Who should be my next featured artist and what the next featured painting should be are the decisions I have to make each day. Often I will make my choice when I flick through one of my art books or maybe I will be inspired by an artist or painting I have seen on one of my gallery visits but often or not the decision will come from research I have made into a previous painting. My Daily Art Display featured artist and painting today comes from a little bit of all those. In my last blog I looked at Manet’s Music at the Tuileries Gardens and listed a number of Manet’s friends the artist had added into his work. One of these was the floral painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Last week when I was wandering around the National Gallery in London I stood before one of his non-floral paintings entitled Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards and my curiosity was immediately pricked. Who were Mr and Mrs Edwards and why should this French artist paint the portraits of this English couple? I knew then that sooner or later I had to feature this painting in one of my blogs and do some research into the background behind the work and the sitters. So come with me on this journey of discovery and find out more about this couple.
Edwin Edwards was born in the small market town of Framlington in the heart of the Suffolk countryside in 1823. He was the youngest of four sons of Charles Edwards and Mary Kersey. He was educated at Dedham in Essex and went on to study law. He became a legal practitioner in the admiralty and prerogative courts attaining the impressive position of King’s Proctor and Examiner of the Courts of Civil Law and the High Court of Admiralty. When he was twenty-four he published a book entitled A treatise on the jurisdiction of the High Court of Admiralty of England. In 1852 he married Elizabeth Ruth Escombe. The couple had no children. Despite having a busy and lucrative legal career Edwin Edwards had a great love for art and in 1861, aged thirty-eight years of age and with support from his wife, he decided to forego his legal career and become a full time artist.
Edwin Edwards had started painting using the medium of watercolours but later moved on to oil painting. However his real love was etching and he had been influenced by the French artist and etcher Alphonse Legros. He installed a press at his house in Sunbury, where his wife Ruth became skilled at printing. During the 1860s and 70s their home was a meeting place for French and British painters and etchers. It was whilst he was in Paris to arrange for the printing of his first plates that he was introduced to Henri Fantin-Latour by the English painter Matthew White Ridley. Edwards and Fantin-Latour soon became great friends and the French artist would visit London and stay with the Edwards family in their Sudbury home. Edwin Edwards and his wife bought many of Henri Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings, and found other buyers among their wealthy circle of friends thus securing the French artist a regular and steady income. Between 1864 and 1896 Fantin-Latour painted over 800 floral portraits, and almost all were purchased in England.
Molesey Lock by Edwin Edwards (1861)
In 1861 Edwards made an etching trip along the River Thames with James McNeil Whistler, Fantin-Latour and Whistler’s brother-in-law, Francis Seymour Hayden, an English surgeon, who later dedicated his life to etching and printmaking and it was during this trip that Edwin Edwards completed a portrait of Whistler sketching, seated, at Molesey lock. In all, Edwards completed over three hundred and fifty etchings consisting of scenes of the Thames at Sunbury, English cathedral cities, the wild Cornish coast, and countryside scenes in Suffolk, many of which are now housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. He also published a three-volume work entitled ‘Old Inns of England,’ which were illustrated with a number of his etchings.
From 1861 until his death in 1879, aged 56, he was a prolific exhibitor of his work. He exhibited fifty four works at the Royal Academy and over a hundred of his works at various other exhibitions.
My Daily Art Display featured painting is simply entitled Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards by Henri Faintin-Latour. The painting belongs to the Tate but is presently on loan to the National Gallery, London. When Fantin-Latour first visited and stayed with Edwards and his wife in 1861 he began a portrait of Mrs Edwards but did not finish it until three years later when he again stayed with the couple. It was not until the end of 1874 that Fantin-Latour embarked on the double portrait of Edwin Edwards and his wife and the couple visited his Paris studio for the formal sittings. He wrote to Edwards and said that he intended to portray him, seated at a table in his studio, etching. The background would have a number of canvases on the wall and that his wife would be portrayed standing behind him, overseeing his work, like a “guardian angel, the inspiring Muse”. In reality the painting was much simpler than Fantin-Latour had originally envisaged. The background as you see is plain and not adorned with other paintings. Instead of being depicted etching, Edwin Edwards is seen seated at an angle with his left arm resting on a folio of prints whilst studying an etching he holds in his right hand. Mrs Edwards as was Fantin-Latour’s original idea stands behind her husband. Does she look like a guardian angel? It is hard to interpret her mood. It seems one of aloofness and displeasure and seems somewhat unhappy with the situation. I think she actually dominates the double portrait and would some up her appearance as “she who must be obeyed” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited the work in the Paris Salon of 1875 and it gained a second class medal. This award was very beneficial to Fantin-Latour because from then on he was termed by the Paris Salon as hors concours, which meant that in future, any exhibits he put forward for inclusion at future Salon exhibitions did not have to first be passed by the Salon jury.
In my last blog I looked at the painting Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel which he completed in 1867. He had visited Paris that year and attended the second Exposition Universelle and it was during this stay that he completed a number of sketches of the Tuileries Gardens. On returning to his home in Berlin he completed this work. When it was exhibited, he pointed out that the painting was all done from his memory of the times when he walked around the Gardens watching the weekend promenading of the bourgeois. However, there is a train of thought that believes his work was not just based on his memories but was very much influenced by a painting he saw, when in Paris, by Édouard Manet, which was completed in 1862 entitled Music in the Tuileries Gardens. This is My Daily Art Display featured work today and I will let you decide whether Manet’s painting had any bearing on Menzel’s work.
Music in the TuileriesGarden,s like the Menzel work, hangs, in the National Gallery, London. The work depicts a fashionable Parisian crowd promenading and socialising in the Gardens as they listen to music played by a band, albeit Manet has not included the musicians in the painting. The Jardin des Tuileries lies between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, and it was the favourite place for people to idle away their leisure time. The way in which people spent their free time in the capital became one of Manet’s favourite subjects for his paintings. Manet’s close friend going back to his childhood, Antonin Proust, the politician and journalist, often recalled the many times he witnessed Manet walking along the Parisian boulevards in search of interesting aspects of city life, which he could depict in his paintings. Manet and his companion, the poet, Charles Beaudelaire, could often be seen in the afternoons, strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, a favoured gathering place for the beau monde, who wanted “to see and be seen”. Manet completed numerous sketches of these “beautiful people” as well as the working nannies, who were spending a pleasant afternoon with their little charges.
This was Manet’s first major work on this theme. The Tuileries Gardens were created for Catherine de Medici who, on the death of her husband King Henry II of France, decided to move her home to the Louvre Palace. She then had built a separate new palace with gardens modelled after the gardens of her native Florence. These were the Tuileries Gardens and were opened to the public in 1667 and became a public park following the French Revolution. As we look at the people in the scene we can imagine the enjoyment they were having whilst they socialised and listened to the music. Leisure time and recreational activities such as listening to music in a park on a Sunday afternoon was all part of this newly quoted term, modernity.
Manet's manMenzel's man
Menzel’s work is far more detailed than Manet’s painting. If we compare the two works there are some similarities but Menzel also maintained some differences. Both depict families enjoying their leisure time. Look at foreground and slightly right of centre of today’s painting by Manet. There is a man with the top hat bending down in conversation with a lady. He is almost the same character, in the same pose leaning against a tree, we saw yesterday in Menzel’s work. The theme of both paintings is similar – bourgeois Parisians at leisure but as I have just said there are also some differences in the two works. Menzel’s depiction of what is happening is somewhat more realistic.
Manet's childrenMenzel's children
In his work we saw children in the foreground playing with a bucket and spades but they are not dressed in their “Sunday best” clothes and look somewhat dirtied by their playing on the ground. Now compare that with the children in Manet’s painting. They too have buckets and spades but these children, like their adult counterparts , are dressed in their best clothes and are behaving much more demurely. Also in Menzel’s work we witnessed a small child being dragged off screeching by a woman, probably her mother. We also saw dogs skirmishing but in Manet’s work there is no such unsavoury incidents happening, which would otherwise shatter the beautiful tranquillity of the scene.
Manet has included the portraits of many of his friends into the lively social gathering, some of whom are fellow artists. Manet has painted himself at the far left of the painting partly hidden by the figure of Comte Albert de Balleroy, the wildlife artist, seen here holding a walking stick, who shared a studio with Manet. Another artist also included is Henri Fantin-Latour, best known for his flower paintings. Manet has added portraits of his brother Eugène, who was the husband of the Impressionist painter, Berthe Morissot. Several cultural figures of the time are featured in the painting such as the French poets Baudelaire and Théopile Gautier and the travel writer Baron Taylor. Other intellectuals who have found their way into the painting are the art critic Champfleury and the bearded sculptor Zacharie Astruc who sits at the table and behind him stands the journalist Aurélien Scholl. Two women sit facing us in the foreground. The younger of the two, on the left, is Madame Lejosne, the wife of the Commandant in whose house Manet met Baudelaire and the fledgling painter Frederic Bazille. The other lady is Heminie d’Alcain, the wife of Jacques Offenbach. Offenbach is the bespectacled man with a moustache who sits in front of a tree to the right of centre of the middle ground, between Eugène Manet and the painter, Charles Monginot who we see doffing his hat to a lady .
Menzel’s work was far more detailed and with his painting your eyes darted from place to place surveying different incidents. In some ways this painting, by Manet, as did Cezanne’s Large Bathers ( My Daily Art Display March 13th))have an “unfinished” look about them but this is all to do with their style of painting. So what did the critics think of this work by Manet when it was first exhibited in 1863? It received very mixed reviews. On one hand, many of the artists who were soon to be known as the Impressionists, like Claude Monet and Frederic Bazille, were delighted with Manet’s depiction of the Parisian scene. However the conservatives among the art critics were less than complimentary. Paul Mantz, the art historian and art critic, who would later become Director General of Fine Arts and a member of Supreme Council of Fine Arts was particularly ruthless in his condemnation stating that Manet’s composition struck him as being disorganised and formless, while the broken play of light that animates its surface with such an eloquently restless quality roused him to declare that “this is not colour, but the caricature of colour”.
I have had a number of comments added to the Large Bathers blog strongly disagreeing with my assertion that Cezanne’s work had an unfinished look to it and therefore I will not dare comment about the finish of this work. Emile Zola explained the “unfinished” look of Manet’s painting, countering such criticism, saying:
“…You are to imagine a crowd of people, a hundred characters perhaps, moving about in the sunlight under the trees in the Tuileries; every character is simply a blot of colour, hardly given form at all, and the details are only lines and black dots. If I had been there I should have asked the amateur [observer of the painting] to move away to a respectful distance; he would then have seen that the patches of colour were alive, that the crowd was speaking, and that the picture was one of the characteristic productions of the artist, the one picture in fact in which he had most loyally obeyed his eyes and his temperament…”
As with most of the Impressionist works of art, the best view you get is if you stand back from the work to see its exquisiteness. Close up one just sees brushstrokes but at a distance one discovers the true beauty of the work.
So which painting do you like best, the one by Adolph Menzel or the one by Édouard Manet?
Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel (1867)
The featured artist in My Daily Art Display today is German and is looked upon, along with the artist I featured in my previous blog, Caspar David Friedrich, as one of the most famous and most successful German artists of the nineteenth century. His name is Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel.
Menzel was born in 1815 in Breslau, which is now the Polish city known as Wroclau. His father Carl Erdmann Menzel was originally a school headmaster but when young Menzel was just three years of age he gave up his educational career and started up a lithographic printing works. Adolph Menzel first exhibited a drawing in 1827 when he was only twelve years of age and two years later he exhibited eight lithographs, which were printed in his father’s workshop and which featured the history of Breslau. To gain more business opportunities for his printing company, Menzel’s father moved his family and business to Berlin in 1830 where he knew he was likely to receive more commissions. Adolph Menzel became an apprentice in his father’s firm and at the age of seventeen took over the running of the company when his father suddenly died. His mother and siblings now looked upon Adolph as the family breadwinner.
Künstlers Edenwallen
In 1833, aged 18 Menzel enrolled at the Berlin Königliche Akademie der Künste where he met the wallpaper manufacturer, Carl Heinrich Arnold, who would not only become Menzel’s close friend but would furnish him with a large number of commissions. His reputation as an artist and illustrator grew after he had completed a commission for the art dealer and publisher, Louis Sachse, to create a number of lithographs for the German writer, Goethe, for his book Künstlers Erdenwallen. It was not until 1837 that von Menzel started to paint in oils. His speciality subject for his paintings was the life and events surrounding Friedrich the Great and in 1839 he was commissioned to illustrate a book, Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen (History of Friedrich the Great) written by Franz Kugler, a Prussian cultural administrator and art historian. In a three year period 1839 to 1842 Menzel produced over 400 drawings.
It was not until the 1850’s that von Menzel started to travel extensively, visiting Vienna, Prague and Dresden. It was also in 1855 that he made his first visit to Paris where he attended the inaugural Exposition Universelle, the first World Fair to be held in the capital. It was held in the specially built building, Palais de l’Industrie, which overlooked the Champs-Elysées. Whilst there, von Menzel, was able to study not only the industrial exhibits but also the art exhibits on display by French artists such as Gustave Courbet. Eleven years later von Menzel returned to Paris to attend the second Exposition Universelle in 1867 and it was during this stay in the French capital that he visited the Tuileries Gardens which is the subject for today’s painting. That same year he was decorated with the “Cross of the Légion d’honneur by Napoleon III for his service to the arts.
By the 1880’s von Menzel had established his international reputation as an artist and lithographer. In 1884 the Nationalgalerie in Berlin held the first major retrospective of von Menzel’s work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his career as an artist. In 1890, aged 70, he was given an honorary doctorate from Berlin University. He was bestowed with many other honours. He was made an honorary citizen of both Breslau and Berlin and made a member of both the Royal Academy of London and a member of the Akadémie des Beaux Arts, the Paris Academy. His greatest honour came in 1898 when he became the first artist to be admitted to the Order of the Black Eagle as a Knight, the highest order of chivalry in the Kingdom of Prussia.
Adolph von Menzel died in Berlin in 1905, aged 89.
My Daily Art Display featured painting today is entitled Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel. He painted it in 1867 and now hangs in the National Gallery, London. It was following Menzel’s 1867 trip to Paris that he returned to his studio in Berlin with many sketches of the Tuileries Gardens, which lay across from the Louvre. He had become interested in painting scenes set in areas where society people pretentiously paraded and whilst in Paris was fascinated with the bustling social goings-on within the Gardens. The subject matter of his paintings were at this time often depicting bourgeois society and he, because of his fame as an artist, lived the lifestyle of this very grand bourgeois. Menzel’s painting is filled with detail and exudes a great deal of realism.
Woman and child
What I like about the works is that with so much going on in the painting your eyes flick from one group to another and every time you look at it your eyes focus on something different. I like the number of separate vignettes taking place. Let your eye wander up the centre of the painting and observe the little chubby girl being dragged off by the woman in blue. How often have we seen that! Dogs abound, in some cases having territorial disputes whilst the adults try their best to ignore such distractions and have only one thing in mind – to look their best! When the painting was first exhibited Menzel was at pains to tell everybody that it was done from his memories of his recent visit to the French capital.
Was it a work just from memory or was there something else which prompted Menzel to depict such a scene? In my next blog I will give you another possible motivation for Menzel’s depiction of the Tuileries Garden. Notwithstanding what inspired Menzel to paint this lively event, which is buzzing with activity, it is a fascinating work of art. I stood before it the other day and I was mesmerised by what I was looking at and as I said the other day, when talking about Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape, I was so pleased I had visited Room 41 of the gallery. The next time you visit the National Gallery; don’t forget to pay that particular room a visit. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.
When I visited the National Gallery in London last week I knew I only had an hour to spare so decided to try and sensibly limit what I wanted to see rather than rush around trying to see as much as I could in the allotted time and end up really seeing nothing. I decided to visit the Impressionist paintings which were housed in rooms 43 to 46. They were awash with works by Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir and the likes. I spent some time in front of The Large Bathers by Cézanne as I knew I was going to write about the Philadelphia Museum of Art version of the painting which is very similar to the one in the National Gallery. (See My Daily Art Display for March 13th). The reason for mentioning all this is not that I am featuring another Impressionist work today but that having passed through these rooms I arrived at Room 41 which was simply entitled The Academy.
So why label this room as such? The answer is that It goes back to the first half of the 19th century and the academic teachings of École des Beaux-Arts, which was the official art school in Paris. The training that young aspiring artists received at this establishment was very taxing and their tutors made them spend long periods drawing. The students started by copying plaster cast statues and then later they would join the life classes. In some ways there art was regimented. It had to conform to the rules of The Academy. Their tutors only wanted to have them deliver what we now term academic art. I had thought that the title of this room would mean that it would be full of works by French painters but it was not. It was more to do with the style of paintings than the nationality of the artist and although there were a large number of works by famous French artists such as Corot, Delacroix, Géricault, and Jaques Louis-David there were some non-French contributors such as the Spanish painter, Francesco Hayez, the Danish painter ChristenKøbke and the German painter, Johann Philipp Eduard Gaertner. However I came across a painting in this room, entitled Winter Landscape, by one of my favourite artists, Caspar David Friedrich and it is this painting along with two of his other works, which are connected to this painting that I want to feature in My Daily Art Display blog today. Caspar David Friedrich studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the end of the eighteenth century. This Academy is the oldest and most renowned place of higher learning in Denmark.
Caspar Friedrich was one of the leading artists of the German Romantic movement. He specialised in landscape painting but with a difference. His aspiration as a landscape artist was not to be a topographical artist portraying true representations of what he saw but he wanted his paintings, as he once said, “to reflect the artist’s soul and emotions in the landscape”. He endowed his landscape works with symbolism and the natural elements in his work often took on a religious connotations.
There is something about all Friedrich’s paintings which make them so evocative. I find his works of art breathtaking and I stood before this painting and marvelled how such a painting could exude an overwhelming feeling of both wonderment and awe. As we have seen with other artists, they would often paint a number of versions of the same subject. In some cases the difference between the various versions would be very noticeable in others the differences would not be so obvious. Two of today’s painting fall into the latter category. The two paintings, Winter Landscape and Winter Landscape with Church look almost the same, but not quite. To confuse things slightly I am also going to look at another work of his, also entitled Winter Landscape, which is almost a prequel to the other two. Sounds confusing? Let us take a look at each of the works.
Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich (Schwerin) 1811
The oil on canvas painting, above, entitled Winter Landscape, can be found in the Staatliche Museum in Schwerin and was painted by Friedrich in 1811.This painting has an intense feeling of solemnity and pathos as we look out at a bleak winter scene with a snow covered ground stretching out as far as the eye can see. This melancholic depiction before us, with its threatening dark grey sky features a tiny old man, bent over and leaning on his two wooden crutches. He is standing between two gnarled tree trunks and into the distance we can see the stumps of trees which have been cut down. Some art historians would have us believe that we should interpret this as being symbolic of the end of life and see the painting as an allegory for the aged man coming to end of his life as the landscape and vegetation also have reached the end of their life cycle. So looking at this work are we to believe there is no hope for this man? Probably so, but then Friedrich decided to paint a companion piece. In fact that same year, 1811, he painted two companion pieces which follow up the story of the little old man. These two works depicted a tale of the old man’s salvation.
Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich (National Gallery, London) 1811
One of the companion paintings was again entitled Winter Landscape and is housed in Room 41 of the National Gallery, London. This work was discovered in a private collection in 1982, and was acquired by the National Gallery five years later. The second one, thought to be a copy of the London painting, is entitled Winter Landscape with Church, and can be found in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Museum of Art and Cultural History) in Dortmund. In both of these paintings we see that Friedrich has introduced, for the first time in his art work, a Gothic church, which can just be seen emerging out of the misty backdrop with the somewhat red-streaked threatening winter sky overhead. In the mid-ground we see a man leaning back against a boulder and is probably the same man we saw leaning on his crutches in the previous work. He had arrived at the end of his journey and we see him gazing up, in prayer, at the crucifix which is positioned in front of a cluster of young fir trees. The figure of Christ on the cross looks down upon him. In the foreground we see his crutches lying in the snow, which we presume he has discarded. The abandoned crutches and the man looking up devotedly at the crucifix are interpreted as the man’s blind faith in his Christian beliefs and his feeling of security he has derived from those dearly held values.
In the first painting we looked at there is little to see but dead trees and stumps of once large ones. We felt for the crippled man as he stood bent over his crutches in that wintry landscape and in a way we grieved for his unwanted solitude and wretchedness. However in this scene before us now we see him in prayer and for him, we begin to realise he has reached the place he wants to be. The mood of the painting is so different from the previous one. The snow is the same. We still almost feel the coldness of the scene but the atmosphere has changed. The once hopelessness has been replaced with a degree of hope. The figure of Christ on the cross is symbolic of the hope that his resurrection would bring. No longer does the man feel the necessity of wooden sticks to act as crutches. The only support he wants is that given to him by his belief in Christ.
Looming on the horizon we see the facade of the spires of the grand Gothic church which reach toward the heavens, the silhouette of which has a marked similarity to that of the fir trees. These trees along with the rocks we see appearing from beneath the snow in some ways symbolise faith and the large Gothic church, which appears to be rising from the ground, is symbolic of our belief that there is life after death.
Friedrich used few colours in these two paintings as he was more interested in the graduating tones of the few colours he used. On a close examination of the actual paintings we are able to see that the misty but iridescent background has been achieved by stippling. Stippling, in this case, is the creation of shading by using small dots. The dots are made of a pigment of a single colour, and for this work the artist has used, the blue pigment, smalt, and has applied it with the point of a brush.
Winter Landscape with Church by Caspar David Friedrich (Dortmund) 1811
The London version of the painting is different to the version in Dortmund in as much as Friedrich has shown small blades of grass pushing up through the melting snow. This symbolises hope and rebirth. Also in the London version of the painting Friedrich has added an arched gateway in front of the church.
In November 1811 Friedrich sent these three works along with six others to an exhibition in Weimar. This was the largest group of works shown by Friedrich so far. The works were admired by a number of critics and poets, writers and famous figures like Goethe and Ludwig Tieck but they had their detractors who were opposed to the way Friedrich treated religious subjects and landscapes.
The Large Bathers by Cézanne (1907) Philadelphia Museum of Art
Paul Cezanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence. His father, Louis Auguste Cézanne was the co-founder of a banking firm and Cézanne was brought up in a wealthy and prosperous environment which eventually, on his mother’s death in 1897, resulted in him receiving a large inheritance. When he was thirteen years of age Paul Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon, where he met and became friends with Émile Zola. This friendship was important for both of them; for with their youthful romanticism they always pictured themselves having successful careers in the art world of Paris and as we now know their dreams turned to reality with Cézanne becoming a highly successful painter and Zola a highly successful writer. Throughout his life Cézanne would look back on his childhood and teenage years in Aix when he and his friends would spend many heady sunlit days soaking up the Provencal climate as they would go down for a swim in the nearby Arc River. Maybe with that in mind, it is not surprising that Cézanne would recall those days pictorially, completing almost two hundred works featuring people, both male and female, bathing, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly, nearly all with landscape backgrounds.
The featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is one of his three larger works entitled The Bathers and sometimes referred to Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) so as to distinguish it from some of his smaller works on the same theme. This painting is housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The other two large works can be found in the National Gallery, London and the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. It is thought that Cézanne worked on all three paintings simultaneously. All three were completed during the last ten years of Cézanne’s life and in some ways characterise his move towards abstraction. This can be seen in the way the faces of the bathers are without any definition and their bodies seem to merge with the landscape. Look at how Cézanne has depicted the angle of the back of the figure on the left which runs parallel to the tree. It is almost as if he or she is part of the landscape. I say “he or she” as are we sure of the sex of these bathers? There is little or no narrative to the painting, nothing to interpret, no symbolism although we must wonder a little as to who the two figures are that are seen on the other side of the river and why did the artist add in the swimmer who breaks the surface of the river as he swims past the naked gathering.
This work of art, which Cézanne started in 1897, was not completed until 1906, the year of his death and is looked upon as one of his greatest works. It was the last of the three large works to be completed. The painting of female nude figures in a pastoral setting had been done many times before by artists such as Titian and Nicolas Poussin, but their works often harked back to classical mythology, such as the depiction of the goddess Diane and her handmaidens, but in this work by Cézanne there is no mythological connotation. The figures stemmed from Cézanne’s own imagination and possibly things he remembered from childhood and not from actual observation of models.
The women in some way exude a “goddess-like” aura and almost appear to be on a stage with the trees on either side forming a theatrical proscenium arch. The bathers seem totally relaxed. There is a definite calmness about Cézanne’s depiction of this river bank scene. As we look at the painting our eyes focus on three triangular structures. The two triangular formations made by the groups of naked bathers on each side of the foreground and the central larger triangular structure formed by the leaning trees on each side and the horizontal of the blue-coloured river forming the base of the triangle. The blue of the river splits the two bands of ochre coloured earth on either side.
Le Nu au Musée du Louvre by Armand Silvestre
These three works featuring the bathers are thought to have been Cezanne’s final delving into the nude figure and his desire to associate human oneness with nature. We know that Cezanne had a fascination with the depiction of the nude and would use photographs to aid his depictions. The young French artist Francis Jourdain recounts the tale in his 1950 book Cézanne in which he visited Cézanne at his studio in 1904 and was shocked to discover that Cézanne owned a small art book, entitled Le Nu au Musée du Louvre, which consisted of photographic illustrations of nudes. Jourdain was shocked by it and described it as an affreux albumjadis à Paris dans un kiosk des boulevards, (an awful album once bought in a kiosk in Paris boulevards). The publication contained photographs of paintings and sculptures of nudes from Ancient Greek times up to the modern times. Le Nu au Musée du Louvre was written by Armand Silvestre in 1891. He had who also had written a five volume work, Le Nu au Salon. He justified his work saying that it was to highlight the beauty of the feminine nude.
Cézanne would have wanted this book as it was literally a gold mine of images of the nude female figure and of course unlike live models who would constantly have wanted to move and grumble about having to sit still, the photographs were static and uncomplaining! The professor of Art History, Theodore Reff, in his 1958 Harvard dissertation, Studies in the Drawings of Cézanne summed up Cezanne’s positive attitude to the use of nude photographs against the use of actual nude models:
“… [Unlike the models, the photographs] never moved or grew tired and more important, they never confronted him with the easily disturbing eroticism of the flesh. Assimilated to an ideal aesthetic world of canvas or marble, they were neutralised and approachable…”
Of course the main disadvantage was that the photographs were of a single view but along with Cézanne’s sketches, the photographs served both as models of ideal beauty and as an aide-memoire for him when he represented the nude figure in natural settings as we see in today’s featured work.
When I look at today’s featured painting I cannot help but think it is like a preliminary sketch for a later completed painting. There are many primed areas of unpainted canvas which show up as white patches. Look closely at the figure in the foreground on the extreme right. Are we looking at a pair of arms or are we looking at the backs of slightly bent legs? To my mind we are seeing the long arms of the figure which only just shroud remnants of earlier legs. Look also at the face of the woman seated on the ground in the left foreground. She has no face at all. .
Although some would disagree, I believe this is an unfinished work, “completed” in the year he died. Other say that Cézanne is asking us to use our imagination as to what is going on and does not want to spoon feed us with what we would term a “completed work”. I prefer to go along with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s description of their painting:
“…the painting has the feel of an unanswered question; a testament to the “anxiety” Picasso famously declared it to be the source of his great interest in Cézanne. The artist left unresolved the startling contrast between the lushly painted landscape and the stiffly drawn, expressionless faces…”
Picasso once referred to Cézanne as “my one and only master” and in his youth the young Spanish painter was believed to have carried a gun, waving it half-seriously at anyone who annoyed him, particularly anyone insulting the memory of Cézanne. “One more word,” he would say, “and I fire.”
At first the three large Bathers canvases were not hailed by the public as masterpieces but Cézanne’s fellow contemporary artists saw the greatness in these last works of the genius. Matisse commented:
“At critical moments in my artistic adventure it gave me courage; I drew from it my faith and endurance.”
Cézanne had been out painting in fields near to his home and had been caught in a torrential downpour which soaked him to the skin. He headed home but collapsed and had to be rescued by a passing motorist. The next day, he got up to carry on with his painting but later on he collapsed once again. The girl who had been modelling for him called for help and he was put to bed, which he never left it again. Cezanne died of pneumonia on October 22nd 1906, aged 67.
On his death the painting I have featured today was bought from Cézanne’s son by Ambroise Vollard. Vollard was one of the most important dealers and art collectors in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century and someone who championed the cause of the then unknown artists such as Cézanne, Renoir, Gaugin and Van Gogh. It became part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1983.
Finished or unfinished that I will leave you to decide but nevertheless it is looked upon as one of the great masterpieces of art.
Thomas Beckford, the celebrated English art collector and novelist, wrote of the Tribuna of the Uffizi:
”…I fell into a delightful delirium which none but souls like us experience, and unable to check my rapture flew madly from bust to bust and cabinet to cabinet like a butterfly bewildered in a universe of flowers…’’
For anybody who has just clicked on this page you need to look at the previous blog first as this is a follow-on blog and will not really make sense if you had not read the previous one.
In this blog I am going to reveal the names of the paintings which formed part of the main work by Johan Zoffany entitled The Tribuna of the Uffizi but first, I will introduce you to some of the characters Zoffany included in his work. It was the inclusion of some of these people, which upset his patrons, King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte.
If we look at the central foreground we have six gentlemen clustered around the Venus of Urbino painting by Titian. The gentleman seated is the Honourable Felton Hervey who was the ninth son of the 1st Earl of Bristol and who was Equerry to Queen Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, and had passed through Florence on his Grand Tour in 1772.
The two gentlemen, dressed in black standing behind the chair are, on the left with his right hand on the painting and his left hand pointing towards the Roman marble sculpture, The Wrestlers, is Thomas Patch. The man on the right is Sir Horace Mann, British envoy to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It was the inclusion of these two gentleman that upset George III and his wife. Thomas Patch was an English painter, engraver and caricaturist. He travelled to Rome, where he met Joshua Reynolds and worked in the studio of Joseph Vernet, producing pastiches of Vernet’s work and his own views of Tivoli. However, in 1755 Patch was banished from the Papal States for some homosexual act and settled in Florence. Here he earned a living undertaking art commissions from well-off young British men who were passing through Florence and Rome on Grand tours.
Sir Horace Mann was a diplomat and long standing British resident in Florence. He kept an open house for British visitors at Florence, inviting them for conversazione, which were formal gatherings where something related to the arts was discussed when there was no performance at the theatre. His generosity and kindness was universally acknowledged, although his close friendship with the painter Thomas Patch sullied his reputation. The two gentlemen in the fawn coats, both Grand Tourists, are Valentine Knightleyof Fawsley, who stands between Patch and Mann and John Gordon who looks at the Titian painting, over the arm of Thomas Patch. The man standing behind the painting is Pietro Bastianelli, who was a custode (custodian) of the Uffizi Gallery.
To the left of painting we see six men clustered around the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna which was painted by Raphael in 1508 and according to the provenance of the painting was bought by Zoffany in 1772, who resold it three years later. After changing hands a number of times, the painting came into the possession of Andrew Mellon, the American banker, industrialist, philanthropist and great art collector. On his death in 1937, the painting was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The four men to the left of the painting are from left to right, George, 3rd Earl Cowper, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and avid art collector and frequent visitor to Florence. Next to him is Sir John Dick, Baronet of Braid and was, at the time, British Consul at Leghorn and next to him looking up at the painting is Other Windsor, the 6th Earl of Plymouth who was known to have been in Florence in the first half of 1772.
Standing to the left and just looking around the Madonna painting is the artist himself, Johan Zoffany, who would often include himself in his group portraits. The two men standing to the right of the Madonna are a Mr Stevenson, dressed in a red dress coat, who was the travelling companion to George Legge, Lord Lewisham, the portly man with the gold-coloured waistcoat, who stands next to him. Legge was a member of the royal court of George III and he and Stevenson were known to have been in Florence in 1777. The man, sitting sketching, is the artist, Charles Lorraine-Smith and looking over his shoulder is Richard Edgcumbe who went on to become the 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe. He was a writer on music and also later in life became a politician
The final grouping on the right hand side of the painting are clustered around the Venus de’ Medici, a life-size Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of an original bronze Greek sculpture. It was the grouping of these men staring at the posterior of Aphrodite and the lewd comments made by many of the Grand Tourists about the sculpture that offended Queen Charlotte as I explained in the previous blog. The four men standing behind the statues and gazing up at “her” are from left to right, George Finch, the 9th Earl of Winchilsea, a great cricket lover and patron to the sport and Messrs.Wilbraham, Watts and Doughty all of whom visited Florence on their Grand Tour between December 1772 and February 1773. Standing in front of the Venus de’ Medici are, on the left Thomas Wilbraham, who was accompanying his brother and on the right, James Bruce the Scottish traveler and travel writer who had spent the previous dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile. He was known to have been in Florence in 1774.
And now to the paintings that are on display. How many did you recognise? I have already mentioned Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Raphael’s Niccolini-Cowper Madonna and here is a list of the others which Zofanny included in his painting.
On the left-hand side wall there are two large paintings hanging above three others. The upper paintings from left to right are Bacchante by Carracci and Charity by Guido Reni. The three paintings below from left to right are Madonna della Sedia by Raphael, Virgin and Child by Correggio and Galileo by the Flemish painter, Justus Sustermans.
On the wall facing us there are nine paintings. The three on the upper level from left to right are Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine by the School of Titian, the large painting in the middle is Saint John by Raphael and the upper right work is The Madonna by Guido Reni. The middle layer of paintings on this wall, from left to right, comprises of Madonna del Cardellino by Raphael. In the middle is Horror of War by Rubens and to the right is Madonna del Pozzo by the Florentine painter, Francesco di Christofano, better known simply as Franciabigio. The three smaller paintings below eye-level on this wall are, from left to right, Sir Richard Southwell by Hans Holbein, Portrait of Verrocchio by Lorenzo di Credi but has since been identified as a Raphael’s portrait of Perugino and Holy Family by Niccolo Soggi.
Finally on the wall to the right there are a further six painting although the two works of art on the extreme right are partly hidden. The three on the upper tier are from left to right, Cleopatra by Guido Reni, The Painter with Lipsius and his pupils by Rubens and Leo X with Cardinals de’ Medici and de’ Rossiby Raphael. The three works on the lower tier are from left to right, Abraham and Hagar by Pietro da Cortona which is now hanging in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. In the middle hangs The Tribute Money attributed to the School of Caravaggio and on the right is The Miracle of Saint Julian by Cristofano Allori.
The only other painting not mentioned as yet lies face up on the floor in the foreground just to the left of the Venus of Urbino and is The Samian Sibyl by the Italian Baroque painter, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino or Il Guercino.
I apologise for so much detail in one blog but I hadn’t realised it would be so complicated to try and describe what was in front of our eyes!!
The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johann Zoffany (1772-77)
Johan Zoffany was born Johannes Josephus Zoffaly in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1733. His father Anton Zoffaly was a court cabinet maker and architect to Alexander Ferdinand, Prince of Thurn and Taxis and it was at the Prince’s court that young Johan was brought up. When the Prince took up residence in Regensburg, Zoffany served as an apprentice to the local painter, Martin Speer. In 1750, at the age of 17 when he had completed his apprenticeship Johann travelled to Rome and studied with the portrait painter, Agostino Masucci. In 1757, now back in Germany, Zoffany was commissioned by the Elector of Trier to paint frescoes and paintings for his new palace at Trier and his Ehrenbreitstein Palace in Koblenz.
In 1760 Zoffany travelled to London. Here he was initially employed by Benjamin Wilson, the painter and printmaker and it was from his connection with Wilson that Zoffany came to the attention of one of Wilson’s patrons, the actor and theatre impresario, David Garrick, and he commissioned Zoffany to paint a number of theatrical works which featured the actor in famous theatrical roles. Garrick also had Zoffany paint some conversation pieces of he and his wife set in the grounds of his Hampton estates. The term Conversation Piece is an informal group portrait, often full length but usually small in scale in a domestic interior or garden setting and was a very popular art genre in 18th century England. They would often portray a group of people apparently engaged in genteel conversation or some activity. Usually the group would be members of a family, but sometimes friends would be included. In some conversation pieces groups of friends or members of a society were depicted. It was for these works that Zoffany made his name in England.
Zoffany’s fame spread among the London elite and commissions started to roll in for his portraiture and conversation pieces. One such commission came from the Prime Minister, John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, who wanted Zoffany to paint portraits of his three sons and another portrait of his three daughters. It was thanks to Bute that Zoffany was introduced to King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte in 1763. Both were impressed by his work and commissioned Zoffany to paint portraits of their family. The Royal Academy of Arts had been founded in December 1768 through a personal act of King George III. Its task was to promote the arts of design in Britain through education and exhibition. There were originally thirty four founder members, with Sir Joshua Reynolds its first President. The rules stated that there would be forty Academicians. In a Council of the Royal Academy in November 1769 it was reported to those present that “his Majesty had been pleased to appoint Mr Johan Zoffany to be one of the forty Academicians”. Zoffany was now a Nominated Member of the Academy.
The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy by Johan Zoffany (1771-2)
George III also set him a task to paint a group portrait of the Royal Academy members which Zoffany duly completed in 1772 and was entitled The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy. Zoffany himself is seen with brush and palette in his hand at the far left of the painting. The king and his wife were delighted with the painting and Queen Charlotte commissioned Zoffany to paint an even larger and more elaborate conversation piece set in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, which would depict the art treasures held within the octagonal room. Zoffany travelled to Italy to carry out the commission in 1772 and did not complete the ambitious work until 1777.
Zoffany returned to England with his masterpiece but was distressed to find that his genre of conversation pieces had gone out of vogue and his work was no longer required by his wealthy and fashionable clients. He could have reverted to his other artistic forte, that of portraiture, but at the time he had many very successful rivals for that type of work, such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds as well as the emerging “new kid on the bloc” George Romney.
By 1783 Zoffany had all but given up hope of receiving commissions for his work in England and decided to travel to India in his search for rich patrons. For the next six years Zoffany bided his time in the sub-continent travelling between Calcutta and Lucknow completing commissions he received from the wealthy British colonials and the local Lucknow aristocracy. Once again he had the opportunity to carry on with his beloved conversation pieces. Such was the popularity of his work that he was inundated with commissions and by the time he returned to England in 1789 he had made his fortune.
Zoffany died in 1810, aged 77. He was one of the greatest exponents of the English Conversation piece with its Rococo flamboyance and will also be remembered for the charm of his theatrical works depicting scenes from popular plays of the day.
My Daily Art Display featured painting today by Zoffany is looked upon as one of his greatest works. It is his grand conversation piece entitled The Tribuna of the Uffizi, which he started in 1772 and completed in 1777. Going to Italy at the behest of his Royal patrons, George III and his wife Queen Charlotte, to paint this work had not been his original plan as in 1772 he had hoped to secure a passage on Captain Cook’s vessel when he set sail on his second voyage to the South Seas but the offer of a sea voyage never materialised and so he took up the commission from Queen Charlotte to travel to Florence and record in a painting the collection of art and sculpture which the Grand Duke of Tuscany had put together in the Tribuna of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Queen Charlotte had envisaged this work would be a pendant to Zoffany’s earlier work owned by the English rulers entitled Academicians of the Royal Academy which he completed in 1772 and was well received by the royal family.
The Tribuna was an octagonal room within the Uffizi Gallery, designed in the late 1580’s by Bernardo Buontalenti in which the art collection of Francesco de’ Medici would be housed. In 1737 it came into the possession of Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The commission was a great challenge to the talents of Zoffany as the Tribuna art collection was one of the greatest in all Europe. Was it a true reproduction of what was there at the time? Not quite, as Zoffany had to experiment and alter the perspective of the room in order to incorporate all the various pieces of sculpture and in some cases he had to reduce the size of individual pieces. The collection of art in the Tribuna during the time Zoffany was painting it was also going through a slight reorganisation and this gave him the excuse to make his own decision as to what would be on display. In doing so he omitted some paintings which were actually on display and added others which although housed in the Uffizi were never hung in the Tribuna. One of these was Titian’s Venus of Urbino which we see in the central foreground. There were also a number of paintings by Guido Reni which were housed in the Pitti Palace but were transported to the Uffizi just for Zoffany to copy!
There are twenty five paintings shown in this work. How many can you identify? All I will tell you is that amongst them there are six by Raphael, three by Guido Reni, two by Titian, two by Rubens and one each by Carracci, Corregio and Holbein.
Besides the works of art, sculptures and other artefacts, the painting is populated by no fewer than twenty two men all of whom were either connected with the Uffizi Gallery or were a miscellany of Grand Tourists. So who were these Grand Tourists and what was the Grand Tour? The Grand Tour was the traditional trip around Europe taken by mainly upper-class wealthy young European men, although primarily the term is associated with the British elite and nobility. It reached the height of its popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and it was a kind of rite of passage for this wealthy elite. One amusing aspect of Zoffany’s inclusion of the men was that during the many years he worked on the painting he would add and remove people as he saw fit and would tell some of the travellers they had to sit for him as the George III had specifically asked for their portrait to be included. Of course that was never the case. The one thing Zoffany was adamant about was that he would not portray a woman within the group. It is thought that this could be due to the fact that he incorporated some lewd visual jokes into the painting. Look at the group of men to the right who are staring at and fascinated by the backside of the Venus de Medici. This sculpture had been well-known for the lewd comments made about it by the Grand Tourists. In Vicci Coltman’s book entitled Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 she quotes a comment made by Charles Townley, the English country gentleman and antiquary who had made a couple of Grand Tours whilst Zoffany was painting his masterpiece. Townley had said that he had been told that:
“…the sight of the Venus in the Florence Gallery will give you some yammering after a Tuscan Whore…”
It was not just the heterosexual innuendos that made Zoffany’s painting risqué, but his addition of two well known homosexuals, Thomas Patch, in the right foreground in conversation with another homosexual, Sir Horace Mann. Patch is pointing at the sculpture The Wrestlers and their addition in the painting was to prove a step too far.
Zoffany returned to England in 1779 and delivered the painting to his royal patrons. Queen Charlotte was horrified to see the room cluttered by so many men and worse still to incorporate lewd innuendos of both a heterosexual and homosexual nature. She was especially shocked that Zoffany had included portraits of the two infamous homosexuals into the scene. George III reluctantly paid for the work but had it placed out of sight in a room in Kew Palace. The artist Joseph Farrington was active in the social, cultural, and professional art world of his time and he kept a daily diary from 13 July 1793 until his death, missing only a few days. This diary often referred to the London art world. The diary eventually constituted 16 volumes and in one of the volumes Farrington recounts a conversation between George III and the artist William Beechey in which he quotes the king as saying of Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi:
“…[The King] expressed wonder at Zoffany having done so improper a thing as to introduce the portraits of Sir Horace Man[n], [Thomas] Patch, & others, who were considered as men addicted to improper practices – He sd. The Queen wd. Not suffer the picture to be placed in any of Her apartments…”
It is thought it was not so much that Zoffany took it upon himself to add the twenty two Grand Tourists into the painting but it was the character of some of them that shocked and offended George III and his Queen. Zoffany never again received a royal commission and from that day on lost their patronage.
This is a beautiful work and one of unbelievable detail. I stood before it yesterday when I visited the preview of the Johan Zoffany RA, Society Observed exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. If you are in London you should make a point on visiting this exhibition which runs until June 10th.
Tomorrow I will give you the answer to the names of the paintings and the artists who painted them
In my last blog I looked at the English portraitist James Sharples and talked about how he took his family from England to America in search of patrons and their lucrative commissions. He was just one of many European artists who decided that the way to make a fortune from their art was by crossing the Atlantic. He of course had not only to compete against the new immigrant artists who had also made the journey but he also had to compete for work against America’s own painters. Today in My Daily Art Display I am focusing my attention on of those great 18th century American artists, John Singleton Copley, who in fact moved across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, from Boston to London.
John Singleton Copley was born in 1738 in Boston, Massachusetts. Both his parents, Richard and Marie were of Irish descent and had arrived in America just two years before he was born. His mother ran a tobacco shop which was on the Long Wharf pier at the port. His father, who was also a tobacconist, suffered from poor health and went to the West Indies around about the time of his son’s birth in the hope that the warmer climate may help, but he died there in 1748, although the actual year of his death is contested. His mother remarried when Copley was 10. She married the engraver, painter, and schoolmaster Peter Pelham and it was believed that he gave young John Copley his first artistic tuition. Pelham made his living by selling his portraits and engravings and even ran evening classes in arithmetic and writing as well as a dance class. Another tutor of Copley was the Scottish born portrait painter John Smybert who had left his homeland and had come to America in 1826. Both Copley’s tutors died when he was just thirteen years of age and so his artistic tuition was handed over to Joseph Blackburn, an English portrait painter, who had left home and worked in Bermuda and in colonial America. Blackburn worked in Boston and eventually set up a studio in the town. Although this master-student partnership started well it ended in acrimony. The master (Blackburn) realised his student (Copley) was becoming a far better artist than himself and jealousy ended the arrangement.
Boy with a Squirrel by John Singleton Copley (1765)
In 1776 Copley had sent his painting, entitled Boy with a Squirrel, to London, for the Society of Artists Exhibition. The painting featured his step-brother, Henry Pelham with his pet squirrel. It was the first work of art painted in America to be exhibited abroad and it was well received by the critics and on the strength of this work he was made a Fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Benjamin West, the American artist who had moved to London in 1763, invited Copley to do as he had done and move to Europe to continue his artistic studies. For Copley, the invite was tempting and in some ways made him more unhappy with his present situation. He was aware of his talent and the lack of artistic stimulation in Boston. In the book Letters & Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776, there is one letter which Copley wrote to the American artist, Benjamin West:
“…In this Country as You rightly observe there is no examples of Art, except what is to [be] met with in a few prints indifferently executed, from which it is not possible to learn much…”
However although the invite to leave America was tempting Copley was aware that his portraiture was selling well and he had a good standard of living, mixing with the aristocracy who were his patrons and so he decided to stay in Boston and wrote back to Benjamin West in 1768 explaining his reasons:
“…I should be glad to go to Europe, but cannot think of it without a very good prospect of doing as well there as I can here. You are sensable that 300 Guineas a Year, which is my present income, is a pretty living in America. . . . And what ever my ambition may be to excel in our noble Art, I cannot think of doing it at the expence of not only my own happyness, but that of a tender Mother and a Young Brother whose dependance is intirely upon me…”
Susanna Farnham Clarke (Mrs Susanna Copley) by John Singleton Copley
However, although not wanting to move to England himself, he continued to send his art work to London where his artistic reputation was on the rise. In 1769 John Copley married Susanna Farnham Clarke, whose father was one of the richest Boston merchants and a very wealthy and powerful business man, the Boston agent for the prestigious Honourable East India Company. Copley and his wife were very happy and his wife’s beauty was portrayed in a number of her husband’s paintings. The Copley’s marriage lasted for forty-five years and they went on to have six children.
Copley’s early works were in oils but he then began to dabble with pastels. By the age of nineteen Copley had built up a reputation as an outstanding portraitist. However Copley wanted to branch out and tackle historical paintings which at the time were very popular and the market for them was excellent. Copley’s family connections and his wife’s relatives were Loyalists, staunch supporters of British Colonial rule. Copley’s father-in-law was the merchant to whom the cargo of tea was consigned which sparked the infamous Boston Tea Party in December 1773 and this incident and what followed drove Susanna Clarke’s father to the brink of bankruptcy.
The unstable political climate worsened by the day, leading in 1774 to the rise of patriotism and the birth of the Patriots, the supporters of the colonists of the British Thirteen United Colonies who would within eighteen months rebel against British control. Copley’s lucrative work started to dry up and it was because of his fear of an oncoming war that Copley decided to take up Benjamin West’s invitation to come to England. His clear intention was to return to America as soon as the troubles were over, at a time when there would be a resurgence of his once-thriving art business and he would be looked upon once again as America’s leading portrait painter. He set sail for England from Boston on June 1st 1774 leaving his mother, wife and children in the care of his step brother, Henry Pelham. Copley had fully intended to return soon to America but the long and bloody War of Independence which eventually broke out in 1775 forced him to postpone his return. After the war ended, Copley financial situation no longer permitted a return, and the painter ended up staying in Britain forever.
On his arrival in England in 1774 Copley sought out Benjamin West who introduced him to Sir Joshua Reynolds both of whom were founder members of the Royal Academy of Art. Copley set off in September of that year on a nine month European tour taking in Paris before moving to Italy and from there journeying north into Germany and the Low Countries. In 1775 whilst still in Europe, Copley became alarmed at the deteriorating political situation in America and for the safety of his family. In a letter to his step brother, Henry Pelham, he wrote:
“…if the Frost be severe and the Harbour frozen, the Town of Boston will be exposed to an attack; and if it should be taken all that have remained in the town will be considered as enemies to the Country and ill treated or exposed to great distress…”
Having also been alarmed about the situation at home, Copley’s wife and children, unbeknown to her husband, had already left Boston at the end of May 1775 and arrived in London where they stayed with her brother-in-law. Her father and her brothers followed shortly after. Copley returned from his European trip and he and his wife set up home in London where Copley remained for the rest of his life. By the start of the nineteenth century, life for Copley the artist, was becoming problematic. He was still painting but sales were declining probably due to the Napoleonic Wars. The house his family were living in was expensive to run and the cost of putting his son, John Jnr. through law school was proving costly. The problem for Copley was that he couldn’t equate the fall of his earning power with the necessity to rein back his expenditure. He became very depressed with life and by 1810 his health was concerning those around him. At a dinner party in August 1815 Copley suffered a stroke and although he seemed to be recovering, he suffered a second seizure the following month and died in September 1815, aged 77.
On his death, Copley was deep in debt and his barrister son, John, who would later become Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, had to settle his father’s financial affairs, maintain his parents home and look after his mother, Susanna, until she died in 1836.
In My Daily Art Display today I am featuring the large oil on canvas painting entitled The Copley Family, by John Singleton Copley, which he completed in 1777 and is now housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It measures 184cms x 229 cms (72 inches x 90 inches). He started this group portrait painting a year after his family had arrived from America and settled in London and shortly after he himself had returned from his artistic tour of Europe. Although an accomplished portraitist, this was the first time Copley had executed a group portrait. The figures are almost life-size and his talent as a portraitist ensure that they all have a life-like appearance.
Copley himself is seen standing at the back of the family group grasping a sheaf of sketches and stares out at us in a manner which gives the impression that he is about to introduce the members of the Copley family to us. Copley’s father-in-law, the once prosperous merchant, Richard Clarke is seated on the left of the painting, stern-faced avoiding our gaze, holding the youngest of his grand-daughters, Susanna. To the right of the painting we see Copley’s wife Susanna, cradling her son John. Look at how Copley has captured the look of love and tenderness in his wife’s face as she gazes down at her son. On the far right of the painting and to his wife’s left, her daughter, Mary, vies for her attention. Standing upright and in a formal pose is Copley’s eldest child, his daughter Elizabeth. It is interesting to note that in those days boys wore dresses like their sisters until they were about six or seven years of age and old enough to wear breeches.
Copley had decided on the setting of the painting so as to give an air of classical refinement. He has achieved that by the inclusion in the painting of elegant and fashionable furnishings and as we look over the shoulders of his sitters we see the ancient and classical Arcadian landscape à la Claude Lorrain and this background setting could well have come from paintings Copley had seen during his travel around Italy. This group portrait of a family is of greater intimacy as it is the father who has lovingly depicted the scene.
Bronze statue of John Singleton Copley in Copley Park, Boston
John Singleton Copley’s hometown Boston has memorialised their artist by naming a city square after him, Copley Square, located in the Back Bay district of the city. The square-shaped park at the centre is a mass of greenery and on the north side is the bronze statue of the artist.
My Daily Art Display today is not about a single painting but about a talented artistic family of English portrait painters. This was a veritable dynasty of artists of the highest quality. The head of the family was James Sharples who was born in Lancashire around 1751. Originally his family had intended that James should study for the Catholic priesthood and he was sent to France for his initial training. The theological path that his parents had wanted him to follow was not for James and he returned to England. Instead James followed his chosen profession, that of an artist. At the age of twenty-eight, whilst living in Cambridge, he had four of his pictures accepted for the 1779 Royal Academy Exhibition. Two years later he moved to Bath where he set himself up as a portrait painter and art teacher.
He and his first wife had a son, George. Little is known of him but it is thought he could have also been an artist as in the 1815 Royal Academy Exhibition there was a painting by a “G Sharples of London”. With his second wife James fathered a second son, Felix who eventually came to live with James and his third wife Ellen Wallace. Ellen Wallace, who was of French extraction, lived in Bath and came from a Quaker family. She was born in 1769 and was eighteen years younger than James. They had met whilst she was attending one of his art classes. James and Ellen Sharples married in 1787 and went on to have two children of their own, James Jnr. born in 1788 and Rolinda born in 1793, both of whom became artists.
George Washington by James Sharples (1796)
Around 1794 James, his wife Ellen and the three children, James, Felix and Rolinda set off for America. It is thought that James believed that in America it would be possible to make a good living by painting portraits of the leading American figures of the time. The sea voyage did not go to plan as their ship, according to Ellen Sharples’ diaries, was captured by a French privateer and James and the family were taken to Brest where they were kept prisoners for seven months. The following year they were eventually released and continued on with their voyage to America, and eventually arrived in New York. Sharples started working in New York and Philadelphia, which was the then seat of government and a place full of eminent people, including local and national politicians. It is known that in the execution of his work Sharples made us of an instrument known as a physiognotrace. This was a device which was designed to trace a person’s profile in the form of a silhouette.
Slowly but surely, Sharples built up commissions for his portraiture. The whole family then embarked on a painting tour of New England picking up lucrative commissions which often entailed making reasonably priced copies of his original portraits of American political leaders, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams. Around 1797 when the family was living in Philadelphia, Ellen Sharples began to draw portraits professionally. At this time, there was a great demand for reasonably priced copies and Ellen’s career of copying her husband’s original portraits on commission flourished and she could command virtually the same price for her miniatures as her husband charged for his mini-portraits. It was not just the mother and father who had artistic talents as their three children under their parents’ tutelage soon became accomplished artists in their own right and were soon able to contribute work for the family business. Portraiture in America at that time was highly competitive not only because of home-grown American artists but more so from European painters who, like Sharples, had travelled to America in search of their fortune. This intense competition made it necessary for artists to travel and look for clients rather than wait at home for clients to come knocking upon their doors. James Sharples often had to drag his family from place to place in search of commissions.
James and Ellen Sharples soon built up reputations as talented portraitists who concentrated on small scale pastel portraits and whose work was in great demand and slowly but surely they became financially secure. James Sharples died of heart trouble in 1811, aged 60 and Ellen and her two children, James and Rolinda returned to England. Felix Sharples, who was at this time twenty-five years old, chose to stay in America, working as a portrait artist, where he died in 1830 aged 44.
Charles and Catherine Darwin by Ellen Sharples (1816)
Ellen, along with James and Rolinda settled down in Clifton, just outside Bristol and the three of them set up a family business producing small-scale pastel portraits for clients. Rolinda Sharples began to work in oils and she moved away from being a miniaturist and ventured into the highly competitive world of full-scale portraiture and history paintings depicting groups of people. Rolinda was elected an honorary member of the Society of British Artists in 1927 and was one of the first female artists to attempt multi-figure compositions, which formed part of the pictorial historical records of the time.
The Stoppage of The Bank by Rolinda Sharples (1831)
The painting above entitled The Stoppage of the Bank by Rolinda Sharples was completed in 1831. The background to this painting relates to the happenings in 1825 when England had just recovered from the Napoleonic Wars and the country’s economy started to boom. In the euphoria of this boom, even the most clear-headed of bankers made risky loans ( a familiar story ??). The bubble burst in April 1825 and the stock market crashed. By the autumn a number of country banks had failed causing panic. It was a financial catastrophe, which led to widespread ruin and misery for the unfortunate people who had all their capital invested in the failed banks. This is the setting, which Rolinda Sharples illustrates in her painting. The scene before us takes place in a fictional street, called Guinea Street but which had a great similarity to the real Corn Street in Bristol. On the right of the painting is a bank whose closure is causing shock and consternation to the people waiting outside attempting to get their money. Behind, we see the famous Dutch House which stood on the corner of Wine Street and High Street until destroyed in the Blitz. The church in the centre background is All Saints Church. Rolinda Sharples used some artistic licence when she placed the church in that position, one presumes it was for artistic effect.
The Artist and her Mother by Rolinda Sharples (c.1820)
Both Rolinda and her brother James predeceased their mother. Rolinda died of breast cancer in 1838, just forty-five years of age and James Jr. died of tuberculosis in 1839. Ellen Sharples, the last of the Sharples family, died in 1849 aged 80.
Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch by Gaugin (1892)
Paul Gaugin – Part 3 (Conclusion)
Today I am concluding my look at the life of Paul Gaugin. My earlier blogs on February 23rd and February 25th looked at the early and middle part of Gaugin’s life and should probably be read before you begin today’s offering.
We had reached 1887 and left Gaugin desperately wanting to leave France and head for Panama where he believed he would be able to lead a worry-free lifestyle. He and his artist friend Charles Laval set sail in April of that year and before reaching Colon in Panama the ship weighed anchor off the island of Martinique. They eventually arrived at Colon and Gaugin was disappointed not only with the area but also that his plea to his brother-in-law for financial assistance was turned down. Gaugin and Laval now had insufficient money to return to their newly chosen destination, Martinique. It was then imperative that they found the funds from another source to pay for their proposed sea passage and so they worked on the construction of the Panama Canal. The French had made the first attempt to construct a sea-level canal in 1880 under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps who had been involved in the construction of the Suez Canal some twenty five years earlier. Gaugin and Laval finally accrued enough money for their trip to Martinique in June. The Gods however didn’t look favourably on the two intrepid artists for whilst on the island of Martinique both Gaugin and Laval were extremely ill suffering from bouts of malaria and dysentery. The pair returned to Paris in November 1887. Despite his illness during his sojourn on Martinique, Gaugin believed his short time on the island was a defining moment in his life. He wrote enthusiastically about it in a letter to his wife, Mette, in February 1888:
“…you must remember that I have a dual nature, the Indian and the sensitive civilised man. The latter has disappeared [since my departure], which permits the former to take the lead…. the sensitive man has disappeared, which permits the Indian to forge resolutely ahead…”
Although he did not complete many paintings whilst at Martinique due to illness, what he brought back to Paris was remarkable and well received. Gaugin lodged once again with the Schuffenecker family in Paris and struck up a friendship with Theo van Gogh, who worked as an art dealer for his family business at the Goupil Gallery. Theo took on Gaugin on the strength of these Martinique works of art. Theo’s brother Vincent van Gogh invited Gaugin to join him in Arles so that together they could set up and artistic colony and art institution which Vincent termed “A Studio in the South”. Gaugin was disinclined to join Van Gogh on this project but Theo paid him to go to Arles to keep an eye on his brother. In October 1888 Gaugin travelled south to Arles and stayed with Vincent van Gogh in the Yellow House. The two artists were incompatible and within two months, and after many violent arguments, Gaugin left Vincent and returned to the Schuffenecker household in Paris. Of his disagreements with van Gogh, Gaugin wrote in a letter that December to a fellow artist, Émile Bernard:
“….Vincent and I don’t agree on much, and especially not on painting….. He is romantic, whereas I, I am more inclined to a primitive state…”
Van Gogh and Gaugin had a different philosophy to their art. Van Gogh liked to have the subject he was painting in front of him whilst Gaugin preferred to paint from visions in his mind. Once again we see Gaugin talking about his alter ego, that of him being the primitive man.
By 1889 the curse of wanderlust struck Gaugin again and this was heightened by his visit to the Exposition Universelle, the World Fair held in Paris that year. Within the exhibition there were many stands highlighting the beauty and opportunities of the overseas French colonies. Gaugin believed he could set off for one of these far-flung territories along with some of his artistic friends and set up a Studio of the Tropics. Initially Gaugin favoured going to the French colony of Tonkin, which is now part of Vietnam or maybe go to Madagascar but finally he decided on Tahiti. Another reason for Gaugin to leave France could well have been that his preferred art dealer, Theo van Gogh, who had managed to sell many of his works, suffered a mental breakdown and died suddenly in January 1891 and with him went Gaugin’s main source of income.
In March 1891 Gaugin finally had agreement with the French government to sponsor his trip to Tahiti and in return for a reduced cost of the sea passage, he would record the customs, landscape and people in his paintings of the French colony. Before he set sail he went to Copenhagen to see his wife and children and unbeknown to him at the time, it would be the last time he sees them. Gaugin set off from Marseille on April 1st and arrived in the Tahitian port of Papeete on June 9th. The Tahiti that Gaugin finds was not the Tahiti he had envisaged. This was not the land of plenty which the Exposition Universal had described. Tahiti was a down-at-heel French colony and Gaugin believed the native Tahitians had been ruined by missionary zeal. What he had expected to see just did not exist.
His first works after he settled in Papeete were portraits of Tahitian women demurely dressed in their “Sunday-best” clothes but the demand from France was paintings of the pure full-blooded naked primitive native women. They neither wanted to see depictions of the missionary-converted women, nor did they want to see the mixed race women, the product of their parents’ relationship with passing sailors. Gaugin decided that if he was to find the true spirit of Tahiti he must move out of the colonial capital of Papeete and so along with his young mistress he went to Mataiea and away from the colonial influence of the capital. He now felt much happier and in a letter to George-Daniel de Montfeid, the French artist, art collector and biographer of Gaugin, he wrote:
“…I am now living the life of a savage, walking around naked except for the essentials that women don’t like to see (or so they say)…”
Gaugin remained in Tahiti but his lack of money and hand-to-mouth existence was affecting his health and he became depressed and hankered to return to France but the Governor of the Island refused to let him leave. In the spring of 1893, he sent a number of his Tahitian paintings to de Montfreid to be exhibited and sold. In the autumn of 1893 he finally managed to leave the island and returned to Paris where he fully expected to be acclaimed a hero for all the Tahitian works of art he had sent home. His works were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris and although they were well received by critics, sales were disappointing.
In the spring of 1894 he revisits Pont Aven with his very young Javanese mistress. Gaugin had returned to this artist colony, not as a respectable gentleman artist but as the uncouth primitive savage, a persona which he had developed during his Tahitian stay. His constant fornication with very young and under-age girls earned him a certain notoriety and his heavy drinking bouts often lead to fights with the locals and on one occasion his ankle was shattered causing him to be laid up for more than half a year. In early 1895 he received his come-uppance for his unrestrained debauchery over the years when he was diagnosed as having contracted syphilis. He is completely disillusioned with France and he sold as many of his paintings as he could and left the shores of France for the last time and headed back to Tahiti.
Life back in Tahiti was not kind to the ageing artist. To his great disgust, the country had become more modern. His health was slowly but steadily deteriorating due to the onset of the symptoms of syphilis. His financial situation worsened and in 1897 he suffered a series of heart attacks. He also received the sad news from his wife Mette that his daughter Aline had died of pneumonia in Copenhagen, at the age of 20. In the early months of 1898, in a moment of complete despair, he went into the mountains and attempted to kill himself with arsenic. It does not kill him but badly damaged his internal organs and he had to be often hospitalised to stabilise his condition. More bad news from home was to follow as his third and favourite child, Clovis, died in 1900 aged just 21.
In 1902 he moves from Tahiti to Atuona on Hiva-Oa in the remote Marquesas Islands where he died the following year of syphilitic heart failure, just a few weeks short of his fifty-fifth birthday.
My Daily Art Display featured oil on burlap painting today was completed by Gaugin in 1892 during his first stay in Tahiti and is entitled Manao tupapau -The Spirit of the Dead Watching and is housed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Manao tupapau is the spirit of the dead. The painting is a mass of colour, the yellow blanket, the black and gold valance and the phosphorescent greenish sparks on the violet background, which exaggerate the creepy atmosphere. This is a highly atmospheric and sensuous scene, full of mystery and foreboding. Fear emanates from the painting. Gaugin explained his thought process when he painted this picture:
“…I have made a nude of a young girl… who is a Maori. These people traditionally fear the spirits of the dead… I must explain this fear with as few of the time-honoured literary devices as possible… there are a few flowers in the background but… as they only exist in the girl’s imagination… I make them like sparks… finally I have made the ghost just a plain little woman, for this girl… can only picture the spirits of the dead as looking like the person who has died…”
Gauguin in choosing the face-down pose of the young naked girl knew it could be highly problematic when it was seen by the French public and of course it was these very people who would be the potential buyers of his art. He must have been fully aware that his depiction of the young girl would strongly hint at lovemaking, which had just occurred or was about to happen. It is interesting to note that very few paintings up until then depicted the naked body of a woman lying down. The one well-known exception was probably the Reclining Girl by François Boucher (My Daily Art Display, May 30th 2011). Not to be detracted from his desire for that pose Gaugin probably then decided to incorporate the “spirit of the dead” theme with the fear that came with it, so as to add some gravitas to the work.
We need to understand the thought process of the Tahitians when it came to life and death. The Tahitians divide their day into two halves: daylight, or ao, and darkness, or po. With po they associate the tupapaus, and therefore they fear the night. The tupapaus are the Tahitian personifications of the spirits of death. For the Tahitians they are a genuine and permanent threat to them and they associate them with the darkness of night. The Tahitians are so afraid of them that they never go out of their homes at night without a light, and even with a light they never venture out alone. They always keep their homes lit at night, so as to ward off the tupapaus.
Before us we see a young dark-skinned Tahitian female as she lies naked, face down on her stomach on top of a bed with a stray tendril of her jet-black hair lying across the pillow. She is probably in her early teens, Gaugin’s age of choice for his mistresses. She exudes an abundance of sexuality. Her body retains some of the “puppy fat” of a young female. There is firmness to her limbs and buttocks and a definite seductiveness about her pose, which of course was all in the mind of the artist. Her body is stiff as if she dare not move an inch for fear of the repercussion of so doing, although one can imagine that inwardly she is shuddering with fear. She is terrified by the presence of the hooded spirit of death with its averted phosphorescent-coloured eye, which we see sitting crouched at the foot of the bed. For the young girl, death was not a strange occurrence as European ships and the sailors brought to the island diseases such as smallpox, dysentery, scarlet fever and tuberculosis for which Tahitians had little or no immunity. Add to this the weapons the sailors brought with them to the island to ttrade for food and which provided the natives with a much more effective killing machine during local rival confrontations. She has witnessed death through disease and local confrontations many times over and by his depiction of this scene and despite its exotic colouring, Gaugin is, in a way, commenting on the fragility of Tahitian life.
It is as if the spirit is keeping a vigil at the foot of the bed. Maybe the girl believes the spirit has come to take her to the “next world”. Native Polynesians believed that the phosphorescence of the light was the spirits of the dead. The hag-like spirit with bulbous lips is seen in profile and the face and eye reminds me of Ancient Egyptian drawings of women. The hand of the evil spirit lies menacingly on the bed. In this case the spirit is the embodiment of an old woman dressed in a black shawl but for the frightened girl she is probably the embodiment of a dead relative who may have come for her. In his 1901 book entitled Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, Gaugin recalled the incident. He had just returned home unexpectedly late one night. The room was in darkness. He struck a match and saw his wife, Tehura……
“…immobile, naked, lying face downward on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear . . . Might she not with her frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?…”
It is a remarkable painting and for me the story behind it adds to its appeal.
That ends my look at Gaugin and his life and I wonder what you think of him as a man and as an artist. The two are quite different. Such differences between the personality of a person and the quality of what he or she produces have always existed and still do nowadays. So should we just take in and enjoy what Gaugin has produced and put to the back of our minds his way of life and his proclivity for sex with under-age girls or is that just too difficult? By compartmentalising Gaugin’s lifestyle and Gaugin’s art work, are we simply justifying the unjustifiable?
my daily art display 