June 2011 – Page 3 – my daily art display

L’Absinthe by Edgar Degas

My Daily Art Display the other day featured one of the great American Realist artist Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting Automat and we looked at thetheme of loneliness and isolation in an urban environment. Today I am featuring a painting, which may
have influenced Hopper. It has had many titles but finally in 1893 the painting was simply called L’Absinthe. It was painted in 1876 by the French painter and sculptor and one of the founders of Impressionism, Edgar Degas.

Degas was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas. Born in Paris in 1834, he was one of five
children of Augustine and Célestine De Gas. His father was a banker and Edgar was brought up in a moderately wealthy family environment. After the death of his mother when he was five years old, he was brought up jointly by his father and grandfather. He began school life at the age of eleven and at about this time dropped the use of the ostentatious spelling of the family name for the surname he is known by now, Degas. He finished his schooling at the age of nineteen and attained a baccalaureate in literature. When he left school he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. However his father had planned for his son to study law and enrolled him in the Faculty of Law at the
University of Paris. Edgar was very half-hearted about his father’s career choice and failed with his studies. He had been always interested in art and in his teenage years wanted to eventually become a famous history painter and paint pictures depicting great moments in history. This art genre had achieved immense popularity in France in the
nineteenth century. In 1855 he met the great French Neoclassical painter Ingres, who was his idol, and who offered Degas advice, which he was never to forget:

“..Draw lines, young man, and still more lines,
both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist…”

He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts and a year later journeyed to Italy where he stayed for three years, part of this time was spent living with his aunt in Naples.
It was during this time that he studied the works of the great Italian Renaissance painters, such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. He returned to France in 1859 and moved into
a Paris studio. His painting genre slowly changed from that of a history painter to one of a painter of contemporary subjects. He was still copying paintings at the Louvre and it was said that in 1864, whilst working on a copy of Velazquez’s portrait that he met another artist engaged in the same work. The artist was Édouard Manet, who was a key figure in the change-over from Realism to Impressionism and somebody who was to
influence Degas.

His painting career was temporarily halted for two years with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Degas enlisted in the National Guard and his military duties gave him little time for painting. With the conclusion of the war midway through 1871, his military life came to an end and the next year he went New Orleans where his brother, René, and other relatives lived. He returned to Paris the following year but sadly in 1874 his father died. A careful scrutiny of his father’s estate revealed that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts and Degas, wanting to preserve the good name of the family, had little choice but to sell his house and a large quantity of his art work to service the debt. Having always lived a relatively wealthy existence in which his art was mainly a hobby and for his own pleasure, Degas suddenly found himself having to paint pictures to sell and by so doing, put food on his table. Art historians believe it was during this time that Degas produced some of his greatest works.

It was also in this period of his life that Degas came together with a group of like-minded artists and together they put on independent exhibitions of their art works. The first of their exhibitions was held in 1874 and it was dubbed an Impressionist Exhibition. However, Degas did not like the label “Impressionists”, which the media had attached to his group of painters. Degas was a leading-light within this group and proved to be a great organiser.

His financial situation had improved by this time through the sale of his art and he developed a love for collecting works of art of the old Masters such as El Greco as well as works by his contemporaries, Manet, Pissarro and Cézanne. Alas, with age came his dissatisfaction with life in general. He became frustrated and disgruntled with life and became very argumentative and his friends began to desert him. Of Degas’ confrontational behaviour and loss of his friends, Renoir once commented:

“…What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one
of the last to go, but even I couldn’t stay till the end…”

Degas never married nor had any children. In many ways all he had was
his art and he lost that in the last few years of his life when his eyesight
started to fail. He died in Paris in 1917 aged 83.

And so to the painting, L’Absinthe. We see two figures, one a man, the other a
woman sitting at a table outside a café. They are positioned to the right of centre of the painting which was a style often favoured by Degas. The man wearing a hat looks scruffy, almost tramp-like. His gaze is away from the woman and is fixed on something off the canvas, to the right of the picture. The woman is also wearing a hat and is dressed more formally than the man. She stares ahead with a blank expression, her arms hanging limply down by her side. On the table before her we see a glass filled with a green coloured liquid – absinthe. It is this drink which lends its name to the painting. This drink became very popular in France around 1850 and became commonly known as the queen of poisons or la fée verte (the green fairy). It is anise-based drink made from the wormwood herb and which is highly toxic and extremely addictive. It can have an alcohol content as much as 80 per cent by volume, twice that of spirits we buy today. It was a latter day drug. One critic condemned it saying:

“……Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country….”

In some ways although this painting depicts two people sitting at the same table, the theme is loneliness and social isolation and the consequences. There is an air of desolation about the man and woman as they stare into space. Degas invites us to join these regulars at this café. Look how they sit side by side but there is no contact between them. There is no animated conversation between them. Degas is showing us that you can be together but still be alone. Maybe they can gain some comfort from their individual loneliness.

She sits with her absinthe before her. He is with his black coffee, probably trying to counteract the effects of too much absinthe. In my mind, there is a feeling of isolation
permeating from this work. In this case the isolation may be due to the fact that this pair are heavy drinkers and for that reason they are shunned by society. Although this is a café scene, the painting could be classed as a portrait as both the man and the woman were known to the artist. The woman, dressed up as a prostitute, was the famous French actress Ellen Andrée, who modelled for many of the Impressionist artists and the man was Marcellin Desboutin, a painter and engraver who favoured the Bohemian lifestyle. Degas wanted his two models to pose as absinthe addicts in front of his favourite café, the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, which was situated in the Place Pigalle in Paris. It was a popular meeting place for Degas and Impressionist painter friends such as Manet, and van Gogh and this quaint meeting place existed up until 2004.

The painting which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay was first exhibited in 1876 but was not well received by the critics. For them it was “ugly and disgusting”. In 1892 when it came up for auction at Christie’s the lot was greeted with “boos and hisses” ! For
many critics the painting was looked upon as a blow to morality. The English viewed French art with grave suspicion as to its morality and preferred paintings which were morally uplifting and incorporated a moral lesson. George Moore the Irish writer and art critic of the time described the woman in the painting:

“…What a whore…”

and of the painting itself critically uttered:

“….the tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson….”

Ellen Andre — Ellen Andrée, the actress.

Amusingly once the painting had been exhibited Ellen Andrée became a larger than life figure and a succès de scandale, which only goes to confirm that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The French government, at the time, took a much dimmer view of the painting and the furore that had risen from it. They tried to dampen down to the controversy by saying the green drink on the café table was simply green tea!!!

Automat by Edward Hopper

“All the lonely people, where do they all belong? “

I am sure the words from the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby are known by most people. Loneliness can be a terrible burden to have to bear and its often associated with the impersonality of a large city, which although teeming with people, they seem to remain as strangers, whereas within small village communities there is a sense of camaraderie and friendliness which ensures that with a minimum of effort your loneliness can be banished.

My Daily Art Display featured painting for today is entitled Automat by the American artist Edward Hopper, which he completed in 1927. His theme of loneliness and the loneliness of city life was a constant theme in a number of his paintings. Look back to My Daily Art Display of January 23^rd when I featured his famous work entitled Nighthawks.

In today’s painting we see a woman, with her cloche hat pulled low down over her forehead, staring into her coffee cup as she sits by herself, in what Hopper terms as an Automat. I have to admit I had never heard of this term before but I believe they were what we would now call fast food outlets, which served simple food or drinks, and which were served by coin-operated and bill-operated vending machines but I guess the machines have been removed an there is waitress service nowadays. There is a starkness about the setting, almost but not quite minimalist. Like the scene in Nighthawks there are just windows but no doors on view, giving a slight sense of entrapment. Her look of preoccupation would suggest she may be, for some reason unknown to us, mentally entrapped.

The woman we see before us is pensive, her eyes are downcast and to my mind she seems a little sad. She is well dressed with her warm winter coat with its fur collar and cuffs. She wears makeup so maybe she is on her way for an evening out or looking how dark it is outside, maybe she is on her way back home. Of course we are not really sure whether she is on her own or whether the empty chair at her table is for somebody else. Maybe she is awaiting her companion or is her despondency due to the companion’s non-arrival.

Another strange thing about the woman is that she has only one glove on. Could it be that this café is not only a lonely place but also a cold one and the one glove is all she wanted to remove so that she could hold the cup and yet still retain some warmth? The dark window takes up a lot of space in the painting and its darkness adds to the atmosphere of the painting. It is pitch-black outside and, along with the way the woman is dressed, gives us the feeling that this scene takes place on a cold autumn or winter night. There is no sign of life outside, no people, no lights from other buildings and no headlights from cars. This lack of outside lights works well and allows just the penetration of the blackness by the reflection of the café lights to be more effective and in so doing adds to the feeling of isolation. Does Hopper want to liken the woman’s mood and her life to this view of the window – dark with little going on in it? She is in the middle of a deserted town which adds to the sense of her isolation and solitude. Note how Hopper has painted the woman’s legs. The brightness of his colouring of them draws our eyes to them even though they are under the table. It adds a little bit of overt sensuality to the painting and makes us wonder how such a woman could feel sad and lonely. We are now concerned about her vulnerability. Is her pensiveness also due to her feeling vulnerable as she sits alone in this café?

Time Magazine August 1995 — Time Magazine, August 1995

Hopper’s painting and ones of a similar theme are linked with the perception of urban alienation, which by definition is the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the urban world, as through indifference or disaffection. It is interesting to note that in August 1995 Time magazine used this painting on its front cover with its lead article dedicated to stress, anxiety and depression.

Loneliness is often the central subject matter in Hopper’s art. The people he depicts look as though they are far from the comfort and reassurance of home. We see clues as to their isolation in the way they stand reading a letter beside a hotel bed or drinking in a bar. They stare out of the window of a moving train or read a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces often have the look of vulnerability and introspection. They look like they may have just been jilted or have just broken up with someone. They often seem to be mentally searching for something or someone and have been cast adrift in transient settings. His paintings are often set at night, as this adds to the mood and evocatively all we see through the window is darkness.

Yet despite this bleakness we witness in Hopper’s paintings, they are not themselves bleak to look at – perhaps because they allow us, the viewer, to witness some of the artist’s grief and disappointments, and from that we feel less personally persecuted and beset by them. It is as if we suddenly realise we are not the only person to feel sad or depressed, for isn’t it true that sometimes a sad book consoles us more when we feel sad. Maybe we just need to realise we are not alone in our sufferings.

In some ways Hopper has challenged us to make up our own mind about the story behind the painting. There is no action going on to give us any clues. Maybe the story we come up with will depend on our own state of mind. If we are happy, we may well believe that the woman is thinking about the coming to the café of her beloved. If we ourselves are feeling lonely and slightly depressed then maybe we empathize with the woman and share her isolation and vulnerability. So what is to be? What is your take on the scene in the painting? Maybe it is at times like this, when we look at the painting and we perceive the loneliness and unhappiness of the woman that we should take time to be grateful for what we have. Maybe we should not always desire something else. Maybe we should want what we have.

The Embarkation at Margate of Elector Palatine and Princess Elizabeth by Adam Willaerts

Another day another Dutch artist but we move from the countryside and animals to sea and ships. My featured artist today is the Flemish painter Adam Willaerts, who was actually born in London. Born to Flemish parents in 1577 he was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history, approximately spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade and science, military, and art were some of the most admired and highly-praised in the world. The reason of his birthplace being in England was because his parents had to flee Antwerp to avoid religious persecution. They returned to their Flemish homeland in 1585 and Adam remained there for the rest of his life. He spent the majority of his time in Utrecht where he became a member of the local Guild of St Luke. The Guild of Saint Luke was the most common name for a city guild for painters and other artists in early modern Europe, especially in the Low Countries. They were so called in honour of the Evangelist Saint Luke, who was the patron saint of artists.

The Arrival of the Elector Palatine at Flushing by Adam Willaerts (1623)

Willaerts was known for his paintings of rivers and coastal landscapes but in particular his depictions of grand arrivals or departures of ships carrying dignitaries, which is exactly what is shown in my featured painting in today’s My Daily Art Display. This is one of a series of paintings produced to document the marriage of Frederick V, Elector Palatine, to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I and Anne of Denmark, in 1613. It was painted ten years after the event in 1623 by Adam Willaerts in and is entitled The Embarkation at Margate of Elector Palatine and Princess Elizabeth. The painting was acquired by Queen Victoria in 1858 and can now be seen in the Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

The Arrival at Vlissingen of the Elector Palatinate Frederick V by Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom (1623)

One presumes that the painting was commissioned in the Netherlands around the same time that other artists such as Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom in 1623 and Cornelis Claez van Wieringen in 1628 were commissioned to paint similar works.

Embarkation of the Elector Palatine in the Prince Royal at Dover 25 April 1613 by Claes van Wieringen (1628)

So who were these people and what were they doing in the south-east English port of Margate ? Frederick, or to give him his Germanic title, Friedrich V, was the protestant Elector Palatine of the Rhine and for a short time King Fredrick I of Bohemia. His wife was Princess Elizabeth the daughter of the protestant King James VI of Scotland (and simultaneously King James I of England). In 1619 Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia and ruled in Prague for one winter (hence his name the ‘Winter King’) before being defeated in 1620 by the Imperial army. The couple arrived as exiles in the Netherlands in 1622 and were formally deprived of the Palatinate by imperial edict in 1623.

Princess Elizabeth married Frederick in London on February 14^th 1613 and after prolonged celebrations sailed from Margate on 25 April 1613 for Heidelburg and Prague, via the port of Flushing (in Dutch: Vlissingen). The couple were seen off by James I and Anne of Denmark both of whom can be seen in the foreground of the painting; they then were rowed out by bargemen in livery and brought aboard the sailing vessel, Prince Royal, which we can see lying at anchor awaiting the arrival of its distinguished guests. The vessel, Prince Royal was built in 1610 by Phineas Pett for Henry Prince of Wales, the king’s eldest son. This in all probability explains its “HP” monograms, Henry’s initials, (Henricus Princeps) and the Prince of Wales feathers as well as a figurehead of St George on a horse. Prince Henry did not attend his sister’s wedding to Friedrich as he died of typhoid fever, aged 18, a year before the event. The painting depicts a scene of pomp and ceremony as King James I sees off his daughter Princess Elizabeth and her husband. The beach scene with its mass of figures is typical of Willaert’s works. The ship lies in the centre of the picture surrounded by a blaze of natural, but highly suggestive white light.

Critics of the painting were less than enthused by the depiction of the choppy sea with one describing it as “a rolling vegetable patch, with cresting waves emerging like florets of broccoli sprouting from the soil”.

Rather harsh but if you zoom in on the waves there is that look as described by the critic!!!!

The Young Bull by Paulus Potter

After yesterday’s controversial and somewhat depressing painting by Klimt I thought I would lighten spirits with not one but two paintings which have a connection to each other. I don’t really have a forward plan of what my next featured painting will be, the choice is often coincidental. For example, today I received in the mail a long awaited catalogue which goes with the Dutch Landscapes exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. A couple of weeks ago I had intended to visit the exhibition and was not best pleased that the catalogue had not arrived before my trip to London. However if you read my blog on that day you will know I never made the exhibition as the Gallery was closed owing to the state visit of Barrack Obama.

So I was looking through the catalogue this morning and came across a work that is on display in the exhibition by Paulus Potter. I had intended to feature that painting but when I was researching the artists and his paintings I changed my mind and My Daily Art Display features his most famous painting entitled The Young Bull. The reason I changed my mind was because of an interesting connection his painting has with one by a American Modernist painter, Mark Tansey – but more about that later.

Paulus Potter was born in 1625, in Enkhuizen, a harbour town in Northern Netherlands. His painting speciality was that of animals, especially cows, horses and sheep in landscape settings. From Enkhuizen he and his family moved to Leiden and later Amsterdam. His father, an artist, taught his son the basics of painting. We know that Paulus eventually arrived in Delft because it is recorded that when he was in his early twenties he became a member of the Guild Of St Luke in Delft. In 1649 he moved on to The Hague where he married. His father-in-law was a wealthy builder and through him Paulus was introduced to the rich and privileged of Dutch society and with this fortuitous turn of events Paulus had a market for his paintings. He wasn’t to capitalise on that for long as his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1654 at the young age of 28.

Today’s painting, an early example of Romanticism, entitled The Bull, was painted by the twenty-one year old Paulus Potter around 1647 and can now be found at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. This remarkable life-sized painting was, in the early nineteenth century, as popular with the Dutch people as Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Paintings featuring cattle were de rigueur in Holland at this time. The scene of a bull in the meadow in itself is unremarkable but what makes it so special is the amount of detail in the painting. Look at the flies hovering around the back of the bull which stands in the shade of the tree. Look too on the ground by the feet of the cow and you can just make out a small frog which is being watched closely by the cow which is lying on the ground. The standing bull takes centre stage in the picture and the artist has added a cow, three sheep and a farmer. To the right we see a low-lying meadow with some cattle grazing and in the distance, just visible on the horizon sheltering below a low dark threatening sky is a church spire. This has been identified as the church spire of Rijswijk which is now a suburb of The Hague.

So now to the second painting I promised. This is a much more modern painting. The painting entitled The Innocent Eye Test is by the American Postmodernist painter Mark Tansey. His forte is monochromatic paintings, which are often amusing, sometimes mocking and often touch on the subject of art critics and their critiques. The picture (above) which he painted in 1981 depicts a group of officials looking at a cow who in turn is staring at a painting. They are wanting to take note of the cow’s reaction to seeing a life-sized painting of a cow and a bull . The painting which is being observed closely by the bull is the Paulus Potter painting The Young Bull. I am amused to see all the bespectacled officials in business suits or lab coats especially the one holding the mop which one must presume is in case the bull gets too excited by the painting and has an “accident”!!!

……….and finally another twist to the story of the paintings, below is a recent article from the New York Times newspaper dated May 11^th 2011, regarding Mark Tansey’s painting The Innocent Eye Test…….

“..British collector Robert Wylde filed federal suit against the Gagosian Gallery on Thursday over a Mark Tansey painting, “The Innocent Eye Test.” Wylde alleges that the Manhattan gallery concealed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 31 percent partial ownership of the work, and the fact that the museum planned to eventually to reclaim the painting altogether.

The Innocent Eye Test was originally owned by Artforum publisher and established art dealer Charles Cowles, then partially owned and promised to the Metropolitan Museum in 1988. In 2009, collector Robert Wylde was shown the Mark Tansey painting at Cowles’ SoHo apartment, when Cowles was closing his Chelsea Gallery after 30 years.

Wylde, who lives in Monaco, purchased the Tansey through the Gagosian Gallery for $2.5 million on August 5th, 2009. In spring of 2010, a Gagosian lawyer contacted Wylde, when the gallery learned of the Metropolitan Museum’s partial ownership.

Gagosian Gallery is internationally renowned as a foremost art market institution, and rarely discloses transactions on the basis of client confidentiality and business discretion. Although this is not the first suit against the gallery – most recently, misidentified protester Ingrid Homberg filed after being removed from an Anselm Keifer show in February–the Tansey suit is uniquely sale-related. Robert Wylde additionally contends that Gagosian Gallery canceled his Richard Prince sale when a higher offer was received.

Gagosian Gallery spokeswoman Virginia Coleman told the New York Times that Charles Cowles claimed clear title to the painting, and that, “the gallery acted in good faith.”

In lieu of the lawsuit, Cowles himself told the New York Times he considered the 2009 sale his mistake. He “didn’t think about” the Metropolitan Museum’s stake in the painting once it was returned from its initial showcase, and sold it through Gagosian in 2009 for financial reasons.

The Beverly Hills Gagosian Gallery is set to show its latest Mark Tansey works in an upcoming exhibition from April 19th to May 28th. The gallery’s artist summary alludes to complex uncertainty, inviting the viewer to engage in the metaphorical aesthetic disorientation during exhibition..”

….and all this because my gallery catalogue arrived in today’s mail !!!

Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt

I have already featured paintings by two of the great Austrian artists, Egon Schiele (May 26^th and 27^th) and Oskar Kokoschka (Dec 10^th), and today I would like to present a painting by an artist, who has been termed by many, as the greatest Austrian painter who ever lived. Between 1900 and his death in 1918, Klimt dominated the art scene in Vienna.

The featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is entitled Three Ages of Woman which he painted in 1905. It is also sometimes referred to as Mother and Child. The painting is housed in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. This was one of the artist’s most beloved paintings. For Klimt, although he had painted smaller allegorical pictures, this was to be his first and one of his last multi-figured large-scale allegorical painting, which simply put, is a painting in which there is a pictorial representation of abstract ideas by the depiction of the characters or events in the painting. It is a visual symbolic representation. This painting by Klimt is about the transience of life and the permanence of death.

In the painting we see three women at different stages of life. The youngest is the baby, representing infancy, who in turn is being cradled in the arms of the mother, who although is an adult, is a young adult, representing motherhood. The third figure, on the left of the group is the old woman who represents old age. These three figures have appeared before, slightly altered in form, in some of his earlier and later paintings, such as Medicine which he first exhibited at the 10^th exhibition of the Secession Group in Vienna in 1901 and Death and Life which he completed in 1911.

The background of this is a sea of silver bubbles but the three figures are closely surrounded by unusual shapes. So what are the shapes? It is believed that Klimt had a great interest in the science of microbiology and the shapes floating above the head of the younger women resemble colonies of bacteria, whilst the older woman stands amid the elongated protozoa, which is associated with death and decomposition. This painting is about transition – birth to death. It reminds me of the words uttered at a graveside when the coffin is being lowered “while we are in life we are in death”. It is the thought that on the day you are born you start the dying process.

Let us first concentrate our gaze on Klimt’s portrayal of the old woman. There is nothing endearing about his depiction of the woman. Some would have us believe that Klimt based his depiction of the old woman on Rodin’s sculpture called The Old Woman. In the painting, the head of the elderly woman is bowed as if she has lost all her strength, both physically and mentally, and the will to carry on with life. She is withering away. Her right arm lies limply by her side. Her breasts have sagged. Her stomach muscles can no longer hold in her belly. The veins and arteries in her hand and arm stand out. Her left hand covers her face and by this gesture we take it that she wants to see no more of life. She wants to close it out. She has had enough. She just wants to hide away from all the trials and tribulations that come with life. In her mind she has lived too long.

The mother with the child in the middle of the group represents beauty and the way she lovingly cradles the baby is a representation of the unconditional love of a mother. See how she rests her head on the head of the child. She is the personification of contentment and this look of contentment is mirrored in the face of the baby as she peacefully sleeps in the knowledge that the arms that hold him and the sound of his mother’s heartbeat offer him safety and affection.

So did the painting receive with universal acclaim? Not really. Many feminists viewed the painting with disdain pointing out that Klimt’s “message” is that a woman’s life is over after the young motherhood stage of life. The overall feel to this painting is one of isolation. The three women look as if they are trapped inside a column surrounded on both sides by a void. After the death of his baby son, Otto, in 1902, Klimt became preoccupied with the subject of death and the passage of life on its unstoppable journey towards death.

This is a truly wonderful and yet disturbing painting and once again I would like to have been in the head of the artist as he painted this picture so as to understand what was going through his mind.

The Madwoman sometimes known as Hyena of Salpêtrière by Théodore Géricault

The Madwoman sometimes known as Hyena of Salpétrière.by Géricault (1823)

My Daily Art Display today is a painting by the French artist and pioneer of the Romantic Movement Théodore Géricault. Many will be familiar with his two masterpieces, namely, Officer of the Hussars and The Raft of Medusa but today I am going to take a look at a rather disturbing portrait he completed in 1823 entitled The Madwoman or sometimes known as Hyena of Salpétrière.

But first, a little about the artist. Théodore Géricault was born in 1791 in Rouen in the north west of France. He began his art tuition under the tutelage of Carle Venet an expert painter of horses and the “sport of kings”. He also spent time with the classical painter Piere-Narcisse Guérin who believed the young Géricault had great talent but lacked calmness and composure which was needed to become a first-rate painter.

He went on to study at The Louvre where he copied the paintings of the Masters, such as Rubens, Titian and Rembrandt. He did this for almost six years and developed a love for their style of painting which he believed to be of much more importance in comparison to the new art genre Neoclassicism, which had begun to come to the fore at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1816 he went to Italy and visited Florence, Rome and Naples and this trip was the start of his love affair with the art of Michelangelo. Géricault’s first great success as an artist came in 1821 when he was thirty years of age and he exhibited The Charging Hussar at the Paris Salon.

A Mad Woman and Compulsive Gambler by Géricault — A Madwoman and Compulsive Gambler by Géricault

It was in 1821 and just three years before his death at the young age of thirty-three that he embarked on a series of ten portraits of the insane who were all patients of his friend Doctor Etienne-Jean Georget, the French psychiatrist who pioneered in psychiatric medicine and worked at the infamous Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. They series of portraits were all of maniacs who had an obsession. One was a person who stole children, one was a person who obsessed with gambling, one was a man who was obsessed with robbery, a kleptomaniac, and the poor woman in our featured painting was obsessed with envy. The name of the establishment derived from the fact that it had originally been a gunpowder factory and then later was converted to a dumping ground for the poor of Paris. It served as a prison for prostitutes, and a holding place for the mentally disabled, criminally insane and the poor. Its other “claim to fame“was that it was infested by rats!

Of the ten portraits only five, including the one featured today, remain. The Madwoman is housed at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon. In this painting Géricault has with compassion tried to capture and understand the image of mental illness. Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and believed, as others did, that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death.

Let us look closely at the old woman in the painting. She avoids our gaze as she looks downwards with slightly bulging eyes. Her eyes are red-rimmed probably brought on by the amount of mental and physical pain she has had to endure. Her mouth is tense. You can see the anger in her face but angry with what? Her case notes stated that she suffered from “envy obsessions” and maybe the slightest hint of a green tint to her face was the artist’s way to signify her obsession with envy. Her expression was likened to that of a hyena and hence the subtitle of the painting Hyena of Salpétrière.

Gericault’s career was short-lived. His love of horse riding was to be his downfall as after many riding accidents, which had weakened him, coupled with chronic lung infections, the young artist died after much suffering in Paris at the tender age of thirty-three.

Géricault's tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

If you ever visit Paris you should, like I have done on many occasions, make the journey to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which houses the graves and tombs of many famous people including that of Géricault, his bronze figure reclines, brush in hand, on top of his tomb.