AH 112

Angelica Kauffman, Cornelia Presenting Her Children as Her Treasures, ca. 1785 Neoclassicism

- The theme of the painting is the virtue of Cornelia, - children are treasures, not money - a characteristic example of the Enlightenment embrace of the values of the classical world

François de Cuvilliés, Hall of Mirrors, Germany, early 18th century. Rococo

- displays the Rococo architectural style -height, dazzling the eye with the organic interplay of mirrors, crystal, and stucco relief.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1766 Rococo

- exemplifies Rococo style. Pastel colors and soft light complement a scene in which a young lady flirtatiously kicks off her shoe at a statue of Cupid while her lover gazes at her.

Germain Boffrand, Salon de la Princesse, france, 1737-1740. Rococo

- featuring sinuous curves, gilded moldings and mirrors, small sculptures and paintings, and floral ornamentation, -were the center of Parisian social and intellectual life.

François Boucher, Cupid a Captive, 1754 Rococo

- the dynamic play of crisscrossing diagonals, curvilinear forms, and slanting recessions—to create his masterful composition. - a pyramid of rosy infant and female flesh and fluttering draperies set off against a cool, leafy background.

Giambattista Tiepolo, Apotheosis of the Pisani Family, ceiling painting, 1761-1762. Rococo

-A master of illusionistic ceiling painting in the Baroque tradition, -adopted the bright and cheerful colors and weightless figures of Rococo easel paintings for huge frescoes.

Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717. Rococo

-the first great fête galante painting, fête galante ("amorous festival) Fête galante paintings depicted the outdoor entertainment or amusements of French high society. - depict the outdoor amusements of French upper-class society. -The haze of color suited the new Rococo taste and was the hallmark of the Royal Academy's Rubénistes.

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery

A characteristic example of Wright's work is A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery. In this painting, a scholar demonstrates a mechanical model of the solar system called an orrery, in which each planet (represented by a metal orb) revolves around the sun (a lamp) at the correct relative velocity. Light from the lamp pours forth from in front of the boy silhouetted in the foreground to create shadows that heighten the drama of the scene. Curious children crowd close to the tiny orbs representing the planets within the curving bands symbolizing their orbits. An earnest listener makes notes, while the lone woman seated at the left and the two gentlemen at the right pay rapt attention. Scientific knowledge mesmerizes everyone in Wright's painting. The artist visually reinforced the fascination with the orrery by composing his image in a circular fashion, echoing the device's orbital design. The postures and gazes of all the participants and observers focus attention on the cosmic model. Wright scrupulously and accurately rendered every detail of the figures, the mechanisms of the orrery, and even the books and curtain in the shadowy background. Figure 26-12 Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery, ca. 1763-1765. Oil on canvas, . Derby Museums and Art Gallery, Derby. Wright specialized in dramatically lit paintings celebrating the modern scientific instruments of the Industrial Revolution. Here, a scholar demonstrates an orrery, a revolving model of the solar system.

The Oxbow

A splendid scene opens before the viewer, dominated by the lazy oxbow-shaped turning of the Connecticut River. Cole divided the composition in two, with the dark, stormy wilderness on the left and the more developed civilization on the right. The minuscule artist wearing a top hat in the bottom center of the painting, dwarfed by the landscape's scale, turns to the viewer as if to ask for input in deciding the country's future course. Cole's depictions of expansive wilderness incorporated reflections and moods romantically appealing to the public. Figure 27-23 Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on canvas, . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908). Cole championed the idea of America having a landscape distinct from Europe's. Here, he contrasted dark wilderness on the left and sunlit civilization on the right, with a minuscule painter at the bottom center.

The Slave Ship

Figure 27-22 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Henry Lillie Pierce Fund). The essence of Turner's innovative style is the emotive power of color. He released color from any defining outlines to express both the forces of nature and the painter's emotional response to them.

Rue Transnonain

Figure 27-29 Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834, 1834. Lithograph, . Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund). Daumier used the recent invention of lithography to reach a wide audience for his social criticism and political protest. This print records the horrific 1834 massacre in a workers' housing block.

Coronation of Napoleon

Figure 27-3 Jacques-Louis David, Coronation of Napoleon, 1805-1808. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. At his patron's insistence, David recorded Napoleon at his 1804 coronation crowning his wife with the pope as witness, thus underscoring the emperor's authority and independence from the Church.

A Harvest of Death

As O'Sullivan's photograph modulates from the precise clarity of the bodies of Union soldiers in the foreground, boots stolen and pockets picked, to the indistinct corpses in the distance, the suggestion of innumerable other dead soldiers is unavoidable. This "harvest" is far more sobering and depressing than that in Winslow Homer's Civil War painting, Veteran in a New Field (Fig. 27-35). Though it was years before photolithography could reproduce photographs such as this one in newspapers, photographers exhibited them publicly. They made an impression that newsprint engravings never could. Figure 27-52 Timothy O'Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863. Negative by Timothy O'Sullivan. Albumen print by Alexander Gardner, . New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Rare Books and Manuscript Division), New York. Wet-plate technology enabled photographers to record historical events on the spot—and to comment on the high price of war, as in this photograph of dead Union soldiers at Gettysburg in 1863.

Liberty Leading the People

Based on the July 27-29, 1830, Parisian uprising against Charles X (r. 1824-1830), it is at once a record of a contemporaneous event and a Romantic allegory. Dominating the composition is the bare-breasted personification of Liberty defiantly thrusting forth the republic's tricolor banner as she urges the masses to fight on. She wears a scarlet Phrygian cap (the symbol of a freed slave in antiquity), reinforcing the urgency of this struggle. Arrayed around Liberty are bold Parisian types—the street boy brandishing his pistols, the menacing worker with a cutlass, and the intellectual dandy in top hat brandishing a musket. As in Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 27-1), dead bodies are all around. In the background, the towers of Notre-Dame (Fig. 13-10) rise through the smoke and haze. The painter's inclusion of this recognizable Parisian landmark announces the specificity of locale and event, balancing historical fact with poetic allegory. Figure 27-16 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. In a balanced mix of history and poetic allegory, Delacroix captured the passion and energy of the 1830 revolution in this painting of Liberty leading the Parisian uprising against Charles X.

Burial of Atala

Burial of Atala (Fig. 27-6) by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) is an important bridge between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Girodet based the painting on The Genius of Christianity, a novel by François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848). The section of the novel dealing with Atala appeared as an excerpt a year before the publication of the entire book in 1802. Both the excerpt and the novel were enormously successful, and as a result, Atala became almost a cult figure. The exoticism and eroticism integral to the narrative accounted in large part for the public's interest in The Genius of Christianity. Set in Louisiana, Chateaubriand's story focuses on the young Native American Chactas and Atala, a Christian girl of mixed European and Native American descent, who had promised her mother on her deathbed that, like the Virgin Mary, she would remain chaste her entire life. However, she falls in love with Chactas, and they run away together through the wilderness. Erotic passion permeates the story, and Atala finally commits suicide rather than break her oath. Girodet's painting depicts this tragedy. Atala's grief-stricken lover, Chactas, buries the heroine in the shadow of a cross. Assisting in the burial is a cloaked priest, whose presence is appropriate given Chateaubriand's emphasis on the revival of Christianity (and the Christianization of the New World) in his novel. Like Gros's depiction of the exotic Muslim world of Jaffa (Fig. 27-5), Girodet's representation of Native American lovers in the Louisiana wilderness appealed to the public's fascination (whetted by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803) with what it perceived as the passion and primitivism of native life in the New World. Burial of Atala speaks here to emotions, rather than inviting philosophical meditation or revealing some grand order of nature and form. Unlike David's appeal in Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 26-26) to feelings that inspire public action, the appeal here is to the viewer's private world of fantasy and emotion. But Girodet-Trioson also occasionally addressed contemporary themes in his work, as he did in his portrait (Fig. 27-6a) of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a French legislator and former slave. Figure 27-6 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Burial of Atala, 1808. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Girodet's depiction of Native American lovers in the Louisiana wilderness appealed to the French public's fascination with what it perceived as the passion and primitivism of the New World.

Charles I at the Hunt

Charles I at the Hunt (Fig. 25-5), the ill-fated English king stands on a hillock with the Thames River in the background. An equerry and a page attend him. The portrait is a stylish image of relaxed authority, as if the king is out for a casual ride in his park, but no one can mistake the regal poise and the air of absolute authority that Charles's Parliament resented and was soon to rise against. Here, the king turns his back on his attendants as he surveys his domain. Van Dyck's placement of the monarch is exceedingly artful. He stands off center, but as the sole figure seen against the sky and with the branches of the trees pointing to him, he is the immediate focus of the viewer's attention, whose gaze the king returns. In this masterful composition, Van Dyck also managed to make Charles I, who was of short stature, seem taller than his attendants and even his horse. The painter also portrayed the king looking down on the observer, befitting his exalted position. Figure 25-5 Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I at the Hunt, ca. 1635. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Van Dyck specialized in court portraiture. In this painting, he depicted the absolutist monarch Charles I at a sharp angle so that the king, a short man, appears to be looking down at the viewer.

Ophelia

Figure 27-40 John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852. Oil on canvas, . Tate Gallery, London. Millet was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose members refused to be limited to the contemporary scenes that strict Realists portrayed. The drowning of Ophelia is a Shakespearean subject.

Grace

Figure 26-14 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Grace, 1740. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Chardin embraced naturalism and celebrated the simple goodness of ordinary people, especially mothers and children, who lived in a world far from the frivolous Rococo salons of Paris.

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait

Figure 26-16 Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait, 1790. Oil on canvas, . Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Vigée-Lebrun was one of the few women admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In this self-portrait, she depicted herself confidently painting the likeness of Queen Marie Antoinette.

the park at Stourhead

Figure 26-30 Henry Flitcroft and Henry Hoare, the park at Stourhead, England, 1743-1765. Flitcroft's design for Hoare's Wiltshire estate included a replica of the Pantheon overlooking an artificial lake, and a grotto alluding to Aeneas's journey to the Underworld from Lake Avernus.

Departure of the Volunteers of 1792

Figure 27-18 François Rude, Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (La Marseillaise), northeast pier relief of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France, 1833-1836. Limestone, high. This historical-allegorical sculpture features the Roman war goddess Bellona, but the violent motion, jagged contours, and densely packed masses typify Romantic painting compositions.

Still Life in Studio

Figure 27-48 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Still Life in Studio, 1837. Daguerreotype, . Société Française de Photographie, Paris. One of the first plates Daguerre produced after perfecting his new photographic process was this still life, in which he was able to capture amazing detail and finely graduated tones of light and shadow.

Two Women at the Bath

Figure 28-10 Torii Kiyonaga, detail of Two Women at the Bath, ca. 1780. Color woodblock print; full print , detail . Musée Guimet, Paris.

The Potato Eaters

Figure 28-17a Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885.

Impression: Sunrise

Figure 28-2 Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Oil on canvas, . Musée Marmottan, Paris. Fascinated by reflected sunlight on water, Monet broke with traditional studio practice and painted his "impression" en plein air, using short brushstrokes of pure color on canvas without any preliminary sketch.

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal

Figure 28-3 Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun), 1894. Oil on canvas, . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Theodore M. Davis Collection, bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915). Monet exhibited 20 paintings of Rouen Cathedral in Paul Durand-Ruel's commercial art gallery in Paris. The canvases show the facade at different times of day and under various climatic conditions.

Walking Man

Figure 28-33 Auguste Rodin, Walking Man, 1905. Bronze, high. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. In this study for a statue of Saint John the Baptist, Rodin depicted a headless and armless figure in midstride. Walking Man demonstrates Rodin's mastery of anatomy and ability to capture transitory motion.

The Gates of Hell

Figure 28-34 Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, 1880-1900 (cast in 1917). Bronze, . Musée Rodin, Paris. Rodin's most ambitious work, inspired by Dante's Inferno and Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (Fig. 21-10), presents nearly 200 tormented sinners in relief below The Three Shades and The Thinker.

The Tub

Figure 28-9 Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886. Pastel, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The Tub reveals the influence of Japanese prints, especially the sharp angles that artists such as Kiyonaga used in representing figures. Degas translated his Japanese model into the Impressionist mode.

Red Room

Figure 29-3 Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908-1909. Oil on canvas, . State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Matisse believed that painters should choose compositions and colors that express their feelings. Here, the table and wall seem to merge because they are the same color and have identical patterning.

Improvisation 28 (German Expressionism)

Figure 29-7 Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912. Oil on canvas, . Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937). The theories of Einstein and Rutherford convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance. He was one of the first painters to reject representation in favor of abstraction in his canvases.

The Night Café

For van Gogh, the power to create involved the expressive use of color. "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly."Footnote Color in painting, he argued, is "not locally true from the point of view of the delusive realist, but color suggesting some emotion of an ardent temperament."Footnote "[It is better for a painter to] start from the colors on his palette than from the colors in nature.... I study nature, so as not to do foolish things ... however, I don't care so much whether my color is exactly the same, as long as it looks beautiful on my canvas ... I repeat, starting from one's palette, from one's knowledge of the harmony of colors is quite different from following nature mechanically and servilely."Footnote Some of van Gogh's letters contain vivid descriptions of his paintings, which are invaluable to art historians in gauging his intentions and judging his success. Figure 28-18 Vincent van Gogh, Night Café, 1888. Oil on canvas, . Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark). In Night Café, van Gogh explored ways that colors and distorted forms can express emotions. The thickness, shape, and direction of the brushstrokes create a tactile counterpart to the intense colors.

Third-Class Carriage

His unfinished Third-Class Carriage (Fig. 27-30) provides a glimpse into the cramped and grimy railway cars of the 1860s. The riders are poor and can afford only third-class tickets. First- and second-class carriages had closed compartments, but third-class passengers had to cram together on hard benches stretching from one end of their carriage to the other. The disinherited masses, the victims of 19th-century industrialization, were Daumier's indignant concern. He depicted them in the unposed attitudes and unplanned arrangements of the millions thronging the modern cities—anonymous, insignificant, dumbly patient with a lot they cannot change. Daumier saw people as they ordinarily appeared, their faces vague, impersonal, and blank—unprepared for any observers. He tried to achieve the real by isolating a random collection of the unrehearsed details of human existence from the continuum of ordinary life. Daumier's vision anticipated the spontaneity and candor of scenes captured with the camera at the end of the century. Figure 27-30 Honoré Daumier, Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862. Oil on canvas, . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929). Daumier frequently depicted the plight of the disinherited masses, the victims of 19th-century industrialization. Here, he portrayed the anonymous poor cramped together in a grimy third-class railway carriage.

La Madeleine

In 1807, Napoleon resumed construction of the church of La Madeleine (Mary Magdalene; Fig. 27-2) in Paris, which had been interrupted in 1790. However, the new emperor converted the building into a "temple of glory" for France's imperial armies. (The structure reverted again to a church after Napoleon's defeat and long before its completion in 1842.) Designed by Pierre-Alexandre Barthélémy Vignon (1763-1828), the grandiose Napoleonic temple includes a high podium and a broad flight of stairs leading to a deep porch in the front. These architectural features, coupled with the Corinthian columns, recall Roman temples in France, such as the Maison Carrée (Fig. 7-32) at Nîmes, making La Madeleine a symbolic link between the Napoleonic and Roman empires. Curiously, the building's classical shell surrounds an interior covered by a sequence of three domes, a feature found in Byzantine and Romanesque churches. Vignon in essence clothed a traditional church in the costume of imperial Rome. Figure 27-2 Pierre-Alexandre Barthélémy Vignon, La Madeleine, Paris, France, 1807-1842. Napoleon constructed La Madeleine as a "temple of glory" for his armies. Based on ancient temples (Fig. 7-32) in France, Vignon's Neoclassical design linked the Napoleonic and Roman empires.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

In the 19th century, advances in the sciences contributed to changing theories about color and how people perceive it. Many physicists and chemists immersed themselves in studying optical reception and the behavior of the human eye in response to light of differing wavelengths. They also investigated the psychological dimension of color. These new ideas about color and its perception provided a framework within which artists such as Georges Seurat (Figs. 28-16 and 28-17) worked. Although historians do not know which publications on color Seurat himself read, he no doubt relied on aspects of these evolving theories to develop pointillism. Figure 28-16 Detail of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Fig. 28-17). Seurat's color system—pointillism—involved dividing colors into their component parts and applying those colors to the canvas in tiny dots. The forms become comprehensible only from a distance.

Sleeping Gypsy

In the earlier painting, the recumbent figure occupies a desert world, silent and secret, and dreams beneath a pale, perfectly round moon. In the foreground, a lion resembling a stuffed, but somehow menacing, animal doll sniffs at the gypsy. A critical encounter impends—an encounter of the type that recalls the uneasiness of a person's vulnerable subconscious self during sleep—a subject of central importance to Rousseau's contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Rousseau's art of drama and fantasy has its own sophistication and, after the artist's death, influenced the development of Surrealism (see Surrealism). Figure 28-27 Henri Rousseau, Sleeping Gypsy, 1897. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim). In Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau depicted a doll-like but menacing lion sniffing at a recumbent dreaming figure in a mysterious landscape. The painting suggests the vulnerable subconscious during sleep.

The Kiss

Klimt depicted a kneeling couple locked in an embrace. The setting is ambiguous, an indeterminate place apart from time and space, perhaps a garden of flowers. Moreover, all the viewer sees of the embracing couple is a small segment of each body—and virtually nothing of the man's face. The rest of the canvas dissolves into shimmering, extravagant flat patterning. This patterning has clear ties to Art Nouveau and to the Arts and Crafts movement (discussed later) and also evokes the conflict between two- and three-dimensionality intrinsic to the work of Degas and other modernists. In The Kiss, however, those patterns also signify gender contrasts—rectangles for the man's garment, circles for the woman's. Yet the patterning also unites the two lovers into a single formal entity, underscoring their erotic union. Figure 28-30 Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-1908. Oil on canvas, . Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Klimt's paintings exemplify the Viennese fin-de-siècle spirit. In The Kiss, he revealed only a small segment of each lover's body. The rest of the painting dissolves into shimmering, extravagant flat patterning.

Olympia

Manet's subject was a young white prostitute. (Olympia was a common "professional" name for prostitutes in 19th-century France.) She reclines on a bed that extends across the full width of the painting (and beyond) and is nude except for a thin black ribbon tied around her neck, a bracelet on her arm, an orchid in her hair, and fashionable slippers on her feet. Like the seated nude in Le Déjeuner (Victorine Meurent served again as Manet's model), Olympia meets the viewer's eye with a look of cool indifference. The only other figure in the painting is a black maid, who presents Olympia a bouquet of flowers from a client. Figure 27-33 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Manet's painting of a nude prostitute and her black maid carrying a bouquet from a client scandalized the public. Critics also faulted his rough brushstrokes and abruptly shifting tonalities.

Woman with the Hat

Matisse depicted his wife, Amélie, in a rather conventional manner compositionally, but the seemingly arbitrary colors immediately startle the viewer, as does the sketchiness of the forms. The entire image—the woman's face, clothes, hat, and background—consists of patches and splotches of color juxtaposed in ways that sometimes produce jarring contrasts. Matisse explained his approach: "What characterized Fauvism was that we rejected imitative colors, and that with pure colors we obtained stronger reactions."Footnote For Matisse and the Fauves, therefore, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning (see "Henri Matisse on Color", and Fig. 29-2a). Figure 29-2 Henri Matisse, Woman with the Hat, 1905. Oil on canvas, . San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (bequest of Elise S. Haas). Matisse's portrayal of his wife, Amélie, features patches and splotches of seemingly arbitrary colors. He and the other Fauve painters used color not to imitate nature but to produce a reaction in the viewer.

Family of Charles IV

Much of Goya's multifaceted work deals not with Romantic fantasies but with contemporary events. In 1786, he became an official artist in the court of Charles IV (r. 1788-1808) and produced portraits of the king and his family (Fig. 27-11a). Dissatisfaction with the king's rule increased dramatically during Goya's tenure at the court, and the Spanish people eventually threw their support behind the king's son, Ferdinand VII, in the hope that he would initiate reform. To overthrow his father and mother, Queen Maria Luisa (1751-1819), Ferdinand enlisted the aid of Napoleon Bonaparte. Because he had designs on the Spanish throne, Napoleon readily agreed to send French troops to Spain. Not surprisingly, as soon as he ousted Charles IV, Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte (r. 1808-1813) on the Spanish throne as his surrogate.

Death of Sardanapalus

One of the best examples of the Romantic spirit is the engrossing novel Frankenstein, written in 1818 by Shelley's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). This fantastic tale of a monstrous creature run amok remains popular to the present day. As was true of many Romantic artworks, the novel not only embraced emotionalism but also rejected the rationalism underlying Enlightenment thought. Dr. Frankenstein's monster was a product of science, and the novel is an indictment of the deep faith in science that Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers promoted. Frankenstein served as a cautionary tale of the havoc that could result from unrestrained scientific experimentation and from the arrogance of scientists. Figure 27-15 Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Inspired by Lord Byron's 1821 poem, Delacroix painted the Romantic spectacle of an Assyrian king on his funeral pyre. The richly colored and emotionally charged canvas is filled with exotic figures.

The Cyclops

Redon represented the mythological one-eyed giant Polyphemus emerging from behind a rocky outcropping in a landscape with a rich profusion of fresh saturated hues that harmonized with the mood that Redon felt fitted the subject. In Homer's Odyssey, Polyphemus is a monstrous giant whom the Greek hero Odysseus must vanquish on his journey home from Troy. Redon chose, however, the less familiar tale of Polyphemus's love for the nymph Galatea. Redon's Cyclops is a shy, simpering creature with its single huge loving eye set into a misshapen head. He rises baloonlike above the beautiful sleeping Galatea. The contrast with Raphael's representation of the same subject (Fig. 22-11) could hardly be more striking. As Redon himself observed: "All my originality consists ... in making unreal creatures live humanly by putting, as much as possible, the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible."Footnote Figure 28-26 Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, 1898. Oil on canvas, . Kröller-Müller Foundation, Otterlo. In The Cyclops, the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon represented the mythical one-eyed giant Polyphemus shyly observing the beautiful sleeping Galatea. The rich profusion of hues is the legacy of Impressionism.

Chiswick House

Richard Boyle (1695-1753), earl of Burlington, strongly restated Jones's Palladian doctrine in the new Neoclassical idiom in Chiswick House (Fig. 26-29), which he built on London's outskirts with the help of William Kent (ca. 1686-1748). Paving the way for this shift in style was, among other things, the publication of Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), three volumes of engravings of ancient buildings, prefaced by a denunciation of the Italian Baroque style and high praise for Palladio and Jones. Figure 26-29 Richard Boyle and William Kent, Chiswick House (looking northwest), near London, England, begun 1725. For this English villa, Boyle and Kent emulated the simple symmetry and unadorned planes of the Palladian architectural style. Chiswick House is a free variation on the Villa Rotonda

The Horse Fair

She filled her broad canvas with the sturdy farm Percherons of Normandy and their grooms on parade. Some horses, not quite broken, rear up. Others plod or trot, guided on foot or ridden by their keepers. Bonheur recorded the Percherons' uneven line of march, their thunderous pounding, and their seemingly overwhelming power based on her close observation of living animals, even though she acknowledged some inspiration from the Parthenon frieze (Fig. 5-50, top). The dramatic lighting, loose brushwork, and rolling sky also reveal her admiration of Géricault's style (Fig. 27-1 and 27-14). Bonheur's masterful depiction of horses at life size and seen from multiple angles captivated viewers, who eagerly bought engraved reproductions of The Horse Fair, making it one of the most popular artworks of the century. Figure 27-31 Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853-1855. Oil on canvas, . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887). Bonheur was the most celebrated woman artist of the 19th century. A Realist, she went to great lengths to record accurately the anatomy of living horses, even studying carcasses in slaughterhouses.

Starry Night

Similarly illustrative of van Gogh's "expressionist" method is Starry Night (Fig. 28-19), which the artist painted in 1889, the year before his death. At this time, van Gogh was living at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, near Arles, where he had committed himself. In Starry Night, the artist did not represent the sky's appearance. Rather, he communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it. The church nestled in the center of the village is, perhaps, van Gogh's attempt to express or reconcile his conflicted views about religion. Although the style of Starry Night suggests a very personal vision, this work does correspond in many ways to the view available to the painter from the window of his room in Saint-Paulde-Mausole. The existence of cypress trees and the placement of the constellations have been confirmed as matching the view visible to van Gogh during his stay in the asylum. Still, the artist translated everything he saw into his singular vision. Given van Gogh's determination to "use color ... to express [him]self forcibly," the dark, deep blue suffusing the entire painting cannot be overlooked. Together with the turbulent brushstrokes, the color suggests a quiet but pervasive depression. A letter van Gogh wrote to his brother on July 16, 1888, reveals his contemplative state of mind: Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter's life.... [L]ooking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.Footnote Figure 28-19 Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest). In this late work, van Gogh painted the vast night sky filled with whirling and exploding stars, the earth huddled beneath it. The painting is an almost abstract pattern of expressive line, shape, and color.

The Thankful Poor

Tanner painted the grandfather, grandchild, and main objects in the room in great detail, whereas everything else dissolves into loose strokes of color and light. The lighting reinforces the painting's reverent spirit, with deep shadows intensifying the man's devout concentration. The golden rays pouring in the window illuminate the quiet expression of thanksgiving on the younger face. The deep sense of sanctity evoked here in terms of everyday experience became increasingly important for Tanner. Within a few years of completing The Thankful Poor, he began painting biblical subjects grounded in direct studies from nature and in the love of Rembrandt that had inspired him from his days as a Philadelphia art student. Figure 27-38 Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Thankful Poor, 1894. Oil on canvas, . Collection of William H. and Camille Cosby. Tanner combined the Realists' belief in careful study from nature with a desire to portray with dignity the life of African American families. The lighting reinforces the painting's reverent spirit.

The Child's Bath

The Child's Bath owes much to the compositional devices of Degas as well as to Degas's sources—Japanese prints. But rather than providing a view of a nude woman unaware of the male artist-voyeur who has intruded into her private sphere, Cassatt's canvas celebrates the tender relationship between a mother and her child, both of whom gaze at their joint reflection in the tub of water. Figure 28-12 Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath, 1893. Oil on canvas, 3 ′ 3 1 2 ″ × 2 ′ 2 ″ . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Robert A. Walker Fund). Cassatt's compositions owe much to Degas and Japanese prints, but her subjects differ from those of most Impressionists, in part because, as a woman, she could not frequent cafés with her male friends.

Third of May, 1808

The Spanish people, finally recognizing the French as invaders, sought a way to expel the foreign troops. On May 2, 1808, Spaniards attacked Napoleon's soldiers in a chaotic and violent clash. In retaliation and as a show of force, the French responded the next day by rounding up and executing Spanish citizens. This tragic event is the subject of Goya's most famous painting, Third of May, 1808 (Fig. 27-12), commissioned in 1814 by Ferdinand VII (r. 1813-1833), who had reclaimed the throne after the ouster of the French. In emotional fashion, following the lead of Callot (Fig. 25-35) in the 18th century, Goya depicted the anonymous murderous wall of Napoleonic soldiers ruthlessly executing the unarmed and terrified Spanish peasants. The artist encouraged empathy for the Spaniards by portraying horrified expressions and anguish on their faces, endowing them with a humanity lacking in the faceless French firing squad in the shadows. Moreover, the peasant about to be shot throws his arms out in a cruciform gesture reminiscent of Christ's position on the cross. (The anonymous martyr's right hand also bears Christ's stigmata.) Goya enhanced the emotional drama of the massacre by sharply contrasting the darkness of the night with the focused illumination of the French squad's lantern and by extending the time frame depicted. Although Goya captured the specific moment when one man is about to be executed, he also recorded the bloody bodies of others lying dead on the ground. Still others have been herded together to be shot in a few moments. The horrible massacre will continue indefinitely. Figure 27-12 Francisco Goya, Third of May, 1808, 1814-1815. Oil on canvas, . Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Goya encouraged empathy for the Spanish peasants massacred on May 3, 1808, by portraying horrified expressions on their faces, endowing them with a humanity lacking in the French firing squad.

Arc de Triomphe

The colossal limestone group Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (Fig. 27-18), also called La Marseillaise, is one example. The relief, the work of François Rude (1784-1855), decorates one of the gigantic piers of the Arc de Triomphe (Fig. 27-18a) in Paris, designed for Napoleon by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (1739-1811). The sculpture depicts the volunteers of 1792 departing from Marseilles to defend France's borders against the foreign enemies of the revolution. A composite personification of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war; Liberty; and the Marseillaise, the revolutionary hymn that since 1879 has been France's national anthem, soars above patriots of all ages, exhorting them forward with a thundering battle cry emerging from her wide-open mouth. The figures recall David's classically armored (Fig. 26-26) or nude heroes, as do the rhetorical gestures of the wide-flung arms and the striding poses. Yet the violence of motion, the jagged contours, and the densely packed, overlapping masses relate more closely to the compositional method of dramatic Romanticism, as found in the canvases of Géricault (Fig. 27-1) and Delacroix (Fig. 27-16). Indeed, the allegorical figure in La Marseillaise is the spiritual sister of Delacroix's Liberty. Rude's stone figure shares the same Phrygian cap, the badge of liberty, with Delacroix's earlier painted figure, but Rude's soldiers wear classical costumes or are heroically nude, whereas those in Delacroix's painting appear in modern Parisian dress. Both works are allegorical, but one looks to the past and the other to the present.

Paris: A Rainy Day

bears little resemblance to Monet's or Manet's, but the subject is unmistakably Impressionist. Figure 28-5 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas, . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Worcester Fund). Although Caillebotte did not use Impressionistic broken brushstrokes, in his view of the new "Haussmannized" Paris, the composition featuring cutoff buildings and figures suggests the transitory nature of modern life.

The Nightmare

The concept of the nightmare is the subject of a 1781 painting (Fig. 27-9) by the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli, better known by his English name John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). Fuseli lived in Rome from 1770 to 1778 and settled in England in 1799 and eventually became a member of the Royal Academy and one of its instructors. Largely self-taught, he contrived a distinctive manner to express the fantasies of his vivid imagination. Fuseli specialized in night moods of horror and in dark fantasies—in the demonic, the macabre, and often the sadistic. In The Nightmare, a beautiful young woman lies asleep, draped across the bed with her limp arm dangling over the side. An incubus, a demon believed in medieval times to prey, often sexually, on sleeping women, squats ominously on her body. In the background, a ghostly horse with flaming eyes bursts into the scene from beyond the curtain. Despite the temptation to see the painting's title as a pun because of this horse, the word nightmare in fact derives from "night" and "Mara." Mara was a spirit in Scandinavian mythology who tormented and suffocated sleepers. Fuseli was among the first to attempt to depict the dark terrain of the human subconscious that became fertile ground for later artists. Figure 27-9 John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, . Detroit Institute of the Arts (Founders Society purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman). The transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism marked a shift in emphasis from reason to feeling. Fuseli was among the first painters to depict the dark terrain of the human subconscious.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

The four girls (the children of one of Sargent's close friends) appear in a hall and small drawing room in their Paris home. The informal, eccentric arrangement of their slight figures suggests how much at ease they are within this familiar space and with objects such as the enormous Japanese vases, the red screen, and the fringed rug, whose scale subtly emphasizes the children's diminutive stature. Sargent must have known the Boit daughters well. Relaxed and trustful, they gave the artist an opportunity to record a gradation of young innocence. He sensitively captured the naive, wondering openness of the little girl in the foreground, the grave artlessness of the 10-yearold child, and the slightly self-conscious poise of the adolescents. Sargent's casual positioning of the figures and seemingly random choice of the setting communicate a sense of spontaneity. The children seem to be attending momentarily to an adult who has asked them to interrupt their activity. The painting embodies the Realist belief that the artist's business is to record modern people in modern contexts. Figure 27-37 John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Florence D. Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Julia Overing Boit, in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit). Sargent's casual positioning of the Boit sisters creates a sense of the momentary and spontaneous, consistent with Realist painters' interest in recording modern people in modern contexts.

Burial at Ornans

The huge (10-by-22-foot) canvas depicts a funeral set in a bleak provincial landscape outside the artist's hometown near Besançon in eastern France. Attending the funeral are the types of ordinary people that Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) presented in their novels. While a robed clergyman recites the Office of the Dead, those attending cluster around the excavated gravesite. Although the painting has the imposing scale of a traditional history painting, the subject's ordinariness and the starkly antiheroic composition horrified critics. Burial at Ornans is not a record of the burial of a Christian martyr or a heroic soldier. It commemorates a recurring event involving common folk, and it does not ennoble or romanticize death. No one had ever painted a genre subject on this scale. Furthermore, Courbet had the audacity to submit Burial at Ornans to the 1851 Salon in the category of history painting, but declined to identify the deceased. Figure 27-27 Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Although as imposing in scale as a traditional history painting, Burial at Ornans horrified critics because of the ordinary nature of the subject and Courbet's starkly antiheroic composition.

Pauline Borghese as Venus Victorious

The most famous portrait that Canova carved is, however, the marble statue (Fig. 27-4) of Napoleon's sister Pauline Borghese (1780-1825) in the guise of Venus Victorious. Initially, Canova had suggested depicting Pauline clothed as Diana, goddess of the hunt. She demanded, however, that she be portrayed nude as Venus, the goddess of love. Thus Pauline appears, reclining on a divan and gracefully holding the golden apple, the symbol of the goddess's triumph in the judgment of Paris. Canova clearly based his work on Greek statuary—the sensuous pose and seminude body recall Hellenistic works such as Venus de Milo (Fig. 5-84)—and the reclining figure has parallels on Roman sarcophagus lids (Fig. 7-59; compare Fig. 6-6). Figure 27-4 Antonio Canova, Pauline Borghese as Venus Victorious, from the Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy. 1808. Marble, long. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Canova was Napoleon's favorite sculptor. Here, the artist depicted the emperor's sister—at her insistence—as the nude Roman goddess of love in a marble statue inspired by classical models.

Raft of the Medusa

an immense (23-foot-wide) canvas with figures larger than life. The painting immortalized the July 2, 1816, shipwreck off the Mauritanian coast of the French frigate Medusa, which ran aground on a reef due to the incompetence of its inexperienced captain, a political appointee. The captain and his officers safely abandoned the ship. In an attempt to survive, 147 passengers built a makeshift raft from pieces of the disintegrating frigate. The raft drifted for 13 days, and the starving survivors dwindled to 15, in part because of cannibalism. Finally, the ship Argus spotted the raft and rescued those still alive. This horrendous event was political dynamite once it became public knowledge. Figure 27-1 Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The Gross Clinic

The painting portrays the renowned surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where the painting hung for 130 years until its sale in 2006 to raise funds for the college. Eakins's decision to depict an operation in progress reflects the public's increasing faith that scientific and medical advances could enhance—and preserve—lives. Dr. Gross, with bloody fingers and scalpel, lectures about his surgery on a young man's leg. The patient suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone infection. Watching the surgeon, acclaimed for his skill in this specific operation, are several colleagues—all of whom historians have identified—and the patient's mother, who covers her face. Eakins, who considered becoming a physician and studied at the college, included his self-portrait (in the doorway at the right) to underscore the accuracy of what he recorded as an eyewitness. Also present is an anesthetist, who holds a cloth over the patient's face. Anesthetics had been introduced in 1846, and their development eliminated a major obstacle to extensive surgery. The painting, made more dramatic by the lighting, is an unsparing description of an unfolding event, with a good deal more reality than many viewers could endure. "It is a picture," one critic said, "that even strong men find difficult to look at long, if they can look at it at all."Footnote Figure 27-36 Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1875. Oil on canvas, . Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. The too-brutal realism of Eakins's depiction of a medical college operating amphitheater caused this painting's rejection from the Philadelphia exhibition celebrating America's centennial.

Lord Heathfield

The sitter was a perfect subject for a Grand Manner portrait—a burly, ruddy English officer, the commandant of the fortress at Gibraltar. Heathfield had doggedly defended the British stronghold against the Spanish and French, and later received the honorary title Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar. Here, he holds the huge key to the fortress, the symbol of his victory. He stands in front of a curtain of dark smoke rising from the battleground, flanked by one cannon pointing ineffectively downward and another whose tilted barrel indicates that it lies uselessly on its back. Reynolds portrayed the features of the general's heavy, honest face and his uniform with unidealized realism. But Lord Heathfield's posture and the setting dramatically suggest the heroic themes of battle, courage, and patriotism. Figure 26-20 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Heathfield, 1787. Oil on canvas, . National Gallery, London. In this Grand Manner portrait, Reynolds depicted the English commander who defended Gibraltar. As is typical for this genre, Heathfield stands in a dramatic pose, and his figure takes up most of the canvas.

Blessed Art Thou among Women

The title repeats the phrase that the angel Gabriel used to announce to the Virgin Mary that she would be the mother of the Messiah. In the context of Käsebier's photography, the words suggest a parallel between the biblical Mother of God and the modern mother in the image, who both protects and sends forth her daughter from her secure home into the unfamiliar world at large. The white setting and the mother's pale gown shimmer in soft focus behind the girl, who wears darker tones and whom the photographer captured with sharper focus. Käsebier deliberately combined an out-of-focus background with a sharp or almost-sharp foreground, thereby blurring the entire image slightly. In Blessed Art Thou, the soft focus invests the scene with an aura of otherworldly peace. The photograph showcases Käsebier's ability to inject a sense of the spiritual and the divine into scenes from everyday life. Figure 28-31 Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou among Women, 1899. Platinum print on Japanese tissue, . Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner). Symbolist Käsebier injected a sense of the spiritual and the divine into scenes from everyday life. The deliberately soft focus of this photograph invests the scene with an aura of otherworldly peace.

Apotheosis of Homer

at the Salon of 1827 (see "Academic Salons"). The huge painting, intended for a ceiling in the Louvre, incorporates none of the perspective devices of Baroque ceiling painting. Rather, the canvas presents in a single statement the Neoclassical doctrines of ideal form and composition. It is the artist's attempt to wed the styles of Raphael and classical antiquity. Winged Victory (or Fame) crowns the epic poet Homer, who sits like a god on a throne before an Ionic temple. At Homer's feet are two statuesque women, personifications of the Iliad (holding a sword) and the Odyssey (holding an oar), the offspring of his imagination. Symmetrically grouped about him is a company of the "sovereign geniuses"—as Ingres called them—who expressed humanity's highest ideals in philosophy, poetry, music, and art. To Homer's left are the Greek poet Pindar with his lyre, Phidias with his sculptor's hammer, the philosophers Plato and Socrates, and other ancient worthies of different eras. They gather together in the painter's world of suspended time as Raphael united them in School of Athens (Fig. 22-9), which was the inspiration for Apotheosis of Homer. To the far right in Ingres's assembly of literary and artistic giants are the Roman poets Horace and Vergil, and two Italians: Dante, and, conspicuously, Raphael. Among the forward group on the painting's left side are Poussin (pointing) and Shakespeare (half concealed). At the right are French writers Jean Baptiste Racine, Molière, Voltaire, and François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon. Ingres had planned a much larger and more inclusive group, but limited the cast of characters for the Salon exhibition. Figure 27-7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Inspired by School of Athens (Fig. 22-9) by Raphael, Ingres's favorite painter, this huge canvas is a Neoclassical celebration of Homer and other ancient worthies, Dante, and select French authors.

Death of General Wolfe

West depicted the mortally wounded young English commander just after his defeat of the French in the decisive battle of Quebec in 1759, which gave Canada to Great Britain. Because his subject was a recent event, West clothed his characters in contemporary costumes (although the military uniforms are not accurate in all details) and included a rare glimpse for his English audience of a Native American warrior, depicted as an exemplary "noble savage." However, West blended this realism of detail with the grand tradition of history painting by arranging his figures in a complex and theatrically ordered composition. His modern hero dies among grieving officers on the field of victorious battle in a way that suggests the death of a saint. (The composition, in fact, derives from paintings of the lamentation over the dead Christ; compare Fig. 20-9.) West wanted to present this hero's death in the service of the state as a martyrdom charged with religious emotions. His innovative and highly effective combination of the conventions of traditional heroic painting with a look of modern realism influenced history painting well into the 19th century. Figure 26-21 Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe, 1771. Oil on canvas, . National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (gift of the Duke of Westminster, 1918). West's major innovation was to blend contemporary subject matter and costumes with the grand tradition of history painting. Here, the painter likened General Wolfe's death to that of a martyred saint.

Vision after the Sermon

also known as Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, his most important early work. The painting shows Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, visualizing the sermon they have just heard in church on Jacob's encounter with the Holy Spirit (Gen. 32:24-30). Joining the women, at the far right, is a tonsured monk who has Gauguin's features. The women and the monk pray devoutly before the apparition, as they would have before the roadside crucifix shrines that were characteristic features of the Breton countryside. Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus the viewer's attention on the idea and intensify its message. The images are not what the Impressionist eye would have seen and replicated but what Gauguin's memory recalled and his imagination modified. Thus the artist twisted the perspective and allotted most of the space to emphasize the innocent faith of the unquestioning women, and he shrank Jacob and the angel, wrestling in a ring enclosed by a Breton stone fence. Wrestling matches were regular features at the entertainment held after high mass, so Gauguin's women are spectators at a contest that was, for them, a familiar part of their culture. Figure 28-20 Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888. Oil on canvas, . National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Gauguin admired Japanese prints, stained glass, and cloisonné enamels. Their influences are evident in this painting of Breton women, in which firm outlines enclose large areas of unmodulated color.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

an etching from a series titled Los Caprichos (The Caprices), Goya depicted an artist, probably himself, asleep, slumped onto a desk, while threatening creatures converge on him, at least in his dream. The subject is a variation on the theme of Fuseli's Nightmare (Fig. 27-9), but without that painting's sexuality. Seemingly poised to attack the artist are owls (symbols of folly) and bats (symbols of ignorance). The viewer might read this as a portrayal of what emerges when reason is suppressed and, therefore, as advocating Enlightenment ideals. However, the print is ambiguous, probably intentionally so. The Sleep of Reason can also be interpreted as Goya's commentary on the creative process and a testament to his embrace of the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares. Goya's explanatory caption for the print reads: "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." Figure 27-11 Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, no. 43 from Los Caprichos, ca. 1798. Etching and aquatint, . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918). In this print, Goya depicted himself asleep while threatening creatures converge on him, revealing his embrace of the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and nightmares.

Ancient of Days

combines his ideas and interests in a highly individual way. For Blake, this figure united the concept of the Creator with that of wisdom as a part of God. He chose Ancient of Days as the frontispiece for his book Europe: A Prophecy, and juxtaposed it with a quotation ("When he set a compass upon the face of the deep") from Proverbs 8:27. The speaker is Wisdom, who tells the reader how she was with the Lord through all the time of the creation (Prov. 8:22-23, 27-30). Energy fills Blake's composition. The Almighty leans forward from a fiery orb, peering toward earth and unleashing power through his outstretched left arm into twin rays of light. These emerge between his spread fingers like an architect's measuring instrument—a conception of creation with precedents in Gothic manuscript painting (Fig. 13-32). Here, however, a mighty wind surges through the Creator's thick hair and beard. Only the strength of his Michelangelesque physique keeps him firmly planted on his heavenly perch. In this image Blake merged ideal classical anatomy with the inner dark dreams of Romanticism. Figure 27-10 William Blake, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy, 1794. Metal relief etching, hand colored, . Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Although art historians classify Blake as a Romantic artist, he incorporated classical references in his works. Here, ideal classical anatomy merges with the inner dark dreams of Romanticism.

Saint-Lazare Train Station

depicts a characteristic aspect of the contemporary urban scene. The expanding railway network had made travel more convenient, bringing large numbers of people into Paris and enabling city dwellers to reach suburban areas, such as Bennecourt (Fig. 28-2a) and Argenteuil (Fig. 28-2b), quickly (Map 28-1). In his "impression" of the Saint-Lazare railway terminal, Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris's modern transportation hub. The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape. Monet's agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life. Figure 28-4 Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The Impressionists often painted scenes of the new urbanized Paris, the heart of modern life in France. Monet's agitated application of paint contributes to the sense of energy in this railway terminal.

Oath of the Horatii

depicts a story from pre-Republican Rome, the heroic phase of Roman history. The topic was not too obscure for David's audience. Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) had retold this story of conflict between love and patriotism, recounted by the ancient Roman historian Livy, in a play performed in Paris several years earlier. According to the story, the leaders of the warring cities of Rome and Alba decided to resolve their conflicts in a series of encounters waged by three representatives from each side. The Romans chose as their champions the three Horatius brothers, who had to face the three sons of the Curatius family from Alba. A sister of the Horatii, Camilla, was the bride-to-be of one of the Curatius sons, and the wife of the youngest Horatius was the sister of the Curatii. David's painting shows the Horatii as they swear on their swords, held high by their father, to win or die for Rome, oblivious to the anguish and sorrow of the Horatius women. Figure 26-26 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. David was the Neoclassical painter-ideologist of the French Revolution. This huge canvas celebrating ancient Roman patriotism and sacrifice features statuesque figures and classical architecture.

Saturn Devouring One of His Children

depicts the raw carnage and violence of Saturn (the Greek god Kronos; see "The Gods and Goddesses of Mount Olympus"), wild-eyed and monstrous, as he consumes one of his sons in reaction to a prophecy that one of his children would dethrone him. Because of the similarity of Kronos and khronos (the Greek word for "time"), Saturn has come to be associated with time. This has led some to interpret Goya's painting as an expression of the artist's despair over the passage of time. Despite the simplicity of the image, it conveys a wildness, boldness, and brutality that evoke an elemental response from all viewers. Goya's work, rooted both in personal and national history, presents darkly emotional images well in keeping with Romanticism. Figure 27-13 Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Children, from Goya's Quinto del Sordo farmhouse, near Madrid, Spain, 1819-1823. Fresco, later detached and mounted on canvas, . Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. This disturbing fresco from Goya's farmhouse uses a mythological tale to express the aging artist's despair over the passage of time. Saturn's Greek name, Kronos, is similar to the Greek word for "time."

Breakfast Scene

from Marriage à la Mode, is one in a sequence of six paintings satirizing the marital immoralities of the moneyed classes in England. In it, the marriage of a young viscount is just beginning to founder. The husband and wife are tired after a long night spent in separate pursuits. While the wife stayed at home for an evening of cards and music-making, her young husband had been away from the house enjoying the company of another woman. He thrusts his hands deep into the empty money-pockets of his breeches, while his wife's small dog sniffs inquiringly at the other woman's lacy cap protruding from his coat pocket. A steward, his hands full of unpaid bills, raises his eyes in despair at the actions of his noble master and mistress. Figure 26-18 William Hogarth, Breakfast Scene, from Marriage à la Mode, ca. 1745. Oil on canvas, . National Gallery, London. Hogarth won fame for his paintings and prints satirizing English life with comic zest. This is one of a series of six paintings in which he chronicled the marital immoralities of the moneyed class.

Ugolino and His Children

he based on a passage in Dante's Inferno (33.58-75) in which Count Ugolino and his four sons starve to death while shut up in a tower. In Hell, Ugolino relates to Dante how, in a moment of extreme despair, he bit both his hands in grief. His children, thinking he did it because of his hunger, offered him their own flesh as food. In Carpeaux's statuary group, the powerful forms—twisted, intertwined, and densely concentrated—suggest the self-devouring torment of frustration and despair wracking the unfortunate Ugolino. A careful student of Michelangelo's male figures, Carpeaux also said he had the ancient Laocoön (Fig. 5-89) in mind when he conceived Ugolino and His Children, which he hoped would be "a masterpiece of the human spirit." Certainly, the storm and stress captured in his Ugolino recall similar characteristics of the group of Laocoön and his two sons. Nevertheless, the sense of vivid reality in the anatomy of Carpeaux's figures shows that the artist had studied the human figure from life, not solely from other statues. However, the French public did not share Carpeaux's interest in Realism. They preferred the idealized bodies of classical sculptures—one of the reasons that Carpeaux was forced to remove another of his best works, The Dance (Fig. 28-32a), from the facade of the Paris opera house (Fig. 27-45). Figure 28-32 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Children, 1865-1867. Marble, high. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, Inc., and the Charles Ulrich and Josephine Bay Foundation, Inc., gifts, 1967). As in Dante's Inferno, Carpeaux's Ugolino bites his hands in despair as he and his four sons await death by starvation. The twisted forms suggest the self-devouring torment of frustration.

The Gleaners

he depicted three impoverished women—members of the lowest level of peasant society—performing the backbreaking task of gleaning. Landowning nobles traditionally permitted peasants to glean, or collect, the wheat scraps left in the field after the harvest. Millet characteristically placed his large figures in the foreground, against a broad sky. Although the field stretches back to a rim of haystacks, cottages, trees, and distant workers and a flat horizon, the gleaners quietly doing their tedious and time-consuming work dominate the canvas. It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast with the almost invisible agricultural workers in Constable's Hay Wain (Fig. 27-21). Figure 27-28 Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Millet and the Barbizon School painters specialized in depictions of French country life. Here, Millet portrayed three impoverished women gathering the scraps left in the field after a harvest.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

he opened the door to a radically new method of representing forms in space. Picasso began the work as a symbolic picture to be titled Philosophical Bordello, portraying two male clients (who, based on surviving drawings, had features resembling Picasso's) intermingling with women in the reception room of a brothel on Avignon Street in Barcelona. One was a sailor. The other carried a skull, an obvious reference to death. By the time the artist finished, he had eliminated both men and simplified the room's details to a suggestion of drapery and a schematic foreground still life. Picasso had become wholly absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the five women in their interior space. Instead of depicting the figures as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove them with the equally jagged planes representing drapery and empty space. Indeed, the space, so entwined with the bodies, is virtually illegible. The tension between Picasso's representation of three-dimensional space and his modernist conviction that a painting is a two-dimensional design on the surface of a stretched canvas is a tension between representation and abstraction. Figure 29-1 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest).

The Hay Wain

is representative of Constable's art and reveals much about his outlook. His subjects are Romantic but not sublime. Here, a small cottage sits on the left of a serenely pastoral scene of the countryside. In the center foreground, a man slowly leads a horse and hay-filled wagon (a hay wain) across a shallow stretch of the Stour River. Billowy clouds float lazily across the sky. The muted greens and golds and the delicacy of Constable's brushstrokes complement the scene's tranquility. The artist portrayed the oneness with nature that the Romantic poets sought. The relaxed figures are not observers but participants in the landscape's "being." In terms of content, The Hay Wain is significant for precisely what it does not show—the civil unrest of the agrarian working class and the resulting outbreaks of violence and arson. The people populating Constable's landscapes blend into the scenes and become one with nature. Figure 27-21 John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821. Oil on canvas, . National Gallery, London. The Hay Wain is a nostalgic view of the disappearing English countryside during the Industrial Revolution. Constable had a special gift for capturing the texture that climate and weather give to landscapes.

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette

in which Renoir depicted throngs of ordinary working-class people gathered in the popular Parisian dance hall of that name. Some crowd the tables and chatter, while others dance energetically. So lively is the atmosphere that the viewer can virtually hear the sounds of music, laughter, and tinkling glasses. Unlike Manet's Folies-Bergère, a nightclub where people went to seek a new mate or the company of a prostitute, the Moulin de la Galette (Cake Mill) was a gathering place for friends, here seen on a sunny Sunday afternoon, their only day off from work. Renoir dappled the whole scene with sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce precisely the effect of floating and fleeting light that the Impressionists cultivated. The casual poses and asymmetrical placement of the figures and the suggested continuity of space, spreading in all directions and only accidentally limited by the frame, position the viewer as a participant rather than as an outsider. Whereas the artists favored by the French Academy frequently sought to express universal and timeless qualities (Baudelaire's "other half of art;" see Modernism at the Folies-Bergère), the Impressionists attempted to depict just the opposite—the incidental, momentary, and passing aspects of reality. For Renoir's friends, that "reality" rang true. Several of them posed for individual figures in the painting. Figure 28-7 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Renoir's painting of this popular Parisian dance hall is dappled by sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce the effect of floating and fleeting light that many Impressionists cultivated.

Three Women in a Village Church

is Leibl's most famous work and characteristically depicts the life of rural peasants in Bavaria. The painting, which took three years to complete, records a sacred moment—the moment of prayer—in the life of three women of different generations. Dressed in rustic costume, their Sunday-church best, they quietly pursue their devotions in the village church, their prayer books held in large hands roughened by work. Their manners and their dress reflect their unaffected nature, untouched by the refinements of urban life. Leibl highlighted their natural virtues: simplicity, honesty, steadfastness, and patience. The picture is a moving expression of the artist's compassionate view of his subjects, a reading of character without sentimentality. Figure 27-34 Wilhelm Leibl, Three Women in a Village Church, 1878-1882. Oil on canvas, . Kunsthalle, Hamburg. French Realism spread quickly to Germany, where Leibl painted this moving depiction of simple peasant women of different generations holding their prayer books in hands roughened by work.

Abbey in the Oak Forest

is a characteristic example. It is the pictorial equivalent of a solemn requiem. Under a winter sky, through the leafless oaks of a snow-covered cemetery, a procession of monks bears a coffin into the ruins of a Gothic church that Friedrich based on the remains of Eldana Abbey near Greifswald. The emblems of death are everywhere—the season's desolation, the leaning crosses and tombstones, the black of mourning that the grieving wear, the skeletal trees, and the destruction that time has wrought on the church. The painting is a kind of meditation on human mortality. As Friedrich himself remarked: "Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting." Figure 27-19 Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1810. Oil on canvas, . Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. Friedrich was a master of the Romantic transcendental landscape. The reverential mood of this winter scene with a ruined Gothic church and cemetery demands the silence appropriate to sacred places.

Nocturne in Black and Gold

is a daring painting with gold flecks and splatters representing an exploded firework punctuating the darkness of the night sky. More interested in conveying the atmospheric effects than in providing details of the scene, Whistler emphasized creating a harmonious arrangement of shapes and colors on the rectangle of his canvas, an approach that many 20th-century artists adopted. Whistler's works angered conservative 19th-century critics, however. In England, John Ruskin (1819-1900) responded to Nocturne in Black and Gold by writing a scathing review accusing Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Figure 28-11 James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), ca. 1875. Oil on panel, . Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (gift of Dexter M. Ferry Jr.). In this painting, Whistler displayed an Impressionist's interest in conveying the atmospheric effects of fireworks at night, but he also emphasized the abstract arrangement of shapes and colors.

La Place du Théâtre Français

is one of many panoramic scenes of the city painted by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), the only Jewish member of the Impressionist movement and the only painter to submit his work to all eight Impressionist exhibitions. Born in the Danish West Indies, he settled in Paris in 1855 and was largely self-taught. Pissarro's approach to recording the new look of Paris was quite different from Caillebotte's. Using larger, rougher brushstrokes and a brighter palette, Pisarro captured his visual sensations of a crowded Parisian square viewed from several stories above street level. Unlike Monet, Pissarro did not seek to record fugitive light effects as much as the fleeting motion of street life, which he achieved through a seemingly casual arrangement of figures and horse-drawn carriages. Ironically, to accomplish this sense of spontaneity, Pissarro sometimes used photography to record the places he wished to paint, as did many of his fellow Impressionists. Indeed, the visual parallels between Impressionist paintings and photographs are striking, including, in La Place du Théâtre Français, the flattening spatial effect produced by the high viewpoint. Figure 28-6 Camille Pissarro, La Place du Théâtre Français, 1898. Oil on canvas, . Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (Mr. and Mrs. George Gard De Sylva Collection). This Impressionist view of a busy Paris square seen from several stories above street level has much in common with photographs, especially the flattening spatial effect of the high viewpoint.

Mont Sainte-Victoire

one of many views that he painted of this mountain near his home in Aix-en-Provence. His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the "truth" of Impressionism. Rather, he sought a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting visual information that the eyes absorb. Instead of employing the Impressionists' random approach when he was face-to-face with nature, Cézanne, like Seurat, developed a more analytical style. His goal was to order the lines, planes, and colors of nature. He constantly and painstakingly checked his painting against the part of the scene—he called it the "motif"—that he was studying at the moment. Figure 28-22 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904. Oil on canvas, . Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (George W. Elkins Collection). In his landscapes, Cézanne replaced the transitory visual effects of changing atmospheric conditions—the Impressionists' focus—with careful analysis of the lines, planes, and colors of nature.

The Apparition

one of two versions of the same subject that Moreau submitted to the Salon of 1876, treats a theme that fascinated him and many of his contemporaries—the femme fatale ("fatal woman"), the destructive temptress of men. The seductive heroine here is the biblical Salome (Mark 6:21-28), who pleased her stepfather, King Herod, by dancing enticingly before him and demanded in return the head of Saint John the Baptist (compare Fig. 21-8). In Moreau's representation of the story, Herod sits in the background, enthroned not in a Middle Eastern palace but in a classical columnar hall resembling a Roman triumphal arch. Salome is in the foreground, scantily clad in a gold- and gem-encrusted costume. She points to an apparition hovering in the air at the level of Herod's head. In a radiant circle of light is what Salome desired—the halo-framed head of John the Baptist, dripping with blood but with eyes wide open. The combination of hallucinatory imagery, eroticism, precise drawing, rich color, and opulent setting is the hallmark of Moreau's highly original style. The Apparition and Moreau's other major paintings—for example, Jupiter and Semele (Fig. 28-25a)—foreshadow the work of the Surrealists in the next century (see Surrealism). Figure 28-25 Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1874-1876. Watercolor on paper, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Moreau's painting of Salome, a biblical femme fatale, combines hallucinatory imagery, eroticism, precise drawing, rich color, and an opulent setting—hallmarks of Moreau's Symbolist style.

Paul Revere

painted before the artist left Boston, conveys a sense of directness and faithfulness to visual fact that marked the taste for honesty and plainness noted by many late-18th- and 19th-century visitors to America. When Copley painted his likeness, Revere was not yet the familiar hero of the American Revolution. In this picture, he is a working professional silversmith. The setting is plain, the lighting clear and revealing. Revere sits in his shirtsleeves, bent over a teapot in progress. He pauses and turns his head to look the observer straight in the eyes. The painter treated the reflections in the polished wood of the tabletop with as much care as he did Revere's figure, his tools, and the teapot resting on its leather graver's pillow. Copley gave special prominence to Revere's eyes by reflecting intense reddish light onto the darkened side of his face and hands. The informality and the sense of the moment link this painting to contemporaneous English and Continental portraits. But the spare style and the emphasis on the sitter's down-to-earth character differentiate this American work from its European counterparts. Figure 26-22 John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, ca. 1768-1770. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Joseph W., William B., and Edward H. R. Revere). In contrast to Grand Manner portraits, Copley's Paul Revere emphasizes the subject's down-to-earth character, differentiating this American work from its European counterparts.

Grande Odalisque

painted for Napoleon's sister Caroline Murat (1782-1839), queen of Naples. The subject—the reclining nude female figure—followed the grand tradition of antiquity and the Renaissance (Figs. 22-16 and 22-39) in sculpture as well as painting, as did Canova's Pauline Borghese as Venus (Fig. 27-4). Grande Odalisque again shows Ingres's admiration for Raphael in his borrowing of that master's type of female head (Figs. 22-7 and 22-8). The figure's languid pose, small head, and elongated limbs and torso, and the generally cool color scheme reveal the painter's debt to Parmigianino (22-44) and the Italian Mannerists, sculptors (Figs. 22-52 and 22-52a) as well as painters. However, by converting the figure to an odalisque (woman in a Turkish harem), Ingres, unlike Canova, made a strong concession to the burgeoning Romantic taste for Orientalist subjects. Figure 27-8 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. The reclining female nude was a Greco-Roman subject, but Ingres converted his Neoclassical figure into an odalisque in a Turkish harem, consistent with the new Romantic taste for the exotic.

The Scream

painted in 1893 when he was 30 years old, exemplifies his style and remains to this day one of the most potent symbols of the unbearable pressures of modern life on individual people. The image—a man standing on a bridge—belongs to the real world. In fact, the inspiration for the painting came after Munch had experienced a fit of anxiety after walking, intoxicated, across an Oslo bridge on a summer evening. However, his depiction of the scene departs significantly from visual reality. The Scream evokes a powerful emotional response from the viewer because of the painter's dramatic presentation. The man in the foreground, simplified to almost skeletal form, emits a primal scream. The landscape's sweeping curvilinear lines reiterate the shapes of the man's mouth and head, almost like an echo, as the cry seems to reverberate through the setting. The fiery red and yellow stripes that give the sky an eerie glow also contribute to this work's resonance. Figure 28-29 Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893. Tempera and pastels on cardboard, . National Gallery, Oslo. Although grounded in the real world, The Scream departs significantly from visual reality. Munch used color, line, and figural distortion to evoke a strong emotional response from the viewer.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

painted in Tahiti in 1897, was, in the artist's judgment, his most important work. The scene is a tropical landscape, populated with native women and children. Despite the setting, most of the canvas surface, other than the figures, consists of broad areas of flat color, which convey a lushness and intensity. Figure 28-21 Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897. Oil on canvas, . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Tompkins Collection). In search of a place far removed from European materialism, Gauguin moved to Tahiti, where he used native women and tropical colors to present a pessimistic view of the inevitability of the life cycle.

Wanderer above a Sea of Mist

probably Friedrich's most famous painting, a solitary man dressed in German attire suggestive of a bygone era stands on a rocky promontory and leans on his cane. He surveys a vast panorama of clouds, mountains, and thick mist. Because Friedrich chose a point of view on the level of the man's head, the viewer has the sensation of hovering in space behind him—an impossible position that enhances the aura of mystery that the scene conveys. Art historians dispute whether Friedrich intended the viewer to identify with the man seen from behind or if he wanted the viewer to contemplate the man gazing at the misty landscape. Some think that the man is not an anonymous hiker but a specific Prussian war hero contemplating the scenery of his native land. In any interpretation, the painter communicated an almost religious awe at the beauty and vastness of the natural world. Figure 27-20 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, 1817-1818. Oil on canvas, . Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Friedrich's painting of a solitary man on a rocky promontory gazing at a vast panorama of clouds, mountains, and thick mist perfectly expresses the Romantic notion of the sublime in nature.

Street (German Expressionism)

provides a glimpse into the frenzied urban activity of a bustling German city before World War I. Rather than offering the distant, panoramic urban view of the Impressionists (Fig. 28-5), Kirchner's street scene is jarring and dissonant in both composition and color, conveying the disquieting and alienating character of Dresden in the early 20th century. The women in the foreground loom large, approaching somewhat menacingly. The steep perspective of the street, which threatens to push the women directly into the viewer's space, increases their confrontational nature. Harshly rendered, the women's features make them appear ghoulish, and the garish, clashing colors—juxtapositions of bright orange, emerald green, chartreuse, and pink—add to the expressive impact of the image. Kirchner's perspective distortions, disquieting figures, and color choices reflect the influence of the work of Edvard Munch, who made similar expressive use of formal elements in The Scream (Fig. 28-29). Figure 29-6 Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908 (dated 1907). Oil on canvas, . Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kirchner's perspective distortions, disquieting figures, and color choices reflect the influence of the Fauves and of Edvard Munch (Fig. 28-29), who made similar expressive use of formal elements.

Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa

recorded an incident during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the course of the general's Syrian campaign of 1799. This fearsome disease struck Muslim and French forces alike, and to quell the growing panic and hysteria, on March 11, 1799, Napoleon himself visited the mosque at Jaffa that had been converted into a hospital for those who had contracted the dreaded disease. Gros depicted Napoleon's staff officers covering their noses against the stench of the place, whereas Napoleon, amid the dead and dying, is fearless and in control. He comforts those still alive, who are clearly awed by his presence and authority. Indeed, by depicting the French leader as having removed his glove to touch the sores of a French plague victim, Gros implied that Napoleon possessed the miraculous power to heal. The composition recalls scenes of the doubting Thomas touching Christ's wound. Here, however, Napoleon is not Saint Thomas but a Christlike figure tending to the sick, as in Rembrandt's Hundred-Guilder Print (Fig. 25-16), which Gros certainly knew. The French painter also based the despairing seated Arab figure at the lower left on the comparable figure (one of the damned) in Michelangelo's Last Judgment (Fig. 22-19). The kneeling nude Frenchman with extended arm at the right recalls the dead Christ in Michelangelo's late Pietà (Fig. 22-20). Figure 27-5 Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa, 1804. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. In his depiction of Napoleon as a Christlike healer, Gros foreshadowed Romanticism by recording the exotic people, costumes, and architecture of Jaffa, including the striped horseshoe arches of the mosque-hospital.

At the Moulin Rouge

reveals the influences of Degas, of Japanese prints, and of photography in the oblique and asymmetrical composition, the spatial diagonals, and the strong line patterns with added dissonant colors. But although Toulouse-Lautrec based everything he painted on firsthand observation, and the scenes he captured were already familiar to viewers in the work of the Impressionists, he so emphasized or exaggerated each element that the tone is new. Compare, for instance, the mood of At the Moulin Rouge with the relaxed and casual atmosphere of Renoir's Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Fig. 28-7). Toulouse-Lautrec's scene is decadent nightlife, with its glaring artificial light, brassy music, and assortment of corrupt, cruel, and masklike faces. (He included himself in the background—the diminutive man wearing a derby hat accompanying the very tall man, his cousin.) Such distortions by simplification of the figures and faces anticipated Expressionism (see Fauvism), when artists' use of formal elements—for example, brighter colors and bolder lines than ever before—increased the effect of the images on observers. Figure 28-14 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-1895. Oil on canvas, . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection). Toulouse-Lautrec devoted his brief career to depicting the bohemian lifestyle of Paris at night. The oblique composition, glaring lighting, masklike faces, and dissonant colors of Moulin Rouge typify his work.

Nadar, Eugène Delacroix

shows the painter at the height of his career. In this photograph, the artist appears with remarkable presence. Even in half-length, his gesture and expression create a mood that seems to reveal much about him. Perhaps Delacroix responded to Nadar's famous gift for putting his clients at ease by assuming the pose that best expressed his personality. The new photographic materials made possible the rich range of tones in Nadar's images. Figure 27-50 Nadar, Eugène Delacroix, ca. 1855. Modern print, , from the original negative. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Nadar was one of the earliest portrait photographers. His prints of the leading artists of the day, such as this one of Delacroix, reveal the sitters' personalities as well as record their features.

Village Bride

sums up the characteristics of the genre. The setting is an unadorned room in a rustic dwelling. In a notary's presence, the elderly father has passed his daughter's dowry to her youthful husband-to-be and blesses the pair, who gently take each other's arms. The old mother tearfully gives her daughter's arm a farewell caress, while the youngest sister melts in tears on the shoulder of the demure bride. An envious older sister broods behind her father's chair. Rosy-faced, healthy children play around the scene. The picture's story is simple—the happy climax of a rural romance. The picture's moral is just as clear—happiness is the reward of "natural" virtue. Figure 26-15 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Village Bride, 1761. Oil on canvas, . Musée du Louvre, Paris. Greuze was a master of sentimental narrative, which appealed to a new audience that admired "natural" virtue. Here, in an unadorned room, a father blesses his daughter and her husband-to-be.

Basket of Apples

the objects have lost something of their individual character as bottles and fruit and have almost become cylinders and spheres. Cézanne captured the solidity of each object by juxtaposing color patches. His interest in the study of volume and solidity is evident from the disjunctures in the painting—the table edges are discontinuous, and various objects seem to be depicted from different vantage points. In his zeal to understand three-dimensionality and to convey the placement of forms relative to the space around them, Cézanne explored his still-life arrangements from different viewpoints. This resulted in paintings that, though conceptually coherent, do not appear optically realistic. Figure 28-23 Paul Cézanne, Basket of Apples, ca. 1895. Oil on canvas, . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926). Cézanne's still lifes reveal his analytical approach to painting. He captured the solidity of bottles and fruit by juxtaposing color patches, but the resulting abstract shapes are not optically realistic.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

under the influence of the younger Impressionists. The Folies-Bergère was a popular café with music-hall performances, one of Paris's most fashionable gathering places. At the center of Manet's Folies-Bergère is a barmaid, who looks out from the canvas but seems disinterested or lost in thought, divorced from her patrons as well as from the viewer. In front of her, Manet painted a marvelous still life of bottles, flowers, and fruit—all for sale to the bar's customers. In the mirror is the reflection of a gentleman wearing a dapper top hat and carrying an elegant walking stick. He has approached the barmaid, perhaps to order a drink, but more likely to ask the price of her company after the bar closes. Also visible in the mirror, at the upper left corner of the canvas, are the lower legs of a trapeze artist and a woman in the nightclub's balcony watching some other performance through opera glasses. Figure 28-1 Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Oil on canvas, . Courtauld Gallery, London.

Death of Marat

which he wanted not only to serve as a record of an important event in the struggle to overthrow the monarchy but also to provide inspiration and encouragement to the revolutionary forces. The pain ting commemorates the assassination that year of Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793), an influential writer who was David's friend. The artist depicted the martyred revolutionary still holding a quill pen in his right hand after Charlotte Corday (1768-1793), a member of a rival political faction, stabbed him to death while Marat was immersed in a bathtub as he worked. (Marat suffered from a painful skin disease and required frequent medicinal baths.) His "desk" was a board placed across the tub with a wood stand next to it for his writing materials. David presented the scene with directness and clarity. The cold neutral space above Marat's figure slumped in the tub produces a chilling oppressiveness. The painter vividly placed all narrative details in the foreground—the knife, the wound, the blood, the letter with which Corday gained entrance—to sharpen the sense of pain and outrage. David masterfully composed the painting to present Marat as a tragic martyr who died in the service of the revolution. Indeed, the writing stand, which bears the words "To Marat, David," resembles a tombstone, and David based Marat's figure on the dead Christ in Michelangelo's Pietà (Fig. 22-12) in Saint Peter's in Rome. The reference to Christ's martyrdom made the painting a kind of "altarpiece" for the new civic "religion," inspiring the French people with the saintly dedication of their slain leader. Figure 26-27 Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, . Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. David depicted the revolutionary Marat as a tragic martyr, stabbed to death in his bath. Although the painting displays severe Neoclassical spareness, its convincing realism conveys pain and outrage.

Luncheon on the Grass

widely recognized only later as a seminal work in the history of art, was rejected by the jury for the 1863 Salon. It depicts two clothed men and one nude and one clothed woman at a picnic. Consistent with Realist principles, Manet depicted a contemporary genre scene and based all four figures on real people, including Victorine Meurent (1844-1927), Manet's favorite model at the time, and his brother. The two men wear fashionable Parisian attire of the 1860s. The nude woman—she has undressed in the park and tossed her clothes on the grass—is a distressingly unidealized figure who also seems completely unfazed by her nakedness. She gazes directly at the viewer without shame or flirtatiousness. Her companion looks in the same direction. Neither pays any attention to what the second man is saying to them. Nor is it clear what relationship, if any, the second woman has to the trio "at lunch." She appears to be looking for something in a pool of water, while attempting unsuccessfully to keep her garment dry. No one has any interest in the picnic food. This is no luncheon on the grass, although it may be the aftermath of a meal. Nor is this truly Realism, because the subject is incomprehensible—as Manet wished it to be. In this work, he sought to reassess the nature of painting. The composition contains sophisticated references and allusions to many artistic genres—history painting, portraiture, pastoral scenes, nudes, and even religious scenes. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe is Manet's impressive synthesis and critique of the entire history of painting. Figure 27-32 Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, . Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Manet shocked his contemporaries with both his subject matter and manner of painting. Moving away from illusionism, he used colors to flatten form and to draw attention to the painting surface.