Ch. 30: European and American Art, 1715-1840

Henry Flitcroft and Henry Hoare THE PARK AT STOURHEAD 30-16

Wiltshire, England. Laid out 1743, executed 1744-1765, with continuing additions. Following Kent's lead at Chiswick, landscape architecture flourished in England in the hands of such designers as Lancelot ("Capability") Brown (1716-1783) and Henry Flitcroft (1697-1769). In the 1740s, the banker Henry Hoare began redesigning the grounds of his estate at Stourhead in Wiltshire (FIG. 30-16) with the assistance of Flitcroft, a protégé of Burlington. The resulting gardens at Stourhead carried Kent's ideas for the English garden much further. Stourhead is a perfect example of the English picturesque garden: Its conception and views intentionally mimic the compositional devices of "pictures" by French landscape painter Claude Lorrain (SEE Figure 23-56), whose paintings were popular in England. The picturesque view illustrated here shows a garden designed with "counterfeit neglect," intentionally contrived to look natural and unkempt. The small lake is crossed by a

Jean-Antoine Watteau THE SIGNBOARD OF GERSAINT 30-3

c. 1721. Oil on canvas, 5'4" x 10'1" (1.62 x 3.06 m). Stiftung Preussische Schlössen und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Schloss Charlottenburg. Watteau painted this signboard for the Paris art gallery of Edmé-François Gersaint, a dealer who introduced to France the English idea of selling paintings by catalog. The systematic listing of works for sale gave the name of the artist and the title, the medium, and the dimensions of each work of art. The shop depicted on the signboard, however, is not Gersaint's but a gallery created from Watteau's imagination and visited by typically elegant and cultivated patrons. The sign was so admired that Gersaint sold it only 15 days after it was installed. Later it was cut down the middle, and each half was framed separately, which resulted in the loss of some canvas along the sides of each section. The painting was restored and its two halves reunited only in the twentieth century. Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) has been seen as the origina

Jean-Siméon Chardin SAYING GRACE 30-35

c. 1740. Oil on canvas, 19 x 15⅛" (49 x 38 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Chardin was one of the first French artists to treat the lives of women and children with sympathy and to portray the dignity of women's work in his images of young mothers, governesses, and kitchen maids. Shown at the Salon of 1740, Saying Grace was purchased by King Louis XV and remained in the royal collection until the French Revolution. Diderot greatly admired Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), an artist who as early as the 1730s began to create moralizing pictures of refined intimacy in the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting by focusing on touching scenes of everyday middle-class life, with an emphasis on the moral goodness of everyday familial routines. SAYING GRACE (FIG. 30-35), for instance, shows a mother leaning to set the family table for a meal. Across from her sit two children: an older daughter partially concealed by the table and her younger brother in the foreground who

Thomas Gainsborough ROBERT ANDREWS AND FRANCES CARTER (MR. AND MRS. ANDREWS) 30-25

c. 1748-1750. Oil on canvas, 27½ x 47" (69.7 x 119.3 cm). National Gallery, London. Gainsborough was engaged to paint this couple's portrait shortly after the 20-year-old Robert Andrews married 16-year-old Frances Carter in November 1748. An area of painting in Frances's lap has been left unfinished, perhaps anticipating the later addition of a child for her to hold. A counterpoint to Reynolds's style of portraiture is found in the art of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), who catered to his rich and fashionable clients' tastes for the informal poses and natural landscapes introduced to England by Van Dyck in the 1620s (SEE Figure 23-29). Gainsborough's early, unfinished ROBERT ANDREWS AND FRANCES CARTER (FIG. 30-25), painted soon after their wedding in 1748, shows the wealthy young rural landowner and his wife posed on the grounds of their estate, with the Sudbury River and the hills of Suffolk in the background. The youthful Frances Carter sits stiffly on a decorati

Angelica Kauffmann CORNELIA POINTING TO HER CHILDREN AS HER TREASURES 30-28

c. 1785. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50" (101.6 x 127 cm). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund. After her return to Italy, Kauffmann painted CORNELIA POINTING TO HER CHILDREN AS HER TREASURES (FIG. 30-28) for an English patron. The scene in the painting took place in the second century BCE during the republican era of Rome. A woman visitor shows Cornelia her jewels and then asks to see those of her hostess. In response, Cornelia shows off her daughter and two sons, saying: "These are my most precious jewels." Cornelia exemplifies the "good mother," a popular theme among some later eighteenth-century patrons who preferred Classical subjects that taught metaphorical lessons of civic and moral virtue. The value of Cornelia's maternal dedication is emphasized by the fact that her sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, grew up to be political reformers. Kauffmann's composition is severe and Classical, but she softens the image with

Benjamin Henry Latrobe U.S. CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, DC 30-69

c. 1808. Engraving by T. Sutherland, 1825. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC. Neoclassical style was also popular for large public buildings in the United States, perhaps most significantly and symbolically in the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, DC, initially designed in 1792 by William Thornton (1759-1828), an amateur architect. His monumental plan featured a large dome over a temple front flanked by two wings to accommodate the House of Representatives and the Senate. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), also an amateur architect, hired a British-trained professional, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), to oversee the actual construction of the Capitol. Latrobe modified Thornton's design by adding a grand staircase and Corinthian colonnade on the east front (FIG. 30-69). After the British gutted the building in the war of 1812, Latrobe repaired the wings and designed a higher dome. Seeking new symbolic forms for the nation within

Horace Walpole, John Chute, and Richard Bentley PICTURE GALLERY SHOWING FAN-VAULTED CEILING, STRAWBERRY HILL 30-21

After 1754. The Gothic Revival emerged alongside Neoclassicism in Britain in the mid eighteenth century and spread to several other nations after 1800. An early advocate of the Gothic Revival was the conservative politician and author Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto, widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. This tale of mysterious and supernatural happenings set in the Middle Ages almost single-handedly launched a fashion for the Gothic. In 1749, Walpole began to remodel his country house, STRAWBERRY HILL, transforming it into the kind of Gothic castle that he described in his fiction (FIG. 30-20). Working with several friends and architects, over the next 30 years he added decorative crenellations (higher and lower sections alternating along the top of a wall), tracery windows, and turrets. The interior, too, was redesigned according to Walpole's fanciful Gothic interpretation of the British historical past. His PICTURE GALLERY (FIG. 30

Jean-Antoine Watteau PILGRIMAGE TO THE ISLAND OF CYTHERA 30-4

1717. Oil on canvas, 4'3" x 6'4½" (1.3 x 1.9 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. In PILGRIMAGE TO THE ISLAND OF CYTHERA (FIG. 30-4), painted four years earlier, Watteau portrayed an imagined vision of the idyllic and sensual life of Rococo aristocrats, but with the same undertone of melancholy that hints at the fleeting quality of human happiness. This is a dream world in which beautifully dressed and elegantly posed couples, accompanied by putti, conclude the romantic trysts of their day on Cythera, the island sacred to Venus, the goddess of love, whose garlanded statue appears at the extreme right. The lovers, dressed in exquisite satins, silks, and velvets, gather in the verdant landscape. Such idyllic and wistfully melancholic visions of aristocratic leisure charmed both early eighteenth-century Paris and most of Europe. Watteau painted Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera in 1717 as his official examination canvas for admission to membership of the French Royal Academy of Painting and

Rosalba Carriera GUSTAVUS HAMILTON, 2ND VISCOUNT BOYNE 30-10

1730-1731. Pastel on blue paper, 22¼ x 16⅞" (56.5 x 42.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum, New York. Carriera began her career designing lace patterns and painting miniature portraits on the ivory lids of snuffboxes before she graduated to pastel portraits. Her portraits were so widely admired that she was awarded honorary membership of Rome's Academy of St. Luke in 1705 and was later admitted to the academies in Bologna and Florence. In 1720, she traveled to Paris, where she made a pastel portrait of the young Louis XV and was elected to the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, despite the 1706 rule forbidding the further admission of women. Returning to Italy in 1721, she established herself in Venice as a portraitist of handsome young men such as the Irish aristocrat GUSTAVUS HAMILTON, 2ND VISCOUNT BOYNE (FIG. 30-10). He visited Venice in both 1730 and 1731, and Carriera portrays him dressed for carnival with a half mask and lace veil under his stylish tricorne hat.

François Boucher GIRL RECLINING: LOUISE O'MURPHY 30-5

1751. Oil on canvas, 23¼ x 28¼″ (59 x 73 cm). Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. In 1765, Boucher became First Painter to the King. In this role he painted portraits of Louis XV, scenes of daily life, mythological pictures, and a series of erotic works for private enjoyment, often depicting the adventures of Venus. The subject of one such painting—GIRL RECLINING: LOUISE O'MURPHY (FIG. 30-5)—however, is hardly mythological. The teenage Louise O'Murphy, who would soon be one of the mistresses of Louis XV, appears provocatively pink and completely naked, sprawled across a day bed on her stomach, looking out of the painting and completely unaware of our presence. Her satiny clothing is crushed beneath her, and her spread legs sink into a pillow; braids and a blue ribbon decorate her hair, while a fallen pink rose is highlighted on the floor. Louise's plump buttocks are displayed at the very center of the painting, leaving little doubt about the painting's subject. In cont

Jacques-Germain PANTHÉON (CHURCH OF SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE), PARIS 30-33

1755-1792. This building has an interesting history. Before it was completed, the revolutionary government in control of Paris confiscated all religious properties to raise desperately needed public funds. Instead of selling Sainte-Geneviève, however, they voted in 1791 to make it the Temple of Fame for the burial of Heroes of Liberty. Under Napoleon I (ruled 1799-1814), the building was resanctified as a Catholic church and was again used as such under King Louis-Philippe (ruled 1830-1848) and Napoleon III (ruled 1852-1870). Then it was permanently designated a nondenominational lay temple. In 1851, the building was used as a physics laboratory. Here the French physicist Jean-Bernard Foucault suspended his now-famous pendulum in the interior of the high crossing dome, and by measuring the path of the pendulum's swing proved his theory that the Earth rotated on its axis in a counterclockwise motion. In 1995, the ashes of Marie Curie, who had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Jean-Baptiste Greuze THE VILLAGE BRIDE, OR THE MARRIAGE, THE MOMENT WHEN A FATHER GIVES HIS SON-IN-LAW A DOWRY 30-36

1761. Oil on canvas, 36 x 46½" (91.4 x 118.1 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Diderot reserved his highest praise for Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), and his own plays of the late 1750s served as a source of inspiration for Greuze's painting. Diderot expanded the traditional range of theatrical works in Paris from mostly tragedy and comedy to include the drame bourgeois ("middle-class drama") and "middle tragedy" (later called the "melodrama"), both of which communicated moral and civic lessons through simple stories of ordinary life. Greuze's domestic genre paintings, such as THE VILLAGE BRIDE (FIG. 30-36), were visual counterparts to Diderot's preferred theatrical subjects. In this painting, Greuze presents the action as a carefully constructed composition on a shallow, stagelike space under a dramatic spotlight. As an elderly father hands the dowry for his daughter to his new son-in-law, he conveys what contemporary critics saw as a moral lesson on financial m

Miguel Cabrera. 1. DE ESPAÑOL E INDIA, MESTIZA (From Spaniard and Indian, Mestiza) 30-48A

1763. Oil on canvas, 5115/16 × 39¾″ (1.32 × 1.01 m). Private collection. Casta paintings typically show a man and woman of different racial types, along with one or two of their children. The racial category of each parent is identified, and the racial nomenclature associated with their children is also indicated. The painting illustrated here—1. DE ESPAÑOL E INDIA, MESTIZA (1. From Spaniard and Indian, Mestiza) (FIG. 30-48A)—is the first panel of a cycle of sixteen casta paintings created in 1763 by Miguel Cabrera (1695-1758), one the most gifted and famous painters in New Spain at this time. Cabrera was mostly known as a painter of religious subjects, but he also painted portraits and a single cycle of casta paintings that began with this one. It is a scene of family interaction that takes place in an exterior setting, probably near a stall set up in an open market. The Indigenous "Indian" mother is the central character, standing in front of an internal, rectangula

Joshua Reynolds LADY SARAH BUNBURY SACRIFICING TO THE GRACES 30-24

1765. Oil on canvas, 7'10" x 5' (2.42 x 1.53 m). The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection, 1922.4468. Lady Sarah Bunbury was one of the great beauties of her era. A few years before this portrait was painted, she turned down a proposal of marriage from George III. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was a generation younger than Hogarth, and represented the mainstream of British art at the end of the century. After studying Renaissance art in Italy, Reynolds settled in London in 1753, where he worked vigorously to educate artists and patrons to appreciate Classically inspired history painting. In 1768, he was appointed the first president of the Royal Academy. His Fifteen Discourses to the Royal Academy (1769-1790) set out his theories on art in great detail. He argued that artists should follow rules derived from studying the great masters of the past, especially those who worked in the Classical tradition; he claimed that the ideal image communicated unive

Jean-Honoré Fragonard THE SWING 30-6

1767. Oil on canvas, 31⅞ x 25¼" (81 x 64.2 cm). The Wallace Collection, London. Fragonard's THE SWING (FIG. 30-6) of 1767 was originally commissioned from another painter, Gabriel-François Doyen, although the identity of the patron is unknown. Doyen described the subject he was asked to paint as sensually explicit, and he refused the commission, giving it to Fragonard, who created a small jewel of a painting. A pretty young woman is suspended on a swing, her movement created by an elderly guardian obscured by the shadow of the bushes on the right who pulls her with a rope. On the left, the girl's blushing lover hides in the bushes, swooning with anticipation. As the swing approaches, he is rewarded with an unobstructed view up her skirt, lifted on his behalf by an extended leg. The young man reaches out toward her with his hat as if to make a mockingly useless attempt to conceal the view, while she glances down, seductively slinging one of her shoes toward him. The playful a

Joseph Wright of Derby AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR-PUMP 30-26

1768. Oil on canvas, 6 x 8' (1.82 x 2.43 m). National Gallery, London. In the English Midlands, artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) shows an Enlightenment fascination with the drama and romance of science in his depiction of AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR-PUMP (FIG. 30-26). Wright set up his studio during the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, and many of his patrons were self-made, wealthy industrial entrepreneurs. He belonged to the Lunar Society, a group of industrialists (including Wedgwood), merchants, traders, and progressive aristocrats who met monthly in or near Birmingham to exchange ideas about science and technology. As part of the society's attempts to popularize science, Wright painted a series of "entertaining" scenes of scientific experiments. The second half of the eighteenth century was an age of rapid technological change, and the development of the air-pump was among the many scientific innovations of the time. Although primarily used to s

Benjamin West THE DEATH OF GENERAL WOLFE 30-29

1770. Oil on canvas, 4'11½" x 7' (1.51 x 2.14 m). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921. Gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Eaton Hall, Cheshire, 1918. The famous actor David Garrick was so moved by this painting that he enacted an impromptu interpretation of the dying Wolfe in front of the work when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Two years later, West shocked Reynolds and his other academic friends with his painting THE DEATH OF GENERAL WOLFE (FIG. 30-29), which seemed to break completely with Neoclassicism and academic history painting. West argued that history painting was not dependent on dressing figures in Classical costume; in fact, it could represent a contemporary subject as long as the grand themes and elevated message remained intact. Thus, West's painting, and the genre it spawned, came to be known as "modern history" painting. At first, King George III and Joshua Reynolds were appalled, but modern history pie

PORTRAIT OF MOTHER ANA MARIA OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF CHRIST 30-48B

1770. Oil on canvas, 45 × 35″ (114.3 × 88.9 cm). Denver Art Museum. Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer (2014.215). Eighteenth-century Latin American painters were frequently commissioned to paint portraits of members of wealthy and powerful families in New Spain. Some of these preserve the likenesses and meanings of public officials, but this PORTRAIT OF MOTHER ANA MARIA OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF JESUS (FIG. 30-48B)—painted in 1770 by an artist in a distinguished school of painters active in the cultural center of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City—represents a young nun shortly after she took her vows in the Franciscan Convent of Santa Clara in Puebla. Portraits of nuns, elaborately outfitted for this liturgical ceremony, were popular in Mexico. They were sponsored by the young woman's family to mark her transition from the novitiate to the profession of vows as a nun, a lifetime commitment that was conceived as a marriage to Christ and signified by a wedding ba

Johann Zoffany ACADEMICIANS OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY 30-27

1771-1772. Oil on canvas, 47½ x 59½" (120.6 x 151.2 cm). The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, England. Zoffany's group portrait of members of the London Royal Academy reveals how mainstream artists were taught in the 1770s. The painting shows artists, all men, setting up a life-drawing class and engaging in lively conversation. The studio is decorated with the academy's study collection of Classical statues and plaster copies. Propriety prohibited the presence of women in life-drawing studios, so Zoffany includes Royal Academicians Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann in portraits on the wall on the right. During the seventeenth century, the French government founded a number of academies for the support and instruction of students in literature, painting and sculpture, music and dance, and architecture. In 1664, the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris began to mount occasional exhibitions of members' recent work. This exhibition came to be known as the Sa

John Singleton Copley THOMAS MIFFLIN AND SARAH MORRIS (MR. AND MRS. MIFFLIN) 30-1

1773. Oil on canvas, 61⅝ x 48" (156.5 x 121.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted this double portrait of Thomas Mifflin and his wife, Sarah Morris (FIG. 30-1), in 1773 when the Philadelphia couple was visiting Boston for a family funeral. This was the same year when American colonists protested against the British tax on tea by staging the Boston Tea Party—seizing British tea and tossing it into Boston harbor. The painting must have hung in the couple's Philadelphia home when Thomas Mifflin, a prominent merchant and politician, and other leading representatives of the colonies negotiated a strategy for the impending break with Britain at the First Continental Congress. The painting proclaims the couple's identity as American patriots, committed to the cause of independence. Sarah—not her famous husband—is the center of attention. She sits in the foreground, wearing a stylish silk dress decorated with expensive laces, a finely wr

John Singleton Copley WATSON AND THE SHARK 30-32

1778. Oil on canvas, 5'10¾ x 7'6½" (1.82 x 2.29 m). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund. John Singleton Copley, whose portrait of Sarah Morris and Thomas Mifflin opened this chapter (SEE Figure 30-1), moved from Boston to London just before the Revolutionary War, never to return to his native land. In London, he established himself as a portraitist and painter of modern history in the vein of fellow American expatriate Benjamin West. Copley's most distinctive modern history painting was WATSON AND THE SHARK (FIG. 30-32), commissioned by Brook Watson, a wealthy London merchant and Tory politician, in 1778. Copley's painting dramatizes an episode of 1749 in which the 14-year-old Watson was attacked by a shark while swimming in Havana Harbor and lost part of his right leg before being rescued by his comrades. Copley's pyramidal composition is made up of figures in a boat and Watson in the water with a highly imaginary shark set against the bac

Sebastian Salcedo VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE 30-47

1779. Oil on panel and copper, ″25 X 19" (63.5 X 48.3 cm). Denver Art Museum. Funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. George G. Anderman and an anonymous donor (1976.56). Images of the Virgin Mary had taken on a Latin American inflection since she was believed to have appeared in Mexico during the sixteenth century. In one such case, a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego (1474-1548) claimed that the Virgin Mary visited him in 1531 to tell him in his native Nahuatl language to build a church on a hill where an Aztec goddess had once been worshiped, subsequently causing flowers to bloom so that Juan Diego could show them to the archbishop as proof of his vision. When Juan Diego opened his bundle of flowers, the cloak he had used to wrap them is said to have borne the image of a Mexican Mary in a composition used in Europe to portray the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, especially popular in Spain (SEE FIG. 23-22). The site of Juan Diego's vision was renamed Guadalupe, after Our Lady

John Henry Fuseli THE NIGHTMARE 30-30

1781. Oil on canvas, 39¾ x 49½" (101 x 127 cm). The Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society purchase with Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischmann funds. Fuseli was not popular with the English critics. One writer said that his 1780 entry in the London Royal Academy exhibition "ought to be destroyed," and Horace Walpole called another painting in 1785 "shockingly mad, mad, mad, madder than ever." Even after achieving the highest official acknowledgment of his talents, Fuseli was called "the Wild Swiss" and "Painter to the Devil." But the public appreciated his work, and The Nightmare, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, was repeated in at least three more versions and its imagery was disseminated through prints published by commercial engravers. One of these prints would later hang in the office of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams were manifestations of the dreamer's repressed desires. Back in

Jacques-Louis David OATH OF THE HORATII 30-38

1784-1785. Oil on canvas, 10'8¼" x 14' (3.26 x 4.27 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. The most important French Neoclassical painter of the era was Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), who dominated French art for over 20 years during the French Revolution and the subsequent reign of Napoleon. In 1774, he won the Prix de Rome and spent six years in that city, studying antique sculpture and learning the principles of Neoclassicism. After his return to Paris, he produced a series of severely plain Neoclassical paintings celebrating the antique virtues of stoicism, masculinity, and patriotism. Perhaps the most significant of these works was the OATH OF THE HORATII (FIG. 30-38) of 1784-1785. A royal commission that David returned to Rome to paint, the work reflects the taste and values of Louis XVI, who, along with his minister of the arts, Count d'Angiviller, was sympathetic to the Enlightenment. Like Diderot, d'Angiviller and the king believed that art should improve public morals

Clodion THE INVENTION OF THE BALLOON 30-7

1784. Terra-cotta model for a monument, height 43 1⁄2″ (110.5 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund and Frederick R. Harris Gift, 1944 (44.21a b). Clodion had a long career as a sculptor in the exuberant Rococo manner seen in this work commemorating the 1783 invention of the hot-air balloon. During the austere revolutionary period of the First Republic (1792-1804), he became one of the few Rococo artists to adopt successfully the more acceptable Neoclassical manner. In 1806, he was commissioned by Napoleon to provide the relief sculpture for two Paris monuments, the Vendôme Column and the Carrousel Arch near the Louvre. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Rococo largely fell out of favor in France, its style and subject matter attacked for being frivolous at best and immoral at worst. One sculptor who clung to the style almost until the French Revolution, however, was Claude Michel, known as Clodion (1738-1814). Most of his work consisted of playfu

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard SELF-PORTRAIT WITH TWO PUPILS 30-41

1785. Oil on canvas, 6'11" x 4'11½" (2.11 x 1.51 m). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Julia A. Berwind, 1953 (53.225.5). Also reflecting the revolutionary spirit of the age, the painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) championed the rights of women artists. Elected to the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the same year as Vigée-Lebrun, Labille-Guiard asserted her worthiness for this honor in a SELF-PORTRAIT WITH TWO PUPILS that she submitted to the Salon of 1785 (FIG. 30-41). The painting was a response to sexist rumors that her work and that of Vigée-Lebrun had actually been painted by men. In a witty role reversal, the only male in this monumental painting of the artist at her easel is her father, shown in a bust behind her canvas, as her muse, a role usually played by women. While the self-portrait flatters Labille-Guiard, it also portrays her as a force to be reckoned with, a woman who engages our gaze uncompromisingly and whose students a

Antonio Canova CUPID AND PSYCHE 30-14

1787-1793. Marble, 61 x 68" (1.55 x 1.73 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. The theories of the Albani-Winckelmann circle were applied most vigorously by sculptors in Rome, who remained committed to Neoclassicism for almost 100 years. The leading Neoclassical sculptor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was Antonio Canova (1757-1822). Born near Venice into a family of stonemasons, he settled in Rome in 1781, where he adopted the Neoclassical style under the guidance of the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton and quickly became the most sought-after European sculptor of the period. One of Canova's most admired works depicts the erotically charged mythological subject CUPID AND PSYCHE (FIG. 30-14) in a way that recalls the ancient Classical sculpture that attracted artists and scholars to Rome. Condemned to a death-like sleep by a jealous Venus, Psyche revives at Cupid's kiss. His projecting wings offset the rounded forms of the two linked bodies and balance the dow

William Hackwood for Josiah Wedgwood "AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?" 30-19

1787. Black-and-white jasperware, 1⅜ x 1⅜" (3.5 x 3.5 cm). Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Staffordshire, England. The socially conscious Wedgwood, informed by Enlightenment thinking, established a village for his employees and showed concern for their well-being. He was also active in the international effort to halt the African slave trade and abolish slavery. To publicize the abolitionist cause, he commissioned the sculptor William Hackwood (c. 1757-1839) to design an emblem for the British Committee to Abolish the Slave Trade, formed in 1787. Hackwood created a small medallion of black-and-white jasperware with a cameo likeness of an African man kneeling in chains and the legend "AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?" (FIG. 30-19). Wedgwood sent copies of the medallion to Benjamin Franklin, the president of the Philadelphia Abolition Society, and to others in the abolitionist movement. The image was so compelling that the women's suffrage movement in the United S

Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE WITH HER CHILDREN 30-37

1787. Oil on canvas, 9'½" x 7'⅝" (2.75 x 2.15 m). Musée National du Château de Versailles. As the favorite painter to the queen, Vigée-Lebrun escaped from Paris with her daughter on the eve of the Revolution of 1789 and fled to Rome. After a very successful self-exile working in Italy, Austria, Russia, and England, the artist finally resettled in Paris in 1805 and again became popular with Parisian art patrons. Over her long career, she painted about 800 portraits in a vibrant style that changed very little over the decades. While Greuze painted scenes of the poor and middle class, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) became famous as Queen Marie Antoinette's favorite portrait painter. Vigée-Lebrun was also notable for her election into the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which then made only four places available to women. In 1787, she painted MARIE ANTOINETTE WITH HER CHILDREN (FIG. 30-37). Drawing on the "good mother" theme seen earlier

Jean-Antoine Houdon GEORGE WASHINGTON 30-42

1788-1792. Marble, height 6′2″ (1.9 m). State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia. The plow share behind Washington alludes to Cincinnatus, a Roman soldier of the fifth century BCE who was appointed dictator and dispatched to defeat the Aequi, who had besieged a Roman army. After the victory, Cincinnatus resigned the dictatorship and returned to his farm. Washington's contemporaries compared him with Cincinnatus because, after leading the Americans to victory over the British, he resigned his commission and went back to farming rather than seeking political power. Just below Washington's waistcoat hangs the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783 by the officers of the disbanding Continental Army who were returning to their peacetime occupations. Washington lived in retirement at his Mount Vernon, Virginia, plantation for five years before his 1789 election as the first president of the United States. The French Neoclassical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828

Jacques-Louis David DEATH OF MARAT 30-39

1793. Oil on canvas, 5'5" x 4'2½" (1.65 x 1.28 m). © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. In 1793, David painted the death of the Jacobin supporter, Jean-Paul Marat (FIG. 30-39). A radical journalist, Marat lived simply among the packing cases that he used as furniture, writing pamphlets urging the abolition of aristocratic privilege. Because he suffered from a painful skin ailment, he would often write while sitting in a medicinal bath. Charlotte Corday, a supporter of an opposition party, held Marat partly responsible for the 1792 riots in which hundreds of political prisoners judged sympathetic to the king were killed, and in retribution she stabbed Marat as he sat in his bath. David avoids the potential for sensationalism in the subject by portraying not the violent event but its tragic aftermath—the dead Marat slumped in his bathtub, his right hand still holding a quill pen, while his left hand grasps the letter that Corday used to gain access to his home. The s

William Blake NEWTON 30-31

1795-c. 1805. Color print finished in ink and watercolor, 18⅛ × 23⅝" (46 x 60 cm). Tate, London. Fuseli's friend William Blake (1757-1827), a highly original poet, painter, and printmaker, was also inspired by the dramatic aspect of Michelangelo's art. Trained as an engraver, he enrolled briefly at the Royal Academy, where he quickly rejected the teachings of Reynolds, believing that rules limit rather than aid creativity. He became a lifelong advocate of probing the unfettered imagination. For Blake, imagination provided access to the higher realm of the spirit while reason was confined to the lower world of matter. Blake was interested in exploring the nature of good and evil and developed an idiosyncratic form of Christian belief that drew on elements from the Bible, Greek mythology, and British legend. His "prophetic books," designed and printed in the mid-1790s, brought together painting and poetry to explore themes of spiritual crisis and redemption. Thematica

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson PORTRAIT OF JEAN-BAPTISTE BELLEY 30-40

1797. Oil on canvas, 5'2½" x 3'8½" (1.59 x 1.13 m). Musée National du Château de Versailles. David was a charismatic and influential teacher who trained most of the major French painters of the 1790s and early 1800s, including Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824). Girodet-Trioson's PORTRAIT OF JEAN-BAPTISTE BELLEY (FIG. 30-40) combines the restrained color and tight composition of David with a relaxed elegance that makes the subject more lifelike and self- possessed, accessible and inaccessible at the same time. And like many of David's works, this portrait was political. The Senegalese-born Belley (1747?-1805) was a former slave who was sent to Paris as a representative to the French Convention by the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). The Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which African slaves overturned the French colonial power, resulted in the first republic to be ruled by freed African slaves. In 1794, Belley led a successful legislative campaign to abolish slaver

Jacques-Louis David NAPOLEON CROSSING THE SAINT-BERNARD 30-49

1800-1801. Oil on canvas, 8'11" x 7'7" (2.7 x 2.3 m). Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. With the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacques-Louis David re-established his dominant position in French painting. David saw in Napoleon the best hope for realizing France's Enlightenment-oriented political goals, and Napoleon saw in David a tested propagandist for revolutionary values. As Napoleon gained power and extended his rule across Europe, reforming law codes and abolishing aristocratic privilege, he commissioned David and his students to document his deeds. In 1800, four years before Napoleon became emperor, David had already begun to glorify him in David NAPOLEON CROSSING THE SAINT-BERNARD (or Bonaparte Crossing the Alps) (FIG. 30-49). Napoleon is represented in the Grand Manner, and David used artistic license to imagine how he might have appeared as he led his troops over the Alps into Italy. Framed by a broad shock of red drapery, he exhorts his troops to follow

Francisco Goya FAMILY OF CHARLES IV 30-44

1800. Oil on canvas, 9'2" x 11' (2.79 x 3.36 m). Museo del Prado, Madrid. A large portrait of the FAMILY OF CHARLES IV (FIG. 30-44) reveals some of Goya's ambivalence. He clearly wanted his patron to connect this portrait to an earlier Spanish royal portrait, Las Meninas by Velázquez (SEE Figure 23-21), thereby raising his own status as well as that of the king. Like Velázquez, Goya includes himself in the painting, to the left behind the easel. The king and queen appear at the center of this large family portrait, surrounded by their immediate family. The figures are formal and stiff. Much has been written about how Goya seems to show his patrons as faintly ridiculous here. Some seem bored; the somewhat dazed king, chest full of medals, stands before a relative who looks distractedly out of the painting (perhaps the face was added at the last minute); the double-chinned queen gazes obliquely toward the viewer (at that time she was having an open affair with the prime minister

Antoine-Jean Gros NAPOLEON IN THE PLAGUE HOUSE AT JAFFA 30-50

1804. Oil on canvas, 17'5" x 23'7" (5.32 x 7.2 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. The huddled figures to the left were based on those around the mouth of hell in Michelangelo's Last Judgment (SEE FIG. 21-46). Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) began working in David's studio as a teenager and eventually competed with his master for commissions from Napoleon, traveling with Napoleon in Italy in 1797 and later becoming an official chronicler of his military campaigns. His painting NAPOLEON IN THE PLAGUE HOUSE AT JAFFA (FIG. 30-50), like David's portrait, represents an actual event in the Grand Manner. During Napoleon's campaign against the Ottoman Turks in 1799, bubonic plague broke out among his troops. To quiet fears and forestall panic among his soldiers, Napoleon decided to visit the sick and dying, who were housed in a converted mosque in the town of Jaffa (now in Israel but then part of the Ottoman Empire). The format of Gros's painting—a shallow stage with a series of poin

Caspar David Friedrich ABBEY IN AN OAK FOREST 30-65

1809-1810. Oil on canvas, 44 x 68½" (111.8 x 174 cm). Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In Germany, the Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) saw landscape as a vehicle through which to achieve spiritual revelation. As a young man, he had been influenced by the writings and teachings of Gotthard Kosegarten, a local Lutheran pastor and poet who taught that the divine was visible through a deep personal connection with nature. Kosegarten argued that just as God's book was the Bible, the landscape was God's "Book of Nature." Friedrich studied at the Copenhagen Academy before settling in Dresden, where the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe encouraged him to make landscape the principal subject of his art. He sketched from nature but painted in the studio, synthesizing his sketches with his memories of and feelings about nature. In ABBEY IN AN OAK FOREST (FIG. 30-65), a funeral procession of monks in the lower foreground is barely visible through the gloom that

Joseph Mallord William Turner SNOWSTORM: HANNIBAL AND HIS ARMY CROSSING THE ALPS 30-62

1812. Oil on canvas, 4'9" x 7'9" (1.46 x 2.39 m). Tate, London. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is often paired with Constable. The two were English landscape painters of roughly the same period, but Turner's career followed a different path. He entered the Royal Academy in 1789, was elected a full academician at the unusually young age of 27, and later became a professor at the Royal Academy Schools. By the late 1790s, he was exhibiting large-scale oil paintings of grand natural scenes and historical subjects, in which he sought to capture the sublime, a concept defined by philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797). According to Burke, when we witness something that instills fascination mixed with fear, or when we stand in the presence of something far larger than ourselves, our feelings transcend those we encounter in normal life. Such savage grandeur strikes awe and terror into the heart of the viewer, but there is no real danger. Because the sublime is experienced vicari

Francisco Goya THIRD OF MAY, 1808 30-45

1814-1815. Oil on canvas, 8'9" x 13'4" (2.67 x 4.06 m). Museo del Prado, Madrid. In 1808, Napoleon launched a campaign to conquer Spain; he would eventually place his brother, Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844), on the Spanish throne. At first many Spanish citizens, Goya included, welcomed the French, who brought political reform, including a new, more liberal constitution. But on May 2, 1808, a rumor spread through Madrid that the French planned to kill the royal family. The populace rose up against the French, and a day of bloody street fighting ensued, followed by mass arrests. Hundreds were herded into a convent and then executed by a French firing squad before dawn on May 3. In Goya's impassioned memorial to that slaughter (FIG. 30-45), the violent gestures of the defenseless rebels and the mechanical efficiency of the tight row of executioners in the firing squad create a nightmarish tableau. A spotlighted victim in a brilliant white shirt confronts his faceless killers with o

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres LARGE ODALISQUE 30-57

1814. Oil on canvas, approx. 35 x 64" (88.9 x 162.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. During Napoleon's campaigns against the British in North Africa, the French discovered the exotic Near East. Upper-middle-class European men were particularly attracted to the institution of the harem, partly as a reaction against the egalitarian demands of women of their own class that had been unleashed by the French Revolution. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), perhaps David's most famous student, served as director of the French Academy in Rome between 1835 and 1841. As a teacher and theorist, Ingres became one of the most influential artists of his time. His paintings offer another variant on the Romantic and Neoclassical, combining the precise drawing, formal idealization, Classical composition, and graceful lyricism of Raphael (SEE Figure 21-7) with an interest in creating sensual and erotically charged images that appeal to viewers' emotions. Although Ingres fervently desire

Théodore Géricault THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA 30-51

1818-1819. Oil on canvas, 16'1" x 23'6" (4.9 x 7.16 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. The life of Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), a major proponent of French Romanticism, was cut short by his untimely death at age 32, but his brief career had a large impact on the early nineteenth-century Parisian art world. After a short stay in Rome in 1816-1817, where he discovered the art of Michelangelo, Géricault returned to Paris determined to paint a great modern history painting. He chose for his subject the scandalous and sensational shipwreck of the Medusa (FIG. 30-51). In 1816, this French ship bound for Senegal ran aground close to its destination. Its captain, an incompetent aristocrat commissioned by the newly restored monarchy of Louis XVIII, reserved all six lifeboats for himself, his officers, and several government representatives. The remaining 152 passengers were set adrift on a makeshift raft. When those on the raft were rescued 13 days later, just 15 had survived, some o

Théodore Géricault STUDY OF HANDS AND FEET

1818-1819. Oil on canvas, 20½ x 25" (52 x 64 cm). Musée Fabre, Montpellier. Géricault also made separate studies of many of the figures, as well as of actual corpses, severed heads, and dissected limbs (FIG. 30-54) supplied to him by friends who worked at a nearby hospital. For several months, according to Géricault's biographer, "his studio was a kind of morgue. He kept cadavers there until they were half-decomposed, and insisted on working in this charnel-house atmosphere ..." However, he did not use cadavers for any specific figures in The Raft of the Medusa. Rather, he traced the outline of his final composition onto its large canvas, and then painted each body directly from a living model, gradually building up his composition figure by figure. He drew from corpses and body parts in his studio to make sure that he understood the nature of death and its impact on the human form. Indeed, Géricault did not describe the actual physical condition of the survivors on th

Théodore Géricault THE SIGHTING OF THE ARGUS 30-52

1818. Pen and ink on paper, 13¾ x 16⅛" (34.9 x 41 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Géricault prepared his painting carefully, using each of the prescribed steps for history painting in the French academic system. The work was the culmination of extensive study and experimentation. An early pen drawing (The Sighting of the Argus, FIG. 30-52) depicts the survivors' hopeful response to the appearance of the rescue ship on the horizon at the extreme left. Their excitement is in contrast to the mournful scene of a man grieving over a dead youth on the right side of the raft. The drawing is quick, spontaneous, and bursting with energy.

Théodore Géricault THE SIGHTING OF THE ARGUS 30-53

1818. Pen and ink, sepia wash on paper, 8⅛ x 11¼" (20.6 x 11¼" (20.6 x 28.6 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. A later pen-and-wash drawing (FIG. 30-53) reverses the composition, creates greater unity among the figures, and establishes the modeling of their bodies. This is primarily a study of light and shade. Other studies would have focused on further analyses of the composition, arrangement of figures, and overall color scheme. The drawings look ahead to the final composition of The Raft of the Medusa, but both still lack the figure of Jean Charles at the apex of the painting, and the dead and dying figures at the extreme left and lower right, which fill out the composition's base.

John Constable THE HAY WAIN 30-61

1821. Oil on canvas, 51¼ x 73" (130.2 x 185.4 cm). National Gallery, London. Gift of Henry Vaughan, 1886. John Constable (1776-1837), the son of a successful miller, claimed that the quiet domestic landscape of his youth in southern England had made him a painter before he ever picked up a paintbrush. Although he was trained at the Royal Academy, he was equally influenced by the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape-painting tradition (SEE Figure 23-45). After moving to London in 1816, he dedicated himself to painting monumental views of the agricultural landscape (known as "six-footers"), which he considered as important as history painting. Constable's commitment to contemporary English subjects was so strong that he opposed the establishment of the English National Gallery of Art in 1832 on the grounds that it might distract painters by enticing them to paint foreign or ancient themes in unnatural styles. THE HAY WAIN (FIG. 30-61) of 1821 shows a quiet, slow-moving sce

Karl Friedrich Schinkel ALTES MUSEUM, BERLIN 30-68

1822-1830. In several European capitals in the early nineteenth century, the Neoclassical designs of national museums positioned these buildings as both temples of culture and expressions of nationalism. Perhaps the most significant was the ALTES MUSEUM (Old Museum) in Berlin, designed in 1822 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) and built between 1824 and 1830 (FIG. 30-68). Commissioned to display the royal art collection, the building was built directly across from the Baroque royal palace on an island in the Spree River in the heart of the city. The museum's imposing façade consists of a screen of 18 Ionic columns raised on a platform with a central staircase. Attentive to the problem of lighting artworks on both the ground and the upper floors, Schinkel created interior courtyards on either side of a central rotunda. Tall windows on the museum's outer walls provide natural illumination, and partition walls perpendicular to the windows eliminate glare on the varnished

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres PORTRAIT OF MADAME DÉSIRÉ RAOUL-ROCHETTE 30-58

1830. Graphite on paper, 12⅝ x 9½" (32.2 x 24.1 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art. Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund (1927.437). Madame Raoul-Rochette (1790-1878), née Antoinette-Claude Houdon, was the youngest daughter of the famous Neoclassical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (SEE FIG. 30-42). In 1810, at age 20, she married Désiré Raoul-Rochette, a noted archaeologist, who later became the secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1816 to replace the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and a close friend of Ingres. Ingres's drawing of Madame Raoul-Rochette is inscribed to her husband ("Ingres to his friend and colleague, Mr. Raoul-Rochette"), whose portrait Ingres also drew around the same time. Although Ingres complained that making portraits was a "considerable waste of time," his skill in rendering physical likeness with scintillating clarity and in mimicking in paint the material qualities of clothing, hairstyles, and j

Eugène Delacroix LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE: JULY 28, 1830 30-55

1830. Oil on canvas, 8'6½" x 10'8" (2.6 x 3.25 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris. The French novelist Stendhal characterized the Romantic spirit when he wrote, "Romanticism in all the arts is what represents the men of today and not the men of those remote, heroic times which probably never existed anyway." Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), the most important Romantic painter in Paris after Géricault's death, depicted contemporary heroes and victims engaged in the violent struggles of the times. In 1830, he created what has become his masterpiece, LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE: JULY 28, 1830 (FIG. 30-55), a painting that encapsulated the history of France after the fall of Napoleon. When Napoleon was defeated in 1815, the victorious neighboring nations reimposed the French monarchy under Louis XVIII (ruled 1815-1824), brother of Louis XVI. The king's power was limited by a constitution and a parliament, but the government became more conservative as years passed, undoing many revo

Honoré Daumier RUE TRANSNONAIN, LE 15 AVRIL 1834 30-60

1834. Lithograph,11 x 17⅜" (28 x 44 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund (1982.120.4). In the wake of the 1830 revolution in Paris, Daumier began supplying pictures to La Caricature, an anti-monarchist, pro-republican magazine, and the equally partisan Le Charivari, the first daily newspaper illustrated with lithographs. His 1834 lithograph calling attention to the atrocities on RUE TRANSNONAIN (FIG. 30-60) was part of a series of large prints sold by subscription to raise money for Le Charivari's legal defense fund and thus further freedom of the press. A government guard had been shot and killed on the rue Transnonain—only a few blocks from Daumier's home—during a demonstration by workers, and in response, the riot squad killed everyone in the building where they believed the marksman was hiding. Daumier shows the bloody aftermath of the event: an innocent family disturbed from their sleep and then murdered. The wife lies in the shadows to

Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT, LONDON 30-66

1836-1860. Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, London. Pugin published two influential books in 1836 and 1841, in which he argued that the Gothic style of Westminster Abbey was the embodiment of true English genius. In his view, the Greek and Roman Classical orders were stone replications of earlier wooden forms and therefore fell short of the true principles of stone construction. The British claimed the Gothic as part of their patrimony and erected many Gothic Revival buildings during the nineteenth century, prominent among them the new HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT (FIG. 30-66). After Westminster Palace burned in 1834 in the fire so memorably painted by Turner (SEE Figure 30-63), the British government announced a competition for a new building to be designed in the English Perpendicular Gothic style, harmonizing with the neighboring thirteenth-century church of Westminster Abbey where English monarchs are crowned. Charles Barry (1795-1860) and Augustus Welby

Thomas Cole THE OXBOW

1836. Oil on canvas, 51½ x 76" (1.31 x 1.94 m). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908 (08.228). Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was one of the first great professional landscape painters in the United States. Cole emigrated from England at age 17 and by 1820 was working as an itinerant portrait painter. With the help of a patron, he traveled in Europe between 1829 and 1832, and upon his return to the United States he settled in New York and became a successful landscape painter. He frequently worked from observation when making sketches for his paintings. In fact, his self-portrait is tucked into the foreground of THE OXBOW (FIG. 30-64), where he turns back to look at us while pausing from his work. He is executing an oil sketch on a portable easel, but like most landscape painters of his generation, he produced his large finished works in the studio during the winter months. Painting of the Conneticut River. Painting, originally titled "View from Mount H

Richard Upjohn TRINITY CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY 30-67

1839-1846. Most Gothic Revival buildings of this period, however, were churches, usually either Roman Catholic or Anglican (Episcopalian in the United States). The British-born American architect Richard Upjohn (1802-1878) designed many of the most important American examples, including TRINITY CHURCH in New York (FIG. 30-67). With its tall spire, long nave, and squared-off chancel, Trinity Church quotes the early fourteenth-century British Gothic style particularly admired by Anglicans and Episcopalians. Every detail is rendered with historical accuracy, but the vaults are plaster, not masonry. The stained-glass windows above the altar were among the earliest of their kind in the United States.

François Rude DEPARTURE OF THE VOLUNTEERS OF 1792 (THE MARSEILLAISE) 30-56

Arc de Triomphe, Place de l'Étoile, Paris. 1833-1836. Limestone, height approx. 42′ (12.8 m). Artists working for the July Monarchy increasingly used the more dramatic subjects and styles of Romanticism to represent the 1830 revolution, just as Neoclassical principles had been used to represent the previous one. Early in the regime, the minister of the interior decided, as an act of national reconciliation, to complete the triumphal arch on the Champs-Élysées in Paris begun by Napoleon in 1806. François Rude (1784-1855) received the commission for a sculpture to decorate the main arcade with a scene that commemorated the volunteer army that had halted a Prussian invasion in 1792-1793. Beneath the urgent exhortations of the winged figure of Liberty, the volunteers surge forward, some nude, others in Classical armor (FIG. 30-56). Despite these Classical details, the overall impact is Romantic. The crowded, excited group stirred patriotism in Paris, and the sculpture quic

Anton Raphael Mengs PARNASSUS 30-13

Ceiling fresco in the Villa Albani, Rome. 1761. Winckelmann's closest friend and colleague in Rome was a fellow German, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779). In 1761, Cardinal Albani commissioned Mengs to paint the ceiling of the great gallery in his new villa. To our eyes Mengs's PARNASSUS ceiling (FIG. 30-13) may seem stilted, but it is nevertheless significant as the first full expression of Neoclassicism in painting. The scene is taken from Classical mythology. Mount Parnassus in central Greece was where the ancients believed Apollo (god of poetry, music, and the arts) and the nine Muses (female personifications of artistic inspiration) resided. Mengs depicted Apollo—practically nude and holding a lyre and olive branch to represent artistic accomplishment—standing at the compositional center, his pose copied from the famous Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican collection, one of Winckelmann's favorite Greek statues. Around Apollo are the Muses and their mother, Mne

Thomas Jefferson MONTICELLO 30-70

Charlottesville, Virginia. 1769-1782, 1796-1809. Thomas Jefferson's graceful designs for the mountaintop home he called MONTICELLO (Italian for "little mountain"), near Charlottesville, Virginia, employ Neoclassical architecture in a private setting (FIG. 30-70). Jefferson began the first phase of construction (1769-1782) when Virginia was still a British colony, using the English Palladian style (see Chiswick House, Figure 30-15). By 1796, however, he had become disenchanted with both the English and their architecture and had come to admire French architecture while serving as the American minister in Paris. He then embarked upon a second building campaign at Monticello (1796-1809), enlarging the house and redesigning its brick and wood exterior so that its two stories appeared from the outside as one large story in the manner then fashionable in Paris. The modern worlds of England, France, and America, as well as the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, come togethe

Abraham Darby III SEVERN RIVER BRIDGE 30-22

Coalbrookdale, England. 1779. In 1779, Abraham Darby III built a bridge over the Severn River (FIG. 30-22) at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England, a town typical of industrial England, with factories and workers' housing filling the valley. Built primarily for function, the bridge demonstrated a need for newer, better transportation routes for moving industrial goods. Its importance lies in the fact that it is probably the first large-scale example of the use of structural metal in bridge building: Iron struts replace the heavy, hand-cut stone voussoirs of earlier bridges. Cast iron construction--the compressive strength of iron is 72 times greater than that of limestone. This virtue allowed for the building of lighter, stronger structures using cast-iron. In 1779, Englishman Abraham Darby III used cast iron in his Severn River Bridge, which marked the first use of structural metal in bridge building. Built primarily for function, the bridge resulted from a need for newer, bette

GEORGIAN SILVER 30-17

Elizabeth Morley: George III toddy ladle, 1802; Alice and George Burrows: George III snuffbox, 1802; Elizabeth Cooke: George III salver, 1767; Ann and Peter Bateman: George III goblet, 1797; Hester Bateman: George III double beaker, 1790. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Silver collection assembled by Nancy Valentine. Purchased with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Grace and family. The interiors of country houses like Chiswick and Stourhead were designed partly as settings for the art collections of British aristocrats, which included antiquities as well as a range of Neoclassical paintings, sculpture, and decorative wares. Objects are examples of Neoclassical Georgian silver. Georgian period encompasses the years from 1714 to 1830, when Great Britain was ruled by four successive kings named George. During this time, Britian became the industrial leader of Europe. and witnessed the rapid development of a middle class. The era also saw a stylistic shift from

William Hogarth THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT 30-23

From Marriage à la Mode, 1743-1745. Oil on canvas, 27½ x 35¾" (69.9 x 90.8 cm). National Gallery, London. Between 1743 and 1745, Hogarth produced his Marriage à la Mode suite, inspired by Joseph Addison's 1712 essay in the Spectator promoting the concept of marriage based on love rather than on aristocratic machinations. In his series of paintings and later prints, Hogarth portrays the sordid story and sad end of an arranged marriage between the children of an impoverished aristocrat and a social-climbing member of the newly wealthy merchant class. In the opening scene of the series, THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT (FIG. 30-23), the cast of characters is assembled to legalize the union. At the right of the painting sits Lord Squanderfield, raising his gout-ridden right foot on a footstool as he points to his lengthy family tree (with a few wilted branches), which goes all the way back to medieval knights, as if to say that the pile of money in front of him on the table is not payment

Giovanni Battista Piranesi VIEW OF THE PANTHEON, ROME 30-12

From the Views of Rome series, first printed in 1756. Etching, 18 9⁄16 x 27⅛" (47.2 x 69.7 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, the Arthur Rose Collection. (2012.159.11.60) The city of Rome was also captured in vedute for tourists and armchair travelers, notably by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Trained in Venice as an architect, he moved to Rome in 1740 and studied etching, eventually establishing a publishing house and becoming one of the century's most successful printmakers. Piranesi produced a large series of vedute of ancient Roman monuments, whose ruined, deteriorating condition made them even more interesting for his customers. His VIEW OF THE PANTHEON (FIG. 30-12) demonstrates his careful study of this great work of ancient Roman architecture, which seems even more monumental in relation to the dramatic clouds that frame it and the small figures who surround it on the ground, admiring its grandeur from all directions.

Canaletto THE DOGE'S PALACE AND THE RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI 30-11

Late 1730s. Oil on canvas, 24⅛ x 39¼" (61.3 x 99.8 cm). National Gallery, London. Wynn Ellis Bequest 1876 (NG 940). A painted city view was by far the most prized souvenir of a stay in Venice. Two kinds of views were produced in Venice: the capriccio ("caprice," plural capricci), an imaginary landscape or cityscape in which the artist mixed actual structures, such as famous ruins, with imaginary ones to create attractive compositions; and the veduta ("view," plural vedute), a more naturalistic rendering of famous views and buildings, well-known tourist attractions, and local color in the form of tiny figures of Venetian people and visiting tourists. Vedute often encompassed panoramic views of famous landmarks, as in THE DOGE'S PALACE AND THE RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI (FIG. 30-11) by the Venetian artist Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto (1697-1768). It was thought that Canaletto used a camera obscura (see Chapter 31) to render his vedute with exact topographical accu

Josiah Wedgwood THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER 30-18

Made at the Wedgwood Etruria factory, Staffordshire, England. 1790-1795. White jasperware body with a mid-blue dip and white relief, height 18″ (45.7 cm). Relief of The Apotheosis of Homer adapted from a plaque by John Flaxman, Jr., 1778. Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Staffordshire, England. The most successful producer of Neoclassical decorative art was Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795). In 1769, near his native village of Burslem, he opened a pottery factory called Etruria after the ancient Etruscan civilization in central Italy known for its pottery. His production-line shop had several divisions, each with its own kilns and workers trained in diverse specialties. A talented chemist, in the mid-1770s Wedgwood perfected a fine-grained, unglazed, colored pottery which he called jasperware. His most popular jasperware featured white figures against a blue ground, as in THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER jar (FIG. 30-18). The low-relief decoration was designed by the sculptor Joh

Johann Balthasar Neumann INTERIOR, CHURCH OF THE VIERZEHNHEILIGEN 30-9

Near Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany. 1743-1772. The beginning of the Rococo coincided with the waning importance of the Church as a major patron of art in northern Europe. Although churches continued to be built and decorated, the dominance of both the Church and the hereditary aristocracy as patrons diminished significantly. The Rococo proved, however, to be a powerful vehicle for spiritual experience. Several important churches were built in the style, showing how visual appearance can be tailored to a variety of social meanings. One of the most opulent Rococo churches is dedicated to the Vierzehnheiligen (the "Fourteen Auxiliary Saints" or "Holy Helpers"); it was designed by Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753) and constructed in Bavaria between 1743 and 1772. The plan (FIG. 30-8), based on six interpenetrating oval spaces of varying sizes around a vaulted ovoid center, recalls that of Borromini's Baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome (SEE Figure 23-

MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC 30-48

Near Tucson, Arizona. 1784-1797. In New Spain, colonial architects continued to draw on Spanish architecture and earlier colonial buildings, designing retablo façades for Latin American churches well into the eighteenth century. A fine example is the MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC, in the North American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona (FIG. 30-48). In 1700, the Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino (1644-1711) began laying the foundations for this church, using stone quarried locally by Indigenous people of the Pima nation. The Pima had already laid out the desert site with irrigation ditches so there would be running water in every room and workshop of the new mission. In 1768, before construction began, the site was turned over to the Franciscans as part of a larger change in Spanish policy toward the Jesuits. Father Kino's vision was eventually realized by the Spanish Franciscan Juan Bautista Velderrain, who arrived at the mission site in 1776. This is a large church—99 feet

Francisco Goya THE SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS 30-43

No. 43 from Los Caprichos (The Caprices). 1796-1798; published 1799. Etching and aquatint, 8½ x 6" (21.6 x 15.2 cm). Yale University Art Gallery. Bequest of Ralph Kirkpatrick, Hon. M.A. 1965 (1984.54.92.43). After printing about 300 sets of this series, Goya offered them for sale in 1799. He withdrew them two days later without explanation. Historians believe that he was probably warned by the Church that if he did not do so he might have to appear before the Inquisition because of the unflattering portrayal of the Church in some of the etchings. In 1803, Goya donated the plates to the Royal Printing Office. Soon after the French Revolution, Charles IV, threatened by the possibility of similar social upheaval in Spain, reinstituted the Inquisition, halted reform, and even prohibited the entry of French books into Spain. Goya responded to this new situation by creating a series of prints aimed at the ordinary people, with whom he identified. The theme of Los Caprichos (The Caprices

Joseph Mallord William Turner THE BURNING OF THE HOUSES OF LORDS AND COMMONS, 16TH OCTOBER 1834 30-63

Oil on canvas, 36¼ x 48½ (92.1 x 123.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928. Closer to home, Turner based another dramatic and thrilling work on the tragic fire that severely damaged London's historic Parliament building. Blazing color and light dominate THE BURNING OF THE HOUSES OF LORDS AND COMMONS, 16TH OCTOBER 1834 (FIG. 30-63), and the foreground of the painting shows the south bank of the Thames packed with spectators. This fire was a national tragedy; these buildings had witnessed some of the most important events in English history. Turner himself was witness to the scene and hurriedly made watercolor sketches on site; within a few months he had the large painting ready for exhibition. The painting's true theme is the brilliant light and color that spirals across the canvas in the explosive energy of loose brushwork, explaining why Turner was called "the painter of light."

Germain Boffrand SALON DE LA PRINCESSE, HÔTEL DE SOUBISE 30-2

Paris. Begun 1732. The French court was happy to escape its confinement in the rural palace of Versailles and relocate to Paris. There courtiers built elegant town houses (in French, hôtels), whose social rooms may have been smaller than at Versailles, but were no less lavishly decorated. These became the center of social life for aristocrats who cultivated witty exchanges, elegant manners, and a playfully luxurious life specifically dedicated to pleasure, leisure, and sensuality that frequently masked social insecurity and ambivalence. Salons, as the rooms and the events held in them were known, were intimate, fashionable, and intellectual gatherings, often including splendid entertainments that mimicked in miniature the rituals of the Versailles court. The salons were hosted on a weekly basis by accomplished, educated women of the upper class including Mesdames de Staël, de La Fayette, de Sévigné, and du Châtelet. The Rococo style cannot be fully appreciated through single o

Church of São Francisco de Assis 30-46

São João del Rei, Brazil. 1774. O Aleijandinho (the nickname of Antônio Francisco Lisboa, meaning "the little cripple"), the child of a Portuguese architect and a West African slave, was one of the most famous eighteenth-century artists in colonial Latin America. His nickname derives from a serious disability. At age thirty-nine, he began to lose his fingers and toes to leprosy or syphilis, but he continued to work by walking on his knees and using the assistance of slaves in his workshop, who strapped tools to his arms as he asked for them. O Aleijandinho and his workshop produced independent works of polychromed wood sculpture, but he also designed and carved the decorations of church façades. Based on the churches he designed in the prosperous Minas Gerais region of Brazil, O Aleijandinho is credited for the creation of a Brazilian form of Rococo that would remain popular in the colony into the nineteenth century. The façade of the CHURCH OF SÃO FRANCISCO DE ASSIS in

Horace Walpole and others STRAWBERRY HILL 30-20

Twickenham, England. 1749-1776. The Gothic Revival emerged alongside Neoclassicism in Britain in the mid eighteenth century and spread to several other nations after 1800. An early advocate of the Gothic Revival was the conservative politician and author Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto, widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. This tale of mysterious and supernatural happenings set in the Middle Ages almost single-handedly launched a fashion for the Gothic. In 1749, Walpole began to remodel his country house, STRAWBERRY HILL, transforming it into the kind of Gothic castle that he described in his fiction (FIG. 30-20). Working with several friends and architects, over the next 30 years he added decorative crenellations (higher and lower sections alternating along the top of a wall), tracery windows, and turrets. The interior, too, was redesigned according to Walpole's fanciful Gothic interpretation of the British historical past. His P

Richard Boyle (Lord Burlington) EXTERIOR VIEW OF CHISWICK HOUSE 30-15A

West London, England. 1724-1729. Interior decoration (1726-1729) and new gardens (1730-1740) by William Kent. Designed in 1724 by its owner, Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington (1695-1753), CHISWICK HOUSE (FIG. 30-15) is a fine example of British Neo-Palladianism. In visiting Palladio's country houses in Italy, Burlington was particularly struck by the Villa Rotonda (SEE Figure 21-35, Figure 21-36), which inspired his design for Chiswick House. The plan shares the bilateral symmetry of Palladio's villa, although its central core is octagonal rather than round and there are only two entrances. The main entrance, flanked here by matching staircases, is a Roman temple front, an imposing entrance for the earl. Chiswick's elevation is characteristically Palladian, with a main floor resting on a basement, and tall, rectangular windows with triangular pediments. The few, crisp details seem perfectly suited to the refined proportions of the whole. The result is a l

Honoré Daumier THE PRINT LOVERS 30-59

c. 1863-1865. Watercolor, black pencil, black ink, gray wash, 10⅛ x 12⅛" (25.8 x 30.7 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Lithography, invented in the mid-1790s, is based on the natural antagonism between oil and water. The artist draws on a flat surface—traditionally, fine-grained stone (lithos is Greek for "stone")—with a greasy substance. After the drawing is completed, the stone's surface is wiped first with water and then with an oil-based ink. The ink adheres to the greasy areas but not to the damp ones. After a series of such steps, a sheet of paper is laid face down on the inked stone, pressed against it with a scraper, and then rolled through a flatbed press. This transfers ink from stone to paper, thus making lithography (like relief and intaglio) a direct method of creating a printed image. Unlike earlier processes, however, grease-based lithography enables the artist to capture the subtleties of drawing with crayon and a liquid mixture called tusche. Francisco