French Painting Research Articles

A obra de Jean-Baptiste Debret como fonte histórica para os estudos dos trajes usados no Brasil no início do século XIX

O artigo apresenta uma visão da moda usada no Brasil no início do século XIX à luz da obra do pintor francês Jean-Baptiste Debret. Sua obra constitui um corpus iconográfico com litografias feitas a partir de suas aquarelas e pranchas que comporiam os fascículos de Viagem pitoresca e histórica ao Brasil. Os trajes retratados por Debret foram analisados sob o olhar de historiadores da moda, concluindo-se que a moda usada no Brasil no período joanino e no Brasil de Pedro I seguiu as tendências europeias da época, o estilo Império e o estilo Romântico.

Unharmonious Images Conceived by Troubled Minds: Graphic and Literary Caricatures in Heinrich Heine’s French Affairs and French Painters

Although the German poet Heinrich Heine, who moved to Paris in 1831, repeatedly declared his commitment to a subjective and politically engaged way of artistic expression, he vehemently professed his dislike of the graphic satires which appeared in La Caricature and represented the “Citizen King” Louis Philippe in the shape of a pear. Nevertheless, Heine’s own accounts of the current French Affairs for the German press exhibit many clear analogies to the seemingly detested satiric drawings: Not only did he use them as an important vehicle of his own political criticism, but he also matched them with his own verbal caricatures of the French monarch and his cabinet. After showing that Heine and the caricaturists did indeed share the same butts and means of criticism, the article analyses both the graphic and verbal strategies and techniques they employed to avoid press censorship.

Paris-on-Hudson

In 1969, a curious picture entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, as part of a major bequest by American banker Robert Lehman (1891-1969). Identified as a Hudson River Scene, the painting, undated and unsigned, depicts an idyllic river landscape, surrounded by green hills, indeed reminiscent of the Hudson River School. Yet the attribution devised by the museum for might appear curious at first glance, as it does not rule out the possibility of a work produced by a little-known French painter named Victor de Grailly. Born in Paris in 1804, Grailly died in the same city in 1887. Mentioned in several museum collections, his pictures constitute a debatable body of work to this day. But if only a few biographical elements have been saved about the artist, the crunch of the debate lies elsewhere.

РАЗВИТИЕ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ПОТЕНЦИАЛА ЕВРОПЕЙСКОГО КОМИКСА В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ ЭДМОНА БОДУАНА

The article describes a vivid example of individualization and creative adoption of the European comics, the ground for inter-medial experiments of the French painter Edmond Baudoin. The artist not only introduces high-quality graphics into comics but creates truly deep artistic space applying to other forms of art. The researchers consider such issues as the formation of the artist’s creative method and reliability of guidelines identified by Edmond Baudoin himself in his autobiographical works.

Picturing Art History in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Rylands English MS 60, compiled for the Spencer family in the eighteenth century, contains 130 printed portraits of early modern artists gathered from diverse sources and mounted in two albums: 76 portraits in the first volume, which is devoted to northern European artists, and 54 in the second volume, containing Italian and French painters. Both albums of this ‘Collection of Engravings of Portraits of Painters’ were initially planned to include a written biography of each artist copied from the few sources available in English at the time, but that part of the project was abandoned. This article relates English MS 60 to shifting practices of picturing art history. It examines the rise of printed artists’ portraits, tracing the divergent histories of the genre south and north of the Alps, and explores how biographical approaches to the history of art were being replaced, in the eighteenth century, by the development of illustrated texts about art.

Analysis of the constituent materials of 19th century paintings attributed to Louis-Auguste Moreaux belonging to the Historical Museum of Santa Catarina – Florianópolis, Brazil

A series of five 19th century works of art, attributed to the French painter Louis-Auguste Moreaux, were the object of historical research and materials analysis with the objective of safeguarding these pieces of cultural heritage. The paintings were analyzed using imaging through UV-induced visible luminescence, FTIR, EDS and GC–MS. The images obtained by scientific documentation demonstrated the repaintings of two paintings (P01 and P05), with areas of luminescence indicating that they have undergone posterior interventions. FTIR analysis showed the paintings were produced using oil-based binder and pigments containing sulfates, carbonates, aluminosilicates, Prussian blue and iron oxides. EDS analysis showed the presence of Pb in all samples analyzed. In the areas containing blue pigment the presence of Fe, Na, Al, Si and S was observed and the black and earth tones showed mainly the presence of Fe. The GC–MS confirmed the presence of oil, and linseed and walnut oils were found to be the main binders used by the artist.

Revisiting Harrison and Cynthia White’s Academic vs. Dealer-Critic System

The field of art market studies is based on a famous opposition, coined by Harrison and Cynthia White in 1965, regarding the “academic” system, as opposed to the “dealer-critic” one. Published in 1965, their book, Canvases and Careers, Institutional Change in the French Painting World, was qualified by Patricia Mainardi and Pierre Vaisse, but their criticism dated back to the 1990s. In the meantime, the development of digital methods makes possible a broader reassessment of Harrison and Cynthia White’s theory. Based on a corpus of Parisian auction sales, from 1831 through 1925, this paper uses econometrics to call into question the antagonism between the academic and the dealer-critic system, and comes to another conclusion: the academic system was crucial to determine the value of artworks and its efficiency did not collapse in the 1870s, nor in the 1880s, but rather after the Great War.

ЛІТЕРАТУРНІ СЮЖЕТИ В ТВОРАХ Е. ДЕЛАКРУА – “ЗАГИБЕЛЬ КОРАБЛЯ ДОН-ЖУАНА” ТА “ПІСЛЯ КОРАБЕЛЬНОЇ АВАРІЇ”

In this article, we have studied problems associated with features of the painting development in the Romantic era. We have highlighted questions on the interrelationship between literature and painting and considered new trends in the development of the French painting in the first half of the 19th century. Artists of this era, in particular E. Delacroix, searched for new subjects actively by finding interesting themes in works of the world literature. E. Delacroix was inspired by works of Dante, L. Ariosto, T. Tasso, W. Shakespeare, J. Goethe, G. Byron, F. R. de Chateaubriand, W. Scott etc. Among them we should make the English writer G. Byron stand out: His character personified the romantic ideal of the whole era and his heroic life became a role model for young generation. In Byron’s works Eugène Delacroix was searching for new themes and his romantic hero and every time finding the relevant ways for his artistic solution system. Е. Delacroix’s works show us the integrity of romantic ideas clearly and the close mutual influence of the Western European literature and French painting allows speaking about the uniqueness of this era.

Língua, memória de colonização e narratividade no século XIX

Este trabalho analisa os vocábulos “descobrir”, “conquistar”, e “barbárie”, como vestígios de ancoragem da constituição dos primeiros sentidos sobre a língua brasileira e do processo de colonização científica e territorial, pelo europeu, no Brasil. Recortamos as três definições com base em condições de produção distintas: as duas primeiras retiradas do dicionário Houaiss (2015), e a terceira do diário do pintor e viajante francês Hércules Florence (2007), escrito no século XIX, propondo uma interlocução entre os modos como essas palavras fazem movimentar e repetir, da memória discursiva, os sentidos instituídos na/pela colonização europeia no Brasil e seus desdobramentos para a formação da língua nacional. Ancorados aos pressupostos da História das Ideias Linguísticas, em articulação com a Análise de Discurso, buscamos precisar como o sujeito-colonizador se relaciona com a língua brasileira, em suas práticas iniciais de colonização, e as formas dos sentidos sedimentados pelas definições dicionarizadas.

Tricky, Fine, and Trapped: Painting the Femme Forte in Early Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract Between the late 1620s and late 1640s, Jacques Blanchard, Simon Vouet, and Claude Vignon all painted the femme forte (strong woman), an exemplary, heroic femal type whose popularity was linked to the presence of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria on the royal stage of France. This article puts early seventeenth-century French paintings of femmes fortes into conversation with period discourse regarding the reception of paintings and the status of women. Pictorial representation tended to cast the femme forte into contexts that compromised her exemplary status. Nude, on the verge of death by her own hand, the figure of the femme forte invited the very kind of sensual consumption that the femme forte herself attempted to disavow. Yet the ultimate threat posed by the femme forte was that her image might ‘trick’ male viewers into unwise actions.

Collecting French art in the late 1800s at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Abstract From the nineteenth century, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales has been a marker of cultural ambition in Australia. This paper critically considers five large French paintings purchased at the end of the nineteenth century at significant expense by the gallery. Feted by contemporaries as examples of the French academic style, they formed part of plans to develop a representative collection to further understanding of art in the colony and, over time, they have taken on a rich role in the collective cultural memory. Through close examination of these paintings, their historical reception, criticism, reproduction and traces in the gallery’s archives this article reveals a history of taste, class and the formation of the cultural value of art. Using an object-based approach, it positions these works as evidence of changing cultural ideas within the context of a state collection to offer new insight into their status, the gallery itself, and the multiple roles of public art collections.

Auguste Renoir, Sculptor With Hired Hands: A Masterful Artistic Cooperation Overshadowed by Legal Issues and Copyright Infringement.

The coping with rheumatoid arthritis of the famous French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is described in former publications. The heavily handicapped painter has in his last years created sculptures in cooperation with the sculptor Richard Guino (1890-1973). The extraordinary genesis of the sculptures through a masterful artistic cooperation, as well as the resulting legal issues and shameful copyright infringements, is reported. Renoir's decision to create sculptures with the help of Guido can be attributed to his remarkable artistic vision, vitality, optimistic nature, and strong will and is also a further testimonial of creative coping of an artist overcoming the physical handicap due to rheumatoid arthritis of his final years, so far not described in detail in the medical literature.

L'Écrit et l'image: la question de l'énonciation et de la narrativité dans la peinture de Robert Combas

Nous étudions dans le présent article la manière dont l’énonciation écrite vient se superposer sur l’énonciation peinte en la stratifiant, la modifiant et en en rompant l'unité. Nous prenons comme exemples quelques tableaux du peintre français Robert Combas, figure de proue de la « Figuration libre » dans les années 80 laquelle revalorise la narrativité dans la peinture. Combas recourt largement à l’écrit dans sa création picturale. L’écrit introduit un autre plan énonciatif, une autre voix, un autre monde, qui, pris à part, constitue une entité autonome, et mis en parallèle avec l'image, crée une sorte de polyphonie non sans affrontement avec celle-ci. Nous analysons les écrits dans les tableaux de Combas et les « paratextes » qui accompagnent ces derniers en nous interrogeant sur le rapport entre l’écrit et l'image dans la constitution des plans énonciatifs de l’œuvre.

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 August–15 November) include the Palestinian hip-hop documentary Palestine Underground; the viral spread of one Great March of Return protester's photo, which was extensively compared to the famous French painting Liberty Leading the People; and Palestinian celebration over the resignation of Avigdor Lieberman as Irael's defense minister, which generated the hastag #Gaza_tantasir (Gaza_victorious).

Courbet’s The Bathers and the “Hottentot Venus”: destabilizing whiteness in the mid-nineteenth-century nude

The virulent criticism leveled at Édouard Manet’s Olympia in 1865 has come to be seen as a clear-cut case of “shading meaning”: the presence of the black woman metaphorically darkening the white woman with insinuations of depraved sexuality and disease, leading at least one critic to brand Olympia a “Hottentot Venus.” This article demonstrates that a fuller, more nuanced understanding of this epithet can be gained by examining the critical reaction to an earlier “scandal” painting, Gustave Courbet’s The Bathers (1853). Though Courbet’s work contained only pale-skinned women, no less a critic than Théophile Gautier labeled its central figure a “Hottentot Venus.” Analysis of this distinct, yet parallel, textual and pictorial episode reveals what otherwise remained unspoken: the extent to which racial difference was a constitutive element of the idealized, classicizing nude in mid-century French painting, regardless of the skin color of the represented figures. The Bathers, like Olympia, caused a scandal because it denaturalized whiteness—the assumed superiority of European bodies and aesthetic norms that was visualized by the ideal nude and reinforced by its critical reception—by creating a representational space where “white” bodies could be “shaded” by race, sexuality, and class. The critics’ invocation of the Hottentot Venus was therefore an attempt to exoticize and reject bodies that were all at once unacceptable and dangerously familiar: in other words, to reject the “contamination” that was always, already, at the heart of whiteness.

Artistic expression and Psychiatry in Greece: Prominence highlights (1950-2011)

The art of the confined began to be studied by psychiatrists in the late 19th century for diagnostic purposes, while the first studies of aesthetic interest were found in the first decades of the 20th century, when psychiatrists as the Swiss W. Morgenthaler and the Austrian H. Prinzhorn published studies on mentally ill artworks, having mainly aesthetic approach. The artworks of the mentally ill belong to the field of Art found in the international literature by the term of Art Brut. The term "Brut" was introduced in 1945 by J. Dubuffet to describe the production of art by authors who were not taught academic art, did not belong to any artistic movement and were indifferent to a potential identification with the viewer or the collector. This French painter and sculptor named Art Brut the founded movement, whose main field was the works of mental patients. Dubuffet was particularly affected, in terms of artistic expression, like so many other creators of expressionism and surrealism, by the art of the mentally ill. Regarding the Greek scene, the relationship between our country and this category of Art began in 1950, at the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica "Dromokaitio", when Professor G. Pampoukis and Dr N. Drakoulidis sent patients' works to the Exposition Internationale d' Art Psychopathologique ( International Exhibition of Psychopathological Art) held in Paris that year. By the late 1980's, only occupational therapy projects existed. The first major artist appearance with a mental disorder is that of O.K. with his participation in the 2nd Biennale of Young Artists of the Mediterranean, in 1987. The year 1994 was a very important one in terms of art production of the mentally ill, as the Cultural Communication Unit (CCU) of the Psychiatric Hospital of Thessaloniki (P.H.T.) was founded, which aim was to produce original works that recorded the psychic reality of the patients and did not recreate other artists' projects. Regarding the promotion of this art, of great significance are the three Panhellenic Exhibitions held in 1996, 1997 and 2001, the last under the auspices of the Greek Psychiatric Association, which brought together the patient-artists' projects of various institutions of our country with the general public, receiving very positive feedback from both the press and the critics. Worth mentioning is also the honorary discrimination of two patient-artists who cooperated with the CCU, D.Z. and A.V., in EUWARD 2004 and 2007 of the German Foundation Augustinum, and also of G.M., who was awarded the first prize at the competition of "Very Special Art" in USA. Two other important moments of the effort of projecting the relationship between Art and Psychiatry were first in 2004 with the exhibition On The Other Bank, as part of the Cultural Olympiad, and the other in 2005 at the Christian and Byzantine Museum of Athens, where the exhibition Art against Stigma, organized by the World Psychiatric Association, the Greek Psychiatric Association and a privately held pharmaceutical company took place. Finally in 2011, again under the auspices of the Greek Psychiatric Association, works of the famous Prinzhorn Collection were exhibited both in Athens and Thessaloniki. In this way the public, once again, came into contact with works in which fears, insecurities and demons within the soul of every patientartist were imprinted, these projects serving not only as clinical evidence but also as creations of unquestionable artistic value.

Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque by Catherine Kautsky

Reviewed by: Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque by Catherine Kautsky Mark DeVoto Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque. By Catherine Kautsky. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. [xxix, 223 p. ISBN 9781442269828 (hardback), $38; ISBN 9781442269835 (e-book), $36.] Music examples, illustrations, notes, bibliography, indexes. The piano was Claude Debussy's instrument, and we know from numerous contemporary sources that he was an outstanding pianist, even though he seldom performed in public. Beginning in the mid-1890s, and especially with the composition of the three orchestral nocturnes, Debussy, like Robert Schumann sixty years earlier, began to give descriptive or extramusically suggestive titles to his works, eventually to the point that titles became "impressionist" in the manner of the works of French painters—and this as much as any other factor influenced his being identified as an "impressionist composer." Characteristic titles appear in La mer and in his piano music, beginning with the Estampes and two series of Images and becoming exaggerated in the two books of preludes. Catherine Kautsky, a pianist who teaches at Lawrence College, spent a year in Paris doing on-the-scene research for this new book, which examines the artistic and intellectual environment within which Debussy's extensive output of piano music came to birth—"to view [Debussy] through the lens of his piano music and the city he so fully embraced" (p. xvii). Previously, other authors made comparable efforts, notably Edward Lockspeiser (Debussy: His Life and Mind [2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1962–65)]), who explores especially Debussy's aesthetic against the background of literature. Kautsky is more concerned with the visual arts and popular theater. Her text is amplified by more than fifty reproductions [End Page 96] of paintings, feuilletons, posters, and book illustrations. All of these make a strong case for the sources of Debussy's inspiration in the exotic, popular culture, and entertainment: vaudevilles, the cabaret, circuses, acrobats, children's books, commedia dell'arte, and icons of classical antiquity. Relatively little in the book deals with specific analyses of music; there are eighteen music examples pointing to musical influences and details of style, less often to structure. Merely listing some of Debussy's titles shows how some subjects became recurring themes in his work: "Clair de lune" (a single movement from the Suite bergamasque as well as two different vocal settings of a Verlaine text); "La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune" (Preludes, bk. 2, no. 7); "Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut" (Images, 2nd ser., no. 2). Another recurring theme is the African Negro as an element of popular theater, such as in imported American minstrel shows ("Minstrels" [Preludes, bk. 1, no. 12]) and in toys ("Golliwogg's Cake-Walk," from Children's Corner; La boîte à joujoux, a children's ballet incorporating an earlier short piece, "Le petit nègre")—realizations that today would be considered socially insensitive but which Debussy always treated with wit and affection. Kautsky examines this subject in chapter 4, "The Cakewalk Wars," using illustrations from posters and offering an analysis of the cakewalk as a popular style of dance. "Fair-haired Maidens" forms the topic of chapter 11, with "La fille aux cheveux de lin" (Preludes, bk. 1, no. 8) at the forefront, but there are also the various treatments of Pierre Louÿs's Chansons de Bilitis, as well as the moment that everyone remembers in act 3, scene 1 of Pelléas et Mélisande, when Mélisande's "longs cheveux" (long hair) tumbles out of her tower window, inspiring Pelléas to tousle her tresses into the adjacent willow branches. The book includes a rarely reproduced frontispiece by Maurice Denis from the original edition of Debussy's La damoiselle élue (Paris: Librairie de l'art indépendant, 1893). Kautsky sees a parallel with an earlier painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879), and Aubrey Beardsley's Salomé (1893), a symbolist foreshadowing of art nouveau; perhaps her pursuit of this relationship is exaggerated, but Debussy's Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune, a quintessential art nouveau actualization in music, comes from just that time, in...

The Falling Gods: Charles de La Fosse’s Allegory of Autumn as Theme and Variation

La Fosse’s Allegory of Autumn as Bacchus and Ariadne, painted for the ensemble of The Four Seasons conceived by Jules Hardouin-Mansart for the Grand Salon of Marly in 1699, brings into focus the artist’s means of allegorization. This essay analyzes the painting in two interrelated aspects: it considers the mode of temporality in La Fosse’s individual visual poiesis and its bearing on the development of French painting on the cusp of the eighteenth century. Considering the temporality of allegory, the essay seeks to demonstrate how the ensemble of paintings from the Grand Salon signals a new stage in the development of the French academic school, marked particularly by a departure from logos-driven allegories and an embrace of more complex, temporal allegories grounded in a pictorial medium. In addition, the essay points to the emergence of the pictorial mode of lamentation adapted by La Fosse from contemporaneous opera.

Beyond All Price: Victorian Hair Jewelry, Commemoration & Story-Telling

When the Rothschild Foundation and National Trust commissioned the artist Jane Wildgoose to present an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, the country mansion built for Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898) containing his magnificent collection of eighteenth-century French decorative arts and European paintings, she focused not on the grandeur of the house or the luxury of its contents, but on a simple lock of hair and a tiny photograph of Ferdinand’s wife, Evelina (1839–1866). This essay gives an account of how these humble objects held the key to a deeply personal story relating to Ferdinand and Evelina. Focusing on the materiality of human hair, and the complex codes for mourning in the late Victorian period, Wildgoose unravels some of the meanings associated with nineteenth-century mourning jewelry, including examples selected from the Rothschild collections and the Royal Collection to accompany Evelina’s hair and photograph in her exhibition Beyond All Price. It also discusses her research trip to Leila’s Hair Museum in the USA, where she learnt techniques for making wreaths from human hair in order to be able to make new pieces of hairwork for the exhibition. The essay concludes with discussion about Wildgoose’s ongoing work with donated human hair, and her associated research into the historical circumstances that led to a “unique status” being ascribed to human remains in collections, in the UK government’s Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums.

Desiring The Shore: Adolphe Lalyre and the Sirens of Carteret

Adolphe Lalyre was a high-profile French painter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has now largely fallen into obscurity. Seemingly unmoved by the series of movements in Modern Art that came to prominence during his lifetime-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism-he persisted with a style of painting derived from Symbolism, initially favouring religious themes before moving on to a series of works representing (human-form) sirens during an extended residency at Carteret, on the coast of Normandy. The French term sirene refers to both human-form female water spirits and fish-tailed ones of the type usually referred to in English as mermaids. This article explores the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of Lalyre's sirene paintings and discusses the pleasures and temptations they offered the viewer at an historical moment when Modernism, and Modernity more generally, was in its ascendancy. Our analysis examines Lalyre's work within the specifically local context of Carteret and, more broadly, with late 19th and early 20th Century France, focusing on the importance of the artist and visual representations in the process of place-making and especially with regard to shifts in the meaning of sea and shore, along with the rise of the tourism industry.