Category Archives: Art

Art

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

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A generation or two before the Impressionists, French artists didn’t have the luxury of lolling about fields painting haystacks and generally having a wheeze of a time. At a time of seismic social and political change, an artist had to box clever to stay on the right side of dangerous political forces. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was one such painter who managed to successfully navigate his way – and his art – from the final years of the Ancien Régime through the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

David was considered to be the preeminent painter of the Neoclassical era, that return to the high-minded severity of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome in contrast to the frivolity of the late Baroque. David’s history painting matched the moral climate of the final years of Louis XVI and he was favoured by the Court. However, David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Robespierre, and his Death of Marat (1793) became one of the most famous images of the era.

Imprisoned briefly after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Consul of France. As well as his suitably heroic rendering of Napoleon in his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), he also created the monumental The Coronation of Napoleon (1806). Finally, after Napoleon’s fall from power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, where he remained until his death.

However, let’s return to David’s origins with a painting considered a Neoclassical masterpiece, Oath of the Horatii (1784). It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa. Instead of the two cities sending their armies to war, they agree to choose three men from each city; the victor in that fight will be the victorious city. From Rome, three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to fight three brothers from a family of Alba Longa, the Curiatii.

The three Horatii brothers, willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown saluting their father who holds their swords out for them. There could be no more evocative a scene of patriotic duty and, although painted four years before the Revolution, it nonetheless became a symbol of loyalty to State and a defining image of the time.

Of the three Horatii brothers, only one will survive the confrontation and he will kill each Curiatii brother in turn, seizing victory for Rome. Aside from the three brothers depicted, David also represents, in the bottom right corner, a woman crying. She is Camilla, a sister of the Horatii, who happens to be also betrothed to one of the Curiatii fighters, and thus she weeps in the realisation that, whatever happens, she will lose someone she loves.

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

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Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) was a London-born painter and sculptor whose artistic talents were recognised early on: at age thirteen he exhibited works at the Royal Academy as an “Honorary Exhibitor” and was elected as an Associate there at the minimum age of twenty four. He was able to paint extremely quickly and perhaps these days would have attracted a cool nickname like snooker players Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White (Lightning Landseer, perhaps); he was also reputed to be able to draw simultaneously with both hands. One biographer wrote:

…upon the occasion of a large party assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in London, the conversation having turned upon the subject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impossible for anyone, however skilful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Landseer quietly; “give me two pencils and I will show you.” The pencils were brought, and Landseer, taking one in each hand, drew simultaneously and unhesitatingly the profile of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the other the perfect outline of the head of a horse.

Certainly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paintings of animals, particularly horses, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubtedly the set of four bronze lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Today’s subject is probably his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scottish Highlands. It was completed in 1851 as part of a series of three panels intended to hang in the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that commission never came off due to some dispute or other and it was sold into private ownership. It also, however, sold widely in reproductions and became one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century. It probably helped that Queen Victoria was a big fan.

The painting was purchased in 1916 by the Pears soap company and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in advertising. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons distillery and became their trademark before similarly being used by Glenfiddich on their whisky bottles. A derivative of the Monarch graced the shelves of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason via the cans of Baxter’s Royal Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of shortbread biscuits. In 2017, the painting was finally sold by its last owner Diageo to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it can now be viewed by the public in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer terminology makes him a “royal stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which sixteen points are needed, but let’s not quibble; he’s a magnificent beast.

The Monarch of the Glen
Art

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog (1818)

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Back in 2016 when I introduced this blog (here) and the sense of the “sublime” as something of excellence “occasionally glimpsed” herein, I mentioned that the concept of the sublime was one with a long history of being debated by artists and writers over the centuries. I can pad that idea out a bit now, since it has a direct connection to the subject of this week’s blog, and so for fun and edification, here’s a little potted history or mini-essay on the concept of the sublime.

The first known study of the concept was the 1st century AD treatise On The Sublime, ascribed to Longinus and which talks about the use of great or lofty language, intended to inspire awe or veneration, in the field of rhetoric. This treatise was rediscovered in the 16th century and translated into English and French in the following decades, and it had a significant influence on literary criticism and the philosophy of aesthetics in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The concept was developed in Britain in the early 18th century and came to describe an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty, brought into prominence by the writings of John Dennis (1693), Joseph Addison (1705) and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1709). All three of these authors had undertaken a crossing of the Alps, as part of that familiar Enlightenment pastime the “Grand Tour”, and all three independently expressed their contrasting feelings of fear and pleasure at the awesomeness of nature and derived, as Addison described it, “an agreeable kind of horror”.

Edmund Burke more formally developed this conception of sublimity in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, and German philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Rudolf Otto each added their academic heft to the subject. Soon, the concept would be realised in the art movement known as Romanticism and we would see the portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner: not just a visualisation of the simple enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather an examination of a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature and its majestic power.

German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was instrumental in creating this notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling: die romantische Stimmungslandschaft. Friedrich’s paintings commonly employed the Rückenfigur, a person seen from behind, contemplating the landscape and inviting the viewer to similarly place himself in that medium and experience the sublime potential of nature. The Friedrich painting that is above all used to characterise this concept is his 1818 oil on canvas, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

It depicts a man standing upon a rocky precipice and gazing out across a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce. It is considered one of the masterpieces of the Romanticism movement and to successfully evoke the sublime or Addison’s “agreeable horror”.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Art

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1512)

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Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, what with the Creation of Adam being astride the top of these blogs week in, week out: it’s time to look at that apex predator of the Renaissance art world, and number one cause of visitors’ neck strain, the Sistine Chapel. No visit to Rome is complete without it, and perhaps no blog on the sublime can afford to omit it.

First, a whistle-stop history tour: Sistine Chapel 101, if you like. Meet Pope Sixtus IV, pope between 1471 and 1484:

Pope Sixtus IV

It was Sixtus (adjective “Sistine” in case you need that mansplained) who commissioned the building of the chapel, which was completed in 1481 and has served ever since as the Pope’s official residence. Sixtus is also known for founding the Spanish Inquisition, but that’s another story, let’s stick with the chapel. He arranged for a team of painters (not Michelangelo yet – he comes later – but including two other famous names, Botticelli and Ghirlandiao) to create a series of frescoes on the walls, depicting the lives of Moses and Jesus.

Fast forward to 1508 and Pope Julius II is in charge (Julius was a relative of Sixtus: nepotism was another of Sixtus’s strong suits):

Pope Julius II

Julius commissioned Michelangelo to complete the decoration of the chapel by painting the ceiling, which he completed four years later in 1512. This was a project that changed the course of Western art and is rightly regarded as one of the crowning artistic accomplishments of human civilisation. Replete with biblical scenes,  stories and characters, the ceiling is a riotous collection of limbs and draperies, at first glance, and indeed a photo of the ceiling doesn’t really do it justice – but given time to appreciate (whilst not bumping into fellow tourists), it is an artistic tour de force that warrants its fame. Click on these images to expand; the first to spot the Creation of Adam wins a prize…

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James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871)

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With Mother’s Day imminent it seemed apposite to take a look at an image that has been enduringly associated with motherhood, particularly in the US, since the Victorian era: the famous Whistler’s Mother. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was an American painter, based primarily in England, and a leading proponent of “art for art’s sake”, that credo which considered art to have intrinsic value quite separate from any moral or didactic function. He was all about tonal harmony and saw parallels between painting and music, even entitling many of his paintings as “arrangements”, “harmonies”, and “nocturnes” – his Whistler’s Mother is only colloquially so-called and was really called Arrangement in Grey and Black.

The subject of the painting is, unsurprisingly, Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was living with the artist in London at the time. The story goes that Anna Whistler was only acting as a substitute because the original model couldn’t make the sitting, and although Whistler had envisioned his model standing up, his mother was just too uncomfortable to pose upright for long periods of time so insisted on sitting down.

The work was shown at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1872, after narrowly avoiding rejection by the Academy (a bone of contention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrangements” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Academy, and they insisted on adding an explanatory adjunct, “Portrait of the Painter’s mother“, to Whistler’s title. Whistler eventually sold the painting, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg and  is now housed in the Musée d’Orsay.

In 1934, the US Post Office Department issued a stamp engraved with the portrait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bearing the slogan “In memory and in honor of the mothers of America”. In that spirit, this blog is written in memory and honour of my own lovely mum, and to mothers everywhere!

Whistler’s Mother
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great treasures in the trove that is London’s National Gallery is this masterpiece of Neo-Impressionism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actually one of a pair of Seurat masterpieces, alongside A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (held at the Art Institute of Chicago), with each sister painting depicting one side of the Seine river and portraying the different levels of French society that frequented them in their leisure time: the wealthy society relaxing at La Grande Jatte and the working-class residents hanging out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paintings are leading examples of the technique developed by Seurat and known as pointillism, involving the use of thousands of small, distinct dots of colour and relying on the ability of the eye and the mind of the viewer to blend the individual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actually first used in a pejorative sense to mock Seurat (a reaction commonly experienced by art pioneers of course) but it stuck, and the technique is representative of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for interesting new methods.

Here, we’re focusing on the working-class residents of the city. They line this picturesque spot by the river as they enjoy the sunshine. There are around five figures in the foreground and down the bank we see other people and boats in the background, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the buildings are low level and don’t take too much attention from the figures nearest us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jatte where the bourgeoisie enjoy the shade) and the characters are flooded with sunlight.

Seurat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paintings are monumentally sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seurat knew that size would need to be met with technical brilliance and so he prepared very carefully with thirteen oil sketches and ten drawings before embarking on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stunning luminosity and plenty of interest to hold the viewer’s attention. Sadly, Seurat died at just 31 and so we will never know what sort of direction his style might have taken in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a funny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolted-on, world-renowned big name like your Rembrandts and your Van Goghs, you might find yourself in or out of fashion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many people outside (and probably inside) of France have never heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s preeminent academic painters in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Bouguereau executed some 822 known paintings during his career, often portraying quintessentially classical and mythological subjects: Cupid and Psyche, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick religious works, pastorals, and coyly erotic nudes. His portraits were rendered with near-photographic verisimilitude and with a consummate level of skill and craft. Given that a high percentage of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau represented the “old guard”, an upholder of traditional values and indeed one who contrived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being rejected by the ‘Salon de Monsieur Bouguereau’. In other words, he was a dinosaur and destined to be overshadowed by the Impressionists and the modernists of the dawning new century; his reputation sank after his death and for many years his work was regarded as irredeemably passé. He has, however, recently achieved something of a rehabilitation, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auction room. Quite right too, he was brilliant.

A representative work is this 1894 piece, Bacchante. A bacchante was a priestess or follower of Bacchus, the god of wine and intoxification, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depicted as wild women, running through the forest, tearing animals to pieces, and engaging in other acts of frenzied debauchery, Bouguereau here chooses to portray his Bacchante ‘before the party’!

 

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Raphael’s The School Of Athens (1511)

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Back in 2006 I went to Rome, visited the tombs of Keats and Shelley, sat on the Spanish Steps, had my camera stolen on the subway (holidays are often mixed affairs, after all), discovered a penchant for liquorice liqueur, marvelled at the Coliseum, got a sore neck looking up at St Mark’s Cathedral and the glorious Sistine Chapel…and spent some time in contemplation of the famous fresco that is the subject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, the apartment in the Vatican palace whose walls and ceiling were painted by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) was commissioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also commissioned Michelangelo to paint the nearby Sistine Chapel (this Pope clearly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stanza della Segnatura is an embodiment of all that was great about the classical spirit of the Renaissance. It’s hard to think of a better symbol for the marriage of art, philosophy, and science that was the hallmark of the Italian Renaissance than The School of Athens.

The frescoes depict the themes of philosophy, theology, literature and justice, and personifications of the same four themes decorate the ceiling. The School of Athens, representing philosophy, is notable for its accurate perspectival projection, which Raphael learned from Leonardo da Vinci (whose likeness Raphael used for the central figure of this painting, Plato). The two central figures are Plato and Aristotle, each holding a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assortment of figures from the worlds of philosophy and the natural sciences, including Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid and Ptolemy. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to visit the Stanza della Segnatura, but do look after your camera!

Art

Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew (1600)

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For the archetype of the dangerously passionate artist, go no further than Caravaggio. Caravaggio (full name Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571–1610) lived a tumultuous life in Rome in the late 16th century, painting masterpieces in between being locked away for various offences usually involving brawling and assault. Many records exist of his being sued for one infraction or another: he was sued by a waiter for throwing artichokes in his face; he was sued by his landlady for not paying his rent and then for vandalism when he threw rocks through her window. Usually, Caravaggio was bailed out by wealthy patrons but when, in a duel in 1606, he actually killed a local gangster, he was forced to go on the run and he spent the final four years of his life moving between Naples, Malta, and Sicily. Thus, Caravaggio, like none other, compels us to separate the artist from his art.

But what an art: Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro (the use of strong contrasts between light and dark) that came to be known as tenebrism. He used the technique to transfix subjects in bright shafts of light between dark shadows, and since he often chose crucial moments and scenes from the Bible and literature, his works were often vividly expressed drama. He worked rapidly, with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and instead work directly onto the canvas: if he had been a snooker player he would have been Hurricane Higgins.

A case in point is The Calling of St Matthew, held in the Contarelli Chapel, Rome, and depicting the story from the Gospel of Matthew: “Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, ‘Follow me’, and Matthew rose and followed Him.” Caravaggio depicts Matthew the tax collector sitting at a table with four other men. Jesus Christ and Saint Peter have entered the room, and Jesus is pointing at Matthew. A beam of light illuminates the faces of the men at the table as they stare at the new arrivals. When you look at the picture, you could be forgiven for wondering which sitter is Matthew: is the bearded man pointing to the slumped figure (“Who, him?”) or at himself (“Who, me?”). Fortunately, two other paintings sit alongside this one in the chapel (The Martyrdom of St Matthew and The Inspiration of St Matthew) and they feature the same bearded man unequivocally playing Matthew.

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew
Art

Edgar Degas’s The Dance Class (1874)

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The writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1873: “Yesterday I spent the afternoon in the studio of a painter named Degas. Out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers”. That same year Edgar Degas (1834-1917) would join forces with Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne, to exhibit paintings under the banner of Impressionism and would go on to achieve fame as one of the world’s great artists and renderers of movement. Half of his prodigious output (of 1200 or so works) depicted dancers and the world they inhabited, and he claimed the ballet for modern art as Cézanne claimed the landscape and Monet the haystacks and lilies.

In the 1870s Edgar Degas had become fascinated with ballet dancers, paying frequent visits to the magnificent Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opéra and its Ballet. He haunted the wings and stalked the classes where the Opèra’s ballet master, Jules Perrot, trained groups of young girls. He would be constantly sketching his observations and accumulating ideas for paintings to render later in his studio. Degas’s pictures of ballerinas performing onstage convey exquisitely the balance, grace and radiance of the dancers, whilst at other times, Degas stripped away the poetry and illusion to show the hard work behind the scenes: the hanging around, the stretching at the bar, the rubbing of sore muscles, the tying of shoes.

It is at this point that I should signal the need to separate art from reality, for the reality of the ballet was that it had a sordid underbelly. The dancers were usually young, poor, vulnerable and ripe for exploitation by abonnés, the name for wealthy male subscription holders who often lurked in the foyers, and there was more than a hint of prostitution (often with their mothers in collusion, desperate I suppose to push their daughters up the ladder). The glamour was only on the surface.

To defend Degas from the obvious fleeting thought, however (although his character may be called into question for various other reasons such as misanthropy and anti-semitism), it is understood that his relationship to the dancers was paternal and professional rather than predatory.

Of the several hundred Degas paintings to choose from, here’s one that features the old Perrot schooling his ballerinas in The Dance Class (1874), with the dancers in various stages of preparation. The girl on the left appears to be looking at her mobile phone!