Nineteenth-century Painting Research Articles

Claude Chamber

Proto-photographic and proto-cinematic technologies are an unending source of inspiration for a visual artist. We want to consider the case of an eighteenth-century optical device, the Claude mirror, as a starting point for an artistic collaboration.
 The Claude mirror is a small black convex mirror named after the painter Claude Lorrain and used by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century painters and travellers for viewing landscapes. The dark mirror surface produces an image with a limited tonal range, allowing the viewer to look at the environment as if it were a painting. A famous Thomas Gainsborough drawing shows a man seated on a bank with a sketchbook on his lap and holding an oval mirror propped against a tree branch (Gainsborough, 1750-55).
 In spring 2019, in a flash of joint inspiration, we conceived a method of combining aspects of our artistic processes: Salla’s moving image and Laura’s printmaking practice. For 18 months, we captured photographic time-lapse sequences of everyday views from the backyards of our studios, residencies, and homes as reflections on the surface of copper plates installed in the environment (Myllylä and Vainikka, 2021). In the resulting installation, titled Claude Chamber, we projected the video sequences on the gallery space, reflected via the same mirror surfaces, and the projected images became distorted and spatial.
 We were intrigued by this optical device, in which characteristics of photography and printmaking meet. One can think of a Claude glass as a predecessor of the camera viewfinder, an early photographic gesture. It can also be viewed as a printing plate, a matrix reflecting a view. In a traditional printing plate, the image is attached or fastens itself onto the surface of the plate; in our installation, the image is transient and moving.

A Curious Case of Neglect

The ‘Van Lynden Collection’ comprises forty-four paintings that were hung in the Lyndenstein country house in Beetsterzwaag by Baron van Lynden (1827-1896) and his mother Cornelia van Borcharen (1789-1864), and forty-six paintings purchased from 1860 onwards, when the baron married Maria Catharina, Baroness van Pallandt (1834-1905), for their residence in The Hague. The baroness’s involvement is not mentioned in archival documents because of women’s legal incapacity at the time. The article corrects this by referring to the Van Lynden-Van Pallandt Collection and discussing the history of all the works. Lyndenstein was home to an almost encyclopaedic selection of finely painted works by Dutch Romantic artists to which Van Lynden, when a young man, added paintings from exhibitions of Living Artists that mostly had already received awards. Louwrens Hanedoes, himself a painter and a relative, might have mediated and represented the baron in purchasing. In their Hague residence, Van Lynden and Van Pallandt hung modern French works painted in a loose or even sketchy manner. These were acquired during visits they made together to sales and galleries in Paris and through their commercial relationship with Goupil & Cie (from 1884 Boussod, Valadon & Cie) and the firm of Wisselingh & Co, both with branches in the Netherlands. The collection from Lyndenstein arrived in the Rijksmuseum in 1899; in 1900 it was followed by the Hague collection, which had also been bequeathed but was then donated by Baroness van Pallandt during her lifetime. It was not possible to keep the Van Lynden-Van Pallandt Collection together because of the rapid expansion of the collection of late nineteenth-century paintings, the changing appreciation of modern art and the nationalist preference for Dutch art in general and the Hague School in particular, and long-term loans to other institutions. A number of the French masterpieces were not hung permanently until after the Rijksmuseum had been renovated (2013).

Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Painting by Allison Leigh

Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Painting by Allison Leigh

Nineteenth-Century French Painting of Rural Life on Diplomatic Mission to China

Abstract Paysages et paysans: la vie rurale en France au XIXe siècle, 1820–1905 was the anodyne title of a loan exhibition inaugurated in March of 1978 at Beijing's National Gallery of China. As the first exhibition of Western painting in China after the instauration of the Communist regime in 1949, the show was a cultural- diplomatic landmark; its planning and reception can refresh our understanding of both Franco–Chinese cultural relations in the waning years of Maoism and the diplomatically recuperative uses of French nineteenth-century painting. This article uncovers the rationales of French actors and institutions as revealed in archival documents and then scrutinizes the unexpected reception of an art exhibition that remains an important episode in cross-cultural relations and aesthetic reclamation.

Mother’s Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative. Lisa Algazi Marcus

Although the wet-nursing industry may have long faded into the past, the debate around breastfeeding remains a fascinating and salient subject in the twenty-first century. Indeed, while perusing the wealth of striking historical and literary examples offered up in this study, one cannot help but reflect on their connection with divisive issues in our own time. Lisa Algazi Marcus perceptively addresses a powerful political imaginary of the mothering body that continues to intensify bodily autonomy debates today — not only those most obviously implied by the subject of her study, concerning the use of formula milk and public breastfeeding, but also those around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. This book, then, feels important and timely, and addresses a significant gap within nineteenth-century French studies. It begins with a thorough account of attitudes to breastfeeding in eighteenth-century France, including moving statistics on the prevalence of wet-nursing and the associated infant mortality rates despite the period’s abundance of idealistic discourse on the value of nursing one’s own child. This sets the stage for the second chapter to consider the reasons for a decline in portrayals of breastfeeding in the Romantic era, stressing the impact of Napoleon’s regressive attitudes towards women and his associated public policy. Algazi Marcus examines a very wide range of authors here: Gabriel Legouvé, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and George Sand, alongside a selection of early nineteenth-century paintings. The final two chapters explore realist and naturalist authors’ renewed interest in both breastfeeding and the allegorical Republican figure of Marianne, moving between Balzac’s Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841), Alexandre Hepp’s Le Lait d’une autre (1891), and Zola’s Fécondité (1899). Algazi Marcus’s primary interest in these chapters is in the curious proximity of the maternal and the sexual. Whereas in the eighteenth century it was acceptable to cite sensual pleasure as an incentive for women to nurse, she argues, after the relegation of the maternal breast to the private sphere under the Empire, discussion of such pleasure could only later return via the (often pathologizing) eroticization of mothers and wet-nurses by anxious male authors. The fourth chapter investigates, in particular, Hepp’s and Zola’s politicized deployment of characters named Marianne during the Third Republic. The fictional passages Algazi Marcus cites are always intriguing, and occasionally astonishing — helping to make this study a genuinely compelling read. They also provide fertile ground for her psychoanalytic readings, which propose that these authors’ own processes of subconscious desire and identification are what motivate their depictions of the mother–infant dyad. However, the discussion of psychoanalytic theory itself (Freud and Kristeva) in Chapter 3 feels too brief, and one might have expected a rationale for why other interpretive paradigms were left aside. In particular, given that this study is centrally concerned with the political uses of biological essentialism, a response to gender theory since Judith Butler would have been welcome, even if only to clarify the author’s chosen approach. Nevertheless, Algazi Marcus’s clear-sighted analysis and impressive range of sources ensure that this is valuable and thought-provoking research.

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South

Indelible marks: Beth Harland’s absorption

ABSTRACT The article traces Beth Harland's approach to painting practice in light of her engagement with Michael Fried's interpretation of eighteenth and nineteenth century painting and her fascination with Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The contrast between reflection on phenomena of inner life and a painting’s audience address is explored through a reading of passages from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve and Fried's writing about theatricality and absorption. Harland’s practical and theoretical explorations of the situation and possibilities of contemporary painting, illuminated by her engagement with notions of theatricality and absorption, are then outlined. After considering Hans Belting’s views on seriality and processes of re-working, the article concludes by suggesting that Harland sought and achieved a buoyant working relationship between formational contraries, avoiding both hypostatisation and easy compromise.

Deutsches Romantik-Museum, Frankfurt

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Editors’ Welcome

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

British Decorative Arts Galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Salem, the Prince of Tombouctou: A North African Model in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Luxury After the Terror by Iris Moon

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

At Once “Ancient” and “Modern”: The Art-Journal’s Illustrated Catalogues and the Notion of Adaptation in Nineteenth-Century Historicism

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean edited by Margaret S. Graves and Alex Dika Seggerman

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition by Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Romantic Spain: David Roberts and Genaro Pérez Villaamil

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media by Rachel Teukolsky

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850–1890: Intercultural Engagements with Architecture and Craft in the Age of Travel and Reform by Mercedes Volait

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.