty-year

historian

for the public."

European mimetic

tradition,

it

also pioneered a

new

art

of

sensual liberation and personal expression founded in part on

non-Western "primitivism." As much

as

was an

it

any longer existed. Besides, they reasoned, had not an

engine of cultural criticism, political reinvigoration, and

or pattern

shown

was adequate

personal expression? "Art

to his friend the painter

to
is

that

form alone

convey

spiritual

meaning and

an abstraction;" Gauguin wrote

Emile Schuffcnecker

in

by doing

like

come of it. The only way

repeated by

many

Conceived

period

between Classical rep-

nonrepresentation,

to rise

up

to

God

and. the spiritual as bases for art

conflict

resentation and critical modernity to a point of crisis; on the

horizon lay the irregular terrain of Cubism, the ab\ss of

the
is

was

others of this generation.

during

dominant nineteenth-century

the pre-

more of

our divine master, by creating." Gauguin's

emphasis upon dreams

Symbolism accelerated

international perspective.

also an

August 1888,

"take from nature as you dream, and think

creation that will

earlier

line, color,

it

was

of

retreat,

generation of Romantics

decadence, and recondite meaning,

art

hopelessly degraded and no significant public sphere for art

of widespread

like

the

Societe
I

European

and the revolutionary dreamscape of

Surrealism. Symbolism was no! an avant-garde subculture

Pre-Raphaelite

Anonyme

ink pendants

ilues,

or

Brotherhood,

the

the

Xcoimprcssionist

structured societies with

Impressionist
Societe

membership

des
lists,

proscribed exhibition venues, and sectarian rules of

MODI.RMSM

RSI

SYMBOLISM

305

to

be able to place the development of the symbol

any

in

period whatsoever, and even in outright dreams (the dream

being indistinguishable from

our

art

is

life).

The

aim of

essential

to objectify the subjective (the cxtcrnalization of

the Idea) instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen

through the eyes of

Kahn's
tify

final

temperament).

pithy formulation, that the artist should "objec-

the subjective

instead of subjectifying the objective,"

which Naturalist writers and painters such

had done, was rapidly seized upon by
painters as well as poets as the essential
esthetics.

Thus, by 1891, the young

"Symbolism

article called

Zola and Monet

as
a

diverse array of

maxim of Symbolist
Albert Aurier, in an

critic

Paul Gauguin," was

in Painting:

able formally to codify a definition of Symbolist painting

under

five

terms:
>

unique ideal

1.

Ideist, for

2.

Symbolist, for

3.

Synthetist, for

its

be the expression of the

will

Idea.
it

will

it

express this idea by means of forms.

will

present these forms, these signs,

according to a method

which

under-

generally

is

standable.
4.

313

PALL GAUGUIN

Green Christ 1889. 36^

28H92

Subjective, for the object will never be considered as an

object but as the sign of an idea perceived by the subject.

x 73)
5.

(It

Decorative

consequentially)

is

painting in

its

decorative

for

proper sense, as the Egyptians and, very

probably the Greeks and the Primitives understood

inclusion and exclusion;

it

was an international cultural and

spawned numerous

esthetic direction that, however,

nothing other than a manifestation of art

local

subjective, synthetic, symbolic

and

at

it, is

once

ideist.

avant-gardes. During the final two decades of the nineteenth

century,

Symbolism became an

irresistible cultural tide that

swept across Europe and North America.

In practise, these recipes for Symbolist art were distilled by

French, and
critics,

first

what many regarded

of

all

as a

be recognized by

September

its

rhetoric. In

18, 1886, the

in

poet

Jean Moreas proclaimed the value of pure subjectivity and

He

representation of the "Idea."

endeavors to clothe the Idea

nevertheless,

in

wrote: "Symbolic poetry

form which,

sensitive

would not be an end

in itself,

but would be

subordinate to the idea while serving to express

it

art

can

derive from objectivity only a simple and extremely succinct

point of departure."

Kahn penned
upon the

A week later,

a response to

right of poets

the poet and critic Gustave

Moreas

and

contemporaneity and indulge

in

which he too

insisted

artists to disdain history

in a

at

306

to subject

and

world of dream:

matter we are tired of the quotidian, the near

hand, and the compulsorily contemporaneous;

RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

that theory of art

subjective states by

vocabulary of

Yet

if

historical

we wish

means of a

line, tone,

and

Symbolism had

this

to

artists,

simple formula:

which ascribed the greatest

restrictive

and non-naturalistic

color.

accepted rhetoric,

a generally

and ideological significance was much

agreed upon.

To

less

its

widely

some, such as the painter Maurice Denis

(1870-1943) who, along with Paul Serusier, Edouard Vuillard

(1868-1940), and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), was a
of the avant-garde group called the Nabis (the word
for prophets),

Symbolism was

is

member
Hebrew

form of "Neotraditionism"

that stressed Christian values of quietism, piety, asceticism,

and hierarchical

stability.

In 1890, Denis described

how

the

Symbolist rejection of Naturalism and embrace of formal

abstraction was paving the
spirituality:

As

public

down

value to the representation of dreams, visions, or other

Symbolist manifesto, published

the Paris Figaro Litter aire on

a small

Symbolism was

THE RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

Symbolism may

and

European and American,

later other

way toward

new and earnestly felt

"All the sentiment of the work of art comes

unconsciously, or almost so, from the state of the

'He who wants

to paint the story

artist's soul:

of Christ must

live

with

,V4

Paul Gauguin

Yellow Christ 1889.

.ity

x 2X} (92 x 73)

Rill

TORK. OF SVMHOl. ISM

307

315

JAMES ENSOR The Entry

316

308

of Christ into Brussels

ODILON REDON

Ophelia

Among

RHETORIC OF SYMBOLISM

i88g 1888.

the Flowers 1905.

8'6 x 14'6 (260 x 430.5)

25 x 35f (64 x 91)

Christ,' said

313

Fra Angelico. This

is

a truism.

Our

impression of moral order opposite [Gauguin's] Green Christ

[1889] and the bas-relief

Be

Love and You Will Be Happy

in

cannot spring from the motif or motifs of nature represented,

but from the representation

To

itself,

forms and coloring."

chromed wooden Christ which

was the term used by

the

size

who were

artists
a

impressions and memories.

artist's

Gauguin

close to

at

painting was meant to synthe-

During the

Feneon, Symbolism was an art of creative freedom and

Universal Exposition of 1889, an exhibition of Synthe'tisme

sensual liberation that furthered the growing impetus toward

was held and

Describing

anarchism.

revolutionary

Gauguin (1848-1903)

in 1889,

the

work

of Paul

he invoked the anarchist dream

of free and autonomous nations or communities living side by

side in cooperation

and harmony:

quite

removed from

it:

material furnished for

illusion,

he puts into a

him by

reality;

new

order the

he disdains

number, makes them

hierarchic;

and

within each of the spacious cantons formed by their

interlacing, an opulent

own

and

pride without in any

dence of

sultry color bleakly extends

itself.

upper

Braque from nearly

of Picasso and

Gauguin's landscape receives

intent

ideist

could hardly be more different from Denis's

The trees are flat

clearly manifest.

middle right

to

background

left,

ing,

is

from

the stone wall and serpentine

and the crisp edge of the horizon

upper right

at

is

unrelieved by atmospheric perspective. Finally, and in sum,

the event

Gauguin represented

ary,

By

neither historical nor clearly

is

and the technique neither mimetic nor

these ambiguities the painting

marked by these opposing

ideological distinctions

interpretations.

The art of Gauguin

and remains today, the chief field on which the

Symbolist battle was waged; our survey of the movement

and end with him. In between, we

improbable

of the

Symbolism and

will

will briefly

of an

collision

the naturalist genre of land-

suggestion

described

the

to
it

is

The

and symbolist

that

lay

in

beyond

Octave Mirbeau

critic

evocativeness of the

in 1891 as

clearly abstract.

subjective

of an alternative reality

assented

antinaturalist

red clouds that zig-zag

path in the middle-ground are painted without tonal model-

must take account of the complex

results

later.

the antinaturalist and decorative aspect

its

therefore begin

generation

somewhat more complex

compositional articulation than his figures, but here too the

objective knowledge or sight.

examine the

newspaper, but in any case

in

"moral order." Thus, any adequate definition of Symbolism

at the time,

perhaps the result of being

third,

up

description of it as an "unconscious" rendering of a traditional

was

1891.)

in

contemporary, the scene neither quotidian nor clearly vision-

Feneon's description of Gauguin's Symbolist painting as

political allegory

its

blotted with, or rolled

its

way threatening the indepen-

neighbors, and at the same time without

its

compromising

of newsprint on

all

even the illusion of atmosphere; he accentuates

lines, limits their

Groupe Synthetiste was formed

Indeed, examination of Yellow Christ reveals the impression

anticipating the "low-culture"-inspired pasted paper collages

Reality for [Gauguin] was only the pretext for a creation

when he

painting

"a rich, disturbing blend of barbaric

splendor, Catholic liturgy,

Hindu

reverie,

Gothic imagery,

and obscure and subtle symbolism."

Yet however esoteric

its

sources or syncretism, what

perhaps most noteworthy about

is

Yellow Christ and other

Brittany pictures by him, such as The Vision After the Sermon

(Jacob Wrestling With the Angel) (1888) and The Green

scape painting.

Christ
left

PAUL GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM IN

BRITTANY

and what

largely

pietistic,

reveals

them

to be

Symbolist

all

is

what

is

unpainted and unsaid. Gauguin's decorative,

and populist representations of Breton

spirituality

pointedly overlooked the modernizing transformations which

the people and their region were then undergoing.

While no single artwork succinctly exemplifies

314

is

purposely crude, populist or synthetist in aspect. (Synthe'tisme

Pont-Aven during 1886-90:

other critics, such as the Neoimpressionist apologist

the artist had seen in the rustic

chapel of Tremalo near Pont-Aven in Brittany, the painting

of Aurier's

During the

1870's and '80's, Brittany experienced an economic

boom and

Symbolist preconditions, Gauguin's Yellow Christ, contem-

cultural redevelopment. Despite a nationwide reduction in

porary critics generally agreed, came close. Painted in Pont-

wholesale prices and extremely sluggish growth rates in the

Aven

generation following the (nearly worldwide) "crash" of 1873,

in

Brittany in September

of three Breton

women

889, the

gathered around

work depicts
a crucified

group

Christ (or

sculpture of Christ) planted in the gray rock of Golgotha.

shrill

The

yellow color of the divided fields of grain and of Christ's

body, the latter thickly outlined

in

Prussian blue

like the

leading around the painted glass in medieval church windows,

creates an abstract

picture surface.

and therefore decorative pattern upon the

Inspired by an eighteenth-century poly-

Brittany, like

France,

some other formerly underdeveloped regions of

thrived.

Agriculture

was

becoming rationalized

(small landholders were dispossessed and the landless

into wage-laborers), fishing

and

tourism

rapidly

and other industries expanded,

grew.

The

latter

development

especially significant for our account since, ironically,

the

touristic

marketing

of

made

Breton

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

"primitiveness"

IN

BRITT

Wi

it

is

was
that

309

317
318

PAUL GAUGUIN
PAUL GAUGUIN

The Seaweed Gatherers 1889. 34i

x 48} (87 x 123)

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin 1889. 44^x36^(113x92)

many other artists to the region in the

The unique and picturesque Breton costumes, for

brought Gauguin and

first

place.

example, which we see represented

in

works by

artists

such as

Gauguin, Bernard, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, were not

residue of ancient Celtic culture, but rather a complex and

modern expression of
cultural aspiration.

social hierarchy, class mobility,

They permitted people proudly

their indigenous identities, while at the

and

to express

same time encourag--

ing touristic consumption. Yet Gauguin's representations of

what he called

in a letter to

Theo Van Gogh "savage" and

"primitive" Brittany, in pictures created between 1886 and

1890 and again in 1894, largely avoid any reckoning with

tourism or with the larger conflict there (and in

much

of rural

agrarian France) between traditional culture and what the

philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described as the forces of

"universalizing civilization," that
talism and

its

is,

modern

industrial capi-

colonizing mass culture.

Gauguin's strategy of evasion thus provides

preliminary gloss upon Symbolism.

considered below

and Hodler

Gauguin, Ensor,

further

who will be
Redon, Munch, Vrubel,

The

painters

are Symbolist because their works share certain

formal features: flatness, decorativeness, reductiveness, and

abstraction; certain iconographic features: a concern with

dreams, visions, and the

spiritual;

and certain ideological

features: avoidance of contradiction, disdain for history,

flight

310

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

BRITTANY

and

from modernity. Symbolist painting, unlike previous

319

PAUL GAUGUIN Jug

Portrait 1889.

320

PAUL GAUGUIN

1889.

28J-

36J-

in the

Form of a Head,

Self-

Height 7{ (19.3)

Christ in the

Garden of Olives

(73 x 92)

(i

(il

1\ \\l) S\ \II!()1.IS\1 l\ 11RITT

WS

311


modernisms considered

book, was as Denis wrote, a

in this

form of "Neotraditionism" that upheld a conservative and

"moral order"

hierarchical

profound

transition.

Symbolism was thus "mythical," func-

modern European myth

tioning, as

"Myth

speech."

does, to "de-politicize

today," wrote the mid-twentieth-century

Roland Barthes, "turns

critic

the midst of a society in

in

empties

reality inside out,

with nature.

history

and

fills it

reality:

it is,

literally, a ceaseless

[Its

function

is]

to

it

of

empty

flowing out, a hemorrhage, or

Yellow Christ and other landscapes, and himself as

kind of refugee in Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

Realist painter represented himself as the

forever

condemned

Form of a Head,

the

himself as

a savior

and

an historical amnesia.
decorative fanfare of

similar forgetfulness lurks

much Symbolist

amid the

misunderstood," he said of the Christ

art of

Gauguin, does not permit Denis and Barthes to have the

say;

Feneon's words too must be remembered.

Gauguin's "synthetist"

art

To
its at

upon the anarchist

Garden

the

keep

shall

and

ideal,

Vincent

in a letter to

wrote

Garden of Olives] represents the

pain that

human." What was crushed was the

community

artistic

fated to be

is

for a long time." Later he

it

7"/,'

in

is

both divine and

ideal of establishing a

"savage and primitive"

Brittany in concert with his friends and followers Bernard,

Louis Anquetjn (1861

Schuffenecker (1851

Jacob Meyer de Haan (1852-95), and Paul Serusier (1865-

once

principles

1934),

Crushed too was the

1927).

selflessness with

Van Gogh

South Seas, Gauguin's response

In Brittany as in the

and alienation was

to pain

the creation of myths, both of the

1932),

mutual support and

ideal of

at Aries.

modern and of the primi-

Symbolism consisted

of mutual respect alongside individual autonomy. Indeed,

tive sort described above; his

according to him the art of Gauguin was anything but "de-

of a dialectic of avoidance and earnest expression of social

politicized," despite the fact that

it

Perhaps instead of Barthes,

reality."

Levi-Strauss that we turn for

germaine

to

was "removed from

should be to Claude

it

a definition

of myth that

Symbolism. The function of myth

societies (those

is

(an impossible achievement

real)." Primitive

myths

if,

precisely

other Symbolist painters, such as Ensor,

simply denied modernity outright, finding solace

in fantastic

imaginings of an ideal past and Utopian future.

in "primitive"

without writing), Levi-Strauss writes, "is to

provide a logical model capable of overcoming

Many

contradiction.

contradiction

as happens, the contradiction

is

are valuable to their cultures not

ENSOR AND POPULISM

James Ensor was born

in

1860

at the seaside resort

northwestern Belgium, and died there

in

at the

of Ostend,

age of 89 in

because they mask or occlude contradictions, but because they

1949.

manage

avant-garde culture as he indulged his carnavalesque imagina-

or organize them. In so doing, they underline the

prevailing communitarian principle in primitive societies,

that, as the anthropologist writes, "self-interest is the

of

evil."

all

Gauguin's),

In

argue below, shares this "primitivist"

and Norway, Ensor was

European

new and compelling

modernity and

look at Gauguin's paintings, sculptures, and

The best works are subtly

marked by modern signs of artistic

and degrading

but forcibly

alienation, class division,

labor. After organizing in Paris an exhibition of

Impressionist and Synthetist art at the Cafe des Arts (also

as the Cafe Volpini, after the proprietor), adjacent to

the great 1889 Universal Exposition,

in

Gauguin returned

June of that year and soon

after

nearby hamlet of Le Pouldu. During the next

depicted such

modern

moved

six

to

to the

months, he

subjects as proletarian labor in The

Seaweed Gatherers (1889), subdivided and enclosed grain

312

Symbolist contemporaries
a

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

BRITTANY

art
is

Flemish

art since Breugel,

dead, truly dead.

artists

France, Switzerland,

in

self-imposed exile from moderniza-

and contemporaneity. "Long

tion

painting!" Ensor exclaimed in 1900:

culture.

politics.

Dutch and Flemish

Breugel, Rembrandt, and Rubens. Thus,

shall

ceramics from Brittany reveals that he did not entirely abjure

Pont-Aven

Van Eyck, Bosch,

like his

he remained aloof from urban,

tion in partial emulation of past

of the best Symbolist art (especially

fact, a closer

known

his life

Much

perspective, providing audiences with a

critique of

source

For most of

Long

was disdainful of modern

live

naive and ignorant

"Long

live the

peasant in

Bosch, Rubens and Jordaens

live free, free, free art!" If Ensor

artistic sophistication

and

feeling,

he was equally scornful of academicism: "All the rules,"

Ensor wrote,

"all the

canons of

art

vomit death

like their

bronze brethren."

For
his

all

his extravagance

artistic

training

and

vitriol,

lessons in Ostend,

and enrollment

Academy of Fine

Arts.

Academy

however, Ensor began

conventionally

320

'"

final

harmonic and independent colors and forms anticipated, he

believed, a political future based

him,

from Brittany represented not

"Neotraditionism" but a beckoning "new order;"

crushing of an

harmonious

art.

Yet the complexity of Symbolism, and especially the

Wandering Jew,

martyr. "This painting

318

which the

in

Gauguin portrayed

Self-Portrait (1889),

Barthes argues that at the

lies

889),

picture

of Olives (1889) and the extraordinary and disturbing

to a journalist: "[Christ in the

fashion,

walk the earth. In Christ

to

Van Gogh, "so

core of modern myth embodied

and tourism
mass media,

The Meeting (1854),

inspired by Courbet's

perhaps an evaporation, in short, a perceptible absence."

today in advertising,

317

fields in

enough with private

in

1877

at the

Although he

later

disparaged the

Brussels

as "that establishment for the near blind," he

remained there nearly three years and even earned an award

319

for his

drawings after Classical busts. Between 1880 and 1885

he continued his studies on his

own by making dozens

Rembrandt,

copies and interpretations of master drawings by

Callot,

Watteau, Goya, Turner, Daumier, and others. Ensor's

complex assimilation of

321

this

mainly Northern European and

generally anticlassical graphic tradition

is

extraordinary and bizarre etching entitled

1st on,

ing the Stools

life

in

the

Pouffamatus,

of King Darius after the Batle of Arbela (1886).

upon Plutarch's

subject of this work, very loosely based

of the Persian king Darius, of course satirizes the Classical

narratives usually assigned to enterprising

but

apparent

and Transmouff, Famous Persian Physicians Examin-

Cracozie,

The

of

its

style reveals

Baroque

Academy

students,

an earnest effort to understand and employ-

Rembrandtesque) conventions of hatch-

(especially

ing and chiaroscuro.

Yet even

the

at

level

of form,

tendencies could not be restrained.

Ensor's

iconoclastic

Rembrandt allowed every

contour line in his etchings an expressive independence, and

every section of hatching an articulate clarity and orderliness;
Ensor, in contrast, purposely confuses both hatching and

contour

lines,

lending his composition a peculiarly anarchic

and comic quality wholly consistent with

content. This mixture of emulation and

Baroque traditions

Renaissance and
majority

works

of Ensor's

in

the

its

scatological

mockery of Northern
apparent in

the

decade following

his

is

from the Academy, including the Bosch-like

departure

Antony (1887). Here the red-cowled

Tribulations of Saint

hermit Antony

is

tempted and tormented by

women and

soldiers, frogs and balloonists, angels and demons,

all

and continuing

1881

in

Arbela 1886.

% x 7 (23.7 x

1884 to be:

in

decades, Ensor regularly submitted etchings, drawings, and

contemporary

paintings like these to exhibitions in Brussels organized by the

his

avant-garde groups

La

Chrysalide, L'Essor, Les Vingt, and

La Libre Esthetique as well, on occasion,

to

more conservative

venues, even including the Paris Salon in 1882. Ensor was

clearly

uncomfortable about exhibition with the various rule-

bound Salons des Beaux-Arts,

yet

he was hardly more

enthusiastic about showing with the avant-garde organizations.

The

(Les Vingt)
artists,

Le Groupe des Vingt

Brussels fraternity called

is

a case in point.

and

writers,

critics

Formed

in

1883 by

that included

number of

Ensor, the self-

proclaimed Symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), the

Indcpcndants

in

France,

sought

to

exhibit

progressive artworks exclusive of the constraints imposed by

Salon

juries.

At

first,

the group

embraced

tendencies and directions, claiming

several artistic

commitment

to the

creation of both explicitly partisan and disinterestedly pure

by the

their goal

the direct interpretation of

artist, letting

himself go freely in

1886 between champions of an unambiguous

socialist direc-

and proponents of unfettered choice

matters of content as

well

as

Rodenbach and Khnopff, among

in

form (the poet Georges

others),

subsequent group

exhibitions were clearly dominated by the latter Parnassian

tendency.

Ensor

initially

stance, but

shared Les Vingt's dichotomous

became

artistic-

distressed, after 1886, at the increasing

esthcticism and cosmopolitanism of the group's exhibitions.

membership

create and

reality

tion in art (Picard)

He was

counterpart Les

"The study and

nique." Although the organization became factionalized by

the critics

Theo Van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), and

and lawyers Octave Maus and Edmond Picard, Les
like its

17.8)

temperament and [gaining] thorough mastery of tech-

Neoimpressionist

Vingt was an exhibition society that,

Pouffamatus, Cracozie, and Transmouff, Famous

works of art. Accordingly, they ambiguously stated

more than two

for

Iston,

Persian Physicians Examining the Stools of King Darius after the Battle of

painted

with the textures and hues of blood and feces.

Beginning

JAMES ENSOR

321

especially disturbed
lists

Rcdon, Whistler, Rodin, and

was

vehicle

by the inclusion

of non-Belgian

for

"pauvre Belgique,"

artists,

others.

For him, the

the consolidation
as Baudelaire

in

Les Vingt

including Seurat,

and

a\

ant-garde

rejuvenation of

had called

it,

in

the face of

seemingly insuperable national divisions of language and

ethnicity. In

November

1886, he wrote to Octave M.uis, the

group's secretary: "It would be with

ENSOR

much

WD

pain wore

I'Ol'l

1.

isw

to see

313

XX

Les

lopers."

hy

the group; he

now saw himself as

who had

isolated

already been exiled from

Ensor was granted

Although

from

and claimed the status of an

adopt

all artistic

exile

rules

even from

official art.

luxury

the

to

Ensor rejected

or internationalist perspective,

institutions,

those

of the inter-

falling into the clutches

Thus, from the moment Les Vingt hegan

Pan-European
and

and perhaps

lose their virginity, their nationality,

their personality

of a

small

retrospective of his best works at the 1886 exhibition of Les

Vingt, he was largely ostracized from his fellows two years

315

when he sought

later,

d'oeuvre,

is

splenetic

to exhibit his prophetic Entry of Christ

1889 (1888). This painting, Ensor's chef

Brussels in

into

by

a vast (nearly 10

that

affair

cacophonous, and

15 feet),

represents

conviction about the

his

decadence of his age. Accompanied by military bands, masked

marchers, historical and literary figures, urban bourgeoisie,
workers, and politicians of every political persuasion, Christ

enters Brussels in seeming triumph.

''''Vive

red banner exclaining

La Sociale" ("Long Live Socialism")

above the diminutive savior

who

is

suspended

is

mounted on

donkey

in

the upper center of the picture; to his right, above the serried

ranks of revelers, a poster announces "Fanfares Doctrinaires

Toujours Reussr
ceed"); to his

("Doctrinal Fanfares Always Suc-

[sic]

left

green reviewing stand offers various

322

JAMES ENSOR Old Woman With Masks

).

21J-X

18$(54x47)

clowns and dignitaries an ideal vantage point for watching the

spectacle below. In the fore and middle-ground, figures are

roughly stacked one above the other as

209

if standing

manner reminiscent of Courbet's Burial

several images d'Epinal

More

upon which

at

that

on

risers, in

Ornans and the

work was based.

extravagant and grotesque than Courbet's painting,

each face in The Entry of Christ

is

mask

each expression a grimace. These faces,

or a caricature and

and green. Though

every sense a history painting

in

created with a contemporary public in mind, The Entry of

was never exhibited

Christ into Brussels in 1889

lifetime;
it

making

a virtue of necessity,

he wrote

in

Ensor's

late in life that

remained "untarnished by exhibition."

into Brussels in 1889,

by recourse

to the grotesque

Ensor sought

and the

artistic

legitimacy

fantastic, genres rooted in

those ancient Flemish habits and traditions

called Breugelian

which

(1891),

whose rudiments survived

even
in the

today

Ostend

Yet

Ensor sought,

if

prominently

in

is

mood

ing project was

lators"
it,

Ensor pleaded
life

and

ruining traditional Ostend by modernizing

in his writings

and

art for the re-creation of

for the cultural unities that are

it:

filled

with characters and motifs that appear to be based on

contemporary

314

festivals

and Breugelian depictions of proverbs,

ENSOR AND POPULISM

fin-de-siecle

to

those which included great coats of arms and red-

wooden shoes." In

fact,

Ostend could hardly have been further from

Ensor's ideal

community.

presumed

"Let us re-establish our pure and natural

lipped prostitutes, ostrich plumes and

in his art.

the inspiration,

doomed. Condemning the "mercurial specu-

who were

carnivals

middle 1880's included them

mature works

of neurasthenia and anguish.

parades (held each year

in the

his other

not the expression of an integrated

Rousseau) frequented the Ostend carnivals, masques, and

Ensor's drawings, prints, and paintings from this time are

he

stands out most

Indeed, Ensor himself appears to have believed his synthesiz-

have attended

beginning

What

However carnavalesque

Ensor's pictures evoke a

carnival

Lent, in June, and in August), and

marry

cultural whole, but rather a melancholic reckoning with a

company of
at

to

art of easel painting,

The Entry of Christ and

of the 1880's and '90's

Ensor cherished. Indeed, Ensor himself (somefriend Ernest

manner of Courbet,

in the

cannot be said to have fully succeeded.

festivals that

young Brussels

The Battle Between Carnival

popular traditions to the modern

times in the

his

recalls Breugel's

Man

and Lent (1559).

culture in ruins.

Rejecting both academicism and estheticism in The Entry

of Christ

Lent, as in Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged

like the picture as a

whole, are coarsely painted in discordant hues of red, white,

blue,

the seven deadly sins, or the battle between Carnival and

of a unified,
city

"pure and natural" Belgian

of 27,000 people, Ostend was one of the

chief bathing resorts in Europe, and during the

summer

its

population tripled. Ensor

knew

too well this modernized and

commercialized Ostend; for the

first

half of his

life

he lived in

an apartment near the beach above a small curio shop run by

his

grandmother, mother, and aunt

who

sold souvenirs,

Elisee Reclus. Indeed, Brussels

politics for

some

Edouard Anseele had established

tives called voohuit in 1874,

summer

peuple.

tourists.

Like other alienated

of
period Hodler, Munch,
Ensor witnessed
of
the

artists

the collapse

precisely those romantic ideals he most cherished.

He

prized

handicraft at a time of rapid industrialization, he exalted

familial

and communal bonds

structured

upon

in

society

increasingly

cash nexus, and he dreamed of a pure and

natural society in a

Belgium increasingly structured,

like the

rest of Europe, on fashion and the commodity. Less admirably

(but in

common

women

with his antimodern polemics, as in his chauvinist

with the above

artists too),

remark about red-lipped prostitutes, and

Masks

(1889), in

which

his

Ensor targeted

had been

time, especially since a

including shells, costumes, and masks, to the throng of

and Redon, among others

322

Demolder, and the noted French geographer and anarchist

By 1879

several

center of radical

young printer named

a series

of worker coopera-

and soon thereafter

progressive

maison du

representing

parties

social-democratic, Marxist, and anarchist factions of socialism had been formed, which in 1885

the umbrella of the Belgian

Workers

would be united under

Party.

The

year 1886 was

development of the workers' movement

crucial to the

Belgium, to the

artistic

avant-garde and to Ensor

anarchist celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris

Commune

and

by coal miners led

a coincident strike

popular demonstrations that were halted only by police

violence and the proclamation of a state of siege.

"Now

review articles in L' Art moderne dedicated to books by the

task of art

woman; her painted

facilitating the

mask, the picture argues,

behind which lurks the hollowness of death.

first

overall pattern of his resentments,

it

is

not

The Brussels home of his friend Rousseau which

he

entered in 1879, was a center for progressive politics and

culture, frequented by the iconoclastic Belgian artist Felicien

Rops (1833-98), the

radical

author

and

and

literature,

critic

Eugene

now

the

he believed, to serve "in preparing or

accomplishment of

too, the political

surprising that Ensor took a keen interest in the radical politics

of his day.

the

been

anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Jules Valle. It was

Given the

is

time to dip our pens into red ink," wrote Picard in 1886 in

mockery. Lifeless yet leering carnival masks surround the old

a

to a

general strike on March 25, followed by a sequence of massive

turned into an arena for childish doodling and misogynist

is

in

an

Old Woman With

a portrait of a family friend has

face too

alike:

historical destiny."

Now,

schisms within the Brussels avant-garde,

described above, were too great to be overcome by broad

esthetic manifestos or vague statements of

common

purpose.

Ensor's engagement with Belgian socialism during the

turbulent decade between 1885 and 1895

is

reflected in his

artwork. His vitriolic satires of King Leopold, such as Belgium

in the

Nineteenth Century (1889), his inclusion in The Entry of

**

323 JAMES ENSOR The Gendarmes 1892.

14 x 21f (35.5 x 55)

ENSOR

WD

I'OI'l

I.

ISM

315

t^ir

324

JAMES ENSOR

Christ of banners proclaiming

Anseele et Jesus"
323

(later

My

"Vive

Portrait in lgbo 1888.

la

l\ x 4J (6.9 x 12)

Sociale" and "Vive

painted out by the

artist), as well as his

idea that he was enjoying more than his

depiction of strikers and strike victims, such as The Gendarmes

is

(1892), reveal his general leftist sympathies clearly enough.

and purity.

Yet the precise

political significance of these

Even The Entry of

difficult to establish.

slogans,

may be

interpreted as a satire and not a celebration of

socialist politics.

McGough

artworks remains

Christ, with all its

In his book on the painting, Stephen C.

has very plausibly interpreted Ensor's painting as

an attack upon
tive doctrines,

all

"fanfares doctrinaires"

and upon

all

upon

institutions, either

all

manipula-

governmental

or religious, that restrict individual freedom. Indeed, Ensor's

expressed

frequently

disdain

for

bourgeois

society

simultaneous rejection of any compromise of his

of an antiauthoritarian or anarchist kind.

shocking character of his art

vulgarity

artistic

he was sympathetic to socialism, but only

liberty suggest that

to socialism

own

conforms

intellectualism,

its

to the impetuosity,

vehemence, anti-

and masculinism of fin-de-siecle anarchism.

Unlike Marxists

first

The

independence, violence, and

who proposed

that the seizure

was

stage in the creation of a classless, egalitarian

society, anarchists

such as Reclus generally argued that any

revolution that permitted the maintenance of a state (even

provisionally)

was authoritarian and bourgeois. Disdaining

revolutionary elites (but at the same time necessitating

by stressing individualism and

voluntarism),

them

anarchists

constantly sought ways to bring the masses into the revol-

utionary process. In order to do so,

many

believed they must

purge themselves of greed and corruption and be united with

the people in

316

body and

soul.

The famous

ENSOR AND POPULISM

fair

one extreme form of this exaggerated

parallel fanaticism

may

share of sunshine,

stress

upon populism

be detected in the art of

Ensor. His vocabulary of grotesque and caricatural forms, his

comedy and

his scatology, his

misogyny and

his intransigence,

reveal at once an effort to unite with the popular classes of past

and present Belgium, and

to strike the

a voluntarist desire

hammer blows

single-handedly

that will bring

down

and avant-gardist

edifices of bourgeois propriety

the twin

elitism.

In the art and ideas of Ensor are thus found populism and

megalomania

in equal mixture. In 1931, the 70-year-old artist

my

wrote: "I have no child except light,

and

daughter; light, one

indivisible, light, bread of the painter, light, the painter's

mie, light,

Animate

queen of our senses,

us, reveal to us the

light, light, illuminate us!

new paths we must

joy and happiness." Ensor's rich imagination

follow toward

may

be seen as

the inversion of Cafiero's madness; he wished to absorb

all

the

light, to absorb and retransmit to posterity the lessons of the

by the

industrial proletariat of the institutions of the state

necessary

and

madness by the

anarchist Carlo Cafiero (1846-92), driven to

case of the Italian

Dutch and Flemish masters and

the popular culture of the late

Middle Ages. Yet because of Ensor's nearly messianic

self-

regard, he had, as he himself admitted, no real progeny; his

art, like

much

beginning.

It

other Symbolist production, was an end not a

was based on the

still-born

dream of a modern nation dressed up

and phantasmagoric

in the epic

garb of a pre-

industrial age. Ensor's art thus resembles nothing so

much

as

the bones, shells, and fossils sold in his mother's curio shop,

which were

his

chief motif;

his

paintings represent the

desiccation of Romantic imagination

the reduction to

mere

bone of the once embodied hopes of Delacroix and Ingres,

Constable, Turner, and Friedrich for an organic society in

which

artists created art as naturally as trees

Ensor was preoccupied with

his

own

produced

failure to achieve

fruit.

such

transcendence, and depicted his impotence, marginality, and

324

decay

literal

in the

macabre etching

My

Portrait in 1960

(1888).

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING:

MUNCH, REDON, MONET, AND HODLER
The

issue of

of what

may

Symbolism's renunciation of modern society

Kahn

called "the compulsorily

(or

contemporaneous")

be illustrated by examining the movement's position

within the history of landscape painting. Since

its

origins in

the late Renaissance, landscape painting has represented not

just the physical

appearance of land but the social relations

between humans

in nature.

such

painters

as

Claude

During the seventeenth century,

Lorrain

and

Nicolas

Poussin

represented the Italian countryside as a pastoral realm of

peace and plenty, recalling

by the

Roman

a Classical

Golden Age described

poets Virgil and Ovid. In

The

Netherlands,

landscape painting was similarly idealizing and inspiring,

although

its

permitted

it

greater
to

verisimilitude

and contemporaneity

function as an ideological support to an

economic order that depended upon

rationality, productivity,

and expansionism. By the beginning of the nineteenth

century,
art

we have seen, during

the

Romantic period, landscape

(and nature generally) often served as

supposed unnatural intrusions into

capitalism, urban living,

a protest against

social

life

industrial

and the money economy. Yet

these cases, including of course such art

in all

movements

as

325

Arnold Bocklin

'ita

Somnium Breve

M x45(180x

114.5)

Realism and Impressionism, the relations between nature and

society or country

and

city

were intensely

the mythic stability of the one

dialectical

depended upon the

that

stability

is,

of

326

Arnold Bocklin

Island of the

Dead

1880. 31Jx571-(80x 150)

SI

MHOl.lS

I.

\\1)S( VPE

PAINTING

317

327

Edvard Munch

47x46H119.4x

328 Christian

Krohg

4QJ-X23J- (103.5x51.4)

the other,

the

measure of the one revealed the hidden

dimensions of the other. In

a progressive

this

way, nature continued to serve

function for society, offering itself up as a

measure against which both human accomplishments and

failures could

be gauged.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the

dialectical relation

between nature and society was severed

the literature and art of Symbolism.

During

in

period of

wrenching economic expansion and contraction, colossal

urban and industrial growth, and the

final

eradication in

Europe of the remaining pockets of premodern community,

nature came to be considered by
inviolable sanctuary

some

and not simply

Unlike Caspar David Friedrich, who

writers

and

artists as

a standard of

an

judgment.

in the first quarter

of the

century depicted nature as a locus for spiritual fulfillment and

social reconciliation,

325

Somnium Breve
326

Arnold Bocklin represented

it

in the last

three decades as a place of escape or eternal rest.

[Life

is

1888, and Island of the

Vita

Short], an allegorical landscape of

Dead

(1880), for example, are siren

songs in praise of blissful solitude and easeful death. In 1937,

the Frankfurt School critic

Leo Lowenthal described

this

generational sea-change in the representation of nature in his

essay about the popular fn-de-siecle

Norwegian

Hamsun:
318

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

novelist

Knut

Sick Child 1885-6.

11">)

Sick Girl 1880-81.

329

Edvard Munch

The Voice 1893. 34^x42^(87.6x108)

Knut Hamsun

However, with the coming of doubt and even despair about

novels of

personal fulfillment within society, the image of nature was

and nature

no longer

a basis for a

alternative.

new

fantasy.
reality,

his

His soul, inviolable

in

could find solace in such

at

peace

world, he could join the world of nature.

surrender than

manmade

forces.

This

man's imagery of

in
is

at least

submission; frustrated

attempt to participate autonomously

this

man
in

ideology but outraged in

a

a "thing," like the tree or the brook,

in

the

as

ultimate surcease of social pressure. In this context,

feel

and

in

in

the societal

He could become

find

portray this antinomy of society

an extreme form.

became an

perspective, but

Nature was increasingly envisaged

could submit to nature and

in

more pleasure

hopeless struggle against

the most significant change in

his environment to take place in the

closing decades of the nineteenth century in Europe.

The

As Lowenthal's remarks
watershed

period

in

indicate,

the

literary

the fin-de-siecle was a

representation

of the

antinomy between society and nature, but examples from the

visual arts are in fact

Classical rhetorics

as the Virgilian pastoral

thrall.

more

vivid since only there had the

which defined the landscape genre

The Symbolist

and georgic

continued

such

to exert their

painters of landscape, in short,

and understood the former paradigms of landscape

arl

knew

and

set

out to destroy them. In so doing, they destroyed as well anj

critical

engagement with modernity and created instead

.1

mythic landscape of dreams.

The Norwegian Edvard

Munch

SYMBOLIST LANDS(

(1863

^PE

(
1

H4) began

PAINTING

his

;i

career in the circle of Christiania (Oslo) anarchists that

included the journalist and activist

naturalist painter Christian

327

Sick Child (1885

328

sister's

6),

Krohg (1852-1925). Munch's

is

memories of

inspired in part by

death from consumption and

Girl( 1880-81),

Hans Jaeger and the

in part

his

by Krohg's Sick

an angry and vivid study of the ravages of a

degenerative disease.

By

its

content, large size, and scraped

and battle-scarred surface, Munch's Sick Child was

clearly an

indictment of a perceived social and cultural sickness as well as

of a tubercular epidemic.

by contemporary

critics

The work was

upon

its initial

bitterly

condemned
at

Leon

Bonnat's conservative academy, and returned in 1891,

'oice

by the

six called

among

(1893), a painting included

artist

"The

wrote:

stared into that clear sea, and

sky was

seemed

it

all

as

if

open and

were lying face

my

face with the uttermost depth of the world;

tensely against

Jealousy (1890),

it,

and

at

Munch

home

heart beating

depicted his simultaneous fear and

of superior and omniscient natural forces.

forgotten and

human

womanly

society

is

listory

is

powerless before the onslaught

and the eternal feminine.

of nature, destiny,

The French

to

there." In The Voice, as in

longing to submit to what he saw as the magical,

thrall

clean.

painter and graphic artist Odilon

(1840-1916) similarly articulated the

fin-de-siecle

Redon

antagonism

between nature and society by portraying humans

as passive

and powerless objects acted upon by uncontrollable natural

confirmed Symbolist.
In The

Hamsun

(1894),

Munch

exhibition;

soon thereafter retreated to Paris to study drawing

329

on earth that has such beautiful; lingering twilight." In Pan

"The

Frieze of Life,"

Among

Redon

group of

forces. In Ophelia

Munch

depicted

meditation upon Shakespeare's irrational Opjielia, seduced by

the Flowers (1905),

created a

the physical charms of nature.

The uniqueness

resort at Asgardstrand. Starkly dressed in white, she thrusts

image may be judged by

comparison with the Pre-

her chin forward and keeps her hands behind her back; she

is

Raphaelite Millais's widely reproduced and

moonlight

at

Ophelia of 1851 (Redon

a lone

young woman standing amid

as rigid as the trees

right.

This

paintings:

and

trees near the shore of the

as ghostly as the shaft of

how Munch described

"The frieze is intended
is

pictures, which, gathered together,

life.

Through them

beyond

it

all

Hamsun

with

seen

exhibited

during his

visit to

as a series of decorative

represent the fully stretched out figure of Ophelia, but only

would give

'life,

a picture

with

of

all

its

on." Like his compatriot

whom he was often compared, Munch

nature alone a world of sentiment and pathos.

walked along the shoreline and listened

found

"Have you

to the sea?"

in

ever

Munch

in

1895).

her head and shoulders. "Native and indued unto" nature, as

Shakespeare wrote, Redon's Ophelia

tion

is

which surround
artist

her. Indeed, the heroine

the ghostly

of no place

woman

in

Munch's The

Roger and Angelica

(ca.

330

1908),
a

endowed by

Voice, she

is

the

flora; like

identified

Redon

created a field of

technique he called "mutual

John Everett Millais

30 x 40 (76.2 x 101.6)

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

is

with the irrational and irresistible forces of nature. Similarly,

in

know

barely visible; atten-

with no greater personality than the ambient

glowing hue by means of

is

primarily drawn to the clouds of abundant flowers

how

the evening light dissolves into night?

330

Unlike Millais, Redon chose not to

asked a friend about Asgardstrand: "Have you ever noticed

P.O

it

much

London

there winds the curving shoreline, and

joy, carries

may have

of Redon's

the significance of the six

the sea, while under the trees,

complexity of grief and

316

Ophelia 1851.

331

331

Oimi.on

Rkdon

Roger and Angelica a.

1908.-

36J-

x 28} (92.7 x 73)

1
!

\i

noi. si'
1

1.

\\DS(

\im

I'

\i\ riNG

121

exaltation of colors."

The

marine water and sky

is

dazzling luminosit] of the ultra-

intensified by orange

complements,

purple and gray-blue adjacents, and the judicious introduction of white or black accents

induces

a feeling

and highlights. The

result

of disorientation and phantasmagoria.

Created during the twilight of a career marked by isolation

and public incomprehension, Ophelia Among

the Flowers

and

Roger and Angelica eschew the unnatural and assaultixe

grotesques found

in

Rcdon's early

noirs ("blacks"),

such as the

nightmarish charcoal The Eye (1882) and the lithograph The

Smiling Spider (1885). In these

late

works

Redon

in color,

instead focused a pantheistic vision on the minutiae of the

my

natural world: "I cannot say what have been

wrote

in 1903, "I love

nature in

all its

forms;

sources," he
love

it

in the

smallest blade of grass, the humblest flower, the tree, the

ground and the rocks

selves,

more than

ted the novelist

in the

all

things for their character in them-

ensemble." In 1904, Redon instruc-

Andre Gide: "Enclose yourself in nature," ex-

pressing that desire to

"become a

"like the tree or the brook,

thing," as Lowenthal writes:

and find more pleasure

render than in a hopeless struggle against

A
332 ODII.ON RF.DON The Smiling Spider 1885. 10} x 8f(26x
333

Mikhail Vrubf.l Pan

334 ODII.ON

322

REDON

1899.

48|x4i|(i24x

The Cyclops lqos. 25} x 20

21.5)

by

parallel

the

surrender before nature

sophisticated

and

is

in this sur-

manmade

represented

idiosyncratic

Russian

forces."
in

works

painter

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910). Rejecting the

106.3)

(64.1

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

x 50.8)

populism and sentimentality that characterized paintings by

the earlier peredvizhniki (Wanderers) group

who included

332

335 Cl.AUDE MONET Waterlilies 1905.

35^x36^(89.2x92.7)

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy (1837-87) and his student Ilya

the confrontation between the

Efimovich Repin (18441930)

nature signified the limitless potential for

Vrubel embraced

the stance

of the European Symbolist esthete. Possessed, as he wrote, by

a

"mania"

for technique, his paintings are densely

broad

with

impastoed

planes

of color,

packed

anticipating

the

nonobjective works of the early twentieth-century Russian

avant-garde. Indeed, Vrubel was conversant with

same

musicians, and authors

artists,

He

generation.

333

who

many

of the

influenced the later

read the works of Tolstoy and Nietzsche,

development,

landscape

for

nature

painters,

passive and private pleasure.

Monet,

volition, a space

immersed

The

in a fantastical

and

paintings of Bocklin, Degas, Monet, Moreau, Whistler, and

seasonal, the result of natural forces.

many

remarks are illuminating:

others through their reproduction in the pages of the

Russian journal Mir Iskusstva {The World of Art). VrubtTs

( 1

899),

which uncannily anticipates Rcdon's painting The

Cyclops. (1905),

was inspired by Anatole France's story Le

Saint Satyre.

depicts a kindly satyr

pan pipes
earth.

in

The

It

hand

who appears

crescent

moon

rising

to

with cloven hoof and

have emerged from the

on the horizon echoes the

shape of the creature's horns and wisps of hair and beard; the
cool aqua color of the water at middle right and
in

left is reflected

the blue pools of Pan's gentle eyes. Like the Cyclops in

Rcdon's painting, the Pan

product of nature

Whereas

for

in

VrubtTs

who must soon

Romantic

is

an autochthonous

return to

artists, like

its

native bourn.

Friedrich and Turner,

light.

in

designed for

apparent

in

works made

at

similar vitalism
especially the

Giverny, such as Waterlilies (1905),

spectator are

is

which the

artist

and

world of water, color,

only changes that occur in Monet's garden are

Once

again, Lowenthal's

Nature's timetable replaces the timetable of history.

Whoever

or

wholly "other," an entity

is

independent of human society or

the late paintings of

human growth

Redon, Vrubel, and other Symbolist

designed stage sets for Rimsky-Korsakov and knew the

Pan

334

social

autonomous individual and

senses and accepts these rhythmic patterns as

fundamental has
rational effort.

full

knowledge immediately and without

At the same time, the endless reproduction

of natural phenomena, the cyclic order of nature, as

opposed

to the

apparent disorder and happenstance of all

individual and historical lads, testifies to the powcrlcss-

ness of humans.

It is

the extreme opposite of

human

self-

assurance before nature.

Such

conception of nature

in

the

work of these

.utisis

arose from the desire to evade social contradiction, history,

sniiioi.isTi.wnsi \n

\i\ ri\(i

323

US

and contemporaneity,

to evade, that

of "universalizing civilization."

is,

the dispiriting forces

The antagonism

of nature

described here occurred specifically

the

and society

that

moment

history when the colonization and commodifica-

in

tion of nature

is

and society had progressed so

dialectic conception

trace of the

at

far that the earlier

was ideologically unsustainable. Not

modern, the quotidian, or the insouciant could be

permitted to invade painted landscapes for fear of shattering

the

Romantic dream of plenitude and thereby admitting the

threatening

nightmare

The Symbolist
more

and

of alienation

powerlessness.

opposition of nature and society

compellingly

than

revealed

is

nowhere

landscapes

the

in

of

independent peasantry,

disappearance of an

the

erosion of cantonal autarchy, the loss of a rich and vivid "folk"

culture,

and the concommitant

rise

of a tourist industry were

the factors that led to the artistic segregation of

humans and

In

he

1897,

his

discussed

talents

the

to

essential

"The Mission

precepts of that art in a lecture called

of the

Artist," delivered to the Society of the Friends of the Fine-

Arts in Freiburg.

lis

address repeated

many

Symbolist tenets of the day, but added

whether

Parallelism,

whether

it

it is

used to

is

a feeling

very high

fir

the

the innumerable

left,
.

trees,

an element of variety, always

of unity. If
I

go

for a

walk

in a forest

of

can see ahead of me, to the right and to

columns formed by the

Whether those

of the prevailing

new one:

the main feature of the picture or

set off"

produces

tree-

tree trunks stand out clear

against a darker background or whether they are silhouetted against a deep blue sky, the

impression of unity,
Hodler's

nature in the Symbolist landscapes of Ferdinand Hodler

Forest

(1853-1918). Indeed, the duration of Hodler's

first

(1885),

parallel

main

note, causing that

the parallelism of the trunks.

is

landscape was probably The Beech

painted

more than

was only

decade

before

after 1900, with the

coincided

exposition of the theory, but

it

series of paintings depicting

Lake Leman, Lake Silvaplana,

industrialization, not to say commodification of Switzerland.

Lake Thun, Lake Geneva, and the summits of the Alps

tourist

in

pictures

life

1867 to Ferdinand Sommer,

in

the

village

of

Thun

in

painter of

Bernese

the

Oberland, Hodler was witness to and participant

in

the

parallelism

came

to

dominate

his art.

that

Lake Geneva Seen From

Chexbres (1904) consists of an arc of land in the foreground

embracing

parallel

bands of blue,

violet,

and pink water. The

explosive growth of the Swiss tourist industry. Yet what

clouds at the horizon resemble identical puffs of smoke from

marks Hodler's mature landscape art from the 1880's and

after

locomotive passing from right to

traces of the touristic.

The

a series

is

the elimination of nearly

all

rhetorical justification for this erasure

is

found

in

Hodler's

After achieving considerable success and celebrity in the

1890's with the exhibition in Paris of such disturbing and

dreamlike figure paintings as The Night

336

324

Ferdinand Hodler

The Night

\%<>\.

( 1

89 1 ) and The Chosen

45frx9'9J (116x299)

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

the clouds at the top are

of parallel and interlocked chevrons. In 1908, Hodler

traveled to the Schynige Platte in the Bernese Oberland, a

region he had

Symbolist theory of "parallelism."

left;

known and

number of mountain
style; the

loved in his youth, and painted a

landscapes, including Eiger,

Jungfrau Above the Fog

in a still

mass of the mountains

more
is

342

the

with a crucially important period of modernization and

Apprenticed

336

Hodler increasingly devoted

4),

painting.

trunks.

Hodler.

The

One (1893
landscape

Mbnch and

radically simplified

rendered with thin

oil

343

337

Ferdinand Hodler The Monch With

Clouds 1911. 25^x36

(64.5x91.5)

338

EDVARD MUNCH Madonna

1895-7. 23J x 17H60.6 x 44.5)

washes of gray and blue, while the three summits are precisely
337

outlined in blue, green, and red. Finally, in The

Clouds (1911), Hodler was

at his furthest

Monch With

remove from the

busy tourist pictures of his early career. Here he has depicted

the massif and

summit of the second of the

the Bernese Oberland

appears as

a steel-blue

three great peaks of

near Grindelwald.

The mountain

pyramid with pasty white excrescences;

serpentine clouds, recalling the spermatazoa that enframe

338

Munch's lithograph Madonna (1895-7),

parallel the picture

surface and rectangular borders, lending by contrast a

still

greater mass and stability to the rock.

The

late parallel

landscapes of Hodler are visions of a world

frozen in time and space. Evacuated and dreamlike, they

conform

to

no conventional rules of landscape painting and,

unlike the paintings of his exact contemporary

Van Gogh,

lack

bravura facturc and cxpressionistic color contrasts. Most

striking of

all,

however, Hodler renounces the integration of

figures or even buildings in his landscapes, a practise essential

for

Van Gogh

in his

representation of agrarian Utopias in Aries

and Auvers. Neither arc Hodler's landscapes much

like the

S\

\l

HOI. 1ST

LANDSCAPE

\1\

TIMi

125

PAUL GAUGUIN Manao

339

paintings of Cezanne,

would seem

tupapau (The Specter Watches Her) 1892. 28} x 36}

whose Mont Sainte-Victoire (190406)

to offer the closest analogy to

The Munch With

Clouds. Both artists sought completeness and stability in their

art,

but where the

latter

included

in

his

paintings

the

unavoidable elisions or lacunas of vision, the former carefully

excised

all

that

was fragmentary, untidy, or uncontrollable;

where Cezanne captured temporal

brushwork,

a juxtaposition

of

flux

warm and

through energetic
cool colors,

and

(73 x 92)

the principle of parallelism.

you see everybody walking

occasions,

they

are

represents an idea.

grouped

Walk

If there

same

in the

is

a public festival,

direction.

around

speaker

who

into a church during a religious

service: the feeling of unity will impress you.

gathered for a happy occasion,

disturbed by a dissenting voice. In
it is

On other

When we

we do not
all

like

to

is at

The work

multiplicity of outlines, Hodler's images are largely static,

same time

often built of adjacent hues of a single temperature, and of

reveals

newly apprehended order of things and

repeated shapes or outlines in accordance with his theory of

parallelism.

In

"The Mission of the

If we

Artist,"

Hodler

compare these decorative instances

nature] with occurrences from our daily

326

arose from

[of parallelism in

SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE PAINTING

we again

beautiful because

it

expresses a

the

of art
is

general harmony.

Hodler's theory of parallelism and the landscape art that

stated:

life,

be

the examples given,

easy to see that the parallelism of the events

decorative parallelism.

are

find

it

much as a
To represent nature and society by

articulated a social or political as

compositional imperative.

means of a system of decorative

parallels

was

to

make the unity

340 Paul GAUGUIN The Meal,

Bananas 1891. 28^x3^(73x92)
341

PAUL GAUGUIN

Vahine no

of the Mango) 1892. 28$ x 17

or

The

te vi

{Woman

(72.7 x 44.5)

and wholeness of the work of

art

substitute

completeness and social integration lacking

in addition, to

endow the artist with

at will the

harmony and order presumed

dominated by

religious faith. Like

was,

to characterize an

popular democracy, and

Maurice Denis's arcadian April (1892),

Munch's haunting The

(1891), Hodler's The

it

heroic powers to re-create

earlier age

festivals,

the

for

in real life;

and Monet's

Voice,

Monch With Clouds displays a

344

Poplars

lyrical

decorative

balance and hierarchism quite unlike earlier Impressionist or

Realist works. Yet the "general

harmony" of which Hodler

spoke was only the mirror image of a terror that was equally

omnipresent
artist

in his art;

it is

seen in The Night in the face of the

shrinking beneath the black-shrouded figure that squats

over his loins, and in Valentine

his lover in the

would argue,

in

Agony (1915)

hours before her death.

in the jagged profiles

in the face

of

It is visible as well,

of frigid rock that Hodler

painted in the Oberland. Symbolist art reveals those feelings

of powerlessness and fear that preoccupied a generation.

Gauguin too experienced

fled

this alienation

and

and he

fright,

Europe because of it.

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN TAHITI

In an effort to restore his fading ideals, health, and finances,

Gauguin resolved
and move

to

the

in

1890 to abandon both Brittanj and Paris

French island colony of Tahiti

in

the

Polynesian archipelago. In September, he wrote to Redon:

(I

(,l

l\

WD S>

\lHOI.IS\l 1\

Mil

345

342

FERDINAND HODI.ER The

Beech Forest 1885. 39}

x S1J (101 x 131)

F Htik* v>

343

328

FERDINAND HODLER Lake Geneva

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

Seen From Chexhres 1904. 27}

IN TAHITI

x 42^ (70.2 x 108)

Maurice Denis

344

April 1892.

i4fx24

(37.5x61)

345
191

Ferdinand Hodi.er
5.

The

Valentine in

Agony

23} x 35f (60.5 x 90.5)

reasons you give

me for remaining in Europe are more

flattering than they are convincing.

although since
plans.

want

returned to Brittany

Madagascar

to

is still

go to Tahiti and

that the art

My

which you

up,

weeks

have modified

my

described the Tahitian night in a letter to his wife Mette:

is

too close to the civilized world;

my existence there.

finish

like so

much

of what will be created

down

state of primitiveness

and savagery.

today

there, as

metaphor, to the originary innocence of humanity. Three

made

mind

is

believe

only the germ

cultivate in

myself a

after his arrival at the colonial capital Papeete,

Such
the

a beautiful night

same as

Gauguin sought

longing to "go back,

my

far

to indulge fully his primitivist

back ... as

far

back as the dada from

childhood, the good old wooden horse." As his words

suggest, Tahiti for

Gauguin represented both

artistic regression.

To

return to his

go and

own childhood

live

and,

among
in

personal and

indigenes meant to

the familiar Rousseauisl

do

this night;

Thousands of persons

these people

are doing

abandoning themselves

living, leaving their children to

village,

In Tahiti,

it is.

Gauguin

grow up quite

roam about everywhere, no matter

no matter by what road, sleeping

in

to sheer

alone. All
into what

any house,

eating etc., without even returning thanks, being equally

ready to reciprocate.
.

the\

They

And

these people are called savages!

sing; they never steal;

do not

kilt

\'wn

mj door

Tahitian

is

lorama (good morning, good bye, thanks,

Oinitu

(I

don't care, what does

GAUGUIN

WD S\

it

never closed;

words describe them:

etc.)

and

mailer, etc.) and the) arc

\lHOl ISM l\

Mill

329


called savages!

keen

heard of the death of King Pomarc with

The

regret.

Tahitian

and the old order

Our

soil is

hecoming quite French,

missionaries have already introduced a good deal of

he would regain his mastery.

Munao tupapau (The

Gauguin depicted
identified as

spectator.

She

and

above

race. ...

should

memory

have your

like to

to learn

violet,

Specter

1892),

whom

he

bed, facing the

on yellow-white sheets, shaded with blue

lies

bedspread printed

and flowers. The background

the language quickly, for very few here speak French.

Watches Her,

young Tahitian woman

Tehura, lying on her stomach on

Protestant hypocrisy and arc destroying a part of the

country, not to mention the pox which has attacked the

whole

named La Nouvelle Cvthcrc),

(Tahiti had indeed once been

In

gradually disappearing.

is

blue with yellow

in

fruit

orange, and blue,

violet, pink,

is

illuminated with white and green sparks or light-bursts.

As

was

his letter indicates, Tahiti

and

reality

once

at

profound disappointment

dream-becomc-

to

Gauguin;

he-

observed native selflessness giving ground to European greed

and

freedom

sexual

traditional

surrendering

to

cash

economy, and responded with nostalgia and bittersweet

imaginings. Childhood and native innocence were frequent
subjects in Gauguin's Tahitian art at this time, appearing, for

example,
340

Te Hare farani (The Flowers of France, 1891) and

in

The Meal, or The Bananas (1891). In the

shown behind an overlarge

children are

latter

work, three

table covered with

white paper or canvas and an assortment of still-life objects

bananas, lemons, a knife, a half-eaten guava, a gourd and

ceramic bowl, and

wooden bowl

with water.

filled

The odd

disjunction of scale between the table and children

appear to be

at least

(who

on the verge of adolescence) and the

simple tripartite division of the composition

attempt to represent the meal from

else to reconstruct childish

a child's

and native

may

be an

point of view, or

seeing.

women, which

Gauguin's depiction of young native

Above and

from

his art

his arrival in Tahiti in 1891 until his

death in 1903, seems to arise from some of the same personal

and cultural impulses

One day

innocence, so indigenous

women

were associated

in

Gau-

natural

fecundity

and beneficence,

as

drop

o'clock in the morning.

saw

341

Teha'amana

in

colonial

and demographic

in its birth rate since the

well, the acquisition

vahines

Vahine no

te vi

a successful

in

epoch of

and depiction

(Woman of the Mango,

as

1892),

for a powerlessness before

stockbroker,

to the caprice of patrons

"House of Pleasure"
Marquesas

in 1871

Gauguin was

left

Union Generale

1882 to the legitimate demands of his wife, Mette

Gadd, and

330

vigor:

women), such

(wives,

vulnerable by the spectacular collapse of the

bank

Tehura

had promised to

When

home

till

(as

and

critics.

he called his

Islands), in this land of

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

last

Now,

house

in his

in

the

"amorous harmony"

IN

TAHITI

one

opened the door ...

down on

lay motionless, naked, belly

the bed;

she stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear, and she

seemed not

to

know who

moment,

was. For a

too

felt a

strange uncertainty. Tehura's dread was contagious:

seemed

me

to

staring eyes.

that a phosphorescent light

had never seen her so

it

poured from her

lovely;

above

all, I

had

never seen her beauty so moving. And, in the half-shadow,

which no doubt seethed with dangerous apparitions and

ambiguous shapes,

feared to

make

ment, in case the child should be

.

Perhaps she took me, with

those legendary

The

demons

the slightest

terrified out

move-

of her mind.

my anguished face, for one of

or specters, the Tupapaus that

the sleepless nights of her people.

picture,

and the

artist's

description of

veritable encyclopedia of primitivism

young native woman

mind" by

is

it,

appears to be

and misogyny. That the

portrayed as "terrified out of her

"specters," suggests that she

ruled by emotion

is

stereotypes of native peoples as mentally inferior to West-

was a means of compensating

modernity. Once

[her].

didn't get

means of

Napoleon. For Gauguin as

of successive

to Papeete.

thought, a characterization consistent with widespread racist

for a vanished military

a significant

go

as a whole, the acquisition of colonial

France had suffered an ignominious defeat by Prussia

and

to

and mysticism and incapable of disinterestedness and rational

possessions (Tahiti was only annexed in 1881) was a

compensating

with the

first

and sexual prerogative.

restoration of male political authority

For the French nation

well

as

was obliged

return that evening, but ...

filled

guin's mind, as in the collective colonialist imagination, with

oiManao

the genesis

published in 1897:

as in his paintings of children. Just as

children represented a lost and earnestly sought natural

Gauguin described

tupapau in Noa Noa, his Tahitian diary and novel,

dominated

to the left stands a figure in profile dressed in a

black robe and cowl.

erners.

"The Tahitians

are veritable children," Henri

le

Chartier wrote in his 1887 book on the French colonies of

Polynesia, "[and of a marked] fickleness.
trait

of their character

forest,

is

But the principle

superstition: the solitude of the

the darkness of the night and especially spirits

tupapaus

frighten them." Moreover, Gauguin's association

own rekindled desire

affirms the misogynist canard that women "long to be taken,
violently," as Gauguin wrote in Noa Noa. At the same time,
Gauguin's own Oedipal fear of losing mastery, control, or
of the young woman's dread with his

even bodily integrity before the body of

suggested by

his discussion

his

young lover

and representation

in

is

Manao

tupapau of "half-shadows," "dangerous apparitions," "am-

39

346 ODILONREDON "Death: My Irony

Exceeds All Others," from To Gustave Flaubert
1889.

Ityx7}

(26.2 x 19.7)

biguous shapes," "demons," and "specters." For Gauguin, as

for other

Symbolists such as Redon and Munch,

alternatively blessed virgins

women were

and femmes fatales whose

ent sexuality portended castration and death. Like

346

tupapau, Redon's lithograph "Death:

My

insist-

Manao

Irony Exceeds

all

Others," from his album entitled To Gustave Flaubert (1889),

(ca.

and seized by demons or

a skeleton. Fugit

1887), a small independent bronze derived

Amor

from two

depicts the pair of adulterers described by

the

Second Circle of

Hell.

As

in the

Profundis Clamavt (Out of the Depths

Dante

as inhabiting

drawing entitled De

Have

I Cried)

from The

Flowers of Evil, the sculpture represents, as a critic in 189S

unions of lust and death that threaten masculine authority.

wrote, the "dangerous enigma" of the feminine:

dominance

in

his colossal

and uncompleted Gates of Hell

(1880-1917), and his twenty-two illustrations for Baudelaire's

Flowers of Fvil (1887
sculpture,

women

portal, twisting

8),

among

veritably cascade

and writhing

and orgasm. In the

other works. In the former

latter

in

from the Dantesquc

simultaneous death shudder

ink drawings,

women

are

shown

dead and dying, luring and repelling male embraces, entwined

350

similar figural groups on the right-hand panel of the Gates,

and Munch's etching The Kiss (1895) represent those unholy

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) also depicted themes of male

347

in lesbian love

"She

flics

along, listless and disdainful, her lips curling with a smile of

victorious witchery."

Like

the

paintings

and

prints

contemporaries

of his

mentioned above, though unlike the anodyne sculpture The

IValtZ (1891) by

his

Rodin based many of

lover C.amillc Claudel

his

works on cliched themes of sexual

violence and the Jem me fat ale. Yet there

erotic

extremism

(i

\l (,l

in

IN

(1864 1943),

is at

the

same time an

some of Rodin's works, such

WD si

\lliOl

[SM IN

as in the

Mini

34 (

>

347

332

AUGUSTE RODIN

The Gates of Hell 1880^1917-

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

TAHITI

22'3| x 13'U x 33i (680 x 400 x 85)

348

AUGUSTS RODIN
Height

ca. 1890.

349
18x

/to, Messenger

of the Gods

37J- (95.3)

CAMILLE CLAUDEL The Waltz

1905.

13 x 1\ (46.4 x 33 x 19.7)

350

AUGUSTE RODIN

15 x

18Jx 7^(38x48x20)

Fugit

Amur

ca.

sculpturally raw and genitally frank

(ca. 1890),

.Messenger of the Gods

348

or in the several masturbation drawings, that would

appear to permit

one which,
"allows

Iris,

very different interpretation of sexuality,

as the art historian

women

Anne Wagner

to possess their bodies."

has written,

Something of the

same dichotomy between masculine control and dispossession,

believe,

women and

is at

work

in

Gauguin's treatment of Tahitian

of the cultural construct called "the primitive."

Indeed, the question of Gauguin's primitivism and attitude

women is much more complex than initially suggested

by Manao tupapau. In depicting tupapaus and in employing
toward

the Tahitian

language

in

his

title,

Gauguin was

celebrating aspects of the native culture that

in

fact

the French

colonial authorities were attempting to suppress in the

name

of "assimilation," the stated policy of subjecting the islands

and

their inhabitants to

French

legal

and economic obli-

gations and cultural controls. Instrumental to this policy was

the effort of Catholic and Protestant missionaries to eradicate
local religious beliefs

religion

and instruct the natives

in

Christian

and the French language. Gauguin's depiction of

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN TAHITI

333

339

35i

PAUL GAUGUIN Mahana

native "superstition" in
title

no atua (Day of the

Manao tupapau and

must therefore be seen

to assimilation

God)

1894. 26J x 36 (68.3x91.5)

use of a Tahitian

in the context of native resistance

and what the

the colonial

artist later called

"reign of terror." Absent from Gauguin's picture

hypocritical

is

any of the

smugness or ignorant condescension found

in

Chartier, quoted above, or in the travel writer Mativet,

argued

in his

who

1888 guide to La Nouvelle Cy there that tupapaus

nightmares,

and

reality.

Gauguin, by contrast,

appears to have recognized that spirits (Mo'a) played a crucial

role in Tahitian culture

the

tupapaus

and

religion. Indeed, spirits

form one half of the basic

antithesis" (as the anthropologist

secular, wordly, or

human.

constant interaction with

sharks,

334

pigs,

horses,

"conceptual

is

be in almost

which can take the form of

dogs, cats, and birds.

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

IN

among
of his

inevitability

is

Noa Noa

called

is

one

others, of his frank recognition of the

own

separation as a

European from

Polynesian spirituality.

Thus Gauguin's
ally, is

trism.

phenomenon gener-

While nineteenth-century primitivism

was mostly notable

peoples were
it

primitivism, like the

not reducible to simple masculinism and Eurocen-

fit

for its

(or exoticism)

naked assertion that non-European

only for conquest, conversion, or extirpation,

also at times fostered critical reflection

upon the

differences

between Western and non-Western cultures, and upon the

failures of the former. In the letter to

Gauguin

clearly

engaged

Redon

already cited,

in this primitivist dialectic:

Noa, meaning

To be a Tahitian is to

spirits,

such as

Douglas Oliver writes) of

Polynesian culture, the other half of which

indication,

Le

were simply the result of indigenous confusion between sleep,

dreams,

Gauguin's Tahitian diary novel

Indeed, that

TAHITI

Gauguin

is

finished here, and no one will see

Yet you know that

photographs

and

am

an

drawings,

egoist.

whole

him anymore.

carry with
little

me

world

in

of

comrades that bring

of all you have done.
star; in

."] is

have memories

my mind the image of a

my case to Tahiti, I do not dream

also have in

promise you, but on the contrary of eternal

not death

death with
.

pleasure; of you,

following this, in

of death,
life

me

its

in life

but

serpent's

upward among

phrase of Wagner that explains

the practitioners

enveloped in a

My

[Redon's "Death:

tail

inescapable, but in Tahiti,

roots pushing

Europe, that

in death. In

life

it

Irony

must be seen with

the flowers. ...

my thought:

its

recall a

"I believe that

of great art are glorified, and that,

of rays, perfumes and

tissue

celestial

melodious concord, they

will

be restored for

the breast of the divine sources of

all

eternity to

harmony."

green mandorla, her loins are accented by

calves are

below.

Here

is

his letter to

Redon conforms

that sanctioned violence

women and men

and the feminine

in

Eurocentrism

to the reigning

upon the bodies of

real

Tahitian

during the 125 years since their "discovery"

On

by Captain Samuel Wallis.

the other hand, however,

seen a jigsaw-puzzle pattern of colors that bears only

antipode to the

upper

illusionistic,

European manner seen

direction

two

of liberating

color

from

the

slavish

labor

of

illusionism, thereby paving a road that leads to the nonrepre-

new twentieth-century

and Mondrian,

as well

appreciation of the esthetic

achievements of non-Western and especially indigenous

peoples.

In

Mahana

no atua, as in

many

of his other Tahitian works

such as Faaturuma (Reverie, 1891), Te Faaturuma (Silence, or

To Be Dejected, 1891), Fatata

the

te miti

We

Going? (1897), Gauguin admits profound

own

cultural heritage

and posits the

instrumentalism and hierarchism that sanctioned European

exploitation.

By

jettisoning the "death in life" of Europe

and

embracing the culture of Polynesia, Gauguin was expressing

an internationalism that was as rare as

it

was potentially

352 PAUL GAUGUIN Te faaturuma

36x27(91.2x68.7)

(Silence, or I'n

Be Dejected)

subversive in an age of empire. Indeed, Gauguin was a

consistent supporter of indigenous rights, jeopardizing his

own

life

the

in

Marquesas by protesting

in

support of

Polynesian rights in February 1903 (two months before his

death) in a letter to the French colonial governor: "This
hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality,
nity

under the French

on

flag takes

respect to [native] people

who

are

and Frater-

a singular irony with

no more than

tax fodder in

the hands of despotic gendarmes."

351

In Gauguin's

Mahana

no atua (Day of the God, 1894), he

has juxtaposed, without hierarchy or favor, several religious

and

pictorial traditions. In the

women, men, and children

upper third of the painting,

are

naturalistically

depicted

beneath an azure sky streaked with white clouds. Behind them

are a line of breaking waves, yellow sand, and a distant village

with houses, a horseman, and boaters. In the middle of this

zone stands the monumental statue of a god inspired

at

once

by Easter Island megaliths, Buddhist figures from the temple

of Borobudur

in

Java, and the feminine Tahitian deity Hina.

In the middle third of the painting are three figures, sitting or

reclining

on pink sand.

To

the

left, a

child lies facing us with

head resting on hands, legs bent, and toes touching the water;
to the right,
fetal

another child facing away from us,

posture; in the center a

woman

graceful contraposto: her upper torso

is
is

is

folded into

facing us, posed in a

framed by

kind of

GAUGl

IN

352

(Near the Sea, 1892) and

monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We?

uncertainties about his

very

in the

century painter progressed further than Gauguin in the

Western cultures was an

of the

would mirror.

Cezanne, no other nineteenth-

Besides

registers.

Where Are

criticism

it

Here, the sensuality of color has its own way; the lower third of
Mahana no atua thus represents the abstract, Polynesian

Gauguin's Utopian embrace of the natural "harmony" of nonexplicit

phantasmagorically colored water

sentational achievements of Kandinsky

the one hand, Gauguin's vulgar association of the

primitive, the non-European, the natural,

in the

water constitutes the lower third of the painting.

the merest resemblance to the upper world

as to the

On

immersed

The

red pareu and her

\ND NYMHOl ISM

1\

TAHITI

(35

353

353

PAUL GAUGUIN Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We

value of a

new

syncretic and international culture. In these

works, Western illusionism

is

juxtaposed to non-European

Going? 1897. 54x 12'3J (139x 374.5)

lists

and

was the

to their friend Levi-Strauss, "primitive" art

expression of an equilibrium between

humans and nature

abstraction and patterning, Christian deities are paired with

which aboriginal cultures had achieved but which capitalism

Hindu, Buddhist, or Tahitian gods, and European narratives

destroyed.

of

fall

and redemption are transformed into parables of

The

goal of the Surrealist

movement,

Breton wrote, "was the elaboration of

therefore, as

myth

collective

healthful eroticism and natural abundance. Moreover, native

appropriate to our time" that could resurrect a primitive

women

balance between nature and society, albeit at a

are depicted in the works cited above as intellectual

and contemplative people

much

Europeans,

less

(a relative

novelty in depictions of

Polynesians),

and possessed of

powerful and independent sexuality.

and

at

times

even

Gauguin anticipated the stance of the

Breton

who wrote

realism

is

with

brigandage

against
.

all

wholly

Surrealist author

first

because

it

Andre

has sided

forms of imperialism and

and secondly because of the profound

between surrealism and primitive thought."

336

unsuccessful),

years after Gauguin's death: "Sur-

with peoples of color,

allied

them

fifty

ness.

Gauguin's

much

higher

achievement and global interconnected-

art

and

thought,

finally

conceived

generation before Freud, Levi-Strauss, and the Surrealists

In this radical ethnographic endeavor (admittedly partial,

contradictory,

level of technological

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM

To

white

affinities

the Surrea-

IN TAHITI

lack this progressive notion of an aujliebung, or transcendence

to a historically higher level.

In

common

with the other

Symbolists, Gauguin sought refuge from modernity in a

remote and unspoiled land;

like

them, too, he was frightened

by, and yet accepted (at times even revelled in), his

own

powerlessness and marginality. Unlike them, however, he

posited in his art a primitive alternative to the European social

and cultural order.

16

THE FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF

CEZANNE
SYMBOLISM IN EXTREMIS

vehement

what Kahn called "the near

in disdaining

at

hand

and the compulsorily contemporaneous," but very different

THE

ART OF PAUL GAUGUIN WAS PAINTED ON

canvas as large as the French imperium. Enacting the

modern roles of tourist and

Paris to Pont-Aven,

Gauguin

colonialist,

Quimper,

traveled from

Aries, Martinique, Papeete,

and the Marquesas, seeking consolation for the

of a

loss

bourgeois and masculine prerogative in the metropolis. In so

doing, Gauguin, like
fleeing
is,

many avant-gardists before him, was also

modernization and indeed history

itself

fleeing, that

those forces of "universalizing civilization" that

artist

left

the

victim to the caprice of the market during a period of

economic depression. For the most

Gauguin brought along

baggage on

as

we have

part,

seen,

his travels the various

hierarchies that generally sustained Europeans of his gender

and

class.

commit

In Tahiti he dreamed of rape

it)

he did not actually

and he swaggered and patronized,

colonialist bureaucrat.

was

(if

Yet

in the end,

it

was

to his Surrealist descendants) that the

at first, like

clear to

him

any

(as

it

dynamics of flight

from what has been considered here thus

was internationalist

that, like

conception of art as

Great Refusal

reason;

mapped

the

human freedom;

in

his

later

game

question

in

in

words) "the

which the dice

played to enshrine

is

may be

critical values

is

during the 1860's and

can

be

foundation

bomb,

of

detonate beneath

set to

Cezanne stimulated
'70's.

during which he created

that

celebration

and Utopia. These

Academy, and the Salon. Undoubtedly the wild

child of Impressionism,
ies

contrary

detected in the art of Cezanne. For the

young Cezanne, painting was

the Ecole, the

surrender,

erotic

culture,

its

critical

Yet he also attained

apoplexmaturity

manner of painting and drawing

nothing

called

liberation as

also

nevertheless created a

Herbert Marcuse's

Great Refusal

the

traditional

utopianism. In his extreme retreat from metropolitan culture,

and mimesis, Gauguin

839

Western progress, power, modernization, and instrumental

complexity and

Classical painting,

(in

to accept the rules of a

and retrospection also propelled an unallayed radicalism and

contours of a future cultural realm of sensual gratification and

He

( 1

Gauguin's, announced the modernist

The game

are loaded."

his.

Where Gauguin
Cezanne

in his perspective, Paul

1906) was almost parochial in

body of work

far.

critical

than

less

logic.

It

dialectical

was an

in

its

art of sensual

much as one of formal rigor and it thus laid a

for much of the artistic accomplishment of the

twentieth century.

masculinism and primitivism, he

charted an expressive terrain more truly androgynous and

internationalist than any that

before; in his retreat

had been imagined

from modernity and partisan

also explored the radical political potential of an

art

that

intransigently

refused

the

in

Europe

politics,

he

autonomous

blandishments

of

art

was thus an extremist and

dialectical

response to the alienation and despair that wracked the

Symbolist generation. Yet there was

achieved

artistic

The

art

and career of Paul Cezanne

book devoted

deplored contemporaneity.

Gauguin's

PAUL CEZANNE AND THE END OF

NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART

at

least

one other

response during the fin de stale, equally

century

art.

to

The

the

reason

critical
is

is

the logical endpoint of a

examination of nineteenth-

simple: no artist was

more

critical

than he himself in exploring both the cognitive and perceptual

mechanisms of seeing and representing; indeed,

more

clearly than an) before

it

his art reveals

the inseparabilit) of these two

meanings of the word "seeing." Though Cezanne benefited

from the

greatly

of Delacroix, Courbet,

insights

artistic

Manet, and Pissarro, he alone risked the destruction of

mimesis

quest for a manner of representation that was

in the

and the

true to both individual apperception

reality.

To

achieve this dialectical seeing,

paradigms had

be suspended and

to

all

"Cezanne's doubt," as the

uncertainty, the doubt of a

I

the end of his

life.

told

at times even

was

am

primal

the primitive

Emile Bernard

at

Yet the new language he spoke was so

and compelling that few afterwards could even

articulate

remember, much

therefore emerges as most salient from a survey of

Cezanne's

art

is

the aspect of search, invention, discovery, and

Indeed, in the course of his long career,

Cezanne changed from

revolutionary.

From an artist who,

antagonism

in heroic

Romantic rebel

like

to

cultural

Delacroix, saw himself

he became an

to a corrupt world,

From

be

represented

revolutionism

preceded

it.

assumed

and
a

an

Yet

understood.

his

artistic

form different from any that

point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation

life."

him "commu-

nard," "intransigent," and "anarchist," he mostly eschewed

politically

charged subject matter. Unlike the painting of his

almost equally admired Manet, Cezanne's revolutionary work

was not the

result of unprecedented esthetic effects:

though he

was judged incompetent and insolent by most contemporary

critics,

he understood, respected, and

made

extensive use of

the greatest masterpieces of the past.

The
matter

radical
of, in

works

exist

sphere and

political

opposition

silent

in

and sensual
to

Western society "suffocated

in

the cultivation of kitsch." Cezanne's art thus

becomes the

signal instance of that modernist paradigm, the revolutionary

artwork that

is at

same time

the

apolitical.

usual terms of art historical analysis

reception

critical

For

this reason, the

sources and

stylistic

beyond

stretched

are

their

and

limits

in

attempts to describe the works produced after about 1885.

Formal analysis and

that

dialectics provide the only vocabularies

make any sense for understanding the mature

"A man,

Cezanne.

Russian

Cezanne

a tree,

up

paintings of

an apple, are not represented" wrote

Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Wassily

painter

in building

in

in

Art" (1912), "but used by

a painterly thing called a 'picture'."

knowledge

newness of Cezanne's paintings was instead

as

nonconceptual objects."
to this formulation,

The

best works by

do not represent the

world, they are themselves worlds. "In front of a work by

Cezanne," wrote Maurice Denis

in 1907,

"we

think only of

the picture; neither the object represented nor the artist's

personality holds our attention.

And

picture and a classic picture, the

if at

once we

word begins

say: this

to take

on

precise meaning, that, namely, of an equilibrium, a reconciliation of the objective

of Cezanne

may

Cezanne began

then

in

1839

in

fairly

be seen as

festivals that flourished

during

the middle years of the century. In addition, the

young

Cezanne admired and emulated

Sorrow, or

Mary Magdalen

century

(ca.

in early paintings,

artists,

CEZANNE AND THE END OF 19TH-CENTURY ART

such as

1867) and Pastoral Scene

work of native Baroque and

(ca.

early nineteenth-

such as the Neoclassical history painter and

landscapist Francois-Marius Granet (1775-1849), in an effort

to

uphold or revive regional Aixois traditions of religious and

landscape
a

art.

Provencal

after

In

artist his

national artistic

back

fact,

it

to

life

may be argued that Cezanne remained

whole

having come to

life;

monuments,

its

even

know and

in his final

two decades,

share in the fervid, inter-

of the French capital, Cezanne was drawn

Aix as to a magnet

its

scenery,

its

architectural

legends, and traditions. In the last two years

before his death, he devoted

victory over an

more time than ever before

army of invading Teutons and

to the

Roman

the fabled

He also concentrated upon the theme of bathing,

partially in homage to the Roman Aquae Sextiae

perhaps

from the expression of

Aix-en-

Mistral (1830-1914), and attended the local Corpus Christi

and other religious and secular

omous"

refrain

Born

Provence, he read the vernacular Provencal poetry of Frederic

origin of Aix.

These

by embracing the cultural reviva-

lism that dominated his native region.

instances of what the twentieth century has termed "autoncreation.

his career

depiction of Mont Sainte-Victoire, site of the ancient

and the subjective."

The mature works

CEZANNE'S DEVELOPMENT: THE QUEST

FOR TOTALITY

1870), the

Adorno's phrase, their "inherent structure. They

Cezanne, according

virtue of their intellectual rigor

such

desirability,

degraded

By

much admired Courbet,

was not the product of an insurgent

content: though artists and critics alike called

338

... As

itself.

he became an

verities of the past,

Unlike the work of his

Cezanne's radical art

is a

mediated through

writes, "is

who devised a means through which a new cultural order

could

are

of a just

the

Ingres before and the Symbolists after, dreamed of a

artist

art

"Concerning the Spiritual

who,

words, "submissive to nature."

upon the moral

Adorno

artist

in his

like

as

artist

who was

future based

autonomous artwork,

(he-

The

influences, literary iconography, biographical references,

less speak, the old.

critical synthesis.

In

Impressionists in their years of greatest achievement.

nothing other than the form of the work

it,

utterance. "I

discovered," Cezanne

of the way that

What

first

of thai

eminently constructed and produced objects, such works of

artistic-

existentialist philo-

sopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty described

name

we saw was only glimpsed

"free space" that

facts of material

vocabulary devised. The task was daunting, and

debilitating.

human

previous

wholly new formal

ameliorative social or political solutions in the

354

PAUL CEZANNE

354

Pastoral Scene ca. 1870. 251 * 31} (65 x 81)

(Waters of Sextius) that gave the town

began and concluded

its

name. Cezanne thus

his career desiring to

product of his beloved land; he would surely have wished

said of him, as the poet

"produced

Max Buchon

his paintings as

the future Naturalist writer,

be the natural

entitled

woman

it

in

and

simply as an apple-tree produced

my

The Rape

youth, Cezanne roamed the Provencal countryside

".

and the

cadaver with angular bod)

the deathly Self-Portrait (ca. 1861

(ca.

is

the

2),

Latin about the

others

depicting

intony

murders,

(ca.

1870).

orgies,

and

Cezanne

the violent

1867), the tormented Pastoral Scene,

Temptation of Saint

brooks, and clouds he saw, and the

a pale

and dull empty eyes." This

with his friend Emile Zola, and rhapsodized in French and

hills,

a verse allegory

arms who had been so pink and rosy suddenly

rattling bones,

who painted

Cezanne enclosed

Terrible Story," which concludes:

disappeared and turned into

did of Courbet, that he

apples."

As

"A

and the

an

autopsy,

arc-

panpipes, shepherds, and maidens' love of which he dreamed.

passionate, violent, and expressionistic, invested

But

energy and vehemence of an unresolved Oedipal nightmare.

darker romantic vision also accompanied him on his

rambles, and from this the innovative

letters written to

assumed

artist

emerged. In

In the Temptation,

Zola in Paris after 1858, Cezanne frequently

in

tone of Baudelairean irony and spleen in describing

his sadistic

and misogynist

fantasies. In

one

letter

own

of 1859 to

lie sits

with the

young Paul (prematurely bald) appears

the guise of the tempted and tormented Saint

Pastoral Scene,

356

These works, and

uncomfortabl)

version of Manet's Dejeuner;

in

in
/

\ntonv; in

die foreground of his

Modern Olympia

EZANNE'S DEVELOPMENT: QI EST FOR TOTA1

111

(ca.

339

355

869 70), he

Even

is

pasha seated

stiffly

before his concubine.

the portraits of his father are painted in a high emotional

timbre. In the Portrait ofLouis-AugUSte Cezanne, Father oj the

Reading L'Evenemenl (1866), the

Artist,

awkwardly separated from

his crossed legs

of the newspaper slicing across his groin.

is

similarly cut off

in front

from

his

torso

sitter's

is

by the bottom edge

The

erect right

body by the newspaper, and

arm
set

is

of an ominous shadow of gray/orange on the high-

backed easy chair. In each of these works, Cezanne demonstrates a willingness to flout

The

conventions.

moral proprieties and

artistic

violence, eroticism, confessional character,

and purposeful awkwardness of these early paintings

led

observers to characterize them as childish and naive.

Throughout these
works

to the

be accepted.

eminent

years,

He

even had the temerity

Nieuwerkerke,

demanding

Cezanne repeatedly submitted

in

I860 to write to the

Superintendent

of

second Salon des Refuses and,

Fine
in

Arts,

effect,

apology for past injuries. In a reprise of Courbet's words

355

PAUL CEZANNE A

356

Paul Cezanne The Rape

Modern Olympia
ca. 1867.

ca.

1869-70. 22x21f(56x55)

35^x46(90.5x117)

his

Salon with the knowledge that they would never

an
in

am unable
colleagues whom I

1853 to the same Nieuwerkerke, Cezanne wrote: "I

judgment of

to accept the unauthorized

have not myself appointed

to evaluate

my

work." Thus

rejecting the cultural authority of the state, as he did his

340

CEZANNE'S DEVELOPMENT: QUEST FOR TOTALITY

359

outlining of nose and brow serves both to establish the contour

of the face and to flatten

it

against the background plane. This

quality of pictorial consistency or totality

monumental

anything found

unlike

is

at

once naive and

work of

the

in

Cezanne's Romantic, Realist, and Impressionist predecessors

and foreshadows the achievements of the mature

artist.

In The Rape (probably representing Pluto's abduction of

Persephone), Cezanne focuses equally upon the nude fore-

ground

middle-

figures, the female attendants in the left

ground, and the truncated

Mont

Sainte-Victoire

in

the

background. Painted with looping and undulating strokes of

paint, the riverbank, water, foliage,

mountain, and sky are

given nearly equal visual weight, suggesting an all-over two-

dimensional structure and balance that act as a counterforce to

the emotional depth and expressiveness of the narrative. In

other words, even though the picture represents a misogynist

dream,

suggests

detachment, abstractness, and

its

style

objectivity.

Even

sional fears

and hatreds of modern woman, he struggled

overcome them

in

as the

young Cezanne indulged

his obsesto

order to re-order vision and design into

single unified procedure.

358
357

PAUL CEZANNE

ca.

Portrait of Uncle Dominique 1866.

PAUL CEZANNE

Portrait of the Painter, Achille Emperaire

1868-70. 78} x 48 (200 x

122)

15xl2

(39.5 x 30.5)

father's career wishes for

him (Louis-Auguste would have

preferred his son to be a banker or lawyer, like himself),

Cezanne became

romantic and an intransigent. Despising

the person and rule of

Napoleon

III,

and approving the

character and politics of Jacques Vingtras (from Jules Valle's

anarchist novel of the

but not yet

same name), the young

a revolutionary.

difference:

"The

transcends

it

artist

was

a rebel

Jean-Paul Sartre described the

revolutionary wants to change the world; he

and moves toward the future, toward an order of

values which he himself invents.

The

rebel

is

careful to

preserve the abuses from which he suffers so that he can go on

rebelling against them.

He

always shows signs of a bad

conscience and of something resembling a feeling of guilt. He-

does not want to destroy or transcend the existing order; he

simply wants to

rise

up against

it."

Indications of the future revolutionary temperament are,

however, also visible

in the early, cxpressionistic paintings.

Their stark contrasts of

tonality, shrill juxtapositions of hue,

and dense coagulations of paint (often applied with variously

shaped palette knives) are new and noteworthy. But what
most important
is

357

in

is

Cezanne's pictures from before about 1873

their pictorial clarity

and sense of expressive

totality. All

parts of, for example, the Portrait of Uncle Dominique (1866)

are

equally

dense,

worked,

and

elaborated.

The

black

CEZ \\\l

s Dl

ELOPMI NT

<}l

EST FOR TO

\l

l\

.541

Lawrence Gowing, the

358

Rape and

and painter, has

historian

art

summarized Cezanne's achievement

works such

in

of the Painter, Achille Emperaire

Portrait

The

as

1868-

(ca.

70) as nothing less than "the invention offorme in the French

modernist

sense

meaning

of paint

condition

the

constitutes a pictorial structure.

It

is

that

the discovery of an

most part the product of paint density, composition, and tonal

contrast and not the result of choice of colors or modulation.
is

as if the colorless genre of

It

as the art historian

and curator John Elderfield has written, was

fully

adequate

to

express the violent dreams and Oedipal longings of the

youthful

artist.

medium and the material."

intrinsic structure inherent
What Gowing refers to as forme may be seen, for example, in

cal

the tectonic armature created by the insistent verticality of the

and more

in the

melodrama,

But

as

Cezanne gradually attained psychologi-

maturity (perhaps hastened by his liaison, beginning

1869, with Hortense Fiquet),

inclusive.

his artistic vision

became

As he gradually dismissed from

in

richer

his art the

formed by the sides of

cliched, adolescent roster of femmes fa tales, he increasingly

the chair, the sitter's spindly legs, the pleats in his dressing-

explored the dynamics of hue. Impressionism, and especially

Achille Emperaire: notice the parallels

gown, the black

line

running from

his red collar to his slippers,

and the attenuated Bodoni-style stenciling

These

canvas.
stability

at

at the

parallel lines create a feeling

same time

the

that

top of the

of architectural

sufficient

two-dimensional structure built from vertical and

horizontal

perception, that

wooden

ribs,

is,

of the painting as a self-

covered with canvas, and painted

with a viscous colored medium.

The
offers

some confirmation of the

"Paul

is

really very

much

important instrument of Cezanne's totalization of subjective

artist's totalizing intentions:

stronger than [Courbet and Manet].

reality.

In early 1872, during the bleak

Commune's

night of the

dawn

following the dark

Cezanne was

destruction,

beside Pissarro at Pontoise in the

living

He de France, and learning

from him the decisive lessons of Impressionism. Cezanne

shared

1 867 correspondence of Cezanne's friend A. F. Marion

would be the most

of Pissarro,

instruction

experience and objective

they evince a sense of

picturality

the art and

with

his

anarchist

and mentor

friend

Together they discovered

method

of

love

landscape and a faith in the healing capacity of rural

life.

for representing their

feelings about the plenitude of nature; for Pissarro this

meant

He is convinced of being able, by a more skillful execution and

the depiction of peasant laborers in worked fields, and the

Thus he

creation of textural and coloristic unities of figure and ground.

perception, to admit details while retaining breadth.

would achieve

his aims,

complete." Fifteen years

and

same, as Gauguin revealed in

friend Pissarro:

works would become more

his

later,

the artist's intention was the

mocking

"Has M. Cesanne

[sic]

letter to

Cezanne's

discovered the exact

formula for a work that would be accepted by everyone? If he

should find the recipe for concentrating the
all

him

expression of

and unique procedure,

his sensations into a single

you, to get

full

to talk about

it

in his sleep

it

owe you

approximate both the motif

complex sensations he
as

feel,"

he told a

Cezanne

life,

will tell

it

to you."

light

critic in 1870,

and

and of disciplining

air

seen,
it

was precisely an

was the

artistic

1860's and early

'70's

no question that

possess an

see,

have very strong

The

is
it

sometimes violent and

art

of social and psychological distance;

work and celebrated the

petit-bourgeois

implicit

leisure.

freedom

of

Cezanne accepted

Impressionism's principled rejection of instrumentality, but

visible

from

changed and

paintings of the

unprecedented formal

consistency and tectonic structure, but they are

his

expression of a subculture that disdained

he could not accept

for artistic totality

career.

"and

Indeed, Impressionism, we have

disordered imagination.

bourgeois and

the beginning, there can be

before his subject. "I paint as

felt

Cezanne used the narrowed tonal range and prismatic hues

CEZANNE'S ARTISTIC MATURITY

grew over the four decades of his

could

it

and the powerful and

itself

sensations."

alienated

Although Cezanne's quest

the fashioning of a pictorial

of Impressionism as a means both of capturing the effects of

with us." At the end of his

the truth in painting and

method meant

beg

try,

almost believed he had found his formula; he told Bernard in

1904: "I

this

universe sufficiently complete and nuanced that

by administering

one of those mysterious homeopathic drugs and come directly

to Paris to share

For Cezanne,

still

domi-

its

frequent emotional and intellectual

shallowness. By the end of the 1870's, he had outstripped his

Impressionist

teacher

by

creating

works that are both

convincing semblances of physical objects and figures and

records of the

artist's

Compared with

own

shifting perceptions over time.

Pissarro's Village

Near Pontoise

(1873),

nated by the Baroque drama of chiaroscuro and tonal contrast.

Cezanne's House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise

Color

1873) possesses an unusually dense and clotted surface. Its

is

not yet fully integrated into their pictorial fabric. In

the paintings considered above, color functions primarily to

express

moods

or strong feelings

and only

partially to indicate

mass, volume, depth, and pictorial unity.

The

"intrinsic

structure" of Uncle Dominique and Achille Emperaire

342

CEZANNE'S ARTISTIC MATURITY

is

for the

color

is

more uniformly warm than

latter's cool

work (note the

blues alternating with the red roofs in the middle-

ground) and
teacher,

Pissarro's

(ca.

its

tonality

moreover,

is

more even. Unlike

Cezanne

marks

the

his friend

and

contours

and

362
363

359

Paul

Cf./.ANNF. Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cizanne, Father of the

78}x47|K200x

Irtist,

Reading L' Evenement [866.

120)

CEZANNE'S

\K

S II

MATURITY

343

360

361

344

PAUL CEZANNE

PAUL CEZANNE

Still Life

With Apples

The Large Bathers 1900-06. 67J x 77

CEZANNE'S ARTISTIC MATURITY

1895-8. 27 x 36H68.6 x 92.7)

ca.

(172.2 x 196

success

of tree-trunks in each), and clearly anchors trees and buildings

the charitable juror Antoine Guillemet. His few press notices

Cezanne's landscape, in sum, suggests a greater

were as uncomprehending and patronizing as they had been

in the earth.

planarity and pictorality than Pissarro's, together with a

greater
365

364

1882 when he was admitted as

boundaries of objects with broad lines (compare the treatment

mass and

Pont one

Cezanne's

(1877),

L'Estaque

(1876-8)

appears

balanced and calm. Both works employ divided and multidirectional

brushstrokes

when he
decade

solidity.

Beside Pissarro's The Cote des Boeufs at L' Hermitage, Near

of brown,

and

green,

but

blue,

coming

in

exhibited with the Impressionists nearly a

first

earlier; the Portrait

of L. A. (present whereabouts

unknown) was described by

the critic of the Dictionnaire

Veron as "a beginner's work painted

at great

fading from public view and becoming legendary. In

fast

1885,

evoke the shape, density, and surface texture of the objects

"that misunderstood man, whose nature

they describe. In addition, Cezanne has chosen to highlight

cal

and explore, rather than obscure,

Virgil

the areas in his landscape

motif that are physically and visually complex or ambiguous;

expense of

Cezanne was

color." Increasingly melancholic and reclusive,

Cezanne's strokes are broader than Pissarro's and manage to

all

"pupil" of

..

Gauguin professed admiration

for his art

is

but called him

essentially mysti-

he spends whole days on the tops of mountains reading

and gazing

at the sky."

At the same time

that he

was suffering alienation from both

thus he lavishes attention on the intersection of roof hips and

avant-garde and academic Paris, Cezanne suffered

cornices, the convex edges of buildings, the joinings of leaf to

of personal blows that further affected his

branch, the lines where mountains meet the sea, and the places

unconsummated passion

where chimneys

(or masts?) break the horizon.

Aix

Comparison of these landscapes suggests

Cezanne may have believed

that the energy

that

while

and ephemerality

left

for a

maid from

him angry and confused.

art.

number

In 1885, an

house

his parent's

The same

at

year, Zola's cruel

portrayal of him in L'Oeuvre ended the only friendship he ever

had. In April 1886,

Cezanne grudgingly married Hortense

months

of Pissarro's Impressionism were appropriate to the depiction

Fiquet (they were already living apart), and

of transient atmospheric effects, he found the style to be too

attended his father's funeral. This latter event secured him

unstable, intangible, and inexpressive for the convincing

financially but exhausted

representation of the countryside and

that

Cezanne judged Impressionism

tiality

understood

its

people. But while

be flawed by ^substan-

and emotional remove, he also

that traditional

sical

to

definitively

academic technique, which he thoroughly

linear drawing, single-point perspective, Clas-

anatomy, tonal modeling, and chiaroscuro

flawed by

its

determined

was equally

very procrusteanism; these stolid formal tricks

were wholly inadequate

the world as he

moved through

in the late 1870's,

it,

and besides, they were the

devised an art that employed the

futility

death was

at

of

human

all

intercourse, and

hand, Cezanne

now worked

and with unprecedented dedication. His land-

still lifes,

and figure paintings progressed apace, and

his style quickly achieved the

later generation

modern and

complexity and resolve that

would see as the foundation

own

for its

abstract art.

The twenty

years between 1886 and the artist's death in

1906 spanned the careers of Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, and

They witnessed

Symbolists.

the

exhibition

the

(1886),

Eiffel

the

Tower

last

Impressionist

Exposition

in

Paris

evasive-

(1889), the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1902), the deaths of Zola

Put another way, he marshaled the dynamic, kinesthetic

(1902) and Pissarro (1903), and the exhibition of the Fauves

faceted, mosaic surface of

ness.

scapes,

to the artist's shifting perceptions of

remnant of an old and discredited order. Thus Cezanne,

beginning

ceaselessly

own

later

him emotionally. Convinced by

had transpired of the

certain that his

six

Impressionism without

its

features of Impressionist art, with the architectonic tangibility

and expressiveness of

his

early

works.

monumentality and emotional resolve

in his art;

he wished, he

make of Impressionism something

told Bernard, "to

like the art in the

Cezanne wanted
solid,

museums."

at

the

Salon d'Automne (1905).

powers of concentration or

autonomous

art

his

THE FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CEZANNE

he devised an

After exhibiting with the Impressionists in their third group

essentially struck off

kept in occasional contact with

on his own.

pictorial invention

members of

the

1)

different responses to the

motifs before him, but three basic principles of

may

be extrapolated through examination

of selected works.

Though he

paranoia,

of extraordinary formal rigor. Generaliza-

make because of Cezanne's always

Cezanne

of this had any

tions about this art, as Elderficld has observed, are difficult to

specific

exhibition in 1877,

None

discernible impact on Cezanne's art; by virtue of his unusual

Holding illusionism

(1879 82),

perverse

avoidance of linear

up the

at

humor

clarity

bay

in

results

Houses

Provence

from the purposeful

and perspectival exactness. Cezanne

edges of the two largest houses without

group (especially Renoir) he needed no further lessons from

lines

them. Nor did he try to exhibit with them; for seven out of the

clarifying their exact spatial locations, lie both reveals

next eight years he tried in vain to show

obscures the underside of roof eaves and the

at

the Salon, his only

vertical

and

of

rocks

FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CEZANNE

345

flat

tops

366

346

362

CAMILLE PlSSARRO

363

PAUL CEZANNE House

Village

Near Pontoise

1873.

24 x 31J (61 * 81)

of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise

FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CEZANNE

ca. 1873.

21f x 26 (54.9 x 66)

in

order to hide the

illusionistic

artist's

cat-and-mouse helps

and ambiguity of perception

in

the integrated surface which

2)

367

Use of

Victoire

point of view. This

to preserve the

is a

(ca.

in

Paul Cezanne

365

CAM1LLE PlSSARRO The

Pontiiiseca. 1873.

record of that perception.

364

L'Estaqueca. 1876.

1^x23^(41.9x59)

complexity

time and space, and to preserve

tectonic facture, or passage

Seen From Bibemus

game of

Mont

Cote

tics

Boeufs at L' Hermitage, Near

45J-X34J- (115x87.5)

Sainte-

1898-1900), the brushstroke

shape, size, boundary, and direction

is

independent of the

structure and texture of the objects that are represented. This

painterly freedom
resistance to

may

mimesis described above, but

illusionism

alternative

be considered another example of the

is

involved.

The

in fact a

kind of

so-called passage

brushstrokes on the rocks in the middle-ground are like

colored gemstone facets, roof shingles or overlapping

affiches;

they are themselves planes that cling to the picture surface yet

which constitute the tectonic authenticity of the rock. Once

again, the two-dimensional authority of the pictorial support
is

reconciled with the depth and breadth of nature.

3)

360

consistent concentration

Still Life

With Apples

(ca.

1895

upon the edges of things

8),

in

the most important parts

of the picture are where objects meet

lime, peach,

lemon,

tablecloth,

and goblet; pitcher, tablctop, tablecloth, shadow,

peach, apple, peach, tablecloth. At these junctions, colors are

juxtaposed and the drama of surface and depth

and understanding
totality,

it

had

to

is

sensation

enacted. For the picture to represent

comprise fugitive sensations and unantici-

pated interactions, not merely independent objects, dolors

had

to

be adjusted across the boundaries of things, and

hierarchies between absence and presence eliminated.

Ml

Kl

WD Si

C( ESS

OF CEZ \\\l

;>47

366

367

348

PAUL CEZANNE Homes

PAUL CEZANNE Mont

in

Provence (Vicinity ofL'Estaque)

Samte-Victoire Seen From Btbemus

FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CEZANNE

ca.

ca.

1879-82. 25^x 32

(64.7 x 81.2)

898-1900. 25j-x31H65x!

368

Paul Czannf. Mont

Sainte-Victoire ca. 1902 06. 33 x 25fr(83.8 x 65)

\ll

RE

WD Si

ESS OF

CEZANNl

Wi


Physical objects in Still Life With Apples arc formed from

"One should

the collision of one color with another.

model," Cezanne

What

told

Bernard, "one should say modulate."

the artist undoubtedly

meant was

that in order to attend

depth as well as the surface appearance of things, he

to the

must

traditional

reject

modeling with

The

culminant of the nearest lemon, for example,

white highlight but by

warmer (advancing) mustard.

Indeed, the entire gamut of objects

painting

not created by a

of cooler (receding)

a subtle array

greens and yellows against a

is

point

in

monumental

this

fruits, goblet, pitcher, tureen, curtains, table,

and

are constituted not by tonal modeling

and

local color

cal:

"He

Merleau-Ponty has written, was paradoxi-

art,

was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous

surface, with

no other guide than the immediate impression of

no outline

nature, without following the contours, with

to

enclose the color, with no perspectival or pictorial arrange-

ment. This

Cezanne's suicide: aiming for

is

denying himself the means to attain

contradictory,

discovered

expression of

Gauguin described

as

prescription

the

procedure?" His

art

was

when

was

"Has Cezanne
and unique

Cezanne himself

abstract, as

could not.

told

it

must be

represented by something

mass

balance

the

longing for the subordination

vitalistic

before nature. Cezanne

of facture,

expressed through

and

volume,

color,

tonality,

desire for the simultaneous independence and

cooperation of each.

Mont

Sainte-Victoire (1902 06), like the Large Bathers,

not only a depiction of a cherished subject

the painter's youth amid the
is

also a

hills

one

and waters of Provence

symphony of color modulation,

it

at

of blue,

and brown, applied with discrete oblong brushstrokes,

up-and-down and

an

create

side-to-side

jostling;

browns and yellows and cooler blues and greens

peak

orchestrated with

once balanced and variegated passage. Dozens of tints

gray,

is

that recalled

outlined in blue

itself is

once,

warm

instigate a

The mountain

twice, three times

in

order both to record the kinesthesia of the painter's eye, hand,

arm, and body and

on the

of that vaunted

to assert the clarity

Both of these paintings, therefore, one focused

architecture.

human and one on

inscription of the

the natural

by

their

drama of self and environment

unmistakable

express

the

Utopian longing for a reconciliation. That image of concord,

which had

been dreamed (though somewhat

earlier

elementally) by Constable, Courbet, and

others,

was one of the most

less

Van Gogh among

salient critical legacies of the

nineteenth century.

"As eminently constructed and produced

writes,

"[autonomous artworks] point

which they abstain: the creation of

objects,"

Adorno

to a practice

from

To combine

a just life."

perception and apperception, the sensual and the cognitive,

by color."

Paradoxical, contradictory, and abstract, Cezanne's late

paintings might also be called Utopian.

362

humans

subtle

was only

discovered that the sun, for instance, could

not be reproduced, but that

else ...

art

compressing the intense

for

Denis: "I wished to copy nature, but

satisfied

His

it."
it:

reality while

his sensations into a single

all

of

constant shuttling between surface and depth.

but by color modulation.

Cezanne's

expressed

artists

and dark and

light

instead modulate with warm and cool hues.

cloth

not say

Though

they recall,

the intellectual and the emotional within a single

so

Adorno argues

is

to

betoken a

work of art

totality that is

absent in a

unlike Ensor's, no fabled past of popular enchantment, and

world scarred and fragmented by modernization and an

though they imagine, unlike Seurat's, no future of sensual

exclusive reliance

harmony, they are nevertheless themselves dreams of con-

totality in his art,

cord, cooperation, and totality. In The Large Bathers (1900-

society in the very

one of three monumental paintings on

06),

made

in the artist's last half-decade, the

earth, plant,

each

is

is

subject

boundaries between

and human are elided while the autonomy of

assured.

(their sex

this

The

ten bathers, irregularly outlined in blue

mostly undetermined), the three large, blue-

black trees that strain

upward

at left

and

right,

and the

yellow-brown earth below, share the task of composing the

base, sides,
like

Mont

and mass of a single great pyramid or mountain,

Sainte-Victoire

elements possess

at

the

itself.

Yet each of the three

same time

purposiveness and

upon
and

to achieve

form of the artwork

itself.

That formal

and of the
the achievement both of
labored before may be judged, however,
generations
a single artist

that

failure as well as a success.

During Cezanne's

especially in the decades that followed, the

criticism

in

form came more and more

last years,

and

embedding of
to

resemble

hibernation of criticism. Indeed, by the time Cezanne was

rediscovered by a public familiar with

tion,

art

spheres.

Cubism and

abstrac-

and cultural criticism inhabited wholly separate

The

story of that fateful segregation cannot be told

here; the effort of the present

in

Symbolists Munch, Redon, Vrubel, and Hodler. Those

best art was critical.

FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CEZANNE

Cezanne strove

doing insinuated his criticism of

insinuation

formal rigor not present in contemporary works by the

350

reason.

in so

book has been only

the nineteenth century things were

different,

to

show

that

and that the

368

CHRONOLOGY

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

1780-89
1780

1781

The American War of Independence (begun

The Gordon Riots in London.
Surrender of the troops of Lord Cornwallis
ending the British military
revolutionists.

Yorktown,
American

at

effort against the

Immanuel Kant,

in 1776) continues.

Virginia,

J.-A.-D. Ingres born.

J.-L. David, Belisarius.

John Singleton Copley, Death

of Major Peirson (completed 1784).

Kritik der reinen Vernunft

(Critique of Pure Reason). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions.

Lessing
1782

dies.

John Howard urges the reform of Newgate

prison,

London.

Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous

Liaisons).

1783

Treaty of Paris signed, granting recognition and vast lands to the

13 former American colonies. Kant, Prolegomena (Prolegomena to

Any Future
1784

Metaphysics). Mozart, Idomeneo. Stendhal born.

Beaumarchais, Le

Denis Diderot

Manage

de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).

Siddons as
1785

1786

Oath of the Horatii. Goya, The Family of

Luis. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs
The Tragic Muse.

J.-L. David,
the Infante

dies.

Don

Metaphysics of Morals). Alessandro Manzoni born.

Benjamin West, Queen Philippa Intercedes for

Burghers of Calais.

Death of Prussia's Frederick the Great. Kant, Metaphysische

J.-G. Drouais, Marius at Minturnae.

Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundations of the

the

Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical First

Principles of Natural Science). Mozart, Le

Nozze de Figaro (The

Marriage of Figaro).
1787

Federal Government established in the U.S.

The Free

African

founded in Philadelphia by Richard Allen. J. W. von

Goethe, Egmont. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitution of
Government of the USA. Mozart, Don Giovanni.
Society

1788

Louis

is

XVI summons

as finance minister.

States-General and recalls Jacques Necker

New

York

David, Death of Socrates. Tischbein, Goethe on the

Ruins in the Roman Campagna. E.-L. Vigee-Lebrun,
Marie-Antoinette With Her Children.

David, Love of Paris and Helena.

federal capital of U.S. Kant, Kritik

der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason). Arthur

Schopenhauer and Byron born.

1789

The French Revolution

begins; storming of the Bastille; feudalism

abolished; Declaration of the Rights of

Man

in

France; King and

David, Lictors Returning

to

Brutus the Bodies of His

Sons.

move from Versailles to Paris. George Washington becomes

U.S. President. William Blake, Songs of Innocence.

court
first

1790-99
1790

Louis

XVI

capital.

accepts French constitution. Philadelphia U.S. federal

Jews granted civil rights in France. Kdmund Burke,

Reflections on the Revolution in France. Kant, Kritik der

Urteilskraft (Critique of

Judgment). Alphonse de I.amartinc born.

11RONOI

(KJ<i

151

1791

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Champ de Mars.
G. von Herder, Ideen zur
Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of" a Philosophy
on the History of Man, begun 1784). Thomas Paine, Rights of

David, The Oath of the Tennis Court. Theodore

Louis

XVI

arrested at Varennes. Massacre of

James Boswell,

Man, Part

I.

Life

ofJohnson.

J.

Gericault born.

Mozart, Die Zauberflbte (The Magic Flute). Death of

Mozart.
1792

Girondist ministry in France; revolutionary

Commune

estsblished; royal family imprisoned; First Republic proclaimed;

trial

of Louis XVI; France declares war on Austria, Prussia, and

Sardinia.

Thomas

Paine, Rights of Man, Part II.

Mary

Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women. C.

de Lisle, La Marseillaise. Percy Bysshe Shelley born.

1793

Louis

XVI and Marie

J.

Rouget

Antoinette executed; Reign of Terror;

Louvre, Paris, opens. David, Death of Marat. Goya,

The Fire.

Charlotte Corday murders Marat; Robespierre and St. Just join

Committee of Public Safety headed by Danton; worship of God

banned; Holy Roman Empire declares war on France. William
Godwin, The Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. Kant, Religion

is

innerhalh der Grenzen der hlossen Vernunft (Religion Within the

Limits of Mere Reason).

1794

Supreme Being'

in Paris; Danton and St. Just executed;

Assembly abolishes slavery in French colonies;
Robespierre overthrown on 9 Thermidor (July 27). William Blake,
Songs of Experience. J. G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten
Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge). Thomas Paine,
The Age of Reason.

'Feast of

Legislative

1795

Bread

riots

and White Terror

Goya, Procession of the Flagellants. John Trumbull,

The Declaration of Independence.

in Paris; establishment of a ruling

Directory in France; French occupy Belgium. Friedrich Schelling,

Vom

Ich als Princip der Philosophic oder iiber das Unbedingte im

menschlichen Wissen (Concerning the Self as the Principle of

Philosophy or the Absolute

1796

in

Human

Knowledge).

Napoleon assumes command in Italy. Babeufs socialist

"Conspiracy of Equals" defeated in France. George Washington's
"Farewell Address." Spain declares war on Britain. Goethe,
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years).
Schelling, Das dlteste Systemprogram (System of Philosophy).

Goya, The Duchess of Alba. William Blake, Newton.

Houdon, George Washington. Edward Savage,

The Washington Family. West, Death on a Pale Horse.

J. -A.

Friedrich Schlegel, Versuch uber den Begrijf des Republikanismus

(Essay on the Concept of Republicanism).

1797

1798

Napoleon appointed to lead invasion of England. French capture

and proclaim Rome a Republic. Battle of Pyramids, Napoleon
commands. King Ferdinand IV of Naples takes Rome, French
recapture. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn (published
1816). Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Essai historique,
politique, et moral sur les revolutions anciennes et modernes dans leurs
rapports avec la revolution francaise (A historical, political and
moral study into the effect of ancient and modern revolutions on
the French Revolution). Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion. Kant,
Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysics of Morals). Haydn,
"Emperor" Quartet. Franz Schubert born.

The German

and esthetic journal

founded by K.
Schlegel brothers, as the manifesto of the new Romantic
movement.

Athenaeum published

Moon

Light.

literary

in Berlin (until 1800)

W.

F.

Napoleon's Parthenopean Republic at Piedmont; Napoleon is

made first consul on 18 Brumaire (November 19). Austria declares

war on France. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde. Friedrich

352

Turner, Millbank,

Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea. Wordsworth and Coleridge,

Lyrical Ballads.

1799

A.-L. Girodet, Portrait ofJean-Baptiste Belley.

CHRONOLOGY

David, Intervention of the Sabine Women. Goya, Los

Caprichos.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

1799

VISUAL ARTS

Schleiermacher, Uber die Religion (On Religion, third edn. 1800).

Haydn, The Creation. Giacomo Leopardi, Alexander Pushkin, and

Honore de Balzac born. Death of George Washington.

1800-09
1800

French army advances on Cairo and Vienna; Napoleon's army

conquers Italy. Washington, D.C. new federal capital of U.S.
Holderlin, three odes. Schiller,

den
1801

Roman

Mary

(Letter on the Novel).

Stuart. Schlegel, Brief uber

Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed

With the Sun. Antonio Canova, Cupid and Psyche.
David, Madame Recamier. Goya, Portrait of a Woman.
Blake, The Great

Lord Macaulay born.

Union between Ireland and Great

Britain.

assassinated, succeeded by Alexander

I.

Czar Paul

David, Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass. Goya,

Naked and Clothed Maja, and Family of Charles IV.

English enter Cairo,

French troops leave Egypt, recovered by Turks. Slavery

reintroduced in French colonies. Hegel and Schelling, Kritische

Gros, Battle of Nazareth.

Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy). Schelling,

Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of

Nature). Haydn, The Seasons.

1802

Napoleon President of
Prelude. Victor

1803

Hugo

Italian Republic.

Wordsworth begins The

Gerard,

Madame

Recamier. Girodet, Ossian Receiving

the Napoleonic Officers.

born.

France and Britain renew war. Louisiana Purchase doubles

territory of the U.S. Prosper Merimee born. Choderlos de Laclos
and J. G. Herder, theoretician of Sturm und Drang (storm and

James Barry, Self-Portrait Henry Raeburn, The

.

Macnab

portrait.

Turner, Calais

Pier.

stress), die.

1804

Napoleon proclaimed Emperor, crowned before Pope Pius VII;

Code Napoleon composed and promulgated. Schiller, William
Tell. Beethoven, "Eroica" symphony. George Sand born. Kant

Gros, Napoleon

in the

Plague House at Jaffa.

dies.

1805

Britain, Russia,

Sweden, and Austria sign treaty against France.

Napoleon King of Italy. Peace between

Battle of Trafalgar.

Austria and France. William Hazlitt,

Human

Action. Beethoven, Fidelia.

An

Essay on the Principles of

Hans Christian Andersen,

Giuseppe Mazzini, and Alexis de Tocqueville born. Schiller

1806

1807

British

Canova, Tomb of the Archduchess Maria Christina.

Goya, Dona Isabel Cobos de Procal. Philipp Otto
Runge, The Hulsenbeck Children. Turner, Shipwreck.
Samuel Palmer born.

dies.

occupy Cape of Good Hope. Prussia declares war on

End of Holy Roman Empire.

Canova, Napoleon as Mars.

F. Chalgrin begins Arc

J.

France. Napoleon enters Berlin.

de Triomphe, Paris. Ingres, Napoleon on the Imperial

John Stuart Mill born.

Throne. Bertel Thorvaldsen, Hebe.

Prussian and Russian troops fight French forces at Eylau. British

Canova, Pauline Borghese as Venus. David, The

Coronation of Napoleon. Turner, Sun Rising in a Mist.

parliament forbids slave trade. Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of

Immortality. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of
the Mind). Beethoven, "Leonora" overture.

Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow born.
1808

Act of U.S. Congress forbids importation of slaves from Africa.

French army occupies Rome, invades Spain. Napoleon recaptures
Madrid after rebellion and Joseph Bonaparte's flight. Goethe,
Faust, Part I. Charles Fourier, Theorie des quatre mouvements el
des destinees generates (The Social Destiny of Man). Heinrich
Kleist, Penlhesilea. Beethoven, "Pastoral" symphony. Gerard de

Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains.

Ingres, La Grande Baigneuse. Runge, Morning.

Nerval born.
1809

Austria and France at war. French take Vienna. Napoleon annexes

Papal States.

A.W.

Friedrich,

Monk

by the Sea.

Schlegel, Uber tlramatische Kunsl und Literatur

(Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, i vols., 1809-11).

Beethoven, "Emperor" concerto. Nikolai Gogol, Abraham
Lincoln, Felix Mendelssohn, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Alfred,

Lord Tennyson born.

llRONOl.OCiY

353

VISUAL ARTS

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

1810-19
1810

France declares abortions

illegal.

Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory

of Colors). Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake. Mme. de Stael, De

/'
Allemagne (Germany). Kleist, liber das Marionnettentheater (On
the Marionette Theater). Frederic

Friedrich, Abbey in the

Disasters of

revive

War.

German

J. F.

Oak Forest. Goya begins The

Overbeck founds 'Nazarenes' to

religious art.

Chopin and Robert Schumann

born.

1811

George

III

of England insane; Prince of Wales becomes Prince

Ingres, Jupiter

Tecumseh

Regent. William Henry Harrison defeats Indians under

and

Thetis Thorvaldsen, Procession of

Alexander the Great.

Tippecanoe, Indiana. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Theophile Gautier, Franz Liszt, and William Makepeace
Thackeray born. Kleist dies.
at

1812

Napoleon invades Russia, enters Moscow, but retreats with the

army greatly diminished. General Malet executed after attempt
end war and reinstate monarch Louis XVIII. British Prime
Minister Spencer Percival assassinated in House of Commons.

to

Canova, Venus Italica. Goya, Portrait of the Duke of

Wellington. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and His

Army

Crossing the Alps.

U.S. declares war on Britain. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmdrchen (Fairy Tales). Hegel
begins Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic, completed 1816).
Alexander Herzen and Charles Dickens born.

1813

Turner, Frosty Morning. David Cox, Treatise on

Landscape Painting and Effect in Water Colours.

Prussia and Austria declare war on France. "Battle of the

Nations," Leipzig, Napoleon defeated. William of Orange

reinstated in Holland,

French expelled. Mexico declares

independence. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Shelley, Queen

Mah. Saint-Simon, De la Reorganisation de la soaete europeenne

(On the Reorganization of European Society). Georg Biichner,
Soren Kierkegaard, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner born.
1814

Napoleon
up throne in

David, Leonidas at Thermopylae. Gericault, The

Allied armies (Britain, Russia, Austria) enter Paris.

abdicates, banished to Elba. Louis

Paris.

End of Anglo-U.S. "War of

XVIII

takes

1812". Jane Austen, Mansfield

Blacksmith's Signboard. Goya, The Uprising of the

Second of May 1808 and The Executions of the Third of

May

Park. Scott, Waverley. Wordsworth, The Excursion. Mikhail

1808. Ingres, Odalisque. J.-F. Millet born.

Bakunin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc born.

Fichte dies.

1815

Post-Napoleonic creation of Germanic Confederation. Napoleon

leaves Elba for France; Louis

XVIII

Battle of Waterloo; Congress of

flees;

"Hundred Days";

Vienna marks

final defeat

Goya, The Junta of the

Brighton Pavilion

Philippines.

Nash

rebuilds

in pseudo-oriental style.

of

Napoleon. Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to St. Helena; Louis

returns and Bourbon dynasty is reestablished. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Anthony Trollope born.
1816

Argentina independent. Revival of Luddism

in Britain.

French

naval disaster of the Medusa. Saint-Simon edits L' Industrie

(Industry) until 1818. Jane Austen,

Emma.

Coleridge, Kubla

(begun 1797). Benjamin Constant, Adolphe. Rossini,

Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).
1817

//

Museum. Canova,
The Three Graces. Goya, The Duque de Osuna.

Elgin Marbles bought for British

Khan

Barbiere di

Beginning of war against Seminole Indians in Georgia and

Florida. Byron, Manfred. Keats, "Endymion." Hegel,
Enzyklopddie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences, revised and extended 1827). Henry

John Constable, Flatford

building Vatican

Mill. Pasquale Belli begins

Museum, Rome.

David Thoreau born.

1818

Border between U.S. and Canada agreed. Chile declares

independence from Spain. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey,
Persuasion (posthumous). Byron, Don Juan. Thomas Love
Peacock, Nightmare Abbey. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Mme. de
Stael, Considerations sur les princtpaux eve'nements de la Revolution

Main Events of the French

Marx and Ivan Turgenev born.

francaise (Thoughts on the

Revolution). Karl

354

CHRONOLOGY

Gericault, The Bull Market. Prado

founded.

Museum, Madrid,

1819

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Peterloo Massacre of protestors by British troops in Manchester.

Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa.

U.S. buys Florida from Spain. Keats, "Hyperion" (published

1856). Saint-Simon edits La Politique. Schopenhauer, Die Welt

Fall of Babylon. Turner, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

John Ruskin born.

Wilk und Vorstellung (The World

as Will

Victoria, Prince Albert, Gottfried Keller,

and

Idea).

Herman

als

John Martin, The

Queen

Melville,

and

Walt Whitman born.

1820-29
1820

Spanish revolution leads to constitutional restoration. Due de

Berry assassinated. Missouri Compromise maintains de jure
slavery in U.S. South. Lamartine, Meditations poetiques (Poetic

George Cruikshank, Life in London. Thorvaldsen,

Christ and the Twelve Apostles.

Meditations). Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale." Pushkin, Ruslan and

Ludmila. Scott, Ivanhoe, The Monastery, The Abbot. Shelley,

Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Ode

to the

West Wind.

Washington Irving, The Sketchbook. Friedrich Engels and Herbert

Spencer born.
1821

Greek War of Independence from Ottoman Turks begins. Death

of Napoleon. Coronation of George IV of England.

named

Simon

Constable, The

Hay

Wain. Ford

Madox Brown

born.

Bolivar

President of independent Venezuela. Goethe, Wtlhelm

Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's

Journeyman Years,

completed 1829). Shelley, Adonats. Hegel, Grundlinien de

Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right). Kleist, Prince
Friedrich of Homburg (posthumous).
Confessions of an English

Opium

Thomas

de Quincey,

Eater. Charles Baudelaire,

Fyodor

Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, and Nikolae Nekrasov born. Keats

dies.

1822

Ottoman massacre of Greeks

Rosetta Stone by
J.-B.

J.

at

Chios (Scio). Deciphering of

F. Champollion. William Hazlitt, Table Talk.

Lamarck, Histoire des ammaux sans

Canova, Endymwn. Friedrich, Woman By the Window.

Eugene Delacroix, The Bark of Dante. Canova dies.

vertebres (Natural

History of Invertebrates). Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics,

born.

1823

Enunciation of Monroe Doctrine. Beethoven, Missa Solemms.

Goya,

1824

Simon Bolivar Emperor of Peru. Beethoven completes Ninth

Symphony. Alexandre Dumas (fils) born. Byron dies at
Missolonghi, Greece; Louis XVIII dies, and brother, Charles X,

National Gallery, London, founded. David, Mars

assumes throne of France.

1825

Ottoman

siege of Missolonghi.

Czar Alexander

dies,

Nicholas

succeeds. Diary of Samuel Pepys published. Hazlitt, The Spirit of

the Age.

1826

Saint-Simon

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans. Hazlitt, The

Plain Speaker. Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs).

Constable, The Leaping Horse. Samuel Morse, Portrait

of Lafayette. Palmer, Rest on the Flight

Capitulation of Greek forces on the Acropolis.

(The Betrothed, begun

Journal begins publication in New York
/ Promessi Sposi

Foscolo
1828

Duke

Manzoni completes

The Freeman's
City. Beethoven and Ugo
1821).

die.

of Wellington Prime Minister of Britain. Russia declares

war on Ottoman Empire. End of Russo-Turkish war. Webster,
An American Dictionary of the English Language. Schubert,
"Unfinished Symphony." Henrik Ibsen, Hippolyte Taine, Leo
Tolstoy, and Jules Verne born. Schubert dies.

into Egypt.

dies.

John James Audubon, The Birds of America portfolios.

Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone and His Cabin at Great
Osage Lake. Camille Corot, The Forum Seen From the
Farnese Gardens. John Martin, The Deluge. Gustave

Moreau
1827

Children.

Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Delacroix,

The Massacre at Scio [Chios]. Ingres, Vow of Louis
XIII. J. F. Overbeck, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes born. Gericault dies.

David

dies.

Dog and Saturn Devouring His

born.

Constable, The Cornfield. Delacroix, The Death of

Sardanapalus. Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer. \r\
Scheffer, The Suliol Women. William Holman Hunt
and Arnold Bocklin born.

Delacroix, Faust. Dante Gabriel Rossctti born

Goya

dies.

C.HRONOl.OCiV

3SS

1829

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Greece achieves independence. Fourier, Le Nouveau monde

(The New Industrial and Communal

Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. John Martin,

The Fall oj'Ninevah. John Everett Millais born.

industriel et socie'taire

World). Rossini, William

Tell.

Schlegel dies.

1830-39
1830

July Revolution in France. "Citizen-King" Louis-Philippe

becomes limited constitutional monarch. Indian Removal Act

Palmer, Coming From Evening Church and Cornfield

(Scarlet

Moonlight with Evening Star. Camille Pissarro born.

Lyons silk
La Peau de
Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre

Nat Turner leads Virginia

slave revolt. Insurrection of

workers. Heine in exile in Paris until 1856. Balzac,

chagrin.

Dame). Edgar Allen Poe, Poems. Pushkin, Boris Godunov.

Vincenzo Bellini, La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) and Norma.
Karl von Clausewitz and Hegel die.
1832

Corot, Chartres

Cathedral. Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People.

signed by President

Andrew Jackson. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir

and Black). Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. August le
Comte, Cours de philosophic positive (Treatise on Positive
Philosophy, vol. 1). Emily Dickinson, Frederic Mistral, and
Christina Rossetti born. Bolivar and George IV of England die.

1831

End of Nazarene Brotherhood.

Passage of

Reform Act

first

in Britain,

doubling eligible voters.

Blackface minstrel T. D. Rice performs "Jim

Crow"

in Louisville,

Kentucky. Goethe, Faust, Part II (posthumous). George Sand,

Indiana and Valentine. Tennyson, The Lady of Shallott.
Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (On War, posthumous). Hegel,
Geschichtsphilosophie (The Philosophy of History, posthumous).
Berlioz, Symphome Fantastique. Goethe, Jeremy Bentham, and

Sir

Thomas Lawrence

Ando Hiroshige

in

dies.

issues his first series of landscape

Famous Places in Edo. Constable, Salisbury

Cathedral, From the Meadows. John Martin, The Fall

prints,

of Babylon.

>

Constable, Waterloo Bridge

From

Whitehall. Hiroshige

publishes series, Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido.

Ingres, M. Louis-Francois Berlin. Turner, Staffa:
Fingal's Cave.

Edouard Manet born.

Scott die.

1833

Ferdinand VII of Spain

dies,

succeeded by

a 2 year-old

daughter,

Edward Burne-Jones

born.

Isabella II. Abolition of slavery in British colonies decreed.

Balzac, Eugenie Grandet. Pushkin completes Yevgeny Onegin

(Eugene Onegin) and first draft of Medny vsadnik (The Bronze

Horseman). Johannes Brahms born.
1834

English trade unionists from Tolpuddle transported for sedition.

Balzac, Le Pere

Gorwt (Old

Goriot). Alfred de Musset,

Lorenzaccio. Pushkin, Pikovaya

Schleiermacher

Honore Daumier, Rue Transnonain, April

Delacroix,

dama (Queen of Spades).

Women of Algiers.

15,

1834.

Paul Delaroche, The

Execution of Lady fane Grey. Ingres, Martyrdom of

Saint Symphorian. Edgar Degas, William Morris, and

dies.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler born.

1835

Seminole Indians in new war in Florida. Georg

Tod (Dantons Death). Theophile Gautier,
Mademoiselle de Maupin. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Whites

fight

Biichner, Dantons
(vol.

1;

Twain
1836

vol. 2, 1840). Donizetti,

Lucia di

in the

Desert.

Lammermoor Mark
.

born. Bellini dies.

Davy Crockett

killed at

Alamo. Republic of Texas proclaimed.

Waldo Emerson, Nature.

Dickens, The Pickwick Papers. Ralph

Gogol, Revizor (The Government Inspector).

Sartor Resartus.
1837

Constable, The Valley Farm. Corot, Hagar

Thomas

Carlyle,

Economic depression

in U.S. and Britain. Victoria Queen of

England. Capture of Seminole leader Osceola at St. Augustine.

Corot, Diana Surprised by Actaeon. Francois Rude,

The Marseillaise {The Departure of the Volunteers of

1792).

Winslow Homer born.

David d'Angers, Pantheon pediment,

Paris.

Constable

dies.

and
The French Revolution. Algernon Swinburne born.
Biichner, Fourier, Leopardi, and Pushkin die.
Balzac, Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, Parts II and III 1837
1839). Carlyle,

1838

Publication in

London of "People's Charter," demanding

universal suffrage. "Trail of Tears" in U.S.

Cherokees from homes

in

South

to

West during which 4000

Dickens, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby. Rossini, Benvenuto

Cellini.

356

Henry Brooke Adams born.

CHRONOLOGY

National Gallery, London, opened. Christen Kobke,

moves 14,000

View of Lake Sortedam.

die.

1839

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Maya

M.

culture in Central America examined by John Lloyd.

Invention of photography. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme (The
Charterhouse of Parma). Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail
(The Organization of Labor). Macaulay begins History of
England.

E. Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and

Contrast of Colors and The Application to the Arts.

Paul Cezanne and Alfred Sisley born.

1840-49
1840

Queen

Victoria marries Prince Albert.

Lermontov, Geroy nashego

Our Times). Proudhon, "Qu'est-ce que c'est

(What is Property?). Thomas Hardy and Emile

vremeni (A Hero of
la

propriete?"

Zola born.

1841

Britain proclaims sovereignty over

Opium War. USS

Hong Kong

in the

Creole slave-ship seized by slaves,

midst of the

who

Corot, Breton

Women

at the Well. Delacroix, Entry of

the Crusaders into Constantinople. Ingres, Odalisque

John Martin, The Assuaging of the Waters.

Claude Monet, Odilon Redon, and Auguste Rodin
born. Caspar David Friedrich dies.
with Slave.

Berthe Morisot and Auguste Renoir born.

are

Farm established in
Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series.

subsequently freed. Utopian Brook

Massachusetts. Ralph

Gogol, Shinel (The Overcoat). Poe, The Murders

in the

Rue

Morgue. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (The

Essence of Christianity). Lermontov dies.
1842

Supreme Court.
La Comedie humaine (A Human Comedy) begins to
appear. Gogol, Mertve dushi (Dead Souls, Part I). Macaulay, Lays
of Ancient Rome. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive (A Study of
Positive Philosophy). Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Verdi, Nabucco. William James and Stephane Mallarme born.
Stendhal and Luigi Cherubini die.

David d'Angers, Victor Hugo.

Wordsworth becomes English Poet Laureate. Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Merimee, Carmen. Tennyson, Morte d' Arthur. Carlyle,

Ruskin, Modern Painters,

Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 upheld by U.S.

Balzac,

1843

Past and Present. Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller (Either/Or, 2 vols.) and

vol. 1. Theodore Rousseau,

Under the Birches. Turner, Shade and Darkness
The
Evening of the Deluge.

Frygt og Baeven (Fear and Trembling). William Prescott, History

of the Conquest of Mexico. Flora Tristan, L' Union ouvrier (Union

of Workers). Henry James born. Hblderlin dies.
1844

Marx and Engels meet

Morse demonstrates the 'electric

Browning, Poems. Dumas (pere), Les
Trots Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers). Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Friedrich Neitzsche, and Paul Verlaine born.
in Paris.

telegraph'. Elizabeth Barrett

1845

Irish

famine due to potato crop failure and export of grain

Dumas

to

Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of

Monte Cristo). Poe, The Raven and Other Poems. Engels, Die Lage
der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working
Class in England). Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth
England.

(pere),

Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed. Mary Cassatt,

Thomas Eakins, and Henri Rousseau, Le Douanier,
born.

Portland vase destroyed and restored. Ingres, Portrait

of Countess Haussonville.

Century.

1846

U.S. declares war on Mexico (to 1848). Free-traders repeal

English Corn Law. Proudhon and Marx break relations. Balzac,
La Cousine Bette. Dostoevsky, Bedniye lyudi (Poor Folk). Edward

Millet, Oedipus

Unbound.

Lear, Book of Nonsense. Melville, Typee. Berlioz, Damnation de

Faust. Comte de Lautrcamont born. A.W. Schlegel dies.

1847

U.S. forces take Mexico City. Alexander Herzen leaves Russia

and goes into exile in the West. Charlotte Bronte, June Eyre.
Emily Bronte, Wulhermg Heights. Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Alfred
de Vigny, Oeuvres completes (Complete Works), 7 vols., begun
1839). Lamartine, llistoire des Cirondins (History of the

Marx, Manifest der Kommunistitchen

Communist

Manifesto). Verdi, Macbeth. Wagner, Tannhduser.

Thomas Edison and Georges

Napoleon Reawakening

to

Immortality.

(The

Girondists).

Partei

George Caleb Bingham, Raftsmen Playing Cards.

Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence. Rude,

Sorel born. Mendelssohn dies.

1IR()M)I

OG1

357

1848

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Revolution in France, spreads throughout Europe; Louis

Napoleon III elected President, establishing Second Republic;

Millet,

Lamartine minister of Foreign Affairs in French provisional

government. Revival of British Chartism. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
joins in convening the first women's rights meeting in America,
the Seneca Falls Convention, in which she presents the women's
'Declaration of Sentiments'. Utopian Oneida Community
established in New York. Dumas (fils), La Dame au camelias
(Camille). Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. Chateaubriand,

Gauguin born.

The Winnower. Millais, Rossetti, and

lolman

lunt found Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Paul

Memoires d'outretombe (Memoires From Beyond the Tomb).

Macaulay, History of England (vols. 1 and 2). J. S. Mill, Principles
of Political Economy. Proudhon writes for and edits Paris
newspapers (until 1850), including Le Peuple and La Voix du
peuple. Joris-Karl Huysmans born. Chateaubriand dies.
i

1849

Rome

declared Republic under Giuseppe Mazzini with support of

Giuseppe Garibaldi. French enter Rome and restore Pope Pius
IX. National Assembly fails to unify Germany. Marx moves to
London. Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til Doden (The Sickness unto
Death). Proudhon, Confessions d'un revolutionnaire (Confessions of
a Revolutionary). August Strindberg born. Margaret Fuller,
Chopin, and Edgar Allen Poe die.

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Rosa

Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais: The Dressing of
Vines. Gustave Courbet, The Peasants of Flagey
Returning From the Fair, After Dinner at Ornans, and

Burial at Ornans. J.-L.-E. Meissonier,

War (The Barricades).

Memory of

Civil

1850-59
1850

King Louis-Philippe of France

Courbet, The Stonebreakers. Goya, Proverbios

his general theory of

(posthumous). Millais, Christ

dies. Michael Faraday publishes

magnetism. Emerson, Nature: Addresses and
Lectures. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. Tennyson

in the

House of His

Parents. Millet, The Sower.

becomes Poet Laureate; In Memoriam. Turgenev, Mesyats v

Month in the Country). Engels, Der deutsche
Bauernkrieg (The Peasant Wars in Germany). Herzen, S togo
berega (From the Other Shore). Guy de Maupassant born. Balzac
and Wordsworth die.

derevne (A

Coup

Louis-Napoleon ends French Second Republic.

Iowa and Minnesota surrendered to Federal
Government. Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace, London.
Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables. Melville, Moby Dick. Gerard
de Nerval, Voyage en /'Orient (Journey to the Orient). August
Comte, Systeme de politique positive (System of Positive Politics,
completed 1854). Proudhon, Idee gener ale de la revolution au XIXe
siecle (General Theory of the Revolution of the Nineteenth
Century). John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (-1853). Verdi,
Rigoletto. Wagner, Opera and Drama.

1851

d'etat of

Sioux land

in

Proclamation of French Second Empire by Napoleon

1852

III. Aristide

Boucicault invents department store (Bon Marche) in Paris.

Corot, The Dance of the Nymphs. Millais, Ophelia.

Turner

dies.

M. Brown, Christ Washing Peter's

Hunt, The Light of the World.
F.

Feet.

Holman

Dickens, Bleak House. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Turgenev, Zapiski okhotnika (Sketches from a Hunter's Album).
Gogol dies.
1853

U.S.-Mexico boundary

settled. Matthew Arnold, The Scholar

Gypsy. Charlotte Bronte, Villette. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political
Economy. Verdi, // Trovatore, La Traviata. Wagner finishes text
of Ring.

Bonheur, The Horse Fair. Holman Hunt, The

Awakening Conscience. Vincent Van Gogh born.

1854

Crimean War. Commodore Perry opens Japan to Western trade.

Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! Tennyson, "The Charge of the

Courbet, The Meeting (Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet).

Light Brigade." Thoreau, Walden. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire

raisonne de

I'

born. F.

358

W.

(The Complete Dictionary of

Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud

architecture franqaise

French Architecture,
J.

CHRONOLOGY

vol. 1).

Schelling dies.

Millet,

The Reaper. John Martin

dies.

1855

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Hans Christian Andersen, Mit Livs

Eventyr (The Fairy Tale of My Life). Robert Browning, Men and
Women. Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha. Nerval, Aurelia.

Courbet, The Studio of the Painter, exhibited at

Pavilion of Realism at Paris Universal Exposition.

Paris Universal Exposition.

Tennyson, Maud. Trollope, The Warden. Walt Whitman, Leaves

of Grass (1st edition). Adelbert von Keller, Der Griine Heinrich
(Green Heinrich). Kierkegaard and Nerval die.
1856

End of Crimean War when Russians

Congress

'

in Paris.

Ancien Regime

Revolution).

1857

1859

De

Ingres,

La Source. John Singer Sargent born.

Tocqueville,

(The Old Regime and the

et la revolution

Sigmund Freud

born. Heine and

Schumann

die.

Dred Scott

decision upholds de jure slavery in U.S. Baudelaire,

Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). Dickens, Little Dorrit. George
Eliot, Scenes from Clerical Life. Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

of Ornamental Art" opens in

Trollope, Barchester Towers. Taine, Les Philosophes francais du

XIXe siecle (French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century).

manifesto of the Realist movement. Courbet, The

Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine. Millet, The

Verdi, Simon Boccanegra.

1858

capitulate to Austria; Peace

Nekrasov, Poet and Citizen.

De Musset and Comte

National Portrait Gallery, London, opens.

London

"Museum

(future Victoria

and Albert Museum). Champfleury, Realisme,

Gleaners.

die.

Attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. Marx, Grundrisse (Sketches).

Proudhon, De la Justice dans la revolution et dans I'eglise (Justice in
the Revolution and in the Church). Taine, Essais de critique et
d'histoire (Essays on Criticism and History). Offenbach, Orphee
aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). Giacomo Puccini born.

William Frith, Derby Day. Menzel, Good Evening,

France and Austria begin and end war. France acquires IndoChina. John Brown leads raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in
hopes of igniting slave revolt; he is hanged. Baudelaire, "Salon de

Manet

1859." Dickens,

Edward

Tale of

Two

Cities.

Fitzgerald, Rubdiydt of Omar

Gentlemen.

rejected at the Salon. Corot, Macbeth. Millet,

The Angelus. Whistler, At

the Piano.

Georges Seurat

born.

George Eliot, Adam Bede.

Khayyam. Ivan Goncharov,

Oblomov. Tennyson, Idylls of the King. Charles Darwin, On the

Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Marx, Zur Kritik der
politischen

On

Okonomie (Critique of

Political

Economy).

J. S.

Mill,

Gounod, Faust. Verdi, Un Ballo in Maschera

(A Masked Ball). Wagner, Tristan und Isolde. Henry Bergson
born. I. K. Brunei, de Quincey, Macaulay, und de Tocqueville
Liberty. Charles

die.

1860-69
1860

Abraham

Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in

Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy).
Degas, Young Spartans Exercising. Holman Hunt,

Doveri dell'uomo (The Duties of Man). Anton Chekhov, Jules

Laforgue, Hugo Wolf, Claude Debussy, and Gustav Mahler born.

Finding of the Savior in the Temple. Manet, Spanish

Guitar Player. James Ensor and Walter Sickert born.

Garibaldi proclaims Victor

Schopenhauer
1861

Emmanuel King

Lincoln elected President of U.S. Turgenev, Pervayas lyubov

(First Love) and Nakanune (On the Eve). Giuseppe Mazzini, /

in the

Italy.

dies.

Serfdom abolished

War

of

U.S.

in Russia. Italy

(until 1865).

proclaimed kingdom. Civil

Dostoevsky, Zapiski

iz

myrtvogo

doma (Memoirs from the House of the Dead, completed 1862).

Herzen, Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts). Harriet
Martineau, Health, Husbandry and Handicraft. Sainte-Beuve,

1862

son groupe litteraire sous

Chateaubriand

el

and

under the Empire).

his Circle

I 'empire

Battle of Shiloh ends indecisively after 24,000 are killed.

Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves.
Homestead Act greatly increases settlement of U.S. West.
I

successful at the Salon; he meets Charles

Cezanne. Corot, Orpheus, The Rest. William Morris

founds Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (later

Morris

&

Co.).

(Chateaubriand

The

Flaubert, Salammbo.

Manet

Baudelaire and Edouard Duranty. Pissarro meets

Frederick Church, Cotopuxi. Daumier, The ThirdClass Carriage. Ingres, 'Turkish Balk

Valence and Music

in the Tuileries.

Manet, Lola de
Gustav Klimt born.

lugo, Les Miserables. Christina Rossetti,

Goblin Market. Turgenev, Ottsy

dcti

(Fathers and Sons).

Spencer, The First Principles. Count Maurice Maeterlinck born.

Thorcau

dies.

CHRONOI

0(,\

359

1863

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

Navaho and Apache Indians forced to relocate to reservation in

Mexico. French capture Mexico City. Baudelaire, Le Peintre
de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life). Kingsley, The

The

Water Babies. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address. J. S. Mill,

Utilitarianism. Proudhon, Du Principe fede'ratif (Principle of

I'herbc

New

Salon des Refuses includes works b\ Cezanne,

Guillaumin, Manet, Pissarro and Whistler. Gustavc
Dore, Don Quichotte illustrations. Manet, Dejeuner sur

and Olympia. Rossetti, Beata Beatrix. Delacroix

dies.

Federation). Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur {'Architecture

(Interviews on Architecture). Bizet, Les Pecheurs de perles (The
Pearl Fishers).

D'Annuncio born. Thackeray and Vigny

die.

Working Men's Association (The First

London. Italy renounces claim to
Rome. The right to strike becomes legalized in France.
Maximilian proclaimed emperor in Mexico. Dostoevsky, Zapiski

The

1864

International

International) founded in

iz

podpolya (Notes from Underground). Chevreul, Notes sur

U.S. Civil

War ends

Arnold, Essays

les

(Confederate States surrender) and Lincoln

on heredity. Matthew
Criticism. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in

Mendel publishes

assassinated.

in

his research

Wonderland. John Henry Newman, Dream ofGerontius. Francis

Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World. Taine, Nouveaux

(New

Essais

End

1866

Proudhon and Lord Palmerston

Essays).

Former U.S.

slaves granted de jure civil rights.

i nakazaniye (Crime and Punishment).

Swinburne, Poems and Ballads.

Dostoevsky, Prestuplemye

The French abandon Mexico. Execution

of Emperor Maximilian.
U.S. purchases Alaska from Russia. Nobel patents dynamite in
Sweden, America, and Britain. Ibsen, Peer Gynt. Marx, Das
Kapital (vol. 1). Verdi, Don Carlos. Madame Curie born.

1867

Revolution in Spain. Queen Isabel II

flees to

France. Gladstone

succeeds Disraeli as British Prime Minister. Brahms, Ein

German Requiem). Tchaikovsky, Symphony

Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg. Stefan George
Maxim Gorky born. Rossini dies.

Deutsches Requiem (A

No.
and

Woman With

Chrysanthemums. George Innes,

Zola publishes book of Salon reviews.

Manet meets

Zola and Cezanne. Winslow Homer, Prisoners From

the Front.

Monet, Camille (Woman

in a

Courbet and Manet arrange exhibition

Green Dress).

at Paris

Universal Exposition. Cezanne, Rape Manet, The

.

Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. Millais, Boyhood

of Raleigh. Monet, Women in the Garden. Pierre
dies.

The Dance. Degas, The Orchestra.

Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola. Renoir, The Skaters.
Edouard Vuillard born.

J.-B. Carpeaux,

Heinrich Schliemann begins excavations

to locate Troy. Suez

Canal opened. Completion of U.S. transcontinental railway.

1869

Degas,

Peace and Plenty. Moreau, Orpheus.

Bonnard born. Ingres

Baudelaire dies.

1868

Manet exhibits Olympia at the Salon. Courbet and

Monet meet. F. M. Brown, Work (begun 1852).

die.

of Austro-Italian war; Schleswig-Holstein incorporated into

Prussia.

rejected at the Salon, while Pissarro and

Morisot are included. Manet, The Dead Toreador.
Whistler, Symphony in White No. II: The Little White
Girl. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec born.

on Color).

couleurs (Notes

1865

Manet

American Women's Suffrage Association founded by Susan B.

Anthony. Henry James goes to England. Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women (1868-9). Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Flaubert,
L' Education sentimentale (A Sentimental Education). Lautreamont,
Les Chants du Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror). Tolstoy, Voyna
i mir (War and Peace). Trollope, Phineas Finn. Mark Twain, The

Cafe Guerbois becomes the favorite meeting place of

the Impressionists. Manet, A Balcony. Monet, La
Grenouillere. Degas, The Orchestra of the Paris Opera.

Henri Matisse born.

Innocents Abroad. Verlaine, Fetes galantes. Jules Michelet,

L'Histoire de France (History of France), L'Histoire de

la

French Revolution). J. S. Mill,

The Subjection of Women. Wagner, Das Rheingold. Andre Gide
and Frank Lloyd Wright born.
revolution francaise (History of the

1870-79
Outbreak of Franco-Prussian War and French defeat; Napoleon
III capitulates; Third Republic proclaimed in Paris; Prussians

1870

begin siege. Italians enter Rome, claiming

Ratification of 15th
slaves. Jules

Amendment

Verne, Vingt mille

Thousand Leagues Under the

Valkyries). Dickens,

Lautreamont

360

CHRONOLOGY

die.

it

capital city.

giving voting rights to former

lieues sous les

mers (Twenty

Sea). Wagner, Die Walkure (The

Merimee, Dumas pere, Herzen, and

Manet

joins the National

Guard when war breaks

out.

Cezanne, The Murder. Fantin-Latour, A Studio at

Batignolles. Meissonier, The Siege of Paris. Frederic
Bazille

is

killed in active service.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

1871

Socialist

VISUAL ARTS

Commune is established in Paris in March and

May by government forces; Thiers becomes

Column

King William I of Prussia

proclaimed Emperor of United Germany. George Eliot,
Middlemarch. Darwin, The Descent of Man. Verdi, A'ida. Marcel
Proust and John Millington Synge born.

Dante.

President; Paris under martial law.

1872

Civil

War

in Spain.

Feminist Victoria Woodhull runs for U.S.

Presidency. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

Dostoevsky, Besy (The Possessed, or

The

Manet

sells

Devils). Strindberg,

Vendome.

Rossetti,

The Dream of

29 paintings to Durand-Ruel. Bocklin,

Carriage at the Races.

Four Seasons. Monet, Impression, Sunrise and

The Basin at Argenteuil. Whistler, The Artist's Mother.

Millet,

Financial panic across Europe and North America. Napoleon III

Walter Pater, Studies

dies at Chislehurst, England. Spain proclaimed Republic.

Degas

Germans

Cezanne,

leave France. Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Verne,

Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days).
J. S. Mill, Autobiography (posthumous). Spencer, The Study of

of Napoleon's

in destruction

in the Place

Battle of the Centaurs. Degas,

Master Olof. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragbdie (The Birth of

Tragedy, revised 1878, 1886). Alexander Scriabin born. Gautier
and Mazzini die.
1873

Courbet involved

bloodily repressed in

visits

New

in the

History of the Renaissance.

Manet meets Mallarme.

Modern Olympia. Monet, Autumn Effects,
Orleans.

Argenteuil. Morisot, The Cradle.

Sociology. Alfred Jarry born. Mill dies.

1874

Schliemann begins excavating Homeric cities in Greece. Disraeli

returns as Prime Minister. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.
Verlaine, Romances sans paroles (Songs Without Words). Brahms,
Hungarian Dances. Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov. Verdi, Requiem.
Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen completed.

First Impressionist Exhibition, Paris. Pissarro exhibits

and all other Impressionist exhibitions (1874

which he largely organized; Manet refuses to
participate. Manet, Monet Working on his Boat in
Argenteuil. Monet, The Seine at Argenteuil. Renoir, La
in this

86),

Loge.

1875

Way We

Live Now. Mark Twain, The Adventures of

Carmen. Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria
Rilke born. Hans Christian Andersen, Bizet, and Manzoni die.

Trollope, The

Tom Sawyer.

Bizet,

Edmond and

Jules de

Goncourt publish

L Art du dix-

huitieme siecle (Art of the Eighteenth Century).

Caillebotte, Floorscrapers. Eakins, The Gross Clinic.

Menzel, Iron Rolling Mill. Monet, The Red Boat,

Argenteuil and Poplars Near Argenteuil. Corot and
Millet die.

1876

General Custer and his U.S. cavalry force all killed at the Battle
Horn by Sioux warriors. Telephone invented in U.S.
First Socialist International dissolved. Wagner's Festival Theatre

of Little Big

Second Impressionist Exhibition. Moreau, Salome.

Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette.

Eliot, Daniel Der onda. Perez Galdos,

Henry James, Roderick Hudson. Mallarme,
L'Apres-midi d'unfaune (The Afternoon of a Faun). Nietzsche,

at

Bayreuth opens. George

Dona

Perfecta.

Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen (Thoughts out of Season, or

Untimely Meditations, begun 1873). Wagner, Siegfried. Bakunin
and George Sand die.

1877

Turkey and Russia

at war.

Queen

Victoria

Empress of

India.

Capture of Nez Perce braves and Chief Joseph in Montana

territory. Edison invents phonograph. Flaubert, Trots Contes
(Three Tales). Henry James, The American. Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina. Trollope, The American Senator. Turgenev, Nov
(Virgin Soil). Zola, L'Assommoir. Nekrassov dies.

1878

1879

Russian-Turkish armistice signed. Paris Universal Exposition.

Hardy, The Return of the Native. Henry James, The Europeans.
Swinburne, Poems and Ballads. Engels, Anti-Diihring (including
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).
British-Zulu War; peace signed. Edison invents electric light bulb
in U.S. French Socialist Party formed. Gustave Charpentier, La
Vie moderne

(Modern

Life). Ibsen, Et

Dukkeh/em (A Doll's

House). Henry James, Daisy Miller. Frege, Begriffsschrift

(Conceptual Notation). Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin. Yiollct-lc-

Duc

Third Impressionist Exhibition. Caillebotte, Paris

Street: Rainy Weather. Cezanne, Still Life With
Apples. Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical
Figure of the Schuylkill River. Winslow Homer, The
Cotton Pickers. Monet, Gare St. Lazare, Paris and
Argenteuil, the Bank in Flower. Rodin, The Age of
Bronze. Courbet dies.
William Morris publishes The Decorative Arts.
libel. Cassatt, The Blue

Whistler sues Ruskin for

Room. Degas, The Rehearsal. Monet, Rue Montorgueuil

Decked Out with Flags. George Cruikshank dies.

Fourth Impressionist Exhibition. Bouguereau, Birth of

Venus. Mary Cassatt, /'lie Cup of Tea. Renoir, tome.
Charpentier and Her Children. Rodin, John the Baptist.
Daumier and Couture die.

dies.

IIKONOI.Otn

361

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

VISUAL ARTS

1880-89
1880

Transvaal declares

its

independence. Dostoevsky, Bratya

Fifth Impressionist Exhibition. Cezanne, Chateau de

Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov). Maupassant, Boule de

sin/ (Ball

of Tallow) published in Zola's Naturalist collection Les

Medan (Evenings in Medan). Zola, Nana. Henry

Brooks Adams, Democracy. Nietzsche, Menschliches
Allzumenschliches (Human, All-too-human, begun 1878). Tainc,
La Philosophic de I' art (The Philosophy of Art). Guillaume
Soirees de

Apollinaire, Alexander Blok,

1881

The Boer War

The Outer Boulevards. Renoir, Place

The Thinker and commission of The
Gates off/ell (completed 1917).
Pissarro,

Clichy. Rodin,

and Robert Musil born.

and U.S. President

begins. Czar Alexander II

Garfield assassinated. "Jim

Medan.

Crow"

Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. Degas, Little Dancer

laws passed in Tennessee,

furthering segregation. Flaubert, Bouvard

et

Pecuchet

(posthumous). Ibsen, Gengangere (Ghosts). Henry James, The

Portrait of a Lady. Maupassant, La Maison Tellier. Nietzsche,

Aged Fourteen. Monet, Sunshine and Snow. Renoir,

Luncheon of the Boating Party. Pablo Picasso born.
Samuel Palmer dies.

Morgenriite (The Dawn). Dostoevsky dies.

1882

Susan Brownell Anthony (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and

Matilda Joslyn Gage), History of Woman Suffrage (vol. 1,
completed 1922). Nietzsche, Die Friihliche Wissenschaft (The
Science). Tchaikovsky, "1812 Overture." Wagner, Parsifal.

Gay

Seventh Impressionist Exhibition. Cezanne, SelfPortrait. Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Seurat,
Farm Women at Work. D. G. Rossetti dies.

Darwin, Disraeli, Emerson, Garibaldi, Longfellow, Trelawny, and

Trollope
1883

die.

Marxist party founded in Russia by Plekhanov and others. Robert

Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. Huysmans, L 'Art moderne

(Modern

Art). Nietzsche, Also

Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake

Zarathustra, completed 1892). Metropolitan Opera House,

New

Monet

settles at

Giverny. Durand-Ruel arranges series

of one-man exhibition of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and

Sisley.

Cezanne, Rocky Landscape. Renoir, Umbrellas.

Manet and Gustave Dore

die.

York, opens. Leo Delibes, Lakme. Franz Kafka born. Marx,

Turgenev, and Wagner

1884

die.

Huysmans, A Rehours (Against the Grain). Ibsen, Vildanden (The

Wild Duck). Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des
Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State). Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The Foundations of

The

Arithmetic).

Seurat,

Societe des Vingt holds

new

Belgian Leopold II declares himself sovereign of

State. Pasteur invents vaccine against rabies.

Congo Free

Freud studies under

exhibition.

Manet

Societe des Independants. Bartholdi, Statue of

The Burghers of Calais commissioned.

Bathing Place, Asnieres. Whistler exhibits

Liberty. Rodin,

Portrait of the Artist's

1885

its first

memorial exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Redon, Seurat, and Signac become involved in the

Mother

at Salon.

Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire. Van Gogh, The Potato

Eaters. Redon, Homage to Goya.

Charcot at the Salpetriere hospital for nervous diseases in Paris

and becomes interested in hysteria and hypnosis. Walter Pater,
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a
Marx, Das Kapital (vol. 2, posthumous). J. S. Mill,
Nature, The Utility of Religion, and Theism, 3rd edn. (all

Marius

the Epicurean. Zola, Germinal.

Revolutionist.

posthumous). Victor
1886

Hugo

dies.

Apache chief Geronimo captured, ending

last

major U.S. -Indian

war. Orleans and Bonaparte families banished from France.

Haymarket Massacre of strikers and police in Chicago. Ibsen,

Rosmersholm. Henry James, The Bostonians. Rimbaud, Les
The Strange Case of Dr. JFekyll and
Mr. Hyde. Zola, L'Oeuvre. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der
Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophic (Ludwig Feuerbach
and the End of Classical German Philosophy). Marx, Das Kapital
published in English. Jean Moreas, manifesto of Symbolism in Le
Figaro. Nietzsche, fenseits von Gut und Base (Beyond Good and
Illuminations. R. L. Stevenson,

Eighth and

last

Impressionist Exhibition. Felix

Feneon publishes Les Impressionnistes en 1886.

Cezanne breaks with Zola after publication of
L'Oeuvre, and marries Hortense Fiquet. Rodin, The
Kiss. Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the
Grande Jfatte.

Evil). Liszt dies.

General Boulanger

362

fails coup d'etat in Paris. Perez Galdos,

Fortunata and Jacinta. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (On

Seurat exhibit with Les Vingt in Brussels. Cezanne,

the Genealogy of Morals). Verdi, Otello. Laforgue dies.

Mont

CHRONOLOGY

Gauguin

leaves France for Martinique. Pissarro

Sainte-Victoire and Five Bathers.

and

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

1888

VISUAL ARTS

becomes Emperor of Germany. Eastman

Kodak box camera. Ibsen,
Fruen fra Havet (The Lady From the Sea). Rudyard Kipling,
Plain Tales from the Hills. Strindberg, Miss Julie. Oscar Wilde,
The Happy Prince, and Other Tales. Edward Bellamy, Looking
'Kaiser'

Wilhelm

II

invents paper photographic films and

Backward, 2000-1887. Bergson, Essai sur les donnees immediates de

la conscience (Time and Free Will). George Moore, Confessions of
a

Gauguin and Bernard develop

principles of

Synthetism. Bernard, Buckwheat Harvesters, Pont-

Aven. Ensor, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889.

Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon. Van Gogh, The
Night Cafe at Aries, The Sower, and The Yellow
Chair. Paul Serusier, The Talisman. Seurat, The Side

Show.

Young Man. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (published 1908), Nietzsche

Contra Wagner, Gotzenddmmerung (The Twilight of the Idols),

and completes notes on Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power).
Ruskin, Praeteritas. Mahler, Symphony No.

I.

Nikolai Rimsky-

Korsakov, Scheherazade.
1889

Abortive attempt to

set aside

French Republic, the "Boulanger

Tower opened; more than 30

affair." Eiffel

million people visit the

Universal Exposition, Paris. Anatole France, Thais. Tolstoy, The

Kreuzer Sonata. Mark Twain,

Connecticut Yankee in King

Arthur's Court. Sir Arthur Evans begins excavating Knossos.

Browning and Chevreul

The Nabis emerge as a

The Symbolist La Revue Blanche starts
publication. Eakins, The Agnew Clinic. Gauguin,
Yellow Christ. Van Gogh, Landscape with Cypress Tree
Paris Universal Exposition.

group.

and Starry Night. Monet, Outfields

series.

die.

1890-1900
1890

U.S. Congress passes Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Wounded Knee

Massacre of 300 Sioux people by troops of 7th Cavalry, South

Dakota. First moving picture in

New

Giovanni Morelli's essays on connoisseurship

republished as Kunsthistorische Studien

York. Chekhov begins Tri

Knut Hamsun, Suit (Hunger). Ibsen,

Hedda Gahler. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Zola, La Bete
Humaine (The Beast in Man). J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough.
Sestry (Three Sisters).

iiher

William Morris, News From

Nowhere. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
Italienische Malerei.

Cezanne, The Cardp/ayers. Monet, Haystacks

Seurat, Chahut. Van Gogh dies.

series.

William James, Principles of Psychology. Alexander Borodin,

Prince Igor (posthumous). Faure, Requiem. Tchaikovsky, Pikovaya

dama (Queen of Spades). Gottfried Keller

1891

dies.

Papal encyclical Rerum novarum highlights employer's

responsibility to workers. Arthur

Gauguin

Conan Doyle publishes

the

first

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Hardy, Tess of the D'Urhervilles.

Melville, Billy Budd (posthumous). Wedekind, Fruhlings

Erwachen:

eine Kindertragbdie

(Spring Awakening:

A Tragedy

of

Childhood). Henry Brook Adams, History of the United States of

America During the Administration ofJefferson and Madison.
Melville and

1892

Rimbaud

leaves for Tahiti.

Van Gogh

exhibition at

Salon des Independants. William Morris founds

Kelmscott Press. Cassatt, The Bath. Gauguin, la

Orana Maria. Monet, Poplars series. Alfred Ryder,
Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens. Seurat, The Circus.
Seurat dies.

die.

French encounter colonial resistance in Africa. The Dreyfus

Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworks strike. Ibsen,
Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder). Maeterlinck, Pelleas

Monet, Rouen Cathedral series. Toulouse-Lautrec, At

the Moulin Rouge. Gauguin, Manao tupapau (The

affair.

et

Specter Watches Her).

Lady Windermere's Fan. Leoncavallo, /

(The Clowns). Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker. Tennyson

Meltsande. Wilde,
Pagliacci

and Whitman

die.

1893

Franco-Russian alliance. F. II. Bradley, Appearance and Reality.

Engelbert Humperdinck, Hansel and Gretel. Tchaikovsky,
Symphony No. 6, "Pathetique." Puccini, Marion Lescaut. Verdi,
Falslajf. Maupassant and Taine die.

Edvard Munch, The Voice. Vuillard, The Workroom.

Ford Madox Brown dies.

1894

Alfred Dreyfus convicted of espionage, increasing antisemitism in

Aubrey Beardslcy's designs for Wilde's Salome. Degas,

II oman at Her Toilette. Ferdinand Hodler, The Chosen

becomes Czar. Pullman strike in Chicago.

Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Aenda Kipling, 'The Jungle Book.
George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Alan. Debussy, L'Apres-midi
France. Nicholas

II

1895

d' un fa une

(Afternoon of

Stevenson

die.

Territory

in

imperialist.

Faun). Christina Rossetii and R. L.

Southern Africa named Rhodesia to honor British

Theodor Fontane, T.jfi lines/. Verhaeren, The

Tentacular Cities.

II. (i.

One. Rodin, Balzac.

Wells, The 'Time Machine.

W.

Moreau, Jupiter and Semele.

Pissarro, Place

du Theatre

FranqatS. Rodin, Burghers of Calais.

B. Yeats,

CHRONOLOGY

163

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS

1895

Poems. Freud and Breuer, Studien

Ihsteria).

Der

Marx, Das Kapital

Antichrist. E. C. Stanton,

Sman Lake performed. Engels

1896

1898

iiber

(vol. 3,

Hysteric (Studies on

posthumous). Nietzsche,

The Woman's

Bible.

Tchaikovsky's

dies.

U.S. Supreme Court upholds "Jim Crow" laws. Freud introduces

the term "psychoanalysis." Chekhov, Ivanov: Chayka (The
Seagull). Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman. Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi.
Bergson, Matiere et memoire (Matter and Memory). Puccini, La

Bohime. Verlaine
1897

VISUAL ARTS

and

What is Art? Gauguin, Where Do We Come

From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Max

Freud's self-analysis recognizing infantile sexuality and the

Oedipus complex. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus.
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew.
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac. H. G. Wells, The Invisible
Man. Brahms and Burckhardt die.

Tolstoy,

U.S. declares war on Spain. Zola publishes "J'Accuse" in

new Dreyfus trial. Henry James, The Turn of
the Screw. Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Bismarck,

Rodin, Honore de Balzac. Burne-Jones and Moreau

Gladstone, and Mallarme

Dreyfus exonerated. Right-wing Action Francaise founded

in

Chekhov, Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya). Kate Chopin, The

Awakening. Tolstoy, Voskrensemye (Resurrection). Wilde, The
Importance of Being Earnest. Freud, Die Traumdeutung (The
Interpretation of Dreams, published 1900, with final chapter
giving first full account of dynamic view of mental processes of
the unconscious and of the dominance of the "pleasure
principle"). Elgar,

Dream

Klinger, Christ

Sleeping Gypsy.

die.

Monet, The Japanese Bridge

series

and begins

Waterhlies series. Sisley dies.

ofGerontius. Puccini, Tosca.

Life.

Still Life

Renoir, The

La Modiste.

CHRONOLOGY

Olympus. Matisse, Dinner Table.

Le Douanier Rousseau, The

Cezanne,

1900

in

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Anne M. Wagner, "Rodin's Reputation," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt. Baltimore and London, 1991.
Abigail

Chapter

16

Theodor W. Adorno, "Commitment," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato

New

York,

1977; Oxford,

Paul Cezanne: Letters: Revised and Augmented Edition, ed. John Rewald. New York, 1984.
John Elderfield, "The World Whole: Color in
Cezanne," Arts Magazine, 52: 8 (April, 1978):

Lawrence Gowing et al., Cezanne: The Early Years

1859 1872. London: Roval Acadcnn of Arts; Nct

Mary Louise Krumrine, Paul Cezanne: The Bathers.

Basle: Kunstmuseum, 1989; New York and London, 1990,

Marv Tompkins Lewis, Cezanne'* Early

oj

Redon: Biography,
the Noirs of Odilon Redon.
Saint

Imagery.

Berkele) and London, 1989.

jack Lindsay, Cezanne:

17.

Temptation

I lis

life

and Art. London,

1969.

Ideology, and Style in

Chicago and London, 1992.
and Oskar Batschmann, Ferdinand Hodler: Land-

Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and

scapes. Zurich, 1987.

Maurice Mcrlcau-Poim Sense and Xon-Scnsc. E\an/ licit

Theory.

London, 1955; New

York, I960,

by

liigusle

Rodin

ston, IL, 1973,

William Rubin

John David Farmer, Ensor.

Guggenheim Museum,

Sm ml

Rise ni

the

Albert E. Elsen, The Gales

Stanford, 1985.

1961.

Robert Herbert

Critics. New York, 1979.

Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work. NewYork and London, 1987.
Aline Isdebskv-Pritchard, The An of Mikhail Vrubel.
Ann Arbor, MI, 1982.
S. Kaplanova, Vrubel. Leningrad, 1975.
Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years.
Princeton and Guildford, 1985.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning. London,
New York, and Toronto, 1978.
Louise Lippincott, Edvard Munch: Starry Night.
Malibu, 1988.
Leo Lowenthal, "Knut Hamsun," in The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt. New York, 1977; Oxford, 1978.
Stephen Charles McGough, James Ensor's "The
Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889". New York
and London, 1985.

York, 1988

el les

Stephen F. Eisenman, "Allegory and Anarchism in

James Ensor's Vision Preceding Futurism," Record

Drawings. Boston, 1984.

New

San Francisco, 1977.

le

Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914.

London, 1987; New York, 1989.
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (ed.), The Triumph of Art for
the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and

148 53

Cliffs, 1980.

(ed), Seurat in Perspective, Engle-

Cliffs, 1978.

don, 1991.
E. J.

1978.

Grande-Jatte and the Scientific Approach to

History Painting," Histonenmalerei in Europa
(Mainz am Rhein), 1990, pp. 303-33.

Institute of Chicago,

Museum

1984.

Susan Hiller (ed), The Myths of Pnmitivism. Lon-

and Eike Gebhardt.

15

The Art of Paul Gauguin, with essays by Richard

Brettell et al. Washington, D.C., 1988.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies. New York, 1977.
Ruth Butler (ed), Rodin in Perspective. Englewood

100,"

Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, ed.

Maurice Malingue, trans. Henry J. Stenning.
London, (1948); Cleveland and New York, 1949.
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, trans. O. F. Theis. New
York, (n.d.). See also Noa Noa: Gauguin's Tahiti,
ed. and with text by N. Wadley. Oxford, 1985.
Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work. London,

New

York: Solomon R

1976.

Paul Gauguin: 45 l.ettrcs a I incenl, Theo et 7" ' <'"

Gogh, ed. Douglas Cooper Lausanne: Rijksniu-

seum Vincent Van Ciogh,

1983.

York:
J. -P.

(ed.),

Museum

Ol

Cezanne:

I'he

/.,;/,

II

o,k

Modern An, London,

Sartre, Baudelaire.

New

1'iTT

London, 1964; New ^>rk,

I'M,:

Judith

Wechsler

wood

Sill

(ed

Jiffs,

II

I)

l
l

),

Cezanne

Perspective

'75

HIUI.IOCiR \l'in

367

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Measurements are

inches (centimeters in paren-

in

height before width before depth, unless

theses),

otherwise stated.

ABBATTI, Giuseppe
BARRY, James

101 King Lear Weeping Over the

Body of Cordelia 1786-7. Oil on canvas, 8' 10 x 12'}
(269 x 367). Tate Gallery, London. 102 Satan and
His Legions Hurling Defiance Toward the Vault oj
Heaven ca. 1792-4. Etching, black ink, 29} x 19}

The
Museum, London.

BARYE, Antoine-Louis

Trustees

of

the

British

183 Lion Crushing a Serpent

( 1 77. 8). Musee du Louvre,

1833. Bronze, length 70

Photo Bulloz.

Paris.

BAZILLE,

(211x201).

Musee

Fabre,

Montpellier.

BERNARD,

Emile 305 Self-Porlrait With Portrait

of Gauguin 1888. Oil on canvas, 18}x21}
(46 x 54.9). Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh,

Amsterdam.

BILLINGS, Hammatt 156 Uncle Tom and Little

Eva 1852. Wood engraving bv Baker and Smith,
3} x 5} (8.9 x

William 95 Frontispiece to Visions of the

Daughters of Albion 1793. Relief etching, watercolor, 6f x 4} ( 1 7 x 12). The Trustees of the British

Museum, London. 96 "A Negro hung

alive by the
Ribs to the Gallows," from John G. Stedman
Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the

Revolted Negroes oj Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild

Coast of South America 1796. Engraving, 7x5}

(18x13.5). 97 The Spiritual Form of Nelson

Guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathmgs are infolded
the Nations of the Earth 1809. Tempera on canvas,
30 x 24} (76.2 x 62.5). Tate Gallery, London. 99
Alhwn Rose ca. 1794-5. Color print, with pen and
over

engraving,
10} x 7}
Trustees of the British
Museum, London. 107 The Great Red Dragon and
the Woman Clothed With the Sun: "The Devil is
watercolor,

line

The

Come Down" ca. 1805. Pen and ink with watercolor

over graphite, 16}xl3} (40.8x33.7).
1993
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.8999. 110 Laocobn
ca. 1820. Engraving, 10} x 8} (25.5 x 21.2). Reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

BOCKLIN,

Arnold 325 Vita Somnium Breve 1888.

Tempera on wood, 70} x 45 (180 x 114.5). Oeffentliche

Dead

Kunstsammlung,

Basel.

326 Island of the

31}x 57} (80 x 150).

Kunstsammlung, Basel.
Rosa 21 1 Plowing in the Nivernais: The

1880. Oil on canvas,

Oeffentliche

BONHEUR,

Dressing of the Vines 1849. Oil on canvas, 69 x 8'8

(175.3 x 264.2). Musee National du Chateau, Ver-

Photo

R.M.N.

230 The Horse Fair 1853.

Oil on canvas, 941, x 167} (239.3x506.7). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of
sailles.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. All rights reserved,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

BORRANI, Odoardo

222 The 26th of April 1859

1861. Oil on canvas, 29} x 22} (75 x 58). Private

collection.

368

The Nut

Arts 1993.

BRETON, Jules

229 Blessing the Wheat in the Artois

1857. Oil on canvas, 51 x 10'6 (129.5x320).
Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Photo
R.M.N.
BROC, Jean 27 The Death ofHyacinth in the Arms of
Apollo 1801. Oil on canvas, 70x49} (177.8
x 125.7). Musee des Beaux-Arts, Poitiers.
BROWN, Ford Madox 207 Work 1852-65. Oil on
canvas, 54 x 78 (137 x 197.3).
Manchester City
Art Galleries.
CAILLEBOTTE, Gustave 240 A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann ca. 1880. Oil on canvas, 26} x 24

CANOVA, Antonio
Museum

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

41 Perseus 1801. Marble, height

of Art. Photo David Finn. 42 Pauline

Borghese as Venus 1808. Marble, length 79 (200.7).

Borghese, Rome. 43 Magdalene 1796.

Marble, height 37 (94). Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.
CARPEAUXJean-Baptiste 245 The Dance 1867-9.
Galleria

Stone, height 13'9} (420).

R.M.N.

politan

Museum

of Art,

New

York. Gift of Paul

The Metropolitan
of Art. 275 The Letter (3rd state) 1891.
Colored etching, drypoint, and aquatint, 13} x 9
1993 National Gallery of Art,
(34.7 x 22.8).

J.

Sachs. All rights reserved,

Museum

Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Collection. 276

Afternoon Tea Party (4th state) 1891. Color
16}xl2}
drypoint and aquatint on paper,
(42.5x31.1).

1993 National Gallery of Art,

Washington, DC. Chester Dale Collection. Photo

Dean Beasom. 277 The Omnibus (4th state) 1891.
Soft-ground etching, drvpoint, and aquatint in

18x12} (45.7x31.4).

color,

1993 National

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale

Collection. 279

Oil on canvas,

Young Women Picking Fruit 1892.

52x36

(132x91.5).

Museum

of

Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA.

86f (220). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York. All rights reserved, The Metropolitan

Photo

14).

BLAKE,

(27.1x20.1).

1880.

(67.9 x 61). Private collection.

Frederic 236 La Toilette 1870. Oil on

83x79

canvas,

William-Adolph 302
Oil
on canvas,

34} x 52}
(88 x 134). Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of Mrs.
William E. Scripps.
The Detroit Institute of
Gatherers

223 Cloister 1861-2. Oil on

cardboard, 7} x 10 (19.3x25.2). Galleria d'Arte

Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

(74.6 x 50.4).

BOUGUEREAU,

Musee d'Orsav,

Paris.

CASS ATT, Mary

251 Self-Portrait 1878. Gouache

on paper, 23} x 17} (59.6 x 44.4). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Edith
H. Proskauer, 1975 (1975.319.1). All rights
reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 253
Portrait oj Louisme Elder Havemeyer ca. 1896.
Pastel, 29x24 (73.6x61). Shelburne Museum,
Shelburne, VT. 255 Five O'Clock Tea ca. 1880.
Oil on canvas, 25} x 36} (64.7 x 92.7). Courtesy,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Maria Theresa
B. Hopkins Fund. 259 The Boating Party 18934.
Oil on canvas, 35} x 46} (90.1 x 117.1).
1993
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Collection. Photo Richard Carafelli. 260
Woman in Black at the Opera 1880. Oil on canvas,
31} x 25} (80 x 64.8). Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. The Hayden Collection. 266 Reading Le Figaro 1883. Oil on canvas, 41 x 33
(104x83.7). Private Asset Management Group,
New York. Photo Christie's New York. 267 Lydia
Working at a Tapestry Frame ca. 1881. Oil on
canvas, 25} x 36} (65.5 x 92). Flint Institute of
Arts, MI. Gift of the Whiting Foundation. 268
The First Caress ca. 1890. Pastel on paper, 30 x 24
(76.2x61). New Britain Museum of American

CT. Harriett Russell Stanley Memorial

Fund. 269 Mother and Child 1908. Oil on canvas,
1993 National Gallery of
36} x 29 (92. 1 x 73.7).
Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Collection. 271 The Bath ca. 1892. Oil on canvas, 39 x 26
(99 x 66). The Art Institute of Chicago. The
Robert A. Waller Fund. Photo
1993, The Art
Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved. 273 The
Mother's Kiss (5th state) 1891. Drypoint and
aquatint on paper, 17} x 1 1 (43.5 x 30). The Art
Institute of Chicago. The Mr. and Mrs. Martin A.
Ryerson Collection 1932. Photo
1993, The Art
Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved. 274 The
Coiffure (5th state) 1891. Drypoint and aquatint in
color on paper, 19 x 12} (48 x 30.9). The MetroArt,

g-

CATLIN, George

143 Clermont, First Chief of the

(Osage) 1823. Oil on canvas, 29x24
(73.7x61). National Museum of American Art,
Tribe

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo

Art Resource, New York. 140 The Last Race,
Okipa Ceremony (Mandan) 1832. Oil on canvas,
23}x28} (58.8x71.3). National Museum of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.
Photo Art Resource, New York. 144 Letters and
Notes
., frontispiece, "The Author painting a
Chief at the Base of the Rocky Mountains," 1841.
Engraving, 9} x 6 (24x15). The Huntingdon
Library, San Marino, CA. 146 Callin Painting the
.

Portrait of

Oil

Mah-To-Toh-Pa Mandan 1857-69.

15}x23} (39x60.6).
1993

on board,

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

CEZANNE, Paul 354 Pastoral Scene ca. 1870. Oil

on canvas, 25}x31} (65x81). Musee d'Orsay,

Paris. 355 A Modern Olympta ca. 1869-70. Oil on
canvas, 22 x 21} (56 x 55). Private collection. 356
The Rape ca. 1867. Oil on canvas, 35} x 46
(90.5 x 117). The Provost and Fellows of King's
College, Cambridge (Keynes Collection), on loan
to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 357 Portrait of
Uncle Dominique 1866. Oil on canvas, 15}xl2
(39.5 x 30.5). The Provost and Fellows of King's
College, Cambridge (Keynes Collection), on loan
to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 358 Portrait of
the Painter, Achille Emperaire ca. 1868-70. Oil on
canvas, 78} x 48 (200x122). Musee d'Orsay,
Cezanne,
Paris. 359 Portrait of Louis-August
Father of the Artist, Reading L'Evenement 1866. Oil
1993 National
on canvas, 78} x 47} (200 x 120).
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1970.5.1. 360 Still Life
With Apples ca. 1895-8. Oil on canvas, 27 x 36}

The Museum of Modern Art, New

York. Lillie P. Bliss Collection. 361 The Large
1900-06. Oil on canvas, 67} x 77}
Bathers
(172.2 x 196.1). Reproduced by courtesy of the
Trustees, The National Gallery, London. Pur(68.6 x 92.7).

chased

in

1964 with the aid of the

Max Rayne

Foundation and a special Exchequer Grant. 363

House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise ca.
1873. Oil on canvas, 21f x 26 (54.9 x 66). Musee

d'Orsay, Paris. 364 L' Estaque ca. 1876. Oil on

canvas, 16} x 23} (41 .9 x 59). The Bernhard Foun-

New

York. 366 Houses

Provence ca.
1879-82. Oil on canvas, 25} x 32 (64.7 x 81.2).
1993 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

dation,

in

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. 367

Mont Samte-Victoire Seen From Bibemus ca. 1 898Collection of

1900. Oil on canvas, 25} x 31} (65 x 80). Baltimore

Museum

The Cone

of Art.

Collection, formed by

Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore. 368 Mont Satnte-Victoire ca. 1902-06. Oil
on canvas, 33 x 25} (83.8 x 65). The Art Museum,
Princeton University. Lent by the Henry Rose
Pearlman Foundation.
CHARPENTIER, Constance 26 Melancholy 1801.
Oil on canvas, 52x66 (132 x 167.6). Musee de
Picardie, Amiens. Photo Bulloz.
CHASSERIAU, Theodore 203 Portrait Drawing of
de Tocqueville 1844. Pencil on paper, Il}x9}
(30 x 24).

CHERET,

Musee

Lithograph poster, 23}xl6} (59.7x41.9). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Wilderness

x 162.6).

Frederic

Twilight

in

the

40x64 (101.5
Museum of Art. Mr.

Cleveland

and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 65.233.

CLAUDEL, Camille 349 The Waltz 1905. Bronze,
18J-

13x7}(46.4x33x

CLESINGER,

19.7). Private collection.

Jean-Baptiste 194

Woman

Bitten by

Snake 1847. Marble, length 31 (78.8). Musee du

Louvre, Paris.
COHOE 150 Fort Marion Prisoners Dancing for
Tourists 1875-7. Graphite and colored pencil on
a

133 The Course of Empire: Desolation 1836. Oil on canvas, 39} x 63} (99.7 x 160.7).
Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society,
New York City. 136 Sunny Morning on the Hudson
River 1827. Oil on canvas," 18} x 25} (47.6 x 64.1).

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Mr. and

Mrs. Karolik Collection.
CONSTABLE, John 117 Golding Constable's Flower
Carden 1815. Oil on canvas, 13 x 20 (33 x 50.8).
Ipswich Museums and Galleries, Ipswich Borough
Council. 118 Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden
1815. Oil on canvas, 13 x 20 (33 x 50.8). Ipswich
Museums and Galleries, Ipswich Borough
Council. 119 The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon)
1821. Oil on canvas, 51}x73 (130.5x185.5).
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The
Courtesy,

London. 121 Dedham Vale

48(145 x 122). National

Gallerv,

1828. Oil on canvas, 57} x

Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Castle,

Mouth of

Stormy Night

the

1829.

122 Hadleigh

Thames Morning
Oil

After a

on canvas, 48x64}

(122 x 161.9). Yale Center for British Art,

New

Haven. Paul Mellon Collection. 123 Old Sarum

1832.

Watercolor,

Honore 179 Rue Transnonain April 15,

1834 1834. Lithograph, Il}xl7} (29.2x44.8).

196 The Third-Class Carriage ca. 1862. Oil on

canvas, 25} x 35} (65.4 x 90.2). National Gallery of

Canada, Ottawa.
Jacques-Louis 1 Belisanus Begging Alms
1781. Oil on canvas, 9'5} x 10'2} (287.3 x 312.1).
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille. 3 The Oath of the
Horaln Between the Hands of Their Father 785. Oil
on canvas, 10'9}x 13'11} (329.9x424.8). Musee
du Louvre, Paris. Photo
R.M.N. 7 Socrates at
the Moment of Grasping the Hemlock 1787. Oil on
canvas, 51} x 77} (129.9 x 195.9). The Metropoli-

Museum

tan
lard

of Art,

Il}xl9} (30.1x48.6).

By

courtesy of the Board of the Trustees of the

Museum, London.
Gustave Page 6 Portrait of Baudelaire
ca. 1848. Oil on canvas, 20| x 24 (53 x 61). Musee
Fabre, Montpellier. Photo Bulloz. 202 Man With
Leather Belt ca. 1845. Oil on canvas, 39} x 32}
(100 x 82). Musee d'Orsay, Paris. 205 After Dinner at Ornans 1849. Oil on canvas, 76} x 8'5}
(195 x 257). Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille. 206 The
Slonebreakers 1850. Oil on canvas, 63 x 8'6
(160x259). Formerly Gemaldegalerie, Dresden
(destroyed in World War II). 208 The Studio ofthe
Painter: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years
of My Artistic Life 1854 5. Oil on canvas,
ll'10xl9'8 (360.7x599.4). Musee d'Orsay,
Paris. Photo
R.M.N. 209 A Burial at Ornans,
1849. Oil on canvas, 10'4x21'9 (315x663).
Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Photo <( R.M.N. 210
Victoria and Albert

COURBET,

>

Peasants of Flagey Returning From the Fair 1849.

Oil on canvas, 81{ x 9'lj (206 x 275). Musee des

Beaux-Arts, Besancon. Photo Hulloz. 213 The

Meeting 1854.03 on canvas, 50jj x 58g(129x 149).
Musee Fabre, Montpellier. Photo Bulloz 214 The

New

Wolfe Fund, 1931.

York. Catherine Loril-

The

All rights reserved.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. 10 Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons 1789. Oil on
canvas, 10'7}xl3'10} (322.9x422). Musee du

Louvre,

Paris.

Photo

R.M.N.

14 The Oath of
and white

the Tennis Court 1791. Pen, bistre wash,

26x41}

DENIS, Maurice 344 April 1892. Oil on canvas,

14}x24 (37.5x61). State Museum KrollerMuller, Otterlo.

DEVERIA, Eugene

69 The Birth of Henri IV 1827.

Oil on canvas, 15' 10} x 12' 10} (484 x 392). Musee

du Louvre,

DEVOSGE,

Paris.

after J.-L. David 15 The

Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau 1793. Pencil
on paper, 18} x 15} (46.7 x 40). Musee des BeauxArts de Dijon.
DROUAIS, Jean-Germain 8 The Dying Athlete
1785. Oil on canvas, 49} x 71} (125 x 182). Musee
du Louvre, Paris. Photo
R.M.N 9 Marius at
Mmlurnae 1787. Oil on canvas, 9'xl2'2
(274.3 x 370.8). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo

Anatole,

R.M.N.

DUNCANSON,

Robert Scott 155 Uncle Tom and

1853.
Oil
on canvas, 27} x 38}

Eva

Little

(69.2 x 97.2).

Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of

Mrs. Jefferson Butler and Miss Grace R. Conover.

The Detroit Institute of Arts 1993.

DUPRE,

Augustin 137 The Diplomatic Medal 1790.

Bronze, diameter 2} (6.7). Division of Numisma-

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Asher B. 134 Landscape: Progress 1853.
Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 (121. 9 x 182.9). The Warner
Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation,
tics,

DURAND,

Tuscaloosa, AL.

EAKINS, Thomas

29 Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass 1800.

Oil on canvas, 8'10} x 7'7} (270.8 x 231.8). Musee
National du Chateau, Versailles. 30 Leontdas at
loz.

Thermopylae 1814. Oil on canvas, 12'll}xl7'5

(395.6 x 530.9). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo

R.M.N.

DAVID

J.-L., and Francois Gerard 34 Aeneas

Carrying Anchises From the Ruins of Troy late
1790's. Engraving, 9} x 6} (24.5x15.5). Photo
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

DAVID D'ANGERS,

187 The pediment of the Pantheon, 1830-37. Stone. Paris. 190

Pierre-Jean

The Motherland Calling Her Children

to the

Defense

of Liberty 1835. Stone, 53} x lO'll} (135x333).

Arc de Triomphe, Aix gate, Marseille.
DAVIS, Theodore R., and William S. Soule 149
Page 41, Harper's Weekly, January 16, 1869. Photo
New York Public Library, New York.
DEGAS, Edgar 242 Portraits at the Stock Exchange
ca. 1879. Oil on canvas, 39} x 32} (100x82).
Musee d'Orsay, Paris. 243 Little Dancer iged
Fourteen ca. 1881. Yellow wax, cotton skirt, satin
ribbon,

wooden

base, height 39 (99.1). Collection

VA. 244
The Dance School 1873. Oil on canvas, 19x24}
(48.3 x 62.5). The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washof Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville,

ington, D.C. William A. Clark Collection, 1926,

26.74.

DELACROIX, Eugene
lus

64 The Death ofSardanapa-

1827. Oil on canvas, 12'l IJ x 16*3 (395 x 495).

Musee du Louvre,

Paris.

Photo

<

\1

28th Oj July: Liberty Leading the People

canvas, 8'6} x I0'8 (260x325.1).

65 The

830.

( )il

Musee

on
du

RAIN. 66 The Bark oj

Louvre, Pans Photo
Dante and Virgil 1822. Oil on canvas, 74 x 945
(188 x 241). Musee dU LoUVTe, Pans, Photo Bulloz. 67 The Massacre at Sao 1824. Oil on canvas,
(

l3'8J-xH'7j
Paris.

(417.2x354)

71 Greece on the

Rums

Musee du Louvre,
o/ Missolonghi

S 27

des

Bordeaux. 192 Women of Algiers

1834. Oil on canvas, 70} x 90} (180 x 229). Musee
du Louvre, Paris.
DELAROCHE, Paul 180 Artists of All Ages 183641. Encaustic, 12'5x82' (388.6x2,499.4). Ecole
nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Beaux-Arts,

Musee

(66 x 105).

National

Musee

Oil on canvas, 83} x 56 (213 x 142).

du Chateau, Versailles. Photo

R.M.N. 16 Marat at His Last Breath 1793. Oil on
canvas, 63} x 49} (160.7 x 124). Musee Royaux des
Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo A.C.L. 17 The Death
ofBuru 1793. Oil on canvas, 46} x 61 (118 x 155).
Musee Calvet, Avignon. 28 The Intervention of the
Sabine Woman 1799. Oil on canvas, 12'8xl7'}
(386 x 520). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo Bul-

highlights on paper,

paper. Private collection.

COLE, Thomas

National

DAUMIER,

Edwin 135

1860. Oil on canvas,

The

R.M.N.

DAVID,

Carnavalet, Paris.

Jules 292 Le Bal du Moulin Rouge 1889.

CHURCH,

Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seme 1856-7. Oil

on canvas, 68} x 81} (173 x 206). Musee du Petit
Palais, Paris. 215 Sleepers 1866. Oil on canvas,
53}x78} (135x200). Musee du Petit Palais,
Paris. 216 Seaside 1866. Oil on canvas, 21} x 25}
(53.5 x 64).
Wallraf-Richartz
Museum, Cologne. 217 Grand Panorama of the Alps With the
Dents du Midi 1877. Oil on canvas, 59} x 82}
(151 x 210). The Cleveland Museum of Art. John
L. Severance Fund.
COUTURE, Thomas 185, 186 Romans of the Decadence
1847.
Oil
15'6}x25'10
on
canvas,
(473.7 x 787.4). Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Photo

175 Will Schuster and Black Man

Going Shooting (Rail Shooting) 1876. Oil on
canvas, 22} x 30} (56.2x76.8). Yale University
Art Gallery, New Haven. Bequest of Stephen
Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903. 176 Negro Boy Dancing
18}x22} (46x57.7). The
1878. Watercolor,

Museum

Metropolitan

Fund, 1925.

of Art,

New

All rights reserved,

York. Fletcher

The

Metropolitan

Museum

of Art. 250 Self-Portrait 1902. Oil on

canvas, 30 x 25 (76.2 x 63.5). National Academy of

Design, New York City. 252 The Swimming Hole

ca. 1883-5. Oil on canvas, 27x36 (68.5x91.4).

Amon

Museum, Fort Worth, TX. 254

Mahon 1904. Oil on canvas,

Carter

Portrait of Mrs. Edith

20 x 16 (50.8x40.6). Smith College Museum of

Art, MA. Purchase, Drayton Hillyer Fund. 258

Max Schmitt in a
31}x46}

Museum

Single Scull 1871. Oil on canvas,

The

(81.9x117.5).
of Art,

New

Metropolitan

York. Purchase, Alfred N.

Punnett Endowment Fund and George D Pratt

1990 By The
1934 (34.92). Copyright
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 261 The Cross
96x78
(243.8 x 198.1).
Clime 1875. Oil on canvas,
Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson
University, Philadelphia, PA. 262 The Concert
Singer ( Weda Cook) 1892. Oil on canvas, 75} x 54}
(191.4x138.1). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Given by Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss M.irv V

Gift,

Williams. 264

Miss

Van Buren

canvas, 45 x 32(1 14.3 x 81.2).

1891.

Oil'

on

The Phillips Collec-

Washington, D.C. 265 Fortran of Benjamin

Professor Rand 1S74. Oil on canvas,
60 x 48 (152.4 x 121.9). Jefferson Medical College
tion,

Howard

Thomas

of

[efierson

niversity,

Philadelphia,

PA. 270 GirlH nil Cat Portrait OJ kalhrm 1872

Vale
Oil on canvas, 62Jx48j (159 4x122 6)
University Art Gallery, New Haven. Bequest ol
Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903. 278 William
Rush Curving His Allegorical Figure oj the Schuyl(

kill

River

iiii

!).

1877.

Oil on canvas,

Philadelphia

Museum

20J

of \rt

Mrs Thomas Eakins and Miss Mar]

26J

(51.1

Given I"
Williams

EASTERLY, Thomas

147 Keokuk, or the Watchful

I'm IS47. Daguerreotype National Anthropologi-

cal

Smithsonian

Archives,

Institution,

Wash-

ington, D.C.

ENSOR, James

315 The Entry

LIST OF

II.

1. 1

l ('/;>/ into Brussels

SIR \TIO\S

369

on canvas, 8'6}xl4'6
1889
1888.
Oil
(260 x 430.5). Collection of J. Paul Getty Museum,
Malibu, CA. 321 Iston, Pou/famatus, Cracozie, and
in

Transmouff, Famous Persian Physicians Examining

of King Darius after the Buttle / Arbela

the Stools

1886.

9$ x 7 (23.7x17.8). Koninklijk
voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. 322

Etching,

Museum
Old Woman

With Mush 1889. Oil on canvas,

21}xl8} (54x47). Musee des Beaux-Arts,
Ghent. 323 The Gendarmes 1892. Oil on canvas,
14 x 21} (35.5 x 55). Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ostend. 324 My Portrait in I960 1888.
Etching, 2\ x4}(6.9x 12). Bibliotheque Royalede
Belgique, Brussels.

FAVEAU,

Felicie de 182 Christina ofSweden RefusGive Mercy to Her Squire Monuldeschi ca.
Plaster,
1827.
15Jx22J (40x58). Musee des
Beaux-Arts, Louviers.
FLANDRIN, Hippolyte-Jean 212 Napoleon 111
1860-61. Oil on canvas, 83} x 58 (212x147).
Musee National du Chateau, Versailles.
FLAXMAN, John 24 "The Fight for the Body
of Patroculus," from Illustrations to Homer's
Iliad" 1793. Engraving, 6| x 13 (16.8x33.6).
98 "Design for the Monument to British Naval
Victories with a Statue of Britannia," 1799.
Engraved by William Blake, 8} x 5} (21 x 14.6).
The Trustees of the British Museum, London.
FRIEDRICH, Caspar David 132 Abbey in the Oak
1809-10.
Forest
Oil
on canvas, 39} x 67}
(100.4 x 171). Schloss Carlottenburg, Berlin.
FUSELI, Henry 100 Thor Battering the Midguard
Serpent 1790. Oil on canvas, 51} * 36i (131 x 92).
ing to

Royal Academy of Arts, London. 103 The Nightmare 1790. Oil on canvas, 30x24} (76x63).

Goethe Museum, Frankfurt. 104 Symplegma

(Alan and Three Women) ca. 1810. Watercolor,
7}x 9} (18.9x24.5). By courtesy of the Board of
the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
GAUGUIN, Paul 313 Green Christ 1889. Oil on
canvas, 364, x 28} (92 x 73). Musees Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. 314 Yellow
Christ 1889. Oil on canvas, 36} x 28} (92x73).
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. General
Purchase Fund. 317 The Seaweed Gatherers 1889.
Oil on canvas, 34} x 48} (87x123). Folkwang
Museum, Essen. 318 Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin
1889. Oil on canvas, 444. x 36} (1 13 x 92). Narodni
Galerie, Prague. 319 Jug in the Form of a Head,
Self-Portrait 1889. Glazed stoneware, height 7}
(19.3). Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen. 320 Christ in the Garden of Olives 1889. Oil on
canvas, 28} x 36} (73 x 92). Norton Gallery and
School of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. 339 Manao
tupapuu (The Specter Watches Her) 1892. Oil on
canvas, 28} x 36f (73 x 92). Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Buffalo, NY. A. Conger Goodyear Collection. 340 The Meal, or The Bananas 1891. Oil on
canvas, 28} x 36} (73 x 92). Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

R.M.N. 341 Vahine no te vt (Woman of

Mango) 1892. Oil on canvas, 28fxl7}
(72.7 x 44.5). Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone
Collection formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss
Etta Cone of Baltimore. 351 Mahana no Atua
(Day of the God) 1894. Oil on canvas, 26} x 36
Photo
the

Paris. 31 Ossian 1801. Oil on canvas, 725 x 76J

(184.5X 194.5). Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo
Elke Walford. 56 Entry of Henri IV into Puns
1817. Oil on canvas, 16'7Jx31'4} (510x958).
Musee National du Chateau, Versailles. Photo
(

R.M.N

GERICAULT,
Cavalryman

Theodore 52 The Charging

(chasseur)

Oil

1812.

on

Light

canvas,

11'5J x 8'8J (349 x 266). Musee du Louvre, Paris.

Photo Bulloz. 53 The Wounded Heavy Cavalry-

man

(cuirassier)

(358 x 294).

1814. Oil on canvas,

Musee du Louvre,

1'9 x 9'7}

Paris 58 Severed

Limbs 1818. Oil on canvas, 20} x 25} (52x64).

Musee Fabre, Montpellier. 59 Despair and Cunmhalism on the Raft of the Medusa 1818. Black
pencil, brown ink, heightened with white gouache

on beige paper, 11x15 (28 x 38). Private collection. 60 Pity the Sorrows ofthe Poor Old Man 1821.
Lithograph, 124. x 14} (31.7 x 37.6). Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris. 61 Portrait of an Insane Man
1822-3. Oil on canvas, 24x19} (61.2x50.2).
Ghent Museum. Photo A.C.L. 62 The Raft of the
1819.
16'lx23'6
Medusa
Oil
on canvas,
(490.2 x 716.3). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo

R.M.N.

226 Reception of the Siamese

Ambussudors by Nupoleon III and the Empress
Eugenie at Fonlainebleau, June 27 1861 18614. Oil
on canvas, 50} x 8'6} (128 x 260). Musee National
du Chateau, Versailles. Photo
R.M.N.
GILLRAY, James 105 Phaeton Alarm'd! 1808.
Engraving, 13 x 14} (33 x 36.8). The Trustees of
,

the British Museum, London.

GILPIN, William 111, 112 Plates from Three
Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque
Travel, and On Sketching 1792. Both 6} x 9

(15.5x22.5).

GIRODET,

Anne-Louise 12 Pieta 1789. Oil on

x 92} (335 x 235). Church of Montesquieu-Volvestre, Haute-Garonne. 13 The Sleep of
Endymwn 1791. Oil on canvas, 19} x 24} (49 x 62).
Musee du Louvre, Paris. 25 Portrait of JeanBuptiste Belley 1797. Oil on canvas, 63 x 45
(160 x 114.3). Musee National du Chateau, Versailles. Photo
R.M.N. 32 Ossian Receiving the
Napoleonic Officers 1802. Oil on canvas, 37x73}
(93.9x186.7). Musee National du Chateau de
Malmaison, Reuil-Maison. Photo Bulloz. 33 The
Deluge
1806.
Oil
on canvas,
14'l}xll'2}
(431 x 341). Musee du Louvre, Paris. 49 Alala at
the
Tomb 1808. Oil on canvas, 77} x 8'6}
(197 x 260). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo Bulloz. 51 The Revolt at Cairo 1810. Oil on canvas,
11'84-x 16'4J (356 x 500). Musee National du Chateau, Versailles. Photo
R.M.N.
GIRTIN, Thomas 115 Kirkstall Abbey 1800.
1

1'

The Trustees of
16 Somerset House

Watercolor, 12 x 20 (30.5 x 50.8).

the British
for

Museum, London.

"Eidometropolis," 1802. Watercolor, 9} x 21}

The Trustees of the British Museum,

(24.4 x 54).

London.

GOGH,

Vincent Van 295 La Berceuse 1889. Oil on

Museum
State
36} x 28} (92 x 73).
Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. 296 The Artist's Bedroom

canvas,
in

Aries 1888. Oil on canvas, 28} x 35} (79 x 90).

(68.3 x 91.5).

The Art Institute of Chicago. Helen

Birch Bartlett Collection, 1926.198. Photo 1993,

Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam. 297 Carpenter's Workshop and Laundry
1882. Pencil, ink, and paint on laid paper, 1} x 18}

The

(28.5 x 47).

Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights

Reserved. 352 Te Faaturuma (Silence, or To Be

on
canvas,
36x27
(9L2 x 68.7). Worcester Art Museum, Worcester,
MA. 353 Where Do We Come From? What Are
We? Where Are We Going? 1897. Oil on canvas,
54} x 12' 3} (139x374.5). Courtesy, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Arthur Gordon Tompkins
Residuary Fund.
GEORGIN, F and J.-B. Thiebault 188 The
Apotheosis of Napoleon 1834. Print, 16 x 23
(40.6 x 58.2). Photo Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
GERARD, Francois 23 Cupid and Psyche 1798. Oil
on canvas, 73} x 52 ( 1 86 x 1 32). Musee du Louvre,
Dejected)

370

1891.

Oil

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Otterlo.

State

Museum

299 The Bearers of

Kroller-Muller,
the

Burden 1881.

Pencil and ink on laid paper, 17 x 23} (43 x 60).

Museum

Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. 300 The

1885. Oil on canvas, 32} x 44}
(82x114). Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh,
Amsterdam. 304 Portrait ofPere Tanguy 1887-8.
State

Potato

Eaters

Musee Rodin,
Photo R.M.N. 306 Yellow House at Aries
888. Oil on canvas, 28} x 36 (72 x 91 .5). Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam. 307 The
Night Cafe 1888. Oil on canvas, 28} x 36}

Oil on canvas, 36} x 29} (92 x 75).

Paris.
1

(72.4 x 92).

on

Madrid. 73 Cuprichos 4.1 "El sueno

de la ra/on produce monstruos" (The sleep of
reason produces monsters") 1799. Etching and
aquatint, 8} x 6(21.6 x 15.2). Biblioteca Nacional,
teca Nacional,

Madrid. 74 Conde de Flondablanca 1783. Oil on

81}x42 (207x106.7). Banco Urquijo,
Madrid. 75 Charles IV and His Family 1801 Oil
on canvas, 9'2} x 11'} (280x335.9). Museo del
Prado, Madrid. 76 The Family of the Duuue de
Osunu 1788. Oil on canvas, 88} x 68} (225.7 x 174).
Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo Mas, Barcelona. 77 Queen Muriu Luisu Wearing u Mantilla
1799. Oil on canvas, 82} x 51} (210 x 130). Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real, Madrid. Photo Mas,
Barcelona. 78 Naked Maja ca. 1798-1805. Oil on
canvas, 37} x 74} (94.9 x 189.9). Museo del Prado,
Madrid. 79 Clothed Maja ca. 1798-1805. Oil on
canvas, 37} x 74} (94.9 x 189.9). Museo del Prado,
Madrid. 80 Courtyard with Lunatics 17934. Oil
on canvas, 17}xl2} (43.8x32.7). Meadows
Museum, Dallas. 81 The Knife Grinder ca. 180812. Oil on canvas, 25} x 19} (65 x 50). Reproduced
by courtesy of the Board of Directors of the
Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. 82 The Executions
of the Third of May, 1808 1814. Oil on canvas,
8'8} x 1'3} (266 x 344.8). Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo Mas, Barcelona. 83 The Witches' Sabbath 1797-8. Oil on canvas, 17} x 12} (44x31).
Museo Lazaro Galdiano, Madrid. 84 Cuprichos 68
"Linda maestra!" ("A fine teacher") 1799. Etching
and aquatint, 8} x 5} (21.3 x 15). Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Photo Mas, Barcelona. 85 Cuprichos
50 "Los Chincillas" ("The Chincillas") 1799.
Etching and aquatint, 8} x 5} (20.8 x 15.1). Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. 86 Capnchos 10 "El amor
y la muerte" ("Love and Death") 1799. Etching
and aquatint, 8} x 6 (21.8x15.3). Biblioteca
Nacional, Madrid. 87 Cuprichos 52 "Lo que puede
un sastre!" ("What a tailor can achieve!") 1799.
Etching and aquatint, 8} x 6 (21.7 x 15.2). Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Photo Mas, Barcelona. 88
The Uprising of the Second of May, 1808 1814. Oil
on canvas, 8'9 x 1 1'4} (226.7 x 345.8). Museo del
Prado, Madrid. 89 The Disasters of War 26 "No se
puede mirar" ("One can't look") ca. 1810-20.
Etching and lavis, 5} x 8} (14.4 x 21). Photo Mas,
Barcelona. 90 The Disasters of War 2 "Con razon 6
sin ella" ("Whether Right or Wrong") ca. 1810-20.
Etching and lavis, 6} x 8 (15.5x20.5). 91 The
Disasters of War 79 "Murio la verdad" ("Truth is
dead") ca. 1810-20. Etching, 7x8} (17.5x22).
Photo Mas, Barcelona. 92 The Disasters of War 80
"Si reucitaria?" ("If she were to rise again?") ca.
1810-20. Etching, 7x8} (17.5 x 22). Photo Mas,
Barcelona. 93 The Disasters of War 84 "La seguridad de un reo no exige lOrmento" ("The custody of
canvas,

GEROME, Jean-Leon

canvas,

308 Self-Portrait With Bandaged Eur 1889.

canvas, 23} x 19} (60x49). Courtsuld
Institute Galleries, London 309 Joseph Roulin
1888. Oil on canvas,
32 X 25$ (81.2 x 65.3).
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Robert
Bequest.
Treat Paine II
310 Eugene BetH 1888. Oil
on canvas, 23jj x 17} (60x45). Musee d'Orsay,
Paris. 311 Starry Night 1889. Oil on cam. is,
29x36j| (73.7x92.1). The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Acquired through the I.illie I'
Bliss Bequest. 312 Crows in the Wheat/ields 1890
Oil on canvas, 19j x 39< (50.5 x 100.3). Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam.
GOYA, Francisco 72 Cuprichos 1 frontispiece, 1799.
Etching and aquatint, 8} x6(21.9x 15.2). Biblio1903.

Oil

Yale University Art Gallery,

New

Haven. Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A.

a criminal does not call for torture") ca. 1810-20.

burin, 4} x 3} (11.5x8.5). Photo

Mas, Barcelona. 94 Saturn Devouring His Children
ca. 1820. Mural transferred to canvas, 57} x 32}
(145 x 82.9). Museo del Prado, Madrid.
GRANDVILLE 198 "Apple of the Hesperides and
rum ice," from Un Autre Monde 1844. Photo

Etching and

Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Antoine-Jean 39 The Battle of Nazareth
1801. Oil on canvas, 53} x 76} (135 x 195). Musee

GROS,

des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo

Patrick Jean.

40

Plague House a I Jaffa 1804. Oil on

x 23'74/ (532.1x720). Musee du
R.M.N.
Louvre, Paris. Photo
GUERIN, Pierre-Narcisse 20 The Return of Marcus
Sextus 1798. Oil on canvas, 85} x 95} (217 x 243).
R.M.N. 48
Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo
Aurora and Cephalus 1811. Oil on canvas,
8'4} x 734/ (254.5 x 186). Musee du Louvre, Paris.
R.M.N. 55 Henri de Rochejaquelew 1817.
Photo
Oil on canvas, 85 x 56 (216 x 142). Musee Munici-

Napoleon

canvas,

in the

17'54/

Constantin 234 The Champs-Elysees 1855.

Musee du
Photo Bulloz.
HARRIET, Fulchran-Jean 19 Oedipus at Colonus
1796. Oil on canvas, 614, x 52} (156 x 133). Private
R.M.N.
collection. Photo
HENNEQUIN, Philippe-Auguste 21 Allegory of 10
August 1799. Detail. Oil on canvas, 88} x 68}
(224 x 175). Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.
HERSENT, Louis 54 Louis XVI Distributing Alms
1817. Oil on canvas, 70 x 904.
to
the Poor
(178x229). Musee Nationale du Chateau, VerR.M.N.
sailles. Photo
HODLER, Ferdinand 336 The Night 1891. Oil on
canvas, 45} x 9'9} (116x299). Kunstmuseum,
Bern. 337 The Monch With Clouds 1911. Oil on
canvas, 25} x 36 (64.5x91.5). Private collection. 342 The Beech Forest 1885. Oil on canvas,
39}x51} (101x131). Kunstmuseum, Solothurn. 343 Lake Geneva Seen From Chexbres 1904.
Oil on canvas, 27f x 421 (70.2 x 108). Collection
du Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. Photo J.C.
Ducret. 345 Valentine in Agony 1915. Oil on
Oil on paper, 91 x 16} (24.1 x41.6).
Petit Palais, Paris.

23}x35}

canvas,

(60.5x90.5).

Oeft'entliche

Kunstsammlung, Basel.
HOMER, Winslow 161 Prisoners From
1866. Oil

on canvas,

Metropolitan

Museum

24x38
of Art,

the Front

(60.9x96.5).

New

The

York. Gift of

Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922 (22.207). Copyright

1984 By The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 164 A
Bivouac Fire on the Potomac 1861. Wood engraving, 13} x 20 (34.9 x 50.8). Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. 165 Our
Jolly Cook 1863. Lithograph, 13} x 1 1} (35.2 x 28).
Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth, TX. 166
The Bright Side 1865. Oil on canvas, 13}xl7}
(33.7 x 44.4). The Fine Arts Museum of San
Francisco. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1979.7.56. 168 A Visit From the Old
Mistress 1876. Oil on canvas 18 x 244/(45.7 x 61.3).
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution,
Washington,
DC. Photo Art
Resource, New York.
HOSMER, Harriet 169 Beatrice Cenci 1857. Marble, 17} x 41} x 17 (43.8 x 104.7 x 43.1). St. Louis
Mercantile Library. 170 Zenobia in Chains 1859.
Marble, height 49 (124.5). Wadsworth Atheneum,
Hartford. Gift of Mrs. Josephine M. J. Dodge.
HUNT, William Holman 200 The Awakening Conscience 1853. Oil on canvas, 294/ x 22 (74.9 x 55.8)
excluding frame. Tate Gallery,

London.

INGRES, Jean-August-Dominique
the Imperial Throne 1806. Oil

(265.7 x 160).

35 Napoleon on

on canvas, 8'8} x 63

Musee de l'Armee,

Palais des Inva-

36 The Ambassadors of Agamemnon

1801. Oil on canvas, 434/ x 61
(109.9x154.9). Ecole nationale superieure des
Beaux-Arts, Paris. 37 Jupiter and Thetis 181 1. Oil
on canvas, 1 l'4f x 8'5J (347 x 257.2). Musee Grand, Aix-en-Provence. 38 The Turkish Bath 1862.
Oil on canvas, diameter 424/ (108). Musee du
Louvre, Paris. 63 The Apotheosis of Homer 1827.
Oil on canvas, 12'8x 16' II (386 x 515.6). Musee
du Louvre, Paris. Photo '(') R.M.N. 68 The Vow of
Louis XIII 1824. Oil on canvas, 13'9jx8'8J
(421 x 264.5). Montauban Cathedral. Photo Bulloz. 70 Henri IV Playing With His Children 1817.
Oil on canvas, 39 x 49} (99.1 x 125). Musee du
Petit Palais, Paris. Photo Bulloz
184 M. LouisFrancois Berlin 1832. Oil on canvas, 46x37}
(116.8x95.3). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo
lides,

Paris.

Visiting

74} x 56}

canvas,

Louvre,

Achilles

and the Sphinx 1808. Oil on

(188.9x143.8). Musee du

Paris.

ISRAELS,
canvas,

Jozef 301 The Frugal Meal 1876. Oil on

35x54} (88.9x138.7).
Glasgow

Museums: Art Gallerv and Museum, Kelvingrove.

JOCELYN,
canvas,

Nathaniel 154 Cinque

(76.8x64.8).
304/ x 254/

1839.

on

Oil

New Haven

Colonv Historical Society. Gift of Dr. Charles B.

Purvis, 1898.

JOHNSON,

pal, Cholet.

GUYS,

Bulloz. 228 Oedipus

Eastman 158

Old

KAUFMANN, Theodor

160 On to Liberty 1867. Oil

on canvas, 36 x 56 (91.4 x 142.2). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Erving and
Joyce Wolf, 1982. All rights reserved, The Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

Young Omahaw, War

and Pawnees 1822. Oil on
canvas, 364/ x 28 (91.8 x 71.1). National Museum
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Miss Helen Barlow. Photo Art
Resource, New York. 148 Keokuk, Sac (Watchful
Fox) 1827. Oil on panel, 174/ x 13} (44.4x34.9).
National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.
KRIMMEL, John Lewis 153 Quilting Frolic 1813.
Oil on canvas, 16} x 22} (42.8 x 56.8). The Henry
Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Courtesy,
Winterthur Museum.
KROHG, Christian 328 Sick Girl 1880-81. Oil on
canvas, 40} x 231 (103.5 x 51.4).
NasjonalgalCharles Bird 142

Eagle, Little Missouri,

leriet,

Oslo.

LABILLE-GUIARD,

Adelaide 6 Self-Portrait
With Two Pupils 1785. Oil on canvas, 83 x 594,
(210.8x151.1). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. Gift of Julia A. Berwind 1953
(53.225.5). All rights reserved, The Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

LANDON,

Charles,

Anne-Louise Girodet

after

50 Pygmalion and Galatea from Landon's Annates

du Musee de 1' ecole moderne des Beaux-Arts, 1819.

Engraving, 5} x 3} (13 x 9.5).

LEIBL, Wilhelm 219 Town

Politicians 1877. Oil

248

Bar

at the Folies-Bergere

on canvas, 37}x51} (96x130).

Courtauld Institute Galleries, London.
MARIS, Jacob 298 The Bleaching Yard 1870. Oil on
Rijksmuseumcanvas, 16} x 224/ (41x57).
Stichting Amsterdam.
MARTIN, John 124 The Fall of Ntnevah 1829.
Oil

Mezzotint, 36 x 26} (91.4 x 68). The Trustees of

the British Museum, London. 125 The Last Man
Watercolor, 18} x 27} (47.6 x 74). Laing
Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tvne.
MENZEL, Adolph von 220 Iron Rolling Mill 1872

LEUTZE, Emmanuel

on

Museum

Shaw

of Fine Arts, Boston.

Collection.

MONET,

Claude 237 Regatta at Argenteuil 1872.

Oil on canvas, 19 x 29} (48 x 75). Musee d'Orsav,
Paris. 246 Women in the Garden 1866-7. Oil on
canvas, 8'4 x 81 (255 x 205).

Photo

R.M.N. 335

Musee d'Orsav,

Paris.

1905. Oil

Walerlilies

on

(89.2x92.7).
Courtesy,
35} x 361
Museum of F'ine Arts, Boston. Given in memory of
Governor Alvan T. Fuller bv the Fuller Founda-

canvas,

tion, 61.959.

MOREAU,

Gustave 227 Oedipus and the Sphinx

1864. Oil on canvas, 80} x 41 (204.7 x 104.1).

The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The

Bequest of William H. Herriman, 1921. All rights

Musem of Art.
Berthe 247 Laundresses Hanging Out
the Wash 1875. Oil on canvas, 13 x 16 (33 x 40.6).
iCi 1993 National Gallery of Art, Washington,

reserved, The Metropolitan

MORISOT,

D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

249 The Psyche 1876. Oil on canvas, 251x211
Thvssen-Bornemisza
Collection,
(64 x 54).
Lugano, Switzerland.
MUNCH, Edvard 327 Sick Child 1885-6. Oil on
canvas, 47 x 46} (1 19.4 x 1 19). C Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. 329 The Voice 1893. Oil on canvas,
34} x 42} (87.6 x 108). Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. 338 Madonna 1895 7. Color litho-

graph, 23} x 17} (60.6x44.5).

167 Entrance

NAST, Thomas

of the Fifty-fifth
Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment into Charleston.

141 study for Westward the

South Carolina, February 21. lHbS 1865. Pencil,

neutral wash, and oil, heightened with white, on

Course of Empire Takes its Way ( Westward Ho!)

1861. Oil on canvas, 331 * 43} (84.5x110.2).
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian

Washington,

Resource, New York.

LEWIS, Edmonia 172

5. Oil on canvas, 60} x 99} (153 x 253). Staatliche

Museen, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
MILLAIS, John Everett 199 Christ m the House of
His Parents 1850. Oil on canvas, 334/ x 54
(85 x 137.2). Tate Gallery, London. 330 Ophelia
1851. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 (76.2 x 101.6). Tate
Gallery, London.
MILLET, Jean-Francoise 197 The Gleaners 1857.
Oil on canvas, 33 x 44 (83.8 x 111.8). Musee du
Louvre, Paris. Photo Bulloz. 201 The Sower 1850.
Oil on canvas, 39} x 324/ (101 x 82.5). Courtesy,

Stiftung

Museum

30 x 38} (76 x 97).

Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur.
canvas,

Institution,

RM.N.

1882.

ca. 1832.

Kentucky Home
(Negro Life in the South) 1859. Oil on canvas,
36 x 45 (91 .4 x 1 14.3). Courtesy of The New-York
Historical Society, New York City. 159 A Ride for
Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves ca. 1862-3. Oil on
board, 22x264/ (55.8x66.6). The Brooklyn
Museum. Gift of Miss Gwendolyn O. L. Conkling.
JOHNSTON, Frances Benjamin 152 Class in American History 1899 1900. Platinum print, 74/ x 94/
(19x24.1). The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Gift of Lincoln Kirstein.

KING,

Photo CO
ca.

DC.

Photo

Art

board, 141 * 211 (36.2 x 53.9). Courtesy, Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston. M. and M. Karolik Collection

of American Watercolors and Drawings, 1800 75.

Samuel 120 A Hilly Scene ca. 1826.

PALMER,

Watercolor,
Forever Free 1867. Marble,

and

pen,

(20.6 x 13.3). Tate Gallerv,

8J x 5}

tempera,

London.

411x11x7

PAPETV Dominique

versity,

12'ljx20'8 (370x635).
Musee de Compiegnc Photo
R.M.N.
PEYRON, Pierre 2 The Death of Alcestis 17S5. Oil
on canvas, 10'8 x 10'6 (327 x 325) Musee du
R \1 \
Louvre, Paris. Photo
PILOTY, Karl von 218 Sent Before Wallensteins
10'2jxll'll}
Corpse 1855. Oil on canvas,
(312 x 365). Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
PILS, Isidore 204 The Death of a Sister / Charity
1850 Oil on canvas, 95 x 10' (241 X 305) Musee
R M.N
d'Orsav, Pans. Photo
PISSARRO, Camille 238 Hoarfrost 1873, Oil on
canvas, 25fx36j
(65x93). Musee d'Ors.n,
Paris 241 Edge of the Woods or. I ndergrowlh in
Summer I87'U )il on oun.is, 4<>> X 63} (126 x 162)

(104.8x27.9x17.8). Howard UniJames A. Porter Gallery of AfroAmerican Art, Washington, D C. 173 Hagor

in

Wilderness

the

1868.

Marble, 52} x

5i x

(133.6 x 38.8 x 43.4). National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C. Gift of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. 174
Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter 1872-

Marble, height 27

(68.6).

Carver Museum, Tuske-

AL.
Edouard 231 The Barricade

gee Institute,

MANET,

ca.

1871.

Watercolor and gouache, 18J x 13J (46.5 x 33.4).

Reproduced by courtesy of the Board of Directors
of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. 232 Musk
in the Tttilerics 1862. Oil on canvas, 30x46}
(76 x 118). Reproduced by courtesy of the Trus-

1843.

Oil

193 The Dream

of

Happiness

on canvas,

<

National Gallerv, London. 233

1868 9.
Oil
on canvas, 66} x 49}

The Cleveland Museum

R.M.N. 235

canvas, 18; x 2lj (44 x 55) Pennsylvania Museum

ot \n Courtes] of the John
Johnson Collec-

51} x 745

Pans Photo
Olympia 1863. Oil on canvas,
(130.5x190). Musee d'Orsav, Paris.

tion, Philadelphia,

362

LIST OF

1. 1

tees,

The

Balcony

(169x125).

Musee d'Orsa\,

of

\n

Gift ol

Manna

Fund. 7X1 L' Isle Lacrois, Rouen. \Um 1888. Oil on

II.

tllagc

\cai Pontoisi IS"!

SIR vriOVS

371

Oil on canvas, 24 x 31 J (61 x 81).

Sammlung Oskar

Reinhart "Am Romerholz," Winterthur. .165 The

Cote des Bocufi at
Hermitage, Near Pontoise ca,
1873. Oil on canvas, 45j x 34+ (1 15 x 87.5). Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National

Gallery, London.

POWERS, Hiram

Slave 1846.
Marble after original plaster of 1843, height 651
( 1 66.4). The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,

The

171

Creel-

D.C.

PREAULT, Antoine-Augustin
43x55

Bronze,

189 Slaughter 1833

(109.2x139.7). Musee des

Beaux-Arts, Chartres.

PRUD'HON, Pierre-Paul

44 Crime Pursued by Vengeance ami Justice 1808. Oil on canvas, 96 x 9'7

292)'
Musee du Louvre, Paris. 46 Psyche
(244 x
Carried by Zephyrs to Cufiid's Domain 1808. Oil on
canvas, 76+. x 61 1 (195 x 157). Musee du Louvre,
Paris. 47 Portrait oj Empress Josephine 805. Oil on
canvas, 96 x 70i/ (244 x 179). Musee du Louvre,
1

Paris.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES,

Pierre 283 The Sacred

36x91 (92.6x231).

Grove 1884. Oil on canvas,

The

Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Potter

1993, The
Palmer Collection, 1922.445. Photo

Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved.

REDON, Odilon 316 Ophelia Among the Flowers
1905. Pastel, 25 x 35f (64 x 91).

courtesy of the Trustees,

The

Reproduced by

National Gallery,

London. 331 Roger and Angelica ca. 1908. Pastel

on paper and canvas, 36+. x 28+. (92.7 x 73). The

Museum

of Modern Art,

New York.

Lillie P. Bliss

332 The Smiling Spider 1885. Lithograph, 10+ x 8+. (26x21.5). Musee du Louvre,
Paris. Photo Bulloz. 334 The Cyclops 1905. Oil on
canvas, 25|x20 (64.1x50.8). State Museum
Kroller-Miiller, Otterlo. 346 "Death: My Irony
Exceeds All Others," from To Gustave Flaubert
1889. Lithograph, 10+ x 7+. (26.2 x 19.7). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
REGNAULT, Jean-Baptiste 11 Lamentation of
Christ
1789.
Oil
on canvas,
13'llJx91J
(425 x 233). Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo
R.M.N. 45 Liberty or Death 1795. Oil on canvas,
23f x 19+. (60 x 49). Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo
Elke Walford.
REPTON, Humphry 113, 114 "View from my own
cottage, in Essex," before and after, from Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape
Gardening 1816. Both 6* x 9 (17 x 24).
RENOIR, Auguste 239 Bal du Moulin de la Galette
1876. Oil on canvas,
51+x68i. (131x175).
Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Bequest of Gustave
Caillebotte, 1894.
263 The Loge 1874. Oil on
canvas, 311- x 25+. (80x64). Courtauld Institute
Collection.

London.
RODIN, Auguste 347 The Gates of Hell 1880-1917.
22'3} x 13'1+ x 33+.
Bronze,
(680 x 400 x 85).
Musee Rodin, Paris. Photo Bulloz. 348 Iris, Messenger of the Gods ca.
890. Bronze, height 37^
Galleries,

(95.3).

Musee Rodin,

1887. Bronze, 15 x 18J x

Rodin, Paris.

ROGERS,

350 Fugit Amor ca.

(38 x 48 x 20). Musee

Paris.
71-

Plaster,

New-York

RUDE,

Francois 191 The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792) 1833-6. Limestone,
height 42' (504). Arc de Triomphe, Paris.

RUNGE,

Philipp Otto 131 Morning 1808 (small

on canvas, 42f x 33f (108.9 x 85.9).

version). Oil

Kunsthalle,

Hamburg.

SARGENT, John

Singer 256 Lady Agnew of Lochnaw ca. 1892-3. Oil on canvas, 49+ x 39+^
(125.7x100.3). National Galleries of Scotland,

372

The

Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights

Reserved. 285 Final study for Chahut 1889. Oil on
canvas, 21| x 18+ (55.6 x 46.7). Albright-Knox Art

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

l()'6x

Edo

144,

Museum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo.

STEVENS, Alfred 303 The Japanese Dress ca.

1880.

Musee

d'art

Oil on canvas, 59 x 41+ (150 x 105).

moderne

TANNER,

et d'art

The

century.

Metropolitan

o
O

II

Havemeyer

Print,

Museum ol
Collection,

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,

(82.5x67.3).

CT.

VERNET,

Horace 57 City Gale at Clichy 1822. Oil

on canvas, 38j x 51j (97.5x130.5). Musee du
Louvre, Paris. Photo
R.M.N. 178 The Due
(

Proceeds to the ilolel-de-Ville, July 31,

1830 1833. Oil on canvas, 89} x 8'4J (228 x 258).

d' Orleans

Musee National du Chateau,

VIGEE-LEBRUN,
Anloinette With

Versailles.

Her Children

Marie-

Elisabeth-Louise

1787. Oil on canvas,

9'+x 84f(275 x 215). Musee National du Chateau,

Versailles. Photo C R.M.N. 5 Portrait of the
Artist With Her Daughter 1789. Oil on canvas,
41Jx33 (105x84). Musee du Louvre, Paris.
Photo <Ci R.M.N.
VRUBEL, Mikhail 333 Pan 1899. Oil on canvas,
48Jx41J (124 x 106.3). The Tretyakov Gallery,

Moscow.
Benjamin 106 The Destruction of the Old
and False Prophet 1804. Oil on panel,
39 x 56i (99x143.5). Minneapolis Institute of
Arts. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund. 108
design for The Apotheosis of Nelson 809. Oil on
1

canvas, 391- x 29 (100.3x73.8). Yale Center for

British Art, New Haven. Paul Mellon Collection.
WHISTLER, James Abbot McNeill 224 The White

Girl 1862. Oil on canvas, 84+. x 42+. (214.6 x 107.9).

1993 National Gallery of Art, Washington,

DC. Harris Whittemore Collection.

WIERTZ, Antoine 195 Two Young Girls

or The

Beautiful Rosine 1847. Oil on canvas, 55^x39+.

(140x100).
A.C.L.

WO-HAW

Wiertz,

Photo

Brussels.

151 Reading Class at Fort Marion 1875-

and

Pencil

7.

Musee

crayon

on

paper,

8xll+.
Nega-

tive:

Indians

17.

Miscellaneous illustrations

Hamp-

Museum, Hampton, VA.

Gerard 18 Belisanus 1795. Engraving,

x 13H46.5 x 34.5). Photo Bibliotheque Natio-

after Francois

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC,

Henri de 291 Le Divan

Japonais 1892-3. Color lithograph poster, 31 x 24
J-

(80.8 x 60.8).

18+.

nale, Paris.

Philippe-Auguste Hennequin 22 The Remorse

of Orestes 1800. Engraving, 15+. x 22+. (39 x 56.5).
Photo Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
109 Plate 10, vol. 1, from Baron d'Hancarville's

after

TURNER,

Joseph Mallord William 126 London

1809. Oil on canvas, 35+. x 47 \ (90x120). The
Turner Collection, Tate Gallery, London. 127
Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the
Alps 1812. Oil on canvas, 57 x 93 (144.8 x 236.2).
The Turner Collection, Tate Gallery, Lon128

The

contemporain, Liege.

1893. Oil on canvas, 48 x 35 (121.9 x 88.9).

don.

Mother Bathing Her

(22.2 x 28.5). Missouri Historical Society.

Henry Osawa 177 The Banjo Lesson

ton University

York

eighteenth

period,

Havemeyer All rights

Bequest of Mrs. II.
reserved, The Metropolitan Museum ol Ifl
VANDERLYN, John 139 The Death oj Jane
on
McCrea
1804.
canvas,
Oil
32J x 26j

Beast

Moderna,

lite

Florence.

(37.5 x 25).

New

Art,

Le Crotoy. Upstream 1889. Oil on

canvas, 28+ x 36+. (73 x 93.3). Detroit Institute of
Arts. Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill.
The
Detroit Institute of Arts 1993. 289 The Models
1886-8. Oil on canvas, 79 x 98+ (200.6x250.8).
The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, PA. 290
Chahut 1889-90. Oil on canvas. 66+. x 55+
(168.9x140.9). State Museum Kroller-Miiller,
Otterlo. 293 The Circus 1890-1. Oil on canvas,
73x60 (185.4x152.4). Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Bequest of John Quinn, 1924. Photo Bulloz. 294
Young Woman Powdering Herself 1889-90. Oil on
canvas, 27+. x 34+, (70.4 x 86.6). Courtauld Institute Galleries, London.
SIGNAC, Paul 286 The Dming Room. Breakfast
1886-7. Oil on canvas, 35 x 45+. (89 x 115). State
1943. 288

Pitti,

\\l \IU), Kitagawa 272

Son

WEST,

Buffalo,

I4'10(320x 452). Galleria d'

Palazzo

NY. General Purchase Fund

Gallery,

Dudley,

Watercolor,

John 157 Slave Auction 1859.

13+ (33.7). Courtesy of The

Historical Society, New York City.
height

Edinburgh. 257 F.na and Deity, Daughters / Mr

and Mrs. Asher Wertheimer 1901. Oil on canvas,
73 x 5IJ (185.4 x 130.8). Tate Gallery, London.
SCHEFFER, Arv 181 St. Augustine and Si. Monica
1854, Oil on canvas, 53ix41J (135.2x104.7).
Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The
National Gallery, London.
SERNESI, Raffaelk) 225 Roofs in Sunlight I860 61.
Oil on cardboard, 4J x 7J (12.3x19). Galleria
Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome.
SEURAT, Georges 280 Aman-Jean 1882 3. Conte
crayon, 24i x 18+, (62.2 x 46.4). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Stephen
Carlton Clark, B.A. 1960. All rights reserved, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 281 The Echo 1883.
Conte crayon, 12+ x 9+_ (31.1 x 23.4). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Bequest of Edith
Malvina K. Wetmore. 282 A Bathing Place.
Asnteres
1883-t. Oil on canvas, 79x9'10
(200.9 x 299.7). Reproduced by courtesy of the
Trustees, The National Gallery, London. 284 A
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte
1884-6. Oil on canvas, 81+. x 10'U (207.6 x 307.9).
The Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett
Memorial Collection, 1926.224. Photo
1993,

11

16+.

Worcestershire

ca.

1831-2.

The Board of
Museums & Galleries

(27.9x41.9).

the Trustees of the National

on Merseyside (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port

Sunlight). 129 Slaivrs Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying Typhoon Coming On 1840. Oil
on
canvas,
(91x138).
Courtesy,
35J- x 54+.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 130 Rain, Steam,
and Speed
The Great Western Railway 1844. Oil
on canvas, 35 x 48 (91x122). Reproduced by

courtesy of the Trustees,

The

National Gallery,

London.

USSI, Stefano 221 The Expulsion of the Duke of

Athens From Florence 1861. Oil on canvas,

Researches on the Origin, Spirit and Progress of the

Arts of Greece; on the Antique Monuments of India.

of Asia and Egypt 1785. Engraving,

Persia, the Rest

6x8(15x20.5).
138 "America," from The Four Continents 1804.
Engraving, 13x9J (34.6x24.6). The HenryFrancis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Courtesy,

Winterthur Museum.
145

Mandan

buffalo robe, collected 1837.

Width 82J

Berne Historical Museum, Switzerland.

War Photograph and Exhibition Company 162 A
Group of "Contrabands" ca. 1861-5. Stereograph.
George Eastman House Collection, Rochester,
(210).

New York.
Taylor and Huntington Publishers 163 Execution of
a Colored Soldier 1864. Stereograph. Courtesy of
The New-York Historical Society, New York City.

INDEX

Page numbers

in italic refer to illustrations; in

bold

Abbati, Giuseppe, 229-30; Cloister, 229

Academic Painting, 190
Academie des Beaux-Arts, 190, 193, 233
Academie Julian, 186
Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 295
Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels, 312-13
Adorno, Theodor, 137, 338, 350
Alba, Duchess of, 83, 92

Years' Expedition against the Revolted

Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the
Wild Coast of South America (Stedman/Blake), 101, 101; "Poetical and
Historical Inventions," 98, 103; Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan,
in whose Wreathmgs are Infolded the
Nations of the Earth, 102, 103-04, 108,
110, 113, 114; Spintual Form ... (of
Pitt), 110; Visions of the Daughters of
Albion, 100, 100

Algardi, Alessandro, 199

All-German Historical Exhibition (1858),

227
Althusser, Louis, 10-11

Aman-Jean, Edmond-Fran^ois, 274, 275

American Art Students' Club, Paris, 186
American Society of Painters of Water
Color Exhibition (1878), 185
d'Ancona, Vito, 229

139
Boime, Albert, 12-13, 172, 183, 194, 202,

Aurier, Albert, 306, 309

Austen, Jane, 1 16
Autre Monde, Un, 208, 208

Babeuf, Gracchus, 36
de, 58, 207,

Blanqui, Auguste, 191, 197, 211

Bocklin, Arnold, 305, 323; Island of the
Dead, 317, 318; Vita Somnmm Breve,
317, 318

Anti-Slavery Society, 165

Art moderne, 315

Honore

Blanc, Charles, 276

Blanc, Louis, 208, 210

Bohm, Jakob,

Angrand, Charles, 278, 281

Anquctin, Louis, 312
Anseele, Edouard, 315, 316
Antigna, Alexandre, 236
Anti-Slavery League, 166

Balzac,

239

Banti, Cristiano, Brush Gatherers, 230

Barbizon school, 235, 246, 298

Barlow, General Francis Channing, 177
Barlow, Joel, 147
Barrell, John, 122
Barry, James, 10407; King Lear Weeping

Over the Body of Cordelia, 104, I OH;

Satan and His Legions Hurling Defiance
Toward the Vault of Heaven, 107, I0H
Barthes, Roland, 312
Barye, Antoine-Louis, 194; Lion Crushing
a Serpent, 194, 195
Baudelaire, Charles, 11, 12, 204, 206-07,
208, 210, 211, 212, 221, 230, 239, 240,
244, 304, 313, 331

Baudry, Paul, 243

Bauer, Bruno, 253
Bazille, Frederic, Toilette, 243,

243

Belgian Workers' Party, 315

Bcnedite, Leoncc, 9

Benjamin, Walter, 120, 211, 239

Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Joseph, 186
Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 163, 180
Benson, Eugene, 177-8
Benvenuti, Pietro, 228
Berkeley, Bishop, 148-9
Bcrlo, Janet, 159-60
Bernard, Emile, 296, 302, 310, 312, 338,
342, 345, 350; Self-Portrait With Portrait of Gauguin, 298, 298
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 243
Bertall (Charles Albert d'Arnoux), 246
Bezzuoli, Giuseppe, 228
Hillings, Hammatt, Uncle Tom and Little
Eva, 166, 167, 167
Bing, Samuel, 296
Blake, William, 8, 9, 77, 97, 98
14, 128,
188, 189, 190; Album Rose, 99 KM),

230
Bonaparte, Joseph, 92
Bonheur, Rosa, 211, 236; Horse Fair, 236,
237; Plowing in the Nivernais: the
Dressing of the Vines. 216, 218, 236
Bonnard, Pierre, 306
Bonnat, Leon, 234, 320
Boone, Daniel, 148, 149
Borghese, Princess Pauline, 55
Borrani, Odoardo, 26th of April 1859,
228, 228
Bouchardon, Edme, 197
Boucher, Catherine (Mrs. Blake), 98, 99,
101

Boucher, Francois, 56, 86

Boudin, Eugene, 246
Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 233, 234,
243;

8,

99; Great

Red

Dragon and the Woman Clothed With

the Sun: "The Devil is Come Down,"
1 12,
3; Jerusalem, the Emanation of
1

the

Gran

Albion, 101; Lao,

mm,

113

14,

114; Milton, 100; Narrative of a Five

Nut

Gatherers, 294,

295

90
Canning, George, 1 10
Canova, Antonio, 545, 56, 57; MagdaCaiiizares, Jose de,

54,

lene,

Thomas,

Carlyle,

and

11, 134, 210, 296;

Carnot, Lazare, 221

Carolus-Duran, Charles, 260
Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 243;

Dance,

243, 250
Carroll, Lewis, 267
Carstens, Asmus, 225

Carus, Carl Gustav, 202

Cassatt, Mary, 254, 255-60, 2634, 26672, 290; Afternoon Tea Party, 269, 270;
Baby Reaching for an Apple. 271; Bath.
268^ 208; Boating Party. 259, 260, 261;
Caress, 267; Coiffure, 268, 269; Emmie

Modern Woman, 271-

273; Mother and Child, 267, .'67,Mother's Kiss, 268, 269; Omnibus, 269,
270; Portrait of Louisine Elder Havemeyer, 255-8, 257; Reading Le Figaro,
265, 266; Self-Portrait. 255, 256; Woman in Black at the Opera, 240, 262,
263, 264; Young Women Picking Fruit,
271-2, 273
Castagnary, Jules, 230-32, 233, 234, 235,

232

Chief of the Tribe. 152, 154, 156;

Last Race. Part of Okipa Ceremony.
151.

152, 153; Letters

152,

155

and Notes

ill

Morning

Thames-

After

Stormy

Night. 125, 127. 188; Hay II am Landscape: Noon). 122-3, 123; Old Sarum,
I

125-8, 127
Cordav, Charlotte, 31
Cornelius, Peter, 208, 225, 227
Corot, Camille, 246, 296

Courbct, Gustave, 9, 86, 9i, 190, 206,

210, 211-24, 225, 235, 256, 237, 242,

Estaque), 345-7,
vence 1 uuiity of
348; Large Bathers. 344, 350; L'Esta-

Burial at Ornans. 214, 215, 216, 217,

217, 236, 279-81, 314, Chateau d Or-

ISO;

Modern Olympia, 339

Montague Suiiilc-l icloirc.

t/ue.

345, 347;

40,

340;

326;

267, 26N, 290, 303, 338, 339, 340, 542,

'

Mont Samte-Vntotre.

349,

342; Portrait of

ichille
I

it,

le

hapman, Maria Weston,

Charivari,

I.e.

iOS, 211

the

rips

Fan. 214, 216, 218, 221, Portrait

Baudelaire,

6;

Seaside.

223,

oj

224,

Sleepers. 222. 224, Stoneireakers, 214.

Emper-

214

IS,

221

4,

216; Studio of the Painter, 216.

the
243,
Toilette of
Bride,
212, > mine Ladies on

Wounded Man.

the Banks o/ the Seme. 222, 224. 230

niisin. \ ictor, 196
Couture, Thomas, 202 05, 212, Roman*
oj the Deaden.,. I'M, 196, 197, 198,
202 03, 204 OS, 209, 242
(

Crayon, I he ISO
row, rhomas, 220

(
t

181

ol the

nil the

With Leather

que. HI,.?-//, 342;

Saint Inlony. 339

Chadwick, Whitney, 181
Champfleurj (Inks Husson), ill, ili,
217, 221,224
Chapman, John Gadsby, Baptism / Po-

Grand Panorama

Dents du Midi. 223, 224, Han

Belt. 212, 212; Meeting
(Bon/our Monsieur Courbct), 217, 219.
512; Peasants oj l'lae,e\ Returning From
II

Domini-

Rape. 139,340, 341,

342; Self-Portrait. 339; Sorrow, oi
M.ny Magdalene. 338, Still Life With
temptation of
ipplet, 344, 347 50;

Dinner at Oman-. 213, 214;

ifter

nans. 224;

350;

Wont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Bibe-

cahontas, 148

Allarpiccr,

Cezanne, Louis-Auguste, 341, 345; 343

Cezanne, Paul, 9, 86, 232, 268, 335, 33750; House of the Hanged Alan. Auverssur-Oise, 342-5, 346; Houses in Pro-

194

Canaletto, 131

Thomas, 141-3, 166; Course of

Empire: Desolation, 139, 141-i, Sunny
Morning on the Hudson River. 141, 142
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10
Constable, John, 120-28, 129, 130, 131,
132, 188, 189-90, 316, 350; Dedham
123-5,
Goldmg
Vale.
126;
122,
Constable's Flower Garden. 121. 122;
Goldmg Constable's Kitchen Garden.
121, 122; Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the

Corneille, Pierre, 17-19, 22

Cenci, Beatrice, 180. 181

Portrait o/ the Painter,

Haussmann, 248, 253

317

16, 131, 166,

ing for Tourists. 159, 160

Catlm

First

Cole,

Louis-Auguste Cezanne, Father of the

Artist, Reading I.'Evenement. 34(1, 343;

Caillcbotic, Gustave, Balcony, Boulevard

214, 216, 219, 242, 253

Claudel, Camille, Waltz, 331, 333

Clesinger, Jean-Baptiste, Woman Bitten
by a Snake. 204, 205
Cohoe, 1 59; Fort Marion Prisoners Danc-

mus. 347, 348; Pastoral Sane. 338, 339,

339; Portrait of L. A.. 345; Portrait o/

239

J.,

Clark, William, 149, 153

aire. 341,

Cameron, Simon, 163

< ampbell,
Thomas, 130
Campin, Robert, Mi-rode

Clark, T.

Painting the Portrait of Mah-To-TohPa Mandan. 155, 156; Clermont,

13

Inn, Franchise,

the

Claretie, Jules, 242

2,

237, 240, 244

Calicro, Carlo, 316

233-4, 276
Claude Lorrain,

nal Caress, 268;

Cabanal, Alexandre, 233, 234, 243

Cabat, Louis, 236
Cabinet d'Anatomie Comparee, Paris,
..u

Chrysalide group, 313

Church, Frederick, 142 -3; Twilight
Wilderness. 140, 142-3

Classicism, 8-9, 14-19, 28-50, 5 1 -68, 724, 77, 103, 146-7, 165-6, 196-205, 225,

(Mrs. Robert Riddle). 266; Lamp. 269;

Letter, 269, 270; Lydia Crocheting in the
Garden at Marly, 266; Lydia Working
at a Tapestry Frame, 265, 266; Mater-

Byron, Lord, 68, 71, 75, 76, 130, 142

<

le, 330, 334

Theodore, 212, 234, 243;
Portrait Drawing ofde Tocqueville. 212,
212
Chaumelin, Marius, 250
Cheret, Jules, Bal du Moulin Rouge. 285.
286
Chevreul, Michel-Eugene, 277

257. 258, 259;

Child, 267; First Caress, 266,

267; Fitting, 268; Five O' Clock Tea.
Lady at her Tea Table

Bullard, Laura Curtis, 183 4

Burke, Edmund, 104, 107, 116
1

Chartier, Henri

and her

Catlin, George, 149, 151-6; 232;

Thomas,

191

Charpentier, Constance, 3840; Melancholy. 38-40, 40. 49, 57

Chasseriau,

Bracket!, Edward, 181

Butts,

Past

Present, 210

Castille, Hippolvte,

Brady, Mathew, 158, 186

Breitner, George, 291
Breton, Andre, 336
Breton, Jules, 211; Blessing the Wheat in
the Artois, 236, 236, 294; Gleaners, 216
Breugel, Pieter, 97, 199, 304, 312; Battle
Between Carnival and Lent. 314; Blind
Leading the Blind, 293
Broc, Jean, 66; Death of Hyacinth in the
Arms of Apollo, 40-41,-//
Bronowski, Jacob, 103
Brooklyn Art Association, 173
Brothers, Richard, 101
Brown, Ford Madox, 210; Work, 210, 215
Brown, John, 167, 168
Bryson, Norman, 9
Buchon, Max, 339

Charles III, King of Spain, 82

Charles IV, King of Spain, 82, 89, 92
Charles X, King of France, 8, 71, 74, 76,

57; Pauline Borghese as

55,

Venus, 54, 55, 77; Perseus, 53, 55

Caravaggio, Ecstasy of Saint Francis, 212

Bourgoing, J. F. de, 83-4

Bovdell, John, 104

104, 105; America, 8, 99, 100; Ancient

Union*. 114, Europe,

to color illustrations

Ramon de la,
ubism, IOS, 350
urns.
dward, 144, 162
uhiv Gerard, 210

hi/,

i\ni \

;
I

'

Duranly, Edmund, 1M
luret, Theodore, 244

Custer, Genera] George, 157 8, 160

Cuvier, Georges, 194, 196, 197

Dagnan-Bouveret,

Pascal,

Eakins, Thomas, 184 7, 255 60, 262 6,

267, 269, 272; Concert Singer (Weda

310

Dante, 8-9, 53,68, 101, 331

Daumier, Honore,

193, 206, 208, 211,

290, 313; " Abduction l Helen," 208;

Rue Transnonain, April

15, 1834, 192, 193; Third-Clan Carriage, 206, 207; 1 on Have the Floor,
Ratapoil, 230,

Explain Yourself, 193

David, facques-Louis, 12, 1+ 20, 21

96, 211,225, 235, 276, 29S; leneas

Carrying
(nchises From the Ruins oj
1

Troy (with F. Gerard), 46, 46; Belisarius Begging linn, IS, 15 16; Coronation
oj Vapoleon, 233; Death of Bora, 32 4,
33; Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau, 31, 32; Hector, 31; Intervention of
the Sabine Women, 41 3, 42, 47, 44;

Leonidas at Thermopylae, 22, 43 4, //,

46-7; Lictors Returning to Brutus the
Bodies ofHis Sons,

2,

Miss

an Buren, 262, 263, 264; Negro

Boy Dancing,
6,

28, 29, 36, 38, 45, 51, 57, 68, 74, 92, 98,

104,

Cook), 263, 264; Coral Necklace, 263;

II uli Cat, 267, 267. Gross Clinic,
264-6; Home Scene, 267, Max
Schmitt in a Single Scull, 259 60, 261;
Girl
262,

26, 27, 28, 30, 34,

Marat at his Lust Breath,

31-2, 32, 37; Napoleon at the Saint42, 53, 76, 78,

6;(> Id- Fashioned

Helen Parker), 263;

185, 185

Dress (Portrait

oj

Mrs Edith Mahon, 257, 258,

263; Portrait oj Professor Rand. 262-3,

Portrait oj

264; Self-Portrait, 255, 236, Swimming

Hole, 256, 258 9; William Rush Canine, His Allegorical Figure oj the Schuylkill River,

and Black

269 71, 271; II ill Schuster

Man Going Shooting (Rail

Shooting), 184, 185, 186

Easterly, Thomas, 1 56-7; Keokuk, or the
Watchful Fox, 156-7, 157

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 193, 274, 295

Eiffel Tower Exposition, Paris ( 1 889), 345
Eitner, Lorenz, 9

Gogh,

Friends of the Indians, 160 61

Fiiimeni'.n, Eugene, 243
Fry, Roger, 274
Fuseli, Henry, 107 10, Nightmare,
113;

109,
II

omen).

Symplegma (Man and

10');

107,

Thor Battering the Mid-

Gainsborough, Thomas, Road from the

Market. 216
Gardner, Alexander, 158
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 221
Garrison, William Lloyd, 181
Gauguin, Paul, 190, 204, 232, 289, 298,
300, 301 02, 305,306, 309 12,327 36,
337, 342, 345, 350; Be in Love and You
Will Be Happy, 309; Bonjour Monsieur
Gauguin, 310, 312; Christ in the Garden
of Olives, 31 1, 312; Faaturumu (Reverie), 335; Fatata te mitt (Near the Sea),
335; Green Christ, 306, 309; Jug in the
Form of a Head. Self-Portrait. 311, 3 2;

Father, 17, 17-19, 22, 24, 25, 26, 42, 49,

76; Oath ofthe Tennis Court, 30, 30-31;

Ensor, James, 305, 310, 312-17, 350;

Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, 315;
Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889,
308, 314, 315-16; Gendarmes, 315, 316;
Iston,
Cracozie,
and
Pouffamatus,

Watches Her), 326, 330-31, 333-4;

Meal, or the Bananas, 327, 330; Seaweed Gatherers, 310, 312; Te Faaturu-

David d'Angcrs, Pierre-Jean,

Monument
erland

to

193,

194;

Emancipation, 202; .MothHer Children to the

Calling

Defense of Liberty, 199, 201; Pantheon

pediment, 196-202, 199, 203
Davis, Theodore R., 157-8, 159, 172

Descamps, Guillaume 221, 234

Defrcgger, Franz von, 225

Dance School, 249, 253; Little

Dancer Aged Fourteen, 249, 253; Miss
the

Cirque

Fernando,

285;

Portraits at the Stock Exchange, 249,

253
Delacroix, Eugene, 64, 68, 74, 97, 193,
194, 221, 224, 234, 241, 276, 296, 303,
316, 338; Bark of Dante and Virgil, 6871, 72; Death of Sardanapalus, 70, 756; Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi,
76, 77; Massacre at Scio (Chios), 71-2,
73, 75; 28th ofJuly: Liberty Leading the
People, 70, 76-7, 191, 196, 203, 205;

Women of Algiers, 202, 203-04, 243

Delaroche, Paul, 190, 197, 204, 225;
Artists of All Ages, 192-3, 193, 197
Delecluzc, Eticnnc, 8-9, 12
Demolder, Eugene, 315
Denis, Maurice, 306-09, 312, 338, 350;
ipril, 327, 329
Descartes, Rene, 9
Deveria, Eugene, 74, 75; Birth of Henri
IV. 74, 75

Devosge, Anatole, 32
Diaz, Narcisse, 235
Dickens, Charles, 99, 210, 296
Dictionnaire Veron, 345
Diderot, Denis, 22
Dreyfus Affair, 272, 345
Drouais, Jean-Germain, 17, 23-6, 28-9,
33, 60, 61; Dying Athlete, 23-4, 24, 29,
34;

Manus

at

Minturnae, 24-5, 25, 27,

28

Drumont, Edouard, 253

Dryden, John, 152
DuBois, W. E.

B., 176

Dubois-Pillet, Albert,
Mile. M. D., 288

278;

Portrait

of

Dujardin, Edouard, 285, 304

Duncanson, Robert Scott, 166, 180; Falls
of Minnehaha, 166; Landscape With a

View of Vesuvius and Pompeii, 166;

Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 166, 166-7;
Valley Pasture. 166
Dupont, Pierre, 212
Dupre, Augustin, Diplomatic Medal, 1457, 146

Dupre, Jules, 235

Durand, Asher B.,

142

-3;

My

ing for the

4;

Landscape,

poleon III.

2X1,219

Flaubert, Gustave, 206, 211, 230

Flaxman, John, 41, 43, 48, 54-5, 56, 103,
152; "Design for the Monument to
British Naval Victories, with a Statue
of Britannia," 103, 103; "Fight for the
Body of Patroclus," 38, 38
Foster, Stephen, 168
Foucault, Michel, 89
Fould, Achillc, 221
Fourier, Charles, 203, 298
FYagonard, Jean-Honore, 86
France, Anatole, 323

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, 175

Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, 160-61
Franque brothers, 45
Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia,
225
Free African Society, 165

French Academy, Rome, 15, 34, 48, 71

Freud, Sigmund, 336
Fried, Michael, 266
Friedrich, Caspar David, 137-9, 141,
188-9, 208, 316, 318, 323; Abbey in the

Oak

Forest. 138, 141

Durand-Ruel, Paul, 250

225

Wilhelm

III,

King of

Prussia,

Cafl 299,300; Portrait ofPere Tangiq

296

8, 297; Potato Haters. 293 4, _">A

302; Roots and Trunks oj lues. 303,

Self-Portrait With

(Silence,

or

y Lucicntes, Francisco Jose de, 8, 9,

12, 77, 78 97, 98, 190, 303, 313; Ubum
G, 97; "Black Paintings," 92, 96 7,
Bordeaux Milkmaid, 96, 97, Caprii hot,
8, 78-9, 79, 86, 89 92, 9/, 96; Charles
IV and His Family, 80, 82, 86, 92;
Clothed Maja. 83, $4, 86, 93; Conde de
Flondablanca. 80*82, 80; Courtyard
With Lunatics. 12, 85, 86, 88-9, 90, 96;
Disasters of War, 86, 92, 94, 95, 94-6,
97; Executions of the Third of May,
1808, 86, 88, 92-1, 96; Family of the
Duque de Osuna, 81, 82; Family oj the
Don Luis, 80-82; Knife
Infanta

Naked Maja,

Georget, E. J., 88
Georgin, F., and J.-B. Thiebault, Apotheosis of Napoleon, 199, 200
Gerard, Francois, 26, 31, 36, 38, 41, 53,
56, 71; Aeneas Carrying Anchises From
the Ruins of Troy (with J.-L. David),

Cupid and

Psyche, 37, 38, 38. 40; Entry of Henri II

into Paris, 63, 634, 74; Ossian, 44, 45;

Recamier, 37

Gericault, Theodore, 60, 63, 64, 71, 75,

190, 203, 212, 234; Charging
Light Cavalryman (chasseur), 60, 60and Cannibalism on

89, 97,

62, 68, 71; Despair

Medusa, 64-6, 65; Pity

Sorrows of the Poor Old Man, 67;

the Raft of the

Portrait of an Insane

Man,

67,

67-8;

Raft of the Medusa, 66-7, 68, 69, 7 1 76;

Severed Limbs, 65; Wounded Heavy
Cavalryman (cuirassier), 61-2, 61
,

Germ, The, 208

Gcrorne, Jean-Leon, 194, 197, 233, 243,
255, 295; Cockfight, 193-4; Reception of
the Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon
III and the Empress Eugenie at Fontamebleau, June 27, 1861, 233^1, 234,
236; Slave Market, 234
Gide, Andre, 322
Gillrav, James, 110; Phaeton Alarm' d!,
110, ///
Gilpin, William, 116; Three Essays: On
Picturesque Beauty,
On Picturesque

and On Sketching, 16, ///

Girodet (-Trioson), Anne-Louis, 23,
Travel,

Madrid Album

B. 86;

83, 84, 86, 93; Picnic, 86;

Queen Maria Luisa Wearing a Mantilla,

83, 83; Sanlucar Album A, 86; Saturn

Gautier, Theophile, 204

General Coloured Association, 165
George III, King of England, 99, 110

the

Grinder, 87, 92;

Yellow Christ, 307,

Madame

<"<>,

Yellom

Goya

From? What Are We? Where Are We

46, 46; Behsarius, 34, 34;

303,

302,

House ai tries, 299, 300

Goncourt, Edmond de, 298
Goupil & Co., 298
Gowing, Lawrence, 342

To Be Dejected), 335,

Going?, 335, 336;

309, 312

Bandaged Ear,

301; Starry Night,

335; Tiare farani (Flowers of France),

330; Vahine no te vi (Woman of the
Mango), 327, 330; Vtswn After the
Sermon {Jacob Wrestling With the
Angel), 309; Where Do We Come

portrait of

Fantin-Latour, Theodore, 232, 234, 304

Fattori, Giovanni, 229
Fauves, 345
Faux, William, 150
Faveau, Felicie de, 194; Christina of
Sweden Refusing to Give .Mercy to Her
Squire Monaldeschi, 194, 195
Feneon, Felix, 276, 278, 309, 312
Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 92, 93, 94,
96
Fevre, Henri, 276
Figaro Litteraire, 306
Fildes, I.uke, 292
Fiquct, Hortensc, 342, 345
Flandrin, Hippolvtc-Jean, 212, 233; Na-

Friedrich

INDEX

Esposizione Nazionale, Florence (1861),

228
Esquilache, Marquis of, 82
Essor group, 313
Eticnnc, Louis, 232
Evening Post, 177
Examiner, 132
Eyck, Jan Van, 312
Eytinge, Sol, Jr., 179; Virginia One
Hundred Years Ago, 179

Progress, 140, 142-3

374

Body of a Hanged Man.

Tribulations of Saint Antony, 313

253;

at

Erdman, David, 103

Degas, Edgar, 235, 250, 253, 255, 268,

286, 290, 323; Criminal Physiognomies,

Lola

Transmouff, Famous Persian Physicians

Battle of Arbela, 313, 313;
Portrait in 1960, 316, 317; Old Woman
With Masks, 314, 315; Skeletons Fight.

Wheatfields, 304, 105; Eugene Bock,

301. 302, Joseph Roulm. 300, 302, Wight

Mahana no atua (Day of the God), 334,

Manao tupapau (The Specter

335;

190, 220, 286, 288

Bearers of the Burden, 293, 293; Bereuse I To Mere Roulm). 260, 262, 288
90, 289, 301, 304, (.>/>,/,,'> II orishop
and Laundry, 291 2, 292; Crows In the

Enfantin, Prosper, 204

an, 289, 290, 291, 295, 296,

303, 304, ilO

(iadd, Mette (Mrs. Gauguin), 329, 330

ma

\.in, 291
\

3112,

303,304 05,312,325,345,350; trtisl't

Bedroom in hies. 2S9. 290, 300 Ml,

guard Serpent, 106, 108 10

Instil de Coulanges, Numa-Denis, 10

Elderfield, John, 342, 345

Socrates at the .Moment of Grasping the

Hemlock, 22-3, 23, 26, 30, 41

Gogh, Vincent Van,

'Three

Bernard Pass, 43, 43, 47; Oath of the

Horatii Between the Hands of Their

Engels, Friedrich, 10

Ciogh, Theo
298, 300,

Devouring His Children. 96, 97; Uprising of the Second of May, 1808, 92-3,
93; Water Carrier, 92; Witches' Sabbath, 86, 89, 90, 96
Grandville, 136; Autre Monde. 208, 208
Granet, Francois-Marius, 338
Grant, General Ulysses S., 176
Gros, Antoine-Jean, 51, 74, 234; Battle of
Nazareth, 51-2, 52. 53; Capitulation of
Madrid, December 4, 1808, 176; Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa, 52, 523, 59, 66
Groseclose, Barbara, 146
Gross, Dr. Samuel D., 262, 264-6

Groupe

Synthetiste, 309
Groux, Charles de, 294
Growe, Bernd, 276

Guerin, Pierre-Narcisse, 36, 60, 66, 68,

71; Aurora and Cephalus, 57, 57; Henri
de Rochejaquelem, 62, 63; Return of
Marcus Sextus, 346, 35
Guilbert, Yvette, 285
Guillemet, Antoine, 345
Guizot, Francois, 193, 197
Guys, Constantin, 240; Champs Elysees,
240, 241

Haan, Jacob Meyer de, 312

Habermas, Jurgen, 189
Hague School Realism, 291
Hals, Frans, 260

Hampton Institute, 161, 187

Hamsun, Knut, 318-19, 320
I

Baron d'. Researches on the

and Progress of the Arts

lancarville,

Origin, Spirit,

26,

27, 31, 33, 34, 36, 48, 50, 51, 56, 64, 66,

of Greece
of India.

on the Antique

Persia, the Rest

Monuments

of Asia, and

74; Atala at the Tomb, 57-8, 58; Deluge,

45-7, 46; Ossian Receiving the Napoleonic Officers, 44-5, 45, 59; Pietd, 27-8,
28, 32; Portrait ofJean-Baptiste Be/ley.
37, 39; Pygmalion and Galatea, 58, 58-

Egypt, 113, 114

Harper's Weekly, 157-8, 158. 159, 172,

Revolt at Cairo, 57-8, 59, 76; Sleep of

Endynuon, 28-9, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40,

Haussmann, Baron Georges, 238

Havemever, Louisine Elder, 255-8,

49, 55, 56, 57, 58

111
Haves, Rutherford B., 176, 179
Hazlitt, William, 129, 132
Hegel, Georg, 11, 141,208
Heim, Francois-Joseph, 74
Heine, Heinrich, 205
Hennequin, Emilc, 278
Hennequin, Philippe-Auguste, 45, 56;
Allegory of 10 August, 36, 36; Remorse

9;

Thomas, 118-20,

Adelpbi
Terrace, 120; "Eidometropolis," 120;
Kirkst all Abbey. 119, 119-20; Somerset
House, 119, 120
Glaize, Auguste-Barthelemy, Misery the

Girtin,

131;

Procuress, 230
Gobineau, Arthur de, 234

Godoy, Emmanuel, 83, 86, 89, 92

Goethe, Johann von, 68, 141, 234

175, 179
Harriet, Fulchran-Jean, 34; Oedipus at

Colonus. 34, 35. 43

of Orestes, 36, 37

257,

Henner, J.-J., 233

Henri IV, King of France, 63,
Henrv, Charles, 277
Herbert, Robert, 286

Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 225

Keokuk, Chief, 156-7

75

63,

Khnopff, Fernand, 313

King, Charles Bird, 149, 150; Keokuk Sac
(Watchful Fox), 156-7, 157; Young

Herder, J. G., 109

Herding, Klaus, 224

Omaham, War

Herkomer, Hubert van, 292

Hcrmel, Maurice, 276
Hersent, Louis, 63; Louis
ing

Aims

XVI

to the Poor, 62,

Hight, Kathryn, 153

Historicism, 22-8,

Distribut-

63

193-202,

104-07,

225-33
Hobbes, Thomas, 104
Hodler, Ferdinand, 305, 310, 315, 324-7,
350; Beech Forest. 324, 328; Chosen
One, 324; Eiger, Munch, and Jungfrau
Above the Fog, 324-5; Lake Geneva
Seen From Chexbres, 324, 328; Mbnch
With Clouds. 325, 325, 326, 327; Night,
324, 324, 327; Valentine in Agony, 327,
329
Hogarth, William, 80, 164; "Madhouse,"
88; Rake's Progress, 88
Holl, Frank, 292
Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore, 305

Homer, 8-9, 38, 44, 69, 71

Homer, Winslow, 172-5; Bivouac
the Potomac,

174;

172,

Fire on

Bright Side,

173-5, 175, 176; Inviting a Shot before

Virginia,
173; Our Jolly
173, 174; Prisoners From the
Front, 172, 176-9; Visit From the Old
Mistress, 178-80, 179
Petersburg,

Cook,

Horkheimer, Max, 10, 11

Hosmer, Harriet, 181; Beatrice Cenci,
180, 181; Zenobta

Chains, 180, 181

Howling Wolf, 159

Hugo, Victor, 234, 239
Hunt, William Holman, 208, 210; Awakening Conscience, 209, 209
Impressionists,

137, 220, 224, 232,

12,

and Pawnees, 150, 154

Klingender, Francis, 845, 86
Knickerbocker, 142
Kodcra, Tsukasa, 300
Kosciuszko, Thaddcusz, 221
Kossuth, Lajos, 221
Kramskoy, Ivan Nikolaevich, }2i
Krimmel, John Lewis, 164-5, \H6; Quilting Frolic. 164, 164, 165, 168
Krohg, Christian, 320; Sick Girl, 318, 320
Kropotkin, Peter, 315
Ku Klux Klan, 176
Labille-Guiard,

Lebrun, J.-B.-P., 19
Lee, General Robert
Lega, Silvestro, 229

Lehmann, Henri,

276, 316, 338; Ambassadors of Agamemnon Visiting Achilles. 47-8, 48; Apotheosis of Homer. 8-9, 69, 74, 193; Henri

TV Playing

With His Children. 74, 75;

Jupiter and Thetis. 48-9, 49; M, LouisFrancois Berlin. 196, /96; M. Riviere

and Mme.

Napoleon on the
Imperial Throne. 47-9, 47; Oedipus and
Riviere. 262;

the Sphinx, 235, 235; Source, La, 224;

'Turkish
Bath,
50,
50;
Valpincon
Bather, 50; Voir of Louis XIII. 724, 74

Frugal Meal. 294, 295

Jackson, Andrew, 150

Jaeger, Hans, 320
James, Henry, 183, 260
Jameson, Anna, 16
janson, H. W., 9, 10
1

Jefferson,

Thomas,

181-2, 182,

Woman and Her

Child, 181;

Hagar in the Wilderness, 182, 182-3;

Old Indian Arrowmaker and His
Daughter, 183, 183
Lewis, Meriwether, 153
Libre Esthetique group, 313
Lincoln, Abraham, 169, 175, 176, 181,
186
Lindsay, Jack, 131
Linn, Karen S., 187
Little, John, 169
Littre, Emile, 244
Lora, Leon de, 246
Louis XIV, King of France, 8, 14, 15, 74
Louis XVI, King of France, 76, 196

Louis XVIII, King of France, 63

Louis Napoleon see Napoleon

III,

Emperor
193, 194, 196, 197,214
Louthcrburg, Philippe de, 134
Louvre, Paris, 8
Lowenthal, Leo, 318-19, 322, 323
Luce, Maximilicn, 278
Lucid, Robert F., 174
Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, 225

Millais,

165.

Johns, Elizabeth, 263, 264, 265

fohnson, Eastman, 186; Old Kentucky
169, 170, 186; Ride />
Liberty: the Fugitive Slaves, 170, 170

168,

Johnson, Joseph, 99
Johnston, Frances

Hcnjamin,

161

Class in American History, 161

187
J.-IS.,

2,

2;

162,

246

Journet, Jean, 217

Jovellanoa,

82, 92

Juvenal, 204
106,

317, 337

Kandinsky, Wassily, 335, 338

Kant, Emmanuel, 9
Kaufmann, Thcodor,
170, 171

175;

On

89; 81

Flute

227; Iron Rolling Mill.

227,

John Everett, 208; Christ

in the

House of His Parents. 208-09, 209, 210;

Ophelia. 320, 320
Millet, Jean-Francois, 205, 206, 235, 236,

290, 294, 296; Gleaners. 206, 207, 211;

Sower, 211,211
Milton, John, 101, 107, 108, 129
Mirbeau, Octave, 309
Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), 323

Palmer, Bertha Potter, 271, 272

Palmer, Samuel, 128-9; Hilly Scene. 124,
128
Papctv, Dominique, Dream of Happiness.
203, 203. 204
Paulet, Alfred, 277
Pennell, Joseph, 186
Pennsylvania Academy of Design, 186
Pennsylvania Academv of Fine Arts, 184,
255
Pcskelechaco, Chief, 150
Petalesharro, Chief, 1 50
Pcvron, Pierre, 19; Death of Alceslis. 16,
'19

Pforr, Franz,

208

Phidias, 8-9, 47, 277

Philadelphia
Centennial

Exposition

(1876), 183
Picard, Edmond, 313, 315
Picasso, Pablo, 199; Guernica, 199
Picot, F. E., 233

Pieneman, Jan Willem, 295

Pigalle, Jcan-Baptiste, 197

Mistral, Frederic, 338

Karl von, 227; Seni Before Wallen-

Piloty,

Modernism, 220, 303, 304-06

Mondrian, Piet, 274, 301,335
Monet, Claude, 250, 253, 260, 296, 306;

stein's Corpse,

225, 226

Death of a Sister of

Isidore, 211;

Pils,

Charity, 212, 213, 215

Giovanni

Careen, 88

Grenoutllere, 277; Poplars, 327; Regatta

Piranesi,

at Argenteuil, 245, 246; Waterlilies, 323,

323; Women in the Garden, 243, 246,

Pissarro, Camille, 232, 250, 268, 338, 342,

251,271

Monro, Dr. Thomas, 118- 19,

Moratin, Leandro Fernandez,

120, 131
82, 89

and the Hydra of Lerna, 235;

Oedipus and the Sphinx, 234-5, 235;

cules

the Hoods
Summer, 248, 253;
Hoarfrost, 245, 246; He Lacroix, Rouen.
Mist. 278, 282;
illage Near Pontoise,
342-5, 346

Undergrowth

Pissarro, Lucien, 278

Pitt,

Plint,

251, 253; Psyche, 253-4, 254

Morris, William, 12
Morrison, Ralph, 158

Pocahontas, 147-8

William, 99, 110

Plato, 22

Edward, 210

Plutarch, 26, 313

Pointillism see

Neoimpressionism

Pollaiuolo, Antonio, Battle of Nudes, 227

305, 310, 315, 319

211,

323, 350; "Frieze of Life," 320, Jea320; Kiss, 331;

in

Morisot, Berthe, 240, 246, 250, 254, 290;

Laundresses Hanging Out the Wash,

lousy,

Edge of

Pontoise, 345, 547;

Salome, 235
Morel, Benedict Augustin, 243

Munch, Edvard,

Winter, 246;
345; Corner of a I illage
Hermitage, War
Cote des Boeufs at
or.

Moreas, Jan, 306

Moreau, Gustave, 234-5, 304, 323; Her-

Battista,

Madonna. 325,

Pollastrinl, Enrico,

228

Pollock, Griselda, 255, 294, 298

Postimprcssionist Style, 272

MacMonies, Mary Fairchild, 271

Macphcrson, James, Ossian, 44

Nabis, 306
Vular, 244

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
298, 305, 320
17
Price, Martin,

Madison, James, 22

Napoleon

Mah-To-Toh-Pa,

Chief, 152 3, 155, 156

Mainardi, Patricia, 232
Mallarme, Stephane, 12, 247, 250 52,
253, 304
Malraux, Andre, 86-8
Mandanart, 13, 152 3, /x>
Manet, Edouard, 86, 92, 190, 191, 220,
237, 238 44, 246, 247, 250, 253, 255,
29(1,

338, 342, irgenteuil.

253, Balcony, 239 40, 241, liar at the

Folies-Btrgire, 252, 253, 254; Barri238,

239; Boating, 261); Christ

Mocked, 2\2. Dejeuner tur Fherbe, 232,
241, 277, 339;
Masked Ball at the

Optra, 253; Musi, in the TuiUries, IVi.

240; Olympia, 224, 231 4, 242
to Liberty

Orton, Fred, 298

Ossian, 44, 104; 45

Mussini,

cade,

Kahn, Gustave, 277, 278, 281, 285,

Ogden, Robert C, 187

Oliver, Douglas, 334

8, 41, 131, 317

Powers, Hiram, Greek Slave, HI, 181
Pratt, Richard H., 159
Antoinc-Augustin, Slaughter,
Preault,

260, 276, 285,

Gaspar Mclchor dc,

Official Painting, 190

Paine,

325; Sick Child, 318, 320; Voice, 319,

320, 327

Murray, Freeman Henry Morris, 183

l.uigi, 228
Mother, Richard, 9

I,

parte), 43

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 210, 212, 252,

267
Prud'hon, Pierre-Paul,

110. 146, 17.

(
1

>4,

196,

III,

Emperor

ol

France, 208,
3,

238,

Thomas,

175, Entrance ol the Fifty-

Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment

South Carolina, Febru-

into Charleston,

ary 21. 1865, 175 6, 177

National Academy ol Design, 168, 172,
175, \nmial Exhibitions, (1865), 173,
(1866), 176, 178
Naturalism, 9, 225 7, 235 7
Nazarencs, 208, 225, 22N

Nelson, Lord, 102, 103

Marat, Jean-Paul,

Neoclassicism

tee

lassicism

56;

Crime Pursued

engeance and Justice, 55, 56; Portrait of Empress Josephine. 56

Psyche Carried b\ Zephyrs to ('lipid's
Domain. 56, 56; Zephyr. 56, 57
Pugtt, Pierre, 193, 199
by

211, 217, 220, 221, 230, 232

Manet, Eugene, 239

31

210.

Emperor of France (Bona-

243, 341; 219, 234

Nasmyth, James, 134
fifth

208.

4, 45, 48, 53, 54, 56, 61, 74,

208, 330; 41, 47, 52

Nast,

200

78,92,96,99,

Napoleon

Poussin, Nicholas,

I'M),

Macchiaioli, 190, 228 30, 237

163

Jongkmd,

183; Forever Free,

25, 141, 147, 149, 153,

Jocclyn, Nathaniel, 165-6; Cinque.

165 6

Home.

Politicians,

Louis-Philippe, King of France, 76, 190,

Israels, Isaac, 291

Israels, Jozef, 294;

Town

Oberlin College, 181

Offenbach, Jacques, 239

Thomas, 99, 100

Pajou, Augustin, 22, 197

Maurice, Frederick Denison, 210

Maus, Octave, 281,313
Mauve, Anton, 291
Max, Gabriel von, 225
May, Ernest, 253
McElroy, Guy, 164-5
McGough, Stephen C, 316
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 80, 225
Menzel, Adolph von, 225, 227;

Roundtable of Frederick 11 at
Sanssouci, 225
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 338, 350
Michelangelo, 9, 76, 109, 243; Tomb of
Giuliano de' Medici, 8
Michelct, Jules, 129, 193,296

176

Neoimpressionism, 274-86, 28S.

309,313
New York Illustrated Sews, 175
Nieuwerkerke, Comte de, 220, 233, 340
Nochlin, Linda, 221,253
Novotny, Fritz, 9

Osuna, Duque and Duquesa, 82,

Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 208

Party. 206

Mathews, Nancy Mowll, 255

Mativet, 334

227;

226. Ill
Leopold, King of Belgium, 315
Leroux, Pierre, 196
Lessing, Gotthold, 114
Leutze, Emmanuel, Westward the Course
of Empire Takes its Way (Westward
Ho!), 148-9, 153, 163, 170
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 144, 162, 312, 336
Lewis, Edmonia, 180-84; Death of Cleo183; Freed

8-9,

E.,

83,

Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, 19,

20, 85
Marion, A. F 342
Maris, Jacob, Bleaching Yard. 291, 292
Marmontel, Jean-Francois, 16
Martin, John, 129-30, 141; Fall of Nmevah, 129, 129; Last Man, 130, 131. 134
Marx, Karl, 10, 11, 12, 98, 120,208,210,
230, 253; Capital. 221, 247-8; Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
11, 13; Manifesto of the Communist

Recital,

274, 276

Leibl, Wilhelm, 225-7;

296, 298, 302, 305, 312, 317, 327, 337,

338, 341, 342, 345; exhibitions, (1874),

50, 51, 63, 75, 203, 221, 233, 234, 243,

Two

21
Laforgue, Jules, 248, 304
Langdon, Charles, 58
Langston, John Mercer, 181
Laurens, Jean-Paul, 186
Lavater.J. C, 107
Lawrence, Thomas, 74, 128
Lears, Jackson, 259

patra,

(1886), 255, 276, 345

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique,

20-22;
19,
Pupils, 20-22,

Adelaide,

Self-Portrait With

237, 243, 244-54, 255, 264, 274, 278,

225, 250; (1877), 250, 253, 345; (1879),

253, 255; (1880), 255; (1881), 255;

Eagle, Little Missouri,

Marcuse, Herbert, 286, 337

Maria Luisa, Queen of Spain, 82, 83,
89

Pugin, Augustus, 134

Puvis dc Chavannes, Pierre, 224, 27o,
305, Peace, 224, Sacred Grot
V 11./., 224
'

Racine, Kan, 8, 68
Raphael, 8, 72. 203. 208, 24
Raynal, \bbe, 37
Realism, .'On 24, 230, 291, 317
Recamier, Madame, 37
Rectus, Elisee, 315, 116

INDIA

is

175

Redon,Odilon, 235, 276, 295 6, 304, 305,

310,313,315, 120 22, (27, 134 5,350;
"Death \l\ Irony
Exceeds all Others," 331, 331, 335;
\phelia Among the Flowers,
308,320, 122; Roger and ingelica, 120
Smiling Spider, 322,

Custave Flaubert, 331

Rcgnault, [ean-Baptiste, 45, Lamentation
8,2,45; Liberty or Death,

7,

254, 340; (1806), 45; (1808), 57; (1810),

59; (1812), 60; (1814), 61, (1818), 63;
(1819), 66; (1822), 68; (1824), 71, 74,
123;

(1827),

74,

194;

191;

(1831),

204; (1845),

(1834),
131,

(1847),

196,

\na-

(1849), 214; (1850), 214, 216, (1851),

216, 217; (1853), 236; (1857), 236;

Tulp, 265

504,

246,

250, 253,

545; Bal du Moulin ie

la

Galette, 246, 247; First Evening, 264;

/ ./. 263, -64; Siring, 246
Ri pin, [lya Efimovich, 323
Repton, Humphrey, 117-18; "View from
m\ own cottage, in Essex," before and
after, 118
Rewald, John, 10
Revue Wagnerienne, 304
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 104, 107, 110
Ribot, Thcodulc, 211, 212
Ricoeur, Paul, 310
Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 90
Robespierre, Maximilien, 22, 33, 34, 35,
208
Rodenbach, Georges, 313
Rodin, Auguste, 305, 313, 331-3; De
Profundis Clamavi, 331; Fugtt Amor,
331, 333; Gates of Hell, 331, 332; Iris,
Messenger of the Gods, 333, 333
Rogers, John, 167-8; Slave Auction. 168,
168
Rolfe, John, 148

Romano,

Giulio, 109

Romantic

style

Prize, 15,

203,

204;

(1848),

12;

214;

(1861), 230; (1864), 234; (1865), 242;

(1869), 240; (1882), 253, 313, 345;

(1884),277,(1894), 187
Salon d'Automne, 345
Salon des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1857), 232
Salon des Independants see Societe des
Artistes Independants
Salon des Refuses, 232, Ui, 340
San Francisco Art Association, 183
Sargent, John Singer, 260 62; F.na and
Betty, Daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Asher
Wertheimer, 259, 260; Lady Agnew <>l
Lochnaw, 25H, 260-62; Mr. and Mrs. I.
N. Phelps Stokes, 260
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 341
Schapiro, Meyer, 216, 244, 281
Schefler, Ary, 64, 194, 197, 234; St.
Augustine and St. Monica, 193-4, 19-1
Schelling, F. W., 189
Schimmel, Julie, 150

Henry Rowe, 157

Schuffenecker, F.mile, 305, 312
Scott, Dred, 169
Seele, Johann Baptist, 164
Schoolcraft,

17,47,62,68,71

Romney, George, 89
Rood, Ogden, 277, 278
Rops, Felicien, 315
Rosa, Salvator, 116, 141
Rosaldo, Renato, 152
Roscoe, William, 107
Rosenblum, Robert, 9, 10
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 208
Roulin, Augustine, 262, 288
Rousseau, Ernest, 314, 315
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 82, 107,
196, 197
Rousseau, Theodore, 235, 236

light,

306,312

Seurat, Georges, 190, 220, 253, 274-86,

296, 301, 303, 304, 313, 345, 350;

Aman-Jean, 274-5, 275, lib; Bathing

Chahut
studv 280; Chahut, 281-5, 284,
286; Circus, 281, 286, 287; Echo, 274,
final

275, 275, lift; Le Crotoy, Upstream,

279, 283; Models, 281, 283; Sideshow,
281; Sunday Afternoon on the Island of

Grande Ja tie, 216-1, 278, 279-81,

279, 284, 285; Young Woman Powderthe

Rowlandson, Thomas, 116

Royal Academy of Arts (Britain), 98-9,
104, 110, 120, 122, 125, 128, 132, 150,
189, 208, 210

Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos

(Spain), 82
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture
(France), 14-15, 16, 17, 19, 23, 28
Rubens, Peter Paul, 41, 63, 113, 246, 295,
312

ing Herself, 288, 289-90, 289

Shakespeare, William, 8-9, 68, 104, 107,

108, 320
Shaw, Colonel Robert Gould, 175, 181
Shelley, Mary, The Last Man, 130

Richard, 244
Signac, Paul, 276, 279, 281, 285; Dining
Room, Breakfast, 278, 282; Gasometer
at Chchy, 278
Shiff,

Signorini, Telemaco, 229

Simpson, Marc, 174

Sisley, Alfred, 246

138, 139, 141;

ing,

"Times of Day," 139

Ruskin, John, 11-12, 115, 130, 136, 137,

188,209,215,236

INDEX

Anonyme, 244, 250, 252, 305

Societe des Artistes Independants, 276,
Societe

278,281,305,313
Society of Friends
(Freiburg), 324

of the

Society of the Rights of

Socrates, 22, 23

Swedenborg, Emmanuel,

101

Symbolists, 267, 272, 303, 305-36, 337,

338, 345, 350
Synthctists, 309,312

Fine

Battle oj Jemappes,
Clichy, M.ti-I, Din
to

Thomas,

July

ille.

11,

1830,

191, I'll

Vicn, Joseph-Marie, 16
Vigee, Louii, 19

Vigee-Lebrun, Elizabeth-Louise, 19 2(t,

22; Marie- tntoinette With Her Children, 18, 20; Portrait of the
trim II ////
Her Daughter. 20, 20
Vincent, F.-A., 20, 22
Vingt group (I.es Vingt), 313
Virgil, 8 9, 128,317, 345

Comic

de,

The Rums

14
of Empire.

142'

Tanner, Henry Osawa, 184; Banjo Lesson,

185, 186-7
Tassaert, Octave, 211, 212
Taylor,

llolel-de-l

the

64, (.';/) Gait M

d'OrUani Proceeds

Voltaire (Francois Marie

82,89, 152, 196, 197

\rouet), 9, 68,

Vrubel, Mikhail, 305, 310, 322-3, 350;

Pan, 322, 323
Vuillard, Edouard, 306

101

and Huntington Publishers,

Execution of a Colored Soldier, 171-2,

Taylor

Wagner, Anne, 333

Wagner, Richard, 279, 304, 335
Wallis, Captain Samuel, 335

173
Thackeray,

W. M., 137
Thiebault, J.-B. see Georgin,
Thiers, Adolphe, 193
Thompson, E. P.,
Thomson, James,

Exhibition Company, Group of "Contrabands," 171,

173, 174
Washington, George, 163, 164
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 131, 313
West, Benjafnin, 110-13, 150; Apotheosis

War Photograph and

V

101

132

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, Divan Japonats, 285, 285

Tristan, Flora, 203; Mephis 203

Troyon, Constant, 235

Trudaine de la Sabliere, 22-3
Trumbull, John, Surrender oj General
Burgoyne at Saratoga, October 16,
1777, 177

Tuke, Samuel, 88
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 145
Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 115,
130-37, 141, 166, 188, 303, 313, 316,
323; Dudley, Worcestershire, 132-3,
134; London, 132, 133; "Picturesque

Views in England and Wales," 132;

Ram, Steam, and Speed the Great

Western Railway, 135, 136-7, 137;

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead
and Dying
Typhoon Coming On, 1356, 135; Snow Storm: Hannibal and His
Army Crossing the Alps, 132, 133
Turner, Nat, 167

of Nelson, 133, 113; Destruction of the

Old Beast and False Prophet. 110-13,
///

Wheatley, Francis, 89
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 313,
323; Girl m White, 231, III
Whitney, Anne, 181
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 166
Wiertz, Antoine, Two Young Girls or the
Beautiful Rosme, 204, 205
Wilkie, David, 164
Wilkins, Charles, 1 14
Williams, Eunice, 14$
Williams, Gwyn, 97
Williams, John, 148
Williams, Raymond, 239

Winckelmann, Johann,

107, 114, 225

160; Reading Class at Fort
Marion, 160, 161-2, 161
Wolf, Eric, 144
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 99, 107
World Exposition see Universal Expo-

Wo-Haw,

sition

World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago

(1893), 186, 271

Ukiyoe, 268-9
Universal Exposition, Paris, (1855), 220,

oj Athens From Florence, 228, 228

Utamaro, Kitagawa, 268; Mother Bathing
Her Son, 268, 268

Arts
Valle, Jules, 315, 341

Man, 192

\ .in Dyck, Sn Vnthony, 260

Velazquez, Diego, 80 82,260; Triumph oj
Bacchus, 227
Verhaeren, Emile, 279, 286
Vernet, Carle, 60
Wind, Horace, 64, 66, 191, 221, 234,

Volney,

Tainc, Hippolytc, 130, 135

Tanguy, Pere, 296
Tanner, Bishop, 184

221, 225, 232, 236, 241; (1867), 176,

296; (1889), 309, 312; (1900), 161
Ussi, Stefano, 228; Expulsion of the Duke

Slotkin, Richard, 145, 162

Smith, John, 147

Rude, Francois, 199; Marseillaise (The

Departure of the Volunteers of 1792),
199, 201
Runge, Philipp Otto, 137-11, 208; Morn-

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 210, 211

229-30, 233

Serusier, Paul,

Sophocles, 8, 34
Soule, William, 158
Springer, Anton, 227
SteiHlh.il (Marie Henri Beyle), 55
Stevens, Alfred, Japanese Dress, 296, 296
Steward, S S Flic Bhuk Hercules, or the
Adventures of a Ban/a Player. 187
Stone, |ohn Augustus, 149
Stowe, Harriet lleecher, 166-7, 179
Strong, Pauline Turner, 148
Sumner, Charles, 181
Surrealists, 305, 336, 337

Tintoretto, Last Supper, 221

Selvatico, Pietro, 229, 230

Place, Asnieres. 275, 276, 277;

152,

Battista, 54, 55, 56,

60

Thore, Theophile, 232

Sernesi, RafTaelo, 229-30; Roofs in Sun-

(Romanticism), 5 1 68-72,
74-7, 78-97, 98-1 14, 225, 234-5; landscape painting, 115-43, 188-90

.V76

Saint-Simon, Henri de, Wouveau Christianisme, 296

Salon, Pans, 1X9, 210, 230 57, 242, 246,

llarmens/,

Rijn,

n "i Dr.

Rome

57, 58, 59,

Summer, Ferdinand, 524

246, 294, 304, 312, 313;

Renan, Ernest, 232

Renoir, Picrrc-Augustc,

2%,

Sommariva, Giovanni

Theo Van, 313

199, (1843),

Rembrandt van
186

Rysselberghe,

Vanderlvn, John, Death ofJane McCrae,

147, 148; 147

World's Congress on

Africa,

(1893), 186, 187

Wright of Derby, Joseph, 134

Wyzewa, Theodore de, 304
Yeats, William Butler, 259
Yusupoff, Prince, 57

Zapater, Martin, 82, 86, 92

Zola, Emile, 232, 306, 339, 345
Zorilla, Leocadia, 92, 97
Zuccaro, Federico, 275-6

Chicago

THIS

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THOMAS CROW

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at

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holds the Chair of History of Art at the University of Sussex.

BRIAN LUKACHER

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a critic, art historian

is

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