Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871 (A Social History of Modern Art)

Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871

a social history of modern art volume  4



Art in an Age of



Civil Struggle



1848–1871



Albert Boime



The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

Albert Boime is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author is grateful to the Brockthorne Foundation for its support of this project. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09  08  07   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-06328-7 isbn-10: 0-226-06328-3

(cloth) (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boime, Albert. Art in an age of civil struggle, 1848–1871 / Albert Boime. p. cm.—(A social history of modern art; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-06328-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-06328-3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Art, European—19th century. 2. Art and society—Europe—History—19th century. 3. Art and revolutions—Europe—History—19th century. 4. Realism in art—Europe. I. Title. N6757.B63 2008 709.03'4—dc22 2007009848 ∞  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For Robert Rosenblum

Contents



Illustrations  ix



Introduction  1



1

Springtime and Winter of the People in France, 1848–1852  5



2

Radical Realism and Its Offspring  77



3

Radical Realism Continued  139



4

The Pre-Raphaelites and the 1848 Revolutions  225



5

The Macchia and the Risorgimento  365



6 Cultural Inflections of Slavery and Manifest Destiny in America  403



7

Biedermeier Culture and the Revolutions of 1848  471



8

The Second Empire’s Official Realism  577



9

Edouard Manet: Man About Town  633



10 The Franco-Prussian War, the French Commune, and the Threshold of Impressionism  737



Coda: Menzel and the Transition to Empire  783



Notes  801 Photo Credits  863 Index  865



vii

Illustrations

chapter 1

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28



ix

Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers  15 Auguste Vinchon, The Volunteer Enrollment of 1792  19 Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers  22 Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers  22 Thomas Couture, The Enrollment  23 Thomas Couture, French Volunteer  24 Thomas Couture, Man Pulling a Cannon  24 Thomas Couture, Study of the Mayor of Paris as George Washington  26 Thomas Couture, tracing of a detail of a reproduction of David’s Sabines  27 Thomas Couture, Father and Son  27 Ange-Louis Janet-Lange, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  42 Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies of sketches of the Republic  44 Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies, detail  44 Hippolyte Flandrin, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  44 Dominique-Louis Papety, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  46 Honoré Daumier, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  46 Honoré Daumier, Last Council of the Ex-Ministers  47 Honoré Daumier, The Divorcées  49 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  50 Sébastien-Melchior Cornu, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  50 Charles Landelle, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  52 Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies, detail  54 Bertall, Bertall à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques  55 Tony Johannot, La République  56 Jean-François Soitoux, Symbolic Figure of the Republic  57 Jean-Jacques Barre, Seal of the Republic  59 Jean-Jacques Barre, State Seal, obverse and reverse  60 The Republican Medal and Its Reverse  61



1.29 There Is No Place Like Home  62 1.30 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848  63 1.31 Adolphe Leleux, La Sortie, Paris  65 1.32 Adolphe Leleux, The Password  65 1.33 Honoré Daumier, The Uprising  67 1.34 The Great Barricade at the Entrance of the Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, from the Place de la Bastille  70 1.35 Adolphe Hervier, The Barricade  70 1.36 Adolphe Hervier, The Barricade  70 1.37 Léon Cogniet, The National Guard of Paris Departs for the Army in September 1792  71 1.38 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Souvenir of the Civil War  73

chapter 2

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16

Jean-François Millet, The Stoning of St. Stephen  86 Jean-François Millet, The Cliffs of the Hague  86 Jean-François Millet, Antoinette Hébert  88 Jean-François Millet, Monsieur Ouitre  88 Thomas Couture, Portrait of Adolphe Moreau  89 Jean-François Millet, Oedipus Taken Down from the Tree  89 Jean-François Millet, Return from the Fields  90 Jean-François Millet, Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Egalité)  92 Jean-François Millet, The Winnower  94 French Agriculture—Winnowing  95 Jean-François Millet, The Sower  110 Jean-François Millet, Ruth and Boaz or The Harvesters’ Meal  116 Jean-François Millet, Man Grafting a Tree  119 Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners  122 Jean-François Millet, The Angelus  127 Jean-François Millet, The Man with the Hoe  131

chapter 3

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12



x

Karl von Steuben, Return from the Island of Elba  142 Gustave Courbet, masthead design for Le Salut Public  144 Gustave Courbet, The Sculptor  146 Thomas Couture, The Troubadour  146 Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with a Black Dog  147 Gustave Courbet, The Man with the Leather Belt  148 Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans  151 Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers  159 Cham, Why Do They Call This Painting Socialistic, Papa?  160 Gustave Courbet, Funeral at Ornans  170 Master Mason’s Tableau with Symbols of the Legend of Hiram  177 Gustave Courbet, Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair  183

illustrations



3.13 Thomas Couture, The Realist  184 3.14 Gustave Courbet, Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire  188 3.15 Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigna, The Fire  189 3.16 Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies of the Village  191 3.17 Gustave Courbet, The Bathers  197 3.18 Gustave Courbet, The Wrestlers  197 3.19 Gustave Courbet, The Meeting  201 3.20 Legend of the Wandering Jew  202 3.21 Gustave Courbet, The Apostle Jean Journet Setting Out for the Conquest of Universal Harmony  204 3.22 Frontispiece for first edition of Constitutions des franc-maçons  206 3.23 Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio  208 3.24 Frontispiece for Leaves of Grass  222

chapter 4



4.1 William Holman Hunt, Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions  234 4.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin  238 4.3 Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts  244 4.4 Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress  248 4.5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini!  252 4.6 John Everett Millais, Isabella  255 4.7 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, two designs for stools  256 4.8 John Everett Millais, Copy of a Cast of the Apollo Belvedere  257 4.9 John Everett Millais, Copy of a Cast of Fighting Gladiators  257 4.10 William Holman Hunt, Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse  260 4.11 John Everett Millais, Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (Christ in the House of His Parents)  261 4.12 John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents  267 4.13 John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark  270 4.14 John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark  270 4.15 John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge  271 4.16 John Everett Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter  275 4.17 John Everett Millais, Ophelia  278 4.18 Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Lady of Shalott  280 4.19 John Everett Millais, Portrait of Ruskin  282 4.20 John Everett Millais, The Waterfall  284 4.21 John Ruskin, Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas  286 4.22 John Everett Millais, The Rescue  287 4.23 John Everett Millais, Peace Concluded or The Return from the Crimea  290 4.24 “Conclusion of Peace,” headline from the Times  291 4.25 William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd  293 4.26 William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World  300

xi

illustrations



4.27 4.28 4.29 4.30 4.31 4.32 4.33 4.34 4.35 4.36 4.37 4.38 4.39 4.40 4.41 4.42 4.43 4.44 4.45 4.46 4.47 4.48 4.49 4.50

Philipp Veit, Christ Knocking on the Door of the Soul  304 William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience  309 Thomas Brooks, The Awakened Conscience  313 William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat  321 William Holman Hunt, Finding of the Saviour in the Temple  324 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found  329 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found  329 Smithfield Market—Calves and Oxen  334 Smithfield Market—Sheep—The Drover’s Goad  334 Thames Embankment  335 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix  337 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Astarte Syriaca  341 Ford Madox Brown, Work  345 Specimens from Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition of 1850 (To Be Improved in 1851)  347 Ford Madox Brown, Heath Street, Hampstead  350 What Our Navvies Are Likely to Do  351 Ford Madox Brown, Work  352 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Work (Le Travail)  353 The Irish Street Seller  356 The Groundsel Man  356 Ford Madox Brown, Work  360 Portrait of Thomas Carlyle  361 Ford Madox Brown, Last of England  363 The Emigrants  363

chapter 5



5.1 Rafaello Sernesi, Roofs in the Sunlight  368 5.2 Vito D’Ancona, Portico  368 5.3 Domenico Induno, Bulletin of 14 July 1859, Announcing the Peace of Villafranca  375 5.4 Giovanni Fattori, French Soldiers of ’59  379 5.5 Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence  379 5.6 Francesco Hayez, The Kiss  380 5.7 Giovanni Fattori, After the Battle of Magenta  383 5.8 Adolphe Yvon, Magenta, 4 June 1859  385 5.9 The War—Attack on the Church of Magenta  385 5.10 Giovanni Fattori, Garibaldi at Palermo  386 5.11 Garibaldi and His Army Arriving at Marsala  387 5.12 Odoardo Borrani, The 26th of April, 1859  390 5.13 Telemaco Signorini, The Venice Ghetto  393 5.14 Telemaco Signorini, The Tuscan Artillerymen at Montechiaro Saluted by the French Wounded at Solferino  394 5.15 Giuseppe Abbati, The Cloister  395



xii



illustrations

Giuseppe Abbati, The Cloister of Santa Croce  397 Silvestro Lega, Singing the Stornello  398 Silvestro Lega, The Trellis  400



5.16 5.17 5.18



6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 6.19 6.20 6.21 6.22 6.23 6.24 6.25 6.26 6.27 6.28 6.29 6.30 6.31 6.32 6.33 6.34 6.35 6.36 6.37

Hiram Powers, America  402 Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico  406 George Caleb Bingham, The Verdict of the People  410 George Caleb Bingham, Order No. 11  412 Lilly Martin Spencer, Height of Fashion  416 Lilly Martin Spencer, Power of Fashion  416 Lilly Martin Spencer, The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic  418 Lilly Martin Spencer, Blind Faith  419 William Sidney Mount, Dawn of Day  423 Dandy Jim from Caroline  424 John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman  426 Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Robert Gould Shaw  428 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free  428 Thomas Ball, Emancipation Group  430 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South  432 Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves  436 Thomas Satterwhite Noble, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis  439 Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Margaret Garner  440 The Modern Medea—The Story of Margaret Garner  440 Alexander Gardner, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863  443 George N. Barnard, Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, South Carolina  444 Henry Mosler, Lost Cause  445 George N. Barnard, The John Ross House, Ringold, Georgia  445 Frederic Church, Our Banner in the Sky  446 “Hail! Glorious Banner of Our Land”  447 John Gast, American Progress  450 Asher B. Durand, Progress  450 Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape in the Riesengebirge  453 Caspar David Friedrich, Traveler above the Fog  453 Thomas Cole, Scene from “Manfred”  456 Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits  457 Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross  458 Thomas Moran, The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone  459 William S. Jewett, The Promised Land—The Grayson Family  461 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way  461 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” with McCormick Reapers in the Van  463 Frederic Edwin Church, Mount Ktaadn  464



xiii

illustrations

chapter 6



6.38 Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls  465 6.39 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania  467 6.40 George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley  468 6.41 Frances “Fanny” Palmer, Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”  469

chapter 7



7.1 Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Destruction of Jerusalem  472 7.2 Commode, Southwest Germany  474 7.3 Richard Caton Woodville, The Sailor’s Wedding  476 7.4 Karl Begas, The Begas Family  477 7.5 Moritz Oppenheim, The Jung Brothers with Their Tutor  478 7.6 Johann Peter Krafft, The Entrance of Kaiser Franz into Vienna after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1814  480 7.7 Johann Peter Krafft, Kaiser Franz Giving a Public Audience  480 7.8 Peter Fendi, Family Reunion  482 7.9 Peter Fendi, Archduchess Sophie Accompanying Her Children in the Evening Prayer  482 7.10 Peter Fendi, The Seizure  483 7.11 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Seizure  484 7.12 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Portrait of the Notary Dr. Josef Eltz, His Wife Caroline, and Their Eight Children in Bad Ischl  486 7.13 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, View of the Dachstein and Hallstatt Lake from the Hütteneck Alp near Bad Ischl  488 7.14 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Lower Austrian Peasant Wedding (Wedding in Perchtoldsdorf)  489 7.15 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Interrupted Pilgrimage  491 7.16 Moritz von Schwind, Morning Hour  492 7.17 Moritz von Schwind, Rübezahl, Berg-Geist  493 7.18 Moritz von Schwind, The Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein  497 7.19 Moritz von Schwind, Portrait of Franz von Schober  497 7.20 Moritz von Schwind, Sleeping Knight  497 7.21 Moritz von Schwind, The Prisoner’s Dream  498 7.22 Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet  501 7.23 Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm  502 7.24 Carl Spitzweg, Peace in Land  502 7.25 Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Mendel Levin Nathanson’s Elder Daughters, Bella and Hanna  505 7.26 Christen Købke, View of a Street in a Copenhagen Suburb, Morning Light  506 7.27 Christen Købke, View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen  508 7.28 Christen Købke, View of Østerbro from Dosseringen  508 7.29 Anton Ziegler, The Barricades on the Michaelerplatz on the Nights of the 26th and 27th of May 1848  510 7.30 Carl Friedrich Lessing, Hussite Sermon  513



xiv



illustrations

Hans Holbein, The Waggoner  516 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz (Yet Another Dance of Death)  517 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  518 Alfred Rethel, The Factory of Friedrich Harkort at Burg Wetter  518 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  519 Julius Diez, Liebermann, der Berliner Sezessionswirth  520 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  521 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  521 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  522 Title page from Goupil’s publication of Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz  523 Karl Wilhelm Hübner, Silesian Weavers  525 Alfred Rethel, The Battle of Cordova  529 Alfred Rethel, Entrance of Charlemagne into Pavia  529 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Atelier Scene  536 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Jobs Being Examined  537 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware  539 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature  543 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature  544 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature  546 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature  546 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature  548 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Portrait of Ferdinand Freiligrath  552 Wilhelm Müller, Silhouettes of Freiligrath and Wulff  553 Photograph of Ferdinand Freiligrath  553 Grand Funeral Procession of the Victims of the [French] Revolution  556 The Dead Carried before the King and Queen  556 Solemnities over the Dead before the Neuen Kirche, Berlin  557 Adolph von Menzel, The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution  560 Adolph von Menzel, The Anhalter Railway Station by Moonlight  561 Adolph von Menzel, The Berlin–Potsdam Railroad  561 The King of Prussia in the Streets of Berlin on the 21st March 1848  565 Revolutionary Meeting in a Cellar in Berlin  567 Adolph von Menzel, The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution  569 Adolph von Menzel, My Father’s Hand  571 Adolph von Menzel, My Father’s Hand  571 Adolph von Menzel, The Coronation of King Wilhelm I at Königsberg, 1861  573 Adolph von Menzel, The Coronation of King Wilhelm I at Königsberg, 1861  573



7.31 7.32 7.33 7.34 7.35 7.36 7.37 7.38 7.39 7.40 7.41 7.42 7.43 7.44 7.45 7.46 7.47 7.48 7.49 7.50 7.51 7.52 7.53 7.54 7.55 7.56 7.57 7.58 7.59 7.60 7.61 7.62 7.63 7.64 7.65 7.66 7.67



8.1 8.2 8.3

Taking Down the House of the National Assembly  579 Removal of the Inscription “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”  579 Demolitions for the Rue de Rennes  580



xv

illustrations

chapter 8



8.4 Charles de Marville, Rue de Gindre (partie de la rue Madame)  581 8.5 Demolitions for the Avenue de l’Opéra  583 8.6 Perspective from the Avenue de l’Opéra  583 8.7 Honoré Daumier, Ratapoil  586 8.8 Honoré Daumier, “Fair Lady, Will You Accept My Arm?”  586 8.9 Honoré Daumier, New Toy Launched by Ratapoil  586 8.10 Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte  587 8.11 Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte  587 8.12 Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte  587 8.13 Eugène-André Oudine, The Accession of Napoléon III to the Empire  602 8.14 Edouard Detaille, Napoléon III Crowned with Laurel and Smoking a Cigarette  602 8.15 Isidore Pils, The Battle of Alma  602 8.16 Ernest Meissonier, The Emperor Napoléon III at the Battle of Solferino  603 8.17 Ange-Tissier, The Submission of Abd el Kader  604 8.18 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Napoléon III Receiving Abd el Kader at Saint-Cloud  605 8.19 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie at Fontainebleau, 27 June 1861  607 8.20 Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by the Emperor of the French at the Palace of Fontainebleau  607 8.21 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Age of Augustus  608 8.22 Gustave Boulanger, Rehearsal of “The Flute Player” in the Atrium of H.I.H. the Prince Napoléon  610 8.23 Jean-Louis Hamon, My Sister Is Not at Home  611 8.24 Jean-Louis Hamon, The Human Comedy  611 8.25 Eugène Guérard, Théâtre de Guignol (Champs-Elysées)  611 8.26 Jean-Louis Hamon, Conjuror  612 8.27 Auguste Toulmouche, Forbidden Fruit  613 8.28 Jean-François Millet, Immaculate Conception  615 8.29 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pope Pius IX Blessing Locomotives  615 8.30 William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Entrance of the Emperor at Tarascon, 14 June 1856  617 8.31 Alexandre Antigna, The Visit of the Emperor to the Slate Quarry Workers of Angers during the Floods of 1856  620 8.32 Ange-Louis Janet-Lange, Napoléon III Distributing Alms to the Flood Victims of Lyon in June 1856  621 8.33 Thomas Couture, The Baptism of the Prince Imperial  622 8.34 Rosa Bonheur, Ploughing in the Nivernais  623 8.35 Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair  623 8.36 Jules Breton, The Gleaners  625 8.37 Charles Gleyre, Ruth and Boaz  625 8.38 Evariste Luminais, The Fair Grounds  625 8.39 François Bonhommé, The Barricade of Canal Saint-Martin, 23 June 1848  627 8.40 François Bonhommé, Diploma for a Mutual Aid Society  627 8.41 Ernest Meissonier, Les Bravi  629



xvi



illustrations

chapter 9

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 9.19 9.20 9.21 9.22 9.23 9.24 9.25 9.26 9.27 9.28 9.29 9.30 9.31 9.32 9.33 9.34 9.35 9.36 9.37 9.38 9.39 9.40 9.41



xvii

Henri Fantin-Latour, Portrait of Edouard Manet  632 Edouard Manet, Portrait of M and Mme Auguste Manet  639 Edouard Manet, The Nymph Surprised  641 Edouard Manet, La Pêche  642 Edouard Manet, Portrait of Antonin Proust  644 Thomas Couture, Portrait of a Woman  644 Edouard Manet, The Bark of Dante  645 Edouard Manet, The Bark of Dante  645 Edouard Manet, The Infanta Margarita  646 Edouard Manet, Portrait of Roudier  647 Thomas Couture, Portrait of a Man  647 Edouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker  650 Edouard Manet, The Boy with the Cherries  655 Thomas Couture, Drummer Boy  656 Le Gamin de Paris  658 Edouard Manet, The Fifer  659 Edouard Manet, Concert in the Tuileries  667 Edouard Manet, The Old Musician  669 Charles Monginot, Caught in the Act  673 Edouard Manet, The Street Singer  674 Frédéric Bazille, The Italian Street Singer  674 Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe  676 Charles de Marville, Scene at the Bois de Boulogne, Paris  678 Eugène Guérard, Long Live Wine, Long Live the Juice Divine  680 A. Morlon, Boating Party on the Banks of the Seine  680 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies-in-Waiting  684 Henri Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix  687 Henri Fantin-Latour, The Atelier in the Batignolles  688 Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus  690 Edouard Manet, Olympia  691 Titian, Venus of Urbino  693 Lambert Sustris, Venus  694 West Indian Women Laundering  697 Edouard Manet, The Universal Exposition of 1867  702 Edouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola  704 Edouard Manet, The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama  711 Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian  714 Isidore Pils, Zouaves in the Trenches  718 Execution of Maximilian  721 Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian  722 François Aubert, The Execution Squad  723

illustrations



9.42 9.43 9.44 9.45 9.46 9.47 9.48

Paul-Alexandre Protais, Morning, before the Attack  726 Paul-Alexandre Protais, Evening, after the Attack  726 Jean-Paul Laurens, The Last Moments of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico  728 Photograph of Maximilian  730 Edouard Manet, La Guerre civile  734 Charles de Marville, Fountain, Place de la Madeleine  734 Edouard Manet, The Barricade  735

chapter 10



10.1 Auguste B. Braquehais, Communards Posing at the Base of the Vendôme Column  740 10.2 Auguste B. Braquehais, Communards Posing  740 10.3 Cham, Souvenirs et regrets  741 10.4 Rebuilding  745 10.5 Karl Fichot, The Principal Monuments of Paris during the Course of the Year 1873  746 10.6 Charles de Marville, The Restoration of the Vendôme Column after the Commune  746 10.7 Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise  752 10.8 Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines  754 10.9 The Ruins of Paris: Porte Maillot and the Avenue de la Grande Armée  754 10.10 Bertall, La Barricade  756 10.11 Dubois, Une pétroleuse  756 10.12 Eugène Girard, The Emancipated Woman Shedding Light on the World  756 10.13 Title page from V. Fournel, Paris et ses ruines  757 10.14 Bertall, Le Docteur Tant-Pis et le Docteur Tant-Mieux  759 10.15 Edgar Degas, The Cotton Office, New Orleans  761 10.16 Jean Béraud, A Soirée in the Hôtel Caillebotte  763 10.17 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Weather  765 10.18 Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe  767 10.19 A. Lamy, The Pont de l’Europe and the Gare Saint-Lazare  767 10.20 Claude Monet, Le Pont de l’Europe  769 10.21 Claude Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare  769 10.22 Claude Monet, The Railway Bridge, Argenteuil  771 10.23 Claude Monet, The Roadbridge at Argenteuil  771 10.24 Claude Monet, The Wooden Bridge at Argenteuil  773 10.25 Claude Monet, The Roadbridge at Argenteuil under Repair  773 10.26 Le Pont d’Argenteuil  774 10.27 Claude Monet, The Railroad Bridge Viewed from the Port  775 10.28 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Hope  777 10.29 Title page from J. Claretie, Histoire de la Révolution de 1870–71  777 10.30 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Ruins of the Tuileries, May 1871  778 10.31 Alphonse Liebert, Interior of the Salle des Maréchaux  778 10.32 A State Ball at the Tuileries [Salle des Maréchaux]  779 10.33 M. Val Elven, Ruins. Interior of the Tuileries. Current State of the Vestibule of the Salle des Maréchaux  779

xviii

illustrations



10.34 10.35

Emmanuel Frémiet, Joan of Arc on Horseback  781 Emmanuel Frémiet, Gorilla Carrying Off a Human Female  782

coda

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7

Adolph von Menzel, The Departure of King William I for the Army, 31 July 1870  785 Adolph von Menzel, Soldier of the Prussian Landwehr and French Prisoners  787 Adolph von Menzel, The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple  788 Adolph von Menzel, End-of-the-Day of Atonement (The Habdalah)  788 Adolph von Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops)  793 Laminoirs de Lipine (Society of Zinc, Mines, and Foundries of Upper Silesia)  793 Donnersmarck-Hütte  797



xix

illustrations

Introduction

Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871, the fourth volume in the series A Social History of Modern Art, essentially covers the period from the European revolutions of 1848 and the bourgeoning independence movement in Italy through the American Civil War and culminating with the French Commune. Although Biedermeier culture is also covered in this volume, I take this step back in time from 1848 to help clarify the wellsprings of the revolutions in Prussia and Austria and its predominantly realist sensibility. This volume embraces the various movements of realism and culminates just at the moment of transition to French impressionism, although the Italian Macchiaioli already anticipate many of the principles later associated with the French movement. This is a period characterized by a quantum leap in science and technology, and by the continuing secularization of intellectual thought and ordinary existence. The major metropolitan centers may be seen as battlegrounds in a double sense: as sites for civic transformation and urban renewal programs and as spheres of actual domestic combat. Napoléon III’s ambitious project to rebuild Paris from the ground up had as its major aim to transform the old medieval city into a modern metropolis, but it also succeeded in driving the working classes to the slum districts on the eastern margins of the city or to the shantytowns of the suburbs. The mastermind and supervisor of the emperor’s vast scheme, Baron Georges Haussmann, widened the boulevards and eliminated many of the narrow, winding, crooked streets both to reduce the opportunities for street uprisings and the construction of barricades and to allow the military to move in expeditiously with rolling armor to crush them. Although some opponents of the scheme, still reeling from 1848, feared the increase of workers that public works would attract to the city, the program actually served to stabilize the social and political structure by offering abundant employment. These urban developments in Paris paralleled a similar evolution in Vienna, Brussels, New York, and a host of other municipalities as these cities were revamped to accommodate the privileged sectors of society and protect them

1

from “mob rule.” Napoléon III and Haussmann also influenced American city planning and civic architecture in the post–Civil War era, similarly aimed at facilitating more harmonious class interaction and keeping a lid on class warfare. Strategic considerations played a conspicuous role in the urban rebuilding program and with good reason: the period is marked above all else as one of conflict between, on the one hand, the residual but rapidly disintegrating Metternichean system and, on the other, liberal and nationalist impulses that preserved the revolutionary engagement inspired by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which continued to be championed in progressive circles despite renewed attempts to smother liberal ideals. The most articulate expression of liberalism in the nineteenth century was formulated by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill in his famous essay, On Liberty. Written in 1859, a sort of delayed challenge to the accumulating wave of reaction following the revolutions of 1848, On Liberty summarized the faith of a liberal in continuous social progress through the capacity of humankind for freedom of thought—a classic restatement of Enlightenment universalism. That same year Charles Darwin published his momentous theory of evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of Species, a milestone in biological science in that it applied the same laws to the development of human beings and animals, creating the conditions for linking all life with cosmic, suprahistorical forces. Darwinian ideas were enthusiastically, if loosely, extended to social and political discussions in the ruthless argument that came to be known as Social Darwinism and exploited to justify harsh economic competition, racial differences, imperialism, and even the necessity of war. Together with his later Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin’s key contributions bracket the dates of this volume, with the later work elaborating on his crucial notion that human beings descended from “some lowly organised form.” Although it was mainly the conservatives who appropriated the term “Social Darwinism” to rationalize their brute behavior in the marketplace, social democrats were among the first to observe Darwinian parallels to their scientific approach to history. In 1860 Marx wrote to Engels that Origin of Species provided a “basis in natural science for our views,” and subsequently entertained the idea of dedicating the second volume of Das Kapital to the biologist. (Darwin, however, refused the offer.) Of course, Marx’s influential theory and criticism of contemporary society was the equivalent of Darwin’s apocalyptic bombshell in the social sciences, beginning with his landmark Communist Manifesto (authored jointly with Engels), published on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. It is no coincidence that in the same decade of the 1860s the word “capitalism” entered the West’s economic and political vocabulary, a period when the idea that economic growth and political and social progress rested on competitive private enterprise assumed the force of dogma. Marx predicted capitalism’s demise and replacement by a new classless society, an intellectual act of sheer courage and bravado

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introduction

at the time he wrote Das Kapital. Yet Marxism had an immense appeal for both the downtrodden and their intellectual allies, promising an end to exploitative industrial society and assuring adherents that the triumph of their cause was guaranteed by history. Although the influence of Marxism grew during the second wave of industrialization in the closing decades of the century, Marx’s role in the founding of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) in 1864 was instrumental in building a workers’ movement, some of whose members participated in the Commune of 1871. Even earlier, Marxist ideas circulated through his (and Engels’s) journalistic contributions and deeply affected many of his contemporaries in both nationalist struggles as well as the international movement that stressed solidarity with laboring classes everywhere in a period of intense nationalism. Except for the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War (in the latter case, the siege of Paris and the Commune that grew out of it are part of the story), most of these nationalist struggles took place on domestic fronts either to oust a foreign occupier or defend one’s class, political party, property, or way of life against the onslaught of fellow citizens. These conflicts were fought out on home territory by ordinary citizens as well as by uniformed soldiers in the face of the breakdown of the traditional separation of domestic and military domains. Total mobilization of the citizenry to support military solutions undermined the old threshold between home and battlefield and made citizens fair game as well as combatants. Circumstances reached a breaking point in 1848 when the economic crisis of the previous two years gave rise to uprisings for political liberty and nationhood in the major metropolitan centers in Europe: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Naples, Venice, and Rome. Although all the revolutions of 1848 ended in defeat for the insurgents, they set into motion powerful forces that generated more lasting consequences. Popular uprisings were shunned in favor of coalition building with independent nation-states as in the case of Italy, where the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, ruled by an indigenous Italian dynasty, helped lead the Risorgimento—the drive for Italian unification. By 1870, complete Italian unification would be achieved. One year later, Germany was united under the aegis of Bismarck when, on 18 January 1871, at Versailles, the German princes granted the title of Kaiser (emperor) to Wilhelm I. In this case, however, Bismarck’s success in foreign affairs persuaded the remnant of the liberal movement to engage in Realpolitik, to abandon revolutionary ideals for the realities of power and a conservative, authoritarian state. German unity was achieved on the back of Napoléon III’s ill-fated decision to declare war on Prussia, igniting the nationalist sympathies of the South German states who had signed defensive treaties with Prussia in 1866 and now came to its aid. Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the French emperor created the conditions for renewed civil struggle in France known as the Paris Commune. It began as both a

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patriotic refusal to accept French defeat and as a rejection of Napoleonic rule, but when the radical faction of the mobilized populace went its own way under the provisional government presided over by the same Thiers who oversaw the suppression of the French workers in 1834, civil war broke out in which Frenchmen slaughtered Frenchmen with a savagery unprecedented in European history. French contemporaries labeled the conflict a guerre civile, a true civil war between hostile citizen factions of the same country. Coming only six years after the end of the American Civil War—the most devastating of all fratricidal wars in the nineteenth century—the ruthless suppression of the Paris Commune, although lasting only two months, recapitulated many of the horrors of the bloody internecine strife of the American conflict. The American Civil War was the bloodiest war anywhere between 1815 and 1914, and its combatants sustained even greater losses than the casualties of the first Napoleonic wars. It tested the very survival of the American experiment, focusing on the contradictions of slavery and the problem of race in a society dedicated to freedom and equality. The American crisis was a matter of vital concern to the rest of the world as well, and though no foreign power recognized the Confederacy or intervened on its behalf, it became a world event anyway. Lord Palmerston relished the prospect of the elimination of a dangerous rival in the Atlantic world, while Napoléon III perceived the Civil War as the best possible cover for his intervention in Mexico. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both keen observers of the Civil War, emphasized the universal significance of its elimination of the last remnants of a feudal system in America and saw it as a victory for wage earners in the North in smoothing the path of industrial capitalism. The victory of the North gave to American nationalism a powerful stimulus and helped build a sense of involvement unprecedented in American history. It was a great watershed in American history and went a long way in shaping the national culture, as is evident in the literature and visual arts of the period. Significantly, the war also advanced manufacturing interests, whose success in contributing to the salvation of the Union justified a spectacular industrial expansion and growing corporate organization as a kind of patriotic virtue. Finally, it gave a vigorous impulse to the industrial capitalists whose quest for an expanding international market will constitute the main theme of the next volume in the series, Art in an Age of Empire, 1871–1914.



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i Springtime and Winter of the People in France, 1848–1852

The revolutionary movements that broke out in the late winter and early spring of 1848 heralded the only major social and political upheaval the European continent experienced during the Age of Civil Struggle. In France, the revolution of 1848 momentarily swept away the eclectic cobwebs spun by the July Monarchy and stimulated excited civic participation on all levels of society. Previously unimagined alternatives now seemed attainable, as the grid that held the fears and blocked the people’s aspirations broke apart and the most disparate groups could feel themselves fraternally united. Although the economic forecast during this period was unsurprisingly gloomy, the social atmosphere was charged with an extraordinary ebullience which was manifested in the sudden efflorescence of political clubs (including the surfacing of several heretofore secret societies), some with names like Jacobin and Montagnard derived from the Great Revolution and others organized for the emancipation of women and European peoples still suffering under a tyrannical yoke. The proliferation of clubs or popular societies between March and June helped make the February revolution a social revolution in the sense of mobilizing and educating thousands of people previously excluded from the political process. The club movement, supplemented by ongoing banqueting, provided the meeting point for mass participation at a time when organized labor and political parties in France were still in their infancy.1 They constituted a power bloc that acted to keep the Provisional Government on course during the unstable transition, enlisting the energies of women, the working poor, and Fourierists, Icarians, and other utopian sects now able to operate in the open. The proliferating banquets and the planting of Trees of Liberty and their blessing by the clergy attested to the hopefulness and accented the cult of the people, instanced by the opening words of the government’s proclamation of 26 February that spoke in the name of “the people.” The optimism expressed itself in a flood of newspapers and pamphlets filled with novel social and reformist programs which

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poured forth as soon as the Provisional Government abolished the stamp duty and removed restrictions on the liberty of the press. Unfortunately, the euphoria would be short-lived, as the political realities set in and complicated the plans of the idealists. The idea of the “Republic” remained anachronistically linked with the dream of 1789 and its antique ideal. Furthermore, as it turned out, the progress of the February revolution rested on a freak alliance of classes, each of which participated for very different reasons. The petty bourgeois, not quite rich enough to qualify for the vote, shared with the workers their resentment against the tight elite of industrialists and bankers who ran the July Monarchy, and hoped through the expansion of the franchise to make decisions more favorable to artisanal trade and small shopkeeping. The workers fought to achieve some economic security and job guarantees for all. At the same time, the smaller tradesmen were afraid for their profits and property, and would soon begin to wax paranoid about what the aristocratic and haut-bourgeois described as the “excesses of the people.” As Marx wrote: “The Provisional Government, rising on the February barricades, necessarily reflected in its composition the different parties that shared in the victory. It could be naught but a compromise among the different classes that had jointly overthrown the July throne, but whose interests were antagonistic.”2 Although its break with the past was nearly complete, the Provisional Government that emerged out of the heady successes of the first months could only constitute a compromise of many conflicting voices. George Sand described the moderate faction—which included Arago, Marie, Garnier-Pagès, Crémieux (all four of whom had been opposition deputies during the July Monarchy), Dupont de l’Eure, Armand Marrast, and Lamartine—as “the juste milieu of the Republic.”3 This group perceived the revolution as a political opportunity: it meant the completion of the first revolution by the substitution of a free and democratic republic based upon universal male suffrage for a monarchy based upon a rigidly restricted franchise. Sand lined them up against the radical faction—including republicans Ledru-Rollin and Ferdinand Flocon and socialists Louis Blanc and the machinist Alexandre Martin (a veteran of the secret society Les Saisons and known simply as “Albert” in the contemporary accounts)—for whom the revolution implied a social and economic as well as a political transformation; they in fact wished to translate the writings of the earlier reformists into practical action and cushion society against the hardships of the new industrial age. The insurmountable dilemma of 1848 lay in the conflict between those who wanted to seize the opportunity to solve the social problem by radical reform of the conditions of labor and those who were determined to resist social changes that they feared would lead to chaos and anarchy. The moderate group thought it sufficient to grant the right to vote to the male population, shorten the working day, and allow a laissez-faire program to take care of the rest. In the initial stages, the radical

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group took to the offensive while the moderates held back out of fear of antagonizing those who fought on the barricades. If Lamartine’s eloquence could save the tricolor from being replaced by a red flag, the government still had to compromise by allowing a red rosette to be affixed to the tricolor standard. For a brief time both camps worked well together despite their ideological differences and were responsible for significant political as well as social gains. Several members in both factions of the coalition government—Dupont de l’Eure, Crémieux, Ledru-Rollin, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, Flocon and Louis Blanc—bridged the gap as Freemasons, and Lamartine in a moment of generosity could admit that in the beginning the secret societies “constituted a sort of democratic Freemasonry.” Many of the Masonic symbols used during the revolution of 1789 were revived in this period: the triangle, square, compass, and plumb line. At the outset of the regime, the operative coalition between moderates resentful of Louis-Philippe’s opposition to electoral reform and radicals seeking social change was facilitated by Masonic influence.4 Working hours were reduced in Paris and the provinces, National Workshops (Ateliers Nationaux) were created to deal with widespread unemployment, universal male suffrage was introduced into France, and slavery was abolished in the colonies. Nudged by workers’ demonstrations, the Provisional Government made Blanc the chair of a commission on labor issues at the Luxembourg Palace empowered to draft wage agreements and labor codes for all branches of industry and trade. The hesitation and vacillation of the new regime that played it by ear on a daily basis, however, gave rise to disorders in Paris and instilled grave doubts in a large portion of the populace, producing a sense of disquiet that spread to the remotest parts of the country. Strapped for revenues, the government caused further unrest in the countryside by increasing direct taxes. Despite the echoes of the cry for revolution heard in the clubs, it would seem that the country as a whole in 1848 neither wished for drastic social change nor the abolition of economic inequality. The more affluent peasantry, many of them now proprietors in their own right, were only frightened by tales of the Parisian socialists and by rumors of the redistribution of income and property. Even in Paris, workers’ disturbances began to have their effect, and when the April elections for the National Constituent Assembly rolled around, most of the votes were cast on the side of “law and order.” The voting results represented an overwhelming defeat for the extreme radicals, who won only 100 out of 876 seats. Early in May the Assembly began to betray its conservative direction, and a series of demonstrations led by radicals culminated with massive arrests and prosecutions, including that of Albert, who had been deposed along with Blanc by a reorganized government authority in the form of an Executive Commission following the resignation of the members of the Provisional Government. Worse, this Executive Commission also decided to disband the poorly organized National Workshops that at least provided

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some relief for the unemployed, a move that was perceived by the laboring classes as immediately inimical to their interests and led once more to the erection of barricades. The National Workshops and Radical Thought

The institution of the National Workshops crystallized the antagonism between the classes, looming on the political horizon as it did as an inauspicious expression of the socialist slogan “the right to work.” By 1848, the critical attack on the existing economic system by Fourierists, SaintSimonists, and a host of other reformist groups and the projection of their utopian alternatives had penetrated into the popular consciousness and informed working-class agitation. The window of radical opportunity opened during the first months of the Second Republic would always be remembered as the heyday of a free political press, with hundreds of new journals appearing in the capital and provinces and functioning not only as mouthpieces but also as centers of political mobilization for the diverse associations encouraging worker-controlled production. The titles themselves often clue the readers to their respective positions: La Démocratie pacifique, the Fourierist venue; La Réforme, an uncompromising opposition paper edited by Flocon, Ledru-Rollin, and Blanc; and La République, vaunting itself as socialist and sympathetic to Icarian ideas. Both the aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville and the radical Karl Marx characterized the June uprising as class warfare, with the first observing that the insurrection represented “a powerful effort of the workers to escape from the necessities of their condition, which had been depicted to them as an illegitimate depression, and by the sword to open up a road towards that imaginary well-being that had been shown to them in the distance as a right.”5 The agitation of workers on behalf of the concept of the “right to work” and some economic alternative to laissez-faire doctrine threatened bourgeois political hegemony and intensified the social divide along clearly defined class lines. Although their immediate antagonists in the form of the Garde Mobile were also part of the artisanal community, these troops were on the average much younger and threw in with the moderate Republic as a better option. But a substantial portion of the insurgents came out of the National Workshops, and collectively reacted to the betrayal of the promise to workers in February guaranteeing them the “right to work.” The document that would become a primary text of the international labor movement, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—originally the platform of a secret society appearing in German in February 1848 and in French shortly before the June insurrection— began with an extraordinary statement defining the entire history of human society up to the present as “the history of class struggles.” Although the authors insisted that the specific character of the antagonists mutates

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according to the dominant economic ideas at any given time, it was clear from the timing of their analysis that their immediate theoretical framework had been informed by the counterrevolution and its Hegelian interpretation. The history of France between 1789 and 1830 was predominantly a history of political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the old privileged orders, the nobility and the clergy. After 1830, the unfolding of political and social struggle shifted to a confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Extrapolating the salient data from these dialectical movements in the present and comparing them with those in the past, Marx concluded that society boiled down to a site of contestation between an elite owning the means of production and a toiling community whose labor has been exploited (“alienated”) to provide wealth for this elite. Since the class with economic power invariably controls the state apparatus and its collateral institutions, it is able to exert political power to expand its wealth and hold down the laboring class. Additionally, its command over mental production and channels of information allows it to effectively propagandize itself as the natural and inevitable outcome of human history and even succeed to a large extent in impressing these arbitrary ideas on the exploited classes as eternal and universal. Marx and Engels admit the influence of other socialist pioneers on their thought, but distinguish “communism” from “socialism” as a more advanced and scientific formulation of social and economic evolution leading to the triumph of the proletariat. Although admiring the critical analyses of the existing order, they claimed that their predecessors did not have a sufficient grasp of the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat, and looked to the bourgeoisie for reform from above to obtain redress of the grievances of nascent capitalism. Marx mentions in this context the work of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Cabet (Voyage en Icarie), and Proudhon (Philosophy of Poverty), but though he is dismissive of them, their ideas continued to circulate and inspire reform movements throughout the world. The pioneers of socialism, a motley crew that included Henri, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and Robert Owen (1771–1858), experienced directly the full impact of the dual revolution and the countervailing tendencies. By 1848, the growth of the industrial base made their analyses even more cogent and appealing. They posited new societies based on the spirit of cooperation rather than on competition, espousing social and economic systems in which production and distribution of goods would be planned for the general welfare of the entire population. Their leading ideas included the elevation of the workers to “industrial equality,” universal and free education, and the emancipation of the female, thus releasing the early feminist energies in the modern era. It was Saint-Simon who first formulated the famous slogan, “From each according to his/her capacity, to each according to his/her needs.” Having witnessed the confusion and horrors of the 1789 revolution, he set out to

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create a rational social system capable of controlling both absolute monarchy and what he perceived to be the excesses of popular sovereignty. His disciples followed his missionary bent in clarifying the emerging stage in history profoundly marked by science and industry, but they subscribed to a scientifically and industrially organized society led by a new “priesthood” of artists, businessmen, manufacturers, and scientists. This elite, chosen on the basis of talent rather than noble lineage, would supersede the old social hierarchy and harness technology for the general good. Saint-Simonists championed efforts to develop vast canal and railway projects, credit institutions, and urban reconstruction, and individual ex-members of the movement would play a major role in the transformation of Paris and the general industrial expansion during the Second Empire. Fourier’s bitterness toward society, the Jews in particular, sprang from his having been financially ruined by the French Revolution, but his search for a principle of harmony that could reconcile him to society expressed itself in global and universal terms. His relentless dissection of bourgeois society was complemented by a highly original utopian solution to the social problem. He conceived the idea that the law of the moral universe is one of emotional attraction or gravitation, corresponding to the laws of material gravitation in the physical world. The defects of society start from the obstacles thrown in the path of attraction, the remedy for which is a total reorganization of the environment to permit the full play of attraction and thereby achieve social harmony. Unlike the Saint-Simonists, who planned to reorganize society on the model of large-scale industry and giant railway and canal systems, Fourier advocated small social units of agricultural communities, called phalanges or “phalanxes,” comprising some 2,000 persons living in huge buildings called phalanstères, where a cross-section of disparate personalities and temperaments encompassing the full range of the collective ideal would attain harmony by expressing their individual passionate natures in every way to make life pleasant for themselves and others. The inclusion here of the choice of work in accordance with one’s temperament made Fourier the first to stress the importance of rotating and satisfying work to overcome the oppressiveness of modern labor. (His solution for collecting garbage was to employ children for this task since they enjoyed wallowing in filth.) The wage system was to be abolished, and work would be remunerated by a share of the profits accruing to the phalanstery. All members of the association were to be guaranteed decent food, clothing, and lodging and given stock divided into shares equivalent to the capital the member initially brought to the association. Despite some stunning insights into the workings of bourgeois society, he upheld the principles of property, heredity, interest on capital, and income inequality within the phalansteries, where people with unequal fortunes participate.6 Owen, a textile manufacturer predisposed to the aims of the 1789 revolution, turned radical when exposed to widespread mistreatment of the working classes; when he became part owner and manager of the New

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Lanark cotton mills in Scotland in 1799, he resolved to improve the lives of his employees and to prove to other capitalists that it was possible to do so without suffering a loss of profits. Accordingly, he raised wages, ameliorated the work environment, refused to hire children under ten, provided workers with neat cottages and food and clothing for reasonable rates, and established free schools for children and adults. In 1835 he launched a new society known as the Association of All Classes of All Nations, where the term “socialism” was used for the first time. Owen argued against Malthus that as a consequence of technological improvement and rapidly accumulating wealth, sufficient food could be made available for all; the main problem was not the disproportionate growth in population in relationship to the food supply but the unfair distribution of wealth. Akin to the Fourierists, Owen came to believe that environment played a key role in character formation and that the entire social and economic order had to be drastically revamped to achieve a sane society. He tried to establish a model community based on his idea of group living at New Harmony, near Evansville, Indiana, but it was doomed to an early failure. Nevertheless, Owen’s radicalism never wavered, and the revolution of 1848 infused him with fresh inspiration. Then seventy-seven years old, he traveled to France at the end of March to lend his support to the reform program that he claimed to be the summation of his ideals.7 Etienne Cabet, a radical deputy from the Côte-d’Or disheartened by Louis-Philippe’s betrayal of the laboring classes, mounted a courageous attack against the regime with his analysis of the revolution of 1830.8 Exiled in England in the mid-1830s, he was attracted to Owen’s activities and fell under the influence of Thomas More’s Utopia. In 1840 he published his own utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie, which opened with a picture of serene world, an “earthly paradise” where private property has been abolished and the inhabitants live out their lives in supreme contentment. Men and women are equal and everyone receives the same education. Like Owen’s project, Cabet’s visionary organization, with its thoroughly planned and structured walkways, vast lawns, grottoes, waterfalls, and parks, sought to establish the sense of a community of natural equality in which the land is shared by all and is reinvented to provide a salubrious environment capable of shaping ideal men and women. Icarianism represented one of Europe’s most significant and popular pre-Marxist socialist developments as well as one of the more fascinating of the utopian experiments in the United States. Although short-lived due to environmental factors, tentative colonies were established in Texas and Illinois. Marx and Engels cited Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty (Système des contradictions economiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, 1846) as an example of “bourgeois socialism.” The artisanal author of What Is Property? (Qu est-ce que la propriété? 1840)—and who straightaway answered the question of the title with the famous equation “property is theft”—once impressed Marx for his bold way of stating the issue of social stratification.

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Yet Marx always faulted him for lack of historical understanding, for not perceiving economic categories as dependent on a particular historical development and applying them as if they were absolute and eternal. Marx was initially so outraged by Philosophy of Poverty that he wrote a rebuttal which he perversely entitled The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and the two former comrades never spoke to one another again. Proudhon’s appeal to the workings of inevitable justice and economic equality from above would always be suspect to Marx, and his history of contradictory positions and inconsistencies are baffling even to sympathetic biographers. But Marx could not deny the French philosopher’s courageous participation in the revolution of 1848 and his vociferous opposition to Second Republic moderation as spokesperson for the poor in the National Assembly. As seen in his Les Confessions d un révolutionnaire (1851), he continued for strategic purposes to subscribe to the democratic and social Republic (even including himself among the démocrates-socialistes) and to vote with the Mountain.9 Proudhon’s attacks on Louis-Napoléon led to his arrest and incarceration in 1849, although like most radicals who managed to remain in Paris he eventually made peace with the government of the Second Empire. While respecting the merits of various socialistic and communist programs, he inevitably dismissed them as utopian and impractical. Social order is established on the basis of inexorable justice, not on the humanitarian shibboleths of fraternity, self-sacrifice, and love spouted by so many well-meaning socialists. He also rejected violent revolution as a means of social change. Alone among the major reformers, he denies women a larger social and political role and insists on their moral and intellectual inferiority to men. He agrees with most of the reformers that central to a well-organized and just economy was the universalization of property and the free circulation of credit, and advocated guaranteed work for all, the equalization of wages, that labor be made the basis of all value (as measured by time), and abolition of the distinction between labor and capital. He was attacked by all shades of the political spectrum, and this lack of party affiliation hardened the position of this self-proclaimed anarchist. Anarchism for Proudhon in 1848–1851 meant the affirmation of liberty expressed in direct popular government, where all the citizens have an immediate share in the formation of their public institutions. The state and its irrational authority and social hierarchy would wither away as society gradually achieved economic equilibrium and social justice. Proudhon chooses Louis Blanc as representative of modern socialists only to viciously refute him, while Marx refers to Blanc more sympathetically in claiming closeness with French social democrats. (Blanc’s theory on the organization of work marks the emergence of social democracy.) One of the most popular economic critiques in France was Blanc’s own concept of social organization, outlined in his book Organisation du travail (1840), in which organization of work is carried out by a network of social workshops through a centralized, state-controlled industry. By this means,

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the state could subjugate existing capitalists on their own ground without disrupting the whole order of society and simultaneously promote the well-being of the working class. The workers in the various workshops would govern directly, equalize wages, and distribute the returns among themselves, then use them to support the old and infirm, to alleviate the effects of recessions in other industrial branches, and to replace worn tools and machinery. Blanc believed that the success of these national workshops would gradually displace privately owned firms and that private competition would give way peaceably to cooperative production or what he called “association.” Class distinctions would eventually disappear as the state’s authority diminished in favor of decentralized control. The National Workshops decreed by the Provisional Government on 26 February travestied Blanc’s concept, doling out for a certain time two and then one-and-a-half francs per day to unemployed male workers regardless of age and ability and regardless of the type of work they performed. The workshops were doomed to failure because the work shortage in the period generated a number of applicants far beyond the capacity of the government to provide work for them. Artisans of diverse skills were required to do tasks for which they were not trained or carry out hard labor with pick and shovel all day; often workshop members could be seen seated along the roads reading, talking, or idling. They became demoralized and their work discredited, and inevitably frauds were committed. In the end, workers only had to be on hand during certain hours to receive their stipend. By 11 March, the daily expenditures amounted to over 20,000 francs per day and kept increasing; on 19 May there were 87,942 unemployed workers registered and the subsidies totaled 182,879 francs. Whatever hopes the project sustained (Blanc claimed it was a setup from the start), it miscarried and was seized upon by conservatives as a pretext to eliminate the government’s “socialist” protection of the workers. Nevertheless, the workshops assumed a symbolic importance for the working classes as the one attempt of the revolutionary regime to ameliorate their class position and rectify previous gross neglect. In addition, the public workshops had the effect of uniting the working class for the first time by gathering all the trades into one and the same organization. In this way, the public workshops tended to create a feeling of class solidarity among the laboring community by unifying them into a single official body. Although workers themselves recognized the limitations of the workshops, the organization gave them a hint of the possibility of moving from the plane of utopian theory to the plane of practical reality. The persistence of the economic crisis had steadily hardened social antagonisms and heightened the tension between workers and bourgeois. Blanc wrote that the “counterrevolution” in 1848, which included socalled republican converts, was specifically directed against the threat of socialism.10 Already at the end of May fear of the impending dissolution of the workshops sparked renewed street demonstrations. Conservatives

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argued that a government-supported organization of work on a national scale meant financial disaster, and the government responded by dismantling the National Workshops on 21 June. When the decree appeared in Le Moniteur the following day, a workers’ delegation met to protest, but Marie, minister of public works, rejoined with threats. Most of the working-class quarters of Paris now rose sympathetically in response (or felt the pressure to do so) and barricades were once more erected. No assurances of future good will could persuade the workers to disperse peaceably; on 24 June 1848 the National Assembly invested General Cavaignac with special authority to use force to put down the insurrection. A bitter civil war—a genuine class war—ensued and was ruthlessly crushed by the government soldiery, many of them recruited from the countryside, where there was little sympathy for the rebels. Lamartine’s specious apologia for the suppression of these workers betrayed a real lack of understanding of the social problem. For him they were the scum of society whose uprising constituted “a plebeian and not a popular movement, a conspiracy of subalterns and not of chiefs, an outbreak of servile and not of civil war.”11 Hence these lowly laborers could not be counted as citizens as Lamartine abused the term in his rantings about “the people.” In the end, thousands of workers were killed, and thousands more arrested and/or deported. All leftists were placed under suspicion, while others like Caussidière and Louis Blanc sought refuge in England. Clubs were subjected to supervision, new press laws reimposed cautionary payments on those who wished to publish political papers, and in September the working day in Paris was once again increased to twelve hours. When the Assembly applauded Cavaignac for his suppression of the uprising, even Lamartine could utter with dismay, “The Republic is dead.” All the optimism of February and March dissipated in the horrors of civil war and its aftermath. The Second Republic was henceforth to be a republic of the bourgeoisie as the previous regime had been a monarchy of the bourgeoisie. Louis-Napoléon’s election to the presidency in December was anticlimactic, although the ultimately terrifying result—a plebiscitarian dictatorship—could not then have been foreseen. Thomas Couture’s Enrollment of the Volunteers

Between the insurrection of June and Louis-Napoléon’s electoral victory, Thomas Couture was commissioned by the government to paint The Enrollment of the Volunteers of 1792 (fig. 1.1).12 Couture was perhaps the most popular artist in France at the moment of the outbreak of February 1848. The memory of the Romans of the Decadence was still in everyone’s mind, and its apparent critique of the previous regime invested him with a republican aura. (Couture even embraced Lamartine on the tribune when the Second Republic was declared.) The Second Republic actually completed the payments for the Romans and hung it in the Luxembourg. Couture was

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1.1  Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers, 1848–1879. Musée Départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais.

selected for Salon jury duty under the new government, and actively participated in the unions of artists seeking to reform the administration of the arts.13 It probably surprised no one when Couture was assigned one of the major commissions of the Second Republic, La Patrie en danger, or, as it came to be called—The Enrollment of the Volunteers. Couture looked back to the patriotic defense of the endangered fatherland in 1792 for his pictorial narrative. He attempted to show a grand pageant of peasants, priests, nobles, bourgeois, and artisans transformed into a triumphant citizens’ army that surges with energy past a recruiting platform symbolizing the threshold of conversion. Mothers raise their children high in the air to witness this example of national esprit, while (in the initial idea) a personification of Liberty presides over the festival as harbinger of the glorious outcome. Yet what began as an enthusiastic search for a usable past to legitimatize one view of the revolution of 1848 would ultimately fizzle into fiasco and bitter disenchantment. The conflictual development and tragic culmination of the work are inseparable from the disastrous history of the 1848 Republic. Couture and his creation were ultimately caught up in both a cultural and ideological struggle that began in the name of sweeping change and ended with a retreat to the middle ground. Just as Romans points thematically to the decline of a society and demolishes a lifeless classicism and bombastic romanticism, so The Enrollment, with its manifest conflicts and contradictions, reveals the political and aesthetic fissures of 1848. Its hybrid composition of realist and allegorical features attests to the transitional and compromised character



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of the Second Republic and Couture’s inability to shed the cloak of grande peinture. The work of displacing this notion would be left to the radical realists, whose movement and personalities Couture henceforth regarded with ambivalence. They took up the premises of the social and democratic Republic and surmounted the ambiguities of the moderates by plunging into politically charged subject matter out of sync with the academic tradition and conservative taste. As for Couture, he considered his effort an authentic and novel cultural support for the hopes and aspirations of the republicans of 1848. Undoubtedly, he had in mind something akin to a combination of David’s Oath of the Tennis Court and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, both of which helped shape contemporary history. La République reported on 15 March that the director of fine arts issued a special order for the installation in the Luxembourg Museum of “Delacroix’s Liberty on the Barricades and Couture’s Romans of the Decadence.”14 Thus for a brief period during the Second Republic the two were hung as pendants in the Luxembourg—the alpha and omega of Louis-Philippe’s art history. Paradoxically, only after 1848 could Delacroix’s picture be shown publicly, after languishing in obscurity during most of the July Monarchy. Champfleury wrote in August 1848 that it had been “hidden in an attic for being too revolutionary.”15 Although Louis-Philippe’s Ministry of the Interior initially acquired it as a gesture to the Left, after the uprising at the funeral of Lamarque in June 1832 it was never again openly displayed for fear of setting a bad example. The picture was eventually returned to the artist—no doubt after 1839 when orders were given to consign to storage all pictures inspired by the revolution of 1830. Following the February 1848 revolution, the minister of the interior approved a proposal to reclaim it and exhibit it publicly, and it eventually hung in the Luxembourg Gallery from the end of May 1849 to the end of the Republic. The behind-the-scenes shuffling of the tableau in 1848 involved several key bureaucrats close to Couture, including Charles Blanc, brother of Louis, who commissioned The Enrollment. Actually, Couture was already well advanced on the project before the government commission, one which he himself must have proposed for official authorization. Indeed, he had executed his preliminary designs for the painting as early as December 1847, which bears out Michael Fried’s contention that its immediate source of inspiration was Michelet’s series of lectures prepared for his course at the Collège de France between December 1847 and February 1848. Michelet’s almost evangelical lectures, known as L’Etudiant, called for an art glorifying the legendary exploits of the 1789 revolution to reunify the nation, and repeatedly referred to the volunteers of 1792 and their enthusiastic response to the proclamation that “the country is in danger.” By displacing the idea of revolution safely back to its fountainhead in the eighteenth century, Couture could not only respond to Michelet’s appeal but at the same time satisfy the need for a patriotic history picture

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glorifying the moderate regime of the Second Republic. As a contemporary critic described the germinal idea: “It is intended as both a representation of a popular festival and an allegory. It is a kind of Triumph of la Patrie taking place on an antique chariot [sic], hauled along by young men an by women adorned with flowers, surrounded by the cannons of the Bastille, whinnying horses, youth in arms, exalted populace, and wives and children accompanying this heroic march.”16 Charles Blanc, the brother of Louis and the director of fine arts who commissioned the work on 9 October 1848, expressed a strong desire for a theme relating the ideals of the government to those of the revolution of 1789. The very next day Blanc published in the official newspaper a long article conceptualizing a republican art grand enough to rival monarchical culture, emphasizing the need for monumental paintings for institutional buildings.17 Couture’s project meshed perfectly with Blanc’s vision; Blanc hoped to install the work in the Salle des Séances of the National Assembly, awarding the artist the exceptionally high price of 12,000 francs for its completion. The scale and location of the commission rivaled that of David’s initial projection of the Oath of the Tennis Court, and, ironically, the fluid political circumstances of 1848 would similarly prevent Couture from completing it. Despite the fact that by October 1848 the Republic remained only a shadow of its founders’ aspiration, Couture still felt sufficiently motivated to energetically forge a visual statement for the regime capable of arousing popular morale. He had sided with the moderates during the insurrection of June and shared their belief that the destabilizing forces of “anarchy” had now been overthrown and the ground prepared for an orderly constitutional process. Hence his static image of Liberty, which sits innocuously in the center (i.e., the work of the revolution is complete). Yet it could be only a question of time before this work would suffer a loss of enthusiasm: its driving stimulus could only diminish from December 1848 on. In fact, as soon as it was projected on to its definitive surface, it lost all contact with the contemporary reality it purported to represent and became a stillborn child of the painter’s imagination. But perhaps for this reason it is the perfect symbol of the strange, short-lived Republic of 1848: it condenses into one monumental extravaganza all the contradictions and inconsistencies of the contemporary French society as incarnated in the pictorial conflicts of the artist. Couture’s initial fervor for the commission reveals the lyrical illusions of union and fraternity that momentarily held together the shaky alliance of people and bourgeoisie. Charles Blanc recalled that when the painter discussed it “he spoke in words of fire.”18 Couture’s two official pictures, Romans and The Enrollment, record the transition from a perception of decline to one of regeneration in the public sphere. The psychological mood switch is clearly apparent in a comparison of the two pictures: the forms of the first are sluggish and confined, those of the second blusterous and

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unconstrained. Romans gives off an aura of languor and torpor, The Enrollment radiates nearly religious exaltation and is Couture’s quickened response to decadence. Romans manifested the oppressive weight of luxury and immorality; The Enrollment, the regenerative infusion of moral responsibility, devotion, and self-sacrifice. The degenerate atmosphere of the July Monarchy is dispelled by the infusion of morale and by a sense of selfrespect. Couture’s perspective corresponds to that of Louis-Marc Caussidière, a prominent figure of 1848 who served for a time as prefect of police and emphasized in his memoirs the “decadence of private morals” during the final phase of the July Monarchy, whose “government of privilege” encouraged “selfishness and corruption.”19 Months before the actual enactment of the commission, the Provisional Government affirmed in the official newspaper that “one of the best subjects which the surge of patriotism has given to art is the enrollment of 1792.”20 Challenged by the precedent of grande peinture by David, Gros, and Géricault, Couture again embarked on a vast synthesis linking the revolution of 1789 with that of 1848 and symbolically engaging all social classes in a common enterprise. Couture’s theme was inspired by the concept of a volunteer army developed by the Military Committee of the National Assembly in 1792 to counteract the evils of a standing army. It proposed a truly national and egalitarian conscription in which “each man, from the moment that his native land is endangered, shall be ready to step out. . . . Every [male] citizen should be a soldier, every soldier a citizen.”21 That summer represented a period of extreme crisis for the second and radical stage of the revolution as Austrian and Prussian troops menaced France on its frontiers, and on 11 July the National Assembly declared a state of emergency with the proclamation “Citizens, the country is in danger [la patrie est en danger].” Less than two weeks later, the call went out for army volunteers from city squares throughout France. As Couture accurately shows, platforms for enrollment were hastily erected, with tables improvised of planks supported by drums. One outfit of volunteers from Marseilles made history as they set out for the capital singing Rouget de Lisle’s recently composed “War Song for the Rhine Army”: those who heard the stirring chant renamed it in honor of the singers and it has come down to us as La Marseillaise. The theme of a volunteer army drawn from outside the metropolis accorded well with the wishes of the new republican government, except that emphasis was shifted to one class—the floating mass of unemployed workers. Cavaignac, the minister of war, wanted a large volunteer army and even requested the lowering of age restrictions to seventeen to achieve this purpose. As he argued in the National Assembly on 7 June: The February Revolution gave a new energy to the patriotism of our younger population. . . . If this patriotism were adopted, it would further complement the patriotic feelings which today animate the great French family by offering an honorable career and new means of expressing devotion for their country to



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the young people of the working classes, which are suffering from stagnation of industry and commerce.22

Moderates, including Cavaignac, must have anticipated working-class discontent, for just over two weeks later the young “volunteers” (they were actually paid) in the form of the Garde Mobile were exploited to help suppress the Parisian workers’ insurrection. Couture, however, like Lamartine, would have perceived the savage rebels of June as unworthy of the title of “citoyen,” and therefore beyond the pale of the nation. He envisioned the union of the good citizens fighting in defense of the fatherland, not engaged in internal conflict. He chose the moment of the volunteers’ passionate and unrestrained response to the call to arms, forged under pressure from without. Like his hero Michelet, he wished to project la patrie as a colossal aggregate that nevertheless possessed a unique national personality. In this, too, Couture seems to have responded to Victor Cousin’s notion that the painter suffers a disadvantage compared with the poet when attempting to personify la patrie: “How many ideas, how many feelings the word patrie awakens in us; how many things this word—so brief and so immense—calls to mind; God! Let a painter try to represent God or the patrie and you see whether he will be able to provoke emotions which are as intense and as profound.”23 Unlike the self-indulgent Romans, who spurn their ancestral heritage, the descendants of 1789 unite to take up the heroic struggle initiated by their forebears and strive to preserve the political gains of the revolution. The subject of the country in danger was hardly novel, and during the July Monarchy it became a kind of running theme, but Couture’s treatment differs dramatically from that of other artists. Vinchon’s Volunteer Enrollment of 1792, for example, begun in the late 1840s and first exhibited at the 1.2  Auguste Vinchon, The Volunteer Enrollment of 1792, 1850. Musée National du Château, Versailles, on deposit with Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lunéville.



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Salon of 1850–1851, transforms the turbulent event into an orderly procession of neatly uniformed automatons (fig. 1.2). Conversely, Couture makes his lively ragtag figures carry the compositional movement, breaking out with sweeping arm gestures and plunging forward unconstrained. Couture’s portrayal of the spontaneous acting-together of a whole people required the presence of an external threat. Group solidarity in a class-splintered society often requires enemies. The menace that issues from without generates the incentive for a society/nation to surmount its ordinary divisions in unity against the common foe. The demonizing of an adversary also constitutes an ideological strategy for bolstering the traditional values and customs of one’s own preferred community. Jerome Boime demonstrated the dynamics of this process with his discovery of “the fraternal order”—a system of political exclusion opposed to the civil order and based on bonding through the risk of violent death. The potential duplicity of ordinary civil discourse, especially in moments of crisis or drastic social change, creates an intolerable set of social relationships that need to be clarified and rid of torturous doubt. This desperation induces the desire to seek and even create situations in which the sincere affections and hatred of others will be manifest either in self-defense or in provocation, where genuine trust and love for others can be certified, and can be experienced reciprocally. The extreme solution of the civil order to this problem is the field of battle or physical confrontation, a site where proof of affiliation must go beyond verbal or written contractual conventions. The more danger one faces, the more one can be trusted, because by that predisposition one reveals a willing disregard for those civil values that attenuate affiliation through conventional representation. True comradeship is established only by putting our lives in danger for each other, and the strength of this bond grows all the stronger if there are common enemies who provide the opportunity by their hostility.24 Civil wars and revolutions are classic instances of the confrontation between the fraternal and civil orders, as the insurrection of June aptly demonstrated. The duplicity of the moderate bourgeois republicans set the stage for the insurrection of the working classes following the abandonment of the National Workshops, who now took to the streets. Many of those arrested in June claimed that they had been forced to participate, suggesting, however, less an overt threat than peer group pressure. They were confronted by circumstances that tested their commitment and class solidarity, articulated in the form of such familiar expressions as, “Will you stand up and be counted?” “Which side are you on?” “You are either for us or against us!” Or as the insurgents of June put it even more succinctly in their popular slogan: “Du pain ou du plomb!” (Bread or Lead!). If they could not afford to earn the distrust of their neighbors in the working-class faubourgs in the eastern section of Paris, their participation was further stimulated by the perennial hatred of the privileged classes who feared them and wished to arrest their social progress.

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On the other side, moderates teamed up with conservatives to repress the “barbarians at the gate” and met the emergency by conferring extraordinary powers on Cavaignac, minister of war. By rushing to the defense of the civil order and establishing a “sacred union against anarchy,” they united through demonizing the insurgents and compensating for their tortured sense of compromise by ruthlessly suppressing those stigmatized as radical extremists. Louis Blanc recalled that already in April “the so-called republican converts began the counterrevolution” through their vehement denunciations of socialism, whose negative associations they easily affixed to the rebels.25 This drastic social split played out in the insurrection of 23–26 June eventually undermined the Republic by depriving the moderates of their popular base and opening the way to authoritarian recuperation. When Couture began his work this split was not yet so pronounced, but he was well aware of the old divisions between rich and poor, radicals and moderates (and conservatives masked as moderates). The choice of 1792 avoided links with the Jacobin era of 1793 and the onset of the Terror— associations that Lamartine fixed on the extreme Left. Couture avoided the ideological splits by showing that under exceptional circumstances all classes could unite, and that once accomplished the exception—having established a model for social cooperation—would prove the rule. Thus he exploited for his lesson in social harmony the concept of a broad alliance against a foreign enemy, an idea he thought he could still carry through after the misfortunes of June. Couture conceived the composition in two horizontal layers organized in a pyramidal design. On the lower level, representatives of the various social groups unite in a forward-sweeping procession moving toward the right, while above them, as the apex to the design, Couture elevated a tribune, or platform, where the volunteers register. Couture ingeniously exploits the pictorial tradition to express a modern concept: while traditionally the two-part division referred to the earthly and celestial realms, Couture reverses this order by identifying the transcendental sphere with la patrie and the new nation-state. Devotion is not to a spiritual but to a temporal power capable of healing all earthly ills and ushering in the millennium. His inversion may be likened to Marx’s rotation of Hegel’s Absolute. Both the first sketch and the initial painted study boldly express the rhythms of the moving file and the variety of individual gestures and poses (figs. 1.3–4). The only figures that do not hold their place effectively in the design are the winged allegories hovering overhead. They not only interrupt the smooth flow of the slope at the right, but they are also swallowed up by the rest of the action. Although clearly derivative of Delacroix’s Liberty and François Rude’s Victory, Couture’s personifications lack their integral compositional function. The allegories of his predecessors crown the design through their prominent scale and location, while Couture’s more diffident allegorical figures appear lost in the vast panorama like delicate winged insects.

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1.3  Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers, chalk drawing, 1848. Musée Départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais. 1.4  Thomas Couture, The Enrollment of the Volunteers, painted sketch, 1848. Musée du Haubergier, Senlis.

He made a larger sketch with the aim of increasing their size and to give them greater visibility (fig. 1.5). Although subsequently painted out, radiography has revealed the figures’ original presence. At some point, he changed his mind entirely about the soaring allegories and tentatively eliminated them from the design. They show up again, however, in the definitive, unfinished version in Beauvais, where the two allegories, now more prominent and hugging more tightly to the train of people, still reveal that they posed a major source of difficulty for the painter. The separate study of the tribune indicates that the two conventionnels at the right of the platform had to be shifted to the left in the final version to allow for the new positions of the winged allegories. They also necessitated shifting the direction of the billowing flag with the motto “La patrie est en danger” from right to left, which further weakened the original design.



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1.5  Thomas Couture, The Enrollment, painted sketch, 1848. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass.

The personified abstractions marred his conception in yet another way: they are conspicuously imaginary types in a work otherwise almost entirely grounded in reality. Although for historical purposes some of the figures are dressed in eighteenth-century costume, most of them were modeled from life, and such material accessories as the cannon were scrupulously reproduced from existing artifacts. Even the static figure of Liberty seated atop the cannon—which to some extent also hinders the processional flow—had an actual analogue in the contemporary pageants and festivals. The collision of contemporary and idealized imagery is felt through every stage of the work and anticipates the coming realism. The combination of unsparing naturalism and idealized sentiment is seen in the Springfield sketch; on the left, at the extreme rear of the procession and directly below the tribune, Couture depicted his father in contemporary clothing—a portrait omitted in the final version. Here and there we discern other almost photographic portrayals, as in the final version’s group in the left-hand section and the head of the unfinished soldier on the extreme left of the upper level. Couture’s fidelity to his live models is strikingly apparent in his study of the unfinished soldier, who also appears on the platform in the Springfield sketch (fig. 1.6). In the final attempt the artisans pulling the cannon were also carefully painted from life, their beards and trim haircuts clashing with the long hair and clean-shaven faces of the other more historically accurate types. Indeed, the cannoneer in the rear has a tattoo on his right arm—a feature Couture expressly associated with the modern worker. Furthermore, Couture’s need for realism in his representation of laborers is especially evident in the preliminary studies and in his close observation of the textures of work clothes and accessories (fig. 1.7).



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Still another aspect of the monumental version is its number of incomplete passages, or areas in various stages of completion. The surface is a confused tangle of reworked motifs—a palimpsest of contradictory ideas. While the numerous pentimenti reveal an abundant imagination, they also attest to a colossal failure of nerve at critical junctures in the creative process. The final project dissolved into a series of clashing gestures, each one serving to negate the previous one that it overlay. At the same time, these unfinished passages convey an air of spontaneity that contributes to the effect of dramatic action. If the picture lacks the easy handling of brushwork characteristic of his preliminary studies, the large version shows many areas of freshness and vigor that reminded many a critic of a brilliant “first attempt.”26 More than any of his predecessors—not excluding Delacroix—Couture’s halting behavior in the creative process attests to the emerging ascendance of sketchlike ground over polished surface in modern painting. Additionally, his abrupt tonal contrasts and vivid colorations predisposed contemporary critics like Champfleury and Baudelaire to credit Couture

1.6  Thomas Couture, French Volunteer, 1848. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. 1.7  Thomas Couture, Man Pulling a Cannon, 1848. Musée Départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais.



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with a potent influence on the younger generation, including the Barbizon painter Diaz. But his work also contributed to the techniques of Millet, Troyon, Daumier, and Manet (who studied with Couture for six years), and would continue to be admired by later avant-garde artists like Cézanne and Mary Cassatt. The conjunction of Couture with the Barbizon school and other realists intimates his authentic role in the progress of modernist technical practice, but the grand tradition haunting him forced him to partially embed his methods in idealized forms that refused direct reality. Significantly, his claim to the middle ground once again affirms his political position in 1848. He conceived an idea of freedom inspired by a vision of the new Republic, and the energy of his sketching procedures was stimulated by the changing political conditions. This chaotic period of transition, compromised though it may have been by opposing forces, empowered him to abandon forever the residual classicism and inaugurate a quasi-realist approach for magisterial work. Implicit in his politics and choice of 1792, however, was a counterrevolutionary impulse that was bound to check his convictions—convictions further undermined by the rapid downfall of the regime and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Thus the short-lived history of the Second Republic, and Couture’s own disillusionment that followed in its wake, is inscribed graphically in the imperfect state of the picture. For this reason, it may be positioned in the history of art as a transition statement, mediating between the aesthetic and political program of the moderate Second Republic and the more radical realism of Millet and Courbet. The model of the United States appealed to the fledgling republicans; and those responsible for the drawing up of a Constitution for the new government were obsessed with the American political system—perhaps owing to sympathy with their forebears of 1789, whose adoration for Washington and Franklin bordered on fanaticism. Garnier-Pagès requested information from the U.S. diplomat W. C. Bryant pertaining to the American democracy, whose example “we would like to follow.” Those most taken with the Yankee system, however, belonged to the conservative faction, who especially admired the electoral college that mitigated for them the potential evils of universal suffrage. The Left, on the other hand, maintained that the principle of federalism opposed social progress, and they also rejected the bicameral organization of the legislature. All factions opposed American slavery and what they perceived to be the reign of an American plutocracy. By the time Couture began his definitive work, enthusiasm for American politics was associated with a moderate point of view incarnated in the image of George Washington. Evariste Colombel, the mayor of Nantes, wrote, “At the start of our truly republican era, may we have another Washington as in the United States!” Lamartine exclaimed in his reception of an Italian delegation that Europeans must banish the name of Machiavelli and substitute for it that of Washington: “We must now call out in

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1.8  Thomas Couture, Study of the Mayor of Paris as George Washington, black-and-white chalk drawing, 1848. Musée National du Château, Compiègne.



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the name of the liberty of today . . . the need of the times is for a Washington of Europe.”27 Desperate for a hero, he looked to General Cavaignac on horseback, whom he compared to Washington after he restored public order. Armand Marrast, now the mayor of Paris and one of those selected to draw up the Constitution of 1848, belonged to the moderate faction wishing to pattern it after the American instrument. Couture used Marrast as the model for his equestrian figure of the mayor of Paris in the left-hand section of The Enrollment (fig. 1.8), wishing at the same time to give him “the features of Washington, who presides morally over the freedom of the world.”28 His study of the mayor (mocked in his own day for trying to imitate the look of President Polk)29 as George Washington again attests to Couture’s identification with the moderate agenda. As already suggested, part of Couture’s problem lay in his desire to construct a metaphorical unity of the two revolutions of 1789 and 1848. He employed as his central pictorial motif the triumph, an ancient type of procession honoring great martial heroes or rulers, derived in turn from the iconography of triumphal parades of mythological deities and/or such abstract personifications as Virtue, Love, and War. The triumph usually depicted the hero, deity, or allegorical personage seated or standing in a triumphal car drawn by horses, enemy prisoners, or other participants in the parade. Often, the triumphant protagonist was accompanied by Victory hovering above and holding out a wreath of laurel. Couture’s initial thought was to replace the chariot with a cannon and the martial hero with Liberty in the person of Théroigne de Méricourt, a female revolutionary activist of 1789 praised by Michelet in his writings for her role in such key events as the storming of the Bastille, the Women’s March on Versailles, and the Festival of Liberty of 1792. In Art in an Age of Revolution it was shown that the neoclassical style of the revolutionaries ushered in an era of real-life triumphal festivals and pageants, several of which were designed and choreographed by David. In his design for an opera curtain, dating from the period 1793–1794, David conceived a triumphal march of the people in which the chariot of humanity crushes under its wheels the symbolic attributes of kingship, church, and feudalism, and crowning their act is the allegorical figure of Victory flying overhead. Couture surely knew this image, since The Enrollment shares with it the semi-draped female figure seated on the triumphal car and carrying a scepter, the striding figures, and the parents holding their children aloft to observe the fine example for the future. He evidently considered himself the 1848 equivalent of the older artist, borrowing also the gestures of the deputies in David’s Oath of the Tennis Court. But perhaps the most fascinating instance of this identification is Couture’s borrowing of the motif of chapter one

1.9  Thomas Couture, tracing of a detail of a reproduction of David’s Sabines, 1848. Musée National du Château, Compiègne. 1.10  Thomas Couture, Father and Son, 1848. Musée Départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais.

the mother raising her child above her head in David’s Sabine Women that he actually traced from a reproduction and incorporated into The Enrollment (fig. 1.9). Couture noted that David conceived the Sabines at a moment of national disunity and intended it to signal an appeal for union. He singled out the motif of the mother and child as constitutive of this appeal, thereby testifying to his conscious association with this work in the interest of picturing national unity. Couture’s programmatic engagement with the eighteenth century also reveals itself in his fascinating plagiarism of the condemned son in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Paternal Curse, a motif he used for the prototype of his brave youth joyously departing for the front at the far left of The Enrollment. Since Couture took for his source a character whose enlistment proved destructive to the unity of the family and recast it into a scene in which the same act is viewed as heroic, it may be assumed that his use of it had a specific narrative function. It is as if Couture exonerates the son from the paternal curse in showing him forsaking selfish goals and acting out of patriotic devotion to la patrie. Once again Couture manifests his recurring



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preoccupation with generational conflict, but this time he does so by forging a rapprochement of generations in the service of a higher ideal. Indeed, Couture’s original conception depicts the father embracing his son as he accompanies him in the march to the front (fig. 1.10). The Realism of The Enrollment

Despite Couture’s ready reliance on the past for inspiration, almost every feature in the work reinforces the ideological mindset of his contemporary moderate constituency. All the thematic components of the picture operate to give tangible form to ideas circulating in the heat of agitated passion just prior to and following the overthrow of the July Monarchy. Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins, published in 1847 and presented on the stage on 2 September of the same year, enjoyed a spectacular popular success, as a result of which “’89 is back in fashion, and so even is ’95.”30 Lamartine’s sympathies were for the moderates of 1789, not the Jacobins whom he classified as “demagogues” responsible for the Terror. As he confessed in Girondins, “So long as revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the revolution.” Hence, as far as he was concerned, the founding of the Second Republic meant the completion of the first revolution. Although Lamartine is less sanguine about civil uprising in his History of the French Revolution of 1848, he asserts that the later revolution extended that of 1789, “with fewer elements of disorder and greater elements of progress.” Further: In both it was a moral idea which exploded on the world. This idea, this principle, is the people;—the people who, in 1789, relieved themselves from the pressure of servitude and ignorance, from privileged classes and absolute monarchy; the people which, in 1848, freed themselves from the oligarchy of the few, and a too stringent and exclusive constitutional monarchy.

Of course, Lamartine’s lip service to the principle of popular sovereignty is consistently contradicted by his dismissal of the gullible masses who are susceptible to the demagoguery of the representatives of the “uncompromising Republic.” He likened them to the Jacobins of 1793 and he and the moderates to the Girondins of 1792, and he warned against the “horrors, the fanaticism, and the socialism of 1793.” And he continued with his definition of a republic’s capacities: If anarchy can be subdued, rest assured it is by a republic. If communism can be vanquished, it is by a republic. If the revolution can be moderated, it is by a republic. If universal war—if the invasion which it would perhaps bring upon us as the reaction of Europe—can be warded off, again rest assured it is by a republic.31



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His version of the republic bordered on the counterrevolutionary, suggesting that his notion of “the people” expanded only slightly on that of King Louis-Philippe. Lamartine belonged to the liberal bourgeoisie who wished to sustain property rights and laissez-faire competition in the social and economic realms, but the fear of revolution and radical social reform drove him into the arms of the conservatives. His vision of the republic could only have been articulated as a theatricalized presentation of “the people” happily accepting bourgeois hegemony in the form of a choral complement to the ancient narrator’s recital. 32 His fascinating theatrical metaphor of an “antique drama” was echoed by others, both on his right and on his left, who experienced the popular movement of 1848 more as a reenactment of 1789 than a progressive cause grounded in the reality of the present. Neoclassic and romantic imagery on the stage and in the visual arts had shaped an exalted vision of the past that played itself out in the gestures and spectacles of pre–June 1848. The enlightened aristocrat Tocqueville, who no less than Lamartine despised socialism and feared the masses, wrote in his recollections of the period: We French, Parisians especially, gladly mingle literary and theatrical reminiscences with our most serious demonstrations. This often creates the impression that our feelings are false, whereas in fact they are only clumsily tricked out. In this case the quality of imitation was so obvious that the terrible originality of the facts remained hidden. It was a time when everybody’s imagination had been colored by the crude pigments with which Lamartine daubed his Girondins. The men of the first revolution were still alive in everybody’s mind, their deeds and their words fresh in the memory. And everything I saw that day [24 February] was plainly stamped with the imprint of such memories; the whole time I had the feeling that we had staged a play about the French Revolution, rather than that we were continuing it.33

Marx, although in Brussels at the time of the February revolution, watched its developments with keen interest, especially the June Days. He saw the moment as a critical stripping away of popular illusions about the true forces in opposition in modern political life. He declared that it was the institution of universal suffrage that destroyed the romantic notion of a united and harmonious people entertained by moderates like Lamartine and Couture and that belied the reality of class division. The moderates imagined that France consisted of citoyens much like themselves with overlapping interests and understanding—the cult of “the people.” But the reality of elections brought into play the opposing interests of different social groups and thus unveiled the class struggle. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx agreed with Tocqueville in a famous passage:

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Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. . . . The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things . . . precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.34

Thus the unmasking of the illusions in June was tantamount to unveiling the truth of class conflict and an end to the play-acting. Couture, however, went right on trying to keep up the masquerade by allegorizing revolution as a harmonious interaction of the classes, performing a kind of historical melodrama that simultaneously operated as living theater for his contemporaries. The Provisional Government even decreed that its representatives wear the costume of the conventionnels (i.e., the members of the Convention of 1793), including the white waistcoat with turn-down collar in which Robespierre was always represented on stage. No one except Caussidière honored the decree, but Couture’s insertion of the conventionnel on the tribune manifests the popular fantasies of the period. Earlier we mentioned the festivals of the first revolution, and here again Couture’s triumphal procession fuses past and present to suit a contemporary agenda. The Second Republic was fascinated by the festivals of the earlier revolution and tried to emulate them in its own cultural program. Two major festivals were organized in 1848 in imitation of the first revolution, the “Fête de la Fraternité” on 20 April and the “Fête de la Concorde” on 21 May. Both of these featured dazzling spectacles in which members of all classes marched plus magnificent floats in the form of triumphal chariots with allegorical figures of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and a colossal figure of the Republic passed in review before an immense platform upon which sat members of the Executive Commission and the National Assembly. Tocqueville described the grand allegorical festivals of the 1848 revolutionaries as imitations of the “ridiculous [follies]” of their predecessors, but he and others were in fact deeply worried by the massive turnout of workers, now organized and militant. Lamartine claimed that the government arranged these public festivals to channel this potential peaceably and drain off working-class discontent. Popular demonstrations on 17 March and 16 April led by the revolutionary clubs (filled with “incendiary” foreigners—Poles, Belgians, Italians, and Germans—promoting insurrection and anarchy) in combination with workmen circles terrified Lamartine. The van of the vast procession that assembled along the Champs-Elysées on 17 March to demand postponement of elections to allow more time to circulate radical reform programs was led by a group of men and one woman sporting red caps,

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“those hideous symbols of our saturnalia of terror.” Lamartine’s disgust at the sight of the liberty bonnets, pervasive in 1848 as in 1793, made him anxious, and even though the demonstration menaced no one, “it filled every mind with dismay, and visibly denoted that Paris was thenceforth wholly at the mercy of the proletarians.”35 To reassure the public’s safety against the “demagogues, dictators, and barbarians of civilization,” Lamartine and his conservative colleagues looked for an opportunity “to reaccustom the eye of the people to the presence, to the dazzling pomp, and to a renewal of kindly feelings to the troops.” Hence the “Fête of Fraternity” was organized by the government as a review of the National Guards from Paris, precincts, and nearby towns, as well as the newly formed Garde Mobile and troops within reach of the capital. As the troops marched down the Champs-Elysées and passed beneath the Arc de l’Etoile, Lamartine expressed relief to see that the public rejoiced with him at “this vision of restored social order.” Both Michelet and George Sand, patrons and friends of Couture, were unavoidably swept up in the enthusiasm of 1848 and entranced by the popular and official festivals. Sand was among the visitors who thronged his studio to do homage to the painter of The Enrollment of the Volunteers. In her Souvenirs de 1848, she eloquently described a street parade in the aftermath of February, perceiving it not as a disciplined military machine but more like the spontaneous action of a volunteer passionately devoted to high ideals. She wrote that similar processions occurred regularly and everywhere in Paris, and, deeply moved by these scenes of the intermingling of the classes, she appealed to contemporary artists: “You artists whose pride and personal interests have been wounded, do you not see these animated tableaux, those expressive faces, and will the feeling which inspired these improvised compositions not speak somehow to your heart or to your talent?”36 Written in April 1848, these passages share the generally optimistic mood of the first months of the Second Republic and deep feelings of sympathy with the working classes. Michelet—undoubtedly a major source of influence on the government’s exploitation of the festival as an official event—attached deep importance in his History of the French Revolution (the first volume of which appeared on the eve of the revolution of 1848) to the role of the festivals in rallying the people to the cause of the Great Revolution. His attachment, moreover, has to be seen in the context of his obsession with both Théroigne de Méricourt and the volunteers of 1792. He first lauds “the daring and gallant” Théroigne de Méricourt in his History of the French Revolution and later in his Women of the Revolution, envisioning her as a latter-day Joan of Arc who embodied the popular spirit, the very personification of the Revolution and of Liberty. Michelet celebrated the public festivals in which she participated, especially the spectacular festival of freedom, the “Fête de la Liberté” of 1792, when a statue of Liberty was “towed upon a chariot shaped into the bow of a ship.”

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The most momentous event of that year for Michelet was the enrollment of the volunteers, and its display of unity prompted the historian to identify the event with the festivals. He even wrote in his History of the French Revolution that those who guided the people in the festivals were the same who led the volunteers into battle. Michelet had previously mentioned the episode in Le Peuple of 1846, concluding that the “élan of ’92” should be taught as an object lesson to school children. He picked up the theme again in his famous series of lectures at the Collège de France published as L’Etudiant, a course begun in December 1847, suspended on 6 January, and then resumed in March when the Provisional Government reinstated him. He called for an art to exalt 1789 and thereby contribute to constructing the nation by rekindling stirring memories of the past. In one lesson he effusively declared of the volunteer enlistments of 1792: A great day! a sublime day, to be eternally remembered, on which these solemn words were promulgated, with the flag deployed over our squares and the cannons firing repeatedly: “The endangered fatherland calls its children!” (La patrie en danger appelle ses enfants!) And after they were spoken, six hundred thousand men had been signed up! For war? No, that is France’s unique glory. Signed up for liberation, for universal peace, signed up for the salvation of the world.37

His third volume of the History of the French Revolution, written in 1847– 1848 and appearing in 1849, devoted a long section to the enrollment of 1792. At one point in his account he interrupts the narrative to gush forth: “O proud heart of France in ’92! When shall we know it again? What love for the world, what happiness in rescuing it, what sacrificial ardor!” And again: These innumerable volunteers all have kept the character of this truly unique epoch which gave them life for glory. And now, wherever they may be, dead or alive, immortal dead, illustrious scholars, old and glorious soldiers, they all remain marked by an emblem that sets them apart in history. This emblem, which made the whole earth tremble, is nothing else but their simple name: “Volunteers of ’92.”

What Michelet found especially critical and moving “was the profound feeling of admirable solidarity which revealed itself everywhere. Everyone spoke to everyone, talked, prayed for the fatherland . . . everywhere there were songs, shouts, tears of enthusiasm and of leave taking.” Michelet described in colorful and picturesque detail the organization of the enlistments and the physical arrangement of the enrolling booths that were erected to accommodate them: the hastily assembled table set on two drums, the fluttering tricolor banner with the solemn announcement of the “country in danger,” the municipal officers with shoulder sashes and the continuous stream of volunteers ascending and descending

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the platform. All levels of society joined company here: “There were no high, no low, no superior, no inferior; these were men, nothing more; this was all of France.”38 Although standing further to the left than Lamartine, Michelet similarly imagines a united and fraternal society in which—to use Marx’s words— “all the royalists were transformed into republicans and all the millionaires of Paris into workers.” Michelet’s sentimental view of the harmonious union of the classes differs from Lamartine’s in that it was generated out of enthusiasm rather than from a condescending position that ignored class antagonisms. Lamartine, for example, loathed Théroigne de Méricourt as “the impure Joan of Arc of the public streets” who attached herself willynilly to every insurrection and festival. Couture’s canvas tries to skirt ideological distinctions and achieve the sentimental reconciliation of the classes. The painter conceived the idea during the period that Michelet inaugurated his inspiring lecture series, and his description of the painting is charged with the historian’s fiery rhetoric: In my picture, they are carrying liberty to the world; truth shows itself in Théroigne de Méricourt, placed on the limber of a cannon, clothed as their idol, and drawn by all the people. Where are they going? Down there, down there, to the frontier. They are all united in one spirit; they desire equality, their hands clasped, their hearts beating in sympathy. Priests, farm laborers, workers have the same end in view, to defend their fatherland in danger. The fatherland, what is the fatherland? It is the wife, the child, the parents, and grandparents, all helpless, all loved. The volunteers swear to defend them, the women take the children and raise them in the air; from the bosom of the crowd surges the generation to come.39

Couture’s transcendence of actual social conflict requires a juggling act, however; his image hovers somewhere between the visionary elevation of Lamartine and the earthy excitement of Michelet. Conspicuously absent from his procession-festival is the emblematic bonnet rouge, and his personification of Liberty is a neutralized version of an emancipated woman. Méricourt rode on horseback often dressed in male clothing with a pistol in each hand. By transposing her from her role as radical feminist and activist to an allegorical and symbolic mode, Couture deprived her of her specific historical status and recast her as a cipher—one of the generically “helpless” females for whom the volunteers fought. At the same time, Théroigne de Méricourt as Liberty retains some of the power Michelet attributed to her and enacts an emancipatory role—albeit circumscribed—within Couture’s thematics. As in the case of Romans, a courtesan dominates the composition and is taken as its leitmotiv. Again he chose his central symbol aptly: there were several instances of whores fighting on the barricades, and Flaubert evoked these souvenirs of the 1848

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revolution in Sentimental Education by projecting the image of Liberty as a prostitute. Naturally, in this instance and in other counterrevolutionary writings the female warrior-prostitute of 1848 took on negative connotations, but for Couture the moment was propitious for redeeming the fallen woman. He could now transpose her to a higher level of symbolic meaning by associating her with the abstract terms “liberty” and “freedom.” Couture’s Théroigne is the reformist’s image of the prostitute exalted through the transformation of society: just as decadence was incarnated in the vampirish courtesan, so the regeneration of society is incarnated by the rehabilitated woman. Here again The Enrollment of the Volunteers constructs a dialectical challenge to Romans of the Decadence. In December 1848 Prince Louis-Napoléon, trading in on his magical name, was elected first president of the Second French Republic. Three years later, following the coup d’état in December 1851, in true Napoleonic form he virtually proclaimed himself emperor, and several months later he overthrew the Second Republic for the Second Empire. All of this occurred before Couture could complete his canvas. According to the painter, shortly after the coup the new minister of the interior, the fanatical Bonapartist duc de Persigny, visited his studio to inspect the work. Couture noted that he looked with contempt upon the theme and asked him to suspend execution on this “tableau de démagogues.” Couture felt intimidated and later admitted: “He had a most authoritative manner, and I felt that I should look on his request as an order.”40 From this moment on, his inspiration for The Enrollment flagged and he began shifting his attention to other commissions. Thus the imperial regime brought into the open the social antagonism that Lamartine and Couture glossed over, and in Couture’s case, the new government’s more rightward shift relativized his moderate position as extremist. Under these conditions, his concept lost all of its topical relevance and vitality, even though he subsequently tried to modify it to suit the taste of the new regime. He eliminated the figure of Théroigne de Méricourt and replaced her in part by a striding standard bearer reminiscent of Napoleonic pomp. Significantly, it was less the theme—the government purchased Vinchon’s version of 1792—than its packaging that irritated the government, attesting to the link between aesthetics and politics, and suggesting as well Couture’s proximity to the culture of the Second Republic. There is a striking parallel between the ephemeral success of Michelet’s L’Etudiant of 1848 and Couture’s Enrollment: both were conceived under similar circumstances and pressures as a kind of militant banner to rally the young, and both were rendered null and void with the suppression of the June uprising (Michelet was sickened by the event) and the election of Louis-Napoléon to the presidency. Although the Republic continued in name through December 1851, the presence of a Bonaparte in office dealt a deathblow to the hopes and aspirations of the “men of ’48.” Michelet

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could never again recover the enthusiasm of L’Etudiant and Couture never regained the ardor of The Enrollment. Both works were almost immediately dated at the point of conception and bear witness to the surge of optimism prevailing in the prerevolutionary days and early months of the Provisional Republic. As historical documents, they resemble more the ephemeral nature of the political pamphlet than the elaborate historical treatise, the sketchy outline more than the finished work. The Competition for the Figure of the Republic

Couture’s painting was not the only casualty of the shifting sands of political formations; an even more dramatic example was the open competition for a symbol to represent the new Republic.41 The fall of Louis-Philippe and the rise of the Second Republic entailed a cultural shift from the iconic representation of the father-king toward a feminized abstraction standing for a collectivity. The rhetoric of the new society offered selflessness, compassion, and maternal protection, and consistent with bourgeois gender types the impersonal female allegory most closely approximated these attributes. Although still denied her political and civil liberties in actuality, woman advances from the incarnation of simple virtues and qualities to the personification of the whole nation. Yet the elevated symbolic role of the female in public life also heightened her consciousness of the disparity between the rhetoric and the reality. The regenerated social order promised by the Republic and its more inclusive ideal stimulated French feminism generally and was not without influence on the contestants. The androgynous character of many of the entries incorporated the latest ideas of the reform movements and turned the competition into one of the liveliest cultural events of the short-lived regime. The contest marks a watershed in the development of French modernism not only for the inclusive range of its participants—classicists, romantics, juste milieu painters, Barbizon artists, and future realists—but also because it vividly manifested the pictorial conflicts of the art community living in a period of rapid political transition. The search for an appropriate symbol of the Republic illuminated these issues precisely because of the uncertainty of the constituencies and inconsistencies of its program. It is symptomatic that when the time came for the final judgment, the outraged jury rejected all twenty versions as unfit to represent the Republic and terminated the competition for the painted image.42 The various contests for the allegorical image (including painting, sculpture, coins, medals, stamps, and seals), opened officially on 18 March 1848 with an announcement in the Moniteur, were designed to fulfill three overlapping goals: (1) to give the new government a concrete identification and an outward sign of unification and legitimacy, (2) to efface the official visual traces of kingship generally and the July Monarchy in particular, and (3) to demonstrate that a republican concept was capable of inspiring

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great artistic achievements. The contest sprang from the urgent need of the revolution for a thorough transformation of monarchical symbolism. This included not only a fresh visual appearance to replace the previous sign system but a new protocol which enjoined everyone to address each other as “citizen” and proclaim the sweet watchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The fledgling government wanted to inspire its finest talents to project its new face throughout the nation in a cogent visual form. Further, the divisive and wavering aspirations of the new regime made it press for some external sign of unification and legitimacy. The rules required an unsigned single figure in sketch format (approximately 73 by 60 cm), and, out of reaction to the restricted competitions of the previous government, went out of its way to encourage the full range of painters in France (native as well as foreign born). This enabled independents to compete on the same grounds as the academicians and their disciples. The sketches for all the competitions were exhibited after several delays and postponements during the week of 25–30 April. The huge turnout, however, of almost five hundred painted sketches was so unexpected that the blue-ribboned panel of political leaders, artists, and critics—including Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, Pyat, Arago, Jeanron, Thoré, Charles Blanc, Ingres, Delacroix, Delaroche, Meissonier, Robert-Fleury, Decamps, Cogniet, and Schnetz—had to convoke a special session to amend the contest regulations. The jury enthusiastically endorsed Delaroche’s proposal to increase from three to twenty the number of sketches to be enlarged and finished for a definitive trial in October, and to subsidize the finalists with a stipend of 500 francs to cover their time and expenses. All twenty finalists evidently certified their intention to follow through with the second test during the second week of June. But the following month, on 2 July, Flandrin wrote Blanc that his current circumstances prevented him from completing the assignment and asked to be relieved of his obligation. He was promptly replaced by Diaz, the first supernumerary on Blanc’s list. Daumier, who is occasionally cited as having refused to enter the final trial, actually began work on the large-scale version. Yet for one reason or another, he failed to complete his figure in time for the October judgment. As a result of Flandrin’s defection and Daumier’s absence, the final lineup consisted of eighteen of the original finalists plus Diaz. The definitive judgment took place on 23 October 1848 by a jury composed of Charles Blanc, Flocon, Arago, Albert de Luynes, Vernet, Picot, Robert-Fleury, Meissonier, Couture, and F. B. de Mercey. Voting after June on works inspired and painted prior to June, the jury reacted indignantly to what it felt to be a disgraceful fiasco, deciding not only to cancel the contest but even opposing the idea of a new one. There was general dissatisfaction on all sides of the political spectrum, but for very different reasons. Although the finalists presented a bewildering farrago of symbolic attributes (many of these Masonic) and often tactless, hybridized personifi

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cations, the differing explanations for the outcome varied according to the ideological lens of the observer. An English critic, for example, dismissed the definitive pictures for being “as heterogeneous and undecided in aim as is the great original, the French Republic itself, which resemblance is about the best encomium that can be passed upon them.”43 Louis Blanc, on the other hand, expressed bitter disappointment over the outcome. He would have wished to see representations of “force under the appearance of calm, serenity rising out of the storm, and the power to create emerging from a heap of ruins,” but what he saw for the most part was only “the image of a vulgarly powerful goddess, and looking somewhat like the type depicted in the flaming iambs of Auguste Barbier.” His explanation for the failure of the figures to live up to expectations was that the artists had yet to discover the authentic ideals of the new regime.44 The reviewer for the centrist magazine L’Illustration, reporting on the exhibition just prior to the final verdict, perceived the confused results from a more explicitly partisan perspective. He began his article by asking in a contemptuous tone, “What kind of republic should the contestant have painted?” and follows with several possibilities: the “long-standing republic [la république de la veille], that hydra with a thousand heads,” at war with itself as much as with the constitutional monarch; the republic of 1793, with its prodigious parade of monsters and heroes; the republic of the June insurgents, “which has already entered the stream of history with this inscription on its flanks: ‘Pillage of the School of Law, the assassination of General Bréa, and the martyrdom of the Archbishop of Paris.’” Or should the artists have opted for the republic of the banquets of Toulouse and Montpellier (referring to the savvy Montagnard political organization in these two towns), a republic “without spirit, without heart, and without God, and which shouts: ‘Long live Barbès! Long live the guillotine and long live Hell!’” There were other versions of course, but to speak fairly of the Montagnards, “each of them has a republic in their pockets for their own particular use, and if France should one day find itself without a republic it will be the result only of an overload of possibilities, of too many choices.”45 The reviewer clearly identified the competition as socialist-inspired and tagged the variety of responses as the outcome of anarchic-type freedom. He claimed that the true idea of liberty had less to do with physical movement than with the “victory of the will over the passions.” Here the artistic process is confounded with conservative psychology, since in academic discourse the finished picture exhibited the rational control of the impulsive and spontaneous gestures manifested in the preliminary sketch. The passions—identified in the competition entries with the energetic and emotional qualities of the allegorical personification—needed to be tamed by the rule of reason before the Republic could sit for its portrait. Just as the 28 October 1848 issue of L’Illustration went to press, the reviewer learned to his delight of the jury’s decision not to award the prize

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for the painted figure of the Republic. He tacked on to his article the snide observation that now the left-wing journals such as “La Réforme, La République, La Démocratie so-called pacifique and the other interpreters of the flame-colored republic [république-ponceau] are going to blame everything on the reactionaries.” The inclusion of this statement at the end of the review dramatically highlights the political implications of the judgments of the entries, and the slur on the “pacific” intentions of the Fourierist paper betrays the bourgeois anxiety over the passionate and humanitarian republic that would outlaw capital punishment. Despite the disastrous conclusion of the contest, its underlying impulse and inspiration stemmed directly from the upsurge of optimism and political idealism marking the early stage of the regime. The competition attracted talents of every stylistic stamp, including Couture, Daumier, Millet, Diaz, Leleux, Devéria, Chassériau, Chenavard, Isabey, the Scheffer brothers, Hamon, Amaury-Duval, Flandrin, and Gérôme. Daumier seized the opportunity of testing his painterly talents in public (appealing to him perhaps because of the guaranteed anonymity) for the first time in his career. With rare exceptions, it was a contest for the younger generation; older artists like Ingres, Delacroix, and Delaroche declined to participate. Among the first group, the notable exception was Courbet; he had at first intended to enter the competition, but at the last minute decided against it. Still, he and his friend Bonvin encouraged Daumier to participate, and Courbet anticipated being chosen as a copyist to reproduce the winning figure for official buildings throughout France. One liberal critic, responding to the first trial of the sketches, approved of the stylistic diversity, considering this appropriate for the new Republic, which regarded individuality in aesthetic expression as part of the broadened representation of divergent opinions in the polity at large.46 For the first time in French history the bureaucracy regulating art production, display, and distribution assumed an essentially egalitarian position. It sponsored a totally open and free Salon in 1848 and allowed the artists greater responsibility in the administration of the arts, sanctioning artists’ associations and juries. Indeed, during this period the government helped foster collaborative effort and break down old prejudices. Although the government had not initially intended to invite foreign participants, the artists pressed a petition upon Ledru-Rollin opposing such an exclusion on the grounds that it was contrary to the fraternal aims and universalizing spirit of the regime.47 Thus in this heady period artists enthusiastically embraced the Second Republic’s theoretical idealism, and they refused to recognize barriers either among themselves or between themselves and their foreign peers—whether those barriers were of stylistic or national origin. By encouraging the abolition of such constraints, the nascent regime helped relativize style as the free expression of the enfranchised citizen and gave impetus to the independent men and women affiliated with realist and Barbizon tendencies.

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The Politics of the Sketch

But it is not for this alone that the contest signals a turning point in the development of nineteenth-century French painting. In addition to the contest’s salutary democratizing effect, the entries embodied the aesthetic conflicts of the period, which flowed from the political contradictions of a society in rapid transition. Many of the artists experienced difficulty in carrying the spontaneity and vigor of their original sketch into the definitive work. Several critics felt that the original sketches were far superior to the final representations. One English reviewer observed that although some of the sketches were “the result of a few slashes of the brush, they startled by the brilliance or boldness of their expression.”48 Most of the hostile French critics, however, perceived the sketches as a hodgepodge of unformed, “grotesque” ideas unworthy of following through to the finished stage. The critic for the moderate paper Le National, bent on discrediting the radical Republic and its misguided policies, attacked even the sketch trial as a viable way of discovering talent: Testing by way of a sketch, by its extreme facility and inventiveness, attracts swarms of contestants, the charlatans, the apprentices, the amateurs, the entire mob of mediocrities and savages whose shameful outpouring we witnessed for the first time in the competitions of painting and sculpture for the symbolic figure of the Republic. . . . This absurd license, under the pretext of equality, produced only the saddest of efforts. It debased the competition; it dishonored our tradition in public; it made it impossible to render any kind of clear, sober evaluation, to make any secure selection from among such a hodgepodge of works without name, embryos and ébauches in a welter of preliminary chaos which would have numbed the view and tried the patience of even the most knowledgeable and expert of juries.49

He understood the sketch as the most equivocal of visual practices; to judge on its basis is to judge not that which is, but what shall be. It is to try to divine the picture in the canvas, and the statue in the block. Given these conditions, it was inevitable that the competition should miscarry. While the competitions brought out a complex set of associations and historical connections, it should be noted that the republican concept itself often made use of the sketch as metaphor for regenerative activity. For example, an article in the progressive Le Crédit, written in connection with the competition for the coin designs, observed that “the Republic, born only yesterday, is still an unformed seed, but a fertile seed beyond the power of humans to destroy.”50 Art critic and novelist Théophile Gautier, blown away by the irrepressible sketch techniques in the first trial, wrote that the “strange inventions” on display at the Ecole were “as impossible to describe as the tumultuous proceedings of the National Assembly.”51 The more conservative L’Illustration wrote in its review of the sketch trial that

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the first revolution (of 1789) was an extraordinary thing, but what is its legacy?—“a solitary sketch, a simple outline of a projected masterpiece.” And it went on to elaborate: “The revolution of 1848 seems to herald the dawn of a new era, greater than ever before, in which the government of human society will be altering everything from top to bottom; but the immense results that it promises everyone are at this moment still in a state of vague hopes.”52 The reviewer restated that the current government was still only provisional, an unformed and shapeless institution that can be realized and completed only through the efforts of the National Assembly. Here the journal expressly identified the radical elements of the regime with the confused and uncertain qualities of those sketches in the exhibition embodying revolutionary attributes and audacious handling. Referring to the sculptural maquettes, the paper reiterated that “none of the works show anything definitive. Everything remains for the artists to complete, analogous to the members of the National Assembly.” In other words, only when the moderates and conservatives resolve the question of the Constitution and terminate the Provisional Government will the Republic complete itself, as a “finished picture.” In this instance, the right-of-center journal tried to link the negative traits of the sketch to the unfinished work of the Provisional Republic. On the one hand, the confident and bold execution of the first idea conjured up the creative, dynamic Republic envisioned by Louis Blanc and feared by conservatives, while, on the other, the sketch trial could be condemned in the same breath as the Republic for its vague and optimistic promises so far off from being fulfilled. Here the review in L’Illustration inevitably touched a raw nerve in challenging the fundamental concept of the new regime. The attempt to achieve the final Republic by a series of trials, or sketchy policies that constitute a continually unfolding government, represented an attempt to attain the authentic realization of the social form of Rousseau’s general will. But insofar as the regime had to be final and complete in order to produce the good society, to that extent the sketched-out plans had to be frustrating approximates. The collective art of the fledgling Republic may be understood as a sketch inspired by an unattainable ideal that it could not cease attempting to realize—hence, the image of the radical Republic perpetually in motion. In this sense, the spontaneity of the radical project and the immediate conservative call for social order were incompatibly poised against each other as sketch to finished work. The jaded critic Laurent Jan, a political moderate, gleefully announced at the end of November that, decidedly, “our Republic lacks a portrait.” He implied that a social order capable of producing only barbarous sketches did not deserve one. Anyway, he inquired, how was it possible “to translate into visual terms this abstraction that we call the Republic? What is the character, what are the symbols that can communicate to everyone: here is the French Republic?” He concluded that the failure of the painting

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competition only served to demonstrate the poverty of the radical concept of a totally open and public competition.53 The failure to give the Second Republic a visual identity and a national symbol attests to the dramatic intersection between art and history in 1848. The specific likeness of traditional authority made Jan more comfortable than the abstract and anonymous personification of the Republic, and this experience prognosticated negative tidings for the new regime. The concept of the Republic, like Truth and Liberty, was an abstraction assigned to a feminine gender (La République, La Vérité, La Liberté) and traditionally personified as female. The contestants were locked into the “always-already” visual discourse by the very requirements of the contest, and had to invent clever strategies for animating the ancient conventions. But like the applicants to the government’s National Workshops, the artists entered a nowin situation because, after June, the democratic Republic as the minority imagined it could not be sustained even as a beautiful dream. That it was still thought possible to visualize a Republic as if it were a timeless virtue or set of qualities confirms the indebtedness to the First Revolution declared by Tocqueville and Marx. Although all societies collectively represent their social institutions and ideals through myth, the advanced nature of radical republicanism outran the capacity of the bourgeois revolutionary myth to embody it in conventional allegorical form. Allegory as a rhetorical device encoded synoptically to give larger meaning and status to everyday ideas and events had to be stretched to the maximum to allow for the significations of the “democratic and social Republic.” The fact that the artists were forced to work with forms that had lost most of their contemporary validity played into the hands of the conservative majority by pushing their radical opponents to admit the failure on aesthetic grounds while all the time politics lay behind the Right’s scornful response. Yet the need of the politicized artists of the competition to conceptualize the Republic in an updated form easily decipherable to their broad audience resulted in a more accessible female body and more realistically portrayed accessories. The outward convention was infused with greater naturalism, which at once undermined allegory and high art as the sine qua non of visual production. The allegory, meant to stand for something else, now partially revealed itself to be what it actually represented in outward form, no more, no less—what you saw was what you got. The female body became a person, less conceptual than actual, and thus incapable of sustaining the vision of a collectivity replacing a ruler with a specific name and likeness. Leloir’s definitive entry reminded Gautier of “certain types of the quartier Bréda [a notorious red-light district].”54 We saw in volume 3 that at the outset of the July Monarchy Delacroix’s Liberty barely passed the litmus test for high art, and it is not surprising that eighteen years later she could hardly stand on her own merits when expanded into the image of the Republic.

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Those who did participate valiantly attempted to infuse the personifications provided by numismatic materials and such standard handbooks as Ripa’s Iconologia and Gravelot and Cochin’s Iconologie par figures with vitality and originality. Indeed, it may be said that the contest served as a kind of junction where the historical and “learned” strains of the academic tradition and the enthusiasm for the utopian daydreams conjured up by the Republic were brought together in an unruly fashion. The artists were caught in a period of accelerating change, and they came up with a Janus-faced composite of realism and idealism just at that moment in history when one was superseding the other in French cultural practice. Even the critics reflected the ambivalence: Jan declared, “Let us be republicans, but let us also be of our times and especially of our country!” One curious attempt to do precisely that is Janet-Lange’s Republic, in which the allegorical figure is seated against a backdrop of a modern industrial complex (fig. 1.11). Here the jarring collision of the real and the ideal, tradition and modernity, has something of the burlesque about it: the allegorical Republic holds up a Torch of Enlightenment and is all but buried in an avalanche of symbolic attributes, including gears and cogwheels, agricultural implements, the fruit of abundant harvest, and architectural and sculpted fragments; silhouetted against the sky is the smoking chimney of 1.11  Ange-Louis Janet-Lange, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, sketch, 1848. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.



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a giant manufacturing works and the cranes of a vast building site, pointing to the rise of a modern metropolis. Meanwhile, perched at the Republic’s right foot is the watchful Gallic cock, and on the pedestal of the throne are carved reliefs of the popular triadic symbols of both Republics, the liberty bonnet, the triangle of Equality, and clasping hands emblematically representing Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. In this instance, the allegorical personification and traditional attributes seem to be relics of a bygone age excavated in the midst of a modern downtown area. The so-called Marianne figure (with its populist and religious connotations) that would become commonplace under the Third Republic was still too charged with revolutionary associations in 1848 to get past the conservatives. The First Republic, with its dual aspect, provided the main precedent: on the one hand, it encoded a transcendent image of force and power; on the other, its incarnation in a female body projected maternal qualities of charity, compassion, and sustenance. Although the images of the two Republics are often indistinguishable, the First Republic tended to stress the deific and militant presence of the figure, while that of 1848 generally emphasized the maternalistic principle. When campaigning in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône in April 1848, Ledru-Rollin proclaimed that “the nation [ironically la patrie, literally the fatherland] is a mother who shows no preferences nor makes favorites among her children; she embraces them all in the same love and the same solicitude. She wishes to see all of them happy, equal, and free.”55 Maurice Agulhon has refined my initial broad categories of allegorical Republics into more subtle political classifications of radical and conservative, depending on the figures’ posture, costume, and/or accessories. He lists calmness and vehemence in the figure’s bearing as clues to the artist’s political views: the former suggests a republic ruled by order; the latter, nascent Liberty, fresh from the barricades, who strives to fulfill her destiny. Critics could perceive in the two types either the consummation of an ideal or the embodiment of a promise yet to be achieved. Although his classifications are not always foolproof—the socialist Blanc, for example, wanted to see the appearance of calm in his version of the Republic—they provide useful guides to help us navigate through the parade of figures that might otherwise appear as relatively indistinguishable. Many of the originals exist in provincial museums throughout France, but in those cases where the location of the work is unknown we are fortunate to have a sheet of thirty-six thumbnail sketches of the anonymous Republics hanging at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and identified by their original exhibition number. The artist who made these sketches on the spot was Pierre-Roch Vigneron (1789–1872), who also entered the competition and evidently wanted an idea of his competition (figs. 1.12–13). Judging from his accurate renderings of known examples by Flandrin, Cornu, and Ziégler, he clearly made faithful reproductions of the originals. Thanks to his record-keeping and to the preservation of several of the originals we have

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opposite 1.12  Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies of sketches of the Republic, brown ink and pencil on tracing paper, 1848. Shepherd Gallery Associates, New York. 1.13  Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies, detail. 1.14  Hippolyte Flandrin, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, sketch, 1848. Private Collection, Paris.



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a solid sampling of fourteen known images of the twenty sketches selected for the final trial. Among the most remarkable of the sketch entries was the one by Flandrin, originally ranked as the best of the twenty preliminary winners, and whose absence in the final trial was sorely lamented by the critics (fig. 1.14). Awestruck and remote, Flandrin’s figure is set above the globe of the world on the altar of Fraternity and crushes beneath her right foot the serpent of hatred. Her right hand firmly grasps the olive branch of peace, and with her left she holds a sword, buckler, and tricolor whose staff is encased in a fasces, the symbol of unity. Modeled upon the ancient Winged Victory of a type found in Pompeii or available in the iconographical manuals (but not that of Samothrace, which had yet to be discovered), the Republic’s wings expand (to suggest “the amplitude of her future”) and her drapery circulates as if buffeted by wind. Her anxious eyes gaze ahead and her lips are parted in anticipation, a realistic physiognomy joined to the allegorical body. Yet her flight is checked by the left foot, which rests flatly on the altar at a ninety-degree angle from the right, which faces front; the stem of the fasces anchors her further to the pedestal, and she appears encumbered by all the paraphernalia she carries. Flandrin seems to have been caught between the desire to project the static power of a national monument and a process of rejuvenation. On the whole, however, the figure radiates a sense of expectancy reflecting a sympathetic disposition toward the social Republic. June soured Flandrin, however; he and his brother Paul served in the National Guard repression of the insurgents, and thereafter he threw his support behind the framers of the conservative Constitution. It is no coincidence that his letter of withdrawal from the competition is dated 2 July. Out of deference to the members of the National Assembly, he voted in the December elections for their bloodstained hero General Cavaignac.56 Dominique-Louis Papety’s staid Republic was even more ambivalently posed in his sketch, standing emblematically on a pedestal like an ancient deity and leaning on a spear draped with the tricolor. Her outstretched right arm held a globe of the world, signifying the universal outlook of the infant Republic. In the definitive entry he altered this motif, eliminating the globe and the tricolor to suit the moderate jury (fig. 1.15). The figure is rigid, and the one note of movement is confined to the swarm of bees around the beehive on the left-hand side of the pedestal, a sign of industrious, intelligent, and well-organized labor. It was well known that Papety was a follower of Fourier, whose disciples frequently used the beehive as a symbol of the phalanstery, but nothing in the Republic’s body language portends a drastic overhaul of the present society. Daumier’s popular sketch, which placed eleventh and whose absent finished counterpart was also sorely missed by the critics, is a powerful female protector and nurturer of the young (fig. 1.16). Enthroned and ensconced in her niche, she grasps the tricolor with firmness while actively protecting springtime and winter of the people in france, 1848–1852

1.15  Dominique-Louis Papety, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, 1848. Collection de la Ville de Paris. 1.16  Honoré Daumier, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, sketch, 1848. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

her children with her muscular left arm and maintaining a watchful eye. The massive throne determines the formal design of the composition and reinforces the idea of the durability of the Republic’s support. The painter also suggested solidity and bulk by modeling the forms with heavy contours and broad contrasting areas of light and shade—qualities borrowed from his graphic work that heightened the cogency of his bare-breasted Amazon. Champfleury recalled viewing the bizarre assortment of sketches, which included “red Republics, pink ones, green and yellow ones, marble ones, stone ones, and ivory ones; some roasted brown, some blackened like a pipe, some scratched and some scraped; Republics in flowered dresses, in National Guard uniforms, in silk robes and in dressing gowns; Republics clad in chains, arrayed in symbolic attributes, and some wearing nothing at all.” In the midst of these uneven entries, he observed that one work stood out for its simplicity and sobriety: “A seated female supports two children suckling her breasts; at her feet two children [sic] read. The Republic nurtures her children and instructs them.” Champfleury was carried away by the work: “On that day I shouted, Long Live the Republic! for the Republic had made a painter: daumier.”57



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One of the rare political artists to be imprisoned during the July Monarchy, Daumier welcomed the creation of the Republic. Something of his attitude comes through in his caricature published in the Charivari of 9 March 1848, Dernier Conseil des ex ministres (Last Council of the Ex-Ministers), showing the figure of the Republic in a liberty bonnet throwing open the doors to the cabinet’s darkened chambers and letting in the dazzling light of the new order (fig. 1.17). As she enters to take possession with quiet composure and forceful step (Blanc’s ideal), the former ministers (including Thiers, who is recognizable by his spectacles and crop of white hair) scramble over one another in panic to exit via the nearest window. The image stirred Michelet, who wrote the artist that now the Republic “has the power and the authority as Mistress of the house. . . . She alone is at home in France.”58 Here, dark and light oppositions operate ideologically, with the old order seen clustered in shadow in dark frock coats chased by the new, basking in an aura of radiant glory. Daumier’s competition sketch focuses on the humanitarian side of the Republic proclaimed by Ledru-Rollin and others, but it also represented a radical commitment to the recognition of the responsibility of the state for the social well-being of its citizenry. If the radicals accepted the principle of electoral reform, it was seen as a means to eliminate poverty and to provide free education for all. Daumier’s Republic continues to nurture her children beyond the normal time for breastfeeding, and below her right knee another reads with complete equanimity and absorption. It may be recalled that all of the major reformers emphasized the

1.17  Honoré Daumier, Last Council of the Ex-Ministers,

lithograph, 1848.



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need for universal education, and the Provisional Republic made free and compulsory elementary education a top priority on its agenda. Hippolyte Carnot, an ex-Saint-Simonist and radical republican, was appointed minister of public instruction and recommended major reforms of primary instruction, including the raising of teachers’ salaries and the establishment of écoles maternelles—places of refuge for single mothers and their children and sites for adoption. (His proposals withered on the vine in the post-June reaction, when he was forced to resign.) Lamartine declared in his history of the 1848 revolution that the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next was the work of the state, and concluded: “Thus society has eternally a child to instruct and to bring up”—the precise theme visualized by Daumier. One other trait of Daumier’s Republic that owes a debt to the reformers is the androgynous appearance—the female head and mammoth breasts joined to a hard, muscular male body. The image of the androgyne appealed to the reformists, who made emancipation of women a cardinal plank of their platform, proposing that the new person in their utopia would be a perfect blend of male and female. The androgynous Adam—the primordial androgyne—assumed symbolic significance as an ideal of human progress for many social reformers, who perceived social equality as the prelude for the symbolic reunion of the male and female principles. The concept played an important role in the thought of the Saint-Simonists, who addressed themselves to their founder’s dying words, “Man and woman are the social individual.”59 As the Saint-Simonists considered their leadership under Père Enfantin flawed in these circumstances, they posited a woman who could share with him the role of Supreme Ruler. Since La Mère had to be Jewish, a search for the female Messiah was launched in Constantinople, the crossroads of East and West.60 La Mère would occupy a chair next to that of Enfantin at their regular reunions, but ultimately the exploration was fatally disrupted by government pressure without and internal divisions within the movement. Significantly, Daumier’s fusion of Fatherland and Republic is enthroned, occupying the seat imagined for her by the Saint-Simonists. Actually, Daumier’s caricatures of the period reveal a strong antifeminist position during a period when the emergence of the Republic stimulated the rise of associations and revolutionary clubs like the militant laundresses and fringe-makers demanding higher wages and middle-class feminists insisting that suffrage be made truly “universal.”61 Female rights petitioners were caught up in a swirl of activity, participating in mixedgender political gatherings and organizing their own conferences. In one example from his series The Divorcées (Charivari, 4 August 1848), Daumier, taking a cue from Couture, shows an impassioned female orator from a dramatic angle on the podium dramatically making her point: “Fellow Female Citizens, the rumor is spreading that divorce will be denied us . . . let us unite here and now to declare La Patrie est en danger!” (fig. 1.18).

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Daumier catches the atmosphere of the heated debates and tumultuous proceedings by building his composition in a sort of stacked pyramid of overlapping levels reaching an apex in the ardent gesture of the speaker. Mobilized by Eugénie Niboyet and Jeanne Deroin, the 1848 suffragettes energetically petitioned the Provisional Government for redress of the electoral system. The government responded by closing the feminist clubs. Through the influence of feminists who had the ear of Pierre Leroux, an ex-Saint-Simonist and imaginative social thinker on the order of Fourier, the resolution for female enfranchisement reached the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, only to be overwhelmingly defeated. It may be difficult to reconcile Daumier’s antipathy to equal rights for women in the caricatures with his republican sympathies and strong female depiction in the painted sketch. One could claim that Daumier mocks the pretensions of individuals rather than reform itself, but his sustained and systematic attack on bluestockings and tipsy feminists and obvious sympathy for the domesticity of spouse and mother suggest a conventional patriarchal attitude. His ambivalence was symptomatic of other major male reformers such as Comte, Proudhon, and Michelet, who could accept a regenerative social mission for women as long as it was relegated to an abstract plane of existence. Despite the fresh spin on the moral superiority of woman, she

1.18  Honoré Daumier, The Divorcées, lithograph, 1848.



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remained superior to man only at the level of representation—when she stood for all Humanity.62 As the Fourierist paper declared shortly after the proclamation of the new Republic: “La France, this older daughter of Humanity, reoccupies her place at the head of the universal movement; she calls on all peoples to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.”63 Gérôme’s muscle-bound Amazon standing stiffly before a crouching lion points to the force of the new Republic but also suggests that its preferred state is one of reason and order, thus signifying a more moderate position than Daumier’s sketch (fig. 1.19). The active type seems to be personified in Sébastien-Melchior Cornu’s version of the Republic; facing front on the platform of a throne-like altar, she grasps the folds of the tricolor in her left hand and with her right arm thrust high holds a scroll with the inscription “Souveraineté du peuple”—Sovereignty of the People (fig. 1.20). Beneath the Phrygian bonnet the expression of the face is open and frank, and, with her right foot extending beyond the edge of the platform, she appears to be striding forward in the direction of the beholder.



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opposite 1.19  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, 1848. Mairie des Lilas, Paris. 1.20  Sébastien-Melchior Cornu, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, sketch, 1848. Musée des BeauxArts et d’Archéologie, Besançon.



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The Republic in motion corresponds to Cornu’s radical politics and his enthusiastic support of the regime during its early months. The radicals and the socialists agitating on behalf of the Provisional Republic wished to keep alive the revolutionary idealism, to isolate the opposition, and to shelve the liberal monarchists whose conversion to republicanism they distrusted. The moderates, however, tried to restrain revolutionary fervor and conciliate the dynastic liberals amenable to a watered-down version of the Republic. But what the first group defined as the dynamic component of their policy hardly matched the definition assigned to it by the moderate majority. The radicals in fact wanted to efface the memory of 1793, whose horrific image still clung to that of the Republic for the moderates and conservatives. It was they who sponsored legislation to abolish the death penalty for political crimes, and they wanted to go even further in eliminating it for common offenses as well, but this proposal too was blocked by conservatives. Blanc’s idea of a revolutionary Republic was one that moved forward to undertake the completion of her mission, not to perpetuate or exacerbate the class struggle. Once the Constitution was established the Left never advocated insurrection except in those cases where its conditions were willfully transgressed. Yet the opponents of the vision of the dynamic Republic interpreted it as a sign of the mob’s perennial threat to social order. Thus Louis Desnoyers, editor of the moderate journal Le Siècle, claimed that many of the competition entries depicted “veritable viragos, furies, shrews, enraged female devils,” scrambling with their standards and pikes “over piles of paving stones, beams, barrels and overturned coaches, as if the Republic had to be eternally storming barricades! The artists completely misjudged the fundamentals of the subject. The Republic is neither riot nor sedition, nor revolt, nor insurrection, nor revolution; it is, quite to the contrary, the end of all that. It is the end, all the rest is but the means.” Not surprisingly, his favorite—like that of several of the conservative critics—was the allegory of Charles Landelle, depicting a stately and alluring young woman “in an attitude of calm strength and unhurried movement,” nonchalantly leaning on, but not brandishing, an outsized sword that she could never wield in real life (fig. 1.21).64 In actuality, none of the known images of the Republic submitted to the competition conforms to the wild description of Desnoyers. He displaced to the mild effigies his own anxieties and fears of the populace typical of the Right throughout 1848, but especially conspicuous after June. It should be recalled that the June uprising occurred during the interval between the preliminary trial held during the last week of April and the definitive contest in October. Until that moment conservatives had a difficult job of persuading the public of the Left’s violent intentions; afterwards they only had to make passing references to June to raise the specter of murderous “reds.” Every attempt was made to blame the insurrection on Blanc, Caussidière, and Ledru-Rollin. But the slaughter of the springtime and winter of the people in france, 1848–1852

1.21  Charles Landelle, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, 1848. Lycée Saint-Louis, Paris.



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insurgents by heavy artillery and the mass deportations demonstrated that it was the so-called “party of order” that proved to be the party of bloodshed. No matter; the fear of spontaneous popular violence overdetermined every image of the spirited Republic with the vision of bloodthirsty instincts waiting to be unleashed. The workers’ adoption of the color “red” for their flag, scarves, and caps was interpreted by unprogressive forces everywhere as a sign of unbridled savagery. Red flags conjured up the June Days, and keeping that memory in the foreground of peoples’ imagination was central to the strategy of the conservatives, who seized every opportunity to remind the bourgeois to vote for the “party of order” in December. This horror of “seeing red” was especially evident in the reviews of the competition entries, many of which, like the Cornu and Henri-Pierre Picou, displayed the Phrygian bonnet on the head of the Republic. The red cap—although mistakenly assumed to have been the symbol of the enfranchised slave in antiquity—ranked as the most consistently important symbol of all, both because it was one of the earliest attributes of Liberty and because since 1792 it had become identified with the unrestrained outbursts of popular protest. Not surprisingly, it constituted the focus of anxious critical response to the republican allegories. As early as May, L’Illustration noted that many of the trial sketches had crowned their Republics “with the red bonnet, plain blood.” This same reviewer could glimpse in the images of the Republic “the guise of a Fury who treads in the shadows with an incendiary torch in her hand.”65 The Republic installed after the elections of 23 April became increasingly nasty to the socialists, and ended by being openly conservative, even reactionary. The antirepublican polemic of the moderates after June hysterically defined the socialists as savages and “terrorists.” They conjured up images of bloodshed to frighten the bourgeoisie, and the most appalling rumors about the insurgents were rife in Paris and the countryside. The moderates attempted to make the Red Republic a metaphor for the perverse and pathological. Reviewing the definitive competition, Jan looked back to the preliminary trial and recalled that there were “Republics of every color,” but that the red ones predominated. These he associated with the political views of the Left, “from the ex-rose pink Caussidière to the bloodthirsty red Montagnards [rouge montagnard sang de boeuf].” He observed a large group of Republics “with a furious look, a curse on their lips, shirtchapter one

sleeves rolled up, a bloody pike in their fist, and decaying corpses at their feet, who seemed to say: This is the way we govern, whose turn is next?” Jan predictably singled out the red cap as totally inappropriate for the Republic, since historically the Phrygian bonnet was white and never used in France. He singled out the attribute as the worst offense of the radical personifications: “Let us crown our Republic with laurel wreaths, oak leaves or flowers; place on her forehead the flame of genius or the Star of Truth; but in the name of beauty and good taste, spare us this pitiful headgear!” Jan couched his criticism of the red cap in aesthetics and decorum, but he was clearly infuriated by its appearance and characterized it as a kind of moral transgression. He betrayed his true political convictions in describing Fossey’s figure of the Republic, which wore the red cap as “an old Montagnard from the old days [une vieille montagnarde de la veille]”—i.e., not a Johnny-come-lately. He perceived Fossey’s Republic as a “wicked woman” who “roasted” the decree of the death penalty on a small stove like a sweetmeat. While pretending to be humane, the “chef ” (rotisseur) was in reality a sadistic charlatan baiting a trap for the unwary.66 Fortunately, we do not have to take Jan’s hysterical outburst at its face value. Vigneron’s sheet of thumbnail sketches shows that Fossey’s Republic (the one unnumbered image in the second row) is hardly menacing: although sporting the red cap (perhaps sufficient grounds for the conservatives’ displeasure), she stands sedately, holding the Triangle of Equality in her right hand, while her left hand supports a tricolor flag, the Scales of Justice, and an open book inscribed with the message “Love one Another” (fig. 1.22). At her left side a young olive tree—symbol of peace—springs from the earth, while a broken shackle lies at her feet. What Jan saw as a “small stove” was actually the Altar of Fraternity, in whose flames the Republic has thrown the decree of the death penalty, as well as other symbols of Abuses and Privileges. Indeed, many of the Republics, including those wearing liberty caps, assumed a “saintlike” aspect and preached biblical virtues. An example was August Hesse’s Republic (No. 390), whose left hand holds an open book on which is printed the words Sanctum Evangelium, a scale, and a scepter of Justice. Her right hand thrusts the tricolor flag upwards toward heaven. Not that the radicals abandoned the religious ideal entirely; although anticlerical, they exploited the sacred iconographical traditions especially in rural areas to gain support for the Second Republic. The spirit of 1848 was passionate and evangelical, and the republicans tried to win over the peasantry by appealing to their folkloric tradition. The Republic appeared in the guise of a new religion, surrounded with an emotional and even mystical aura that explained the power of its figuration despite its seeming banality. On the whole, then, the sketches exhibited during the last week of April 1848 intimated a modest degree of political progressivism, but even this modicum of progressivism was immediately suspect to the moderates,

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1.22  Pierre-Roch Vigneron, sheet of studies, detail including Félix Fossey, Symbolic Figure of the Republic (unnumbered), 1848.

who seized political control following the elections of 23 April. The reaction issued mainly from the Right; the radical press was surprisingly mute on the subject, probably because it did not know how to manipulate the cultural and aesthetic concepts as effectively as its opponents. The reaction endeavored to demonstrate that the Republic’s open, democratic competition attracted mainly mediocrities, that the idea of the progressive Republic was an absurdity impossible to encode, and finally that the collection of rag-tag stereotypes exposed the creative impotence of republican culture. At the heart of this negative criticism was a challenge to the very nature of the Second Republic itself. L’Illustration had a field day with the sketches, publishing an entire page of Bertall’s caricatures of the entries (fig. 1.23).67 The cartoonist’s devastating satires convey the motley character of the displays, yet at this stage they do not manifest the captious tone of the critiques after June. Bertall’s cartoons, however, do attest to the political implications of the contestants’ visual strategies. His first example bears this legend: “A very skinny Republic who appears to have fasted since 24 February. This picture is probably done by the brush of a reactionary artist.” Another example shows a

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1.23  Bertall, Bertall à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 6 May 1848.

Republic with her thigh exposed, and the legend states: “Without being entirely covered with breeches [culottée], the Republic must not be sans-culotte” (i.e., without breeches, the term for radical republicans of the First Revolution who wore trousers in opposition to the costume of the upper classes). Other parodied entries referred to a “Neo-Christian Republic” (showing a haggard creature, breasts bared and sagging, and wearing the Phrygian bonnet), an “Industrial Republic,” a “Radical Republic” (République progressiste—who wears the liberty cap and holds a skull symbolizing

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1.24  Tony Johannot, La République, wood engraving from Reybaud, Jérôme Paturôt (1848).

Equality), an “Unreasonable Republic,” and a “Financial Republic” (suggesting that no matter who governs, money reigns). All of these titles, if not immediately suggestive of political positions, point to a distinctly ideological reading of the images. The journal entitled this page of satires “Bertall à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques,” which probably inspired the title of the 1848 novel by Louis Reybaud, Jérôme Paturôt à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques.68 Reybaud, who had written a pioneering if conflicted book about the social reformers, began his career as a liberal critic of the July Monarchy, but the Republic frightened him and forced him to retreat to a conservative position. Jérôme Paturôt attacked the Provisional Government with sardonic humor: the eponymous hero considered himself a republican under the July Monarchy (républicain de la veille), but finds himself shifting to the opposite end of the political spectrum under the impact of the new regime. One of the key scenes depicts the moment when Jérôme accompanies his artist friend Oscar to the exhibition of the sketches for the symbolic figure of the Republic. Oscar, who had himself submitted an entry, lauds the government’s magnanimous decision to hold an open competition in which masters and pupils could compete on common ground. But after rhapsodic praise for this stimulus to the creative imagination, Oscar launches into a tirade against the results: See all these sketches: there is manual skill, but where is the conception, where is the idea? Nothing that induces reverie, nothing that transports us to other realms!

Oscar then unwittingly condemns the whole competition by claiming that his entry alone merited the prize, but while he waxes effusively about it Jérôme can hardly refrain from laughing out loud. All Jérôme saw was “a ghastly looking Virgin tapping with an olive branch on the terrestrial globe which split open.”69 His perception of the creature’s physiognomy and its immoderately large eyes was visualized in a subsequent edition of the book by Tony Johannot (fig. 1.24). A witty exchange that then ensues between Oscar and Jérôme reveals that the competition for the Republic constituted the leitmotif for the entire novel. When the painter asks his friend if he agrees that his entry is “the best,” Jérôme responds somewhat confusedly with a question: “La meilleure de quoi?” to which Oscar

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naively replies, “La meilleure des Républiques, Jérôme!” Later an enthusiastic supporter of Louis-Napoléon, Reybaud clearly singled out the painting competition with its pluralistic jumble as a means of discrediting the new regime. The Sculpture Competition

The sculpture competition enjoyed a very different outcome from the painting contest. Following the presidential elections in December, the Second Republic began operating normally with an executive installed in accordance with the Constitution. The new president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, formed an unprogressive government of ex-royalists (both Orléanists and Legitimists)—the first time since February that a government had been formed without long-standing republicans. In this changed political climate the antisocialists felt secure enough to choose a figure of the Republic from the definitive sculptural entries in January 1849. For this second tournament ten finalists submitted plaster models two and a third meters high. These ten were Jean-Jean Allasseur, Jean-Auguste Barre, Astyanax-Scévola Bosio (who replaced Duret when the latter withdrew), Théodore-François Dévaulx, Georges Diébolt, JeanJacques Feuchère, Jean-Louis-Nicholas Jaley, François-Gaspard Aimé Lanno, Louis Roguet, Jean-François Soitoux, and Ferdinand Taluet.70 It was Soitoux, a pupil of David d’Angers and Feuchère, who was declared the winner. His work depicted “France proud and calm,” crowned with oak leaves and a star instead of a liberty cap, and protecting the Constitution with a powerful sword (fig. 1.25).71 Her sober, serene bearing was complemented by heavy classical robes and the impersonal “look of eternity” inculcated in the sculptor by his master David d’Angers.72 Soitoux did manage to smuggle in some of the familiar symbolism, such as the carpenter’s level, beehive, fasces, and even a nondescript band on the Republic’s brow which hung down on both sides of her head and carried the inscription “République Démocratique 24 Février.” But all this added up to no more than frosting on the classical cake, indicating that the jury could perceive that the essentially conservative tradition of monumental sculpture conformed perfectly to the taste and ideological predisposition of the latest “republican” government. But it seems clear that there were also formal and aesthetic factors that contributed to the successful resolution of the sculptural competition.

1.25  Jean-François Soitoux, Symbolic Figure of the Republic, final plaster model, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 27 January 1849.



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For one thing, the allegorical subject appeared less ambiguous in sculpture than it did in painting. Sculpture still operated optimally as apotheosis rather than as documentation; its function was to depict magisterial persons (generally male) and abstract ideals rather than ordinary people and the immediate world. The vacant stare, idealized pose and rhetorical gesture, and monochromatic surface all worked in favor of a conservative representation. The antique prototype, central to the fine arts curriculum, had been a long accepted convention perpetuated by official and other privileged interests trying to project the face of legitimate authority in public spaces. Soitoux’s statue of the anonymous Republic fit the standard official code for allegorical sculpture, only what had been previously relegated to accessory status as symbolic of a quality or virtue in public monuments now assumed front rank. An impersonal, collective female personification replaced the specific portrait of male king and military hero.73 Yet the traditional orthodoxy in the work could satisfy the conservative jury because of its generality and familiarity. Sculpture by definition (except in rare instances like Rude’s Victory, which operates at the level of accessory) could not permit the impetuous action of the painted representation; rather, it projected a sedate image in which reason had gained the ascendance over the passions. It is no coincidence that the staid Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor was designed by Soitoux’s disciple, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. But if sculpture in 1849 remained intrinsically conservative in both theme and formal presentation, its public function could never be totally neutral in the ideological sense. One leftist reviewer noted that the design for a commemorative medal of the Republic by Nieuwerkerke—soon to become surintendant des Beaux-Arts under the Second Empire—was “hardly democratic or social.”74 Nieuwerkerke’s conservativism aside, sculpture— even in its most placid and benign state—could assume an emphatic political character once it was designated for a public site. Like the Vendôme Column, a work could be charged with ideological potency depending on location, time, and the current regime. Indeed, Soitoux later claimed that Nieuwerkerke, as head of the imperial establishment, counseled him to transform his Republic into a figure of justice or even Liberty.75 (This was not unusual; as in the case of Couture’s Enrollment, the administration spent much of its energy trying to persuade artists of republican disposition to bring their work into line with the prevailing ideology of Napoléon III’s regime.) Soitoux refused to play this nominalist game, but in retrospect it may be observed that he could have made the alteration without compromising in the least the formal integrity of his statue. This dual nature of sculpture—its intrinsic conservatism and extrinsic public (i.e., performative) role—is seen in the case of one other entry for the sculpture competition. Roguet’s Republic, which won an honorable mention, was later stripped of its republican attributes and shipped to Orléans as a personification of the city. A crown replaced the Phrygian

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1.26  Jean-Jacques Barre, Seal of the Republic, 1848.



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bonnet, and its other accessories were altered in accordance with local traditions. Feuchère, another of the finalists, was commissioned by the government to execute a statue personifying the Constitution for the Place de l’Assemblée Nationale, but he completed it only in 1852, after the coup d’état, and it was therefore no longer politically relevant. Nieuwerkerke, head of the section of fine arts, however, deemed it compatible with the needs of the Second Empire. The administration planned to simply label it “The Law” and install it in its destined site, now the Palais du Corps Législatif. Only the wording of the inscription would be changed to protect the guilty: “feliciter—regnante napoleone iii francorum imperatore anno mdcccliv.” Thus the positive outcome of the sculptural competition confirms the conservative direction of the government in the wake of Louis-Napoléon’s election. The collective ideals and dynamic character embodied in the canvases were rejected, while a traditional look associated with notions of social hierarchy and authority made the designs for sculpture, coins and medals, and seals acceptable. If the jury managed also to select winners in the coin and medal competitions, however, it came at the expense of the favorite symbol of the Left. The government expressly prohibited the representation of the Phrygian bonnet in these contests.76 La Réforme angrily reported this stipulation and criticized the government for its conservative gesture: “[The Phrygian bonnet] is the only common sign of all the nations; it is an allegorical emblem that republicans must preserve.”77 As a result, the engravers concocted bizarre coiffures that appeared more like burdens than ornaments.78 La République bitterly protested the ban, noting that the red cap “frightens the members of the Fine Arts Commission,” whom they labeled “petty men, poor republicans.”79 During the period that the National Assembly debated and passed the majority vote in favor of the Constitution (October–November 1848), Jean-Jacques Barre (the head engraver at the mint) designed the official seal of the Republic (fig. 1.26). His female personification is seated in profile while the upper part of her body twists to face the spectator. She is totally covered in heavy drapery, and her head is crowned with a diadem of ears of wheat. Behind her head, like springtime and winter of the people in france, 1848–1852

a spiky halo, beam the rays of the sun. (This conservative image was used again during the early Third Republic and resembles the type exploited by the Statue of Liberty’s French sponsors, all moderate republicans, most of whom had been traumatized by both the June insurrection and the Commune of 1871.) Foreign Reaction to the Competitions of 1848

1.27  Jean-François Barre, State Seal, obverse and reverse, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 28 October 1848.

Barre’s designs were given pride of place on the cover of L’Illustration for 28 October 1848 (fig. 1.27). Within France itself, the seal represented a conservative republican emblem of the government in the final stages of drafting the Constitution. Outside France, however, any concrete visualization of the Republic threatened defenders of the existing monarchical regimes. Feudal England, for example, watched with horror as the Republic consolidated itself, even after the suppression of the June insurgency, whose collapse it regarded with relief. The English reaction was conditioned in part by the agitation in April of the Chartists, who took their cue and much of their symbolism from the Provisional Government. One Chartist organizer invoked Louis-Philippe’s recent expulsion as a model for home politics: “Is that not a lesson for our tyrants? Should not such an example have an effect upon our Government?” Artisans and liberal bourgeois participating in the Chartist demonstration of 10 April carried tricolor flags and banners with the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” England grew fearful as the young French Republic announced solidarity with the Chartists, and when, on the eve of the demonstration, the conservatives could see that they had gained the upper hand, they boasted: “This day England will prove how much her strength excels that of vast armies, and her liberty that of specious republics.”80 In view of the conservative British reaction to the French Republic, it is not surprising that their media seized upon the republican imagery to vent



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their anxieties. Punch, for example, had a field day with Barre’s seal, parodying L’IIlustration’s reproductions by showing the seated allegory on one side and a ferocious looking insurgent worker on the obverse (fig. 1.28).81 The head of the defiant rebel seems to have been modeled on the likeness of the Russian anarchist Bakunin; he carries a lighted torch in his left hand (a subversion of the Torch of Enlightenment held by some of the painted Republics) and a rifle in the other, while he packs a pair of pistols inside his belt. Beneath his feet he crushes a pair of placards reading “Property” and “Religion,” while the slogan replacing “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” reads “Socialism, Communism, and Atheism.” The piece in which these caricatures appear is entitled “Pictures of the Republic” and refers to the “Six hundred designs in painting and sculpture . . . sent in for the allegorical figure of the Republic, intended to adorn the Hall of the Assembly.” The accompanying verses reveal Punch’s position on the nascent French Republic: Come first, young rafael, moyen age of vest and hat and head, You’ll dash in your Republic in a rusty ground of red; A red-capp’d dame, half fishhag, half fiend in mould and mien, And in the distance marat’s bust, crowning a guillotine.

1.28  The Republican Medal and Its Reverse, wood engraving from Punch, 1849.

Other verses refer to Republics whose red bonnets barely conceal a crown, to a tunic “loop’d above the knee” which reveals beneath a “high historical jack-boot.” The poem concludes with a bit of general advice to all of the contestants:



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So paint her, painters, as she is—your Republic in her youth, Graced by no senseless symbols that lie against the truth; Fence her with swords from her own sons, and let her motto be— “Behold, all nations of the Earth! what I am, be not ye.”

The following year Punch, feeling less anxious about the impact of the revolutions on domestic tranquility, published across a two-page-spread a cartoon entitled “There Is No Place Like Home” (fig. 1.29).82 It depicts a smug, self-satisfied John Bull sitting serenely in his armchair surrounded by his contented wife and numerous progeny in the shadow of a portrait of Queen Victoria. Surrounding this roughly octagonal scene are vignettes of death and insurrection sparked by the revolts of 1848–1849. The image of the French Republic, wearing her liberty bonnet, can be glimpsed in the lower margin, totally devastated by events and burying her face in anguish, while directly above her, in the top margin, a figure like the one shown in the caricature of the seal wildly brandishes a dagger and a flaming torch. German conservatives, whose response we will analyze in more detail in a subsequent chapter, also lashed out against the promises of the Republic and its influence on local uprisings. In July 1849, L’Illustration reprinted the series of six wood engravings by the Prussian artist Alfred Rethel entitled “Yet Another Dance of Death in the Year 1848” (Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848) (fig. 1.30).83 These wood engravings enjoyed an immense success among the bourgeois in Germany, but their appeal spread everywhere in proportion to the retooling of the counterrevolution. When we consider that the woodcuts were only ready for circulation in late May and early June, 1849, the rapidity with which the series was



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picked up by the French journal attests to its fundamental expression of European reaction. The series opens with Death called into action by a quintet of vices— Folly, Falsehood, Cunning, Vanity, and Bloodthirstiness—who arm him for his mission. Death is the hero of the revolution; he rides into town like a rebel leader and, acting like a charlatan at a medicine show, incites the people near a local tavern against the rulers in order to reap his harvest at the barricade. He himself stands proud and erect like a general on the field of battle, holding the red flag, as the bullets of the national guard play harmlessly upon his bony ribs. But those who follow him are not so invulnerable as the grapeshot sweeps them off the barricade. The contest between the forces of democracy and the reaction quickly ends, as trium-

opposite 1.29  There Is No Place Like Home, wood engraving from Punch, 1849. right 1.30  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848, wood engraving, after the woodcut series. Reproduced in L’Illustration, 28 July 1849.



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phant Death, wearing a victor’s wreath around his skull, rides with his banner unfurled across the barricade, while his victims writhe in their death struggle and children bewail their fallen fathers. As Death throws one last scornful look at the destruction he has wrought, the legend names him “The hero of the Red Republic.” Rethel imitates Lamartine in associating the red flag with the blood of duped victims of radical agitators. The entire series mocks the 1848 revolution in France and its allegorical expressions. The very first panel in Rethel’s series allegorizes the female Vices in postures reminiscent of the symbolic figure of the Republic; Falsehood hands over to Death the Scales of Justice—a popular emblem in several of the sketches. In Rethel’s series, however, these scales have been stolen from Justice, who is shown bound and helpless, and subverted by Death to deceive the townspeople into believing that a peasant’s pipe weighs as much as a king’s crown. The numerous poses and attitudes of Death holding the scales, banner, and sword of Justice further carry an allusion to the allegorical figures of the Republic. Death itself is a perversion of the robust Republics—again recalling the caricatures by Bertall published the previous year. Rethel’s “hero of the Red Republic” also picks up on the Right’s slanderous associations of bloodthirstiness with the symbolic color of the Left. The phobia surrounding the color red reflected by extension the reaction everywhere to the rallying symbol of social revolution.84 In France disillusionment with the Republic is virtually inscribed in the work of the radicals, once so full of hope for the future. On 8 March George Sand could still exclaim: “Long live the Republic! What a dream, what enthusiasm and at the same time what discipline, what order in Paris! . . . We are out of our mind, intoxicated, delighted to have fallen asleep in the mire and to have awakened in heaven.” Less than four months later, on 29 June, she would write her daughter Augustine: “Words fail me and my heart is broken. I don’t want to speak about it to you, you know what I think and suffer from such a catastrophic end to our beautiful dream of the fraternal republic.”85 Sand’s sense of dejection and disillusionment was pervasive among the intellectuals after June, and the popular election of Louis-Napoléon in December crushed their last remnant of hope. Their work, developing in a social environment of disenchantment and loss of idealism, anticipates the realist movement. Adolphe Leleux, who had already carved out a niche for himself making condescending genre constructions of Breton village life earlier in the decade, was struck by the menacing aspect of the street fighting in Paris during the insurrection of June. In his work the bayoneted rifles in the hands of the insurgents take on a sinister life of their own, turned against them, so to speak, as frightening symbols comparable to the liberty cap and red banner that sparked the hysteria leading to their suppression. In La Sortie (The Departure), we see only the bayonet and the lower leg stepping off as the figure is cut off abruptly by the right-hand picture

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1.31  Adolphe Leleux, La Sortie, Paris, etching, 1848. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. 1.32  Adolphe Leleux, The Password, 1848. Musée National du Château, Versailles.



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plane (fig. 1.31). It recalls the old illusionistic image composed of three lines, a vertical, and a zigzag above and a curve below extending from the vertical, representing “A Soldier and His Dog Going through a Door.” Leleux breaks with convention to convey the urgency and violence of the insurgent’s outburst, leaving behind him a disconsolate family whose own tormented postures reveal the awful impact of his action. The sense of desolation established by the direction of their gaze and the bayonet fragment appeared to critics as imbalanced and incoherent. Similarly, Leleux’s Le Mot d’Ordre (The Password) lacked all pretense to a picturesque arrangement, some “central idea” or didactic message to justify it as a work of high art (fig. 1.32). It shows a ragtag trio of insurgents behind a barricade ( just barely glimpsed at the right) in a squalid district of the city, perhaps one of the old streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine where the insurrection took its last stand. (Curiously, however, the official description of the work held that they were “three working-class citizens who have become National Guardsmen”—undoubtedly a fiction that springtime and winter of the people in france, 1848–1852

facilitated the picture’s acceptance that year.86) Their bodies tense in uneasy vigilance, as one stands guard with a watchful eye and the other two exchange the password. A slovenly fellow whispers into the ear of a much younger comrade—Delacroix’s boisterous gamin from the Liberty now hardened into premature adulthood. Again, Leleux pays special attention to the menacing weapons, now sharply silhouetted against the towering wall behind them. Despite the slattern outfits and unkempt appearance of the rebels, they are seen as disciplined and maintaining order in their claustrophobic confinement. Lamartine recalled the popular demonstration of 17 March when the crowd, in a surprisingly ordered manner, marched from the Champs-Elysées to the Hôtel de Ville to pressure the government to ship the regular army outside of Paris and postpone elections to allow for more time to spread the word to the rural populations. Reacting in panic and frightened by the appearance of the liberty cap, Lamartine recorded: “This army of the populace, calm, silent, and well-disciplined, guided by the secret watchwords implicitly obeyed, overawed the capital by its imposing aspect. Though it menaced no one, it filled every mind with dismay, and visibly denoted that Paris was thenceforth wholly at the mercy of the proletaries.”87 The secret password, a holdover from the clandestine clubs and societies, was a matter of life and death. Louis Blanc recalled encountering an uneasy group guarding a barricade under imminent attack during the night of 24 February. When he tried to cross, the commander asked for the password in a menacing tone, and when neither he nor his companions could remember it they felt themselves in real danger. Afterwards, he reflected on his experience, and while like Lamartine he was impressed with the military discipline and civic pride of the workers, instead of finding it unsettling he lauded their barricade ritual as a symbol of their newfound independence and freedom from official authority. The password was key to internal self-containment, self-government, and mutual protection. The people were now in control of their own destiny, and Blanc took solace in hearing the nocturnal cry echoing from barricade to barricade: “Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous!”88 Leleux’s insurgents are desperate men living on the edge, driven to rebellion by poverty and hunger. Significantly, they are not depicted as heroes or aggrandized as defenders of social justice, and, except for the anxiety implied in the narrative and knowledge of the historical outcome, the scene represented would otherwise appear as somewhat ordinary and anecdotal. The specter of the insurgents haunted bourgeois society, and Leleux offers relief by depicting them as pitiable human beings reduced to the level of cornered rats. Their desperation has honed their instincts to animal-like acuteness, but they remain connected to the human family through their ritual signals that transform them into a community. Their peculiar status does not permit compositional manipulation that would

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1.33  Honoré Daumier, The Uprising, ca. 1849. Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.

frame the work with a proverbial message like Couture’s Enrollment of the Volunteers, and the stark result disturbed spectators at the Salon of 1849 by the revelation of a permanent oppositional social class too entrenched to be easily read out of civil society. Daumier’s The Uprising of circa 1849 points to a further layer of dissatisfaction and pessimism pictorially realized as a de-heroicized echo of The Enrollment of the Volunteers (fig. 1.33). While Daumier translated Couture’s symbolic parade into a working-class crowd, the central figure leaning forward into the fray with clenched fist thrust upward is Couture’s enthusiastic artisan at the right with bared arm flung overhead. Daumier also borrowed from this figure the white blouse and turned-up sleeve, and certain technical traits such as the bold scumbling textures, heavy black contours, and the underlying red-brown ébauche. Daumier’s scenario presents a startling contrast to that of his younger contemporary: as against the allegory of social and national fusion, Daumier poses a disjunctive relationship between the lone agitator trying to stir the populace to action and the crowd, which reacts passively to his appeal. The euphoria and solidarity expressed in the disciplined demonstrations of 1848 have now passed into the wariness and despondency of 1849. The attempt of the solitary insurgent to rekindle the revolutionary passions dissipates, checked by the street crowd. Daumier effectively conveys this opposition through the contrast between the blonde rebel in his luminous white blouse and the somber silhouettes of the bystanders, who con-



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tain his lightness in their massed darkness. Their dejected, sagging, squat, and bewildered bodies further arrest his vigorous gesture; even the lines of the architectural backdrop seem to pull the protagonist backward and close off possibility. Unlike Leleux’s Password, where the walled-off corner signaled a last desperate stand, here it disconnects as in a short circuit. Experiences such as this were not uncommon in Parisian life even before June 1848, but they especially resonated with the mood of despondency of the subsequent period. An English journalist observed one “young orator” haranguing a crowd to obtain signatures for a petition to close shops on Sundays and holidays at noon instead of three o’clock, and the reaction the journalist described remarkably parallels that represented by Daumier: But the mass around does not seem to catch his enthusiasm; for I see none of those shifting lights in the chiaro-obscuro of the crowd, that would indicate one of those electric movements that fall upon popular masses, under the influence of inspiration. Now, he cries, “Vive la République! Citizens, friends, let us to the Faubourg St. Antoine!”—the workman’s quarter, where émeutes [uprisings] are generally cooked up. But no one seems inclined to follow him into that distant region, in order to get up a shop-shutting insurrection.89

Closer to the period of Daumier’s representation was Ledru-Rollin’s attempt on 13 June 1849 to rouse the populace to arms to halt the government’s expedition against the Roman Republic, a flagrant breach of the new Constitution. By coincidence, it was the anniversary of the June insurrection, but this time the great majority of depressed working-class faubourgs ignored the call to arms. Thousands of families were still bewailing the deaths and deportations of the previous June, and the popular leaders were languishing in jail or in exile. The great abolitionist and radical republican Victor Schoelcher recalled that when Ledru-Rollin took to the streets and made an appeal to revolution, “the people did not answer.”90 The brutal repression of June had effectively paralyzed efforts to demonstrate in the streets, but even if attempts were feasible it is unlikely that the working classes would have come en masse to the aid of Ledru-Rollin. The people recalled that he had supported Cavaignac against the insurgents, and most of them considered his present request inappropriate. Ledru-Rollin’s abortive agitation in the streets ruined his career, forcing him to flee to London and into twenty years of exile. Like the unfortunate wretch in Daumier’s Uprising, Ledru-Rollin had underestimated the degree of support he had in the streets. Daumier’s painting stands in relation to events and the emerging movement in art as did his lithograph of Rue Transnonain fifteen years earlier. As in the sketch for the Republic, his easel work achieved its effects in part through the relationship with the lithographic medium and its bald juxtapositions of lights and darks. There is an almost caricatural feel to The Uprising, not only in the flat modeling and boldly outlined and reductive

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physiognomies of the protagonists, but in the way these qualities are exploited to represent a topical event. In the next chapters we will see how popular imagery entered the realm of ambitious painting and became a critical ingredient of realist work. Realism often attacked social conventions not with the sophistication of high art styles but with the harsh invective of cartoonists like Daumier. Realism was never to be simply an attempt to replicate the empirical world but often a means of exploring the contradictions and injustices of everyday life. Construing reality realistically is not the same as reproducing it conscientiously. Daumier’s Uprising, with its play of contradictory forces, dealt directly with life in the streets after revolutionary fervor had dissipated and positive expectations were defeated. Daumier brought a caricaturist’s perspective to high art at a moment when high art was undergoing a radical transformation under the cumulative influence of the dual revolution and the counterrevolutionary response. Neither romanticism nor classicism seemed adequate to encode the contending forces then in play, nor could either of them do justice to the mood of pessimism that gripped large segments of the populace that was now politically empowered and still seen as dangerous by the privileged classes. They could not be elided from society and art, but they had to be controlled in both contexts. No longer victims or happy slaves, they could not be cast as classic heroes or romantic lovers. Now the artist assumed the role of sociologist, and this is how the emerging realist movement could offer a lowly cartoonist the opportunity of a lifetime. I want to conclude this chapter with two depictions of the barricade that help us map the transition to realism. The barricade as signifier of revolution and symbol of popular resistance to illegitimate authority makes sense only as a sign of the real (fig. 1.34). It is significant that both works represent episodes of the June insurrection, the turning point of the revolution of 1848 and the beginning of the loss of idealism that had marked the popular acceptance of the political change. The first, entitled La Barricade, is by Adolphe Hervier, and is inscribed “Juin 1848, Paris” at the lower righthand corner (fig. 1.35).91 Hervier portrays the bloody carnage that followed from the National Guard’s artillery salvos against the barricades: upon a heap of blocky paving stones and other debris of the shattered structure, broken and twisted bodies have been violently flung in every direction. The inscription and careful observation of local detail suggest direct observation, but the arrangement indicates a reconceptualizing of his project. The preliminary pencil and watercolor study, inscribed at the upper left with the phrase “triste souvenir” (sad memory), also carries a smudged inscription below in pencil which includes the words “St. Antoine”—the traditional nest of rebellion and thus once again certifying the actuality of the scene. The sketch further eliminates artful background detail and effects of smoke and dust and places more emphasis on the bodies (fig. 1.36). In the painted version, the painter tries to make meaning out the grisly sight by

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opposite 1.34  The Great Barricade at the Entrance of the Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, from the Place de la Bastille. Reproduced in Illustrated London News, 1 July 1848.

1.35  Adolphe Hervier, The Barricade, 1848. Private Collection, Paris. 1.36  Adolphe Hervier, The Barricade, pencil and watercolor, 1848. Private Collection, Paris.

tilting the pile of human and inanimate wreckage toward the spectator and building a pyramid of corpses crowned at the apex by a tattered red flag contained in an old wooden barrel. It is possible that the flag makes oblique reference to the work of Hervier’s teacher Léon Cogniet, whose Parisian National Guard Leaves for the Front in September 1792 used the flag as a focal point in celebrating patriotic devotion to the nation (fig. 1.37). The emblematic banner fluttering above its pedestal functions as transcendental sign of civic order and unity. The two works by Hervier and Cogniet in turn display a link with the precedent established by Delacroix. A flag occupying the pinnacle of a composition devoted to the barricade automatically invokes Delacroix’s Liberty, whose tricolor banner waves in triumph and vindicates the sacrifice of the fallen insurgents in her midst. Hervier clearly suggests its opposite in The Barricade, where the shredded flag leans inertly in its wooden container and no allegorical complement redeems the sprawling corpses. The tattered red fragment signals utter defeat, ringing down the curtain on the June drama. Hervier stains the torsos of the dead workers in the same color, reaffirming the conservative association of the Red Republic with torrents of blood.

1.37  Léon Cogniet, The National Guard of Paris Departs for the Army in September 1792, 1836. Musée National du Château, Versailles.



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opposite 1.38  Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Souvenir of the Civil War, 1849. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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At the same time, the red flag mediates the scene of carnage for the artist, framing it with a moral on the futility of working-class initiative and dissent. By restaging the actual scene to climax with the shredded flag, Hervier endowed a random act of violence with a moralizing narrative. In this sense, Hervier manifests an analogous tension between tradition and modernity experienced by Couture and the participants in the competition for the figure of the Republic. Considering this work in relationship to Delacroix’s Liberty, the older work has the advantage of an entire repertoire of traditional motifs in which to embed revolutionary protest, while in contrast Hervier’s narrative structure barely contains the human detritus which threatens to overwhelm it. It makes a greater advance in the ideological commitment to the observable world, drastically curtailing the conventional apparatus and projecting an alternative perspective of traditionally marginalized folk. But it does so only when that group is safely neutralized on the “wrong” side of the barricade. Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile (Souvenir of Civil War) amplifies Hervier’s commitment in trying to see beyond the ideological curtain that separated the classes (fig. 1.38).92 Even more breathtakingly naturalistic than Hervier, Meissonier brings us to the threshold of a demolished barricade and its erstwhile defenders, savagely flung in every direction under the impact of grapeshot. The pressure of the blasts has rendered the faces of the relentlessly piled-up bodies almost indistinguishable from the rest of the flattened rubble. It is as if a monster steamroller squashed the barricade out of existence and pulverized human beings and paving stones into a homogeneous bloodstained mass. Meissonier earned his reputation under the July Monarchy mainly for his combination of eighteenth-century subjects and seventeenth-century Dutch technique (Flemish Burghers, 1834; The Connoisseurs, Salon of 1843), a synthesis ideally suited to the taste of fashionable patrons who collected both centuries. The year 1848 jolted him from his complacency: a partisan of the moderate republicans, he perceived himself as a dutiful citizen and loyal soldier when he enlisted as a captain of artillery in the National Guard to help crush the June insurrection. He ordered the firing of the cannon as if acting out another of his fantasies, but when he saw the combatants in his own unit falling around him and viewed firsthand the effects of his salvo on the barricades, he gained deeper insight into the casuistic propaganda of the conservatives and a better understanding of the conflict that the Right glamorized as a struggle for “law and order.” He tried to expiate his guilt by shifting his horror and resentment on to another officer, one totally indifferent to the bloody sight before him, which included innocent victims accidentally killed in and around their dwellings. When Armand Marrast, mayor of Paris, asked the officer if all the corpses were those of insurgents, the officer replied: “I can assure you, Monsieur le Maire, not more than a quarter of them were innocent.”93 chapter one

Meissonier’s Souvenir de la guerre civile was based on this experience. His heretofore sublimated realism could now be foregrounded in a topical theme that imposed itself with overwhelming urgency. He originally planned to entitle the work “Juin” and submit it to the Salon of 1849, but memories of the event were still too fresh in everyone’s mind and he was persuaded to withdraw the entry until a later date. When it exhibited at the following Salon of 1850–1851, it had not lost its terrible power. Critics on both the Left and the Right were overcome by its relentless realism, which reduced dead human beings to the state of inert rubble and treated the human and material wreckage with the same precise articulation. The reformist critic Sabatier-Ungher compared the treatment to the objectivity of a daguerreotype and linked it with the matter-of-fact attitude of certain historians who coolly recorded statistics of victims of some catastrophe in one sentence and then passed quickly to the next item with a trivial anecdote. In this sense, Meissonier preceded Courbet in recording death with a lack of emphasis, dramatic contrast, and a circumspect selection of detail. Above all, critics marveled at Meissonier’s lack of artifice, as in the case of the conservative Peisse, who declared that the work prevented an aesthetic distance—that its realism kept thrusting itself at the spectator. Unlike Hervier, there is no clear culminating point or narrative focus to make sense of the destruction (other than a sort of subliminal blue, white, and red coloration diffused through shredded clothing and pools of blood). Finally, neither the Left nor the Right could grasp at a hint of ideological content with which they could identify, that could be formalized in visual terms. Despite his own conservative bias, Meissonier here penetrated one of the social deceptions of the privileged classes. He neither heroicized nor morally degraded the victims; this was not a neutral statement or one that refused to take sides, but rather a depiction of reality that defeats art, that denies art its capacity to distance the beholder from reality. This is certainly the feature of the watercolor sketch that struck Delacroix when he accompanied the artist to his studio to see what he called the “Barricade.” Delacroix winced in painful remembrance as he subsequently described its “horrible truth,” and then he added that “though one cannot say that the thing is not exact, perhaps there is lacking that indefinable thing that makes an object of art out of an odious object.”94 Delacroix recognized that Meissonier had eradicated the manipulative arrangement of forms that he had employed in his Liberty, and at the same time was thrown by Meissonier’s ability to confront the subject so directly on its own terms and to represent it so faithfully. Alexander Herzen, a Russian radical exiled in Paris during the June Days, heard drunken National Guardsmen sing “Mourir pour la patrie,” while other youths from the Garde Mobile, fresh from the country, bragged about how many insurgents they had shot. Later, when he articulated more fully his disillusionment and no longer dreamed of the good society, Herzen claimed that it was possible to combat only specific falsehoods that

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were encountered close up. On the eve of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” Certainly, Meissonier gained a heightened awareness of these social relations during the terrible June Days. It was less a “truth” that he discovered than the falsity of bourgeois consciousness. The veil of conservative propaganda fell and the artist recognized that what he was fighting was not a war against the savages but a “guerre civile” against his humbler fellow human beings, and he expressed his bitter disillusionment in a painstaking portrayal of the murderous fallout of social demonization. The painting is not “real” by virtue of its simulation of observable reality, but because it is less experienced as an artifact in its absence of conventional compositional design, staged groupings, and predictable props. More importantly, it is “real” because it pushed back the boundaries of social and aesthetic limitation ideologically imposed on contemporary reality—a limitation that inescapably influenced the ability to see. It is not the mere factual transcription of modern society and its surrounding life that makes a realist, but the interpretation and penetration of the screen of perception and deception that follows from the dominant belief systems at any given time. That is why there is no single “realism” of the period, but a multitude of realisms each of which corresponds to the degree to which artists commit themselves to the discovery and visualization of a new social fact. The realism that emerges after 1848 arose from the disappointments and disillusionments of those who wished to resolve the social problem; it is the realism of those whose positive expectations were deflated and who wound up profoundly humiliated. George Sand wrote in mid-July 1848 that she was not only “brokenhearted” but she could no longer believe “in the existence of a republic which begins by killing its proletarians. This is a bizarre solution to the problem of poverty. It is pure Malthus.”95 It has been argued that the failure of 1848 is inextricably linked with the doctrine of art for art’s sake, that young romantics like Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, and Flaubert, initially carried away by the heady visions of social change, withdrew out of bitterness from their engagement with actuality and thereafter assumed a detached and cynical view of collectivist effort. There is much to support this assertion, given the direction of their careers during the Second Empire. But the doctrine had already been proclaimed long prior to the February revolution as a subset of romantic ideals, and even clearly articulated and critiqued by Lammenais in his Esquisse d’une philosophie (1841).96 It seems to me that their treatment of bourgeois ideals and critique of religion has more in common with the state of disillusionment I associate with the realist attitude. As in the case of caricaturists like Daumier, they erected their ivory towers on the ruins of 1848 to survey the dark side of the civic order.

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springtime and winter of the people in france, 1848–1852

Realism implies the absence of idealism and a felt duty to carefully trace the sources of the conditions of existence. This is also why the realist sensibility took to the landscape sketch as a crucial tool in its kit bag; it allowed for a transcription of the terrain relatively unmediated by traditional compositional procedures and the baggage of tradition. Finally, Meissonier’s commitment to representing a scene of horror without flinching required a certain detachment and lack of feeling, an absence of emotional response that marks one type of realist disposition. (Of course, it is one thing to withhold sympathy from dead insurgents and another to withhold it from live peasants.) It is from this perspective that the “realism” of Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile made a watershed contribution to the new movement.



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2 Radical Realism and Its Offspring

Realism and Its Discontents

Realism in art is perhaps less a style or a movement than a state of mind committed to reproducing aspects of the unstable world of sensory perception. Previous references to the idea of realism as the attempt to portray life as it is, to describe as accurately and as faithfully as possible what is observed through the senses, generally ignore the subjective component of this effort. Thus there never existed a single realism but a multitude of realisms, sharing only the engagement with the empirical world. Since this world is constituted in human thought as a language of signs, mimetic portrayal of those signs is always an act of selective interpretation. The distinguishing factor in realism is the same factor that distinguishes one human being from another at all times and places, reflecting the depth of his or her engagement with the world. The more we know, the more we see, and this is why we marvel at some realist work as the revelation of the abundance of the earth’s potential while other variations scrupulously rendering the external world appear vacuous. What we now classify as “escapist” or “unrealistic” when we say that someone is “into denial” does not necessarily imply that the individual is more drawn to the imaginative faculties than to empirical observation, but that the part of that person’s reality belongs to a highly selective and narrow band of experience. More complicated, of course, is the “reality” of one’s belief system, going so far as to take the world as it exists as illusory and mental and insisting on a “higher” reality invisible to material sense. The artist with this agenda could produce a work whose broad features would be totally formless and unrecognizable, but still be described as an example of authentic “reality.” There always have been fundamental contradictions within the concept of realism. On the one hand, realists opposed classical and romantic ideals with the particular and the ordinary, and, on the other, they were always confronted with the paradox of having to capture that reality through the medium of paint, and having to acknowledge the attempt to create an

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illusion of reality while investing their work with ideological significance. In short, they were always aware of deploying strategies to visualize their sense of truth. Thus my study starts with the nineteenth-century notion of realism as engagement with the immediate world of the senses in an attempt to understand it, fix it, and even to change it. At one end is Constable’s close-up vision of his provincial environment and its overarching skies, and at the other is Courbet’s desire to capture the social relations in a rural setting during highly charged political circumstances. The radical realist is more intent on revealing aspects of his or her reality that have been overlooked or deliberately obfuscated by those whose reality has been more privileged (those who live in and wish to preserve “a fool’s paradise”). Realism is as much a social process as a visual process, and even the most mindless “copying” of nature is still the concrete expression of a conscious human being. The realism driven by radical political motivation takes on the undesirable and inegalitarian aspects of a reality denied by less progressive thinkers, and is often tagged as ugly or grotesque by more conservative critics. The manifold types of realism, then, are defined by their ideological motivation and selective focus, and the central aim of this book will be to characterize and contextualize the various types of realism on both sides of the ideological divide. The radical realist, analogous to the philosophical realist, subscribes to the notion that objects of sensory perception exist independently of their being perceived by a conscious mind, are real in their own right. Both therefore share the sense that reality is ultimately knowable and capable of mastery, even though they might resist claiming such ultimate knowledge in the present. Radical realists not only accept reality as dynamic and in continual flux, but this is one of the motivating factors in their effort to grasp it in the here and now. But the confidence in a graspable, knowable reality is part of their credo, even though they have no illusions about achieving the goal at any given moment. Realism as a style has a cyclical component, emerging regularly as a salutary counterweight to fantastic, mystical, classicist, and romantic forms of expression. As in the case of all new movements, it represents an attempt to enlarge upon the repertoire of aesthetic possibilities in a given era. Realism is perhaps the ultimate in stylistic change, since it states in effect that one can paint or write about anything in the perceivable universe. In its purely theoretical guise, realism rejects the artificiality of the various forms of classicism and romanticism, with their hierarchical and elitist significations. The classicist vision holds life as more orderly than it is and the romantic version shows it to be more emotionally and adventurous than it normally is, and both tend to focus on the heroic gestures of extraordinary people. Radical realism rejects their sentimentality and melodrama (although socialist realism, fascist realism, and popular magazine illustration retains them) and replaces their grandiose subjects with ordinary individuals in familiar, everyday surroundings.

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Since the dawn of human civilization realism has played a role in all the arts of representation, but it is chiefly the self-conscious formulation of the movement in mid-nineteenth-century France that will constitute the heart of this investigation. Modern science inevitably influenced it, coinciding as it does with the emergence of sociology as a scientific study of society, the rise of professional journalism and detailed reporting, and the wish to understand social problems in the light of current events. Realism insists on telling the “truth” as directly and simply as possible, preferring brute facticity to the artful dodge. The bourgeois emphasis on science and technology created the conditions for a conservative realism that espoused scientific reasoning and sociological concepts but which deployed naturalistic techniques strategically to maintain the status quo. Thus a conservative realist could very well provide a breathtakingly accurate depiction of a middle-class or workingclass environment but still manage to falsify the social relations within the situation. The right-wing realist formulation would not only reject radical realist efforts to master reality and eliminate hierarchy, it would tend to deny that reality is ultimately knowable. It masks itself with a scientific veneer, but declares the realist attempt to improve on the “reality” of everyday life as a form of hubris. Both proclaim a love of “truth,” but the conservative masquerades as an Enlightenment devotee in order to subvert radical claims. The tradition of Western realism allows for the broadest interpretation of realism itself. Since it is a dynamic concept always in use, realism in one period can look very different from the styles of realism in another era. One question that perpetually arises in connection with realist works: Is what you see the same as what you get or is there a layer of meaning not readily apparent? Remember that human beings—including the most rigorous scientific minds—endow the world with meaning. No matter how scrupulous the recording, the technician’s data and research has been framed with a particular end in view that ultimately contextualizes his or her conclusions. People who subscribe to realism might differ ideologically, and their selection from the entire range of possibilities can drastically differ. Let me provide an example of the world I know best. As I write, my country on the whole enjoys a standard of living that is the envy of the international community. A major segment of the population takes for granted the things that surplus money can buy—travel, leisure, cars, and beautiful homes. In the midst of plenty, however, problems persist. Perhaps the most glaring is the presence of impoverished zones in our urban centers. The persons living in the typical pocket of poverty are black, but even more significantly, poor. Their existence here is a critical facet of the historical circumstances that gave rise to these conditions. Even those who work tend to receive wages that place them beneath the poverty line. The houses in these zones are old and dilapidated, investment capital scarce, crime rates high, gangs rampant, drugs everywhere, and jobs in short sup

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ply. You see where I am going: one type of realist will concentrate on the obvious improvements and blandishments of the economic well-being of middle-class society, and another will choose to depict the impoverishment of those living under the adverse conditions that are nevertheless inseparable from the exclusionary conditions facilitating the advantaged sector of American society. The radical realist would seek to show that society in general and its agent, the state, have constructed these ghettos as an instrument of social control and prevented their residents from sharing the wider society’s success.1 I believe this example will help clarify the contribution of the realist movement in literature and art in the nineteenth century. Realism then was consciously applied to individuals and movements and the notion hotly debated in the press. Realism was proclaimed in France around mid-century, but its antecedents stretch back a half century earlier, to the invention of lithography and, later, photography. And it spread to all parts of the Western world, including the United States. Although realism never fades from the scene entirely, other styles would rival it for public attention by the end of the century, when it became one more stylistic option among others. Impressionism, for example, steals its thunder, but it would have been impossible without the realist precedent. The centrality of realism in visual representation raises many complex questions of taste. For example, banal photographic realism has always been associated with philistinism or a taste for the commonplace and kitsch. If the “true” artist strives to reach beyond the commonplace, then to what extent does he or she distort the data of perception? Free-wheeling experimentalism in the exploration of the visible world in all of its manifestations is a scientific pursuit, and those mid-century realists who considered themselves socialists and democrats subscribed to the power of human reason to organize their world. They followed the notion that an accurate accounting of the conditions of heretofore ignored social strata would enable society to understand more clearly the results of injustice and oppression and arrive at more equitable solutions to social ills. France, 1848

Baudelaire’s entry in his Journaux intimes, “My intoxication in 1848,” is followed a few lines later by “The horrors of June. Madness of the people and madness of the bourgeoisie.”2 For Michelet, Sand, Lamartine, Blanc, and Baudelaire, June was the ugly revolution, the revolution gone sour, and I believe that it is no coincidence that “ugly” is the code word most frequently applied by conservative critics to the intentions and objects of the realist movement. They accused the young painters of substituting the “hideous” and the freakish in nature for the truth, stigmatizing their efforts as vulgar, trivial, and ignoble. The coupling of realism and ugliness carried the same associations for conservatives everywhere that “red” and “evil”

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did prior to June. When Dickens uses the terms “ugliness” and “hideous” to condemn Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, he immediately links it with “the vilest cabaret in France”—thus identifying what he sees as PreRaphaelite deformities with French socialism. The work of realists was overdetermined in the reaction to 1848, and critical responses, though couched in aesthetic jargon, were larded with political significations. On the one hand, the foregrounding of heretofore marginalized themes, types, and environments elicited what I would call a “xenophobic” response to what appeared as startling representations of “alien” people and ecologies, while on the other, the conscious recuperation of aspects of ordinary life systematically excluded from previous high art was meant to amplify the limited notion of the Beautiful, now seen as a bourgeois social category as much as an aesthetic one. George Eliot opined that by introducing the category of the ugly into aesthetics, realism made high art’s commitment to nature more inclusive. Millet mocked academic claims to “absolute beauty” as “a tremendous joke,” and he defended his right to represent nature in its fullness of expression: “Let us have no weakening of character; let Apollo be Apollo, and Socrates be Socrates. Do not combine the two—they would both lose by it. Which is the handsomer, a straight tree or a crooked tree? The one that is in its place. I therefore conclude that the beautiful is the suitable.”3 Courbet loved to say that “the beautiful is the ugly,” suggesting that the ugly, candidly represented, contained its own beauty. The realist devotion to what was considered “ugly” in life signified a faithful portrayal of the culturally voiceless, whereas for the opponents of the realists it meant a backsliding to the June Days. In constituting the unsightly and uncomely as part of the high art repertoire, radical realism implied a transvaluation of ugliness. The negation of the ideal was seized upon by enemies of progress to attack realists as subversive of a social order that refused to recognize the ugly as anything other than an accident of nature, like the suffering and degradation of human beings under burgeoning capitalism. This is how Proudhon understood the realist fascination with the dark side of rural living. Although admitting the artists’ claim “that the ugly, even the horrible have their role to play in art,” their representations are not done simply for shock effect but to achieve a deeper insight into the nature of reality. Defending the new movement, which he labeled the “critical school,” he explained: Imagine that we no longer paint the immortals [i.e., gods, heroes, and saints], emancipated from ugliness, as well as from pain and illness, superior to all outside influences, whose incorruptible and unchanging nature can only sustain a single appearance and thus they can never look different from one another. Then it would be a question of fleeting, suffering, sick creatures subject to error and vice, slaves to sin, whom it is necessary to restore to health and reason, and gradually lift to virtue. Artists therefore have the mandate to reproduce them



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in all their affections, passions, and degradations, as well as in all their perfectibilities. This immense range is the prerogative of the artist, and explains why, the more the variety of expression, the more art distances itself from the wholly arbitrary.4

The Salon of 1850–1851 represents the triumph of the “ugly realists,” with Millet and Courbet commanding a disproportionate share of critical attention. During this period, when the political reaction that would soon destroy the last remnants of the Second Republic was gaining its momentum, there remained a haunting fear of the power of the people that led to the negative critical reception of the radical realists. Thus the last Salon of the Second Republic, for all its contradictions, offered a window of opportunity for the independents. The jury remained democratically run by the artists and included Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, and Meissonier, and Courbet, in possession of the Medal of the Second Class awarded him in 1849, was now exempt from scrutiny. It is not so much the much ballyhooed competition for the figure of the Republic but the movement of realism that marks the new regime’s historical contribution to culture, and in this sense justified Charles Blanc’s dreams of a republican art equal to that of the great authoritarian systems past and present. The colossal official exhibition opened at the end of December 1850 and extended to the following year, taking place in a huge structure in the vast courtyard of the Palais-Royal—still called by its republican title, the Palais National. Among the numerous objects shown, Millet’s Sower and Botteleurs de foin, Courbet’s powerful trilogy, Leleux’s La Sortie, Antigna’s L’Incendie, Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile, and landscapes by the Barbizon painters attested to the liberating effects of the ephemeral Republic on independent and experimental art. When Louis-Napoléon, president of the Republic, was called upon to deliver a speech at the awards ceremony, he could only muster lukewarm comments on the exhibition. He declared that he admired the “masterpieces” presented to the public that year, “despite the political agitation” that clearly took its toll on the artists’ time and energies. He hoped for a more “beautiful” showing the next year, and then he almost tipped off the secret of his planned betrayal when he cited a proverbial example of what he expected in the future. He recalled that the “Emperor” (i.e., Napoléon I) always reminded his troops that they accomplished nothing as long as there remained work to be done. He then admonished the artists to redouble their efforts for the next exhibition “to enhance the glory of the French reputation.”5 The subject matter of the radical realists was predominantly agrarian, and the response shows that the potential power of the people was displaced from town and urban center to the countryside. The politicization of the rustic hinterlands was such a dramatic turnabout from the traditional privileged view that in some ways the provincial threat was more keenly

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felt than the urban. The grands notables who consolidated their political and economic power during the July Monarchy—the landowning aristocracy, financiers, large manufacturers, and public functionaries—owned both townhouse and country estate and escaped to the land on the pretense of espousing the values of rural society. These landed proprietors formed a significant portion of the early patronage of the Barbizon painters and thus their self-perception was based on an imaginary landscape that had little in common with the sordid reality of the peasantry. Nevertheless, the elite conceptualization of French society and political policy was decisively influenced by the landowners’ perspective.6 As this rustic ambiance had been so benignly presented in the past, any close-up and factual depiction of it was bound to appear strange and vulgar. Even Corot himself was put off by what he called Millet’s “new world” and admitted being frightened by it. Agulhon pointed out that the peasantry had been traditionally conceptualized en bloc, and the thought of millions of rural folk as potential reds sent shock waves through the conservative ranks.7 The power going out from the city to the country was traveling full circuit as the countryside began to organize and buttress the hopes of the metropolitan radicals. What I wish to emphasize is the role of the rural ambiance generally and the peasantry specifically in constituting the project of modernity. It was not simply realism that paved the way to modernism. On the contrary, the social struggle of the peasantry sparked by 1848 provided the means for the breakthrough imagery we associate with the movement. Herbert’s seminal thesis on the rural zone as a displaced site for concerns about the proletariat makes perfect sense, but the reasons for the statistical increase of the peasantry in art are clear and obvious—the pervasiveness of the agrarian world and the sheer numbers of potential peasant voters enfranchised in 1848.8 Peasants did indeed pour into the cities to fill out the ranks of the proletariat, but it was their growing political menace rather than their absence in the countryside that sparked the change in social attitude. Thus conservative writers on the problem like Eugène Bonnemère express as much concern for ameliorating the conditions of the peasantry and neutralizing their discontent as they do for the depletion of the countryside. Jean-François Millet

Millet and Courbet stand out conspicuously in this period for their strong conviction about the agrarian world and for thematizing the life of the peasantry in frank and startling ways. They are fiercely determined to assimilate this subject matter to high art and on this score are unwilling to compromise their naturalism. No doubt, their own rural upbringing played a role in their stubborn persistence in the face of negative criticism, especially after experiencing the effects of the franchise. They and a host of other painters of the countryside were empowered by universal suffrage, and having crossed that threshold there could be no retreat. It is this

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confidence and assertiveness in their subject matter that made the radical realists highly controversial and brought down the charges of “exaggerated ugliness” on their heads. Eventually, as the political agitation of the countryside subsided and the Second Empire government felt more secure about its rural base, this imagery not only became acceptable but was actively encouraged. The imperial regime even sought to foster an official school of peasant painters that softened and prettified the approach of the radical pioneers, whose work was initially perceived as politically disruptive in the aftermath of 1848 and then interpreted as an affront to the peasant population. “I am a peasant, and nothing more than a peasant,” Millet always insisted when critics probed for deeper meanings in his work. Like other nineteenth-century intellectuals of his generation, he played the hayseed as an outward sign of sympathy with the masses but also to serve as an alternative role model for others wishing to break with the official system. Certainly Millet was no impoverished farm boy migrating to the big city looking for work; he was born into a prosperous rural family with servants in the isolated village of Gruchy not far from Cherbourg, Normandy, studied Latin and the classical authors, and went to Paris on a fine arts scholarship.9 His mother, Aimée-Henriette-Adelaïde Henry, descended from a long line of rich farmers from Sainte-Croix-Hague, one of the largest market towns in the surrounding country. The family was religious, conservative, and monarchical, and Millet’s beloved great uncle, Jean-Charles Millet, raised to the priesthood, quit the clergy during the revolution of 1789 rather than swear a constitutional oath required by the revolutionary regime that he believed abused the pope. If young Millet was called upon to help out with the chores on the large family farm, he also enjoyed the leisure time to study, read, draw, and paint. Indeed, his family was cultivated enough to recognize and encourage his artistic talents, and (except for his grandmother) made no effort to confine him to village life. He first studied under a local portrait painter in Cherbourg named Bon Mouchel (or Dumoucel), a pupil of David, and subsequently with Lucien-Théophile Ange Sosthène Langlois de Chèvreville, a former pupil of Gros. On Langlois’s recommendation, the Municipal Council of Cherbourg voted an annuity for Millet’s advanced training in Paris (sweetened further by local benefactors), and though it lasted only a short time the stipend gave him the jump start he needed to launch his professional career. Millet’s recollections of his initial encounter with the big city in January 1837 stress the sordid contrast between the tumult and foul air of the big city and the bucolic world of his youth. He came upon a print-seller’s shop advertising sleazy lithographs—sexy grisettes, women bathing or at their toilettes—reminding him of signs for perfumery or fashion plates. (Although claiming to be displeased by the sight, he would soon take up similar themes to earn his living.) That first night he stayed in a rundown hotel and suffered from terrible nightmares, conjuring up visions of his mother

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and sister spinning near the family hearth and crying as they thought of the dangers that beset him and prayed that he would escape the perdition of Paris. Thus his personal mythmaking begins from the initial moment of contact with the metropolitan center, contrasting urban corruption with the more salubrious rustic environment. He entered the studio of Paul Delaroche, one of the most frequented of July Monarchy workshops. Although later he confessed that the theatrical effects of Delaroche displeased him, he enrolled with the master because of his clout within the Beaux-Arts system. Disregarding Millet’s long prior apprenticeship under Mouchel and Langlois, Delaroche assigned his new pupil to the beginners’ class of the cast, and his first drawing was a study of the Germanicus that impressed even advanced students like Couture. Millet made rapid progress and soon began plotting his triumph in the Prix de Rome competition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He entered the contest in 1839, and though he successfully took eighteenth place in the preliminary sketch trial, he failed the second heat. Millet protested that his figure was outstanding, and Delaroche agreed; but after acknowledging the superiority of his figure, the master confessed that he had been obliged to defend the work of an older pupil in preference to that of Millet. But he concluded: “I promise that next year I’ll do all I can for you.” Crushed and disillusioned by the politics of the Beaux-Arts system, Millet withdrew from the academic establishment, never to return. He began independently to perfect his life drawing at the Académie Suisse, an informal studio space without instructors but where models posed for a fee, and he supported himself by selling pastiches of eighteenth-century masters like Boucher and Watteau. Though Millet had to scramble to earn a living by alternative means, his independent stance was sustained by other academic dropouts. This experience reinforced his hostility to urban institutions whose competitive systems fostered rivalry and stifled change. Nevertheless, Millet gained valuable lessons from his training under Delaroche that he carried over to his independent work. A comparison of a painted sketch, The Stoning of St. Stephen, done for a Saturday composition assignment, circa 1838–1839, with a landscape study executed by Millet some three years later, is revealing (figs. 2.1–2).10 The figures and background have been roughly blocked in, the modeling in light and shade drastically condensed and flattened, and physiognomies reduced almost to the level of caricature. In the figure of the protagonist, the characteristics of Millet’s mature works are found in embryo—simplified facial structure, drapery folds rendered by solid areas of shadow, and the generalized shape of the torso, which appears to be based on an elementary geometric form. The group in the left middle ground anticipates his later thematic choices and also exhibits stylistic features that he later favored. The same technique was used for sky and ground in the landscape study. The two sketches contain an effect of sunset: just above the horizon an intense yellow-orange band has been brushed in broad horizontal

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2.1  Jean-François Millet, The Stoning of St. Stephen, 1838–1839. Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg. 2.2  Jean-François Millet, The Cliffs of the Hague, ca. 1844. Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg.

strokes, while above this streak the artist applied parallel gray-blue bands. In both, an edge of cloud peeps out from the sky in almost the same relative location. The diagonal rock mass in the right half of the seascape bears an affinity to the right-hand section of the academic sketch, forming a similar

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diagonal leading from the distant mountain to the reclining figure of St. Stephen. The significance of this exchange resides not simply in the formal resemblance, but in the fact that Millet sought motifs reminiscent of his compositional efforts in the studio. At the same time, the noticeable loosening up of the paint technique in the landscape study also suggests the experimental possibilities inherent in its program. In November 1841 he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, the daughter of a tailor in Cherbourg, and, by the end of the year, the newlyweds were residing in Paris, where Millet began preparations to break into the Salon system. His first attempt in 1842 ended in disaster, and he subsequently worked to develop a style appealing to the jury and the broad Salon-going public. During the next five years, his work takes on by turns aspects of the rococo and an updated neoclassicism painted with loose patchwork technique—manifesting both the final flowering of July Monarchy eclecticism and his desperate attempt at commercial success. His admission to the Salon of 1844 crowned these efforts, but his happiness was cut short by the premature death of his wife just one month after the exhibition opened. Two of his works, The Milkmaid and The Equestrian Lesson, were done in an eighteenth-century mode; the critic Théophile Thoré hailed the one as “a little oil sketch [esquisse] in the taste of Boucher,” while the other, a large pastel of a plump smiling cherub riding naked on daddy’s back with mommy snuggling close, he characterized as “very harmonious.”11 Millet’s rich and variegated surface derived from both Couture and Diaz, popular favorites in this period whom Champfleury associated with the “Ecole Deforge”—referring to a color merchant and art dealer on the boulevard Montmartre who exhibited their work. Positioning Couture at the head of the school, Champfleury claimed it smacked of Boucher and the rococo, an artificial world of hothouse flowers and kept women. He noted that the group dominated the Salon of 1846.12 Not surprisingly, it was around this time that Deforge began to display Millet’s work in his shop window, including some sexy nudes. The dual influence of Couture and Diaz on Millet’s portraiture of the mid-forties is particularly conspicuous in Antoinette Hébert and the halflength effigy of Monsieur Ouitre, both completed in 1845 (figs. 2.3–4). Both are painted with the loose brushwork and subtle colorations reminiscent of the two masters, while the Monsieur Ouitre emulates the formula Couture crystallized in his Portrait of Adolphe Moreau, also dated 1845 (fig. 2.5). More interesting is the Antoinette Hébert, in which a young girl, whose head is fetchingly wrapped in a rose-colored kerchief, gazes admiringly at her reflection in the mirror; since the girl is seen from behind, the spectator is put into the position of voyeur peering in on what is meant to be a private act. The picture has a curious twist in that, seen from the rear, the large kerchief—covering half the kneeling girl’s back—and the mere glimpse of a protruding plump cheek convey a decidedly childlike look, while in the mirror we see a precocious and knowing face perched above bare shoulders,

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2.3  Jean-François Millet, Antoinette Hébert, 1845. Private Collection, United States. 2.4  Jean-François Millet, Monsieur Ouitre, 1845. H. Shickman Gallery, New York. Present whereabouts unknown.



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transforming the reflection into a sexually charged image. The gilt frame of the mirror that she fingers constitutes the threshold between innocent childhood and sexual knowledge, an idea of revelation reinforced by the drawn curtain at the right. Despite Millet’s ingenious nuancing, in the end the work exudes an erotic charm recalling the boudoir scenes of Greuze. That same year he began to paint several pastoral idylls, including a Daphnis and Chloe, showing the pair of quasi-nude child lovers (with the girl seen from behind and her cheek jutting out akin to the Antoinette Hébert) cavorting in a sylvan forest setting, he playing the flute and she dangling a fishing pole in the nearby stream with her arm stretched across his lap. The commercial motive of these works is apparent, but it may very well be that at this stage in his life the pastoral theme represented a way of reconciling his rural background with the contemporary demands of the art market. Well acquainted through his reading of pastoral authors like Theocritus and Virgil with the idea of an arcadian world that remains inviolate until corrupted by civilization, Millet updated the assumption with a city versus country antinomy while still maintaining the classical associations. Additionally, by representing the liberation of libidinous energies within the woodland environment, he exhibits affinities with the Barbizon painters whom he would soon join. There is also the personal change in his life: following the death of his first wife he plunged into a passionate relationship with an adolescent chapter two

2.5  Thomas Couture, Portrait of Adolphe Moreau, 1845. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 2.6  Jean-François Millet, Oedipus Taken Down from the Tree, 1847. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

domestic servant named Catherine Lemaire whom he met in Cherbourg. Thirteen years his junior, she became his lover and mother of four of his children (ultimately they had nine) before they were wed in a civil marriage. He hid the knowledge of their relationship from his family for several years, and his grandmother died in 1851 without having learned of it. Although a number of reasons are given for his removal to Barbizon in 1849, one often overlooked is the freedom from bourgeois conventions that the secluded village offered him and his sex partner. Sex was very much on his mind when he undertook a major preparation for the 1846 Salon, The Temptation of Saint Jerome, depicting the anchorite beset by a number of lascivious females; Couture admired it, but the jury rejected it. Millet then cut up the picture to use for a new canvas, Oedipus Taken Down from a Tree, admitted to the Salon of 1847 (fig. 2.6). It represents the moment when a shepherd and his family rescue the infant



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condemned to death by King Laius to prevent the prophesy that his son would slay him and marry the queen. As the shepherd cuts the rope that bound the babe to the tree, the infant is delivered into the arms of a young woman nude from the waist up, and an older woman who assists her. (It may not be coincidental that Catherine had given birth to their first son in July 1846 and was again pregnant at the time of the completion of Oedipus. The scene actually mimes the moment of parturition, and, intriguingly, the infant was kneaded out of the impastoed body of a seductive nude from the original canvas.) Once again, the ancient scenario allowed Millet to fuse a classical theme with a rural ambiance and justify his increasingly vigorous technique, whose thick encrustations struck critics as a kind of mason’s mortar. Thoré, although confused by the picture, admitted that within the phantasmagoria he could detect “an audacious brusher and original colorist.” Perhaps one of his most characteristic pre-1848 works is Return from the Fields, done in the period 1846–1847 and characterized by Sensier as a legacy of the Fragonard or eighteenth-century rococo tradition (fig. 2.7). Here the peasant world is projected from an aristocratic viewpoint, creating a world of rural harmony that recalls more the bucolic scenes on Sèvres porcelain 2.7  Jean-François Millet, Return from the Fields, ca. 1846–1847. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.



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of counterfeit shepherds and shepherdesses specially made up for the occasion. Although Millet’s muscular male and robust females resemble more accurately their real-life counterparts, their action harks back to the ancien régime in making rural life a site for amusement. Millet’s peasant lad pushes a wheelbarrow improvised into a baby carriage, bearing the sweetest little tot napping in a bed of straw, and accompanied by two buxom women who make sure baby is as snug as a bug in a rug. This work is quite compatible with Léopold Robert’s The Harvesters of the Pontine Marshes and Pilgrims Returning from the Feast Day of the Madonna dell’Arco, the bourgeois’ paradigmatic fantasy of peasant life that disguised hardship and toil with feast days and moments of amusement. Like the “happy slaves” in the apologetics of Southern slave owners, a life of drudgery and thralldom is reduced to the fleeting instants of pleasure and self-abandonment. I have ventured into Millet’s pre-1848 work primarily to demonstrate the galvanizing effect of the revolutionary moment on his sensibility. Prior to 1848 his prime ambition is to gain entrance into the Salon and earn a living, and to do so he paints in a sensual, superficial mode that blends contemporary Salon taste with eighteenth-century and classical eroticism. His encounter with the revolutionary experience drastically transforms his outlook, awakening him to the possibilities of a novel perspective of rural life and empowering him to embark on a program that, while meeting with rigid resistance and severe rebuke, finally earns him the official and popular success he so eagerly desired. Millet’s enthusiastic participation in the two major artistic events of the Second Republic—the competition for the figure of the Republic and the free and open Salon of 1848—dramatically altered the trajectory of his career. Millet was one of the more ambitious contestants, executing at least five different projects, none of which, however, placed among the finalists. In a letter dated 28 June 1848, his mother complains about his neglect of correspondence owing to his deep involvement in the competition for the figure of the Republic. (She then launched into an attack on the government for the new taxes exacted from the countryside and the commercial stagnation.)13 Although the whereabouts of his painted sketch is unknown, several of his preliminary drawings exist, including an initial study projecting the Republic as fearsome conqueror in the mode of the First Republic. He then shifted to a Republic steeped in “Lacedaemonian simplicity,” flanked by rural symbols. Holding honeycombs in one hand, and a painter’s palette and brushes in the other, she suggests less a republican allegory than an autobiographical statement.14 In one of these preliminary sketches, he depicted the Republic as a sort of “Spartan” peasant incarnating the virtues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in the open countryside (fig. 2.8). Cloaked in loose-fitting garments that assimilate the liberty bonnet to the costume as a kind of hood, the figure is stripped of all allegorical clues save for accessories such as the carpenter’s level or Triangle of Equality that she holds above her head. She

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2.8  Jean-François Millet, Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Egalité), black chalk drawing, 1848. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims.



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stands barefooted in an open field, leaning nonchalantly on a cylindrically shaped monument that displays a relief of embracing putti—a symbol of fraternal love. Directly behind her, Millet has placed a realistically drawn plow that further establishes the rural milieu. The suggestion of a sword attached to the plowshare at the left invokes Isaiah’s prophecy, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares.” The somber, almost spectral appearance of the figure anticipates Millet’s isolated and gloomy Sower, as well as his forlorn shepherds and shepherdesses. This figure marks a personal transition between his commercial rococo and pioneer realist phases. It is no coincidence that he introduces his breakthrough style in the Salon of 1848, the one Salon in all French art history in which anyone who wished could be admitted “without exception.” While Courbet seized the occasion to exhibit ten of his pictures, Millet showed only two: a biblical theme, The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, and The Winnower. Admittedly, the first is a far cry from the countryside of the second; but he wanted to display his full range with an example of a fresh type of history painting as well as novel rural genre. The broadly brushed Captivity of the Jews was based on passages from Psalms 137:3–6, race memories of the woeful moment when the psalmist’s people could not sing of Zion and had to hang up their harps in shame. When their captors demanded a song, the psalmist responded for his people: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Then, in a sudden reversal, he declares: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Millet’s subject may relate to his own sense of being cut off from his native land, and it is precisely this rupture that explains his inability to measure up to his idealized self-perception.15 (Significantly, he used this same canvas years later to paint over it a Young Shepherdess Seated [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]—an image of a lonely, iconic peasant.) Thus The Captivity of the Jews symbolizes both a confession of his previous compromise and an assertion of the need to return to his roots for authentic performance. Millet’s analogy of his previous role as artist with a captive Jew on the verge of emancipation is rich in metaphorical associations. Young Millet was raised on Old Testament stories and often painted them, and his favorite expression was “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” In actuality, Jews were making social progress during the years of his maturachapter two

tion, and it is noteworthy that many Saint-Simonist reformers—including Olinde Rodriguez, Emile and Isaac Péreire, and Gustave d’Eichthal—who would carve out important entrepreneurial niches for themselves under the Second Empire were Jewish.16 Saint-Simonism attracted persecuted minorities because it promised to relieve them of borderline status and radically advance their social position. In 1846 the liberal lawyer Isaac Adolphe Crémieux, defending a rabbi who refused to take the pernicious oath “more Judaico”—a throwback to the Middle Ages requiring Jews in legal proceedings to repeat a particularly humiliating ceremonial formula—won his case in the Cours de Cassation (Supreme Court). By 1847, the Jewish Fourierist Alexandre Weill could write in La Démocratie pacifique that soon the Jewish community would completely assimilate and henceforth there would no longer be Jews, Catholics, or Protestants, “only brothers and disciples of Jesus.”17 The 1848 revolution enfranchised Jews as well as workers and peasants, and the Constitution’s protection of their civil rights remained inviolate throughout the Second Empire. Significantly, two politically progressive Jews served in the Provisional Government, Crémieux as minister of justice (instrumental in drafting the legislation to abolish slavery in the colonies), and Michel Goudchaux as minister of finance. Even James de Rothschild got into the act, donating 50,000 gold francs to the families of victims who fought on the barricades in February, and granting Ledru-Rollin 250,000 francs exclusively for “patriotic ends.”18 If the events of 1848 assumed a specifically Jewish character, it also followed that Jews could once again be singled out for ritual persecution. Jews were attacked in Alsace as early as the end of February, with the pillaging and looting of Jewish homes ironically accompanied by shouts of “Long Live the Republic!” Other similar incidents erupted throughout the BasRhin and the Haut-Rhin regions, with the result that many Jews fled across the border to Switzerland.19 Thus it is possible that Captivity of the Jews resonated in Millet’s mind both with the topical news and his own sense of separation from his people. As metaphorical Jew, Millet identifies his rural village with Jerusalem and weeps his lament until salvation comes in the form of The Winnower— the once oppressed slave who abruptly breaks the bonds of confinement (fig. 2.9). What we see is a vigorous, real-life counterpart of the ambiguous personifications of the Republic—Millet’s lugubrious peasant-Republic come down from posing to return to work.20 More importantly, the clever technical bravado, flowery drapery, and complex groupings that marked his previous production have now been compacted into a single powerful figure concentrated on a solitary task. To see how far he has taken this idea may be judged from comparing his figure with examples of popular imagery (fig. 2.10). His picture has been stripped of all superfluous detail, where even the figure’s rugged clothing helps consolidate the univocal idea. The winnower not only stands alone, analogous to the symbolic figure of the

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opposite 2.9  Jean-François Millet, The Winnower, 1848. National Gallery, London. top 2.10  French Agriculture.—Winnowing. Reproduced in Illustrated London News, 20 September 1851.



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Republic, but also wears a red bandanna on his head in clear allusion to the liberty bonnet. Additionally, his white blouse and trousers with blue pads (tied to the knees to cushion them against the shock of the sieve) combine to display the effect of the tricolor. As often practiced in the contest and in other republican themes of the period, Millet incorporated the national colors into the general design. Hence the winnower with his red cap represents a revolutionary symbol in the double sense of national and personal liberation. It was Ledru-Rollin himself who purchased the work for his private collection, the same minister of the interior who had decreed the competition of the symbolic figure and the free and open Salon of 1848. (Later, after Ledru-Rollin had fled Paris for London, he sold off his collection, and an American student of Couture, Robert Loftin Newman, acquired it in 1854.) That July, through the support of Ledru-Rollin and Auguste Jeanron, the liberal director of the National Museums in France and friend of the artist, Millet received a commission from the government. Begun as Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, it ran counter to his new direction and he left it unfinished. Instead, he proposed substituting for it Female Haymakers [ faneuses] Resting, which wound up with three sullen women and a single male isolated against a haystack in a large, open field eerily in mood like the abandoned Hagar and Ishmael.21 What is clear from this commission is that radical realism and its offspring

Millet’s latest work appealed to, and was encouraged by, the progressive wing of the Second Republic. Gautier’s review of the 1848 Salon reflected his enthusiasm for The Winnower’s rugged character and such veristic effects as the fine dust of the grain that he claimed made spectators sneeze while beholding it. He waxed less ecstatic later that year when reviewing the definitive versions of the figure of the Republic, condemning the contestants for their failure to rivet the crowd’s attention and make it cheer at first glance, “Vive la République!”22 Millet’s winnower perhaps proved more persuasive as symbol of the Republic, and affirms the transition in taste. Gautier’s critique, conditioned by the events of 1848, claimed that The Winnower had what it took to “bristle the stubble on the clean-shaven chops of the bourgeois,” with its thick paint plastered on the canvas like mortar, its brutal and “uncultivated” appearance. Gautier deliberately plays on the agricultural term inculte to designate the rude peasant, conjure up rural wastelands, and address the unpolished surface of the picture. This untamed winnower “heaves up his sieve with his tattered knee, tosses the grain from his basket into the air in the midst of a column of gold dust, and arches his back in the most magisterial manner.” This is the new peasant, born of 1848, savage as the untilled countryside, confident in his bearing and in control of his space. The crude technique and the taciturn, laborious winnower combined to convey the latent power inherent in the countryside. The critic for the official newspaper disliked Millet’s “affectation” in the application of his pigment, but he had to admit that the artist “solidly grasped and rendered the rustic naiveté of his personage.”23 Millet knew that his native Normandy was one of the main granaries for Paris, which to a large extent was still dominated by the agricultural sector and subject to fluctuations issuing from the size of the harvest. Since the price of bread measured the purchasing power of the population at large, social peace in town depended on the success of the harvest. The agricultural crisis of 1846–1847 precipitated a sharp increase in the price of grain, and despite a good harvest in 1847 prices and unemployment still ran high. This economic crisis certainly contributed to the social unrest that sparked the revolution, and undermined the official view of the countryside as a bulwark of conservatism. Thus the advent of universal suffrage foregrounded the peasantry as another contingent of barbarians threatening the economic power and political authority of the ruling landowners, manufacturers, and politicians. Millet created in The Winnower a stark and imposing image of peasant individuality and self-sufficiency. The isolated figure suggests a laborer whose holding was insufficient for his family needs and who had to hire himself out for wages—a considerable portion of the rural population in Normandy. Winnowing, a crucial stage of cereal processing, followed the threshing of the wheat, when the kernels of grain were separated from the stalks and the straw was stacked for use in the stable and cottage. Next,

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the kernels were winnowed in a wicker sieve to remove straw remnants, chaff, weed seeds, soil, stones, and other material. Once the impurities were winnowed out, the grain could be stored to market later or ground into meal for family needs. Millet’s winnower launched his systematic investigation into the ways the agricultural cycle shaped the rural population, projected from a paternalistic perspective. His close-up projections of toiling peasants proved to be a site for displaced anxieties about the poor in both town and country, suggesting that the 1848 revolution set into motion forces vastly more powerful than either he or Ledru-Rollin could control through representation. The Realist-Rural Discourse

Of course, the ground already had been tilled for the radicals by the writing of what I will call the “realist-rural discourse.” The tendency to elevate the rural at the expense of the urban as a regenerative model during the July Monarchy has already been indicated in the previous study of the Barbizon school in volume 3, but now I wish to show the formalization of this process under the pressure of radical historical change. The revival of interest in seventeenth-century Lowlands painting and the earlier genre tradition, as well as a renewed interest in the qualities of folk art, is seen in a burgeoning body of literature representing popular subjects in the past as well as in the critical use of this material as a standard by which to measure and legitimatize the parallel efforts of contemporaries. The number of major entrepreneurs collecting Lowlands art suggests that realism began as a distinctly bourgeois phenomenon, growing out of a need to find an expression of taste appropriate to the conquest of nature and therefore independence from traditional elite aesthetic norms. The radical break pushes the envelope to the point of revealing the social and physical effects of this conquest, and is not merely content to aestheticize it in escapist landscape forms. It is this tension and its articulation in radical criticism that produces the realist-rural discourse. It should be recalled that despite Millet’s agrarian background, the artist clearly rejected farming as his life’s work—a crucial fact often ignored in the literature. For all of his celebration of rural labor in various texts and in his visual production, he refused it for himself and chose instead to represent it from the perspective of a sophisticated eyewitness. In effect, Millet’s migration to Paris and Barbizon (a favorite weekend getaway of Parisians) paralleled the general rural exodus of farm laborers to the towns. Once settled, he behaved like a calculating bourgeois in earning his living, distasteful as it may have been to him personally. He never made close friends or even socialized with peasants, but preferred the company of cultivated townspeople and well-connected officials.24 Thus he required the opportune moment opened to him by the Republic and the wider cultural shift that accompanied it to radically redirect his energies.

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There are at least four strains of cultural development flowing into the realist-rural discourse, all of them overlapping to a degree and interrelated. First is the notion of a scientific-rational ordering of knowledge applied to society, theorized in the writings and practical activities of Auguste Comte; second, there is the distinct neo-Rousseauistic literary tendency affected by utopian socialist thought that establishes a binary opposition between town and country, between a duplicitous, greedy, and artificial civil order and a primitive, frank, and authentic rural milieu; third, there is a vernacular version of this discourse that assumes various popular forms such as satirical poetry, songs, popular imagery, and novels, geared to diffusing culture in the direction of greater inclusivity, pretending to appeal even to worker and peasant by a more trustworthy and immediate representation of their lives; finally, out of these strains emerged a sort of identity politics, with the artist or writer assuming a peasant persona based on a rural upbringing or some country experience (invariably privileged rural status), and laying claim to authentic agrarian values. Writing in December 1848, in the wake of the presidential elections, Auguste Comte, author of the philosophical system known as positivism, observed the increasing diffusion of “moral anarchy” that has extended to the countryside: Since the end of the Middle Ages, the towns have taken the rural areas into tow without bothering to consult them. They are now reacting, in turn, to this traditionally accepted subordination, which so often turns abusive. In the name of spiritual anarchy, they propose at last to also assume leadership. All the same, I do not believe that this predictable reaction poses a very dangerous threat, mainly because of the difficulty these areas will always experience in trying to concentrate their forces for intervention. But there will result out of all this a powerful ongoing stimulus to finally take up the cause of the agrarian masses with dignity, whose legitimate interests are still so little respected.25

Here is a major text from a key framer of the realist-rural discourse developed during the July Monarchy in tandem with what he described as the transition from the Catholic-Feudal order to the new Scientific-Industrial order. In the same letter quoted above, Comte refers to his recently organized club, the Société Positiviste, an avant-garde group aiming to keep the Republic on track and out of trouble with its restive urban and rural populations. Its motto was “Order and Progress,” which he hoped to see displayed on the future tricolor banner of the French Republic. Thus the same forces shaping Millet’s fresh visualization of the peasant motivated Comte to propose sweeping social and political changes, including government-sponsored public works programs for the unemployed in town and countryside, a drastic reduction in military expenditures to pay for those programs, and a revamping of the state’s educational and religious obligations.

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Like Hegel, Comte wished to build a philosophical system that could encompass all human knowledge, and like him he perceived his own era as the final stage of historical development.26 He saw himself arriving at a moment of social and political crisis, when old institutions and belief systems were disintegrating in the face of scientific and technical discovery. He systematically elaborated his ideas in his six-volume opus, Cours de philosophie positive, published between 1830 and 1842, and though eschewing theology and metaphysics, and delighted to witness the fall of monarchy in 1848, his vision of a new world order based on the new science of “sociology” (his term) was counterrevolutionary in design. He opposed socialism and communism, admonishing his followers to ignore them since they lived “in a country where more than half of the citizens have more or less proprietorship and the rest are trying to attain this status.” He envisioned himself and his fellow members in the Société Positiviste as the “doctors of the French Republic”—an elite formation that would guide the nation to its true destiny.27 Rooted in Saint-Simonist doctrine but rejecting its egalitarian side, Comte could express approval of Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851 and the possibility of a “temporal dictatorship” as a means of insuring order for the “republic.”28 Despite his mixed political and social views, Comte appealed deeply to a broad segment of French society, including skilled artisans and socially progressive artists like the sculptor Antoine Etex and the engraver Félix Bracquemond. His system contributed to the critical evaluation and articulation of realism as a potential regenerative force in modern culture. Comte postulated that the social order could not be transformed until all the theoretical conceptions belonging to it could be submitted to scientific testing and worked into a systematic whole. He rejected all metaphysical notions of causality and origins and dedicated himself to investigating immediate nature and society for practical advantage. What he called “positivism” was meant to signify the opposite of “negativism,” distinguishing between a doctrine that preached the supremacy of science as the ultimate source of knowledge and one that negated this view with an assertion of outworn prescientific dogmas. Positivism purported to express reality by describing phenomena—that is, by processing knowledge from ongoing events and immediate sensation in consciousness. Comte pioneered in attempting to construct a philosophical system along the lines of the scientific method. He assumed that knowledge was to be obtained only through direct observation of data and the testing of hypotheses as they unfold in experience, and that the immediate object of knowledge is the event and the thing. He ignored the question of whether events were subjective or objective; he aimed at discovering the statistical uniformity of their occurrence for both an observational science and a philosophical understanding of modernity. This he traced in his famous “law of three stages,” which mapped the progress of thought through the theological, metaphysical, and, finally, the positivistic or scientific state.

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Once a disciple and trusted secretary of Saint-Simon, Comte looked to reorganize the world on rational principles whose values could determine the behavior of the individual. He assumed that a study of society could be undertaken according to the principles of the physical sciences, by applying the positivistic method to a science of the civil order. What is unique about Comte is his attempt to study social events as if they were analogous to rocks and plants and could disclose the general laws governing society. The notion that society could be studied like the natural world held out the possibility for increasing power over both, thus addressing the concerns of a broad range of political, social, and cultural critics. Comte’s sociology represented a scientific approach to controlling reality and rationalized bourgeois economic and industrial supremacy. At the same time, Comte, no less than Marx, aspired to a lucid understanding of the development and crisis of industrial capitalism, and historicized the evolution of institutions and social systems issuing from it. The radical critique of society began with the assumption that it was possible to get a handle on reality, hence both Comte and Marx shared the idea that the role of the philosopher was not simply to understand the world but to change it. Comte in effect systematized for the realist avant-garde the possibility of expanding the repertoire of culture toward greater inclusivity—encouraging them to probe the arbitrary boundaries of bourgeois hegemony and ideology and to push back the limitations on possibilities. In this way, realists shared with Comte and Marx the spirit of scientific investigation and analysis. In its radical manifestation, realism could be seen as a form of parallel criticism of metaphysics, superstition, philosophy, and idealism that attacked privileged ideology and culture. Although even the conservative bourgeois masked certain aspects of reality like exploitation, surplus labor, and the contradictions of the boom-and-bust cycle—the ugly side of capitalist economics—by blaming the victims, they nevertheless could not omit the victims entirely from the picture.29 The bourgeoisie could hardly deny that the emerging industrial capacity resulted from the emancipation of the commons, whose impact was felt in both the town and the countryside. The formation of capital permitted intellectual growth by emancipating people from the yoke of animal labor, and this in turn generated a synergistic effect through accumulated and collective efforts. Since a large portion of the commons, however, remained in a state of thralldom, it took a series of revolutions to disrupt the ideological narrative that explained this anomaly. Thus between 1830 and 1848 the realist-rural discourse focused on the poor in the town (Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris) and in the countryside (George Sand’s pastoral novels). Even in Mystères de Paris, however, the country is situated over and against the town as the site of innocence, health, and sound morals. The wholesome rural region stands as the antithesis of the degenerate urban milieu. The protagonists find their salvation in the countryside: La Goualeuse, mired since birth in the city’s hardships and driven into prostitution,

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daydreams of a rural cottage and loses herself in descriptions of rustic landscapes. When actually removed to a farm and dressed in peasant costume, she experiences a sense of freedom and rebirth. Rodolphe, born with a delicate constitution, is sent to a farm to breathe “the pure air of the fields, the woods, and the mountains,” and undergoes a complete metamorphosis as a type of modern superhero. As pressures to become selective in this period mount, a displacement from the town to the country occurs. This is the phenomenon that Herbert describes—the artists’ exploitation of the peasantry as a surrogate for the relentless urban transformation and the radical critical analyses accompanying it.30 By depicting rural areas, the artist could eliminate almost all references to the industrial processes and the new social relations they introduced. But as we have seen, the substitution backfired as the peasantry organized itself politically and assumed the symbolic mantle of the working class. The situation intensified with the “depopulation” of the countryside and the migration to Paris, where country folk merged with the proletariat in the crowded working-class quarters. The most influential writer in the rural genre was George Sand, whose pastoral novels of the 1840s resonated powerfully with the contemporary public mood. She wished to problematize Balzac’s suggestion that the anthropoid type was still to be found among the peasant population.31 Whereas his Paysans of 1844 treats country folk as wild and superstitious akin to the Jacksonian version of tribal peoples, Sand treats the peasantry as the “noble savage.”32 She wished to repair the omission in modern literature of peasant heroes and heroines, just as the pioneering historian on the peasantry Eugène Bonnemère lamented the paucity of historical writing on the subject. Sand’s close ties to the realist and Barbizon painters is seen in Thoré’s homage to her in his review of the 1846 Salon.33 The radical art critic, who would go on to found and edit La Vraie République (for which Sand wrote), praised her as a painter the equal of the greatest masters, claiming that she was the only “painter” he knew who could surpass his hero Théodore Rousseau in representing a sunrise.34 In 1846 Sand published her La Mare au Diable (The Devil’s Pool), launching a sequential trilogy of rustic tales glorifying the countryside. The point of departure for her novel and revisionist view is the connection she makes between a Holbein woodcut from The Dance of Death series and an actual scene of farm labor. The prologue and opening scene, inspired by the print, fired the imagination of contemporary writers and artists. Gautier was reminded of it more than once when viewing the work of Millet and Courbet; the Prussian artist Alfred Rethel probably knew it, and Rosa Bonheur based her Laboring in the Nièvre of 1849 directly upon it. According to Edward Wheelwright, an American disciple of Millet, the French painter picked up Wheelwright’s copy of Sand’s novel, discussed it in detail, and admitted that his controversial Death and the Woodcutter was inspired by the opening scene.35

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The Holbein woodcut, showing an old peasant bent at his plow urging on a team of emaciated horses, carries the following legend: By all thy sweat and all thy swink, Thou’lt gain poor living, Man. And think— That after toil and wearing heft, death is the waiting host who’s left.

As in the other plates of the Holbein series, the single mocking figure of the skeleton skips jauntily in the landscape, here hiding himself beside the old peasant in the disguise of his plowboy. Sand ruminates over the difference between Holbein’s time and her own, seeing in the earlier work a reflection of a society burdened with an implacable sorrow and terrifying sense of fate, while in her own she sees an insistence on the good life and the happiness it brings. The peasant, however, is excluded from the bourgeois ideal: “As he sows his grain he must know that he is toiling at the work of Life, and must not take pleasure in the fact of Death walking by his side.”36 Sand personally rejects the representation of the repulsive side of poverty, claiming that the mission of art should be one of sentiment and love, and that the artist has the responsibility of doing more than simply employing “measures of prudence and conciliation to lessen the alarm roused by his own pictures.” In the end, she opined that art is not a study of “positive reality” but a quest for “ideal truth.” She does not intend by this, however, to shirk her own responsibilities as an observer of authentic peasant life and the political realities that govern it. She begins her book proper with the statement that Holbein’s woodcut made her ponder the life of the fields and the fate of those who till them: It is dreary, no doubt of it, to use up one’s strength and days in cleaving the breast of this jealous earth which yields so grudgingly the treasures of its fertility, when the day’s end brings only a morsel of the blackest and coarsest bread as one’s sole reward, the sole profit accruing from this stern toil. These riches clothing the soil, the harvest and the fruits, the proud beasts that, fattening in the bush grass, are the property of a few, and the instrument of the weariness and slavery of the majority. The man of leisure, in general, has no love for the fields or meadows in themselves, nor for the spectacle of nature or the lordly animals who are to be turned into ringing gold for his use. The man of leisure visits the country in search of a little fresh air and health—and then goes back to spend the fruit of his vassals’ toil in the great cities.37

Then she writes from the perspective of the toiler of the land, too unhappy and fearful of the future to be able to enjoy the charms of rural landscape and country life. Her privileged contemplation of the countryside is thus troubled by the thought that what to her is an arcadian paradise is in fact a field of sorrows for those who work it.

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As she strolled along the edge of a field absorbed in these thoughts, her attention was diverted by a group of peasants busily preparing the soil for the next sowing. The panorama was vast enough to compare with Holbein’s print, and she noted at the top of the field an old man whose broad back and stern features recalled the plowman; he was guiding his old-fashioned plow, drawn by a pair of oxen yoked together as “brothers.” Next, her eye was attracted to a superb spectacle, “a noble subject for a painter.” She observed at the far end of the plowland a young peasant driving a magnificent team of four young oxen, while at his side a child prodded the flanks of the animals with a long light switch tipped with a needle. The sight of the sheer control exercised over the animals, despite the violence of their struggle to overcome obstacles, produced a graceful and calming effect over the entire scene. Finally, the young plowman began to intone a solemn, melancholy song handed down from long tradition in the countryside, a song meant to sustain the rhythmic movement of the animals and soothe their fatigue. The wild and peculiar song, attuned to the gait of the oxen, established a poetic and optimistic mood in striking contrast to the Holbein picture. Sand then confessed that she would be “happy in his place, if my arms grown suddenly brawny and my chest made suddenly powerful could thus impregnate nature and sing her, and my eyes still see, and my brain understand, the harmony of colors and sounds, the subtleties of tones and the gracefulness of shapes—in a word, the mysterious beauty of things!” Thus true happiness would be the individual equipped with the combination of the manual skills and bodily strength of the peasant and the capacity to behold the beauties of the landscape which he tills for survival. She then admonishes her urban reader not to despise the peasant, “all you who think you have a legitimate and absolute warrant to order him about!” She prefers his simplicity of mind to the reader’s “deceptive gleam,” and then proclaims that her familiarity with the peasant personalities she observed permits her to tell their story. And she asks, “Is not the husbandman’s furrow as worthy as that of the idler who happens to have a name, a name that will endure if by some peculiarity or freak, he makes a little stir in the world?” She holds it as a sacred obligation to rescue from oblivion the dutiful husbandman whom history so easily forgets. Switching again to her sophisticated self, she concludes that “he will know nothing of it, and will hardly trouble his mind about it. But I shall have had some enjoyment in the attempt.” Here in these opening sections of the book, Sand lays out the essential strands of the realist-rural discourse. Although exempting herself from the harsh realism of some of her contemporaries, and even looking for the bright side of country life, she nonetheless fills out the rural world with precise observation and does not shirk the brutal aspects of everyday rural existence. In this she differs from earlier novelists (Marivaux, Restif de La Bretonne) who looked for models in the fields and farmyards but yielded a

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one-sided glimpse of their subjects. At the center of her discourse are her barbed attacks on the urban, middle-class proprietors of the agricultural domains and their inability to empathize with peasant life. The cosmopolitan female takes it upon herself to tell the peasant’s story for fear that it will be effaced by history’s implacable plow. Her admitted potential to identify with the peasant and articulate their inner lives for them hints at her belief in social metempsychosis. Sand was close to the two outstanding writers of the period on the subject, Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, both former Saint-Simonists. These utopian socialists understood metempsychosis as the process of human perfection— an infinite series of reincarnations leading to increasingly progressive states of existence. Deeply attached to birds, Sand believed that “feathered bipeds” had played a role in her anterior existences. Analogously, she felt that an intense study of human beings and their history would enable the investigator to identify with, and even inhabit, their bodies and souls. For her and her fellow social reformers the unity of all the species and the dissolution of rigid sexual stereotypes constituted the central plank of their utopian agenda. It is this capacity to empathize with all of God’s creatures that empowers her to write the history of less privileged beings. Her pastoral novels contain many passages projected from an animal’s perspective and sympathetic if mute exchanges between quadrupeds and humans. The young mare, La Grise, plays a role in The Devil’s Pool comparable to that of the lead characters, and in fact is described as “young, handsome and vigorous”—the same terms used to portray the peasant hero Germain. Sand’s next novel, François le Champi (François, Child of the Bush), about a rural foundling (enfant trouvé) possessed with a sensitivity superior to those around him, delves deeper into peasant psychology and clarifies the author’s ideological position. First serialized in the Journal des débats, it ran from late 1847 through February 1848 before being interrupted by the revolution. In the preface—which takes the form of a dialogue with a male artist—she again takes up the problem of the contrasting lives of peasant and urbanite. She sets up a binary opposition, describing one side as the healthy or “primitive life” (la vie primitive) and the other as the artificial or “unnatural life” (la vie factice), and wondered how the creative individual could bridge these two states. Her friend’s proposed solution was to engage the world directly without the mediation of the memories of the history of art, to obliterate thoughts of painting when gazing at the landscape or of music when listening to the wind. He wanted to relish experience purely by instinct, because “this singing cricket appears more joyous and elated than I can ever be.” If he had his way, he would have been born “an illiterate peasant whom God endowed with good instincts and an upright conscience; and I imagine, with my numb and useless faculties, in ignorance born of depraved tastes, that I could be as happy as the primitive creature dreamed of by Jean-Jacques.” Sand shared this fantasy, but added that the “simplest

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and most naive peasant is still an artist,” one whose unconventional art lifted her soul more than all of high culture. Delighted by her unexpected endorsement of his view, he agreed that the peasant’s art was purer because it issued directly from nature. Sand then complained of her having to express her thoughts in the language of the French Academy, when she could access a natural language infinitely superior for the rendering of emotions, sentiments, and thoughts. Her companion then suggested that she tell her story while imagining that on her right hand sat a Parisian who only spoke modern French, and on her left a peasant for whom every word had to be intelligible. She accepted the challenge as a kind of scientific test of her capacity to penetrate “the mystery of primitive simplicity and communicate to the mind the charm of an authentic state of nature.”38 She resolved this for herself within the novel’s structure by creating peasant narrators who recount the story during a veillée—the after-dinner storytelling and music sessions during long autumn and winter evenings when two or more families and their friends met at a single farmhouse to save on light and heat.39 Sand’s second rustic novel takes up the question of ugliness, which she suggests is always in the mind of the beholder, but which, as a subjective attribute, may be modified over time depending upon social relationships. In this instance, the marginalized rural foundling—traditionally assigned to banditry or associated with vicious habits—is raised by a loving and virtuous woman in the salubrious pastoral atmosphere and develops into a good and socially useful human being. Apparent ugliness and its misinterpretation is the leitmotif of the book; thus the sprightly woman La Sévère makes François uncomfortable at first sight, striking him as “being ugly and malevolent, although she was neither one nor the other.” Later, when François is forced to abandon his foster home, he takes work with another farmer whose affairs prosper under his guidance. When his new master learns of his story, he responds that “nothing is so ugly as misunderstanding.” The last of the rustic idylls, La Petite Fadette (Fanchon the Cricket), written in the summer of 1848 and published in book form the following year, expatiates on the theme of ugliness incarnated in the eponymous heroine. It is a post-June narrative, dealing more directly with the issues that she only touched upon in La Mare au Diable. The story relates the encounter between the ugliest, dirtiest, least esteemed person in the village with her exact antithesis Landry Barbeau, the handsomest, hardest working, and most respected lad for miles around. An adolescent tomboy looked upon by the villagers as an evil sorceress, Fanchon is the most authentically religious person in her rural community. She is the female equivalent of François le Champi, completely at home in field and marshland and the eternal butt of local prejudice. She is also the fictional persona of the author as adolescent, thus allowing for traits of identification linking Sand to the peasant world.

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Fanchon perceives herself as irremediably ugly and makes herself more repulsive by her choice of dress and foul language. In an exchange with Landry, who attempts to explain to her why she is persecuted by the villagers, she ripostes with her own notion of beauty that approximates the idea of the appropriate. Peasants know that everything “is fitting (avenant) and beautiful in heaven and upon earth.” Sand makes her say that the privileged classes “too often despise those things which appear neither beautiful nor good, and in so doing deprive themselves of what is helpful and beneficial”—the same humanitarian logic Millet used in justifying his use of the “ugly” in his work. Nicknamed after an insect, the Cricket tells Landry that she is consoled by the knowledge that God does not find her face repulsive. Her condition has enabled her to develop a sympathetic attraction to all creatures assigned to an inferior lot in life; hating to see animals suffer, she resists crushing caterpillars, torturing frogs, dismembering wasps, or nailing bats to trees, and instead rescues them from their tormentors whenever possible. She declares to the despised animals that “if every ugly thing ought to be killed, I have no more right to live than you.” Gradually, however, Landry gains insight into her true inner beauty and spirituality and the novel ends with their marriage. Significantly, the preface of the original edition (dropped after 1850) opened, like François le Champi, with another dialogue between Sand and her artist friend, this time set against the backdrop of the failed Republic and their shared disillusionment in the wake of June. As she seeks solace in the countryside, the melancholy song of the plowman momentarily soothes her spirit by instilling in her a sense of the healthy intersection of nature with the work of human beings. The strains of the human voice in conjunction with the land rose above the travails of all “the captives and victims of all nations, martyrs of every kind of progress!” During the period she wrote the novel, Sand was subjected to all sorts of bizarre charges because of her support of the radical Republic, including accusations of harboring dangerous subversives and stocking arms in her country estate at Nohant.40 One connection between the revolution and the stories was her idea of collectively entitling the series of rural novels The Evenings [Veillées] of the Hemp Dresser and dedicating it to Armand Barbès, one of the most radical of the 1848 republicans. Arrested in the insurrection of 15 May that aimed at dissolving the National Assembly, Barbès was imprisoned until the amnesty of 1854. She corresponded with Barbès during his confinement, and wanted to dedicate the work to all “our imprisoned friends,” emphasizing that since open discussion of politics was out she could at least write tales to beguile them and lull them to sleep. Here is solid evidence that the rural world represented an alternative universe of discourse for a troubled city folk.41 In a later revised preface of 21 December 1851 (note the proximity to the coup d’état), Sand wrote that she drafted La Petite Fadette while

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“troubled and broken hearted” by the rent in civil society, and that she had looked to the rural world for solitude and calm.42 The realist-rural discourse also appealed to progressive-minded intellectuals as a means to broaden their audience by addressing the immediate concerns of ordinary people. Salon art representing the visible world carried the advantage over allegory and literary subjects in attracting a large part of a public heretofore excluded from culture both as subject and object. At the same time, it was a public becoming increasingly informed through cheaply reproduced lithographic prints and political brochures. In popular imagery, the formerly disenfranchised could see themselves mirrored, which heightened their sense of self-identity and self-awareness. The free-swinging poet and songster Pierre Dupont was instrumental in the popularization of rural genre and working-class themes. The gifted songwriter and Freemason was a close friend of George Sand and almost the entire realist contingent, including Baudelaire, Corot, Decamps, Bonvin, Courbet, Castagnary, Champfleury, and Murger, whose company he joined at their favorite bohemian haunts. Rather than imitate Victor Hugo and Lamartine, he served as a voice and role model for the commons. He based his music on authentic folk songs and tales, and his work, like that of the realists, was criticized for its naiveté and clumsiness.43 He composed his first rustic song in 1845, “Les Boeufs,” a solemn hymn to the peasant’s love for his draft animals: I have two great oxen in my stable, Two great white oxen spotted with red; The plow is made of maple wood, The cow prod of a holly branch. It is through their pains that we see the plain Green in winter, yellow in summer; Each week they earn More money than they cost me.44

The slow, melancholic cadence of the melody (perhaps informing Sand’s commentary on the plowman’s song in the opening scene of La Mare au Diable) immediately enjoyed an immense vogue during the waning days of the July Monarchy. It would be trotted out as a kind of national anthem at official gatherings and liberal soirées during the Second Republic. Inaugurating in popular song a new genre, rustic realism, it projected the “primitive” simplicity of the toiling peasant as the antithesis to what Sand described as la vie factice. There was also a certain shock effect to the brutal last two lines of the refrain: “I love my wife. Ah, but I would prefer / To see her die before my oxen do.” The following year Dupont incorporated the song in a collection entitled Les Paysans, chants rustiques, with a cast of characters dear to the hearts

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of the realists, including shepherds, poachers, and plowmen. His subsequent “La Chanson des foins” (Song of the Hay) portrays the hard labor of the peasant in vivid imagery reminiscent of the opening scene of Sand’s La Mare au Diable: Bent in two the reaper toils unceasingly Drenched in a pool of sweat. Hot on his trail Death follows close, Cutting the string of flowers like one of the Three Fates.45

Dupont soon shifted his attention to the proletariat of Lyons and Paris, also publishing his “Chant des ouvriers” in 1846. As in the case of the rustic melodies, this song addresses the drudgery, widespread unemployment, risk of death, and lack of secure wages that haunt the weavers of the cities. Baudelaire admired its melancholy mood and intense metaphors, and even Marx refers to the “Chant des ouvriers” in a note to book 1 of Capital, quoting these lines: “Poorly clothed, lodged in holes / Under the roof timbers, among the rubbish / We live with the owls / And the thieves, friends of the shadows.” Tellingly, the note is found in a section devoted to the depletion of the countryside: the forced emigration of farm laborers to the towns as a result of concentration and capitalization of agriculture, the conversion of arable land into pasture and machinery, and the continual eviction of the agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages. Reduced to pauperism by rampant exploitation, the peasantry migrates to the towns in hopes of a better life, only to fall into the conditions exposed in Dupont’s song.46 The 1848 Republic enfranchised Dupont, who in turn believed he had anticipated it in his songs. His radical orientation is seen in the last couplet of a new “Chant des paysans,” published in 1849, which applauds the emergence of the countryside as a political force and tries to persuade the peasantry to support the new government by uniting with the working class. He calls for collective pressure to bring about the millennium: “Earth is going to break its chains / Poverty has terminated its lease / Athirst let us come together en masse / The wheat is ripe, the presses flow / Here is bread, here is wine.”47 Another song, “La Républicaine,” written on 25 February, is steeped in the euphoria of the moment; it glorifies the Republic as “our mother” in the mode of Daumier and Ledru-Rollin and delights in the experience of heaven on earth “while waiting for eternity.” But June soon reared its ugly head and Dupont had to beat a hasty retreat: just two days after the suppression of the insurrection, he wrote dispiritedly “A Dirge for the Days of June.” Although unsympathetic to the uprising, he asked for clemency for the surviving insurgents driven by hunger and poverty, and admonished Parisians to seal “hatred and discord” in the graves of the victims. Daumier’s Republic-Mother had lost her children.

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Millet’s Sower

Millet’s new direction unfolded within the context of the vigorous realistrural discourse, stimulated by the revolutionary energies released in 1848. This is strikingly evident from the critical responses to his well-known signature piece Le Semeur (The Sower), which one critic disparaged as “too socialist.” (Ironically, in the twentieth century it would become both a trademark for an American bank and a revolutionary symbol in Moscow, Beijing, and Cuba.48) Traditionally, the sower always had something of the truculent in his gestures: when starting his field he first hurled a handful of grain in the air, “This is for the good Lord,” another into the hedges, “This is for the rats, mice, and crows,” and finally one on the ground, “This is for me!”49 But nothing in the makeup of the sower of old prepares us for Millet’s astonishing interpretation (fig. 2.11). His Sower represents a transformative break with all prior depictions of the peasantry, its hulking, gargantuan figure lunging across the canvas like a soldier in combat. Instead of charging with bayonet in hand, however, he strides down the furrowed slope armed with only his grain pouch, whose contents he scatters across the field with a powerful gesture. He grasps the seed in a large menacing fist, simultaneously frightening and attracting the crows, who seem to dart out of his hand against the direction of the grain. One critic saw The Sower flinging into the sky “handfuls of grapeshot”—as if joining battle against the forces that oppressed him.50 The Sower’s old battered cap shades his face into sinister anonymity, while his dark slash of a mouth protrudes like a gaping wound. His leg wrappings of plaited straw add a freakish touch to his lumbering body, resembling a golem constructed of mud and straw suddenly endowed with supernatural power. His magnitude is heightened by the thrusting of his massive torso through the horizon line and the silhouetting of its bulk against the dismal gray-blue sky. His sheer bulk, the splayed legs, and the pitch of the landscape push him relentlessly forward like a creature out of control. Only the wheel-less harrow drawn in the opposite direction by a pair of oxen on the horizon offers a counterbalance to the sower, but, reduced to a background vignette, it barely slows his dizzying descent. Michelet’s chapter entitled “The Bondage of the Peasant,” in Le Peuple (1846), uses a military metaphor to describe the modern peasant’s relationship to the land. Michelet had previously drawn a distinction between the tightfisted peasantry of the past and their contemporary counterparts who could no longer be content with their ancestors’ circumscribed world. Today’s peasant, having served in Napoléon’s army, has “higher aspirations” and even believes in the “impossible.” Michelet explains: The acquisition of land is a battle for him; he goes to it as to the charge, and he will not retreat. It is his battle of Austerlitz: he will win it; of course there will



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be a desperate struggle, but he has seen plenty of these under the Old Commander.51

opposite 2.11  Jean-François Millet, The Sower, ca. 1849–1850. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.



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Michelet then describes the peasant’s exertions to subdue the land, a fight that requires battlefield courage. Unlike the plantation slave, who is permitted a periodic rest, the peasant—a “voluntary black”—knows no repose. The “heroic” peasant returned from the wars went to the field thinking “that by the power of his will he could do anything, even slow down time.” But the plowing field is quite different from the battlefield, and there “time will not be slowed.” It is this that weighs heavily on the peasant’s shoulders and propels him relentlessly downhill. And Michelet asks the reader rhetorically: “Are you surprised if, when you meet him on the land that devours him, you find him dark and gloomy? You pass and greet him warmly, but he will not look at you and pulls his hat down.” These passages foreshadow Millet’s sower, providing a textual analysis of the isolated rural laborer becoming increasingly bitter on the eve of 1848. Michelet puts it succinctly: “He hates the rich, he hates his neighbor, he hates the world.” Alone on his miserable plot of land like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, the peasant turns into a “savage.” The townsman develops an inordinate fear of this sordid person who seems “capable of anything” and dare not approach him. The wealthy landowner visits periodically, but prefers to live in the town daydreaming of rural harmony and letting the village notary mediate his dealings with the locals. After 1848, Millet perceived his role as that of visual “troublemaker,” an artist-missionary sent into the world to arouse the bourgeoisie from their slumbers and disturb them in their complacency. His sower accomplishes precisely that by rejecting tradition on two levels: on the one hand, he is cast into the heroic mold of Michelet’s ex-soldier storming the field, and on the other, he assumes the ugly and ungainly character that frightens the townsman. The sower occupies the pictorial space with the same conviction as an allegorical personification, but it refuses merely emblematic status. Gautier described his headdress as a “bizarre bonnet”—a comment charged with memories of the competitions for the symbolic figure of the new regime. He also experienced both the sower’s imposing presence and his “violent gesture,” which seemed “to be painted with the very earth he was planting”—a hint at the scatological associations stimulated by the picture.52 The next year, in fact, Millet began a painting of a lone figure in a broad expanse of field spreading manure, and the very colors and textures seek an equivalent of the scattered dung.53 It was as if he wished to bring townspeople up close to smell the odiferous fecal matter, and experience directly the filth and dirt associated with actual farm life. This combination of monumentality and physical aggressiveness creates a new national icon to replace the nurturing and sanitized Republic. Millet’s “Lacedaemonian” version of the republican symbol has been transformed into a militant Spartan clad in “proud raggedness” and smeared with cow shit. radical realism and its offspring

The Sower operated synecdochically, representing for its viewers the organized peasantry rising up from the hinterlands. No wonder that conservative critics recoiled in horror from this evangelizing depiction of a vigorous and uncontrollable rural laborer. They tried to neutralize its effect by comparing it unfavorably to their own feudalistic ideal. One critic, who claimed to have directly witnessed the sowing ritual, declared that there was nothing “violent or doleful” about the practice, and regretted to see the artist “slandering” the peasant in this way. Another reviewer accused Millet of cleverly exploiting his “slothful” and “indecisive” technique to disguise “all sorts of blackguards [crapules] whom he calls peasants.”54 On the other hand, the Fourierist critic François Sabatier-Ungher wrote in La Démocratie pacifique that this powerful yet suffering laborer embodies the curse of work that society has imposed on its members—work that one day, however, will be “the only authentic pleasure of intelligent beings in the regenerated society to come.” He concluded that The Sower represented “the modern demos”—Greek word for the people and the root of the title of Sabatier-Ungher’s progressive newspaper. Perhaps not coincidentally, the abbreviated name for the new radical coalition was démocsoc [démocrate-socialiste]—close enough to see what Sabatier-Ungher had in mind. Clearly, for both Right and Left Millet’s rural spook conjured up an image of a political collectivity. Millet wrote Sensier in 1851 that peasant subjects suit his temperament better than nude women and mythological subjects, and elaborated as follows: I must confess, even at the risk of passing again as a socialist, that it is the human side of art that touches me most, and if I could only do what I like, or, at least, attempt it, I should do nothing that was not an impression from some aspect of nature, whether it be landscapes or figures. The joyous side of nature never shows itself to me. I do not know where it is. I have never seen it.

Like George Sand, he admits feeling guilty whenever he hikes into the woods for relaxation or calm, for inevitably he met with a toiling laborer or woodcutter carrying a load on his back. The weariness of the laborer strikes him, and he is tempted to ask the townsman: “Is this the happygo-lucky work some people would have us believe in?” This is the view of “the true humanity” of the countryside to which he now committed himself.55 Thus between June 1848 and the 1850–1851 Salon, Millet underwent a period of intense soul-searching, culminating with the discovery of his true calling. Two painful events accelerated the process of self-understanding. When the June insurrection broke out, Millet donned the uniform of the National Guard and fought in defense of the Republic. He was present at the taking of the barricades of the Quartier Rochechouart, one of the last effective strongholds of the uprising, and witnessed the death of the

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insurgent leader. Like Meissonier, he returned in disgust, outraged by the massive repression of the laboring population and the vindictive attitude of the conquerors. He tried to efface the bloody events from his mind by fleeing to the suburbs and painting a quick succession of impressions of the neighboring countryside. The other event occurred soon after, in front of the store window of Deforge’s shop: he overheard two youths discussing his work on display, The Bathers. The first asked his companion, “Do you know the name of the painter of this picture?” The other replied, “Yes. His name is Millet and he only paints nude women.” The remark struck the artist like a thunderbolt, and he experienced a sense of profound shame, intensified by his guilt over participating in the assault on the working population. He went home to ask his wife’s approval of his decision to cease his potboiling activities, advising her that henceforth they would have to tighten up their already strained household budget.56 Surely Millet’s decision would have been fortified by the realist-rural discourse that had developed into something of a vogue during the period of the Second Republic. Gautier, for example, begins his review of The Sower by associating its impression on him with that of the opening pages of Sand’s La Mare au Diable. Millet’s participation in the competition for the figure of the Republic and his Winnower already hint at the transformative influence of the revolutionary moment on his thought; nevertheless, his Sower represents the kind of drastic break with his past that is consistent with his own testimony on the public and personal traumas of June and its immediate aftermath. What gave substance to the realist-rural discourse and empowered Millet’s depiction of the effects of rural labor was the politicization of the countryside. Heretofore systematically neglected by successive regimes as a sort of amorphous but readily taxable entity, the rural population now began to awake to its potential. The invisible body of the peasantry was rapidly materializing into flesh and blood. Although Louis-Napoléon pulled in a big rural vote on 10 December 1848, the countryside was still up for political grabs as party agitation extended into the heartland. The agricultural depression continued to be felt during the next two years, with a sharp downward turn in farm prices. Peasants fell into debt and their precarious hold on the land was threatened. The increased taxation of 45 percent that had been levied on the land by the Republic in 1848 encountered widespread rural outrage (including that of Millet’s mother) and even resistance, particularly in the Midi and in the southeast, and the Left’s promise of low credit rates to facilitate small landownership and neutralize usury rallied huge blocs of the peasantry. Ten million French peasants possessing the right to vote could theoretically outnumber all other groups in society. And the peasantry that universal suffrage had propelled to center stage was discontented and threatening. The Provisional Republic initially alienated the peasantry with its onetime

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surtax, prompting succeeding governments to tread lightly on the agrarian problem by enacting moderate policies such as the founding of new schools in rural areas and a National Institute of Agriculture. Between the elections of 13 May 1849 and the coup d’état of December 1851, all shades of the political spectrum waged a total propaganda war to win over this restless populace.57 Despite the overwhelming victory of the conservatives in the elections of May, they were alarmed by the large percentage of country folk who voted the radical ticket in poor and remote rural areas. The thought of millions of French peasants waving red banners sent chills down their spines. Louis Veuillot, editor of the ultra-Catholic newspaper L’Univers, expressed the felt menace in noting that today’s peasant no longer believed in God, spent his time in cabarets reading the newspapers of Proudhon and Thoré, and voted socialist in the hopes of getting “his greedy paws on a good portion of other people’s property.”58 The democrats and socialists had formed an effective alliance that presented itself as the party of the future, polarizing the antagonists into two camps: democrat-socialist and reactionary. The new coalition became affectionately known by their adherents as démoc-soc, and if the first half of the abbreviation invokes the people, it is probably no coincidence either that soc in French means plowshare. The démoc-socs stigmatized the Party of Order as “financial feudalists” and usurers waiting to prey on rural communities. (This inadvertently helped spread anti-Semitism in the countryside by exploiting the traditional association of Jew and usurer, although in fact almost all rural moneylenders were local notables and often included priests.59) The peasants and rural artisans of Dordogne voted overwhelmingly in favor of the socialist candidate because of suspicion that the old noble and bourgeois proprietors were uniting to restore feudal obligations. In the departments of the Corrèze and Haute-Vienne, 39 of 56 rural cantons gave the socialist candidate an absolute majority.60 As Clark has indicated, there developed an almost continuous rural band of democratic support in the center and eastern center of France comprising the departments of the Cher, the Nièvre, and Allier, the Saône-etLoire, the Jura, the Ain and the Rhône, while to the south the Left could claim an area bordering on the Alps extending all the way to the Mediterranean Provence. The central zone reached as far as Alsace, and on the west, skirting the edge of the Massif-Central, another belt comprised the HauteVienne, the Corrèze, and the Dordogne, and an area between the MassifCentral and the Pyrénées that included the Aude and the Ariège.61 The successful spread of radicalism beyond town suburbs and the winning of peasant electors explains Millet’s reiterated apologies for his “socialist” imagery in the period of the Second Republic. Although he would later disavow any specific radical message in his work, his written statements betray this influence on his thought and he relished the initial reception of his new direction that positioned him as a rebel. Sensier recalled

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looking at a photograph of Millet when he was around forty, looking out confidently from his garden at Barbizon in the rough costume of the locals. It struck him as the image of “one of those enthusiastic peasants, victims of our civil wars, who, vanquished, look at death without flinching. . . . He was pleased when I said: ‘You look like a leader of peasants who is about to be shot.’”62 Following his encounter with Millet in April 1853, Delacroix came away with the distinct impression that the peasant-painter was “certainly of the constellation or squadron of artists with beards who made the revolution of 1848, or who applauded it, apparently believing that there would be equality of talents as of fortune.”63 When his Death and the Woodcutter was refused by the Salon jury in 1859, Millet vehemently declaimed: “They want to break my spirit and force me into their drawing-room art, but no. I was born a peasant, and a peasant I will die. I will say what I feel. I paint things as I see them, and I will hold my ground without retreating one sabot.”64 Yet history shows that the person speaking these words is the militant bourgeois empowered by 1848, not the peasant who migrated to the city and refused to work his family’s land. His identification with the peasant had less to do with his background than with the kind of fantasy that informed Sand’s pastoral novels and the realist-rural discourse. The lasting impact of his empowerment is seen in his courageous inclusion of the traditionally xenophobic in his work, a feature that he refused to disavow even after dismissing the “socialist” frame of reference. He ridiculed the pretensions of certain types who imagined that they could “rectify the so-called failures in taste and errors of nature.” Millet believed that it as possible to start from any point to “arrive at the sublime,” and what the artist loved with the greatest passion and power assumed a special beauty of its own, which he or she could ultimately impose on others. And further: The whole arsenal of nature has ever been at the disposal of strong people, and their genius has made them take, not the things that one conventionally called the most beautiful, but those which best suited their places. In its own time and place, has not everything its own role to perform? Who would dare to say that a potato is inferior to a pomegranate?65

Millet’s aesthetic manifesto is unthinkable without 1848; it fulfills the radical realist demand for increasing inclusivity of social and material phenomena. Realism allowed him to carve out a niche for himself over and against the restricted academic franchise, and by expanding the repertoire of art he created fresh possibilities for himself and his followers. Some moderate critics saw in The Sower biblical allusions to the tragic earthly destiny of human beings, thus divesting it of its political significations by transposing the work to a religious plane. Millet seemed to want to keep them guessing in his presentation to the Salon of 1853, which

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2.12  Jean-François Millet, Ruth and Boaz or The Harvesters’ Meal, 1853. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

he initially planned as a Ruth and Boaz, but whose title he subsequently changed to The Harvesters’ Meal. As set forth in the book of Ruth, chapter 2, Boaz discovers the widow Ruth gleaning in the fields during the barley harvest and bids her to join the reapers at mealtime, to “eat of the bread, and dip thy morsel in the vinegar.” When she rises to resume her work, Boaz commands his field workers to let her glean “even among the sheaves, and reproach her not.” Ruth justifies the exceptional confidence of Naomi’s kinsman Boaz and eventually they marry; their child Obed becomes the grandfather of David, future King of Israel. The elevation in the status of Ruth the Moabite from utter destitution to union with one of the first families of Bethlehem constitutes one of the great success stories of the Old Testament. Millet updated the narrative by showing a scene of modern harvesting, a pause in the labors as the exhausted reapers take their midday meal (fig. 2.12). The picture was planned in an elongated horizontal format to allow a panoramic glimpse of the wide circle of laborers squatting at the foot of a towering haystack (truncated by the oblong picture plane). Their sickles are jabbed neatly into a sheaf of hay to announce temporary cessation of labor as well as to define their occupation. The participants in the harvest meal are interrupted by their overseer (or perhaps a working peasant proprietor—a sickle is slung over his left shoulder), who, having surprised a young gleaner in the field, gently nudges her by way of invitation toward the rustic meal. With all eyes fixed upon her, she holds back from shyness, but the older man, a



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patriarchal type, guides her firmly and assures her of the team’s positive reception. This hospitable gesture unites the gleaner—the lowliest constituent of the rural totem pole—with the larger rural family. The critics generally liked this work, even though they invariably harped on the “ugliness” of the reapers. The conservative Paul de SaintVictor began his review by asserting that Millet has “made himself the poet of the people and the sculptor of coarseness.” The picture was “a Homeric idyll translated into patois,” and Millet’s rustics were “of a superb, brutal, primitive ugliness.” Nevertheless, one felt “a respect in the presence of those rude peasants, companions of the great oxen, warriors armed with scythes, nurturers of human beings.” According to Gautier, Millet’s work demonstrated that there was nothing so coarse in nature that it could not be exalted by style. His Harvesters were certainly not modeled after the Apollo Belvedere: “Snub-nosed, thick-lipped, prominent cheekbones: this is their type.” Despite their “poverty and ugliness,” however, they embodied “the majesty of workers in close contact with nature.”66 Gautier’s negative comparison of the peasant physiognomies with the idol of neoclassicism was deliberate, since by now it was common knowledge that Millet had declared war on the Academy’s category of the Beautiful. Sensier claimed that Millet wanted to paint “authentic harvesters, not in the manner of Léopold Robert . . . but true rustics burdened and exhausted from fatigue.”67 Here Sensier was referring directly to Robert’s Arrival of the Harvesters at the Pontine Marshes, a bucolic fantasy that enjoyed a sensational success at the Salon of 1831. (As Herbert pointed out, Millet’s gleaner seems to make explicit allusion to an analogously positioned female in Robert’s picture who also carries a wrapped bundle of wheat.68) Proudhon, who detested Robert’s painting for its false image both of harvesters and Italians, stated in a footnote that he had learned of a picture by Millet that eclipsed Robert’s with authentic action and types issuing from “rustic veracity.”69 This would suggest that word spread of Millet’s challenge to traditional depictions of the peasantry, and that his brutish Harvesters calculatedly refuted the elegant heads of Robert’s studio models. Millet’s circle of homely reapers, dressed in coarse linen shawls and battered straw hats for protection from the sun, arranged in lumpish postures and vulgar gestures, recalls nothing less than a witches’ Sabbath painted by Goya. But if there is something terrifying and bestial about his peasants, then the surprisingly positive critical acceptance of this version of the peasantry begs some form of historical explanation. The 1853 Salon was only the second to be organized after the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, when rural France Rouge rose up in protest against the Napoleonic betrayal of the Republic. The peasants in the Nièvre, Cher, Lot-et-Garonne, Basse-Alpes, and Var, and generally in central and southwest France, had gradually become in the eyes of the moderates and conservatives the rural counterpart of the hideous democrats and socialists who organized the insurgency of June. The coup succeeded in large measure because most members of the

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National Assembly accepted the line that socialism haunted the state, reflecting in part the recognition of the Left’s growing influence in the heretofore reliably conservative rural areas. As it turned out, armed resistance to the coup did indeed come mainly from the peasants and artisans of the villages and small towns who were looking forward to the constitutionally mandated elections of 1852. They had been promised freedom from taxes and usury and a chance to gain the land inevitably bought out from under them by the rich bourgeois, and now they asserted themselves against the privileged just as the insurgents of June had done more than three years earlier. Conservative accounts pictured the rural insurgents as hordes of ferocious savages in tatters armed with scythes, sickles, and pitchforks. One song found on an insurgent actually alluded to the coming “harvest” of the tyrants: Bugger the kings! Bugger the cossacks! Hunger is marching today. The harvest is coming, right soon, right soon, And we’ll sweep all the tyrants away.70

Hence Millet’s brutish laborers fit well the revised image of the peasantry politicized during the years 1848–1851, a peasantry whose loyalty the emerging imperial regime of Napoléon III made it a top priority to regain. Millet may have intended something more personal, however, since the painting was conceived prior to the coup d’état, possibly as early as 1850. He had as yet to introduce his common-law wife to his family, the knowledge of whom he had successfully hidden from his paternal grandmother and mother. (His brother, Jean-Baptiste, visited him in 1852 and must have learned the truth, but evidently kept the secret.) The first died in May 1851 and the second in April 1853, and it is probably not coincidental that Millet married Catherine in a civil ceremony in September 1853. He must have been long contemplating breaking the news of his partner and children to his family one way or another, and the image of the patriarchal overseer introducing the humble gleaner to his tribe probably contained private meanings for him in that period.71 Nevertheless, the central theme of the work is invitation to the feast, an act of social inclusion by the powerful in the countryside on behalf of the vulnerable. The patriarchal benevolence of Boaz is translated into rural hospitality, again displacing concerns about urban social justice to a provincial site. Forever contrasting the straightforward life of the primeval countryside and the deceitfulness and artifice of civil society, the openhanded sociality in the one and close-fisted rejection in the other, Millet merges his private fantasy with a cry of country against city. Thus his modern rendition of the biblical narrative brings us back to his engagement with the realist-rural discourse and the writings of George

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Sand. But if there is protestation here and profound sympathy with toiling humanity in general, it is also clear that philanthropy is dispensed from above. Millet’s idea of sharing is not a collectivity made up of equals but a charitable disposition of the powerful toward those less fortunate than themselves. The Boaz-overseer figure constitutes part of a benign rural hierarchy that monitors the heartland. Not quite a garde-champêtre (a uniformed rural guard representing national interests against local ones), he nevertheless operates to maintain order in his sector of the countryside. Finally, this figure exercises patriarchal control by protecting the women— he actually directs the young gleaner to sit with the two females grouped at one end of the reapers’ circle. For his next work, Peasant Grafting a Tree (Le Greffeur), exhibited in the World’s Fair of 1855, Millet tempered his usual brutal realism, perhaps in response to government pressure to display noncontroversial themes for an international audience (fig. 2.13). After 1850, Millet’s friend Sensier occupied a key post in the Ministry of the Interior and regularly mediated between the government of Napoléon III and the painter. Sometime in 1852 Sensier went to the office of Auguste Romieu, director of fine arts and author of Le Spectre rouge de 1852, and delivered Millet’s domestic picture of Two Women Sewing. After investigating Millet’s political background, Romieu awarded the painter a state commission. In the summer of the same year, Gérôme paid Millet two visits and lauded his work (in the late 1850s they would actually collaborate on a commission to decorate a papal rail2.13  Jean-François Millet, Man Grafting a Tree, 1855. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.



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way carriage). Meanwhile, Sensier was obtaining government subsidies for his protégé, and it was within this context of official contact that Millet began preparing his exhibit for the Exposition Universelle. The source was a verse from Virgil, “Graft thy pear tree, Daphnis, and posterity shall pluck thy fruit,” and from it emerged Millet’s pictorial pastorale of a male peasant solemnly grafting a tree in his garden, observed reverentially by his wife and newborn child.72 The wife behaves as if their entire fortune depended on the success of the graft, anxiously watching with rapt expectation. Instead of deploying the excremental colors of The Sower, Millet applied a bright array of hues within a predominantly gray tonal structure that balances the dismal and the cheerful. The woman wears a gray-purple head covering, pink blouse, brown apron, and deep blue skirt, while Millet kneads into the male’s clothing the three primaries red, yellow, and blue, with both figures set against the gray-blue of their cottage. Gautier began his review by distinguishing Millet from the “mannerists of ugliness, who under the pretext of realism, substitute the hideous for the true,” for Millet looks for and attains a degree of style in representing rustic types. Although he admitted that the wife was certainly not “pretty,” this had more to do with the fact that peasant women aged more quickly than their counterparts in the town owing to their exhaustive rural labors. The mother and her infant, plain as they were, appeared as Madonna and Child, and the theme emphasized patriarchal control, prosperity of the family tree, and the perpetuation of the peasant population. Gautier was happy to see these peasants—and with them their succeeding generations—“resigned” to their lot.73 Pierre Petroz, one of the most astute critics of the nineteenth century, characterized the work within the context of the realist-rural discourse. He noted that the work affirms his own observation that family life in remote country places often has “a tranquility, a gravity, a moral beauty, a something primitive and powerful which is rarely found elsewhere.” And he developed his thesis: In the middle of one of those enclosures, half courtyard and half garden, which front country houses, a man who has just been cutting a tree below the branches holds in his left hand a graft, which, with the right, he inserts in the wood prepared to receive it. His wife, carrying in her arms their child, still in swaddling clothes, is watching with interest the head of the family, who, absorbed in his work, accomplishes one of the important acts of his existence, following out reverently consecrated custom. Round about them all breathes of order, propriety, and modest prosperity; their clothes have neither stain nor rent, but show the effect of the housewife’s care. This man, grafting a tree under the eyes of his wife, at the time when a son had recently been born to them, represents admirably—one cannot deny it—our French peasants, laborious, thrifty, planted, so to say, in the soil, living and dying in the places of their birth, which they are never



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induced to abandon by the love of adventure or the inducement of gain; and the ensemble of this scene so full of truth has a character patriarchal, symbolic, quasi-religious.74

Petroz here serves as spokesperson for the revised image of the peasant, once again restored to the good graces of the conservatives. The creation of the Crédit Foncier de France to extend credit to the countryside accomplished in agriculture what the Reds had promised prior to the coup, and the peasantry began to enjoy greater prosperity under the Second Empire. Farmers whose situation was improved with the suppression of the last feudal remnants and by opportunities to buy land from urban absentee landlords became zealous supporters of Napoléon III, who would soon take them for granted. The peasant was no longer perceived as a threatening agent of the Left, but imagined once again as the bulwark of conservatism. Millet’s entry for the Exposition Universelle seems to have been expressly designed to fit the latest government version. Indeed, its popularity facilitated Théodore Rousseau’s successful pose as middleman for an affluent American buyer of the painting—a fiction that permitted the landscapist to mask the generous purchase of his friend’s work. If Millet had been bought out, however, how can we explain his next Salon submission, the notorious Gleaners of 1857 (fig. 2.14)? Although the homespun textures and harvest atmosphere have come to be associated with Thanksgiving and mom’s pumpkin pie, this work raised an even noisier outcry than The Sower and was bitterly attacked for its presumed social message. It depicts a trio of peasant women stooped over and gathering stray ears of wheat in a vast expanse of open field; two of them charge downfield close to the earth in synchronous rhythm, while the third, a figure of monumental solidity, bends over from the opposite side at a right angle to them, counterbalancing their brisk movement as if in command of their action. Their crude heavy clothing and rough linen head coverings for protection from the August sun, their downhill stride, and their dominance of the pictorial field recapitulate the salient traits of The Sower. Conservatives responded to the work as if the three gleaners represented ferocious communists menacing the social order. The harvest failures of 1853 and 1855 had resurrected nightmarish memories of the disastrous cereal shortage of 1846 that sparked the economic crisis leading to 1848. Jean Rousseau wrote in Le Figaro that behind the three gleaners he could perceive silhouetted on the sinking horizon “the pikes of the popular uprisings and the scaffolds [i.e., for the hangings and guillotines] of ’93.” Here he must have had in mind the armed peasant opponents of the coup d’état carrying scythes and forks, but, unwilling to indict the contemporary peasantry, he displaced his anxieties to the Year of Terror of the First Revolution, indirectly incriminating the Mountain of 1848–1850. Paul de SaintVictor also accused Millet of demagogical intent:

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2.14  Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

While Courbet sanitizes and refines his style, M. Millet is in the process of straining his. His three gleaners have gigantic pretensions; they behave like the Three Fates of pauperism. They are scarecrows in tatters, stuck in the ground; and like scarecrows they lack faces: a headdress of fustian serves in their place. M. Millet apparently believes that poverty of execution is appropriate for paintings of poverty. His ugliness lacks emphasis, his coarseness is unrelieved. An ashen tone envelops the figures and landscape. The sky is of the same tone as the skirt of the gleaners; it resembles a huge rag hanging on a line. . . . It displeases me to see Ruth and Naomi pacing across Boaz’s field as if they were tramping across the floorboards of a theater stage.75

Although never quite overt, Saint-Victor’s statements fairly reek with fears of organized peasant power. The gleaners have “gigantic pretensions,” they are as frightening as bogeymen and as momentous as the Three Fates, the environment takes on the very quality of their rags, and they subvert the biblical narrative of Ruth by seizing control of Boaz’s field.

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What prompted his hysterical outburst is Millet’s marshaling of his figures in rhythmic formation and their seeming independence of any supervising agency. While the wealthy farmer-proprietor or steward on horseback overseeing the harvest is located in the remote distance, the gleaners command the visual space and act in concert, literally and figuratively encroaching on the terrain. Saint-Victor’s response may be clarified with some understanding of the traditional institution of gleaning. Gleaning consisted of gathering in the fields the odds and ends of cereal crops that escaped either the vigilance or the implements of the harvesters. If they were lucky, gleaners might collect enough pickings to make flour for a single loaf of bread. Once a feudal prerogative authorized by the church and sanctioned by scripture, gleaning rights had been continually adjusted to meet changing social and economic conditions. Mosaic law (Deuteronomy 24:19) had stipulated that when the harvest was complete, “and [thou] hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow”—an act of benevolence toward the humble in remembrance of Jewish servitude in Egypt. Gleaning, then, was not open to all comers: only certified indigents physically incapable of cultivating the land—the infirm, the elderly, orphans, and widows among others— possessed gleaning rights. Once the harvesting ended and the hayricks had been erected, gleaners were allowed into the open fields to glean without tools between sunrise and sunset for a limited period of the week. In effect, the state played a cunning game with gleaners—appearing to take the high moral ground but also trying to define and categorize poverty akin to modern welfare and preserving control over the harvest practice for facilitating the levying of taxes.76 Gleaners, moreover, were always subject to discrimination and surveillance, eternally suspected of abusing their privilege. In Normandy, Millet’s native region, an ordinance issued by the Caen police as early as 18 July 1788 required the economic status of gleaners to be certified by parish priests and two local notables. Not surprisingly, the cahiers de doléances—the regional complaints drawn up for the Estates-General on the eve of the revolution of 1789—took up the matter with a vengeance, some pleading on behalf of tenant farmers who blamed noble landowners for failing to maintain the regulations, some taking the side of the gleaners, who cited the refusal of farmers to permit gleaning after the harvest and protested the increasing use of scythes that cropped close to the ground. A new law passed by the National Convention on 20 July 1791 tightened up existing rules but sustained the idea of gleaning as a right of the poor. Napoléon’s rural code, however, made a significant change in the wording of the gleaning laws, defining it as a charitable (aumône), rather than an obligatory, act. By the time of the July Monarchy, gleaning was decreed an option entirely at the disposition of the proprietor, who alone could authorize it. In addition, gleaners had to be kept under surveillance by an

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authoritarian garde-champêtre during the entire time they were in the field. The language of these years is particularly aggressive, as a large faction of proprietors argued that the institution had lost its raison d’être because of the extreme division of agricultural land (smallholders tended to harvest their crop with scrupulous care) and wanted to suppress it altogether. It was reported that in some localities “the field is invaded by gangs of women,” which could lead to “a real pilfering.” The question of gleaning rights was hotly debated in parliamentary deliberations between 1854 and 1856 and widely reported in the press. New bourgeois landowners objected to gleaning as an infringement of private property that only encouraged the poor to expect a “free lunch.” In 1857 the commission on gleaning of the Côte d’Or declared that the practice invited “all sorts of abuses and provided the occasion for numerous depredations” on the land. The criminalizing of gleaners led to stricter rules to prevent theft of an already secured crop and to screen eligible candidates.77 Millet’s magisterial presentation of the three gleaners and their dominance of both the pictorial as well as agricultural field must have conjured up for Saint-Victor the belligerent tone of the language used in the recent debates on gleaning laws. As Saint-Victor’s commentary suggests, he felt that the paradigmatic text on gleaning—the biblical encounter between benevolent landowner and grateful dependent that Millet had translated in Harvesters—had been rudely violated. This time instead of a humble and grateful Ruth, Millet launched his gleaners into the field like soldiers on the warpath. The leftist critic Petroz shared Saint-Victor’s insight, but interpreted the painting as a powerful visual statement on the social inequality that condemned paupers to such humiliating conditions: The injustice of certain social inequalities, the unfair distribution of wealth, the extreme abundance in which some live, the penury in which the greater number vegetate, are at least as striking in the fields as in the city. No composition has, in our time, better made this felt than The Gleaners exhibited at the Salon of 1857. Three poor peasant women, covered in miserable rags, but decent, pass by picking up here and there some meager ears of corn, while at the extremity of the vast field in which they wander bent over the ground, a number of reapers, supervised by the proprietor, or the farmer, pile sheaf on sheaf, and heap into lofty stacks the abundant harvest.78

Edmond About, like Saint-Victor, a government hack, tried to mediate between the hostile reception of critics like Rousseau and Saint-Victor and the socialist spin given to the work by the Left. About was allied to Saint-Victor and may have developed a strategy in coordination with him, the former taking the high road and encouraging those aspects of Millet acceptable to official ideology, and the latter the low road and attacking the features most odious to the regime. About saw in the picture a religious

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image and commended its serenity. Although observing the contrast between the impoverished gleaners and the “well-fed harvesters heaping the opulent grains and the wealth of the proprietor,” he rejected any thought of a social antithesis. He could note neither “pitiable grimaces of maudlin poverty nor menacing gestures of envious misery: the three women appeal neither to charity nor to hate.” They carry out their arduous task “with that active resignation that is the virtue of peasants.”79 The apologetics of this government employee is betrayed by Millet’s own statements and his unprecedented portrayal of the gleaning practice. Despite About’s ingenious sophistry, the critic could hardly offset comments from both Right and Left converging on Millet’s unabashed portrayal of the social inequities and misery of the countryside. Above all, he shaped his gleaners into compact masses rolling down the countryside and scaring off conservatives in every direction. I am convinced that what sparked Millet’s militant image was another painting of The Gleaners by Jules Breton that was the darling of the critics at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Regarding this work, which will be discussed in detail in a later chapter, it may be noted for now that Breton softened this theme of rural labor and emphasized the presence of the garde-champêtre. Not only is the look of drudgery absent, Breton’s gleaners even seem to be enjoying a frolic in the field. Such a falsified image of gleaning, with comely peasants smartly dressed and romping in the countryside, collided with Millet’s understanding of agrarian misery, and he set out to correct this picture with brutal fidelity to the act of gleaning. About the time of his completion of The Gleaners, when it was objected by critics that he consistently overlooked the handsome laddies and pretty lassies in the countryside out of preference for the formless, he countered: “Beauty does not reside in the face; it radiates from the whole figure and appears in the suitableness of the action to the subject. Your pretty peasants would be ill suited for picking up wood, for gleaning in the furrows of August, for drawing water from a well.” He then reaffirmed his position of rebellion against the stereotype: “Let them not believe that they will force me to lessen the types of the soil; I would prefer to say nothing rather than to express myself feebly.”80 When preparing his painting for exhibition in 1857, Millet wrote Théodore Rousseau that he was “working like a black slave [nègre]” to get his picture done.81 This association with plantation labor is intriguing when we examine The Gleaners up close and note that the dark-complexioned figure at the right could indeed pass for a black cotton picker. Stoop labor reveals a timeless and universal bodily position that has become a metonym for drudgery, and in 1857 it would have embodied an intertextual reference to grinding labor everywhere in the world. As Petroz suggested, gleaning automatically implied beggared circumstances everywhere and the sunrise–sunset formula would have applied equally to the serfs of Russia and the cotton pickers of Alabama.

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In Eugène Sue’s popular Le Juif errant (1845), the young priest Gabriel de Rennepont dreams of a curacy in a rural village far from Paris where he can ameliorate the condition of the agricultural laborer, whose “existence is as unhappy as that of a negro slave.” Thus the plantation slave may very well have been in Millet’s mind when he painted the picture. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published in French in 1852 as La Case de l’Oncle Tom, and enjoyed almost the same widespread popularity that it did in the United States. In January 1853 the book was favorably reviewed in L’Illustration, which included a biography and portrait of Stowe and laudable commentary by George Sand, who hailed Stowe as a “saint” and upholder of “the human being’s eternal and inalienable right on earth: liberty!”82 It is highly probable that Millet came across this piece, since the same journal published an album of his sketches of laboring peasants just one week later.83 Millet also would have learned of the sensational reception of the book from his American groupies, many of whom hailed from the Boston area—always a stronghold of abolitionist activity. Wheelwright noted that Millet was familiar with passages from Emerson and William Ellery Channing—both noted New England abolitionists.84 Stowe’s novel inspired Pierre Dupont’s Tom, chant des Noirs, thus implicating blacks—“bent beneath a yoke of iron”—in the realist-rural discourse.85 It may be recalled that the nascent Second Republic emancipated the slaves in the French colonies, and that its planners rejected the American model of government because of the slave system. Millet may have been especially sensitive to the issue of slavery: his well-to-do grand-uncle had been a plantation overseer on Guadeloupe, thus earning his fortune from slave labor. Proudhon took account of the universal condemnation of black slavery and the systematic disregard for white servitude in France, leading him to exclaim at one point, “Would to God that our proletariat were as materially well off as the Blacks!”86 Thus it would seem that on the eve of the American Civil War, when the sectional divisions and abolitionism foregrounded the slave issue, Millet’s choice of simile to describe his own laborious process signified an ongoing commitment to his revolutionary conversion of 1848. Certainly the pressures of the authoritarian regime, coupled with his need to earn a living, made him vacillate between the aggressive and idyllic poles of his production, but Millet never entirely abandoned his 1848 ideals. The famous Angelus of 1857–1859 amplified the traditional theme of the pious peasant, but it departed in subtle ways from the conventional representations (fig. 2.15). What we see in the picture straight off is the sharing of the farm labor by both male and female; in this case, they are digging up and gathering the potato harvest in sacks to be transported in the wheelbarrow. Typically, they break the horizon line, their bodies silhouetted against the sky and the broad plain that stretches behind them. Their labors have been momentarily interrupted by the sounding of the evening Angelus bell from the distant spire of the church of Chailly (a village just north of

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Barbizon on the western edge of Fontainebleau), and they reverently bow their heads in prayer. Angelus is the Latin word for angel, and refers to the Angel of the Annunciation, reminding the people in the countryside of the birth of Jesus. The Angelus bell tolled three times a day, at sunrise, midday, and sunset, with the strokes rung in groups of three, corresponding to the recitation of the three parts of the Angelus litany, which began “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae”: The angel of the Lord announced to Mary, And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, Be it done unto me according to thy word. 2.15  Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857–1859. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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Once the three couplets of the litany were recited, this prayer was added: “We beseech thee, O Lord, pour forth thy grace into our hearts; that as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought into the glory of the resurrection through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.” After each couplet of the Angelus a short hymn of praise was recited, beginning with the words “Ave Maria.”87 The solemn and mournful portrayal of the moment would seem to go beyond daily ritualistic practice, and may be explained in this case by the prayer’s allusion to the resurrection. Millet wrote to a friend that when he painted the picture he had in mind childhood recollections of his life in the field, at the side of his grandmother, recalling that when the Angelus bell tolled, “we abruptly interrupted our tasks and recited the Angelus for the wretched dead, very piously with our hats in hand.”88 The fact that Millet did not attend the funeral of his beloved grandmother in 1851, and that his mother died two years later without knowledge of his common-law family, invests the work with the special pathos that Millet had intended. What Herbert calls “the funerary poses” of the couple may be understood as a site of displaced guilt feelings that must have been tapped every time Millet heard the sounding of the Angelus.89 The twentieth-century surrealist Salvador Dalí was baffled by the powerful appeal of what superficially appeared as an insipid and banal image. He tried to account for his own obsession with Millet’s picture by a highly personal psychoanalytical exploration, and his interpretation complicates the representation to the point of making what has always been considered safe and familiar bizarre and threatening. The phallicized pitchfork thrust deeply into the earth, the vaginal basket that may double as a surrogate coffin for a child, the handles of the wheelbarrow seemingly thrusting out from the side of the woman’s body like the prongs of a fork, and the idea of plucking sustenance from the earth—all argue for a complexity that may indeed touch on sexuality, birth, death, and the engulfing power of the female, whom Dalí likens to a praying mantis.90 Dalí is right in assuming a complicated subtext underlying the fascination for the seemingly banal. But I believe his cosmic interpretation dispenses with what is possible in the history of the period. Millet was deeply attached to the distaff side of his family and missed the moral and spiritual support they had consistently provided. None of the children, Jean-François above all, could ever live up to their zealous religious standard. His grandmother and mother also had to bear the brunt of running the family farm, and their suffering was exacerbated in their late years by the profound regret that the male heirs—and especially their favorite—had abandoned their ancestral land and traditional calling. As the grandmother wrote him on 25 May 1847: “It is very sad for us when we come to think that we have brought up a whole army of lads, all strong and handy, and then to find that not one of them cares to till the land. We are obliged to hire labour.”

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Then she quickly adds: “I should be glad to know what benefit you reaped from your much vaunted pictures.”91 Millet’s lifelong obsession with the rural world, and his desperate attempt to live the peasant life while practicing his bourgeois profession is haunted with the guilt of his refusal of the real thing. He celebrated in paint the life that he actually rejected for himself, and this contradiction produced the effect that Baudelaire attributed to Millet’s inability to content himself with the poetry of his subject and his irrepressible need “to add something to it at any price.”92 Nowhere is this more strikingly evident than in The Angelus, where country people are made to bow with the devotion that Millet never felt. Herbert rightfully distinguishes between the male and female attitudes, perceiving that the man “is not praying” and appears to be “revolving his hat between his fingers while he waits for his wife to finish her prayer.”93 I agree with his observation of their difference, but I see it less as an opposition than as a matter of degree. Both are praying, but the woman is more fervent and active in her gesture. She in fact is the mainspring as well as bulwark of the composition and, akin to the female in the same position in The Gleaners, provides closure to the design. He stands along an absolute vertical, while she cranes her neck at almost a right angle to his body—thus sustaining him pictorially and spiritually. The conventional view of the peasantry’s conservatism and religious superstition had undergone such a wrenching transformation in the recent period that the government requested a steady flow of information from the countryside on the activities of their rural constituencies. Village priests were asked to continually monitor their flock for adherence to routine religious rites. The daily ritual became a test of both religious faith and political loyalty, and any deviation from the routine could be viewed as a sign of dissent. This suggests varying degrees of belief in the countryside, and a loss of the old fundamentalism. In this, Millet is again consistent in problematizing the rural communities rather than conceptualizing them en bloc as homogeneous entities. He sets up a contingency of belief just as he established a contingency of class in The Gleaners. Millet himself never attended church, and he married his wife in a religious ceremony a little over two weeks before he died—a gesture designed to legitimatize her in the eyes of the church. For Millet the female incarnates the religious feeling and supplies the male with the spiritual fortitude he lacks and needs. She keeps the faith for the both of them and backs him up with the moral and social fiber derived from it. I see the work constituting an acknowledgment of his debt to the women in his life and an expiation of his guilt for having strayed from the ancestral tradition. At the same time, it is clear that official pressure and Millet’s shrewd business sense had much to do with what ultimately turned out to be one of his most commercially successful ventures. This may be the “religious” image that About seemed to detect from far-off in The Gleaners—that is, the idea he wished to plant in the artist’s mind as a future alternative to his

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social themes. When Millet first showed the work to an ecstatic Sensier, he immediately asked his friend to help him sell it. (It had been originally commissioned by an American painter, Thomas G. Appleton, a friend of William Morris Hunt and William Perkins Babcock, two of Millet’s close American friends, but Appleton reneged on the offer.) Sensier claimed that he acted as his middleman, contacting potential buyers and speculators, and it passed through the hands of the painter Papeleu and the Belgian dealer Arthur Stevens before being acquired by the Belgian minister and collector Van Praët.94 The rest of the story, as they say, is history. The Angelus went from collector to collector, dealer to dealer, its cost endlessly spiraling; already in 1869 Durand-Ruel purchased it for 30,000 francs, an unheard-of price for a Millet painting in his lifetime. Following the painter’s death in 1875, when his work became the object of wild speculation, his prices went through the roof. Wrangling over his work sparked an international sensation in 1889, when the French and the Americans competed for The Angelus at the Sécretan sale and the bidding reached the level of 553,000 francs. The Americans finally obtained it when the French government refused to vote the funds necessary to supplement the sum raised by the Frenchled consortium. The following year French department store magnate Alfred Chauchard acquired it from the American Art Association for 800,000 francs and bequeathed it to the Louvre. During this entire process, Millet’s widow received a pittance (a portion of exhibition receipts) and must have deeply pondered the vagaries of public taste. The astonishing changes in taste that attended upon Millet’s work in his lifetime and beyond are already felt in the response to The Man with the Hoe, painted in 1860–1862 and exhibited at the Salon of 1863 (fig. 2.16). The subject is an overtaxed farm worker pausing in his labors from utter exhaustion, propped up by his long-handled weeding tool. His open mouth shows hard breathing from exertion, and dark shadows fill the sockets of unseeing eyes. Physically, he appears as a kind of prehistoric creature in the evolutionary chain; depicted with hardly any forehead and a pointed cranium, leaning on a tool that resembles a primitive weapon (the French houe was much larger and clumsier than an American hoe), hunched over like an agrarian Quasimodo, he broadcasts a sinister, almost terrifying look. Unlike Peasant Grafting a Tree, where it is clear that the land belongs to him who tills it, grows it, and cares for it, here the protagonist is unmistakably a hired laborer ranked only slightly higher than the gleaner in the agrarian social hierarchy. None of Millet’s previous figures display so vividly the brutalizing effects of alienated labor. Even his sower and gleaners take possession of the land as if their work counted for something in their lives, but in this case human toil is devalued to the level of the beast. Hatless and exhausted in the midday sun, his sagging body needing the handle of his implement to sustain him, The Man with the Hoe reverts to Millet’s horror of human misery in the countryside. He stands alone with only his

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2.16  Jean-François Millet, The Man with the Hoe, 1860–1862. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

crude-handled tool in a vast, uncultivated and hilly field covered with rock and overgrown with weeds and prickly thistles, hinting at the impossibility and futility of the task confronting him. Millet shrewdly builds a pyramidal design out of the bent, dejected form supported by the farming implement, simultaneously monumentalizing him and refusing him domination. Strikingly reminiscent of Giacomo Ceruti’s Old Man Leaning on a Spade (see volume 1 in this series, Art in an Age of Revolution, pp. 7–8), Millet’s painting also ironizes the provisional status of the serf within a compositional design conventionally associated with permanence and monumentality. The critic Jules Castagnary observed something of the crucified Christ in this figure, the briars and thistles conjuring up the Crown of Thorns; I would even go further in comparing Millet’s symbolic wasteland with Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.95 As in the Hunt, a new truth knocks at the portal of modern civil society stifled by the tares of indifference, piquing its conscience and reminding it of its failed social obligations.



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Millet knew that the work would provoke controversy, but his secondclass medal, won ten years earlier, cushioned him against jury scrutiny. (As it turned out, however, the Salon jury of 1863 suspended the exemption status of Courbet, whose Return from the Conference was rejected for its satirical treatment of priests; it was not even allowed to be shown at the Salon des Refusés.) Millet even wrote Sensier early in 1862 that his Man with the Hoe predisposed him “to really tell off these gents who hate the fact that someone presents them with an alternative view of life that ensnares and confuses them; but in the end this is the terrain on which I stand and I will remain there.”96 Despite this show of bravado, however, he was hardly prepared for the harshness of the critics, including even Gautier, who had begun to turn against him by the end of the 1850s. Once again his forms were described as “ugly” and “cretinous,” and his theme denounced by conservatives as “socialist.” This time, however, even critics who had been disarmed by his milder subjects ranted and raved in exasperation over his intransigence. Saint-Victor’s ferocious diatribe reiterated the old saw that the artist deliberately sought out the basest types among the peasantry: He lights his lantern and looks for a cretin; he must have searched for a long time before finding his Peasant Leaning on a Hoe. Such types are uncommon, even at the Hospice de Bicêtre [a home for the aged and insane]. Imagine a monster without a skull, with eyes whose lights have been extinguished, with an idiot’s grin, planted with legs askew like a scarecrow in the middle of a field. No glimmer of intelligence humanizes this brute at rest. Does he come to work or to murder? Does he come to cultivate the earth or dig a hole for a grave? The public voice has disclosed his name: it is Dumolard [a notorious murderer of servants] burying a maid. . . . It is a strange tactic for honoring the people by a painter devoted to plebeian themes, representing them under degraded masks of brutalization! As if country folk did not have their own beauty and elegance! As if work in the fields strikes the laborer with the stupidity of his ox!97

Saint-Victor’s concluding remarks are especially revealing in marking an ideological shift in attitude toward the peasant and a new attack strategy against Millet’s work: by 1863 the peasant was no longer feared as a radical force and so the critic assails Millet for insulting the peasantry. This becomes the shared strategy of the conservatives who denounce Millet for glorifying rural cretinism and offending peasant sensibilities. Ernest Chesneau, for example, wrote of his models in 1864: One seems to recognize not an individual, but a type—the type of the country cretin. . . . By-and-by as the pictures of M. Millet pass in succession before the eyes of the amateur, he soon recognizes that it is always the same cretin, the same idiot, who is presented to him. . . . If pushed by curiosity, you seek in the catalogue what can these monsters be, whom the painter takes pleasure in



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reproducing without rest or respite, what is your stupefaction, when you learn that he pretends to nothing less than to represent the laborious race of our fields; the strong stock of the people, from which are recruited our armies, so intelligent and so brave!98

Chesneau virtually repeated this argument in 1868, claiming that Millet revealed a strong bias in favor of “brutal reality,” and inquires of his reader whether in the present time it is true that peasants are kith and kin to the animal world as the painter presents them. According to Millet, peasants lack all initiative, drive, and personal desire, and are only “machines to weed, labor, guard and shear sheep.” The artist never shows under their brutalized brow a glimmer of the obsession with land and property that is so profoundly ingrained in the French peasantry. His grotesque image of the rural populace may be faithful to the reality, but the reality is relevant to only “a small minority whose numbers diminish daily.”99 Millet answered his critics in a moving letter to Sensier, contradicting their assertion of his narrow selection of rural types and restating his commitment to the realist-rural discourse: Is it impossible [for my critics] to admit that pictorial ideas can be inspired by the sight of a man devoted to gaining his bread by the sweat of his brow? There are those who tell me that I deny the charms of the country. I find much more than charms there; I find infinite splendor. I see there, as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said: “I assure you that Solomon even in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these [Luke 12:27].” I see very well the aureoles of the dandelions, and the sun also, which spreads out beyond the world its glory in the clouds. But I see as well, in the plain, the steaming horses at work, and in a rocky place, a man with a broken back, whose han! [panting] has been heard since morning, and who tries to straighten himself upright a moment to breathe. The drama is enveloped with splendors. That expression, “The cry of the earth,” is not my invention; it was discovered long ago. My critics are people of education and taste, I imagine; but I cannot put myself in their place, and, as I have never known in my life any other thing than the fields, I try to say as well as I can that which I saw and experienced when I worked there. Those who wish to do better have certainly the upper hand.100

Despite the renewed critical attack after having improved his status and his own growing conservatism, Millet remained from first to last a rebel of 1848. Nevertheless, the world had radically altered since then, and The Man with the Hoe struck the critics differently from the threatening figure of The Sower. As we have seen, his cretinous look especially disturbed them. This is a complex picture to unpack, but one that evidently struck the official reviewers as further to the right in its implications than current government policy. The year 1863 saw the inauguration of the so-called Liberal Empire,

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and even though government candidates continued to roll up large majorities in rural districts, the state sought to appeal to the pocketbooks, rather than play upon the fears, of the rural sector. The government now assumed a rational, conservative peasantry capable of understanding that Napoléon III guaranteed their best interests. Ironically, it was the moderate republicans who assumed a doltish and brain-dead peasantry. Their spokesperson Jules Ferry, who wrote the pamphlet Les Elections de 1863, attacked the peasant’s political unintelligence in falling for the government line. In this sense, Millet’s benumbed laborer matched the concept of the frustrated opposition, which formerly had such high hopes for rural folk. Simultaneously, there began in the 1860s a reinterpretation of Millet’s work in the context of Christian stoicism and the acceptance of one’s lot in life.101 Conservative critics united around the idea of a negative image of the peasant to neutralize Millet’s political potential. Later, the magnates of France and the robber barons of America who collected Millet’s work applied their interpretation to embrace the whole range of the poorer classes (including the urban), perceiving Millet’s images as embodying the ethics of hard work and resignation.102 Sensier may have lamented the distressing lack of forehead in The Man with the Hoe, but he also declared that the structure of the laborer’s body was solid, his limbs well fashioned and proportioned, and altogether capable of sixty more years of productive work. His passion and primary function was “to pick the soil and clear the lands,” and he had “no ambition for anything else.”103 This attitude was seconded by Théophile Silvestre, a sophisticated Bonapartist critic who received a regular subsidy from the emperor’s private purse. Silvestre’s study of the artist, originally published in the progovernment paper Le Figaro in 1867, traces Millet’s style and thematics to the stolid peasantry of his native Gréville, a politically conservative region where the rural laborer—“good, intelligent, and sensitive to natural beauty”—spent his life “serving the earth” as proudly as he manned the imperial army. For Silvestre, The Man with the Hoe epitomized eternal rustic resignation.104 The progressively abstract interpretation of Millet’s imagery is seen in Silvestre’s revisionist critique of earlier evaluations and his view of The Man with the Hoe as not simply a peasant but “a portrait of the peasantry.” His article dates after Millet’s turn in critical fortune at the Salon of 1864, when the apparently benign Shepherdess Guarding Her Flock was unanimously praised. About tipped his hand when he wrote that no one could find fault with such a masterpiece, “where everything is true without realism.”105 The harmony of the landscape and the adorable young woman watching the sheep satisfied the critics, although it did not prevent them from lashing out bitterly at his solemn Peasants Bearing to Their Farmhouse a Calf Born in the Field, shown in the same exhibition. Sensier advised Millet to examine the Shepherdess carefully in preparation for all future works, since it “really pleased everyone.”106 The same year Millet accepted a commission to do an allegorical cycle of the Four Seasons for

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a banker’s townhouse, which he executed in an academic style. Finally, in 1868, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Silvestre, Millet received the coveted official award of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. A combination of Millet’s growing marketability and conservatism made his work more palatable to official circles and an international clientele. He wrote Sensier in 1867: “I repel with all my strength the democratic [démoc] side, as it is understood in the language of the clubs, that they have wished to attribute to me. My sole desire has been to direct thought to the human being consecrated to earning a livelihood in the sweat of his brow. . . . I have never had the idea of making any plea whatsoever. I am a peasant’s peasant.”107 True, the denial is somewhat ambiguous and qualified; his reference to the “language of the clubs” harks back to 1848, again affirming the permanent imprint of this experience on his sensibility. It is sufficient for him to restate his commitment to the realist-rural discourse and never mind the vagaries of history that transformed his once radical stance into an avenue of commerce. Nevertheless, the initiating circumstances of his mature work enabled it to persist as a contested site for the ideological agendas of both social reformer and capitalist. The most well-known text in this ongoing debate was Edwin Markham’s poem of social protest inspired by The Man with the Hoe, the original of which Markham may have viewed in the William H. Crocker collection in San Francisco. The poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1899 and was reprinted in every part of the world, at a time when burgeoning democratic socialist and labor parties confronted the robber barons and plutocrats on their own ground. Markham opposed the Yeoman—the well-to-do farmer—with the Hoeman, “the landless workman of the world.” I give here the opening and two closing stanzas of the poem to indicate Markham’s use of the image as a powerful warning against the exploitation of labor: Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? ……… O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, The monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape;



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Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with this man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?

When Markham’s poem was being lauded by socialists and social reformers everywhere, the American railroad baron Collis P. Huntington fretted and fumed. Huntington obsessively collected images of peasants to represent his ideal type of laborer. He was the railroad shogun of the Far West, a partner of Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker— father of the owner of The Man with the Hoe—who organized the union of the Central Pacific Railroad with the Union Pacific to form the first transcontinental line in the United States. He carried off his ambitious project on the backs of Chinese coolies whom he exploited for half the normal wages. He vehemently opposed labor unions and employed paternalistic practices to head off potential grievances. He adored Millet’s Man with the Hoe, for him the perfect embodiment of the gospel of work, and waxed furious over the enormous popularity of Markham’s poem. He put up a cash prize through the New York Sun to the writer of a poem of equal merit extolling the dignity of manual labor in contrast to Markham. He claimed that Millet’s figure had a distinct mission in life and was much to be envied when compared with the large number of “incapables” who have been taught that “common labor of work in the trades or in the fields is beneath them.” These incompetents were the “real brothers of the ox . . . who have lost that true independence of soul that comes to him who dares to labor with his hands, who wields the hoe and is master of his destiny.”108 Here the fatalistic character of Millet’s peasants is admirably suited to the idea of the magnates, who wanted to see peasants bound eternally to the soil and their own workers eternally bound to them. Thus Millet’s work provoked nostalgia for a world religiously devoted to work in a time of industrial change and militant organization of labor. He preached the gospel of work akin to the Victorians, displacing it from an urban to a rustic site, which also appealed to the new financial elite late in the century. Millet set out to paint the full range of country life and its labors, a series of episodes of rustic life embracing the types of every age

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and station in the rural districts. Comtean in principle, Millet’s systematic record of the peasantry and their environment constitutes a sociology of the countryside and swallows up the fine distinctions between the Beautiful and the Ugly. He took the ugly or the nonbeautiful as part of his mission, turning the Comtean principle to the advantage of the radicals. Everything in that world had its designated niche, and this appropriateness justified his embrace of it in art. He gave substance to a realm just then materializing into a political force, and he cannot be held responsible for the fact that in the end his work could be used to contain that force.



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3 Radical Realism Continued

Gustave Courbet

When Millet learned that Courbet’s Venus Jealously Pursuing Psyche (a work with lesbian overtones) was rejected by the Salon jury of 1864 on the ground of indecency, he wrote angrily to Castagnary that nothing Courbet did could ever be as salacious as the work of Cabanel and Baudry, whose pictures of a supine Venus were the hits of the previous exhibition. He decried the hypocrisy of the jury and added, “I admit an indecent intention as well: this picture by Courbet would be three times as indecent for the reason that his women must be a thousand times more alive than the others.”1 Millet clearly identified with Courbet’s realism, although he could not nurture so persistently the spark of radicalism ignited by 1848. He was neither Christian nor socialist, but much closer to Christian Socialism than Courbet, and his need to sermonize neutralized his ability to function politically in the real world. Nevertheless, both eschewed sentimentality in their work and were joined in brotherhood by Thoré as the “two master painters in the Salon of 1861.” Mocking their critics, he noted that perhaps their only mistake was in showing “nature with too much reality.” Their pictures were the best painted in the Salon, “but M. Courbet is a realist! M. Millet a realist! Curses!” He then went on to define his own criteria for great art, an “original feeling for nature and a personal execution.” It is the originality of the artist that makes the master and not the choice of subject. For Thoré to be a “realist” was to express rugged individuality and independence of thought—the keys to elevated forms of socially responsible art.2 If the carefully crafted public persona of Courbet signified anything, it was this ideal of intellectual, political, and artistic independence. Like Millet, Courbet’s persona evolved under pressure in response to the events of 1848 and the realist-rural discourse. What made him unique as an artistic personality was his conscious connection to the first French revolution and the sense of being its beneficiary. To a large extent this construction

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could be historically justified: the family fortune was established partly by his paternal grandfather, Claude-Louis Courbet, a peasant who profited from the sale of estates confiscated from émigrés fleeing the revolution, and partly by his maternal grandfather, Jean-Antoine Oudot (1768–1848), a revolutionary veteran awarded land for his ardent support of the Jacobins in 1793. Castagnary claimed that it was the unreservedly self-confident and tenacious grandfather Oudot who provided the decisive role model for young Courbet. Courbet always remained close to his maternal grandparents, who raised him during much of his childhood, and the grandfather initiated him into his own republican and anticlerical views. Courbet was born in Ornans on 10 June 1819—a generational year for naturalism that also witnessed the births of Ruskin, Eliot, Fontane, and Whitman. His maternal grandparents lived in Ornans, a small town in the Franche-Comté region in the valley of the Loue river in eastern France, and his mother (née Sylvie Oudot) returned home to have her baby. Courbet’s father, Régis, was a major landowner and vintner in Franche-Comté, owning property and vineyards in the village of Flagey and in Ornans, and a vineyard in the valley of Valbois that produced over five hundred gallons of wine per year. Indeed, the elder Courbet was prosperous enough to qualify as one of the privileged 200,000 electors during the regime of Louis-Philippe, thus positioning him in the hybrid social category of rural bourgeoisie. Gustave would always address him in correspondence as “Monsieur Courbet, propriétaire.” Well-to-do and impractical at the same time, he spent his leisure time devising several crackpot schemes to ameliorate the labor of his farm workers, inventing a new kind of harrow that destroyed the seedlings and a five-wheel vehicle (one in the rear) to carry provisions for the chase.3 It is Régis’s peculiar social status, with its combination of rustic and bourgeois preoccupations, that set the conditions for the unfolding of Gustave’s career. Gustave was the firstborn and only son of the family; after him came four daughters, Clarisse, Zoé, Zélie, and Juliette, the first of whom died at the age of fifteen. The powerful female presence in Courbet’s life—including mother and maternal grandmother—played a preponderant role in his self-perception. A hint of this shows up in his many images of women depicted in groups or in pairs, often including portrayals of his sisters. It may be that his fascination for lesbian themes displaced a sexual attraction to his sisters, especially since the representation of intimate love between females in his day titillated a predominantly male audience. As early as 1840, he attended a masked ball in Paris dressed as a woman, in a dress cut lower than my shoulders, with my hair turned back and braids at the back of my head, and I had flowers, a black velvet bodice, and wide flounces at the bottom of my muslin dress. I looked so good that I was forced to dress like that again, but that time the ladies dressed me. I had to dance with all the gentlemen of the company, for I was all the rage.4



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Courbet’s delight in his successful cross-dressing, his flagrant narcissism, and his fetishistic preoccupation with the costume details hint at his frustration of growing up male in a feminine-dominated space. Even his later affectation of a masculinist boorishness to help create his rustic persona never effaced entirely the female traits he must have harbored in his fantasies. Actually, he reverted to his rural origins in resisting the process of bourgeoisification (including male responsibilities) that his father wished to impose upon him. Thus when the watershed events of 1848 occurred he was mentally prepared to accept their liberating political and social consequences. Although his identification with the peasantry would always be somewhat self-conscious, he could assimilate the pretense as part of his persona. In this, he differed from Millet, whose direct claim to the rural subject stemmed from actual farm life and whose portrayal of the peasant always carried with it a sense of nostalgia and loss. Young Courbet began his studies in 1831 at the Little Seminary (a secondary school so named to distinguish it from the regular diocesan institution), administered by the archbishopric of Besançon, the capital of the province, which prepared pupils for both religious and secular education. Courbet’s disinterest in classical languages may or may not reveal an early inclination toward modern life, but if he showed slight interest in academic subjects, the school provided an early outlet for his nascent artistic gifts. The drawing teacher, “Père Beau,” had studied with Gros and often took the pupils out on field trips to draw directly from nature. The sight of Courbet’s notebooks filled with scribbles of every imaginable subject filled the elder Courbet with consternation. He would have wished to see his son in one of the bourgeois professions, especially law, a decision warmly endorsed by cousin François-Julien Oudot, a professor at the School of Law in Paris. Accordingly, in 1837 Régis sent him as a boarder to the Collège Royal de Besançon to study philosophy, thinking that the experience would turn him around. Courbet dropped out of school altogether in 1838, and by the end of the following year he traveled to Paris ostensibly to study law and satisfy parental aspirations. Although reticent at first within his new urban surroundings, he gradually gained fresh confidence and asserted his independence by dropping the law courses and plunging into advanced art training. Courbet always claimed to be an autodidact, but he spent several months in the studio of Baron Karl von Steuben, and remained there as late as January 1841.5 Steuben was a well-known academic history painter who exhibited regularly at the Salons (in 1839 he showed La Esméralda from Hugo’s NotreDame de Paris), and had been picked to participate in Louis-Philippe’s pet project of the Galerie des Batailles for the Versailles Museum.6 He had previously attracted attention with his Return from the Island of Elba, exhibited at the Salon of 1831, a work appealing to the then current mania for Napoléon, who is shown being greeted warmly by a crowd of veterans, civilians, and former opponents (fig. 3.1).7 Steuben tried to reach a broad public

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3.1  Karl von Steuben, Return from the Island of Elba, engraving of original shown at Salon of 1831. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

and had already circulated the image in reproduction to achieve maximum popularity. His public relations savvy and reputation may well have attracted young Courbet; Steuben’s Battle of Poitiers was exhibited in the Salon of 1838 and then seen again in its permanent location in the newly renovated Versailles Museum. (In the 1840s Courbet also attended the Académie Suisse and regularly visited the studio of Auguste Hesse, another frequent contributor to the Salons.) During this period, Courbet reveals aspects of his personality that anticipate the mature adult. He is terribly aware of proper fashion while living in Besançon and strives for the right effect in dress, complaining at one point that his clothes are “in a hellishly mean state,” and wanting to order a new set from the tailor; on another occasion he lamented that he had nothing to wear “in the way of summer daytime trousers,” and that his one suit weighed “at least fifteen to twenty pounds, and his daytime vest is merely a blue cloth double-breasted vest,” guaranteed to make him catch cold.8 Later, newly arrived in Paris and partying like mad, he spends more than twenty francs on white gloves, and when Oudot’s children remark his lack of proper attire he is “forced” to order a suit and black trousers. In the same letter, he complains that Parisian heat demanded summer clothes, including a jacket, two pairs of trousers, a vest, and boots. The term for “dressing up” in the Franche-Comté region generally meant a disguise, and although this referred more to the peasantry’s mindset than to that of the rural bourgeois, it is noteworthy that Courbet was conscious of role-playing at an early age.9 This facet of his personality already reveals itself in his confrontation with the army examining board.



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Conscription in the military was done through a lottery for a certain number of recruits from every canton; lots were drawn annually and young men with numbers higher than the required contingent were exempt. Courbet, however, received a low number and rather than buy himself a substitute decided to get himself rejected. He ultimately succeeded by stammering throughout the interview, even though the medical authorities accused him of “playing dumb.” In the letter to his father describing the proceedings, Courbet twice stated that, primed with cognac and tobacco, he “played his role” to perfection. As his sense of self developed, he assumed the persona of the shrewd rustic who could meet sophisticated Parisians on their own plane. This despite the fact that as early as March 1844 he could write home that “I am not much in tune with country tasks anymore.”10 Like Millet, he migrated from country to town and exploited rural resources to make a living from those whom he professed to despise. He wrote his friends Francis Wey (the author) and his wife in 1850, “Yes, dear friends, even in our so civilized society, I must lead the life of a savage. I must break free from its very governments. The people have my sympathy. I must turn to them directly, I must get my knowledge from them, and they must provide me with a living. Therefore I have just embarked on the great wandering and independent life of the bohemian.”11 In this same letter Courbet referred to the popular reception of an exhibition of his work in his native region, gibing that the population of the Franche-Comté were willing to pay fifty centimes to see the show, and out of “their own pockets imagine that!” But this early strategy of appealing to rustic audiences with works celebrating the countryside soon gave way to a patronage of the privileged classes. Yet Courbet never ceased playing the role of the bold, outspoken bumpkin as he simultaneously transposed high culture to his provincial point of origin and, conversely, incisively revealed an unexpected slice of rural life to the know-it-alls of Paris. What empowered Courbet in this early period was the progressive climate created by the revolution of 1848 and his engagement with the realist-rural discourse that led to the government purchase of his painting After Dinner at Ornans. Akin to Millet, Courbet’s painting was decisively affected by the revolutionary moment. Four years younger, however, and inflamed with the grandiose role for artists projected by the reformists (he claimed to have arrived in Paris a convinced Fourierist), he planned to carve out a niche for himself by transforming the conditions of perception and taste. In 1846 he thought, like Millet, of making a name for himself and wanted to “gain the public’s acceptance,” but he showed himself more innately courageous: “The more different you are from the others, the more difficult it is. You must realize that to change the public’s taste and way of seeing is no small task, for it means no more and no less than overturning what exists and replacing it. You can imagine what jealousy and bruised egos that produces!”12 The passage is important for his emphasis on the public’s “way of

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3.2  Gustave Courbet, masthead design for Le Salut Public, no. 2 (1848).

seeing,” an idea that he will reiterate throughout his lifetime and which is, I believe, the core of his realist platform. His statements reflect Thoré’s doctrine of originality: in a letter of 21 March 1847, Courbet mentions a planned visit to Thoré in connection with a project for a counter-exhibition to house the large number of works rejected by the Salon jury, including all three of his own submissions. Courbet’s preference for an alternative exhibition space grows out of his awareness of official control over the Salon (“the only game in town”) and indicates his budding radicalism. In addition to contact with Thoré, he is by this time participating in the bohemian circle of Dupont, Buchon, Murger, Schanne, Baudelaire, Champfleury, and the painter François Bonvin. Poised for success just one month prior to the 1848 breakout, he writes confidently of his project for the Salon and his growing status in the art world: “Even without [the Salon piece] I am about to make it any time now, for I am surrounded by people who are very influential in the newspapers and the arts, and who are very excited about my painting. Indeed, we are about to form a new school, of which I will be the representative in the field of painting.”13 For his friends Champfleury, Baudelaire, and Toubin he designed a vignette for the masthead of the second issue of their short-lived radical newspaper, Le Salut public. In this barricade scene inspired by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Courbet replaced Liberty with a male worker in smock and battered top hat and carrying a flag with the slogan Voix de Dieu, Voix du Peuple (fig. 3.2). Courbet thought of participating in the competition for the figure of the Republic (“to replace Louis-Philippe’s portrait”) as his mentor Auguste Hesse did, but at the last minute decided against it. Alternatively, he hoped for a commission to do one of the 800 copies of the definitive image of the Republic projected for



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distribution in Paris and the provinces, and planned to enter the songwriting competition organized for musicians (another of his talents). As a middle-class intellectual, he always assumed he was doing his share by aligning himself with a radical perspective. As he wrote his family in March: Anyhow, I am not getting very involved in politics, as usual, for I find nothing emptier than that. When it was a question of destroying the old errors, I did what I could, I lent a hand. Now it no longer concerns me. Do what you think is best. If you don’t do things right I will always be ready to lend a hand again to destroy what is badly established. That is all I am doing in politics.

And he added: “To each his own: I am a painter and I make paintings.”14 Since the government decreed that all submissions would be accepted that year, Courbet showed ten paintings—making up for the previous refusal of his Salon offerings. By April, he could attest to the triumph of the realist-rural discourse as the cultural complement to social reform. Writing home to his family and inquiring about the progress of his father’s harrow, he predicts that it will become a necessity, for “the way things are going . . . even painters are going to want to become farmers.” In the same letter, he recounts the events of 16 April and the government’s attempt to undermine the working-class parade by spreading rumors of an imminent Communist takeover. Courbet knew that the crowd was not conspiratorial and looked on bitterly as the National Guards whipped up animosity against the so-called “Communists” and stirred up cries of “Long live the Provisional Government.” He characterized these developments as “ridiculous and meaningless,” sad to see that moderate onlookers who “had fallen for a joke” went home smugly imagining “that they had nipped the evil in the bud.”15 He took the side of the radical republicans and sympathized with the insurgents of June, but watched events with a sense of detached irony. He evidently belonged to the National Guard, and in his letter to his family of 26 June 1848, which he painfully begins “we are in the midst of a terrible civil war,” he noted that the “insurgents fight like lions . . . and have already greatly harmed the National Guard.” For him the “distressing spectacle” was even more devastating than St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, when thousands of French Huguenots were killed in a massive religious purge. Observing that the National Guard and the Mobile Guard kept watch in all the streets, Courbet outlined his position: I don’t fight for two reasons. First, because I do not believe in wars fought with guns and cannon, and because it runs counter to my principles. For ten years now I have been waging a war of the intellect. It would be inconsistent of me to act otherwise. The second reason is that I have no weapons and cannot be tempted. So you have nothing to fear on my account.16



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3.3  Gustave Courbet, The Sculptor, 1845. Private Collection. 3.4  Thomas Couture, The Troubadour, 1843. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

The letter is clearly a rationale for a noncombative position, but I still see it as a progressive formulation given the almost universal middle-class loathing of the insurgents in June. As a member of the National Guard, Courbet is not considering fighting with the insurgents but actually declaring his refusal to take up arms against them. This is a radical position in June. Again, as for Millet, the revolutionary moment galvanized his effective synthesis of personal style, working methods, and thematic concentration. We may judge this more precisely by examining his early work, most of it designed for the official Salon although often rejected. The majority of these paintings, including the narrative subjects, are self-portraits and correspond to an intense introspection in the painter’s early twenties. They betray a marked debt to late romantic medievalism and the troubadour style of artists gathered around the “Ecole Deforges” (Couture, Henri Baron, and Faustin Besson, among others), baptized by Champfleury in his review of the 1846 Salon. This is not to say that his early works lack original traits—indeed, many of them represent quirky and eccentric attempts to revitalize a waning idiom—but that they take off from already popularized styles. Courbet’s Sculptor (1844) and Guittarero (1845) recall such works of Thomas Couture as Troubadour (1843), Jocondo (1844), and Falconer (1844–1845), especially in their tilting heads, dreamy preoccupation, and



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languorous, awkwardly posed bodies decked out in medieval tights (figs. 3.3–4). The landscape of the Guittarero evokes Moritz von Schwind’s Biedermeier Gothicism, resembling an illustration for the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. The shallow landscape nooks with their convenient rocky perches seem more like scenic backdrops than natural prospects. His first work admitted to the Salon was Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, painted, according to the artist, in 1842, but accepted in 1844 (fig. 3.5). Here Courbet presents himself as a dandified outdoorsman, resting after having climbed with his spaniel to the crest of a mountain. At his side, leaning against a boulder, is his elegant walking stick and sketch album; but instead of showing himself at work at his elevated station, he and his dog turn to confront the spectator, who, as Michael Fried has pointed out, is positioned to view them from below.17 This subverts the conventional image of the poet-artist climbing the heights to gaze down rapturously on the sublime scene below—indeed, there is just such a prospect in the painting—essentially turning the voyeuristic gaze back on itself. Typically, the absorbed poet-painter is a certifiable conduit of proper taste who inferentially invites the spectator to share the exalted view, but in this case the poet-painter turns abruptly to catch the beholder in the act of beholding. Instead of being able to contemplate the magnificent perspective in safe isolation, the spectator is forced to confront the knowing artist and spaniel staring down at her as an unwanted interloper. Courbet plays on the romantic trope, 3.5  Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, 1844. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.



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showing that he is well aware of romanticism’s waning status, and searching for ways of giving it an original and perhaps even parodic twist. I think we see this process reiterated in The Man with the Leather Belt of the mid-1840s, a work that references Old Master Dutch, Spanish, and Venetian portrait painting but replaces the aristocratic sitter with the artist himself (fig. 3.6). The half-length seated figure is actually painted over a copy of Titian’s Man with the Glove (Louvre, ca. 1519), and there is a calculated connection between the hand grasping the belt in the Courbet and the bare right hand at the lower framing edge in the Titian. Courbet similarly represents himself as a dashing cavalier, but one who has to work for a living. His right elbow rests on the same leather-bound album glimpsed in Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, with a porte-crayon lying across it. He simultaneously seeks traits of identification with the great art of the past while declaring his independence from it. Unlike Titian’s sitter, moreover, whose eyes turn away from us, Courbet faces outward, his right hand (and provocative bared wrist) debonairly brushing back his long hair to let the spectator get a better look at him, his left forcibly grasping the rugged leather belt. The dexterous relationship of the two hands suggests both sensuality and virility, an interplay of sexual invitation and physical presence. Near the end of the July Monarchy, when utopian movements grew in strength, 3.6  Gustave Courbet, The Man with the Leather Belt, 1845–1846. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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Courbet narcissistically flaunts both feminine and masculine aspects of his personality as the foundation of the creative act—the artist as androgyne. Thus during his apprenticeship years we see Courbet expending his creative energies in a number of hit-and-miss directions, and though demonstrating a distinctly original and satirical turn of mind, he remains mired in the throes of a fading romanticism. Although never as financially needy as Millet, his thirst for fame is just as pressing and he eagerly plunges into the official fray to establish his reputation. As late as spring 1848, he had yet to find his focus—conspicuously evident in the jumble of themes submitted to the free Salon that year. His ten pictures included a Classical Walpurgis Night, inspired by Goethe’s late classicizing sequel to Faust, several portraits, and a variety of landscape and genre scenes. One of the landscapes, Midday (Le Milieu du jour), showed a man in a frock coat and top hat chasing a nymph through the woods! Yet between the winter of 1848–1849 and the following spring Courbet embarked on a series of monumental pictures that constitute a watershed in both his personal and creative development. These large figure compositions, centering on his native region around Ornans and exploring the social relations of his family members and friends, mark the emergence of modern critical realism. Through contact with Thoré, Buchon, Champfleury, Dupont, and Sand (Courbet’s 1848 Salon entries included a musical theme inspired by Sand’s novel Consuelo), Courbet assimilated the realist-rural discourse and grasped its ideological appeal to the moderate Second Republic. Except for Sand, these middle-class males assembled at the Brasserie Andler, a rendezvous for late bohemian and realist intellectuals anxious to debate cultural politics and inaugurate a new movement. The romantic bohemianism of the early July Monarchy had by now taken a sharply political turn, recognizing that mere cultural measures could never alone reform a materialist society. In a sense, Courbet’s testing of romantic tropes in his work of the 1840s corresponds to the late phase of bohemianism marking a transition to realism. Thus bohemians cum realists shared collectivist aspirations and a refusal of bourgeois culture, and although bohemianism was a distinctly urban phenomenon, its fringelike status placed it in a sympathetic relationship to rustic life. Analogous to the peasantry migrating from the countryside only to wind up in the working-class slums of Paris, so artists and writers of rural origin like Courbet and Buchon wound up merging with more urban types like Baudelaire, Champfleury, Mathieu, and Dupont, who developed strong ties to folk and popular culture. Buchon and Champfleury were especially open to the work of the German authors exploring folk themes, in particular Johann Peter Hebel and Berthold Auerbach, who opposed rustic candor to the duplicity and impersonality of town and city. Buchon translated from Hebel’s Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes and Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, and Champfleury devoted a long critique to Hebel and pored over Auerbach and the Swiss Albert Bitzius (aka Jeremias Gotthelf ). Hence there are

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points of intersection between Biedermeier culture and French realism that will even overlap in 1848, when revolution breaks out in Berlin and Vienna and Biedermeier turns critical. We know that 1848 marks the critical turning point in Courbet’s career because Champfleury, in his letter to Sand recapitulating the painter’s development, declared, “Since 1848 M. Courbet has been privileged to amaze the crowd,” and Courbet’s full title of his magnum opus/manifesto of 1855—The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life—affirms that the significant date of departure for his artistic maturity was 1848. Castagnary wrote in his unpublished biography of Courbet that just at the moment when the artist had acquired technical mastery, political events disrupted everyday life and eliminated at one fell swoop the bourgeois monarchy and the sway of the Academy of Beaux-Arts, which “gave freedom to everyone, including the painters.” He added that the “new master could now paint freely and according to his own ideas . . . and Courbet had an idea, more than an idea, a doctrine: he was a realist.”18 Given these eyewitness accounts we may infer that the transformative moment in Courbet’s life and art is inseparably linked to the revolutionary events of that year. Years later, Courbet wrote to Jules Vallès that in 1848 he “raised the flag of realism, which alone put art in the service of humanity.” As a consequence of that action, he had since consistently resisted all forms of illegitimate authority, desiring to see human beings governing themselves according to their needs. He added that in the same year he opened a “socialist club” to rival other radical clubs filled with “so-called” republicans, and although neither his correspondence nor the accounts of his friends support this assertion, the statement nevertheless testifies to his own belief in the decisive importance of 1848 for his artistic and political development.19 In addition to the stimulus of the revolution, the death of his beloved maternal grandfather, Jean-Antoine Oudot, on 13 August of that year, profoundly moved him. The coincidence of the demise of his boyhood idol— a hero of the 1789 revolution—with the painful crises of 1848 bracketed an entire history of the French radical tradition up to that moment. Courbet chose at that juncture to carry on the grandfather’s memory by consecrating his efforts to sustaining that tradition through his art and his intellect, if not through direct action. One month after Oudot died Courbet visited his family in Ornans, and by December was back in Paris hard at work on After Dinner at Ornans. The work centers on Courbet’s father, Régis, and three family friends seated around a table, and although the painter inscribed in the register of Salon entries that the event took place in the home of Urbain Cuenot, Castagnary claimed that the interior resembled “that of the Courbet family in Ornans.” The melancholy mood of the scene and dejected posture of Régis probably resonates with the painter’s own mental state in this period.

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3.7  Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans, 1848–1849. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

One reviewer wondered why the artist went out of his way to “convey the sense of sadness by vastly extending his mournful and dirty painting, as if it had been executed with the ashes of the fireplace?”20 In the wake of 1848 and the death of his grandfather Courbet needed to renew contacts with family, boyhood acquaintances, and his natal environment. Along with this work, Courbet exhibited several views of the topography surrounding Ornans. Life-size at six by eight feet, the immense canvas represented his first major undertaking of a rural theme; it made a powerful impression on the 1849 Salon audience unaccustomed to seeing an ordinary genre scene blown up to history painting proportions (fig. 3.7). In a space with a large fireplace—known in Franche-Comté as a chambre du poêle, which functioned as kitchen, salon, and dining room combined—Courbet’s father at the left, Cuenot, and an artist friend, Adolphe Marlet, meditatively listen at table to Alphonse Promayet at the far right playing the violin. As in The Draughts Players (1844), the protagonists are seen close-up from behind and to the side and the table is aligned with the frontal picture plane; the



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spectator is thus positioned as if suddenly opening a door onto the scene. This effect is reinforced by the location of the legs of the chairs close to and touching the lower picture edge, so that the distance between the spectator’s space and the illusionary space is all but negated. The actuality of the scene is made all the more convincing by the size of the figures in relation to the shadowy interior, by the starkly precise rendering of the accessories, and by the mellow, flickering light. Within the space itself the figures appear unstaged and refusing a coherent pattern; rather, they are strung out in a wobbly line as if assuming artless positions. In fact, however, a subtle diagonal unites the key figures from left to right, from Courbet père, sunk heavily in his chair, to Promayet, raised slightly above the others on an improvised bench. Both cross one leg over the other and lower their heads in total absorption. The other two gaze in rapt attention at the virtuoso performer and serve as linkages between what I believe to be the two principal figures: Régis Courbet and Promayet. This fits Courbet’s own explanation that on the occasion depicted he and his friends persuaded Promayet to specifically play for his father. Régis does more than merely listen, however: he is drawn into himself and his memories by the music—the alter ego of the painter still mourning the loss of grandfather Oudot. Courbet once established a historical lineage linking all three in a common bond of integrity: “My grandfather, who was a 1793 Republican, adopted a maxim that he always repeated to me: ‘Shout loud and walk straight.’ My father has always followed it and I have done the same.”21 The original title of the work, Une Après-Dînée à Ornans, suggests more than an ordinary dinner, but carries the connotation of a dinner caught on the run, on the road. The protagonists still wear their bulky hunting clothes, and have come in out of the late autumn cold to share the warmth of a friendly hearth. Clark characterized the moment as a veillée, a rural ritual that took place between supper and bedtime during autumn and winter evenings, but others—Georges Riat and Hélène Toussaint in particular— have stated that the time of day depicted is the afternoon. I share Clark’s opinion, mainly on the direct testimony of the artist himself, who referred to the work in a letter as Evening at Ornans [Soirée à Ornans], and also Castagnary, who declared that the picture recalled for him the “evenings” he spent with the Courbets at Ornans when the “large room that served at once as salon and dining room was transformed into a reading room or music session.”22 Weber has described the veillées as after-supper moments in rural households when an hour or two before bedtime was given over to singing or listening to music. The veillée was a regular ritual throughout most of rural France that began as the fall labors diminished. Late fall and winter evenings were long, cold, and isolating, and fires had to be carefully tended and nursed. Around the fire would gather neighboring families who took nightly turns at one another’s home, thus saving on light and heat. Music

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and folklore were standard features of most veillées (recall that Sand wanted to call her pastoral tales the “Veillées of the Hemp Dresser”), and the talk was filled with reminiscences. Typically, the event took place when the light was poor and music then became indispensable entertainment in country life. Notables and officials generally detested the veillée because the discourse and songs frequently turned bawdy and subversive.23 Courbet’s work thus documented the participation of his family and friends in a common social ritual of the countryside, narrativizing an ordinary rustic scene on a scale reserved for history painting. The absence of old Oudot within the unfolding circumstances of 1848 revealed to Courbet the possibility of glimpsing history at work within the present, of understanding history as constitutive of the dynamic here and now. Painfully aware of having missed the opportunity to record Oudot within context for posterity, Courbet’s historical sense expanded to encompass contemporary commonplace events. He now grew conscious of watching history unfold before him and believed it was possible not only to participate in that history but help shape it. This attitude clarifies one of Baudelaire’s headings in notes for a projected essay on the painter: “Courbet saving the world.” Courbet consistently wrote of realism as “my way of seeing” (ma manière de voir), admitting up front its subjective and ideological implications, but also acknowledging his role in the construction of contemporary history.24 His letter to his prospective students was quite clear on this issue, asserting that “art, or talent, should be to an artist no more than the means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the events of the times in which he lives.” And he continued: Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it. I hold that the artists of one century are totally incapable of representing the things of a preceding or subsequent century, in other words, of painting the past or future. It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. Historical art is by nature contemporary. Every age must have its artists, who give expression to it and reproduce it for the future. An age that has not managed to find expression in the work of its own artists has no right to be expressed by later artists. That would be falsifying history.25

After Dinner at Ornans represented his first mature attempt to put that doctrine into practice. Conservative reviewers of the 1849 exhibition were characteristically ambivalent in their responses to the work: generally bowled over by Courbet’s technical mastery, they were incensed by what they considered a huge wasted effort. Their strategy was to implicate his work in the negative discourse surrounding the daguerreotype, to reduce his painting to the level of mechanical process. The art critic of L’Illustration noted that the subject would have well suited a small genre picture, but why did the artist have to give the “vulgar thing the proportions of Ingres’s

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ceiling decoration of [the Apotheosis of ] Homer?”26 Louis Peisse got the ball rolling with his statement that no other artist could “degrade art [encanailler l’art] with greater technical know-how,” a remark picked up by others searching to position Courbet’s work. “Feu Diderot” of L’Artiste, for example, admitted the crudity of the term but felt that it was the sort of truth that comes from the bottom of a well. Advising the painter to interpret and not simply imitate nature, the critic admonished Courbet to infuse his work with more “passion” and elevate it above the trivial. He declared that Courbet “suffered a grievous fault, and that is to be satisfied with himself.” He needed to search for and discover beauty—that is, “nature seen through the lens of poetry.”27 Courbet’s response to these critics (in a letter to Francis and Marie Wey) acknowledged full responsibility for their particular reading of his new work: “Yes, M. Peisse, it is necessary to degrade art. For too long you have been affirming art that is pomaded and in ‘good taste.’ For too long painters, even my contemporaries, have based their art on stereotyped ideas.” What is curious in both Peisse’s and feu Diderot’s remarks is an implied familiarity with Courbet’s mindset, as if he were a veteran of the Salon. They treated him as an experienced professional who had somehow strayed from the straight and narrow and needed to get back on track, and, conversely, Courbet answered them as the bellwether of the new movement. This indicates the profound impression his work made in 1849, echoed in Delacroix’s exclamation before the picture: “Have you ever seen anything like it, anything so strong, without dependence on anyone else? Here’s an innovator, a revolutionary, too; he burst forth all of a sudden, without precedent: he’s an unknown!”28 Lagenevais of the conservative Revue des deux mondes began his review by wondering out loud why Courbet painted a genre scene on a five-foot [sic] canvas. A kitchen interior pleases on a modest scale, he continued, but loses its charm when scaled to actual size. When magnified this way accessories that were normally so enchanting in small Flemish cabinet pictures simply became boring and commonplace. Like Peisse and feu Diderot, he acknowledged Courbet’s technical virtuosity and precision but regretted that it produced nothing more than a “trivial truth.” Nevertheless, he used Courbet’s example of modernity positively to put down the faux “realist” work of Meissonier and Fauvelet, who insisted on slotting their scenes into a comfortable rococo niche and depriving the Salon audience of the inelegant aspects of modern life.29 The critic for the center-right journal L’Illustration made an important contribution to the discussion: he observed that the four protagonists of the picture were “half-bourgeois and half-rustic,” hinting at Courbet’s more complicated understanding of the rural social structure and helping explain another side of the critics’ consternation. The painting problematized the inhabitants of the countryside at a time when that population could no longer be taken for granted. When Lagenevais claimed that

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realists had pretensions of being revolutionaries, he surely had in mind their larger-than-life workers and peasants. Yet I believe it was the very instability of the peasantry in this phase of the Republic that guaranteed Courbet’s official success that year, for despite the acerbic critiques he won a second-class medal (exempting him henceforth from ordinary jury scrutiny) and the state purchased the work for 3,000 francs. On 5 August 1849 the official government newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, ran a review-article on agriculture that began as follows: In an era when the most subversive doctrines have spread throughout the countryside, when society is attacked on all sides, when the family, property, everything is open to question, it is the obligation of honest people and especially eminent men placed at the head of affairs to lend their good name and talents in support of the nation in order to arrest the evil, to attack and combat it, and restore the calm and repose to society that a few fanatics have wrested from it temporarily. One of the most efficacious means of achieving this is to moralize the rural populations, to increase their well-being in augmenting agricultural production through positive improvements, and to enhance in their own eyes and in the eyes of all the art that they cultivate, the most ancient, the most noble, and the most essential to mankind.30

In this official statement on the rural areas, the government sets as its priority their stabilization and moralization, the restoration of “the calm and repose” that have “temporarily” been lost because of the radical politicization of the countryside. Now what Courbet shows in his work are rural inhabitants totally entranced by the dulcet strains of the violin, soothing them into a state of absolute calm and serenity. Music is shown to have a “civilizing” effect on rustic folk. Here the ambiguous “half-bourgeois, half-rustic” portrayal may have aided in sustaining the image of a peasant capable of absorption in higher cultural forms. It may be worthwhile to confront this work with the American William Sidney Mount’s Music Hath Charms or The Power of Music of 1847. Courbet may have known Mount’s work since it was sent to Paris and lithographed by Goupil in 1848 for European consumption. 31 Mount similarly showed three men (wearing hats like that worn by Marlet) in a rustic ambiance captivated by a violinist, one of whom is an African American who stands outside the barn where the others, all white, gather to listen. Particularly intriguing is the opening into the barn, which operates as a surrogate frame whose lower edge barely contains the figures, analogous to Courbet’s composition. The difference being, however, that Mount exploits the container motif to depict an outside as well as inside, thus excluding the African American, who nevertheless listens as attentively as the whites inside. Mount’s title invites the idea of the “savage beast” who may be soothed—a theme dear to the heart of dominant elites everywhere whose concerns were the same in wishing to contain dissenting peasants, mili

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tant artisans, feminist agitators, and upstart blacks. What was crucial was securing them all to a fixed place within the scheme of things. Returning now to the Courbet, it is possible to speculate that the imaginary spectator brought close-up to the pictorial space is an excluded auditor like the black in Mount’s work, a peasant servant perhaps (who is surely there somewhere), not permitted to share the space of the “half-bourgeois, halfrustic” fraternity. Thus the spatial arrangement implies an element of exclusivity in its proximity to the beholder, who is made to feel debarred from the intimate gathering. Courbet’s social and political consciousness, though developing rapidly, still retained elements of class bias at the outset of his radical phase. The logic of events acted as a corrective on his bourgeois blind spots. Two days before the 15 June opening of the Salon of 1849, the radical republicans, led by Ledru-Rollin, staged one final attempt to gain control of the government. Outraged by Louis-Napoléon’s violation of the Constitution in intervening in Italy to suppress a sister republic, a long column of assorted republicans and National Guardsmen from the working-class districts made their way toward the National Assembly. Government troops broke up the demonstration, and when Ledru-Rollin and a loyal group of followers rallied at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers to organize a fullscale insurrection, the troops again easily put down the rebellion. Courbet monitored these events closely and wrote his father that the “Constitution has been violated from top to bottom,” thus echoing the position of the extreme radicals. He condemned the “insolence of the reactionary party” and noted that General Changarnier, who led the troops against the insurgents, announced that France would have an emperor by morning. Radical newspapers had been vandalized, and barricades once more erected. Changarnier was fired at by a sniper “but unfortunately not hit. Everyone who fired was killed on the spot. As for M. Napoléon, he has not been shot at yet, which is even more unfortunate.”32 Thus by 1849 Courbet’s political progressivism had moved solidly to the Left and between then and the end of the Republic critics positioned him as leader of the radical realists. When two weeks before the coup d’état a critic named Garcin called him “the socialist painter,” Courbet wrote the editor of the newspaper with an energetic avowal of principle: “I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist but a democrat and a republican as well—in a word, a partisan of all the revolutions and above all a realist . . . a sincere lover of the honest truth.”33 He now perceived himself as a role model to empower others, intending to “be so outrageous that I’ll give everyone the power to tell me the cruelest truths. You see that I am up to it. Don’t think that this is a whim, I have thought about it for a long time. Moreover, it is a serious duty, not only to give an example of freedom and character in art, but also to publicize the art I undertake.”34 Courbet made good on his word in the Salon of 1850–1851, where he exhibited three major multifigure pictures, two landscapes, and four por

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traits, including the well-known self-portrait Man with the Pipe—the artist moved by the spell of tobacco rather than the muse. His explanation of this portrait to the patron who bought it emphasizes his evolving “realist” demystification of bourgeois ideology: “It is the portrait of a man unburdened of the nonsense that made up his education, who seeks to live by his own principles.”35 Courbet added that his numerous self-portraits disclose his gradually changing attitude and altogether constitute an “autobiography.” Here he testifies to his striving for self-knowledge, a process inextricable from his visual production. He insisted in his “realist manifesto” of 1855 that his main objective had always been “to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.” Applied to his art this meant, “To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art—that is my goal.”36 Courbet’s robust presence on the Salon scene of 1851 created a sensation; in spite of themselves, the most conservative critics converged on his pictures as if riveted by a magnetic force, often devoting such a disproportionate amount of space in their reviews to his painting that they wound up apologizing to their readers for sinking in the mire with a miserable charlatan. Their excuse was their fear of Courbet’s bad example for the younger generation and the need for clarity on first principles. When Louis de Geofroy of the lordly Revue des deux mondes overheard someone describing Courbet’s work as “socialist painting,” he responded, “too bad for socialism! the pictures of M. Courbet do nothing to render it attractive.” Yet he began and ended his long critique of the Salon harping on Courbet, one of the new barbarians glorifying ugliness and “widening the breach” of the Salon wall.37 Courbet was ultimately passed over in silence by the awards committee, and an outraged Gautier, with rare generosity, wondered how this was possible: Courbet had stirred up the public as well as the artists, and despite his defects his superior qualities and incontestable originality merited a first-class medal just like Antigna.38 Castagnary made it clear that the wild reception of Courbet’s work was overdetermined by the charged political conditions: What! They had dissolved the national workshops; they had conquered the proletariat in the streets of Paris; they had overcome the republican bourgeoisie of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers; . . . They had purged the general election, eliminating by the law of 31 May [1850] three million voters—and yet there were the “vile masses” who had been chased out of politics, reappearing in painting!39

Castagnary recalled that the period was shot through with tension as the right wing of the National Assembly aggressively pursued with Louis-Napoléon the unraveling of the Republic, and nervously felt a “presentiment of an approaching catastrophe.”

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Courbet’s response took the form of a retreat to his native homeland. His three ambitious pictures and the landscapes were all painted in and around Ornans, where he spent the fall and winter of 1849–1850. He converted a space in a family-owned house in Ornans into a workshop and once again plunged into the social and cultural life of the familiar countryside. All the titles of his works in the Salon carry that specificity of locale— for example, Un enterrement à Ornans, Les Paysans de Flagey revenant de la foire (Doubs), and Les Casseurs de pierre (Doubs). The images of the social structure and topography of his native environment were essential to his ongoing self-analysis and to the public expression of his ebullient personality. The Stonebreakers

We know a great deal about the origin of The Stonebreakers, which Courbet began in November 1849, concurrent with his work on Funeral at Ornans. Apparently, the sight of two laborers along the road crushing rocks into gravel stirred him to momentarily suspend effort on his magnum opus and immediately take up what he considered a pendant to his After Dinner at Ornans (fig. 3.8). Near the end of November he wrote his friends Francis and Marie Wey about his encounter on the road, prefacing his description of the circumstances with reflections on his restless mental state in the vicinity of his rural hometown: “If after I left, you were beginning to find me lazy, my God, what would you say now? And you would be right! But I will clear myself heroically, you’ll see. When I am in Ornans, I am in Paris, my thoughts wander. Here especially I enjoy that kind of vague idleness where one does so many things while doing nothing. That is not what I mean by clearing myself, but it is coming.” I take these comments as indicative of his soul-searching at the outset of the most productive period of his life, and that his intention to “clear himself ” signified his perseverance in probing the ideological boundaries that constrained pictorial vision—his “heroic” equivalent to fighting on the barricades.40 He immediately followed these insights with his eyewitness account of his experience on the road: I had taken our carriage to go to the Château of Saint-Denis to paint a landscape. Near Maisières I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on the road. One rarely encounters the most complete expression of poverty, so right there on the spot I got an idea for a painting. I made a date to meet them in my studio the following morning, and since then I have painted my picture. It is the same size as Evening at Ornans. . . . On one side is an old man of seventy, bent over his work, his sledgehammer raised, his skin parched by the sun, his head shaded by a straw hat; his trousers, of coarse material, are completely patched; and in his cracked sabots you can see his bare heels sticking out of socks that were once blue. On the other side is a young man with swarthy skin, his head covered with dust; his disgusting shirt all in tatters reveals his arms and parts of his back; a leather



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3.8  Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849. Destroyed. Formerly Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

suspender holds up what is left of his trousers, and his mud-caked leather boots show gaping holes on every side. The old man is kneeling, the young man standing behind him energetically carrying a basket of broken rocks. Alas! in this class [état], this is how one begins, and that is how one ends.41

Concluding his description with an inventory of their tools—a pannier (for carrying on the back), a hand barrow, a hoe, and a farmer’s lunch pail— Courbet noted the irony of the entire wretched scene taking place in a bright, sunlit landscape, in the middle of the countryside. Significantly, it is precisely at this juncture that he challenged Peisse’s comment on his After Dinner at Ornans, “Yes, Monsieur Peisse, we must degrade art. For too long you have been affirming art that is pomaded and ‘in good taste.’” If anything, The Stonebreakers must be seen as an aggressive encroachment on the ideological boundaries of Salon art and a further extension of Courbet’s self-awareness. The two road menders are in effect the absentees in the After Dinner, the equivalent of Mount’s excluded blacks and Millet’s ostracized gleaners, now come home to demand their place at the table. Some of Courbet’s other remarks in this letter and in subsequent correspondence with Champfleury confirm his heightened sensitivity to the class issue and ability to empathize with those outside his tribe.42 The epiphany upon spotting the two workers—the fact that he suspended other picto

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3.9  Cham, Why Do They Call This Painting Socialistic, Papa? wood engraving from Revue comique du Salon de 1851, 1851.

rial labors to take up the stonebreakers’ theme—hints at some kind of revelation. Courbet’s self-disclosure is most evident in his fascination for the clothing of the laborers, always keeping in mind his own former dandified obsession with the elegance of his figure and setting it off to best advantage with the latest male fashions. At the same time that he is repulsed by their garb, he itemizes their every costume detail just as he did when ordering his own tailored dress. Courbet recognized in the articles of clothing sure signs of class, and delineates them with scrupulous objectivity. Rather than mask the body as in bourgeois clothing, however, these filthy, patched, gaping, and tattered hand-me-downs disclose the wretchedness of working-class physical existence. The wracked and stricken bodies of the stonebreakers—in a letter to Champfleury he adds that the young man suffers from scurvy—are revealed by the clothing in inverse proportion to fashionable concealment or conscious display of status. Courbet noted in his letter to Champfleury that the old man’s coarse trousers “could stand by themselves,” and his attempt to give them the weight and feel of coarse fabric was strikingly apparent to the critics. Contemporary cartoonists had a field day in seizing upon this motif as the salient feature of the painting (fig. 3.9). In his letter to the Weys Courbet wrote in a postscript that he had just purchased a pair of blue leather sabots, suggesting his identification with the rural laborers. Fried sees the nearness of the stonebreakers to the frontal plane as evidence of Courbet’s own bodily investment in the picture’s



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physicality, but I would go further in arguing that this nearness has a social function in representing Courbet’s desire to attach himself corporeally to the bodies of the road menders.43 He told Champfleury that he loved the winter season, a time when “the servants’ drinks are as cool as their masters,’” and he bragged that the local vine-growers and farmers were much taken with his painting, claiming that nothing could “be more true to life.” Thus he delights in the broadening of his audience with an idiom that transcends “art for art’s sake” and communicates to a constituency normally excluded from representation in the institutionalized venues of display. Finally, the letter to the Weys describes the old man as “bent over,” which in French is “courbé,” a pun on the painter’s own last name. These are only tantalizing snippets to be sure, but in their aggregate I believe they are telling indications of Courbet’s increasing class-consciousness in the breakthrough period. Stone-breaking for roadbeds was commonplace in rural areas especially during the off-seasons (after hay-time and harvest) when the primary farm chores had been accomplished and extra income was needed. Rocks were quarried from the side of the roads and crushed into gravel to pave new thoroughfares or repair old ones for the winter weather. The Second Republic also funded roadwork in the countryside to avoid an influx of unemployed peasants into Paris, and the association of this project with the memory of the disastrous National Workshops may have exacerbated the critical response of conservatives to Courbet’s enterprise in 1851.44 During the economic hard times of 1848, the Municipal Council of Chavignolles (Calvados) offered relief to the unemployed by commissioning a branch road built to a local nobleman’s château.45 Courbet noted that he was on the way to the picturesque Château of Saint-Denis to do a landscape when he came upon the road menders, once more indicating his awareness of class oppositions and contradictions. It was clear that from the official perspective, stone-breaking was “make work” activity, a low form of unskilled labor designed to prevent the rural canaille from pillaging and filling the ranks of the “idlers” in town and province. Courbet wanted to observe this painful spectacle by refusing as much as humanly possible to idealize and sentimentalize it, to record it unburdened by bourgeois prejudice. Although shocked reviewers of the 1850–1851 Salon concentrated their commentaries on Funeral at Ornans, the brief comments on The Stonebreakers are nevertheless telling. Geofroy launched his review with this work: M. Courbet says to himself, “What’s the use of seeking out beautiful types that are only accidents of nature and reproducing them according to an artificial arrangement that is never seen in ordinary life?” Art that is made for everyone should represent what everyone sees; the only rule to follow is perfect exactitude. Accordingly, our theorist plants his easel on the side of a highway where road workers are breaking stones. Here is a picture already made, and, for fear



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that a single detail might escape him, he copies the two manual laborers in all their grossness and natural size. The older worker, glimpsed in profile, wears a straw hat and a striped vest with two rows of buttons; he has removed his jacket and kneels with one knee on the ground to work; his shirt is of a very coarse linen and his trousers are patched; finally, he wears sabots, and his dirty heels show through the worn wool stockings. His young companion carries a load of rocks and we see him only from the rear; but this part of his body is not without some important peculiarities: one shoulder strap retained by a single button and a rent in his shirt that reveals his bare shoulder, etc.46

These comments demonstrate Courbet’s capacity to force his critics to meet him on his own ground. Geofroy practically repeats verbatim the description that the painter gave the Weys, including the special emphasis on the clothing. We find over and over again that Courbet’s sensitivity to costume as a social signifier irritated the conservatives for the very reasons that their own ideological attraction to this aspect of his work obligated them to admit their own class-consciousness. He compelled his critics to think and argue his work in political terms, which is precisely what they wished to avoid in their Salon reviews. This is seen in the writer for L’Illustration whose inordinately long section on Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans prompted an apology to his readers. Describing The Stonebreakers as still “another reality,” he continued: Two stonebreakers of the department of Doubs. That’s it! It is a subject with very little appeal. To render it even more unpleasant the artist has suppressed the two heads of the poor laborers, that is to say, the only things capable of preserving the interest of such an empty subject. The standing worker turns his back to us and we see only his nape; the other who kneels has his head hidden under his straw hat. What happens to the principal objects of a painting if they are not treated with the importance that is evidently accorded them, positioned with their relative legitimate value, expressive of a certain truth, and rendered with a vivacity suitable to display the artist’s talent for material execution? Instead of that wan and ambiguous glimmer of light spread throughout the scene, shouldn’t we feel the full effect of sunlight that the painter meant to put there, indicated by the cast shadows that, however, do not sufficiently achieve the aim of making it shine?47

Here again the critic affirms Courbet’s intention to refuse his subject all idealization, although he finds it painful and disturbing to behold. The critic finds Courbet’s clinical detachment intolerable and wants some kind of dramatic lighting scheme and narrativizing concept, pathos, or moral contrast to justify the painter’s choice of subject matter. According to the critic of the Le Moniteur universel, Fabien Pillet, Courbet should be counted among the painters “who reveal a marked predilection for the least civilized of rustic customs and habits.”48 This restated the

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general concern for Courbet’s rejection of idealized forms and content and his seeming preference for the sordid aspects of human behavior and social existence. At the core of this new construction aimed at displacing classic, romantic, religious, and metaphysical interpretations of nature and society was a novel concept of time, an experience in real time opposed to the “timelessness” of classical beauty and spiritual perfection. The old dualism of the timeless and the temporal realms was replaced by the monistic emphasis on an imperfect time-ridden human dimension. Classicists and romantics celebrated the epic and episodic moment, even when their work was based on actuality: David’s Oath of the Tennis Court, Goya’s Third of May, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People are all stage-managed to elevate reality to the level of epic consciousness. The moment chosen is a heroic moment demanding an undivided state of heightened adoration and thralldom, the suspension of critical thought. Similarly, notions of the Beautiful and Divine Perfection presupposed the negation of the consciousness of change and contradiction in pointing to an exalted state. Realism’s focus on the empirical world, however, revised the aims of high art to align it with the scientific and positivist method, providing a sense of concrete time that flattened out climactic historical representation and, by extension, history painting. It was the uninflected present that preoccupied the realists, and in the hands of the radicals realism’s embrace extended to the squalor of life, the social contradictions, and the alienation of labor analogous to Marx’s analysis of modern capitalism. Contrary to the conservatives, Proudhon lauded the work as a successful case study of “socialist painting.” Simply reproducing the realities of the contemporary present was not enough; artists have to touch the consciences of their audiences and make them think. In this light, Proudhon understood The Stonebreakers as an ironic comment on “our industrial civilization, which every day invents marvelous machines to labor, sow, reap, harvest, thresh the grain, grind it, knead, spin, weave, sew, print, manufacture nails, paper, pins, cards; in short, to execute all sorts of jobs, often very complicated and delicate,” but which “is yet incapable of liberating the human being from the grossest, most painful, the most repugnant tasks—the eternal lot of the poor.” Proudhon continued his discussion of modern machines, declaring that they are more skillful than human beings and achieve better results, and once in motion “they replace us with immense advantage.” Machines have only one fault: they do not act by themselves but require people to monitor, control, and even to serve them. But what is there to prevent someone from inventing a machine to crush stones like the one invented to saw them? Proudhon responds that Courbet would have had simply to modify his subject, since the problem of manual labor remains the same and is in fact insoluble. One invention invokes another ad infinitum, but universal mechanization of all tasks in creation is as impossible as a perpetual motion

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machine. One day someone will invent a machine to break stones, but to be of significance to the capitalist it will then be necessary to invent one to extract the stones from the quarry, another to load them, another for the vehicle to transport them, and still another to spread them, and the process goes on without end. Even if we admit the possibility of total mechanization, what would then happen to the suffering laborers who live off these wearisome tasks, and who would then be completely disinherited from society? Thus it is that the human being becomes a slave to the machine, the outcome of human ingenuity. The more mechanized we become, the more we increase servitude, and the grosser the task and the more servile the function the greater is the physical, intellectual, and moral impoverishment of our proletarian slaves. This is the fatal law of labor in a capitalist society with no alternative in sight. Proudhon suggests what he considers the sole remedy, to distribute this heavy task as a public service among all the eligible members of society, either in the form of a duty or paid labor. Outside of that solution there is only endless exploitation, and consequently degradation and disfigurement of the human race. If aesthetic idealism and the fine arts accept and hide servitude as a natural social state, then the rights of the human being and citizen established in 1789 have lost their meaning. Proudhon then asks his reader to guess which of the two laborers in the painting most effectively expresses servitude and poverty, predicting the obvious in the choice of the old man, since youth is better able to tolerate afflictions. But Proudhon writes that this response would be mistaken: The kneeling old man, bent [courbé] over his rude task, who breaks stones on the side of the road with a long-handled hammer, is certainly worthy of your compassion. His immobile body reflects a melancholy that goes straight to the heart. His stiff arms rise and fall with the regularity of a lever. Here indeed is the mechanical or mechanized human being in the state of desolation to which our splendid civilization and our incomparable industry have reduced him.

The old man has at least seen better days, since he has lived; though his present is without illusion and without hope, he has his memories and regrets to sustain him, while the youth will never know the joys of life. Chained before his time to penurious labor, he is already coming apart at the seams; his shoulder is out of joint, his step is enfeebled, his trousers are falling down; uncaring poverty has made him lose his self-esteem and the nimbleness of adolescence. Ground down in the prime of life, he is already half dead. Proudhon then elaborates on the same conclusion reached by Courbet in his letter to the Weys: Thus modern bondage devours the generations in their growth: this is the state of the proletariat. And we speak of liberty, of human dignity! We declaim against the enslavement of blacks, whose status as beasts of burden at least



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protects them against the excesses of pauperism! May it please God that the proletariat may be at least as materially well off as the blacks! Doubtless, it would not be completely fair to judge this great nation of ten million sovereign voters by this sad example; but does it make it any less true that this is one of the shameful aspects of our society, and that there is not one of us, city dweller or peasant, worker or proprietor, who may not one day, through a quirk of fate, see herself reduced to this? The condition of the stonebreakers is that of more than six million souls in France; then boast of your industry, your philanthropy, and your politics!

Proudhon quotes a critic of a rival school of thought who called The Stonebreakers “a masterpiece in its genre.” He accepted this judgment with the qualification that the genre to which the painting belonged had to be considered the most elevated genre of the day, indeed, the only one admissible in contemporary art. He then asked rhetorically what the canvas would need to gain unanimous approval. He answered that it would have to be less real and more traditional. For example, if Courbet loved antithesis and melodramatic contrast like the romantic author Victor Hugo, he would have located the stonebreakers at the entrance of a château; behind the gate, in perspective, a vast and superb garden, and beyond, the master’s mansion with terrace, portico, and marble statues of Venus, Hercules, Apollo, and Diana. Courbet, however, preferred the broad open highway, completely bare, with its emptiness and monotony, which Proudhon thought was preferable. There is where work occurs without diversion, where poverty is unrelieved by holidays, and only dreary solitude reigns. Proudhon concluded his discussion of The Stonebreakers with an affirmation of its broad appeal, noting that some peasants who have viewed the painting wanted to possess it to install it—“guess where?”—on the high altar of their church. He suggested that Hippolyte Flandrin, the student of Ingres famous for his biblical scenes in the churches of Saint-Séverin and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, take a hint from Courbet’s “morality in action” to improve his religious compositions. Here again Proudhon transposes Courbet’s monumental genre paintings to the level of official high art.49 At this point, Proudhon again enters into dialogue with his imaginary middle-class reader as a pretext for spelling out the conditions of a realist sensibility. “Poverty grieves you,” Proudhon declares, and although admitting high tragedy and catastrophic misfortune into the art canon, the readers undoubtedly feel that it is beneath art’s dignity to reproduce everyday suffering. His readers reply that everyone knows that life is not a bed of roses: our hospitals, prisons, asylums, pawnshops, and penitentiaries are constant reminders of our misfortunes. Since pain is more universal that happiness, why confound them? If art has a mission, surely it is to throw a veil of consolation and decency over the misery of the century. Kindly spare us the cruel refinements of “critical art.”

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Proudhon then retorts that this is precisely the error of the critics of realism and the defenders of all previous art movements, who wish to separate that which is intrinsically inseparable: light and dark, spirit and matter, form and substance, beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, art and science/industry, fantasy and conscience, joy in work and illness, freedom and thralldom, life and death, glory and humiliation. They refuse to recognize that human life consists in the union of these binaries, mixed in varying doses. Instead, they have compartmentalized life into a type of God and a type of human being, a type of aristocrat and a type of slave; they have dreamed of one existence of perfection and exalted bliss, and another of eternal damnation and punishment, and they have declared: the first is the Ideal, Paradise, Art; and the second is Reality, Barbarism, Hell. And thus they have proscribed nine-tenths of the human race, reserving for themselves the ideal and condemning all the rest to hard labor. Proudhon rejected these self-serving categories and argued that art must embrace everything at the risk of infamy for the entire human race. Here, I believe, he gives the most succinct definition of realist ambition in the post-1848 era, converting aesthetics into political ideology and expanding the repertoire of the artist to encompass hitherto proscribed themes and forms. Courbet’s art provoked such responses in a tense atmosphere of political transition, which is why the conservatives so resented him at the Salon of 1850–1851. The Moniteur universel reported on 22 February 1851 that the district attorney had seized all the issues of the newspaper Le Vote universel with the article “Aux Paysans, études politiques et sociales” (To the Peasants, Political and Social Studies), and was prosecuting the author and publisher for “inciting hatred and mistrust of one group of citizens against another.”50 The art critic of the government newspaper considered Courbet’s “Franche-Comtois” laborers a representation of the worst form of degraded human being in the countryside, and although this genre was unpleasant to the eye, the artist at least had the merit of “treating it with scrupulous fidelity.”51 In other words, the viewer of Courbet’s painting could get a good picture of the type of rustic ruffians most susceptible to Red propaganda. Max Buchon’s advertisement for Courbet’s dry-run exhibition of his new pictures in Besançon and Dijon in the spring and summer of 1850 (pending the official opening of the Salon) described the two stonebreakers as the alpha and omega, the dawn and twilight, of modern galley-slave [forçats] existence. The old codger with his crude labor, his poverty, and sympathetic physiognomy was not yet the last word in human distress. Indeed, things could get much worse: “If the poor devil had the least thought of turning socialist, he could be envied, denounced, expelled, cashiered. Just ask the local prefect.”52 Buchon’s observation of the old man’s “automatic precision given by long habit” and Proudhon’s mechanical metaphor to clarify the significance of The Stonebreakers echoed the thoughts of Courbet, who described

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the kneeling road mender as “an old machine.” Courbet’s metaphor arose at the moment of observation, for it is built right into the composition, unstructured and artless as it might appear at first sight. (We have already seen that the concealment of the heads of the two laborers impersonalizes their activity as mere motion at work.) Starting with the movement of the youth, who steps off at a diagonal, we read zigzaggedly across the pictorial field from left to right, impelled in part by the absence of any relieving horizon or opening for visual respite. The movement initiated by the angle of the younger worker’s left foot is extended by the diagonal of the hoe leaning against the side of the road, which in turn directs us to and parallels the back of the older man, continues in his upper right arm, and culminates in his raised right forearm and sledgehammer. Thus the two figures are linked in a movement reminiscent of the axes of a piece of machinery, akin to the connecting rods of the wheels of a locomotive. The idea of beginning as one, and ending up as the other, suggests an endless cycle of rotating machinery, the perpetual motion machine dreamed up by Proudhon’s capitalist. As automatons, their lives are predetermined by outside social forces. The pioneer writer on the peasantry, Eugène Bonnemère, hinted at this process in appealing to the privileged classes to alleviate the conditions of the peasantry: You can multiply the schools, you can make education free, but you will have done nothing, absolutely nothing, as long as you have not changed the conditions of the existence of this person who, bent over [courbé] and brutalized on his furrow every hour and every day of his entire life, arrives at the end of his career as ignorant and almost as miserable as at the beginning of it.53

Courbet’s robotic laborers participated in a wider field of discourse than the merely representational, forging a radical political tract as much as a radical artistic manifesto. The allegorizing of modern society as a web of sinister invisible forces ensnaring the helpless individual is parodied in Sue’s Wandering Jew, where the Jesuits, a murderous Javanese cult, and rapacious capitalism are made to possess a common conspiratorial purpose against the commons. The AbbéMarquis d’Aigrigny, mastermind of the Jesuitical conspiracy, describes the power of the Order to transform the individual into an automaton. Once enlisted, the new recruit becomes but a human shell; its kernel of intelligence, mind, reason, conscience, and free will, shriveled within him, dry and withered by the habit of mutely, fearingly bowing under mysterious tasks, which shatter and slay everything spontaneous in the human soul! Then do we infuse in such spiritless clay, speechless, cold, and motionless as corpses, the breath of our Order, and lo! the dry bones stand up and walk, acting and executing, though only within the limits



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which are circled around them evermore. Thus do they become mere limbs of the gigantic trunk, whose impulses they mechanically carry out, while ignorant of the design, like the stonecutter who shapes out a stone, unaware if it be for cathedral or bagnio.

This mechanized existence echoes on a perverse religious level the lives of proletariat men and women beaten down into submission by a pitiless power with mechanical precision. The symbolic incarnation of this proletariat is the perpetual wanderer, the Jewish artisan who mocked Christ and was condemned to roam the world unceasingly. He represented the race of laborers, a race “always slaves, who, like me, go on, on, on, without rest or intermission, without recompense, or hope; until at length, women, men, children, and old men, die under their iron yoke of self-murder, that others in their turn then take up, borne from age to age on their willing but aching shoulders.” Implicit in Sue’s novel and in Proudhon’s analysis of the robot-like Stonebreakers is the notion of alienation soon to be articulated in less fantastic terms by Marx. Actually, the two laborers were alienated in a double sense—from their own drudgery as depicted in the painting and from the spectator’s wish to see them conform to the conventional aesthetic and social code. Social roles once determined transform social relations into the form of a relation between objects. Human relations are replaced by objectlike relations between roles. This is what Marx refers to as “reification,” the state in which the object masters us and the world we have forged turns against us “as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.” The proletariat’s labor ultimately serves to increase the wealth and power of the capitalist, thus reinforcing the conditions of her or his own oppression. Machinery, intended as a means of emancipating human beings from the yoke of animal labor, becomes alienated from their control and winds up exercising power over them. Millet and especially Courbet wanted the viewer to experience the material existence of their subjects by transferring the sense of weight and texture of the external world to the canvas, hence the sheer density of their surfaces. The rough, mortar-like accumulation of pigment (applied by Courbet with palette knife) substitutes for the actual material substance portrayed. Hence the difference between realism and its later offshoot impressionism, which addresses almost exclusively the fleeting effect of light as it falls on matter. The realist’s light effect is composed of broad opaque patches that transform the universe into a mosaic of solid chunks of matter, whereas that of the impressionist is a transparent web of loosely connected brushstrokes. The realist is still involved with the accumulation of empirical detail translated as viscous pigment, whereas the impressionist’s emphasis on the fugitive atmospheric effect ignores the look and scope of cognitive substance.

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The reviewer of the Moniteur universel declared that Courbet’s “bulky and heavyset diggers [terrassiers] in The Stonebreakers perform their task with praiseworthy zeal, but their forms needed to have been modeled more firmly,” and later complained that the execution of Funeral at Ornans was “more rustic than meticulously finished,” here punning on the word rustique which meant both coarse and countrified.54 The bold execution of Courbet’s work in the 1850–1851 Salon implicated him in the sketch-finish debate that had been sharpened by the discussion of the Barbizon painters and then folded into the realist-rural discourse. His unemphatic presentation of his figures called for an overall surface execution that in the eyes of contemporary critics made his forms appear flat and primitivized as in popular prints. But read in the context of his ungainly rural workers, the rough execution reinforced the awkwardness of the first impression and intensified the raw power exuded by the country types. Other reviewers alluded to the “unfinished” surfaces of these works, a characteristic that many of his colleagues likened to pochades, or the most summarily painted sketches. In this sense, Courbet’s work approximated more the landscapist’s étude than the history painter’s esquisse—that is, a study of nature rather than an imaginative composition for a finished tableau.55 Whereas the esquisse depended upon chiaroscuro, a more or less arbitrary arrangement of light and shade, the étude stressed the light values of a natural site. The étude required a certain dexterity to capture the ephemeral light effect and played down the clarity of specific objects in favor of the general ensemble. Thus it was primarily the visual, rather than the structural, elements that dominated the surface of a painting. Instead of relying on the old composition in arbitrary light and shade (as Courbet had done in The Man with the Leather Belt, for example), independents like Corot and Courbet came to accept the actual arrangement of light and shade as the foundation of their pictures, spreading the values over the entire canvas. An artist cannot accept the actual conditions of light as governing the light and shade of his work without extending the same scheme of relations over the whole surface. Otherwise the values would be contrary to empirical fact—a problem detected by Dupays in The Stonebreakers, where the shadows cast by the figures contradict the predominant gray tonality. Despite what the critics perceived as defective drawing, they grudgingly admitted the validity of the atmospheric effect that they nevertheless tried to dismiss by classifying his work as pochades. Yet a certain ambivalence pervades the critical responses in decrying at one and the same time Courbet’s mechanical exactitude and his sketchiness, his accuracy and his slovenliness, a contradiction growing out of the monumental projection of Barbizon-like études. What bothered them was his capacity to convey the sense of the literal weight and texture of objects with an economy of means, thus bolstering the claims of the independent sketchers against the academic and official finishers. He managed

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to establish the look of gravity through the viscosity of his medium while retaining the consistency of the light values, and this technical ambiguity contributed still further to the perturbations in his already confused field of mixed peasant/bourgeois social relations. Funeral at Ornans

3.10  Gustave Courbet, Funeral at Ornans, 1849–1850. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The most hysterical outcry of the critics was reserved for Funeral at Ornans (fig. 3.10). A bigger target than The Stonebreakers, it may have been easier to attack. The size of Funeral at Ornans is twenty-one feet long and eleven feet high and has come down to us with fifty-one life-size and larger-than-lifesize figures (Buchon counted fifty-two in 1850). Courbet’s original title for the work, entered by him in the Salon register, was “Tableau of Human Figures: History of a Funeral at Ornans,” suggesting both his Faustian aspirations for the work and his desire to raise a local incident to the level of history painting. He momentously dubbed it his “declaration of the principles of realism” and elsewhere presented it as the “funeral of romanticism.” It is a canvas that vies in magnitude with the battle scenes of Steuben and Vernet in the Galerie des Batailles, and it strives for similar accuracy in reproducing the site, costumes, accessories, and physiognomies. Instead, however, of depicting military celebrities engaged in heroic combat, it modestly limns a community of relative unknowns ranged sedately in a queue. The event takes place in the new cemetery of Ornans opened in September 1848 on a hill in the stark open countryside outside of the town. (Ornans is unseen on the lower ground of the Loue river valley between



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the spectator and the limestone cliffs on the horizon.) On the left is the Roche du Château, where we see houses in the locality of the Château d’Ornans, a former residence of the dukes of Burgundy, and on the right are the majestic cliffs of the Roche du Mont. Courbet’s narrative seems to hover between an inaugural event or civic ritual and an act of burial: hardly anyone present is mindful of the deceased, and several faces wear expressions of boredom, impatience, and indifference. Even the dog in the foreground, typically a symbol of loyalty and watchfulness, turns his head away from the proceedings. The diversity of expressive states suits the incoherent assembly that mills around without a single vivid formal gesture or dramatic focus to unify them, save for the harsh landscape panorama that encloses them. It may be recalled that Courbet interrupted his work on Funeral in November 1849 to take up The Stonebreakers. I believe that the two are dialectically related, both subjects constituting a working through of Courbet’s unfolding socialist and collectivist ideals. (Courbet always measured his intellectual progress in terms of specific stages or phases connected with peak moments of his career.56) Courbet employed no professional models for his colossal canvas, an unprecedented gesture in an enterprise of this scope. Funeral was literally a community project, as the painter tapped into his immediate district to document what could have been an actual neighborhood event. What most excited the painter in the process of painting the large picture was the local community’s enthusiastic participation in his project. As he wrote Champfleury early the next year: Here models are for the asking. Everyone would like to be in the Funeral. I could never please them all, I would even make quite a few enemies. Those who have already posed are the mayor, who weighs four hundred [pounds]; the priest; the justice of the peace; the cross bearer; the notary; Deputy-Mayor Marlet; my friends; my father; the choirboys; the gravedigger; two veterans of the revolution of ’93, in the clothes of that time; a dog; the deceased and his bearers; the beadles (one of the beadles has a nose as red as a cherry but broadly proportioned and about five inches long, something for Trapadoux to fool with!); my sisters, and other women as well, etc. I had hoped to get by without the two precentors of the parish, but there was no way to do it. Someone warned me that they were offended, that they were the only church people I had not included. They complained bitterly, saying that they had never done me any harm and that they did not deserve such an affront, etc.57

It was as if the individuals of his village were conscious of their mission to body forth for the benefit of the Salon spectator their social and political significance.58 Visually, this common point of reference is shown as a freshly dug open grave in the center foreground, cut off abruptly by the lower framing edge, which seems to extend the physical matter of this focus straight

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into the spectator’s space (or face). Assuming that the serpentine procession of mourners loops around the grave site, this motif would then invoke the viewer’s participation in the interment ceremony and in the community as well. The obsequies are about to commence, as the pallbearers barge into the scene from the left carrying the draped coffin, the curate thumbs the pages of his prayer book, his assistants take their places, and the gravedigger kneels impatiently by the open grave. The lateral disposition of the cortege of mourners and officiants is seconded by the panoramic landscape in the distance, whose projecting cliff lines echo the parallel rows of heads and sustain the tug of the horizontal, frieze-like movement. Courbet chose a funeral ceremony as the unifying motif around which to assemble the members of the provincial community, and to orchestrate a massive group portrait on the scale of both Dutch guild and company portraits and allegorical/historical composite murals such as Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer, Chenavard’s ill-fated Universal Palingenesis cycle for the Pantheon, and Delaroche’s Hemicycle at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Unlike these precedents, however, and even earlier funeral paintings of Christ, the saints, or historical figures glorified in Poussin’s Funeral of Phocion and El Greco’s Funeral of Count Orgaz, which focus on the specific identity of the deceased to enshrine immortality, Courbet’s enormous canvas brings neighbors and relatives to the grave site of an unknown person. By thus insisting on the anonymity of the deceased, Courbet refused any intimation of transcendence or promise of the afterlife. The departed survives only in the memory of those left behind, not in a heavenly ascent or gravestone marker. Courbet’s funeral rite approximates the Jewish doxological prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, in which neither the name of the deceased nor that of relatives is mentioned but instead praise is rendered to God for blessings to the “whole house of Israel” and hope expressed for the speedy establishment of His kingdom on earth. Although we feel a powerful sense of absence of a once-palpable presence, it is experienced through the attraction of the crowd to the yawning grave site. It is the community that endures and who will selectively retain the image of the person mourned, thus insuring a certain version of immortality that will vary from individual to individual. If the deceased’s identity remains undisclosed, every one of the mourners was recognizable and identifiable.59 Courbet’s burial scene is a site of reconciliation and locus of memory—a commemorative event in which the community takes precedence over the individual. This is a scene of public as opposed to private mourning, a communal grief distributed among all the social strata in town and village. Though nothing of consequence seems to be recorded, Courbet’s painting is preeminently political in emphasizing the community in its varied social composition united around a common point of historical memory. Although attempts have been made to identify the defunct, the fact that neither Courbet nor his friends, relatives, and early biographers ever cared

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to do so confirms that the person being buried was always less important to the painter than those who came to bury him.60 Courbet depicted a crosssection of the population of his hometown district rather than a memorial; indeed, his stated attitude to the mourning process at this time attests to a surprising indifference to the dead. Apologizing to the Weys in March 1850 for not writing on the occasion of the death of Francis’s father, Courbet confesses: I don’t know whether I have told you my philosophy toward the dead. First of all, I don’t mourn the dead, convinced as I am that one mourns not for them but for oneself, out of egoism. I would perhaps grieve for them if the life of one man was directly useful to the life of another, but I don’t believe that is the case, for I would not appreciate a man whose existence was based on another. I would not grieve for a man for I would use the time I spent grieving to free myself of him, etc.61

This is a rather bizarre admission and probably overstates the case, but given his reaction to the death of grandfather Oudot less than two years before it may represent his hardened response to the trauma. The callous disregard for the feelings of the Weys may represent Courbet’s strategy for camouflaging a sense of guilt, but it agrees with the attitudes of other realists— Meissonier and the German Adolph von Menzel, for examples—whose capacity to record scenes of death and destruction with cool objectivity depended on clinical detachment and affective distancing from their tragic or horrific aspects. This is an attitude born of the combination of disillusionment and sudden self-knowledge in the failure of the 1848 revolution. In the case of Courbet, the coincidence of the demise of his maternal grandfather—the hero of ’93—with the bafflement of republican hopes in ’48 could only have intensified his letdown. The withholding of emotion (associated with romanticism) and a more “realistic” appraisal of events was related to fear of further disappointment and humiliation. At the same time, Courbet’s declared desire to “free” himself from the influences of others as an alternative to grieving was consistent with his freshly won struggle to unlearn the false ideals inculcated in him since birth. Hence the association of his realist sensibility with the repudiation of conventional bourgeois morality and residual romantic expression. Viewing with detached objectivity the cycle of destruction from 1789 to 1848—the mounting toll of society’s laboring victims, and the social and religious rituals that tried to redeem the unequal distribution of justice—Courbet put on display a pageant of a localized community to disclose the mainsprings of the social mechanism. Like Comte and Marx, Courbet conceived of his work as an expression of the process of historical change. Realism constituted the aesthetic equivalent to positivism in representing the final stage of historical development. In Funeral he depicts aspects of the social role of religion, the conquests of

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natural science, and the possibilities of human progress. His subject allowed him to carefully assemble a microcosm of society which he could classify and to which he could apply a strict empirical approach. As in the case of The Stonebreakers, he could stay within the realm of immediate experience and still contribute to an understanding of the laws governing human affairs. The small-town society comprehensively represented in Funeral served as a test case for realist documentation of historically progressing society, passing from the stages of the rule of priests and exploitative labor to the highest stage of society, when the mind breaks with all illusions inherited from the past, formulates laws based on careful observation of the empirical world, and reconstructs society in accordance with these laws. The clergy—the first estate—are there in full array: they include the bald-headed curate Bonnet at the left dressed in a black, silver-embroidered cope, looking for the right page in his prayer book; his two beadles, JeanBaptiste Muselier and Pierre Clément, wearing the Franche-Comté uniform of flared red cap and scarlet robes edged with black; behind them the church organist, Promayet (father of Alphonse), in white surplice and black cap; two choirboys carrying candle, holy water stoup, and brush; and the cross-bearer, also surpliced, named Colart; and behind him the sacristan, Cauchi, in a tall, black, triangular-shaped toque. Next comes the notables, or prominent citizens of the town, who dominate the central section: the portly mayor, Claude-Hélène Prosper Teste de Sagey, and to his right, occupying the pictorial center, Hippolyte Proudhon (no relation to the philosopher), a well-known lawyer of Ornans, and Courbet’s equally prominent father, Régis, facing the spectator just to the right of the mourner crying into his handkerchief, and behind them Urbain Cuenot, bareheaded, and probably Adolphe Marlet, wearing a top hat. This circle of male figures is completed by the two veteran republicans of ’93, Cardet and Sécretan, the latter garbed in festive eighteenth-century dress including knee breeches, silk stockings, tail coat, and bicorne (cocked hat). He extends his hand, palm upward, toward the open grave, as if to comment on the meaning of death (or the futility of life—“See how it all ends!”). Consistent with Catholic custom, the women form a separate group, and in their mourning cloaks seem to coalesce into a mass of black, relieved only by the whites of handkerchiefs and some lace bonnets. Like the cliff face of Roche du Mont rising above them, they provide a bulwark of support for the community, as well as expressing the collective grief of their households. Above the mayor, the heads of two of the tearful women—Joséphine Bocquin’s ample black hood swells to a crescendo—crown all the rest, bringing up the extreme rear of the cortege and projecting directly into the rock face of the Roche du Mont. Farther to the right, we come upon “Mère Gagey,” the craggy-faced woman in white bonnet fifth from the far right and looking away from the central group. She was the spouse of Claude François Gagey, Courbet’s old stonebreaker, and her head is located close to the rocky mass in the background. Courbet’s sisters are the

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three figures in black hoods in the foreground just right of Sécretan: Juliette covers her mouth with her handkerchief, Zoé’s face is buried in her handkerchief, and Zélie bows her head pensively. Their mother, née Sylvie Oudot, also wearing a black cloak, is at the extreme right, holding the hand of a young daughter of the mayor’s family and thus sharing the load of the communal grief beyond her familial duties. Courbet’s spread of the social strata of the town is complicated in this ritual, since many of the rustic participants are endimanchés, dressed in their Sunday-best or mourning clothes, blurring the differences in rank and station. In addition, even artisan and peasant members of the tiny population literally wore more than one hat in having to serve double functions in times of emergency and on special occasions, or, as in the case of the rural stonebreakers, to supplement their meager incomes. For examples, the beadles, Muselier and Clément, were by occupation vine-grower and shoemaker respectively, and the cross-bearer, Colart, was also a vintner. The most remarkable of the participants, the gravedigger kneeling on one knee beside the gaping cavity, Antoine Joseph Cassard, was another vine-grower who supplemented his income by digging graves. The brawny peasant gravedigger cuts a curious figure at the side of his excavation; isolated from the rest by his kneeling position and disengagement from the mourning process, head erect and alert, hand authoritatively flexed on his upraised thigh, he eyes with impatience the clumsy pallbearers who bulldoze their way through the crowd and get a severe look from a jostled choirboy. Although he alone kneels—the quintessential symbol of inferiority in nineteenth-century genre painting—his commanding torso and robust physique surmount the conventional designation and invest him with a singular dignity and authority that surpasses even that of the clergy and civic officials. In the process of excavating the grave, Cassard has disinterred the skull and bones of an ancient inhabitant of the region—perhaps suggestive of the life-and-death cycle of the communal theme. Buchon, in a revision of the text of his Besançon ad for the exhibition at Dijon, was singularly drawn to the gravedigger, who reminded him of “the old dances of death,” of the skeletal figure of Death personified, who “forced kings, popes, emperors—all the great men of the world and all the oppressors of the poor— to pirouette to his tune, whether they liked it or not.”62 Buchon probably had in mind Sand’s prologue to La Mare au diable, which incorporated Holbein’s woodcut series into her realist-rural discourse, but instead of deploying the danse macabre to point up the hardships of rural life, he affirms the image as an instrument of radical thought. Calling the gravedigger “the gatekeeper to the hereafter,” Buchon next makes an unexpected connection between him and the old stonebreaker, coyly concluding: “In the mind of the painter he might well be nothing but the psychological antithesis, the counterbalance [to the stonebreaker]—I would say almost the avenger.” This is a significant statement from

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Courbet’s friend and compatriot, who is depicted in startling profile at the left rear of Funeral, just above the pallbearer’s hat. His head too is held high and, also like the gravedigger, he seems to stand apart from the others. The connection with the old stonebreaker is apt: the kneeling gravedigger with his shovel, just glimpsed at the bottom edge of the picture, partially mirrors the other in pose and costume. Although their legs are reversed, the position is identical, with both kneeling on improvised pads to cushion the knee and both wearing the peasant vest and full-sleeved chemise. The stalwart gravedigger operates as a kind of regenerated counterpart of the crushed stonebreaker. Although I accept Lindsay’s interpretation of this statement as a spiritual inversion of earthly status in which the last shall be first, I do not believe that it is meant to condemn the social body depicted. This is a dynamic aggregate that stands behind the gravedigger, an image of a society forced in spite of itself to undergo the process of social change. Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie inadvertently produces “its own gravediggers,” a reference to the inevitability of the proletariat’s success. Courbet shows a social resurrection in progress, beginning with the class heretofore bowed to the earth in brutish humiliation; it is fitting that its emblematic representative kneels on one knee, ready to rise at the appropriate moment. This ironic twist to the funeral ritual is expressed in the curious position of Colart, who, holding up the paradigmatic symbol of the resurrection, looks outward at the spectator with a wily glance. A key figure in the composition, his strong vertical crucifix relieves the dominant horizontality of the composition and acts as an anchoring mechanism. Narratively, however, he behaves rather inappropriately for the sacrosanct porte-croix. He functions akin to those shrewd bystanders in nineteenthcentury American genre who exchange a visual wink with the spectator, thereby commenting on that aspect of the pictorial narrative unseen to its other participants. Colart’s disruptive glance ironizes the resurrection as a social rather than a religious phenomenon, affirming further that its reference is to the overburdened living rather than to the liberated dead. This is the meaning of the presence, at the extreme left, of grandfather Oudot, who peers over the assembly as an interested spectator. It makes no sense to see his marginalized physical presence as a resurrection in the spiritual sense. Instead, as a historical commentary on the renewal and progress of society, he aptly fulfills the function of role model and witness. He corroborates the class origins of Courbet and his family, and evokes memories of his participation in the political and social struggle that surmounted them. The crowd at the funeral operates as a synecdoche of human history realizing itself in the victory of the proletariat. The deceased republican of ’93, seconded by still living veterans of the first revolution who tower over the grave site, brackets the progressive evolution of French society from 1789 through 1848. The impulse given to the deliverance of the working classes by Oudot’s generation still resonates through the society,

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3.11  Master Mason’s Tableau with Symbols of the Legend of Hiram, nineteenth century.



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expressing itself in the uplifted heads of Buchon and Cassard. Although the accomplices of slavery and despotism still exist, the end of their reign of terror is imminent. When Courbet shared with Bruyas his plans for a counter-exhibition in 1855, he applied the metaphor of the gravedigger to himself to symbolize the destruction of the old order: “So we will lay our plans and proceed to this great burial. You have to admit that the role of gravedigger is a fine role, and that sweeping the earth clean of all that rubbishy jumble is not without its charms.”63 Grave-digging, stone-breaking, rebuilding on new foundations—these are terms that carry a frankly Masonic significance, and in Funeral there is a striking piece of evidence that confirms this interest.64 The pall spread over the coffin is decorated with black crossbones and a series of droplets or “tears” near the trimming, a wellknown Masonic combination symbolizing the death of Hiram, the officially recognized architect of King Solomon’s temple (fig. 3.11). Legend had it that three journeymen working for Hiram, impatient to progress to master status, tried to wrest from him the sacred words of initiation to this level. Each one waited for him at one of the three doors of the temple, and when he refused in turn to divulge the secret they wounded him mortally with the tools of the trade: square, ruler, and mallet. They then buried his remains outside the town and planted a branch of the acacia tree to mark the spot. The restaging of this legend is central to the ritual of elevation to the degree of Master Mason, as the journeyman undergoes a kind of psychodrama representing the chief scenes in the murder of the architect. This myth turns on the ritual of death and resurrection, with the three blows representing Hiram’s physical, emotional, and mental death, and his rebirth at the same time in an improved body, heart, and mind. The allegorizing of Hiram is pervasive at the highest level of Masonry and focuses on the skull and crossbones as emblematic of the physical death of Hiram; tears (usually silver) symbolizing lunar rays or the loss of the solar (corporeal) influence; and a Latin cross signifying immortality. The appearance of these three symbols in close proximity in Courbet’s work complicate the funereal theme with a Masonic signification that transforms it into a performative ritual. Although Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851 would usher in a burgeoning of secret societies forced to go underground in the countryside, Freemasonry flourished openly in the short-lived republican era. The government itself was largely composed of Masons and contributed to radical realism continued

its solidarity during the early Provisional phase. Many of Courbet’s friends in this period were Masons or would become initiated in the near future, including Proudhon, Champfleury, and Bruyas. No documented proof of his initiation exists, but enough visual evidence has been accumulating to attest to intimate contact with Masonic ideals. Given the intimate links between Masonry and the revolutionary tradition in France, it is possible that the presence of this material in Funeral pays homage to grandfather Oudot and represents a further development of French society in the direction of fraternal association. The gravedigger and his shovel (actually we see only the blade, which could pass for a mason’s trowel) and the stonebreaker hammering away the impurities (the pierre brute) of his own existence may then be seen as shapers of the new unity among all creatures. Despite the many novel features of the work and its social and political significations, it still may not be clear as to how such a work could have aroused the Parisian critics to violent discussion in 1851. One question especially drove them up the wall: was Courbet serious or was he trying to put one over on them? Some of the motifs in Funeral struck them as grotesque and primitive, more suitable to popular imagery and satire than to Salon art. The ruddy faces and especially the cherry-colored noses of the two beadles chimed with their uniforms, together with the perceived stiffness and flatness of the figures, impressed reviewers as anticlerical caricature. As we have already seen, caricature and realism went hand in hand in dealing with the sordid aspects of nineteenth-century society, but Courbet’s monumental display of everyday ugliness overtaxed critical tolerance. Clément de Ris noted Courbet’s urge “to do the ugly thing” and refused to be dragged into a discussion of Funeral at Ornans, which he could “not take seriously.”65 Dupays of L’Illustration had the most to say about the picture, which inspired a long disquisition on the decline of classical idealism and the fatal tendency of modern art to “enter into alliance with the ugly.” Funeral manifested such a “harsh prejudice, an affectation of trivial or grotesque ugliness so offensive, that it seemed exclusively aimed at shocking us with a system.” (The critics’ repeated use of “system” to describe Courbet’s intention was a coded rebuke of his radical agenda.) On this level, he felt compelled to address the picture, but it irritated him to hear that it was causing commotion in artistic circles as an art “of the people”—grandiose words too frequently abused in the present epoch and fraught with danger. The reviewer noted that After Dinner should have warned him, for once again Courbet exaggerated the dimensions of his subject and failed to harmonize his color scheme. He wondered what the artist had in mind with all these grotesque singularities. One thing Courbet made abundantly clear, however, with all his bizarre motifs, he did not aim “to please.” Dupays next provided a detailed description of the painting, describing the class makeup of the gathering as “half peasant, half bourgeois”—different from the previous year when he characterized the individual figures in After

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Dinner as half-and-half. He perceived in the long file relatives, friends, and indifferents, all pressed closely together in great confusion, conforming to the reality of a funereal event but acting contrary to the aims of art, which presupposed a tasteful selective process: The types of physiognomies are the most vulgar imaginable; for the most part they appear to be no more than portraits, which lowers the level of the work even more as a composition. It would seem that this is one of those pictures where one groups, as much as possible, the members of an extended family desiring to have their portraits reunited in the same space. Finally, in the midst of this terribly uninteresting crowd, the two beadles distinguish themselves by their grotesque look and their drunkard’s faces, which, like the dazzling red of their robes and toques, clash with the black and white that dominates the rest of the picture. Why these comical caricatures among this sadness?66

Geofroy of the Revue des deux mondes agreed that the heads of the men and women are either so “insignificant or repugnant” that they fail to inspire interest: If these are family portraits, leave them in Ornus [sic]. For those of us who are not of Ornus, we need something more to hold our interest. What is necessary to awake in the spectator is the natural feeling aroused by such an event in reality; now this is not exactly the result achieved by your grotesque caricatures. We will scarcely weep in front of this burial, and this certainly proves that the verity is not always true.67

Pillet of the Moniteur universel more or less repeated these ideas, but as a writer for the government newspaper he could accept the grotesque portrayals as authentic images of that hostile portion of the countryside allying itself with the Reds: Let us give credit to the artist, where credit is due: if the heads of his peasants are generally ugly and negligently modeled, if the flesh tones are not true, there is at least in the physiognomies, as in the demeanor of these villagers in their Sunday best, a sort of rustic naiveté which does honor to the observant attitude of the artist.68

Courbet’s able defender, Proudhon, denounced the critics for treating the work as gross caricature, but he had to admit that “the contrast between the figures and the pious motif that unites them is of such violence” that it would take a long time for the public to appreciate it. Of all life’s events, Proudhon continued, the one that lends itself least to irony and satire is the one that terminates it, death. If anything must remain sacred on this plane of existence, for both the believer and the unbeliever, it is the last moments, the solemn farewells, the graveside ritual for the deceased.

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How then was it possible for Courbet to take pleasure in ridiculing such a scene and in making its actors play the fool? It is all the more remarkable and indeed, sacrilegious, that the event takes place among the simple peasantry in the religious atmosphere of a small town: Look at the gravedigger with the heavy, brutish face; the impious and mischievous choirboys; these pimple-nosed beadles, who, for a few sous, have left their vineyards to come and participate in the funereal drama; at these priests, jaded with funerals as much as with baptisms, rushing through with a distracted air the indispensable De Profundis: what a sad and distressing spectacle! A shameful sight to spread before the eyes, is it not?

So who would be interested in such a work? What is its proper niche? Surely not in a church, where it would be an insult; not in a school, a town hall, or a theater. Even an eccentric man of leisure who might wish to exhibit it for the gaze of the curious would hesitate to display it in his living room. Given the lack of moral purpose in this work, what is the rationale for its existence? Proudhon answers that this criticism is precisely the painter’s justification. Anyone who has ever attended a modern funeral and observed its proceedings knows that French society has long ago abandoned the sublime poetry of ancient Christian burial rites. The French have lost faith in prayers and ridicule the idea of a hereafter, and the death of a human being is considered on the same level as the death of an animal. Despite all the outward display of churchly pomp and decorum, the dead are treated as ciphers. All the old signs of immortality, the ceremony, the marble, the crosses, and the inscriptions, have been emptied of their traditional meaning. It would suffice to simply order a dustcart from the police to remove the corpse to the cemetery. It is this perverted development in modern society that Courbet wished to lay bare—excepting the authentic tears of the women. All the rest is a joke and a sacrilege. Courbet proves once again to be as profound a moralist as he is a painter, holding up a mirror to the brute facts of French existence. By offending the outworn ideal, he calls his fellow countrymen back to their authentic dignity. If Funeral is not flawless, at least it is salutary and original, and it would be judged prodigious if people had an ounce of feeling for art and modern hearts and souls were not corrupted.69 Proudhon’s interpretation plays down the communal theme in favor of the work’s apparent anticlericalism, thereby in effect agreeing with the general commentary but taking a more positive view of what most reviewers condemned as negative. Nevertheless, he does imply that the funereal rite functions as a rallying point for understanding modern society, even if for its baser aspects. Funerals, then as now, assumed a class dimension in the period, with clear distinctions made between those of the rich and those of the poor. Most poor people were buried in pauper’s or common graves, and the rising cost of funerals was a point of sore contention by radical

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pamphleteers. Since the uprising at the funeral of Lamarque in 1832, it was noted that socialists used the assemblies at obsequies as a platform to launch political demonstrations.70 Courbet’s manifestation of anticlericalism within the context of a funereal rite was understandable from the perspective of the church’s discriminatory practices. For example, in Sue’s Le Juif errant, two funerals take place the same day at the church of Saint-Méry; in the first a couple of distracted choristers, wearing soiled surplices, chant prayers with a sullen air around a plain pine coffin, attended only by a sobbing old man and miserably clad child. Neither the beadle nor the sacristan put on their robes, and they yawned with impatience during the entire ceremony. That same morning the funeral of a wealthy donor also took place, and this time the numerous clergy of the parish turned out in full procession with their dazzling robes and brilliant uniforms, and a team of choristers wearing fresh white surplices sang out in thunderous unison. Critics consistently responded to the male fashions in Funeral, mocking the pretentious airs of the rural bourgeoisie and the vine-growers in their Sunday best. Clothing was a critical marker of class status in this period, and we have already seen to what extent Courbet himself experienced the pressures of the mania for the fashionable. Dress as status symbol is always a tangible sign of economic and social change, signifying a society in a state of transition and the perception of new possibilities. The comments on the black coats and parade of the rural social structure showed Courbet’s ability to heighten Parisian consciousness of class differentiation in the countryside, again calling attention to the political potential of the provinces. Champfleury’s defense of the picture emphasized the way in which the bourgeois aspects of the work, especially the male costume, indirectly reinforced the issue of class differentiation in town and country. He wrote: “As for the alleged ugliness of the bourgeois of Ornans, he has not exaggerated anything; it is the ugliness of the province as opposed to the ugliness of Paris.” He jeered at his contemporaries, unable to appreciate modern dress and ignorant of the fact “that the modern costume is in harmony with modern physiognomy, and that the fancy frills of Watteau would make us look more ridiculous than Cassandre [a commedia dell’arte character].” In Courbet’s work, the “simplicity of the black costumes is akin to the grandeur of parliaments in red robes by Largillière. It is the modern bourgeoisie, full-length, in all its ridiculousness, its ugliness, and its beauty.”71 These comments may be traced to Baudelaire’s conclusion to his Salon review of 1846, in which he pleads for a recognition of the beauty and native charm of contemporary garb. The black dress coat and frock coat is the necessary fashion for “our suffering age, which wears the symbol of perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders.” This clothing not only possesses a special political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public

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soul—an immense cortege of pallbearers. Even the peasant dresses up for a funeral in his black Sunday best—hence funereal black is the common denominator of the modern male.72 Courbet faced up to his community without flinching at the sight of its absurdities, contradictions, and ugliness. The way we describe society dictates our ideological position, and in Courbet what we see is a community undergoing a process of change, carefully spelled out in the differentiation of personalities and social types and in the lack of internal cohesion. Typically, a recurrent activity like a funeral ceremony helps maintain structural continuity within social life, but in this instance Courbet seizes upon it as an occasion to disrupt that continuity by breaking with its protocol. He confounds in varying degrees the codes of beauty and ugliness assigned to the different social levels, spreading traits of deformity and coarseness egalitarian-like among all ranks in the countryside. If physically the gravedigger fits the gross stereotype of the rustic, he is also positioned as the most magisterial figure in the composition. Courbet reorganizes his community on canvas for the purpose of showing its imminent dissolution in actuality. The provincial remnant of organic feudalism is simultaneously rent by atomistic capitalism and healing socialism. Courbet breaks up his family and disperses its members through the crowd, thereby politicizing it through identification with a social constellation transcending his immediate tribe and social class. The community rests on no clear-cut hierarchy or political authority: the sacredness of the ecclesiastical tradition is questioned and the legal authority in the person of the mayor and his adjoint are lost among the mass of mourners. Courbet shrewdly exploits a funeral rite as the pretext for the reconciliation of the diverse constituencies of this society, for the funeral, like the Sunday dress, equalizes its participants and temporarily suspends the effects of the division of labor. Dupays called it “the love of the ugly in Sunday dress, all of the trivialities of our disgraceful and ridiculous modern costume taken seriously.”73 The worker/peasant, whom the system daily impoverishes and reduces to a machine, takes his place at the interment as assistant to the clergy, as symbolic bridge between revolutions, and, ultimately, as the sturdy gravedigger who embodies the future. The ceremonial occasion and the funereal costume diminish the distance between town and countryside, between the urban and the rustic, so that the only difference that remained was the degree of ugliness. Funeral at Ornans exemplified the realist-rural discourse carried to its logical conclusion, depicting the rural world as being as much a political and social mess as its cosmopolitan counterpart. It might be said as well that Courbet’s small rustic society was realizing itself as part of a larger constellation, evolving from the local to the national and fulfilling Rousseau’s conception of the “general will.” Thus it is altogether unsurprising that the theme troubled middle-class art critics for one reason or another. While Louis-Napoléon’s regime was gradually suppressing republican innova

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tions and trying to achieve a disciplined social order, Courbet presented an uncontrollable community with a seeming penchant for troublemaking. Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (Doubs)

Almost as imposing as Funeral and Stonebreakers, Courbet’s Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair similarly excited howls of protest and lamentations on society’s inevitable lapse into barbarism. The outraged Dupays claimed to see in it an extension of the author’s “systematic exposition of vulgar realism,” and his deliberate attempt “to disabuse us at one fell swoop of all our rural fantasies, to dispel forever the [Horatian musing] O rus, quando te [ego] aspiciam?—Oh countryside, when can I behold you?” And he continued: “It is possible that on the day of the fair the highways out of Flagey are charged with figures as decidedly disagreeable as the ones we see here; but then it is necessary to pass over them and return another day for a better choice.”74 A parody of a rural religious pilgrimage, Peasants of Flagey—another view along the highways and byways of Courbet’s hometown region—depicts a parade of rustics trudging home with their commodities and newly purchased animals after a long day at the fair in Salins (fig. 3.12). The prominence of the animals indicates Courbet’s fascination for the territory heretofore reserved for animaliers such as Troyon and especially Rosa Bonheur, whose popular image of an ox-drawn plow, Ploughing in the Nivernais, was purchased by the government in 1849. (Of course, Dupont’s song of Les Boeufs still enjoyed an immense vogue, and some of its rustic humor may be 3.12  Gustave Courbet, Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, 1855 version. Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon.



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reflected in Courbet’s “deux grands boeufs” at the left of the picture, who return the spectator’s gaze.) Courbet’s obvious relish in portraying this menagerie created a memorable impression on Salon goers, seen in the contemporary caricatures of the painting that cast the subject as a procession of stuffed animals and toys. (The picture that exists is actually a later version, with a few changes, most notably the woman carrying the basket on her head, who originally was located at the far right.) The figure in the right foreground leading a pig by a long cord tied around its hind leg impressed itself so vividly on Thomas Couture’s imagination that he satirized the realist by showing a painter in rough peasant costume seated on a classical head and sketching a severed pig’s head (fig. 3.13). The critic Geofroy sneered at Courbet’s identification of the locale and the indigenous natives: What does it matter to us . . . whether they come from Flagey or Pontoise? But it is necessary to be precisely true: it is definitely Flagey (department of Doubs) from whence they come; one has a blouse, the other a suit and a beaver hat. Good heavens! I almost forgot to mention that the latter [sic] is leading a pig by a cord around the right hind leg. It is not clear who has the most gauche demeanor here, the human beings, the oxen, or the pigs. 3.13  Thomas Couture, The Realist, 1865. Crawford Municipal School of Art, Cork, Ireland.



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Actually, it is the rider with the blouse who wears the beaver hat, and he is Régis Courbet, the artist’s father and mayor of Flagey, accompanied by his farmhands, servants, and neighbors. Régis on horseback occupies the compositional center, his tall hat strongly silhouetted against the twilight sky. Although depicted as a person of authority, he wears the peasant smock, reminding us that Courbet’s father worked his own land in concert with his hired hands. The young rider alongside Régis looks back to exchange a smile with one of the two women following behind, one of whom leads a bull by the horn, as the other, a neighbor named Josette d’Arbon, brings up the rear with a basket of goods balanced on her head. On the right, walking along the side of the road, the odd character walking the pig wears a hodgepodge of bourgeois and country clothing— including both peasant vest and black frock coat—castoffs perhaps picked up at the fair. His left hand grasps the strap of an oil keg on his back, while his right holds both an outlandish cotton umbrella and the pig’s leash. A kind of peasant chiffonnier or junk collector, this large-scaled figure also flouts conventional perspective in moving across the picture plane counter to the dominant diagonal movement. Although coming up abruptly as he does adds to the feeling of an exodus, his idiosyncratic manner has an ungainliness reminiscent of the eccentrically clad figures of the Munich painter Carl Spitzweg—The Poor Poet with his umbrella and sundry accessories especially comes to mind—whose satires of bourgeois costume were themselves inspired by contemporary French caricaturists. Of the three major pictures exhibited in the Salon of 1850–1851, this has always been considered the least worthy of extensive analysis. Yet Proudhon awarded it pride of place in his aesthetic treatise, using it as his quintessential test case in defining realism and art’s social purpose and putting it in opposition to his bête noir of inauthentic representation—the “decked out” Harvesters of Léopold Robert. In Peasants of Flagey there is not the least bit flattery or posturing, not the slightest glimmer of an “ideal figure.” For Proudhon everything in that work was “true, taken directly from nature,” painted with so much naiveté and sincerity that we are tempted to accuse the painter of merely substituting a daguerreotype for a work of art. But if we pause long enough before the work to get past this “realism of vulgar appearances,” we would soon sense that hidden beneath this vulgarity is “a depth of observation which I believe is the essence of art.” Proudhon begins his reading of the picture by placing the scene a little before 1830, during the time of the Restoration or “at least thirty years after the revolution.” Next he describes the characters, beginning with the man in the foreground, who evidently wore breeches and a three-cornered hat in the original, and then comments that the younger peasant on horseback was turned toward a young girl in the rear of the company. He agreed that at first glance none of this seemed to hold anything of strong interest, accustomed as most viewers were to paintings of exalted religious scenes, ancient history and mythology, or Shakespearean drama, and that it might

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even strike beholders as a tavern sign or an item destined for the flea market. Yet these seeming banalities concealed a significant statement. Proudhon returned to the man leading the pig, whom he claimed could be defined by his clothing. He was actually a small village landholder already anxious about his winter provisions in the springtime. He represented one of the volunteers who heeded his country’s call in 1793 and fought on the Rhenish front, where he took up smoking. Having returned from his military campaigns, he resumed his rustic life and no one who saw him would ever guess him to be a hero of the Republic. He went to the fair first of all to do his shopping, and then to cash his pension check earned in the war against the émigrés. If memories of the revolution are little to his taste, however, the stubbornly opinionated fellow preserves even greater rancor against the ancien régime, and come the July Days of 1830 he will be among the first to rally to the tricolor flag against the priests and the nobles. The mature man riding the horse is a rich peasant, mayor of his commune, the chief of a major farming operation. He is a notable in the community who, beneath the blouse, knows how to preserve his official status, speaking little and with discretion, professing moderate opinions, and couching his responsibility in the trappings of superior authority. The serious and reserved demeanor of our mayor betrays the positivist outlook of a satisfied rustic, a man of order, proud of the beauty of his horses, and who, as a privileged elector, considers it beneath his dignity to vote with the opposition. He is accompanied by his son, whom he has just secured against the risk of conscription, and who, on his side, has not the slightest intention of playing hero. No one is less avid of medals and military honors than the French peasant. The youth exchanges a smile with the peasant woman walking behind: is it his fiancée? No, the fiancée of the mayor’s son would never travel alone on foot, lost in the crowd. Neither is she his mistress; in the marriage practice, the Franche-Comté peasant moves in a measured tread; a mismatch is as antipathetic to him as it would be to a bourgeois or noble. As to free love, he thinks twice about it: he dreads the potential scandal and its disadvantages, and it is certain that he would never advertise his passion. As much as he might appear to be flirtatious, it is certain that there is nothing to it. On her side, the young woman, even though she pays him the honor of returning his smile, would never dream of a marriage out of her class. Proudhon sees all this as an authentic image not only of the peasantry of Franche-Comté, but of the French peasantry generally thirty or forty years removed from the revolution, in one of any number of typical scenes of provincial life. Courbet’s types may disappoint lovers of Robert’s more agreeable Harvesters, but they have the virtue of representing the stock out of which “our fathers emerged and on which our future posterity depends.” It is indeed France’s last bastion of regenerative potential in the declining state. Here is rustic France, with its indeterminate humor and

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positive outlook, its simple language, its gentle passions, its unemphatic style, its thought more down to earth than in the clouds, its mores equidistant from democracy and demagoguery—a portrait of a once healthy and happy juste milieu consistently betrayed and exploited by the reigning authority and whose morals are now as corrupted as those of urban, industrialized France. Thus “Courbet’s Country” and its precious values represent a world threatened with extinction, and in documenting it for posterity the painter rose to the stature of the Old Masters. Proudhon concluded that Courbet’s work would one day be worth one hundred times all the fantasies of David, Delacroix, and Ingres put together.75 No doubt Proudhon went over the deep end in propounding his fantastic interpretation of the work; setting Courbet’s scene in some idealized recent past is surely a figment of his wildest imagination. One of Courbet’s early biographers who knew the painter hints at his repudiation of Proudhon’s zany explanation.76 Nevertheless, Courbet carried on extensive written and personal exchanges with the philosopher in the course of his research on the book and Proudhon—though clearly not bound by them—was therefore privy to at least some of the artist’s intentions. Some of Proudhon’s narrative details resonate with the known facts of Courbet’s family. His father was mayor of Flagey and politically more conservative than Courbet’s grandfather, the old veteran of 1793. Although Gustave was the only son in his family and would have been too young to serve as the gallant swain in a narrative set around 1830, Régis did secure his son against conscription and it is true that Gustave detested military jingoism and battlefront heroics. This adds up to a scenario akin to the Funeral, where Courbet links the generation of the revolution with that of the present. As Rubin argues, Proudhon’s narrative declares the ideals associated with the old rural world as the source of moral and physical renewal. Proudhon envisions a bright, new France where all of the marvels predicted by Fourier have been realized. But first the people have to be instructed in science, history, in the cult of justice, and in the true joys of work and of association. Responsible intellectuals should give up their bohemian habits, engage in prolonged study, immerse themselves for ten to fifteen years in mechanical works and in business projects before addressing the public; certify their reason by their labors, produce late in life, and not indulge in literature, philosophy, and the arts until after forty or fifty years have transpired. Under these conditions, the long transition traced by the Renaissance, the Reform, and the French Revolution will have ended and regeneration will be complete.77 Proudhon thus used Courbet and the realist-rural discourse to promote his own agenda, and this meant taking certain liberties with the material when necessary to make it conform to his program. What is significant is that the philosopher, who admitted his ignorance in matters of art, could find in Courbet’s work a link to his radical social and humanitarian thought.

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Akin to Baudelaire’s defense of the poetry of Pierre Dupont, Proudhon perceived Courbet’s coarse and awkward portrayal of country types in Peasants of Flagey as a breath of fresh air in art and in life—a wholesome respite amid the general corruption in modern urban France. Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire

3.14  Gustave Courbet, Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire, 1850– 1851. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

Courbet began an immense canvas, Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire, after his return to Paris in the summer of 1850, but he abandoned it before completion for political reasons sometime in 1851 (fig. 3.14). It is his only large-scale urban scene (twelve by eighteen feet), and that it follows so soon his major rural subjects is probably no coincidence. If he had intended to displace academic history painting with monumental genre, he now strategized against the sacrosanct category by substituting domestic firefighting for classical and modern battle scenes. One obvious clue to Courbet’s intention is the pun on the French word for fireman, pompier, and the insider’s jeering term l’art pompier to designate pompous classical Salon works whose heroes wore metal helmets resembling those of modern firefighters. On a deeper level, however, he was also expressing an antimilitaristic position in eulogizing civilians whose courage was the equal of any warrior, past and present. I see the mobilized firemen as covert representatives of the metropolitan citizens who took up arms against the coup d’état. Nochlin has suggested a connection between the subject and Pierre Dupont’s song L’Incendie, chant des pompiers, published in 1851.78 Dupont



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explained his song as “a kind of military march for the use of fire departments, these true soldiers of the peace, who confront fires with as much courage as our armies, but whose acts are too often little noted or forgotten.” His verses sustain this central idea: “Our firemen, peaceful soldiers / Who also know how to conquer or die.”79 Courbet took over this idea but politicized it, perhaps in response to Antigna’s L’Incendie, which showed in the Salon of 1850 and was awarded the medal for realism that Gautier felt should have gone to Courbet (fig. 3.15). Antigna’s painting depicts an impoverished family trapped by fire in their attic chamber, and focuses on their terror in the face of impending tragedy. Representations of the poor could be raised to the level of serious painting when enfolded into the category of the sublime, and not surprisingly, critics positioned Antigna as a realist alternative to Courbet. Courbet’s response is to send for help to put out the fire and rescue the destitute family that Antigna would risk for the sake of Salon honors. As in Funeral, he organizes a social collectivity around a specific incident, in this case the sounding of a fire alarm to which a brigade of firemen hastily respond. Although the regimented units pulling the fire wagon with its pumps and hoses dominate the composition, they are flanked by the real protagonists of the picture: on the right, an artisan in his smock at the side of the chief fire officer and anxiously summoning his help, and on the left a working-class woman—presumably the artisan’s wife, who looks across the picture in his direction—lifting her skirt in preparation to rush

3.15  Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigna, The Fire, 1850. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans.



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alongside the team of firemen. Together they lead the way to the location of the blaze and the officer directs his team according to their pleas. The woman carrying an infant in her left arm while another child clutches at her dress bears a striking resemblance to the panic-stricken mother in Antigna’s picture. Courbet also sustains the class context by depicting at the far right a bourgeois couple who show little concern for the situation and coldly withdraw from the scene. Courbet chose the fireman as his paradigmatic type in the representation of urban realism as a sign of the heroism in everyday life. The romantic conflagrations were typically inspired by biblical or infernal sources, but now the representation of fire need not be associated with apocalyptic visions but with catastrophic scenes of everyday life. Fires were commonplace in the town and country, especially within the crowded Parisian slums. Antigna depicted one such scene as high tragedy, whereas Courbet chose to exemplify social solidarity with the poor. The vicious French military suppression of the Roman Republic in 1849 may have further stimulated Courbet to displace heroic combat in the field to the daring actions of firemen in the civil domain. The officer in the picture was the actual supervisor of the fire station off the rue Saint-Victor at 24, rue de Poissy, and he arranged for the alarm to be sounded one evening to give Courbet a glimpse of the proceedings at first hand.80 As it turned out, this officer, Victor Frond, was a radical republican who rallied his firehouse to resistance against the coup d’état in December 1851. What happened to him may explain Courbet’s subsequent abandonment of the picture. Writing his family about the fate of one of his friends in the aftermath of the coup, Courbet notes: As for me, I was lucky and narrowly escaped. If I had been in Ornans two weeks later, I would be in his position, or two weeks earlier in Paris, I would have been transported because of my association with that idiot [Victor] Frond, officer of the fire brigade, who has just been sent off to Lambessa [a penal colony in southern Algeria] for having roused his firehouse to insurrection. I could have undergone the same fate, quite likely, for I had included him in my painting. I am forbidden to continue until further order and everyone is quite amazed that I am allowed that much.81

Significantly, Courbet considered his painting “quite daring,” suggesting a more complex reading of the subject than meets the eye. Executed in a period of crisis, the depiction of the republican Frond leading his “troops” on behalf of the working class may have been a metaphor of the hoped-for movement to quench the destructive political fires engulfing the nation. The Salons of 1852 and 1853

Despite Courbet’s insistence that he would “never applaud M. Napoléon”

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no matter what he did, the repressive period following the coup forced him to moderate the direction of his work during the next few years. In turn, the administration, recognizing his gifts, also offered him inducements to produce works more favorable to the official taste. (Louis-Napoléon had already offered to buy The Man with the Pipe in 1851, but as Courbet had accepted a previous offer he turned him down with relish. As will be shown, Napoléon III’s regime actually promoted an official realist style and tried to enlist Millet and Courbet in the program.) Early in 1852 Courbet wrote Champfleury about his forthcoming Salon submission that he was disarming his judges by shifting the terms of the realist debate: “I have made something graceful.”82 He was referring to his Young Ladies [Demoiselles] of the Village, and evidence of the government’s encouragement of Courbet is seen in the purchase of this work by the comte (later duc) de Morny, Louis-Napoléon’s half-brother, minister of the interior, and one of the leading architects of the coup d’état. His name was listed in the catalogue entry as the owner of the picture, giving Courbet a certain official cachet if not protection from the venom of some of his critics. What we see in the picture is a pasturage enclosed in a rugged hill site setting above Ornans where the humans and animals seem to have been added as an afterthought (fig. 3.16). Three women, incongruously dressed to the nines as they saunter to a picnic area, encounter a young cowherd who is barefoot and clad in a patched pinafore and apron. They stop to chat with her and the one closest to her hands her a galette (a thin, flat cake) from her picnic basket. The young girl’s free hand is close to her body and she 3.16  Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies of the Village, 1851. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.



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appears hesitant to accept the treat, but the young woman urges her to accept it. The other two women regard the transaction with a somewhat condescending air, while their spotted black-and-white dog keeps a close watch on the cattle on the opposite side of the stream that meanders through the grassy ravine. Although empirically located on different planes, cattle, dog, women, and cowherd are telescoped to form a single line running across the picture plane, uniting them in a type of processional movement favored by the artist. Courbet posed his three sisters as the models for the fashionable women: Zoé at the right in a yellow broad-brimmed hat that matches her dress; next Juliette with an umbrella and Indian shawl draped over her shoulders; and finally Zélie, who interacts so graciously with the young cowherd. Dupays, who had several reservations about the picture, nevertheless admired the “harmonious accord” that existed between the figures and the landscape.83 Indeed, the earth tones, especially the yellow ochers, resonate throughout the surface, linking rocks, flora, cattle, and figures by way of the dresses of Zoé and Zélie and the straw hat of the young cowherd. It would seem that Courbet wished to show metaphorically the intimate connection between the inhabitants of the region and the land, that despite differences in degree of biological development and class, all creatures in the Franche-Comté were bound by a common ecological heritage, and that these relationships were solid and enduring like the geological formations of Ornans. Critics once again rose up in protest, but this time the sense of outrage was muted somewhat by Courbet’s feint to the right and the intimidating fact of the picture’s owner, the comte de Morny. Dupays sandwiched his attack on the one hand with the recognition that the painter evidently wished to “humanize” his work—instead of giving us a “scarecrow,” he met us halfway with “a truly pastoral scene”—and on the other with praise for the vivacious execution and aura of freshness and candor. All this despite the “too harsh and crude literalism” and the painter’s monotonous fixation on the same regional landscape motif—clearly missing the point of Courbet’s devotion to his native region. Finally, Dupays pulled out the class card, arguing that in the final analysis the painting represented a “bourgeois—rustic if you wish—but a trifling form of art” that fell woefully short of the standards of high performance. Clément de Ris, who couldn’t take Funeral seriously at the previous Salon, noted that the painter’s style had “singularly modified since last year; he has, as they say, mixed a little water with his wine.” He was not certain if Courbet had heeded the criticism, but he congratulated him in any case on the positive change. Although he faulted Courbet for still failing to make appropriate choices and for accepting all views and types willynilly, he thought that the landscape was “full of truth, energy, and radiance” and praised the simplicity of the style and dexterous paint handling. He criticized the work for a lack of aerial perspective that made the dog,

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cows, and background appear at the same distance from the viewer, but he also defended the artist’s presentation of the three women against unfair attacks on their commonplace appearance. It was clear to him that Courbet wanted to show commonplace creatures, so that the criticisms were not only misdirected but could be interpreted as indirect eulogies. Here again he raises the class issue: “Humble bourgeois women of a tiny provincial village, or the daughters of artisans habituated to woolen or organdy dresses, could not be expected to show the free and easy manner of a Parisian woman long accustomed to enveloping herself in the folds of a cashmere shawl or a cloud of fancy lacework.” In the end, he flat-out declared that Courbet would never do better.84 Only Gustave Planche of the stuffy Revue des deux mondes remained adamant in his denunciation of Courbet. Nevertheless, he saw fit to consider Courbet at the very beginning of his review. At the outset of the Salon, he heard it rumored that Courbet’s entry would silence his critics, and he looked forward to reviewing this new work and welcoming Courbet into the official pantheon of artists. Despite all the ugly figures in Funeral, no one could deny their “powerful reality” nor the bountiful pictorial gifts of the painter. But if he thought Courbet had heeded the advice of enlightened critics and “tempered his predilection for the ugly,” he was sorely disappointed by the actual sight of Demoiselles de village. He could still marvel at Courbet’s expressive power and astonishing transcription of details, but there remained the same old mistrust and disdain “for everything that smacked of the beautiful and elegance of form.” The young women who share with the cowherd “are ugly enough to frighten you,” and they provoke only disgust from the sophisticated Salon viewer. Planche’s critique oscillated between outright condemnation and awe of Courbet’s potential: at one point he claimed that the artist’s skill is of the type admirably suited for sign painting, and if that seemed cruel, he did not mean by it to imply that his work lacked natural qualities. The only thing to praise in the work is the treatment of the topography, yet even here the want of perspective and erroneous scale of the cattle (like wooden toys) undermines the landscape effect. Planche then gives the game away by suggesting that if the realist school had rested its hopes on this year’s performance by Courbet it was doomed to disappointment. Planche claimed that the infatuation with his work has begun to fade, and he was happy to see this development because the inordinate acclaim that Courbet’s painting won in some circles could only wound those honest laborers who have never separated “imitation of nature from ideal beauty.” At the moment when literal, prosaic, and vulgar imitation will become the last word in art, when the imagination will be dismissed as an irrelevant and useless luxury, then the worthy followers of the Renaissance tradition will find themselves disowned and humiliated. But at last the hour of Courbet’s comeuppance has arrived, and now he may be ranked among those crude apes of nature who have never glimpsed the true mission of art.85

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What Planche feared most of all were not the frightening demoiselles, but the example that they might set for a younger generation. It is fascinating to see the critics fall all over themselves in trying to cope with an innovative painter with recognizable talent who flaunts the tradition that is central to their approach to art. They want him to renounce his unruly ways and “more rustic than thou attitude” and devote his talent to the art of the Beautiful. All the lamentations about the painter squandering a brilliant talent were at bottom an expression of displaced anxiety about the direction of contemporary art. In all this, there is evidence of a concerted effort that may have been inspired by the comte de Morny on behalf of the government. The oscillating critiques of 1852 suggest a subtle form of coercion hinting at conspiratorial action. We have seen as well the class readings of the work by the critics: Planche for example decried the “pimply noses” of the young women that one might find in the “cabaret,” and Gautier described one of Courbet’s sisters as looking like “a cook in her Sunday best.” As in his previous work, Courbet raised the issue of class structure in the countryside through his insights into the ideology of fashion, and otherwise complicated the static, homogeneous view of the rural world maintained by partisans of the status quo. The juxtaposition of the barefoot and impoverished cowherd with the fashionably dressed women who offer her a charitable gift conjured up a problematic class structure in the countryside, and not surprisingly critics consistently pointed out the women’s want of elegance. By emphasizing the lack of good taste among the aspiring bourgeoisie, they tried to absorb them into that amorphous rustic mass that had until 1848 conformed rather reliably to the elite myth. Once the threat of this problematic in the rural areas subsided, after the suppression of resistance against the coup, the old myth began to revive. Already at the end of 1851 the conservative L’Illustration began a series on peasant life, celebrating rustic life as the cradle of French civilization, whose virtues and values remain constant amid “the confusion of ideas and dissolution of morality” in the present age. While nine million city and town folk are busily occupied with politics and art, twenty-seven million country folk are laboring in the field to provide them with the necessities of life. Yet there is little overall recognition of their contributions to contemporary society. The author of the series ostensibly wanted to get beyond stereotypes and address key questions thus far ignored: What role do peasants play in modern society? What part do they play in the daily progress of our civilization? To what extent do new ideas or biases penetrate their customs? The peasantry, as the only class that preserves tradition, serves as a counterweight to accelerating historical change. As French people are dragged unwittingly to an uncertain future, the peasant’s persistent loyalty to the fatherland and love of family should provide a model for the nonpeasant population. Describing the peasantry’s cultural behavior, the

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writer admitted their coarse manner of speaking and acting but qualified this assertion by noting that if there was “rudesse” (roughness) there was no “grossièreté” (grossness)—the term used so often to put down Courbet’s types. Unlike eager townfolk, always anxious to get ahead, the peasantry is content with their lot in life.86 Following the coup, the same author began a new series called “Errors and Prejudices of the Peasants,” recounting in detail the regional superstitions of even the most pious of the peasant population. This time he claimed that it would probably take a half century before these “barbaric” practices will have disappeared, and that the generation now arriving at maturity would probably blow off the last vestiges. Yet he reiterated his previous conclusion in the form of a question: Would peasants then be more civilized than they are today? Foreseeing the moment when progress would sweep away tradition and morals would be set free from their mooring, the author conceptualized the peasantry as the one fixed point of stability amid the vast sea changes brought on by bourgeois industry.87 In short, the tenor of his journalistic series ran counter to everything implied in Courbet’s pictorial series, which perhaps helps explain the hostility aroused by his Salon exhibits in the moderate and conservative press and the reasons for the government’s interest in his work. As we have seen, the other side to the two-pronged attacks on Courbet concerned the “socialist” implications of his painting, typically invoked to discredit his work as entrenched in a distinct political agenda. In 1852 L’Artiste ran an article entitled “Socialism in Art,” a vicious swipe at Courbet’s attempt to mingle art and ideology. The author labeled any attempt to introduce socialist principles in art as a “monstrous” deviation from tradition, a move which could only end up “burlesquing” itself. A gifted painter impatient for fame, Courbet unwittingly put on a “mask of triviality” by attempting to embody socialist ideas in his work. Courbet needs to get back on track by recognizing that “socialist art” is an oxymoron, and that great art can never be egalitarian but must remain aristocratic and hierarchic.88 This position dovetails with that of Dupays, who demeaned the subject matter of Demoiselles de village in class terms as “bourgeois,” that is, as inferior to the traditional status of noble painting. Dupays would clarify his position in the ensuing years through his dialogue with Courbet’s work, culminating with a clear statement of his position in his article on the realist presence in the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Noting that economically the bourgeoisie had gained the ascendant in society, culturally they remained at the bottom of the heap. Dupays reiterated the cliché that art is essentially an aristocratic activity not used to keeping bad company. Like the great lord of an estate, art invites shepherds, shepherdesses, and beggars to his peasant festivals, but rejects with an exquisite disdain “that race of pretentious upstarts in their Sunday best, who from one end of the earth to the other all have the same physiognomy, the same expression, and the

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same dress suit.” Dupays felt palpably uncomfortable in the presence of rural folk he could not quite pigeonhole, and he classified them in the same category as the bourgeoisie, who, in their ugly fashions, are indistinguishable from one another. He argued that it was to this bourgeois concept of art that Courbet was devoted—the bourgeois in trousers, in vest, in derby, in black dress suit, half-bourgeois, quarter-bourgeois—of the type you find in Demoiselles de village, the most antipicturesque and disagreeable scene it is possible to imagine, where “boors pretend to elegance.” According to Dupays, this bourgeois pretentiousness constitutes Courbet’s sole claim to fame, and he isolated him from other realists in a special category of “vulgarism.”89 Courbet’s confounding of bourgeois and villager, urban and rural, ugly and elegant, underscored the changes in French society that elevated commoners to the level of the old elite. The sight of half- and quarter-bourgeois suggested an aspiring and upwardly mobile peasantry transforming the countryside into a hotbed of political agitation that threatened to overturn the dominance of the old order. Thus Dupays’s negative definition of Courbet’s radical realism served to reinforce it as a political and social as well as cultural force. This was affirmed in his comments on the painter in the Salon of 1853, when once again Courbet’s entries attracted a disproportionate amount of critical attention. Courbet had planned from the outset of that year’s Salon to take up the traditional category of the nude and run it through the alembic of radical realism. He treated the female nude in his Bathers and the male in his Wrestlers, and both were greeted with consternation as parodies of academic standards (figs. 3.17–18). The Bathers spotlights a hefty woman seen from her fleshy rear, stepping out of a shallow forest pool totally naked save for a scanty drape held below her buttocks, while The Wrestlers— painted over the old Classical Walpurgis Night to literally efface his romantic phase—shows a pair of bulky fighters locked in tense struggle before a distant crowd of spectators.90 It is symptomatic of Courbet’s approach that he contextualized his figures with a convincing modern narrative that justified their nudity: they were not simply posing for an audience of voyeurs. Dupays immediately jumped on Courbet, dubbing him the “chief of the school of the ugly,” and not of the type of ugly expressed as supernatural grandeur and force, but of “vulgar ugliness, ignoble ugliness.” What does Courbet want? He no longer needs a reputation, since he already has earned more notoriety than any artist in recent memory. The critics and the public are even prepared to forgive his “offending eccentricities” as youthful peccadilloes, but instead of appeasing them he continues to squander his talent on caricatures enlarged to the scale of history painting. Dupays contemptuously claimed that no one could pass The Bathers without laughing out loud, and Gautier likened the massive central figure to a “Hottentot Venus” mooning the beholder with her “monstrous rump.” All that adipose tissue in the compositional center shocked the Salon audience: the

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3.17  Gustave Courbet, The Bathers, 1853. Musée Fabre, Montpellier. 3.18  Gustave Courbet, The Wrestlers, 1853. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

emperor supposedly struck the canvas with his riding crop in indignation, and Empress Eugénie, who had been admiring the massive haunches of the Percherons in Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, wisecracked before The Bathers, “Is she a Percheron too?”91 Dupays was also offended by the female servant of the fleshy bather: “This slut has not yet revealed her deformities; she has only begun to remove her stockings. As she undresses she gazes upon her companion, entirely nude and turning away, and is unable to stifle her surprise and her laughter at the sight of this elephantine portliness.”92 Dupays and even Delacroix misunderstood the meaning of the exchange that goes on between the two women: as the lusty bather steps from the water she raises her right arm in modesty to signal her companion not to look at her, but the latter cannot forbear a quick peek and gazes in admiration at the amplitude of her mistress. That there is something distinctly sensual in this exchange is reinforced by the half-undressed servant’s grasp of a nearby tree branch, upturned to suggest an erect phallus. Courbet took the elegantly contoured nude of the academics and literally and figuratively turned it inside out, thereby attacking the Academy’s paradigm of the Beautiful. Instead of depicting his nude frontally as



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did Ingres and Gérôme, he hides her sexuality from spectators and shows them her behind; instead of a typically smooth and graceful modeling, he submerges the female anatomy in layers of fat. The only one privy to her charms is the maidservant, again flouting the conventional notion of the female nude as less a site of sexual arousal than an exemplar of ideal purity for a predominantly male audience. Courbet’s subversive nude was meant to disrupt the prevailing hypocrisies of contemporary cultural display and through gross emphasis on the flesh forcefully project the substance and variety of human existence.93 Here Proudhon is once again instructive as confidante of Courbet and interpreter of his works. Taking on the critics of the work, he jeers at their preference for the nymphs of the academic sculptors Pradier and Clésinger, always displayed in some impossible posture suffering the arrow of Eros, or for the “aphrodisiacal” odalisques of Ingres. He points up their hypocrisy in salivating over a prostituted or millionaire Venus wearing tuckedup nightgown and turning away in disgust from the “honest woman” of Courbet, who exits her outdoor bath while showing them her big behind. This is authentic art and not pornography disguised as mythology: you would never confuse his “horsy” and “big-assed” bather with a Diana or Hebe. Nevertheless, she is neither humpbacked nor bowlegged, and not badly built; the world is full of beautiful women, who, when undressed, would not look half so good. So why the indignation and repugnance? Courbet’s only sin in painting the figure with “a truth, a realism, if you will, that will never be surpassed,” was that he broke with the stereotype, the arbitrary convention of the ideal. Proudhon then recounts the anecdote of the empress’s confrontation with the picture and her clever sally in response: “Is she a Percheron too?” He claims that if he had been present at the time he would have replied, as he politely doffed his hat, “No, madame; she is only a simple bourgeoise, like so many others in our society, and whose husband, liberal under Louis-Philippe, reactionary under the Republic, is now one of the most devoted subjects of the emperor.” And he elaborated on his idea of the bather as personification of her class: Yes, here is this fleshy and well-to-do bourgeoisie, deformed by fat and luxury; whose flabbiness and mass stifles the ideal, and foreordains them to die of cowardice if not of molten grease. Here is what their foolishness, their egoism and cuisine have given us. What amplitude! What opulence! They may be likened to a lamb awaiting slaughter.94

Proudhon’s interpretation is revealing in showing us how a radical interpretation of the work could intersect at many points with the conservative accounts. They differed fundamentally, however, in evaluating the motives of the painter: for the radical, Courbet’s work excelled in clarifying the state of the society, while for the puzzled conservatives (including Delacroix) it contributed to its debasement. Proudhon asserted that Courbet

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mercilessly stripped his victims to disclose the vulgar forms beneath, while Dupays saw this display of the forms as itself a manifestation of bourgeois corruption. The conservative reaction is also seen in the mocking critiques of The Wrestlers, similarly discussed in class terms. Typically, wrestlers were of peasant origin, selling their physical power for the entertainment of society’s privileged sectors. In this case, the site of the wrestling match—the openair arena of the Imperial Hippodrome on the periphery of the ChampsElysées—was a favorite sporting ground for the upper classes of the Second Empire. Dupays argued that in order to compensate for his bather’s affront to the “fair sex,” Courbet attempted to produce with even more rudeness “the deformities of the vilain”—a pun on the feudalistic term for serf and its topical connotations of blackguard, or filthy and wicked character. Whatever their anatomical merits, the wrestlers were overshadowed by content exclusively devoted “to blackness, ugliness, and triviality.” All three works by Courbet were subjected to scatological insults; the critics seemed to have sniffed a malodorous aroma around every one— monumental unwashed bodies reeking with the stale stench of bodily fluids of every sort. The predominant gray cast of the wrestlers’ bodies sparked an obsessive harping on the theme of darkness, which suggests still another manifestation of a regional and class-bound discourse tinged with racism. Charles Tillot, for example, claimed to see “two Auvergnat traders in coal” (keeping in mind the stereotype of Auvergnats as petty sharpers), and Clément de Ris pretended to perceive them as an advertisement for “shoe polish merchants.” Gautier, who had previously described the bather as a Hottentot Venus, saw the wrestlers as having “rolled in soot and coal dust” prior to the match, and even refers to them at one point as “black men.” Eugène Loudun mocked the muscular athletes as “enormous black, burly, bullnecked men, with blacksmith’s arms and boxer’s hands that could break your jaw with one blow. . . . It’s real enough to scare the hell out of you.” Despite the scoffing context of these remarks, they betray what Herding rightfully interprets as a displaced fear of the potential threat of the underclasses.95 The wrestlers sell their labor power as purveyors of entertainment, heroic warriors operating outside the military domain to divert the bourgeoisie from the exploitative routine of everyday life. Now the French word for wrestler, lutteur, derives from lutter, meaning to struggle, to strive against, to cope with, so that wrestling quickly springs to mind as a metaphor for the struggle for existence or the class struggle.96 Courbet’s wrestlers go about their work as strenuously as the stonebreakers; their swollen veins demonstrate that they are using every fiber of their bodies to accomplish their task. Yet instead of setting up a dramatic confrontation between opposing forces as Géricault and others did in fistfights and other competitive sports, Courbet ironizes his contest as a stalemate between evenly matched contenders. Dupays and others were confused by the positions of

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the fighters, whose legs line up like the legs of a piece of furniture, as if united into a single interlocking mass. Despite their intense struggle on behalf of the bourgeoisie, these bigger-than-life proletarian combatants wind up in a deadlock, and by extension probably refer to the standstill of the entire republican movement. The Meeting

The 1853 Salon had one positive outcome for Courbet; it brought him into contact with Alfred Bruyas of Montpellier, soon to become his single most important patron. Bruyas was profoundly moved by the works at the Salon and promptly purchased The Bathers and The Sleeping Spinner, as well as The Man with the Pipe, and even commissioned his own portrait (a favorite subject, judging from the number of his portraits in his gallery). Just two years younger than Courbet, living a similar bachelor existence, Bruyas had inherited a fortune from his banker father and lived out the role of wealthy Maecenas. Despite his wealth, however, he was always in delicate health, and he seemed desperate to leave something to posterity. An obsession with his own self-image represented one pole of his desire for immortality; finding a solution to the world’s social ills constituted the other. It is this longing that made the rich connoisseur an unexpected partner of the realist and socialist Courbet. Bruyas espoused Saint-Simonist and Fourierist principles, among them the importance assigned to the artist in advancing humanity’s quest for fulfillment. Their mutual friend, the Fourierist critic François Sabatier-Ungher, sympathetic to the radical realists, may have brought them together. Bruyas felt obligated to buy The Bathers despite the attacks against it because it represented to him a new truth and a vivid instance of creative independence. He associated realism with positivism in the evolution of human progress and championed Courbet as its leading exponent, envisioning the artist as a model of social as well as of artistic freedom.97 The painter’s first portrait of his new friend and benefactor, called Tableau-Solution, depicts Bruyas with his left hand resting on a fictive book entitled “Etudes / sur / l’Art moderne / Solution / A. Bruyas.” According to Silvestre, the painting represented a symbolic pact between artist and patron to promote their shared views on the “solution” to contemporary life and art. Their solution, of course, was Courbet’s brand of realism, and its realization implied the patron’s commitment to subsidizing Courbet’s work and maximizing his freedom of action. Bruyas, however, was a bundle of contradictions who confused his art patronage with the public good. He stood behind the coup d’état as a socially stabilizing act whose beneficent results, he predicted, would be reflected in the Salon exhibits of 1853! Then he purchased The Bathers, the most provocative work in the house, because it raised the most challenging questions about art and its relationship to reality. Yet his favorite painting of 1853 represented him in the middle of

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3.19  Gustave Courbet, The Meeting, 1854. Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

Octave Tassaert’s studio holding forth with the painter on a canvas in progress, and this image, he wrote Courbet, embodied “the true poem of modern painting.” Courbet had found a partner loonier than himself, although art history has privileged Bruyas as a mere “eccentric.”98 Courbet consistently took advantage of Bruyas’s foibles, and nowhere is this more evident than in the picture entitled La Rencontre or The Meeting (fig. 3.19). Commissioned by Bruyas, The Meeting bears visual testimony to their partnership and commemorates Courbet’s stay at Montpellier between June and October 1854 to collaborate with the patron on their joint “solution.” Just before he left Ornans for Montpellier he wrote Bruyas that he planned to realize a “unique miracle” in his lifetime, to live off his art without sacrificing his principles. In Bruyas he had found his ideal sponsor: “I have met [rencontré] you. It was inevitable because it was not we who



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3.20  Legend of the Wandering Jew, woodcut, early nineteenth century. Frontispiece for Champfleury, Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (1886).



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have encountered [rencontrés] each other, but our solutions.” The reiterated form of rencontre, to meet, the meeting, is the operative metaphor in the picture, a meeting of minds bent on a single purpose. Courbet and Bruyas and Bruyas’s manservant Calas all meet at a symbolic crossroads just outside Montpellier and exchange formal salutations. Their body language and costume make a study in contrasts while apparently meeting on a common plane. Courbet, as fashion-conscious as ever, portrays himself as a sturdy vagabond with a huge pilgrim’s staff, roughing it in the wilderness with gaitered boots, a battered hat crushed in his left hand, and his portable landscape equipment strapped to his back; Bruyas carries an elegant walking stick and wears kid gloves and his fashionable trademark olive green jacket with striped collar; the servant wears lumpy bourgeois hand-me-downs and carries a knob-headed cane along with a spare wrap for his master. Courbet energetically thrusts himself forward with his staff planted ahead, his right foot advanced, his head upraised and beard stiffly pointing outward; Bruyas stands rigidly at attention, halted in his tracks by his formidable partner, and extends his hat outward in welcome, while Calas, who also doffs his cap, bows his head in reverence. (About claimed that the self-effacing servant behaved as if he were assisting a priest at mass.) Even Bruyas’s dog stands erect on all four legs, wagging his tail and barking a ceremonial greeting. Courbet not only reverses the traditional hierarchical relationship of artist and patron but equates himself with visiting royalty and saintly heroes. At the same time, he alters conventional class decorum in posing himself as a journeyman craftsman confidently facing his bourgeois better. Ironically, the source for the image was a portion of a popular broadside of the Wandering Jew, representing an encounter of Ahasuerus and two upright citizens (“Les Bourgeois de la Ville parlant au Juif errant”) on the road to a nearby town (fig. 3.20).99 The Legend of the Wandering Jew was well known in Courbet’s circle: in addition to Pierre Dupont’s poem on the theme (1856), Champfleury would later use this same woodcut print as the frontispiece for his Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (1869), and the voluminous notes of his systematic study of the legend suggest that he had been engaged in the research over a long period, accumulating along the way a major collection of prints illustrating the subject that Courbet surely knew.100 chapter three

Briefly, the genesis of the theme of the Wandering Jew traces to a legendary inhabitant of Jerusalem named Ahasuerus, who, when Jesus agonizingly bore his cross to Calvary and paused for a rest at his doorstep, drove him away with the rebuke, “Walk faster!” and received in turn this chiding, “I go, but you will walk until I come again!”101 Ahasuerus was henceforth condemned to perpetual wandering until Jesus returned to redeem humankind. Popular literature in the late medieval period linked him and his fellow Jews to the Antichrist, and thus he was fused with the anti-Semitic deicidal Jew. Although the mythical figure undergoes various mutations throughout history depending on time and place—peripatetic observer of human folly, harbinger of disaster, example of man’s inhumanity to man, and mysterious stalker of the night—he is most often the suffering sinner who abused Jesus and can never know peace until the advent of Christ’s return. If then he repents and converts, he could at long last find his eternal resting place. Thus on one level he embodied a Christian parable on the fate of the Jewish people, and on another served as a warning to other wouldbe dissidents within the church. Later folkloric accretions made Ahasuerus a shoemaker, an artisan, and in the most influential treatment of the legend—the Fourierist-inspired novel Le Juif errant by Eugène Sue—he emerges as the intermittent synecdoche of the downtrodden proletariat. Joined by his sister, the Wandering Jewess, the two stand as symbolic spokespersons for the oppressed laborers of the world, Jew and Gentile, male and female. Indeed, in the novel the persecution of the Jews (symbolically enacted in the long-suffering Samuel and Bathsheba) and the curse of the Wandering Jew merge with the afflictions of the proletariat, as uttered in this lamentation of Ahasuerus: “My brethren! through me—the laborer of Jerusalem, cursed by the Lord, who in my person cursed the race of laborers—a race always suffering, always disinherited, always slaves, who, like me, go on, on, on, without rest or intermission, without recompense, or hope.” The vignette of Ahasuerus encountering two solid burghers of the local town (a constant in the Franco-Flemish version of the legend) and accompanying text were crucial to establishing the moral and social contrast between the accursed pariah and the upright citizenry to whom he invariably confesses his woeful tale. Courbet clearly chose this secondary image to play up the incongruity between himself and his patron, preferring in this instance to identify with the outcast Jewish artisan in opposition to his solidly bourgeois patron. As in the case of the allegorical personification of the Republic, where the abstract female image could embody positive energy, so the image of the Jew, also operating on the plane of abstraction, could serve as role model for the realist condemned to pariah status. Courbet in fact had used the image once before in painting the portrait of Jean Journet, a Fourierist missionary, who, staff in hand, marches off to announce to the world the benefits of the phalanstery. Courbet also executed a lithograph of the radical evangelist entitled The Apostle Jean Journet

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3.21  Gustave Courbet, The Apostle Jean Journet Setting Out for the Conquest of Universal Harmony,

lithograph, 1850. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Setting Out for the Conquest of Universal Harmony, showing him beginning a nationwide pilgrimage with his staff and shoulder bags loaded with brochures and extra clothes (fig. 3.21). Significantly, the lithograph is enclosed on three sides by a complainte, a plaintive lyric of the type attached to the image of the Wandering Jew. Champfleury felt a strong affection for this madcap Fourierist true believer who disrupted theatrical performances and private parties with a call for converts to the cause. Journet considered himself the modern “savior of the world” and Champfleury quotes him as having written to Chateaubriand: “The apostle is he who condemns, who absolves, who judges; it is he who is the last man on earth, it is he who is powerful, it is he who is the apostle, it is I, it is Jean Journet.”102 This is the kind of rhetorical bravado that appealed to Courbet, who considered himself the “apostle” of realism. Journet, who left the Parisian nonbelievers for the provinces, established a precedent for Courbet in trekking to Montpellier to preach his Fourierist doctrine to local church dignitaries. Traveling on foot like his Fourierist role model and the Wandering Jew, he deliberately eschews such bourgeois conveniences as the diligence receding in the distance. Despite his humble lifestyle, however, the outcast is not only elevated socially in relation to the townsmen but immodestly accepts their acknowledgment of his superiority. The Meeting was one of eleven canvases accepted for the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Courbet wrote Bruyas that the work created “an extraordinary impression.” Critics, he noted, were calling it Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, and the numerous foreigners crowding around it attested to its “universal success.” The various doggerel verses, satirical poems, and caricatures devoted to the picture would seem to confirm Courbet’s sense of its reception, but most often they were aimed at deriding the sheer narcissism of his self-presentation: And the somber foliage, hollowed out like an arch, The meadows, the branch that a swollen fruit caused to curve [courbait], Sang in unison: “Bonjour, M. Courbet, the master painter! Monsieur Courbet, salut! Bonjour, M. Courbet!”103



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About, who nicknamed the work “Fortune Bowing before Genius,” mockingly observed that neither the bourgeois patron nor his servant cast a shadow on the ground: “M. Courbet alone has power to obstruct the sun’s rays.” Yet on the peripheries of About’s jibes there is inadvertent testimony to some of the work’s positive qualities: the critic gleans from the landscape the weather (“It is a hot day”), the time of day (“between eleven and noon”), and the topographical location (“outskirts of Montpellier”). For what is remarkable is that just as he convincingly conveyed the peculiar geological features in and around Ornans, here Courbet captures the brightness and warmth of the southern atmosphere, low horizon, big azure sky, and indigenous vegetation of the Midi in late spring. Courbet’s Meeting represents an actual moment in time, but a moment mediated by a selectively staged action reminiscent of the popular source that informed it. Although embedded in the ordinary act of greeting, the picture stands as the first of Courbet’s “real allegories.” Indeed, it represents a sort of ritual encounter commemorating the creative association of Bruyas and Courbet. The ritualistic component may overlay a Freemasonic intention: Bruyas belonged to a local lodge and wears white gloves in the painting, an indispensable item of the ceremonial dress worn at Masonic unions. White gloves symbolize the purity of the soul and possess a protective power—qualities that Courbet may have wished to assign to his patron under the circumstances. Canes—usually decorated with prominent pommels like the round-headed type held by Calas—also form part of the symbolic garb at lodge meetings when carried by the Master of Ceremonies. It may be stretching it a bit to confront the frontispiece of the first edition of The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1723) with The Meeting, but the juxtaposition reveals some intriguing parallels (fig. 3.22). In the ritual encounter of the two principal officers, the Grand Master commits the constitutions to his successor with a hand gesture resembling that of Bruyas, while the attendant at the left holding a wrap (apron?) and a pair of gloves and inclining his head strikes me as the prototype of Calas. Courbet may have used Masonic materials to lend emphasis to this rite of passage, but they are of minor importance within his larger realist enterprise. They relate to Courbet’s projection of himself as itinerant artisan, the type of journeyman or compagnon who traveled freely from town to town seeking to ply his skills. George Sand’s novel Le Compagnon du tour de France celebrates the independence of these skilled craftsmen as they rambled through the countryside. In addition, their craft brotherhoods and signage were modeled on Freemasonry, which in turn associated itself with the tradition of the compagnonnage. The itinerant craftsman could be seen as a regenerated version of the Wandering Jew, and Courbet, as has been shown, transposed the sign of persecuted artisan into one of liberation.

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3.22  Frontispiece for first edition of Constitutions des franc-maçons (1723).

By joining the rural and the urban, town and country, Courbet’s scene metaphorically realized the Comtean ideal of social and environmental transformation through synthesis of scientific knowledge. His exploitation of a popular image for the source of his painting drew on traditional folklore as a bridge between high and low culture, making his subject matter more inclusive and enabling him to emancipate himself from elite aesthetic norms. The landscape as sign of untrammeled nature served as a locus of freedom for reconciliation of town and country, artist and society, worker and bourgeois, bourgeois and peasant, thus fulfilling the ideals of the realist-rural discourse. The fact that Montpellier and the department of Hérault generally had formed part of Red France, and that its well-organized working classes and petty bourgeoisie resisted the coup d’état in December 1851, perhaps made this symbolic reunion especially urgent for Bruyas.104 The celebratory meeting of the townsman and the artist/worker/peasant at the rural crossroads heralds the resolution of social and political divisions in the post-1848 period.

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The Studio

By the decree of 22 June 1853, the Salon of 1854 was canceled and postponed to 1855, when it was to be combined with the Exposition Universelle. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 represented the imperial riposte to Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851, and the French government meant to surpass its predecessor by staging a vast spectacle of the fine arts, a component missing from the London show, limited to the display of sculpture and examples of the industrial arts. Writing for L’Artiste, Charles Perrin puffed this innovation for France, which for the first time in history permitted “art to appear face to face with industry.” Ironically, Perrin, who loathed Courbet, inadvertently wrote the apologia for the painter’s attractions. Speaking for France, he claimed that the nation called upon art in 1855 to function “as a more or less faithful image of our society and that of foreign societies as well,” a role that industry could never fulfill.105 It already has been shown to what degree the government’s plans for the Exposition influenced Millet’s exhibit of Peasant Grafting a Tree, and it remains to be seen what strategies were deployed to win Courbet’s sympathy. Around October of 1853, Courbet wrote to Bruyas about a luncheon date with Nieuwerkerke, the authoritarian surintendant des Beaux-Arts who wielded enormous clout over cultural matters during the Second Empire. Courbet noted that the engagement had been arranged by the two “sell-outs” Chenavard and the landscapist Louis Français (recently named Chevaliers in the Légion d’Honneur), and that the sole intention of the surintendant was to convert him to the government’s position. Nieuwerkerke told Courbet that the administration hated to see him going alone, that he could win its full support if only he would tone down his approach and “mix a little water with [his] wine” (recall the same expression by Clément de Ris, a critic close to the seat of cultural power). Nieuwerkerke admitted the regime’s great respect for Courbet’s talent, and declared that the government hoped to see him produce his greatest work yet for the coming World’s Fair and that he, Nieuwerkerke, would personally steer it through appropriate channels. Courbet’s reply to Nieuwerkerke, as he related it to Bruyas, was filled with righteous indignation, but he also made it clear that he understood why the government needed his talents: “I alone, of all the French artists of my time, [have] the power to represent and translate in an original way both my personality and my society.” When a startled Nieuwerkerke blurted out, “Why, Monsieur Courbet, you are quite proud,” Courbet replied: “Sir, I am the proudest man in France.” He opposed himself as an individual one-person government to the collective government of Napoléon III and shouted that the attempted bribe insulted the entire community of artists. When Nieuwerkerke requested a definitive answer to his request for a special work for the Exposition Universelle, Courbet responded that the government owed him 15,000 francs for drawing so many

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3.23  Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, 1854–1855. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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paid admissions to their previous exhibitions. Defeated, Nieuwerkerke retreated to the door in disgust, but turned back one last time to admonish Courbet: “Note well that it is the government and not just me that has invited you to lunch today!”106 One year later we find Courbet hard at work on his magnum opus, the immense, multifigured Atelier, or The Painter’s Studio, one of fourteen entries that he initially planned to submit to the Paris Exhibition of 1855 (fig. 3.23). This ambitious canvas, twenty feet wide and twelve feet high and containing thirty-three life-size figures, was unmistakably the fruit of the exchange between Courbet and Nieuwerkerke. We first learn of its existence in a letter to Bruyas where Courbet informs his patron that he has completed the outline sketch of the definitive tableau. He describes it as “the moral and physical history of my atelier, including all the people who serve me and participate in my action. In the background of the painting will be The Bathers and Return from the Fair. On my easel I’ll paint a landscape with a miller driving his donkeys loaded with sacks to the mill. I’ll title it the ‘first series,’ for I hope to have society pass through my studio, to become aware of and to love my inclinations as well as my aversions.”107 He amplified and clarified his theme in even more detail in his letter to Champfleury, written not long afterwards (autumn 1854). Here he states that the work—as yet untitled—is divided into two parts, but then runs

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them together in his opening description of the first: “These are the people who serve me, support me in my ideas, and take part in my activity; people who thrive on life, and those who thrive on death; society at its best, its worst, and its average—in short, it’s my way of seeing society with all its interests and passions; it is the whole world coming to me to be painted.” Spelling out more precisely the differences of the two divisions of the painting, he locates on the right the shareholders (actionnaires) in his enterprise—that is, friends, working colleagues, and art lovers. On the left is the other world of commonplace life—the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who thrive on death. Courbet himself is in the middle of these two groups, painting away at his easel, this time modifying the subject to show the miller pinching the butt of a young girl he meets on the way to the mill. After this general description, he gets down to specifics, starting from the extreme left: On the edge of the canvas is a Jew I saw in England making his way through the feverish activity of the London streets, devotedly cradling a coffer in his right arm and covering it with his left hand. He seemed to be saying, “It is I who have the best of it.” He had an ivory complexion, a long beard, a turban, and a long black robe that trailed on the ground. Behind him is a curate with a red bloated face and triumphal expression. In front of them is a poor, very thin old man, a veteran republican of ’93 (that minister of the interior, for example, who was part of the Assembly when Louis XVI was condemned to death, the one who as recently as last year was taking courses at the Sorbonne), ninety years old, a beggar’s pouch in his hand, wearing a patched white linen jacket and a broadbrimmed hat; he is looking at a pile of romantic paraphernalia at his feet. (The Jew takes pity on him.) Then there’s a hunter, a reaper with his scythe, a circus Hercules, a clown, an old-clothes merchant, a laborer’s wife, a laborer, and an undertaker’s assistant; a skull lying on a newspaper; an Irishwoman nursing her child, and a studio mannequin. . . . The old-clothes man presides over all this, displaying his shoddy goods to all these people, each of whom in their own way pays the greatest attention. Behind him, in the foreground, is a guitar and a plumed hat.

Next, Courbet enumerates the aggregate of individuals on the opposite side, starting with himself at the easel, but not bothering to reveal as much descriptive detail as in the first part. Watching him paint over his shoulder is a nude model, with her clothes piled up behind his chair. A white cat cavorts on the floor nearby. Next comes his friend Promayet, holding his violin beneath his arm, followed by Bruyas, Cuenot, Buchon, and Proudhon. Champfleury he includes seated on a stool, and beside him an elegantly clad lady with her husband. Baudelaire would be depicted at the extreme right absorbed in a book, and next to him a “Negress looking coquettishly at her reflection in a mirror.” Finally, in the rear of the painting, in a window recess, two lovers will be whispering sweet nothings to one another.108

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Courbet’s description was by no means exhaustive, but it characterized the work’s conceptualization up to that moment. He made several changes and additions as he continued, most notably the introduction of the seated braconnier or poacher, with his rifle and dogs, on the left, and a peasant child watching Courbet paint at the easel along with the nude model. He also altered the painting on the easel, removing the incident of the miller and the young girl and confining himself to a pure landscape of the Loue banks near Ornans. Next to Champfleury, he added a young boy lying on the floor making a child’s drawing—a subject akin to popular imagery that especially intrigued the writer. Finally, just before exhibiting the picture he eliminated the black woman; Edouard Houssaye, editor of L’Artiste, noted her presence as late as April 1855, describing her as a person of the “yellow race.” She was actually Jeanne Duval, the mixed-race mistress of Baudelaire, who requested that Courbet remove Duval from the picture. (The chemistry of oil paint, however, has allowed her to remain as a faint silhouette hovering above her lover.) When Courbet completed the work he called it The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life, using the oxymoronic form of “allégorie réelle” to reconcile his realist approach with an attempt at historical synthesis—a kind of realist riposte to the historical cycles of Chenavard, Ingres, and Delaroche. Since he began the work at the end of 1854, modern commentators tend to date his “seven-year” phase from 1847, but it was actually the delivery date of the picture and the event of the Exposition Universelle he had in mind, making the starting year 1848. Thus the work constitutes a summation of his career from the decisive revolutionary moment at which he attained political as well as artistic maturity. Several emblematic passages in the painting signify the rejection of both classicism and romanticism: on the side of those who thrive on death the mannequin of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows suggests the demise of classicism, while the undertaker’s assistant presides over a pile of props dear to romantic imaginations, including plumed slouch hat, dagger, and a guitar that Courbet had himself used in his own romantic phase. Also to the side of the undertaker’s assistant is a skull nestled in a crumpled copy of the Journal des débats, a newspaper that extolled classicism and romanticism and scoffed at Courbet’s realism. His emblematic barbs specifically targeted the chiefs of the two schools, Ingres and Delacroix, who were given special retrospective exhibitions at the World’s Fair, as well as the sycophantic press who puffed them as representative of France’s cultural supremacy. The peddler of shoddy goods who attracts the crowd alludes to the government-controlled press that camouflaged outworn ideas with inflated rhetoric. Meanwhile, Courbet shrewdly paints a landscape while turning his back on the posing model—an outright refusal of the academic routine. The unschooled model, the innocent peasant lad—and perhaps the playful animal

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reacting instinctively—alone grasp the importance of Courbet’s work, representative of that wider natural community (Sand’s la vie primitive) Courbet hoped to reach with his art. This theme is reinforced by the child sketching on the floor near Champfleury who, as Schapiro pointed out, profoundly admired children’s drawings for precisely those traits of sincerity and truthfulness that he admired in folk imagery. At the same time that Courbet rejects outworn classicism and romanticism and reaffirms realism and its sources in spontaneous nature, he also announces his program of social inclusivity in the post-1848 period. His wide range of types include agricultural and town laborers, artisans, mountebanks—including a clown in Chinese costume, perhaps signaling the imperial ties of the Second Empire—religious figures, a peddler of cheap goods, and a destitute woman clinging to life for herself and her suckling infant, as well as the affluent in his circle, including a number of prominent landowners, financiers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals. There can be no doubt that he produced this magisterial effort in response to Nieuwerkerke’s request. Early in 1855, as the deadline for submission drew close, Courbet, delayed by illness and the enormity of the task he set himself, asked Français to intervene with Nieuwerkerke on his behalf to obtain a special extension to complete it. He reminded his friend that Nieuwerkerke “offered me his help in your presence,” and hoped that he “could hold him to his word at this time.”109 Courbet was granted the extension, but in the end the selection committee of the Exposition Universelle of 1855 rejected the picture, along with two others, Funeral at Ornans and his portrait of Champfleury. (Although the pretext for refusing the big works was the want of space required for the foreign displays, the rejection of the portrait of Champfleury hints at behind-the-scenes manipulation.) The committee, however, did accept eleven of his entries, including The Stonebreakers, The Meeting, and Demoiselles of the Village. Courbet’s desire to be represented by Funeral and especially the new Studio prompted him to organize a retaliatory counter-exhibition in a hastily constructed iron and hollow-brick structure on 7, avenue Montaigne, opposite the Fine Arts pavilion of the World’s Fair. Opening just six weeks after the inauguration of the Exposition Universelle, his display of forty paintings and four drawings approximated the numbers allowed to Ingres and Delacroix, who carried the banners for classicism and romanticism in their separate retrospectives. His special show was advertised by a large sign over the entrance which read “le realisme”—a clear shot at his official competition. Well aware that the administration had used realist rhetoric to justify its inclusion of the fine arts in its commercial and industrial exhibition, Courbet reappropriated the high ground by emphatically declaring, in the catalogue printed for his private show: “To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living

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art—this is my goal.” Calling upon Bruyas to ship The Bathers to Paris for the show, he reminded him that “in this you are serving a holy and sacred cause, the cause of liberty and independence, a cause to which I, like you, have consecrated my entire life.” Courbet’s paranoid dreams of overwhelming his enemies and earning profitable returns from thrill-seeking crowds were quickly dashed, however, when only a trickle of visitors showed up each day. Critics like Perrin calumniated him for his inordinate vanity in posing “heroically as commander-in-chief of realism,” although they could hardly avoid confronting The Painter’s Studio. Writing for L’Artiste, Perrin saw, on the left-hand side of the painting, “a battalion of monsters escaped from the Cour des Miracles—Courbet’s lamentable personification of ‘our era.’” Yet this was the same work that Delacroix went to visit in early August and which held him spellbound for nearly an hour. He confessed in his diary that he simply “could not tear” himself away from the sight of the singular “masterpiece,” and concluded that the selection committee refused “one of the most extraordinary works of our time.” Courbet’s subtitle, suggesting the conclusion of a distinct phase of his career, clarifies the paradoxical coupling of “real” and “allegory.” The work tries to marry the autobiographical and the social in a historical synthesis that conveys the “appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation.” There is a suggestion of a concealed message in the work, a puzzle that needed to be deciphered. He wrote to Français that it would “take too long to explain what I want to let you guess when you see it. . . . It is fairly mysterious, it will keep people guessing.” This statement has given rise to all sorts of ingenious interpretations by modern art historians, but since Courbet had already delivered the long version to Champfleury, I believe there is no need to think beyond what the painter reiterated for Français as “the story of my atelier, what goes on there morally and physically.” Most of the recent work of interpretation has been based on Toussaint’s identification of the figures on the left-hand side as well-known historical celebrities, some of them quite convincing, as for example, the Jew (Achille Fould, minister of state) and the curate (Louis Veuillot, the ultramontane Catholic editor of L’Univers). But I find her other identifications less persuasive, including the designations of the seated poacher as Napoléon III and the purveyor of shoddy goods as Persigny, minister of the interior. Courbet may very well have employed actual personalities for his types on the left-hand half of the composition, but they could have easily served him as representative ethnic or occupational types of what he characterized as the exploiters, those who “thrive on death,” rather than as hidden portraits in a preplanned puzzler. This type of abstruse riddle is totally alien to Courbet’s sensibility, and it hardly makes sense for Courbet to have included revolutionaries like Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Kosciuszko (who died in 1817!)—as Toussaint supposed—among those who “thrive on death.”

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On the other hand, I am sympathetic to her Masonic reading of the picture, which I shall return to in a moment. My rejection of the identification of the poacher with Napoléon III means also that I have to reluctantly reject Herding’s imaginative interpretation of the work as an adhortatio ad principem, an exhortation to the ruler calling for reconciliation between rival nations, parties, and classes.110 I see the picture is an enterprising attempt at a temporal synthesis of Courbet’s experience within a given time period, and a monument to his intellectual mastery of people and events. Not unlike Ingres in his Apotheosis of Homer, Courbet visualized a universal scheme of culture that emanated from a single powerful source. He differed significantly from Ingres, however, in placing himself, the artist, at the center of that formation. In a sense, Courbet broke the ice with this picture by daring to place himself at the hub of history and society. If Toussaint is right in her identification of the poacher as Napoléon III, his presence in a subordinate position serves to categorically affirm Courbet’s dominance within his realm of action. (Recall his statement to Nieuwerkerke that he too was “a government.”) In expressing gratitude to Bruyas for his support of the private exhibition, Courbet reminded him of the historical importance of participating “in my action.” But here as elsewhere he meant no mere show of egocentricity, but a reversal of the social and political conventions that would impose arbitrary constraints on human beings. Here is where I believe Toussaint’s Masonic reading offers a possible clarification of Courbet’s intent, although she seems to have confused his early label for his effort—“first series”—with the first three degrees or Blue Lodge degrees of Masonry. The term “series” is used almost uniquely in the Rite of Misraim (or Rite of Egypt) that is divided into four series of ninety degrees, of which the first series is “symbolic” (série symbolique) and comprises thirty-five degrees including apprentice, journeyman, and master. The final degree in this series is “Grand Commandeur du Temple,” and Toussaint rightfully suggests that Courbet’s description of Bruyas’s pose as “triomphant et commandeur” carries this Masonic connotation.111 Above all, she points out the significance of the term “atelier” in French Masonry as a synonym for loge or lodge. Actually, “atelier” in the Masonic terminology means much more: it is the generic term for the entire Masonic edifice. Masons cannot exist in isolation, but only in groups, and it is the group concept that is designated as “atelier.”112 Thus the Masonic symbolism lends support to Courbet’s totalizing attempt to harmonize metaphorically the varying levels of his society. The representative community of Funeral at Ornans now expands into a global fraternal association united around a common vision of nature or reality. This is symbolized in the Franche-Comté landscape that Courbet paints on his easel, the focal point of the composition.113 The whole world comes to Courbet’s doorstep to participate in his celebration of his native

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environment—the rustic alternative to town corruption, the site of reconciliation of the urban and the rural, and of the restoration of inner peace to troubled souls, the model for the regeneration of French society. As in The Meeting, he again metaphorically resolves the conflict between town and country and pictorially realizes the realist-rural discourse as a “solution” to the social question. Until now, not much attention has been paid to the significance of that part of the title referring to the picture as a résumé of a “seven-year phase.” I intend to develop this idea even more fully in my discussion of Whitman and Courbet, but for now I wish to point out that Courbet consistently conceptualized his career as a series of discrete “stages” of development progressively leading to his realization as a complete person making “living art.” This is an idea borrowed from Comte, who believed that his own era opened upon the final stage of historical development. Comte’s sequence of three historical stages, culminating with the positive, provided the conceptual model for thinking about human progress—the philosophical and sociological foundation of Courbet’s seven-year phase crowned by his fulfillment as a realist painter. In one sense, Courbet’s Studio, which brings the whole world to his doorstep, visualizes Comte’s design for a comprehensive philosophical system capable of encompassing all human knowledge. This interpretation assumes a public and political intention in the construction of the monumental composition, but we have also seen the attempted government intervention to pressure him to conform to its program. It would have been difficult for anyone, even a strong-willed personality like Courbet, to stoutheartedly resist a combination of blandishments and threats by the authoritarian regime. Several years later, in a bitter letter to the exiled Victor Hugo, Courbet compared his lot under Napoléon III’s regime to that in which Hugo and Delacroix worked: When you and Delacroix were in your prime, you did not have, as I do, the Empire to tell you, “Outside of us there is no salvation.” There was no warrant for your arrest; your mothers, unlike mine, did not make underground passages in the house to hide you from the police; Delacroix never saw soldiers violating his home, effacing his paintings with a bucket of turpentine, by ministerial order; his works were not arbitrarily shut out of the Exposition [1855]; he did not need ridiculous chapels to house his pictures outside the Exposition; the annual official speeches did not single him out for censure; unlike me, he did not have that pack of mongrels baying at his heels, in the service of their mongrel masters. The battles were about art and questions of principle; you were not threatened with proscription.114

Here, whether partially hallucinatory or not, he attests to the intense compulsion to conform that he experienced at the time of the Exposition Universelle. Clearly his capacity to demonstrate his convictions required the government’s facilities, including its permission for an extension of

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the deadline to complete his picture and for erecting his temporary pavilion near the grounds of the Exposition Universelle. In the end, I believe that these pressures acted negatively on him to produce an outcome that in many ways contradicted his stated convictions. Most modern observers point out the lack of communication among the diverse figures assembled in the painter’s studio and the painter’s utter indifference to their presence, including his dearest friends, mentors, and patrons. In a work pretending to visualize a harmonious reconciliation of modern social factions, the want of a shared activity or reciprocal recognition militates against a metaphorical resolution of the social question. In addition, there are what I would call “ethnic slurs” in the composition that undermine its stated claim to inclusivity. The “Negress” that has been effaced was originally gazing at herself “coquettishly” in the mirror while her lover read, and the circus clown wears a mocking Chinese mask and costume. But it is especially the image of the Jew, hugging tightly his jewel box (a familiar trope in the literature) and muttering to himself that he has the best of it, who betrays Courbet’s social and ethnic prejudices. Significantly, Courbet began his description of the theme in his letter to Champfleury with the position of the Jew, and in the composition it is the Jew’s full-length body with his prominent fur shtreimel and caftan at the extreme left-hand edge that towers over all the others and frames the section of those who “thrive on death.” Courbet could identify with the pariahs of society when projected on a level of abstraction like the fabulous Ahasuerus, but when it came to empathizing with them in actuality he expressed traditional rural prejudices that irrationally associated Jews with usury. Leftist anti-Semitism found a source of strength in the financial policies of the house of Rothschild, which maintained close ties with Louis-Philippe and supported his relative neutrality in foreign affairs. (Generally, the Rothschilds opted for political stability and the reigning authority, but rumors of their subvention of the coup d’état did not endear them to the enemies of Louis-Napoléon.) Alphonse Toussenel’s notorious Les Juifs, rois de l’époque; histoire de la féodalité financière (The Jews, Kings of the Epoch; History of Financial Feudalism), first published in 1845—the most popular book in a flood of pamphlets against the Rothschilds—was enthusiastically endorsed by the entire radical press. A disciple of both Michelet and Fourier, Toussenel articulated the resentments of a large portion of his society who perceived the handful of Jews in Paris in control of Louis-Philippe. Courbet was close to a number of anti-Jewish leftists, including his friends Toussenel (whom he knew from the Brasserie Laveur) and the poet Pierre Dupont, who wrote a particularly nasty piece about Jewish usury.115 In addition, he clearly shared the virulent anti-Semitism of his compatriots from the Department of the Doubs, Proudhon and Fourier, who decisively contributed to the development of an anti-Jewish ideology in France. Fourier knew that more Christians practiced usury than Jews in France, but

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stigmatized Jewish usury as more dangerous and therefore opposed Jewish emancipation. His disciples Toussenel and Proudhon identified the Jew with usurious parasitism and condemned the Jewish arriviste as the epitome of crass philistinism and vulgarity.116 During the Second Empire, French Jewry attained the height of its power and prosperity in the nineteenth century and became linked symbolically with the regime. Louis-Napoléon was predisposed toward SaintSimon’s technocratic program, and a number of Jews who had been affiliated with Saint-Simonism, including the brothers Emile and Isaac Péreire—founders of the Crédit Mobilier to help provide capital and credit for rapid industrialization—carved out distinguished careers for themselves. The banker Achille Fould, another prominent Jewish SaintSimonist, subsidized Louis-Napoléon’s campaign for president in 1848, and subsequently held key positions as minister of finance and minister of state in his administrations. As one of the key organizers of the Exposition Universelle of 1855, it was Fould who ultimately authorized permission for Courbet to organize his private show. Courbet’s references to Fould in his letters are always respectful, but he acknowledges him as the seat of power in his dealings with the regime. If Toussaint is correct in identifying the Jew as a disguised Fould (there even appears to be a letter “f ” on his shtreimel), then the Jew’s body may be a site for displaced anxieties about Jewish influence in cultural matters generally and in the World’s Fair specifically. At the picture’s opposite end is Baudelaire, the Jew’s counterpart, who is a source of moral support and creative inspiration. The Jew and Baudelaire constitute the boundaries of the composition, the flanking antipodes of constructive and destructive influence on the artist’s work. Given the salient role of the Jew in Courbet’s textual and visual formulations, he implies that the pressures constraining him at the point of creative practice stem from overweening Jewish ascendance in French culture. What I see in the picture is a retreat from the radicalism of the 1848–1854 phase and a settling into a bourgeois mode that he had for so long valiantly resisted within and without the familial context. His need to please his patron, the Bonapartist Bruyas, as well as the strains of government coercion must have affected his compromised “solution” to the social question. Unlike Funeral, where the community organizes around a commonplace ritual and his social criticism has a logic, in the Studio there is no correlation between the negative and positive poles of society and no implied critique of the political and social constraints responsible for conditions of exploitation. Indeed, he has nothing but praise for the rich bourgeois on the right side who participate in his action. These controvertible gestures and builtin limitations flagrantly disrupt his prior development, and the resultant guilt feelings may have been displaced to the body of the close-fisted Jew. Against this Jewish “other,” Courbet can gesture expansively and magnanimously within a narrowly circumscribed field of action.

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In any case, the Studio, far from posing a threat like the previous pictures, indicated the concessions he made in response to his patronage and government efforts to modify his style. The work might be more appropriately subtitled “An Allegory Summarizing My Bourgeoisification during the Last Seven Years.” First, it is composed in the academic manner that he studiously avoided in previous work. It converges on a single dominant figure flanked on either side by well-defined groups, recalling David’s Leonidas or any number of conventional history paintings invoking the frieze principle, with a hero or ruler occupying the compositional center. Indeed, at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 there were several major variants of this pattern, including Couture’s Romans of the Decadence, Chassériau’s Tepidarium, Hamon’s Human Comedy, and Müller’s Last Roll Call of the Revolution. Second, Courbet’s painting ranges him directly among the dominant elite performing the role of a courtly entourage. His version of the Human Comedy is divided into two distinct groups, a privileged class who serves his cause and provides for his support, and a parasitic and marginalized class who “thrive on death” or who are otherwise exploited. There is no question as to his affiliation; he wears the fashionable jacket with striped collar beloved of his patron Bruyas, as seen in the comparison of his selfportrait study for the Studio and his portraits of Bruyas for this picture and The Meeting. The striped collar and piping emanate from the same tailor’s workshop, and his wearing of it in his studio betrays the rustic garb he wears in The Meeting as masquerade. Significantly, the aspiring grand bourgeois, as we have seen, uses the language of the stock exchange to describe his relationship to his patrons: he called them “actionnaires,” or shareholders in Courbet, Inc. It is no coincidence that in the period 1855–1856 Courbet speculated on the stock market, investing heavily in railway and other shares. The result, however, was disastrous, and his financial losses (including those incurred by the private show) threw him into a profound depression during the latter part of 1855. Proudhon was himself preoccupied with the Bourse in this period. His friend and biographer, Sainte-Beuve, wrote that Proudhon tried to get railroad concessions for friends in 1853–1854 and asked for help from Prince Napoléon. Proudhon also advised English capitalists who sought to finance railways in Switzerland. It was in this period that he decided to publish, although anonymously at first, the sensational potboiler The Manual of the Stock Exchange Speculator, consisting of a mass of statistical information on all the leading companies listed on the Bourse. Courbet must have read the work, because his letter to Champfleury describing the Studio borrows its terminology. Proudhon declared that the public of the Bourse, similar to the world of production and consumption, divides itself into two categories, the exploités and the exploiteurs. The first—the more numerous—consists of the “vile multitude, the rubbish heap of porters, domestics, rentiers, petty bourgeois, hard working but greedy.”117

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The very title of Courbet’s painting reflects an entrepreneurial attitude. The Masonic implications of the term atelier have already been discussed, but another related definition is that of a small factory, designating a location where mechanical and artisanal activity of every kind was carried out under the direction of a chief called the patron. And what does Courbet produce in his atelier? A landscape, now an artifact removed from nature, or the prime source of realist inspiration. This marked a new direction; in the next few years he churned out numerous landscapes and hunting scenes for the market inspired partly by the British artist-entrepreneur Edwin Landseer. He purchased several pieces of real estate, including land on which he wanted “to plant clumps of trees of all species for my painting.”118 Champfleury wrote at this time that it disturbed him to witness Courbet’s concessions, that he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the concerns of his patrons. This observation was seconded by conservative critics who noted that he was gradually humanizing his work, while the more progressive Thoré regretted throughout the 1860s Courbet’s apparent renunciation of his social commitment. Finally, in 1866 Courbet’s provocative nude, Woman with a Parrot, earned him universal esteem from the Second Empire gang, and no one was more pleased to see it than Sainte-Beuve, a Second Empire lackey, who raved about it in the company of Troubat, the chaplain of Princess Mathilde, and Edmond About, who suggested that Courbet now quit his modest studio and live like the true Renaissance Man in a sumptuous Parisian townhouse.119 The Studio then, though a magisterial effort to visually contextualize the sociological conditions of a contemporary artist’s career, pulls its punches and discloses a conservative tendency. Dupays argued that the work should be viewed “as a general confession of the error of [Courbet’s] youth,” like those farewell reunions organized for the noisy and scatterbrained companions associated with the wild heyday of youth just at the moment one accepts a serious position in life. He saw in the work’s left half all the “hideousness of the world,” the deformities, vices, gruesomeness, decrepitude and poverty, frightful women, detestable types of every stamp. Concentrating his repugnance on the Irish mother, the reviewer wondered how Courbet had the courage to place “this vermin next to him and one of his friends in a hunter’s outfit, instead of relegating her to an obscure corner, behind the indescribable dustheap of humanity in which we can pick out peasants, street porters, a Jew, an old-clothes peddler, a clown, and an undertaker’s assistant.” But Dupays noticed that Courbet had decisively turned his back on this human debris in favor of his landscape, signaling a wholly new and improved direction in his work.120 Striking as this testimony is from one of Courbet’s most ardent opponents, it pales in comparison with the curt observation of Courbet’s mentor Proudhon on the work. The anarchist philosopher, who could read a political message in a grain of sand, had only this terse comment to make about the Studio while moderately critiquing the self-indulgent display of

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the painter’s monumental ego: “He has made a purely personal picture in his Real Allegory, a work that is at the same low level of quality as Lot and His Daughters”—an early biblical theme done before Courbet’s realist renunciation that shows a father seducing his daughters.121 Yet in the end this centerpiece of his private exhibition produced a positive outcome in stimulating a heated debate on the meaning of “realism” in the modern age. Champfleury’s famous open letter to George Sand defending Courbet was written in support of his private show at a time when the painter sustained acrimonious attack from the press. The letter was first published in L’Artiste, a journal generally hostile to Courbet but whose editors hoped to exploit the painter’s notoriety to ingratiate itself with the government and gain increased readership.122 Although Champfleury was not wholly uncritical of Courbet’s work, troubled especially by the selfcontradictory subtitle of “Real Allegory,” he nevertheless ends on a strong note of support for Courbet’s painterly independence. Champfleury’s letter has become a canonical text in Courbet scholarship, but the equally important response to it by Charles Perrin has been systematically elided from the literature. Perrin directed his letter to Houssaye, managing director of L’Artiste, opening it with an expression of shock that anyone other than the artist himself took Courbet seriously. Perrin began by denying any animus against realism per se; in fact, some brands of realism were perfectly acceptable to him, including Champfleury’s novel Chien-Caillou, which mingled grace and beauty in its “sincere expression of nature.” Realism and poetic expression are not incompatible, but Perrin denied that there was an ounce of poetry in Courbet’s “notorious bazaar” on the avenue Montaigne and challenged any of his readers to prove him wrong. Perrin understood Courbet’s realism as a way of painting “that exalts and exaggerates only one of the many true aspects of nature—I speak of the material side—at the expense of another no less true, which is the spiritual.” Ugliness, Perrin continued, had no claim to art other than to serve as “a diaphanous veil through which the spiritual penetrates, and it makes no difference whether this spiritual gaze is objective or subjective, whether it emanates from the painter or the model.” Perrin then seized upon the example of Champfleury’s correspondent to exemplify his point, opposing Sand’s pastoral novels to Courbet’s Demoiselles de village. Sand painted reality, but her types were neither rococo nor ugly, and never did “the monstrous realism of The Bathers ever sully her brush.” Perrin then followed with an exclamatory note, first observing that Courbet wished to paint his century and then protesting: “My God! It is possible that the century is ugly; however, with all due respect, not as ugly as that!” Perrin concluded his rebuttal of Champfleury’s defense with his wicked analysis of the Studio, declaring that Courbet’s “battalion of monsters escaped from the Court of Miracles” were the sick models of reality Courbet relied upon to personify the epoch. Nevertheless, he still felt that the

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Studio showed progress over his previous work, and that, although a failure, it would have made a great painting had Courbet eliminated everything in the picture except himself alone at the easel. What troubled and perplexed Perrin most of all was that “Courbet, young, handsome, and well built, with a spiritual physiognomy, stubbornly refuses to see anything in nature but the ugly.”123 Since good taste, like good breeding, was predicated on the ability to appreciate the Beautiful, Courbet’s assertion of the ugly in life threatened the cherished assumptions and class supports of high culture. Perrin’s dogmatic riposte to Champfleury was in turn taken up by a more progressive writer, Fernand Desnoyers, soon to be an eloquent spokesperson for the idea of an official Salon des Refusés as an alternative outlet for independent and experimental work rejected by the Salon juries. Desnoyers wrote that one did not have to be an apologist for ugliness and evil to perceive that realism had “the right to represent that which exists and that which is visible to the naked eye.” He then concluded with a positive appreciation of the new tendency while making a sly dig at its opponents: “Singular school, is it not? Where there is neither master nor pupil, and whose only principles are independence, sincerity, and individuality!”124 The debate on realism stirred by Courbet’s private show proved immensely valuable in articulating and clarifying the aims of the independents, and paving the way for the avant-garde painters of the next generation. Additionally, it caused consternation among bourgeois progressives by aligning itself with the new era of technology, science, and faith in progress yet at the same time dwelling on the negative aspects of the market economy. At the Exposition Universelle, Courbet’s imagery raised the controversial issue of laissez-faire economics versus state intervention in the face of human misery. Finally, Courbet’s grim representations rent the veil from the world of illusions to reveal the politics of culture beneath. Coda on Courbet and Walt Whitman

I wish to conclude this chapter with a parallel study of Courbet and Walt Whitman to suggest that Courbet’s persona was not unique in the Age of Civil Struggle, but represented a type of individual challenge everywhere in the individualized battle against illegitimate authority. In the case of Courbet and Whitman, their thematic and subjective affinities are so striking that past failure to make the case for their relationship appears as an historical oddity. Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” (titled “Poem of the Body” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass) mingles images of laborers, athletes, and firemen reminiscent of Courbet’s subjects of the 1850s, at one point juxtaposing swimmers, wrestlers, and firemen in a single verse and thematically converging with Courbet’s Salon entries of 1853, which included The Bathers and The Wrestlers. The poet’s allusion to firefighters in “Song of Myself ” (one of the untitled “Leaves of Grass” in the 1855 first edition) practically transcribes Courbet’s Firemen Rushing to a Fire:

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Those ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes more to me than the gods of the antique wars, Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, Their brawny limbs passing safe over the charred laths . . . . their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames; By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born . . .

The poet and the painter were particularly responsive to water and often walked the seashore, identifying their expansive egos with the infinite regression of the sea’s horizon and the surging ocean. Courbet’s paintings of himself saluting the sea at Palavas (1854) and the later stormy seas done at Etretat in 1869 come alive when juxtaposed with Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (and excerpted here from a later edition): As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

Or again from the first edition: Sea of stretched ground-swells! Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! Sea of the brine of life! Sea of unshovelled and always-ready graves! Howler and scooper of storms! Capricious and dainty sea! I am integral with you . . . I too am of one phase and of all phases.

It may be argued that the remarkable coincidence in their artistic strategies and thematics is nothing more than the playing out of a nineteenthcentury episteme and that other similar parallels could be easily adduced out of the welter of periodic or Zeitgeist options. Nevertheless, let us press on. The basic biographical facts of the lives of Whitman and Courbet are in themselves full of intriguing coincidences. Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 and Courbet less than two weeks later on 10 June 1819, an unlikely pair of twins starting their lives under the sign of Gemini. They were passionately fond of music, swimming, and hunting and incorporate these recreations into their work as thematic testimony to the free-spirited democrat.

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Both Whitman and Courbet entered adulthood with only a semi-education because of conflicts between their career preferences and paternal pressures, and both passed through a “romantic” phase before forging their identity in a self-conscious “realist” mode which crystallized in the year 1855. That year Whitman and Courbet outraged the establishment and the public on both sides of the Atlantic, and the savage epithets heaped upon their work for lack of decorum, aesthetically flawed structures and compositions, and their aggressive assertion of self-importance seem to have a common source. They flaunted their lack of “finish” and “polish” in their work and lifestyles, borrowing metaphors from the sketching practices of the art world to describe their broadly brushed ventures. The two “roughs” then associated their respective cultural production with their idea of democracy, functioning as Messiahs and way-showers of a New Age. They deployed the open-air landscape and its material rugosities as the chief vehicle for their republican and nationalist proclivities. This also explains the curious coincidence of their personas: the earthy, free-swinging independents shouting a “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” I shall never forget the flush of excitement I experienced when I first juxtaposed the frontispiece of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—the socalled “carpenter’s portrait” based on a photograph taken on a hot July day 3.24  Frontispiece for Leaves of Grass, engraving, 1855, after Gabriel Harrison’s daguerreotype, Walt Whitman (1854). Photograph courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.



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in 1854—with Courbet’s self-projection in The Meeting, painted the same year and exhibited for the first time at the Universal Exposition of 1855 (fig. 3.24). Rakish, bearded, defiant, casually clothed in workman’s costume, they identified themselves with the independent itinerant artisan. Perhaps the most striking material parallel in their respective careers is their notorious manifestoes of 1855, Leaves of Grass and The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life. Operating on the margins of the establishment in their respective countries, they undertook at their own expense to bring these works before the public. Whitman published his own book and Courbet erected a large pavilion to show his rejected work in competition with the official international exposition. Whitman described his ultimate intention in Leaves as “a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary and poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America—and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book.” And here is what Courbet wrote in his realist manifesto of 1855: “I have studied, outside of all systems and without prejudice, the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns. I no more wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other . . . No! I simply wanted to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality. To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art—this is my goal.” It is now possible to see as one outcome of the American and French Revolutions the rise of the independent creator, the autodidact who wishes to free her- or himself from illegitimate authority. Whitman, one of the “roughs,” and Courbet, “maître-peintre,” assumed the pose of the selftaught, literate artisan. Both read deeply into contemporary science and sometimes pseudoscience to liberate themselves from orthodoxy and nourish their particular brand of realism. They went outside academic, political, and literary establishments in their attempt to empower themselves to empower others, identifying with a kind of pantheism that recognizes the Godhead, or good, in everything and everyone, in their likes as well as their dislikes. To break from authority meant realizing their freedom with the kind of “retching” effort Whitman spoke of in his Eagle review on Hazlitt, and they meant to serve as a paradigm for everyone to follow. Their boastful brand of self-respect carried with it respect for the underdog. Two distinct yet similar artists draw upon the same sources for their own sense of national identity, and in the process struggle to preserve the flame of liberty in the midst of repression.

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4 The Pre-Raphaelites and the 1848 Revolutions

The Origins of the Pre-Raphaelites

In volume 3 of the Social History of Modern Art (Art in an Age of Counterrevolution), I explored the neo-Gothic influences on the young Pre-Raphaelites, in particular the writings of Pugin, Ruskin, and Disraeli, and the visual contributions of their immediate disciples. It now remains to show how the Pre-Raphaelites attempted to cull from the religious debates of the period a strategy for tempering the reformist sensibilities to make them compatible for their public. It is this tension between their religious predisposition and their effort to modernize artistic production through scientific accuracy that gives their work its peculiar Victorian flavor.1 Karl Marx was in London when the English celebrated their industrial leadership and unprecedented material progress with the first international exposition. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in a kind of giant greenhouse called the Crystal Palace, provided a significant comparison of the relative economic development of the participating countries. Despite all the high-sounding rhetoric of pacific rivalry and international fellowship, the British ruling classes were out to prove their superiority in quantity, size, and variety. But the exhibition gained a symbolic foothold in history because it glorified the productive ingenuity of the bourgeois class everywhere. Four years later, Napoléon III’s government inaugurated the first international World’s Fair in Paris to demonstrate the new prosperity and expansion of his nation. He even went the Great Exhibition one better by organizing a major international exhibition of paintings to show off French culture as a complement to its industrial and agricultural progress. But it could not have escaped anyone’s notice that the magnificent spectacles of 1851 and 1855 were designed to efface the physical and mental traces of 1848. In this way, the bourgeois component of the counterrevolution could mask its reactionary motives with a solid front of technological innovation and industrial progress. Although the Pre-Raphaelites shared many of the political, social, and religious preoccupations of their older contemporaries and mentors dis

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cussed above, the immediate stimuli to the formation of their community were the revolutionary movements of 1848. At the time of the French outbreak, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti had yet to attain their majority and were open and idealistic enough to receive multiple impressions from the welter of ideological and religious agendas then being declaimed throughout the nation. The pressures of the reaction, however, gradually foreclosed their initial identification with marginalized groups. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in early September 1848 in the home of the parents of John Everett Millais at 83 Gower Street. Millais, together with Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, better known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt, bound in close friendship, constituted the core of the group and provided most of its creative energy. It is particularly their innovative work of late 1848 and early 1849 that established Pre-Raphaelite painting as a distinctive style. But there were seven founding members in all, and youth was a precondition for membership: they included Rossetti’s brother William Michael, a writer who earned his living as a civil servant at the Inland Revenue Office; the sculptor Thomas Woolner; and the artists James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. Millais, William Michael Rossetti, and Stephens were the youngest at nineteen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was next at twenty, Hunt was twenty-one, Woolner twenty-two, and Collinson, at twenty-three, was the oldest. All were of middle- and lower-middle-class origin. The father of the Rossettis taught Italian at King’s College, London; Millais’s father was retired from a commission in the Island Militia of Jersey; Hunt’s father was a warehouse manager; Woolner’s father was a letter-sorter in the city; Stephens’s parents were for a time the supervisors of the Strand Union Workhouse, London; and Collinson’s father was a bookseller. Thus this was a brotherhood of talented and confident middle-class youths who grew up empowered by the Reform Bill of 1832 and burning with ambition to make their mark on English society. They idealized their ambitiousness as a wish to revitalize the whole of English painting, to carry out in art what Carlyle, Pugin, Ruskin, Dickens, and Disraeli were hoping to achieve through their social criticism. As Hunt recalled, “Millais and I had thought at first of husbanding only our own fields, but the outspoken zeal of our companions raised the prospect of winning waste lands, and of gaining for English art a new realm from the wilds, such as should be worthy of the race.”2 They were precociously astute and public-minded, well aware of the political and religious complexities and contradictions of Victorian society. They united in their detestation of the conventionalizing and potboiler program of the Royal Academy that institutionally meant to them what the “cash nexus” meant to Carlyle. The combination of the terms “Pre-Raphaelite” and “Brotherhood” were not arbitrarily selected, but decided upon after careful consideration of their connotations.

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Although there are differing versions of the origin of the term PreRaphaelite, it is clear from my discussion in volume 3 that the general concept was already a commonplace in Victorian art criticism. It is not surprising that Rossetti at first suggested Early Christian, or that Brown recalled that when he heard the group discussing the early Italian masters he reminded them “of the German P.R.’s, and either [the name] pleased them or not, I don’t know, but they took it.” After Hunt and Millais read Charles Bell’s Anatomy of Expression, with its examples of Old Master painting, they waxed critical of the affected posturing of the figures in Raphael’s late work (specifically, the cartoon of the Transfiguration), which they perceived as a disregard for “the simplicity of truth” and a step in the direction of decadence. This opinion they immediately advanced to their fellow students, who replied, “Then you are Pre-Raphaelite.” Hunt recalled that he and Millais “laughingly agreed that the designation must be accepted.”3 As in the case of the term post-modern, Pre-Raphaelite joins its prefix to the subject it wishes to negate while simultaneously affirming its very centrality for the new tendency. Hunt claimed that early Raphael was acceptable—only late Raphael declined into mannerism and insincerity. Either way, Raphael loomed large in their imagination as the focus of their attack on tradition and academic formulas. They had to grapple with the heroic appeal of Raphael to persuade themselves of the “manliness” of their undertaking. This required collective action as a political statement, and it was Rossetti who added the crucial qualifier “Brotherhood.”4 It belittles the concept of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whenever it is interpreted exclusively or even primarily as an aesthetic designation. Hunt chose “Pre-Raphaelite” over “Early Christian” as “more radically exact,” while Rossetti defended “Brotherhood” against the imputations of clericalism. He recalled their heated political debates at Woolner’s studio, and their host’s hatred for “our governing and wealthy classes,” as well as the immersion of their close associate Walter Howell Deverell in the writings of Carlyle and Charles Kingsley which dwelt “on the miseries of the poor, the friendless, and the fallen, and with this special interest he had . . . a general sympathy for all social and human concerns.”5 On one occasion the group broke into a chorus of the Marseillaise and Mourir pour la patrie in the streets of London. It is noteworthy that immediately after Hunt and Millais accepted the denomination of Pre-Raphaelite from students at the Academy, they experienced a release from institutional pressure, and expressed their exhilaration by participating in the last major outbreak of Chartism on 10 April 1848. This new manifestation was generated by the return of economic distress after 1846, but its immediate stimulus was the series of revolutions on the Continent. The deplorable conditions of the working classes and widespread food shortages throughout the 1840s reenergized Chartism—the first British independent working-class movement. Chartism emerged in

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its practical form during the late 1830s and resembled the later international socialist and labor movement; Marx and Engels absorbed many of its ideas. While its “People’s Charter” was directed at a moderate constituency with its call for electoral reform, its real aim was to overthrow capitalist society and put production, distribution, and exchange on a cooperative basis. The severe winter of 1847–1848 had brought grim times to the working classes; economic conditions had steadily worsened during the second half of 1847; depressed trade and vast unemployment led to widespread working-class discontent. As already shown, this unrest was made manifest in the heightened Chartist activity inspired in good measure by the February revolution at Paris. In March uprisings broke out in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and other large towns. The Chartists’ projected mass demonstration in London on 10 April 1848 faded as the government moved quickly to weaken support, passing emergency legislation to curb assemblies and virtually transforming London into an armed camp. The Chartists took their cue and much of their symbolism from the recent French revolution. One organizer invoked Louis-Philippe’s expulsion as an example for home politics: “Is not that a lesson for our tyrants? Should not such an example have an effect upon our government?” Artisans and liberal bourgeois gathering on Kennington Common carried tricolor flags and banners with the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”6 Their goal was to submit to Parliament a petition signed by a million subscribers reiterating the charter’s demands. Hunt and Millais accompanied the marchers from Russell Square across Blackfriars Bridge to Kennington Common, but they did not cross onto the grass where the demonstrators assembled and instead watched the proceedings as spectators from behind the enclosure. In the midst of the orations, the police showed up and warned Feargus O’Connor—editor of the Northern Star and leading Chartist spokesperson—that the petitioners would be blocked from crossing the Thames from the south to the north side. It was pointed out to O’Connor that snipers occupied the roofs of the neighboring houses. O’Connor then advised his followers to disperse, while the huge petition would be carried to Westminster Palace in three cabs. (Clownish signatories who inscribed “Victoria Rex” and “Mr. Punch” did much to discredit the petition and made it easy to dismiss.) Hunt described the dense, artisanal crowd as “law-abiding,” but also observed a gang of hired thugs armed with bludgeons who were determined to confront the demonstrators. At this point, he and Millais (who had to be whisked away) made their way to London Bridge, then to the Bank of England and the Mansion House, all the while observing soldiery concealed behind sandbags. Suddenly, a rainstorm broke, and both they and the reformers cleared the streets and “scampered home.”7 Although it is clear from Hunt’s testimony that he and Millais were fairweather radicals, their escapade should not be taken lightly. When Hunt conceived the painting Rienzi that year, he recalled that, “Like most young

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men, I was stirred by the spirit of freedom of the passing revolutionary time.” A year later, harking back to the spirited discussions in Woolner’s studio, he remembered: “The world was then too agitated with discontent not to call forth all our political views.”8 The political agitation of 1848 acted upon the imagination of the future Pre-Raphaelites, pushing them toward reform and predisposing them to sympathy with other marginalized groups. Here they acted contrary to the predominantly conservative British middle and upper classes, who breathed a sigh of relief when “the springtime of the people” ran out of steam and the reaction gained the upper hand. An editorial for Blackwood’s Magazine eloquently spelled out the majority feeling at the end of 1849: If the year 1848—“the year of revolutions” was preeminent among all others for the magnitude and interest of the events it brought forth, the year which has just expired—the year of the reaction—is still more worthy of serious reflection, and affords subjects for more cheering meditation. If the first exhibited the whirlwind of anarchy let loose, the second showed the power by which it is restrained; if the former filled every heart with dread at the fierce passions which were developed, and the portentous events which occurred in the world, the latter afforded reason for profound thankfulness, at the silent but irresistible force with which Omnipotence overrules the wickedness of men, and restrains the madness of the people.9

The Pre-Raphaelites initially stood to the left of such right-wing triumphalism, although they accepted the neomedieval notion that religious reform would be conducive to social reform. There is yet another dimension of their political attitude, and that is the affixing of the word “Brotherhood” to their appellation. It has already been shown that Rossetti had to fend off its implication of clericalism, and here he may have been the most qualified in the group to do so. By now we should be accustomed to thinking of the Restoration idea of “brotherhood” in a double sense, both in the monastic connotation associated with the Nazarenes, but also as a secret, fraternal order associated with insurrection. The Pre-Raphaelites inherited both meanings, and it is this ambiguity carried through in their imaginative projections that makes even their biblical scenes quirky and modern. One the one hand, it is hardly to be doubted that “Brotherhood” signified some sense of solidarity with the Italian Primitives and the Nazarenes, thus showing their immersion in the Gothic revival preached by Pugin and Ruskin. One mediating influence was the careful outline work of Josef Führich, a disciple of Overbeck whose engraved illustrations served as a model for their own illustrative attempts.10 Hunt complained much later in life about the influence of medievalism on the taste of the period, but the types of criticism he deploys—faults of proportions and awkward shapes—were those the Pre-Raphaelites then associated with sincere faith

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and natural truth. On the other hand, “Brotherhood” carried unmistakable allusions to a Freemason-like fraternity. Significantly, when the group agreed to use the monogram P.R.B., each member had to swear an oath to keep its meaning secret—the key formula of all exclusive fraternal associations. Although this particular group assumed the guise of a secret order ostensibly “to do battle against the frivolous art of the day,” what is important to note is that the group organized against a perceived external threat that mobilized them as a unit. During the period of the Brotherhood’s sorest travail, Hunt’s father admonished the son that it was impossible to succeed as an artist in Britain “without rich and influential friends.” He regretted that he lacked “that masonic bond in your favour of having been at a public school.”11 When Hunt reflected late in life on the nation’s need for a national art, he insisted that it not be done for a privileged few but must “be a freemason’s sign to all.”12 I believe that the P.R.B. constituted a surrogate “Masonic bond” for the brethren. Members of the group even addressed each other in correspondence as “brother.” Hunt was often invited to the Rossettis for dinner in this period, and he recalled that the senior Rossetti was always surrounded by foreigners, “all escaped revolutionists from the Continent.” They spoke mainly Italian, and he could tell from the tone when they were denouncing their opponents (Bomba, Pio Nono, and Metternich) or praising their heroes (Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Louis-Napoléon—not yet the traitor to republicanism).13 Hence the Rossetti home was a haven for escaped Freemasons and ex-Carbonari participating in the Risorgimento, the resurgence of Italian independence and quest for national unity. One Italian historian of the Pre-Raphaelites wrote that the elder Rossetti was “the poet of our Risorgimento.”14 Indeed, the career of the father, Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe, a native of Vasto in the Abruzzi when it belonged to the Kingdom of Naples, was inescapably linked to the political events of the early Risorgimento.15 He himself had belonged to the secret society known as the Carbonari and joined in the uprising of 1820 that forced Ferdinando I to draw up a Constitution.16 At the time when the Austrian invasion of Naples was imminent, Gabriele wrote a patriotic poem with this quatrain addressed to Ferdinando: “I vindici coltelli / Saparan passarvi il cor: / I Sandi ed i Luvelli / Non son finiti ancor” (Avenging knives will direct themselves to your heart: the Sands and Louvels are not yet done with their work).17 When Metternich’s armies suppressed the insurrection the following year and the rebels were dispersed, Gabriele managed to escape to Malta disguised in an English uniform on a British flagship in the custody of Admiral Sir Graham Moore. He eventually made his way to London and was appointed professor of Italian at King’s College. He married Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, another exiled Italian writer who once served as secretary to the poet and dramatist Alfieri. Gabriele never severed his contacts with the Italian nationalists, and kept a close watch on the developments of 1830 and 1848.

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His house became a well-known haven for Italian refugees and patriots, whose cause was generally favored by the English. That the elder Rossetti was also a Freemason18 played a major role in his literary work. In his analytical and allegorical interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia con commento analitico, 1826–1827), written shortly after his arrival in London, Gabriele perceived Dante “as a member, both in politics and in religion, of an occult society having a close relation to what we now call Freemasonry.” He also declared that the Commedia and the books of other famous authors in various languages and epochs were based on a similar coded program. In correspondence with Dante scholar and botanist Charles Lyell (father of the geologist) he writes that “the entire poem of Dante, all the lyrics of Petrarca, almost all the works of Boccaccio, and, in fine, all the old writings of that class, are nothing else than downright doctrine and practice of the Freemasons, in the strictest acceptation of the word.” In the same letter he refers to John Hookham Frere, a Freemason who befriended him on Malta, being fearful that his seemingly bizarre interpretations and analysis may be a first step in betraying their position to the world, and Rossetti concluded: “I am not so mad as to plan detriment to the society, and to myself ”—a clear hint that he belonged to the Craft.19 Significantly, his application for an appointment at the recently founded King’s College was strongly supported by Sir Gore Ouseley, a prominent Mason in the Grand Lodge of the United Kingdom.20 Rossetti’s arguments convinced Isaac Disraeli, a fellow Freemason, who must have shared his enthusiasm for the political interpretation of Dante with his son Benjamin. (Isaac’s father was born in Cento in the district of Ferrara, and thus felt a strong bond with Italian culture.) The elder Disraeli was responsible for encouraging Benjamin in the direction of a mainstream gentile life that inevitably included Freemasonry.21 The importance of Freemasonry for Jews everywhere in the nineteenth century lay in its opening a path for integration into the non-Jewish social environment. Here then may be a major source of Disraeli’s fraternal concept of Young England, which overlaps with Mazzini’s contemporaneous Young Italy (Giovine Italia)—an offshoot of Freemasonry and Carbonarism. It is noteworthy that after Mazzini settled in London in 1837, he carried on an extensive public relations campaign promoting his organization. Mazzini and Rossetti kept in close touch, and although Disraeli’s Toryism had nothing in common with their ideology, all three advocated the liberation of peoples from the yoke of animal labor and impoverishment. That early conservative critics grasped onto the initials P.R.B. as an artistic equivalent of Young England attests to the heightened fears of political conspiracy in the 1848 epoch associated with secret societies, Jews, and subversive movements. Soon after Mazzini arrived in London he joined the Italian colony, and he and the elder Rossetti allied on the basis of a shared vision of Italian

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unity. They corresponded frequently right through 1848, and Mazzini evidently hoped at one point that Rossetti would support his plans for a republic. The elder Rossetti, however, believed that Mazzinian agitation ultimately led to the abortive insurrections in Italy of 1848–1849, and the hesitation of foreign powers—especially the French—to extricate Italy from the Austrians. Thus he advocated a moderate politics along the lines of a constitutional monarchy, though favorable to the actions of the heroic Garibaldi (a well-known member of the Craft) consistent with his Freemasonic sympathies. This is also seen in Rossetti’s support for the pending Reform Bill of 1832: “God forbid that this Bill should not pass—there would certainly be a revolution.”22 Gabriele continued to write in the vein of his first work, and his subsequent Sullo spirito antipapale che produsse la Riforma (1832) develops the idea of a secret society to which Dante and other writers belonged, explaining the anticlerical and antipapal sentiments covertly expressed in their work.23 He is even more specific about the Masonic subtext of the Divine Comedy in the exegetical Il mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo of 1840.24 He interprets the Inferno of Dante as a symbol of the wretched state of Italy under the popes at the time it was written. As opposed to Pugin, he saw the Reformation not as the progenitor of spiritual decline but as the outcome of the Church’s ruthless policies to preserve power. Yet the elder Rossetti neither renounced his Catholicism nor joined the Church of England, taking a middle course with respect to religious issues. His religious ambivalence allowed his wife Frances (née Polidori)—sympathetic to High Church ideals—to take over the religious training of their children. Like Ruskin, Rossetti took it for granted that every text had a double meaning that could appeal on one level to the understanding of the “common reader” and on another to “brighter intellects.”25 He termed these two levels of reading the literal and the allegorical, which he also attributed in Dante’s case to a need for a coded system that would enable him to evade papal retribution. The simple reader would have been a Guelph, or blind subscriber to strong papal rule, and the wiser a Ghibelline, like Dante, who conspired against the pope and desired the secular reign of monarch or emperor. These two opposing factions had their counterparts in the Italy of Rossetti’s time, with neo-Guelphs proposing to achieve independence from foreign control by federating the various Italian states under a papal president, and neo-Ghibellines wanting to unify under the aegis of the king of Sardinia-Piedmont. Rossetti’s identification with the neo-Ghibellines insured that his own texts always carried the hidden significance that he ascribed to the writings of his hero. His tight typological reading of texts anticipates the Pre-Raphaelites’ own symbolic system, in which every detail carries meaning both in and of itself and in relationship to the whole. Hunt’s direct contact with the senior Rossetti would have reinforced the approach he gleaned from Ruskin’s Modern Painters. As the charismatic and learned father of two of

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the founding members of the group and genial host to the others, the elder Rossetti’s intellectual influence was probably decisive in orienting them to his interpretive bent. The fact that early meetings of the P.R.B. took place upstairs in the Rossetti residence while the heated Risorgimento discussions went on below further attests to the intersection of art and politics in 1848. Both Gabriel Dante and William Michael were well aware of their father’s role as Carbonaro in the Neapolitan uprising as well as of his strong Masonic sympathies, and they were surrounded daily by the exiled members of Young Italy and patriots of the Risorgimento.26 It is therefore inconceivable that the P.R.B.—especially in light of Rossetti’s contribution of the idea of “Brotherhood”—could have come into existence without the political agitation and ideological ferment of 1848. Hunt’s response to Millais’s query on the nature of his scruples was that they were “nothing less than irreverent, heretical, and revolutionary.” When Hunt declared that he and Millais resolved in 1848 “to join in the search for new possibilities in art,” he essentially admitted to their solidarity with the regenerative ideals of insurgents everywhere that year. Finally, Hunt stated that the group “agreed upon” the Pre-Raphaelite principle in February 1848—the very month the French revolution broke out.27 It is no coincidence that the work Hunt conceived in the wake of the Chartist procession was his Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions, a fourteenth-century subject to which he gave the highest priority despite his many other pressing projects (fig. 4.1).28 It was his pioneer PreRaphaelite presentation and one he claimed was inspired “by the spirit of freedom of the passing revolutionary time.” When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it represented his first public display to carry the initials P.R.B. The entry was accompanied by a slightly modified text from the opening chapter of the picture’s literary source, Bulwer-Lytton’s 1835 novel, Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes: But for that event, the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a poet—the peaceful rival of Petrarch—a man of thoughts, not deeds. But from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became concentrated to a single point; and patriotism, before a vision, leaped into the life and vigour of a passion.

The plot, steeped in Risorgimento politics, was conceived by the author in Rome following the revolutionary upheavals of the early 1830s—an influence reflected in the dedication of the novel to the Milanese Alessandro Manzoni, author of the celebrated historical romance I promessi sposi. Manzoni’s sweeping saga, told in the Italian vernacular, of an aristocratic and clerical conspiracy against a betrothed peasant couple established him as a popular hero of the Risorgimento. In the second edition of Rienzi,

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4.1  William Holman Hunt, Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions, 1848–1849. Private

Collection.



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which appeared in 1848, Bulwer-Lytton claimed credit for contributing to the nationalist fervor “among the rising generation of Italian youth.”29 He concluded his preface with a hope for a Ghibelline outcome in Italy: “And in now looking round Italy for a race worthy of Rienzi, and able to accomplish his proud dreams, I see but one for which the time is ripe or ripening, and I place the hopes of Italy in the men of Piedmont and Sardinia.” Hunt himself explained the motivation for using the text as a source: “The appeal to Heaven against the tyranny exercised over the poor and helpless seemed well fitted for pictorial treatment.” Swept up in the politics of Rossetti’s household, he posed Dante Gabriel for the head of the Tribune Rienzi, and his brother William Michael for the figure of Adrian di Costello, who tries to comfort Rienzi with the words “Let me be your brother. . . . I want a brother like you.” Since Millais served as the model for the slain victim, the work added up to a genuine “Brotherhood” project, with three of the P.R.B. members posing for the protagonists, and the central character crying out “Justice! Justice!” Hunt’s source centered around two feuding noble factions, the Orsinis and Colonnas, who carry on the tradition of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The first chapter, entitled “The Brothers,” opens in Rome with Cola chapter four

di Rienzi and his younger sibling walking and musing along the banks of the Tiber. Cola di Rienzi launches into a tirade about the exploitation of plebeians like himself by the patrician Colonna faction, outraged by the duplicitous practice of recruiting pliable plebeians under the cloak of a democratic show. The brothers separate as Cola runs an errand and the younger gathers flowers for a garland for their sister. Suddenly he is swept up in the retinue of Orsini knights hunting Colonnas, and in the melee that ensues he is mistaken for an Orsini by one of the Colonnas and killed. Returning just at that moment, Cola kneels by his murdered brother and, lifting his crimsoned hand to the sky, cries for vengeance against the aristocratic rulers of Rome. Rienzi now vows to liberate the state from tyrannical control and restore power to the people. The novel is awash in anachronisms redolent with topical significance. In a key scene the author establishes a setting of an elevated pile of large chunks of stone dragged “from the ruins of Rome,” a remnant from a recent street skirmish that served “as a barricade for citizens against citizens.”30 More than once Bulwer-Lytton compares Rienzi to Bonaparte; when the physiognomy of the mature Rienzi is described, the author finds “a certain resemblance to the popular pictures of Napoléon.” By 1347, Rienzi has gathered a sufficient following of plebeians and liberal nobles to pull off a bloodless insurrection. As the nobles either temporarily leave the city or retreat into hiding, a Constitutional Assembly is declared and a democratic series of laws (what Bulwer-Lytton calls the “New Constitution”) is accepted with acclaim. Although Rienzi himself is given unlimited authority to complete the work of the revolution, he takes the modest title of Tribune and for the remainder of the novel struggles against the temptations of ambition and personal power to dispense justice consistently for patrician and peasant alike.31 Hunt’s representation displays the influence of Pugin and Ruskin, signaled by the gushing figure of Adrian di Costello at the left wearing a medieval corselet and the turreted buildings in the background. The redemptive gesture of Rienzi, the pietà-like pose of his brother, and the presence of a Madonna figure coming up over the hill and carrying two infants in her arms gives the picture’s structure a New Testament feeling. He merges the medievalizing and Christianizing themes, however, with the modernity of plein-air painting and his revolutionary sympathies—a paradigm of the P.R.B. synthesis. Hunt recalled that in 1848 the appeal of the poor and helpless to Divine Providence for release from tyrannical control was no mere literary theme: “‘How long, O Lord!’, many bleeding souls were crying at that time.”32 Hunt repeatedly insists that Rienzi was a revolutionary work, both in content and style. He explained to Rossetti that he was putting into practice his “principle of rejection of conventional dogma, and pursuing that of direct application to Nature for each feature, however humble a part of foreground or background this might be.” He meant thereby to eradicate

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“the stereotyped tricks of decadent schools, and of any conventions not recommended by experienced personal judgment.”33 Excepting the figures and a few details, most of the picture was painted out-of-doors at Hampstead Heath; the fig tree was painted on the spot in the garden of Stephens’s father at Lambeth, “its leaves and branches in full sunlight, with what was then unprecedented exactness.” The patches of grass with dandelion puffs and other blossoms and the young trees were rendered “directly and frankly, not merely for the charm of minute finish, but as a means of studying more deeply Nature’s principles of design, and to escape the conventional treatment of landscape backgrounds.”34 It is difficult to believe that the twenty-one-year-old Hunt spoke with such authority of his intentions, but it should be recalled that he was recording his reminiscences in old age and writing history to shore up and legitimatize his key role in the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His seemingly well-thought-out responses of 1848 were actually those of his mature reflections. Much of this record was also affected by the art criticism at the time in which he was writing, especially the late symbolist critique (itself heir to Ruskinian and P.R.B. doctrine) of realist-type approaches that would have captured Hunt’s attention. Now almost exclusively associated with modernity and urban life, realism was once again equated with antireligious and materialist preoccupations. He ends his autobiography with a thundering denunciation of impressionism as “materialistic and soulless” and threatening nothing less than the extinction of modern art. Thus despite the P.R.B. emphasis on nature in the years 1848–1850 akin to their counterparts in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and America, Hunt subsequently declared that he and his colleagues “were never realists.” One can hear the echoes of contemporary criticism when he asserts that an artist’s work “must be the reflex of a living image in his own mind, and not the icy double of the facts themselves.”35 Since no artist could ever simply replicate the facts of brute existence, the symbolist critique actually targeted the ideology as much as the aesthetics of the painters espousing the representation of everyday life. Hence it addressed the political and social intentions of realist artists, reflected in Hunt’s unfavorable attitude to French realism and in the nature of P.R.B. technical precision and surface finish. Realism not only leaves God out of the equation but induces us to look upon the world “as without design or finish, unbalanced, unfitting, and unlovely, not interpreted into beauty as true art makes it.” Hence P.R.B. “realism” required careful attention to surface detail as opposed to Courbet-like crudity to charge it with the symbolic significance necessary to give closure—that is, completion—to the world. The Victorian and utilitarian bourgeois urge to practical moral and religious purpose required perfection of style to convey the thought that the solutions to social problems were already available within biblical formulae. They needed only to be practiced to produce the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The work of the French bourgeois realist, on the other

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hand, still embodied the ethos of revolutionary individualism, where the “unfinished” surface signified the expression of freedom from social and political constraint. The advances of the Industrial Revolution at mid-century and the extent of British global power—symbolized by the Great Exhibition of 1851—promoted the sense that perfection was then within the grasp of human society. That the Pre-Raphaelites acted on this dictum is seen in Hunt’s history of the movement, which from first to last addresses itself to “the nation”: In the exercise of her holy function art must sort out the good and the beautiful from the base and hideous. She presents the form of a nation’s spirit, exactly as the sandy atoms on a vibrating plane make a constant and distinct pattern to the sound of a given note. . . . But while the temper of the people is of necessity reflected by its art, in wise hands it may be controlled to an independent course and initiate a purifying influence, and help to mould the nation’s thoughts, affections, and impulses.36

Though written in retrospect, it shows that the Pre-Raphaelites embraced the Carlylean combination of sympathy for the underprivileged and a wise paternalism. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe and America they practiced a form of plein-air realism to demonstrate their rebellious position in 1848, but it was tempered by their religious attitudes and typological symbolism. Every detail in a composition had to carry the burden of a moral judgment and offer the viewer the possibility of redemptive existence. In this they shared the prevailing middle-class fascination for natural history, especially botany and geology, which even carried over into clerical hobbies. The divine purpose could be disclosed in every leaf, blossom, and stamen, and walks in the countryside and nature hikes into the woods represented opportunities to observe the workings of the Infinite Mind and the bounties of unlimited Creation. Armed with a geologist’s hammer and a collecting basket, Victorian men and women approached plant life and fossils with a missionary zeal. This is already evident in the plant and flower symbolism of Rienzi. The fig tree at the left of the picture probably symbolizes the disdain of the nobles for the plebeians, seen in the indifference of the riders leaving the scene, while the garland of flowers strung by the dead youth contains hyacinths, anemones, daisies, and violets, all of which have a bearing on the picture’s theme. The hyacinth symbolized misfortune and sorrow; in Greek legend, Hyacinthus was the name of a handsome youth beloved by Zephyrus and Apollo, who were rivals for his affection. During a game of quoits between Apollo and Hyacinthus, the jealous Zephyrus deflected a discus thrown by Apollo so that it struck and killed Hyacinthus. The griefstricken Apollo summoned the flower out of the blood-stained earth in remembrance of his beloved. Similarly, the tears shed by Venus over the

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4.2  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848–1849. Tate Gallery, London.



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body of the fallen Adonis were translated into the commemorative anemone, also a symbol of the brevity of existence. The daisy represented innocence and fidelity, and the violet embodied similar attributes of modesty and faithfulness. Finally, dandelions (seen in the right foreground and on the hills at the left) are associated with prophecy, as the act of blowing the seedball foretold a person’s fortune.37 Of course, flower symbolism is not stable and each blossom may often carry multiple meanings, and we can never be sure that each and every flower in a composition painted out-of-doors signified a specific idea. But there is enough evidence to demonstrate that for Pre-Raphaelites, held in the powerful grip of Ruskin’s writings and of the contemporary typological tradition, all objects in the natural world served both a representational and symbolic function in their painting. Thus they could balance their innovative plein-air work with traditional emphasis on storytelling and careful polish. This self-conscious synthesis is also a hallmark of Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, painted in the same period as the Rienzi and the first work produced by a P.R.B. member to be exhibited with the group’s monogram (fig. 4.2).38 Rossetti got the jump on Hunt and Millais somewhat to their annoyance, showing at the Free Exhibition of Modern Art in the Chinese Gallery at Hyde Park Corner which opened on 24 March 1849—over a month earlier than the Royal Academy. 39 Although scarcely a revolutionary theme and based on the New Testament episode, it departed from tradition in several distinctive ways. Beyond the interior space there is a view of a naturalistic, brightly lit landscape representing a glimpse of the Sea of Galilee. The design’s vivid colorations, shallow space, and vertical orientation recall medieval manuscript illumination. The reviewer of the Athenaeum, predisposed to Puginesque ideals, declared that the work’s “sincerity and earnestness” reminded him “forcibly of the feeling with which the early Florentine monastic painters wrought.” He took to the idea that Mary was shown in a familial setting and engaged in the ordinary task “of embroidering drapery to supply possibly some future sacred vestment.”40 Significantly, Rossetti not only treated Mary’s childhood in an everyday chapter four

secular context akin to genre painting but also featured characters based on his own family circle. The Virgin was modeled directly after his sister Christina, St. Anne after their mother, and St. Joachim after “Old Williams,” an occasional handyman and servant employed by the Rossettis. The incorporation of family members into his work inevitably invoked the tense psychological drama of interpersonal relationships—a trait his work shared with Pre-Raphaelite work generally. The picture depicts the Virgin engaged in embroidering a scarlet cloth with the image of a tall lily stem, which she is copying from life. Sitting closely to her is St. Anne, who supervises her needlework. The actual lily in its vase, supported by an angel, rests on a pile of six large tomes inscribed with the names of the cardinal and theological virtues: “Caritas,” “Fides,” “Spes,” “Prudentia,” “Temperantia,” and “Fortitudo.” The palm branch crossed by a thorny briar on the floor in the foreground, the ingenious cruciform trellis, the red robe draped over the tiled balustrade, all presage the Passion, while St. Joachim’s act of pruning the vine points to the Eucharist and Christ’s sacrifice. The haloed dove perched on the trellis symbolizes the protective Holy Spirit awaiting parturition. Then there is the flower symbolism. The white Madonna lily, associated with the Virgin, symbolizes purity, and the lone rose in the glass atop the balustrade recalls the traditional sign of her miraculous incarnations. But Rossetti’s use of Christina as the model for his Virgin charges the floral metaphors with personal significance. Their father had written these verses about Christina and his other daughter, Maria: Christina and Maria, My dear daughters, Are fresh violets Opened at dawn. They are roses nurtured By the earliest breezes; They are lovely turtle-doves In the nest of Love.41

Here we see that the metaphorical predisposition of the elder Rossetti could be applied to living specimens as well, nurturing and liberating their poetic instincts. Indeed, flower symbolism pervades Christina’s writing: one of her childhood examples apostrophizes “The Solitary Rose,” published in a book of her poetry printed privately in 1847 by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori. Christina’s identification with the flower, which she ultimately chose as her personal sign, is stated in the first verse: O happy Rose, red Rose, that bloomest lonely Where there are none to gather while they love thee; That art perfumed by thine own fragrance only,



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Resting like incense round thee and above thee;— Thou hearest nought save some pure stream that flows, O happy Rose.42

This same preoccupation is seen in Dante Gabriel’s two sonnets written for the picture, the first attached to the original frame and the second written for the catalogue of the Free Exhibition (both are now affixed to the present frame): I This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect God’s Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee. Unto God’s will she brought devout respect, Profound simplicity of intellect, And supreme patience. From her mother’s knee Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity; Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect. So held she through her girlhood; as it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home She woke in her white bed, and had no fear At all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed: Because the fulness of the time was come. II These are the symbols. On that cloth of red the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each, Except the second of its points, to teach That Christ is not yet born. The books—whose head Is golden Charity, as Paul hath said— Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich: Therefore on them the lily standeth, which Is Innocence, being interpreted. The seven-thorn’d briar and palm seven-leaved Are her great sorrow and her great reward. Until the end be full, the Holy One Abides without. She soon shall have achieved Her perfect purity: yea, God the Lord Shall soon vouchsafe His Son to be her Son.43

Rossetti, however, shared the fascination for the emblematic use of nature and religious symbolism with a knowing constituency. His description of the picture in a letter of 14 November 1848 to Charles Lyell mentions

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that it belonged “to the religious class which has always appeared to me the most adapted and the most worthy to interest the members of a Christian community.”44 This statement suggests that he had a specific audience in mind prior to painting the work, and was attuned to the religious ferment of the period. He also noted that though the work illustrates the traditional Education of the Virgin theme, he wanted to give it a special twist by substituting the act of embroidering for the conventional scene of reading. According to his brother and close associates, Dante Gabriel was never more than a casual attendant of the Anglican Church, so that his interest in appealing to “a Christian community” is less a religious act than a calculated strategy. The work’s curiously detached quality seems more appropriate to genre than to religious painting, as Dante Gabriel carefully piles up symbol upon symbol in a style closely approximating his father’s methods for decoding medieval literature. Hunt, who recognized the influence of Brown’s Wycliffe Reading His Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt on Girlhood, perceived Rossetti’s picture as a holdover from the older artist’s “Overbeckian phase.” But this “phase” was also mediated by the contributions of Pugin and his collaborators, whose work Brown had consulted in the process of searching out sources for his own painting. The bench on which the Virgin sits and the portable organ behind her carved with the legend “Laus deo” are distinctly Puginesque accessories, while the tiles of the balustrade resemble the medieval-style encaustic designs the porcelain manufacturer Herbert Minton began producing in the period. In addition, the figure of Mary and certain accessories such as the handsome book bindings recall picturesque details from the frontispieces of Pugin’s True Principles of Pointed Architecture and Specimens of Gothic Architecture. This brings us back to Rossetti’s stated intention to produce a work peculiarly fitted to address a particular religious community, and here again it seemed appropriate for him to exploit his mother and sister as models for the biblical subject. One of the major Tractarian writings was a sermon on the Annunciation which emphasized the link between the incarnation of Christ and the apostolic succession—tracing the ministry of the primitive church back through the Apostles to Christ incarnate.45 At the moment, Rossetti’s mother and sister were deeply attracted to the Oxford Movement and High Church teachings.46 Since 1843 Frances Rossetti and her two daughters had begun attending Christ Church, Albany Street, one of the main London centers of the movement, whose vicar was Reverend William Dodsworth, a disciple of Pusey, Keble, and Newman. Under his direction, Pusey and many other leading Tractarians preached Sunday sermons at Christ Church. Frances, Christina, and Maria all enthusiastically embraced Anglo-Catholic teaching, but for Christina it marked a period of upheaval in her life. While eventually she would devote her poetry to propagating High Church gospel and be recognized as the poet laureate of the Oxford Movement, the

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immediate impact of Anglo-Catholicism upon her precocious adolescent sensibility stirred her with burdensome guilt feelings. Sometime in the spring of 1845, then nearing her fifteenth birthday, she suffered a nervous breakdown and for the next five years had to be placed under medical supervision. Significantly, the breakdown was diagnosed at one point as a form of religious mania, a state of excessive self-reproach for failing to fulfill one’s religious obligations. Although showing symptoms that moderns could relate to anorexia, Victorians made their diagnosis of turbulent female adolescence within the parameters of religious experience. One clue to Christina’s crisis in the 1840s is the short story she wrote in 1850 entitled Maude, in large measure an autobiographical projection treating the onerous problems that beset her in the previous decade. Maude Foster is fifteen when the story begins, a poet, always in a delicate physical state, excels in improvising bouts-rimés (a game of rhyme endings) sonnets, occasionally attends St. Andrew’s Church, is fascinated with the prospect of an Anglican sisterhood, feels like a hypocrite in comparison to the simple religious faith of one of her friends, and is torn between her gifts for writing and ambition for success and the Victorian pressure against female display—all vivid features of Christina’s self-portrait at the moment of her crisis in 1845.47 Maude is also a female-centered world where males are marginalized at best, leaving the protagonist to work through her difficulties free from the masculine gaze of father and brothers. By coincidence, the first Anglican sisterhood—promoted by Pusey and Dodsworth—crystallized in the Christ Church parish in 1845 and made its first public appearance on Easter Sunday. Christina admitted an early attraction to the convent, but was probably discouraged by her mother.48 When Maude asks her mother if she should mind her becoming a nun, the reply came, “Yes, my dear; it would make me miserable.” Nevertheless, Christina retained a romantic attachment to the idea of a female religious order and eventually did rescue work for a penitentiary in Highgate run by Anglican nuns. Wearing the habit of an Associate of the Order and called “Sister Christina,” she administered to unmarried mothers and prostitutes. In this sense, I believe that Maude is a response to her brother’s depiction of Girlhood, which attempts to subject her and their mother to the programmatic exigencies of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—an exclusive fraternal association that did not permit female members. Thus the singlesex concept of the religious sisterhood stood in opposition to the intellectual brotherhood, although Christina was as ambivalent about the one and the other as were her brothers, who knew she qualified mentally and creatively for the P.R.B. When Maude’s friend enters a convent, it inspires the eponymous heroine to compose a poem tracing the diverse motives of three girls who decide to become nuns. The poetic thoughts contrast with the characterization in the painting. For example, the first novitiate, seeking womb-like protection and nostalgic relief from the pains of maturation, states:

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There, while yet a child, I thought I could live as in a dream, Secret, neither found nor sought: Till the lilies on the stream, Pure as virgin purity, Would seem scarce too pure for me:— Ah, but that can never be.

Here the ideal of lily-white purity remains an elusive goal rather than the reality of the religious devotee in the picture. The second girl, disillusioned in love, perceives the nunnery as an escape to a refuge where her personal self-sacrifice enables her to achieve resolution to her earthly pain: Yea, the reward is almost won, A crown of glory and a palm. Soon I shall sing the unknown psalm; Soon gaze on light, not on the sun; And soon, with surer faith, shall pray For him, and cease not night nor day.

The third girl enters as part of her struggle to attain spiritual happiness, associating herself with the male-identified imagery of Girlhood: Oh for the grapes of the True Vine Growing in Paradise. Whose tendrils join the Tree of Life To that which maketh wise. Growing beside the Living Well Whose sweetest waters rise Where tears are wiped from tearful eyes.

Referring to her own floral emblem, Christina hints that this girl is her persona: I will not look upon a rose Though it is fair to see: The flowers planted in Paradise Are budding now for me. Red roses like love visible Are blowing on their tree, Or white like virgin purity.49

Christina/Maude has her own agenda independent from the role assigned to her by her brother in the picture. Although the Middle Ages scripted the nun as the bride of Christ, in Christina’s short story each of the novitiates

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commits herself to the convent with the aim of resolving private doubts and insecurities. They are not precisely compliant daughters who unquestioningly submit to the will of God. This is the kind of complexity absent in male representations of sisterhood. The well-known Convent Thoughts, for example, painted in 1850– 1851 by Charles Allston Collins, a High Church follower and close associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, depicts a simplistic male schema of the ideal Victorian woman, whose natural habitat is a walled-off garden cloister (fig. 4.3).50 Surrounded by symbolic flowerbeds of lilies and roses, she gazes contemplatively at a passion flower, whose name was derived from the resemblance of its parts to the shape of the cross, the five wounds of Christ, the crown of thorns, and even the nimbus signifying divine glory. The two pages of the open medieval missal held in the nun’s other hand illustrate the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary, again representing her selfless dedication to religious obligations. An inscription at the top of the frame, “Sicut Lilium,” is a fragment taken from the Song of Solomon 2:2, referring to the verse, “As the lily among thorns [Sicut lilium inter spinas], so is my 4.3  Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts, 1850–1851. Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.



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love among the daughters.” This is often interpreted in the typological tradition as both a sign of Christ’s love of the Church and an allusion to the Virgin Mary. The white lilies pointing upward to the nun and the roses in the rear reinforce the link to Mary and the idea of the woman as a pure, flower-like essence. The image of the closeted, dreamy, virginal, self-sacrificing female clearly appealed to one side of the Victorian male sensibility, but its erotic implications could be smuggled in among the religious allusions. Millais informed Hunt that the work started out as a paean to a “fancied love affair” which evidently fizzled out, and Collins changed the subject from the female protagonist in Shelley’s Sensitive Plant, “Who out of the cups of the heavy flowers / Emptied the rain of the thunder showers,” to the nun meditating on the significance of the passion flower.51 Thus the High Church references gloss the original theme of romantic love, perhaps seen in the detail of the erect lilies pointing in the direction of the nun’s body. The patron for this work was Thomas Combe, the prominent superintendent of the Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), Oxford, and churchwarden of his parish. He and his wife were influential High Church people within the Oxford University community and became major patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Combes had purchased Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, and Millais jokingly began his correspondence to Combe as “Dear Early Christian”—a clue to his Anglo-Catholic status and to Millais’s own early attraction to High Church principles. Combe noted that the flowers in Convent Thoughts were painted in the garden of his own home located in the quadrangle of Clarendon Press. Although otherwise critical of the picture, Ruskin praised Collins’s rendering of the water plant in the goldfish pond, Alisma plantago, which he knew at firsthand from his own botanical study. Ruskin claimed that it had never been “so thoroughly or so well drawn,” proof positive to him that truth to nature was paramount in the P.R.B. program.52 But invariably their synthesis of the natural and symbolic constituted an attempt on the part of nascent intellectuals to add instant profundity to their productions. Like Convent Thoughts, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin ostensibly reflects an attempt to convey “a symbol of female excellence. The Virgin being taken as its highest type.”53 Although Rossetti’s picture depicts Mary confined and closely supervised by a sort of “mother superior,” the scene unfolds in a secular context, in an everyday domestic setting that reminded the Athenaeum’s critic of John Rogers Herbert’s Our Saviour Subject to His Parents at Nazareth. Thus it avoids overt references to a female religious order, perhaps partly in response to Low Church critics of Anglican nunneries as papistinspired but also to the idea that they constituted a menace to the family structure and to patriarchal authority.54 Rossetti’s imagined “religious community” for whom he presumably painted the pictures comprised a fair share of sceptics (including Rossetti himself and brother William) and

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Puseyite opponents, and the awkwardnesses of the picture relate to his religious ambivalence. If he borders on Mariolatry under the pressure of the High Church beliefs of the female side of his family, he justifies it by the genre-like presentation. In a sense, he created a subject out of the immediate family tensions as they were played out in Victorian religious struggles for control of social change. This tension is observed in the picture in the anxious interaction of Mary and St. Anne at the embroidery frame, posed by Christina and Frances. St. Anne/Frances practically sits on top of Mary/Christina, staring fixedly at the needlework and folding her hands in impatience. A bored and tight-lipped apprentice, Mary avoids eye-contact with her mother and looks straight ahead at the lily plant. In reality, Frances Rossetti undertook both the secular and religious education of all her children at home. She was a firm disciplinarian who carefully regulated their routine. Since the daughters were raised to be governesses, she closely supervised their training, including such practical domestic chores as needlework and embroidery. Christina, however, hated the idea of becoming a governess and grew to despise her needlework chores. Yet this engendered a conflictual mindset which contributed to her adolescent turmoil, for while as children she and Maria enjoyed an egalitarian upbringing with the boys, they were gradually reigned in to conform to the Victorian model of femininity. Her desire to create poetry and be admired for her gifts ran counter to the self-effacing feminine ideal as well as to the notion of religious self-sacrifice. When Maude espies her cousins Mary and Agnes Clifton embroidering a cover for the lectern in their church, she compliments their handiwork and they invite her to join them at the frame. Maude, however, demurs at the task, claiming inability and lack of time to learn, but then she murmurs to herself, “How I envy you. . . . I am sick of display and poetry and acting.” The motif of the embroidery frame is central to Rossetti’s idea. Almost every Victorian novelist (and not only in Great Britain) wishing to represent maidenhood, the good wife and mother, depicted their female protagonist seated in an isolated alcove absorbed in spinning, sewing, or embroidering. George Eliot’s Mrs. Transome, in Felix Holt, the Radical, took to embroidering useless objects—“then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.” Disraeli in particular consistently employs the image to conjure the self-sacrificing and submissive Victorian woman: in Coningsby he writes of the stirring sight of graceful English women “bending over their embroidery frames,” while in Sybil he has Lord Marney’s wife Arabella, the epitome of the long-suffering, passive wife, sitting often at her embroidery frame. Equally important for Rossetti’s picture, the ceremonial revival of the Oxford Movement encouraged embroidery-work for altar frontals and vestments, harking back to a tradition that had ended with the suppression of the religious orders in the sixteenth century.55 The symbolic connection between the embroidery frame and Victorian ideals of femininity and the Oxford Movement makes it possible to see the

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ambivalence of Mary/Christina regarding the needlework in her brother’s portrayal and in her own self-projection in Maude as allusions to Christina’s actual religious crisis and breakdown in the 1840s. Significantly, in Maude the designs on the embroidery correspond in large part to the symbolism in Girlhood. Maude observes a cross, crown of thorns, and several floral emblems. Agnes also points out a palm-branch and notes that the border is to be decorated with vine leaves and grapes. When Maude asks her if the flowers mean anything, Agnes replies by citing the opening line of chapter 2 of the Song of Solomon, the one just preceding the verse quoted by Collins in the inscription above the frame of Convent Thoughts: “I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valleys”—hence linking the motif with both that work and Girlhood and through them with the P.R.B. program generally. There is yet another social facet of the image that embeds it in a topical Victorian discourse. The flip side of the popular image of the upperclass woman absorbed in her embroidery frame is that of the working-class needlewoman slaving away in the clothing trade. Approximately ten percent of the female workforce employed in the huge London garment trade were seamstresses, dressmakers, and milliners.56 The drudgery and small wages made the needlewoman socially, economically, and sexually vulnerable. Her condition, written up in contemporary government and municipal reports and journalistic accounts, was highlighted in Thomas Hood’s sensational poem, “The Song of the Shirt.” Published in the Christmas number of Punch, 1843, its melodramatic verses achieved widespread notoriety and did much to heighten public awareness of the ruthlessly exploited seamstress: 57 O! Men, with Sisters dear! O! Men! with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you’re wearing out, But human creatures’ lives! Stitch—stitch—stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt. ……… With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread— Stitch! Stitch! Stitch! In poverty, hunger and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, Would that its tone could reach the Rich! She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”58



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4.4  Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress, 1846 version. Forbes Magazine Collection, New York.

The poem inspired the artist Richard Redgrave to paint The Sempstress, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, portraying the despairing needlewoman in a dingy garret, laboring on a man’s shirt into the wee hours of the morning by the flickering light of a lone candle (fig. 4.4). Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) probably took its cue from this picture for one of its opening scenes, in which the impoverished heroine toils on a luxurious ballroom gown during the early morning hours in a dark, chilly corner of a dressmaker’s sweatshop. She strains her “aching eyes” in gazing out of the window “on the lovely sky of a winter’s night.” An unwed yet singularly self-sacrificing mother, Ruth is ultimately martyred on the rack of doubledealing Victorian morality. Anti-Semitism also reared its ugly head in connection with the clothing and needlepoint trades. This is especially evident in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, where sweaters and rapacious workshop masters are almost always identified as Jews. Henry Mayhew’s popular Morning Chronicle series of 1849–1850, “London Labour and the London Poor,” which drew public attention to the deplorable working conditions of tailors and needlewomen, had previously prompted Kingsley to write his pamphlet on the sweating system entitled Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850).59 (Sweaters were middlemen whose work was farmed out to them by enterprising tailors, and the laborers often took part of their work home to their wives and daughters.) Although Jews formed a minority among the sweaters, Kingsley singles them out as characteristic of the occupation and even attaches a

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special onus to them for exploiting “the unfortunate Christian.” He makes Crossthwaite, a Chartist in Alton Locke’s shop, declare: “We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters who draw their livelihood out of our starvation.”60 Although not openly hostile to Judaism, Christina Rossetti’s dialogue poem “Christian and Jew” (written in 1858, the year Parliament passed the Jewish Disabilities Removal Act) denies the Jew a place in paradise except at the price of baptism and conversion. If brother William recognized the “genius” of young Simeon Solomon, he could still refer to him as “an unsightly little Israelite.”61 It may be recalled that at the end of 1847 members of Parliament hotly debated the admission of Jews, and Disraeli outraged the body when he declared that Jews were the “authors” of Christianity. Much as the Anglicans deprecated papal influence, some of them dreaded even more the thought of Jews gaining political power. The hostility of ultra-Protestants on this issue matched the intensity of their anti-Catholic opposition, with the result that the controversial parliamentary exchange gained widespread notoriety.62 It could hardly be doubted that Christina and her brothers were aware of the arguments, since the person who taught them German, Dr. Adolph Heimann, was Jewish, and his young wife, Amelia, became one of Christina’s closest friends. Indeed, shortly after her “Christian and Jew” appeared, Christina felt compelled to send a note of apology to the Heimanns. One of the common stereotyped arguments advanced by opponents of Jewish admission to Parliament was the Jewish lack of allegiance to England—that Jews were permanent outcasts and aliens whose spiritual home remained Judea. They had to twist Disraeli’s argument by stripping away from modern Jews the Judaism of the Old Testament and assigning to them the “false” religion of the Pharisees as recorded in the New Testament. That the curious identity problem connecting Judaism and “the early Christians” vexed Rossetti is manifested in his poetic interpretations of New Testament themes. The poem “The Seed of David” wrestles with the ironies of Christ’s Jewish ancestry: Christ sprang from David Shepherd, and even so From David King, being born of high and low. The Shepherd lays his crook, the King his crown, Here at Christ’s feet, and high and low bow down.

The question of the dual identity of Jesus arises again in “The Passover in the Holy Family,” which confronts the book of Exodus with the Synoptic Gospels: Here meet together the prefiguring day And day prefigured. “Eating, thou shalt stand, Feet shod, loins girt, thy road-staff in thine hand,



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With blood-stained door and lintel,”—did God say By Moses’ mouth in ages passed away. And now, where this poor household doth comprise At Paschal-Feast two kindred families,— Lo! the slain lamb confronts the Lamb to slay. The pyre is piled. What agony’s crown attained, What shadow of Death the Boy’s fair brow subdues Who holds that blood wherewith the porch is stained By Zachary the priest? John binds the shoes He deemed himself not worthy to unloose; And Mary culls the bitter herbs ordained.63

In a sense, Rossetti, who once conceived a picture of a Passover Seder in Jesus’s family when Christ was still a child, embeds the Jewish clan of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin in a British milieu and merges their identity with the artist’s own household. He thus attempts to divest the early Christians of their Judaic links and “convert” them into High Anglicans. The moment of the angel’s appearance to Mary and the allusions to the martyrdom of her son and her subsequent sufferings constitute the threshold of their conversion. Henceforth the wicked or unrepentant Jew serves as the dialectical foil for the good Christian, just as the impoverished and exploited needlewoman is held in sexist and class tension with the reflex image of the woman at the embroidery frame. Both the needlewoman and the well-todo embroiderer are female victims of the Victorian code, but the self-sacrificing spouse was socially conditioned to feel superior to her destitute and marginalized sister. As one of the few socially committed painters of the 1840s, Redgrave would certainly have attracted the attention of the young Pre-Raphaelites. His ability to create sympathetic and socially redeeming portrayals of helpless women could have contributed to Rossetti’s psychological projection of his sister. Part of Christina’s guilt stemming from her preference for poetry over needlework may have been implicated in her sense of class as well as gender and religious conflict. As members of the lower middle class, all the Rossettis had to earn a living to survive, and the rejection of handicraft occupations in connection with her planned future as governess implied a rejection of a working-class livelihood. If Dante Gabriel scrupulously depicts the psychological exchange between his mother and sister, he must also express his own sibling rivalry with his talented sister. It should be recalled that the publication of a book of Christina’s poems in 1847 made her the family star in this period, and although there was a good deal of mutual support for one another the Rossettis were an extremely competitive clan. Christina would have represented a formidable rival to her brothers in their quest for worldly fame, and the threat she posed to them may be reflected in her exclusion from

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their male fraternity. Rossetti’s insertion of her into a religious setting that simultaneously secures her submissive obedience to a Victorian code of values (“a symbol of female excellence”) suggests his attempt to metaphorically divest her of her self-assertion and special gifts and exploit her guiltridden sensibility. His sisterly ideal fit that of the patriarchal requirements and granted his unstated jealousy an aura of legitimacy. Indeed, Rossetti’s covert recommendation for her to give up creative work and surrender to church work and housework followed the current medical cure for her type of invalidism. Finally, he identified her with the victimized needlewoman in a trade supposedly dominated by Jewish “sweaters” and thereby further marginalized her. In this connection, the “Jewish mother” carefully supervising Mary stands in for the exploiting middleman of Petticoat Lane and ultimately implicates the Rossetti household in the detested Judaic culture. Thus he ran the full cycle from Anglicizing and Christianizing his Jewish protagonists to imbricating them with practices that fixed the lot of actual Jews in British culture. This ambiguity may be traced to Rossetti’s ambivalent relationship with his sister, the schismatic pressures within High Anglicanism that affected the family generally, and Victorian sexual repression. By tailoring the image of his sister to conform to the prescribed mold, he not only eliminated his rival in symbolic representation but also transformed her into the spiritually vulnerable, hothouse type associated exclusively with the demarcated feminine sphere. As in the case of Collins’s indelicate Convent Thoughts, I am suggesting a latent eroticism in Rossetti’s depiction of pubescence in Girlhood. In this instance, however, the image is overlaid with incestuous implications. Jan Marsh detected in Christina’s writings evidence of incest trauma and guilt, which she speculates related to interaction with her father. But in Dante Gabriel’s obsessive recording of his sister’s face and body and in their intense creative exchange it is also possible to glean an erotic fixation of brother and sister. Whether this was mutually experienced cannot now be stated with any certainty, but Rossetti’s eccentric Ecce Ancilla Domini! or The Annunciation, his follow-up composition to Girlhood in a projected triptych on the life of the Virgin, contains a number of bizarre features hinting at incestuous desire. Rossetti conceived the work at the end of November 1849, and from the start he meant it to be novel and sexually engaging (fig. 4.5). Traditional representations of the event showed the modestly attired Virgin reading a prayer book at a prie-dieu in a fairly open interior. Yet Rossetti informed his brother that he intended to show the Virgin in bed “without any bedclothes on, an arrangement which may be justified in consideration of the hot climate; and the angel Gabriel is to be presenting a lily to her.”64 William Michael took the comment on the bedclothes as an instance of PreRaphaelite commitment to the representation of “probable facts.” As in Girlhood, Rossetti turned to his sister Christina as the principal model for the Virgin’s head, although he changed her brunette hair color to red.

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opposite 4.5  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! 1849–1850. Tate Gallery, London.



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Rossetti’s preference for red-haired women and the traditional association of red hair with both Jews and heightened passion already invested the work with personal eroticism. But by dressing Christina in a white, loosefitting, sleeveless nightgown, exposing her uncovered in bed in the intimacy of her bedchamber, and showing her shrinking in fright from a robust male whose nudity peeks through the folds of his tunic, he automatically charged the scene with a keen sexual undercurrent. Christina is hemmed in tightly on all sides: by the angel, the walls, and the upright embroidery frame in the right foreground transferred from Girlhood—a feeling of constriction intensified by the narrow vertical composition. The unrelieved taut verticality is disrupted only by the diagonal of the lily held awkwardly by the angel, and pointing downward toward Christina’s knees. As Christina anxiously withdraws into her corner, she concentrates her entire attention on the stem of the lily as if it were a surrogate male penis. It is curious that no previous writer has observed that the angel who announced to the Virgin the divine plan for her conception had the same name as the author of the picture. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was familiarly known by his second name, and thus the overshadowing apparition of the angel Gabriel in the picture merges with the authorial presence. It is perhaps understandable that Rossetti did not portray himself directly in the role of Gabriel, but instead modeled the angel after his brother and alter ego William, thereby projecting his incestuous desire while insuring the fraternal sexual tension with their sister. Since William was also a fellow Pre-Raphaelite, the work further displaces the sexuality to a synecdochic level in which the collective identity or “Brotherhood” (Woolner also sat for the angel) substitutes for the individual member. The passive, sexually threatened Christina is constructed as the P.R.B.’s ideal “sisterly” counterpart. Significantly, one of the group’s inside jocular interpretations of their initials centered on Rossetti’s sexual preoccupations—“Penis Rather Better.”65 Despite the satirical intention, however, this reading gives the “brothers” a masculinist orientation. The title Ecce Ancilla Domini!—“Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38)—was exclaimed by Mary at the moment she yielded to her divine role as ancillary to God’s will. The utterance followed the angel’s response to her question—“How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?”— that the conception would take place through the Holy Spirit without human mediation. As in Girlhood, Rossetti represents the Holy Spirit by the dove, here flitting in through the window like one of the canaries in a dream of Christina’s. Rossetti’s initial title assumes the perspective of the Virgin, who after initial hesitation resigns herself to the inevitable. Rossetti’s revelation of High Church sentiment again veered close to the edge of Mariolatry and popery, and he even inscribed Latin mottoes on the original frame. As he did in Girlhood, however, he tried to temper the image with naturalistic detail and a novel compositional point of view. In the end, attacks on the picture and its sale to a Belfast shipping agent named Francis the pre-raphaelites and the 1848 revolutions

McCracken prompted Rossetti to change the title to The Annunciation. By so doing, he reinterpreted the scene and shifted the thematic focus to the messenger bringing tidings from the Lord. One of the novelties of the picture, consistent with P.R.B. aims, was the clean, fresh look of its surface and vivid colorations. The Pre-Raphaelites tried to reproduce the brilliance of early Renaissance panels painted in fresco and tempera (in which egg yolk is the binding medium) on a gesso ground. The dominant tonality of Rossetti’s work is white with accents of the prismatic colors red, blue, and yellow. All of these colors could be justified for their conventional symbolic associations, and even Dickens could write that everyone knew that blue was “the Madonna’s favourite colour.”66 What is unique is the geometric scheme and division of space. The plane of the blue curtain behind the Virgin partially conceals the angle of the two walls forming the corner and flattens the design, while the vertical of the embroidered red cloth draped over its frame reinforces this planar effect. Between the blue hanging and red cloth, the circular golden halo behind the Virgin’s head adds a piquant note. The simplicity of the colorations is almost startling, and the absence of conventional light and shade contribute to the visionary effect. The abusive response from some critics to Ecce Ancilla Domini! at the National Institution (the former Free Institution of Modern Art now moved to Portland Gallery in Regent Street) in 1850 so discouraged Rossetti that, with few exceptions, he thereafter refused to exhibit in London. The reviewer of the Athenaeum considered it “an example of the perversion of talent which has recently been making too much way in our school of Art and wasting the energies of some our most promising aspirants.” He criticized the picture for want of a fuller range of light and shade, its flat color, and eccentric composition. Although Rossetti and his colleagues professed to look at nature “in its truth and simplicity,” in fact they were nothing more than “slavish imitators of artistic inefficiency.”67 Since the “secret order” of the P.R.B. now stood unveiled in the public sphere, the consternation among critics expressed itself primarily in the form of an attack on its self-proclaimed sincerity. Perhaps the first revelation of the meaning of the notorious monogram appeared in Angus B. Reach’s column, “Town Talk and Table Talk,” of 4 May 1850, which fairly ridicules the novel features of the group and their ostentatious identification with the medieval Old Masters: Has any casual reader of art-criticisms ever been puzzled by the occurrence of three mysterious letters as denoting a new-fashioned school or style in painting lately come into vogue[?] The hieroglyphics in question are “P.R.B.,” and they are the initials of the words “Prae-Raffaelite Brotherhood.” To this league belong the ingenious gentlemen who profess themselves practitioners of “Early Christian Art,” and who—setting aside the Mediaeval schools of Italy, the Raffaelles, Guidos, and Titians, and all other such small-beer daubers—devote



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their energies to the reproduction of saints squeezed out perfectly flat. . . . A glance at some of the minor exhibitions now open will prove what really clever men have been bitten by this extraordinary art-whim, of utterly banishing perspective and everything like rotundity of form. It has been suggested that the globe-shape of the world must be very afflicting to the ingenious gentlemen in question.68

4.6  John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–1849. Board of Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

The “artfully-shaped and coloured pancakes” of the group were henceforth attached to a movement cloaked in secrecy—in some quarters, a recipe for radicalism. The group certainly promoted this image, as the case of Millais’s first P.R.B. picture, Isabella, painted in the same period as Hunt’s Rienzi and Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (fig. 4.6). It proudly advertised the group allegiance with the monogram in two places, once after Millais’s signature and date and again carved Puginesque-like in the leg of the wooden stool at the lower right (fig. 4.7). Isabella was inspired by the narrative poem by John Keats, “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” itself taken from a story by Giovanni Boccaccio about the ill-fated lovers Lorenzo and Isabella.



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4.7  Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, two designs for stools, wood engravings, from Gothic Furniture in the Style of the 15th Century (1835).



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Until joining with Hunt and Rossetti, Millais had been merely a precocious academic student, winning prizes at the Royal Academy and astonishing his older peers. He was only eleven when he entered the Royal Academy, on 12 December 1840, on the recommendation of Sir Martin Archer Shee, president of the Academy. Millais’s academic exercises of 1842–1843—developed in the popular preparatory school located at 6 Charlotte Street in Bloomsbury run by Henry Sass—already display brilliant promise (figs. 4.8–9).69 A fair portrait painter but gifted teacher, Sass grounded the neophytes in the tedious process of copying the “flat” (engraved outlines of ancient statuary) before assigning them to a huge plaster ball to teach the intricacies of light and shade. He loathed the French practice of shading with charcoal and stump (a coiled paper shaped like a pencil rubbed into the charcoal) and insisted on the linear precision of meticulous cross-hatching. The highly finished surfaces of Millais reveal the earmarks of Sass’s highly disciplined pedagogical system.70 Swept up in the excitement generated by the competition for the decorations of the New Palace of Westminster, Millais submitted a colossal cartoon (ten by fourteen feet) in 1847 based on a New Testament subject, The Widow’s Mite. Although rejected, it attests to the influence of the medieval revival on Millais’s initial careerist ambitions. This influence expressed itself more fully in the Isabella: Millais recalled that some of the “vestments” of the characters followed the illustrations of medieval costumes in a book Rossetti loaned him. Although Millais had access to Camille Bonnard’s Costumes historiques (1829–1830), his use of the term “vestments” conjures up Pugin’s encyclopedic Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844). Lorenzo’s costume seems to have been inspired by the habit of the monk shown in Pugin’s frontispiece, and the sculpted carpentry of Isabella’s stool invokes Pugin’s furniture designs, which often display his carved monogram as well as Gothic mottoes—most striking in the plates of his influential Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century.71 The immediate idea of the painting grew out of Hunt and Millais’s collaborative project for a series of copperplate etchings in “slightly shaded outline” to illustrate Keats’s poem. Keats figured with double asterisks on the Pre-Raphaelite list of “Immortals” exemplifying their creed, and his lyrical style especially appealed to Hunt and Millais. The moment of the Isabella story Millais chose to depict is a scene at table, alluded to in the very first stanza: chapter four

4.8  John Everett Millais, Copy of a Cast of the Apollo Belvedere, ca. 1842–1843. Royal Academy of Arts, London. 4.9  John Everett Millais, Copy of a Cast of Fighting Gladiators, 1842. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel! Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye! They could not in the self-same mansion dwell Without some stir of heart, some malady; They could not sit at meals but feel how well It soothed each to be the other by; They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep But to each other dream, and nightly weep.72

Lorenzo is a clerk in the employ of Isabella’s protective brothers, who see him as her social inferior and wish to terminate the relationship. They lure him to his death, bury him in the woods, and then report to their sister that he has been sent away to “foreign lands” on urgent business. Lorenzo’s shade, however, appears to Isabella in a vision and discloses his actual fate. Her old nurse helps her locate and exhume the body, and together they cut off the head and take it home. Isabella lovingly washes, combs, and dresses it, wrapping it in a silken scarf before tucking it into a garden pot which she covers with the common house plant sweet basil. She daily pines away before the pot of basil until her brothers become suspicious; they steal the incriminating evidence and flee Florence never to return again. After launching a futile quest to recover the basil pot, Isabella dies of a broken heart. Millais’s presentation of the banquet scene comprises a fascinating blend of medievalism, symbolism, and modernity, equal to the retelling of the early Renaissance story in Keats’s idiom. The table is shown from an odd perspective, longitudinally leading away to the left from the observer, with the short side parallel to the picture plane. We see dense rows of semicaricatured faces on both sides of the table viewed in profile consistent with the archaizing style of early Renaissance painting, but treated with such physiognomic singularity and gestural liveliness that the central motif of Lorenzo (the lone exception shown frontally) sharing a symbolic blood orange with Isabella at the right-hand edge of the table all but disappears into the general compositional movement. This arrangement leaves open a space in the foreground for presenting the bizarre threatening gesture of the brother at the left, whose right foot kicks out the breadth of the table to brutalize a docile animal. Meanwhile Lorenzo gazes tenderly at Isabella, holding out a plate with two halves of the blood orange—signifying at once their paired relationship and drastic separation. The plate in front of them displays a scene of decapitation, while behind them a pair of passion flowers climbs a column of the balcony. The theme of the Last Supper is implied in the thirteen participants, although the Judas-positioned servant standing isolated from the rest here acts the role of knowing spectator. The falcon at the left perched on the back of one of the brothers’ chairs tears at the white feather of a slain bird, intimating the savagery to come. Impending violence is

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further intimated by the spiteful brother at the left wreaking havoc in his every action; he knowingly strikes out at the dog gently fondled by Isabella—a displaced sign of her tender affection for Lorenzo. In his exertion, his chair lurches violently forward, overturning the salt cellar, and leaving in his wake a pile of broken shells wrought from his menacing nutcracker. He crushes a nut just as he plans to crush the too presumptuous clerk and teach his gentle sister a lesson. The curious motif of the brother’s impulsive rabbit kick did not pass unnoticed by the contemporary critics, one of whom described the “unwieldy leg” in the immediate front of the picture as an “absurd piece of mannerism” that bordered “on the verge of caricature.”73 By and large, however, neither the monogram (not yet fully understood) nor the oxymoronic medieval-modern presentation disturbed the critics, who grasped the work as an attempt to emulate the sincere if flawed qualities of early Italian painting and praised its meticulous execution. The reviewer for Fraser’s Magazine emphasized the vivid characterization of the “whole family” seated at table, the dynamics of their interaction and individualized personalities. This insight was facilitated by Millais’s personalized approach to his models, all of whom were either his relatives or close friends. The artist’s father posed for the guest fastidiously wiping his lips with his napkin and Mary Hodgkinson, his sister-in-law, posed for Isabella. The Pre-Raphaelites were represented by William Michael Rossetti sitting for Lorenzo; Dante Gabriel Rossetti as the tippler at the end of the table drinking from a tall glass; and Frederic George Stephens as the brother on the left regarding the lovers through his upraised glass. Each of the banqueters engages in an isolated action, with only Lorenzo and Isabella relating to each other, and the mood is joyless. The drama at table thus invokes the dynamics of both family and group interactions, and introduces a powerful note of realism into the early Renaissance scene. Keats’s poem embraces a whole slew of ideas bearing upon the wellsprings of Pre-Raphaelite production and ideology. Isabella works distractedly at her embroidery, and metaphorical plants and flowers abound through the text. As in the case of Rienzi, this work of 1848–1849 condemns the arbitrary actions of ruthless despots. Here they are merciless exploiters of people’s labor in factory and mine: With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enriched from ancestral merchandize, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torched mines and noisy factories . . .

Thus Isabella indirectly alludes to the current reformist preoccupation with the deplorable working conditions in the factories in the north of England and in the coal mines. Hunt’s drawing of Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse, preliminary to an etching for the planned series, picks up the issue

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4.10  William Holman Hunt, Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse, pencil and ink drawing, 1848–1850. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

of class conflict and exploitation (fig. 4.10).74 The brothers are depicted as sadistic taskmasters, humiliating and driving their employees to tearful exasperation. Workers in the rear of the warehouse are shown loading and unloading heavy cases, while below the floor in the cellar we glimpse youths prying open wooden crates—a clear reference to child labor in the mines. The work’s topicality is expressed in Hunt’s comment that his personal “business experiences” helped him formulate the composition. Furthermore, Charles Kingsley referred to the crucial passages invoking the merchant brothers in Yeast when he wished to portray the hard-driving mill, mine, and landowner Lord Minchampstead: “Half-ignorant [he] turn’d an easy wheel, / That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.”75 Finally, Keats compared the merchant brothers to “two close Hebrews” who conspired “in hungry pride and gainful cowardice.” As in the case of the magazine Punch, a proper Victorian could espouse humanitarian reforms yet still be anti-Jewish. Millais’s portrayal of the brothers’ cruelty constitutes an indictment against the callousness and greed of a mercantile society. Thus it complements the image of social injustice with one of economic injustice, filling out the programmatic efforts of the P.R.B. to participate in the movement of social reform. The fate in store for Lorenzo was analogous to the fate meted out to workers daily in Victorian industrial society, often victims of what they themselves called “social murder.” Although like Rienzi it displaces its social concerns from the present to the medieval past, representations of this past were so charged with ideological complexity that they were capable of relaying troubling messages to a contemporary audience. The Pre-Raphaelite work that most dramatically demonstrated this point was Millais’s Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (Christ in the House of His

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4.11  John Everett Millais, Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (Christ in the House of His Parents), 1849– 1850. Tate Gallery, London.

Parents), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850 (fig. 4.11).76 No other work sparked as much controversy or gained as much notoriety for the group when it was unveiled to the public.77 It sent shock waves through a community now thinking itself privy to the significations of the monogram “P.R.B.,” and reading sinister implications into the work of the imagined secret society. Ultimately, the attacks on the work impelled Ruskin to rush to the defense of the Pre-Raphaelites. At once devotional and symbolic in content and naturalistic in detail, it stands as one of the Brotherhood’s seminal productions. Against the backdrop of a rural dwelling, Millais constructed a carpenter’s milieu based on contemporary workshops of the type attached to artisans’ cottages. The long horizontal planing table determines the compositional layout as well as the symmetrical distribution of the figures. Joseph, the master carpenter, reaches over one end of the table, to examine the hand of the child Jesus, who has injured it on a nail extending from the tabletop and from which a drop of blood has trickled down to his left foot. The Virgin Mary, who occupies center foreground together with Christ in front of the workbench, has recognized the signs of the stigmata and kneels beside the child with a pained expression. Just on the opposite side of the table St. Anne, the Virgin’s mother, bends over to touch the handle of a pincers whose pair of jaws surround the lacerating nail. At the same time, young St. John whips



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around the right end of the table near St. Joseph, carrying a bowl of water to cleanse the wound. Meanwhile, Joseph’s apprentice, seemingly oblivious to the significance of the event, leans over the left end of the table truing a line. All of the accessories exemplify the typological approach of writers like Ruskin and the elder Rossetti. Millais’s strategic use of St. Joseph’s workshop provided him a convenient set of symbols. The nail jutting from the table, the planks of wood leaning against the walls, the ladder, and the tools in the rack on the rear wall, as well as the bleeding wound in Christ’s hand, all prefigure the crucifixion. A triangular square on the rear wall (that may also bear a Masonic allusion) just above the child’s head suggests the Trinity, and this is reinforced by the presence of the white dove perched on one of the rungs of the ladder. The palm stems springing up from the wicker basket in the left foreground recall Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and through the opening at the left we see a flock of sheep—the metaphorical object of the Good Shepherd’s mission. The scarlet poppy anemone (Anemone coronaria) growing at the foot of the sheep pen conventionally symbolized sorrow, having blossomed at the foot of the cross the evening of the crucifixion and colored red from the drops of blood flowing from Christ’s wounds. Millais carefully reproduced the details of an actual carpenter’s shop in London to establish the veracity of an artisanal milieu. The most remarkable feature of his documentary realism—one that immediately grabbed the critics’ attention—was the heaps of curled wood shavings strewn over the floor around and beneath the table. There is a distinct fussiness, almost obsessiveness, in the execution of these thinly planed shavings, which almost certainly added to the irritation of those Victorian spectators responding negatively to this presentation of the Holy Family. The naturalism of the scene is confirmed in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede, which opens in a carpenter’s shop immediately identified by its long planing table and its abundant “transparent shavings” piled everywhere on the floor. In a vein similar to Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin and John Rogers Herbert’s Our Saviour Subject to His Parents at Nazareth, with which it was often compared, Millais’s intent was to depict in vernacular terms the childhood environment of Jesus. Both a large segment of the public and a number of critics, however, objected to the unidealized conception which portrayed St. Joseph as a common artisan at his workbench (right down to the dirt under his fingernails) and the Virgin and St. Anne as homely members of a laborer’s family. The crowding of several generations into the workshop space and demoralized physiognomies suggested the insufficient accommodations of the English working-class domain. Above all, the excessive representation of the shavings exuded the aroma of a sordid interior of the type described in the reformist literature of Oastler, Carlyle, Dickens, Disraeli, and Henry Mayhew in the Morning Chronicle. The net result of Millais’s treatment was to flaunt the conventional ideal of the

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Holy Family and violate Victorian codes of religious and social propriety. As the critic of the Times expressed it: “Mr. Millais’s . . . picture is, to speak plainly, revolting. The attempt to associate the holy family with the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, dirt, of even disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness, is disgusting.”78 Already in 1844 Engels described the overcrowding in poorly ventilated single rooms and the unsanitary surroundings of working-class families in the towns of London and Manchester, often relying on journalistic accounts, medical studies, and parliamentary reports of these conditions appearing throughout the decades of the 1830s and 1840s. He quoted one article of 1844 that inventoried the wretched interiors of impoverished workers where they are reduced to sleep on nothing better “than a bag of straw or shavings.” Engels agreed with most of the commentators in pointing out that in such hovels “only inhuman, degraded and unhealthy creatures would feel at home.”79 This common assumption lay at the heart of the hostile attacks against the painting, and attests to the P.R.B.’s openness to the current debate. Although Millais depicts the village cottage of a rural artisan rather than the impoverished dwelling of an unskilled factory laborer, the combination of the religious controversy, the revolutions of 1848, and the fears of Tory reformers overdetermined the reception of this work and embedded it in a larger discourse of class and social conflict. Thus the ingenuous and awkward features given by Millais in an effort to convey a feeling of sincerity provoked a response analogous to that accorded Courbet and Millet the same year. Both in France and England the “realist” depiction of working classes was stigmatized as ugly and pretentious, coded formulations for the effort to portray types associated with the current social unrest. While Courbet and Millet were reviled for their rough execution and lack of surface polish that contributed to their “ugly” effect, the Pre-Raphaelites were condemned for using their polished style to serve a similar end. The reviewer for the Tory publication Blackwood’s Magazine claimed that despite their knowledge of anatomy and drawing, Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais “delight in ugliness and revel in diseased aspects.” He went on to attack the deformities in their bodily types: Ricketty children, emaciation and deformity constitute their chief stock in trade. They apparently select bad models, and then exaggerate their badness till it is out of all nature. We can hardly imagine anything more ugly, graceless, and unpleasant than Mr. Millais’ picture of Christ in the carpenter’s shop. Such a collection of splay feet, puffed joints, and misshapen limbs was assuredly never before made within so small a compass.80

What Millais and Pugin may have seen as a healthy return to the religious authenticity of pre-Protestant Europe struck the reviewer as the visual articulation of a sickly underclass typical of the poor in a Catholic

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country. This ideological interpretation is especially evident in the parallel and remarkably vicious diatribe of Dickens against this painting of the young Millais. He begins by confessing disappointment at the sight of the so-called Holy Family, and sarcastically assumes the imagined standpoint of the painter in describing his experience before the picture: You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts; all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred and graceful, or beautiful associations; and to prepare yourselves, as befits such a subject—Pre-Raphaelly considered—for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.81

The terminology recalls the vivid descriptions of the locales of Fagin (also red-headed) and Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, linking Millais’s reconstruction of the biblical milieu with the criminal underworld. Further, in invoking the images of vile cabaret and low gin-shop, Dickens betrays his preoccupation with the recent revolutionary and Chartist demonstrations. It is significant that just prior to the Royal Academy opening, the left-wing French novelist Eugène Sue was reelected by the department of the Seine by a considerable majority, raising the alarm of a “red peril.” As an editorialist wrote in the Illustrated London News: The party represented by M. Eugène Sue is the hungry, clamorous, zealous, enthusiastic party of the dissatisfied multitude—a party that revels in crude theories of government, that dreams of social re-organisation, that has a wild and fanatical faith in human perfectability, and that would make the next generation a generation of angels, by the rather strange process of converting the present race into a race of demons.82

It is hardly a coincidence that Les Mystères de Paris, Sue’s popular social novel, carries keen descriptions of the type of cabaret mentioned by Dickens and linked in the popular imagination to insurgent activities. Thus at one level Dickens read the picture through the overdetermined lens of the Tory still reeling from the shock of the revolutions of 1848. On another, the political reading merged with the current religious controversy and became entangled with domestic issues. Dickens began by decrying the present age as “perverse” and “short of faith,” but was delighted to

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find that at least among the ignorant the “Young England hallucination” no longer held people spellbound. He leaps into a litany of various imagined “brotherhoods” to mock the pretensions of the “pious” Pre-Raphaelites, including a Pre-Laurentius Brotherhood established “for the abolition of all but manuscript books. These mr. pugin has engaged to supply, in characters that nobody on earth shall be able to read. And it is confidently expected by those who have seen the House of Lords, that he will faithfully redeem his pledge.” The negative associations of the Pre-Raphaelites, Young England, and Puginesque medievalism attest to Dickens’s hostility to Roman Catholicism, Tractarianism, and Disraeli Judeo-Anglo-Catholicism, and reveal his hysteria over the gradual loss of Establishment control of the Church of England and Parliament. This is perhaps seen in his disparagement of the “new Holy Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-Raphael offenders.” As Errington has suggested, Dickens’s characterization of the deformities and unnatural qualities of Millais’s figures establishes a link between this critique and his attack on Catholic life and culture generally, which he persistently associates with disease, asceticism, and unnatural tendencies.83 He made the connection between Catholic encroachment, the Tractarians, Young England, disease, filth, and social decline much more explicit in a later article on papal aggression, sparked by the appointment of Cardinal Wiseman to the archbishopric of Westminster with twelve bishops under him and Wiseman’s precipitate announcement that “Catholic England had been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament.”84 Fears of Catholic expansion in England fueled suspicion in some quarters that a foreign conspiracy to deprive the nation of its liberty was underway. The immigration of Irish laborers further reinforced public panic over both the spread of popery and labor unrest in the slums, thus absurdly linking the presumed Catholic conspiracy with secret societies and workers’ insurrection. Dickens himself had made the link in his own mind four years earlier in his Pictures from Italy, when he recalled observing during High Mass at St. Peter’s “stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out, and the extreme restlessness of the Youth of England, who were perpetually wandering about.”85 Hence for Dickens the “Catholicizing” tendency of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—exemplified in Millais’s picture—made it suspect in both the religious and political sense. Dickens wanted an idealized and sanitized Holy Family consistent with Victorian fantasy, and Millais’s version appeared as unhealthy and subversive.86 In Dickens’s opinion, Millais fell woefully short of representing “the most solemn passage which our minds can ever approach.” Instead, Millais’s presentation of “the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting” came closer to Dickens’s perception of “hollow-cheeked” monks, “dirty beggars,” and “miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity” at the doors of churches, hideous paintings of martyrdoms, and the “rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street.” What

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Dickens looked for in an image of the Holy Family was more akin to a royal portrait of Albert and Victoria and their brood of cherubic children—an anglicized appropriation of the traditional image.87 The Athenaeum’s critic spelled out more concretely the troubling content of the work when he wrote that Millais gave to noble forms a loathsome “circumstantial art-language” that for many will seem a pictorial blasphemy.”88 Thus the picture profaned on two counts: once for dragging the Holy Family down into contemporary class antagonism, and again for pushing it toward an Anglo-Catholic and Tractarian articulation. The Pre-Raphaelites approached social problems with religious fervor, and they shared the sense of both social injustice and Christian failure in the existence of so much human destitution. This disposition empowered their realist bent and social critique but also blocked their appreciation of more radical solutions. They looked to romantic religious movements like Tractarianism and Christian Socialism to channel the reformist energies. The subject of Millais’s picture was based on a verse from Zechariah, which served in place of a formal title at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1850: “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah 13:6). According to Hunt, Millais derived the idea from a sermon on the text that he heard at Oxford.89 Although the entire book of Zechariah is a rich compendium of metaphors for carpentry, building, and reconstruction, a close reading of the context of the passage shows that it deals not with the Messiah of the new dispensation but with false prophets who wish to conceal their true identity as husbandmen. The false but repentant prophet is one who finally admits his deception, and confesses that the wounds were probably self-inflicted. Edward Morris has shown that Millais’s erroneous interpretation of the text can be traced to the Tractarian Pusey by way of the twelfth-century medieval mystic Rupert of Deutz.90 Pusey accepted the earlier commentator’s notion that Christ was prefigured in the passage, and his powerful position within the Oxford Movement gave the notion credibility. It should not be overlooked, however, that Zechariah does contain a passage of messianic portent relevant to Millais’s picture: “And I will pour upon the house of David . . . the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son” (Zechariah 12:10). This was cited in John 19:37, “And again another scripture saith, They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” Tract 89 of Tracts for the Times invoked this typological text, referring to the prediction of “the outward and bodily event as narrated by the evangelists.”91 Thus it is not surprising that Anglo-Catholics responded favorably to Millais’s work while Low Church people such as Ruskin and Dickens detested it.92 It may be recalled that it was the High Church follower William Dyce who excitedly called Ruskin’s attention to Christ in the House of His

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4.12  John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 11 May 1850.

Parents. In addition, the Tractarian Guardian praised the work, as did the Illustrated London News, always sympathetic to the Anglo-Catholics. The latter not only reproduced the picture (fig. 4.12), but placed it alongside Dyce’s Meeting of Jacob and Rachel as the two high points of the exhibition: What is called, somewhat slightingly, the pre-Raphaelism of this picture, is its leading excellence. We may look in vain throughout the whole of the Exhibition for another picture (Mr. Dyce’s alone excepted) in which we shall find a sincerity of look in the heads of the principal figures at all comparable to this. The intentional deformities, such as the frost-bitten toes of Joseph, the sore heel of the Virgin, &c, are not at all to our taste; but the picture has so many merits, that all its eccentricities may be very well excused, though they cannot be overlooked.93

Thus there is no doubt that the picture appealed to a Tractarian audience, suggesting the influence of the Oxford Movement on Millais’s thought, and by extension, on that of the Pre-Raphaelites generally. Millais’s father blamed the influence of Rossetti’s medievalism for the negative criticism, claiming that his work was “church traditional . . . with gilt aureoles and the conventionalisms of early priesthood, which we did away with at the Reformation.”94 One facet of this connection to the Oxford Movement may be the motif of baptism, which both Millais and Hunt incorporated into their pictures of 1849–1850. In Christ in the House of His Parents, young John hurries in with a bowl of water, ostensibly to cleanse Christ’s wound, while in Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids a similar clay bowl is conspicuously located in the foreground, and behind it stands a child in a fur loincloth—an attribute of the Baptist.

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This shared motif suggests the Brotherhood’s programmatic effort to join with the Tractarians in the recent controversy concerning the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration that tore open the Church of England. Known as the Gorham case, it involved an Evangelical clergyman who was refused admission and institution to the vicarage of Brampford-Speke by the Bishop of Exeter for being “unsound in doctrine” on the question of baptism. When Gorham took legal action, the bishop showed cause in declaring that Gorham did not accept a necessary connection between baptism and regeneration, thus denying children automatic status as members of Christ. Gorham claimed that baptism was accompanied by regeneration only in relation to the worthiness of the recipient. High Church people, including Tractarians, held that after baptism the infant was immediately changed into a child of God, while Evangelicals believed that this interpretation made conversion unnecessary.95 Although the Court of Arches found in favor of the Bishop of Exeter on 2 August 1849, the judgment was appealed, and on 8 March 1850 the Privy Council reversed it. The bishop, however, still refused to budge, and the Archbishop of Canterbury had to intervene in August to institute Gorham. The decision outraged the Tractarians, who read it as Anglican sanction of unorthodox views on baptism, and it prompted a number of defections to Roman Catholicism. The crisis of the Church of England brought on by the Gorham case (as well as the scandalous notoriety attached to the perceived Romanism of the group) seems to have directly affected the Brotherhood: in May James Collinson resigned from the P.R.B. on the grounds that his membership was incompatible with his renewed commitment to the Roman Catholic faith. (A previous convert, he reverted to Anglicanism to please Christina Rossetti, to whom he had become engaged. His return to the Church of Rome and a vow of celibacy broke their engagement and broke Christina’s heart.) It is difficult today to imagine that a doctrinal debate on the baptismal rite could have such far-reaching effects, but such was the fragile state of Victorian society and the crucial role of religion as a stabilizing factor in everyday life. The Gorham case was carefully monitored in the press, and the subtle points of the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration rehearsed for the public. The presence of a juvenile John the Baptist in the works by Millais and Hunt invoking themes of conversion and cleansing signal their alignment with the Tractarian position linking child baptism and spiritual regeneration. As Grieve has indicated, the links between Millais and Oxford had been close since 1849. He formed an acquaintance with prominent Tractarians during the interval when he began work on the picture, including Thomas Combe, superintendent of Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), and his wife Martha. The Combes were influential High Church members who wholly identified themselves with the Oxford Movement; no less a Tractarian than Newman had officiated at their marriage in 1840, and they

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remained close even after Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. The Combes became the first major patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites and encouraged their budding efforts. In 1850 Millais stayed with the Combes at Clarendon Press while painting Thomas’s portrait. They exerted a powerful influence on his developing sensibility, and in his correspondence, as we have seen, he often addressed his patron familiarly as “The Early Christian”—an explicit reference to his High Church affiliation. His letter of 16 December 1850, referring to the stress he has sustained since the unpleasant critical reception, invokes the schism in the Church of England and the secessions to Rome: I think I shall adopt the motto “In coelo quies,” and go over to Cardinal Wiseman, as all the metropolitan High Church clergymen are sending in their resignations. To-morrow (Sunday) Collins and myself are going to dine with a University man whose brother has just seceded, and afterwards to hear the cardinal’s second discourse. My brother went last Sunday, but could not hear a word, as it was so crowded he could not get near enough. The Cardinal preaches in his mitre and full vestments, so there will be a great display of pomp as well as knowledge.

He ended his letter with earnest assurances to “Pat” (his nickname for Martha) Combe that he had no intention “to turn Roman Catholic just yet.”96 Here he jokingly alludes to the panic over the defections to Rome, and current fears of the destruction of the Church of England. Although the anti-Catholic frenzy of the period incriminated the Tractarians for abetting “papal aggression” and for allowing Romish doctrine and practices to flourish within the bosom of the Establishment, High Church people for the most part, including Pusey and the Combes, wished to remain loyal to the national church. Millais mentioned Charles Collins, an artist friend and High Churchman whom Millais and Hunt unsuccessfully proposed for membership in the P.R.B. During their joint landscape expedition at Botley, a suburb of Oxford (where Collins painted the background for Convent Thoughts), Millais and Collins had been invited by the Combes to work under their auspices in Oxford. The two stayed at their house painting portraits of Combe and his wife’s uncle, William Bennett. Later, Millais wrote Pat that ever since they returned to London, he and Collins have attended the Wells Street Church, a favorite of High Church Ritualists. Together with Hunt they developed a friendly working relationship with the Combes, whom they did their utmost to please; when Ruskin’s Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851)—a pamphlet admonishing Evangelicals and Tractarians to make common cause against Rome—came into their hands, Martha Combe sent them Dyce’s rebuttal, Notes on Shepherds and Sheep, and they duly promised to read it. Millais knew what he was saying when he wrote her in September 1851 that the three of them were living together “as happily as ancient monastic brethren.”97 They spent one evening “sitting in

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4.13  John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 1851. Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 4.14  John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 24 May 1851.

judgment on the Thirty-Nine Articles”—the foundation charter of the Church of England that had been the subject of Newman’s notorious Tract No. 90 (“Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles”) holding that the articles were not in conflict with the Roman Church.98 At this time, Hunt also began his preparatory studies for The Light of the World, his most Tractarian realization to date and made to order for the Combes, who paid the extraordinary sum of 400 guineas for it. No wonder that he considered them “two of the most unpretending servants of goodness and nobility that their generation knew.”99 Hunt had previously sold the Combes his A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary, and Collins’s Convent Thoughts, painted in part in the garden of their home in Oxford, had also been acquired by them. The sale of the Hunt was ardently instigated by Millais, who persuaded Martha’s uncle to buy the work and present it to the Combes, thus demonstrating the P.R.B’s appeal to High Church affiliates from the start.100



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4.15  John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, 1851–1852. Makins Collection, London.



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Meanwhile, stimulated by this patronage, Millais embarked on an ambitious painting program in 1851 which culminated with major entries for the Royal Academy Exhibition. The Return of the Dove to the Ark, depicting two of the wives of Noah’s three sons fondling the dove that returned with the revealing olive leaf, was sold to the Oxford couple (fig. 4.13). He conceived of his work in this period as pictorial sermons, and one idea never executed but also destined for the Combes was meant to teach a lesson about the folly of not looking “to God for help in times of trouble.” He had initially planned to do a John Martin–type extravaganza about the Deluge, with an accumulation of individual responses of those deaf to the prophecy, save one who “prays for mercy for those around her.”101 The reduction of the story of the Deluge to the two Noachian women caressing the dove would have had deep resonance with Tractarians, who emphasized the gathering of the floodwaters as the metaphorical foundation of the Church, as well as its replenishment from among the heretics and heathens.102 Here the pre-Christian women kiss and fondle the dove which is also the symbol of the Holy Spirit in Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Christ in the House of His Parents. The appeal of the picture to the High Church faction is seen in the fact that the Illustrated London News reproduced it—the second year in a row they accorded this honor to the young Millais (fig. 4.14).103 At the same time, anti-Tractarian papers like the Times and the Athenaeum attacked his work viciously, the one contemptuously dismissing “the mistaken skill” by which he “transferred to canvas the hay which lined the lofts in Noah’s Ark,” and the other perceiving “his old perversity” and a “good thought marred by its Art language.”104 It is true that the young painter’s A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, exhibited in 1852, discloses a retreat from the High Church sympathies of 1849–1851 (fig. 4.15). Bowing to the critical pressure and the controversial implications of the group’s religious significations, he concocted a theme that would put to rest once and for all the suspicions surrounding his own position. (He did so by drawing in large part for inspiration from the popular opera Les Huguenots by the Jewish composer the pre-raphaelites and the 1848 revolutions

Meyerbeer.) The popularity of the work at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1852 attested to the effectiveness of its public message. We can trace the immediate stimulus of the work to a letter Millais wrote Martha Combe on 22 November 1851: My brother was with us to-day, and told me that Dr. Hesse of Leyton College, understood that I was a Roman Catholic (having been told so), and that my picture of “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” was emblematical of the return of all of us to that religion—a very convenient construction to put upon it! I have no doubt that likewise they will turn the subject I am at present about to their advantage. It is a scene supposed to take place (as doubtless it did) on the eve of the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. I shall have two lovers in the act of parting, the woman a Papist and the man a Protestant. The badge worn to distinguish the former from the latter was a white scarf on the left arm. Many were base enough to escape murder by wearing it. The girl will be endeavouring to tie the handkerchief round the man’s arm, so to save him; but he, holding his faith above his greatest worldly love, will be softly preventing her. I am in high spirits about the subject, as it is entirely my own, and I think contains the highest moral.105

This shift in Millais’s religious emphasis constitutes a turning point in the critical fortunes of the painter, and coincides with the defense of the PreRaphaelites by Ruskin. Previously vitriolic in his commentary on Millais’s work, the full-time reviewer of the Times now claims to “discover genius in Mr. Millais.” Whereas the microscopic detail of earlier work was finicky and intrusive, now the background wall’s “mosses, its stains, its cracks, and its tendrils of ivy are a surprising example of patient observation and skilful reproduction.” The Catholic female “is admirably wrought with tenderness and terror,” while “the lover is stiff, tall, and a thorough Calvinist”— in short, a proper British gentleman. No wonder the reviewer concluded that, despite some awkward passages in the work, Mr. Millais has unquestionably moved the public to interest as well as curiosity; and, though we still smile at some of his puerilities, we recognize with pleasure in his works an earnest will and an increasing power of execution: we hope to see him cured of his singularities, and in turn he will gradually educate the public to appreciate his merits and to reward his perseverance.106

The Athenaeum’s reviewer, also previously hostile, similarly underwent a change of attitude with regard to A Huguenot, admittedly “Mr. Millais’s best work.” Following a sensitive description of the two lovers, the critic clearly delights in the male’s refusal of Catholic symbolism: He looks wistfully down on her,—fully conscious of the sacrifice he is about to make in this struggle between love and creed; and while he draws her nearer



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to his heart with one hand, with the other—truer to his Calvinism—he firmly unlooses the scarf which she fondly tries to fasten.

This observation of the religious principle is crucial to the entire context of the review, which begins with an overview of the brief history of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarene tradition from whence they sprung: Raphaelism in Art seems in some respects to be a part and parcel of the spirit of the present age and akin to tractarianism in faith. It is the reaction and an antagonism to the conventional, the sensual and the unbelieving—and has the falsehood and exaggeration common to reactions in general. Its object is, to give new life to dry bones, and to spiritualize the formal and the material. It is the protest of the nineteenth century against the seventeenth and the eighteenth especially.

The critic could now view Tractarianism and Pre-Raphaelitism historically, indicating that in the wake of the Great Exhibition and the consolidation of Evangelicalism exemplified in the Queen’s court, the religious and social furor had begun to die down and distance achieved.107 As the reviewer stated: “Nor have we much ultimate fear of men like Mr. Millais. Mind and talent will manifest themselves whatever the vehicle, and will pierce through and ultimately reject the eccentric and the fantastic; and already we see, to some extent, the bursting of his self-imposed bonds.” This easing up of pressure on Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites generally coincides with the capacity to contextualize them as well as the Oxford Movement with which previously they had been closely associated.108 Millais’s innate conservatism and desire to reach a broad audience, however, could not allow for extended engagement with the contentious political and religious issues of the day. His correspondence with Mrs. Combe professes a growing nationalist pride and disdain of the laboring class (both domestic and foreign) in connection with the Great Exhibition: “Such a quantity of loathsome foreigners stroll about the principal streets that they incline one to take up a residence in Sweden, outside the fumes of their tobacco. I expect all respectable families will leave London after the first month of the Exhibition, it will be so crowded with the lowest rabble of all the countries in Europe.”109 A month later, he tries to flatter his patrons by calling their attention to Ruskin’s offer to buy the picture earmarked for them, The Return of the Dove to the Ark, adding: “I have had more than one application for it, and you could, I have little doubt, sell it for as much again as I shall ask you.” This statement reflects his marketing strategy and awareness of the investment potential of innovative work, indicating his growing sense of the convergence of Pre-Raphaelite originality with the technological and scientific wonders exhibited in the Crystal Palace. He assures his Oxford patrons of the investment potential of Pre-Raphaelitism when trying to pitch a sketch by Collins to a friend of the Combes:

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Most men look back upon their early paintings—for which they have received but poor remuneration—as the principal instruments of their after wealth. For one great instance, see Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler, sold for 20 pounds, now worth more than 1000 pounds! Early works are also generally the standard specimens of artists, as great success blunts enthusiasm, and little by little men get into carelessness, which is construed by idiotic critics into a nobler handling. Putting aside the good work of purchasing from those who require encouragement, such patrons will be respected afterwards as wise and useful men amongst knavish fools, who should be destroyed in their revolting attempts to crush us—attempts so obviously malicious as to prove our rapid ascendancy. It is no credit to a man to purchase from those who are opulent and acknowledged by the world, so your friend has an opportunity for becoming one of the first-named wise patrons who shall, if we live, be extolled as having assisted in our (I hope) final success.110

A shrewd business sense clearly underlay Millais’s constantly shifting stylistic and thematic approaches. This includes his transition to the representation of modern life, the first example of which, The Woodman’s Daughter, was painted for the 1851 Royal Academy Exhibition (fig. 4.16). Inspired by a poem by Coventry Patmore and painted in part in Wytham Wood near Oxford, I see the work as an experiment in outdoor painting at the service of a socially conservative idea. The poem’s author, roughly the same generation as the Pre-Raphaelites, stood high on their list of favorite poets and they even persuaded him to contribute to their short-lived journal, the Germ. Patmore represented another Victorian success story of a lower-middle-class type able to leap the social barriers. His heroes and friends were Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, and Dickens, all intensely patriotic and rigid Tories recruited from the middle classes, but unlike them he was also a High Church follower who would convert to Catholicism in the next decade. Although Patmore shared Ruskin’s love of the Gothic style as the style of Christianity, his spiritual predisposition brought him closer to Pugin, whose work he greatly admired.111 According to Patmore, Millais approached him “in great agitation and anger” in the wake of the furious attack on his Carpenter’s Shop, begging him to solicit Ruskin’s support in his defense. Patmore went at once to Ruskin, who then wrote the legendary letter to the Times defending them while simultaneously admonishing them against Tractarian tendencies.112 Despite the chronological confusion (Carpenter’s Shop exhibited in 1850 not 1851, the year Ruskin wrote the letter), Patmore’s intercession was probably crucial, and he became the representative poet of the Brotherhood. Millais idolized Patmore, painting his wife, Emily Augusta in 1851, and accepting his advice to keep a diary as a sacred duty. The narrative poem that informed Millais’s picture tells of Gerald, a woodman, and his daughter Maud, who is seduced by a squire’s son and who, when abandoned, drowns her illegitimate child and plunges into

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4.16  John Everett Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter, 1850–1851. Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

madness. The lines from the poem given in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of The Woodman’s Daughter ran as follows: She went merely to think she helped; And, whilst he hack’d and saw’d, The rich squire’s son, a young boy then, For whole days, as if awed, Stood by, and gazed alternately At Gerald, and at Maud.



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He sometimes, in a sullen tone, Would offer fruits, and she, Always received his gifts with an air So unreserved and free, That half-feigned distance soon became Familiarity.113

The poem opens in Gerald’s cottage, where “Innocent Maud” spends long hours at her spinning wheel—again conjuring up the female ideal sacred to Victorians. (Patmore waxed quite conservative on the feminist issue, holding to woman’s exclusive domestic role and strict subordination to the male.114) On occasion, she accompanies her father into the woods, where he works valiantly “from dawn to dark.” The idle squire’s heir watched them to entertain himself, and over the years the two children build a relationship—open and innocent at first but in time secret and furtive. Their clandestine encounters stem from their dawning inability to “give themselves / A reason why they met”—that is, to justify meeting on a common ground given the awareness of the difference in their social rank. Too late Maud learns of the cruel deception, and tragedy follows tragedy as she seeks to stabilize her existence. There is a hint of class conflict in the painting, as the squire’s son coldly offers a handful of strawberries to a grateful and delighted Maud. The difference in their attire and demeanor is also sharply contrasted: he wears a new bright red tailored outfit and leans rigidly against an oak tree with an improvised riding crop, while she wears an old violet pinafore and worn shoes and holds out her hands greedily to receive the gift.115 Since the oak is traditionally a symbol of sturdy aristocratic manhood, it is significant that the woodman is seen in the distance chopping one down. Gerald and Maud are clearly on a collision course with the young noble. Yet Patmore’s poem is consistent with the Victorian double standard in exonerating the aristocratic male from his act of seduction while making the female bear the burden of her fall. In Patmore’s mind the only sexual behavior allowable was marital intercourse for the sake of children (he wrote the classic Victorian celebration of marriage—The Angel in the House), and thus he argues that Maud should have stuck to her spinning wheel and ignored the siren’s call to a loftier social station. In the end, it is artless Maud who pays for the illicit relationship and destroys the harmony of the rustic existence that she and her father had previously shared. That Millais interpreted the poem in these terms is evident from his first rendition of Maud’s expression, which Patmore himself described as having the look of “a vulgar little slut.”116 A drawing in the Princeton University Art Museum (possibly a replica of the first version by another hand) gives Maud a precocious, knowing look. Although the artist subsequently repainted Maud’s head, he evidently planned to make her the primary guilty party. The theme of the fallen woman—a term reminding us of the

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pedestal upon which the idealized Victorian female was placed—haunted the Pre-Raphaelites, and while often blaming the victim they also revealed a sensitivity to the class and social circumstances that contextualized her plight. Here they followed such social novelists of the period as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, whose sympathy for their fallen female characters was considered morally questionable by self-righteous critics. Gaskell, Eliot, and a host of their male compatriots wrote in a realist mode depicting the effects of industrial society and utilitarian indifference to the pain of the poor at mid-century. They bring to their effort a combination of what Raymond Williams described as “sympathetic observation” and “imaginative identification.”117 Although rejecting reform from below, they nevertheless relied on close reporting to point out the contradictions and human suffering located at the heart of industrialism. Eliot exemplified in her practice the displacement of romanticism when she wrote that “realism ought to further its conquest of romance by patient observation and faithful depiction.”118 Despite their early Puginism and Gothic sympathies, the Pre-Raphaelites comprehended in both their style and program the realist ideology embodied in the work of Eliot. Given their range of interests, penchant for accuracy, and social concerns, it was inevitable that they would shift to the representation of themes drawn from contemporary life. This is already anticipated in the title of their ephemeral journal, the Germ, signifying the genesis of a new set of ideals they wished to propagate at home and abroad. The title was the brainchild of William Cave Thomas, a Nazarene-inspired painter close to Ford Madox Brown who had won a commission for the House of Lords.119 This may help explain the magazine’s combination of Pugin-Ruskinesque medievalism and contemporary concerns, especially in the first issue, prepared at the end of 1849 (but appearing only on 1 January 1850). Holman Hunt’s layout of his two illustrations for two of Thomas Woolner’s poems, “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of My Lady in Death,” resemble the paired imagery in Pugin’s Contrasts, and the scenes are set in a generic medieval society and naturalistic landscape. An essay in the second issue, “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” by Frederic G. Stephens (writing under the name John Seward), sounds like a page straight out of Pugin and Ruskin in running past the reader the achievements of Gozzoli, Orcagna, Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Ghiberti and insisting that the arts have always functioned optimally as “important moral guides” in vigorous, wholesome, and religious nations.120 As the subtitle of the Germ suggests—“Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art”—the magazine was to be a vehicle for planting the seed of their new paradigm in the public space. Although Millais’s next major subject, Ophelia, was inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, nothing in the picture—save for the title—betrays a literary or epic source (fig. 4.17). This would seem to be pure Victorian melodrama orchestrated by a botanizing clergyman gone mad with his

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4.17  John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–1852. Tate Gallery, London.

collecting basket. For all we see when we view the picture is a riotous display of floral specimens let loose on an unsuspecting heroine in a densely overgrown neck of the woods. The facetious reporter for the Times wrote that Millais’s Ophelia made him think “of a dairymaid in a frolic.” According to the artist’s son, the greatest compliment paid the work’s microscopic fidelity was the time a professor of botany, unable to take his class on a field trip because of inclement weather, lectured to them in front of the painting.121 Of course, floral and plant imagery abounds in act 4 of the play, in which the episode of the drowning of Ophelia, driven mad by her lover’s rejection and his murder of her father, Polonius, is narrated by Hamlet’s mother, the Queen. At one point, Ophelia, gradually succumbing to mental illness, sings the line “larded with sweet flowers,” while she enters the scene on another occasion “fantastically dressed with straws and flowers.” All of this meshed with the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with typological symbolism, and in the end the dozens of meticulously rendered plant and flower species in the picture command almost as much attention as the uncanny floating body they surround. This relates Ophelia to the treatment of The Woodman’s Daughter, which similarly strove for a balance of human psychology and natural history. The two works are also linked thematically through their female victims and the curse of drowning in a pleasant woodland site: in both Shakespeare’s tragedy and Patmore’s poem the fatal spot is marked by a willow overhanging a brook choked by waterweeds, but whereas Maud drowns her child and goes mad, Ophelia’s madness precipitates her own “muddy” plunge. Patmore set the moment during a “gentle day of June,” while Millais’s adds



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to the Ophelia a robin warbling in the willow tree to provide a springtime pathos to the tragic episode. Many of the painter’s contemporaries were riveted by Ophelia’s glazed expression as she floated face-up downstream singing her own “deathdirge.” The critic for the Times claimed that Millais rendered death by drowning “as if it were some freak of rude health instead of the climax of distraction.”122 The bizarre image of the drifting body, with elbows close to the body and palms upraised, her skirts spreading out like moss on the surface of the water, is the ultimate image of feminine passivity and helplessness. Another reviewer declared, “The expression aimed at is, that of an incapability of estimating ‘her own distress.’”123 It would seem that Millais succeeded in again appealing to the Victorian fascination for neurasthenic women whose fatal attraction to aristocratic males led them to break with society’s norms. The appeal of a rejected and deranged Ophelia plunging into a botanical quagmire rested on the Victorian imaginative projection of the abnormal female unsuited for domestic life and therefore without future.124 The unmarried heroine condemned to a watery suicide (Waterloo Bridge was the site of choice) was a commonplace in the Victorian literature, and though she’s neither victim of seduction nor prostitute, Ophelia’s choice of the forest wilderness for refuge made her as much of an outcast and marginalized creature as Patmore’s Maud. Although Millais’s sexual fantasy may seem to border on necrophilia, it is possible that in his close-up and obsessive concentration on the spot he imagined himself to be Ophelia’s potential rescuer. As in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, where the eponymous hero delivers Mirah Lapidoth from a watery grave, Millais and his Pre-Raphaelite brethren perceived themselves as would-be rescuers of talented but downtrodden females. All of the women associated with the Pre-Raphaelites in their period of formation were in fact daughters of lower-middle-class and working-class families who were cast into the role of dependents by men uncomfortable with sexual knowledge and emotional intimacy. One such example is the woman who posed for Ophelia, Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Eleanor Siddal. An artisan’s daughter, Lizzie Siddal worked at a milliner’s shop near Leicester Square where she met Walter Deverell and his mother. Struck by her good looks and stately carriage, Deverell hired her as a model for his picture Twelfth Night and introduced her to the PreRaphaelite circle. She subsequently sat for Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, to whom she became engaged and eventually married in 1860 after a stormy decade-long relationship. Siddal was intellectually gifted but relatively uneducated and, stimulated by her contact with the band of youthful idealists, took to drawing, painting, and writing poetry. As lover and teacher, Rossetti had the most decisive influence on her work, but together they forged a creative partnership that resulted in some remarkable collaborative productions.125

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Siddal gravitated to the medievalism of the group, to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the Arthurian poetry of Tennyson. One of her first documented works was a drawing for Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” first published in 1832 and a favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites (fig. 4.18). The Lady of Shalott is confined to a tower on an island near Camelot, subject to a curse that forbids her direct intercourse with the outside world. Day and night she compulsively works at her loom, weaving a “magic web” of shadowy imagery reflected from outside onto her mirror. Sick of mere shadows and captivated by the appearance of Sir Lancelot riding down to Camelot, she abruptly turns from her labors to gaze upon the dazzling helmet and plume of the fabled knight. At that moment, the mirror cracks, the web flies out of the loom, and too late she realizes that the curse has come upon her. Siddal’s sketch of 1853 shows her at the fatal instant, turning away from the mirror with its reflection of Sir Lancelot on horseback to look back through the window. Once again, the female is seated at her loom or embroidery frame in a sheltered environment. Siddal’s conception ingeniously constructs gender individuation in Victorian society, depicting the contrasting outdoor arena of the male hero and the sequestered realm of the female.126 Sexual daydreams were unavoidable but tolerable so long as they remained at the level of reflection, but once the boundary between male and female spheres was transgressed the female paid dearly. The Lady of Shalott’s active gaze symbolizes a sexual desire and enfranchisement that bridges the line of respectability, and for this she pays with her life. The virginal Lady of Shalott, having left the island, is punished for her rashness by going to a watery grave as she floats downstream in a boat 4.18  Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Lady of Shalott, 1853. Collection Jeremy Maas, London.



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toward King Arthur’s court. Tennyson surely had Ophelia in mind when he had the dying Lady of Shalott floating down to Camelot “singing her last song.” Both female characters are denied wifely possibilities and condemned to outcast status. This brings us to Siddal’s part in Millais’s Ophelia and the representation of an innocent female whose inadvertent disruption of social boundaries places her outside the realm of domestic love. Siddal’s fascination for the theme is manifested in the seriousness with which she assumed her responsibilities as model for the picture. Bent on accuracy, Millais had Siddal lie in a large bath filled with water that was heated by oil lamps placed beneath the tub. On the day that the picture reached its final stage, the absorbed painter failed to perceive that the heating lamps had gone out and that the water had turned ice cold. Siddal remained in the chilly water for hours without complaining until quite benumbed, and afterwards contracted a severe cold. Her outraged father threatened a lawsuit, but Millais handled the situation by paying the medical bills. The self-sacrificing Siddal, however, seems to have identified with the martyred females dear to the heart of the Pre-Raphaelites. It may have been this condition of Euphemia (“Effie”) Chalmers Ruskin (née Gray) that first endeared her to Millais, when they came in close contact in 1853. (Although the daughter of a solid middle-class family, at the time of her marriage her solicitor father veered on the edge of bankruptcy as a result of railroad speculations and she became entirely dependent upon Ruskin and his parents, who always considered her “lowly born and lowly bred.”) Millais accompanied Ruskin and his wife that year on a summer holiday in Scotland. Unhappily married to Ruskin, who had yet to consummate their conjugal union after five years, Effie and Millais were drawn to one another during their sojourn in the Highlands, culminating with their own marriage two years later. She combined for him some of the traits of both Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott; in his sketches of the vacation period he painted her with a wreath of foxgloves in her hair while she sat sewing, and in another instance depicted her in an extravagant outfit with a necklace and headdress of bindweed (morning-glory). Effie left Ruskin in April 1854, and as she and her family prepared to travel to the seaside for their annual holiday, Millais warned her mother to make sure that Effie wore “a necklace of corks for there must not be an Ophelia finish to the tragedy.”127 During their Highlands visit, Millais planned a pair of pictures for the Ruskins: one a majestic portrait of Ruskin looking over a steep waterfall cascading through Glenfinlas and the other of Effie inside a tower of nearby Doune Castle at one of the windows through which the windings of the river could be seen. Although only the portrait of Ruskin was executed, it is tempting to see in the other a fantasy of the Lady of Shalott waiting for her Sir Lancelot to ride to the rescue. Effie won an annulment of her marriage with Ruskin one year later on the grounds of nonconsummation, but the scandal that ensued embroiled

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them, their families, and friends in an acrimonious aftermath. Throughout Millais described the divorce as a release from “imprisonment,” as a “deliverance” and “restoration.” Perceiving her as a martyr, he declared that “the poor ill-used Countess [his nickname for her] must return to her former happy life, playing, dancing, and drawing, and never for a moment permit her thoughts to rest upon the tragic farce in which she has so patiently played a suffering part.” While Effie was complaining that Ruskin considered her “unhappily diseased” and somewhat mad, Millais demonized him as a wicked tyrant. Millais championed her cause as her protector, and it is not surprising that he had no other choice than to marry her once she won her divorce, though many of his associates considered it an act of pure chivalry.128 The story reeks of Arthurian legend, with the knightly champion rescuing the “virgin-wife” from the clutches of the malevolent Templar. Millais’s outdoor portrait of Ruskin at Brig o’Turk in the Trossachs (north of Glasgow) does its best to cover up the resentment that Millais felt toward the sitter, especially in the work’s final stages (fig. 4.19). Ruskin disports himself on a rocky ledge overlooking the waterfall akin to Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant in Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, painted four years earlier. (Coincidentally, Ruskin was establishing his reputation in the United States through the American publication in 1847 of the first volume of Modern Painters, and Durand became one 4.19  John Everett Millais, Portrait of Ruskin, 1853–1854. Private Collection.



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of his fervent admirers. Durand’s son, John, was co-editor with William James Stillman of Crayon, the main journalistic outlet for Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite ideas in America, and William Michael Rossetti became its English correspondent. Stillman, who met Ruskin as early as 1850, may very well have mediated some connection between Durand and the English critic.129) But the two works differ in the figure-landscape relationship: whereas the Hudson River artist poses his nature-worshippers within the vast panorama of the magisterial gaze and nationalist aggrandizement, the Pre-Raphaelite closes in on the specific geological composition of the site and reverses the relationship of human and environment. Although Millais may have seen a reproduction of Durand’s picture, he deviates from it drastically in subordinating the landscape to the imposing figure of Ruskin, who bestrides the craggy shelf like a colossus. By microscopically analyzing the striations of the metamorphic gneiss formations beneath Ruskin’s feet, Millais metonymically represents the scientific and industrial revolutions that made the English the dominant economic power in the world. Here Millais could have identified with the sitter, whose fashionable costume of long frock coat and high shirt collar was identical to that always worn by Millais, who hated to be taken for a bohemian artist. The initial concept of the picture may have been influenced by British reaction to the coup d’état in France and the rise to power of Napoléon III. Millais wrote Charles Combe on 5 February 1852 to inform him that he has joined one of the numerous volunteer rifle clubs organized to prepare for an attack by the French. He announced his newfound patriotism: “I am sure you will see that such measures are stringent upon all Englishmen.”130 The Rock of Ages on which Ruskin disports himself may be a metaphor for the unassailable durability of the British nation. Mention has already been made of the projected pendant to the work that would have shown Effie at a window of Doune Castle and the analogy with the Lady of Shalott. Millais also painted a preliminary study of the site slightly lower down the stream, a horizontal composition with a lone figure seated on the rocks at the far right (fig. 4.20). It is none other than Effie doing her sewing—the supreme Victorian male fantasy here carried to absurd lengths in the great outdoors! Rather than engage with the sublime scenery like her husband, she sits absorbed in her dutiful domestic tasks and subordinated to the natural setting like one more spectacle within it. The rock on which Ruskin would be posed is prominent in the foreground, but now it is conspicuously vacant and it is clear whose “absence” is intended. Subject to Millais’s gaze—he is perched above her out of sight—Effie is also the imagined conquest of he who occupies in the imagination the exalted place on the rock. The bold phallic outcropping in this location also asserts Millais’s will to dominance. Significantly, this salient outcropping is barely visible in the scene of Ruskin. Its phallic surrogate is the walking stick he holds somewhat tentatively in his right hand. Yet in the present position the stick is physically

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4.20  John Everett Millais, The Waterfall, 1853. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection, Delaware Art Museum, Newark, Delaware.

impossible to lean on (unless wedged in a crevice, which appears unlikely), but without it Ruskin would seem to be precariously poised on the rock, peering “into the turbulent sluice beneath.” Thus what appeared at first glance as a seamless depiction of mastery over nature suddenly becomes unglued and rife with internal contradiction. Staley has described Ruskin’s figure (painted much later) as seemingly “pasted on the surface,” and Ruskin himself remarked that his “figure’s standing in the way.”131 Millais depicted the master of nature covertly as a “milksop” with a rickety stick, with the rocky substance shown beneath his feet as alone enduring and timeless.132 Lyell classified gneiss, which consists of the same materials as granite, as one of the “primary” rocks of creation.133 He quoted his colleague Macculloch, who noted that in Scotland the masses of gneiss had “become contorted and irregular as they approach the granite,” indicating the dynamic effect of the molten intrusion of granite into the preexisting sedimentary strata. Ruskin was fascinated by the undulating patterns of gneiss, which for him seemed “to form the world,” symbolizing the vitality of primordial creation. Indeed, “from the lowest valley to the highest clouds, all is theirs—one adamantine dominion and rigid authority of rock.”134 Despite his profound admiration for the look of power of the crystalline formations, however, Ruskin also pointed to an ambiguous signification of these “noble rocks”: They, which at first seemed strengthened beyond the dread of any violence or change, are yet also ordained to bear upon them the symbol of a perpetual Fear:



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the tremor which fades from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed to all eternity, upon the rock; and while things that pass visibly from birth to death may sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a perpetual memorial of their infancy,—that infancy which the prophet saw in his vision: “I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form and void, and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled; and all the hills moved lightly.”135

Thus the structure and appearance of mountains bear witness to the moment of Creation, and carry the impress of unfathomable awe along with the projection of the majesty and authority of their formations. Everything obeys the laws of the Divine Blueprint, and the closer the observation of the objects of nature the more they reveal clues to the higher reality. Unlike the cataclysmic approach to geology of John Martin that lent credence to millennial preoccupations in a period of rapid change, Ruskin’s obsession with the minutiae of landscape constituted an attempt to reconcile and buttress British Protestant faith with visual and scientific accuracy. His extravagant indulgence in the “pathetic fallacy”—the endowment of natural objects with emotional and philosophical meaning—helped him surmount the felt threat of geological discovery to the biblical narrative. In the bizarre contortions and irregularities of both Gothic art and geological phenomena he could perceive the authentic manifestation of Intelligent Design. He latched on to the Pre-Raphaelites because their combination of microscopic accuracy and awkward thematics epitomized his sense of visual sincerity. His sermonizing on the links between art, science, nature, and religion also paralleled the work of the industrialists and manufacturers who wanted public support for their relentless attempts to bring the world under subjection. In this sense, his commitment to the brute facticity of existence brought him much closer to the Gradgrinds of his era than he might have realized. Ruskin actually did his own drawing of a gneiss formation on the opposite bank of the stream along which he stands in the Millais painting, and it may have served as a guide for the artist (fig. 4.21). Its remarkable clarity and sharp focus exemplify the acuity of his observation as well as characterize his subjective response to the ferocious veinous patterns that seem to heave and devour the space. Millais, I believe, achieved the sense of ambiguity in both sitter and landscape in his portrayal of Ruskin, representing the solidity of the rock formation but also the ceaseless activity of geological process, and depicting the “master” of nature looking less iron-willed than vacuous as he surveys his domain. Millais’s break with Ruskin proved to be irreparable and occurred just when the P.R.B. was beginning to dissolve. He then was kicked upstairs by his election as A.R.A. (Associate of the Royal Academy) in 1853, and thereafter began devoting his energies to satisfying middle-class Victorian taste.136 Christina Rossetti’s satirical farewell to the Pre-Raphaelite move

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ment notes Millais’s ascendance: “So luscious fruit must fall when over ripe, / And so the consummated P.R.B.”137 When Hunt finally got around to criticizing Millais’s commercialism, his old friend responded: You argue that if I paint for the passing fashion of the day my reputation some centuries hence will not be what my powers would secure for me if I did more ambitious work. I don’t agree. A painter must work for the taste of his own day. . . . I want proof that the people of my day enjoy my work, and how can I get this better than by finding people willing to give me money for my productions, and that I win honours from my contemporaries. . . . There is a fashion going now for little girls in mob caps. Well, I satisfy this while it continues; but immediately the demand shows signs of flagging, I am ready to take to some other fashion of the last century which people are now keen on, or I shall do portraits or landscapes.138

4.21  John Ruskin, Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, 1853. Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.



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By 1855, Millais could even make peace with Dickens and take his place as a leading representative of British painting. He now so closely identified with British nationalism that he began orchestrating an elaborate campaign to promote the British school at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855. Early that year he asked Combe to ship the best examples in his collection of Hunt and himself “for the sake of showing the Frenchmen that we have a school of painters in this country (which they doubt).”139 Perhaps these efforts helped neutralize Ruskin’s resentment against his rival in love (at least publicly); the critic seemed to harbor no professional ill-will against Millais and continued to warmly praise his work. This is most strikingly evident in the case of The Rescue, exhibited in 1855, one of his most popular works to date and one that Millais himself prized highly (fig. 4.22). The subject is a fireman’s daring rescue of three children from the upper story of a blazing household and his deliverance of them to the anxious mother below. The melodramatic theme has been enlivened by Millais’s bold use of a dominant red tonality to convey the fiery ambiance of the interior. Through the window in the hall we glimpse a billowing cloud enveloping the rooftops, while a trail of flame seems to follow rapidly in the footsteps of the fireman as he descends the carpeted steps. Ruskin went into raptures over the work, gushing, “It is the only chapter four

4.22  John Everett Millais, The Rescue, 1855. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

great picture exhibited this year; but this is very great. The immortal element is in it to the full. It is easily understood, and the public very generally understand it.”140 Millais’s changing reputation is also seen in the often positive commentary of the Athenaeum’s reviewers. By 1855, the Athenaeum could refer to “our Pre-Raphaelites” as models of conscientiousness, artists who would “not spare us an ‘apple on the rock’ when they have to paint a Yarrow glen, nor a chip on the carpenter’s floor, if the Dwellers at Nazareth are their

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subject.” Two years later, the Athenaeum takes for granted the public acceptance of the group and refers to them by their initials only, as “P.R.B.’s” The critic in 1855 had mixed feelings about The Rescue, but had to admit that “the comet—the burning star—of the Exhibition is Mr. Millais’s Rescue,— a picture that would be cheap for any public office wishing to save coals in hard winters. Not that, with some heretical exceptions, it is not a work of force and originality, full of purpose and sentiment, and daring endeavour to paint the poetry of English nineteenth-century life:—the life we, and not others, live.” The patriarchal Victorian mentality shows through the critic’s comments on the two protagonists: “The face of the fireman is very good. Thoroughly English, cool, determined, and self-reliant, and what is more, of that type of feature that any physiognomist would at once recognize as common among his profession. The mother is plain, but that might happen, and fantastically wild, which need not be.”141 According to Millais’s brother William, the scene was inspired by their observation of two firefighters plying a hose from a rafter when the roof suddenly collapsed and carried them with it. As Millais and his brother continued on their way, Millais declared: “Soldiers and sailors have been praised on canvas a thousand times. My next picture shall be of the fireman.”142 It is curious that the English Millais and Dickens, the French Courbet, and the American Whitman all chose the fireman in the 1850s as a paradigmatic type in the representation of urban realism, and did so in order to signal the heroism of everyday life. Considering the appalling conditions sustained by British troops in the Crimea during the winter of 1854–1855 that exposed the flawed military presence there, and the vicious French military suppression of the Roman Republic in 1849, it would seem that Millais and Courbet had the incentive to displace heroic combat in the field to the daring actions of firemen in the civil domain. The fireman represented an instance of a working-class male who could be idealized for his loyal and courageous service on behalf of the more privileged groups. Like the navvy, the fireman performed outside the factory system constituting the locus of working-class organization and threat. The Victorian bourgeoisie needed working-class heroes to offset the Chartists and dangerous classes inimical to their interests. Millais could even boast of his many forays with the London fire brigade, whose captain was a friend of his; the painter donned firemen’s overalls and helmet in rushing to the scenes of action. Fires of course would be increasingly identified as inevitable catastrophes associated with the growth and concentration of urban populations, where the combination of the density of buildings and dwellings and coalburning sites guaranteed the rapid spread of conflagrations. Dickens recorded 838 fires in London alone in 1849, and in an article in Household Words he wrote of the heroism of the London fire brigade, including one instance of the rescue of a child with a nightcap to the cries of the crowd shouting “Bravo! Bravo! God bless ’em! Bravo!”143

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Dickens and Millais finally reconciled their differences through their common fascination for the fireman. After an intense discussion of Millais’s projected tableau on 12 January 1855, Dickens sent the painter his account of the fire brigade, at the same time expressing his admiration for Millais’s progress in what he felt to be the “higher and better things.” Millais kept Dickens informed of the progress of the picture, and just before its completion he even invited him to his studio to inspect it. Although Dickens was unable to see it on that occasion, it is likely that he eventually viewed it in friendly and private circumstances.144 Millais’s Peace Concluded (or “The Return from the Crimea”) of 1856 culminates his transition from provocative Pre-Raphaelite painter to fashionable crowd-pleaser and attests to his definitive capitulation to the reaction (fig. 4.23). Perhaps his most sentimental picture to date, it again earned Ruskin’s extravagant praise. The subject is drawn from contemporary history, alluding to the treaty of peace signed between the allies of Turkey on one side and Russia on the other that ended the Crimean War. In a cozy, richly carpeted corner of a Victorian parlor, an officer recuperating from his wounds in the Crimea lies on a divan surrounded by his family and their Irish wolf-hound, curled up at his feet. The officer displays with his left hand a headline on page nine of the Times, dated Monday, March 31, that announces, “Conclusion of Peace” (fig. 4.24). His wife, modeled after Effie, sits beside him tête-à-tête on the edge of the sofa, affectionately embracing him and holding hands. Meanwhile, he gazes down approvingly at one of his daughters who, holding his medal, has arranged on her mother’s lap a cluster of toy animals including a bear, a lion, a turkey, and a rooster—all national emblems of the principals signing the treaty. The child has picked out these toys from a miniature Noah’s Ark sitting on the floor at the extreme left. Standing behind it is her sister, who stares directly at the spectator while affectedly holding up in her left hand a miniature dove with an olive branch. The desire to reach the public is seen in the speed by which he hastened his subject to completion: since the newspaper is dated 31 March and the Royal Academy Exhibition opened at the beginning of May, he had approximately one month to conceive and execute his picture. The treaty and the conduct of the Crimean War was still in everyone’s mind at the time, kept in the foreground of the news by the Crimean Board of Inquiry’s investigation of charges of mismanagement and poor organization. Meanwhile, the British government and military personnel tried to put a good face on the tragic episode; one member of the House of Lords praised the running of the war as an example of the traditional “worth of national character and the grandeur of national enterprise.”145 The theme of Noah’s Ark, which had previously provided Millais with the inspiration for epic conceptions of the religious and social upheavals within Victorian society, has now been reduced to the level of children’s toys. The subjects that he risked at the beginning of the formation of the

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opposite 4.23  John Everett Millais, Peace Concluded or The Return from the Crimea, 1856. P. D. McMillan Fund. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis. top right 4.24  “Conclusion of Peace,” headline from the Times, 31 March 1856.

P.R.B. now operate as self-conscious playthings to be manipulated at will for the benefit of his bourgeois audience. Ruskin himself must have shared in this development, since he had only praise for the painter and his picture. Once he thought that Millais would fall behind others of his school, “but Titian himself could hardly head him now.” The critic predicted that in the future it will rank “among the world’s best masterpieces,” and he concluded with his highest accolade: “I am not sure whether he may not be destined to surpass all that has yet been done in figure-painting, as Turner did all past landscape.”146 The defining moment of Pre-Raphaelite painting in British culture had arrived, replacing the romantic epoch of Turner and Martin. In his preface to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1856, Ruskin addressed readers about the change in appearance of the annual shows, warning them that they will no longer be able to distinguish the Pre-Raphaelite works as a separate class, but that between them and the comparatively few pictures remaining quite of the old school, there is a perfectly unbroken gradation, formed by the works of painters in various stages of progress, struggling forward out of their conventionalism to the Pre-Raphaelite standard. The meaning of this is simply that the battle is completely and confessedly won by the latter party; that rejection has changed into emulation, astonishment into sympathy, and that a true and consistent school of art is at last established in the Royal Academy of England.147



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William Holman Hunt

Ruskin’s declaration occurred paradoxically just as the brethren were separating and going their own way. Hunt’s progress in the early 1850s parallels that of Millais, except that just at the moment of rupture in 1854 he took off for the Holy Land, where he stayed for two years. He made his retreat cognizant that the movement had become, “at least in part, a signal failure.”148 Nevertheless, his abrupt departure forestalled a formal break with the group—a move that helped sustain what Alan Bowness has called Hunt’s “sense of mission,” enabling him to keep faith with the type of singular theme that characterized the early P.R.B. program.149 The year that Millais exhibited his Ophelia and A Huguenot at the Royal Academy, Hunt entered The Hireling Shepherd (fig. 4.25). Shot through with irony and contradiction, this complex work points to the group’s early calculated striving for breakthrough thematics as well as a new system of painting. This is already evident in the quotation from Edgar’s song in King Lear (act 3, scene 6), which accompanied the listing of the picture in the 1852 exhibition catalogue: Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? Thy sheep be in the corn: And, for one blast of thy minikin mouth, Thy sheep shall take no harm.

The expression “jolly shepherd” hardly fits the biblical theme of the “hireling,” one of many jarring incongruities presented by the picture. But it makes sense if we imagine the group wanting to invent an art capable of carrying multiple levels of literary associations and global enough to embrace Shakespeare and the Bible. On the surface, the reconciliation works: what we see is a heedless shepherd dallying with a shepherdess while the unguarded sheep break out of the fold and wander into the corn. In this situation, he could well pass for either a “jolly” or a “hireling” shepherd. But Hunt knew his Bible, and the verses of the parable in St. John from whence the title derives constitute one of the canonical Christian texts. The chapter reveals Christ as the Son of God responsible for the wider flock of humanity, and contrasts the idea of the good shepherd, who would give his life for the sheep, with that of the hireling, “whose own the sheep are not,” and who when he “seeth the wolf coming . . . leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.” And the parable concludes: “The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep” (St. John 10:12–13). This is a prelude to the resurrection, after which “there shall be one fold, and one shepherd”—identifying the crucifixion with Christ’s sacrifice for his sheep. Hence if the “hireling” is the anti-Christ, he must bear witness to the exclusion from the possibility of eternal life. This is too heavy a burden

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4.25  William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851–1852. City of Manchester Art Galleries, Manchester.

for a “jolly” shepherd to carry, and probably explains the presence of the death’s-head moth which the shepherd shows to his female companion. Hunt claimed late in life that his primary aim in the work was to paint authentic rustic people, “not dresden china bergers,” in “a landscape of full sunlight, with all the colour of luscious summer without the faintest fear of the precedents of any landscape painters who has rendered Nature before.”150 Hunt’s work coincides with the emergence of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet in France, and his preoccupation with “real” people parallels their commitment to a naturalistic representation of rural life. In addition to his botanical fidelity, Hunt meticulously replicated the coarse textures of the British peasantry’s costume, their sunburnt visages, and even such accessories as the beer keg slung from the shepherd’s tangible leather belt. Contemporary reviewers agreed with his claim to verisimilitude: the Times critic, characterizing the work as “ludicrous and repulsive,” declared: “Shepherds and shepherdesses with such fiery complexions, such wiry hair, and such elephantine feet were not born in Arcadia,” while the writer for the Athenaeum elaborated:



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Like Swift, [Hunt] revels in the repulsive. These rustics are of the coarsest breed,—ill favoured, ill fed, ill washed. Not to dwell on cutaneous and other minutiae,—they are literal transcripts of stout, sunburnt, out-of-door labourers. Their faces, bursting with a plethora of health, and a trifle too flushed and rubicund, suggest their over-attention to the beer or cyder [sic] keg on the boor’s back. . . . Downright literal truth is followed out in every accessory; each sedge, moss, and weed—each sheep—each tree, pollard or pruned—each crop, beans or corn—is faithfully imitated. Summer heat pervades the atmosphere,—the grain is ripe,—the swifts skim about,—and the purple clouds cast purple shadows.151

On another level, however, the pair retain some of the features of eighteenth-century china imagery: the conventional pyramidal composition favored by Boucher, for example, and though keyed to the biblical source, the preference for showing rural people during a leisurely moment rather than at work. The Athenaeum’s critic mockingly called the work “Love in Idleness.” George Eliot wrote critically that while in The Hireling Shepherd Hunt “gave us a landscape of marvelous truthfulness, [he] placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments.”152 At the time Hunt privileged the verisimilitude of the characters and landscape over the narrative, he was surely responding to avant-garde claims to originality and vivid technique that in many ways the Pre-Raphaelites pioneered. Yet he would also disclaim the title to realist painter and later rejected impressionism as “a standing peril to honest and honourable art” and as soulless and materialistic. Hunt’s didactic turn of mind required a moral framework for his picture-making, and it is the symbolism of The Hireling Shepherd that ultimately determined its purpose. Writing in the same letter quoted above, Hunt recalled that in producing the work he did indeed “have an occult suggestion in mind of a very simple character”: Shakespeares [sic] song represents a Shepherd who is neglecting his real duty of guarding the sheep: instead of using his voice in truthfully performing his duty, he is using his “minnikin mouth” in some idle way. He was a type thus of other muddle headed pastors who instead of performing their services to their flock—which is in constant peril—discuss vain questions of no value to any human soul. My fool has found a death’s head moth, and this fills his mind with forebodings of evil and he takes it to an equally sage counsellor for her opinion. She scorns his anxiety from ignorance rather than profundity, but only the more distracts his faithfulness: while she feeds her lamb with sour apples his sheep have burst bounds and got into the corn. It is not merely that the wheat will be spoilt, but on eating it the sheep are doomed to destruction from becoming what farmers call “blown.”153



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Aside from Hunt’s disdain for his rural folk, what is remarkable in this statement is the lack of confidence in the capacity of the “flock”—always in “constant peril”—to disentangle the chaff from the wheat. Hunt betrays his elitist concern with the credulity of the masses, and criticizes them for elevating “muddle headed” types to leadership positions. As in Millais’s work, the radical edge has become blunted in this work of 1851–1852 and the message more covertly represented. Nevertheless, its very ingenuity in fusing a starkly realist depiction of a rural setting with a fervent ideological program positions it as a milestone of Pre-Raphaelite production. Hunt’s allusions to pastors leading their flocks astray and to “sectarian vanities and vital negligencies of the day” also places the picture squarely in the center of the theological controversies still raging in British society. The work plays on the idea of the “pastoral” duties of the nineteenth-century clergy and their sense of vocation. Hunt’s religious position in relationship to the picture has been debated by various authors, their arguments turning on whether or not Hunt was attempting to throw off suspicions of Tractarianism linked with his previous A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids or reinforcing his ties to the movement. As Macmillan and Errington show, Hunt was still tight with the Combes and even admitted to being “at the very centre of the High Church party in Oxford,” thus making it unlikely that the work condemned Tractarian ecclesiastics for leading their flocks astray.154 We also know that just as he began work on the background of the picture he wrote to Coventry Patmore asking to borrow his copy of Richard Hooker—edited by John Keble in the previous decade—whose works deeply informed Tractarian doctrine. As Errington suggests, he may not have had to read very far before stumbling on a relevant passage: Dr. John Spenser’s introductory “To the Reader” prefixed to the 1604 edition of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity closely resonates with The Hireling Shepherd: This unhappy controversy, about the received ceremonies and discipline of the Church of England . . . hath by the unnatural growth and dangerous fruits thereof, made known to the world, that it never received blessing from the Father of peace. For whose experience doth not find, what confusion of order, and breach of the sacred bond of love hath sprung from this dissension; how it hath rent the body of the church into divers parts, and divided her people into divers sects; how it hath taught the sheep to despise their pastors, and alienated the pastors from the love of their flocks . . .155

Hunt’s shepherd-pastor has led his flock astray, but Hunt never tells us from what idea or principle. In March 1851, Ruskin published his famous pamphlet Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, a work Hunt read that July while painting the picture. Ruskin railed at the schism between the Evangelical and High Church parties in Britain as “one of the most disgraceful

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scenes in Ecclesiastical history.” By paralyzing the Protestant faith, the petty jealousies and disunity played into the hands of the Romanists. What was urgent for this Low Church Anglican was the pressing need for the Church of England to unite within herself the entire Evangelical body “and take her stand against the Papacy.” This required the devotion of the “pastors” of both the English and Scottish churches in seeking common ground for union, “and thus the whole body of Protestants, united in one great Fold, would indeed go in and out, and find pasture; and the work appointed for them would be done quickly, and Anti-Christ overthrown.”156 Ruskin stressed the shepherds because he had little confidence in the sheep; in the same essay he could write, “Of all puppet-shows in the Satanic Carnival of the earth, the most contemptible puppet-show is a Parliament with a mob pulling the strings.” Hunt would have found confirmation of Ruskin’s position in Hooker, who declared the necessity for learned ministers to preach the word, for “if the blind lead the blind both needs fall into the pit . . . teachers are shepherds whose flocks can be at no time secure from danger, they are watchmen whom the enemy doth always besiege.”157 Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd owes a debt to Ruskin as well as to Hooker for its inspiration, since his negligent shepherd-pastor causes his misguided flock to stray from the path of unity. This is the central theme of the picture, with hints of popery as the subtext. The Oxford reformers vigorously debated the possible schismatic outcome stemming from the attempt to restore the Catholic idea of the Church, but always insisted on the universality of the Church. There was inevitably a segment of the movement that drifted toward Rome, with a heavy tide of secessions occurring in 1851. Except for Newman, however, none of the major leaders converted, and the main body of the movement remained steadfastly loyal to the English Church. Already in Tract No. 71, “On the Controversy with the Romanists,” it was declared that to go over to Roman Catholicism would result in “fomenting divisions among ourselves.” Tractarians further castigated Evangelicals for separating from High Church practices.158 As if the dispute-ridden established church did not provide sufficient fuel for controversy, the 1851 Census of Religious Worship (whose results were made known in 1854) demonstrated that Protestant Nonconformity matched in sheer numbers the aggregate membership of Anglicanism—a shocking revelation of the strength of British dissent.159 The other statistical surprise was the formidable number of British “habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion”—chiefly among the working classes and the peasantry. The greatest fear of the Tractarians sprang from their perception of the Anglican Church besieged by growing secularism and materialism, and they hoped to establish its spiritual supremacy beyond the political authority of the nation. It was this challenge of secularism and widespread unbelief—finally laid bare in 1851—that stimulated the rise of the Oxford Movement. A more immediate response to working-class infidelity and politics emerged after 1848 in the form of Christian Socialism, which wanted

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workers to rally under the banner of more egalitarian-minded Anglican clergy and their upper-class supporters. Well known to the Pre-Raphaelites, its arguments were spelled out in the popular novel Alton Locke (1850), by Charles Kingsley, who, together with its founder Frederick Denison Maurice, was the mainspring of the movement. The eponymous artisanal hero of the novel, who undergoes a conversion from Chartist radicalism to Christian Socialism, early on condemns the clergy for its dependence on Tories and neglect of the working classes. The clergy earn their income either by pew rents (which created social distinctions among churchgoers and discouraged working-class worshippers from attending) or by a system that rests on tithing—a source of clerical income keyed to a rent charge on the land dependent upon the price of corn (grain). Either way, the clergy aligned themselves with the exploiting classes and prohibited all free discussion of doctrinal matters. Locke denounces Anglican clergy for “commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have, in the last three generations, alienated us.”160 The stated relationship between clerical income’s dependence on the high price of corn and the clergy’s “scandalous neglect” of their working-class flocks links the book to Hunt’s picture. Although Christian Socialists rejected Tractarianism, their preoccupation with the recovery of dissident working classes for Christ brought them into its ideological orbit. Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd gives us a grossly sensual male and female pastor of the rural type far removed from the Tractarian persuasion; although Hunt says little of the woman’s symbolic role, she could represent the type of lay Methodist preacher like George Eliot’s Dinah Morrison (Adam Bede), who preached to rural artisans out-of-doors. Here the shepherdess carelessly feeds deadly sour apples to her sheep, manifesting the same kind of disregard for the flock as her male counterpart. The central importance of the shepherd’s display of the death’s-head moth in attracting the female’s attention may be a metaphor for the local fears associated with Romanism and its “superstitious” dogmas. Anti-Catholic feeling reached a peak during the winter of 1850–1851 with so-called “Papal Aggression”—Pope Pius IX’s creation in Great Britain of a territorial hierarchy of twelve bishoprics and the elevation of Wiseman to cardinal. The Tractarians were immediately scapegoated for having led their flocks to Roman “mummeries of superstition.”161 The outpouring of indignation spread throughout the countryside, with the rural clergy using their Sunday services as an opportunity to join the swelling protest movement. Hunt and his Tractarian friends must have viewed these accusations with some misgivings, and would have decried the alarmist atmosphere they created. According to Hunt, the sight of the moth fills the shepherd’s “little mind with forebodings of evil and he takes it to an equally sage counsellor for her opinion.” The responsibility for the proliferation of the claims of free thought and commitment to individualism could be laid at the doorstep of Evan

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gelicals and dissenters. The effective leadership of both the Evangelicals and the dissenting community was urban, provincial, and upper middle class, sustained by an influential network of banking, manufacturing, and professional families. This group was open to the discoveries of geologists, astronomers, and natural scientists, as well as to recent historical criticism of the biblical narrative which ran counter to the traditional acceptance of the Bible and cast doubt on specific Christian doctrines.162 The personal crisis of faith generated by the incompatibility of recent scientific discovery and critical liberalism with religious tradition inflected the thought of numerous Victorian intellectuals, whose various strategies for dealing with the conflict decisively affected Victorian culture. Both Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites tried to deploy an aesthetical vision to reconcile the apparently contradictory views. I believe that Hunt’s conspicuous display of the death’s-head moth corresponds to his own fascination with natural history, but that he displaced the painful consequences of this involvement on to the pastor-shepherd. Thus the death’s head is Janus-faced, indicating the extremes of papist superstition on one side and rationalist control of human activity on the other. According to conservatives, the very dependence on science and industry as a panacea instilled a sense of helplessness that could be viewed as a kind of superstition.163 The shepherd’s attempt at seduction through natural history must mean that he is promoting it among his diocesan flock and leading them to their destruction. This position would have coincided with the views of the Oxford reformists, who wished to counteract what they perceived to be the alienating tendencies of scientific thought and industry. The “muddle headed pastors” then—the Low Church people, the Evangelicals, and the Nonconformists—were those who with their butterfly nets and collecting baskets made concessions to the changing social order and lured their followers from the true Church. Hunt himself was caught in conflict between his own need for “liberty of conscience” and scientific accuracy in representation with the imperatives of the established church. Like the Tractarians, he wanted to differentiate the Anglican Church from the secular order on the plane of common human action. This created a dilemma, for the pictorial solution he chose emphasized the empirical disposition of the secular world he attacked. His dilemma was played out in the intense religiosity of his next picture, and in his abrupt departure for the Holy Land two years later. It was his way of reconciling material practice with spiritual desire and assuming the role of a “clear headed pastor” able to guide lost sheep “to the true religion of Christ.”164

The Light of the World Hunt sincerely believed in the P.R.B. mission to use art instrumentally to bring about a spiritual change in the hearts and minds of his fellow citizens.

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No other work so clearly attests to this missionary zeal than the forbidding Light of the World, arguably the most memorable of all British religious images (fig. 4.26). It seems to embody the highest aspirations of the Gothic Revival and the Oxford Movement, merging ritual and symbolic realism into a spiritually transcendent whole. (Its appeal to the Tractarians is demonstrated in the swift willingness of the Combes to pay the enormous price of 400 guineas for it.) Its conception and development overlapped with the production of The Hireling Shepherd and represented an attempt to resolve the painful antinomies of naturalist voyeurism and spiritual revelation. Hunt’s aim in this instance was to turn the realist strategy on itself, carrying it to the point of such excessiveness that it could oxymoronically convey an unearthly naturalism and arouse a sense of spiritual awe. Hunt shared the exciting moment of his conception with Millais, sparked by a reading in Revelation (3:20): “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Hunt went on to justify a nocturnal effect not mentioned in the text: Nothing is said about the night, but I wish to accentuate the point of its meaning by making it the time of darkness, and that brings us to the need of the lantern in Christ’s hand, He being the bearer of the light to the sinner within, if he will awaken. I shall have a door choked up with weeds, to show that it has not been opened for a long time, and in the background there will an orchard.165

Although Hunt specifies the precise point of departure for the work, he again complicates the textual sources by deriving his title from a passage in St. John (8:12): “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” The use of the second text, however, is more than an intellectual conceit, for it also justifies the night effect and gives a positive signification to the otherwise morose theme. Hunt needed the idea of light as a metaphorical means of dispelling the darkness and gloom he clearly associated with the subject. When Millais volunteered to paint a companion piece to be called “The Repentant Sinner,” Hunt protested on the grounds that it would destroy the sense of uncertainty of the response to Christ’s knock that he wished to achieve. (Eventually, Hunt used the idea anyway in his Awakening Conscience—what he considered to be the material counterpart of The Light of the World.) Hunt’s rather hysterical rejoinder to Millais’s benign offer indicates his ambivalence to the picture and his profound psychological investment in its achievement. The reviewer of the Athenaeum characterized The Light of the World as “a most eccentric and mysterious picture,” adding, “The face of this wild fantasy, though earnest and religious, is not that of a Saviour. It expresses such a strange mingling of disgust, fear, and imbecility, that we turn from it to relieve the sight.”166 Here the alien qualities of the work are foregrounded,

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4.26  William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1851–1853. Warden and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford.

perhaps in response to the obvious manifestation of its Gothic and Tractarian tendencies. Its highly personal symbolism gave it a psychological twist that many critics found uncomfortable. The rather negative reception to the picture impelled Ruskin once again to rush to the defense of his protégé, who was by then traveling in the Holy Land. In his letter to the Times of 5 May 1854, Ruskin called it “one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced in this or any other age.” Yet his follow-up description of the picture suggests that even he perceived it as a rather bizarre presentation of the subject: On the left-hand side of the picture is seen this door of the human soul. It is fast barred: its bars and nails are rusty; it is knitted and bound to its stanchions by creeping tendrils of ivy, showing that it has never been opened. A bat hovers about it; its threshold is overgrown with brambles, nettles, and fruitless corn . . . Christ approaches it in the night-time,—Christ, in his everlasting offices of prophet, priest, and king. He wears the white robe, representing the power of the Spirit upon him; the jewelled robe and breastplate, representing the sacerdotal investiture; the rayed crown of gold, inwoven with the crown of thorns; not dead thorns, but now bearing soft leaves, for the healing of the nations.

Ruskin then fixed on the controversial lantern, the “light of conscience,” which is suspended by a chain wrapped around the wrist of Jesus, “showing that the light which reveals sin appears to the sinner also to chain the hand of Christ.” The lantern’s “fire is red and fierce; it falls only on the closed door, on the weeds which encumber it, and on an apple shaken from one of the trees of the orchard, thus marking that the entire awakening of the conscience is not merely to committed, but to hereditary guilt.” Ruskin’s stern Evangelical upbringing predisposed him to read this chilling image as “noble,” but it could easily have been his own heavy burden of guilt that was aroused by the sight of the picture.167 Hunt admitted that the first viewers of the work were more interested in its “occult” and “mystic” treatment, and that the details were not based on conventional ecclesiastical symbolism but on his own private fantasies. When the normally supportive Carlyle saw it, he delivered a loud, lengthy harangue against it: You call that thing, I ween, a picture of Jesus Christ. Now you cannot gain any profit to yourself, except in mere pecuniary sense, or profit any one else on earth, in putting into shape a mere papistical fantasy like that, for it can only be an inanity, or a delusion to every one that may look on it. It is a poor misshaped presentation of the noblest, the brotherliest, and the most heroic-minded Being that ever walked God’s earth. Do you ever suppose that Jesus walked about bedizened in priestly robes and a crown, and with yon jewels on his breast, and a gilt aureole round his head? Ne’er crown nor pontifical robe did the world e’er give to such as Him. Well—and if you mean to represent Him as the spiritual



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Christ, you have chosen the form in which he has been travestied from the beginning by worldlings who have recorded their own ambitions as His, repeating Judas’ betrayal to the high priests. You should think frankly of his antique heroic soul, if you realised His character at all you wouldn’t try to make people go back and worship the image that the priests have invented of Him, to keep men’s silly souls in meshes of slavery and darkness.168

In this fascinating commentary, Carlyle confounds the Jewish high priests and the Vatican’s priests while admonishing Hunt for garbing Christ in “priestly robes.” Carlyle at once expressed his anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic feelings in his outraged response to Hunt’s picture, again pointing to its deep-seated psychological origins. The oxymoronic Light of the World is even more bizarre than The Hireling Shepherd in negotiating the temporal and spiritual realms and is as close as the P.R.B. ever gets to manifesting the Disraeliesque tension between Anglicanism and what I will call “Anglican Judaism.” All of the major Victorian Gentile intellectuals invoked in this chapter were obsessed with the Old Testament heroes while simultaneous practicing anti-Semitic stereotyping. Hunt himself, who traveled to the Holy Land seeking authentic Jewish subjects, could fall into a Dickensian mode in describing a chance meeting with “a short, bloated, dirty, satin waistcoated Jew of about forty.”169 During the debates on whether or not to admit practicing Jews to sit in the House of Commons, Disraeli offended the MPs by reminding them of the contradiction between British anti-Semitism and the fact of Judaism as forerunner of Christianity. His ideal of a synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, growing out of his own upbringing as an Anglican, gave rise to the enigmatic fictional character of Sidonia, a Jewish convert, whose ambiguities resonate with Hunt’s Light of the World (see Art in an Age of Counterrevolution). Hunt’s voyage to the Holy Land followed the ideological pattern of Disraeli’s novel Tancred, as he seeks evidence of “primitive” worship and ceremony and decries “the ugliness, emptiness, and class vulgarity of the Anglican and Prussian worship, as found in the city of Jerusalem.” Hunt immerses himself in rabbinic law, visits the synagogues on the Sabbath and Passover, reads the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Josephus, ready “to reject tradition, religious as well as artistic, not convincingly true.”170 Like Tancred, his quest was to uncover the possibilities of spiritual renewal through contact with the source of all religion. Disraeli’s claim that Judaism was the foundation of Christianity is echoed in Hunt’s depiction of the Christ who wears, according to the artist’s own description, a clasp that conjoins “the Israelitish and Gentile breast-plates.” Later, Stephens would clarify this by referring to the clasp’s inclusion of the “mystic Urim and Thummim” and a set of precious stones bearing “the names of the chosen tribes.”171 At one point in Hunt’s research for the painting, he innocently inquired of a Jewish acquaintance if rabbis

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still wore the Urim and Thummim, and if this were the case he wanted to borrow an example to depict in his picture.172 Nevertheless, he was well aware of the oracular function of the Urim and Thummim and the traditional Christian associations of them with “revelation and truth” and “lights and perfection.” He also knew that the breastplate that contained them was “four-square” and held twelve precious stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.173 According to Josephus, these oracles foretold victory in the field when rays of light emanated from the twelve precious stones. Finally, just below the domed top in front of the lantern are three apertures unmistakably shaped in the form of the Star of David. Hunt himself made it clear that “the diversity of designs of the openings of the lantern” were “essential to the spiritual interpretation of the subject.”174 Hunt’s occult figure and exceptional symbolism go beyond the conventional typological approach of Victorian artists who prefigured Christ’s coming with Old Testament allusions. Here Christ himself is shown arrayed in the symbolic vestures of the high priest of Israel. Significantly, when Hunt visited the Holy Land in search of authentic Jewish models for his New Testament themes, he claimed to have felt most at home with converted or “Messianic” Jews. At the time, intense British missionary efforts in the Holy Land operated as an adjunct to British strategic interests in seeking to establish a Protestant foothold in the predominantly Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic Christian environment. The British campaign was dominated by the evangelical London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (founded 1809) and the Presbyterian British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews (founded 1842). The former, established by Anglicans, was then also known as the London Jews’ Society. Its mission was stationed on what was then called Mt. Zion, in the vicinity of the Anglican church at Jaffa Gate, near the Jewish quarter. The chief stated aim of the English bishop was the conversion of all Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Hunt established close contact with most of the members of the London Jews’ Society mission, and they facilitated his projects and travels in the Holy Land and assisted him in finding Jewish models. He could even call his Finding of the Saviour in the Temple his “Jewish picture.” Like Disraeli, whose novels work through his psychological condition as both Jew and Christian, Hunt was trying to find pictorial solutions for reconciling Christianity and Judaism. Although he believed in Christianity as the New Dispensation, the continuing presence of the stiff-necked Jew was a living reproof of his religious heritage. The converted Jew, on the other hand, who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, shored up his religious identity and confirmed the rightness of his spiritual quest. One further piece of evidence of Hunt’s ambivalence toward Jews was the possible pictorial inspiration of The Light of the World. It was observed from the moment it exhibited in 1853 that it was based on an engraving of

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4.27  Philipp Veit, Christ Knocking on the Door of the Soul, engraving by D. Rist, 1824. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-amMain.



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a similar theme by the Nazarene artist Philipp Veit. Entitled Christ Knocking on the Door of the Soul, it exhibits a similar vertical format and compositional format, with a frontally positioned Christ standing next to the door at the side of a building angled toward the horizon in rapidly receding one-point perspective (fig. 4.27). Hunt asserted that it was Lizzie Siddal, after discovering the print in a Catholic bookstore, who first brought it to his attention in the midst of his production. While Hunt denied having foreknowledge of this work when painting his picture, and pointed out the differing approaches to the subject, it was impossible for him to deny the family likeness of the two works.175 Recalling the primal influence of the Nazarenes on the nascent Pre-Raphaelites and their perusal of prints by their disciples, it is highly probable that a previous view of Veit’s image (perhaps subsequently forgotten) informed Hunt’s conception. What is crucial here, however, is that the Nazarene composition was the work of a converted Jew whose mother was the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn. Hunt’s work differs primarily in heaping upon his work one symbolic attribute after another, perhaps perceiving the stark simplicity and absence of Christian emblems in the earlier treatment as “too Jewish” for comfort. An Italian scholar in direct contact with the PreRaphaelites, about whom he authored a pioneering book, was profoundly affected by the eerie light and sinister shadows of The Light of the World. He wrote that it awed the spectator by its look “quasi di terrore.”176 This association of the celebrated religious painting with a mood of dread and horror must now be considered in the context of Hunt’s personal psychology and the “blaspheming Jew” of traditional British anti-Semitic lore. It will be my contention that The Light of the World may be traced in large part to a recurring nightmare afflicting Hunt since childhood, and which helps explain the discrepancy between the title and stated biblical source. The progression from Shylock to Fagin demonstrates that the Jew as metaphor and social construct persistently haunted the British imagination. James Shapiro’s recent research gives several case studies of Elizabethans plagued in their sleep by images of diabolical Jews.177 The myth of Jewish ritual murder of Gentile children remained as part of every Christian’s heritage, and high and low art portrayed Jews much as people viewed them in their nightmares. Maria Edgeworth’s six-year-old Harrington has been so cowed into obedience by the threat of the old-clothes man that every night he lay under the bedcovers “in an indescribable agony of terror,” surchapter four

rounded by visions of grinning, glaring, bearded Jewish faces carrying bags “in which I fancied were mangled limbs of children.” Walking down East London streets, Harrington imagines that in the dark narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter children like him were being dragged down through trap doors for secret feasts and “midnight abominations.”178 As late as 1851, the image of the monstrous old-clothes man with a bag slung over his shoulder could be paraded in the popular magazine Punch to explain the contemporary delinquency of English youth.179 If in the case of Scott it may be said that he was more sympathetic to Isaac of York than most of his readership, he nevertheless managed to squeeze into the narrative of Ivanhoe all the fanatical beliefs that still surrounded the “unbelieving” Jews in England. Scott, however, developed an insight into the medieval conditions of Jewry that may have still been valid in his own time. He notes that detestation of the Jew united the normally factious Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton, providing them with the external enemy they needed to define their common religious center. Analogously, the English obsession with the no more than 35,000 Jews in Great Britain during the early Victorian era may have been related to the crisis of the splintering and instability of the Church of England in this period. The greatest opposition to Jewish civil rights came from the Anglican establishment, still reeling from the relief of Nonconformists and Roman Catholics. Under these circumstances, maintaining Jewish disabilities and demonizing Jews as the Other may have worked once again to supply the common enemy that helped shore up the British sense of national identity. The vicious anti-Jewish comments from the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, on 25 May 1848, smacked of medieval superstition and clearly reflected his sense of threat.180 As in the case of the Irish Catholics, differences were vastly exaggerated and distorted to bolster and reaffirm the normative values of the dominant society. Here again Jews and Catholics could be fused in the popular imagination as the deviants against which Victorian religious ideals could be measured. The thirty-year debate on the Jewish Question was sounded as frequently as the Condition of England Question and, unfolding from 1828 to 1860, coincided with the emerging Pre-Raphaelite generation. Their own religious identity would have been forged within the crucible of the parliamentary exchanges on Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and Jewish disabilities. Jewish emancipation would have fixed their attention if only for their need to recover the sources of primitive Christianity. The presence of Jews, however, cast into doubt the doctrine of Christian revelation (what anti-Semites projected as their “mockery” of Christian religion). Meanwhile, the Tractarian emphasis on “Early Christian” history and the idea of the New Dispensation logically required the Jewish connection. This is why Ruskin’s discussion of Tintoretto’s Annunciation, which took place in a deteriorating house, so profoundly impressed Hunt: he could read the ruins as a symbol of the collapsing “Jewish church,”

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which Joseph the Carpenter would rebuild on new foundations. Similarly, in The Light of the World Jesus as the Divine Redeemer appears reincarnated in the vestments of the Hebrew high priest. In Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington, the shock of revelation of Simon the Jew is accompanied by the sudden illumination of a lamplighter’s “blazing torch.” Coincidentally, Hunt experienced a trauma in childhood relating to a sudden flash of light in a claustrophobic space whose indelible impress on his personality was felt vividly once more during the production of his picture. Hunt recalled that in his childhood there was always one moment of the day “full of awe” for him. This was after hours in the warehouse that his father managed, when the entire building was cast “in ghostly darkness” and his father, “armed with a bull’s-eye [a lantern with a circular lens], descended into the cellars,” traversing each winding to its remotest corner, and, ascending, proceeded stage by stage, going slowly with every sense intent to make sure that nothing anywhere boded ill for the safety of the place. Every room, so lately palpitating with energy, lively conference, and the bandying of quick retort and laughter, was now silent as the void after a thunder-clap, and to my senses seemed as threatening; so that when my father, examining some newly arranged pile, shot a stream of glaring light into the distant mystery, it was to my awed mind like the flash of lightning of a searching eye from another world.181

Hunt intimated that the remembrance of this daily event profoundly influenced his imaginative life, and the convergence of the simile of “the flash of a searching eye from another world” with the theme of his religious painting is particularly striking. Hunt experienced similar moments of dread while working on the picture. One night he ventured out with his lantern to explore the landscape and hut he wished to include in the picture, descending into a densely overgrown area “where the objects commanding my sight were only those on which the spoke rays of the lantern were shed.” As he dwelt on the hut’s desolation, he pictured in his mind “the darkness of that inner chamber, barred up by man and nature alike.” This in turn brought to mind a memory of “an altogether unexplained experience” that had occurred to him five years earlier. He had arrived by the last train from London at the Ewell Station when the stationmaster was closing his office and emerged with a lantern to walk home. Hunt was delighted to accompany him for the light. When they entered a dense thicket, Hunt cautioned him that some creature was advancing toward them. The two gradually grew more frightened as the object turned into a tall man “wrapped in white drapery round the head and down to the feet.” The appearance of this ghostly being paralyzed Hunt and the stationmaster with fear. When Hunt wanted to borrow the lantern to pursue the apparition as it passed in the thick darkness, his companion refused.

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Late in the autumn of 1851, when developing his composition, he painted on moonlit nights in a makeshift sentry box using candlelight to pick out the subtleties of color. This nocturnal routine unnerved him, especially since the avenue in front of the farm was believed to be haunted. At midnight, Hunt heard a new noise, like the rustling of dead leaves . . . evidently coming nearer as I paused to listen, but the road trodden by the thing of night was hidden from me. . . . The steps had arrived at the face of the house, and now were turning aside to the orchard, where soon indeed I could see a hundred yards off a mysterious presence. I shouted out, “Tell me who you are.” A flash of light shot across the orchard, and then with solemn step the village policeman approached. “I thought you were a ghost,” I said. “Well to tell the truth, sir, that was what I thought of you.”182

On another occasion, while residing in an ancient Paris hôtel, Hunt was haunted by a recurring nightmare of horrific specters after he had extinguished the lights, and on the third night he was so unnerved by the cries “It’s death, it’s death, it’s death!” that he resolved to leave Paris immediately.183 The resemblance of these “ghostly” encounters to the haunting memories of Hunt’s childhood points to The Light of the World as a means of working through primal superstitions. The image of Christ with a lantern blends in with the paternal figures of these ghostly episodes—his father, the stationmaster, and the policeman—all of whom come searching for Hunt with a light to rescue him from the nocturnal demons that haunt him. There is an intriguing coda to Hunt’s episodes of nocturnal traumas, again bearing upon the picture. Some years later, he and his wife decided to visit his old studio on Cheyne Walk, where he had completed The Light of the World. Hunt remembered that they made their way after dark, and as they approached the old building and could see the “blank windows” a mysterious feeling overcame him: “No sign of light and life could be seen there, and all was dark and silent as we turned the corner to the side entrance.” Hunt knocked at the door of the caretaker, but the sounds of the rapping only echoed down “deserted chambers and untrodden stairs.” Finally, one last forceful attempt brought the caretaker from across the street, who had not expected them so soon and had neglected to bring the key. Unable to open the door from the outside, he climbed the garden wall, then withdrew the heavy bolts and chain. Hunt and his party were then startled by the “strangeness” of the caretaker, who, “tall and upright, stood in the void with a lantern in his left hand.” The astonished look on their faces prompted this apology: “I could find no proper candlestick . . . and as this old lantern happened to be handy . . . it will light you over the house.” Hunt then observed: “Walking before us, he finally stood, lantern in hand, in innocent ignorance of its fitness, in the very place where my model had stood to receive the conflicting lights that expressed the meaning of my picture.”184

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Hunt, however, had undergone more than a déjà-vu experience. The circumstances not only recapitulated the episodic encounters in his father’s darkened warehouse but mingled them with his reminiscences of the creation of his picture. The incident distinctly linked these related memories to the painting’s theme, with the caretaker suddenly appearing in the guise of the Saviour carrying the lantern and unfastening a bolted and chained door for the locked-out sinners on the other side. Thus the caretaker joined the lengthy parade of Hunt’s phantasmal custodians, whose authority seemed to conjure up primal guilt and fear of punishment while delivering him from his nocturnal dread. Whence his personal relief gleaned from the promise in St. John 8:12, which also served as the subtext of the picture: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” The shadows that Hunt would dispel also relate to his childhood fears of the “old-clothes man” who inhabited every British youth’s storehouse of memories. In that cavernous warehouse of Hunt’s memory there were fabrics and cotton goods stocked, and it may easily be imagined that the cellar functioned as that mysterious zone where children were dragged down in the old-clothes bag and feasted upon during midnight revels. Hence the preternatural aspect of The Light of the World emerges out of the weird amalgamation of Tractarian and Jewish symbolism that carried Hunt to the edge of religious hysteria.

The Awakening Conscience opposite 4.28  William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853– 1854. Tate Gallery, London.

The Light of the World was dialectically linked to Hunt’s next major picture, the modern-life representation of The Awakening Conscience (fig. 4.28). Even Ruskin’s interpretation of The Light of the World included the phrase “awakening of the conscience” in connection with the approaching radiance. Inspired by the theme of urban prostitution, its significance could be understood as an expression of Hunt’s sexual fears displaced to the site of the female body. Hunt claimed that he wanted a contemporary “material counterpart” of the idea in The Light of the World, and chose as his complementary text Proverbs 25:20: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Hunt wished “to show how the still small voice speaks to a human soul in the turmoil of life.” Hunt’s final melodramatic idea takes the form of a kept woman suddenly recognizing the error of her ways under the impact of spiritual insight. She rises abruptly from her callous lover’s lap as if startled into consciousness, drawn magnetically to the light of revelation that illumines her face and is symbolically represented by the springtime view reflected in the mirror behind her. Hunt claimed that he had been initially inspired by the episode in Dickens’s David Copperfield where Mr. Peggoty searches for his niece Little Emily, who no longer feels at home in respectable society.



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Hunt admitted visiting “different haunts of fallen girls to find a locality suitable for the scene of the old mariner’s pursuing love.” His object was not simply to illustrate a specific moment in the story, but to use in part the idea of a loving seeker of a fallen child suddenly discovering the object of his search. Emily’s repentance, sparked by memories of former days under her uncle’s loving care, enabled Hunt to fill out his pictorial narrative with the theme of “the willing conversion and instantaneous resolve for a higher life” that he felt needed to be emphasized. My understanding of Hunt’s first thought is that in The Light of the World Christ comes knocking at the door, while in The Awakening Conscience he shows us what happens on the other side in response to the knock. He wished to depict a real-life example “in which the appeal of the spirit of heavenly love calls a soul to abandon a lower life.”185 Yet the presentation of the theme of redemption is shrouded in the same kind of ambiguity as the response to the knock in The Light of the World, and it is precisely the tension between redemptive possibility and spiritual unresponsiveness that is tearing at Hunt’s own conscience in this period. The biblical passages accompanying the title of the work in the Academy’s exhibition catalogue of 1854 obliquely confirmed the theme of regenerative opportunities for the mortal sinner. The first was a homily taken from the Wisdom of Ben-Sira (or in Latin, Ecclesiasticus), an apocryphal book of the Old Testament: “As of the green leaves on a thick tree, some fall and some grow; so is the generation of flesh and blood”; and the other, an adaptation from Isaiah 35:3–4: “Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you.” Reviewers typically greeted the painting with an admixture of animosity and perplexity. The Athenaeum’s critic stated that it was “heralded in the catalogue by two mystical, irrelevant texts of Scripture,” and noted that the picture is drawn from a very dark and repulsive side of modern domestic life; but we need scarcely say, is treated, in spite of strange heresies of taste and common sense, with an earnest religious spirit, and, with a great, though mistaken, depth; enigmatic in its title, it is understood by few of the exoteric visitors. . . . It represents a lady just risen from the piano, upon which lies a piece of music, and, turning from a “fast man” who laughs fiendishly, looks at the spectator with pale face, staring eyes, and clenched teeth. Innocent and unenlightened spectators suppose it to represent a quarrel between a brother and sister: it literally represents the momentary remorse of a kept mistress, whose thoughts of lost virtue, guilt, father, mother, and home have been aroused by a chance strain of music. The author of “The Bridge of Sighs” could not have conceived a more painfullooking face. The details of the picture, the reflection of the spring trees in the mirror, the piano, the bronze under the lamp [the bronze clock on the piano is



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under glass—but there seems to be no lamp], are wonderfully true, but the dull indigoes and reds of the picture make it melancholy and appropriate, and not pleasing in tone. The sentiment is of the Ernest Maltravers School: to those who have an affinity for it, painful; to those who have not, repulsive.186

Following his letter to the Times of 5 May, Ruskin proceeded to write a second letter on 25 May defending The Awakening Conscience. Noting that spectators at the exhibition “gaze at it in blank wonder, and leave it hopelessly,” he took it upon himself to clarify the narrative: The poor girl has been sitting singing with her seducer; some chance words of the song, “Oft in the stilly night,” have struck upon the numbed places in her heart; she has started up in agony; he, not seeing her face, goes on singing, striking the keys carelessly with his gloved hand. I suppose that no one possessing the slightest knowledge of expression could remain untouched by the countenance of the lost girl, rent from its beauty into sudden horror; the lips half open, indistinct in their purple quivering; the teeth set hard; the eyes filled with the fearful light of futurity, and with tears of ancient days.

Ruskin took account of the excessively finished details and accessories that may detract from the central thought and thus account in part for the bewildering impact on the viewers. Here his explanation reinforces my thesis that Hunt’s hyperrealism has now assumed a transcendent function: Nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement. They thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or measure, or learn them by heart. . . . There is not a single object in all that room— common, modern, vulgar . . . but it becomes tragical, if rightly read. That furniture so carefully painted, even to the last vein of rosewood—is there nothing to be learnt from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness; nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home? Those embossed books, vain and useless—they also new—marked with no happy wearing of beloved leaves; the torn and dying bird upon the floor; the gilded tapestry, with the fowls of the air feeding on the ripened corn; the picture above the fireplace, with its single drooping figure—the woman taken in adultery; nay, the very hem of the poor girl’s dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness my be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet flailing in the street.187

Ruskin’s interpretation, however, barely touched on the prodigious accumulation of symbolic detail that reflects Hunt’s stress just prior to taking off for the Holy Land. He begins with the title of the song sheet on the piano, “Oft, in the Stilly Night,” a poem set to a Scotch air by the Irish

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poet Thomas Moore. The opening stanza, which pricks the woman’s conscience, contrasts memories of a stainless past with the actual miseries of the present: Oft, in the stilly night, Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond Memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood’s years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone, Now dimm’d and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad Memory brings the light Of other days around me.188

The female victim has started up in a typical Victorian conceit, eyes wide open, hands clenched in pained deformation. Her companion, who is clueless, continues to sing raucously (rather than laughs), oblivious to the revelation that impels her to rise. His insensitivity is also vividly brought home in his indifference to the content of the song. Meanwhile, on the floor in the left-hand corner is another piece of sheet music rolled in a coil but with the title partially exposed, a musical rendition of Tennyson’s elegiac lyric, “Tears, Idle Tears,” in The Princess: Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

Set to music by Hunt’s friend Edward Lear, the verses show that the artist himself was undergoing a nostalgic predilection for an earlier and guiltless time. Ruskin especially called attention to the “fatal newness” of the accessories, a mark of the mismatched couple’s social pretentiousness and meretricious taste. Hunt would have found inspiration for this idea in recent literature, including Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), where the pretentious Rawdon Crawley (who purchases a pair of kid gloves, sign of the aristocracy) and Rebecca Sharp engage lodgings and install a new piano and lavish bric-a-brac. Hence the corrupt present stands in glaring contrast to the sense of the innocent past, when love was freely expressed through shared

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4.29  Thomas Brooks, The Awakened Conscience, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 14 May 1853.

feelings and not through the display and consumption of objects. And in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth, when Bellingham takes the eponymous heroine to her old home, “She saw a vision of former days—an evening in the days of her childhood; her father sitting in the ‘master’s corner’ near the fire, sedately smoking his pipe, while he dreamily watched his wife and child; her mother reading to her, as she sat on a little stool at her feet. It was gone—all gone into the land of shadows.” Although this incident occurs prior to Ruth’s seduction, it serves to contrast her present hard lot with her idealized memories of childhood. An artist perhaps inspired by this scene in Ruth, Thomas Brooks, submitted a work to the 1853 Royal Academy Exhibition entitled The Awakened Conscience (fig. 4.29). The remarkable coincidence of the title of the picture, the subject of the contrast of past purity with a disillusioned present, and even the lines from Moore’s poetry in the exhibition catalogue with Hunt’s construction, attests to the Victorian obsession with the theme of lost innocence. Brooks’s work depicts a man and woman visiting the humble cottage of a large family, with the female looking longingly upon the scene of the patriarch of the household teaching his young child to pray. The review in the Illustrated London News described it in the following terms: A group of more than ordinary, and at the same time painful, significance. What may have been the previous history of the young female, and of her reckless



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companion, who are near the door of the honest yeoman’s home, where they are receiving hospitality; why should she weep, and he scowl, at the sight of the young child saying his prayers, the artist leaves us to imagine.

The reviewer concluded with the accompanying catalogue quotation from none other than the poet Thomas Moore: “There was a time, thou blessed child! / When young, and haply pure as thou, / look’d and pray’d like thee—but now.”189 Both Ruth and the female protagonist of Hunt’s picture feel eternally trapped, and their escape takes place in the imagination through the sight of flowers. Signs of entrapment are omnipresent in the painting, from the claustrophobic space to the skeins of embroidery yarn on the carpet and the wild-eyed cat below the table tormenting a bird. In Dombey and Son, the catlike clerk, Carker, is described as always ready for a spring, a tear, or a scratch, and Dickens raises the question: “Was there any bird in a cage, that came in for a share of his regards?” Hunt noted that in recalling the memory of her childhood environment, the woman resolves to break with her clerk-lover and escape “from her gilded cage.” Even the luxuriant paisley shawl fastened around her waist seems to restrict her movement. But the sight of white spring blossoms and sprouting trees glimpsed through the window (somewhat confusedly reflected in a mirror hanging behind the couple) has inspired a recovery of a personal virginal springtime. Rather than confine as in Collins’s Convent Thoughts, here the garden without represents liberation while the parlor within imprisons. Analogously, Ruth as an orphan apprentice is assigned to the coldest and darkest corner in the dressmaker’s workroom, but her morale is sustained by a series of panels painted with floral wreaths, including “white lilies, sacred to the Virgin,” as well as “every flower which blooms profusely in charming old-fashioned country-gardens,” which reminds her of her childhood home. As seen in the abundant literary allusions of the period, the trope of seasonal change richly resonated with the Victorian mindset. The Athenaeum’s critic compared Hunt’s picture with Ernest Maltravers—a novel by Bulwer-Lytton first published in 1837. In the novel, young Maltravers and Alice Darvil hire a cottage, and they often spend time at the piano singing together. Alice, raised by a rogue father, is naive in sexual matters, and, eventually seduced by Maltravers, she has a child. The parallel movement of the narrative is the tension between Maltraver’s “Conscience” and his temptations and Alice’s late-blooming “Conscience.” Still pledged to one another, the ebb and flow of their life together is marked symbolically by seasonal changes: “Time went on, winter passed away, and the early spring, with its flowers and sunshine, was like a mirror to their own youth.”190 Hunt’s melodrama inscribes the onus of sexual guilt and sin on the body of the woman. Although his friend Edward Lear wrote him in October 1853, “I think with you that it is an artificial lie that a woman should so

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suffer and lose all, while he who led her [to] do so encounters no share of evil from his acts,” Hunt clearly had mixed feelings about the recovery of respectable social status for fallen women.191 It is true, as Susan Casteras has suggested, that since most Victorian images of sexual transgression made the woman alone carry the burden of guilt, the mere presence of the male paramour in Hunt’s picture at least pointed to shared responsibility for the woman’s predicament.192 He even describes the seducer as “the companion of the girl’s fall.” Nevertheless, while Hunt’s protagonist rises symbolically from her shameful station, she is held in suspense within a richly symbolic field without clues to a positive outcome. The Athenaeum’s reviewer noted that the author of “The Bridge of Sighs”—Thomas Hood’s popular emblem for the fatal destiny of whores—could not have conceived of a more pained expression for the woman’s face (subsequently modified for the patron Thomas Fairbairn). Thus Hunt created a modern Magdalen without the means to reclaim her blameless status. This is a historically accurate perception of the condition of the penitent female, despite Victorian attempts to find a social solution for her recovery. The most effective route to take was that of Dickens’s Little Emily, who emigrated to Australia to start a new life. The strategies of those who protested society’s treatment of the fallen woman consisted mainly of attacks on conventional Christianity. It is no coincidence that Gaskell makes a “dissenting minister” the savior of Ruth, since ordinary Christians were only too happy to condemn fallen women. Hunt goes further than most in his abundant allusions, even to the extent of marshalling contemporary sociological arguments about prostitution, its causes, consequences, and remedies. The initial poverty of the woman may have made her susceptible to the blandishments of the seducer, expressed in her fashionable dress and musical accomplishments, which also hint at her previous vanity and love of display. Meanwhile, the cheaplooking parlor contrasts with a woman’s true domestic sphere, where she might have known true fulfillment had she hewed to the straight and narrow. Finally, she takes it upon herself to supply the remedy in repenting for her waywardness. An Evangelical slant is perhaps present in the portrayal of her paramour as a callous brute, a cat playing with a mouse. Hunt certainly drew upon contemporary tracts on prostitution issuing from Evangelical and Nonconformist circles. The influential research of the surgeon William Tait, which would have been accessible to Hunt, contained many useful suggestions for his picture. Tait notes that prostitution deprives the female of the enjoyments and sympathies of society, banishing from her mind “the thought of her father, mother, brothers and sisters. Her conscience tells her that she is the outcast of the family, and the cause of much vexation and grief to every member of it.” Gradually, fallen women draw a contrast between former and present life, “but when they look around for help, there is none to rescue them.” Tait stressed the long-term effects of sin on the prostitute: “Everything which formerly

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rendered them attractive is completely banished. Every feature appears altered in expression, and gives frightful indication of the writhings of an agonized conscience.”193 Typically, however, Tait reiterated the Victorian dictum that once a woman lost her virginity and it was publicized there was no way back to the society from whence she came: “Let an unfortunate female who has seen the error of her ways propose to a more virtuous course of life, and she is despised by those who formerly loaded her with kindness and attention.” Tait also attacked a “benevolent Christian public” whose hearts go out to every other class of delinquents yet who remain obdurate and “unforgiving” toward the fallen woman. He called for more public support of female penitent asylums and refuges, then meagerly subsidized by a society that thought nothing of wasting fortunes on horse racing, foxhunting, and cockfighting. Those who ran the “refuges,” halfway houses for modern Magdalens, may have been sincere in their efforts, but they were entirely ineffective in getting their charges reinstated in society. Sexuality had become a new field for state power, and unregulated female sex threatened patriarchal authority. The best the victims could do was to tough it out heroically by acknowledging their sin openly and withstand the slings and arrows of their tormentors. In the 1840s, Evangelicals, religious workers, and a few physicians condemned male license, while defending patriarchal authority in the family and state. The treatment advised for the fallen generally was repression, for though Evangelicals believed that individuals could be saved, for them prostitutes had abandoned “the prerogatives of civil liberties.”194 The 1844 reform bill on prostitution pushed by the Evangelicals failed in Parliament, even though clauses about permitting legal action against seducers were dropped. Owenite socialists offered an effective critique of the ambivalent stand of the middle class on prostitution, seen in an 1841 article, “British Female Penitent Refuges,” published in their journal, New Moral World. They claimed that “Refuges” were a hypocritical sop to Victorian society, for if from the female armies of the night the old duffers snatch one victim, their sons stand ready on the opposite side to replace the ranks with new recruits. The article also observed that when women leave the refuge, they have limited options and remain as unprotected as before.195 The Evangelicals in turn blamed the Owenites for encouraging prostitution by openly advocating the elimination of religion, property, and conventional marriage through easy divorce—the very moral foundations of Christian society. Popular lectures published that same decade on what was called “Magdalenism,” or “the illicit intercourse of the sexes,” were designed to combat Owen’s “beastly system” and “awaken” a spirit of regeneration. The Reverend Ralph Wardlaw hoped that his publication would “be the humble but chosen instrument of opening the eyes of many to the error of their ways,” that it would

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incline their steps to the paths of rectitude and virtue, and teach their hearts to look from temporal into everlasting life; and if but one, who has hitherto been a wanderer from the fold of her heavenly Father, shall turn from her evil ways, and, after living in the enjoyment of virtue, and religion, and that peace of mind which the world cannot take away, shall die with the hope of a glorious resurrection into eternal life,—the aim of those who have watched over this publication with anxious solicitude, will be fully answered.196

Invoking the authority of Parent-Duchâtelet and Tait, Wardlaw distinguished several classes of Magdalenism, and among the varieties there were “first of all, your kept mistresses;—and, these are of very various grades, from the first-rate style of keeping down to the lowest; but, though varying in the scale of . . . gentility, all are alike in that of moral turpitude.”197 Wardlaw contrasts an earlier time of promise in the lives of the fallen women with the wretchedness of their present circumstances: I shall leave, in a great measure, to your own imaginations, the wounded honor, the offended pride, the shame, the indignation, the grief, the pity, the bitterness of disappointment in retracing the pleasing promises of the past, and the dreary, heart-sinking blight of all that was cheering in the anticipations of the future; —which are the inevitable results, when a daughter, or a sister, has strayed from the paths of purity.

Wardlaw made it clear that once defiled, full recovery of former social status is well-nigh impossible: And even should that daughter, forsaking the paths of sin and shame, find her way back to her abandoned and dishonored home, the very pleasure of her return is but a “bitter-sweet”; the venom which the barbed arrow carried with it to the heart, can never be thoroughly extracted; the very smile of parental love is ever after a pensive smile, and is followed by the sigh and the tear of hidden sorrow.

Wardlaw tried to put a happy face on the work of the female houses of refuge, but his accounts of the low success rate of restoration and of the unwillingness of employers to hire reformed prostitutes must have made the prospect of remaining permanently confined to these asylums a worse option than returning to the streets. Although Wardlaw observed an increasing number of female seducers waiting to “ensnare” young men, he reserved his sharpest invective for males who degrade women to the level of a mere instrument of “selfish and sensual gratification”: Let it no longer be—that, while the liar and the thief are hooted and hissed out of society, the spoiler of virgin innocence—the mean and selfish robber of



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the weak and defenceless—woman’s robber of her most precious possession, the pearl of her purity, and with it her peace, her self-respect, her character, her reputable subsistence, her place in the esteem and affections of her former friends, her prospects in the world, and, possibly and probably too, her health and her life;—that this man should still be the gentleman and the man of honor! Let him be branded as he deserves.

Not surprisingly, however, Wardlaw then addressed the males in his audience as the only potential saviors of the distaff side of the British population. He reminded them that they were “the natural guardians of the feebler sex . . . committed by Heaven to your protection.” He called upon them, “as men,” to stand forward on their behalf; to come with the shield of your protection between them and danger; to prevent their degradation, and vindicate their honor; to screen their purity from the putrid breath of pollution; to maintain and elevate that of the community to which they belong.

Here Wardlaw expresses one of the central paradoxes of the Victorian ideology of patriarchal authority—reinforcing the idea that women, as sexually different and somehow vulnerable, needed the moral protection and control of the same men who perpetuated the system that victimized them. Hunt was himself entangled in this web of paradox at the time he painted his picture. Hunt always felt uncomfortable with respectable young women from the cultivated class, but felt more at ease with the workingclass model who posed for the woman in The Awakening Conscience, Annie Miller, a sexually active barmaid employed by the pub around the corner from Hunt’s studio.198 They worked intensely together for several months and developed a close, if not yet intimate, relationship. While she posed, Hunt lectured to her on the perniciousness of sex outside marriage—evidently displacing his own guilty thoughts at the time he was working on his painful subject. (Like the clerk, Hunt’s hair was copper-colored and combed in waves on both sides of a part down the middle.) Hunt was deeply attracted to Miller, the very type of female that he and his fellow PreRaphaelites fantasized about rescuing, but, insecure about his own want of culture, he had trouble negotiating her lower-class vulgarity, illiteracy, and profanity. Nevertheless, he dreamed of elevating her to a pedestal through a rehabilitation program that he naively imagined would culminate in their marriage. He hired both a former governess and a relative of Frederic Stephens to train Annie and teach her appropriate social graces, commissioned Stephens to oversee the program and chaperon his ward, then abruptly departed for the Holy Land. It is often speculated that this sudden departure was his escape hatch from the looming danger of an unsanctioned love affair with Annie—a

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real-life counterpart to the drama enacted on canvas. Hunt later explained his sudden departure as a response to the breaking up of the P.R.B. movement. Since he intended to spend several years in the Middle East, it is inconceivable that he expected to return to find a totally transformed Annie waiting for him with open arms. While he was gone Annie and Gabriel Rossetti became lovers, and then she had a torrid affair with the seventh Viscount Ranelagh, a dashing libertine straight out of Vanity Fair who called for her in a regal carriage and drank champagne from her slipper. When Hunt returned he did not immediately abandon her, but kept up the pretense of wishing to transform her into his unblemished ideal. Ultimately, giving up in frustration, he offered to pay for her emigration to Australia so she could begin life all over again, like Dickens’s Little Emily. In the end, Hunt’s fantasized solution took the form imagined by the Evangelical reformers: salvation on another plane of existence where there is “no marrying or giving in marriage.” Here is the moral as well as narrative link between The Light of the World and The Awakening Conscience—the female victim of modern life could only have been redeemed, Magdalenlike, by Christ the Savior. At the same time, his theme of the contrast between idealized past and corrupt present was so much a part of the Victorian mindset that it must address a psychological condition more universal than female waywardness. Hunt expresses the useful double standard that middle-class existence required in this period. The aggressive consolidation and materialist ambitions of a large and affluent middle class and an expanding lower-middle-class world of small manufacturers, prosperous shopkeepers, and white-collar workers continued to be couched securely within the context of religious rectitude in which the slightest breath of scandal meant social death. The obsession of the standard-bearers of Victorian morality with loss of innocence probably related closely to their general neglect and mistrust of the poor and to their need to always negotiate the social and increasingly public critique of their materialism and social conformity. Inevitably, the momentary glimmers of awakened conscience were quickly extinguished by displacing them to dreams of a virginal past.

The Scapegoat Hunt’s personal sense of guilt about Annie had to be expiated, hence the trip to Palestine to steep himself in the rarefied and exalted atmosphere of biblical history.199 This and subsequent visits to the region also tended to revivify his national pride, especially in contrast with the local inhabitants, whom he treated like colonized subjects. He exults in the British show of force in the Crimea and longs to fight on the front lines, bragging that with his British nationality “and a fist I would undertake to knock down any two Arabs in the Usbeykia and walk away unmolested.” While painting the landscape for The Scapegoat, Hunt was confronted by a band of Arab

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horsemen who demanded water, and he retorted: “I am an Englishman; you are an Arab. Englishmen are not the servants of Arabs; I am employing Arabs for servants.”200 Hunt’s comments betray his Orientalist construction of the Middle East and immersion in the contemporary colonial discourse that we have analyzed in the previous volume in connection with the French romantics. As suggested earlier, Hunt’s sense of self-sacrifice and urgent removal to the Promised Land was probably influenced by a reading of Disraeli’s Tancred. Tancred’s famous statement that “Christianity is Judaism for the multitude” must have given Hunt pause in his quest to find appropriate Jewish models to pose for his “Christian” narratives. A close reading of Hunt’s memoirs and Tancred reveals parallels in their series of wild adventures and close encounters with Arab peoples, and like Tancred, Hunt arms himself to the teeth as leader of a desert expedition. Tancred’s dreams of conquering the Middle East are echoed in Hunt’s fantasy “of overcoming neighbouring tribes, dislodging the Turks from Judea, restoring the Jews to their long-lost kingdom,” and generally settling the Eastern question—ideas that he considers “tempting even to a peaceful P.R.B.”201 Unlike Tancred, however, Hunt concludes that it would be preferable to leave “the work of bringing back Israel to some one richer in meekness and otherwise more equal than myself to the task of establishing the Kingdom of Peace on earth.” Initially, Hunt arrived with a missionary’s zeal to convince the Jews that the Messiah they still sought was none other than the Christ of the Christians. But when he ran smack into a community of Jews whose religious devotion was as constant as that of his fervent Anglican friends at home, he settled for making his point on canvas. Despite his avowed antiJewish attitudes, he was fascinated by Jewish culture and plunged passionately into the practices of the Jewish community. He attended synagogue services on the Sabbath that impressed him deeply and even grew a beard for the purpose of “conciliating the Jews.” He steeped himself in the Old Testament and Talmudic commentaries, familiarizing himself with the principal holidays and rituals. Significantly, the most memorable work to come out of this expedition was The Scapegoat, an image of utter desolation that tried to synthesize the Jewish concept of ritual atonement and the Christian concept of self-sacrifice and martyrdom (fig. 4.30). Christian missionaries to the Jews knew the Talmudic Tractate Yoma, which discourses on the scapegoat ritual, and may have advised Hunt on some of its subtleties.202 Under their influence, he purchased a white goat with the intention of transporting it to the appropriate site as close as possible to the time of the Day of Atonement (2 October in 1854). The biblical account of the scapegoat is given in Leviticus, chapter 16, where the Supreme Being directs Aaron through Moses to formulate the key ritual for the Day of Atonement by casting lots upon two goats, “one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.” The first goat was to

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4.30  William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, 1854–1855. Merseyside County Council, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.

be offered as a sin-offering, but the other was to be “presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.” As high priest, Aaron was to “lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.” This goat was to “bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness” (16: 21–22). After describing the rituals for washing and cleansing and for putting on the holy garments, the Lord declared: “And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.” Thus the goat sent into the wilderness was not slaughtered as in traditional sacrifice, but sent alive into the wasteland bearing the sins to cleanse the people of their transgressions. Hence the reason for the ritual’s occurrence on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest of Jewish festivals. Indeed, its centrality to the Day of Atonement is symbolically demonstrated by the annual morning’s reading of this portion of the Torah. The Mishnah elaborates on the ritual during the time of the Second Temple, noting that once the lots had been cast the high priest bound a thread of crimson wool on the head of the scapegoat. Following a series



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of other rituals, the high priest returned to the goat, and placing his hands on it, he intoned: “O God, thy people, the house of Israel, has sinned and transgressed before Thee.” In the Old Testament the wasteland to which the goat is dispatched is called Azazel, a term whose meaning is disputed in Talmudic commentaries. One interpretation holds that Azazel is a place inhabited by a supernatural power, “a land which is cut off.” Another related idea is that the wilderness site was occupied by demons, and that the original purpose of the ritual was to eliminate evil by banishing it to its original source. A third interpretation suggests that the name Azazel combines the Hebrew word for goat and the Aramaic root of the verb “to go,” hence its meaning as the “goat which goes.” All of the Talmudic sages, however, agree that the sacrificial rite aimed at purifying the community by removing their sins to an inaccessible and uninhabited zone, and through this act of atonement to regenerate it and restore Israel to a state of grace. Kenneth Bendiner has pointed out that in Hunt’s description of The Scapegoat for the catalogue of the Royal Academy’s exhibition in 1856, he elaborated on the atonement ritual in a way that indicates unnecessary cruelty to the animal. Hunt noted that on occasion the goat refused to leap off the precipice and turned aside, whereupon it was “hooted and driven away by every Israelite who met it, until it had reached a land not inhabited.”203 Here is yet another example of Hunt’s attempt to discredit Jewish rituals as antiquated and barbaric while striving for maximum verisimilitude in his representation of them. Writing from Jerusalem to Millais on 10–12 November 1854, Hunt discussed both his immersion in Jewish culture and the detailed plans for his picture. Trying to fathom Jewish fund-raising in the synagogue ( Jews collect no money directly in their places of worship but set aside a time during the service to receive pledges for donations), Hunt bemoans the current state of the Jews, and the extent to which the revelation which originally came from Heaven has suffered in its contact with Earth, how the idolatry of other nations, the pride of riches, the false conceits of human intellect, and above much else how their exclusiveness has grown into a spirit of hatred which with greater power would be an awful curse in the world. . . . Heaven knows we have vices enough and I would scarcely presume to contrast any ordinary circle of English Protestants with these Eastern Jews, but there is this difference that our vices come from ignorance and indifference to the principles of our religion, while theirs depend upon the observance of Talmudism and increase in proportion to their strictness.204

Condensed in this remarkable paragraph is nearly the entire repertoire of anti-Semitic stereotypes, as Hunt rationalizes Jewish legal disabilities and justifies Western prejudice by projecting “a spirit of hatred” on to the “despised and rejected” victims of worldwide persecution. At the same time, he knows he is bearing witness to the same historical expression of that

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“revelation” from Heaven in which Jesus participated more than eighteen hundred years earlier. In the same letter Hunt informed Millais that he is on his way to the southern end of the Dead Sea, where he intends to set up camp and paint the background for his picture. He then refers Millais to the Old Testament account of the scapegoat, “sent away into the wilderness bearing all the sins of the children of Israel which of course was instituted as a kind of Christ.” Hunt then reinforces this typological interpretation of the scapegoat as a means of convincing the Jews in his midst of Christ’s authentic claim to the Messiahship: My notion is to represent this accursed animal with the mark of the priest’s hands on his head, and a scarlet ribbon which was tied to him, escaped in horror and frightened to the plain of the Dead Sea, and in a death threat turning away from the bitterness of this sea of sin. If I can contend with the difficulties and finish the picture at Oosdoom it cannot fail to be interesting, if only as a representation of one of the most remarkable spots in the world—and I am sanguine that it may be further a means of lending any reflecting Jews to see a reference to the Messiah, as he was, and not as they understand—a temporal King.205

Elsewhere, Hunt noted that the imprecision of the Talmudic description of the placing of the crimson thread on the goat’s head allowed him some leeway, so he engineered it around the horns “to suggest the crown of thorns.”206 Clearly, Hunt’s intention was to take the historic Jewish sacrificial rite and transform it into a Christian martyrdom, thereby making the goat a surrogate Christ. The irony of this could not have been missed by its author: in this interpretation Christ becomes not only a Jewish scapegoat but a scapegoat for the Jews. Several theologians condemned the work as heretical, and would have preferred the goat to be “the bearer of Heaven’s blessings and represent the risen and glorified Saviour.” Hunt, however, reasoned that his interpretation was closer to the historical moment of Christ and thus it was possible for the Apostles to regard it “as a symbol of the Christian Church, thus teaching both them and their followers submission and patience under affliction.” Hunt then elaborated on the idea of Jesus as scapegoat for the Jews: Jesus Christ had borne the sins of the Jewish people and had put to an end blood sacrifices for ever. He taught His disciples that the persecution He suffered would also follow them. His spirit had ascended to God, but His Church remained on earth subject to all the hatred of the unconverted world.207

Perhaps one level of irony eluded Hunt: the experience of the Jews themselves as perennial scapegoats for the converted world. Ecclesiastical writ holding that the Jews paid the penalty of dispersion for the Crucifixion further served to institutionalize their role as scapegoat, but the

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4.31  William Holman Hunt, Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854–1855. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.

Jews could remain resistant to conversion by blaming all their troubles on Christ. Adding to this is Hunt’s blasphemous gesture of associating a hegoat with Christ—surely an unarticulated reason for the puzzled responses of the critics at the 1856 exhibition, who tended to suppress their reservations in a close examination of the work’s mimetic skills. Hunt himself described one nearby cave as the “cavern of Dis” and thought of the “Stygian lake,” evidence that he identified the region with the netherworld. Given the demonic interpretation of Azazel and the diabolical stereotype associated with Jews, it would not be difficult to perceive the image as a satanic twist on the sacrificial rite.208 Despite the naturalistic rendering of the goat in the hostile environment, the final look of the work lends itself to an ambiguous and subversive reading. The lurid yellow-orange-greens of the sky and the fiery purples and violets of the mountains in the sunset seem more appropriate to a drug-induced hallucination than to a landscape painted on the spot. The Scapegoat is an unprecedented realist image hovering in an actual twilight zone where all human reference has been obliterated and distinctions between religious, landscape, and animal painting have collapsed. Hunt, who had difficulty finding Jews to pose for Finding of the Saviour in the Temple both because of the prohibition against graven images and their discomfort in posing for a New Testament scene, chose a theme that required no human subject and therefore harmonized with Jewish law (fig. 4.31).209 He depicts the lone quadruped with such meticulous precision and in such a Godforsaken site that the work appears surreal to a modern eye. The Athenaeum’s critic observed the “salt, supernatural shore, crisp and splashy,” where the littered remains of animals “throw ghastly ribbed



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reflections into briny pools.” He characterized the central image of the exhausted animal in the following grisly terms: On the crumbling shore, its forefeet sunk in the oozy, salt-encrusted sand, stands the Scapegoat,—the scarlet fillet of the priest bound below its horns. The dry tongue hangs from its mouth, and its eye is glazed and filmed with the mist of a thirsty death.

Yet he was willing to overlook the eccentric qualities of the composition and give Hunt the benefit of the doubt, accepting as “strictly true” the bizarre colorations and desolate environment, “however strange, and apparently unnatural.”210 The same reviewer, however, could not abide Hunt’s pretense of the goat as “a type of Saviour” despite the invocation of Talmudic authority in the catalogue. To the reviewer the dying goat, as goat, held out no more interest “than the sheep that furnished our yesterday’s dinner.” He took issue with the notion that Hunt’s naturalistic animal could carry any allegory or hidden embodiment, and censured the artist for trying to pass it off as an allegorical personification. The dealer Gambart, who had initially considered acquiring the work, ultimately refused it on similar grounds, concluding that Hunt’s religious construction would be unintelligible to a popular audience. Ruskin’s long review of the picture was uncharacteristically ambiguous. He claimed that the “singular picture” was “in many respects faultful, and in some wholly a failure,” and yet it was the one work in the gallery “which should furnish us with most food for thought.” Hunt reminded Ruskin of the “mediaeval pilgrim” who traveled to the Holy Land to do God’s work, committing himself to a dreary and pestiferous environment to nurture his spiritual sense and return with an icon to inspire others. But regarded merely as landscape, or as a composition, Ruskin confessed that he considered it “a total failure.” Not only did it lack good “hair painting” and “hoof painting,” the centering of the animal made it look “as if it were painted for a sign.”211 Ruskin was right about Hunt’s missionary intent; the painter had previously informed his friend, the painter Augustus Egg, that he planned his journey to Palestine “to prove, so far as my painting can, that Christianity is a living faith; that the fullest realization of its wondrous story cannot unspiritualize it.”212 In a journal entry, Hunt considers his undertaking so morally upright that he experiences God’s merciful protection from the dangers that beset him, and he even justifies working on the Christian Sabbath (19 November) with the rationale that his occupation is comparable “to that of the priests.”213 Here Hunt was responding to Disraeli’s assertion of Anglican Christianity’s dependence on Judaism, and he had to test directly for himself the extent of the impact of the Jewish origins of his own faith.

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This is further seen in Hunt’s identification with the central image, which is no Landseer-type dumb animal, but an anthropomorphized creature representing the persecuted of the world. Quitting London at a crucial moment in his private and professional life, he must have felt like the guilt-laden goat sent into the wilderness on behalf of his community. Hunt rationalized his flight to Palestine as both a pilgrimage and a crusade, and his numerous references to spiritual regeneration attested to his deep need for consolation in the Holy Land. The immediate inspiration of the picture coincides with the Crimean War, which enabled Hunt to mesh his sense of self-sacrifice with that of the nation as a whole. Hunt felt blameworthy about his absence from England at this time, noting that all his “best friends were in the throes of anxiety, private and public. The Russian war was reddening the world with blood, and in the loneliness of Syria the circumstances of the contest loomed portentously huge and cruel.” Hunt also confessed that the Crimean War awakened in him “the deepest concern; never during my life had England been engaged in contest with a European power. I thought of the horrors of the struggle, but I felt sure that our quarrel was a just one, for the inordinate claims of Russia had left us no choice.”214 In his review of The Scapegoat, Ruskin called attention to the coincidence of the Crimean War with the evolution of the picture. He observed that Hunt reached the Holy Land just as the clouds of Eastern war were gathering to the north, and he painted his “weary goat” on the salt sand “while the hills of the Crimea were white with tents of war, and the fiercest passions of the nations of Europe burned in high funereal flames over their innumerable dead.” His brave English heart had led him to a dangerous and inhospitable zone where even the local Arabs refused “to encamp for a night.” Ruskin’s parallel between Hunt’s foray into the hostile wilderness and the military heroes of Crimea was probably informed by Hunt himself, whose trek into the desert was partly motivated by inner misgivings. Hence the scapegoat could be seen as a persona for Hunt and his heavy burden of guilt. Jan Marsh has cautiously observed autobiographical references in the goat, mentioning in a footnote that Hunt painted the hair of the goat’s head in the typical style of his own haircut.215 As in the case of the clerk in The Awakening Conscience, Hunt combed his hair in waves on both sides of a part down the middle—the same hairdo he gave the goat! Even in Hunt’s own time the goat was seen to have an anthropomorphic head, and was described by one wit as an “excellent portrait” of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, a diplomatic expert on the Turkish Empire whose negotiations on the Christian Holy Places were blamed for the outbreak of the Crimean hostilities.216 Hunt’s driving need to make a grand statement suitable to both his vision of the Holy Land and of British national enterprise was inevitably skewed by his tortured religious conscience and Victorian prejudices. The theme of The Scapegoat clearly taxed Hunt’s physical, imaginative, and

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intellectual capacities, especially as it would have resurrected his childhood nightmares of Sin, Death, and the Devil. His voluntary banishment and the willed banishment of the animal alike were implicated in his religious conflicts. He confessed that if he succeeded in his Dead Sea scene to recover “sensible figures of men’s secret deeds and thoughts, then is this the horrible figure of Sin—a varnished deceit—earth joys at hand but Hell gaping behind, a stealthy, terrible enemy for ever.”217 Thus his attempt to reconcile Judaism and Christianity through a symbol of sinfulness constituted one more attempt to exorcise the demons afflicting him. The work also revealed the limits of the Pre-Raphaelite movement; the several layers of meaning that Hunt attached to the picture—personal, theological, and political—could not be carried by the image of the goat alone. Whereas the typological pretext could work in The Hireling Shepherd and The Light of the World, it was doomed to failure in The Scapegoat. The more that Hunt succeeded in replicating the dumb brute, the more it resembled a splendid zoological specimen found in contemporary natural history manuals. In fairness to Hunt, he at least, while working out his salvation through Christ, allowed himself to be challenged by the Jewish alternative of going it alone. His opportunity occurred during a moment when England’s strategic agenda invested the Jews with a political potential, when they could appear on the scene as both agents of evangelical expectations and British imperial designs. The goat embodies the Jewish roots of Christianity and establishes the status of the daughter religion, but the dying animal’s station in the wilderness reinforces the sense of Jewish superannuation and Christianity’s claim to inherit the mantle of biblical Israel. The goat in its isolation is the Torah superseded, declaring that Judaism’s only value was to prepare the way for Christianity. In the end, Hunt preached only to the converted—to an audience that still supported the British Law of Jewish Disabilities for the aliens in their midst while idealizing their biblical ancestors as model Christians. Thus, in its own way, the miserable sin-laden goat ensured Hunt’s redemption by serving the Victorian imperialist vision.218 Rossetti’s Found

If The Scapegoat is in part a persona of a “fallen man” and his sexual sins, then it should be considered a kind of pendant to The Awakening Conscience. Perhaps it was Hunt’s way of negating the Victorian double standard which generally permitted the “gentleman” responsible for a woman’s fall to escape public censure. Whereas the woman in The Awakening Conscience bears the consequences of a male’s transgressions, it is the surrogate male in The Scapegoat who is charged with the onus of “man’s” collective sins. Jan Marsh noted that the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with the plight of the fallen woman in the early 1850s was hardly accidental, and that their representations played out the personal conflicts in their own lives. Rossetti,

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simultaneous lover of both Lizzie Siddal and Annie Miller, was obsessed with the theme, which appears in a number of his poems and pictures.219 During the years 1853–1872 Rossetti worked intermittently on what was meant to be a major picture of modern life exploiting the theme of a woman’s expiation for sexual sin. As in Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd and Scapegoat, Rossetti uses an animal to symbolize sacrifice, in this case a calf ensnared in a net on the way to a Smithfield slaughterhouse, pointing “to the past and present life of the girl.”220 If Hunt’s woman literally “rises” from her fall, Rossetti’s sinks precipitously to the pavement. Since Rossetti claimed a copyright on the Pre-Raphaelite modern picture, much of what Hunt wrote in connection with his Awakening Conscience was meant to be a defense of his picture’s prior claim to historical departure. But more important than the question of which of them merits credit for what was already a Victorian literary trope is the coincidence of their preoccupation with sexual sin and ritual animal sacrifice. Rossetti wrote Hunt (then in Jerusalem working on The Scapegoat) a long letter on 30 January 1855 describing his picture Found and reminding Hunt of his prior interest in the theme: The subject had been sometime designed before you left England and will be thought by anyone who sees it when (and if ) finished, to follow in the wake of your “Awakened Conscience,” but not by yourself, as you know I had long had in view subjects taking the same direction as my present one. The picture represents a London street at dawn, with the lamps still lighted along a bridge which forms the distant background. A drover has left his cart standing in the middle of the road (in which, i.e., the cart, stands baa-ing a calf tied on its way to market), and has run a little way after a girl who has passed him, wandering in the streets. He has just come up with her and she, recognizing him, has sunk under her shame to her knees, against the wall of a raised churchyard in the foreground, while he stands holding her hands as he seized them, half in bewilderment and half guarding her from doing herself a hurt.

Rossetti followed with his wish to add (probably on the frame) a passage from Jeremiah (2:2)—“I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals”—and anticipated that the calf, “a white one, will be a beautiful and suggestive part of the thing.”221 As in the case of The Scapegoat, an Old Testament allusion was combined with the Christian trope of the sacrificial lamb to symbolize the dialectical relationship between sin and guilt. Rossetti shrewdly couched the Judeo-Christian theme in a modern melodrama in which a “smock-frocked raw-boned” farmer dragging his cart over Blackfriars Bridge to Smithfield Market encounters a streetwalker whom he had once loved in their native village. The specificity of the London locale and Rossetti’s meticulous rendering of the farmer’s characteristic top-boots with buttons up the side, the brick-lined wall, and the netted

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4.32  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found, 1854–1859. Samuel and Mary Bancroft Memorial. Delaware Art Museum, Newark, Delaware. 4.33  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found, drawing, 1853. Trustees of the British Museum, London.

calf (“hair by hair,” according to Ford Madox Brown) insured the appearance of the modernity and naturalism he and his colleagues required for their mature reflections on Victorian morality and religion. The unfinished painting in the Delaware Art Museum depicts the drover looming over the woman flush against the wall in the foreground, grasping her wrists as her brow knits in psychic pain and she struggles to avert her eyes from his terrible gaze (fig. 4.32). We see the bridge in the background with its lamps still lit as dawn suffuses the whole composition with a delicate glow, reminiscent of some of Turner’s early morning landscapes at Petworth. The 1853 drawing in the British Museum—the most complete representation of the work—reveals several details never transferred to the canvas, including a rose fallen into the sewer grating at the right (in the painting the prostrate woman’s gaudy dress is decorated with roses), two birds gathering straw from the cart for their nest, and a cat on the distant pavement (fig. 4.33). Above the brick wall of the graveyard, a partial inscription on a tombstone quotes Luke 15:10—“there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth”—and along the foot of the drawing is the Jeremiah quotation. F. G. Stephens quoted lines from Hood’s poem “The Bridge of Sighs” to adumbrate the motif of Blackfriars in the background—the inevitable symbol of a prostitute’s fate and obvious goal of Rosssetti’s woman.222 Rossetti used as his model Fanny Cornforth (née Sarah Cox), a professional prostitute whom he met in the late 1850s.223 It is likely also that



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Cornforth, like so many women who initially came to London to do service and subsequently took to the streets, began life in a rural village. Despite these parallels with the female in the painting, however, Cornforth hardly conformed to the Victorian stereotype of the defiled woman: not only did she not consider herself degraded, the evidence shows that she considered her occupation both profitable and pleasurable. She felt at ease in the company of Rossetti and his circle, and he seems to have been enamored with her nonconformity to the Victorian moral code. She was not one to automatically link guilt and shame with the subject of sex. In any case, any moralizing that we find in the pictures has to be weighed against the true nature of his sexual relations in the 1850s with a series of workingclass women of varying degrees of “respectability.” One of Rossetti’s earliest poems on the subject of prostitution, “Jenny,” was begun in 1848, the year he conceived of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and developed more fully in 1858, when he was hard at work on Found. The poem, full of allusions anticipating the painting, is narrated by a male collegian musing on the profession of the whore who lies asleep with her head upon his knee: Poor shameful Jenny, full of grace Thus with your head upon my knee;— Whose person or whose purse may be The lodestar of your reverie?

He looks around her room and compares it with his own, “so full of books, / Whose serried ranks hold fast,” admitting that he sought her out after suddenly craving some form of physical and sensual release from his scholarly labors. Floral symbolism unfolds as he refers to her dead lilies, “whose snow-white leaves are spread / Like winter on the garden-bed,” and the withered roses that he had given her in the spring, whose “leaves are curled apart, / Still red as from the broken heart, / And here’s the naked stem of thorns.” He imagines her forever on her nightly rounds, and wonders When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare Along the streets alone, and there, Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavement’s edge Wind on together and apart, A fiery serpent for your heart.

The narrator now thinks of his “cousin Nell,” who is, in may ways, akin to Jenny in her fun-loving ways and fondness for dress, and if between the one and the other there is an unbridgeable gap, who knows but that Jenny’s children may yet erase her shame, so that on the Day of Judgment, vindicated, she may rise again, blameless and free. The narrator then shifts

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to a more pessimistic mode as he condemns his gender, recognizing that for every fallen woman there had to be a man who pushed her over: What has man done here? How atone, Great God, for this which man has done? And for the body and soul which by Man’s pitiless doom must now comply With lifelong hell, what lullaby Of sweet forgetful second birth Remains? All dark.

But woman seems predestined to be forever ensnared by man’s wily machinations, and as he gazes at his beloved, “The woman almost fades from view. / A cipher of man’s changeless sum / Of lust, past, present, and to come, / Is left.” Suddenly, dawn breaks over the horizon, spreading its golden light into the room, and he overhears in the street a drover’s cart with a bleating lamb: And there’s an early waggon drawn To market, and some sheep that jog Bleating before a barking dog; And the old streets come peering through Another night that London knew; And all as ghostlike as the lamps.

The sounds having jogged him from his mood of guilt, he abruptly insists that during their lovemaking his “love rang true,” and, well aware of the mocking overtones of this statement, and deeply ashamed, he lets himself off the hook by promising to keep before him “A dark path I can strive to clear.” Then he exits the room with Jenny still asleep and whispers to her one last goodbye.224 The sonnet he wrote much later to complement the picture again places the onus of sin on the woman—this time, however, invoking the youthful pledge of love she has clearly broken: And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale In London’s smokeless resurrection-light, Dark breaks to dawn. But o’er the deadly blight Of Love deflowered and sorrow of none avail, Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail, Can day from darkness ever again take flight? Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge, Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day



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He only knows he holds her;—but what part Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,— “Leave me—I do not know you—go away!”225

Clearly the ten-year interval between Girlhood and Found represented a period of intense personal and intellectual maturation, but it also pinpoints Rossetti as an archetypical Victorian male trying to negotiate gender bias, religious morality, and passionate sex drive within the context of the contemporary social and religious codes. No matter how liberated he may have felt about sexuality, he nevertheless cautiously navigated the treacherous shoals of revenge and retribution society exacted from the fallen women in its midst. Even less open than Hunt, in the picture he made the woman the sole culprit and garbed his sturdy farmer in a fancy white smock. Unable to pictorially admit his own complicity in the ruin of women, he inserted token gestures hinting at the woman’s redemption in the afterlife. No doubt, Fanny Cornforth’s occupation made it that much easier for him to displace whatever guilt he may have felt onto her image. The erotic focus has now shifted from the cloistered virginal type represented in Girlhood to the easily accessible streetwalker of Found. This transition from the Puginesque setting to Victorian London is consistent with the growing sexual preoccupations of the Pre-Raphaelites and a heightened interest in contemporary social life driven by these personal conflicts. Nevertheless, as Linda Nochlin has suggested, Found may also be seen as a dark complement to Ecce Ancilla Domini! where the scene of a shrinking female confronted by a towering male is safely couched within the Christian context. It is as if Rossetti could only throw off Victorian constraint in his art by treating sex within the context of a morality play about illicit love. Here the double standard operated in his consciousness, allowing him to exploit the prostitute whose very existence depended on the high value Victorians attached to feminine innocence. According to Rossetti’s close friend, the poet William Bell Scott, Found was originally inspired by Scott’s long poetic recitation Rosabell, which recounts the story of an affianced country couple whose engagement is disrupted when the woman decides to travel to London and work as a needlewoman to aid her impoverished family. Inevitably, she falls into bad company and embarks on a career of prostitution.226 Her rural lover, Andrew, spots her in town on market-day, and has to break the evil news to her parents. (Scott claimed that Rossetti wanted to project the encounter that he never actually spelled out in his poem.) Thus Rossetti treated the poles of Victorian womanhood—from the ideal type at the embroidery frame to the corrupted seamstress—as dialectically related categories but pictured them in different temporal and social categories. No instance offers a better glimpse into the rigid compartmentalization of the sexes and the polarities within these gender divisions. In the male-dominated work-oriented spaces outside the home, aggressive

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behavior, success, and honor were encouraged, whereas in the domestic refuges innocence, passivity, and soulfulness were the shining traits assigned to females. Thus the heaviest burden of responsibility fell upon the woman, who had to key her mind and body to the male returned from the arena of aggression. The consequent repression of natural instincts generated its antithesis in the form of the sexually liberated prostitute who, while violating the norms, nevertheless afforded a safety valve that helped maintain the moral boundaries between the public and private realms. Rossetti compensated for his compromise in Found by linking prostitution symbolically with visual hints of urban pollution and sanitation. Along with the marginalized urban poor, who were stigmatized with images of filth and excrement, prostitutes were branded as conduits of disease and contagion. As Grieve has indicated, Rossetti embedded his modern morality play in a metropolitan street setting that addressed several burning issues of the day, including the opposition of town and country and the social and public health problems brought about by the changing demographics and rapid extension of industrialized London. The devastating cholera outbreak of 1848–1849 had further raised the problem of drainage before the municipal authorities and the public. Rossetti would have been in a position to witness at firsthand these problems since he was then living at No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, where his rooms overlooked the putrid Thames. During hot weather, the waste channeled into the water raised such a stench that parliamentary debates were abruptly terminated by it and residents were impelled to leave the neighborhood. At the very moment Rossetti was working on Found in August 1854, he wrote his aunt, Charlotte Polidori, that the summer’s heat was insufferable and “very favourable, I fear, to the spread of cholera. Yesterday the smell from the river was so bad that I was obliged to go out.”227 Seepage of animal matter from the overflowing burial grounds near the river also added to the pollution, and was widely discussed in this period. Another issue involving public health and morals centered on the Smithfield Market, where controversial material conditions provoked outrage from critics like Dickens concerned for the “general well-being of the community.”228 Dickens, who empathized with the stricken beasts, tried to imagine what it was like as an actual specimen being led to market. He frequently witnessed “revolting” scenes of brutalized and diseased animals goaded to a frenzy by “demoniacal drovers,” and observed that even unwholesome cattle condemned by the meat inspector winds up as sausage for the rich and soup for the poor. Although the cattle shows held at the Smithfield Market—located just across Blackfriars Bridge to the north—gave the grounds a veneer of popular entertainment, the crowded and unsanitary conditions of its pens and slaughterhouses made Smithfield one more hotly contested item in the call for metropolitan improvements (figs. 4.34–35).

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Ironically, the subject of proper drainage drew the interest of such disparate figures as the painter John Martin and the architect of Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton. Martin had long been interested in a grand plan for

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cleansing the Thames, and the 1836 report of the committee appointed to study his plan pinpointed the problem: 4.34  Smithfield Market.—Calves and Oxen, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 21 July 1849. 4.35  Smithfield Market.— Sheep.—The Drover’s Goad, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 21 July 1849. 4.36  Thames Embankment, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843.



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The Thames . . . receives the excrementitious matter from nearly a million and half human beings; the washings of their foul linen; the filth and refuse of many hundred manufactories; the offal and decomposing vegetable substances from the markets; the foul and gory liquid from the slaughter-houses, and the purulent abominations from hospitals and dissecting rooms, too disgusting to detail. Thus that most noble river, which as been given to us by Providence for our health, recreation, and beneficial use, is converted into the Common Sewer of London, and the sickening mixture it contains is daily pumped up with water as a common beverage for the inhabitants of the most civilised capital in Europe.229

The situation remained essentially the same in the 1850s, although now there was general agreement on the urgent need for a comprehensive system of drainage. Plans were made for interceptors to receive sewage and for supplies of fresh water, and Paxton embraced Martin’s idea of a Thames embankment to help cleanse the river. The need was most pressing for the stretch between the Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges, with one plan calling for the embankment to debouch onto Chatham Place in a grand esplanade (fig. 4.36). Thus Rossetti’s prescient inclusion of such motifs as the grated sewer, the raised graveyard, the calf on the way to Smithfield Market, and the Blackfriars Bridge across the Thames put him into contact with the Victorian social engineers of urban rehabilitation and renewal. This fascinating convergence of Rossetti’s—and by extension the early PreRaphaelite Brotherhood’s—interests with those of Martin and Paxton suggests a convergence of enlightened social ideals set into motion by the series of French revolutions. Rossetti’s subordination of these motifs to the theme of prostitution as the central problem in the city might have worked had not his own private conflicts and gender bias undermined the integrity of the concept and prevented resolution of his picture. Found represents Rossetti’s swan song to Pre-Raphaelite social criticism and the pre-raphaelites and the 1848 revolutions

revolutionary idealism. One clue to his growing disenchantment is the intensity of the woman’s emotion, which far surpasses in authenticity the moralistic gaze of her former lover, and in this it may be said that Rossetti identified more with the harlot than the upright farmer. His later analogy of the artist and the whore not only attests to the normal loss of idealism accompanying middle age but also to a profound self-loathing for having benefited from the double standard. Rossetti’s inability to complete a picture that he always regarded as integral to the P.R.B. program may relate to the loss of innocence following the breakup of the group. No really good reason has ever been adduced to explain his failure to finish it, and the explanation that he lost interest after Hunt beat him to the punch with The Awakening Conscience is absurd. All the members of the group took up modern-life subjects, and his old mentor, Ford Madox Brown, had begun Work as early as 1852. It is more likely that Rossetti was not up to the task of resolving his brilliant conception within the typological parameters established by Ruskin and the Brotherhood. He had to fit into the scene of modern life as many disparate pieces of his morality puzzle as Hunt, but in a more complex narrative that made prostitution just one component of the urban problems besetting the metropolis. Rossetti’s new direction, whose beginning roughly coincided with the two years of his marriage to Lizzie Siddal from May 1860 to 1862, radically departed from the austere naturalism of the P.R.B. program. This change marks a shift from moral and religious concerns to more secular subjects, including a series of monumental femmes fatales, usually depicted alone and centered in the pictorial field. Although he retains the P.R.B. love of symbolism, it becomes less esoteric and more commonplace in its allusions. At the same time, he modified his technique: the hard edges of the old execution disappear in favor of softer brushwork, and he now indulged more freely in vivid colorations. Hunt, always delighted to position himself as the only “true believer,” described the shift as a transition from “Stoicism to Epicureanism,” wherein his friend depicted sensual female heads surrounded “with such richness of ornamental trapping and decoration” that they surprised everyone, especially as they came from a hand “which had hitherto indulged itself in austerities.”230 The most moving of these works is the Beata Beatrix, inspired by the death of Lizzie, whom it commemorates (fig. 4.37). The title, “Blessed Beatrice,” derives from the closing words of Dante’s Vita Nuova, which assigns to her beatified status.231 Given his combined paternal and literary namesake (Rossetti had been baptized Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti) and father’s absorption in the works of Dante, it is not surprising that throughout his career Rossetti consecrated much of his own creative energies to the celebration of the Florentine’s work and life. Rossetti was especially fascinated by the figure of Beatrice, whose memorable impact on Dante is seen in the symbolic role she plays in both the early Vita Nuova (c. 1293) and the mature Divina Commedia.

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Beatrice is a key personage in the Divina Commedia, one of a trio of “Blessed ladies,” including the Virgin Mary and St. Lucy, who send Virgil on a mission to rescue and guide Dante in his journey through the world beyond the grave. Virgil leads Dante to the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory, where the Roman poet is replaced by the divinely inspired Beatrice, who then accompanies Dante from heaven to heaven until they reach the Empyrean. Here Dante experiences salvation, enjoying for a brief and glorious moment the supreme vision of the divinity. Hence tradition has always assigned to Beatrice the role of the poet’s savior and guide as well as the personification of Faith. Understandably, Beatrice would have been an appealing figure in the Victorian age as another incarnation of the exalted female type. Rossetti exploited this tradition while at the same time infusing her figure with a blatant sensuality that transformed her into a kind of femme fatale. Rossetti used as the starting point of the picture an earlier study of Beatrice posed for by his long-suffering wife Lizzie Siddal. Siddal had been despondent since she had been delivered of a stillborn child in May 1861, and began relying on laudanum, an opium-derived drug, to relieve her symptoms of depression. At the beginning of 1862 she was again pregnant, but late in the

4.37  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, ca. 1864–1870. Tate Gallery, London.



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evening of 10 February Rossetti arrived home only to find her unconscious from an overdose of the laudanum. The efforts of four physicians to resuscitate her failed, and she died the following morning. The coroner’s inquest concluded with a verdict of accidental death, although there was strong suspicion of suicide. One fragment of evidence in support of this theory is a note she pinned to her nightgown that read, “Take care of Harry”—a reference to her mentally challenged brother that Ford Madox Brown removed and destroyed. Struck by guilt and remorse, no doubt exacerbated by his negligent treatment of Lizzie throughout the years of their stormy relationship, he idealized her as the beatified Beatrice playing to his Dante. As Rossetti himself described the work to the wife of his patron: You are well acquainted with Dante’s Vita Nuova which it illustrates, embodying, symbolically, the death of Beatrice, as treated in that work. It must of course be remembered . . . that [the picture] is not at all intended to represent Death, . . . but to render it under the resemblance of a trance, in which Beatrice seated at the balcony over-looking the City is suddenly rapt from Earth to Heaven. You will remember how much Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her death, & for this reason I have introduced it, as my background, & made the figure of Dante and love passing through the street & gazing ominously on one another, conscious of the event, whilst the bird, a messenger of death, drops a poppy between the hands of Beatrice. She sees through her shut lids, is conscious of a new world . . .232

Elsewhere he referred to the subject as Beatrice “seated by a sundial, the shadow of which should be falling on the hour of nine.” He rhapsodizes on the mystical implications of the number nine for Dante’s relationship with Beatrice: he met her for the first time when he was nine, encounters her again nine years later, and she died at nine o’clock on 9 June 1290. The sundial and the red dove are the most conspicuous motifs in the picture, together forming an acute angle composed of the sharp diagonal thrust of the pointer and the downward lunge of the aerodynamic bird which drops the poppy into Beatrice’s hands. These paired motifs symbolically represent the twinned deaths of Beatrice and Lizzie—the poppy referring to the opium which caused Lizzie’s demise. Grieve has noted the phallicized form of the sundial, and the dove—painted vermilion to match the robe of the allegorical figure of Love complementing Dante in the background—also has marked sexual connotations. The enraptured expression on Beatrice-Lizzie’s face, her full lips parted with teeth exposed akin to the protagonist of Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, suggests an orgasmic bliss akin to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Dante’s “Blessed Lady” merges with Lizzie in Rossetti’s memory as a sentient, sensual being whose transcendental state emanates from earthly eroticism. Just as Dante bestowed immortal status on Beatrice Portinari, so Dante Gabriel elevated Elizabeth Siddal to

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celestial glory in his painting. Rossetti assuaged his guilt and justified their sexual relationship prior to marriage as ultimately conducing to her exalted role as the Muse to the new Dante. Rossetti’s identification with the Florentine poet through his father is expressed in his poem “Dantis Tenebrae,” written in memory of the elder Rossetti. It emphasizes his inheritance as well of the haunting image of Beatrice: And didst thou know indeed, when at the font Together with thy name thou gav’st me his, That also on thy son must Beatrice Decline her eyes according to her wont, Accepting me to be of those that haunt The vale of magical dark mysteries Where to the hills her poet’s foot-track lies, And wisdom’s living fountain to this chaunt Trembles in music? This is that steep land Where he that holds his journey stands at gaze Tow’rd sunset, when the clouds like a new height Seem piled to climb. These things I understand: For here, where day still soothes my lifted face, On thy bowed head, my father, fell the night.

The poem conflates the oedipal conflict with the Dantesque romance, and suggests that the “Beatrice” that the two Rossettis cherished in common was Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti, wife and mother. William Rossetti claimed that his brother displayed open physical affection only toward their mother, for whom Dante Gabriel “had a fondling love.” The “bowed head” of the father signifies his death in symbolic representation, and the “declining” gaze of Beatrice the winning of the mother. The insight of Beatrice into the “mysteries” Rossetti inhabits, the guilty remorse implied in the contrast between the day that soothes his “lifted face” and the night that fell on his father, converge on the unspoken rivalry for the affection of the female they loved in common. The shadowy forms of Dante and the allegory of Love (who holds a flaming heart) flanking Lizzie are perhaps veiled allusions to Rossetti’s parents. Their three spatial divisions are connected by the “bridge” of the Ponte Vecchio stretching across the Arno in the upper background of the picture. Frances Rossetti was born Polidori (close enough to Portinari), and it is her love that inspired the son’s literary work on Dante, published shortly before he undertook the Beata Beatrix. Rossetti’s rivalry with his father plays itself out in his own Dantesque explorations and especially in their diverging interpretations of Beatrice. Significantly, he changed the title of his Dante study, originally published in 1861 as The Early Italian Poets, to Dante and His Circle in a new edition of 1874, which he dedicated to his

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mother as “a book prized by her love.” It may be surmised that in its initial form, appearing so soon after his father’s death in 1854, Rossetti had too many mixed feelings to be able to compete with his male parent on his own turf. Later, he could confidently assume the mantle of his father, a transition already implied in the preface to the first edition, where he confessed that in presenting to the public his modest contribution “to our English knowledge of old Italy,” he felt “divided” from his youth. This sense of sudden maturation arose from the fact that his earliest associations with the Florentine poet were “connected with my father’s devoted studies, which, from his own point of view, have done so much towards the general investigation of Dante’s writings.” It may be recalled that central to the elder Rossetti’s interpretation of the Divina Commedia was his understanding of Beatrice as key to an encoded Masonic text. Beatrice is introduced near the middle of the text, in contrast to the woman of the book of Revelation—a polar contrast between virtue and vice. According to Gabriele, the wicked female of Revelation is an allegorical personification of contemporary papal rule, whereas Beatrice metaphorically points to the New Jerusalem or golden age. She conjures up “the two blessings to which man aspires—those of mortal and eternal life; and causes him to enjoy this life in a terrestrial paradise, with the hopes of a heavenly one on high.” On earth, the good life can only mean the reign of a good monarch, and in heaven, the good offices of a virtuous priest. Thus, in opposition to contemporary papal Rome, Dante opposed Beatrice, who joined in her blessed figure “the perfect and essential qualities of an excellent emperor and of a holy priest.” It may be seen that Gabriele does not accept Beatrice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, as the Beatrice of Dante’s inspired writings, but sees her rather as an impersonal allegory combining pope and emperor in a glorious unity embodying his highest political, social, and religious ideals. Although Dante Gabriel retains some of the allegorical and visionary components of his father’s thesis, he divests it of its radical political significance by transforming Beatrice into a tantalizing private fantasy. The break with his father’s interpretation also signals a rupture in the political direction established by Pre-Raphaelitism and a retreat from its naturalism and historicism. His new manner was enthusiastically received by the Athenaeum, the conservative journal that had previously excoriated his work: although he then rarely showed in public, by the mid-1870s the journal’s critic could laud his works as among the “finest pictures of modern production” and classify him as “one of the most powerful and original artists” of modern times.233 The reviewer had in mind his half-bust representations of sexy yet inaccessible females with “full-formed lips,” massive bosoms, and “ineffable” glances at the spectator. Thus Rossetti exchanged the reformist wellsprings of the movement that emanated from his father for a highly subjective take on femininity that resonated with an upper-class Victorian male sensibility.

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4.38  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Astarte Syriaca, 1875–1877. City of Manchester Art Galleries, Manchester.



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The Beata Beatrix conflates Lizzie Siddal, Beatrice, and Frances Rossetti into an object of intense sexual desire who nevertheless remains unattainable in earthly terms. She expires at the moment of rapture, shifting her identity to the higher and nobler condition of visionary and seer. If Rossetti eroticized the Virgin in Ecce Ancilla Domini! here he bestows divine status on a sexualized female. By so doing, he not only contradicted the senior Rossetti’s central thesis but also absorbed the power of both his literary hero and biological father in elevating his personalized and sexualized “Beatrice” to a higher plane of existence. Rossetti’s passionate feelings toward his mother could now be safely displaced onto Lizzie beatified. The Astarte Syriaca, painted during the years 1875–1877, is one of the most evocative examples of his late repertoire of colossal femmes fatales (fig. 4.38). Rossetti had the Athenaeum’s critic drooling as he described the “awe-inspiring, amorous goddess of the Syrians,” her garment flowing in large folds, “here indicating, here concealing, there revealing one or the other portion of the great bosom and the massive limbs of the Queen of Love.” The critic waxed ecstatic over the figure’s “brooding, inscrutable brown orbs,” those “glowing, mysterious, and steadfast eyes looking from under the shadows of her ample brows and abundant masses of bronze-black hair, shadows which add to the mystery and wonder” of her face.234 Rossetti’s figure is girdled twice—just beneath her breasts and again around her hips—with a chain of alternate links of roses and pomegranates that symbolize passion and sexual regeneration. Her hands deftly finger each of the girdles simultaneously. She is shown flanked by two ministering attendants bearing torches, while above her hair an eight-pointed Star of Venus “trembles in a purple atmosphere” between signs of the sun and crescent moon. The abundant folds of the sea-green robe reinforce the appearance of massive proportions and inscrutable feminist power, but the strategically placed girdles simultaneously restrain her. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the picture, whose last six lines were inscribed on the frame. It was quoted in the Athenaeum of 14 April 1877: the pre-raphaelites and the 1848 revolutions

Mystery: lo! betwixt the sun and moon Astarte of the Syrians: Venus Queen Ere Aphrodite was. In silver sheen Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune: And from her neck’s inclining flower-stem lean Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean The pulse of hearts to the spheres’ dominant tune. Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel All thrones of light beyond the sky and sea The witnesses of Beauty’s face to be: That face, of Love’s all-penetrative spell Amulet, talisman, and oracle,— Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.235

The recurrence of the word “mystery” in Rossetti’s poetry conjures up the perennial mystery of birth, and this is confirmed in the opening verse of his 1849 poem on a painting by Hans Memmelinck of the Virgin and Child: “Mystery: God, man’s life, born into man / Of woman.” It is entirely appropriate that the Semitic deity was goddess of fertility and reproduction. It would seem that the colossal Astarte Syriaca hovers “betwixt” the sun of the phallicized mother and the moon of the beloved object of oedipal affection. The model who posed for the picture was Jane Morris (née Burden), the wife of William Morris, a disciple, close friend, and business associate of Rossetti’s who would soon distinguish himself as a leading member of the Arts and Crafts Movement and acerbic critic of capitalist society and culture. They formed a scandalous threesome as Morris shared—albeit grudgingly and involuntarily—his wife with Rossetti, although “Janey” claimed never to have loved Morris and probably seized the initiative in her affair with Dante Gabriel. She filled an important void in Rossetti’s life after his period of mourning for Lizzie had ended. Even more than Lizzie Siddal, Jane Morris has been pressed into art history as the paradigm of the enigmatic Pre-Raphaelite female: brooding, voluptuous, semi-languid, with wavy tresses, prominent neck, large eyes, and full lips—a woman who is both inviting and dangerous. But we know that she was largely a social construct and aesthetic invention, evident from examining photographs and comments from her contemporaries. We know further that her “ineffability” sprang partly from real fears of the female, but mainly from the attraction to the only “pure” woman Victorian males ever knew: their very mothers, who gazed down upon them from towering pedestals. Thus it is appropriate that Janey as Astarte Syriaca is here transposed to a mythic plane, once again testifying to Rossetti’s desire to bestow transcendental status upon his lovers. More than looming frontally toward the

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spectator, she bends her left leg as if to aggressively break the pictorial distance and extend into real space. It is probably not coincidental that Jane Morris posed for the deity when she visited Rossetti alone from November 1875 to March 1876, when he was staying at Aldwick Lodge, near the coastal resort of Bognor, Sussex. She was then both wife and mother, but she returned to her family only for Christmas during that entire period. In Victorian England, this would have required a rare combination of boldness and tact. The year before Rossetti began work on the project, Disraeli took office at the head of the first Conservative government to have a majority in the Commons since 1846. Enterprising publishers reprinted his political novels from the 1840s, and an eager public reread them for clues to his future political moves. I have already suggested the enormous influence of these novels on the Pre-Raphaelites, and one of the key works in the series, Tancred, devotes its concluding section to the role of the mysterious and beautiful Queen Astarte, who rules the ancient indigenous people in the mountainous region surrounding Antioch in Syria. Astarte was named for the Syrian goddess, “the Venus of our land,” whose effigy adorns the vast cavernous temple carved into the rock that serves as the sanctuary for Hellenistic deities dating from the Seleucid Empire. Like the statuary, Astarte inspires awe and veneration while she remains outwardly serene and unimpassioned. When we first meet her she is seated impassively on her divan clothed in a purple robe, her long dark hair descending over her shoulders, which “was drawn off her white forehead [and] bound with a broad circlet of pure gold, and of great antiquity.” Surrounded by attendants and slaves, she listens to the arguments of Tancred and Fakredeen, prince of Beirut, in behalf of their rival plans for deposing the Turks and creating a Greater Syria with the Holy Land included. It was Disraeli who amplified the principle of Empire, enunciating for the first time an affirmative pronouncement on the wealth and glory of a colonial policy. He hit upon the imperialist idea as a positive theme for the Conservative party, and while his desire to preserve the Ottoman dominions as a bulwark against Russia contradicted the plan he made Tancred express thirty years earlier, his purchase in 1875 of a large block of shares in the Suez Canal paved the way for eventual British domination in Egypt. This act provided the window of opportunity for British involvement in the Middle East and fulfillment of the material part of Tancred’s dream. The same year that Rossetti completed Astarte Syriaca Holman Hunt was back in Jerusalem, and his bitter denunciation of the Turks that year in a letter to Ford Madox Brown is couched in the heroic rhetoric of Disraeli’s novel: My notion of British policy in the East is that it is stupid & wicked. . . . The Turk is an utterly hopeless protege—he is an incurable devil of indolence, cruelty & dishonesty—with the most plausible tongue in the world. The notion that



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he could not be driven out of Europe is a delusion. . . . What could be done here could be done with other provinces—to land 4000 men—march onto Jerusalem, there would scarcely be a battle, but in any case there would be but little delay if the invading army had good artillery. . . . It would be the only war in European seas that I should consider not criminal but a virtue, for [the Turk] is a deadly reptile never to be trusted.236

The use of terms like “devil of indolence, cruelty & dishonesty” and “deadly reptile” suspiciously resemble the typical descriptions of femmes fatales dear to the heart of the Victorian moralist and suggest the close relationship between the image of the siren and the image of her degenerate consorts. The imperialist outlook in politics extended to the colonization of the female as emblematic of voracious nature which had to be tamed. The suppression of the Turks as masters of the Holy Land was a giant step for mankind in placing nature under the control of upright Englishmen. Disraeli’s powerful Queen Astarte eventually succumbs to the force of Tancred’s will and would willingly share her throne with him. The remarkable resemblance of Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca and the heroine of the novel suggests another instance of the Pre-Raphaelite debt to Disraeli. The dark Astarte in both the novel and the painting is a Semitic goddess who combines the female threat with Levantine exoticism and hence is doubly dangerous. Although in the novel Astarte fears the Jews, her love for Tancred makes her acquiesce in his plan to restore the world to “divine dominion” as it formerly reigned in the Holy Land. Ultimately, Tancred resists the blandishments of empire she offers him and walks away, maintaining his British uprightness in refusing her siren song. Rossetti’s majestic female goddess is similarly both alluring and submissive, imprisoned by her chains of love. Ford Madox Brown

Meanwhile, Ford Madox Brown was following the precedent of the PreRaphaelites in shifting from medieval and Christian themes to subjects drawn from contemporary life. His most important modern project in this mode was simply entitled Work, conceived in 1852 and sporadically developed over the next decade (fig. 4.39).237 This time he puts into the spotlight “lusty manhood” too busily working to be distracted by the temptations of the flesh. His sonnet devoted to the class-conscious picture smuggles an antifemale message in its condemnation of the “beauteous tripping dame with bell-like skirts” who ignores “ragged wayside babes.” Here it is in full: Work! which beads the brow and tans the flesh Of lusty manhood, casting out its devils! By whose weird art, transmuting poor men’s evils,



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4.39  Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852, 1856–1863. City of Manchester Art Galleries, Manchester.

Their bed seems down, their one dish ever fresh. Ah me! For lack of it what ills in leash Hold us. Its want the pale mechanic levels To workhouse depths, while Master Spendthrift revels. For want of work the fiends him soon inmesh! Ah! Beauteous tripping dame with bell-like skirts, Intent on thy small scarlet-coated hound, Are ragged wayside babes not lovesome too? Untrained, their state reflects on thy deserts. Or they grow noisome beggars to abound, Or dreaded midnight robbers, breaking through.238

Meant to show work in all of its forms, the painting epitomizes the attempt to create an iconography appropriate to the glorified ideal of modern labor—a concept inseparable from the post-1848 social and political climate. While in execution and fidelity to natural appearances it is hard, factual, and precise, it is essentially an allegorical representation organized

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around the ideological issues of work in Victorian society. A team of navvies are seen excavating a deep trench in Heath Street, Hampstead, in preparation for the installation of a new water supply or sewage system— another instance of the influence of the urban sanitary movement on reform-minded individuals. But the number of symbolic details and social types depicted transform their collective activity into an “apotheosis of labor” of the heart, mind, and body. Many critics likened it to a pictorial sermon, an interpretation supported by the four well-known biblical inscriptions on the frame relating to work: “Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day” (2 Thessalonians 3:8); “I must work while it is day for night cometh when no man can work” ( John 9:4); “Seest thou a man diligent in business? He shall stand before kings” (Proverbs 22:29); and finally, the inevitable “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). In this, Brown reinforced the thought of his contemporaries who accepted the ethic of work as the prime means of fulfilling one’s earthly destiny. Sacred terms in the Victorian lexicon, “work” and “labor” embodied a moral imperative equal to that of religious faith. Work was conceived in the aftermath of a turbulent period. It should be recalled that the previous decade was one of profound social turmoil and generally referred to as the “Hungry Forties.” These peak years of Chartist agitation staggered even the most conservative minds, who soon began to see everywhere signs of social disintegration, subversion, and oppression, and an exploitative class too bent on capitalist accumulation even to offer gifts upon the altar of their revered god Mammon. John Stuart Mill declared that Chartism represented “the first open separation of interest, feeling, and opinion, between the laboring portion of the commonwealth and all above them,” and added that “conscientious and sympathizing minds among the ruling classes could not but be strongly impressed by such a protest.”239 A host of religious and moral philosophers, poets, novelists, and journalists now appeared on the horizon with devastating attacks on the system. They were for the most part appalled by the specter of revolution and advocated middle-of-the-road solutions. Those who became the first Christian Socialists closely observed the events of 10 April, and while they refused to participate directly they were profoundly moved by them. In the aftermath, they aspired to mend fences and build bridges by grounding cooperative associations on Christian ideals of Church and Brotherhood and attempting to persuade workers to follow the lead of sympathetic clergy and their enlightened upper-class sustainers. This project was allegorized in Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke (1850), which pointed to the pitfalls of Chartist activity and the potential wisdom of Tory reformist principles. Christian Socialists wanted Chartists to claim political enfranchisement, “not as mere men, who may be villains, savages, animals, slaves of their own prejudices and passions; but as members of Christ, children of God,

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4.40  Specimens from Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition of 1850 (To Be Improved in 1851), wood engraving from Punch, 1850.

inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven, and therefore bound to realize it on earth.”240 (Of course, this solution would not have included such infidels as Jews, Irish, and Communists, who are consistently scapegoated in the novel.) Many of the religious reformers in manufacturing areas shared with the Captains of Industry the idea that British commerce was the universal panacea. The 1851 Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, with its industrial and scientific achievements housed in Paxton’s Crystal Palace, was a solid demonstration of the faith in material progress and a shift in the general social outlook of the middle classes in this period. This is not to say that the highly publicized glass panels of Paxton’s palace blinded everyone: a Punch cartoon of 1850 projects imaginary displays in the Great Exhibition of impoverished workers under glass domes, clearly indicating a layer of reality destined for dissimulation by the glittering façade (fig. 4.40). Generally, however, the middle classes now experienced a gush of optimism based on the safe passage through the revolutionary whirlwinds of 1848. Both Brown and the first patron who commissioned the completion of Work, Thomas Edward Plint, followed the reformists’ position. A well-known stockbroker and philanthropist in Leeds, Plint supported the Christian Socialists’ program and specifically asked Brown to make changes in the already begun canvas to conform to his social and religious ideals: “Could you introduce both Carlyle and Kingsley, and change one of the four fashionable young ladies into a quiet, earnest, holy-looking one with a book or two and tracts?”241 He reaffirmed his keen interest in Brown’s



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picture, and mentioned that he knew of others who shared this interest. Plint’s sense of himself as a representative of a group or association corresponds to the climate of reform then rather pervasively felt in the industrial center of Leeds.242 His father, also named Thomas, had been an accountant who served as secretary to the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutes and audited the books for the Leeds Industrial Cooperative Society, which began as a consumers’ union. The society had been founded by members of the Leeds Redemption Society, a workpeople’s association inspired by the ideas of Owen and Fourier which developed close ties with the Christian Socialists. The main go-between was James Hole, who was on friendly terms with J. M. Ludlow and F. D. Maurice, key figures in the Christian Socialist movement. Both the manufacturing and aristocratic elite in Leeds encouraged the aspirations of the Christian Socialist movement, which they perceived as a more acceptable alternative to Chartism, Socialism, and Trade Unionism; for example, the Tory moderate Viscount Goderich (later Marquis of Ripon), a prestigious and active supporter of the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutes, identified himself as a Christian Socialist.243 That Plint was deeply involved in this movement is indisputable; like his peers he feared revolt from below, a possibility signaled as recently as 1849 by the violent riot over wages by navvies engaged on the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway near Leeds. The Christian Socialists rejected revolution as a social solution and trusted to increased educational opportunities, tract societies, and a general religious orientation to improve the condition of the working classes. The first verses of a eulogy devoted to Plint published in the Leeds Intelligencer stress his evangelical efforts: Martyr and Eremite have passed away— The light grows brighter in the later day; But Heaven has yet its Saints—in mortal guise, Whose lives are worship and a sacrifice. And such was his—who humbly walked with God, And scattered blessings where his footsteps trod.

Plint had been a member of East Parade Chapel, superintendent of its Sunday school, and a local preacher whose hymns and sacred poetry were assembled and published posthumously.244 That his art collecting was intimately linked with his evangelical beliefs is seen in the fact that he owned or commissioned, in addition to Brown’s Work and several pieces by Rossetti, Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, Leys’s Capestro, the Carpenter of Antwerp Preaching in his Work-Yard, and Hunt’s Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, all of which set the motif of labor and artisans into a religious or biblical setting. Brown’s evangelical feelings were no less pronounced, evident in the biblical passages inscribed on the frame, the allusions to the evils of intem

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perance, a notice advertising the Working Men’s College, and the inclusion of both Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, the founder and principal of the Working Men’s College. Brown’s pictorial sermon preaches the Gospel of Labor and of Self-Help, praises the achievements of Commerce and Industry and greater respect for the working classes, and above all, rejects revolution. We know this from an entry he made in his diary at the time he was working on the picture: To what pitch is England destined to soar in the History of the world. Externally a far shining glory to all the Earth and an example, internally a prey to snobbishness and the worship of gold & tinsel—a place chiefly for sneaks and lacqueys, and any who can fawn or clutch, or dress clean at church, & connive. The deepest pondering alas brings me back to old & nothing original conclusions that the Aristocracy of this Country pressed with Torpedo influence on all classes of men and works, commerce allone [sic] is free from their intermeddling and thoroughly successful. In all else be it war, literature, art or science we are great if great, in spite of them—and the depressing influence of established authority taking the precedence of merit & justice. And yet every one would avert revolutions as still worse.245

It was in this state of personal rancor and nationalist social concern that Brown formulated the intricate program for his magnum opus. He projected a complex iconography that summarized his views on the role of labor in contemporary life and the degrees of importance he attached to different categories of work. The setting of the picture is Heath Street, Hampstead, about halfway up on the west side. Brown’s landscape study of the site served as the backdrop for a composite-like view of events occurring in the neighborhood over a length of time (fig. 4.41). The focal point is a group of workers excavating below the street level for the laying of freshwater or sewer pipes. These excavators, actually contractors’ laborers then known as navvies in short for navigators, typically repaired roads, laid drains, dug cuttings and tunnels for the railways, and were considered by the English middle class as the cream of young working-class manhood. In Kingsley’s Yeast (1851), reference is made to a group of rebel students at Cambridge who styled themselves Navvies in opposition to the snobbish Coverley Club.246 Brown himself noted that the navvy was “as worthy of the English painter as the fisherman of the Adriatic, the peasant of the Campagna, or the Neapolitan lazzarone,” and he took this specialized type of laborer as the “outward and visible sign of ‘Work.’”247 The early stages of Brown’s picture coincide with the outbreak of the Crimean War, when the navvy received special attention. Brown’s diary entry on the condition of England cited above was intimately related to his perceptions of the war, when he was everywhere looking for heroes to redeem the national image. He tried very hard to sell a series of potboilers

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4.41  Ford Madox Brown, Heath Street, Hampstead, 1852–1855. City of Manchester Art Galleries, Manchester.

during this period which carried such titles as “The Bugle Calls,” “The Troopship Sails,” “In the Trenches before Sebastopol,” “Wounded,” and “The Return Home.”248 It was Paxton who in October 1854, during an election campaign in Coventry, first put forward the suggestion that navvies should be sent to the Crimea to help the military campaign by constructing roads and other works behind the front line.249 In January, 1855 a team of navvies was commissioned to construct a railway from Balaclava to the trenches near Sebastopol in order to convey supplies to the troops. Contemporary accounts praised them as “young men in the prime of vigourous manhood” who give evidences “of stalwart strength and endurance for which their class is proverbial.”250 Even English troops serving at the front were intimidated by the presence of the navvies, and a remarkable Punch cartoon of 1854 reflects the general sentiment that navvies were superior to British regulars and, if called upon to do so, quite capable of throttling the Russians with spades and pickaxes (fig. 4.42). Significantly, Brown’s hero bears a remarkable resemblance to the central navvy of the cartoon. On the extreme left of Brown’s picture is a barefoot costermonger, or street vendor, clad in tatters and carrying a basket of greenstuff plucked from the field; he peers out at the world anxiously through a tear in his hat brim. A grotesque and paranoidal personality, he is described by Brown as the “ragged wretch who has never been taught to work” and is forced to eke out a marginal existence. On the opposite side of the pathetic herb-seller are two commanding figures who survey the human procession, seemingly idle but who in fact are the brain-workers, “the cause of well-ordained

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4.42  What Our Navvies Are Likely to Do, wood engraving from Punch, 1854.

work and happiness in others—sages, such as in ancient Greece published their opinions in the market square.” Here Brown’s apparent rejection of his patron’s request to paint Kingsley in favor of portraying Maurice, the chief leader of the movement, and Carlyle, who shaped Maurice’s views, reveals his personal biases. Next to these sages on the shaded bank are involuntary idlers out of work from necessity—unemployed haymakers, Irish immigrants, young peasants in search of a harvest job, and an old sailor; and those idle from irresponsibility—mainly Irish vagrants, including the stereotypical drunk leaning against the tree. Finally, filing behind the pariah selling herbs are those idle by choice—the rich “who ‘have no need to work,’” the monocled swell in top hat with his daughter on horseback, whose way is blocked by the excavations, and the fashionable ladies, one of whom distributes tracts on the evils of alcoholism to the navvies. She flings one down into the pit as a navvy, wiser in the ways of the world than she, descends with a hodful of bricks and shoots her a scornful glance. Mingling among the navvies is a beer vendor with his tray loudly announcing his wares, an urban specimen, humpbacked and stunted in his growth, deformed by town life and making a striking contrast with the brawny and vigorous navvies recruited from rural areas. Nevertheless, he is

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4.43  Ford Madox Brown, Work, pencil drawing, ca. 1858–1859. City of Manchester Art Galleries, Manchester.



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a hero in own right, a plucky and respected figure who became prosperous by catering to laborers on the job. Other signs of urban entrepreneurial initiative are the posters and bills pasted on the wall at the left, including an estate agent’s ad, “A Genteel house for sale,” an offer of a reward from the police for information on a highway robbery, and one notice blatantly proclaiming “Money! Money! Money!” There are also notices of the Working Men’s College, a fund-raising event for the Boys’ Home, 41 Euston Road, and an advertisement by the Flamstead Institute of Arts offering Professor Snoöx’s popular lecture on the domestic cat. In the foreground a group of ragged children look on as spectators; they are motherless, and the father is a drunkard who has left their care to his ten-year-old daughter holding the baby. As another symbol of class conflict, their mongrel cur growls at the precious little greyhound clad in scarlet belonging to the fashionable ladies. Brown also points to social injustice in the vignette just behind the brain-workers showing a policeman violently shoving a seller of oranges for obstructing traffic, a detail best seen in a preliminary study (fig. 4.43). He thus clears the way for the procession of electioneering sandwich boards carried up Heath Street calling for votes for Bobus Higgins. John Linton, Brown’s younger contemporary, perceived Work as a “seer’s dream of the redemption of labour which will be wrought into the Kingdom of God on earth.”251 Distinctly Christian Socialist in perspective, its religious agenda is nevertheless held in check by Brown’s scrupulous realism, which imparts to the picture the air of topical social commentary. Brown even went so far as to sit outdoors in a cab of his own invention during unpleasant weather to insure the accurate treatment of the details of his painting. Brown was not alone in his attempt to portray the theme of work at mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, his concept falls midway between examples by the French masters Courbet (in particular, his Stonebreakers) and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, dated 1849 and 1863, respectively (fig. 4.44). Puvis’s allegorical composition, also entitled Work, similarly centers on a group of muscular figures in an outdoor setting, but in keeping with his aristocratic viewpoint he employs the idealized nude body to declare his narrative and projects his figures into an arcadian paradise. His carpenters and blacksmiths, moreover—wholly inept and lethargic—belong to a realm of fantasy epitomized by the artist’s naive remark that “had he not been a painter he would have enjoyed being a blacksmith.”252 chapter four

4.44  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Work (Le Travail), canvas attached to wall, 1863. Musée de Picardie, Amiens.

Brown’s representation is intermediate between the rarefied allegory of Puvis and the straightforward, unheroic statement of Courbet. Despite Brown’s unmistakable craftsmanship and hints at social injustice, the picture as a whole seems to lack energy and conviction. Kitson has noted its passionless design, its rather mild reproach of the exploiting class, and its lack of clear demand for social change. As he suggests, Work gives the impression of a kind of “patronizing homage” to the English navvies, who Brown thought were “fine fellows and was delighted to find them quite intelligent if you spoke to them nicely.”253 Although the picture is antiacademic and realist in its avoidance of episodic or climactic motifs, it is also antigenre in its stilted, synthetic approach and its pretense to encyclopedic thoroughness. In the end, what is left is a rather neutral presentation that offers something for everyone regardless of class bias. This contradiction in Brown’s conceptual approach probably stems from the uncertainty of Tory intellectuals and reformers in the face of Chartist demands and articulate explanation of the social contradictions. We have already seen that novelists like Disraeli, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Dickens as well as a host of others made serious efforts to understand the condition of working people—an effort nurtured by the government’s blue-book publications in the 1840s and 1850s as well as by the lessons of Chartism. But while they sympathized with the proletariat and even repudiated the doctrine of laissez-faire economics, they failed to grasp the singular, unprecedented feature in the outlook of the emerging industrial workers—their informed position on class conflict and their



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intention to control all the conditions of the workplace. The majority of the novelists felt it wrong for the workers to organize themselves—indeed, they feared working people taking matters in their own hands—and chose to appeal to the moral responsibility of the governing classes. One dramatic case of a prominent Victorian author preoccupied with alleviating the condition of the industrial poor and inadvertently operating as propagandist for the Captains of Industry was Samuel Smiles, associated with the doctrine of “self-help.”254 Smiles had participated in the moderate faction of the Chartist movement during the Hungry Forties, advocating an extension of the suffrage, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and improved education of the working classes. He had no sympathy, however, for socialism, and felt that collective striving in an atmosphere of ignorance and poverty was doomed to failure. He asserted that the poor man’s remedy lay in his own hands and turned to self-help as the primary solution to social inequities. Significantly, Smiles lived in Leeds during the years 1838–1854, where he began his career as the editor of the liberal journal, the Leeds Times. His main opponent and rival was the radical Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, who edited the Northern Star and established relations with Marx and Engels. In Leeds, his participation in suffrage and mutual improvement societies brought him into the circles of Plint and his father, the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutes, and the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute. Smiles also established contact with the Leeds Redemption Society and the consumer group founded in part by James Hole. Although he flirted with the socialist movement when he first arrived in Leeds, Smiles noted that its supporters who met at a hall in East Parade (the site of Plint’s church) turned him off because of their atheistic tone. As he declared in his Autobiography: “It was not until the Revs. Charles Kingsley, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Edward Larken, developed the practice of Christian Socialism that the cooperators were dragged out of this frightful pit.”255 Smiles preached the gospel of hard work in all his writings, starting with his famous Self-Help (1859), whose sales far surpassed those of the great contemporary novels. First presented in the form of lectures in the mid-1840s to young workingmen in Leeds who on their own initiative had organized an evening school for “mutual improvement,” he claimed in his introduction to “reinculcate those old-fashioned lessons . . . that youth must work in order to enjoy—that nothing creditable can be accomplished without application and diligence.”256 In his later Life and Labour, he declared: “The life of man in this world is, for the most part, a life of work. In the case of ordinary men, work may be regarded as their normal condition. Every man worth calling a man should be willing and able to work.”257 That Smiles and Brown shared a common platform is seen in the writer’s homage to the brain-worker, who “constitutes the motive power of mankind”; in his distinctions between degenerate idlers and thrifty laborers, deformed townspeople and healthy country people; and especially in

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the awestruck admiration with which he regards the navvy. Like Brown, he lauds the navvies’ extraordinary endurance and love of risks, and rapturously described their corduroy breeches tied at the knee, “displaying beneath a solid calf and foot encased in strong high-laced boots.” Significantly, Smiles printed Brown’s sonnet on Work in its entirety to exemplify the beneficence of labor.258 The ideology of self-help suited the capitalists for the ruthless competition they had to face; with it they could rationalize their opposition to strikes as an attempt to check the freedom of those who wanted to get ahead through self-advancement. In the end, the doctrine of self-help rang hollow—especially when the vagaries of the market closed off job opportunities and encouraged employers to keep wages down. Even if every worker had been a devoted follower of Smiles, only a negligible minority could have succeeded in rising above their station. The remarkable Henry Mayhew, at the time less well known than Smiles, was another compassionate bourgeois reformer who wrote extensively about the London poor. He was a gifted journalist and pioneer social investigator whose fieldwork remains a model for sociologists and anthropologists. During the period from October 1849 to December 1850, he wrote a series of letters on the proletarian subculture for the Morning Chronicle which he eventually assembled and published in 1851 as his London Labour and the London Poor and later expanded into the definitive edition of 1861–1862. This work took Victorian London by storm, and it is no exaggeration to state that it influenced every living novelist, painter, critic, and social reformer mentioned in this chapter.259 Mayhew’s first letter in October 1849 proposed considering the metropolitan poor under three distinct headings: (1) those who will work; (2) those that cannot work; and (3) those who will not work—a classification he carried over into his publication of 1851, where he added a fourth category, “those who need not work.”260 As has been shown, Brown’s painting is organized around an identical classification. In addition, Brown assimilated Mayhew’s sociological approach, which provided many personal details about the lives and attitudes of his subjects. Brown similarly traced the complete life of many of his characters, connecting the actual models in the picture with their past history and present condition, and citing such minor details as their home addresses, places of origin, peculiar personal foibles, and habits of thought. Significantly, Mayhew’s book was richly illustrated as well as documented, and two of the illustrations probably inspired figures in Brown’s composition: The Irish Street Seller and The Groundsel Man (figs. 4.45–46). Despite the divergent clothing details in Mayhew’s image and Brown’s herb-seller, the tattered garments and especially the furtive glance suggest a direct relationship. Mayhew described this street person similarly to Brown, noting that he preferred to walk to market with “naked feet,” and that only his soft disposition saved him from thievery.261

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4.45  The Irish Street Seller, wood engraving from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861–1862). 4.46  The Groundsel Man, wood engraving from Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor.

While Mayhew understood exploitation in terms of capitalist appropriation of the surplus labor created by the worker, and tried to develop an equitable wage principle, he deliberately avoided joining social reformists and hoped that the system, once apprised of its effects, would reform itself: My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings . . . of the poor,—that it may teach those who are beyond temptation to look with charity on the frailties of their less fortunate brethren—and cause those who are in “high places” . . . to bestir themselves to improve the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world,” is . . . a national disgrace.”262

Mayhew’s articles for the Morning Chronicle profoundly affected the future leaders of the Christian Socialist movement, all of whom invoked Mayhew’s authoritative findings in their writings. Maurice wrote: “These Morning Chronicle letters have set us all grieving, thinking, and I hope with some measure acting.”263 Maurice, who opposed competition for profit, dreamed of socializing the Christian and Christianizing the socialist.

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Despite the impact of Chartism on his ideas, however, he believed neither in legislative reform nor in radical social and economic change, but rather encouraged entrepreneurial and consumer cooperatives among working people—a kind of collective self-help. Above all, the politically conservative Maurice believed, along with Smiles, that education was the panacea for the ills besetting the working classes. He shifted his practical efforts from Christian Socialism to the founding of the Working Men’s College. The founding of this school in 1854 marked a watershed in the Christian Socialist movement. Maurice persuaded Ruskin, a Christian Socialist in everything but name, to teach drawing at the college. Ruskin jumped at the opportunity, since the invitation coincided in time with his transition from an almost exclusive preoccupation with art criticism to the broader problems of art in society. In his 1857 lectures on the “political economy of art” (published under that title) and in his later book Unto This Last, Ruskin bitterly attacked free enterprise and the demonic worship of Mammon. He wanted to introduce ethics into political economy, to substitute social service and cooperation in place of individual gain and competition. At the heart of his program for society was a fresh attitude toward work that he had gradually developed since formulating his principles on the Gothic in the introduction of Stones of Venice. Ruskin maintained that workers must be artists and artists workmen. The working person must no longer be a mere hired tool manipulating a machine, but must be educated to create through his own craftsmanship works of social utility and beauty, and by so doing be able to experience joy in the labor. Ruskin further maintained that individuals working happily in the communal spirit of the medieval workshops create the best products. While advocating government intervention to guarantee universal education and training, Ruskin stopped far short of a revolutionary gospel in subscribing to an enlightened individualism and a distinct social hierarchy. His great ambition, which he never found time to realize, was to write “a great essay on Man’s Work, which will be the work of my life.”264 The references to “work” and “labour” in the index of Ruskin’s collected works are numerous enough to compete with the same entries in the biblical concordance. His position on modern labor was summed up in his popular lecture entitled “Work,” delivered in 1865 before the Working Men’s Institute at Camberwell, an affiliate of the college.265 Ruskin began by claiming that idleness and industry cut across class lines: “There is a working class . . . among both rich and poor, and there is an idle class . . . among both rich and poor.” He quickly dismissed the idlers—the scum of society—and then makes distinctions among the industrious resembling the categories of Mayhew and Brown, distinguishing (1) those who work, and those who play; (2) those who produce, and those who consume; (3) those who work with the head, and those who work with the hands; and (4) those who work wisely, and those who work foolishly.

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Later, he added the distinction between those who have the power to exact wealth and those who earn it in the form of wages. But those whose sole object is the accumulation of capital are for the most part as uneducated as the ordinary worker, since it is impossible for a well-educated or brave man to make money the chief object of thought, as impossible as it is “for him to make his dinner the principal object of them.” Then using Christian Socialist terms he warns: “Work first—you are God’s servants; Fee first— you are the Fiend’s.” While Ruskin understood the power of capital and its inequities, he failed to see that the masters of production were as much the inevitable products of modern industry as the workers. His distinction between manual and intellectual labor also reveals glaring contradictions; after praising the ethical character of artisanship, he notes that when both are equally well done the head’s is the noble work and the hand’s the ignoble. The old words “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread” meant that the inherent nature of physical labor is one of calamity. Here Ruskin seems to justify his own endeavors, for he makes manual and intellectual labor mutually exclusive: “There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.” Those who do the rough work may be redeemed and rewarded by working in the service of God and by assuming childlike qualities of humility, faith, charity, and cheerfulness—that is, the gospel of Christian Socialism.266 All of the Victorian writers and thinkers mentioned above were decisively influenced by the towering figure of Thomas Carlyle. Dickens dedicated his Hard Times to the sage, Ruskin acknowledged him as his master, and Smiles, Mayhew, Maurice, and Kingsley quoted him and sang his praises at every opportunity. Kingsley’s Sandy Mackaye, the lovable artisan-philosopher of Alton Locke, is modeled after Carlyle. Carlyle’s bitterly polemical book Past and Present (1843) especially touched the reformists. His sledgehammered preachments, his nostalgia for a medieval harmony, and his denunciation of the English industrial system, in which the “cashpayment nexus” was the sole bond of society, became part of the everyday Victorian vocabulary. Carlyle addresses the reader as if from the mountaintop, declaiming in an apocalyptic tone as he abruptly shifts from satire and name-calling to awesome appeals to the laws of God and the spiritual universe. Like Pugin, Carlyle contrasts a portrait of a medieval community under wise and benign ecclesiastical authority with the flawed image of modern industrial society. He begins Past and Present in outrage at the condition of alienated workers sitting before the St. Ives Workhouse. His sudden insight into the workhouse as a horrific sign of English poverty, especially when considered in the light of the vast potential of the new society, aroused in him a sense of impending crisis akin to the dire circumstances that gave rise to the French Revolution, the subject of an earlier study of his. One indication of his indignation are the contemptuous, caricatural names he gives

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his representative types of the new age: against the majestically drawn Abbot Samson, the leader of the medieval community, he poses the likes of Sir Jabesh Windbag, Viscount Mealymouth, Plugson of Undershot, and Bobus Higgins. Carlyle’s ideas reveal a strong conservative streak; his fierce indignation springs in large measure from his fear of social disorder and anarchy. The immense armies of the unemployed, the hordes of Irishmen that he perceives as the greatest threat of all, shocked him into his prophetic warnings, which get even more strident after 1848.267 Carlyle glorified the cult of the hero, urged an aristocracy of talent, and reveals an idealistic and even imperialistic faith in British industrialism, progress, and labor. He wanted society run by benign patriarchs like the Abbot Samson, whose compassion never outstripped his authority. Carlyle’s book is finally a religious tract exploring the way of redemption through work and the corrupting effects of idleness. A typical passage reads: “In a thousand senses, from one end of it to the other, true Work is worship. He that works, whatever be his work, he bodies forth the form of Things Unseen; a small poet every Worker is.” And later: “No man has worked or can work except religiously; not even the poor day labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of your shoes.”268 In chapter after chapter Carlyle proclaims labor as the chief means of discovering the mysteries of the universe. Rossetti, who also worked at the Working Men’s College, noted that Brown’s picture contained all kinds of Carlyle-isms.269 Brown owned a copy of Past and Present that he systematically annotated, and its ideological subtext permeates the painting. Not only does the sage himself appear in the picture but the biblical passages he quotes throughout Past and Present are inscribed on the frame, and even a specific reference to Bobus Higgins is included. Brown inserted in the right background an allusion to Bobus on the sandwich boards. Bobus Higgins, the bogus sausage-maker, epitomized Carlyle’s notion of the newly rich manipulator of public opinion who seeks office with a simple nostrum for healing social ills.270 Surprisingly, however, Carlyle himself is portrayed in the picture with an unflattering smirk on his face as he peers out at the viewer. The expression resembles the nasty look on several of Brown’s female faces in his paintings and drawings of the early 1850s. Although Carlyle’s general pose was based on a photograph, his physiognomy has been drastically altered and even appears cruel in the preliminary study (figs. 4.47–48). The painter’s grandson explains this anomalous grimace—which perturbed the painter’s closest friends—by referring to Carlyle’s generally contemptuous attitude toward the fine arts. This curious feature signifies Brown’s ambivalence toward the intellectual hero of his painting, and his own tension in straddling the mind worker and manual worker categories. During the same period that Brown conceived his monumental picture, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concentrated on the problems and

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4.47  Ford Madox Brown, Work, detail. opposite 4.48  Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, photograph ca. 1858–1859. City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.



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issues analogous to those it raised. They shared further with Brown and the other Victorian reformists an involvement with Chartism and the writings of Carlyle.271 Marx’s Grundrisse of the 1850s—itself based on his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—contains the germinal ideas for Capital, which parallel both Carlyle’s ideas on work and Brown’s symbolic representations. Marx’s earliest writings posit work as the determining factor in the evolution of the material conditions of human life: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour.”272 Like Carlyle, Marx sees self-realization as determined by action on the world through work. Given this orientation, it is not surprising to learn that Marx and Engels fell under the spell of Past and Present.273 A comparison between Marx’s early writings and Carlyle’s book reveals striking parallels. Carlyle launches his book with a vision of idle workers, depressed and alienated from their work, their fellow creatures, nature, and even from themselves; Marx begins the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts with degraded workers estranged from their product and suffering in their “very existence”—an economic state with emphatic psychological as well as social and economic implications. Both try to get at the distorted relationships set up between worker and capitalist, the worker and his product, the capitalist and his money. Like Carlyle, Marx pictures society as ever splitting apart as the result of capitalism’s initial disruptions of natural human relationships, condemns the bondage of Mammon and the exploitation of labor, and argues for a more equitable distribution of economic wealth. chapter four

Finally, again fundamentally like Carlyle, he argues for a return to authentic human relationships based on spontaneity and fulfilling work. Yet it is less the content than the rhetorical tone that Carlyle and Marx share; Carlyle imposed on his writing an attitude of powerful conviction, a general receptiveness to existence rather than a systematic body of thought. The fact that thinkers on both the Right and the Left found food for thought in Past and Present suggests that it succeeded by the force of its literary style rather than by the weight of its social facts or the logic of its arguments. It electrified by the force of its accusations and censure: Marx’s “our friend Moneybags,” for example, seems directly related to Carlyle’s caricatured capitalist Plugson of Undershot.274 But perhaps the ultimate evidence for this exchange is the fact that the Communist Manifesto refers explicitly to Carlyle’s favorite phrase, the “cash-payment nexus.” While the Manifesto denounces the feudalistic ideals and Christian Socialism espoused by Carlyle, it uses the prophetic rhetoric and style of Past and Present.275 Except for Marx and Engels, all the reformers under Carlyle’s influence appealed directly to moral standards which they felt were universally applicable to human beings. Since these reformers accepted the bourgeois order as absolute and final, they criticized and condemned the condition of their society in terms of a preconceived ideal whose desirability they thought would be self-evident to all rational persons. Marx and Engels, however, wholly rejected these attitudes on the basis of their understanding of history. In their view, human history is driven by changes in the process of production so all-pervasive that they cannot be reversed by the mere intervention of individuals motivated by one agenda or another. Unlike Carlyle, they did not appeal to charitable aid from above, which only substituted one set of illusions for another. They condemned the existing order through appeals to history, not ideals: capitalism was no more inherently evil or malicious than the system of feudalism, but evolved in response to laws of social development, which made it inevitable that at a certain stage in history one class should dispossess and exploit another. As against Carlyle, moreover, the exploiters are not threatened with “divine” retribution but with their inevitable overthrow, guaranteed by historical development. Returning to Brown, we see that he represented many of the concepts and issues illuminated by the advanced social critics; class conflict centered on the problem of work had never before been so explicitly stated in painting. In 1869 he executed a portrait of Ernest Jones, a Chartist leader of the extreme left and close friend of Marx and Engels who upheld their doctrines of class struggle, the incompatibility of interests between capital and labor, and the necessity of the conquest of political power by the working class. Brown later settled in Manchester for several years, where he founded an employment bureau that failed

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for want of cooperation from employers; Brown concluded from his experience in Marxist terms that “manufacturers look upon a good broad margin of starving workmen as the necessary accompaniment of cheap labor.”276 Brown represented in his picture many of the antitheses basic to class conflict: productive and unproductive labor, idleness and work, unskilled and skilled labor, mental and intellectual labor—even the lumpen group described by Marx. But although he attempted to give an accurate rendering of the class divisions of Victorian society, he essentially subscribed to the reformists’ ideas of self-help and improved morality. His apotheoses of labor and its redemptive character are clues to his conservative position. He depicted outdoor laborers instead of the true proletariat as defined by Marx in the mines and textile mills, thus glossing over genuine industrial exploitation and the increasing division of labor which ultimately tends to abolish skilled labor altogether. Even his idealized navvy was an unskilled wage worker with only his labor power to sell, who participated minimally in the planning process and could enjoy no control over the finished product. Mayhew interviewed one railroad navvy whose “heavy high lace-up boots so characteristic of the tribe . . . were burst, and almost soleless with long wear.” As the interviewee reported: opposite 4.49  Ford Madox Brown, Last of England, 1852–1855. City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. 4.50  The Emigrants, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 1852.

I have been a navvy for about eighteen years. . . . I went to work on the London and York. Here we had only 2s. 9d. a day, and we had only four days’ work in the week to do besides. . . . I stopped on this line (for work was very scarce and I thought myself lucky to have any) till last spring. Then all the work on it stopped and 2,000 men were thrown out of employ in one day. They were all starving, the heap of them. . . . I went back to Barnet. Whilst I was there I hurted my leg, and was laid up a month. I lived all that time on charity; on what the chaps would come and give me. I couldn’t declare onto the sick fund, because I hadn’t any bones broken. When I could get about again, the work was all stopped. . . . I sold all my things—shovel and grafting tool and all, to have a meal of food. . . . I should like to go away as an emigrant. . . . This country is getting bad for labor; it’s so overrun with Irish that the Englishman hasn’t a chance in his own land to live. Ever since I was nine years old I’ve got my own living, but now I’m dead beat, though I’m only twenty-eight next August.277

Although Brown’s painting entitled Last of England, begun the same year as Work and depicting a scene from the emigration movement, might suggest that he was sensitive to the other side of the worker’s experience, his emigrant couple (actually inspired by Woolner, who emigrated to Australia in 1852) is deliberately drawn from the middle class to point up Brown’s personal sense of deprivation and frustration in the period (fig. 4.49). Popular illustration of the period most generally depicted the impoverished worker and his family as emigrants taking leave of their native land with a heavy heart (fig. 4.50).

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Brown’s grandson described the painter as temperamentally a Tory and intellectually a socialist—the perfect profile of Young England summed up in “social Toryism.” Brown descended from the upper middle class—his maternal forebears belonged to the minor gentry and his paternal ancestors had a history of distinction in medicine. Later, Brown lived on an inheritance from his mother that was a constant source of guilt. His condescending attitude toward his social inferiors is demonstrated in his relationship with his domestics, one of whom he turned out into the street in a fit of temper for her “insolence.” He was paying her a mere five pounds a year, and it was no wonder that he felt afterwards like a “scoundrel.” On another occasion when a laborer approached him in the field to beg a coin for a beer, he gave “the degraded wretch twopence & scorn.”278 Brown certainly penetrated many of the inequities of capitalism—although betraying the prejudices against the Irish and the idlers without seeing them in the perspective of this system—but he could not transcend the middle-class notion that relief had to come from above and not from the ranks of the downtrodden. It is significant that we are able to identify the models for the upper-class protagonists in the picture but the names of the navvies, costermongers, and indigents go unrecorded, a revealing class distinction.279 Thus Brown’s static and confused composition is imbricated in the very social conflicts and contradictions Marx disclosed in his critique. While Brown’s meticulous naturalism parallels Marx’s scientific approach, it lacks a comprehensive set of ideas to unify the whole. Brown’s class bias and self-consciousness blocked an authentic image of work in his day, a development he must have sensed because the protracted results betray a lack of conviction. Unlike Marx, he could not get beyond the ideological preconceptions of his group and the protest was muffled. Nevertheless, Brown’s painting stands as an invaluable document of the intellectual environment in which Marx formulated his mature ideas and adumbrates the remarkable nature of his contribution. At the same time, it serves as a bridge between Carlyle and Ruskin, on the one hand, and Brown’s disciple William Morris, on the other, with whom he helped found the decorating firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. Morris, who began typically enough under the influence of Rossetti, Plint (who commissioned his first major picture), Kingsley, and Christian Socialism, became the first major artist to embrace Marxism in the deepest sense of that term. But that story will have to await the fifth volume of this series, Art in an Age of Empire.



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5 The Macchia and the Risorgimento

This chapter deals primarily with the Tuscan-based group of artists called the Macchiaioli, who emerge from the political and cultural background known as the Risorgimento.1 They reveal in their work a rich layering of this social topography, portraying the ways Italians at mid-century tried to shape and occupy a national space. They were for the most part democratic intellectuals and activists who organized as a group in Florence in the late 1850s and attained their collective apogee in the following decade, a period coinciding with the establishment of a unified constitutional kingdom in Italy. As is so often the case in the development of modern group formations in the metropolitan centers of Europe, the members met regularly in a public drinking house, a meeting ground for local and international artists, bohemians, and conspirators (attributes sometimes combined in the same person). Their ostensible purpose for uniting was to protest the dogmatic training of the Florentine Academy, but behind this lay their antagonism to the same foreign influences (whether enlightened or not) that dominated not only Tuscan political life but also almost all the provincial territories of the peninsula. As elsewhere in Europe, the 1848 revolutions in Italy began with much promise but culminated everywhere in humiliating defeat. Anxious to terminate the debasing Habsburg and Spanish Bourbon occupations and domination and to link the disparate states into a unified liberal nation, Italian nationalists rose in rebellion in 1848. Revolution broke out in Sicily in January, six weeks before the February insurgency in Paris, and bowing to the rebels’ demands, King Ferdinando II of Naples granted a liberal Constitution. The grand duke of Tuscany, King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont-Sardinia, and Pope Pius IX, ruler of the Papal States, also felt compelled to introduce constitutional reforms. These uprisings in turn sparked revolution in the Habsburg lands in the north. After “Five Glorious Days” (18–22 March) of bitter street fighting, the citizens of Milan forced the Austrians to withdraw. On 22 March the citizens of Venice declared their city free

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from Austrian rule and established a republic. Meanwhile, nationalist pressures pushed Carlo Alberto, hoping to acquired Lombardy and the Veneto, to declare war on Austria. Taken unawares and momentarily intimidated by the wave of uprisings, the ruling foreign princes of the Italian states and Habsburg Austria succumbed to rebel demands. Rome also witnessed a revolutionary outburst, in November, which like the June Days in Paris showed an unexpected popular rage and frustration. Pius IX fled the eternal city, whose leadership now fell to the indefatigable Giuseppe Mazzini. In February 1849 the revolutionaries proclaimed Rome a democracy with the ancient title of the Roman Republic. But their triumph was to be short-lived: heeding the pope’s call for assistance, Louis-Napoléon, the newly elected president of the French Republic, defied his liberal constituency at home and attacked Rome, destroying the infant republic and facilitating the pope’s return. Soon everywhere in Italy the forces of reaction recovered and asserted their authority. The Austrians defeated Carlo Alberto and reoccupied Milan, and Ferdinando II crushed the insurrection in the south. The last city to fall to the reactionaries was Venice, subjected to a relentless bombardment by the Austrians. Carlo Alberto abdicated in favor of his son Vittorio Emanuele II, but in the process gained the esteem of moderate liberals throughout Italy who now envisioned unity under the new Piedmontese red, white, and green flag of Italian nationalism. The regrouping of domestic forces after 1848, which gave greater prominence to the middle class, proved to be the stimulus to the formation of the Macchiaioli movement. Their development, success, and then dissolution followed the trajectory of the Risorgimento, the surging forces of Italian modernization that finally achieved unification of the peninsula but fell short of the democratic ideals that motivated its most radical faction. Nineteenth-century Italian art has been woefully neglected in American art history, and the Macchiaioli are often referred to (even by European critics) as “Italian impressionists,” although antedating the French school by almost a decade. Their careers unfolded during the high point of the drive for national unity, and several of them participated in the street insurrections and wars of the Risorgimento.2 The eleven painters whose work constitutes the core of Macchiaioli activity were all born between 1824 and 1838, and on average were several years older than the impressionists. Cristiano Banti (1824–1904), Vito D’Ancona (1825–1884), Giovanni Fattori (1825–1908), Silvestro Lega (1826–1895), Serafino De Tivoli (1826– 1892), and Vincenzo Cabianca (1827–1902) form the older group; Giuseppe Abbati (1836–1868), Odoardo Borrani (1833–1905), Adriano Cecioni (1836– 1886), Raffaello Sernesi (1838–1866) and Telemaco Signorini (1835–1901) the younger. Their diverse social backgrounds are roughly as follows. Nobility and upper middle class: Lega, Banti, and D’Ancona; middle class: Abbati, Cecioni, Signorini, and De Tivoli; lower middle class: Borrani and Fattori; artisan and working class: Sernesi and Cabianca.

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Despite their predominantly middle-class backgrounds, the Macchiaioli embraced a name bestowed on them by belligerent critics that identified them with marginal social elements. The prefix macchia signifies a “spot” or “stain” or “patch,” while the suffix aiolo is attached to drudge labor. In addition, the dense underbrush of uncultivated landscape was referred to as the macchie—a place where outlaws hid or unwanted babies were abandoned.3 Technically, the macchia was the motif received in a flash, the original pictorial nucleus that conferred on every successful work its artistic life and unity. This embryonic cell consisted of an accord of lights and darks, lines and colors that recreated the effect glimpsed in nature and certified the artist’s sincerity and authenticity. Thus technique and ideology meshed in this avant-garde movement that attached high priority to both mental and political freedom. The macchia was initially that unit of pigment thrust at the canvas and left in an almost pristine state as a building block of the full-blown visualization. The paradigmatic examples have always been the small studies by Sernesi, Tetti al sole (Roofs in the Sunlight, 1860–1861), and D’Ancona’s Portico (ca. 1861), where the artists structured their surface directly with pristine hues, forming a mosaic of broad planes or patchwork of alternating light and shadow (figs. 5.1–2). But this meshwork macchia carried a larger signification as a dynamic liberating principle to address the modern world and the changing Italian environment. As indicated, each of the Macchiaioli participated in the key events of the Risorgimento. Fattori did not join any of the military expeditions (though he painted more battle scenes than any of the others), but served as a courier for the leftist coalition in his hometown Livorno during the revolutionary years 1848–1849.4 Later, all of them warmed to the radical working-class movement led by the master baker Giuseppe Dolfi in Florence. The painters’ meeting place was the Caffè Michelangiolo on the popular thoroughfare of Via Larga (now Via Cavour), which began as a headquarters for the development of Dolfi’s political intrigues and later served as a kind of “think tank” in which aesthetic issues arising from their progressive political positions were discussed.5 The objectives of the Risorgimento, essentially achieved between 1859 and 1870, were to expel foreign rulers from Naples, Tuscany, Lombardy, and the Veneto, unify the peninsula, and give it a secular, constitutional government. The full implication of these goals meant revolution, and ran on a collision course with the moderate liberal politics of some of the leaders of the unification movement who were reluctant to challenge the papacy or to admit the revolutionary nature of their cause. Other participants in the national struggle—primarily bourgeois and petty-bourgeois radicals— wanted to carry the Risorgimento further, to incorporate the masses in a scheme for the full democratization of Italian society. While they made the necessary compromises for strategic purposes to bring about national unity under a constitutional monarch, they also continued to advocate social

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5.1  Rafaello Sernesi, Roofs in the Sunlight, ca. 1860–1861. Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome. 5.2  Vito D’Ancona, Portico, ca. 1861. Galleria d’arte moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

change by reformist means in such crucial areas as land distribution, public education, suffrage, and women’s rights. The Macchiaioli and their defenders belonged to this militant faction, and although their efforts ultimately culminated in disappointment, they forged an energetic alliance around the central idea of democratic Italian revolution. I believe that the three main principles of Risorgimento democracy, as defined by Clara Lovett—“secularism, political equality, and the concern for social justice”6—are metonymically embodied in Macchiaioli painting. The writings of their key spokesperson and apologist, Telemaco Signorini, supported by a host of eyewitness testimony, confirm their origins in radical Tuscan politics.7

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The Architects of Italian Unity

Giuseppe Mazzini Destined to become the most influential radical of the Risorgimento, the charismatic Giuseppe Mazzini began his career as a member of a Carbonaro society and later formed his own network known as La Giovine Italia (Young Italy). The aims of Giovine Italia were to indoctrinate a new generation of Italians in the concept of a united and independent Italy with its capital at Rome and to foster a republican form of government. Committed to the necessity of popular insurrection, Mazzini expended much of his energy editing subversive newspapers, smuggling them across Italian borders, and fomenting uprisings in key regions. As a result, he was forced to live in exile most of his life, settling more or less permanently in London. It may be recalled from the previous chapter that he was friendly with Rossetti’s father, and often attended meetings at their home. He also attracted such prominent followers as Thomas Carlyle and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Mazzini made a brief appearance in Italy during the Italian insurrections of 1848, and enjoyed his finest hour when, in March 1849, he was elected a member of the triumvirate of the new Roman Republic following the flight of the pope. When the French attacked Rome, Mazzini organized a heroic resistance in which Garibaldi played a major role. After Rome fell in June, Mazzini once again escaped to London.

Giuseppe Garibaldi The most colorful figure of the Risorgimento was Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose personality and stupendous military achievements stamped the popular imagination with the heroic side of the nationalist movement. He would become one of the most compelling myths of post-unification Italy, embodying two opposing ideals that could attract both Right and Left— that of father of his country and that of symbol of permanent opposition. His was the only effigy which at the height of the Cold War appeared on a postage stamp in both the United States and the Soviet Union, commemorating the centenary of his triumphant march through Sicily in 1860. The United States honored the hero to whom Lincoln offered the rank of Major General in the Union Army during the Civil War, and the Soviet Union acclaimed him for his support of the Paris Commune and Marx’s First International. His global popularity even in his own time is shown by the enthusiasm he aroused in Great Britain during his Sicilian campaign and his visit to London in 1864. A Times reporter, writing just prior to Garibaldi’s arrival, had this to say: In a few days one of the most remarkable men in Europe will set foot on these shores. For years the name of garibaldi has been familiar to all who are inter-



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ested by narratives of heroic daring, strange adventure, and generous devotion to the cause of freedom.8

Born in Nice, then belonging to the House of Savoy, Garibaldi began his career as a merchant captain, sailing the eastern Mediterranean in small trading vessels. It was as a coastal trader and entrepreneur that he first encountered the obstacles to trading and shipping set up by the foreign-dominated provinces in Italy. All his life he identified with the entrepreneurial class and promoted business ventures, and it is likely that the unfolding of his liberal doctrine took place in this economic context. The risings of 1830–1831 stirred his patriotic commitment to an almost professional level; he was initiated in Young Italy in the autumn of 1833, and early the next year participated in an abortive uprising in the Piedmontese navy. Now an exile, Garibaldi crossed to South America, forming part of the large wave of Italian immigration to the Americas in the 1820s and 1830s. For a while he captained a coastal trader for his own company at Rio de Janeiro, where he joined the Young Italy group there as well as a Freemason lodge. Freemasonry had inspired the more radical Carbonari movement, and Catholic spokesmen, either in good or bad faith, always confused them. Masonry recruited its members from the educated classes, and had been instrumental in the diffusion of egalitarian political ideals and new scientific theories. Both the papacy and autocratic sovereigns were always suspicious of a secret organization in which freethinkers, Protestants, and Jews met and exchanged ideas in an unorthodox way, but this only brought more revolutionaries and radicals into the Freemason orbit. Although a large number of militant Risorgimento democrats—Mazzini, Dolfi, and Garibaldi among them—belonged to Masonic lodges, Freemasonry was not itself a revolutionary group, but functioned as a type of “front organization” where Carbonari members and Young Italians could meet with people sympathetic to their aims. During the next thirteen years, from 1835 to 1848, Garibaldi engaged in almost continuous fighting, at first in the service of the Rio Grande province of Brazil in its attempt to establish an independent republic, and later in Uruguay against its attempted conquest by the dictator Rosas of Argentina. He formed an Italian Legion in Montevideo that became the prototype of his volunteer forces in Italy. The men of the Legion were also the first to wear the famous “red shirt” that later in Italy became the popular symbol of the Garibaldini. The outbreak of the European revolutions of 1848 gave Garibaldi the opportunity to fight on the hills and plains of his native land. In April of that year, he sailed with sixty of his Legion, arriving in June to join Piedmont’s struggle with Austria. The king, however, who knew him only as a Mazzinian republican and a condemned mutineer and deserter, refused his services. To the king’s embarrassment, Garibaldi practically challenged Austria single-handedly with a brief campaign in the Alpine foothills, until forced to escape to Switzerland with

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the remaining half of his sixty. Garibaldi ultimately wound up in Rome in support of Mazzini, and valiantly defended the infant republic against the French invaders. After the French marched into Rome, Garibaldi escaped and—like so many other European refugees in the period 1848–1860—made his way to the United States. Docking at Staten Island on 30 July 1850, Garibaldi was deeply moved when he glimpsed the Italian tricolor flying with the stars and stripes over the quarantine buildings in his honor. He joined the local volunteer fire brigade and a Masonic organization on Staten Island, the Tompkinsville Lodge, No. 471, where he took degrees. Although he never completed the process of naturalization, all his life he regarded himself as a citizen of the United States. Throughout the 1850s he shuttled around the world, biding his time until the years 1859–1860, when he conducted his brilliant campaigns with his Cacciatori delle Alpi in the Alpine foothills and his Mille (Thousand) in Sicily, paving the way for the proclamation of a new kingdom of Italy in March 1861. Garibaldi had received active and valuable support from Americans during his campaign in Sicily and Naples; American-outfitted vessels—some with names like Washington, Franklin, and Oregon—transported his troops and carried arms and provisions to supply them after the landing at Marsala. His admiration for the United States predisposed him to monitor its internal affairs. During the summer of 1861 at his island retreat of Caprera, he followed with great interest the news of the American Civil War. Escaped African American slaves had fought with him in Montevideo, and he felt strong sympathy for the antislavery cause in the United States, standing firm on the side of the North in the Civil War. The American government actually invited Garibaldi to take a high command in the armies of the North. Secretary Seward sent the American minister in Brussels to Caprera to persuade Garibaldi to accept a commission as Major General in the Union Army. Garibaldi, however, stipulated two impossible conditions for acceptance that abruptly terminated negotiations: he wanted an appointment as Commander-in-Chief and the power to abolish slavery. The symbolic character of his name is already seen in the fact that a Garibaldi Guard was organized in the Northern army, and hundreds of immigrants who answered Lincoln’s call for volunteers marched in review at the Independence Day parade in Washington dressed in the red shirts of Garibaldi’s troops. Garibaldi’s magnetic personality and improbable achievements electrified his contemporaries. Writers dedicated their books to him, and there is such a large body of art and literature devoted to his person and exploits that a blockbuster exhibition was organized around him for the centenary of his death in 1882.9 But artists not only painted him and writers not only novelized him, they fought for him as well, including most of the painters who would later be associated with the Macchiaioli. His extraordinary appeal is exemplified in the statement by a young Italian who had gone to

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Rome to study art and who went down to a piazza one day, merely hoping to catch a glimpse of Garibaldi: I had no idea of enlisting. I was a young artist; I only went out of curiosity— but oh! I shall never forget that day when I saw him on his beautiful white horse in the market place, with his noble aspect, his calm, kind face, his high smooth forehead, his light hair and beard—everyone said the same. He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour’s head in the galleries. I could not resist him. I left my studio. I went after him; thousands did likewise. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him; we could not help it.10

And this was no fickle emotion; eleven years later, in May 1860, the same artist joined the Sicilian expedition to wage an even more daring enterprise.

Cavour The preparation of Italy for the wars of unification had been orchestrated in large part by Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810–1861). The second son of an old noble Piedmontese family, he could not make his way entirely on the basis of family advantages. He ran the family estate at Leri, about twenty-five miles northeast of Turin, and by the introduction of new kinds of chemical fertilizer and farm machinery, and the creative financing and marketing of his agricultural products, he made farming a profitable commercial enterprise. He invested in a variety of enterprises, such as silk and the steamship and railway industries, and in 1842 helped found the Associazione Agraria for the promotion of agriculture in the Po Valley. Cavour evolved into a classical example of one type of Risorgimento leader: a gentleman farmer who believed in economic and scientific progress, and representative government with limited suffrage. Nationalism he understood mainly as an avenue to industrial modernization. In December 1847 he and Cesare Balbo brought out a newspaper under a name that later seemed immensely prophetic, Il Risorgimento. Compared to Mazzini’s program, however, its political policies were mild: the independence of all Italian states; some reduction in their number, presumably by Piedmont absorbing some of the smaller ones in the Po Valley; a league of Italian rulers; and a program of moderate reform. Cavour pursued his goals with tactical brilliance and was one of the first Piedmont editors in 1848 to advocate a Constitution. Five years later he became prime minister under Vittorio Emanuele II, the son of Carlo Alberto. Cavour worked to develop Piedmont’s economy, building railways and encouraging agriculture (especially rice culture) and industry; he believed in free trade both at home and abroad, and under his ministry Piedmont’s foreign commerce more than doubled. As prime minister, he backed and came to dominate the Società Nazionale Italiana (Italian

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National Society), a moderate organization that was not only the first of real national scope but also the first that represented a common meeting ground for all factions working for unification under the House of Savoy. It called essentially for a united front, and drew away many militant republicans from the policies of Mazzini. Garibaldi—whose politics eventually moved him to the left of this group—signed the founding petition and later was elected president of the organization. The Società Nazionale played a major role in the war effort, propagandizing for Italian unity under Piedmont’s king and secretly enrolling volunteers throughout Italy to fight for the national cause. Cavour’s first step in the realization of a war against Austria was to get the support of England and France for his cause and restore confidence in Piedmontese arms. To this end he joined these powers in the Crimean War against Russia (1854–1855) with a contingent of 15,000 crack troops, an act that won allies to his long-term purpose. He was invited to the peace conference at Paris in 1856, giving Piedmont world-class status, and he made such a masterful presentation of Italian complaints against Austria that he won over a major segment of public opinion and persuaded the Concert of Europe to recognize the validity of his claims. Cavour’s plans to defeat Austria turned on Napoléon III, the emperor of France, whose Italian connections, nationalist leanings, and desire for military prestige Cavour assiduously exploited. But for several years it looked as though matters would rest there, until events played into Cavour’s hands. On 14 January 1858, an Italian nationalist, Orsini, threw a bomb at the imperial couple as they were about to leave their carriage for the Opéra. Several persons were killed and injured, but Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie escaped unscathed. The shaken emperor, however, was left with a vastly different perspective on the Italian problem. In July 1858, Cavour and Napoléon III met secretly at Plombières, a spa in eastern France, to plot war against Austria. They agreed that Piedmont would acquire all of northern Italy, including Lombardy, the Veneto, and the Romagna, and that the grand duchy of Tuscany would be enlarged into a central Italian kingdom. These two large states and possibly the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (in the event Ferdinando II abdicated) would then form a confederation under the pope. France would receive Nice and Savoy, and Napoléon’s cousin Prince Jérôme would marry Vittorio Emanuele’s reluctant fifteen-year-old daughter, Clothilde. For Napoléon III the arrangement provided several avenues for increased Bonapartist influence while preventing the formation of a unified Italian state that would threaten France. As tensions mounted, and Cavour hunted for a pretext for war against Austria, Russia and England pressured for peace and France wavered. Austria, however, horrified to see young Lombards and Venetians escape conscription by streaming to Piedmont as volunteers, played right into Cavour’s game plan. It issued an ultimatum to Piedmont so strong that

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Cavour needed only to reply with cautious dignity to have his war. On 29 April 1859, Austria invaded Piedmont, and France went to its aid according to the agreement formulated at Plombières. The conflict was a relatively brief one: in early June the Austrians were seriously defeated at Magenta, in Lombardy, but the Battle of Solferino, three weeks later, was as indecisive as it was murderous. Rather than confront increased discontent at home (the Italian war was unpopular in France), further losses, a long siege, the danger that Prussia might come to Austria’s aid, and the possibility that a unified Italy might result from the war, Napoléon III unilaterally agreed to a truce. The emperors of France and Austria met in the village of Villafranca on 8 July and signed a temporary armistice. Three days later they negotiated the preliminaries of a peace treaty, including ceding Lombardy but not the Veneto to Piedmont and maintaining the status quo of the other Italian states. No Italian soldier or statesman of any rank or position was present at this conference; Napoléon III had gone ahead without consulting his main ally. Vittorio Emanuele accepted the terms of the armistice over the violent opposition of Cavour, who in furious protest handed in his resignation. News of the betrayal at Villafranca stunned Italians of every state north of Rome. Embittered shopkeepers replaced the images of Napoléon III in their windows with portraits of Orsini. The full impact of this event is captured with all its agonizing implications in a work by Domenico Induno, a Milanese artist, who depicted the reaction of an assembly of diverse social types in Milan to news of the treaty (fig. 5.3). One veteran to the left raises his hands in despair; an older man stares off into empty space at the right. Everywhere individuals shrug their shoulders in disbelief, collapse in depression, or appear on the verge of tears. Induno deliberately set the scene in the outskirts of Milan, represented by the Gothic Duomo on the horizon, thereby emphasizing the unselfish devotion of the Milanese to the national concept despite their own liberation. Induno himself, together with his brother Girolamo, had participated in the Milan insurrection of March 1848, and in the aftermath took refuge in Florence. He eventually became quite close to the Macchiaioli, exerting a notable influence on Vincenzo Cabianca’s early work. Induno’s specific topographical site for the context of his scene anticipates the Macchiaioli’s Tuscan backdrops as an expression of Italian nationalism. Meanwhile, prior to Villafranca, mild revolutions accompanied the march of Piedmontese troops throughout northern and central Italy. When local patriots gathered in the streets and square, the dukes of Modena, Parma, and Tuscany simply fled. In these areas and in part of the Papal States (the Romagna), supporters of Cavour—usually members of the Società Nazionale—assumed dictatorial powers in provisional governments that adopted Piedmontese laws and currency and called for elections to representative assemblies. Thus the terms of the Villafranca truce could not be carried out. These governments cautiously went their way, carefully

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5.3  Domenico Induno, Bulletin of 14 July 1859, Announcing the Peace of Villafranca, 1861. Galleria d’arte moderna, Milan.

maintaining order and propagandizing in favor of annexation. After several months they arranged plebiscites on the question of annexation and, when the results were overwhelmingly in favor, Napoléon III could hardly reject them. Vittorio Emanuele now officially accepted the request to rule from the Alps to Rimini, on the Adriatic. For its part, France ultimately received the province of Savoy and the city of Nice, Garibaldi’s birthplace. The hero of the Risorgimento never forgave either Cavour or Napoléon III for this stain on his national memory. The extension of the Piedmontese states was a triumph of moderate liberals with which more democratic nationalists were not wholly satisfied, and nascent revolts in Sicily gave them a chance to lead a different sort of Risorgimento. Mazzini and his followers actively formulated plans and called on the intrepid Garibaldi to lead their scheme for an armed expedition to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They hoped that such a force, uniting with local insurrectionists, would overthrow the Bourbon regime. Garibaldi set sail for Sicily one night early in May 1860 with little over a thousand men, mainly middle-class youths from Lombardy, the Veneto, and the Romagna. No event in the nineteenth century so captured the popular imagination everywhere as that bold undertaking. The expedition was like some ancient epic reborn in the modern age: untrained men (and a few women) wearing the red shirts fought against overwhelming odds and were enthusiastically supported in the countryside. In two weeks Garibaldi occupied Palermo, and within two months he overran almost all of Sicily. On 20 August he crossed the straits to the mainland, on 7 September he entered Naples, and on 1 October he defeated the Neapolitan troops at the battle of the Volturno. All this happened with such lightning speed that the Concert



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of Europe had no time to collect its wits before the action was completed, and even Cavour momentarily lost the initiative to the radicals in the cause of unification. But Cavour skillfully recaptured control. He sent Piedmontese troops into the papal territories of Umbria and the Marches, where they were then to push on and preempt Garibaldi’s proposed march on Rome. This way Cavour appeared as savior of the Risorgimento for both foreign foes and domestic partisans. The Piedmontese armies easily defeated the papal troops, and by the second half of September were in a position to confront Garibaldi. The heavy losses sustained at the Volturno, moreover, and the plebiscite for annexation of the southern provinces weakened the republican position. Garibaldi surrendered his title of “il Duce” and withdrew to his island retreat on Caprera. When in March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, Cavour could momentarily rest secure in the knowledge that his moderate liberalism had triumphed.11 Antonio Gramsci claimed that the most radical faction of the Risorgimento, the Partito d’Azione (Party of Action), “was steeped in the traditional rhetoric of Italian literature.”12 The intellectuals—and this includes the Macchiaioli—that comprised the party confused the cultural unity experienced by a minority of Italians with the political and territorial unity embracing the great popular masses, and were doomed to disillusionment. But unification gave Italy an identity at long last and the Macchiaioli their reason for being. Their struggle to forge a new cultural complement to Risorgimento dynamics had been encouraged by the example of their literary and artistic predecessors. Macchiaiolismo versus Accademismo

The Macchiaioli represented a new cultural formation that took place in Florence just after mid-century and lasted until the late 1860s. The strategy of their dissent took the form of antiacademicism, but in fact was aimed at the foreign, specifically Austrian, domination of Tuscan institutions. Although Grand Duke Leopoldo II was rather lenient as despots went, after the suppression of the Tuscan uprising in 1848–1849 his popularity declined and he became increasingly dependent on Austrian backup. The rigid discipline and authoritarian atmosphere of the Florentine Academy could then be identified with the political order. Under the grand duke, the Academy was “imperial” and “royal,” and one of Vittorio Emanuele II’s official rites of purification when ascending the throne of united Italy was to change the denomination and regulation of the academies. The Macchiaioli participated in the planning of the huge revolutionary street demonstration on 27 April 1859 that overthrew the regime and opened the way for Tuscany to join a united Italy. Their role in the events of 27 April was documented by the eyewitness account of the American painter Elihu Vedder, who was in Florence at that moment and had become

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friendly with Banti, Cabianca, and Francesco Altamura (originally from Naples, but closely associated with the Florentines). This is the way he recalled the circumstances: There had been much plotting in the Caffè Michelangelo [sic]. I had not been taken into the plot, but being a rank republican was considered one of them. So when the final day came, I limped along with the rest to the Fortezza di Basso, and we fraternized with the soldiers. The Italian colours were hoisted and the bands broke out into Garibaldi’s hymn and other patriotic airs never heard before in Florence.

Vedder also informs us about the failure of the grand duke’s strategy to avert the catastrophe, hinting that the painters had a role in this as well: There was a rumour that the grand Duke had sent sealed orders for the forts to bombard the city, and then an officer had said—rather than do that he would break his sword across his knee; it was terrible. The Grand Duke didn’t send to have the orders opened and the sword remained unbroken. On the contrary, the Duke went away with a great quantity of luggage; the crowd assembled to witness his departure remained perfectly silent as his carriages rode out of the gates; it was most impressive. The town was not bombarded or sacked. A few francesconi changed hands when all the boys of the Caffè Michelangelo came out in their new uniforms, but the money remained in the hands of the tailors. That was all the damage done, at least in Florence.13

The retirement of the grand duke was one of the rare bloodless coups in revolutionary history: when he saw the massive turnout of the populace beneath his balcony of the Palazzo Pitti, he simply turned around to his family and told them to pack their bags. Not a shot was fired, not a pane of glass broken. A provisional government was hastily established under the leadership of the moderate Bettino Ricasoli, a nobleman famous for his fine Chianti wine. Meanwhile, Napoléon III, disturbed by the chain of events, sent his nephew Prince Napoléon at the head of the Fifth Army Corps of the French army into Florence in late May with the avowed purpose of maintaining order in the streets and guarding Florentines from an Austrian takeover. On 27 April, the same day that Austria declared war on Piedmont, the grand duke was expelled from Florence. Ricasoli offered the king of Piedmont the dictatorship of Tuscany for the duration of the war with the understanding that a final political settlement would follow the peace. His initial request for troops from Piedmont was declined by Cavour, who felt he could not spare the soldiers, and Ricasoli then turned to the French. On 17 May Napoléon III decided to send Prince Napoléon to Tuscany with the multiple strategy of impeding Piedmont’s ambitions in central Italy, staving off the “socialist” movement that he suspected lay behind the Florence uprising, and intimidating the Austrians.

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The French troops arrived in Florence on 28 May and set up their tents on the great meadow of the Cascine, a park extending parallel to the northern bank of the Arno River. Called the Pratone, this meadow was the site of a racetrack that the Florentine upper classes attended on Sundays. The initial reception of the French troops was enthusiastic, but the spectacle of the troops in the park degenerated into a form of public entertainment. The Austrians never appeared, and the troops grew bored with the daily bivouac routine. Street vendors sold refreshments while citizens and soldiers danced together to the tunes of the military band. The invincible military machine began to expose its soft underbelly, opening itself to question and challenge. It is within this context that we may appreciate Giovanni Fattori’s first experiments in the macchia technique. Like his fellow Tuscans, he was drawn to the Cascine to watch the French troops play at soldiering in the park. His seminal studies eliminate the obvious absurdities of the French presence while yet retaining their anomalous condition, examining them with a sobriety and gravitas that set the tone for the Macchiaioli movement. His Soldati francesi del ’59 (French Soldiers of ’59) attests to a new direction in his work, a shift from the academic history pictures of his teacher Giuseppe Bezzuoli to a type of modern history painting based on perceived experience (figs. 5.4–5). Although his series of studies of soldiers in the Cascine were only tentative, they inaugurated his lifelong fascination with military themes and led to his more monumental Risorgimento battle scenes. The military picture—that is, a scene with contemporary soldiers— permitted young artists trained in the academic tradition legitimately to introduce modern subjects into their work. The spectacular battle was consistent with traditional emphasis on heroic exploits, but at the same time it required careful study of topography, uniforms, the time of day, and even weather conditions. Although no battle painter could avoid sliding into nationalist propaganda, even the most blatant images of military aggrandizement demanded a high degree of realism. Among military artists of the nineteenth century, however, Fattori was unique not only in divesting his scenes of grandeur and bombast but also in depicting battles that his side lost. Obsessed with originality, he developed a unique viewpoint of military personnel, often depicting them from the rear on horseback or standing guard, or against neutral backdrops whose bright reflections and contrasting ground emphasize the isolation and tension of military life. Military life is shown as routinized rather than glorified; Fattori reveals its tedium, it loneliness, its wastefulness, its dreadful anticipation. He derived these insights in part from his exposure to the French contingent on the grounds of the Cascine in late May and early June of 1859. Thus the French Troops of ’59 is a fundamental study that declares Fattori’s new direction and speaks for the outlook of his colleagues. Yet without a consideration of Risorgimento politics its design makes little sense.

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5.4  Giovanni Fattori, French Soldiers of ’59. 1859. Private Collection, Viareggio. 5.5  Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence, 1829. Galleria d’arte moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

The strangely silhouetted troops staggered in pairs are frozen into immobility by the contrasting background, somewhat reminiscent of popular newspaper illustrations of troops in review in a vast open terrain. Fattori’s soldiers, however, seem to hover in midair, and despite the cast shadows they lack fixity of position and project irresolution and uncertainty. Fattori closely observed the distinction between the slovenly troops and the more regal bearing of the officer at the right, but the officer’s body is twisted in expectancy and appears as confused as the infantrymen. The situation of these troops is ambiguous and tentative, and Fattori’s summary technique is well suited for the blurred reality of the French presence in Florence at the time.

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5.6  Francesco Hayez, The Kiss, 1859. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

But Fattori does not represent them as the circus oddities they were for many Florentines. He neither exaggerates nor dramatizes their circumstances; if anything, his study is understated and dispassionate. Like the faceless heads of the soldiers, the picture is deadpan and uninflected. This restraint seems surprising in view of the events of the period and the excitement and enthusiasm for the Risorgimento. Yet it is in exactly this sense that Fattori and his fellow Macchiaioli address the history of their time—not in the romantic, swashbuckling mode of their romantic predecessors like The Kiss by Francesco Hayez, who looked to the past for the energy lacking in the present—but in the day-to-day unfolding of events (fig. 5.6). The lack of emotion and the corollary realism of the macchia are based on a candid appraisal of the visual facts on the ground rather than on a projection of the good things to come. The many disappointments and disillusionments attending the compromised Risorgimento did not allow for positive anticipation. This detachment is the foundation of Macchiaioli empiricism and progressive materialism. The Ricasoli Competitions

During this same period, Fattori and his colleagues made their initial entry into official Risorgimento culture. The Provisional Government under Bettino Ricasoli decreed a series of competitions for fine artists on 23 September 1859. The proposed themes were directly tied to Florentine history and the recent events of the Risorgimento. Considering the sad state of the Tuscan economy following the expulsion of the grand duke, foreign observers questioned the new government’s willingness to allocate a relatively large sum of money for the encouragement of the fine arts, no matter how noble the enterprise. As they were soon to discover, however, the contests constituted one component of a huge propaganda campaign. Ricasoli exploited the press, public ceremonies, and even cultural events to prepare the public to accept Tuscan annexation to the Italian union as a fait accompli. Ricasoli reached this decision only after slow and painful deliberation. He had not at first wished for the expulsion of the grand duke, and even fled Florence the night before the public demonstration. The actual work

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of the “pacific revolution” was carried out by the Left on the night of 26 April. But the departure of the grand duke and the overwhelming enthusiasm for Piedmont in its struggle with Austria convinced Ricasoli that his best interests lay with Sardinia-Piedmont under Vittorio Emanuele II. Moderate-to-conservative Ricasoli feared revolution from below and invasion from above. He set out to persuade his peers that fusion was the will of the majority, even though autonomists clearly outnumbered the others. But except for a tiny reactionary faction who enjoyed privileged positions in the grand duke’s court, almost all the liberals and radicals united in their opposition to a restoration of Leopoldo II. In September 1859 Ricasoli sent a deputation to Turin to offer Tuscany to Vittorio Emanuele; the Sardinian ministers only blanched at this gesture. Napoléon III, on being consulted, vetoed union as premature. The king was in a quandary; he hesitated to accept the offer without France’s consent, and yet, as the self-proclaimed leader of the Italian cause, he could hardly refuse it. In the end he gave the Tuscans an audience, agreed that their votes would represent the true manifestation of the will of the Tuscan people, and promised to maintain their cause before the great powers of Europe, but said nothing of union. No one except Ricasoli could have taken this response as anything but rejection. But Ricasoli could not be stopped in his movement toward union. He seized on the verbal vagueness and simply pretended that the king had accepted. Ricasoli announced that Tuscany and Sardinia were now one; he ordered a Te Deum sung in the church of the Santissima Annunziata; the city was illuminated as if for a festival, and a huge image of the king was spotlighted and surrounded by tricolor banners in front of the Palazzo Riccardi on the Via Larga. By the end of the year, Ricasoli’s iron will won the day: Napoléon dropped his opposition to Piedmont’s expansion into central Italy, and now sought the acquisition of Nice and Savoy as compensation. It was in the critical month of September 1859, when Ricasoli gambled on Turin and Paris to meet his demands, that the famous art competition was announced. Both the French and the English recognized its propaganda potential. On 14 September the French consul wrote to his boss Walewski (who at that time made it a cardinal point in his policy to prevent the incorporation of Tuscany into Piedmont) that the Tuscan government was desperately attempting to win over public opinion and to neutralize the leverage of both Vittorio Emanuele and Napoléon III. He noted the pomp of Ricasoli’s parades and the fanfare of the review of the National Guard—all geared to consecrate annexation as an accomplished fact. And in his letter describing the contests he commented laconically that there was much more “in these liberal dispositions than the stated intentions which have dictated them.”14 The 23 September decree creating the competitions was published in the progovernment newspapers. Its opening statement appealed to the

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Tuscan people’s pride in its artistic tradition: “Considering that in Tuscany the fine arts were always the noblest part of its civility, and that a National Government has the obligation to support them in whatever way is worthy of them, [we] summon them to externalize great deeds and great men.”15 The decree called for monumental equestrian statues of “The King, Vittorio Emanuele” and of Napoléon III to be erected in the Piazza dell’Indipendenza. It specified that these monuments were not simply decorations but meant to commemorate and perpetuate the memory of the “two champions of Italian independence.” In addition, two statues of the same rulers were proposed for Livorno, and a series of sculptures of leading Tuscan intellectuals and heroes of the Risorgimento from Lucca, Siena, and Pisa. Next, four historical compositions of ancient and modern themes were suggested: Mario the conqueror of the Cimbri, Frederick Barbarossa conquered by the Lombard League, and two recent events of the Assembly of Tuscan Representatives voting the incompatibility of the Austro-Lorraine House and presenting Vittorio Emanuele with Tuscany’s decree of annexation to the Throne of Italy.16 Another category comprised four military scenes of the battles of Curtatone, Palestro, Magenta, and San Martino. Four other works of military episodes were open to candidates who could choose their own theme. Finally, there were six portraits of the Risorgimento pioneers—Vincenzo Gioberti, Balbo, Carlo Troya, Silvio Pellico, Giovanni Berchet, and Giuseppe Giusti—who had advanced the national cause through their writings, and engraved medals depicting Tuscan Representatives resolving not to recall the Austro-Lorraine House, and voting to form part of “a strong throne under the constitutional scepter of the king Vittorio Emanuele II.”17 No document could be more telling of the interaction between culture and politics during the Risorgimento. Ricasoli designed the competitions to declare and reinforce the propaganda campaign in favor of unification. Like the French government competitions of 1830 and 1848 that opened official commissions to the broader community of French artists—which Ricasoli surely looked to for his model—his own competitions would embody his platform in the form of visual documents that concretized the dream. Every one of the subjects had been carefully selected to link the glorious Florentine past to the heroic present, and to proclaim union with Piedmont as an established fact. By persuading Tuscan peoples that unification was not only inevitable but a present reality, the competitions helped prepare the public for the plebiscite that took place the following March. Fattori’s Entry

The main prize in the battle category fell to Giovanni Fattori’s sketch entry for The Battle of Magenta. Thus the national competition offered the young Macchiaiolo the opportunity to paint his first major military picture (fig.

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5.7  Giovanni Fattori, After the Battle of Magenta, 1860–1862. Galleria d’arte moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

5.7). He deviated somewhat from the subject proposed in Ricasoli’s decree to portray Il campo italiano dopo la battaglia di Magenta (The Italian Camp after the Battle of Magenta). His decision to paint the aftermath of battle rather than one of its peak moments was predicated in part on the peculiar circumstances of the Italian relation to the conflict, but it was also consistent with his original spin on the military scene. Since Italians barely participated in this combat, it would have been inappropriate to depict a heroic charge or clash of opposing armies involving their troops. Fattori’s approach is consistent with that of his understated macchia depictions of the French soldiers in the Cascine. He sets the scene in a panoramic stretch of the actual battlefield, with the horizon line above the figures in the foreground. Two groups of soldiers, Italian and French, are separated by a road on which an ambulance has momentarily halted. The ambulance is run by Sisters of Charity, one of whom treats a wounded Austrian soldier while another signals to an Italian infantryman for help. The mounted French officers and their standing subordinates alike regard the sight of the passing Italians with respect. The Italians in turn march in formation, seemingly unaware that they are being observed with deference. During the defense of Rome in 1849, the French general Oudinot declared contemptuously that “the Italians do not fight.” Ten years later the French learned to see the Piedmontese troops in a different light. Fattori’s take on the theme was daring and original, demonstrating the veristic macchia sensibility and passion for fact. As indicated earlier, the idea of the macchia was not confined to quick painted sketches but involved also finished works in which the initial light effect constituted a pictorial nucleus. The macchia in this sense becomes the formal leitmotif of the picture, informing its ultimate tonal values and

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local color in a vibrant ambiance. We know that Fattori traveled to the site in 1861 to sketch the topographical details, but it is not clear where he derived his information for the painted sketch and for the cartone (cartoon, or magnified detailed drawing for transfer to the canvas) required by the competition. He may have had access to photographs taken at the site. The Macchiaioli were deeply affected by photography, a medium whose growth in mid-century Florence had been stimulated by tourism. Evidence of Fattori’s debt to photography emerges in a comparison of his picture with the French painter Ernest Meissonier’s Napoléon III at Solferino, exhibited at the Salon of 1864. Meissonier, who was present at this second major battle of the 1859 war, takes a different viewpoint, but his work displays several features in common with Fattori’s Magenta. The French troops are situated on the height of Monte Chiaro looking across to the medieval square tower, La Spia, and the battle is in progress in the plain below. Meissonier directs our gaze to the right of the general staff on the hill where we see horse-drawn ammunition wagons waiting in reserve. Fattori, with a deeper and more personal understanding of the significance of the outcome for the Risorgimento, brings us nearer to the field than Meissonier, who distances his French audience from the Solferino carnage. At the same time such important details as the enemy dead in the extreme left foreground, the disposition of the mounted officers, and the wagons are similar in the two works. Since it is unlikely that the artists would have seen each other’s work, it is probable that they relied on a common source such as photographs or wood engravings reproduced in the illustrated periodicals. We may appreciate Fattori’s point of view by also contrasting it with the composition of another French military painter, Adolphe Yvon, whose Magenta, 4 June 1859 centers on a lone French hero at the heart of the design (fig. 5.8). Yvon’s rendition is a much bloodier encounter, as the charging Colonel Tixier steps over Austrian and French dead and wounded in trying to instill courage in the hesitant Zouaves. Yvon’s inflated visual rhetoric is especially evident when set alongside a newspaper illustration of the same scene (fig. 5.9). Fattori on the other hand plays down chauvinist propaganda, refusing all forced centrality and exaggerated heroics and even eschewing combat while displaying respect and compassion for all sides. He wishes to capture something almost indefinable that passes unarticulated between the French and their Italian ally. His evident respect for his own countrymen is depicted modestly without the histrionics or mawkishness typical of nineteenth-century battle painting. It approximates more closely reportorial illustration of similar phenomena, but with the advantage of having been structured with hindsight. That Fattori seizes on the motif of the ambulance is no coincidence since the medical treatment of the wounded was a controversial issue during the wars in Lombardy. The fact that neither side at the battles of Magenta and Solferino had made adequate medical preparations for their

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5.8  Adolphe Yvon, Magenta, 4 June 1859, 1863. Musée National du Château, Versailles. 5.9  The War.—Attack on the Church of Magenta. Reproduced in Illustrated London News, 2 July 1859.

casualties aroused public opinion against the callousness of both France and Austria. It was the sight of thousands of wounded and dying men lying uncared-for on the field of Solferino that stirred the Genevan Jean Henri Dunant to publish his observations urging the formation of some neutral international agency to bring relief to those who fell in battle. His efforts led to the creation of the International Red Cross. Fattori’s central placement of the ambulance divides the French and the Italians formally but unites them thematically. The white tunic of the wounded victim seen in the front of the ambulance indicates he is Austrian, and spotlights one of Dunant’s most poignant themes. He observed at Solferino that enemy wounded were given inferior care by the victors, a situation requiring a medical team that would treat both sides with equal compassion. Zobi’s Cronaca, however, reported that local volunteer women’s organizations provided health care “for all suffering humanity, not making distinctions between friends or enemies.”18 This is one source of inspiration for Fattori’s original twist on the battlefield theme, attesting to his nationalist yet antiwar sensibility: the French and Italian troops are mediated by the ambulance moving diagonally between them, carrying Italian nuns and French and Austrian wounded. Fattori views war not in the mythical sense of glory, honor, and patriotism but as an occasion to create a singular community whose members are bound by common suffering. A sheet of drawings by Fattori in the collection of the Uffizi displays on one side a study of one of the nuns for the Magenta and, on the verso, studies of Garibaldi’s troopers for the painting Garibaldi a Palermo (Garibaldi at Palermo, 1860–1862) (fig. 5.10). The work testifies to Fattori’s immersion in the military events of 1859–1862. it may be said that these “back-to-



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back” sketches parallel the back-to-back episodes unfolding in the drama of unification after Magenta. The next major development was Garibaldi’s unprecedented campaign in the south and the taking of Palermo against overwhelming odds on 31 May 1860. Garibaldi’s band of volunteers, I Mille, “The Thousand,” inspired numerous popular prints and paintings. Many of these show Garibaldi in heroic attitudes, planting the national tricolor at Marsala after disembarking (fig. 5.11) or leading the garibaldini in a charge against vastly superior numbers. Fattori’s picture, however, eliminates all taint of romanticism and melodrama. A battle is in progress, as the garibaldini attempt to break through the barricade set up by the Neapolitan troops in front of the Porta Nuova next to the Palazzo Reale. Fattori ingeniously suggests the continuity of the action by catching falling debris in midair that actually casts shadows on the building façades. Garibaldi himself, accompanied by his officers Nino Bixio and Stefano Türr, is shown observing the scene calmly on horseback, despite the fact that fierce fighting took place in the area and Neapolitan warships shelled it into ruins. Although Fattori’s painting shows us the poised general, it reveals him neither as invincible hero nor as Quixote-like adventurer. Thus, even at the peak of Risorgimento glory the painter understates any atmosphere of flag-waving. Yet Fattori always attributed his macchiaiolo sensibility to the influence of the Risorgimento as it unfolded in the critical period 1859–1861. In an autobiographical statement, he recalled that 1859 represented “a revolution of redemption for both the country and its art, out of which emerged the Macchiaioli.” He defined the focus of their new movement as a fresh inquiry into the nature of reality and its rendering by truthful impressions, opposite 5.10  Giovanni Fattori, Garibaldi at Palermo, 1860– 1862. Private Collection, Montecatini. right 5.11  Garibaldi and His Army Arriving at Marsala,

lithograph, 1860.



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and left no doubt that this practice constituted an authentic revolutionary status for himself and his colleagues: “A furious war was waged against me, I was chased out of art like a renegade [rinnegato].”19 Fattori’s understanding of the radical Risorgimento origins of the Macchiaioli is seconded by Signorini’s published comments on the Caffè Michelangiolo in the Gazzettino delle arti del disegno in 1867. Responding to criticism from a Milanese critic that the group had evolved into a kind of “parish church of the Arno [La Chiesuòla dell’Arno],” Signorini considered the nature of collective action generally, but had the Macchiaioli in mind when he reflected that it had originally banded together in “good faith to form an association and socialism.” Their broadly shared goals were translated into action when the French emperor set out to support the Italian revolution, for “we then became revolutionaries and soldiers, in order afterwards to become free citizens of a great nation.” At that moment, Caffè Michelangiolo became deserted as at least two-thirds of the group enlisted in the volunteer corps [corpi franchi] or in the regular army. Signorini then concluded the article: If the artists failed to fulfill all of their great political dreams, the experience nevertheless offered them a great advantage and a new infusion of vitality that allowed them to get involved in the active life of the countryside, to quit the studio for a time, to see new things, to invigorate the body with more force and courage, to develop more fully the moral tone of the mind and stimulate them to produce with maximum power and energy the recent scenes of camp life.20

Thus Signorini unmistakably credits the radical, the socialist side of the Risorgimento as the catalyst for the genesis of the movement, an admission that he reaffirms in the opening paragraphs of the follow-up article. There he notes that immediately after the wars of unification, those who remained faithful to the reunions of the Caffè Michelangiolo began to exhibit their first tentative experiments, “which passed from aspiration to effort, from effort to research, and finally to accomplished fact.” Freedom of conscience and reason were their primary guides in seeking, “with an anguished desire for progress, la macchia, that is, the clear expression of chiaroscuro, and marked the first step of progress towards modern art.”21 The provocative debut of the Macchiaioli experimentalists is bracketed by the announcement of the Ricasoli contests in September 1859 and the inauguration of the first Italian National Exposition exactly two years later. Fusion of Tuscany with Piedmont became official fact in March 1860 when the Florentine plebiscite overwhelmingly favored union. One year later, a parliament representing all of the recently united provinces met at Turin and, by the grace of God and the will of the people, conferred on Vittorio Emanuele the new title of king of Italy. Following the sudden death of Cavour in June 1861, the king turned to Ricasoli to assume the functions of prime minister. Ricasoli now set about organizing a symbolic

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expression of the winning of the geographical unity of Italy (still minus Rome and Venice). This celebration took the form of the momentous Italian National Exposition that opened in Florence just three months after Ricasoli replaced Cavour. Several of the paintings done for the Ricasoli contests, including Fattori’s still unfinished Magenta, were exhibited at the landmark Esposizione Nazionale of 1861. Although by now Ricasoli had achieved his central goal, he wanted to vaunt Tuscany’s historical role in unification—the thematic emphasis of the 1861 exposition. The organizers made no attempt to conceal the politics of the exhibition: it was opened in Florence by the king himself on 15 September 1861. He wished to persuade his domestic and foreign critics that he had in mind not just the expansion of the Piedmontese state but also the interests of the new nation of Italy.22 He concluded that a major exposition on the order of those in London in 1851 and Paris in 1855, but confined mainly to the peninsula, would have the effect of binding the diverse factions into a psychological whole. By 1861, as Denis Mack Smith has noted,23 a professional and business segment, allied to a new middle class of landed gentry, broke up the traditional power of the landowning aristocracy allied with the Catholic Church. This group enthusiastically supported the moderate Risorgimento because they recognized that nationalism and liberalism would promote their prosperity. Ricasoli himself makes an excellent case study: he won a medal for his Chianti wine display at the fair, and his energetic support of unification was inseparable from his understanding that a divided Italy made industry—in particular the wine industry—inefficient and noncompetitive abroad. The elimination of protectionism and restrictions imposed by the occupying powers of Austria and Spain, as well as the chance to appropriate confiscated church domains in a cheap market, had obvious appeal. This new dominant group was well represented in the National Exposition, and it was really for them that the show was organized. The Macchiaioli collective exhibited twenty-two paintings in the exposition, all painted between 1859 and 1861, five of which represented explicit Risorgimento themes. These included Borrani’s Il 26 aprile 1859 (The 26th of April, 1859), Signorini’s La cacciata degli Austriaci da Solferino (The Expulsion of the Austrians from Solferino), and Fattori’s Magenta. Borrani’s work, purchased by crown prince Carignano, enjoyed wide public and critical esteem (fig. 5.12). It is perhaps one of the most important examples of a “finished” macchia where one senses the chiaroscuro effect of the initial study. Borrani searches for strong light and dark contrasts—manifested most vividly in the narrow window opening onto the gloomy room and the sunlight falling on the bloused white sleeves of the seamstress. The admiring critic “Yorick” declared that he could in no way pass over in silence “the delicate idea of Signor Borrani, who in a young woman seated in an attic-chamber, totally absorbed in her work on the tricolor flag, wished to express the eve of the peaceful Tuscan revolution (26 April 1859).” For

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those, like Yorick, who recalled that happy day when the grand duke was sent packing, the picture was “a gracious souvenir and a faithful reproduction of the truth [del vero].” Here, perhaps without realizing it, the critic summarizes the aspirations of the Macchiaioli—shared by the most advanced thinkers of the Risorgimento—to be modern, national, and truthful.24 The female subject of the painting labors in a hidden nook of the building, concealed from prying eyes. She is part of the conspiracy that will disclose itself on the morrow, in the full light of day. Contemporary remarks on her appearance indicate that she is from the upper classes, further

5.12  Odoardo Borrani, The 26th of April, 1859, 1861. Private Collection, Florence.



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confirmed by the Renaissance chair on which she sits. Hence she belongs to the inside circle of the conspirators—Giuseppe Dolfi, Ermolao Rubieri, and Piero Cironi. Despite his Mazzinian working-class sympathies, the wealthy Dolfi’s plea for annexation and his major role in organizing the 1861 exposition demonstrate his affiliation with the upwardly mobile class that was in the process of wresting power from the old ruling alliance. The Risorgimento was never a mass movement, but included politicized groups such as liberal nobles and segments of the upper, middle, agrarian, and artisan classes. Thus it was in Dolfi’s villa on 26 April that plans for the overthrow of Leopoldo II were hatched and the green light given for the massive demonstration that took place on the following day. Dolfi also supported the Macchiaioli and facilitated their entry into the 1861 exposition. Like them, he concluded that compromises with their socialist ideal were necessary to assure Italy’s advance along the trajectory of modernity. The shift in political and economic conditions expressed itself in the revolt Dolfi orchestrated. Early on the morning of 27 April almost the whole of the city’s population poured into the streets. The signal and rallying point everywhere was the tricolor flag hoisted on major public buildings. Throngs comprising all classes waited to see the tricolor raised, signaling the overthrow of the foreign tyrant. The banners and flags that proliferated in the ensuing days were sewn and embroidered by women, an act that in a sense announced a rejuvenation of their traditional role by putting their domestic skill to work for the revolution. Nevertheless, Borrani’s female protagonist moves beyond the stereotyped role analyzed in the Pre-Raphaelite chapter; she is privy to the revolutionary scheme and participates as one of the plotters. Her environment is not the typical domestic foyer but a concealed corner of an old Florentine building inhabited by the wealthier classes, and is identified with the Renaissance past through such accessories as the chair and the halberd draped with tricolor ribbons that leans against the wall. A combination axe and pike, the halberd was used mainly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thus linking present and past militancy. Finally, Borrani’s Italian Betsy Ross is a strong, unsentimentalized presence whose scrupulous devotion to her task suggests something of the creative artist at work. She adds a feminist note to both the Risorgimento and Macchiaioli painting, an issue we will return to presently. Religious and Social Themes

Jews played a major role in the Macchiaioli circle, including several key patrons such as the geologist and geographer Gustavo Uzielli and olive oil merchant Laudadio della Ripa, uncle of Vito D’Ancona—one of the members of the Macchiaioli community. D’Ancona and Serafino De Tivoli, the other Jewish member of the group, were democratic activists who vigorously participated in the Risorgimento battles. In 1848 they joined the Tuscan volunteers and fought at Curtatone and Montanara, and the following

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year De Tivoli fought under Garibaldi in the defense of Rome. The condition of Italian Jews was central to the policies of the architects of the Risorgimento, since their anticlerical arguments especially targeted religious discrimination. Democrats and even moderate liberals hoped to benefit from the abolition of all educational and social barriers against non-Catholics. Until every ethnic minority in Italy was free, they claimed, “freedom” would remain an empty abstraction. They viewed the presence of ghettoes in Italian cities as a symbolic contradiction of the church’s preachments on love and humanity, and these outmoded urban blights provided a prime target for Risorgimento polemics. It is therefore not surprising that many Italian Jews threw themselves heart and soul into the movement. Jewish communities in Venice, Rome, Milan, and Livorno pledged their money and their bodies to the revolutionary regimes in 1848 and during the years of unification. Already on the night of 17–18 April 1847 Mazzinian rebels from the Trastevere area in Rome (including Fattori’s future friend the landscapist Giovanni Costa) broke open the gates of the Roman ghetto that traditionally had been shut at the hour of Ave Maria. This revolutionary act of Giovine Italia was symptomatic and symbolic. The barriers that religious intolerance had until now opposed to all forms of independent thought were to be broken down, beginning with the gates of the ghetto. Mazzini’s short-lived Provisional Government ordered their destruction and the restoration of full civil rights for Jews. In Venice, the home of the original ghetto, the Republic proclaimed on 23 March 1848 was led by Daniele Manin, whose paternal grandfather was Jewish. In the early days of January 1848, the Jewish community there asked Manin to incorporate the demand for the complete social emancipation of the Jews in his reform program. For Jews, the Risorgimento assumed a double function: by fighting for a free, united Italy they imagined themselves to be fighting for self-emancipation. Hence the rejoicing of the Jewish community in Venice on 11 March 1848, when the victorious republican government declared that henceforth “the citizens of the United Provinces of the Republic, whatever their religious faith, shall enjoy perfect equality of civil and political rights.” Unfortunately, the defeat of the revolutionary regimes and the subsequent reaction swept away all these gains. Jewish disappointment, like the general disillusionment, was one of the bitter fruits of the general disaster. After the Treaty of Villafranca, the Veneto remained in the hands of Austria, and amid the celebrations in Milan and Florence, Venice was mourned as if dead by Lombards and Tuscans who had achieved union after the wars of 1859. Thus it is not wholly fortuitous that the work taken as the generative production of the Macchia movement is Signorini’s Il Ghetto di Venezia (The Venice Ghetto, ca. 1860) (fig. 5.13). Founded on 10 April 1516, the Venetian ghetto was the first enforced zone of residence for Italian Jews,

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5.13  Telemaco Signorini, The Venice Ghetto, ca. 1860. Private Collection, Milan.

and the space that set the example for urban slums down to our own day. Signorini’s painting first showed at the Promotrice exhibition (municipal exhibitions sponsored by local patrons) in Turin in 1861, where it created heated controversy for its exaggerated “chiaroscuro.” The artist himself later referred to it as one of his most “subversive pictures”; the use of the term in this instance surely implied more than its antiacademic technique. His choice of Turin as the city in which to introduce the painting was significant, for it was not only the capital of Piedmont and of the new Italian state but was also one of the most liberal on the question of Jewish civil rights.25 Signorini must have counted on this favorable climate for the reception of his theme. He painted it at a time when his patriotic impulses were strong, when there was a growing market for Risorgimento themes, and when artists were pressed to submit patriotic works for the 1861 exposition. He had been discharged from the Tuscan artillery in October 1859 and spent the following winter in Florence. At the 1860 Promotrice he exhibited two military subjects, including L’artiglieria toscana a Montechiaro (The Tuscan Artillerymen at Montechiaro), purchased by Prince Eugenio

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5.14  Telemaco Signorini, The Tuscan Artillerymen at Montechiaro Saluted by the French Wounded at Solferino, 1859–1860. Private Collection, Valdagno.

Carignano of Savoy (fig. 5.14). He then made a special trip to Solferino for his military picture displayed at the National Exposition—The Expulsion of the Austrians from Solferino (1860). Signorini’s Venice Ghetto horrified portions of the public by its depiction of an ugly mass of seedy tenements with living quarters piled story upon story in narrow, cavernously dark streets. Wretched, hopeless ghetto dwellers are slumped dejectedly in corners or stroll listlessly. This is no ordinary picturesque genre picture but a pitiless, unsentimentalized examination of conditions akin to those described by Massimo d’Azeglio in his analysis of the Roman ghetto: It is a formless mass of houses and hovels that are badly kept up, in constant need of repairs and falling half apart. In it vegetates a population of 3,900 souls, in a space where even half that many would live badly. The narrow streets, which are choked with people, the lack of air, the constant dirt which is the inevitable result of forced overcrowding, all of these factors constitute to make this area sad, ill-smelling and unhealthy.26

Using his macchia technique to emphasize the gloomy archways and dark alleys, Signorini clearly tried to adumbrate an analogous vision. His harsh sunlight operates as a glaring penetration into the shadowed corners, an environment that rarely saw the light of day, and whose denizens lived so close to the edge that survival required shunning it. Signorini’s macchia technique exposed the frayed textures, the sickening smells, and the grimy aspects of ghetto life.

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5.15  Giuseppe Abbati, The Cloister, ca. 1861–1862. Galleria d’arte moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

Like Fattori and Borrani, Signorini avoids dramatic and emotional devices. He depicts an ordinary moment in the lives of the ghetto inhabitants rather than a festive holiday or ceremonial ritual. The macchia is deployed specifically to objectify the conditions of a particular repugnant corner of Italian society. Although the image may now seem tame to us, it struck the conservative segment of the Turin public as unremittingly ugly, a vision of a world they would rather avoid, or, at best, glimpse in a more agreeable guise. At the same time, no one could have missed the fact that the Venice Ghetto was a metaphorical image of a Venice still bound to Austria. The shock of the Treaty of Villafranca, which left the Veneto under Austrian rule, fell heavily on the Venetian people, and contemporary descriptions characterize the people as martyred, mangled, and bleeding from every vein—enduring an ancient yoke like the Jews of the Old Testament. Reports in November described the people as oppressed and desolate, steeped in “gloomy, sullen silence.” In this sense, Signorini’s robot-like figures are taken as general symbols of Venice’s depressed population. The call for Jewish emancipation reflected the larger issue of religious liberty, and although overt themes of the prevailing anticlericalism and thrust toward secularism are absent in the work of the Macchiaioli painters, they are indirectly suggested in their typical laid-back methods. One such example is Giuseppe Abbati’s Chiostro (Cloister, ca, 1861–1862), one of a series of macchia studies he did during the restoration and renovation of the Gothic church of Santa Croce (fig. 5.15). Its central motif—the piled-up marble blocks and the low cloister wall on which a lone youth sits—hangs

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in the central zone like Fattori’s French soldiers, emphasizing a horizontal disposition favored by the Macchiaioli. Santa Croce was one of several buildings in Florence restored between 1857 and 1863, the first stage of Florentine “Haussmannization.” Although some of these restorations began prior to the fall of the grand duchy, they were continued and paid for out of a special tax on the city’s householders. It was resented at the time that some foreigners attributed the improvements to the grand duke, since they were the decision of the municipality in the first instance and had nothing to do with the state government. The façade of Santa Croce was paid for in part by the convent and private donations. These improvements were perceived as an expression of civic pride that developed apace with the Risorgimento and reached a peak in the wake of independence and annexation. Abbati, who began his career as a painter of religious interiors, exhibited three of his works at the National Exhibition, all interiors painted in Santa Maria della Novella (also undergoing renovation at the time) and San Miniato al Monte. It was during the period of the exposition that Abbati’s attachment to Florence began to express itself in macchia experiments. In 1860 he joined Garibaldi’s Thousand, and in the battle of Capua in early October, he lost an eye. Two years later he rejoined Garibaldi on his aborted March on Rome and agonized through the tragic episode of Aspromonte. During the interval, he met Serafino De Tivoli, who introduced him to the Caffè Michelangiolo crowd. Abbati’s politicization in this period is shown by his rejection of the medal offered him by the jury of the National Exposition; he had joined a group of dissident exhibitors who refused to recognize the jury for its conservative disposition. As is the case for Fattori and Signorini, Beppe Abbati’s early experiments in the macchia are inseparable from his political engagement. His approach to Santa Croce is in fact a remarkable case of artistic and philosophic self-restraint, consistent with the understatement and objectivity of the macchia in general. Rejecting conventional spectacles of grandiose church imagery, he looked to the sections of the church under repair or restoration. Even in the larger, more finished work, Il chiostro di Santa Croce (The Cloister of Santa Croce), where monks read or stroll in the shadow of the cloisters, the half of the picture exposed to sunlight shows the work site with day laborers loading stones and marble blocks onto a cart; here chiaroscuro represents not only a formal opposition but an ideological and dialectical confrontation between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa— signifying a force for change (fig. 5.16). Abbati’s self-restraint appears even more remarkable when we recall the importance of this medieval edifice in Florentine history. The church may be called the Pantheon of modern Italy, for here are buried some of Florence’s greatest heroes, including Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo, and Alfieri. The popular poet of the early Risorgimento, Ugo Foscolo, wrote his masterpiece, Dei Sepolcri (On Tombs, 1807), with the Santa Croce

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5.16  Giuseppe Abbati, The Cloister of Santa Croce, ca. 1862. Giacomo and Ida Jucker Collection, Milan.

in mind. Foscolo takes Santa Croce not only as the temple of Florentine grandeur but also of Italy as a nation, where the ingathering of the Italian heroes makes the city the symbolic focus of the Risorgimento. In addition, Santa Croce became a site of popular demonstrations and civic action throughout the decade of the 1850s including the postliberation phase.27 What Abbati accomplishes is a conversion of the churchly and aristocratic codes of the conventional projections of religious institutions into a popular secularized space of repair and renovation. He divests Santa Croce not only of its religious sanctity but also the glorified, heroic associations celebrated by Foscolo. Yet Abbati has not abandoned Santa Croce as a patriotic emblem. He depicts it in a fresh and modern context. His accomplishment, and that of the Macchiaioli generally, was to encode Italian culture as a channel of communication for the contemporary ideals of the Risorgimento. Abbati’s Cloister, with all its apparent innocence, embodies a democratic and scientific insight compatible with the new, secular attitude. The absence of hierarchical social caste, like the absence of hierarchical churchly trappings, makes Abbati’s flat macchie—expressed most vividly in the marble blocks and their contrast with the darkened area of the cloistered walks—a leveling experience, akin to the principle of nationalism itself. Italian Feminism

It is this consciousness of the leveling aspect of their art that makes much Macchiaioli imagery seminal in still another respect, its fresh examination of the role of women in Italian society. Although often showing women in their traditional spaces, the home and the garden, the Macchiaioli portray

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them with a directness and sense of dignity that is rare in mid-nineteenthcentury painting. Nowhere is this more evident than in the remarkable series of paintings done by Silvestro Lega in the 1860s. Lega’s radicalism was nurtured by Mazzinian ideals that articulated a consistent program for the liberation of women.28 In The Duties of Man (1858), dedicated to the Italian working classes, Mazzini declared unequivocally that the emancipation of Italy required the full emancipation of women. He admonished his readers to consider women as full and equal partners in all attempts at social amelioration in civil and political life.29 Lega’s Il canto dello Stornello (Singing the Stornello) portrays three stately women in an interior bonded through their performance of a folk song (fig. 5.17). The woman in the center fingers her chin awkwardly as she simultaneously sings and contemplates the lyrics. The pianist also intones the words, while concentrating on hitting the right keys. The whole work has the gravity of a religious rite, bringing to mind the monumental figures and silhouetted profiles of the early Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. In this male-less space, the women neither pose nor behave self-consciously but use their leisure time to act together in a meaningful way. 5.17  Silvestro Lega, Singing the Stornello, 1867. Galleria d’arte moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.



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Their bodies press close together and they sing in harmony, their lips parted almost identically. The ritualistic harmony is a metaphor for national unity and the new female promised by the most radical thinkers of the Risorgimento. The stornello was a folk song that often recounted the status of women in the past. Folk songs helped shape the social attitudes of children and adolescents, showing them the time-honored path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage. They allowed a venting of feelings in conventional form that might otherwise be tabooed. Stornelli often consisted in an improvised defiance suited to the company, ending with some kind of refrain or chorus that the group sang in response. It is this exchange, and its uniform metrical system, that makes the stornello unique. Lega shows us this exchange in his painting, the moment of the refrain when the group answers the first singer. Alessandro Falassi, who has written brilliantly on Tuscan folk traditions, reveals the wide variety of stornello themes and the ways by which they encoded the rebellious ideas of the younger generation. 30 For example, referring to a boyfriend not favored by a mother, a young woman might sing: “I want a husband of my own choice / Because it’s me who has to be with him, not her.” Other unorthodox songs threatened escape or a marriage “in the woods without a priest.” Sometimes the woman would chide the king for taking the country’s youth: “Vittorio Emanuele, what are you doing?/ You want all the best of the youth, / And what will we do with the old ones?” During the Risorgimento, stornelli assumed a patriotic gloss, amplifying the character of the Tuscan folk song. One of the most popular was the one that followed the Tuscan volunteers on their way to battle when the cause of unity hung in the balance: Farewell, farewell, my fair one! The army goes on its way, If I did not march with it, I would be a coward.31

Although it is tempting to conjecture that Lega’s group sings a patriotic stornello, the precise nature of their song is less important than the way they are portrayed singing it. This is no Pre-Raphaelite morality play or impressionist moment of carefree abandon; it is a vision of Italian femininity on the threshold of independence. The three women stand by an open window looking out to distant fields and hills—a contrast between nature and the civilized refinement of the impeccably groomed women and fashionable interior. The bright, clear light that streams in dissolves the membranous wall separating inner and outer realms, suggesting future possibilities. The private but exclusive space commanded by the women expands into the wild and potentially hostile realm beyond.

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Lega’s Il pergolato (The Trellis, 1868) is set in a typical Florentine villa garden with a trellis walk (fig. 5.18). The long pergola formed the shady arbor that offered respite from the afternoon heat and was the place where hosts and their guests took refreshments. The pergola served as the symbolic focus of villa life, the sign of leisure; the real labor in the sun was left to the peasants. The tension between work and leisure is the dominant motif of the painting. The central figure under the arbor turns her head at the approach of the young female servant who strides in from the right bearing a pot of coffee. More precisely she carries una caffettiera napoletana, a favorite utensil of the period and part of the daily ritual of the upper classes. The mistress’s abrupt reaction to the servant is emphasized by the profile silhouette of her body and frontally turned head. This establishes an unusual dynamic, reinforced by the arrangement of the trellises and the low wall on which the central woman sits. The composition follows a step-like pattern, echoed by the disposition of all the females. The tension between the hostess and her domestic is as much social as it is formal; a gap is established between the classes. The upper-class woman’s facial expression, mingled with expectation and self-awareness, is countered by the confident and selfcontained look and posture of the servant. Indeed, the servant’s bearing is as regal as that of her mistress, and Lega carefully aligns their heads at the same level though the latter is seated. Again, the general compositional movement expresses the social theme; the women are organized around the angular pergola structure leading to 5.18  Silvestro Lega, The Trellis, 1868. Galleria Brera, Milan.London News, 1849.



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the approaching servant and then back again along the diagonal leading past the mother and daughter into the field beyond. Lega would seem to be preoccupied with the intergenerational transmission of political values in the social relations he establishes. The child motif, which became increasingly important to Lega in the next decade, is crucial here as a sign of political socialization and metaphor for Italy’s future. Lega, however, consistent with Macchiaioli verism, advances this idea without flourish or fanfare, subtly incorporating it into a scene of everyday Tuscan upper-class life. The Macchiaioli endeavored to create a landscape appropriate to modern Italy. This meant accurately capturing its light, its soil, and its social relations in the rapidly unfolding Risorgimento as it assumed various twists and turns in the evolution of the new Italian state. They eschewed embellishment and drama, confronting its compromises and contradictions as honestly as possible in accordance with their understanding of events. Their strategic embrace of the group’s designation by hostile critics allowed the Macchiaioli to legitimatize their radical effort. They emphasized the need to be spontaneous and therefore “Italian.” Starting as a shorthand technique for grabbing nature on the run, the macchia was gradually perceived by its proponents to be a dynamic liberating principle and a means of manifesting italianità—the expression of their Italian identity through their personal perceptions of the changing Italian environment and its born-again citizens.



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6 Cultural Inflections of Slavery and Manifest Destiny in America

opposite 6.1  Hiram Powers, America, plaster, ca. 1848–1850. American Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.



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One notable work of sculpture exhibited at the first Italian National Exposition was by the Yankee Hiram Powers and bore the title America (fig. 6.1). Despite his New England pedigree, Powers had settled in Florence in 1837, raised his large family there, was appointed professor at the Accademia in 1844, and remained in the Tuscan capital until his death in 1873. He closely identified his interests with the Florentines and the Italian Risorgimento, joining the citizens in a large demonstration in 1847 to press the grand duke to maintain independence from Austria. He continued to support Italian insurrectionary movements in 1848, and it is clear from his participation in the 1861 exposition that he sympathized with the recent unification of Italy under the aegis of the Piedmontese government. His allegorical personification, executed in marble in 1858, embodied his dual national loyalties and benefited from a propitious moment when America served as a role model for Risorgimento ideals. The United States had provided asylum for many Italian refugees and exiles during the period 1848–1860, and its press compared Garibaldi to Washington, the Risorgimento to America’s struggle for independence. Powers conceived of his statue in 1848 as a tribute to the revolutionary forces of that year, and hoped at the time that Congress would purchase it for the Capitol. It invoked the iconic images of the 1848 French competition for the figure of the Republic, mixing specific American attributes with traditional emblematic accessories. Partially nude, the statue is crowned by a diadem decorated with thirteen stars (for the thirteen original colonies), and the first plaster showed the figure stepping forward with her left foot on a manacle, emblem of despotism, which he subsequently switched to broken chains in the marble. Her right hand leans on the fasces of unity, whose faggots are arranged to resemble a fluted pillar. The sculptor’s biggest problem with the work devolved on the choice of an attribute for despotism, and he experimented at various times with the idea of crown, scepter, chains, and manacle. The failures of 1848, however, and the growing sectional crisis in the United States over slavery

invested the allegory with fresh signification. By 1849, Powers envisioned America as emblematic of both Italy and the United States. For Italy’s defeated revolutionaries it would serve to illustrate that the ideal of national unity persisted and could still usher in the type of republican government established in the United States, while it would serve as a warning to U.S. citizens that they faced potential disunity and the sectional disharmony rife in Europe. Indeed, Powers added a laurel wreath to the fasces to emphasize the importance of national cohesion. He outlined his new plan to a friend in November 1849: Suppose the union dissolved upon the slave question. Quarrels would soon arise between various governments. . . . The strongest would subjugate the weakest who would then become slaves, and so it would be until we should all be slaves, and have kings. . . . I am doing something in my small way to illustrate the advantages we enjoy, the dangers which we must guard against and the means by which we must preserve our liberties. I am endeavoring to embody our political creed.1

Powers also wavered over the introduction of chains beneath America’s foot, concerned that it might “not be noticed as having some relation to slavery in America.” Then he began to regret that the presence of the chains would be viewed negatively by Southerners, especially given the heated climate in Congress over slave extension. He finally resolved to put chains in the work but now insisted that they referred to freedom generally rather than to black emancipation. He added them in 1855 in a burst of anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise. In response to the bill’s passage, he scornfully proposed a new version of the statue that would show her “holding on high” a banner in one hand with the inscription “all are born free and equal,” and, in the other hand, a cat-o’-nine-tails held over a “‘nigger’” kneeling at her feet begging for mercy.2 By 1857, Powers could foresee the sectional disharmony erupting into civil war, and he expressed resignation to the fact that his allegory would again be rendered irrelevant by events. Although as late as 1860 he continued to insist that the work bore no allusion to black slavery, after the Civil War he applied this connotation to the work: “It represents our country with her foot on slavery, broken and destroyed forever.”3 Thus it is possible that Powers charged the statue with this meaning when he exhibited it at the Italian National Exposition in 1861. The Civil War had broken out several months earlier, and his agonized response may have found an outlet in this celebration of Italian unity. His work was favorably received by Italian critics, one of whom described it as “America rising to a new life and trampling on its chains”—a clear reference to the Civil War. Elsewhere, in reviewing Tito Conti’s representation of Columbus receiving support from Ferdinand and Isabella to sail for the New World, the same critic

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rhapsodized about America: “If you had not had slavery and syphilis [mal francese] truly you would have been the promised land.”4 Powers’s oscillation and ambivalence in fixing meaning to his allegory arose from the historical circumstances and his dual role as American abroad preaching the virtues of unity and freedom while glimpsing the reality on the ground in his native land. During the era 1848–1871, American democracy was put to the test as its tolerance of human bondage threatened to discredit its pose as the model of liberal institutions. What brought the issue into the full glare of national debate was the growing sectional tension of the two decades leading to civil war. Seven new states joined the republic between 1840 and 1860, the nation’s land now covering more than three million square miles. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 transferred to the United States a vast new territory that comprised the future states of California, Utah, and Nevada, along with large portions of Arizona and New Mexico. The idea that providence had destined the country to continued expansion went practically unchallenged in the national arena, but it raised the vexatious issue of whether slavery should be permitted to develop into the newly acquired territories. Hence the delimited institution of slavery seeking a broader space of operations and the unlimited vision of Manifest Destiny were paradoxically linked and mutually destructive. Outraged by the Wilmot Proviso, which proposed exclusion of slavery in the territories, and by growing abolitionist attacks, many Southerners who supported the ideal of Manifest Destiny now questioned the value of the Union itself. By the end of the 1840s, the controversy precipitated a national crisis that came to a head in 1850 with a tortured compromise that settled nothing but managed to keep the Union intact for another decade. In 1850 there were fifteen states on each side of the line, a balance tipped in favor of the North when California was admitted. The South’s disadvantage would only increase as the North’s population and number of states increased, so the Wilmot Proviso’s proposed application to future territory foreclosed on any hope of admitting additional slave states, thus fixing the South in a perpetual minority status. Although passed three times by the House of Representatives, the Wilmot Proviso failed to win a majority in the Senate and never became law. Disruptive elements threatening “disunion” in the Thirty-first Congress assembling in December 1849 hunkered down when Kentucky’s Henry Clay proposed that California enter as a free state, that a fugitive slave law be passed to please the South, that new territories in the Southwest be organized without the Wilmot Proviso, and that Texas be compensated for surrendering its claims to part of New Mexico. Although Clay’s compromise bill was defeated, Stephen Douglas, who replaced Clay as floor leader, came up with a similar plan that passed both houses. His Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, the territories of Utah and New Mexico to be organized on the basis of popular sovereignty, and had a

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harsh provision for a fugitive slave act that permitted slave owners and their agents to pursue and seize alleged runaway slaves in Northern territory. It was her anger over the Fugitive Slave Act that prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write her celebrated novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, appearing in book form in 1852. By the end of the year, three hundred thousand copies had been sold, winning thousands of converts to the antislavery cause. Between the Compromise of 1850 and the outbreak of civil war ten years later lay the mounting tension over the issue of slavery and its role in the expansion of the nation. By 1860, most Southerners concluded that the North was not merely content with containing slavery where it existed but bent on its total elimination. When both sides saw the sectional problem as a moral issue, the breach was inevitable. War News from Mexico

6.2  Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848. National Academy of Design, New York.



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The successive crises of the 1840s and1850s manifest themselves in the art of the period in various nuanced ways depending on the politics and culture of the artist. A genre painting (see volume 3) of 1848 by Richard Caton Woodville entitled War News from Mexico most vividly dramatizes the intersection of art and politics in the period (fig. 6.2). Woodville portrays an excited group of white townsmen clustered around a central figure who, with mouth agape, reads a newspaper marked “extra” on the front porch of a Greek Revival structure. The newspaper, symbol of a popular press, is the focal point of the picture, narratively as well as pictorially. The rectangular shape of the periodical is in turn enclosed within the larger rectangle of the porch, surmounted with a pediment with a sign displaying an eagle and the words “American Hotel.” Within this repeating rectangular configuration, a secondary triangular shape is established by the seated figures on either side of the standing reader. On his left-hand side, the diagonal extends beyond the portico and is terminated by the forms of two black bystanders, a male who sits uncomprehendingly on the bottom step of the porch, and a young girl, who also wonders what all the excitement is about. Both of them, as well as a white female servant in a bonnet glimpsed in a window at the far right, lie outside the rectangular structure enclosing the white male patriarchy and, chapter six

by inference, outside the protective container labeled “American Hotel.” The blacks and the white woman have been consigned to the bottom of the social, as well as the visual, pyramid. The surprise registered by the reader and the absorption of his immediate audience strongly suggests that the headlines recount the treaty that terminated the Mexican War, which was signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848. The treaty was opposed in America by both those who wanted more territory from Mexico than the treaty secured and those who wanted no Mexican territory at all. The variety of expressions on the faces of those who see or hear the news suggests the diverse opinions on the terms of the treaty. American nationalist and jingoist aspirations—firing the hopes of Southern sectionalists but sharply dividing Northerners—now saw the United States becoming a transcontinental republic and a power in two oceans. All this, of course, was at the expense of a Mexico now reduced to one-half its original size. Woodville’s hint at rampant patriotism is seen in his emblematic devices and select clientele at the “American Hotel.” In addition to the visual and social exclusion of the two African Americans, they are contrasted intellectually and materially with the whites on the porch: the latter respond with immediate grasp of the announcement, whereas the former turn apathetically in the direction of the agitation, the body of the man remaining hunched over in immobility. While the townspeople are distinguished by their fashionable clothes, the blacks wear tatters and rumpled castoffs. They just barely earn a place in the composition. This despite the fact that the war news from Mexico deeply affected the slave issue and led in a straight line to the sectional crisis that culminated in the Civil War. The critical linking of slavery and expansionism—indeed, Southern dreams of Manifest Destiny were fueled in part by the prospect of new slave territory—does not register in the conduct of Woodville’s blacks, but only in the behavior of the white men at the top of the pyramid. Nevertheless, Woodville could not elide the African Americans altogether, and their presence in the work grants them a measure of status as “hidden witnesses” to the event.5 Woodville hailed from Maryland, a small border state with a small slave population, whose population responded to the prospect of civil war with deep division between its American loyalty and its Southern affiliation. Although it would remain in the Union orbit, it opposed coercion of its Southern brethren. Woodville’s ambiguous display of the blacks in his picture metaphorically points to the ambivalence over the slave issue in the border state even as early as 1848. George Caleb Bingham

Bingham, who, as has been shown in volume 3, did a visual chronicle of the frontier, became closely identified with the culture and politics of Missouri.6 Like Peale, Allston, Morse, Catlin, and Audubon, Bingham

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could never adopt the exclusive label of artist in the modern mythical sense of a creative being living in splendid isolation from the world. Bingham was at once a professional politician who ran successfully for state office, an indefatigable entrepreneur who promoted his work through the sale of engravings, signs, and parade banners, and, finally, a gifted portraitist and painter of the American Scene. Although anti-Jacksonian at the start of his career, Bingham’s identification with the Midwest and moderate Whig politics marked him as a prime example of the American “juste milieu.” When Missouri split into secession and national factions, Bingham painted a glorious equestrian portrait of Jackson to remind Democrats favoring disunion of their founder’s condemnation of nullification and secession three decades earlier. His political hero was Henry Clay, author of the Whig economic policy known as the “American system,” which provided for high tariffs to protect American manufacturers from European imports and help create a larger domestic market for the agricultural products of the South and West, a national bank to establish a uniform currency, and federal taxation to stimulate internal improvements. Clay spoke for middle-of-the-road politics, and it was he who sponsored and inspired several landmark compromises, including the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850. Although initially he condemned Polk’s declaration of war with Mexico, he supported the war effort once it began. A Kentucky slave owner, Clay never challenged the chattel laws but considered colonization and gradual emancipation as possible solutions to the crisis over slavery. He held stereotypical views of the Indians, although on humane grounds he defended Indian rights and opposed the harsh effects of Indian Removal. He claimed that Indians were inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race, impervious to civilization and doomed to extinction.7 Bingham absorbed many of these positions in his thought and work. We left off volume 3 with a discussion of Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, painted in 1851–1852, and noted the omission in the picture of the slaves who formed part of Boone’s contingent in 1775, an absence first highlighted by Lubin.8 The group of settlers led by Boone in 1775 actually included a number of black laborers, among them a “body servant” killed in the Indian attack on 25 March.9 Although the issue of slavery had not yet reached the boiling point, at the time Bingham painted the picture the sectional dispute had taken a new turn as a result of the European revolutions of 1848 and the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies. Elected as representative of Saline County to the Missouri state legislature from 1848 to 1850, Bingham focused on the issues of the Mexican War and Missouri’s position on slavery during the legislative session. Indeed, a series of pro-Union resolutions on the subject formulated to counter the pro-South Claiborne Fox Jackson resolutions (introduced in the Missouri General Assembly in 1849 and denying the right of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories of the United

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States) bore Bingham’s name. The “Bingham Resolutions” attempted to placate extremists on both sides, declaring that although Congress was authorized to legislate on matters relating to slavery, for the sake of unity it should not. His position allied him to Missouri’s leading statesman, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who also wished to prevent the expansion of slavery into the new territories. (Bingham’s pro-Benton position cost him the support of his party, and he decided not to run for a second term in 1850.) Both were pragmatists who hoped to avoid exacerbating the sectional rift which they feared would destroy the Union. Like Clay, the core of their ideological struggle was neither the extension nor restriction of slavery but the continuation of the Union at any cost. Benton in fact, trying to show his impartiality, vaunted his support of Indian Removal as a great favor to the South, making possible the cultivation of their plantation system.10 The attitude of Benton and Bingham toward black people was not unlike that of most Southerners: Benton classified them as an “inferior race” and owned slaves,11 and Bingham’s family had been slave owners for generations. Bingham possessed at least six slaves in 1853, and his brother Henry and other relatives in Arrow Rock held slaves as late as 1860. Bingham’s political constituency in Saline County were heavy slaveholders, and his closest friend, Rollins, owned twenty-four slaves. Benton condemned abolitionists and their pictorial propaganda for inflaming “the passion” of slaves, and warned that a San Domingo–like insurrection could occur in the American South. Always using the Union as his pretext, he claimed that “quieting the South depended upon quieting the North; for when the abolitionists were put down in the former place, the latter would be at ease.”12 Thus it is likely that Bingham’s lily-white expedition of Boone’s is not only a repudiation of the territorial expansion of slavery in his own time, but a disapproval of blacks in the signal work of Manifest Destiny. This attitude is evident in his visual marginalization of African Americans in works supposedly representing a slice of American society, “illustrative of the manners of a free people and free institutions.” In his claim to being the “Missouri Artist,” Bingham would have to share the responsibility for the state’s slaveholding institutions and for its 1820 Constitution containing a free black exclusion clause.13 Although Missourians had agreed not to enforce the clause against blacks from the free states, free blacks in the state were denied the right to vote, to give evidence in court cases involving whites, to request poor relief, to attend public schools with white children, to serve in the state militia, or to marry outside their race. Bingham revealed his true colors in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, when he railed against the “Emancipationists,” whose most radical faction he suspected of wishing to drive “the present population to leave the State, that their places may be filled by voters who will assist in maintaining a strictly Abolition party of the Charcoal hue.”14 Even as late as 1870, when he finally acknowledged emancipation, he persisted in conceptualizing blacks in stereotypical terms:

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The enfranchisement of the negroes is an accomplished fact which marks the beginning of a new era in our history, and the proper enlightenment of the new sovereigns cannot be safely neglected. Even if their skulls are as thick as they are supposed to be we must find means to penetrate them, or Skalawags and low demagogues will be uppermost.15

Finally, Bingham expressed delight when President Rutherford Hayes withdrew the remaining federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana in 1877, thereby ending the commitment of the nation to giving equal rights to newly enfranchised African American citizens.16 Visual evidence of his attitude is seen in the The Verdict of the People, a work of the mid-fifties that culminates a series of political subjects; it depicts a single black in the shadowy left-hand margin pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cider kegs, cups, and crockery (fig. 6.3). Like the lone black in The County Election of 1851–1852, he is rendered almost totally invisible by his marginality and the submerging of his stooping body below the clusters of voters huddled into various combinations. Curiously, the light that illuminates the smiling, portly man facing front just behind the African American stops short of falling on him. The eye of the black man seems to be attracted by the watermelon being sliced directly across his path, reducing him visually and thematically to the stereotype in a scene purportedly portraying a microcosm of American society. Planning for the project that he would subsequently entitle Stump Speaking, Bingham noted that he intended to place in the background “a watermelon waggon over which a darkie, of course, presides.”17 6.3  George Caleb Bingham, The Verdict of the People, 1854–1855. St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri.



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Not all the whites in The Verdict of the People are shown to advantage either—one clerk casts a sinister shadow across the voting results with a nose as long as Punchinello’s—while other participants reveal florid grinning faces and rosy-hued bulbous noses, coarse grimaces reminiscent more of political broadsides than of serious genre painting. Although Bingham always appealed to the popular theme of the “people” to bring home his democratic principles, he shared with his fellow Whigs in Missouri an elitist political cast that gave the lie to his stated devotion to the “common man.” A demure group of women look down on the noisy crowd from the safety of a sheltered balcony, while their banner flutters with the message “Freedom for Virtue. Remember the Ladies.” This demeaning slogan seemingly calls attention to benevolent female influence in charitable and moral causes, but in the context of a male-centered event impacting “the real world” of politics it downgrades women’s activism. The sign not only defers to universal male suffrage, but also negates the space so recently opened up by the first Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848 held at Seneca Falls, New York. Here the delegates adopted a statement that paraphrased the Declaration of Independence, affirming that “all men and women are created equal.” Ironically, Seneca Falls was in large part a response to the exclusion and segregation of female abolitionists at the 1840 World’s AntiSlavery Convention in London. It was their work as antislavery proponents and their encounter with patriarchal abolitionists that heightened their own self-awareness. Bingham, who disliked abolitionists of either gender, especially delighted in ridiculing politicized women. Perhaps Bingham’s most dramatic use of African American types is in his controversial painting Order No. 11, the first version of which he began near the end of 1865 (fig. 6.4). The theme is a melodramatic presentation of an actual historical incident that occurred when Bingham served as state treasurer of Missouri.18 Although the state ultimately remained in the Union, the internal conflicts and widespread brutality near the Kansas border by marauding guerrillas loyal to the Confederacy required drastic action. On 25 August 1863 General Thomas Ewing, then in command of the federal military district centering on Kansas City, issued his notorious “General Order No. 11,” which proclaimed that all farm residents with few exceptions, loyal to the Union or not, living in the border counties of western Missouri would be evicted by force and their property destroyed if they did not abandon their homes voluntarily within fifteen days. Bingham directly accused Ewing of excessive methods that would do more harm than good, but the officer claimed that his action was militarily justified. (Bingham actually had a stake in the area, since it included the property of his wife’s recently deceased father.) The ensuing events bore out Bingham’s projections, as corrupt military and civilian personnel exploited the opportunity to plunder and confiscate the possessions of, and, in a few cases, wantonly murder, the dispossessed victims.

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6.4  George Caleb Bingham, Order No. 11, 1865–1870. Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati.

Although Bingham’s painting of the event focused on the border clashes in western Missouri, it was originally registered under the title “Civil War,” suggesting a wider field of allusion. Local reviewers, however, insistently used the title Order No. 11 to designate the subject, and this is how it came to be popularly known. The picture centers on “a venerable patriarch and his family, who have just been ejected from their dwelling, which is about to be committed to the flames.”19 The old man defiantly confronts the officer in charge, while a daughter clings to him imploring him to temper his language so as not to provoke the officer, who threatens him with the act of drawing his pistol. Another daughter kneels before the officer and begs him to spare her father, while the son of the household lies dead and his grief-stricken wife bends over him. The patriarch’s wife has passed out in the arms of their African American maid, while off to the right a weeping black man hurries from the scene with his son, who wears an expression of fright and horror. Here the blacks, akin to stereotyped female representations, function as bearers of emotion and witnesses to inhumanity. As seen in previous examples, they operate marginally as spectators and not as direct participants. The black “mammy” constitutes part of the core group, but she is shown kneeling on the ground carrying out the task of supporting her mistress and the grandchild. The two African Americans exiting the picture have crossed a vast spatial gulf, signaling both their homelessness and social isolation. It is no coincidence that the pair bears a striking resemblance to The Expulsion by Masaccio, a quotation that establishes a parallel between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and the abandonment of the blacks now left to their own resources. Bingham’s interest here, however, was not

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in the issue of newly enfranchised slaves, as might be expected from the date of the work’s execution. Instead, as he explained his theme: These facts of history, such as I have presented on my canvas, have no necessary connexion with the sale of negroes by Yankees, or their purchase by Southerners. They teach a lesson which previous history had taught our fathers, but which our children of future generations should understand, namely: that the tendencies of Military power are anti-republican and despotic, and that to preserve Liberty and secure its blessings, the supremacy of Civil Authority must be carefully maintained.20

Bingham here defends his interpretation by narratively discounting the repercussions of the event on the former slaves, and whether or not they will be treated as chattel to be pillaged like other household goods. Yet in the same voice that he rejects imperial despotism and upholds civil liberties he shows indifference to the liberty of the “good Negroes” who remain faithful to the family they now must abandon. (He was especially contemptuous of liberated slaves marching in uniform as Jayhawkers under Colonel Charles Jennison’s command.21) As in Boone Escorting Settlers, freedom is meant to be the privilege of white male Anglo-Saxons embodied in the ever-defiant patriarch, who dominates the composition. It is not surprising that some reviewers understood the work as sympathetic to proslavery secessionists, and that Bingham was forced to defend himself against these accusations. Although admitting that his family were slave owners, he denied that they were Confederate sympathizers. He also rejected the notion that he had painted slavery propaganda; the work portrayed loyal citizens and faithful servants whose lives had been violently disrupted by enemies of law and order disguised as Union soldiers. Yet although he placed heavy emphasis on civil liberties and the need to maintain “the supremacy of Civil Authority” over the military, he could not envision African Americans as citizens protected by the very constitutional guarantees that he invoked in defense of his depiction of Order No. 11. Lilly Martin Spencer

Bingham’s female counterpart and contemporary Lilly Martin Spencer could serve as a prototype of the Jacksonian “common woman”—tough, resolute, and ambitious. Not that there was anything common about her life and thought, but she did paradoxically embody the much-cherished independence and entrepreneurial mobility of the ideal male type trumpeted in this period. Writing home from Cincinnati to her psychologically and economically depressed mother, she asserts that she is “determined to brave all difficulties, and to preserve courage and spirit, for there is no other way to get through, and we will get through. We will be happy, rich, and all together, both here in Cincinnati and in our dear little home of Tupper

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ford.” Admitting that there was no lack of competition from well-off male portrait painters able to advertise and promote their work, she remains undaunted: “But I shall beat them all, I hope, one day.”22 Eventually, she not only became the most popular and widely reproduced female genre painter of the time, but she mobilized genre painting’s most appealing traits into what has become our definitive notion of the category. Of course, for many years this operated to her disadvantage, along with the general art historical disdain of American art that plagued the field until the late 1960s, but now that she has been fully rehabilitated she stands out sharply as a pioneer of this type of aesthetic production. As she wrote home in July 1847, following an exhibition of her works in the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts: I mean to become a Michel Angello [sic], if I possibly can. . . . I plan to try to make my paintings have a tendency toward moral improvement, at least as far as it is in the power of painting. Oh! a fine painting has a beautiful power over the human passions and mankind needs all the more [what] powerful minds can do in the way of writing and painting.23

Here Spencer reveals her complicity in the construction of a middle-class identity, her desire to deploy her art didactically as a guide to a higher moral standard compatible with emergent middle-class ideals. Born in 1822 in Exeter, England, of French parents who gradually made their way West across the United States, Spencer was raised on the American frontier. Although her parents, Angélique Perrine Le Petit and Gilles Marie Martin, were both gifted and highly educated teachers held in the highest esteem by their fellow citizens, their social and political beliefs, nurtured by utopian socialist ideals, predisposed them to envision a rural and semi-communal lifestyle for their children. They left for America with the intention of establishing with other English families a self-sufficient community in Pennsylvania. Although the original scheme failed to materialize, the parents never gave up the dream of a cooperative reform society and even settled for a time in the mid-1840s on a Fourier-type phalanx near Braceville in Trumbull County, Ohio. Eventually, her local work brought Lilly to the attention of Nicholas Longworth, the wealthiest man in Cincinnati and the city’s most prominent art patron. Longworth, who made his fortune in real estate and viniculture, was eager to play benefactor to local talent to help raise the cultural level of Cincinnati and establish it as the dominant metropolis of the Midwest. Flattering Longworth for his dedication to the arts, Thomas Corwin wrote him on 23 February 1847: “I believe our Queen City will soon be renowned for something besides hogs. If her representatives in politics were as famous as her artists, both here and abroad, we should speedily have the Capitol, or at least those who rule there, in Cincinnati.”24

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Longworth’s interest in young Lilly Martin may be understood as his own attempt at refinement and as an expression of philanthropic and civic concern meant to balance the vulgarity and materialism associated with “Porkopolis”—the Queen City’s flip-side reputation for hog raising and meatpacking. He lost no time in establishing himself as Lilly’s protector with advice to forgo a planned exhibition in Cincinnati on the grounds that she lacked the requisite experience to exhibit in a major cosmopolitan center. He would have preferred to see her in Boston, where she could receive the best education and “be near to meet with gentlemen of taste, who will show her all possible attention.”25 As the child of social radicals disappointed in their quest for the elusive utopia, Lilly had early made up her mind not to follow the same road. Her own instincts were more conservative, more in line with rugged Jacksonian individualism and laissez-faire economics. Although a note of her parents’ feminist protest occasionally echoes in her work, it never occupies the foreground of her imaginative realizations. Ironically, however, it was the radicalism of Angélique and Gilles that made her career possible: not only their self-sacrifice in behalf of her talents, but their wholehearted commitment to overcoming the obstacle of gender bias, to giving Lilly the full range of options available to males in their era. She in turn refused their idealism with the very independence of spirit that they had inculcated in her. When the Fourierist experiment seemed to be floundering at the beginning of 1848, Lilly wrote condescendingly to her parents that she prayed for the success of the phalanx, for should it “not succeed, dear parents, it would be a dreadful thing for you.” She concludes by referring to the recent insurrection in France, and her only response is how dreadful it would be “if the reign of terror will come again.”26 Fouriérisme—American Style

Angélique Le Petit’s fierce independence is seen in her radical critique (signed “A Mother”) of the Founding Fathers that she sent to the fiery abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Displaying a contempt for the contradictions of the Constitution that allowed for slaveholding and disenfranchisement of one half the nation—mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters—she claimed that the would-be liberators of monarchical tyranny transformed themselves into “kings at home.” And she linked slavery and female oppression in a manner consistent with the keynote theme of Seneca Falls: The men of America having allowed themselves through selfishness to fall in so gross and unjust inconsistency in their most sacred natural relations, of course did not show themselves more scrupulous in their more antagonistickal [sic] relations of Masters and Slaves. So your brothers the chevalric [sic] slaveholders, who declare themselves the champions of republican principles, that is, the reign of



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all the people, said, “not only we shall reign like our brothers of the free states, over our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, but we demand to do what we please with our brother slaves and you shall help us to do so.27

Angélique Le Petit’s friend Sarah Bagley attacked abolitionists for another inconsistency, that of alignment with the owners of capital against their factory hands: Many of those who contend warmly for the emancipation of slavery that does not affect their own interest or position are ready to rivet the chains to the present factory system with all its abominations, upon the operatives of Massachusetts, miserable inconsistency! Who can be right on this subject, but those who labor for universal emancipation.28

Ironically, Fourierist critiques of “wage slavery” were also used by southern proslavery advocates, again revealing the potential of the system to be exploited by various political ideologies. It is perhaps in this context unsurprising to come upon stereotypical images of blacks in the work of Lilly Martin Spencer, an aspect of her work



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opposite 6.5  Lilly Martin Spencer, Height of Fashion, lithograph, ca. 1850. 6.6  Lilly Martin Spencer, Power of Fashion, lithograph, ca. 1850.



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still not adequately discussed in the burgeoning literature devoted to her. A pair of early works, Height of Fashion and Power of Fashion, mock young black children mimicking the elegant postures of the upper classes (figs. 6.5–6). The young girl in Height of Fashion wears oversized hand-me-downs and grins at the viewer through a “quizzing” or connoisseur’s glass, while the young boy in Power of Fashion sports tattered garments and flamboyant turban while smoking a large cigar in a dark alleyway. If these depictions have not yet crystallized into the vile “sambo” stereotypes of the late nineteenth century, they nonetheless reveal disadvantageous characteristics serving vulgar comic purposes on the order of minstrelsy. Spencer often exhibited in popular venues like the art unions and mechanics’ institutes, where her broad humor resonated with a compliant audience. The mere fact of depicting the youth with a cigar betrays Spencer’s canonical portrayal of children, whose most mischievous pranks never transgress the boundaries of wholesome well-being.29 As in many other genre representations of blacks by white artists in this period, the children are made the innocent butt of a cruel joke in which the white spectator could recognize futile aspiration and empty pretense. Unlike the white children whose existence metaphorically suggested the national potential, black youth typically embodied indolence, incapacity, and negligence. Spencer’s black pair is funny to whites in attempting to look ambitious while forever condemned to the peripheries of American life. They will never be able to actualize the future they pretend to in their makeshift disguises, and this is communicated in their knowing glance at the spectator who seemingly catches them in the act. Spencer, as the mediating gaze of dominant society, sees only idle, wasted lives as well as the contentment that supposedly accompanies them. The lithographs of these works proved to be among Spencer’s most popular sellers, done by Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Lafosse and published by Goupil’s New York agent, William Schaus, who also printed the genre scenes of Bingham and William Sidney Mount. Akin to Mount’s The Banjo Player and The Bone Player, Spencer’s blacks are depicted as grinning for the benefit of an international clientele. A decade later Spencer painted The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic: A Day to Remember, in which the two black children, having grown into adulthood, now serve the upper class they formerly mimicked (fig. 6.7). Once again they participate in a comic episode, although the central motif of the picnic outing is itself a slapstick presentation of a sprawling Benjamin Spencer—fallen from a tree swing not sturdy enough to support his corpulence. As the black male servant in the lower right gleefully watches the action, he unwittingly spills the contents of a wine bottle into the lap of a fashionably dressed lady guest not amused by the incident. Meanwhile, the young black nanny keeping a blond baby distracted with her accordion turns to observe this unexpected outcome and grins broadly. While the teeming scene is filled with smiling merrymakers, the blacks with their toothy grins and bright red lips are the least attractive and most caricatured cultural inflections of slavery and manifest destiny in america

6.7  Lilly Martin Spencer, The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic, ca. 1864. National

Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.



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of the participants. Typically, they occupy the periphery of the composition, outside and away from the congested, lily-white center. Spencer painted this picture during the Civil War years, and national allusions pervade the scene: indeed, the pyramidal figural grouping is crowned by a child held aloft on the shoulder of an adult waving an American flag. Perhaps the fall of the father metaphorically points to the potential change in the old social order, and temporary loss of control over its various constituents. The racist representation of the two blacks, irresponsible and unthinking, may then suggest an amalgam of fears and projections attendant upon war’s end. Although blacks in New Jersey (where the work was painted) were free, the realization of emancipation and the prospect of mass migration of blacks northward gave pause even to some abolitionists. Hence the destabilizing images of the blacks in Spencer’s picture still reinscribe and perpetuate the structure of racial domination implied in Height of Fashion and Power of Fashion. One last example of her depictions of African Americans, Blind Faith, belongs to her late production, but is considered here because it is somewhat reminiscent of her comic genre paintings of the 1850s and consistent with her previous stereotypical renditions (fig. 6.8). Importantly, it is also one of the few works by her for which there are elaborate descriptions written in her hand. One was a synopsis in a letter to an unknown correspondent: chapter six

A coloured girl and her beau, who has just come to see her, and she to try, and to show his faith, tells him, “Open your mouth, and shut your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you wise.” Which he, in his unbounded trust in her, does to the utmost of his facial powers, while she, hesitating, and giggling, looks at the spectators and puts in an unfortunate catty-did [sic], brought to her probably by the little Topsey, washing dishes in the background.30

6.8  Lilly Martin Spencer, Blind Faith, lithograph, 1890s.



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Spencer’s picture represents a dense, claustrophobic environment in which the four players act out the bizarre drama. Although in many ways consistent with her love of exaggerated grimace, all the black protagonists again seem to be sillier, more childlike, and more caricatured than their white counterparts in her work. She claims that the “dark beauty” is acting comparable to many a “fairer type” who would deceive her beau, but in her narrative this test of “blind faith” assumes a cruel form quite alien to her standard productions. Like the child smoking a cigar, she not only transgresses the boundaries of acceptable middle-class behavior but even exceeds the customary parameters of her exaggerated visual humor. The idea of inserting a large, live grasshopper into someone’s mouth is repugnant to say the least, a sadistic joke hardly in the same league with getting slapped with molasses or dusted with flour (favorite Spencerian themes). Yet no one in the picture observing the action expresses horror or outrage; the joke amuses the older generation represented by the mother as well as the young servant girl in the background washing dishes. Here it would seem that Spencer reduces black people to the level of insect-eaters, and, indeed, the way the male grasps his knees and opens his mouth gives him a froglike appearance. What is also different about her representation of African Americans is the performative role of the woman, who dangles the wriggling creature in front of her beau while glancing directly and knowingly at the spectator. Spencer frequently allows her protagonists to directly address the spectator to invoke his or her participation, but in this case the female protagonist is not playing the joke on the spectator but having it performed for his or her benefit. Thus what Spencer does is to compel the blacks, both perpetrator and victim, to serve up entertainment for a white audience. Spencer’s stereotypical conceptualization of blacks is also seen in her remarks on the kind of “wisdom” that the players are likely to carry away from this exchange. They are depicted as unthinking children inhabiting cultural inflections of slavery and manifest destiny in america

adult bodies, which reflects Spencer’s doubt over their capacity to derive the necessary lesson of examining for oneself before believing. The gullible and innocent male will be “thoroughly fooled” only to learn to distrust his future bride. “Topsey” (based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cruelly caricatured minstrel showgirl) may learn from this experience, but even this is uncertain in Spencer’s narrative. The vicious orchestration of this scene and degrading caricatures condemn black people to their walled-off social niche. Spencer is acutely sensitive to bodily and facial gestures; the woman’s “shrugged shoulders” and the male’s “facial powers” are mobilized to call the spectator’s attention to their lack of self-worth, especially the absence of the beau’s “manhood.” Despite his signs of dandified self-possession, his body has been stripped of all dignity. The woman toys with him as she would with a pet animal and easily reveals his naive grasp on life. Spencer typically delights in submitting males to ridicule and humiliation—even her own husband—but here it is less a question of failure to cope with certain situations than a caustic devaluation of a generalized state of mental capacity. Thus the emphasis in this work on the distorted bodily gestures discloses the racist view of blacks as more body than mind, more nature than culture. The Art of Exclusion

Lilly Martin Spencer’s career illustrates a paradox: if women were barred from the American promise during a time of the spread of political democracy, the strategical possibilities inherent in this subordinate situation nonetheless enabled women like her to mitigate its limitations. She succeeded partially on the basis of her identification with the dominant patriarchal ideology, and this justified excluding African Americans from the democratic franchise. During all the obstreperous sounding of the “common man” theme, Southern slavery expanded into western territories. The privileged classes then accepted as fair exchange for their political and material advances the toll of human suffering in the South. Between 1830 and 1860 the slave population dramatically doubled from two to four million, while the geographical distribution expanded from twelve to fifteen slaveholding states. The political implications of Southern expansion and the consolidation of their economic system made the slave issue central to political debate during this period. In Boston on 1 January 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched his newspaper, the Liberator, dedicated to the immediate abolition of Southern slavery without compensation to the masters. During the next two years, Garrison organized the New England Anti-Slavery Society and then helped establish a national organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society. By 1840 there was a network of some two thousand local societies with some two hundred thousand members stretched across the North.

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One of the greatest of all antislavery orators, Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to become one of the preeminent African American leaders of the century, received his first encouragement from the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He regularly read the Liberator, and in 1841 attended a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket. There he rose for the first time to address a public gathering, and soon afterwards was employed as an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society. In 1847, against Garrison’s opposition, he founded the North Star, an antislavery newspaper aimed expressly at African Americans. The paper survived for seventeen years, filling a need left unmet by other abolitionist journals in providing a channel for black grievances everywhere and bringing a message of hope to Southern slaves. Abolitionists, both white and black, concentrated on the cruelties of slavery, and they did not have to go far to find illustrations. There were plenty of documented incidents reported in Southern newspapers and court records. The Southern states made themselves especially vulnerable to criticism by refusing to eliminate the system’s worst abuses: its physical brutality, its failure to recognize slave marriages, the separation of children from their parents, the callousness of interstate slave traders, and the denial to blacks of opportunities for education and self-improvement. In the early years of the abolitionist movement most Northerners shared the opinion of Southerners that the crusaders were irresponsible fanatics, and antislavery meetings were frequently broken up by violence encouraged by the local business interests. Northern businessmen, viewing antislavery agitation as a threat to their profitable trade with the South, more than once joined or instigated these encounters. Meanwhile, Southern apologists for the system did their best to provide ammunition for their Northern allies by insisting that slaves “are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world” and that the free white laborer “is more of a slave than the negro.”31 The “lovable slave” stood poised against the “monstrous freedman,” whose existence threatened the entire fabric of lies spun by the apologists. William Sidney Mount

A popular genre painter from Long Island, William Sidney Mount (1807– 1868), revealed a particular fascination for toothy grins in his depiction of African Americans. 32 Perhaps no other artist of the antebellum and Civil War eras painted as many works of black people as did Mount, who established himself—as one of his contemporaries put it—as a painter of “Ethiopians.” Although his African American protagonists are less brutalized than Woodville’s, they are nonetheless relegated to a dependent position in his ideal social order. Mount’s penchant for deploying black males for comic relief is seen in his notes for projects and diary entries. For one painting planned in 1863

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he summarized: “One horse drawing four workman [sic], they seated on a plank of a small waggon. It would add to the humor of the scene by introducing a negro driver or as one of the workman.”33 During a visit to Washington on 23 May 1865 Mount watched a review of the Union Army file past President Johnson and his cabinet. He isolated as the “comic element” the contrabands—the runaway slaves who often served as teamsters in the Union Army—and their mules: Amusing was the appearance in the rear of the First Pennsylvania cavalry of a solitary negro, black as a coal, mounted upon a mule. He was recognized as the original cause of the rebellion, although he rode along apparently unconscious of his importance.

Here Mount would deny active African American participation in the crucial events leading to the Emancipation Proclamation, as if strategic planning and agitation was beyond the capacity of black people and credit for the results should go exclusively to misguided white abolitionists—the “nigger lovers” who took up their cause. Mount then continued with his observation of the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, singling out one transportation brigade known as “Bummers Corps” that especially provoked his mirth: The lean and lank mules, heavily loaded with blankets and articles of subsistance [sic] and camp, were attended by their colored drivers and headed by two whitish colored mules of a diminutive size, ridden by two diminutive contrabands, was novel and unique and caused shouts of laughter and rounds of applause from the lookers on.

Blacks were always there, from earliest childhood on, to provide Mount with amusement, and, as in the case of minstrelsy, made appropriate subjects with which to entertain his own Copperhead audience.34 Mount’s mature views on blacks were expressed formally through his affiliation with the Democratic Party, the party of slavery. He opposed both abolition and the left-wing populism generated by Jacksonian ideals. As the crisis over the Union neared, Mount’s proslavery views became even more strident. As early as 1859, he recorded in his journal in connection with the abolitionist book by Hinton Helper, Impending Crisis of the South, just recently endorsed by the Republican Party, that “The Republican ticket is the Negro ticket. Mr. Greeley, I can’t vote on your ticket because there is a negro in the fence.” After the Civil War, Mount strenuously opposed Radical Republicanism. He displayed a sign in his studio that read: “the democrats call upon all union men, to sustain andrew johnson against the radicals.” In 1867, he and a few allies gathered to celebrate recent Demo-

cratic victories that stemmed the tide of Reconstruction. For the occasion, Mount drew the picture representing A Rooster Standing upon a Dead Negro,

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or The Break of Day. One of the members of the committee wrote that its function was “to see that the cock shall crow from time to time, protected; and taken to Port Jefferson & Stony Brook [towns neighboring Setauket], and exhibited in Setauket on his return.”35 Mount evidently explained the meaning of the picture to the editor of a moderate Republican paper who had commented upon it: The design of the picture is also misrepresented as the rooster is not intended to represent the Democratic party, but such gifted politicians as the Editor of the staff who are trying to galvanize some life into the defunct nigger. He is politically dead; radical crowing will not awake him. It is the Radical Republican Rooster trying to make some capital out of the negro who is about used up for their purpose, which is glorious news for the country. The African needs rest.36

6.9  William Sidney Mount, Dawn of Day, ca. 1867. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1958. The Museums at Stony Brook, Long Island, N.Y.

Mount had painted a smaller version of this work that was exhibited at the National Academy in 1868–1869 as Dawn of Day (Politically Dead) (fig. 6.9). The critic of the New York Herald of 10 April 1871 wrote that it conveyed “a truthful representation of a young negro, one of those genuine Long Islanders of whom it has been asserted that ‘love of ease is the chief characteristic.’ The day of his prosperity is about to dawn but not even the shrill crowing of Chanticleer can awaken him to a consciousness of the fact.”37 Hence as African Americans began to move out of their assigned niche and demonstrate that no law of nature justified their previous position of subordination, Mount and his Northern allies felt the structure of their illusions collapsing all around them and acted desperately to shore them up.



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Mount’s visual stereotypes came to him by way of his slaveholding ancestors. His uncle Micah Hawkins was one of the originators of the minstrel theatrical style. He wrote a popular patriotic song about Washington and Lafayette that was meant to be sung in blackface and in the Negro dialect.38 Somewhat later, the casting of the stereotype of the singing and dancing slaves on Southern plantations in the form of minstrelsy was pioneered by Mount’s contemporary Thomas Dartmouth Rice, whose song and dance “Jim Crow” was first performed in 1828. In the 1840s, Dan Emmett (author of “Dixie”), the founder of the genre as it came down in popular American theater, fixed the definitive image with a beaming smile, tattered hat, worn gloves, fiddle, tambourine, bones, and the cakewalk—a routine that astonishingly lasted until deep into the twentieth century. Emmett’s standard gesture was displayed on the front covers of his published repertoire. He is typically portrayed strumming his banjo while enacting popular minstrel gestures and facial expression that border on freakishness (fig. 6.10). The banjo-picking Jim Crow character with the 6.10  Dandy Jim from Caroline, lithograph, ca. 1844. Cover from Daniel Decatur Emmit [Emmett] Song Book.



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apelike features and wide grin became the stereotypical ideal of white racism in the nineteenth century, and it is no mere vagary of fate that the performers were always whites disguised in blackface. Minstrelsy was finally a white fantasy projected upon black people—no wonder the safe, silly, familiar vision of the grinning black who could “hoof it off ” through thick and thin had a powerful and lasting appeal for American whites. It helped perpetuate in a popular medium what serious artists like Mount and Eastman Johnson conveyed in subtler form. Thus on the question of the black there was a rare convergence of high and low art and of the respective constituencies that supported them as well. John Quincy Adams Ward

A popular statuette called The Freedman, exhibited in New York in 1863 shortly after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, proved to be a visual litmus test for Northern racist assumptions (fig. 6.11). A powerful, semi-nude black figure, seated on the trunk of a tree, begins to cast aside his broken shackles as he gazes intently into an uncertain space and turns to rise. The popular Northern critic James Jackson Jarves wrote in 1864: “A naked slave has burst his shackles, and with uplifted face thanks God for freedom. We have seen nothing in our sculpture more soul-lifting or more comprehensively eloquent. It tells in one word the whole sad story of slavery and the bright story of emancipation.” The perspective of later critics, like Henry Tuckerman, missed the drama charged by the emotional climate of civil war: “Here is the simple figure of a semi-nude Negro sitting, it may be on the steps of the Capitol, a fugitive, resting his arms on his knees, his head turned eagerly piercing into the distance for his ever-vigilant enemy, his hand grasping his broken manacles with an energy that bodes no good to his pursuers. A simple story, simply and most plainly told.” In a similar vein Lorado Taft, in his pioneering history of American sculpture of 1903, sums up the statuette thusly: “[It] is as notable for its containment as for its more technical excellence”—a rather ambivalent statement that confounds the narrative with the technical process. Finally, here is Charles Caffin’s dismissive appraisal in his American Masters of Sculpture appearing in 1913: “It shows simply a Negro, in an entirely natural pose, who has put forth his strength and is looking very quietly at the broken fetters. The whole gist of the matter is thus embodied in the most terse and direct fashion, without rodomontade or sentimentality but solely as an objective fact into which there is no intrusion of the sculptor’s personal feelings.”39 The African American art critic Freeman Henry Morris Murray wrote in his Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (1916) that the critics failed to take into account the historical context of the statuette’s appearance; none of the writers catch the important features of the work: the freedman’s shackles are broken, but he remains partially fettered and is almost totally nude, “still un-clothed with the rights and prerogatives which

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freedom is supposed to connote.” He is a “Freedman but not a Free-man.” Murray proposed that the remaining chain links allude to the African American’s “separation—in schools, in public places, in social life, exclusion from political life; a curtailed school curriculum purportedly adapted to his special needs and limited capacities.” The representation of the lone figure also suggested to Murray that the subject himself broke free from his fetters, an idea contradicting the popular notion that the slaves were “set free by Mr. Lincoln.” As he elaborated:

6.11  John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, bronze, 1863. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

But the “Freedman” was conceived and modeled in a time of “stress and Struggle,” while the burial parties were gathering the dead black soldiers from a half-dozen bloody battle grounds, including Port Hudson and Fort Wagner, and two-hundred thousand more black men were rallying beneath the flag whose triumph they hoped and believed would insure their freedom. Mr. Ward and many others then living had been witnesses of, and participants in, the agitations and struggles, the sacrifices and martyrdoms, which had culminated in the war then raging and which had prepared the way for the Emancipation Proclamation. These men knew well that in the struggles and even in the martyrdoms, black men had borne a conspicuous and noble part.40

Indeed, for witnesses like Ward it would have been dishonest and mocking to have spoken of merely “bestowing” freedom on the quarter million blacks who at that very moment were sacrificing their lives so that “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people should not perish from the earth.” It was only later, during the post-Reconstruction period, when economic competition and neoimperialism became government policy, that sculptors could interpret the Emancipation Proclamation as an act of “charity” and “benevolence,” when Lincoln had clearly stated that it was “an act of justice” warranted by “military necessity.” Murray also commented on the huge commercial success of the statuette. He found it difficult to believe that so unostentatious a figure— “which portrayed but did not caricature the Negro—should have made such a powerful appeal to the parents of the present generation.” Actually, Murray himself provided the answer when he hinted at the transitional character of the image. Ward created an ambivalent figure that is neither totally shackled nor completely free, who is neither standing nor sitting. Although the physical representation corresponds to the idealized nudes of mainstream nineteenth-century sculpture, the indeterminate action leaves

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the narrative unresolved and thus proved inoffensive even to biased whites. Murray interprets this in-between state as prognostic, but his interpretation squares with the critics despite a different emphasis and opposing perspective. Caffin verifies the conservative justification for the popularity of the statuette with his remark that Ward grasped “the limit to which it is safe to go in the interpretation of sentiment.” The statuette’s thematic hesitation manifests the compromised character of the Emancipation Proclamation, which decreed freedom only in regions then designated in rebellion, thus exempting the border slave states not under Confederate control. Lincoln’s detractors made much of this point, but even Secretary of State Seward agreed: “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we can not reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”41 Above all, what bothered even sympathetic critics of the proclamation was the absence of a specific declaration of principle against slavery. Edmonia Lewis

Despite its limitations, the Emancipation Proclamation redefined the official purpose of the war, acknowledging that it was about slavery as much as about saving the Union. Northern African Americans, less concerned with the contradictions, celebrated the moment with jubilant processions and assemblies. One female artist inspired by the event was the mixed-race sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who was promoted by abolitionist groups in and around Boston. Born of an African American father and an Ojibwa (Chippewa) Indian mother, she managed to turn her ethnicity to commercial advantage. Just prior to the war’s outbreak Lewis attended Oberlin College in Ohio, a training ground for the abolitionist crusade that freely welcomed racially mixed students. Oberlin’s admission policies, however, had been haunted from the first by controversy, and the tension between black and white, intensified by the town-and-gown conflict, created a hostile environment for the strong-willed Lewis. She was plagued by accusations of theft and even attempted murder, and though acquitted she was never permitted to graduate. Lewis then moved to Boston, where abolitionists subsidized gifted African Americans and paraded their achievements to counter the racist arguments of the proslavery party. She met William Lloyd Garrison, who in turn introduced her to a local sculptor named Edward Brackett. Brackett lent her studio fragments to copy, including a bust he did of the martyred John Brown. Using it as a model she sculpted a medallion of John Brown, copies of which were sold to the abolitionists and advertised in Garrison’s Liberator. She also executed busts of Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, attesting to the fervent antislavery circles in which she now moved. Her first major work was the portrait bust of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the widely lamented white leader of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer

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regiment of black troops, who died on 18 July 1863, along with nearly half of his regiment, in the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor (fig. 6.12). She claimed that she made the bust “out of grateful feeling ‘for what he has done for her race.’”42 The publicity generated by the Shaw bust and the sale of its replicas helped finance her trip to Italy the following year (1865), and eventually she established a studio in Rome and participated in an American circle of expatriate female sculptors. In this liberated atmosphere she immediately took up the theme of the freed slave, beginning with the portrayal of a woman in chains, kneeling in gratitude as she learns of her emancipation and is embraced by her son. The work manifested her desire to do something “for my poor father’s people.” She used practically the same theme in 1867 for her popular Forever Free, originally called The Morning of Liberty, both titles having been inspired by the rhetoric that had ultimately found its way into the Emancipation Proclamation (fig. 6.13). This time the kneeling woman is paired with a standing male: she clasps her hands in grateful thanks, while he holds a broken shackle in his left hand and with his left leg steps onto a discarded ball and chain.

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Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation of 22 September 1862 declared that on New Year’s Day, 1863, slaves in the rebellious states would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” This keynote had become a major source of hope and propaganda for black people and their abolitionist supporters in their drive to gain maximum political recognition during the Civil War, and the formula was adapted to popular abolitionist poetry: God’s law of compensation worketh sure, So we may know the right shall age endure! “Forever free!” God! How the pulse doth bound At the high, glorious, Heaven-prompted sound That greets our ears from Carolina’s shore! “Forever free!” and slavery is no more! opposite 6.12  Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Robert Gould Shaw, marble, 1865. Museum of Afro American History, Boston. 6.13  Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, marble, 1867. Permanent Collection, Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The swelling chorus of those broadcasting the theme of “forever free” reached a crescendo in Washington, D.C., on the last night of December 1862. A major demonstration gathered at what was called the “contraband camp,” a temporary habitation for runaway slaves received by the Union Armies and defined officially as “contraband of war.” This group waited for the coming day, when, as stipulated in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, they should become free. They spent the night singing songs and prayers, and, just after midnight, chanted an ode written especially for the occasion, whose chorus ended “Free forever! Forever free!”43 The author of this reportage was William Wells Brown, the first major black novelist and essayist in North America; his Negro in the American Rebellion was published in 1867, the year Edmonia Lewis sculpted her pair. That Lewis herself acknowledged this connection is seen in the ceremony in which she presented her sculpture to the Rev. L. A. Grimes at Tremont Temple, Boston, on 18 October 1869. Among those delivering addresses in honor of the occasion were William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown.44 Lewis’s Forever Free is carved, ironically, from white marble. Like Manet and Melville, she went out of her way to break the stereotype, in this case using the beloved medium of neoclassicists to render the physiognomies and costumes of an oppressed ethnic minority. Whereas Hiram Powers exploited white marble to render his discreet Caucasian slave, Lewis appropriated the medium for her metaphorical black sister and brother. Her gesture may be read on two levels: either she “liberated” the white marble from its function of perpetuating the hegemony of white mythology and history—thereby librating blacks from their stereotyped role in art—or she used the color “white” in this instance as the desired goal of emancipation and the “ideal” state of all peoples. In this connection, Freeman Murray was disturbed to find that the physiognomy of the kneeling female more closely resembled a white person than that of the standing male. He compared this phenomenon with what he called “toning,” the attempt on



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the part of some blacks to lighten their complexions in identification with their oppressors, or the predominant social group. He slyly suggested “that there may have been some justification for such a procedure at that time, before fifty years of unexampled accomplishment had proven that what Black Folk really need and should strive for, is not the Caucasian’s physical features but the Caucasian’s opportunity.”45 Murray rightfully sees the kneeling figure as more problematic than the male. The formula for sculpture in the nineteenth century generally positioned subordinate, accessory, or complementary (often allegorical) figures in kneeling poses. Such figures pay homage in the peripheries of a public monument to a notable white male depicted on the pedestal, or, when occupying the same space as the protagonists, they do so in acknowledgment of their “deliverance” from oppression, plague, or natural calamity. The paradigmatic example is Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group, the original of which was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in 1875, and is now in Lincoln Park, not far from Howard University (fig. 6.14).46 This work so appealed to Northerners that a replica was ordered for the city of Boston. Ball depicted a towering Lincoln bidding a kneeling slave with broken wrist-manacles to rise. Lincoln’s left arm is outstretched in a prophetic gesture whose diagonal forms a part of a protective pyramidal envelope embracing the genuflecting black. The back of the newly freed slave delineates a sharp 6.14  Thomas Ball, Emancipation Group, bronze, 1874. Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.



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slope that reinforces the diagonal of Lincoln’s arm. As in the Woodville, the conventional geometries are again deployed for ideological purposes, with the black shown in the downgraded, passive position subject to the control of an upright—albeit benevolent—master. This sculptural protocol signals that white people emancipated slaves of their own free will, so that freed people should now feel wholly in their debt. Of course this is a total fiction; Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation only after the Confiscation and Military Acts of 1862 had made emancipation a fait accompli and there was dire need of black manpower to fill the ranks of the Union Army. But by demeaning the contribution of black people to their own emancipation and creating the fiction of a “bestowal” of freedom, the white majority allowed itself to forgo confessing their sins regarding slavery, to preserve the image of themselves as a basically democratic people, to avoid the nightmarish thought that they were forced into abolishing slavery by black power, and, finally, to fantasize about black people’s perennial dependence on white paternalism. Given the tradition, Lewis’s female figure has to be seen as subordinate and dependent in the double sense of gender and race; she accepts her freedom not as something earned but as something bestowed by an external benevolent power, and it is a male who actively destroys the chains that bind her. Tainted by both racism and sexism, “freedom” is more ironic for the woman than for the man. The male places his hand condescendingly on her shoulder as he lifts the manacles up to heaven. One variation in the formula is that the female does not gaze at her standing black benefactor, but away from him to some unseen force, presumably a transcendent vision of Lincoln. Thus Lewis’s pair manifests her continued indebtedness to the predominantly (white) male social reformers and abolitionists who guided her early career and who show up most frequently in her portrait busts. Eastman Johnson

The transformative energies unleashed by the Civil War and their impact on high art culture is seen in the work of Eastman Johnson, who before the conflict had achieved popular success for his depictions of African Americans in a sentimental visual mode. Henry T. Tuckerman, writing just after war’s end, put Johnson’s contribution into perspective: “No one of our painters has more truly caught and perfectly delineated the American rustic and Negro, or with such pathetic and natural emphasis put upon canvas bits of household or childish life, or given such bright and real glimpses of primitive human nature.” Clearly identifying blacks, children, and rustics in the same category, Tuckerman saw reflected in Johnson’s imagery his own Northern elitist outlook. While naturally assuming himself to be most enlightened in such matters, Tuckerman’s “liberalism” assumes a show of sympathy for social groups unable to fend for themselves—a paternalistic position. As he writes later:

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In his delineation of the Negro, Eastman Johnson has achieved a peculiar fame. One may find in his best pictures of this class a better insight into the normal character of that unfortunate race than ethnological discussion often yields. The affection, the humor, the patience and serenity which redeem from brutality and ferocity the civilized though subjugated African, are made to appear in the creations of this artist with singular authenticity.47

New-York Historical Society, New York.

So much for the reception of Johnson’s work by a Northern writer who sustained the Union cause. Tuckerman’s view of the painter, however, seems to have been determined by Johnson’s pre–Civil War picture—his first major portrayal of African Americans—Negro Life at the South, later dubbed Old Kentucky Home after Stephen Foster’s song steeped in antebellum nostalgia (fig. 6.15). Exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1859, it enjoyed enormous popularity and secured for the painter membership in that by now august institution.



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6.15  Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859. Courtesy of the

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Negro Life at the South is like a scene from a minstrel show, replete with the tuneful strumming of the banjo player, dancing children, courting lovers, and a picturesque ramshackle structure whose rotten beams seem on the verge of collapse. Missing chunks of plaster from the outdoor fireplace, loose clapboards, and broken windows complete the scenic backdrop. At the far right, the well-dressed white daughters from the Big House sneak through an opening in the fence to better observe the festivities. Thus blacks at leisure provide entertainment for white folks. This depiction of plantation slaves at an idle moment was actually based on Johnson’s own home life in Washington, D.C., and the protagonists were servants of the artist’s father.48 Although the family originally came from Maine, Johnson’s father had moved to Washington in 1846 when he was appointed chief clerk in the bureau of construction in the Navy Department. The family seems to have slipped easily into the Southern lifestyle. Johnson’s painting makes a bid for the benign view of slave existence promulgated by Southern apologists who tried to assure the North that all the old abuses had long since been eliminated from the system. The scene suggests that slaves not only remain cheerful and merry under impoverished conditions, but they actually know how to have more fun than white folk. Thus the work came close to the claim of the average Southerner that black people thrived only in the thralldom of a white master. Even in the North, however, the response to Johnson’s work was predicated on a similar set of conclusions. The critic for the Crayon analyzed the painting as an example of the capacity of “Art” to transform the ugly into something worthy of enjoyment: One of the best pictures in respect to Art and the most popular, because presenting familiar aspects of life, is E. Johnson’s “Negro Life at the South.” Here are several groups of negroes, who are assembled in the rear of a dilapidated house. . . . Although a very humble subject, the picture is a very instructive one in relation to Art. It is conscientiously studied and painted, and full of ideas. Notwithstanding the general ugliness of the forms and objects, we recognize that its sentiment is one of beauty, for imitation and expression are vitalized by conveying to our mind the enjoyment of human beings in new and vivid aspects.49

In short, for this reviewer the encoding of the ugly in aesthetic form was analogous to the actual circumstances of poor blacks, who do not allow their degradation and impoverishment to interfere with their happiness. By disguising the ugliness in conventional trappings, the painter allows the spectator in turn to derive delight from their conditions. Another Northern critic, quoted by Tuckerman, received a more mixed message from the image while recognizing it as a form of propaganda for the South. By its inadvertent presentation of the deteriorating environment of slavery, Negro Life at the South also projected the metaphorical demise of the institution:

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How fitly do the dilapidated and decaying quarters typify the approaching destruction of the “system” that they serve to illustrate! And, in the picture before us we have an illustration also of the “rosewater” side of the institution. Here all is fun and freedom. We behold the very reality that the enthusiastic devotees of slavery have so often painted with high-sounding words. And yet this dilapidation, unheeded and unchecked, tells us that the end is near.50

In promulgating the stereotype of the happy and contented bondsman, Southerners were doing more than simply generating propaganda to counter the abolitionist image of the wretched slave; they were also seeking to put to rest their own nagging fears of slave rebellion. In moments of candor, Southerners admitted their suspicions that duplicity, opportunism, and potential insurrection lurked behind the mask of Negro affability. This dualism of contentment and duplicity runs through the writings of antislavery proponents as well. William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian minister in New England, had noted the cliché of the happy slave and its use to repudiate arguments for the rights of slaves. But the slave’s cheerful disposition is the result of a degraded existence and is just one beat away from bitterness: It is not possible to contemplate the occasional gayety of the slave without some mixture of painful thought. He is gay, because he has not learned to think; because he is too fallen to feel his wrongs; because he wants just self-respect. We are grieved by the gayety of the insane. There is a sadness in the gayety of him whose lightness of heart would be turned to bitterness and indignation, were one ray of light to awaken in him the spirit of a man.

Channing, however, accepts that even in the “darkest abode” there is a possibility of a “cheering beam.” Thus the slaves’ hut rings with thoughtless mirth. . . . God is no respecter of persons; and in some slaves there is a happy nature which no condition can destroy, just as among children we find some whom the worst education cannot spoil. The African is so affectionate, imitative, and docile, that in favorable circumstances he catches much that is good, and accordingly the influence of a wise and kindly master will be seen in the very countenance and bearing of his slaves.51

Here we see that even the moderate antislavery writer incorporates the apologies formulated by proslavery advocates. And it is probable that Johnson’s Negro Life at the South was informed by Channing’s writings, which were well known in New England circles. That the work stood so close to the cutting edge between pro- and antislavery views explains its immense popularity among the privileged Northern elite. There seemed to be something for everyone in the picture: Southerners and their partisans claimed to see a confirmation of what they

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had been saying all along about slave conditions, whereas abolitionists perceived in the crumbling and decaying architecture a sign of the “impending crisis” spelled out in the title to a popular book by Hinton Helper published two years before Johnson painted his picture. A Southerner, Helper cited a pile of statistics to demonstrate that the South lagged far behind the North in industrial and agricultural growth. He blamed this condition on the “slavocracy” and warned that the South was headed for “utter ruin” unless it immediately abolished slavery.52 But considering the moment when Johnson painted the picture, it does indeed come off as an apology for slavery, especially when compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, still in everyone’s memory when the work was exhibited. Like Negro Life at the South, Stowe’s work had an astonishing success in the 1850s. The immensely popular novel did more than any other published work to crystallize antislavery feeling in the North in this period. Uncle Tom’s Cabin began to appear serially in a moderate antislavery journal, the National Era. Stow started out with the assumption that blacks were “confessedly more simple, docile, childlike and affectionate, than other races.” This was the picture of her model African American, and it is no coincidence that her second antislavery novel, Dred, published in 1856, deals with the opposite type, a rebel cast in the die of Nat Turner. It exemplified her fundamental revulsion to the idea of black retaliation against whites. To Stowe a black rebel was clearly a warped and deviant personality. Her “normal” black was the long-suffering Uncle Tom, like the banjo player in Johnson’s work. The story unfolds in Kentucky (the location subsequently added to the title of the painting), and two of Stowe’s central characters have some white ancestry, which allows the author to define them in terms of nineteenth-century heroic standards. The mulatto George Harris, for example, “inherited a set of fine European features and a high, indomitable spirit.”53 All the mixed-race characters—George, his wife Eliza, and Simon Legree’s female victims—refuse to adhere to the stoic philosophy of Uncle Tom and actively resist their state. The flirting light-skinned pair at the left of Johnson’s picture may have been suggested by Stowe’s George and Eliza Harris. Uncle Tom himself is discussed in such saintly terms that he seems unreal amid the brutalities and the crimes; the same is true of the sympathetic Southern whites. In the end, the unreality of these characters gave a fantastic aspect to the novel and explains why in 1853 Stowe felt obligated to publish a “key” to it documenting the horrors she described. Similarly, it seemed that Johnson, a kind of inveterate compromiser, tried to give a more “balanced” account of the system from his own perspective, pretending to straightforward documentary and playing down the abhorrent elements of slavery by depicting slaves on their day off. Though he would shift his interest to New England cranberry pickers as symbols of joy-through-work, Johnson was made more responsive by events to the contradictions inherent in the repression of black people. Eight months after the exhibition of Negro Life at the South, John Brown was

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hanged for his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Now the overwhelming issue was the saving of the Union, and those in the North who relied on Southern products quickly discerned which side had the best chances of winning. The textile industrialists and the merchants of the North now made money from government contracts, and emancipation could be seen in wholly different terms. The enlightened Northern elite needed blacks to serve in the army and also anticipated former slaves swelling the ranks of the wage workers. African Americans were suddenly regarded in a different light, more akin to Caucasian workers in Europe whose social progress depended on release from serfdom and feudal oppression. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation the North, desperate for recruits, encouraged young black males to make their way north and join the Union Army.54 The genre image of the African American now assumed a different visual emphasis in response to the growing stress on the slave issue as the basis of sectional strife. Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves (ca. 1862–1863), depicting a black family escaping across the border on horseback, conveys an impression totally at variance with Negro Life at the South and other antebellum examples (fig. 6.16). The painter now represents blacks as energetic and forceful and, above all, determining their own fate. The theme of the runaway slave was popular in this period, contradicting Southern propaganda that slaves were satisfied with their lot and forever attached to their masters. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued 22 September 1862, 6.16  Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves, ca. 1862–1863. Gift of Gwendolyn O. L. Conkling. Brooklyn Museum, New York.



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promised that, on the first day of the new year, the United States government would “recognize and maintain the freedom” of people held in bondage by rebels and would “do no acts or act to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” Thomas Satterwhite Noble

Another artist of the period whose evolution suggests a conversion in the post–Civil War period is Thomas Satterwhite Noble; like Johnson he had studied with Thomas Couture in Paris. Though born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1835, which at the time was the center of the state’s slave trade, he committed himself to a series of edgy slave-related themes that reveal the strengths and well as ambivalences of a human being from a border state that did not secede. Kentucky was always the national cradle of compromise and contradiction: Henry Clay hailed from this state, as did both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. A state where one in five inhabitants was a slave, it had obvious links to the Confederacy; but its nationalism and commercial ties to the Union stood for more in the long run. When war broke out, young Kentuckians enlisted on both the Union and Confederate sides, and in every town flagpoles flew the banners of both sides. By war’s end, however, pro-Southern feelings predisposed Kentuckians to sympathize with the Confederacy. Kentucky still clung to the institution of slavery even after the Thirteenth Amendment (which it refused to ratify) abolished slavery in December 1865. Although the opponents of slavery in Kentucky never achieved its elimination through state action, they kept the issue alive and under discussion in both local and national venues until slavery was finally terminated by constitutional amendment. Significantly, Noble did not begin his series until the period of Reconstruction, when the issues became more sharply defined in his thought—as well as safer to treat and even marketable in the North. Noble was the son of a prosperous hemp rope and cotton bagging (the coarse cloth used for wrapping bales) manufacturer who employed both slaves and black wage labor on his hemp farm. He spent much of his time in the cabins of the blacks at his father’s rope walk, sitting around their fires and listening to their stories and probably their complaints.55 He recalled listening to their tales “until night had settled over the cabins and the way back to the house seemed long and dark. Then one of the Negroes would say, ‘Mars Tom, I’ll take you back home, if you’ll give me some of the biscuits from the white folks’ table.’ The price was a small one to pay for the escort along the lonely path, after the ghost stories I had heard down in the cabin.” Such reminiscences are commonplace in the autobiographical commentaries of privileged white children raised in the antebellum South, and they naturally elide the harsh deprivations of the blacks implied in the request for “biscuits.” (Noble for example also recalled “enjoying their

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crude fare”—but clearly the slaves did not. They ate what they were given, not what they wanted.) Analogously, Noble’s representations of black people do not deal with the cruelties of their everyday life but rather project them in epic moments focusing on the dissolution of families. In this he was a child of his time and class, idealizing the poor by universalizing their plight. After studying abroad under Thomas Couture in the late 1850s, Noble returned to the United States and settled in St. Louis, where his work was soon interrupted by the Civil War. Although ambivalent toward the institution of slavery, Noble joined at last with the Confederate cause and the conservative element of his native state in behalf of the principle of states’ rights. At war’s end he returned to St. Louis, where he enthusiastically embarked on a series of canvases exposing the injustice of slavery and the plight of black people in North America. Clearly the war and its aftermath influenced this new direction, perhaps reflecting an underlying sense of guilt for his participation in the defeated cause and his childhood experiences on his father’s rope plantation. At the same time, a major market in the North now opened for pictures with slave themes; Noble’s early works in this genre sold quickly to patrons in New York and Chicago, suggesting his success in tapping into this market. Northern businessmen and merchants seem to have sought out such images to display their liberal sympathies as well as support of Reconstruction, which benefited them economically. Noble’s The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis is one of his most distinguished productions in this series (fig. 6.17). The title alludes to the (alleged) last sale of slaves in 1865 on the east steps of the St. Louis courthouse on Fourth Street (where the Dred Scott case was argued). Noble organized the crowd in a pyramidal design, with the auctioneer and light-skinned slave next to him located at the apex. Most of the slaves are seated below the platform or are relegated to a marginal position at the far left or behind the platform. Race, class, and social distinctions are scrupulously rendered, transmitting clear signals to its audiences.56 Noble painted the work with the knowledge that Reconstruction had now enfranchised blacks as citizens, with the right to vote and entitlement to equal protection of the country’s laws. Since 18 December 1865 slavery was no longer legal anywhere in North America. Thus the sentiment of the picture had a belated impact, treated internally as if the event were a thing of the past. As described by one reviewer: About seventy-five figures are grouped around a parti-colored slave girl standing upon the auction block, at the foot of the Court House steps. Her hands are clasped, her head bent forward, and her eyes upon the ground, with a finely brought out expression of sadness in her features. . . . Immediately in front of the block are a number of Negro women and children, in bright dresses, waiting



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6.17  Thomas Satterwhite Noble, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, 1870, replica of 1865 painting. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

their turn to be disposed of. On the extreme left an aged Negro—one of the best figures in the picture—is bidding goodbye to his wife. Both have been sold, and to different masters, and the parting scene is well wrought up. . . . In the immediate central foreground, a fashionably-dressed lady and gentleman, with a greyhound, are idly gazing at the scene. . . . There is an old gentleman who has purchased a donkey. There is a newsboy crying his papers in vain. There is an Italian image-vendor, and from the tray on his head the effigy of the dying Christ seems to look down upon the scene in sorrow. The architectural features of the picture are also suggestive. In the distance a church spire is towering heavenward. Upon the abutments are a statue of Justice skillfully thrown half in shadow by the painter, and a statue of Liberty, with head averted.57

According to the critic, there was scarcely a figure in the picture not stereotyped or laden with local color. The reviewer’s own kind of lazy, descriptive reading here accepts all the clichés previously rehearsed in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a given and barely addresses the tragic consequences of the event. The reviewer was far more interested in the coloring and

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“general effect” than in the painter’s compassion for the victims. But Noble himself had fallen prey to the clichés and had to assume responsibility for the various critical readings of his picture in that period. On the other hand, the conservative St. Louis Times published a blurb alongside its lengthy full-column review that stated: “We must—without expressing any opinion as to the merits of the work—question the propriety of the subject. Art has no limits, it is true, but art has no right to distort 6.18  Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Margaret Garner, oil on panel, 1867. Private Collection, Cincinnati. 6.19  The Modern Medea—The Story of Margaret Garner, wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, 18 May 1867.



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history.” In this case, the editor seems to have distanced himself from the subject while paying lip service to the aesthetic claims of art. Yet a close reading of the review indicates that the work was indeed read ideologically from the perspective of an audience sympathetic to an antebellum world. The critic, Alfred Jingle, perceived many of the types in the work similarly to the reviewer of the Guardian: “The center of the picture is occupied by a beautiful octoroon girl, who stands for sale on a platform, with her hands clasped meekly before her, and her small head bowed down, it would almost seem, by the weight of her large downcast eyes.” But he saw this as a deliberate attempt to gain the sympathy of the audience: “I doubt not, but that some enthusiast of the new race of freed people, would pronounce her—the intelligent equal, sensible of her degraded position amongst the whites.” In other words, the degree of her self-consciousness is in direct proportion to the degree of “whiteness” in her color.58 Noble’s most memorable image in the series is Margaret Garner (fig. 6.18). The notorious case of this runaway slave was one of the most tragic and widely publicized in the long annals of the institution’s barbaric history. Noble’s composition was vivid enough to inspire Toni Morrison’s haunting theme in her modern novel Beloved (1987), whose central character, Sethe, was modeled after Garner. Commissioned by a New York City leather broker named Harlow Roys, it was first shown in the 1867 exhibition of the National Academy of Design and then went to Boston to accompany John Brown Led to Execution at the exhibition of DeVries, Ibarra & Co. The work was photographed by Mathew Brady and reproduced in Harper’s Weekly, the primary Republican voice in New York (fig. 6.19). Margaret Garner addresses the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1850, allowing slave owners to enter free territory and claim their runaway slaves. This law was severely abused. Seizures of persons across the Ohio River, even of people who had escaped from bondage years before the law was enacted and had established families, took place daily. The threat to the slavocracy of slaves repudiating the regime and choosing freedom at the highest risk went beyond the mere capital loss, but struck at the heart of the slavers’ ideological defense of the system. Kentucky’s northern border bounded on several free states, and its slaveholders were especially vulnerable to escapees, whom they pursued with an implacable vengeance. Like the scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Eliza broke for freedom, in January 1856, Garner, her husband, and four children and other slaves fled from Boone County across the frozen Ohio River and made their way to the homes of freed blacks in Cincinnati. The Garners hid in the house of an ex-slave named Kite, who had formerly lived in their neighborhood and had been purchased from bondage by his father. Their armed pursuers, however, traced the fugitive family to their hideout, and after a skirmish broke down the door and entered the house. There they found Margaret, who, preferring death to slavery for her children, had attempted to take

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their lives, with one of the children, her daughter, already dead on the floor. The sensational case was tried before huge crowds and rendition ordered. On their return to slavery, Margaret in despair, attempted to drown herself and one of her children by leaping into the river, but even emancipation by suicide eluded her, for she was recovered and subsequently sold to a trader who took her to the cotton fields of the deep South. The incident of “The Modern Medea” electrified the country, including future president Rutherford B. Hayes, then practicing law in Cincinnati and living on a proslavery street. He told James Monroe, a professor at Oberlin College, that the tragedy converted the whole street, and that a day after the murder “a leader among his proslavery neighbors” called at his house and promised to enlist in both the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement.59 Noble’s unusual and powerful representation of the event is organized along the frontal plane, with Margaret Garner and her children on one side and her pursuers on the other. Separating them like a no-man’s land is a spatial gap occupied by two dead children. Noble may have erred here or deliberately heightened the tragic consequences of the event; a preliminary drawing even shows three of the children dead. Garner’s figure and her two surviving children form a trenchant pyramidal configuration—reinforced by the indexical gesture of her right hand toward the dead children— whose energy dominates the visual field and arrests the forward motion of her pursuers. Garner is literally depicted in heroic confrontation with the slave officers, who are reduced to shrinking poltroons. The work projects a sense of liberation in a double sense: Garner not only rebels against her subjection as a female and African American but exercises her only freedom as a mother to extinguish the lives of her offspring. The violation of her person sparks her determination to defeat the system of slavery by denying her masters more black bodies to oppress. This astonishing act and its exploding of the institutional limits demanded of Noble a novel formulation of the conventional pyramidal pattern. While black bodies lie dead at the base of the triangular design, Garner, the immediate controlling factor in this tragedy, occupies its apex, and whites are brusquely excluded from the structure. Garner’s act essentially demonstrated the incredible inequity of the Fugitive Slave Act and pointed out not simply the barbarity of the Slave Code, but held up for all to see the obvious ruthlessness of the slavers. Once slavers could cross with impunity the threshold of a freed person’s home, the sanctity of even the white household could no longer be guaranteed. The horror of the domestic drama of Margaret Garner was literally too close to home for even the most calloused whites. Charles Sumner, the radical abolitionist senator, declared in his bitter denunciation of the Act and failed effort at repeal in August 1852 that it was not only an infringement of the Constitution, but by its language “it is not restricted to any special race or class, to the African or to the person with African blood, but

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that any inhabitant of the United States, of whatever complexion or condition, may be its victim.”60 Civil War Devastation and the Landscape of Manifest Destiny

The war’s devastation and loss of life forced hard questions on both sides as to the meaning of the conflict and its results. Even during the war, however, the consequences of the protracted conflict forced patriotic artists and writers to interrogate the traditionally optimistic rhetoric of American progress and freedom.61 They saw that the cost of the war could only be measured in the blood and flesh of the dead. Photographers especially sought ways to bring their work into harmony with the propaganda of their respective communities and recuperate the tremendous sacrifice of life and material treasure and the traumatic emotional costs.62 This is the case with Mathew Brady, who hoped to create an archive of the Civil War that would be a guide for future historians.63 Although primarily concerned with portraits of his contemporaries, he organized a corps of associates to go to the front and photograph the dead and the wounded in the battlefields. One of his trusted photographers was Alexander Gardner, the manager of his Washington, D.C., gallery. Gardner’s most memorable scene is A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863 from his Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), a title whose ironic metaphorical associations with the landscape ameliorate the grim scene of corpses strewn in the field by returning the bodies to the biblical soil of primordial creation (fig. 6.20).64 Gardner’s commentary on the corpses of Confederate troops is further revealing: “Such a picture conveys a useful moral: it shows 6.20  Alexander Gardner, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863, from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866). Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.



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the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.”65 Thus the photograph, the infallible documentary record, was steeped in the ideology of propaganda. It calls to mind Meissonier’s Barricade, that painted daguerreotype that also preaches an example for the would-be enemies of the nation. George Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866), documenting Sherman’s relentless “march to the sea” and the devastation to the Southern infrastructure in its wake, could not help but record the impact on the topography. Barnard’s Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, South Carolina, hints at Sherman’s juggernaut through its angled perspective shot from a high vantage point that emphasizes the remains of an arcaded trestle vanishing in the distance (fig. 6.21). The onrushing orthogonal is sensed as a displaced image of Sherman’s implacable advance. Barnard’s Nashville from the Capitol is again taken from a lofty vantage point that juxtaposes a classical motif with artillery overlooking the city—the breathtaking gaze from the heights now converted into a menacing aim. These Union sympathizers exploited the qualities of the landscape and its associations with land and nature to justify the violence and loss. Traditionally, the visual and literary tropes of heroism, patriotism, and sacrifice are trotted out to legitimate war’s ugly face, but now photography and landscape painting serve to naturalize the devastation by associating it with defense of the homeland. The very polarity between North and South and the values each stood for guaranteed that the war would have geographical and topographical significance beyond mere territorial dispute, transforming landscape genre into an ideologically charged signifier.66 6.21  George N. Barnard, Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, South Carolina, albumen print, 1865, from Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866). George Eastman House, Rochester.



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A painting by Henry Mosler, a Southern sympathizer, entitled Lost Cause, uses the pastoral landscape as a foil for devastation (fig. 6.22).67 Derived from a Brady photograph called “Pine Cottage” (a ramshackle hut serving as soldiers’ winter quarters),68 it depicts the return of a Confederate soldier to his rustic cabin, set in the beautiful surroundings of the Appalachian highlands, only to find it in ruinous state and overgrown

6.22  Henry Mosler, Lost Cause, 1869. Private Collection. 6.23  George N. Barnard, The John Ross House, Ringold, Georgia, albumen, 1866. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.



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with weeds. The crushed and dejected veteran leans on his musket contemplating the futility of the war and the wreck of his homeland. The theme was pitched primarily to a Southern audience during the Reconstruction era, but its wide distribution and popularity as a chromolithograph suggests that Northerners also responded to its narrative. Barnard also photographed cabins and mansions in postwar dilapidation (fig. 6.23). The popularity of the subject of homelessness wrought by war’s devastation could enlist the sympathies of the victors now ready for reconciliation, even though this meant sacrificing full commitment to the civil liberties of the newly emancipated blacks. Thus the South’s precious principle of white supremacy survived the military and political onslaught intact, while the African American, for whom the war was ostensibly fought, wound up as its most tragic victim. As Northern opinion shifted on the eve of the conflict to oppose further sectional compromise, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that preservation of the Union was the only way Americans could fulfill the promise of their national destiny. The American landscapist Frederic Church, whose ardent nationalism and heady sense of American empire reveals itself indirectly in his panoramic views, was moved during the Civil War to support the Union cause with a pair of pictures depicting the flag at critical stages in the conflict. Here the landscape serves as a locus for the state’s declared values embodied in its most revered icon. The first, entitled Our Banner in the Sky, was painted shortly after the bombardment of Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861 and subsequently widely reproduced up North in the form of a popular chromolithograph (fig. 6.24).69 Church’s numerous studies of streaky twilight and sunrise skies predisposed him to imagine a dawning firmament with bands of red and white cloud around a blue field 6.24  Frederic Church, Our Banner in the Sky, oil over chromolithograph mounted on canvas, 1861. Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.



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of stars. He forged a kind of “naturalized” flag out of the celestial vault, linking it edgewise to an earthbound staff formed of a blasted, branchless tree. The open-ended bands of red-and-white cloud give the “flag” a tattered look, the appropriate metaphor for the ravaged national landscape. Church’s popular image merges landscape and patriotic emblem—the Fatherland and Mother Nature synthesized—in a more specifically symbolic context than his panoramic prospects whose nationalistic associations are typically submerged beneath the rhetoric of convention. His hallucinatory and illusionistic image prefigures a Union triumph in the heavens— the teleological goal of earth’s unfolding history and America’s destiny. He was not above borrowing an idea or two from the purveyors of contemporary popular culture—for example, the “Spirit of the Union” sheet-music cover depicting Columbia proudly carrying an unfurled banner with a bald eagle at her side. She points to the first line of the song emblazoned above her: “Hail! Glorious Banner of Our Land” (fig. 6.25). It is no coincidence that the special reverence Americans accord their flag in modern times first reveals itself around the time of the firing on Fort Sumter. At that moment, the national flag still flew over the isolated federal garrison marooned on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, even though the state had seceded in December 1860. This flag was invested with unprecedented symbolic status as the remnant of federal authority in the

6.25  “Hail! Glorious Banner of Our Land,” 1861. Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Special Collections, the Sheridan Libraries of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.



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seceded states. When on the morning of 12 April 1861 the Palmetto Guard of South Carolina opened fire on the fort, the Stars and Stripes was raised and became its key target. It was finally shot down at noon, and when the South Carolinians took formal possession of the fort they hoisted the Confederate and palmetto (the state emblem) flags. Four years later, after the fall of Charleston, Lincoln ordered the flag raised again with noisy fanfare over Sumter.70 Before the war, landscape—where overt signs of racial and class conflict could be occluded—provided a safe and neutral venue for the expression of the territorial expansion that led to the sectional crisis. It is noteworthy that around 1850 genre painting began to take second place to the growing interest in the exalted landscapes of the Hudson River school and their western counterparts. Lilly Martin Spencer wrote to her mother in 1852 that she wished she had practiced landscape, “for they sell quicker than any other kind of painting.”71 Perhaps the politics of genre painting introduced too many uncomfortable (if inadvertent) revelations of the contradictions of American social life, especially as the sectional crisis reached fever pitch. The uninhabited panoramic landscape, on the other hand, appeared more trouble-free in its operatic sweep, while yet fulfilling the aesthetic demand for inspired work. Here the unencumbered vision of an endless stretch of wilderness conveyed the expansionist fantasy deceptively freed from the visual hints of raucous democracy and the social and political conflict inherent in the westward push. The war smoothed the path of industrial capitalism by the destruction of slavery and the power of the slave-owning class, while the triumph of Northern arms gave an enormous moral and political boost to American nationalist ideals. This sense of Northern promise is culturally expressed in the landscapes of the Hudson River school, and is already evident in the pre–Civil War era in its expression of the consolidation of American territory since the Mexican War. The characteristic viewpoint of Jacksonian-era landscapists traced a visual trajectory from the uplands to a scenic panorama below. Almost invariably the compositions were arranged with the spectator in mind, either assuming the elevated viewpoint of the onlooker or including a staffage figure seen from behind that functioned as a surrogate onlooker.72 This Olympian bearing metonymically embraced past, present, and future, synchronically plotting the course of empire. This experience on the heights and its literary and visual translation became assimilated to popular culture and remained and continues to remain a fundamental component of the national dream. As such, it is inseparable from nationalist rhetoric. I will argue here that this peculiar gaze represents not only a visual line of sight but an ideological one as well. In 1846 Walt Whitman, a young editor with a panoramic grasp of affairs, advocating that the United States keep “a fast grip on California,” disingenuously exclaimed, “We love to indulge in thoughts of the future extent and power of this republic—because with its increase is the increase

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of human happiness and liberty.”73 Whitman saw in the Mexican War a golden opportunity “to furnish a cluster of new stars for the spangled banner.”74 His editorial “American Futurity” prophesies that thirty years hence “America will be confessed the first nation on the earth. We of course mean that her power, wealth, and the happiness and virtue of her citizens will then obtain a pitch which other nations cannot favorably compare with. . . . The mind is lost in contemplating such incalculable acres.”75 Taking the broad view from the summit, Whitman pictured the western territory: Stretching between the Alleghany Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, are millions of uncultivated acres of land—long rolling prairies—interminable savannahs, where the fat earth is covered with grass reaching to a height unknown in our less prolific north—forests, amid whose boughs nothing but silence reigns. . . . The mind becomes almost lost in tracing in imagination those hidden and boundless tracts of our territory.76

Then, like the typical “expectant capitalist,” he forecasts the transformation of this wilderness into empire: We lose ourselves in the anticipation of what may be seen there in time—the flourishing cities, the happy family homes, the stately edifices of public improvement, the sights and sounds of national prosperity.

Here is a dynamic source of intellectual energy for Whitman’s poetry and prose, the force behind his imaginative rendering of the amplitude of space and extensive prospects. Even though the Civil War threatened to deconstruct his optimistic view of America, he made it clear in DrumTaps that he held fast to the inevitability of a stronger nation rising from the ashes. This hopefulness is expressed in such poems such as “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps,” “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” and “Flag of Stars, Thick-Sprinkled Bunting”—“Walk supreme to the heavens, mighty symbol—run up above them all, / Flag of Stars! Thick-sprinkled bunting!” Even when more disillusioned than hopeful, he could title his most serious contribution to prose literature “Democratic Vistas,” with its poignant clarification: “Far, far, indeed, stretch, in distance, our Vistas!” After having financed his most creative years through the buying and selling of real estate, he could aestheticize Manifest Destiny from the elevated vantage point in the most optimistic terms. In the poem from Drum-Taps entitled “From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird,” the poet, wishing “to sing the idea of all,” soars breathlessly across the continent like John Gast’s Spirit of American Progress, embracing all of its varied geography and its teeming life from coast to coast (fig. 6.26). As in the Hudson River landscapes, past, present, and future are synchronically merged in a cosmic present.

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6.26  John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Autry National Center, Los Angeles. 6.27  Asher B. Durand, Progress, 1853. Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Asher B. Durand, the close colleague of Thomas Cole, the pioneer landscapist of the Hudson River school, provides the paradigmatic visual formulation of what I will call the “magisterial gaze.” In his work of 1853 entitled, appropriately enough, Progress, Durand encoded his concept of national progress in readily identifiable terms for the conservative elite and

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their cultural representatives (fig. 6.27).77 Starting from the inevitable leftforeground repoussoir of the blasted trees, craggy outcroppings, and rude wilderness thicket, we follow the diagonal line of sight toward the valley below, where we see a drover hustling a herd of cattle down a country road lined with telegraph poles, leading us next to inland settlements marked by schoolhouse and church, then to every type of mercantile activity imaginable—including factories, locomotive, steamboats—before culminating with a thriving city on a peninsula in the middle distance. In this case, Durand added to the foreground motif the normally absent Native Americans peering out of the gloomy wilderness upon the brighter cultivated scene below.78 As one reviewer sounded the characteristic ambiguity of American progress, “The wild Indian is seen taking a last look at the land of his fathers, and for the last time treading those mountain glades, so beautiful in their wild scenery, but soon to change and disappear before the white man’s resistless march of improvement.” Another critic of the period described the work as “purely american. It tells an American story out of American facts, portrayed with true American feeling, by a devoted and earnest student of Nature.”79 Durand’s patriotic landscape was consistent with his nationalistic stance, expressed in his 1854–1855 “Letters on Landscape Painting”: I desire not to limit the universality of the Art, or require that the artist shall sacrifice aught to patriotism; but, untrammeled as he is, and free from academic or other restraints by virtue of his position, why should not the American landscape painter, in accordance with the principle of self-government, boldly originate a high and independent style, based on his native resources? ever cherishing an abiding faith that the time is not far remote when his beloved Art will stand out amid the scenery of his “own green forest land,” wearing as fair a coronal as ever graced a brow “in that Old World beyond the deep.”80

Progress, “based on his native resources,” is unmistakably a visual manifesto of the “American” style envisioned by Durand. The diagonal line of sight is synonymous with the magisterial gaze, taking us rapidly from an elevated geographical zone to a lower register, telescoping progress synchronically in time and space. Within this fantasy of domain and empire gained from looking out and down over broad expanses is the subtext of metaphorical forecast of the future. The future is given a spatial location in which vast territories are brought under visual and symbolic control. Halfway down the slope we see the road along which drovers take their wares, leading to the manufacturing centers near the river speckled with the smoke of the chimneys and steamships. Thus “progress” implies the conquest of empire as well, anticipating the visualization of the future in the image of the frontiersman surveying the western horizon from the heights of a mountain pass. The generation of patrons who supported Durand’s productions, like the New York merchant Luman

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Reed, would pass on the mantle to their younger business partners, like Marshall O. Roberts, steamship and railroad magnate who also collected Church’s work and that of Albert Bierstadt, painter of the Rockies. The train in Progress crosses a viaduct moving west in the direction of the river toward the setting sun. It was in 1853 that Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Survey bill for determining within ten months the most “practicable and economical” trans-Mississippi railroad route to the Pacific.81 By no strange coincidence Durand painted the work for Charles Gould, the broker and later treasurer of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Gould’s patronage of American art often intersected with, and helped promote, his own business interests. Gould would later participate in the organization of the highly publicized Artists’ Excursion on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (a similar railroad excursion over the Erie Railroad had taken place in 1849), an effort to neutralize fears that the railroad’s penetration of wilderness areas would despoil the environment for artist and traveler alike.82 Artists frequently held hands with the railroad barons and received a “free ride” in return for their services. It is this gaze of command, or commanding view—as it was so often termed in the nineteenth-century literature—that is the perspective of the American searching for new worlds to conquer. It presupposes the spectator as sightseer on the ledge or crest subjugating the boundless reality to a disciplined scrutiny and simultaneously taking a reading from this orientation that is profoundly personal and ideological at the same time. I use the term magisterial gaze to distinguish it from the North European viewpoint, particularly as it is typically manifested in the work of the Swiss Caspar Wolf, the German Caspar David Friedrich, and Friedrich’s Norwegian colleague, Johan Christian Clausen Dahl. Their landscape perspectives are generally organized from the opposing perspective that I name the reverential gaze (see Art in an Age of Bonapartism, chapter 9). In this perspective, almost always associated with the notion of the sublime, the point of view moves upward from the lower picture plane and culminates on or near a distant mountain peak (figs. 6.28–29). The reverential gaze signified the striving of vision toward a celestial goal in the heavens, starting from a wide, panoramic base. (One way to imagine this is to picture an upended cone with the apex tilted away from the viewer.) The convergence of the line of vision on a celestial focal point metaphorically implied the yearning for the unity of experience and matter under the Godhead. This is precisely the inverse of the American gaze. In American panoramic scenes the apex of the imaginary cone is the eye of the presumed beholder already established at the summit; from there the cone expands to embrace the panorama below.83 In this sense, the beholder occupies the spatial location assigned to the Godhead in Friedrich’s work. The magisterial gaze assumes a perspective akin to the divine, represented in the Masonicinfluenced Great Seal of the United States, in which the symbol of the Novus Ordo Seclorum is the radiant eye coterminous with the apex of the

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6.28  Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape in the Riesengebirge, ca. 1810. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 6.29  Caspar David Friedrich, Traveler above the Fog, ca. 1815. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

pyramid. In the landscape, it may be said that the artist aligns himself with the universal sight of the “Great Architect of the Universe.” This concept remained operative in Freemason Gutzon Borglum’s colossal heads carved out of the summit of Mount Rushmore, with Jefferson’s gaze deliberately directed westward from a point once sacred to the Dakota Indians. Of course other nationalities have experienced and expressed similar feelings on the heights.84 The literal and metaphorical ascent was a staple of Romantic imagery throughout the Western world since the eighteenth century, but seeking solitude or religious exaltation on a hillside is not synonymous with an historical reading of the landscape. The aristocratic form of landscape that assumed a spectator of rank placed in a superior position is analogous but not synonymous with the American panorama in which often a farmer, a pioneer, or middle-class tourist enjoys the view.85 James Thomson’s epic poem The Seasons, a long dithyramb to nature’s cycle, contains several references to hilltop prospects, the most well known sounding close in spirit to the American ideal: Meantime you gain the height, from whose fair brow The bursting prospect spreads immense around; And snatch’d o’er hill and dale, and wood and lawn, And verdant field, and darkening heath between, And villages embosm’d soft in trees, And spiry towns by surging columns mark’d Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams.86

Thomson, however, in these lines from “Spring,” is writing from the perspective of his patron, George, Lord Lyttelton, whose country seat, Hagley Park, is being glorified in these passages. It is the well-manicured estate, not a wilderness setting, which constitutes the point of departure for the sighting of the “bursting prospect,” which is a tidy feudal extension of Lord Lyttelton’s seat. In this view, there is nothing left to develop since everything is preordained and fixed in accordance with the inevitable unity of aristocratic ownership of the land and nature’s cyclical rhythm. This theme is repeated in “Autumn,” where the vista gathers in “A gaily chequer’d, heart-expanding view, / Far as the circling eye can shoot around, / Unbounded tossing in a flood of corn.”87 The farmer’s labor here provides the basis for the noble’s “soft civility of life,” the leisurely appreciation and encouragement of the “gentle art” that allows for Thomson’s patronage. Elsewhere mountains are conceptualized as hostile sites, “Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave, / Burning for blood, bony, and gaunt, and grim,” responsible for catastrophic events like avalanches that engulf “hamlets sleeping in the dead of night.”88 When Thomson inserts his nationalist sentiments into the poetic structure, his fantasy of a greater Britannia does not take place in the unfolding landscape glimpsed from the hilltop but is embedded in an imperialist adventure in distant lands.89

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Lord Byron’s Manfred pursues seclusion in “inaccessible” alpine haunts as an extreme condition of life, akin to other risk-taking experiences that exalt his imagination and evoke the Spirits of the Elements: My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain’s top, Where the birds dare not build, nor insect’s wing Flit o’er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow.

The Byronic hero is a thrill-seeking adventurer who wishes to blot out memory and live in the eternal present, oblivious to the surrounding view if not the immediate phantasmal geological structure itself, whose pinnacle he has mastered.90 John Keats’s sonnet “O Solitude!” as well as other of his poems dedicated to upland inspiration, thematizes escape from urban squalor in the immediate present rather than positing a point from which to imagine a progressively developing society: o solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.91

Here the desolate summit is conceived as the center of a closed container that serves as a refuge for boon companions, who bond even more closely through their mutual affection for the solitary site. Keats’s sense of the closeted woodland environment anticipates the French Barbizon school rather than the American Hudson River school. It is instructive, however, to examine works by Hudson River artists inspired by Byron and Keats.92 Thomas Cole’s Scene from “Manfred” (actually act 2, scene 2) of 1833 starts with a sharp diagonal outcropping in the foreground, dramatically directing the viewer’s gaze through the shadowy

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6.30  Thomas Cole, Scene from “Manfred,” 1833. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

steep-sided valley, which meanders to an outlet and a patch of bright sky (fig. 6.30). At the right is Manfred’s dazzling vision of the Witch of the Alps, who rises beneath the arch of the sunbow of a torrential waterfall.93 Cole’s interpretation works through the gloomy and claustrophobic mood of the original to indicate the way out of Manfred’s suicidal passions, and in the descent of the magisterial gaze symbolically registers the passage from dark to light. Keats’s sonnet was the source of inspiration for Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, exhibited at the National Academy in 1849 and paying homage to Cole, who died the year before (fig. 6.31). It was commissioned by Jonathan Sturges, Luman Reed’s business partner and successor as leading patron of New York–based artists, who had been deeply moved by William Cullen Bryant’s oration at Cole’s funeral and wanted to present the poet with a commemorative picture. The painting depicts Cole and Bryant on a rocky ledge discoursing on the landscape features of the Catskill Mountains. At the funeral, Bryant suggested that the region would never seem the same without Cole since he was able to impart to its scenes of grandeur and beauty “a higher interest in our eyes.”94 In Durand’s painting it is Cole

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6.31  Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849. Collection Alice B. Walton, Bentonville, Arkansas.

and Bryant who invest the landscape with its power and majesty—precisely the opposite signification of Keats’s sonnet. Keats posits a place of refuge, not a site for an expression of dominance, as is clearly the case with the two elegantly clad “giants” of their respective fields overlooking the wooded clove. Keats would never have “spoiled” the natural scenery by inscribing the names of the “kindred spirits” on a nearby tree as Durand has done in the left foreground. This graffiti-like tactic to establish the turf of Cole and Bryant is also reinforced by the conspicuous podium-like ledge that conveys the sense of a platform designed for a public discourse. Although individual details of trees, rocks, ferns, mosses, and lichens have been carefully reproduced, the entire composition is so stage-managed that it gives the effect of a diorama rather than of a metaphor for poetic uplift. Despite the appearance of a scene “’mongst boughs pavillion’d,” there is an evolution in the landscape from the blasted stumps in the foreground at the foot of the rocky outcropping to the gently contoured hills in the background. The once wild site has been domesticated by the presence of the poet and the painter. Thus the work operates as an allegory of the magisterial gaze now fully crystallized.

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6.32  Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross, 1875. Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

There are also exceptional examples by second-generation Hudson school painters like Thomas Moran, whose well-known Mountain of the Holy Cross of 1875 depicts a rugged peak of the Colorado Rockies with its huge illusionistic cross formed by snow cascading down its eroded crevices (fig. 6.32). Moran’s vertical format and positioning of the peak in the distant sky presents it, more akin to Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains, as the object of a reverential gaze.95 Also like the Friedrich its Christian symbolism has been confounded with nationalism; one chauvinist writer contemporary with Moran maintained that the Colorado Rockies were superior to the Alps, and the presence of the sacred symbol in their midst was a sign of God’s promise fulfilled at the heart of the American continent.96 Hence the natural formation is a sign of God’s sanction of westward expansion. In this case, however, the subject of the picture is the cruciform design at the apex of the mountain. The options for showing a near-inaccessible mountain in emblematic guise are clearly limited to the solutions developed by North European painters. Nevertheless, what is most striking about Moran’s picture is that the artist has created a distinct separation through atmospheric perspective of the mountainous region and distant valley and the more terrestrial zone from whence the artist has taken his view. The experience of the separation of the two realms in reality is described by Moran in a letter written to his wife during his expedition to the mountain: Next day, Thursday, we began the ascent of the intervening mountain between us and the Roche Mountonnée Valley, and of all the hard climbing that I have experienced, this beat it. Almost perpendicular, covered with burnt and fallen timber, lying 3 or 4 deep. . . . When we got to the top the view was perfectly magnificent. 2,000 feet below us lay the Mountonnée Valley with the Holy Cross Creek rushing through it and at the head of the valley the splendid peak of the Holy Cross, with the range continuing to the left of us.97

Moran’s “perfectly magnificent” view in the painting is taken from this intervening height, where he is able to glimpse simultaneously the vast

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6.33  Thomas Moran, The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, 1872. American Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

reaches of the valley below and the cloud-swathed peak of the Holy Cross. Moran thus wanted it both ways: the solution forced upon him was not wholly satisfying and had to be balanced with the magisterial gaze. This meant literally and figuratively surmounting obstacles such as storm-blasted trees and boulders to find a passage through the wilderness. This he achieved optically by the upland vantage point that positions us in the right-hand foreground, allowing the eye to meander through the circuitous lower valley and ultimately to the site of pilgrimage in the misty region beyond. Like Cole, Moran came to the United States from Great Britain as a youth and broadcast his patriotic devotion to his adopted country through his landscape. Although akin to his predecessor he was steeped in the work of Brits like John Martin and J. M. W. Turner, he nevertheless reflected the nationalistic urge in insisting that American artists throw off decadent European influences and develop a “characteristic nationality” in the depiction of their indigenous land. Moran participated in major government geological surveys and promoted the interests of his patron the Northern Pacific Railroad with his highly publicized scenes of The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone and The Chasm of the Colorado, huge bombastic canvases whose directional gaze is unmistakably magisterial (fig. 6.33).98 The theme of the magisterial gaze trickled down into the popular literature as well. In the dime-novel Westerns produced by the publishing house of Beadle and Adams, the tension between expansionist utopian and primitivist thought in the face of the receding wilderness was played out with monotonous frequency.99 Typically, each narrative of individual heroism participates in the larger historical process in which human beings move ineluctably westward, reducing the wilderness and replacing it with



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opposite 6.34  William S. Jewett, The Promised Land—The Grayson Family, 1850. Berry-Hill Galleries,

New York. 6.35  Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1862. United States Capitol Art Collection, Washington, D.C.



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an industrious civilization. Inevitably, the extermination of Native Americans is tied to the conquest of the wilderness and its transformation into an Edenic garden. Edward S. Ellis’s popular Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860) begins straightaway with the pioneer in a settlement musing on the westward tide and foreseeing that “villages and cities would take the place of the wild forest, while the Indians would be driven further on towards the setting sun.”100 Foresight and elevation are conceptually inseparable in tracing this development. In Edward Willett’s The Hunted Life; or, The Outcasts of the Border (1867), a veteran hunter and his spouse stand on the crest of a Kentucky mountain range and envision the future site of a pastoral society.101 This is a text already anticipated in the painting by William S. Jewett, The Promised Land—The Grayson Family, commissioned by Andrew Jackson Grayson to commemorate the historical moment in 1846 when he and his family attained the summit of the Sierra Nevada overlooking the Sacramento Valley (fig. 6.34). Although executed after the Gold Rush when the land was swarming with speculators and gold prospectors, Jewett’s picture deliberately avoids the overt hints of the “promise” fulfilled but rather insists on displacing it with the pastoral vision and endless horizon. Grayson leans on his hunting rifle nonchalantly as he surveys the limitless valley. He is shown in buckskin coat and leggings with a telescope jammed under his belt, but unlike Bingham’s Boone he wears his frontier garb over a starched white shirt and cravat. His seated wife and child wear dress appropriate to a fashionable middle-class interior. As Pat Hills suggests, the incongruous costumes carry the message that the bearer of the magisterial gaze is a sagacious urbanite equally at home on the frontier. When exhibited in San Francisco in 1857, one reviewer clearly grasped the message: “The composition representing the high idea of the progress of civilization westward will render this picture of ever-increasing value in the history of the arts in California.” Grayson himself confirmed this response, when he recalled: “I looked upon the magnificent landscape with bright hopes for the future.”102 It is the view from the summits of the Alleghenies and, subsequently, the views from the peaks of the Rockies that exemplify the ethos behind the westward expansion. Almost all literary and aesthetic visions of the westward movement take the form of this crested gaze, perhaps receiving its most memorable formulation in Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which, not fortuitously, is located on the west wall of the Capitol (fig. 6.35).103 Contracted between Leutze and Captain Montgomery C. Meigs (then in charge of the additions to the Capitol) in 1861, it takes as its source a line from an eighteenth-century poem (“Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”) by Bishop George Berkeley that had been recast by Eugene Lies as “Westward, Ho!” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1849. Like the mural it inspired (Leutze’s original title was Westward Ho!), it is a paean to Manifest Destiny: chapter six

Westward, ho! since first the sun Over young creation shone, Westward has the light progressed. Westward arts and creeds have tended, Never shall their march be ended, Till they reach the utmost West.104

Leutze’s monumental fresco shows the irrepressible thrust of the pioneers, who pause momentarily to savor their triumph at the crest the Continental Divide. They stand heroically at the pinnacle of the Rockies—the most elevated of them prepares to raise the Stars and Stripes à la John Frémont— gesturing in the direction of the vast spaces beyond. Leutze’s philosophical justification for the forward thrust of empire is inscribed in the right-hand border, ornamented with a medallion of Daniel Boone: “The spirit grows with its allotted spaces. The Mind is narrowed in a narrow Sphere.” But whose mind and whose spirit? Encoded in this representation of the magisterial gaze are the sexism—the outsized frontiersman with coonskin cap inspired by Greenough’s The Rescue embracing his diminutive, swooning wife and daughter—and the racism—the absence of the Native American (whose defeat is metonymically represented by the bow and arrows held by the boy driving a team of oxen in the lower right) and location of the lone black figure, a teamster, way below the peak, leading a woman on a mule and prevented from responding to the vision—that are intimately related to the American striving for national conquest. Leutze’s initial project, conceived (as part of a series) in the mid-1850s and presented in sketch form in 1861, did not yet include an African American; but by the time Meigs obtained clearance for the commission in June the Civil War had broken out. By 1862, the year Leutze completed the mural, Congress passed a Confiscation Act that freed the slaves of masters who served in the Confederate Army and Lincoln proclaimed the Emancipation Proclamation on 23 September. A writer who interviewed him in 1868 for Lippincott’s Magazine claimed that he agreed with her reading of the motif of the African American leading the woman on the mule: There is a group almost in the centre of your picture—a young Irish seated on an ass holding a child—the ass is led by a negro. Did you not mean this group to teach a new gospel to this continent, a new truth which this part of the world is to accept—that the Emigrant and the Freedman are the two great elements which are to be reconciled and worked with? The young, beautiful Irish woman, too, is she not your new Madonna?105

As the writer spelled out her thoughts to the artist, his “face glowed” with delight, taking evident satisfaction in her interpretation. But their common prejudice blinded them to the visual subjection of the African American both compositionally and narratively. He certainly did not play “Joseph”

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to the woman’s “Madonna,” and in effect represented no more than a hired servant too taxed by his labor to share in the general joy of discovery. He alone, buried in the lowest rungs of the compositional pyramid, is unable, or refuses, to participate in the exuberant celebration. The “New Gospel” was still a long way off from fulfillment. But for writers like Bryant and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who enthusiastically applauded the mural, the work captured something of their own desire for a sense of infinite national progress. Hawthorne, who viewed an oil study of the composition while Leutze was preparing the wall of the Capitol, gushingly reported: It looked full of energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have arrived at such a deadly standstill.106

Just as Hawthorne used the symbolism of a tower in The Marble Faun to metaphorically represent America’s far-reaching vision, so now in the midst of sectional crisis Leutze’s theme allows him to look beyond the conflict to an imagined unity based on continuing national expansion. We are fortunate in being able to confirm what lay in the vision of Leutze’s triumphant pioneers through a parody of his composition used as an ad for McCormick reapers (fig. 6.36).107 This popular chromolithograph of the late 1860s or early 1870s, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” with McCormick Reapers in the Van, spells out what the pioneers 6.36  “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” with McCormick Reapers in the Van, undated litho-

graph. Chicago Historical Society, Chicago.



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glimpse in the promised land. Instead of a vast wilderness, they behold a scene of immense farms where a legion of farmers running McCormick reapers are busily at work harvesting grain. On the distant horizon they see thriving towns punctuated by tall chimneys releasing their smoke into the air. Here the potential signified by the magisterial gaze is actualized with a vengeance in the post–Civil War era and amidst the corporate consolidation of American empire. Cole’s brilliant disciple, Frederic Edwin Church, assimilated this outlook in both his work and personal life. Church’s desire to bring his landscape in line with the national destiny is perhaps most strikingly revealed in his Mount Ktaadn (the same peak in the Katahdin region of Maine that attracted Thoreau), projecting an extensive prospect across a valley culminating with the mountain on the far-flung horizon (fig. 6.37). An adolescent male on the upper level sits meditatively beneath a tree and gazes downhill across a stream to a manufactory, probably a textile mill, in the middle distance. The location signifies a stage of development in the infinitely expanding prospect of the youth and, by inference, of the young American nation.108 The work’s owner was Marshall O. Roberts, a shrewd steamship and railroad profiteer who used his insider’s information to buy up undeveloped areas along newly planned routes. Most of Church’s selfmade patrons were anti-Seward Whigs (moderates on the slave question) who became Republicans and profited from the rapid industrial growth of the 1850s. They identified their social mobility with the national destiny, and their patronage of American artists assumed a patriotic signification.



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bottom 6.38  Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Even when Church renders a desolate wilderness scene vacant of all human presence, the magisterial gaze is there to shape and organize the landscape into a work fit for American consumption. The irony of Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) is that it both reflects and contradicts Church’s notion that America was vast beyond exhaustion, a place of unlimited horizons. The invisible onlooker commands these wilderness lands as surely as the mill owner in Mount Ktaadn.109 The view faces into the setting sun, a westward orientation signifying that the urge to expansion makes this tract of wilderness a passing scene. The idea of “twilight” suggests a gradual ending to the dream, the approaching decline of a great era of American history on the eve of the outbreak of civil war. It was only a short leap of time and the imagination from Twilight to Our Banner in the Sky.110 Not surprisingly, Twilight was painted for the railway baron William T. Walters of Baltimore, whose vast landholdings and transport facilities suggested that he was more than happy to resign himself to the inevitable no matter what the outcome. Another real estate tycoon, James Lenox, commissioned Church’s Cotopaxi, one of the artist’s Andean spectacles, painted in 1862, which displaces on to a cosmic drama of South American landscape the violent cataclysm of the American conflict. The active volcano on the horizon had long been a trope (like the proverbial “powder keg”) for revolutionary and political upheaval, and the rising sun pushes futilely against the lowering curtain of smoke and ash.111 Church’s first major public success, Niagara (1857), represented a spectacular variation on the visual dynamics of the magisterial gaze (fig. 6.38). From a point just above Table Rock overlooking Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, the spectator could command a vast, receding space shot through with the violent energy of cascading waters.112 The futurity of



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opposite 6.37  Frederic Edwin Church, Mount Ktaadn, 1853. Stanley B. Resor, B.A. 1901, Fund. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

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American empire is metaphorically actualized on the horizon as boundless and unconstrained power. The picturing of the harnessing and unleashing of colossal forces in the drive westward required a natural analogy on the order and magnitude of Niagara. The stimulus of the “terrible” Niagara on art inevitably related to the national outlook. Art born of this inspiration is the result of democracy, of individuality, of the expression of each, of the liberty allowed to all. . . . It is inspired not only by the irresistible cataract, but by the mighty forest, by the thousand miles of river, by the broad continent we call our own, by the onward march of civilization, by the conquering of savage areas; characteristic alike of the western backwoodsman, of the Arctic explorer, the southern filibuster, and the northern merchant.113

G. W. Curtis described the falls in 1855 as an American symbol of “irresistible progress” and imagined their roar as an inspirational voice urging the nation onward with a stentorian “forward!”114 The symbolic use of the torrential currents to suggest the demoniacal in expansionism and individual entrepreneurialism is seen in Melville’s Moby Dick. In the chapter entitled “Sunset” (that is, facing west), Ahab applies a railroad analogy to his frenzied maritime quest for the elusive white whale: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!” That onlookers of Niagara experienced a rush of power had become something of a cliché by Church’s time, but listen to a comment by a visitor already in 1815: “The whole power of the world seemed insufficient to prevent our unrestrained and almost libertine indulgence in the magnificent scene. I was almost tempted to wish that there still might exist some doubt of our reaching it. It seemed to detract from the power of nature that the Falls should be so completely at our command, so entirely abased at our feet.”115 The Metallic Line of Least Resistance

It is no coincidence that the clandestine route for transporting slaves to free territory was called the Underground Railroad. The straightest line of least resistance over and through every obstacle was the railway, and it thus became the metaphor for emancipation. The railroad barons, however, had their own agenda: they were interested in enhancing property values and developing land for speculation. Their object was less a direct profit from their investment in the railroad than the construction of a major thoroughfare that increased the value of the land around it and expanded the market for industry. Their machine’s success, however, was fueled by the public relations campaign that brought it into congruence with the prevailing

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6.39  Jasper Francis Cropsey, Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, 1865. Gift of Florence Scott Libbey. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio.

sense of inevitable expansion. Hence the ease by which chartered companies could enlist the talents of the painters and photographers to publicize their projects.116 The role of the Eastern landscapists was to tame the wild beast and put it out to pasture. For Leo Marx, “the machine in the garden” exemplified the “assimilability” of the new technology, occupying the middle ground between wilderness zone and town.117 Actually, this should be seen in dynamic rather than static terms, as a transition stage on the way to the New Athens, the New Rome, or the New Jerusalem. The image of the railroad winding its way down from the summit represented the actualization of the abstract gaze into its concrete and iron manifestation. Jasper Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct depicts a view of the most famous bridge on the route of the New York and Erie Railroad, once known as the Eighth Wonder of the World (fig. 6.39). An immense stone structure, 1,200 feet long and 114 feet high, it demonstrated to what extent the railways could disregard natural difficulties. Cropsey assumed a high vantage point to show the vast spaces mastered by the locomotive, at the same time snuggling it benignly into the middle reaches of the landscape. All the old ingredients are present, but now the magisterial gaze is regulated by the railway as it guides the eye down from the primitive hilltop to the dwellings below and thence across the wide valley of promise.118



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Mrs. Huttleston Rogers, 1945. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The peaceful absorption of technology in the landscape—a picture at odds with what everyone knew in their hearts—is deftly treated in the famous Lackawanna Valley by George Inness (fig. 6.40).119 It is the paradigm of the materialization in the landscape of the magisterial gaze. Inness asserted that he preferred “civilized landscape”—landscape subjugated by human endeavor as opposed to wilderness sites—but the contrast he draws between the wilder zone on the hilltop and the pollution and ugliness of the roundhouse and sidings below suggests his ambivalence. He elides the rude thicket in phasing the descending slope from the pastoral to the industrial, but he emphasizes the clearing as the eye moves downward by the pervasive presence of the tree stumps strewn across it. The insistent stumps almost parody the “woodsman spare that tree” theme while providing the transition to the valley at the foot of the hill, a vista of the growing industrial town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the complex of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company, which commissioned the picture. The company had been incorporated in 1851 and lost no time in gaining the authorization of the New York and Pennsylvania state legislatures to survey, lay out, and construct their lines, even if that required encroaching on the lands and waters of individuals, including Native Americans.120 For



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6.40  George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley, ca. 1855. Gift of

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colored lithograph published by Currier and Ives, 1868. Harry T. Peters Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York.

the purposes of cuttings and embankments the corporation had the right to go beyond the allowable width of the road, taking as much land “as may be necessary for the proper construction and security of the road, and to cut down any standing trees that may be in danger of falling on the road.”121 Although that passage referred to New York State, it may be inferred that the company received similar authorization in Pennsylvania, which probably explains all the tree stumps on the hill overlooking the road in Inness’s picture. Here the progress signified by the magisterial gaze specifically implicated the power of the railroad to consume the land. The decade of the 1850s was crucial for the expansion of railway construction, and most of it occurred in the West, especially Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. The railroad played a major role in the mobilization of troops and supplies during the Civil War, and a crucial weakness of the Confederacy was its inability to match the North’s capacity to move large contingents to battle in distant places. Railroads would become the first big business in the nation, requiring huge capital investments, and organized along military lines with a complex hierarchy and staff functions. The post–Civil War era was a golden age for the railroads, consummating the national dream with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad on 10 May 1869.



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6.41  Frances “Fanny” Palmer, Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,”

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The concept of a transcontinental railroad occupied the forefront of the imagination of the shrewdest land speculators in the postwar period. They understood the connection between expansionism and speculation and attempted to gain possession of the leading sites of future cities. By stimulating and guiding the tide of migration through advocacy of a transcontinental railway, they prospered by the rising value of their extensive landholdings in the strategic locations. Thus did the magisterial gaze get converted into the diagonal of a line of tracks and speeding locomotive carrying civilization to the farthest reaches of the continent. Fanny Palmer’s famous Currier and Ives print, Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” executed the year before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, aligns the angle of vision with the limitless track receding precipitously to the farthest reaches of the horizon (fig. 6.41). Moving from left to right as it descends a hill to a valley below, it bisects the composition diagonally into a right and wrong side of the tracks. On the left, a village is being built alongside the railroad line; men continue to clear the woods in the hills, children enter a schoolhouse, others run to greet the onrushing train, and in the middle ground a wagon train parallels the tracks as settlers follow the route opened up by the railroad expeditions. On the right side, however, two Indians on horseback are halted dead in their tracks by the screen of smoke issuing from the locomotive’s smokestack. The steam locomotive has now superseded the frontiersman’s axe as the main symbol of American progress, and the Union, still dismembered culturally and psychically, was being bound together tighter than ever by the iron rail.



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7 Biedermeier Culture and the Revolutions of 1848

It is no coincidence that the term “Biedermeier” was invented in the decade following the 1848 revolutions; although meant to characterize Germanic culture generally prior to that period, the drastic rupture of society generated a nostalgia for the bourgeois values and sentiment that overtly refused the political. In order to map the historical coordinates of Biedermeier culture it is necessary to review some of the events and artifacts predating 1848 before examining the specific works dealing with the revolutions in the Germanic states. The artists associated with the wave of uprisings had been grounded in Biedermeier ethos and abruptly broke with the tradition to meet the challenge of the transformed conditions of society. It is not surprising that in his novel of the quintessential Biedermeier family, Buddenbrooks (1901), Thomas Mann sets the stage for his saga by making his middle-aged protagonists voice sympathy for Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy. There was a strong affinity between Biedermeier and juste milieu society, though Hegel and the older generation may have worried about the “democratic” pretensions of the French regime. The pragmatic approach of the July Monarchy answered to the deepest needs of German Bürgerlichkeit, the constellation of middle-class values that included a desire to hold fast against the extremists of both Right and Left. As a middle-class response to the mobilization of conservative agencies against revolutionary and socially progressive ideals, Biedermeier found expression in all the German-speaking states in the years immediately following the Napoleonic wars. Since Austria was the site of the Congress of Vienna and the seat of the aristocratic restoration, we should naturally want to inquire into the way Prince Metternich’s vision of Europe as an international community built on order, balance, and restraint played out on the home front. Ironically, in the German-speaking nations the counterrevolutionary epoch prior to the series of uprisings in the spring of 1848 is generically defined as “Vormärz” (pre-March) in relation to the insurrections, as if these set the limits of everything that unfolded during the Restoration. This is Hegelian to the

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core, and perhaps appropriately so, since Hegel was the dominant philosopher of the Vormärz epoch (1815–1848).1 The Munich master Wilhelm von Kaulbach made an ambitious attempt to represent the whole of Hegel’s philosophy of history on the walls of the New Museum in Berlin in six complex, encyclopedic images: The Tower of Babel, The Rise of Greece, The Destruction of Jerusalem, The Battle of the Huns, The Crusades, and The Reformation. By the time Kaulbach completed the twenty-year project in 1865, however, its declamatory character was so out of touch with the times that he wound up ridiculing it himself (fig. 7.1). An ebullient personality like Vernet in France, Kaulbach’s taste for largescale visual spectacles appealed to kings Ludwig I of Bavaria and Friedrich Wilhelm IV and their tunnel vision of civic improvements. Rather than posit Hegel’s direct influence on his contemporaries, I believe we should examine what his ideas had in common with the work of other representatives of culture in the pre-March period—in a less grandiose format than that projected by Kaulbach. Kaulbach had studied monumental painting under Peter von Cornelius, first at Düsseldorf and than at Munich, reminding us of the central role of the Nazarenes in the development of nineteenth-century German art. Two diverging strains in painting develop during the Restoration, both receiving impulses from the Nazarenes, who now dominate the teaching and dissemination of the fine arts: the snug, domestic style of Biedermeier, 7.1  Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Destruction of Jerusalem, 1836–1846. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.



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and the radical tendency that culminates in the Rhineland in 1848. The radical strain follows the politically progressive developments of the 1830s and 1840s and, though stylistically indebted to Nazarene and Biedermeier influences, constitutes a critique of resistance against their politics. Paradoxically, it was the Biedermeier penchant for the landscape view and genre painting, for the love of the pithy, human side of everyday bourgeois life, that made possible this transition. Biedermeier belonged mostly to the preindustrial world, and, with the onrush of the railroad and radical politics, it became instantly outmoded; hence its susceptibility to the satirists who targeted its blatant social injustice, innocuousness, and sentimental superficiality. Like other modern stylistic labels, “Biedermeier” saw the light of day as a pejorative term combining the German adjective “bieder,” meaning respectable and commonplace, with “Meier,” a familiar bourgeois German surname. The name in the original compound was spelled with an a (“Maier”), making it more Jewish, and since contemporary caricature often mocks the pretensions of the Jewish arriviste it is possible that the initial label contained a subtle disparaging ethnic ingredient.2 The term was invented by two writing partners, Adolph Kussmaul and Ludwig Eichrodt, who wrote parodic bourgeois-philistine poetry under the fictitious name of Wieland Gottlieb Biedermaier. The poems first appeared in an obscure satirical journal in 1853 and then were regularly published from 1855 in the Fliegende Blätter, Munich’s popular equivalent of Britain’s Punch, where they created such a lively sensation that the poems were assembled into separate volumes. Conjuring up a world of contented and orderly bourgeois, the poems expressed simple homiletic virtues and conservative ideals. Resisting the grandiose utopian notions of the radicals, the writers using the pseudonym Biedermaier posed the modest desires of a provincial society striving to enjoy a depoliticized existence under Metternich’s rigid system. The energy of nationalism generated during the Napoleonic era was drained out after his defeat in the Germanic states and, with the exception of isolated pockets of continued liberal resistance, reemerged in the form of domestic pride and local aggrandizement. Here it would seem that one aspect of Hegel’s social philosophy, emphasizing the state as a key component in the ordering of society, offers a rationale for the Biedermeier attitude. What he defined as “bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” or civil society, has a prominent role in the process by which human beings are constituted as separate individuals. But in his system he distinguishes the interests of these individuals as civil and economic rather than political. The “bieder Meiers” of this world do not feel themselves to be participants in public affairs, but perceive the state as a benign external necessity that operates without need of their input. If their interests appear distinct from those taken up by the state, however, it does not follow that they are in conflict. Indeed, opposition is unnecessary: as rational creatures

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capable of discerning universal law, human beings can accept a rule of reason without thereby becoming servile. Hegel’s thought, no matter how elaborately it is interpreted, corresponded to a middle-of-the-road political position that adapted itself to the status quo. He supported the principle of constitutional monarchy as well as a bicameral representative legislature for Prussia, but fear of democratic rule shows up in his censure of the French revolution of 1830. His wellknown dictum stated in the preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right) proclaims: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” Thus Hegel lacks all interest in projecting a brighter future realized by human action in the present, but rather aims to reconcile people to the world in which they find themselves at any given time.3 His emphasis on the unity and harmony of that civil community which wholeheartedly and uncritically accepts the state coincides historically with the themes of Biedermeier culture. Biedermeier, then, represents a middle-class reaction to the revolution of 1789 and Napoleonic rule spurred by Metternich’s counterrevolution, a tendency to concentrate on private rather than public life. This reaction expressed itself as a provincial and petit-bourgeois taste that also domesticated the audacious romanticism of the older generation, tending to contain culture within a safe, narrow band of expression. This is especially evident in the era’s furniture, whose bulkiness resembles the Empire style but in its stripped-down simplicity mocks it at the same time (fig. 7.2). The houses of the middle classes who set the cultural tone of the era were rather unostentatious neoclassic boxes surrounded by flower gardens. Inside, the rooms typically displayed plain white walls. The Biedermeier style gave

7.2  Commode, Southwest Germany, walnut veneer, ebonized columns, and mounts of stamped brass steel, ca. 1825–1830. Rosgartenmuseum, Konstanz.



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the appearance of something solid and enduring and of being designed for utilitarian ends rather than for mere luxury. The close link between furniture design and Biedermeier style can be found in the painters Josef Danhauser and Johann Baptist Reiter, sons of furniture makers, who fill their clean domestic interiors with miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Biedermeier realism differed from edgy English and French realism; in England and France the antecedent classicism and romanticism, whether from Right or Left, expressed some form of idealism but paved the way for realism by allowing space for imaginative people bent on social change. But in the post-Napoleonic German world, shrinking opportunities and social retrenchment resulted in a diminution of optimism. Thus a conservative realism such as revealed in the work of the French Meissonier was the only option for those whose world had become drastically telescoped to the point of one’s own little cocoon; indeed, the “secure” bourgeois world then implied only a shrunken space for action. With no place to go, cultural expression operated as a defense mechanism against excessive surveillance. This did not mean a total absence of idealism, but rather a restrained set of impulses associated with political powerlessness. A characteristic creative response was the idyllic mode as expanded upon in Schiller’s aesthetic theory, where an “idyll” becomes a harmonious representation of reality— what the world should be but in actuality is not. The Biedermeier strategy was to scrupulously render only that which could be construed within the bounds of propriety. Thus the idyllic mode could be based on a convincing presentation of objective conditions but narrowly telescoped so as to exclude disharmonious elements. Biedermeier activity may be compared with the American genre painting that it decisively influenced through the Düsseldorf school in the pre-1848 era. Several young Yankee artists who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy in that period were attracted to its strong narrative bent and theatrical presentation. Richard Caton Woodville’s carefully constructed Sailor’s Wedding, painted in 1852, establishes the scene in a shallow foreground space and boxlike interior reminiscent of Biedermeier genre (fig. 7.3). His genre themes purported to portray democratic slices of everyday life, but the positioning of African Americans in the peripheries of the picture establishes a social and political hierarchy in the bosom of the republic. Although slavery in the territories threatened to become the paramount issue of the political campaign of 1848, neither the Democrats nor the Whigs took up the loaded question in their official platforms. Woodville’s Biedermeier-like representation disguises the national crisis by confining everyday life to a tightly drawn zone of experience that maintains the lifestyle of the antebellum world of his youth. Some of this inward turning in German Biedermeier may relate to the limited economic opportunities available, as the destruction of the German economy during Napoléon’s rule and the post-1815 introduction of cheap English goods into the German territories undermined local trade

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7.3  Richard Caton Woodville, The Sailor’s Wedding, 1852. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

and manufacture. The political oppression of the Carlsbad Decrees also constrained the movement of thought and action in this period and forced energies into narrow channels. When prosperity returned in the 1830s, industrialization took its toll on the artisanal system while the rural areas were ruined by the crop failures and potato blight of 1846–1847. These disasters spelled the end of the Vormärz era and the termination of bourgeois complacency.4 Biedermeier lived up to its name. The infinitely receding landscape of the German Caspar David Friedrich described in volume 2 is now compressed within well-definable limits and, in the case of Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Richter, assumes a folkloristic appearance—legible, whimsical, and animistic. Fairy tales, although seemingly inimical to Biedermeier realism, constituted an interesting hybrid category not unrelated to the idyllic mode discussed above. Their peculiar blend of Biedermeier objectivity and imaginative fancy established the modern idiom of fairy tale illustration still in vogue today. Carl Spitzweg and Johann Peter Hasenclever jeer at Biedermeier culture, seemingly exempting themselves from it; but Biedermeier’s pretentiousness invited satire from the start and its scoffers also merit inclusion in the movement. The self-consciousness of Biedermeier art is characterized by its theatrical staging, narrow proscenium-like foregrounds, and flat patterning that often suggest scenic decoration. It may not be coincidental that such brilliant representatives of the school including Eduard Gaertner, Domenico

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7.4  Karl Begas, The Begas Family, 1821. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

Quaglio, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Karl Blechen, and Schwind either painted set designs for the theater or illustrated scenes from the stage. Figures pose as actors, recalling that Franz Grillparzer, the foremost Biedermeier dramatist, believed that life itself could be viewed as a stage, and his characters behave self-consciously aware of their surroundings as a scenic backdrop for their play.5 Even in typical genre scenes of extended families in their homes, as in the case of Karl Begas’s The Begas Family of 1821, the landscape glimpsed through the window appears as a theatrical backdrop, the furnishings resemble props, and the individuals appear to be role-playing (fig. 7.4). The composition centers on the patriarch standing rigidly in profile—the painter’s father and model of the upright citizen—while all around him disport his wife and children, exuding warmth and contentment. The view of the Cologne Cathedral and St. Andreas Church through the window complements this scene of domestic bliss and order. Except for the eldest daughter, who leans on the back of her mother’s chair, and the youngest, who snuggles close to papa, gender bias is evident in the various activities of the children, as females are shown sewing or playing a musical instrument and two of the sons are seen actively writing and sketching. The painter on the far right documenting the scene signifies the extreme self-consciousness of Biedermeier artists, whose shallow

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spaces metaphorically point to the narrow world they permit themselves to portray. Artistic self-consciousness in this period is synonymous with self-censorship, the cultural analogue of the system of government surveillance designed to monitor the activities of the intellectuals. The enthusiasm for medievalism that I have already noted in volume 3 in the context of the Restoration also manifested itself in the collecting and rewriting of the Grimms’ fairy tales now aimed at a children’s audience.6 The emphasis on child rearing and nurturing is very much in evidence in the ubiquitous family portraits featured in Biedermeier painting. One remarkable example is by the German-Jewish painter Moritz Oppenheim, who was born in the ghetto of Hanau near Frankfurt and had to overcome enormous social obstacles to achieve an academic education. He studied first at the Munich Academy and then in Paris under Jean-Baptiste Regnault, before finally arriving in Rome to work under Nazarene influence during the years 1821–1825. Unlike other Jewish artists of the period, he resisted conversion, and although he maintained friendly relations with Philipp Veit he was somewhat put off by the strict Catholic practice of the Veit household.7 He was concerned about the effects of Veit’s mother, Dorothea von Schlegel, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, on her grandchildren, whom she blessed with the sign of the cross when they came to wish her good night. 7.5  Moritz Oppenheim, The Jung Brothers with Their Tutor, 1826. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.



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Oppenheim’s concern for child nurturing is perhaps most evident in his captivating portrait of The Jung Brothers with Their Tutor, a work painted in 1826 depicting the three sons of a Rotterdam shipowner who were trained in Frankfurt by the innovative educator Heinrich Wilhelm Ackermann (fig. 7.5). The boy on the left has just opened his collecting basket, and his tutor has extracted a plant specimen that he now holds up for identification. The boy and his brother to his left mull over the answer, while the other brother at the far right of the picture observes them with detached amusement since he knows the answer from the botanical book he holds against his chest. Oppenheim will repeat this theme in the Talmud Torah School, in which a rabbi tests his students on their knowledge of Hebrew and the Old Testament. During the Metternich era, the concentration on child rearing was inseparable from the domestic wall of self-protection erected by the bourgeois. The hermetic folk tales suited this sealed-off world of extended families under one roof, and allowed the Middle Ages in as a playful substitute for the Baroque pomp of imperial and royal splendor. The fairy tale illustrators bridged the work of the German Nazarenes and the Düsseldorf school, tempering the religious medievalism with folk tales of monarchs, knights, and beautiful princesses. Vienna

One major geographical outcome of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period was the consolidation of the realm of the Habsburgs: for the first time since Rudolf was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1273 all the territory under Habsburg control formed one solid, contiguous mass from Northern Italy to the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. Nearly threequarters of this land was covered by mountains, hills, and highlands, and it is not surprising that Biedermeier landscapists expressed the national ideal through imagery of cultivated valleys that suggested subjection of the physical geography and, by extension, its inhabitants. Both the emperor and his chancellor were bitter opponents of social and political change, and the legal expression of their outlook is registered culturally in Biedermeier images of middle-class and peasant contentment. Ironically, Biedermeier imagery has always conjured up a model social world for later discordant societies, but the era’s own feeling of loss is already inscribed in its self-consciously contrived visual regime through the obsessive emphasis on an uncomplicated and harmonious way of life. Vienna stood culturally at the center of the Germanic world, and its Akademie der bildenden Künste was one of the great art academies of the world, with a curriculum that included science and industrial arts courses as well as schools of architecture and landscape. The painter Johann Peter Krafft, appointed director of the Imperial Painting Gallery in the Belvedere in 1828, was one of the chief pillars of the academy and promoted intense study after

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opposite 7.6  Johann Peter Krafft, The Entrance of Kaiser Franz into Vienna after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1814,

1828. Österreichische Galerie, Vienna. 7.7  Johann Peter Krafft, Kaiser Franz Giving a Public Audience, 1836–1837. Österreichische Galerie, Vienna.



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nature. Like his teacher Jacques-Louis David, Krafft shifted from neoclassical to modern patriotic history painting under the impact of far-reaching contemporary events. In his case, the Napoleonic wars redirected his energies to meet the demand for politically relevant subject matter. The year of his appointment to the Belvedere, he painted The Entrance of Kaiser Franz into Vienna after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1814, depicting the Kaiser’s triumphal reception by an enthusiastic crowd celebrating his return at the end of the Napoleonic wars (fig. 7.6). Krafft directs the gaze of the emperor toward a group of young girls strewing flowers in his path, pointing up the paternal guise that fostered the image of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin as the model father and mother in the empire. His work, especially the three “Kabinettformat” paintings for the Imperial Chancellery depicting episodes from the life of Emperor Franz I, established the standard for Biedermeier thematics. Commissioned by the empress shortly before the death of Kaiser Franz in 1835, these works attempt to capture the paternalistic aura of the emperor that the empress wished to preserve for historical memory. One of these, Kaiser Franz Giving a Public Audience, had a personal association for her and emphasized the emperor’s favorite theme of family values (fig. 7.7). Every Wednesday morning Kaiser Franz gave an open audience to ordinary citizens who wished to meet with him. On the occasion depicted in the painting, a young widow and her children present themselves to him as he holds her petition and gently gestures to her to rise from her kneeling position. A large crowd of citizens who have come to present their petitions look admiringly upon the scene. Here Biedermeier reduces history painting to genre, with the emperor not only shrunk to modest proportions but revealed as capable of empathizing with the humblest of his subjects. The representation of the extended Habsburg imperial family as national prototype is seen in Peter Fendi’s Family Reunion, which depicts the entire clan with their children (fig. 7.8). As against the military environment enshrined in the imagery of Napoléon, the Austrian ruler orchestrated his visual propaganda around a harmonious home life. Fendi also portrayed Archduchess Sophie, wife of the Kaiser’s brother Franz Carl, praying with her four kneeling children before bedtime in an idealized projection of domestic bliss and piety (fig. 7.9). Neither the fashions of the family members nor the interior furnishings allow us to divine a state beyond a comfortable middle-class household. The children have broken off playing with their toys, which are scattered on the floor, to gather around the icon of the Madonna and Child. Fendi’s love of irony reveals itself in the Madonna’s appreciative glance at the kneeling children. The shallow space and almost frontal view of the Chinese screen that serves as a room divider convey the look of an architectural section or diorama revealing an intimate internal structure. Occasionally, Fendi could reveal the dark side of Biedermeier life, as in his dramatic presentation of The Seizure, which overturns the image of domestic peace and harmony (fig. 7.10). Here a bailiff evicts an artisan’s biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

opposite 7.8  Peter Fendi, Family Reunion, watercolor, 1834. Schloss Artstetten, Erzherzog-Franz-Ferdinand-Museum, Vienna. 7.9  Peter Fendi, Archduchess Sophie Accompanying Her Children in the Evening Prayer, 1839. Gra-

phische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. top right 7.10  Peter Fendi, The Seizure, 1839. Österreichische Galerie, Vienna.



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family unable to pay the rent, and energetically directs his associates to remove the belongings of the tenants as individual family members collapse under the stress. The work was painted in 1840, when mechanization and market fluctuations led to widespread unemployment and artisanal labor was being devalued. Curiously, the bailiff is given the key position in the composition, sharply outlined against a white plaster wall and at the apex of the pyramidal figural design (on line with a picture of the Madonna). It would seem that even when the authority is shown to be acting unjustly and illegitimately, it is represented as key to a stable society. Nevertheless, Fendi’s work responds to the changing social and political circumstances of the laboring poor in Austria and in other parts of Europe that would climax with the revolutions of 1848. The rural counterpart to Fendi’s picture is Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s The Seizure, which takes place in a rustic courtyard just outside a peasant cottage (fig. 7.11). At the left, the agent who carries the legal approval from the district office of the central government for seizing the family’s goods goes over the document with the embittered old farmer; while in the center the females of the family, surrounded by their children, collapse into tears, plead with the Almighty, or beg the agent’s co-workers to cease carting off their animals. One of the workers, his back turned to a woman who begs for his compassion, makes an expressive gesture as if to intimate that the situation is beyond his control. Unlike Fendi’s urban version, which makes the landlord clearly responsible for the seizure of proletariat property, here peasants seem to be engaged in hostile acts biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

7.11  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Seizure, 1847. Leihgabe der Museen der Stadt Wien, Vienna.

against their fellow peasants. Since only the landowner (usually a noble) could evict his peasants from the land, and the agrarian reforms of Josef II had placed stringent controls on arbitrary dismissals (eviction of peasant holdings required extreme offenses such as disobedience and troublemaking among the peasantry, failing to pay the dues and obligations for three years, or running up exceedingly high debts), it would seem that Waldmüller deliberately masked the social relations in the countryside by placing the blame on the tenantry. The real culprits in the countryside were the lords on whose estates the peasant lived and worked. Except in the Tyrol, peasants were the subjects of the landlord and bore the burden of a host of dues and rents that they paid in labor, in kind, or in cash. Peasantry formed the majority of the population in this period, and the land they worked made up a part of the aristocratic monopoly.8 Except in rare cases, the European cultivators of the soil were held in servile status, although in Austria they had freedom of movement and could settle anywhere they wished within the monarchy. Maria Theresa and Josef II had hoped to replace the large landed estates with small peasant farms tilled by an independent peasantry who would constitute a conservative bulwark of the absolute state. But the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic reign undermined all calls for social change, and Franz abandoned the reform movement entirely. The legal and political class inequalities in the rural areas was especially evident in the peasant unpaid obligatory labor known as the Robot, from the Slavic word robota for work. The peasant owed the lord so many days



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of labor service, the amount varying according to the province. The peasantry’s loathing for the Robot and its inefficiency and controversial regulations were often the subject of analysis among agrarian economists in the Vormärz era. Given the subordinate legal status of peasants and consequent inability to protect themselves from the whims of landlords, illegal extortion of Robot was commonplace. Not surprisingly, abolition of the Robot was the main stimulus to the peasantry’s participation in the revolution of 1848, though by that time the landlords had come to see the wisdom of hired labor. The eviction of the peasant family in Waldmüller’s Seizure, painted the year before the revolution, places the onus on the head of household for not having fulfilled his obligations and thus bringing his family into grief. Although the lord would not have shown his face under the circumstances, still there is no indication of the injustice of the peasant’s feudal obligations to the noble landowner. The landowners’ insatiable demand for compulsory unpaid labor and their excesses led to the abolition of the system. Waldmüller chose the rare moment of a peasant eviction, so difficult to achieve under the existing regulations that under normal circumstances provided security of tenure to preserve the peasant community. He evidently sided with the landowners who blamed the peasants for the failure of Robot labor. This is the class that constituted Waldmüller’s patronage and to whose glorification he devoted most of his pictorial energies. Often he depicts his aristocratic or upper-class sitters on their estates, basking in the luxury of their gardens and elevated surroundings. A remarkable example is his Portrait of the Notary Dr. Josef Eltz, His Wife Caroline, and Their Eight Children in Bad Ischl, perhaps one of the most well-known Austrian Biedermeier family portraits (fig. 7.12).9 Although in this case the sitters are not of noble descent, Eltz kept the accounts of the royal family and was one of the privileged burghers who owned land. The new bourgeois society emerging in the wake of Napoléon mixed in part with the Viennese beau monde, but was represented more by the professional, high financial and official types like Eltz than by industrial and commercial elements. Eltz’s property was located at Bad Ischl, a favorite watering place of imperial Austria located just east of Salzburg. It was frequented for its brine-baths and sulphur springs, with both the nobility and court-connected burghers owning summer residences there (the spa was actually founded by the court physician Franz Wirer). Eltz’s villa was located on the left bank of the Ischl, hidden in a densely wooded park, which extended up the Jainzenberg mountain. Waldmüller’s view looks southward across the river above the rooftops of the town and embraces in the far distance the dramatic snow-covered Dachstein mountain formation, an imposing massif of sharp-ridged limestone cliffs that attracted tourist and mountain climber alike. Waldmüller shows Eltz with his two oldest sons returning home from a hike and being warmly greeted by the rest of his family in their English

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7.12  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Portrait of the Notary Dr. Josef Eltz, His Wife Caroline, and Their Eight Children in Bad Ischl, 1835.

Österreichische Galerie, Vienna.



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style garden. The scene is split along gender lines, with the youngest son rushing forward to embrace his father at the left, and the women of the family remaining in place in the right-hand half of the picture. As the males group to one side around the presence of the father, the women all dote on them and narratively reinforce the gendered structure of the painting, thus identifying the elevated and privileged site with the patriarchal power that comes with ownership of the land. Waldmüller’s portrait, genre, and landscape depictions capture the sweep of Austrian society during the Vormärz period.10 The painter descended from a lower-middle-class milieu; his father first labored as a steward or butler (Haushofmeister) before becoming an independent innkeeper. His mother was the daughter and granddaughter of landscape gardeners, an occupation that must have sparked Waldmüller’s fascination for scenic backdrops, especially the parks and estates of his well-to-do sitters.11 She encouraged him to become a priest, a sign of her recognition of his intelligence and of the upwardly mobile aspirations of the family. His father died prematurely in 1806, leaving the family in precarious financial circumstances; but the precocious Waldmüller then made the decision to become an artist. He withdrew from the gymnasium and early the chapter seven

following year entered the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, where the future Nazarenes were among his fellow students. He excelled in the Academy’s competitions, mastering the classical exercises and winning the Gold Medal. Given his penurious circumstances, he had to earn his livelihood churning out miniatures and portrait drawings. His experience as a scenic decorator, akin to that of Daguerre in France, also sharpened his skills in illusionistic rendering of the landscape. His growing reputation won for him a court commission in 1827 to paint the portrait of Emperor Franz. This event no doubt played a role in his official appointment to the curatorship of the Academy’s picture collection in 1829, when Metternich, who signed the decree, praised Waldmüller’s knowledge of art, outstanding skill, and experience. Waldmüller often confuses categories—his portraiture slips into genre and genre into landscape. His landscapes are always of the domesticated variety, whether showing the park on the outskirts of Vienna, the estate of a wealthy patron, or the mountainous valleys of the Austrian Alps. This is seen even in his panoramic glimpses of the Austrian Alps in which the rooftops of peasant cottages are incorporated into the basic structure of the compositions. At first sight, they make us think of the romantic pictures of Friedrich and Koch, but closer inspection indicates to what extent the land depicted has been rigorously submitted to the controlling view of the painter. Although many of the rugged environments Waldmüller painted militated against the establishment of towns, their clusters of individual farms created self-contained communities. Waldmüller’s topographically precise panoramas always embrace a domesticated terrain carved out of a previously hostile environment. The landscape functions not as a refuge, but as an overt sign of human presence and progress. Thus the slippage of the categories of portraiture, genre, and landscape into a glorification of his patrons’ property attests to the social and class-bound constructions of his work. Waldmüller’s work flaunts the intensive cultivation of land in Austria, both in mountain and plain. His magnificent View of the Dachstein and Hallstatt Lake from the Hütteneck Alp near Bad Ischl, looking southward across the lake, invokes the panorama of high mountains seen in the work of Friedrich and Cole, but his rugged environment is tempered by the cultivated zone in the foreground and the thatched roofs that rhyme suspiciously with the mountain peaks (fig. 7.13). As in the case of the portrait of Eltz and his family, Waldmüller chose a spectacular site for his landscape view. Most of his landscape views in the Wiener Wald and Salzkammergut were well-traveled tourist attractions, again affirming his interest in the imposition of human control over the physically recalcitrant Alpine regions. Over 4,068 feet high, the Hütteneck Alp had a spectacular view of the Dachstein, Donnerkögel, and the Hallstätter See, an imposing deep-green lake bounded on three sides by the lofty mountains. The tiny village of the Hütteneck Alp was situated on a steep slope on the northeast side of the lake. Unlike

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a Thomas Cole, who contrasts an untamed wilderness with a cultivated zone, Waldmüller stresses the always-already realm of cultivation, where the primal harshness of the environment has long been subsumed to the tillage of the peasantry and the commercial imperatives of tourism. His landscape is reinforced by his finicky, mosaic-like technique and mossygreen colorations, which emphasize the materiality of the surface down to the most minute details. After 1840, Waldmüller also undertook a series of genre works portraying rural life. The German term for this portrayal of the peasantry is Sittenbild, referring to the morals and customs associated with rustic life. But Sitte also means a moral code, and it would seem that the artist turned to this community as a model of decorum in a decade fraught with political and social tension in the urban sphere. Although Franz’s patriarchal methods secured him the affection of a major portion of the population, with his death in 1835 and the succession of his ill-fitted son Ferdinand I to the throne, internal government strife led to a loss of national morale. Outspoken opposition to the government began to emerge in the next decade, when considerable unrest broke out in Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy. Waldmüller himself was affected by this agitation, and though a political moderate, began a series of antiacademic writings in the mid-1840s aimed at reforming art education and stimulating a shift in curricular emphasis to naturalistic art theory and practice. Thus the patriotic Waldmüller initiated

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opposite 7.13  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, View of the Dachstein and Hallstatt Lake from the Hütteneck Alp near Bad Ischl, 1834. Private Collec-

tion, Vienna. top right 7.14  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Lower Austrian Peasant Wedding (Wedding in Perchtoldsdorf), 1843. Österreichische Galerie, Vienna.



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his series of benign depictions of rural existence to represent his personal synthesis of naturalism and moderate politics. As in the case of American genre painters, he never showed rustic laborers at work in the fields but preferred to portray them during moments of ritual and festive occasions that emphasized passive acceptance of the rural life cycle and, with it, the social and political institutions that exploited them from the metropolitan center. As opposed to his portraitgenre examples, he is at pains to choose moments when he can represent the peasantry as a homogeneous social entity. The Austrian upper classes who visited theses sites as landholders and as summer inhabitants of nearby resort areas desired to see a benign rustic labor force happily accepting the newly restored Austrian hierarchy as the best of all possible worlds. Contentment therefore could be effectively expressed during those intervals in the work cycle when the community gathered to celebrate its personal and collective milestones. The classic instance of Waldmüller’s series is the Lower Austrian Peasant Wedding (Wedding in Perchtoldsdorf), painted in 1843 (fig. 7.14). An old market village just southwest of Vienna near Mödling, Perchtoldsdorf was known for its picturesque 15th-century Gothic parish church, which Waldmüller dutifully includes in the background to identify the setting. The brilliantly festooned crowd appears more as an operatic group than as celebrants at a wedding festival, with the dominant participants choreographed along a biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

serpentine curve in the narrow stage-like foreground. The conjugal pair stand in the center in their best peasant dress, she wearing in her hair the traditional bridal wreath and he the traditional garland of flowers in his hat. Just behind her and to her right are the bridesmaids, one of whom is amused and flattered by a flirtatious male youth who grabs her right arm and invites her to meet him after the festival is ended. Behind him, the priest sits at table with the bride’s parents, his sober expression adding a censorious note to a spirited event that threatens to erupt into a bacchanalian revel. Waldmüller carefully studies each physiognomy—men, women, and children included—and the sensual, conniving, and coarse expressions are the surest clues to his attitudes toward the peasantry. Despite the conservative character of his themes and the milieu in which he worked, Waldmüller’s rebellious nature found an outlet in the realm of pedagogy. Like the Nazarenes, he targeted the classicizing curriculum of the Viennese Academy as outmoded and despotic. Consistent with Biedermeier naturalism, he advocated more direct study after the live model and outdoor painting of the landscape. Like other painters of his generation, Waldmüller grasped the importance of sketching practice and agreed that many “talented artists . . . including those in the genius category, are able to present their superior ideas in sketch form, but they fail in the definitive elaboration of these sketches.”12 His series of pamphlet attacks on the academic program for its dependence on antique models and routinized exercises stressed the deadening effect on the original instincts of the students. His battles with his colleagues over these issues—which he broadcast in a controversial pamphlet of 1857—led to his dismissal that year and a modest retirement pension.13 The critic Rudolf von Eitelberger’s argument against Waldmüller was as much ad hominen as it was a reinforcing argument for the status quo in a year of upheaval. It is significant that their vituperative exchange occurred in 1848—the year that realism attained its highest pitch. Von Eitelberger attacked Waldmüller on the grounds of his class background, his poor education and lack of general culture, which naturally explained his heretical arguments and opposition to the Academy. The critic in fact began his rebuttal of Waldmüller’s program with the observation that all Europe was then preoccupied with the reform of art instruction, attesting to the close connection between culture and revolution in that period.14 In one of his last pamphlets, Andeutungen zur Belebung der vaterländischen bildenden Kunst (1857), Waldmüller emphasized the artist’s contribution to the public weal through cultural reform: “I entertain the conviction that it is every citizen’s duty to contribute to the welfare of the whole of society through the sharing of professional experience in order to improve undeniably flawed conditions.”15 He recapitulated his past efforts dating from 1845 to reform art education from the ground up, which he deemed crucial to eliminating the vicious system “from which our fatherland’s art suffers,” but all his pleas were ignored or not taken seriously because he was seen

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7.15  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Interrupted Pilgrimage, 1859. Leopold Museum, Vienna.

as merely a “naturalist.” Recent events subsequent to 1848 vindicated his criticism, and he called upon the government to “eliminate the academies and abolish all tuition fees for art education.” He noted that a new era had emerged in Austria, and a newly enlightened government should provide the possibilities for a rich variety of creative developments. The government should allow art education to develop independently and serve only as the buyer of first resort, as the patron of only “genuine works of art created in Austria.”16 Waldmüller’s late style suggests a heightened awareness of the social issues and a greater willingness to engage with them. His peasant themes of the 1850s are far less sentimental and contain many instances of hardship, depicting families in extremis, as in the case of The Last Calf: The Forced Sale (1857), Soup in the Cloisters (ca. 1858), After the Seizure: The Homeless (1859), and The Interrupted Pilgrimage (1859). His visualization of the landscape also changes, gradually shedding the theatrical-looking views and creating an amplitude that provides a more authentic environment for his human action. This is clearly evident in The Interrupted Pilgrimage, where the rugged limestone cliffs and steep ravine above Mödling suggest the cause of the illfated pilgrim’s collapse (fig. 7.15). Moritz von Schwind

A favorite conceit of Biedermeier painters was to portray the landscape

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viewed through a window in a private interior, another way of serving up portions of the natural world to a bourgeois audience feeling uncomfortable with the raw power of the romantic sublime. By framing the landscape with the residential lookout, the Biedermeier artist reduced the fearful potential and complexities of the sublime still associated with the catastrophic consequences of the revolutionary and Napoleonic epochs. An excellent example of this domestication of the landscape is Morning Hour, by Moritz von Schwind, who painted the scene while on vacation at the Starnberger See, just south of Munich (fig. 7.16). Schwind built a country house on the lake in a dense evergreen forest at Niederpöcking that he called Tannenruhe, or Silent Firs. Here he spent the summers with his wife and children. His daughter Marie had her own room whose window opened out on to a magnificent view of the Bavarian Alps including the towering Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. It was a large country villa ludicrously ornamented to resemble a fairy tale cottage—a contradiction nevertheless revealing a certain truth about the origins of Schwind’s fortune. A student of Cornelius, Schwind inherited the Nazarene obsession with the medieval, but he normalized the austere narrative schematizations by transforming them into quasi-realist romps of fairy tale knights, shepherds, and gnomes. The same process of domestication is felt in Morning Hour; here Schwind acts upon favorite motifs of Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge (see volume 2) but neutralizes the allegorical tension of the latter’s “Morgenrot” 7.16  Moritz von Schwind, Morning Hour, 1858. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Schackgalerie, Munich. opposite 7.17  Moritz von Schwind, Rübezahl, Berg-Geist, 1851–1859. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Schackgalerie, Munich.



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(Morning Redness) or dawn and the former’s immensely silent reverential gaze. Instead, Schwind projects his scene from the receding perspective of a pleasant interior where the beholder must first traverse the boards of the rustic wooden floor and the compact Biedermeier furnishings on the way to the view out the window. Substituting for the dwarfed and deserted Rückenfigurs of Friedrich is the lighthearted girl who eagerly throws open the window to greet the dawn. It is from the safety of this Biedermeier staging platform that we follow her upward gaze to the summit of the glorious Zugspitze in the remote distance. Like television, Schwind was never able to leave things to the imagination. His representations of legend and folklore had to be explicitly incarnated in shapes easily recognizable by both a popular and elite audience; although his commissions for book and journal illustration required this legibility, he held to the same rule in his high art as well. This is seen in his memorable depiction of the gnomish Rübezahl, the BergGeist (Mountain Spirit) of the Riesengebirge, the alpine-like mountain range just southwest of Dresden on the frontier of Prussia and the Austrian empire (fig. 7.17). The story of Rübezahl has been previously recounted in volume 2 (pp. 549–552), but it may be helpful at this point to recall a few of the particulars. The peculiar topography and changeable weather of the Riesengebirge gave rise to the series of fairy tales based on the adventures of Rübezahl, a moody, irascible being who ruled over the mountain chain. He could assume various guises and enter into the human realm to learn about the people who cut down the forests to make way for fertile fields running up to the foot of the mountain. During one journey, he came across the beautiful Emma, daughter of Prince Barsanuph, who reigned over part of Silesia. He transported her to his private domain hoping to persuade her to be his bride, but she was already betrothed. She pretends to succumb to his affections but requests that he first count all the carrots in his fields as proof of his love. By the time he finishes, she has fled on a winged horse to her lover, Ratibor. This fable entered into the popular folklore, and henceforth the people called the mountain giant Rübezahl—short for Rübenzähler, or “root counter.”

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Superstition gave Rübezahl the character of a coal peddler with flaming eyes and a red beard, wooden clogs, hooded cloak, and his famous trademark, a gnarled walking stick. He became an intermediary between “good Christian folk” and Jewish usurers, frightening the latter into reforming their ways. He was vengeful to scientists unable to accept the supernatural; when a physician scoffed at the idea of Rübezahl, Rübezahl disguised himself as a woodcutter and tore him limb from limb until the physician became a staunch believer in gnomes and ogres, as well as in God and the gospels. When Schwind took up the theme, he created the definitive form of the giant carefully outlined with all of his distinctive attributes. Everything is immediately intelligible, and the mysterious creature becomes a gruff, lumbering giant in a fairy tale woods without the slightest intimation of the preternatural forces which he incarnated. Here he is reduced to the caricatural dimensions of a picturesque peasant, less potent and mythical than Millet’s striding Sower. He is not shown at work or at rest, but as an idle stroller roaming his realm like a woodland flâneur. He is perhaps closer to Courbet’s Wandering Jew persona in The Meeting (Rübezahl even sports the “Assyrian” beard), where the French realist transforms popular legend into a naturalistic event in the present. Unlike Courbet, however, Schwind exaggerates the landscape forms, depicting the gnarled and twisting mosscovered oak trees as an ecological phantasmagoria. Schwind loved to conjure up in paint dense thickets, rocks, and old walls, which he associated with folklore, and once told his patron Graf Schack that he was the only one who knew how to properly depict the woods.17 This is the source of his appeal to the apologist for feudal traditions, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose book Land und Leute (Land and People, 1854) idealized rural life and the primeval forest as the antidote to the cleavages wrought by the experiences of 1848. Riehl sought relief from urban modernization in the solace of the woods, escaping from the perceived threat of economic expansion, urban growth, and governmental regulation. He lauded the forest as “one of the last surviving remnants of the Middle Ages” and “the heartland of folk culture.” The wanton destruction to extensive estates by the “demagogues” in 1848 represented an attempt to eradicate the Middle Ages by felling the forests, the source of rural livelihood in the face of the “mad rush of commerce and competition.” It is also a zone least inhabited by Jews, “whose paltry capital circulates much more freely among the urbanized peasants and small-town burghers of central Germany than among the authentic peasants of the mountains or the plains.” Riehl’s woodland thickets constituted a site of displacement for all his anxieties spawned by the democratizing elements of the revolution of 1848. He noted that in the social struggles of the present, “the peasant has played a more important role than most suspect, for he has served as a natural barrier against the spread of French revolutionary doctrines among the lower strata of society.”18

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Akin to Daumier’s and Courbet’s exploitation of popular imagery, Schwind’s Rübezahl participates in the realist rejection of academic and bourgeois culture, and celebrates the rural through representation of local folklore. But where they had hoped to change society in the direction of increased inclusiveness, Schwind was always more conservative, expressing an elite dream of the “good old days” by a kind of idyllic posturing, as if he could restore feudal veneration among the popular classes by creating vivid and appealing images of former times. The result is the hybrid intersection of realism and medievalism inhabited by a fairy tale hero who masquerades as a peasant. Glorifying the economic stability of the peasantry in the preservation of an agrarian ideal constituted a defense against the commodification of the land. In a larger sense, the medievalizing and fairy tale images of the peasant constituted a symbolic defense against social change and its accompanying psychological dislocations. The romantic fairy tale enabled Schwind to profit from the desire of the conservative classes to maintain the interests of monarchical rule and to see a benign peasantry and artisanal workforce in representation. By 1844, however, uprisings among the weavers in Silesia radicalized the region and the folklore as well. Earlier, Rübezahl’s name had been invoked by French sympathizers during the French Revolution to dramatize the struggles of the downtrodden, and in 1844 the radical poet Freiligrath could invoke the legendary creature as a form of false consciousness that stood in the way of real social change. The first verse of “Aus dem schlesischen Gebirge” (Out of the Silesian Mountains) tells the story of a destitute worker desperately combing the woods in search of the gnome king to help relieve his starving family.19 But Rübezahl fails to answer the call for help. There is perhaps a private meaning in this bachelor existence of the noble Rübezahl that may have stimulated Schwind’s fascination for the subject, including his male allies the Kobolds, tiny inhabitants of the mountain interior whom the local miners called Bergmännchen (little men of the mountains). (Miners, often subject to hallucinations from cobalt vapors and the oppressive darkness of their work site, often swore that they observed these creatures.) As a young adult, Schwind participated in almost exclusively male cliques in his native Vienna, and even after he married at the age of thirty-eight he more or less preserved his predominantly masculine network. Musically gifted and a talented violinist, Schwind moved in the intimate circles of Franz Schubert, the dramatists and poets Eduard von Bauernfeld and Franz Grillparzer, and several other intellectually and artistically gifted young men. These homosocial relationships tended to be passionate and intense, and if there is no direct evidence that they were sexually consummated, the texts attest to a strong homoerotic interest. According to Bauernfeld, Schubert was Schwind’s “beloved,” and both were madly in love with Franz von Schober, who later proved to be an important contact for Schwind. Bauernfeld wrote that Schwind “worships” Schober “like a God.”20 Schwind’s

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letter of 6 April 1824 to Schober is a frank expression of same-sex desire: “I see myself in thy heart’s love like an angel, who binds us together and I rejoice that you speak to me, to me, who rests calmly and with total love in thy arms, as I do. . . . I want to dance naked, but in the highest sense and in front of everyone. . . . O if I could once again possess thee, then I would know all and be capable of everything.”21 Schober later became an official in the Weimar court, and as Schwind’s close friend and protector won for him the vast fresco cycle for the Wartburg Castle in Thuringia, near Eisenach. The scenes include the medieval history of Thuringia (whose capital was Weimar) and the story of Saint Elizabeth, and constitute a rich compendium of troubadour and chivalric imagery. Considering that Wartburg had been the site of the rowdy tercentenary celebration of Luther’s theses organized by the Burschenschaften in 1817 that led to the Carlsbad Decrees, it would seem that the imagery of medieval Thuringian landgraves here has an undeniably conservative political meaning.22 Although not completed until the mid-1850s, the idea for the project was first conceived in 1849. Additionally, the enormous Competition of the Minnesingers is a veritable pictorial cornucopia of handsome knights, page boys (two of which are shown holding hands), and troubadours, who dominate the composition. It would seem that Schubert, Schwind, Schober, and the others constituted a gay subculture, a clandestine community as dedicated in their own way to the revival of medievalism as the Nazarenes. In Schwind’s case, his many themes of handsome knights aided by bands of gnomes enabled him to sublimate his homoerotic urges within the fairy tale format. This is seen in The Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein, the handsome cavalier who depends on the Kobolds to help him overcome every obstacle on his way to reach his beloved in a tower overlooking a steep and treacherous ravine (fig. 7.18). The gnomes literally dig a path for him out of the cliffside, and the topmost mountain spirit, whose head is hidden by foliage, joins hands with the knight. One clue to the sexual interest of the knight, who seems almost disappointed to arrive at his destination, is the plume of peacock feathers attached to his helmet, a traditional homoerotic symbol. Finally, the blond, mustachioed knight has been modeled on the features of Schwind’s hero, Franz von Schober, as the artist’s portrait of his friend reveals (fig. 7.19). Earlier, Schwind had done a careful sepia drawing of a sleeping knight watched over by his adoring page, and here again the seasoned warrior is modeled after Schober (five years older than Schwind), while the lovesick page may represent the artist himself (fig. 7.20). Thus in The Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein the partially concealed gnome who assists the knight may again be identified as an allusion to Schwind; that the work was done shortly after Schwind’s marriage suggests that the newlywed offered up a sign of his ongoing commitment to his relationship with Schober despite his altered social status.

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7.18  Moritz von Schwind, The Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein,

1843–1844. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig. 7.19  Moritz von Schwind, Portrait of Franz von Schober, pencil drawing, ca. 1868. Formerly Family Album Collection, Munich. 7.20  Moritz von Schwind, Sleeping Knight, ca. 1823. Formerly Hamburg Collection.

Schwind clearly associated these themes of dashing cavaliers with his friendship to Schober; in a letter to Schober of 18 September 1836 he refers him to The Prisoner’s Dream and Knight Kurt’s Bridal Journey, this last a wild medieval fantasy based on Goethe’s story which actually includes portraits of several members of the Vienna circle, including Bauernfeld, Schober, and Grillparzer.23 The Prisoner’s Dream is still another adventure representing gnomelike creatures aiding a handsome knight in extremis (fig. 7.21). Although in this case Schober is not the model, the contrast between the Lilliputians and the dashing cavalier corresponds to the master-servant dichotomy posited in his Sleeping Knight and thus alludes to a persistent fantasy in Schwind’s work. An unexpected admirer of Schwind’s picture at the turn of the nineteenth century was Schwind’s fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud. In his series of popular lectures on psychoanalysis delivered at the University of Vienna in the years 1915–1917, Freud displayed a reproduction of The Prisoner’s Dream as an example of a “wish-fulfillment dream”—a category of dreams stimulated by imperative physical needs such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire: 7.21  Moritz von Schwind, The Prisoner’s Dream, 1836. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Schackgalerie, Munich.



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The picture is called The Prisoner’s Dream, and the subject of the dream must undoubtedly be his escape. It is a happy thought that the prisoner is to escape by the window, for it is through the window that the ray of light has entered and roused him from sleep. The gnomes standing one above the other no doubt represent the successive positions he would have to assume in climbing up the window; and, if I am not mistaken and do not attribute too much intentional design to the artist, the features of the gnome at the top, who is filing the grating through (the very thing the prisoner himself would like to do), resemble the man’s own.24

Freud’s interpretation of the picture barely scratches the surface and was meant for a popular audience, but I believe it nevertheless helps us understand the way Schwind sublimated his social and sexual fantasies in his work. The gnomes or Kobolds are a subterranean proletariat, mining the depths of the mountain on behalf of feudal lords, and this class relationship carries also a sexual meaning in the subordination of slave to master. As several testimonies from his contemporaries indicate, Schwind persistently identified with the gnomes who waited on the knight. Schwind’s persona, wrapped up in legend and fairy tale, enabled him to earn a fortune. He made no bones about his commercial proclivities: when a critic hailed him as “the creator of an original, German kind of ideal, romantic art,” Schwind replied, “My dear sir, to me there are only two kinds of pictures, the sold and the unsold; and to me the sold are always the best. Those are my entire aesthetics.”25 Carl Spitzweg

Schwind’s close friend Carl Spitzweg, a Biedermeier genre painter and illustrator from Munich, shared some of the anecdotal traits of Richter and Schwind, but in place of a folklorish Genoveva or Rübezahl he depicted lonely, grumpy small-town eccentrics and recluses (a type known in German as the Sonderling) in their claustrophobic interiors or confining outdoor locales.26 Spitzweg’s environments, whether sketchily or carefully executed, consistently function as enclosures that guard and preserve the integrity of a cranky sort of life. It is this unworldly and socially marginal material that gives his work its satirical edge, carrying the Biedermeier preoccupation with privacy and individualism over to the fringe of society. He mocked the pretensions of the bourgeois romantics and petit-bourgeois life generally, and his illustrations for the periodical Fliegende Blätter have a more contemporary feel than those of either Richter or Schwind. This may be due to his having started drawing and painting as a second career and having to more or less educate himself. Beginning his career as a pharmacist, he taught himself painting in the 1830s by copying Dutch masters. This experience may have predisposed him to appreciation of the Barbizon school, especially Diaz, Corot, Decamps, and Roqueplan. Although

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traveling to Paris only in 1851, he could have met Barbizon and Barbizoninfluenced artists during trips to Italy and viewed their work in Bavarian exhibitions and collections. He certainly knew work by the French caricaturists Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville, and Doré and was profoundly influenced by satirical journals like Charivari and Punch. Working in small scale with humorous content and concern for realistic detail, he appealed to a broad audience in the Biedermeier era. In some ways, Spitzweg operated as the quintessential outsider akin to his secluded scholars who pause to listen to a bird perched nearby. His autobiographical circumstances and combination of traits put him on a collision course with the academic crowd (which he eventually won over with powerful backing), and like a number of Biedermeier artists, including Waldmüller and Schwind, he managed to successfully function outside institutional boundaries. He received key support from the independent Munich Kunstverein, or art union, founded in 1824 by the artists Domenico Quaglio, Joseph Karl Stieler, and Peter Hess, among others. Spitzweg became a member of the Kunstverein in 1835; this club strongly supported Biedermeier artists by organizing exhibitions and selling their pictures to middle-class patrons. King Ludwig I himself gave the Kunstverein his official blessing as part of his efforts to transform Munich into the cultural capital of Europe. The Kunstverein’s patronage enabled Spitzweg to pursue a somewhat experimental path, testifying to the growing influence of the middle classes on culture.27 Spitzweg’s untutored drawing style, done without the hatchings and conventions of the academies, remains refreshingly modern, more like that of a Disney cartoonist than a nineteenth-century genre painter. One of his most popular works, The Poor Poet of 1839—which owes a distinct debt to Daumier—ridicules the creative personality who lives in poverty on the margins of society while forever awaiting his first public triumph (fig. 7.22).28 The shriveled old man, sitting in his bed near the chilly garret window in nightcap and striped dressing gown, his blanket pulled up to his chin, quill pen secured in mouth, obsessively mulls over his verses for the umpteenth time. A huge umbrella is suspended overhead to protect himself from the leaky roof, while all around him are piles of scholarly tomes with tattered bindings. He warms himself by feeding his stove old manuscripts, and despite his hardships he presses the finger and thumb of his right hand together in a gesture of self-congratulation. But if he mocked in philistine fashion the Luftmensch, Spitzweg shared the escapist attitude of his mainstream audience. His vulnerable absentminded bookworms, amateur naturalists, hypocritical hermits, dreamy antiquarian book dealers, and aged military veterans are always safely ensconced within their sequestered nooks and crannies on the margins of society. Exchanging news with his brother Eduard on the cholera epidemic then raging in Munich, Vienna, and Salzburg, Spitzweg writes from Berchtesgaden that he climbed the immense Watzmann, from whose

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7.22  Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.



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peak he could survey almost all of Austria but “nowhere” did he see the cholera.29 Additionally, Spitzweg’s characters, mostly male, are generally depicted as passive and literally stiffened in their social positions and attitudes, often standing like statues in a niche. His alchemists bend over their experiments in a rigid curve, while his philosophers in gardens and parks resemble the outdoor sculpture they contemplate. Even his bespectacled butterfly catchers on the prowl seem transfixed by their would-be prey, while the Sunday hunters stand bewildered with shotgun in their arms or peer out over a rock in surprise at a deer who stares back. The gaze is essential to Spitzweg, as if scrutinizing an object or person in contemplation is the sole compensation for existence on the edge. Spitzweg attests to a heightened level of perceptual self-consciousness, always aware of looking and at being looked at. It is as if he were involved in the cognitive processes underlying his own powers of perception and representation. In The Antiquarian, Spitzweg depicts himself in the central role reading with his face almost hidden by the book, except that glimpsed in profile we see that the bookseller’s eye is not on the text but slyly gazing out at the spectator in evident awareness that he is being observed. Hanging in his outdoor stall is a large print of Spitzweg’s painting The Bookworm—an absorbed savant who stands on the topmost rung of a ladder in the section marked “Metaphysics” in his cavernous library while juggling books under his arm, between his legs, and in both hands—which reinforces the biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

7.23  Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm, ca. 1850. Von Schleinitz Collection, Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee. 7.24  Carl Spitzweg, Peace in Land, ca. 1850–1855. Private Collection.

point about the relationship between observer and observed (fig. 7.23). On occasion, the gaze has an explicitly erotic component, as when a monk in solitude leers at a woman striding by or a male widower or old bachelor (Spitzweg’s term Hagestolz means “confirmed bachelor,” with an implication of hedged-off seclusion) looks longingly over his shoulder at promenading females and loving couples. Like Corot and Diaz, Spitzweg often portrays peasant women alone in the woods, thus betraying his own sense of solitary bachelorhood and compulsive erotic gazing. There is also a serious side to his gazing, as seen in his series of standing guardsmen and sentries at deserted outposts, where military life is not only neither romanticized nor glorified but often subject to ridicule. Spitzweg gained an insight into military life when he joined the artists’ contingent of the Munich Frei-Korps in 1848 during the February and March disorders leading to the king’s abdication on account of the Lola Montez affair. A conservative supporter of Ludwig, Spitzweg had no love for the rabble storming the villa of the king’s mistress, but he lost no time in caricaturing the bourgeois-soldier in the Fliegende Blätter. Spitzweg’s sentries of the 1840s and 1850s constitute a fantasy about the wastefulness of war. His guards are typically shown as aged veterans posted on a remote hilltop of a ruined fortress, fortified by outdated, rusty cannons that function only as a perch for wayward birds. Somewhat in the mode of the Italian Fattori, his sentinels watch at their post as a tedious exercise, yawning in boredom or otherwise passing the time by knitting. Peace in Land, for example, seems at first like a Claudesque panorama, focusing on a fortress tower and ramparts in ruin and overgrown with thick foliage (fig. 7.24). An ancient cannon overlooks the valley and offers a convenient resting spot for a visiting bird, while the white-haired sentry sits on a broken part of the wall knitting a pair of stockings. The fallen ramparts and overgrown walls suggest that the war ended long ago, but the military charade continues. Painting in the wake of 1848 and the ensuing repression, Spitzweg shows Bavaria at peace once again and nationally satisfied. Copenhagen

Before turning to the 1848 revolution in the German states, it is necessary to briefly examine the Danish contribution, since the Biedermeier period in Denmark is generally known as the “Golden Age”—a term that, like Biedermeier itself, carries a political as well as cultural meaning. Geographically, Biedermeier encompassed Austria, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark. These countries (Denmark ruled Norway and was represented by the duchy of Holstein) formed part of the German Confederation under the presidency of the Austrian Franz I, one outcome of the Congress of Vienna aimed at restoring the traditional Habsburg hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire. As in Germany, the Danish middle classes constituted the principal clientele for the artists of the the Golden

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Age. In fact, during these years Danish society experienced the same press censorship and political repression enforced throughout the German Confederation. Following Napoléon’s defeat, Denmark’s shipping and trade fell into a shambles, the state went bankrupt, and its territory was reduced by the ceding of Norway to Sweden as part of the price of having allied itself with the French emperor. Thanks to the country’s abundant natural resources, however, trading quickly resumed and the nation gradually recovered. By the time Frederick VI died in 1839, the national credit was fully reestablished and the country began to prosper. Despite the tight social controls and press censorship, middle-class society profited from the restored commerce and provided the patronage for the painters of the Golden Age. Only the development of the Schleswig-Holstein agitation of the 1840s marred the period of recovery; it was sparked by the unity movement in Germany and aimed at separating the originally German Duchy of Holstein and the originally Danish Duchy of Schleswig from the Danish state and uniting them with Germany. (Later, when Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck’s leadership, reached for dominion over the other German states, it went to war with Denmark in 1864 over these duchies. Prussia and Austria, Bismarck’s ally in this war, ultimately quarreled over their disposition; Bismarck then goaded Austria into war two years later and crushed its main army, forcing Austria to accept Prussia’s annexation of the two duchies and a number of small German states.) The conflict intensified Danish nationalism and gave rise to the idea of a united Danish state, and this popular feeling—which had been especially aroused during the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein in the years 1848–1850—inflected the evolution of a school of landscape painting. As in Biedermeier painting, the art of the Golden Age is characterized by well-organized spatial formations, sharp-focus realism, and even lighting, which to the modern eye has an almost surrealist feel about it. Part of this has to do with the fact that Danish realism derives in part from Davidian neoclassic finish transferred to the realm of everyday life. The central figure in the Danish movement was Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853), who taught drawing and life classes at the original Copenhagen Academy housed in the Charlottenborg Palace from 1818 until his death in 1853. His first teacher, the highly original and erudite N. A. Abildgaard, indoctrinated him into fundamental respect for the antique, but it was primarily in Paris under David’s tutelage for nearly two years that Eckersberg’s natural talents blossomed. After a period in Rome, where he fell under the influence of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (also a former disciple of Abildgaard), who reinforced his neoclassic tendency, Eckersberg returned to Copenhagen in the spring of 1816 to begin his career. A gifted and caring teacher, Eckersberg transmitted the tradition of highly finished surface and classical composition to his star pupils. Eckersberg treated the commonplace in everyday life with the seriousness of Davidian neoclassicism, the hallmark of the Golden Age and

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7.25  Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Mendel Levin Nathanson’s Elder Daughters, Bella and Hanna, 1820. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.



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Biedermeier painting generally. Although he worked mainly in the category of portraiture, his insistence on direct and close observation of nature predisposed many of his disciples in the direction of naturalist landscape painting. One of his well-known portraits, Mendel Levin Nathanson’s Elder Daughters, Bella and Hanna, painted in 1820, depicts the sisters in the corner of a spare Empire room against a plain wainscoted wall (fig. 7.25). The two women are contrasted both through their positions and their preoccupations: Bella is shown standing with knitting in her hand and directly confronts the spectator; Hanna sits in profile and plays with her tropical bird in an oversized cage. Again, Davidian severity is wedded to the contemporary, with the scrupulous rendering of the exotic bird imparting to the work an Audubon-like naturalness. Mendel Levin Nathanson (1780–1868) was a prominent Danish merchant and leader of the Jewish community in Copenhagen, as well as an outspoken agitator for reform and equality. When in 1813 spurious allegations were circulated accusing the Jews of Denmark of sparking the financial crisis by exporting money out of the country, Nathanson and his business partner Gottlieb Euchel challenged the allegations so successfully that they helped establish a more favorable social climate for Danish Jewry. On 29 March 1814—a day of celebration in the Danish Jewish community—Frederick VI signed a royal decree stating that members of the Jewish faith born in the kingdom or who had received permission to settle within its borders “should have equal opportunity with the rest of the citizens to earn a living and support themselves according to the established laws.”30 Nathanson donated much of his personal fortune and philanthropic energies to alleviating poverty among Copenhagen’s Jews, establishing educational institutions for Jewish boys and girls, and founding a burial society and home for the aged. Late in life he published A Historical Presentation of the Position of the Jews in Denmark, Mainly in Copenhagen (1860), a primary source for the history of Danish Jewry. Eckersberg’s double portrait of the fashionably attired Nathanson sisters in their sparsely furnished interior attests to their bourgeois status and Biedermeier taste. Two years earlier, Eckersberg painted The Nathanson biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

7.26  Christen Købke, View of a Street in a Copenhagen Suburb, Morning Light, 1836. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.



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Family in a classic Biedermeier mode that exalted their agreeable domestic situation—creating an orderly impression that justified their social status.31 The rise of the Jews in Denmark and their full emancipation coincides with the ascendancy of the bourgeois generally, rivaling the landed aristocracy and farmers of the old regime. It is no coincidence that Nathanson was one of Eckersberg’s most important patrons, at first commissioning major history paintings but eventually shifting to genre-style portraits of his family. The Danish need for economic rejuvenation in this period allowed for the political and religious freedom of the Jews—one of the exceptional liberalizing gestures of the government prior to the 1830s. In turn, Jews had to act in accordance with the laws of the country and not rabbinical law and use the Danish or German tongue in all official documents, and, as a result, they quickly assimilated into Danish middle-class society. Nathanson’s commission of the severe double portrait manifests the tension of the family in attempting to reconcile their dual Jewish and Danish identities within a Biedermeier context. Eckersberg’s well-known disciple Christen Købke (1810–1848) is generally regarded as the cultural hero of the Golden Age. The son of a master baker and grain merchant who lived and worked in the Citadel of Copenhagen, he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen as a precocious wunderkind in 1821, studying at first under Lorentzen but coming under the influence of Eckersberg in 1828 and eventually winding up as his private pupil. Købke matured in the mid-1830s, when a measure of economic prosperity was restored to the kingdom, and his open-air landscapes of the suburban and rural surroundings of Copenhagen suggest moments of leisure. He was keenly sensitive to light and atmospheric phenomena,

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making use of a camera obscura for precise descriptive detail and packing his brushwork into minute sharp-focused bits of luminous pigment. Købke’s brand of Biedermeier realism manifests itself in View of a Street in a Copenhagen Suburb, Morning Light of 1836, where he depicts the area around Østerbro, in what is now the eastern section of Copenhagen (fig. 7.26). Influenced by the Italian veduta tradition that he inherited from Eckersberg, the artist opens up the scene with a monumental wide-angle perspective that displays the two sides of the main road passing through the suburb. Contemporary comments marveled at Købke’s ability to create beauty out of such a humdrum scene, a beauty rising out of the harmonious interplay of light and compositional balance. But there is also a social as well as physical divide along the highway: on the right are the mansions of the fashionable swells who promenade in their top hats and carry parasols, while on the left are humble cottages and peasants milling about. This is a class-conscious theme that nevertheless presents a picture of social harmony and peaceful coexistence, with each class knowing their place. Købke’s View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen of 1838 is perhaps his most popular painting (fig. 7.27). This time the view is taken from Dosseringen on the western end of Lake Sortedam on the outskirts of Copenhagen, where the family moved in 1833. The Købke home at Blegdammen was just behind the tree-covered spit of land projecting into the lake at the center of the picture. Two women stand on a jetty seeing off a group of men and women pulling away in a rowboat. They were clearly visitors to the suburban residence, who now return to their own homes on the lake. Like Constable, Købke always depicts the landscape close to home, celebrating the family’s country property and peaceful surroundings with scrupulous accuracy. His View of Østerbro from Dosseringen, combining features of the two previous works discussed, is actually a glimpse of the same suburban residences seen in the painting of Østerbro and from a vantage point similar to the other view from Dosseringen, but now sketched from the opposite direction along Lake Sortedam (fig. 7.28). Often, Købke depicts the royal residences and other important buildings charged with national history. Thus the family property and the national possessions are blended in his landscape—connoting a newly emerging optimism born of the economic recovery and the debt of the family to the government for its livelihood. One salient clue to this nationalist landscape is the presence of the Danish flag in several of his pictures of the 1830s— most conspicuous in the two lake views. The flag’s presence in the work of the late 1830s is significant in indicating the resurgence of patriotic feeling. As late as 1834 the monarchy frowned on such patriotic display as a sign of popular discontent and constitutional movement, and private individuals were banned from flying the flag. Nevertheless, the pressures to modernize political life induced the king to introduce representative assemblies in the provinces and relax the censorship that had existed after 1814. Købke’s work suggests that the ban was not strictly enforced, and the picture was even

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opposite 7.27  Christen Købke, View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen, 1838. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. 7.28  Christen Købke, View of Østerbro from Dosseringen, 1838. Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur.



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purchased for the Royal Collection in 1839. Generally, however, Købke’s brand of Biedermeier realism implied devotion to bourgeois privacy. Købke died too soon to respond to the cataclysmic pressures building up in European society that would abruptly terminate Biedermeier culture and bring chaos to his beloved suburban idyll. A full-blown democratic Constitution was introduced into Denmark in 1849, motivated by the revolutionary events and popular actions of 1848. The nationalist tensions and various uprisings in the then Danish provinces of Slesvig (Schleswig) and Holsten (Holstein) on the North German border pushed the government to make the transition from absolutism to constitutional monarchy. This unexpected political transformation sparked an insurrection in these duchies that developed into a bloody war between German-supported rebels and Danish nationalists during the next three years. The decisive rout of the Germans at the battle of Idstedt in 1850 temporarily restored Danish sovereignty, but in the next decade Austria and Prussia joined forces to wrest the provinces from Denmark. As elsewhere, the sweeping insurrectionary movements of 1848 put an end to Biedermeier complacency and Biedermeier culture.32 In Vienna the change is perhaps best seen in the work of Anton Ziegler, who prior to 1848 relished the ceremonial and festive side of imperial society, but whose depiction of the uprising in Austria shows that same society threatened by a militant coalition of bourgeois students, national guardsmen, and working-class citizens.33 Already in March the impossible occurred when Metternich resigned and censorship was abolished, and by mid-May universal male suffrage was conceded and the imperial court had flown to Innsbruck. On 26 May the Vienna revolution achieved its greatest success: a Committee of Public Safety was organized by university students and bourgeois radicals to direct the remaining remnant of the government. Ziegler’s painting The Barricades on the Michaelerplatz on the Nights of the 26th and 27th of May 1848 foregrounds the united community illuminated by blazing torches behind which the curved Baroque façade of the northeast section of the Hofburg—the imperial palace and favorite residence of the Habsburg emperors since the thirteenth century—is cast into gloomy shadows (fig. 7.29). During this period, a number of armed women took their place on the barricades; in an unusual move for barricade imagery of the period, Ziegler highlights the abundant female representation in the composition’s center. The liberal experiment in Vienna, however, proved to be short-lived— albeit the Constituent Assembly marked an era in constituting the only full parliament in Habsburg history—and absolutist principles were restored in 1849. Middle-class fears of the proletariat’s social aspirations, the concern for order and private property, and nationalist rivalries forged a compromise based more on a sense of weakness than on principled conviction. Only the Hungarians, whose democratic actions from mid-March 1848 had sparked the students in Vienna to demand representative government for biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

7.29  Anton Ziegler, The Barricades on the Michaelerplatz on the Nights of the 26th and 27th of May 1848, 1848. Historisches Museum

der Stadt Wien, Vienna.

Austria, continued to hold out against the Habsburg armies, but in June Russian intervention broke the back of the Hungarian Republic and signaled renewed cooperation among the conservative nations. Prussia and the Revolution of 1848

Although artists in all the revolutionary centers responded to the political changes, Prussian painters in particular present us with excellent case studies of the representation of the transition, struggling to adapt Biedermeier imagery and genre to the exigencies of the moment. It is no coincidence that during the Biedermeier period Düsseldorf became the key industrial and cultural center in Prussia’s Rhineland province. It is especially there, where a highly sophisticated school of genre had developed around the Academy, that we see the evolution of the struggle to forge a new style compounded of genre and revolutionary elements. As in the case of the revolution itself, the Düsseldorf school was largely made up of middle-class liberals who would have been happy to secure constitutional rights through strictly legal means. But in this they were to be severely disappointed.

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The Düsseldorf Academy was one of the most important of the nineteenth-century art schools. Its teachers enjoyed international reputations, and its influence not only extended throughout Germany but far beyond its borders into Scandinavia and North America. It was not until the schools in Paris, Munich, and Berlin gained ascendance in the second half of the century that the Düsseldorf Academy lost its unique position. This shift resulted from the disruption caused by the 1848–1849 revolts in Germany and from changes in artistic taste: the pedagogical switch from Düsseldorf to Paris marks the move to post-1848 naturalism exemplified in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855. The school was founded on a permanent basis only after the Napoleonic wars, reopening in 1819 when it was placed under the directorship of none other than Peter von Cornelius, the ex-Nazarene. But his commission to decorate the Glyptothek in Munich prevented him from devoting all his energies to the task. He divided his school year between the two cities, finally quitting the directorship of Düsseldorf in 1825 to assume the helm of the Munich Academy. It was during the subsequent period that Düsseldorf experienced its most brilliant flowering, under the directorship of Wilhelm von Schadow, yet another fallout from the Nazarene movement. Schadow, however, distinguished himself from the group by his emphasis on nature and his feeling for color. Although he preferred romantic religious painting, he inculcated in his students a strict observation of the natural world as the basis for all visual production, and promoted a style consisting of methodical attention to detail and elaborate finish. He thus aligned himself with the Biedermeier tendencies then emerging in the German states and Scandinavia. An outstanding teacher and administrator, he brought with him from Berlin his disciples Carl Friedrich Lessing, Theodor Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, and others, who were to occupy the important teaching posts at Düsseldorf. Schadow reorganized the school along the lines conceived by Cornelius, dividing the Academy into three distinct levels of instruction: a beginning course that taught neophytes elementary drawing and anatomy from the flat and plaster cast; next a class in drawing and painting from the live model; and at the apex of the curriculum an advanced painting class in which students collaborated with professors on large-scale projects and from which particularly gifted pupils were selected for the Meisterklasse—a program that provided studio space and direct supervision by one of the masters including Schadow himself. A unique feature of the Düsseldorf art scene was its relationship to the stage. Karl Leberecht Immermann, the energetic poet and dramatist, initiated an amateur theater that sometimes convened in Schadow’s own house. The artists themselves participated in stage productions, designing sets and costumes, writing plays, or acting in the dramas. Immermann often posed tableaux vivants, and the painters enjoyed preserving on canvas the most effective tableaux of a successful performance. The heightened realism of the

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Düsseldorf school may be understood in part by the artists’ preoccupation with contemporary stage properties. The shallow foreground and attention to facial expression that marks so much of their work grows out of their experience with the theater. Here again they display affinities with Biedermeier artists generally, as well as with the French Delaroche and Couture. Given Schadow’s orientation, it would seem natural that he consciously skimped on landscape and genre instruction, but his absorption in the theater and realist proclivities influenced his religious themes and encouraged students who wished to work in these modes. He permitted Johann Wilhelm Schirmer to establish a landscape class in 1839, which stimulated a major landscape development headed by Schirmer himself, and which included Eduard Wilhelm Pose and Andreas Achenbach. Genre painting developed apace with Schadow’s silent acquiescence, perhaps because at first it relied on theatrical tableaux and other literary sources. Above all, the growing strength of the liberal bourgeoisie in the Rhine area created a market for anecdotal genre. The Preyer brothers ( Johann Wilhelm and Gustav) and Schrödter, Hübner, and Hasenclever led this field, and they eventually championed realism and a new social order. These developments would gradually give rise to internal conflicts within the Academy and bring about its decline. There already existed religious and political tensions between Catholics and Protestants (grouped around Schadow and Lessing, respectively), playing out the larger conflict between the Protestant minority of the Rhinelanders who supported the new ruling dynasty and the Catholic majority who opposed it. As early as the 1830s, the young Alfred Rethel departed for Frankfurt as a result of the squabbles between the Catholic Rhinelanders at the Academy and the Protestant Berliners who had arrived with Schadow (a converted Catholic). Their differing views influenced the kind of art they produced. Ultimately an independent association of artists developed outside of the Academy in conscious opposition to Schadow’s biased preference for history painting and his disdain for profane art. (Both the independents and the academicians enjoyed the support of the Düsseldorf Kunstverein [Art Union], a group akin to similar organizations elsewhere supported by annual dues which entitled members to purchase paintings acquired from exhibitions and distributed by lot.) The political and social conflicts of 1848 only deepened the rift between the two groups. The establishment that same year of the Malkasten (Paintbox), a free association of art students and professionals, signified the crystallization of liberal anti-Prussian currents among the artists. One early pictorial representation from the previous decade intimating the rift was Carl Friedrich Lessing’s Hussite Sermon of 1836, the first of a series devoted to Jan Huss, a forerunner of the Lutheran Reformation (fig. 7.30). Huss rejected the authority of the pope and condemned the mass, the confessional, the sacraments, and other churchly rituals as inventions

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of ecclesiastical despotism and superstition. He was eventually arrested for heresy and burned alive on 6 July 1415, his ashes thrown into the Rhine; he died uttering the celebrated exclamation, “O sancta simplicitas!” Lessing depicts a passionate follower of the martyr preaching clandestinely in the woods before a crowd of diverse social types including Bohemian nobles and knights, who display mixed emotions in listening to his sermon. The Hussite exhorts his audience to rise up against the papal troops in Bohemia, sparking an insurgency that would create deep divisions within both church and state. He holds up a chalice to illustrate Huss’s heretical notion of universal communion, while in the distant background a Gothic church is burning, a sign of the priestly corruption that the Hussite censures. The work had been commissioned by the Royal Prince of Prussia, who, less accommodating than his father, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was apparently more willing to confront Catholics on their own grounds. (The Hohenzollerns were Protestant, but Friedrich Wilhelm IV generally tried to appease the Catholic majority in the Rhenish provinces antagonistic toward the Prussian state.) A critic for the radical Rheinische Zeitung—whose leading lights were none other than Marx and Engels—noted in 1842 that the subject was relevant for the present day, “when the same battle against the church for spiritual freedom is being fought in other ways and brought to its conclusion.”34 Religion did indeed shape social and political conflict in the pre-March Rhineland no less than the economic conditions. A sharp Protestant-Cath7.30  Carl Friedrich Lessing, Hussite Sermon, 1836. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.



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olic hostility haunted every social interaction, with religiously mixed marriages being a particularly thorny issue. Catholics demanded that children of any such relationship be brought up in the Catholic faith, and there was constant bickering over schools and church buildings and even cemeteries, which were often shared by the religious communities. 35 Eventually, this division split down political lines and was reflected in elections to village councils and in the administration of public festivals. During the winter of 1832–1833, Lessing had come upon Wolfgang Menzel’s Geschichte der Deutschen, which included the story of Huss and the Hussites; it inspired a series of representations devoted to the themes of conflict between church and state and between authority and freedom. Not surprisingly, Hussite Sermon struck contemporaries as topical commentary. On the one hand, it represented a Protestant alternative to the Catholic art tendencies of the Nazarenes and, on the other, mounted an attack on the Catholic community receiving privileged sanctions under Friedrich Wilhelm IV for their antagonism to the democrats. The son of a distinguished magistrate and grandnephew of the famous eighteenth-century author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the painter was perhaps typical of the middle-class liberal who welcomed the revolution of 1848. He exploited landscape and genre from a historical perspective generated by the revolutionary events of 1789, 1830, and 1848, but remained too mired in academic convention to try his hand at the overt depiction of contemporary life. The revolutions of 1848 in Germany rallied the efforts of Prussia’s most gifted painters and illustrators. In this next section, I want to examine the work of three Prussian artists of differing political ideologies for whom the revolutionary situation proved transformative. None of the three metaphorically resolve the oppositional struggles of 1848 in their images of revolution, and their uncertainty is perhaps the ultimate mark of their modernity. What makes them particularly apt as case studies is the range of their political dispositions: Alfred Rethel belonged to the conservative Center Right group, Johann Peter Hasenclever to the radical Left, and Adolph von Menzel to the centrist constitutionalist group. Shifting circumstances and rapid acceleration of historical events in the period 1848– 1849 did not permit rigid compartmentalization of the political parties, but it can be shown that the visual responses of these artists to these events disclose ideological positions overlapping with other texts of contemporary political, social, and cultural expression. Each painter had been working on major projects at the time the revolution broke out, and each abruptly left off his prior activity to take up the revolutionary theme. Rethel, after countless delays, had finally been able to commence his fresco cycle for the town hall of Aachen, Hasenclever had been engaged in a series of genre themes for sale to the overseas market, and Menzel had conceived of a series of paintings based on his previous illustrations for Franz Kugler’s Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen, as well as for the collected Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand. While in all three cases an

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oblique ideological relationship existed between the prior work and the revolutionary imagery, the revolution thrust itself directly into their cultural production so that they had to engage with it in a new project immediately relating to it. Hence their cultural practice during the revolution took on some of the unexpected, unplanned, and volatile qualities characteristic of revolution itself. Rethel’s Todtentanz

I begin with the graphic response of Alfred Rethel, a rising Prussian painter at the time, to the revolution of 1848. Although briefly discussed in the context of his French reception, here I want to take up his role in the German revolutions of 1848. Rethel associated himself with the conservative Center Right faction of the Frankfurt Assembly, convoked to draw up a Constitution for a united Germany. At this time, he had just managed, after countless delays, to commence his monumental fresco cycle on the life of Charlemagne for the town hall of Aachen—the magnum opus of his career. Yet he abruptly abandoned this major official commission to undertake a modest revolutionary project during the period of insurrection from 1848 to 1849. Rethel’s Auch ein Todtentanz (Yet Another Dance of Death) is generally considered to be the quintessential example of counterrevolutionary iconography related to the 1848 revolution.36 The series and its reception, then and now, raise the issue of what precisely constituted a “reactionary” or a “liberal” position amid the welter of political and ideological options existing in Germany and elsewhere at mid-century. Second, the series inspires the question of how a specific political position—in this case, I believe a conservative one—might be represented visually; and third, it presents the issue of the relationship between Rethel’s Dance of Death cycle and his monumental fresco commission in the Aachen town hall. It is necessary to clarify Rethel’s political affiliation and its background to establish the grounds of my interpretation. The artist clearly supported a strong central authority and hierarchical social order, a position that dictated his program in the Aachen town hall. The repudiation of the attempt in 1848–1849 to build a radical democracy in alliance with the impoverished peasantry and working classes was initially received by him and his fellow conservatives as a positive outcome of the short-lived “springtime of the people.” This position is reaffirmed by some twentieth-century scholars who interpret the failure of the brief revolution as a “rational” rejection of mobocracy and popular rule. Thus they read Rethel’s counterrevolutionary intent as an affirmative response to an “evil” action. By classifying Rethel—whom I describe as a conservative and counterrevolutionary—as a “liberal,” scholars identifying with a centrist position may be projecting their own politics retroactively. Hence the necessity of restoring Rethel to his correct nineteenth-century political niche. If we interpret Rethel’s

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7.31  Hans Holbein, The Waggoner, woodcut from The Dance of Death (1549 and 1562 editions).



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condemnation of Left politics as a socially beneficent gesture, then to assign him to a liberal position in today’s terms is to qualify his position as politically progressive—a historical reductio ad absurdum. Finally, to establish such a mistaken congruency between his art and his politics is to depoliticize his authentic authorial voice. On the other hand, by demonstrating that Rethel’s position was essentially elitist, his admitted fear of the Left, of the mob, and of revolution may be seen as part of a coherent worldview. Consistent with his conservative perspective, he perceived the Left’s inclusive social ideal as dangerous and as a threat to the social order. Rethel’s famous cycle of woodcuts is probably the outstanding visual production of the 1848 revolutionary period in Germany. 37 It consists of a series of six thematically linked images on the order of a modern comic strip, each accompanied by a legend in verse form. The cycle was published at the end of May 1849, about three weeks after the uprising of the artisanate and radical bourgeois in Dresden, where Rethel was then working, and where he had witnessed the bloody suppression of the insurrection by Prussian troops. It was received immediately as a major political statement, and reproduced in the conservative press in Germany and in France. By mid-June a third edition appeared; within a year nearly 15,000 copies were sold; the Conservative Alliance of Saxony brought out a special printing, and there were numerous pirated editions. The didactic cycle unfolds a grim satire in the starkest terms to instruct the populace in the error of revolutionary ways. Rethel’s model was the late medieval allegory of the Dance of Death (in France the danse macabre), most notably the pessimistic episodes of Hans Holbein (fig. 7.31). In the allegory and its variations, it is not the dead but Death himself who is the protagonist, bringing home the lessons of mortality to people of every station. Death is seen as striking capriciously and unexpectedly, and all human creatures, regardless of their earthly status, are equal before it.38 In Rethel’s cycle, Death emerges from the tomb and with calculated vengeance claims the living. He is not the capricious sportsman of the Holbein series, but a scheming politico out to destroy those foolish enough to succumb to his devious schemes. The series opens with the cry of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” ringing throughout the world. Death is abruptly called from the chapter seven

7.32  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz (Yet Another Dance of Death), 1849, plate 1.

grave by a quintet of female personifications of vices—Frenzy, Falsehood, Cunning, Vanity, and Bloodthirstiness—who have overpowered and fettered Justice, with whose sword and scales they now arm Death for his revolutionary mission (fig. 7.32). Vanity hands him a hat with a cock’s feather, while Bloodthirstiness waits with the scythe so that Death may reap his “harvest.” According to the verses tailored to the image, now the man is ready “who can make you free and equal.” The second plate shows Death riding toward an ancient town undergoing the growth pangs of industrial transformation (fig. 7.33). Above the town walls rise the old steeply roofed houses and the spires of a Gothic cathedral being crowded by tall factory chimneys—a clear indication of the presence of steam engines. We know what Rethel thought of modern industry from an earlier representation of a factory owned by the industrial magnate Friedrich Harkort at Burg Wetter (fig. 7.34). Even more pronounced than in the woodcut, the factory imposes itself on the buildings of the nearby village, spewing from its chimneys sooty smoke and grime. Unlike eighteenth-century images of industry that weave an aura of the sublime around human artifice, here the ugliness and squalor disfigure the environment. It may not be coincidental that Rethel’s father was forced to work at the factory as a bookkeeper after having failed in business as the owner of a chemical plant. Additionally, Harkort was a progressive industrialist who opposed child labor and championed liberal government.39 His factory on the Ruhr river was installed in an abandoned medieval ruin, a sign of the developing conversion of Germany from a predominantly agrarian to an industrial society. Thus the factory complex signaled two negative factors



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opposite 7.33  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849, plate 2. 7.34  Alfred Rethel, The Factory of Friedrich Harkort at Burg Wetter, 1834. Bildarchiv Preussischer

Kulturbesitz, Berlin. bottom right 7.35  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849, plate 3.



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in Rethel’s life, the déclassé status of his father and the threat to the Edenic rural world of his imagination. The punitive symbol for this disruption and change in the countryside is now figured as Death in the woodcut cycle. He enters the open space at a steeply inclined angle reminiscent of a line of sight, zeroing in on his target with his scythe slung over his shoulder. Wearing an eighteenth-century coat—symbol of the Enlightenment—and the hip boots and broadbrimmed hat worn by a notorious contemporary radical, Death anticipates a “rich harvest” in this town that he has targeted for his machinations.40 But his disguise does not deceive two peasant girls who flee before the terrifying specter, nor the crows that shriek as he passes. The cock’s feather on the hat “glows in the sunlight as red as blood,” while the scythe “flashes like lightning.” The association of the color red with blood states for the first time the leitmotif of the cycle. Once in town Death begins to work his deception. Before the door of a tavern filled to capacity, he posts a manifesto calling for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (thus forging connections between the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the radical agitation at home) and he entertains a crowd with his sly tricks (fig. 7.35). Shouting “Long Live the Republic!” he holds up the scales of Justice by the tongue instead of the handle, thus conveying the illusion that the clay pipe of the ordinary citizen weighs as much as a kingly crown. The boorish and tipsy artisans, students, shopkeepers, and peasants, momentarily mesmerized by the trick, quit their bawdy songs and rowdiness. They accept Death as their leader and promise to follow him. One exception to the near unanimity of the crowd is an old blind woman with a rosary, who leaves the scene while pushing a small

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7.36  Julius Diez, Liebermann, der Berliner Sezessionswirth, from Jugend, 1903. opposite 7.37  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849, plate 4. 7.38  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849, plate 5.



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boy ahead of her. The closing verses for this image read: “You blind woman, why are you sneaking away? / Do you see more than the others there?” As in plate 2, the simple and wise easily penetrate Death’s disguise. One detail of this plate, until now unnoticed in the literature, is the tavern signboard displaying the Star of David in the upper right-hand corner. Although an emblem associated generally with inns and pubs, it may also convey a coded message to fellow believers. According to tradition, the symbol was used by the followers of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras on their begging tours to signal to their comrades that at the place of the sign they would find a hospitable reception. Later, the emblem of Pythagorean religious reform assumed both Freemasonic and Jewish connotations. Since Jews were permitted to be wine sellers and tavern keepers in the period, the odds are that Rethel’s positioning of the sign in the tavern scene reinforces rightist accusations of ascendant Freemasonic and Jewish influence on the German uprisings of 1848.41 This supposition is reinforced by an anti-Semitic caricature by Julius Diez a half century later, depicting the German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann as a hulking tavern keeper before an identical signboard, alluding to his radical aesthetic sympathies as head of the Berlin Secession (fig. 7.36).42 In plate 4 Death now incites the populace to full-scale rebellion (fig. 7.37). Holding forth from a wooden platform used for public addresses, he hands the clamoring throng his sword, which carries the inscription “People’s Justice.” His cry is the starting point for the seduction of the innocent, neatly registered in the legend: “‘People, this sword is yours, / Who else could judge if not you alone?’” Beside him on the platform an artisan holds a flag bearing the first four letters of the word “Republic.” The cry of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” reverberates throughout the town, mingled with cries of “To the Town Hall!” and “Long Live the Republic!” The populace looks to Death as “the hero of the Revolution,” and as a column of soldiers approaches it shouts “Blood! Blood!” Rethel’s next plate depicts the fruits of Death’s machinations (fig. 7.38). People are fighting and dying on a barricade constructed of crates, loose lumber, and barrels filled with paving stones. Bodies lurch backward violently in midair as grapeshot whistles through space and shatters the barricade. Death watches from atop the barricade, grasping the blood-red standard tightly in his hand. As the victims groan in agony, he mocks them: “‘Now I am keeping my promise to you, / You all want to be equal to me!’” chapter seven

Cold horror seizes them as they watch him lift his waistcoat to reveal his skeletal nature. The concluding verses for this image read: “Their blood flows freely like the red flag, / He who led them was Death.” The last woodcut is a terrifying scene of the aftermath of mass carnage (fig. 7.39). Corpses are strewn over the demolished barricade and the surrounding houses are in ruin. A mother and her son weep for their dead husband and father, while in the background the retiring soldiers carry off their dead and wounded. Death has now totally unmasked himself and appears in his traditional skeletal form. Wearing a victor’s wreath around his skull, he rides across the barricade scornfully surveying the wreckage. A dying man is modeled perversely after a figure in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (whose death there is vindicated by the goddess’s appearance):43 he raises himself up with his last breath only to glimpse the horrible fact of his deception. Those who followed Death now lay pale, “All as brothers, free and equal.” As Death prepares to ride off into the sunset, the last victim recognizes the cold-blooded duplicity of “The hero of the Red Republic.” Despite its conspicuous dependence on the medieval broadside tradition, Rethel’s visual conception is strikingly modern in its eccentric and unstable perspectives. The painter’s experience with fresco enabled him to develop his narrative cycle in effective rhythmic sequence, unfolding in a vivid space immediately addressing the spectator and pungently emphasizing every ideological point. Every plate in the series is organized along



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a sharp diagonal movement that commands the spectator’s gaze and keeps the action moving at a fast pace. In plate 3, where Death entertains the crowd, Rethel sets his protagonist in the middle ground and organizes the crowd in a semicircular movement that opens up in the foreground to evoke the space of the actual beholder. In plate 4 Death holds forth from a platform that opens out to the spectator’s space at the left, and in plate 5 we are brought smack up against the danger and violence of the barricades with such telling details as the mattress on which Death stands and the barrel crammed with paving stones. The final plate confronts us with the corpses—reminiscent of those in Meissonier’s Souvenir de la guerre civile— pushed against the picture plane, with death now moving in the direction of the beholder. No one could deny that this was a strikingly hostile conception of revolution. It was received as such from the moment of its publication and thereafter: during the period of the German Empire it was commonly used in schools as a warning against the consequences of revolution. Recall also that the conservative French journal L’Illustration published the entire series on 28 July 1848—a scant two months after the original publication and a month after the magazine had warmly applauded the suppression of the workers’ insurrection at Paris.44 The publishing house of Goupil presented the album the following year, cleverly inserting the word “socialism” in its title (Le Socialisme: Nouvelle Danse des morts) and substituting “la République Démocratique et Sociale” for the “Red Republic” and even “Socialism” for “Republic” to drive the point home to its French audience (fig. 7.40).45 opposite 7.39  Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849, plate 6. right 7.40  Title page from Goupil’s publication of Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 1849.



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Conversely, even some moderates clearly perceived the series as a distortion of the democratic movement.46 Rethel presents Death ironically as the consummate political seducer, in this case as the radical who exploits the rhetoric of democratic socialism to enlist the working classes on behalf of a hidden agenda. His cycle discredits revolution as a positive political course of action and sees the workers themselves as totally ignorant and gullible. Revolution is shown to be destructive of the church and the feudal order, to unfold in the context of the modern industrial city, to result from demagoguery, and to be carried out by the lumpen, misled victims of the lower classes who are easily duped by skillful agitators and agents provocateurs. The agitators drive the common people to self-destructive modes of behavior but they nevertheless deserve their fate for their credulity. Despite Rethel’s seemingly unequivocal stand on revolution, some scholars debate his political attitudes toward the Dresden uprising in May 1849. While his series was conceived during the winter of 1848–1849, his response to the event is taken as symptomatic of the political perspective that informed his project. Indeed, since the first proofs were in Rethel’s workshop at the time of the insurrection, it is even possible that he modified them under its impact. (The cycle was actually published a few weeks later.) What makes his work complex is Rethel’s energy and conviction, conventionally associated with “progressive” experiments like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. He exploited the novelty of anachronism during unstable social conditions, but he also drastically transformed it through modern forms, contemporary physiognomies, and unconventional designs. His synthesis paradoxically aspired to the status of “revolutionary” counterrevolutionary art. The position of all workers had been exacerbated by the economic crisis of the mid-1840s; the potato famine of 1845 was followed by the grain failures of 1846 and 1847. The bad harvest of 1847 coincided with a commercial crisis that began in England and spread throughout the Continent. From August 1847 through January 1848, roughly 245 firms and twelve banks failed in Germany alone. In the spring of 1847 there were hunger demonstrations in several cities, including the so-called potato revolution in Berlin in which women raided markets with inflated prices. State aid was slow in coming, and workers responded with a flood of petitions, increased interest in associations, and readiness for revolution.47 The discontent of the German workers had first manifested itself in Silesia four years earlier. Some 5,000 weavers in the neighborhood of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau rose in protest against the ruthlessness of the entrepreneurs who sought every excuse to pay starvation wages, rejected fixed wages in favor of supply and demand strategy, and increasingly introduced machinery. These weavers burned shops and the houses of the more prosperous master weavers and of the entrepreneurs or middlemen who hired out the work. They were joined by masons, carpenters, and other

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7.41  Karl Wilhelm Hübner, Silesian Weavers, 1844. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf.

local artisans, and the rebellion set off a series of strikes in Breslau, the chief city in Silesia, and even in Berlin itself. The rebellion was brutally suppressed under such strict press censorship that it may never be possible for the historian to recover the magnitude of the brutality. In his Silesian Weavers of 1844, Karl Wilhelm Hübner, a left-wing artist of the Düsseldorf school whose work consistently pitted the poor against the authority of the state and the owners of production, depicted the type of encounter between the entrepreneur and weaver that led to the outbreak (fig. 7.41). The canvas portrays a forbidding entrepreneur coldly rejecting the linen cloth of a weaver for its imperfections and, to emphasize his point, histrionically flinging it to the floor of his firm. Nevertheless, he dangles one end of the cloth tantalizingly in midair, waiting for the weaver’s affirmative response to his lower offer. Meanwhile, the weaver’s wife has collapsed, her hope for the survival of her family having been quashed by a single gesture. In other parts of the shop, buyers scrutinize the weave with a glass or offer a pittance for the work while the artisans and their families look on helplessly. In the left background we catch a glimpse of a more sumptuous interior where clerks record the purchase of the bolts of cloth. The entrepreneur’s elegantly clad son leans nonchalantly on the cloth on the table smoking a cigar. He shows utter indifference to the older man’s dramatic gesture. Another family looks on the main action with horror, while at the far right two angry young weavers storm out with vows of retribution. Hübner’s work created a sensation when it exhibited in



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Berlin in 1844, and crowds continued to gather to its banner in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Halberstadt, Frankfurt, and several other cities that same year. Friedrich Engels may have exaggerated when he declared that the picture “made an enthusiasm for socialist ideas acceptable,” but he accurately conveyed the sense of its popular appeal during the troubled era.48 It was the discontent of the declassed master artisans and unemployed journeymen that contributed to the momentarily successful alliance of bourgeois and proletarian forged during the March days. Often ignored by the radicals and distrusted by the liberals, the artisans waged their own campaign against industrialism. Their first tactic was a direct attack on factories and machines, which began early in March and lasted for about eight weeks. When the newly empowered liberals used their civic guards to suppress disorder, the artisans turned to more orthodox channels of political persuasion. They drafted petitions, issued proclamations, founded unions, and convoked congresses. If they chose their leaders from among bourgeois intellectuals or professionals, these were usually types who had proven their mettle under fire or who had earned the workers’ trust from knowledge gained through direct contact over an extended period of time. They were not rabble-rousers suddenly riding into town to provoke riot. The popular character of the insurrection revealed itself belatedly to Rethel. After witnessing the suppression of the Dresden uprising in early May 1849, he seemed to have second thoughts about his unprogressive interpretation of events. He characterized the struggle at that time as a “magnificent effort for German glory, which was defeated by the sword of coldly calculating military force.” He then went on to confess: “I observed the rise of this movement with mistrust and expected a Red Republic—Communism with all its consequences. But in fact it was nothing more than popular enthusiasm in the best sense of the term for the creation of a great and noble Germany, a mission God entrusted to their hearts and not called forth by the radical prattle of bad newspapers and popular agitators.”49 Rethel’s sudden realization of his mistaken interpretation of the historical circumstances reflects the disillusionment following King Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s rejection of the crown of a united German empire offered to him on 28 March by the Frankfurt National Assembly. This rejection also implied the disinclination of Prussia to embrace parliamentarianism, and meant the effective dissolution of the National Assembly organized to achieve a national consensus in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. The only support that constitutionalism could still find was among the militant artisans and petty bourgeoisie of Dresden, Elberfeld, Düsseldorf, and Kaiserslautern. The uprising that Rethel witnessed in May was essentially of this type, one with which he could identify once he grasped its implications. But as late as 4 May 1849, after the street fighting had begun, Rethel still regarded the approaching Prussian troops as the town’s “saviors”50—when even the most moderate groups perceived the action as a breach of political sovereignty.

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Rethel’s letter to the poet-painter Robert Reinick, who wrote the verses for Auch ein Todtentanz, shows his support of the idea of a Prussian Kaiser.51 This would place him in the camp of the Center Right, which advocated an imperial hereditary ruler and a subordinated parliamentary authority, and rejected the idea of popular sovereignty. Not coincidentally, at the moment Rethel turned to the Todtentanz project, as we have seen, he had been actively engaged on a series of murals on the life of Charlemagne for the Coronation Room of the medieval town hall of Aachen.52 The competition for this commission was of deep importance to German nationalists: it called for frescoes for a space in which thirty-five Holy Roman Emperors, starting with Charlemagne himself, had held council. Rethel’s program stressed the theme of the rise of Charlemagne from tribal king to German emperor, concluding with a scene of a later emperor descending into Charlemagne’s crypt to seek inspiration. Although schematized as early as 1840, ideological conflicts between Rethel, the town councilors, and Aachen’s religious leaders over the program, as well as the ongoing restoration of the town hall, forced Rethel to postpone his project until 1847.53 He was still toiling on the mural cycle when revolution broke out the following year. He continued to work, seemingly unperturbed, until the end of 1848, when he finished a second panel. But instead of proceeding to the next one, he abruptly turned to the Auch ein Todtentanz project. Rethel’s shift of attention may have been triggered by the controversy aroused by his program in its initial phase. The competition had stipulated that the panels should represent key moments from the life of Charlemagne, especially those relating to Aachen as the emperor’s favorite domicile. As such, the competition program called for stress on the local patriotic connection. Rethel, however, although a native of Aachen, stressed national and religious, rather than regional or particularist, issues. He completely ignored Aachen in all but one of his projected designs and chose instead to concentrate on the motivations of Charlemagne’s actions—the destruction of paganism and the institutionalization of Christianity within the political realm. The artist seized the occasion to demonstrate the medieval integration of church and state and the unity of Germany under the Holy Roman Empire. Not surprisingly, his own ideal of a centralized, united Germany was prefigured by Charlemagne’s prefeudal structure and also justified by Christian ideology. But Rethel had to contend with both liberal and conservative criticism of his program.54 On one side, a faction in the Aachen town council—aided and defended by the liberal press—vociferously denounced the decoration of the town hall with such a message. On the other, the Catholic clergy complained that his program was too “Protestant” in its depiction of the scene of the Frankfurt synod of 794, especially regarding Charlemagne’s objection to the restoration of images in the Byzantine Church by the Second Council of Nicaea (787). This act later enjoyed the approval of many

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Protestant apologists, and the Aachen church fathers saw Rethel’s text as a form of propaganda in favor of this “unholy” alliance. Furthermore, both the church fathers and the liberals wondered why Frankfurt—relatively unimportant in their view—was represented rather than a scene in Aachen, and together they persistently blocked his plans. It was only after Rethel managed to transform the controversy into a national issue that he was allowed to proceed. In 1846 he won an audience with Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who enthusiastically supported his plans, facilitating immediate preparations for the execution of the frescoes.55 Of the seven scenes of the definitive program, one dealt with Charlemagne’s victory over the infidel, The Battle of Cordova; two with his conquest and Christianization of Germany, The Fall of the Irmin Column and The Baptism of Wittekind; two with his rapprochement with Rome, Entrance into Pavia and The Coronation; and two with the German extension of his tradition, The Crowning of Ludwig the Virtuous in Aachen and The Visit of Otto III to the Crypt. Arranged roughly in chronological succession, the cycle was to begin with Charlemagne’s symbolic destruction of the pagan Irmin column after his victory over the Saxons near Paderborn in 772 and culminate with the visit of one of the emperor’s successors to the crypt where Charlemagne’s body was embalmed. According to the story, Otto III made this pilgrimage in seeking the inspiration to restore the glory of Charlemagne’s reign in his former German possessions. For Rethel this “historical apotheosis” was filled with topical allusions, and it was to underline the cycle’s contemporary message that he chose this scene for its conclusion. Yet during the course of the cycle’s execution its relevance was challenged by current events. Between March and December 1848 it seemed clear that, whatever form of unity there was likely to be in Germany in the future, it would not be along the lines of the feudal system of the Holy Roman Empire. During this interval Rethel—growing disenchanted with the monarch and fearful of the radical Red Republic—began to lose interest in the cycle. As late as 1849 he viewed the project “as a heavy burden, as the destroyer of my enjoyment of life.” He returned to the work between 1849 and 1851, and introduced black, red, and gold banners into the last two panels that he painted himself (figs. 7.42–43). According to legend these were the colors of the emperor, but in 1848 they constituted the tricolor emblem of national unity, which heretofore had been proscribed as subversive. These murals, however, The Battle of Cordova and Entrance of Charlemagne into Pavia, represent victories over the emperor’s enemies, and while Rethel hesitated to portray the banner, his source for the Cordova had stated that the Muslims carried a “red flag” that was eventually submerged in a “bloodbath” of their own making.56 Rethel’s use of the tricolor was perfectly consistent with his political position, for it should be remembered that Friedrich Wilhelm IV himself had now adopted it as the Prussian standard.

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7.42  Alfred Rethel, The Battle of Cordova, sketch for fresco in the Rathaus, Aachen, 1849. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf. 7.43  Alfred Rethel, Entrance of Charlemagne into Pavia, sketch for fresco in the Rathaus, Aachen, 1850. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf.

Thus Auch ein Todtentanz bears a dialectical relationship with the Charlemagne cycle, revealing the reactionary political wellsprings of Rethel’s visual metaphors. The prologue to the series addresses both the “townsman” and the “peasant,” admonishing them to carefully consider the series of plates that candidly exposes the evils of the current epoch and to beware the many messiahs seducing the crowds by flattery. The epilogue attempts to recover the terms Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity from their revolutionary sense and appropriate them for a traditional standpoint. Instead of the sardonic interpretation of “equality” where the grave is the common denominator, Rethel and Reinick substitute the idea that all “virtuous” people—regardless of their station—are equal among themselves. They are outraged to see the term Fraternity (Bruderliebe = Brotherly Love) profaned and symbolically enlisted under the banner of murder and incendiary torches; they caution the reader to look to heaven for salvation, for it is the celestial flame alone that purifies and with which “God blesses the Fatherland.” Rethel rejects not only revolution as an alternative to repression but also all collective action taken by citizens to redress their grievances. His expropriation of revolutionary signs and symbols for his own propagandistic message parallels the strategies of aristocratic opponents of the revolution. They harped on the “godlessness” of the liberals and radicals, and appealed to the rural folk who made “little noise” and were “therefore rarely noticed.” The conservatives were frightened by liberal industrialism and emphasized agriculture as the foundation of national greatness. The reaction loathed laissez-faire individualism in economics as much as parliamentary liberalism in politics, for both were dangerous to legitimate authority. They attempted to undermine the coalition of the middle class with artisans and peasants, by chastising the former and rewarding the latter with offers of reform. The most enlightened of them embarked on a program of material welfare which essentially borrowed its tactics from the radicals. They committed to support of the less privileged, calling on their peers to protect the weak and oppressed, while preaching the virtues of faithfulness and obedience to the popular classes. The nobles discovered that they shared with the artisans and petty tradesmen (often one and the same) a fear of the financiers, manufacturers, and merchants. Both were threatened by the growth of industrial capitalism; both sought security by a reassertion of their corporate rights. Bismarck declared in 1849 that the handicraftsman constituted the “backbone of the burgher class,” and needed protection against the onslaught of factory life. In industry the conservative strategy was to champion the artisan against the mill owner, reintroducing guild regulation of production. This attitude is evident in Rethel’s plate showing Death riding toward an ancient town whose medieval skyline is being altered by smoking chimneys. Hence the conservatives now made their appeal to the same peasantry and artisanal class addressed by Rethel, using the road to reform and popular culture previously exploited by the radicals.

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Indeed, Rethel and his fellow moderates and conservatives used precisely those methods of deceit and sensationalism to make the very point they condemned in their radical contemporaries. Rethel’s position was preeminently conservative at the moment he produced his broadsheets.57 He condemned bourgeois liberal reformists as well as all shades of the republican Left. Here again he reflected the position of the moderates of the Right Center of the Frankfurt parliament, who entered into an alliance with the conservatives against their common enemy on the Left. This may be more clearly glimpsed by looking more closely at the Auch ein Todtentanz cycle in the light of its subversion of republican ideology. Throughout the texts of the series is the repeated use of the “Red Republic” and its sanguinary associative metaphors as the embodiment of all evil. “Red” and “Red Republican” were popular catchwords for reactionaries and conservatives everywhere in Europe who stressed them relentlessly, as their modern counterparts were to do during the Cold War era. After the suppression of the workers’ insurrection in Paris in June 1848, these terms became even more charged with sinister connotations for the Right. But red was the color of the workers for better or for worse, and had legitimate representation in all the parliaments established in 1848. The workers’ radical democratic party was not a lunatic or anarchic fringe, but a party with legitimate representation. The musician Richard Wagner could note that after the bloody suppression of the insurrection in Vienna of October 1848 that he and his peers spoke of the curse of the “Red Monarchy” in opposition to the “Red Republic.” The Viennese government executed Robert Blum—leader of the Left in the Frankfurt National Assembly—for his participation in the uprising, the most popular of the radical democratic minority in the Frankfurt assembly. Although there was no possibility of the Frankfurt parliament voting a republic, Blum’s presence at that assembly insured the legitimacy and hearing of republican ideals. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of its demands for a united German republic, national workshops, and the nationalization of the transportation system, the seventeen-point platform of Marx and Engels written shortly after the Berlin insurrection coincided to a large degree with the program of the antifeudal liberal constitutional monarchists of the Center Left. Both groups took their chances with a generous electoral law and eligibility requirements for holding office. As always, the out-and-out revolutionaries made up a tiny minority at the National Assembly, but their mere existence (which turned into a swing role as the Assembly became polarized) was enough to threaten the conservatives. One aristocrat could write in April 1848 that one day the German nation “will marvel that a small but active handful of Republicans and Communists have succeeded in ruining Germany.”58 Ironically, most of the Left came from the Rhineland, where Rethel was born, and from Saxony, where he was living at the time he produced his cycle of woodcuts. Blum, like Rethel, was a native

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of Cologne, but represented Leipzig, the center of the book trade where Rethel published his cycle. Arnold Ruge, an associate of Marx from the Rhineland, was an out-and-out revolutionary, and the radical lawyer from Düsseldorf, Hugo Wesendonck, also represented the extreme Left in the National Assembly at Frankfurt. The Right was not represented at all in Saxony, with 87 percent of its representation participating in the Left caucuses as opposed to the national average of 24 percent.59 In brief, Rethel’s politics while in Dresden were by no means the norm. His woodcuts suggest that workers had little to do with revolution, that free from outside interference they would maintain their stable position in the social hierarchy. This followed the aristocratic line that the uprisings were simply inflated riots orchestrated by foreign agitators, by Frenchmen, Poles, and Jews.60 But even the moderates calling themselves “liberals” opposed almost unqualified manhood suffrage and argued for a restricted franchise. Their committee report submitted to the assembly at Frankfurt read: No civic order, whatever its nature, monarchical or republican, will be able to survive or achieve any degree of stability if the right of decision in all political questions is placed in the hands of the great mass, which only too often allows itself to be steered without a will of its own, and which capriciously, day after day, follows now one leader, now another.61

Like Rethel, they idealized Das Volk as a happy lot while at the same time reading them out of the political structure. Yet this calculated “misreading” of reality in 1848–1849 was belied by the statistics of the street fighting. Among the three hundred fatalities of the Berlin insurrection on 18 March, 80 percent were journeymen, artisan-tradesmen, apprentices, skilled and unskilled workers—all fighting for their economic survival.62 As Rudolf Virchow, a young physician with a social conscience, wrote home to his father on 1 May: “You are right when you maintain that it was essentially the workers who decided the revolution, although I believe that you in the provinces do not realize fully that this revolution is not simply political but fundamentally social.”63 Clearly, these groups refused to remain “invisible” in the niche assigned to them by Rethel and his fellow conservatives. Similarly, the symbols and slogans of the republican Left were determined not by the intellectuals but by the condition of the German workers. As in Paris, the red flag was associated with the social democrats and the demand for a republic. Moritz Mohl, the liberal Stuttgart representative at the Frankfurt parliament, painted a sordid picture of the French June Days, when those who refused work “raised the red flag and wanted to murder those people who work.”64 It was in Cologne that the first outbreak of revolution on Prussian soil occurred.65 A growing tension among the working classes induced the Cologne municipal council to forestall action on 3 March by entrusting the merchant Ludwig Camphausen with a

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petition to Friedrich Wilhelm IV calling for the usual liberal concessions: a United Diet for Prussia based on an extended franchise, abolition of censorship, and a federal Constitution for Germany. The council’s meeting, however, was interrupted by a crowd of workers headed by the Jewish physician Andreas Gottschalk and two former lieutenants in the Prussian army, Friedrich Anneke and August von Willich. The workers forced their way in with a petition calling for universal suffrage, complete freedom of the press, speech, and association, an end to a standing army and the empowering of a civic guard, free education for all, and, finally, protection for labor against the vagaries of the marketplace and a guaranteed standard of living. The action of the Cologne workers was regarded at the time as a “movement of Communists,” which meant then that the leaders were not merely liberals or even democrats but claimed to speak for the working classes. As it is today, the word could be extended to stigmatize opponents of every stamp, as in the case of the Austrian general Windischgrätz, who referred to his brother-in-law, the then prime minister of the Austrian Empire, as a “communist” because he refused to restore the privileges of the landowning aristocracy.66 Thus by the time Rethel employed the term it had become the conservatives’ strategic epithet for every type of reformist action from the liberal-left side of the political spectrum. It was generally accepted that just as the French revolution in February 1848 provoked revolutionary action throughout the continent, so the June repression represented the establishment’s attempt to regain the upper hand. The June Days were surely in Rethel’s mind when he executed his series of woodcuts. We may imagine his shock on reading Marx’s celebrated epilogue, “The June Revolution,” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 29 June. Marx interpreted the defeat as a victory, as a demonstration of modern class conflict and as the forerunner of even bigger battles to come: “With the splitting of the French nation into two parts, the nation of property owners and the nation of the worker . . . the tricolor republic now would fly only one color, the color of the defeated, the color of blood. It has become the Red Republic.”67 Whereas Marx understood the event as positive in long-range terms, Rethel wished to twist this type of heroic interpretation to give it a subversive connotation in his woodcuts. In a letter to Reinick dated 22 April 1849, Rethel complained that the poet wrote of beer of wine in the tavern scene but that he wished to emphasize “the bad liquor [Fusel], the schnapps, which is a more appropriate sign of Anarchy.”68 Here again the artist reveals his essentially conservative bias. Consider, for example, the composer Richard Wagner’s article for the Volksblätter of 8 April 1849 entitled “Die Revolution.” Wagner shared many of Rethel’s opinions but harbored a more benign attitude toward the republican idea. He was living in Dresden at the time and has left us a remarkable, if self-serving, memoir of the events.69 He personified Revolution as in the republican allegories popular in France in 1848, seeing “the sublime goddess . . . rushing and roaring on

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the wings of the storm, her august head rayed around with lightnings, a sword in her right hand, a torch in her left,—ever-rejuvenating mother of mankind.” As she descends the princes quake, as do all the conniving ministers and diplomats, the effete courtiers, the corrupt financiers, and other frauds and fools who obstruct the progress of Das Volk, the embodiment of all the natural virtues. She greets and blesses the people in terms that would have raised Rethel’s hair: I am the ever-regenerating, ever-creating Life; where I am not is death [wo ich nicht bin, da ist der Tod!]. I am the dream, the balm, the hope of all who suffer. . . . I come to you to break all the fetters that oppress you, to redeem you from the embrace of Death [der Umarmung des Todes] and to pour young life into your veins. . . . From its roots upwards I will destroy the order of things under which you live, for it has sprung from sin, its flower is misery and its fruit is crime; but the harvest is ripe and I am the reaper [Schnitter]; I will destroy every illusion that has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over many, of the dead over the living, of matter over spirit; I will break down the power of the mighty, of law, of property. . . . I will destroy this order of things, that divides what should be one mankind into hostile nations, into powerful and weak, into privileged and outlawed, into rich and poor. . . . I will destroy this order of things, that cuts enjoyment off from labor, makes labor a burden and enjoyment a vice, makes one man wretched through want, another through superfluity. . . . Down to its very memory I will destroy every trace of this insane order of things, compact of force, lies, care, hypocrisy, want, sorrow, suffering, tears, trickery and crime. . . . So up, you peoples of the earth! Up, you mourners, you oppressed, you poor! . . . Up, follow my steps in all your multitude and variety, for no distinction can I make among those who follow me! Two peoples only are there henceforth: the one that follows me, the other that opposes me. The one I lead to happiness, the other I tread on, crushing it as I go, for I am the Revolution. . . .70

Here surely is the type of text to which Rethel responded with his cycle of woodcuts; not only its specific content but its rhetorical, sermonizing flavor are echoed, only now in mirror-reverse imagery that mocks Wagner’s statement and subverts its intent. Where the Revolution states “where I am not, there is death,” Rethel states the opposite and replaces the figure of Revolution with that of its negative counterpart. Rethel makes Revolution only a disguise for Death, who then employs seductive rhetoric to lead people to their destruction. But if Wagner’s article was written in the name of a perfectly legal and reputable association, Rethel’s project of the following month spoke in behalf of reaction and attested to the great gulf then separating Center Left from Center Right. Wagner’s article appeared in the Volksblätter, a popular title for leftleaning newspapers that burgeoned after March 1848 and derived from the concept of the broadsheets of the late medieval period.71 Rethel’s Blätter,

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with their simple designs and verses, constitute his version of the broadsheets, another attempt to reappropriate the popular forms used so successfully by the Left for the opposite intention. The year 1848 gave rise to a great outburst of pictorial satire in Germany, much of it by liberal cartoonists who ended up executing caricatures for the right-wing press to attack the claims of radicalism.72 Rethel set out to create the impression of a modern political cartoon, but exploited the popular medium to express a morality play closer in spirit to late medieval allegories that served church and state. Popular poetry and song were also exploited by the Left in this period, a fact alluded to in Rethel’s first plate. Perhaps the most popular political poet and songwriter of the time was the revolutionary Ferdinand Freiligrath, who collaborated with Marx and Engels on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.73 Although he had written several social and political poems before 1848, the events of that year inspired such important works as “Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss,” “Die Republik!” and “Schwarz-Rot-Gold.” But his most stirring work, written in Düsseldorf in July 1848, was “Die Toten an die Lebenden” (The Dead to the Living), an appeal of the victims of March to their living fellow-fighters not to betray the ideals for which they gave their lives.74 It is a slashing attack on the reaction and a passionate call to final and decisive revolution under the “red flag . . . waving high over the barricades.” The concept and imagery of the poem may have challenged Rethel to meet his adversaries on their own terms. In the case of Auch ein Todtentanz, the fallen rebels were victims of a monstrous deceit perpetrated by Death himself and finally bereft of all idealism. The appeal of Death “to the living” in Rethel is the sirens’ call to destruction rather than the stirring call to the cause of proletarian world revolution. Rethel’s cycle was counterrevolutionary in both form and content. Frustrated by the limitations of the allegorical mode and “the masterpiece,” the artist found a way of venting his anger at working-class rebels in a visual medium based on a medieval format. He had discovered that the way to drive the dagger into his enemies was to borrow their own weapons. He partially succeeded because of the multivalency and fluidity of symbols, but insofar as he effectively retained the older representational structure in powerful tension with modern revolutionary forms, he succeeded, I think, in creating an innovative counterrevolutionary work. His inspiration ultimately derives from the workers’ enthusiastic engagement with authority, while his images exploited the symbolic trappings of the Left, such as the barricade and the red flag. In the end, his counterrevolutionary message confirmed the reality of the revolution, insofar as he had to rely on leftist energy and symbolism to embody it. Analogously, the political reaction borrowed the rhetoric and reformist ideas of the Left to separate it from the peasantry and handicraft workers. What was “new” and “radical” in their presentation ultimately derived from the very forces they tried to destroy.

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Hasenclever’s Workers Confronting the Magistrature

Rethel’s counterpart on the Left was the Düsseldorf master Johann Peter Hasenclever, the son of a prosperous cutler and swordsmith.75 Prior to the revolutions of 1848 he had established himself as a satirical genre painter, a kind of Westphalian equivalent of his English models William Hogarth and David Wilkie and the Munich Biedermeier painter Spitzweg. Such works as Wine-Tasting in a Cellar and The Reading Room of 1843 are almost caricatural in their depiction of paunchy petit-bourgeois males tippling or scanning the latest literature with bored detachment. An earlier work that mocks academic teaching is the exuberant Atelier Scene of 1836, depicting a motley gang of art students in Hasenclever’s Meisterklasse studio at the Academy (fig. 7.44). In a grand antiheroic gesture, all the artists portrayed signed the painting. One of them in the center of the composition parodies the pose of a cast of the Borghese Gladiator, a standard studio prop, and with his outstretched arm hands over a wine bottle to an unkempt, sloppily clad bohemian who gladly relieves him of it. Meanwhile, Hasenclever strides by with a mannequin carelessly slung over his shoulder, while in the background a fellow artist whispers to the bright-eyed housekeeper that the daubs on the wall will one day be worth a fortune. In the middle of the studio a monumental history painting (suggested by the sketch hanging from the vertical stretcher bar) with its back turned to the spectator is being used as a wall partition, with a painter’s smock draped over the top. The



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floor in the foreground is littered with debris, including a book on Siberia, a map of Düsseldorf, broken glass, a feather, a battered hat, corks, spectacles, and an array of props favored by the Düsseldorf history painters—a sword, helmet, lantern, wine jar, wooden shoe, and a skull. Realistically conveying the actuality of an artist’s workshop, Hasenclever’s messy space and boisterous colleagues disrupt both the by now stereotypical image of the neat Biedermeier interiors and harmonious family gatherings and the pretentious studios of the academicians. Hasenclever’s Jobsiade series, taken from the popular poem that satirized the career of a German student named Hieronimus Jobs and German universities generally enjoyed a wide following among the Rhenish bourgeoisie (fig. 7.45). The series’ parodic style countered the heavy-handed work of the established Düsseldorf school, as well as Prussian authoritarian institutions in general. His patrons belonged to the same liberal industrial and business sector of the Rhine region that had been galvanized by the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and that supported Marx and Engels’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung. As touched on earlier, the Rhineland region enjoyed a liberal climate for three principal reasons: its occupation by the French during the Napoleonic period introduced far-reaching administrative reforms; its predominantly Catholic and militant population induced the Protestant Prussian government that absorbed it in the post-Napoleonic epoch to grant it more privileges than elsewhere; and during the period 1830–1848 it became a major textile-, iron-, and coal-producing center.76 There emerged in Rhenish towns a liberal and active bourgeoisie that also participated in the national opposite 7.44  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Atelier Scene, 1836. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf. right 7.45  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Jobs Being Examined, 1840. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf.



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movement and encouraged the cultural efforts of regional artists. As early as 1829 the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westphalen was founded by the directors of the Düsseldorf Academy and several local industrialists and merchants to mediate directly between artists and patrons. Typical of art unions everywhere, shares were sold to individual members who also paid dues, pictures were purchased through an annual lottery, and all members were given a print of the most popular painting of the year after the exhibition closed. There developed out of this organization a more radical faction of artists who considered themselves in opposition to the academy. They called themselves the Malkasten, or Paintbox and, emulating the coexistence of all the colors in a paintbox, accepted artists of every stamp—thus inaugurating the concept of the “Rainbow Coalition.” The members, who met regularly in a local tavern before purchasing a permanent meeting house, included the Düsseldorf artists who participated in the pre-March and post-March struggles such as Andreas Achenbach, Wilhelm Josef Heine, Carl Friedrich Heine, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Henry Ritter, Adolf Schrödter, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (the German-born American painter who became its first president), Peter Schwingen, Carl Wilhelm Hübner, and Hasenclever. Freiligrath, then living in Düsseldorf, was one of their idols and participated in the meetings of the Malkasten. Among the first German poets to address the working class, he had collaborated, as we have noted, with Marx and Engels on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Leutze, Hübner, and Hasenclever—whose politics are seen in their devoted reading of the radical writings brought out by Marx, Engels, Hermann Püttmann, and Moses Hess77—put forth Freiligrath’s candidature as special honorary member in 1850, and his election caused a showdown with the Prussian government.78 Few people are aware that Leutze began work on his quintessentially American icon, Washington Crossing the Delaware, while living in this radical milieu (fig. 7.46).79 Although devoted to a specific historical moment, Leutze could not avoid being affected by the call for liberty in other corners of the world while working on the picture. Conceived in the years 1849– 1851, during the roughest period of the counterrevolutionary backlash, the painting constituted a displacement of Leutze’s previous high hopes for German unification and constitutional government to an image of imminent victory and reversal of ill fortune. It may be recalled that the event of 25 December 1776 represented a watershed moment in the American Revolution, when the outlook for Washington and his exhausted and demoralized militia troops appeared hopeless. Of his vastly outnumbered 8,000 fighting men, all but 1,500 were ready to quit at the end of December, when they would have completed their tour of duty. Desperate to exploit them while still under his control, Washington made a wild gamble and went on the offensive. On a freezing Christmas night, he shuttled his troops across the Delaware River, marched

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7.46  Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

them nine miles to Trenton, New Jersey, and caught the sleeping enemy by surprise. Losing only four men while taking hundreds of prisoners, he then marched to Princeton, where he dealt the British another smashing blow. The brilliant reversal raised the morale of the troops and enabled Washington to persuade many of them to reenlist and hold out for the spring campaign. Leutze clearly intended his painting as a lesson for the remnant of the rebels, then emotionally, physically, and psychologically drained from defeat. He depicted Washington’s boat surging forward, his crew ferociously struggling through the ice floes, with the general himself standing upright in the prow—an immovable and resolute force backed by the powerful thrust of the flag, which seems to brace him from behind. Yet what is manifestly implied in Leutze’s composition is that the expedition’s success depended entirely on the will and intelligence of one man who stands alone and above the crowd. His “liberal” ideal consisted of a powerful chief wielding power on behalf of those beneath him in the social scale. The abortive collective experiment of 1848–1849 predisposed him to look to a strong leader to unify and guide the people to victory. Here the painter betrays his loss of faith in collectivity, anticipating his moderate political program back in the United States. Groseclose suggests convincingly that the inspiration for the painting derived from Freiligrath’s collection of poetry Ça ira! published in 1846, in



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which the poet pictures revolution as a ship bound for America and navigated by revolutionary heroes of the past. Threatened by catastrophe on all sides, the “heroes and wise men” plunge on through “the watery waste,” exemplified by the steadfast helmsmen Kosciuszko, Washington, Lafayette, and Franklin. But unlike Leutze’s Washington incarnate, these heroes function only as inspirational ideals for the unnamed freedom lovers in the present, who must leap aboard and man the deck: You ask astonished: “What’s [the ship’s] name?” To this question there’s but one solution, And in Austria and Prussia it’s the same: The ship is called: “Revolution!” The ship is called: “Revolution!” It’s the only ship for our sally— Therefore into the sea, you dauntless mate, Into the sea and scuttle the state, That rotten vile galley! Hop to! jump aboard! Hop to see that the deck be manned!80

Although it may be said that Leutze also foregrounds the eighteenth-century hero as an exemplar for moderns, he elevates him to transcendental status while reducing the anonymous troops to mere adjuncts of the enterprise, like the kneeling knights in Lessing’s Hussite Sermon. Hence Leutze’s Washington is a more conservative statement than those of his colleagues Hübner and Hasenclever, whose radical engagement could sustain the perspective of anonymous working-class heroes in contemporary life. Thus it may not seem surprising that Leutze’s painting won a gold medal from the Prussian government at the Berlin official exhibition of 1852. Nevertheless, the work proved to be his most memorable achievement—inspired by his immediate contact with the Rhenish democrats. The close connection between this left-wing artist’s group and the radical socialists is shown by Marx’s rare allusion to a contemporary painting in a letter of 1853 to Charles A. Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune. Referring to his series of articles in the newspaper on the breakup of the German revolution, he noted: Those of your readers who, having read my letters on the German revolution and counter-revolution written for the Tribune some two years ago, desire to have an immediate intuition of it, will do well to inspect the picture by Mr. Hasenclever now being exhibited in . . . New York . . . representing the presentation of a workingmen’s petition to the magistrates of Düsseldorf in 1848. What the writer could only dissect, the eminent painter has reproduced in all its dramatic vitality.

This note was reproduced in the newspaper on 12 August in one of Marx’s

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articles on Europe, inserted at the instigation of none other than Ferdinand Freiligrath.81 A brief recounting of the peregrinations of Hasenclever’s picture may help put it into its proper context. After Freiligrath fled with his family into exile in London in May 1851, the painting was shipped to him by the dissident art union Vereins Düsseldorfer Künstler zur gegenseitigen Unterstützung und Hilfe (Düsseldorf Artists’ Mutual Aid Society). We know from his correspondence with Marx and Engels that Freiligrath undertook to find venues for it in England, and it was accepted for the summer 1851 Exhibition of the Works of Foreign Artists in St. James’s Square, designed to complement the industrial displays at the Great Exhibition that did not accept pictures. In a letter to Marx in June 1853, Freiligrath reminded him that the picture had previously been shown in London two years earlier at the Lichfield House in St. James’s Square and received favorable notice in the Athenaeum. He begged Marx, “in Hasenclever’s name,” to mention it in his next article for the Tribune because “the Yankees have enormous respect for the aesthetic judgment coming out of their Motherland.”82 Freiligrath was surely aware of the existence of the popular Düsseldorf Gallery of New York, which had opened in 1849 and housed the collection of John Godfrey Boker, a successful wine merchant and native of Remscheid in the Rhine Province.83 Boker’s collection included seven pictures by Hasenclever, including four examples of Hasenclever’s Jobsiade series,84 and at an earlier date he even tried to purchase the Workers Confronting the Magistrature. Perhaps thanks to this publicity the work was awarded an “Honorable Mention” by the New York Crystal Palace jury in January 1854,85 but regrettably, Hasenclever had died the month before and could not have learned of his American success. Freiligrath subsequently undertook to alleviate the widow’s financial problems and his own by trying to sell the work (among others by Hasenclever), with its controversial theme, abroad.86 In 1853 a sympathetic German critic expressed doubt that the work’s theme would appeal “to the rich [of Germany] who can afford expensive paintings,” and resigned himself to its loss to the foreign market.87 Thus Freiligrath estimated the market correctly, and managed to sell it to the Philadelphia collector Ferdinand J. Dreer, who exhibited it at least three times in the years 1856 and 1857, and then again in 1877 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.88 Freiligrath’s remark that the painting received favorable notice in the Athenaeum, when it exhibited in the Lichfield House, probably referred to the review of 11 October 1851: For variety of character, impassioned gesture, truthfulness of perspective, and spirit, there is no work here to surpass M. Hasenclever’s Deputation before the Magistrates. . . . It is more eloquent than dozens of newspaper and other reports of the tumult and excitement that prevail at such insurrectionary moments as the year 1848 abounded in. For successfulness of result, this work may be honestly recommended to close inspection.89



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The official catalogue of the New York version of the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1853 described the picture in similar terms: An admirable delineation of the revolutionary spirit which was rife in Germany in 1848. The picture tells its own story—of a popular commotion—demands on the city authorities for redress of grievances—surprise and apprehension in the council. Such scenes were not uncommon in the German cities of the period named.90

What is astonishing is the common language of these journals in describing the work and justifying it for their audiences, language which Marx himself uses. It is as if they had at their disposal a kind of press release sent in advance of publication.91 But what is indisputable is that the Anglo-American media, even in the proslavery South, were not adverse to celebrating other nations’ revolutionary movements and internal conflicts, which suggested that their own liberty was secure enough to allow for their support of its expression elsewhere. By this time, 1848 had receded into memory, and England, for example, which had felt the hot breath of the Chartists and the threat of revolutionary France on its neck, basked in the sunshine of its Great Exhibition and the success of the repression. Nevertheless, Hasenclever’s theme and characterization and its close connection with Freiligrath attest to its authentic revolutionary origins. In the triadic encounter between a demonstrative populace, workers’ delegation, and bourgeois city council, Hasenclever goes right to the heart of the revolutionary unfoldment in its increasingly difficult struggle to maintain its momentum. He depicted a recurring event in Düsseldorf during a hectic two-day period, 9–10 October 1848 (fig. 7.47).92 What we see is the commencement of a session of the Düsseldorf city council at their conference table in the Rathaus, or city hall, suddenly interrupted by a group of artisans presenting a petition for more generous legislation on their behalf. The leader, dressed in heavy, unfashionable clothing, has stepped on to the fine carpet before the formally clad magistrates with his unfurled petition, which carries the fragmentary inscription “an den . . . Wohllöblichen Stadtrath dahier . . . Gesuch um Arbeit” (To the Honorable and Praiseworthy Magistrature . . . Demand for Work). The response of the councilors to this petition is unmistakably registered in their facial expressions and body language. Standing opposite at the other end of the table, the president of the session, who bears the mace or sword of office, stares with mingled fear and amazement at this audacious confrontation. The Spitzweg-type secretary, completely caught off guard, clenches his quill pen between his teeth as he prepares to open the book of the minutes and stares in open-eyed fright. Closer to the petitioner, a councilor offers a despairing “What-canwe-do” look while his hands dally with an elegant snuffbox. The others surrounding the table react with various gestures, some with their hands in absolute rejection, while others signal the absurdity of the petition, peer

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7.47  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature,

1850. Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf.



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quizzically through eyeglasses, discuss rapidly a strategy to deal with the upstarts, whisper devious schemes, or, as in the case of the Oberbürgermeister at the right, mop a perspiring brow. Here and there we find an understanding or contemplative response, but overall the councilors represent a bloc of stolid and unsympathetic resistance to the petitioner. This narrative of demand and rejection is complemented by subtle visual strategies that reinforce it. The councilors are grouped in a semicircular arrangement around the table that opens up at the point of contact with the petitioner, thus presenting a physical as well as psychological block to him. The table itself is aligned on a diagonal axis with the open window through which we see a popular orator—of the type Rethel feared—addressing a large demonstration around a statue of St. George Slaying the Dragon. Above the church tower of St. Lambertus (suggesting a northerly view, although in reality the marketplace was located south of the Rathaus) storm clouds are gathering, leaving no doubt as to the ultimate consequences of this confrontation. The square in front of the Rathaus is already filled to capacity, but through the passageway between the buildings in the background pours forth a continuous stream of people. Just to the left of the orator, also standing above the crowd, an artisan waves a red flag—attesting biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

7.48  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature,

detail.



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to the republican and democratic character of the protest (fig. 7.48). It is the collective power of the people that now presses on the town councilors and pries open their obstructive effort to make way for the petitioning delegation. Visually, this is expressed in the dynamic thrust of the table linking up along the diagonal axis with the event outside and uniting with the movement of the crowd. This connection is dramatically emphasized narratively by the artisan behind the petitioner looking impassionately at the magistrates while beating his breast with his right hand and pointing energetically with the other to the scene outside. The significance of his gesture is all too well understood, as the councilors’ servant prepares to close the window and shut out reality. What empowers the workers’ delegation is their popular support, the same agency that had provided the backbone of all previous revolutions and made it possible for the bourgeoisie to win their gains earlier in the year. Without this empowerment the delegation would be itself a ragtag group that Hasenclever does not flinch from discriminating: the lean workman crazed with accumulated resentment, old age in penury reflecting on the futility of the effort, a philosophically minded artisan observing the impact on the magistrates, and lastly, whispering behind his hand, a police spy intruding into their counsels to betray them.93 Hasenclever wished to represent every human trait brought out in the social and political complexities of an insurrectionary moment, while yet preserving the primary structural valences of his own ideological perception of the event. The very interior decor of the conference contributes to the narrativesymbolic schema. The rococo decorations refer to the age of enlightened despots, whose painted portraits look upon the scene from their oval frames with miscomprehension. An empty suit of armor with a halberdier in its mail fist stands behind the magistrates like an actual guard in the space, but its lifted visor allows the beholder to peer into its cavernous chamber. The hollow armor haunts the scene like a mocking specter of the feudal past, signifying that the good burghers of Düsseldorf are acting in consort with their aristocratic antagonists. (At least for some of the members present such behavior could only be read as anachronistic, and they have accordingly made use of the “ghost” as a hat and umbrella rack.) At the upper right a chapter seven

bust of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV gazes with disgust at the workers, while below the wall pedestal is a print of the portrait of the Archduke Johann of Austria, who was appointed Imperial Administrator of the provisional government established by the Frankfurt National Assembly. Pending the outcome of the parliamentary deliberations, he assumed broad executive power over the territories represented in the assembly. He wore the black, red, and gold cockade prominently in session, but always avoided sitting on the throne, which was placed slightly below the president’s chair. When the Prussian king rejected the imperial crown offered to him by the Frankfurt parliament, the “vice-emperor” lost his job. Hasenclever symbolizes this fiasco by the cracked glass covering the print. Ironically, a headline (presumably written by Marx) of the 12 January 1849 edition of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared: “The Counterrevolution in Düsseldorf is taking the form of a satirical genre painting [humoristischen Genrebild].” Yet what may at first glance appears as satirical Biedermeier genre soon crystallizes into a far more problematic visual statement. Hasenclever’s picture merges genre and history, reinterpreting both as a dynamic ideological category of artistic production. It is as much a social and political statement as a cultural artifact, moving beyond traditional genre as the static expression of bourgeois condescension toward the rural and laboring classes, or, in its more liberal manifestation, as selfparody. Influenced by the shifting social relations, Hasenclever modified the conventional strain of history painting with its inflated rhetoric and dominant hero(es), and at the same time moved beyond standard genre not only by not demeaning the laboring class or moralizing self-righteously, as in Hübner’s Silesian Weavers, but by giving working people a powerful presence based on his own direct identification with radical solidarity. We know from an unpublished letter (ca. 1849–1850) to his friend Kurt Hilgers, then in Berlin, that Hasenclever considered this picture to be the magnum opus of his career.94 He referred to his picture Die fiedelen Bauern (The Happy Farmers), then on exhibition in Berlin, and next he mentioned that he had just completed a canvas entitled the Stadtrat (The Town Council), on which he “spent a good deal of time . . . and have devoted all my strength and spirit so earnestly upon it, that I am almost afraid I have kept it too long, and that it will arrive too late for the Berlin exhibition.” He was most anxious to learn how the public would respond to it and eagerly awaited his friend’s judgment on the canvas, “and if you do not think that it is the best picture I have painted.” He added that he currently was considering offers from Boker and other Americans for his work, and the fact that this otherwise humdrum letter turned up among the Dreer papers makes it virtually certain that the work in question related to the canvas that ultimately entered the Dreer collection. One of several versions of the subject, the Dreer-Düsseldorf picture was the latest and definitive one and revealed an amplified historical perspective. As Bestvater-Hasenclever has shown, Hasenclever’s letter of 27

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7.49  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature,

1848–1849. Bergisches Museum, Schloss Burg a. d. Wupper. 7.50  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature, black crayon drawing, 1848.

Städtisches Museum, Remscheid.

May 1850 refers to his reproduction rights for the version “consisting of twenty-eight principal figures”—the exact number of the Düsseldorf canvas.95 The earlier rendition in the Bergisches Museum, Schloss Burg, signed and dated 1848–1849, differs mainly in the number and treatment of the workers’ deputation and in the interior decor (fig. 7.49). Except for the petitioner, who is almost identical with his later counterpart, the other artisans have a breezier, more uniformly smugly confident deportment than in the more nuanced work. The police spy is also absent, and the artisan’s gesture toward the window is done with the casual hitchhiker’s thumb. The

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suit of armor stands on the artisan’s side of the room, diffusing its symbolic significance. This version was begun in a period much closer to the time of the events that inspired it, and it is possible that the attitude of the artisans exhibits Hasenclever’s greater degree of confidence at the moment of inception. This is most clearly seen in the transformation of the figure behind the petitioner clasping his hands, where quiet cynicism has given way to despair and resignation. The definitive picture is not signed and dated with the time of its execution, but points subtly to it in the date inscribed on the cover of the secretary’s ledger. The importance of this inscription for Hasenclever is seen in the preliminary drawing for this version where the “1848” has been highlighted and stands out clearly among the variety of objects on the table (fig. 7.50). The date has now become a memorial rather than a journalistic recording. The oil sketch at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, which probably precedes the finished drawing, includes one critical detail left out in the other versions (fig. 7.51). It shows an illuminated gas lamp hanging from the ceiling, indicating that the event took place toward evening, which tallies with the historical circumstances. The day before, on 8 October, the first great demonstration by the mass of workers in the textile trades under the banner of the red flag occurred in the suburb of Gerresheim; it was organized by the members of the Volksklub, a left-wing group founded by the socialist labor leader Ferdinand Lassalle that included Freiligrath and Julius Wulff. Wulff, a Düsseldorf democrat and associate of Marx, opened the session by declaring the need for the Red Republic “and not the White, as they have acquired in France.” Calling for jobs, and the abolition of duties on meal and butcher’s meat, he reiterated: “We must have the Red Republic, we must keep agitating and resist the reaction with power until we reach our goal!” To this the crowd responded, “Long Live the Red Republic!” Lassalle then took the floor and denounced the Frankfurt parliament, calling on the radical delegate from Düsseldorf, Hugo Wesendonck, to join with the other leftists and separate from their rightist colleagues to form a new group for a fresh start. Lassalle observed that six hundred workers in Düsseldorf were out of work, and with winter just around the corner it was time to act.96 According to the police reports, the following day the Volksklub organized a massive demonstration that gathered around the town hall three times in the morning and evening, and dispatched a delegation to the town council. It was in the evening that the councilors promised the workers to take action, but the following day it engaged in evasive and duplicitous behavior. The police report states that to meet the emergency the Stadtrat decided to reopen the public works projects on the island of Golzheimer downriver on the Rhine, on the large artificial pond in the Hofgarten (the major park of the city), and the clearing of the canal system, while the newspaper accounts state just the opposite. It was precisely because the Stadtrat canceled the projects that the workers renewed their demonstrations and sent another deputation of workers to confront

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7.51  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Workers Confronting the Magistrature,

sketch, ca. 1848–1849. Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster.



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the town council the evening of 10 October. A tremendous outpouring of public sympathy for the unemployed workers prevented the police from taking direct action. The artisans then organized themselves into a “selfhelp” group, hoping for contributions also from the wealthier citizens in the town. A placard with the masthead “Request for Work” was posted throughout the city and greatly agitated the town council. They felt their authority and jurisdiction impugned, declared a state of emergency, and threatened to punish not only those who organized the program but those who contributed to it. Not until 15 October, however, with the celebration of the king’s birthday, could they gain the upper hand by a show of Prussian military strength.97 For the rest of the year and into 1849 the emphasis of the parties shifted to the political events of Berlin and Frankfurt, which took an increasingly reactionary turn. Acting on the advice of young Bismarck in defiance of the majority of the Prussian constituent assembly (constituted independently of the Frankfurt National Assembly), the king requested his uncle, Count von Brandenburg, to form a truly reactionary ministry on 1 November. The outraged liberal Berlin Assembly now worked feverishly to formulate a Constitution which would bind the king and went out of their way to eliminate “by grace of God” from his title. One week later, the king ordered the assembly to move from Berlin to Brandenburg, allegedly “to protect the deputies’ freedom of deliberation from the anarchistic movements in the capital and their terrorist influences.” The refusal of the assembly to do so led to the king’s calling up of the troops to surround the chapter seven

assembly, whose last official act was to appeal to Prussians not to pay taxes. The royal order to dissolve the Prussian National Assembly followed on 5 December. The excitement over these events in Düsseldorf, and in the Rhineland generally, was enormous. The Düsseldorf Volksklub, as in the case of all democratic associations in the Rhine, organized popular meetings in response to the political events, with Lassalle assuming the leadership and receiving suggestions for strategy from Karl Marx. They hoped to encourage the entire population of the Rhine province to refuse to pay taxes. The declaration of the Frankfurt parliament that the resolution of the Berlin Assembly regarding the refusal to pay taxes was unlawful greatly exacerbated the situation and undermined the work of the Left. Marx claimed that in its inordinate fear of a “Red Republic” the Frankfurt parliament decreed a “Red Monarchy.” The Prussian government had now abandoned all pretense to a legally constituted monarchy, and by its use of force took its stand on the very condition of anarchy which it accused the radical left of fomenting. Thus its counterrevolutionary act had the same “revolutionary” significance the Center Right attached to the “nihilists” who were “always the readiest to arouse tumult, division, embitterment, and to sow seeds of hate and contempt, in short to create confusion and the most pernicious nihilism.”98 The Frankfurt parliament had hoped to maintain the king’s goodwill for its own political solution, but when at the end of March he declined the imperial crown it was confronted with a cruel dilemma. It could admit defeat or attempt to complete its mission by recourse to the insurrectionary means that originally empowered it. The moderates had no choice; they either packed their bags and went home voluntarily or were recalled by their governments. The remaining radicals had no recourse other than to call for support of the Constitution by popular force. This was the source of the spring uprisings in 1849 that involved artisans, day laborers, and the militant petty bourgeoisie of Dresden, Breslau, Elberfeld, Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, and Düsseldorf. The last act of the revolutionary drama in Düsseldorf occurred during 9–10 May, when the barricades went up for the last time. By now, however, most of Düsseldorf ’s citizens had been disarmed, and the insurrection was easily crushed with a score of casualties including a maidservant. It is clear that even the most radical workers operated through legitimate channels and parties and exhausted every legal means at their disposal to get redress of their grievances. Hasenclever’s representation of the workers’ delegation emphasizes their overall decorum and legitimacy; they are not shown as agents of anarchy as Rethel and the conservatives defined the radical democrats. Their dignified appearance is unmistakably contrasted to the cowardly, evasive, and frightened reaction of the city councilors. As opposed to Rethel’s interpretation, Hasenclever’s artisans do not immediately take to the barricades to gain their point but approach the town hall through legitimate channels of protest.

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It is significant that the scene takes place in the town hall, the focus—as Marx reminded his readers—of similar occurrences throughout the German states during the revolutionary period.99 As the local representative body, the town magistrature was the intermediary between the state and the urban community. Carl Schurz recalled, for example, that when he and his fellow students in Bonn wished to support the Prussian assembly’s call for passive resistance, he led a delegation to the town hall to get assurance of the magistrates’ commitment to the appeal or voluntarily hand over the reins of government to the constitutionalists. The Oberbürgermeister received them with politeness but was evasive and stalled for time until the approach of an infantry column forced the delegation to withdraw. It is for this reason, I believe, that the conservative attack on Hasenclever’s picture focused on his characterization of the antagonists. A critic writing for the Prussian court’s private press was particularly offended by the depiction of one councilman as a fop, unfairly impugning his station. Conversely, the critic ridiculed the elevated treatment of the central artisan, who rises up “giant-like” with a martial air when in reality he is a denizen of “the Bremen wine cellars” and is more appropriate to the “wine tasting” satires that established the artist’s reputation.100 One other salient function of the town hall further related to events— its responsibility for the Bürgerwehr or Civic Guard. Roughly equivalent to the National Guard in France, it theoretically embodied the revolutionary demand to “arm the people.” Both the liberals and radicals demanded the elimination of royal troops and the standing army, and the empowering of the Civic Guard in their place. The progressives wanted the Civic Guard to consist of citizens commanded by officers elected by them. Depending upon the politics of a given region, the Civic Guard took on a corresponding ideological cast. Significantly, the Bürgerwehr in Düsseldorf was liberal-left, commanded by the progressive textile merchant Lorenz Cantador. Cantador persistently rejected the town hall’s demands that he march against the workers’ demonstrations and took the side of the people. Eventually Cantador was arrested, and when he was released he went into exile in the United States. Lorenz Clasen, his alternate, also refused to advance on workers carrying the red flag. The Düsseldorf Civic Guard included a number of the painters elected as officers or alternates, including Clasen, the landscape painter Kurt Hilgers, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Karl Wilhelm Hübner, and Hasenclever himself as alternate platoon leader. Hasenclever’s participation in the Düsseldorf Civic Guard attests to his own activist role in the revolution. He immersed himself in groups striving for national unification under the Frankfurt parliament, and helped formulate an address of the Düsseldorf painters to that body. He traveled to Munich in the summer of 1848, where he enlisted the local community of artists to join the Düsseldorf body in a show of solidarity. His identification with the radical movements is further demonstrated by his intimate friendship with Freiligrath. We have already seen to what extent Freiligrath

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figures in the fate of the picture, but now it remains to show that its subtext extols the poet’s contribution to the revolutionary movement. Although Freiligrath had written a number of social and political poems before 1848, the events of that year inspired such important works as “Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss,” “Die Republik!” and “Schwarz-Rot-Gold.” But his most stirring work, written in Düsseldorf in July 1848, was “Die Todten an die Lebenden” (The Dead to the Living), an appeal from the graves of the victims of March to their living fellow combatants to keep their memory alive and not to betray the ideals for which they died. It is a slashing attack on the reaction and a passionate call to final and decisive revolution under the “red flag . . . waving high over the barricades.” The eventful week in Düsseldorf of 8–15 October follows so closely the organized celebration of Freiligrath’s acquittal for “sedition” on 3 October that they appear in retrospect to be historically connected. It may be recalled from the discussion of Rethel that Freiligrath’s powerful poem, “Die Todten an die Lebenden,” aroused considerable controversy among the revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike in this fateful period. It was actually written and published in Düsseldorf at the end of July 1848 to raise funds for the Volksklub.101 Its enormous circulation throughout the lower Rhine as much as its seditious message so outraged the municipal and state authorities that the Ministry of Justice put out a warrant for Freiligrath’s arrest on 24 August and he was imprisoned, together with Julius Wulff, five days later. He was formally charged with provoking the citizenry to overthrow the existing laws by force through his reading of the poem in a large public assembly and by its subsequent publication. At issue was the line “Die rothe Fahne lässt er wehn hoch auf den Barrikaden!” (The red banner flaps in the air high over every barricade!), especially as it was immediately followed by the verses “These banners lead the Civic Guard, they lead the multitude— / Until the thrones go up in flames and princes are driven into the sea!”102 Freiligrath’s trial galvanized the left wing everywhere in Germany, but nowhere did it have a more electric effect than in Düsseldorf. Evidence of the poet’s popularity during the time of the trial in Düsseldorf is seen in the local newspaper advertisements for the sale of his writings, his biography, and even his portrait.103 When Freiligrath’s trial ended in acquittal on 3 October, the crowd broke into jubilant applause and poured into the streets. A massive triumphal procession embracing entire units of the Civic Guard thronged the thoroughfares, the participants singing the Marseillaise and cheering the Red Republic while young women threw flowers and waved handkerchiefs from the windows. Hasenclever confirms the connection between Freiligrath’s experience and the events surrounding the workers’ petition by including him in the painting. I want to argue that the orator seen through the window rousing the populace is none other than Freiligrath himself. Hasenclever had previously painted a highly sympathetic portrait of his friend in 1851 just

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before he fled to England (fig. 7.52). The long hair and whiskers flowing amply around and framing the rectangular shape of the face, the geniality and gentleness of the expression, and the cloak thrown loosely over one shoulder convey an informal character unusual for contemporary portraits, and attest to the warm friendship of artist and sitter. A comparison of this portrait with a close-up of the orator, however, is not entirely convincing: although they share the long hair curling up at the end and the beard, in the picture the orator’s beard is full while in the portrait the cheeks and jowls are shaven and the beard continues the line of the side whiskers under the chin. But it must be recalled that the portrait dates three years after the inception of the painting, and we have evidence that Freiligrath changed the style of his facial hair in this period. This may be easily seen in a silhouette of the author cut at the time of his incarceration in the Düsseldorf assizes by the radical artist and writer Wilhelm Müller (fig. 7.53); here there is not only evidence of a full beard, but also of the same barrelchested bodily shape draped with a frock coat that we see in the detail of the Worker’s Delegation.104 Finally, a photo of Freiligrath from around 1850 shows a head and beard similar to both the detail of the painting and the silhouette (fig. 7.54). The figure that I have identified as Freiligrath is shown in a victory gesture, thrusting both arms in the air and waving a sheet of paper in his left hand. It is a distant echo of the petition held by the artisan, its equiva7.52  Johann Peter Hasenclever, Portrait of Ferdinand Freiligrath, 1851. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.



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7.53  Wilhelm Müller, Silhouettes of Freiligrath and Wulff, 1848. 7.54  Photograph of Ferdinand Freiligrath, ca. 1850. Courtesy of the German Information Center, New York.

lent in the popular domain. This would be Freiligrath’s order of release—a concrete example of what can be achieved when the people are united. An inspiring speaker, Freiligrath often led crowds in singing his own and other popular political songs. His oratorical skills were amply demonstrated in the recital of his “Die Todten an die Lebenden” before huge audiences during the summer, and he again addressed a tumultuous crowd on the day of his liberation. (Perhaps Rethel had Freiligrath in mind when he railed against “mob orators”; it has been pointed out that the background in plate 6 of Auch ein Todtentanz represents the Burgplatz of Düsseldorf ’s Altstadt with the tower of St. Lambertus behind—the same view that Hasenclever catches through the window of his picture.) The juxtaposition of the orator with the statue of St. George Slaying the Dragon would now assume greater symbolic significance in the light of Freiligrath’s recent court victory against the full weight of reactionary officialdom. Freiligrath’s poetry reveals profound affinities with the subject of Hasenclever’s picture. The central image of his famous “Von unten auf!” is a steam yacht carrying the king of Prussia and his retinue, who delight in their leisurely excursion down the Rhine, while under their feet, in the darkness and squalor of the engine room, labors the human being whose toil alone makes their happiness possible: it is the stoker, “der ProletarierMaschinist!” that keeps the “ship of state” going, and when he takes a break to peer at the king on the upper deck he says to himself: “You are much less



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a Zeus, o king, than I am a Titan!” The bond that links Freiligrath’s contribution to political awareness of the toiler’s plight with the theme of Hasenclever’s painting comes through the connection between the poet’s power of speech and the artisans in the town hall. The poet’s ability to articulate the need for a collective strategy has empowered the voiceless proletariat. In this sense, Hasenclever expresses his own middle-class perspective and confirms the dynamic role of the bourgeois intellectual in the revolutionary process condemned by Rethel. But the meaning of the language of the middle-class orators—its metaphors and slogans—was determined not by them but by the condition of the German workers. As against Rethel, Hasenclever’s “agitator” does not incite the crowd through an empty discourse but speaks for the working classes. It is the artisans themselves who have organized the deputation that has interrupted the council’s meaning. It is not the orator but the workers who are given the predominant place in the painting. Their “invasion” of this official space, however, is neither hostile nor aggressive, but an orderly and dignified presentation of their petition. Rethel’s all-powerful rabble-rouser and stupefied populace may now be seen to be the products of reactionary stereotyping and mythmaking. Menzel’s Aufbahrung der Märzgefallenen (Public Funeral for the Victims of the March Revolution)

In Berlin on 16 March 1848 two civilians were killed by a volley from the royal dragoons trying to clear a square. This ended the chance for a peaceful solution to popular demands, and contributed to the breakout of fullscale revolution two days later. Under the pressures of the moment, the king had been fussing with drafts of proclamations on the calling of a constitutional assembly. In the final revision he discussed reorganization of the German Confederation (Deutsches Bund), the idea of a national flag, common German law, and freedom of the press. This is precisely what the affluent sector of the bourgeoisie wanted to hear. On the eve of 18 March, the retiring minister of the interior remarked: “Prussia has already had her revolution.”105 But early the next morning the outgoing minister sent as his last act an urgent summons to the Oberbürgermeister to meet with him and the chief of police. News had reached him that a great demonstration in front of the palace was planned later in the day, to include several volunteer groups “into which many Jews have forced themselves.” Here he anticipated the government’s plot to stigmatize the incipient rebellion as the work of foreign agents, French, Poles, and Jews, and the duped rabble that followed them—the line followed by Rethel in Auch ein Todtentanz. By 11:00 am the streets were crowded with people waiting to hear the announcement of the promised reform proposals. Shortly after 1:00 pm the proclamations were read to a mass of openly enthusiastic people. In a rare

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scene, citizens broke into the chambers of the Berlin town council and embraced the councilors. The military, however, forced on the defensive for the past few weeks, showed itself in an ugly light when ordered to clear the square near the palace. A squadron of garrison troops trotted out and rode right into the crowd with drawn swords, while foot soldiers began marching toward the square. Suddenly, two shots rang into the air from the direction of the foot soldiers, and within an hour the infuriated populace had begun to construct barricades at street corners. This was hardly the strategic plan of a foreign conspiracy or the random destruction of a wild rabble; the first finished barricade, at the corner of Oberwall and Jägerstrasse, was constructed of two hackney coaches, a carriage, a sentry box from the front of the bank, paving stones, and some barrels, while others used carts which happened to pass, laden with bricks or lumber, and even some hastily requisitioned omnibuses and a fruit stall. Women carried bedding and food out of their homes to supply the fighters. Despite the odds and the number of dead and wounded, the insurgents refused to quit until the king withdrew the soldiery from the city. The following day Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave in to the insurrection, ordering the military to suspend action against the barricades. The troops retired from the capital, and the king was left in effect a prisoner of the very subjects whom he looked upon as mindless servants of liberal doctrines and foreign conspirators. Bismarck recalled this moment with particular bitterness, claiming that the king stood no longer at the head of his troops but of the barricade fighters—“those intractable masses before whose threats the princes a few days before had sought his protection.”106 Bismarck would have wished to ruthlessly crush all insurrectionary movements in Germany, and from the experience of 1848 drew his famous “Blut und Eisen” (Blood and Iron) policy for the next generation. That same day, the crowd forced the king to pay homage to those killed on the barricades. This commemorative gesture followed the precedent established in Paris two weeks earlier, when a funeral ceremony for the victims of the barricades commenced in the church of La Madeleine and culminated with a procession to the Place de la Bastille, where the caskets were deposited in tombs beneath the July Column (fig. 7.55).107 Berliners organized an analogous ceremony and cortege of their fallen heroes, and as the bloodied corpses were brought beneath the palace window the king removed his hat—a moment he would always remember with particular disgust (fig. 7.56). On 20 March the king issued an amnesty for all political prisoners, who when released were greeted by the populace as heroes of the struggle for liberty. The following day he rode through the city wearing the liberal tricolor and addressed the newly armed Civic Guard, swearing allegiance to national unity and extolling political freedom. The culmination of this period of concessions to the insurgents occurred on 22 March, a powerful demonstration of the victorious revolution.108 On that day a massive funeral took place for the Märzgefallenen—the

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fallen heroes of March who were buried at the city’s expense in the Friedrichshain. On the front of houses were draped the tricolor and huge banners of black crape. Black flags were hoisted on the gates of the city. Men wore crape around their arms or hats, while women appeared in their mourning clothes on the balconies and in the streets. A crowd larger than the eye could embrace in a single glance covered the palace square from the Gendarmen Markt as far as the grave site in front of the Landsberger Gate. A solemn ceremony was conducted at the Gendarmen Markt, where on the steps of the Neue Kirche a special platform decorated with crape and flowers from the royal gardens had been erected to receive the coffins, 183 in all (fig. 7.57). At noon, the different sections of the Civic Guard, students, artisans, and guilds took up positions assigned to them; the municipal councilors, adorned with golden chains, and three clergy (one Evangelical, one Roman Catholic, and one Jewish) joined them. The clerics addressed the positive results of the revolution: the Evangelical Sydow and the Catholic Ruhland of St. Hedwig stressed the sense of union achieved by the victims as

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opposite 7.55  Grand Funeral Procession of the Victims of the [French] Revolution, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 1848.

7.56  The Dead Carried before the King and Queen, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 1848. top right 7.57  Solemnities over the Dead before the Neuen Kirche, Berlin, 1848, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 1848.

symbolized by the present ceremony, which, in the words of Sydow, was “destined to throw a bond of love and unity around the whole German Fatherland.” Rabbi Sachs closed the religious ceremony with a restatement of ideas associated with the revolution currently circulating in the public domain: It was not Death that made equal all those who rest here, but the strength of life, the power of an idea, a passionate enthusiasm which tore down all the barriers and obstacles that separated man from himself, man from man. It was the power of a conviction, a rising of the noblest feelings and thoughts, which impelled the deceased into the death struggle. . . . It was free self-consciousness, the right of man to use his powers unhindered and untrammeled, they helped to gain by fighting for the Fatherland.

The rabbi sought to dispel the already cliché-ridden idea that “death is the great equalizer” in politics as well as in life—the subject that Rethel exploited with such relish—and to counter accusations of a Jewish conspiracy. If Jews participated, it was to emancipate the society in which they were not yet full citizens so that they too could advance their rights, an issue that would be hotly contested at the Frankfurt parliament. Following the funeral services at the Neue Kirche, the vast procession moved to the Friedrichshain cemetery; the Civic Guard lined the streets, presenting arms as Gustav Hesse—one of the popular heroes of the revolution—marched past in his artisan’s blue smock, wearing his wreath of

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honor. The artisans’ guilds, from whose ranks most of the victims derived, marched at the head of the procession with their emblems and banners. Women and children carried wreaths, while burghers served as the pallbearers. There followed the entire clergy of Berlin, then government officials, the chief of police, and the professors of the University of Berlin in their gowns, including Alexander von Humboldt. Next came a large contingent of armed students, the mayor and town council, followed by factory workers headed by August Borsig, a group of Poles carrying their red-and-white flag, and Italians, some of them singers at the Berlin Opera House, demonstrating their solidarity with the cause of revolution and carrying their Risorgimento tricolor of green, white, and red. Then followed the Gymnasium students and miscellaneous deputations, guilds of all kinds with their pennants and banner, and finally, bringing up the rear, were representatives from Hamburg, Halle, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Braunschweig. The event in Berlin had an electric effect throughout Germany and the other European capitals overturned by popular insurrection. In Düsseldorf one local paper practically printed a sermon for its editorial: Glorious is the death for the Fatherland on the Field of Honor, gloriously flows the blood that fertilizes the soil of the battlefield, gloriously dims the eye of the dying warrior as he glimpses for the last time the sun shining over his distant homeland. . . . For us, for thy distant brethren! For all, all!

It proclaimed to freedom-loving countries everywhere the sublime acts of Germany’s heroic sons in behalf of a united Fatherland, and that their spirit remains with the living as they gather around “the lofty banner of one grand brotherhood; it waves high in the air, and every eye can read its colors: The sacrifice of your Red Blood carried you to Black Death for Golden Freedom!”109 Two days later Freiligrath’s song of “Schwarz-Rot-Gold” appeared for the first time on the Continent in the Basler National Zeitung: Liberty is the nation And rights for all to reap! Liberty hold an auction And thirty crowns go cheap! Liberty is republican! And once again republican!

And then the refrain: Powder is black, Blood is red, Golden flickers the flame!



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Thus the mood immediately following the events in Berlin in March was jubilant for the coalition of liberal and radical middle classes and workers—a coalition feeling unified through the symbolic sign of the national tricolor. But the rise of a democratic movement, headed by the petty bourgeoisie and uniting the radical intellectuals and a major segment of the working population frightened the burghers who now controlled the reins of government. The demand for direct and universal suffrage, as in France, a single legislative assembly and a full and open recognition of the revolution of 18 March as the base of any new political system provided the reaction with a means of undermining the scared liberals. If a group of workers so much as carried a red flag, they were described as wishing to found a republic, and the Civic Guard was called out against them. Already by the end of March, the king was writing to his new liberal minister from Cologne, Ludolf Camphausen, describing the barricade fighters as riffraff and reviving the idea of a plot by foreign agitators. This shift is played out in the visual and technical structure of Menzel’s painting, The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution (fig. 7.58).110 Menzel would become the most well-known realist painter of nineteenthcentury Germany, and the 1848 uprising in Berlin had the same galvanizing effect on his work as had its Paris counterpart on the work of French realists. It roused him from his Biedermeier slumber and pushed him to reconsider his aesthetic, social, and political priorities. Although he did several quick studies from nature in the early 1840s, these were considered only as private experiments, never meant to be exhibited publicly. They included views of the nearby Berlin–Potsdam railway line glimpsed from his upper-story residence on Schöneberger Strasse, No. 18, where from 1845 to 1847 he lived with his invalid mother, sister Emilie, and brother Richard. One of these is The Anhalter Railway Station by Moonlight, recently rebuilt and expanded in 1847, in which a full moon set in a deep blue field hovers eerily above a dark cloud bank and the shadowy debris of the work yards and deserted station complex (fig. 7.59). Another is The Berlin–Potsdam Railroad of 1847, showing a freight train turning along a curve on the pioneer Prussian line through a devastated countryside on the outskirts of Berlin (fig. 7.60). Unlike Turner’s more menacing locomotive that comes straight out toward the spectator, Menzel views his train from above, thus subordinating it to the controlling gaze and panoramic stretch of wasteland. Like Rethel, Menzel sees the disruption to the environment caused by technological change—less a “machine in the garden” than a Frankenstein unleashed. He felt more at home in Frederick the Great’s era, producing vignettes of Prussian history for Franz Kugler’s book as eyewitness documents that made the past appear as a living present. Menzel next conceived a series of paintings based on his illustrations for Kugler, a project interrupted by the 1848 revolution. His Public Funeral actually constituted his first major public foray into the representation of contemporary urban reality. Given that the small

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7.58  Adolph von Menzel, The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution, 1848. Hamburg-

er Kunsthalle, Hamburg.



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scale work is filled with hundreds of figures, it may be that it was initially conceived as a preliminary study for a monumental canvas. It delineates his personal synthesis of the ceremony—sketched by him from every conceivable angle—conducted in the Gendarmen Markt for the victims of 18–19 March. Although absent from Berlin during the days of actual fighting, Menzel returned in time to witness and to record key features of the ceremonial procession. The day after the ceremony he set down some of his impressions in a long letter to his close friend and patron, Carl Heinrich Arnold.111 The letter reeks with ambiguity and ambivalence about the revolution itself and its relationship to the Prussian state and the German nation. He had had a sleepless night, and tried to get off his chest his pent-up feelings by recording his impressions from the moment of his return to Berlin Tuesday evening to the funeral procession the following day. In fact, he accomplished much more, in effect creating a composite of the events and structuring them in a text consonant with his ideological outlook. What strikes the reader is its detached quality; Menzel reports in detail his observations but chapter seven

7.59  Adolph von Menzel, The Anhalter Railway Station by Moonlight, 1846. Oskar Reinhart

Foundation, Winterthur. 7.60  Adolph von Menzel, The Berlin–Potsdam Railroad, 1847. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

is generally unemotionally involved. He counts the numbers of holes in buildings, for instance, or how the coffins were set up in the cemetery, but does not register much feeling about the victims or their mourners. After expressing relief to find his sister and brother safe and sound, he voices his disbelief over the change that took place Berlin in during the short time he had been gone. On the way home from the railroad station he followed a trail of wreckage of four barricades, and this sight so depressed him that he wandered the streets all evening, stopping passers-by and inquiring about the unfolding events from eyewitnesses. He was both horrified and proud to hear of the unyielding ferocity with which the citizens and the military fought each other, far surpassing anything that occurred in Paris. He remarks that there were many courageous actions on both sides, but recalls in the next sentence several “bloody incidents” which occurred the week before, on Monday, 13 March, when the military had triumphed, as if to give the royal troops some measure of credit. Menzel continues his narrative by referring to his family’s recollection of the ensuing atmosphere of tenseness and stillness pervading Berlin’s neighborhoods; by noon Saturday the tension was so great that the approaching storm could be marked by a “lone individual hastily running back and forth on the street” (ein hastiges hin- und wiederrennen Einzelner auf der Strasse). This “lone individual”— the image in his mind immediately preceding the outbreak—clearly stuck in Menzel’s imagination and will help us later in grasping his particular conception of the revolution. Soon squads of artisans could be seen breaking up the boards from the Rinnsteinbrücke and carrying sentry boxes to build barricades. His attitude to the artisans, however, is more highly detached as compared with his concern for the troops and the king. His letter from Kassel to his sister and brother the week before the revolution reflects evident irritation at not being able to find a good Handwerker because all the artisans were politically engaged, and he even refused to take them seriously, putting quotation marks around the word “demonstration.”112 Soon certain streets in Berlin were impassible; it became necessary to bypass them and find alternate routes. Since coaches had been requisitioned for the barricade structures, his sister Emilie had to ride bareback with a coachman who took her to the house of Märker, a close friend of Menzel and soon to become minister of justice under the Auerswald ministry. From early evening until midnight of 18 March the artillery and rifle fire made a horrible nonstop din. Continuing his letter to Arnold, Menzel notes that the night was “terrifying.” Skirmishing ended after midnight but began again toward morning, when it attained a particularly violent level. As far as he was able to learn, the entire guard house, two barracks, and the reserve army’s arsenal had been raided and their contents destroyed. Menzel then makes the incredible statement that “many barricades were finally taken by storm, but only at great cost in human lives, especially officers. Generally, the military suffered a more disproportionate loss of lives than the citizens.” This statement is so preposterous that it is difficult to

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understand how “Menzel the realist” could have uttered it. Since he was present at the state funeral he would have counted 183 citizens lost (another 120 of the wounded would later perish) compared to twenty soldiers, who were interred with a separate and inconspicuous funeral. Even if this could have made sense statistically (Berlin quartered 15,000 troops), the sheer disproportion of the victims in absolute terms makes his observation particularly callous. The baffling comment makes sense only in the context of Menzel’s social ranking: he must have believed that one officer was worth a score of civilians. Here he shared the well-known contempt of the officer corps—open only to the nobility—for the popular classes and for civil affairs generally. Menzel next indulges his curious compulsive desire to count the number of holes in the buildings caused by grapeshot and mortar shells: one in the Friedrichstrasse revealed thirty-one, while the house that sustained the worst bombardment was on a street opposite a high barricade and numbered 190 grapeshot punctures. His obsession with the minutiae of the damaged buildings and wall surfaces manifests his desire to come to grips with the events, to try to grasp them in strictly material terms.113 He began his investigation with utter disbelief, but in the artillery holes, analogous to the wounds in Christ’s body for doubting St. Thomas, Menzel could recognize the reality of the events. He also wants to give the royal troops some measure of credit for their performance, as if imagining them confronting a foreign foe. After recounting how the bakers produced bread during the night to dispatch them to the barricade fighters, he sighed: “No one, however, cared for the soldiers” (Für die Soldaten sorgte niemand). I have discussed this initial section of the letter describing the ceremony at length because it is absolutely essential to understanding what follows: it is as if Menzel had to relive the revolution, to retrace it historically, before he could undertake it visually.114 On one level, his thinking parallels the kind of accurate historiographical research undertaken by such contemporary historians as Johann David Erdmann Preuss and Leopold von Ranke. On another level, his own sense of history has been so severely shaken by the events in Berlin that he has to go over the ground to convince himself of its actuality. Once he has achieved this stage—which is literally a blowby-blow account of the revolution and the events immediately preceding and succeeding it—then he feels up to recording the funeral procession that officially established the unprecedented people’s ascendance over the king. His compassion for the ruler is expressed almost immediately after beginning the discussion of the funeral procession, which he opens with the classic line, “That was a sad, solemn day [Das war ein traurig feierlicher Tag], the like of which one would not have expected to witness in Berlin.” The seriousness and silence of the masses as they carried out the ceremony “made a fearful and powerful impression.” Menzel claims to have observed the funeral procession from various sites and perspectives, but he studied it especially for a long time from the palace directly opposite.115 From this

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standpoint he had a view of the balcony on which stood the king’s adjutant holding a crape, and facing him was a member of the Civic Guard holding the national tricolor. Next he fastened his gaze on the king, and observed: “Every time a new convoy of coffins came by, the king stepped forward with bared head and remained standing until the coffins had passed. His head glowed from afar like a white spot. It must have been the most dreadful day of his life.” This passage is the keystone to the overarching structure designed by Menzel to make ideological sense of the unnerving chain of events. His desire to witness the procession from the perspective of the palace represents not only a projected line of sight but a political and psychological alignment with the Prussian sovereign. Amid the mourning and the pervasiveness of the color black, the king alone emerges pure and undefiled, glowing “like a white spot.” Despite the overwhelming presence of victims and mourners, only the king elicits Menzel’s sympathy. The remainder of the letter is anticlimactic, as Menzel records a final grab bag of impressions. The funeral convoy seemed “endless”; after making extensive forays down the surrounding streets he returned to the palace square only to see again a fresh stream of flags, coffins, and musicians. He followed this train to the burial site outside of town, and sketched the square-shaped plan of the disposition of the graves alongside which the coffins were placed. He notes without emotion that there is space left for the wounded, who are dying all the time: “Jeden Tag kommen Neue hinzu.” Then he records the colors of the coffins, black and yellow, the kind that he had previously seen in the warehouses, all decorated with wreaths and flowers ordered by the relatives of the deceased. Most showed placards weighted down with stones or chunks of earth against the wind, carrying the names and social standing of the victims, including several women and children. By the time Menzel concluded his account he was writing as if he had been in Berlin throughout and witnessed the entire trauma of revolution. “Since Sunday,” he writes, “the entire city is armed and peaceful.” Berlin was in the hands of the Civic Guard, including his friend Märker, who served as commander of the guard at the Anhaltschen Gate. It seemed as if everyone were participating; burghers carrying infantry rifles, students armed with cavalry swords, artists watching over their particular domain as they did in Paris, and even Gymnasium students guarding certain stations. But nowhere could there be seen a soldier, a Gendarme, or a policeman. The few officers he espied were all wearing civilian coats and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. The now “liberated” palace of the despised prince of Prussia displayed in addition to the tricolor and mourning flags three large signs. One was painted in white directly on the wall and proclaimed “The Property of the Entire Nation”—a sight also captured in reportorial illustration (fig. 7.61). From the balcony floated a great white banner that read: “The Property of the Nation Remains Under the

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7.61  The King of Prussia in the Streets of Berlin on the 21st March 1848, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, April 1848.



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Protection of the Citizenry.” Finally, on a board nailed to the side was the announcement of the establishment of a bureau for the redress of popular grievances “run by volunteers of the people for the people.” Menzel was particularly surprised that this building, which had housed the reactionary prince suspected of ordering the shots that sparked the uprising, went undamaged. Generally, the fact that the people were maintaining order and respecting property without the presence of a military or police authority profoundly impressed him. His typical view of the popular classes comes through in a letter written the year before during the hunger riot in Berlin. On 21 April 1847 crowds of women, enraged because of the inordinate inflation, began raiding markets and food shops. In bakeries they weighed the loaves, and if they found the product up to standard they wrote on the baker’s door that he was honest—signs respected by the crowds that arrived later. Menzel’s letter of 23 April 1847 is characteristically ambivalent: he clearly understood the motivations behind the hunger riot and could rationalize the resort to action, but at the same time he condemned the excesses of “the mob of common good-for-nothings [gemeiner Nichtswürdigkeiten] in which the Berlin rabble [Plebs] played an active role, as elsewhere.”116 At the same time, Menzel betrays his own political position in his hopes for the successful outcome of the Landtag, or United Diet of Prussia, convoked by the king in February and opened on 11 April, just ten days prior to the hunger riot. It was a meeting of members of the eight provincial biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848

diets designed to still the clamor for reform and to gain new appropriations for the completion of a Prussian railroad network. (That same year he painted his studies of the pioneering Berlin–Potsdam line.) Menzel believed in a strong monarchy that could intervene on behalf of the popular classes and check the bourgeoisie’s relentless pursuit of profit. He was optimistic that the government would reach a compromise with the members of the United Diet. But the delegates refused to allocate the funds unless the king agreed to their right to hold regular meetings, in effect transforming the Landtag into a standing parliamentary body. Friedrich Wilhelm’s resolute refusal to entertain this notion, however, forced the body to disband on 26 June, and the king returned to his system of personal rule. Menzel, nonetheless, did not give up on the constitutional ideal. He participated in the voting on 2 May for the electors who were to choose Berlin’s representatives to both the Prussian State Assembly and the Frankfurt National Assembly.117 The strongest group emerging from this election were the moderate liberals who merged with the Center Right at Frankfurt. This group, to which Menzel belonged, did not acknowledge unreservedly the principle of the sovereignty of the people. As the breach between moderate and radical grew wider, there developed a tacit alliance between moderate and conservative directed against the common enemy on the Left. Writing to Arnold at the time of the September crisis in Frankfurt, Menzel placed the blame for the disturbances and conflicts on the popular classes: What do you think of Frankfurt, Berlin, and Vienna???!!! . . . One has again entrusted too much to humanity; the ( justified) indignation over those at the top has now become indignation over those at the bottom. Nothing else but a swing from one school bench to another.118

He blamed the radicals for the divisiveness at the National Assembly, implying that they were responsible for the confusion regarding the nation’s prospects. It now remains to show how Menzel’s painting reenacts his political and psychological attitudes. While scholars emphasize the importance of this work as the first attempt to depict a contemporary political event, and therefore critical to his future work, the painting itself was not done directly from life but from memory, with the aid of the hasty sketches and drawings he made during his many forays on the streets during the ceremony.119 These he supplemented with detailed renderings of the Gendarmen Markt. The final attempt, therefore, is a synthesis of a variety of viewpoints comparable to his textual analysis of the procession. Menzel’s final visual record of the event could not seem more dispassionate. He represented it as if from the standpoint of a curious but impartial bystander: the eye first moves to the catafalque’s distant mass of black, set high on the artificial platform against the portal of the cathedral just

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above the compositional center, then to the distant group of mourners in black approaching the church, and then comes back to the foreground, where the densest mass of people is located, returns to the bizarre empty middle via the accordion-like movement of the crowd, and finally takes in the contrapuntal festive nature of the procession of artisan guilds and student fraternities with their insignia and banners, and the waving tricolor flags suspended from the buildings at the corner of Markgrafenstrasse and Mohrenstrasse. As against the dark lugubrious mass of the coffins, the parade-like vignette is set against a light sky that opens up around it. Inevitably, the spectator returns to the foreground, where the central action occurs. The “yellow” coffin being carried by the pall-bearers near the frontal picture plane splits the participants into two distinctly separate groups or wedges in the compositional sense, the students and the bourgeoisie at the left wearing their fraternity regalia, and at the right the artisans and other representatives of the popular classes wearing their blouses, aprons, and characteristic caps—including the tasseled variety, worn by the gesticulating artisan on the right, which especially appealed to contemporary reporters (fig. 7.62). But these two groups are not only divided spatially and by their costume, they are also distinguished by their particular physical and psychological attributes, by their collective behavior. On the left the expressions are dignified and restrained, and the entire group, including the unfinished figures, maintains a rigorous decorum. Just the opposite occurs on the right, where the crowd breaks up into individuated clusters of lively and highly agitated proletarians. While the bourgeoisie pays respectful

7.62  Revolutionary Meeting in a Cellar in Berlin, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 1848.



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attention to the procession, the artisans are engrossed in their own world, gesticulating with their arms and bodies away from the primary compositional center as if totally oblivious to the events. Significantly, perhaps, behind this disorderly group a contingent of the bourgeois Civic Guard with their rifles and bayonets files in to close the formal wedge on this side of the canvas. In addition to the dense but individuated crowd in the foreground there are isolated figures moving frontally out of the picture and away from the convoy. The most striking of these figures is the distinguished-looking personage at the left who doffs his hat as the coffin passes and remains fixed at attention. According to Alfred Lichtwark, the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle who purchased the work in 1902, Menzel told him that the man was a stranger “who had attracted his attention by his immaculate appearance and air of distinction.”120 (It is possible that his aristocratic bearing and military stance may have struck Menzel initially as one of the officers Menzel wrote about in his letter who attended the ceremony wearing civilian coats.) The elegant gentleman’s singularity in the picture, however, is not only a function of his dress and bearing, but also of his spatial location and opposing movement to the axis established by the convoy. His body twists at a right angle to this diagonal and breaks the movement to the center. Indeed, he looks leftward across the foreground plane out of the picture, and except for the doffing of his hat appears detached from the central event. His temporal and spatial location sets him into a particular relationship with the two socially distinct groups in the foreground: while he stands apart from both, his back is turned to the working classes, and, especially since he has sustained his salute after the convoy has passed, he now appears to greet the bourgeoisie at the left, and in particular the welldressed newcomers in the unfinished passage moving toward him on the same ground plane. It is precisely because of these valences and countervalences within the pictorial structure that the picture looks quirky and disjunctive, even setting aside for the moment the question of the unfinished passage at the left. The seemingly random and incoherent movements are also the source of the picture’s “realism”: visually, they are analogous to the additive figures of Courbet’s compositions, and, thematically, the quirkiness resembles a form of reportage of a correspondent in a battle zone. Menzel refuses an obvious formal or hierarchical arrangement to supply the image with an heroic idea or some stab at irony. He did not choose the moment of liturgical rites or moments of concentration such as at the burial site, but instead a relatively random stage in the procession whose segmented focus conveys a sense of maximum incoherence and disorder. There is no sustained movement in the composition that directs the eye to the central event, the catafalque itself, and no sense of a communal, shared experience. This is why the gap between the dense foreground mass and the church assumes its specifically “empty” character. Between the crowd and the event there

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is literally an unbridgeable gap, and this visual gap analogizes Menzel’s own detachment, which I believe is further embodied as a persona in the aristocratic figure at the left. If we examine his most important preliminary study for the composition, we are immediately struck by the appearance in the foreground of an analogous solitary, aristocratic figure who again moves in a direction counter to the convoy, here barely indicated (fig. 7.63). Since Menzel’s letter referred to a similar figure in the streets just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, it may be concluded that this recurrent motif is fundamental to his conception. Recall that Menzel’s greatest pitch of empathy during this event was reserved for the king, standing apart with his head bared. Menzel repeatedly tried to envision the ceremony from the royal perspective, and while a specifically topographical view from a balcony would have not given free scope to Menzel’s taxonomic development of the events, Menzel used the aristocratic figure as a surrogate. I claimed previously that the figure also serves as Menzel’s alter ego, and I would argue that it is the painter’s identification of his persona with the king’s person that constitutes the dynamic signifying core of this picture. Menzel’s affinity with the king represents his psychic need to identify with a dominant male authority. His father had worked briefly as a Schulvorsteher, or school principal, a severe taskmaster who inculcated in the son his prodigious work habits. He quit his position to open a lithographic business and put his son to work creating designs for all sorts of commercial jobs. Young Menzel suffered acutely from his stunted physical stature; his full height measured fourand-a-half feet, giving him the appearance of a dwarf. His insecurity in the presence of others was exacerbated by the inevitable derisive smiles, malicious stares, and suppressed laughter of some of his own colleagues. Lonely 7.63  Adolph von Menzel, The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution, pencil drawing, 1848. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.



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and withdrawn, he loathed going out into the public sphere except to receive its rewards. Conversely, his need for social approval expressed itself in his desperate ambition to win official honors and all the distinctions that Prussian culture bestowed upon its favorite painters. Under these circumstances, he could hardly be a rebel and generally cued his work to current privileged tastes and preferences. Nevertheless, his peculiar existential status affected his worldly gestalt, translated visually in the form of bizarre angular viewpoints, often from an elevated or extreme close-up position. He compulsively peered within and below things, seen in his fascination for containers of every sort as well as their contents. A photograph of Menzel with his sketchpad shows him leaning into his subject as if standing over it, and this is telling of both his ideological and visual perspective.121 His numerous views through upperstory windows into empty backyards, deserted building sites, apartment interiors, and railway locations reveal the depth of his curiosity nurtured in part by his everyday inability to see what others saw without difficulty. His need to approach the subject so intensely forced the kind of detachment from the world that empowered him to depict it so accurately. He could not imagine or idealize a universe that demanded so much from him in the act of scrutiny. Menzel’s relationship with his father played a central role in the choice and practice of his career. Menzel senior, however, died in his prime in 1832, two years after opening a new firm in Berlin, and the entire business fell to the responsibility of his sixteen-year-old son. Menzel recalled his dying father advising him that he was still too young for marriage but “good enough to be head of the family.”122 In Menzel’s mind destiny had taken his father and catapulted Menzel himself to the unforeseen position of Familienhaupt. He now became the family breadwinner, supporting his mother, his sister, and his younger brother. The youth’s sudden inheritance of the awesome responsibility for the welfare of his mother and two siblings matured him quickly and fixed his social views at an early age. He never married, and assumed the role of spouse and father that continued beyond his mother’s death in 1846; his relations with his brother and especially his sister Emilie reveal a profoundly paternal character. This closed world of family life comes through vividly in his correspondence and even in his public statements: he claimed to have “divested myself of any kind of relationship with the opposite sex throughout my entire life. In short, there is a lack of any kind of self-made bond between me and the outside world.”123 Despite the somewhat forbidding character of the older man, the relationship between father and son had been close. Menzel clearly viewed his own career as an extension and completion of his father’s unfulfilled ambitions. Late in life he countered rumors about the supposed paternal hostility to an artist’s profession with the retort that his father’s failures had made him wary of such a career and naturally disinclined him to encourage his

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7.64  Adolph von Menzel, My Father’s Hand, pencil sketch, 1828. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. 7.65  Adolph von Menzel, My Father’s Hand, pencil sketch, 1832. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

son’s aspirations. Menzel insisted that his own achievement should be seen as compensation for his father’s frustrated career.124 His identification with his father is visually and metaphorically acted out in his hand studies of the older man. An early drawing done the year the father began the lithographic business shows the elder’s powerful left hand grasping a lithographic tool closely resembling a knife—a gesture signifying the authority of a dominant male figure and hinting at a fear of castration (fig. 7.64). Menzel did another study, oddly enough, of his father’s left hand as he lay dying, this time in an open gesture that expresses the unmistakable helplessness of the invalid (fig. 7.65). His inscription informs us that immediately after the completion of the drawing his father died.125 These two studies correspond to Menzel’s somewhat unusual Oedipal development, which culminated in his premature and actual replacement of the dominant male authority. Not only symbolically but also in actuality he unloosened the grip that had earlier threatened him with castration. Menzel totally identified himself with his father as business and family head, subsuming all previous paternal functions to himself. This transition is demonstrated in his ambidextrous practice. He got into the habit early on of working with his left hand on lithographic plates when writing was



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opposite 7.66  Adolph von Menzel, The Coronation of King Wilhelm I at Königsberg, 1861, sketch, 1861. Na-

tionalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. 7.67  Adolph von Menzel, The Coronation of King Wilhelm I at Königsberg, 1861, 1865. National-

galerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.



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required since this had to be reversed to print correctly. Out of this practice he evolved the custom of drawing with his left hand and painting with his right—shown by his sketch of his right hand that he notes on the sheet as “drawn by his left.”126 Menzel’s manual dexterity also had a symbolic function; with his left hand he assumed his father’s authority and with his right—the painting hand that gained him international renown—he fulfilled and surpassed the older man’s original ambitions. Years later when he won the official commission to paint The Coronation of Wilhelm I—an image of authority which commanded his most intense effort up to that moment—his Oedipal projections prompted him to deviate from his study of the actual event in the definitive picture.127 His original sketch shows the ruler grasping the scepter of authority in his right hand, but in the final version he switched the symbol of authority to the king’s left hand and put a sword in his right hand that points upward in a transcendental gesture (figs. 7.66–67). It is with his brush that Menzel painted this sword pointed heavenward, neutralizing the castrating weapon into a positive phallic expression of mastery. That this switch occurred in the context of the ascendance of royal rule is crucial—Menzel here identifies with the “father” of the Vaterland. Elsewhere Menzel made an analogy between the good Hausvater (head of household) and the concerned citizen who supports the state.128 The ultimate Hausvater is thus the newly crowned king of Prussia. Menzel’s precocious paternal feelings reveal themselves in his closest friendships, which share the intimacy of his domestic side: he was inevitably attracted to older men well established in business and professional life. These included the successful wallpaper manufacturer Carl Heinrich Arnold and the lawyer Friedrich August Märker, whose family life was bound up with his own, the regimental physician Wilhelm Puhlmann, as well as a host of military and business leaders who regularly purchased his work. He demonstrates a deep respect for what we may call “father substitutes” with whom he could converse on equal terms. Here Menzel’s physical stature reinforced his Oedipal projections. He was rejected as unfit for military service in 1835, and during the height of the revolutionary crisis in 1848 he wrote to his friend Arnold that for the first time in his life he truly regretted not growing into a “big strong chap.”129 The felt discrepancy between his physical stature and his sense of self-importance required an emotional buffer within the circle of those whose self-assurance reassured him. Outside this intimate society, however, he could be vulnerable to the threat of exposure by authority. On one occasion the crown prince vaunted his strength to his guests by offering to lift Menzel on a chair above the crowd, and the disconcerted artist declared vehemently, “I will not tolerate this, Your Imperial Highness!”130 Menzel’s early maturation and habituation to death (in addition to the premature death of both parents, two of the five children did not survive childhood) should also be seen in relationship to his emotional detachment. chapter seven

His ability to sketch the hand of his dying father with cool and precise objectivity, as well as the many images of the wounded, the dead, and dying, testifies to his affective distancing. This in turn predisposed him toward a realist style. As shown in the case of the French Meissonier and Courbet, there seems to be a necessary connection between a nineteenth-century realist sensibility and emotional withdrawal. Finally, this stoicism may also be seen as a function of Menzel’s status at the head of a Prussian household, his sense of himself in a position of authority. Menzel’s lone figure haunting the scene of the revolution is one intimately bound up with his double personal demand for isolation and public recognition. During the ceremony he went up and down the surrounding streets seeking various vantage points, just like the character he noted “running back and forth” prior to the outbreak of the revolution. His empathy with the king and the officer class constitutes traits of self-identification with powerful male authority figures that figuratively stood above the crowd. The prestige that he craved as compensation for want of physical and hereditary privilege he displaced onto the solitary figures of his compositions. Yet the cluster of events he synthesized in his picture and his final configuration of them attested to the absence of the principle of authority and of the social stability that his own self-image required. The revolution in fact shattered the principle of authority and discredited his paternal image, and in this sense the want of order and coherence in the visual narrative corresponds with his sense of chaos in the political and social realm. The absence of a visual center in Menzel’s picture is ultimately a result of the breakdown of the central authority in the political sphere. Finally, the strain of this on the entire pictorial structure is shown in the abrupt break on the left-hand side of the canvas, where there is a major unfinished passage. It should be noted that this section has only been drawn, suggesting that with the dissolution of the sense of secure authority, Menzel’s own self-perception suffered a diminution in psychic energy associated with the paternal left hand, and he could therefore not activate his own painterly contribution associated with his right hand. Already by late summer of 1848 Menzel had lost all interest in the painting. Exactly fifty years later, on the twenty-first of March, 1898, he recalled the evening he returned to Berlin and the chilling scene that had confronted him. He remembered walking the streets and sketching his observations analogously to a newspaper reporter. He had sketched quickly because he had planned to work on the painting immediately and complete it while the circumstances remained fresh in his mind. But he also recalled that what he later witnessed in the real world diminished his interest to the point where he could no longer complete it. Thus he hints at his disillusionment as the explanation for the technical abandonment of his work. The Hamburg critic and art historian Alfred Lichtwark described a visit to the artist in 1902 during which they discussed the picture. Menzel told

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him that even before attempting to complete the canvas he realized that the existing political situation was saturated with “lies or utter rubbish,” and turned the face of the picture toward the wall with such disgust that he could never again touch it.131 He considered the incomplete portion of the canvas as an integral part of the picture, as a metonymic indication of his mental state at the time he left off. Menzel even commented to Lichtwark that the work “would have become a forgery had he laid a finger on it” afterwards. Significantly, he signed and dated the canvas directly over the unfinished portion, certifying that the picture was conceptually complete even though a portion of it remained technically unresolved.132 Inevitably we think of parallels between Menzel’s aborted effort and Couture’s Enrollment of the Volunteers. Both artists (who were born only two weeks apart in December 1815) considered themselves moderate liberals at the moment of the revolutions of 1848, and both embarked on major projects to expose their commitment to what they considered positive about the revolutions. Offspring of the petty bourgeoisie, they could sympathize with popular discontent up to a point, but they also believed sufficiently in their own genius to think good people like them in power could solve the problems of those beneath them in the social order. In each case, their work was disrupted by a change in the equilibrium of political contention (Menzel because of what he perceived to be the further radicalization and social dissent sparked by the process, Couture because the change of regime undermined it entirely) and a concomitant loss of creative energy required to see it through to fulfillment. Their unfinished canvases—the very incompleteness corresponding to forces at work within the present—constitute irrefutable evidence of the intersection of art and ideology stimulated by the uprisings of 1848. Menzel’s belief that the monarch was the only force capable of restoring the lost equilibrium between state and society received a rude check in the spring of 1848. He adhered to the idea of a limited form of representation for a middle-class elite that would inform the king of the steps necessary to take to achieve this equilibrium. The failure to achieve this rather modest gain at the Frankfurt parliament he blamed on the popular classes, whose own participation in the political process he considered a liability. He wanted reform from above, not from below, consistent with the majority of his peers not only in Germany but throughout the revolutionary centers in 1848. These groups split similarly from the working classes, and in the end all hands yielded to military dictatorship and skillful repression. The price the bourgeois constitutionalists paid for this outcome is exemplified in the experience of Menzel’s close friend Märker, who served as minister of justice in the Auerswald cabinet from June to September 1848. He belonged to the party of the cautious bourgeoisie, which best describes Menzel’s position. Rudolf von Auerswald himself was an aristocrat who supported constitutionalism and progressive bureaucracy. While not as

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actively reformist as the Camphausen government, the Auerswald cabinet sought to maintain solid relations with the constituent assembly in Berlin and mediate between it and an increasingly impatient court. When it admitted inability to resist legislative claims to control over the army, the holiest of all royal prerogatives, it turned in its resignation to a delighted Friedrich Wilhelm IV. On 9 August 1848 the Prussian national assembly asked the minister of war to issue an army order to the effect that officers were expected to demonstrate their support of a constitutional system and that those who held differing political views were expected to quit the army. Schreckenstein, the minister of war, and of old feudal nobility, tried to choke the order, but only forced the assembly to act again on a similar motion on 7 September. Faced with this challenge, the Auerswald cabinet resigned. Marx was highly critical of what he called this “middle class” cabinet acting as a front for the crown and “letting its dirty work out to the feudal bear.” He claimed that it failed to recognize that the public welfare was its primary responsibility, even at the risk of coming into conflict with the crown. He also observed that it suffered no qualms about carrying out, through its minister of justice, Herr Märker, old public welfare measures, culminating in wholesale arrests of democrats. Indeed, for Marx “the only serious action” of the Auerswald administration was carried out against the revolution; its numerous lawsuits against the press, the introduction of a system of constables or plainclothes police to supplement the regular police for use against popular meetings and demonstrations, and its use of the Civic Guard against unruly workers were all executed for the sake of public welfare. But the same cabinet “carefully refrained from intervening against the counterrevolution in the name of public welfare.” This salient failure of the cabinet to back the encroachment of the legislative on the executive power compromised it in the eyes of all the parties.133 The resulting isolation of the middle class, the dissolution of the united front that had been formed during the spring uprising, the disintegration of parties, and the contest of cliques is graphically inscribed on Menzel’s canvas. The incomplete portion—both in the narrative and material sense— metaphorically points to the failure of the liberals of the parliamentary center to fulfill the work of the revolution. The longing for unity through the mourning rite that brings out the entire populace to venerate the victims of disunity is interrupted by an unbridgeable spatial gap. Yet Menzel could not accept the conclusion that the failure to establish enlightened bourgeois rule in the form of a constitutional monarchy lay with the middle-class fear of the social revolution and the resistance of the feudal aristocracy in alliance with the crown. From Menzel’s perspective the reaction was a justifiable consequence of the unruly behavior of the popular classes. What’s left are the scattered remnants of society, alone preserving their individual dignity above the din of class struggle.



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8 The Second Empire’s Official Realism

This chapter outlines a simple theory about a subtle conspiracy organized by the Bonapartist regime to fashion a visual style appropriate to its ideological position. Contrary to most previous studies, which have associated it primarily with outmoded classicism, confused eclecticism, or renewed romanticism, this study suggests that the Second Empire’s official taste was predominantly realist. Indeed, the government’s predilection for realism promoted the assimilation of this movement into the mainstream of modern French culture. Napoléon III’s government was the first to attach to itself an official court photographer. Manet’s naturalism and Monet’s impressionism would be incomprehensible without the profound investment of government resources in the encouragement of realism during the 1850s and 1860s.1 Louis-Napoléon, both as prince-president and as emperor, fostered this official style in several ways. He and his administration won over a younger generation of academically trained painters, encouraged the rise of alternative realist styles to rival the radical tendencies, and, through Salon criticism and high influence, managed to blunt and neutralize the realist style of the Left. The Bonapartist government aimed at a consensus realism, which meant forcing concessions from both the Academy and the painters perceived as leftists. By making academic models conform to new molds and progressive tendencies conform to traditional ones, the administration succeeded in establishing what we may call an “official realism.”2 It will become apparent that we must clear the air of stereotypical views of the Second Empire government as an adventurous band of bumblers in the cultural realm. We owe such views largely to conservative scholars unwilling to admit governmental influence in the rise, spread, and success of an avant-garde. Yet thinkers on the Left have also deprecated the imperial regime’s involvement in the Beaux-Arts as stupid and ineffectual. Neither Left nor Right has yet understood that the Second Empire comprised a number of creative conservatives who were supremely pragmatic, flexible, and ingenious in dealing with the visual arts, and who left a lasting

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imprint. We may not like their methods or the results, but to dismiss their role is to distort historical circumstances. Hardheaded types like the comte de Morny, the duc de Persigny, the comte de Nieuwerkerke, Auguste Romieu, Frédéric de Mercey, and even the emperor himself took active roles in producing an artistic consensus integral to the ideological aspirations of the Second Empire. No artist then working could have avoided the impact of their stewardship. 3 It should not seem surprising that the Second Empire preferred realism. Critics and artists had already begun to regard the alternatives, romanticism and classicism, as old-fashioned. While they persisted under various eclectic guises, their respective leaders, Delacroix and Ingres, were no longer the favorites of the dominant class.4 At the same time, these two painters were tainted by their identification with the Legitimist and Orléanist parties now antagonistic to the new government. Although both were given pride of place at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 with their own retrospective exhibitions, this honor had more to do with their historical role and international reputations than with their appeal to contemporary taste. If Louis-Napoléon’s party could not tolerate for long the early radicalism of Courbet and Millet, the Bonapartists at least respected their talents and encouraged them under certain conditions. The positivist, scientific, and industrialist proclivities of the regime further disposed it to a sympathetic view of innovative realist forms, including photography, the genre-like pictures of the Neo-Greeks, Ernest Meissonier’s paintings, and the animal scenes of Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon.5 Above all, since the emperor’s professed aim was to communicate with a broad constituency, he needed a direct form of visual communication. Salon pictures of his civil and military exploits were frequently lithographed and engraved for distribution in the provinces, and government placards incorporated illustrations done in the official realist style.6 Certainly, this style was not formulated in a “smoke-filled room,” nor did it spring forth fully fashioned from the head of Napoléon III. Uppermost in the government’s agenda was the purging of the fearful 1848 Republic and the mania for neutralizing the forces behind it (figs. 8.1–2). The administration began to define its cultural program, with typical pragmatism, by its practice. Already by the mid-1850s the administration had developed a fairly coherent art policy, which it invoked for overtly propagandistic themes, such as the Crimean War, and major civil events, such as the birth of the prince imperial and the emperor’s visits to the flood victims of 1856. Being clearer at first about what it did not want than about what it wanted, the regime expressed this policy in essentially negative terms, but by 1863 it could declare its intentions programmatically. An intensive campaign to create this realist style was launched during the period between the coup d’état and the Exposition Universelle of 1855, to demonstrate a cultural equivalent to the industrial and agricultural progress of the regime.7 As soon as the Great Exhibition of London ended in

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8.1  Taking Down the House of the National Assembly, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 3 January 1852. 8.2  Removal of the Inscription “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” wood engraving from Illustrated London News 17 January 1852.

1851, the government of Louis-Napoléon projected one on a similar scale and planned to add to it a vast display of works of art, a category absent from its predecessor.8 France’s industrial and manufacturing success at the Crystal Palace already was seen as a test of strength against the manufacturing prowess of Great Britain.9 For the 1855 exposition, which opened on May 15 at the new Palais des Champs-Elysées, the organizers nearly doubled the number of firms exhibiting. The French government, however, was not content with only taking a leadership role in the global economy with its luxury goods and decorative arts but intended to display the full range of its cultural supremacy as well. All the organizers of the 1855 World’s Fair proclaimed this innovation in the international exposition and thus attested to the government’s desire to see itself glorified through the fine arts as much as through its industrial products.10 It was clear that Napoléon III hoped to demonstrate in an international arena that he had not only resolved the economic and social crisis attributed to the 1848 revolution but that he had unleashed the creative energies of the entire nation. Haussmannizing Paris

A secondary interest further related the two categories, as defined by Mercey: “The exposure of our chefs d’ateliers, decorators, and industrial artists to the outstanding art productions of each people should incite their imagination, enlighten their taste, stimulate their intelligent activity, and impress their products with that character of originality and seal of nobility and high distinction which doubles their value and glorifies a nation.”11 Mercey had in mind the immense public works projects of demolition and 8.3  Demolitions for the Rue de Rennes, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 8 February 1868.



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8.4  Charles de Marville, Rue de Gindre (partie de la rue Madame), albumen, ca. 1865. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

reconstruction then underway that would eventually transform the space and visuality of Paris (fig. 8.3). Under the direction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, appointed prefect of the Seine on 24 June 1853, the government embarked on a massive program of public works ostensibly to stimulate the French economy— at once providing immediate jobs for thousands of unemployed in town and country—and to improve municipal sanitation and water distribution and create a transportation and market infrastructure capable of sustained growth. The formation of a brand-new network of broad avenues and streets and radiating hubs aimed at facilitating the flow and exchange of goods through the civic center and from one end to the other conformable with the new market forces—a scheme that emerged in the early summer of 1853 when Napoléon III handed Haussmann his legendary plan for modern Paris.12 Haussmann’s urban renewal, like every other policy of the Second Empire, was dictated in large part by the trauma of the revolutions of 1848. All the principal actors in the redevelopment of Paris, from the emperor on down, lived in terror of a recurrence of social disorder fomented by “Reds”—socialists and radical bourgeois republicans. The concentration of the insurgent working classes in the central and eastern districts of Paris facilitated the construction of the barricade system that exploited the narrow, winding, densely crowded streets of Old Paris (fig. 8.4). Haussmann’s memoirs attest to his bitter loathing of the 1848 revolution and the Second Republic—“this so-called regime of liberty”—and all workers and bourgeois prone to “rouge” sympathies. In his Mémoires, he boasted of the effects of the completion of the north-south axial boulevard de Sébastopol (inaugurated with great fanfare in April 1858) on the traditional zone of barricades in the quartier of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers: It meant the gutting of Old Paris, the quartier of uprisings, barricades, by a broad central thoroughfare, piercing piece by piece this almost impossible maze, joined by transverse streets, whose continuation had to complete the work thus begun. The subsequent completion of the rue de Turbigo made the rue Transnonain disappear from the map of Paris!13

This reference to the elimination of a street made infamous by Daumier and long since

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associated with insurrection and brutal repression underscores the disguised politicization of Parisian space. The secretary-general of the prefect, Charles Merruau, discussing the opening of the new rue Réamur, made an almost identical declaration, adding that hacking through this area would “foil the old habits of the entrepreneurs of popular agitation.”14 Although Haussmann denied that the practice of making breaches in working-class quarters was his main priority, it is noteworthy that he did nothing to prevent the spread of new slums in the outer eastern ring of the city and even behind the new structures in the center. He considered himself the urbanistedémolisseur, the demolition expert who blasted his way through the heart of the old medieval neighborhoods to rout out the last remaining strongholds of the Reds. His violent percements (literally “piercings”) through the old centers of revolutionary activity constituted a form of revenge on the enemies of law and order. At the same time, the government further justified its urban renewal with another powerful counterrevolutionary argument: the creation of long and broad corridors would permit rapid deployment of the troops and artillery in the case of future insurrection. All the altruistic goals repeated ad infinitum—about clearing slums, penetrating the congested quarters for more ventilation and light, improving the water supply, and ridding the city of its perennial stench by creating proper drainage through a new network of sewers—overlap with the aim of isolating “undesirable” from “desirable” neighborhoods. For Haussmann urban hygiene included cleansing the dangerous quarters of human pests, and though the cholera epidemic of 1849 provided an added incentive to purify the city of its contaminants, it hardly went unnoticed that the disease mainly struck in the poorer districts.15 His personal repugnance for squalor and disorder, his mania for system and uniformity converged with the imperial mandate to restore “the tranquility of Paris.”16 Merruau, asserting that Louis-Napoléon’s coup of 1851 enjoyed a more favorable outcome than the revolution of 1848, happily seconded Haussmann: No longer did bands of insurgents roam the streets but squads of masons, carpenters, and artisans of every type ran to their projects; if paving stones were pulled up it was not to build barricades but to install water and gas lines beneath the street; houses were no longer threatened by cannon or fire but by the rich indemnity of expropriation. . . .17

The new Paris envisioned by Haussmann would serve as a diversionary spectacle focused visually and functionally on monumental structures and sculptures that served as termini for the broad axial thoroughfares. The spectacle of a rebuilt Paris was meant to be beheld by spectators who would be duly awed and enchanted on the outside, and not troubled by agitators boring from within. The bourgeoisie traded off democratic institutions for safety and security; the broad open vistas and regimented structures restored their confidence by providing the illusion of panoptical control

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over potential mutineers. Marx, exonerating the Communards from torching buildings in their retreat from the Versaillais, claimed that it was “less the vandalism of Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!”18 Haussmann’s architects and decorators teamed up to deliver the goods: Charles Garnier’s Opéra at the end of the avenue de l’Opéra dazzled by its opulence; the domed church of Saint-Augustin occupied the conspicuous site at the crossing of the boulevard Malesherbes and avenue de Friedland; and the northern façade of the new Tribunal de Commerce on the Cité was aligned with the boulevard de Sébastopol (figs. 8.5–6). Not only was an immense quantity of new buildings and housing erected, but the taste for luxurious ornament and decoration marked their

8.5  Demolitions for the Avenue de l’Opéra, photograph, ca. 1858– 1860. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris. 8.6  Perspective from the Avenue de l’ Opéra, photograph, ca. late 1860s.



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exteriors and interiors, especially in the more affluent sectors of the city.19 Public places like cafés, theaters, and concert halls jammed their interiors with paintings and gilt, and artists and decorators suddenly were in demand as never before. The government’s ambition to shape Paris into the epitome of nineteenth-century urban civilization required the artists’ cooperation to produce examples suitable to both its domestic and global reach. The Second Empire’s commercial rivalry with Great Britain led to an increased awareness of the relationship between the fine arts and the industrial arts. It was not sufficient to produce in large quantities, manufacturers and artisans had to produce good designs to compete in the global market. The government respected the arguments of those who claimed that the work of the nation’s fine artists served as a role model in a sort of trickle-down cultural formulation. To this end the titular head of the Second Empire’s art machine, Comte Nieuwerkerke, tightened Salon regulations and counseled juries to toughen entry standards.20 Nieuwerkerke was also appointed president of the jury for admissions, and in addition to the usual number of loyal artists and museum officials chosen by the administration, key members of the imperial commission organizing the exhibition—including Prince Jérôme Napoléon, Achille Fould, the comte de Morny, and Baroche—served on this jury. All were powerful members of the emperor’s court and instrumental in the attempt at cultural hegemony. That they held some clear idea about what they wanted is demonstrated in the case of young Jules Breton when he brought his Gleaners and two other pictures to the barracks provisionally constructed to receive incoming entries for the World’s Fair. Alfred Arago, inspector-general of Beaux-Arts and member of the awards committee, spotted them and singled them out for praise: “You will have success, much success!” Later, Breton’s guardian friend at the Louvre told him that the jury had been completely won over by his Gleaners.21 Before analyzing the specifically propagandist use of the visual arts, however, I would like to review in general the Second Empire’s exploitation of the media. At the outset of his career, Louis-Napoléon had to seek his allies among opponents of the Orléanist monarchy and outside the domain of conventional party politics. He had to appeal to the masses.22 Even after his landslide victory in December 1848, and the plebiscite that acclaimed his coup d’état in 1851, he still did not consider his task complete. It was not enough to have the peasantry’s support: he wanted to attach himself to the upper classes while yet satisfying “the interests of the most numerous classes.” He actually set out to forge a new ruling class from a broad constituency and to indoctrinate a younger generation to replace those who had been “perverted by the revolution of 1848.”23 Despite his firm hold on France through his army and police, the fear of a republican insurrection and the anxieties of his inexperienced cabinet created a climate of insecurity, which in retrospect appears at odds with the actual state of affairs. His own fears of illegitimacy—both personal

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and political—contributed to this insecurity. Obsessed with dynastic succession, the Second Empire aimed much of its cultural propaganda toward identification with the Holy Roman Empire. The need to establish an aura of legitimacy predisposed Louis-Napoléon and his staff to seek control over as many avenues of intellectual and cultural life as possible. The role assigned to propaganda by the regime was fundamental, and the emperor proved to be an able manipulator of public opinion. He and his administrators regulated the press by direct and indirect pressures until almost the very end of the regime. A directive for the elections of 5 April 1869 shows the degree of governmental influence with respect to the so-called independent paper Le Petit Journal, aimed primarily at the working classes and peasantry. The directive noted that while the paper was nonpolitical it had a distribution of 250,000 copies. Millaud, its director, in general agreement with our press arrangements, has begun to publish a certain number of informal portraits of the ministers, principal members of the majority. . . . These portraits, very skillfully done, skirt the political question without directly touching upon it. This journal is also preparing the publication of a military novel about the First Empire, conceived in order to counterbalance the political novels of the opposition directed against the army. This novel . . . originates from the Cabinet of the Emperor.

The lithographs of individual government candidates were to be distributed at the cheapest cost by an organized cadre of image peddlers. Finally, “none of the methods of popular propaganda . . . will be neglected. . . .” While this was written near the end of the regime, the report from the prefect of the police to the future emperor in October 1852 essentially states the same thing and in a more urgent tone.24 Journalists were hired, papers secretly subsidized, brochures published, speeches written—all to influence public opinion and measure public reaction to government policy. The government accomplished this with the “carrot and stick” approach: it used repression and suppression, cajolery, and bribery—always proceeding pragmatically rather than emotionally or vindictively. While it made effective use of political cartoons for posters in election campaigns, the government suppressed opposition cartoonists like Daumier and forced them to shift from commentary on current political events to social satire. Not coincidentally, Daumier turned increasingly to painting after 1852. But not before he produced one of his most brilliant character profiles, the memorable parody of the then prince-president known as Ratapoil. Produced both as a gnarly statuette and a caricatured takeoff in a series of lithographs starting from 1850, Ratapoil (literally “rat’s hair”) acts out the role of agent provocateur for the Society of Tenth December—LouisNapoléon’s dedicated followers organized to discredit his critics and to

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8.7  Honoré Daumier, Ratapoil, bronze, ca. 1850–1851. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 8.8  Honoré Daumier, “Fair Lady, Will You Accept My Arm?” lithograph, 1851. 8.9  Honoré Daumier, New Toy Launched by Ratapoil, lithograph, 1851.

prepare the people for his impending coup (fig. 8.7). It is the bony Ratapoil who cheers the president on his whistle-stop forays into the countryside, whispers sly suggestions to farmers, turns political meetings of opposition leaders into free-for-alls, and propagandizes against republican ideals (figs. 8.8–9). Ratapoil, however—contrary to what many historians have asserted—is no freely translated satire but derives from the princepresident’s actual contemporary persona, and was thus an image Daumier shared with other contemporary graphic artists (figs. 8.10–11). One contemporary illustration shows a Bonapartist in an identical guise pointing to the statue atop the Vendôme Column while attempting to convince his audience that Louis-Napoléon is the rightful heir of his uncle (fig. 8.12). It is to Daumier’s credit that he managed to seize Louis-Napoléon’s salient features—broad moustache (if not yet a goatee), skewed top hat, cane, and lumpy frock coat—while simultaneously converting his persona into a terrifying Robert-Macaire-like swindler and sinister agent of empire.25 In addition to his hired ruffians, Louis-Napoléon especially depended on the press to convert the influential, the articulate, the propertied, and the intellectual communities through brochures and articles in daily and weekly political and literary journals.26 The journals were indispensable for defining the consensus he desired. The regime reorganized the Moniteur universel, the official organ, and by reducing its subscription rate substantially increased its circulation and made it a rival of several popular journals. Naturally, the Moniteur’s official position limited it as a propaganda weapon, but it was well suited to cultivating the intellectual elite,

8.10  Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte 8.11  Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte 8.12  Popular caricature of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte



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so the new editors enlarged its literature and criticism sections and employed outstanding writers like Gautier, Champfleury, Feuillet, Houssaye, and Sainte-Beuve. Through one means or another the government gained control of Le Pays, Le Constitutionnel, and La Patrie, which could shape public opinion more directly.27 Although differing in form and content, they often shared the same pro-Bonapartist personnel. But Napoléon III was not content with a devoted press; he wanted to create a diversity of opinion within a consensus of approval. His remarkable formula provided for an opposition press, where differences in opinion were neither too strident nor too radical. During the period 1850–1851, when the pro-Bonapartist Constitutionnel was one of the three largest papers in circulation, the other two, the so-called opposition papers Le Siècle and La Presse, created the illusion of a democratic press. The comte de Morny (the emperor’s half brother and indefatigable champion of the Bonapartist cause) advised several of his friends among the key shareholders of Le Siècle about the advantages of government cooperation. Gradually, the tone of Le Siècle became moderate and constitutional, as it avoided all direct attacks on the government. It expressed safe, liberal positions, such as praise for the 1789 revolution, rejection of aristocratic pretensions, demands for providing for the needy poor, and (after 1859) anticlericalism. In the end, the government looked upon the paper as its own “republican” voice.28 Like the persuasive Morny, who constantly attracted talent to the Bonapartist party, Prince Napoléon actively sought liberal cooperation for the government’s projects. He was close to republicans and leftists like Leroux, Reynaud, Lammenais, and even Proudhon, who later felt the need to defend his periodic visits to the prince’s residence at the Palais Royal. As deputy from Corsica, Prince Napoléon asked for clemency for the workers arrested after the June Days, and later he even criticized the coup d’état. Nevertheless, he became quickly reconciled to the empire and held a number of key administrative offices, including minister of Algeria and the colonies, member of the Council of State, and president of the Imperial Commission for the Exposition of 1855. The emperor used him as his liaison with the opposition, and through Prince Napoléon’s network and friendships many writers of the Left were snared into writing pamphlets for the government.29 It is probably hard for us today to appreciate the importance of the pamphlet in indoctrination, but in an age when the main forum of communication was the printed word, it was a favorite weapon in the propaganda arsenal. Pamphleteers, usually recruited from the journalists, formed a major part of the government’s “kept band”30 of writers. Their activities often overlapped with the arts, as in the case of Romieu, the director of Beaux-Arts following the coup d’état, and Edmond About, a popular art critic and author. The son of a general under the First Empire, Romieu devoted his journalistic and literary abilities to attacking the republicans of 1848 and ingratiated himself with Louis-Napoléon. In 1850 he wrote L’Ere

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des Césars, and the following year he published the notorious Spectre rouge de 1852, both of which prepared the public psychologically for the coup état. The government subsidized both brochures and awarded him the directorship in 1852. About was a fervent Bonapartist attached to the intellectual circles around Achille Fould, Princess Mathilde, and Prince Jérôme Napoléon. He was one of the select French delegation participating in the ceremony for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Through contact with these influential friends, he meddled with politics from 1857 to 1865 and wrote several pamphlets and articles for the Opinion nationale in support of the government’s policies. One of the most important of these was The Roman Question, first serialized in the Moniteur and then commissioned as a pamphlet by the emperor himself. Napoléon III, Prince Napoléon, and Morny read the proofs, while Fould and Morny wrote key sections.31 Napoléon III’s strategic ploys derived from his recognition of the media’s success in molding biases, opinions, and stereotypes. Minister of the Interior Persigny expressed the official attitude in 1852: “The evil doctrines spread through the country by anarchic works, and the moral disorder and crimes which are the consequences, call for an energetic intervention on the part of the administration in favor of good social principles. This intervention can best be accomplished by means of publications and pamphlets encouraged and, if need be, financed by the administration.”32 The same year he circulated a letter to the prefects in connection with local elections, emphasizing the importance of undermining the old political foundations and parties and of creating a new party.33 The cultural analogy to the new party was a fresh style—differing from the traditional forms identified with previous regimes—or at least some revitalization of the older styles, in line with the government’s bolder approach to foreign and domestic affairs. The extortionate plans of the government were not limited to control of the press but extended to the whole of literary production. This astonishing effort was masterminded by no less a personality than Sainte-Beuve. Like Mérimée, he welcomed the coup d’état and energetically supported the Second Empire. While Hugo, his close friend from the romantic movement, went into exile, Sainte-Beuve trafficked with his enemies. The June insurrection unnerved him, and he believed that Louis-Napoléon was the only one who could tame the “ferocious beast.” In 1852 he accepted the Légion d’Honneur, which he had twice refused under Louis-Philippe. After the coup he appealed to constitutional monarchists not to sulk but to join the emperor, and he transferred his own popular Lundi articles to Le Moniteur. Among the papers discovered at the Tuileries after the debacle was an astonishing memorandum dated 31 March 1856, which Sainte-Beuve submitted to Mocquard, the emperor’s confidential secretary.34 The memorandum was certainly written in response to a request for a systematic strategy from an administration in the process of cultivating a stable of writers

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through paternalistic support. Sainte-Beuve advised the emperor to ignore well-known professors and academicians but to aim at the rank and file— what he termed the presse littéraire—and treat them as if they were manual workers. He suggested three ways of winning over the general mass of authors: (1) provide relief for indigent writers and raise their self-esteem and gain their loyalty by addressing them in the name of the emperor; (2) establish an organization to award an annual prize for appropriate subjects designated by an imperial commission; (3) provide lodgings at the Louvre for representatives of the new literature and maintain direct links with them through the emperor’s office or minister of state. Sainte-Beuve warned against communicating through the Ministry of Public Instruction, which was inevitably wedded to traditional methods. He anticipated administrative concern about democratizing the writers’ corps and encouraging the rise of a literary “proletariat,” but he emphasized the government’s power and secret intelligence “to elevate and organize it.”35 Under previous regimes, writers were motivated by simple greed, and the need to be heard and singled out from the crowd encouraged production of material antagonistic to the public authority. As a result, administrative officials developed the attitude that it was impossible to regulate this type of production. Yet nothing was easier, according to Sainte-Beuve, than to influence it decisively through government resources. Sainte-Beuve stressed the advantages of an imperial prize for both poetry and prose, awarded for “national subjects, actual, neither too curious nor too erudite, but conforming to the life and instincts of modern society.”36 Sainte-Beuve suggested that the organization to award these prizes be called the Académie du Suffrage Universel, a term intended to confute opponents. His aim, consistent with Napoleonic thought, was “to coordinate . . . literature with the entire institutional ensemble of the Empire, and to insure that it was not left to its own resources or to chance.” This encouragement would stimulate a Second Empire style capable of serving warning to entrenched academic bodies. Their institutional constraints and rigidities disposed them to routine and casual public involvement; they would age quickly in the face of progress promoted from above and would eventually be forced to toe the line. This remarkable document attests to the grandiose schemes of the Second Empire to establish a national style in the arts and letters. Furthermore, the methods for accomplishing this in literature are consistent with those used to subjugate the press. Sainte-Beuve’s memorandum points to a consensus based on national themes and grounded in reality, and rejects both the monarchical-minded academies and avant-garde fantasies. Above all, he wanted a realist style for the government and planned to achieve it by promoting an alternative to already existing tendencies, absorbing rival organizations, and neutralizing the potential opposition.37 The pattern of cultural hegemony that evolved at this time also manifested itself in the realm of popular culture. For example, the adminis

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tration deemed it necessary to suppress the public singing of what were seen as subversive songs, such as the Marseillaise and Ça ira. At the same time, it distributed its own tunes like Le Peuple français à Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Le Neveu de son oncle (“Qu’il parle haut à tous les rouges! / D’un mot, qu’il fass’ fermer leurs bouges!”). Songs about the first Napoléon were now revived, including the popular Le Petit caporal and old favorites by Béranger.38 The government also censored drama. Thus the ministry blocked an opera about the Fronde scheduled for the Académie de Musique in December 1852 because of its expressions of revolt. It regarded as potentially dangerous any theme that was based on an uprising and used the phrase “aux armes!” Another play at the Opéra-Comique, Sardou’s Capitaine Henriot, was allowed to proceed after initial reservations had been expressed. Permission had to be granted at the topmost layer of the bureaucracy, which decided that the hero, Henri IV, was less important symbolically for having founded the Bourbon dynasty than for recalling the glorious “heritage of the throne” now occupied by the emperor. 39 A final example was a presentation of twenty-five tableaux summing up the history of France at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin. Here the administration offered its approval on the condition that the director agreed to major revisions. Its stable of writers created a new ending, which the director, over the head of the original author, accepted. The government censors demanded either that the play terminate before the revolution or that the final tableaux be devoted to Napoléon I. The official team systematically eliminated tableaux it found objectionable and then supplied the finale showing Napoléon I Distributing the Eagles on the Champs-de-Mars. The commission concluded that the work had been drastically altered in accordance with imperial “conventions,” and congratulated the director for his foresight in granting the presentation “a larger and broader interpretation, and a more French character.”40 The Government Influence in the Beaux-Arts

No one would deny the Second Empire’s assertion of command in the realm of the visual arts.41 But the main proposition here concerns the government’s stylistic preference, and a review of the extent and character of this control should help in clarifying that preference. The administration wanted to indoctrinate a new generation of artists; already, in 1853, the minister of public instruction founded a commission to adopt standards for teaching drawing in the lycées. The famous report, published in the Moniteur early in 1854, was written by Félix Ravaisson, a popular philosopher at the Court of the Second Empire. Enjoying the collaboration of Delacroix and Meissonier, Ravaisson systematically reviewed all the currently employed pedagogic methods and then advised a straightforward empirical approach that could serve as the basis for both the fine and the applied arts. The earliest lessons would stress geometric solids, parts of the human head,

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and plants. The report recommended that photographs be used as much as possible for studying the human figure and the cast.42 The major institutional vehicle of communication in the arts remained the government-sponsored Salon exhibition, the means by which artistic output was screened and rewarded. It was intimately associated with the press, since it represented a major cultural event regularly reviewed in the newspapers. Often the reviews—which ran serially—were assembled into a pamphlet and sold on the open market. Most of the art critics were talented writers who belonged to that amorphous presse littéraire described by Sainte-Beuve. Those who held government jobs or otherwise enjoyed close connections with the regime—such as Houssaye, who wrote generously about the court in L’Artiste—included Gautier, About, Chesneau, and Saint-Victor.43 By making the Salon from 1850 to 1863 biennial (with the exception of 1853) the government reduced the opportunities of artists by one half. Although the administration allowed artists to elect the jury in 1850, following the coup d’état it began to appropriate this function for itself: in 1852 it appointed half of the jury members, and for the Exposition Universelle of 1855 it named the entire panel. Succeeding juries remained entirely official, with Nieuwerkerke, then director-general of museums, named in perpetuity as ex-officio president. Trying to enlist the support of the younger generation, the administration announced in 1853 that the Medal of Honor, valued at 4,000 francs, would be designated specifically for the encouragement of young talent and exclusive of academicians and members of the Légion d’Honneur.44 In 1852 Nieuwerkerke tightened up the regulations by limiting each artist to three admitted works, an innovation he justified at the awards ceremony in July: “The exhibitions held as they are, gratuitously in one of the palaces of the State . . . confer in themselves a fundamental reward upon those admitted to them.” Artists “should therefore be received there by one of their most complete works and not by sketches or ébauches unworthy of display in a great competition opened by the State.” The rule governing exemptions was now modified as well; those who previously won a medal (and heretofore exempt from jury scrutiny) could still be rejected if their work proved unacceptable (almost certainly written with Courbet in mind). The government’s direct intervention in the creative process aimed at encouraging its brand of high quality for the Exposition Universelle of 1855. In 1855 the emperor founded a triennial prize of 20,000 francs (made biennial in 1859) to be awarded “to the work best capable of honoring or serving the State.”45 Speeches at the awards ceremonies following the coup d’état further reveal the intentions of the administration. Nieuwerkerke told his audience on 20 July 1852 that the government had assumed responsibility for rewarding artists “in the name of the country,” and for “discouraging false vocations and false talents who obstruct all the avenues open to art.” Thus

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the opportunity to enter the artistic profession would henceforth be decided by Nieuwerkerke, Baroche, Persigny, Maupas, Morny, Fould, and Prince Napoléon—none of whom, with the possible exception of Nieuwerkerke—could be considered qualified by training and accomplishments to do so.46 Persigny took the rostrum after Nieuwerkerke and apologized for the prince-president’s absence: Louis-Napoléon had attended an industrial exhibition at Strasbourg and was unavoidably detained. Both events, however, attested to the chief ’s desire to encourage all activities contributing to the glory and grandeur of the country. As Persigny declared: “If a government, which owes its origin and even its principle to the poetic sentiments of the masses, disdains the cult of the arts for the cult of material things, it will depreciate the very conditions of its existence and fail to recognize the genius of its country.” Persigny then affirmed Louis-Napoléon’s faith in the union of art and industry and claimed that art had nothing to fear from the growing commercial and industrial expansion of modern civilization. Above all, the power of the government rested on “popular faith” and was independent of “party intrigues” and “factions.” When Nieuwerkerke reclaimed the floor, he addressed himself to the question of the jury and affirmed Persigny’s remarks. He justified the growing dependence on government appointees for jury duty as a necessity to mediate school rivalries and factions and to overcome the complacencies of confraternity whose entrenched routine vitiated progressive tendencies. Here is the language and approach of Sainte-Beuve’s memorandum now transposed to the realm of the fine arts.47 The following year Nieuwerkerke announced profound improvement in the quality of work submitted to the Salon and advised the jury to be even more severe than before. Napoléon III’s decree of 22 June 1853, establishing the Exposition Universelle of 1855, specifically declared that “perfections in industry are intimately tied to those in the fine arts,” and it was clear that the severe regulations were designed to display the government’s taste before rival nations. This exhibition was placed under the sponsorship of Prince Napoléon, whose commission included Baroche, now president of the Conseil d’Etat; Jean Dollfus, textile magnate; Le Play, engineerin-chief of mines; Morny (who was everywhere at once and served on all major juries); Emile Péreire, president of the Conseil d’Administration du Chemin de Fer du Midi; Regnault, administrator of the Imperial Manufactures at Sèvres; Schneider, head of the Le Creusot ironworks; Seillière, banker; Delacroix; and Ingres—fervent Bonapartists all, whose achievements were the backdrop for the technical and artistic display of France at the World’s Fair.48 At the awards ceremony on 27 July 1853, Achille Fould, minister of state, referring to preparations for the coming Haussmannization, compared the Age of the Second Empire with previous epochs of superior cultural renovation and innovation: the century of Pericles, the century

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of Léon X, the centuries of Augustus and of Louis XIV. Although the honor of having a sovereign’s name attached to an epoch is rare, Fould dared to imagine what the present epoch would be called in the distant future. He praised the overall improvement in the exhibition, and especially commended the artists for their “tangible progress in the technical side of art, in material imitation.” Although he expressed regret that the younger generation did not pursue “le beau idéal” with the same ardor that it brought “to the study of reality,” he observed that the administration applauded the results and wanted to do justice to the remarkable productions. Nevertheless, he hoped to see, following the example of the Old Masters, conciliation of the ideal and reality and the union of the Beautiful “with the intelligent study of forms and scenes which the spectacle of nature presents to the eyes.” (Fould most certainly had in mind a realism tempered by the ideal, in opposition to the sordid and “ugly” examples of Courbet and Millet.) Next, Fould called attention to the government’s extensive patronage of the arts; the vast constructions and rebuilding projects about to transform Paris into a modern metropolis would require an immense army of specialists to carry out the ornamentation and decoration. The government would look to the chiefs of the French school for guidance, but, in addition, “more than one honorable place is reserved for the modest talent who, under the leadership of a sure guide, awaits the proper moment to jump to the first rank.” Fould ended by reminding his audience of the coming World’s Fair and the need to surpass foreign rivals.49 The breakdown of the prizes for that year indicated a great success for the realists and the Barbizon school: of the three Medals of the First Class, one went to Charles-François Daubigny, landscapist; of the six of the Second Class, four were for genre painters, including Gustave Brion and Millet; of the twelve winners in the Third Class category, all but two were genre and landscape painters, including Hamon, Verlat, and a female still-life artist, Octavie Paigné. The distribution of awards in 1855 took place amid dazzling pomp; nearly forty thousand people assembled in the nave of the Palais de l’Industrie, which was brilliantly adapted by Le Play for the ceremony. Prince Napoléon opened the festivities by linking the spectacle at home with the stunning victories of the French abroad in the Crimea. Commenting on the generous number of awards, he announced that the emperor had proved again that in contemporary France “the only true nobility are the soldiers and workers who distinguish themselves.” The prince emphasized the benefits of industrial expansion and the promotion of culture in emancipating society from savagery and drudgery. The World’s Fair embodied the emperor’s most cherished dreams in demonstrating this progress, displaying before all the nations French perfection in the modern methods and instruments of labor. Agriculture especially received the emperor’s generous solicitude, and stood out for its mechanical advances and

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potential to emancipate the field worker and the farmer from the “brutal part” of rural labor. The emperor, flushed with the success of his domestic projects and foreign policy, spoke next. He declared his pacific intentions, emphasizing that French factories, like French art, arts of war and arts of peace, were forged alike for the benefit of all the world. He capped the ceremonies by congratulating Le Play, the commissioner-general who stepped in at a late date to salvage the initially poorly managed exhibition, and whose participation in the final arrangements underlined the regime’s intentions to organize a gigantic spectacle.50 The Exposition Universelle of 1855 constituted a symbolic turning point in the history of Western nations, with Napoléon III using it as a diverting spectacle behind which to carry out a systematic effort at domestic and foreign domination. The bestowing of awards that year was complicated by the presence of a large body of foreign artists who had to be respected, as well as by the Grand Old Men like Ingres and Delacroix, who carried the banner of tradition for the nation and whose international reputations secured for the Fine Arts section of the Universal Exposition a distinguished cachet. But Meissonier won one of the Grand Medals of Honor; Rosa Bonheur, Troyon, Corot, and Français won Medals of the First Class; Isidore Pils, Verlat, and Alfred Stevens were among the Second Class winners; and in the Third Class were Alexandre Antigna, Bonhommé, Breton, Karl Bodmer, Daubigny, Luminais, Octave Tassaert, and Félix Ziem. Realists of other countries—including the English Millais, the American William Morris Hunt, and the Norwegian Tidemand—also did quite well. Following the 1855 Exposition Universelle there was a loosening of Salon regulations; the limit on admissions was lifted and the government fell back on a more conservative line. At the awards ceremony in 1857 the main speaker was Fould, who applauded the “rising talents.” Although expressing reservations about the younger generation pandering to “public taste,” he applauded the fact that the preferred themes of art emanated from the contemporary world, crowned by the image of the emperor.51 As in his previous speech, Fould fully accepted the realist approach but wanted it tempered or softened, in line with administrative ideals.52 By the 1860s, the administration had a clear view of what it needed, and began to prepare for the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Count Walewski had replaced Fould as minister of state, Fould’s fall signaling a political turn as well.53 In 1861 Walewski proclaimed that the government embodied the principle of “paternal authority,” forever reconciling and protecting “tradition and invention, order and progress, discipline and originality.” He commented that the crowds at the exhibition halted before new works—works that were not always irreproachable, mind you, but that revealed the spirit of innovation. This tendency was especially marked in the various landscape attempts: everywhere there was “perfection in all the genres of landscape; the young recruits march in step with seasoned veterans; women rival men

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in study; and those who occupied the steps of the throne do not disdain descending into the muddy arena; so many efforts crowned with success and so many skilled practitioners—that I have felt it necessary to increase the number of medals.”54 Here we find not only a taste for Barbizon landscape and its derivatives, but also the intimation of a developing consensus. Walewski electrified the audience when he mentioned the surprise inspection of the Salon Exhibition by the emperor and empress before it opened to the public. They had spent many hours examining works and complimenting and inquiring about those artists whom they singled out as budding geniuses. Clearly no ruler better understood or protected the arts; he not only purchased objects through official channels but also studied them at close hand and chose for himself. Once again, the conferring of awards proved favorable for all types of realists. Nieuwerkerke awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur to Jules Breton and Alexandre Antigna, while winners in the genre and landscape categories outnumbered history painters four to three. Pils earned the Medal of Honor; Breton won a rappel of the First Class Medal, while rappels of the Second Class Medal were awarded to Ange-Tissier, Brion, Courbet, Verlat, and FélixHippolyte Lanoue. The year 1863 was a landmark in the definitive formulation of the government’s visual regime and ideology: the renewal of the restriction on admissions, the inauguration of the Salon des Refusés, the reforms of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the journalistic accounts all pointed to a coherent plan. Much of the regime’s thinking on the question had been galvanized by the London exhibition of 1862, which demonstrated that the English had made immense progress in industrial design and now threatened France’s lead in the luxury market with cheaper methods of production.55 At the awards ceremony that year, Vaillant, an old soldier now occupying the post of Ministre de la Maison de l’Empereur et des BeauxArts, first gave the usual polite nod to the public taste and then endorsed enthusiastically the concept of originality. He advised all the artists who were willing to take risks for the sake of original ideas that they would find a receptive audience, because in the final analysis, “invention is one of the most precious qualities of art.”56 Vaillant also announced that the Salon would again be annual—a concession made to appease those who complained of the restriction on admissions, but now also a means to afford more frequent opportunities for fresh experiments. Nieuwerkerke took the floor to clarify Vaillant’s remarks. He observed that the administration of the Beaux-Arts was attached to the Maison de l’Empereur, bringing it directly under the aegis of Napoléon III. He boasted that one result of their new orientation was the Salon des Refusés, “an essentially liberal measure” carried out in favor of the wider community of artists and directly owing to the emperor’s intervention. The surintendant declared that he was following the emperor’s lead in addressing himself to everyone exhibiting, those who were listed in the official catalogue and

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those displayed in the rooms set aside for the refusés. Next taking up the question of current trends, he began with the lament that the national art was moving away from “la grande peinture,” but quickly added that this was nothing to get alarmed about. If, for example, the preferences of a few pushed them irresistibly to the study of landscape, their success should not cause undue anxiety over the future of high art in France. “Each epoch . . . yields to a unique movement, to an extremely dynamic pressure on minds and on taste. What is important is that in all of the directions pursued talented people attain the height of their endeavor.” In short, realism was a fait accompli and contemporary artists should strive to achieve excellence within this general tendency. He declared himself open to original aptitudes and willing to grant the maximum liberty in the practice and direction of art, but in return artists had to work hard and flee the “à-peu-près” in all genres.57 Simultaneously with its attempt to demonstrate impartiality, the government stepped up pressure on the Academy.58 The Academy was made to order for administrative purposes since it was a national institution. But the Academy had usurped many of its prerogatives and behaved in an autonomous and despotic fashion. Its reluctance to fall in line completely led to a tug-of-war with the administration that was especially striking in the early 1860s. This attack against the Academy was spearheaded by Nieuwerkerke, himself a member of that institution.59 Hints of government pressure came through the architectural competitions for the Prix de Rome of 1860 and 1862, entitled respectively: “An Imperial Residence in the Town of Nice” and “A Palace for the Governor of Algeria, destined also for the Temporary Residence of the Sovereign”—both, incidentally, pointing to the expansionist and colonialist policies of the regime.60 The most dramatic episode in the conflict was the official decree of 13 November 1863 reforming the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.61 Shocked critics likened it to a “coup d’état” in the cultural domain, and its government partisans proclaimed it the start of a new French Renaissance. Essentially, the decree represented a reaction against the influence of the Academy and the classicism it preached, and its ideological pronouncements invoked the language of the independents. Like the realists, the authors of the decree (mainly Viollet-le-Duc and Nieuwerkerke) challenged the authority of the Academy before the tribunal of sincerity and originality. At the same time, the reforms emphasized the need to unite art and industry, and introduced ateliers and modern workshop techniques into the Ecole’s program. As Sainte-Beuve had recommended in regard to the literary establishment, the government moved in aggressively to revitalize a ready-made corporate body and make it more responsive to its ideological imperatives. The government now administered directly the pedagogical program both in Paris and in Rome through its unprecedented Conseil Supérieur d’Enseignement. It installed three of its favorite painters in the newly founded ateliers of the Ecole: Gérôme, Pils, and Cabanel.

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The immediate effect of the reforms was to destabilize momentarily the academic system and to displace the Academy from its position as arbiter of French art. The critic Thoré noted early in 1863 that there existed in painting two opposing currents that extended in new terms the old struggle between classics and romantics, or, more generally, “between conservatives and innovators, tradition and originality.”62 The administration clearly had thrown its weight on the side of innovation, a code word for realism in 1863. The reforms of 13 November exemplified the Second Empire’s manipulation of the press. It marshaled its journalists, pamphleteers, and prominent supporters to publicize its position and discredit the Academy’s defense. Writing for La Presse, Paul de Saint-Victor applauded the reforms and systematically denigrated the opposition.63 Another ardent champion of the decree was the young art critic and author Ernest Chesneau, whose brochure, published in 1864, is still a key document in the controversy that reached as high as the Corps Législatif in January of the same year.64 In the course of his arguments, Chesneau singled out two celebrated and vociferous opponents of the decree who he thought made strange bedfellows: the painter Ingres and the art critic Castagnary. The former was a disciple of David and guardian of the classical tradition, while the latter was a disciple of Courbet and supported the extreme realists. How ironic, Chesneau slyly commented, that they should find themselves on the same side of the fence on this issue. He derided both for their suspicions that romanticism had usurped the bureaucratic ideals and mocked Castagnary’s reference to Courbet as the “glory of the French school,” as well as his description of Return from the Conference (the anticlerical painting rejected from both the regular Salon and the Salon des Refusés) as “one of the immortal masterpieces by the artist.”65 By his seeming disdain for romanticism and his hostility to the partisans of extreme classicism and realism, Chesneau unequivocally articulated the ideology behind the reforms. On 1 July 1863—four months before the November decree—Chesneau published an article in the Revue des deux mondes entitled “Le Réalisme et l’esprit français dans l’art.”66 It contended that contemporary realism was no more than a return to the French medieval tradition, which had been diverted from its natural course by the impact of the Italian Renaissance. Chesneau emphasized the importance of the miniatures and the early manuscript illustrations as authentic documents of the life of the period. Realism had remained the key aim of French taste through the centuries, Chesneau argued, and the contemporary movement could very well free art from the stultifying control of what he designated as the “philosophic mentality.” This he defined as a celebration of “moral reality” over and against “material reality.” At the same time, however, he warned modern realists against going to extremes. Chesneau’s conception of realism was generous compared to the view of most older critics, who fully condemned the doctrine. Nevertheless,

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he did not recommend the radical approach of Courbet but a materialism tempered by idealism. He took note of Planche’s unrelieved critique of realism, and yet at the same time saw that the movement continued to attract new adherents and promised to absorb all the energies of the younger generation. Faced with this contradiction, Chesneau condemned as useless any attempt to attack realism in the name of “sane doctrines”—an outmoded cliché. Since the tide could not be turned, it was wiser to redirect the current by studying it at its source. He subtitled his article “Les Frères Le Nain,” and elsewhere referred to Champfleury’s recent publication on the brothers, entitled “Les Peintres du réel sous Louis XIII.” He paid homage to the patient research of Champfleury—one of the leaders of the realist movement67—but objected to his extravagant praise. His attempt to absolve the Le Nains of technical flaws set a poor example for the new school, which tended to disregard solid technique and reinforced the current decline in art instruction. Sound craftsmanship ultimately took precedence over the choice of theme. Chesneau agreed with Champfleury, however, that the Le Nains were significant because they sought “absolute sincerity,” and in this they foreshadowed Chardin and Géricault. His stress on the essential quality of sincerity anticipates one of the leitmotifs of the decree of 13 November. Chesneau elaborated on his idea of realism as historically essential in expressing the character of an epoch. The older artists furnished an authentic image of their times, but the present epoch would also be history one day: “Shall we therefore leave it to posterity to reveal ourselves, in the domain of art, our customs, costumes, our conventions, our sentiments and our ideas? What will our descendents make of our history if we do not trace our own development, and why should they do it if we are too ashamed to do it for ourselves?” And he lamented that David was unable to complete the Oath of the Tennis Court for the historical record; both he and his heir Géricault seized the initiative in painting in a style commensurate with the needs of modern society. Chesneau then called for the Second Empire’s type of realism: People of the nineteenth century, how many subjects are in us, around us; how many plays, how many facts that entreat, that imperiously demand the brush of the painter, the chisel of the sculptor! Yet painters and sculptors turn aside hesitatingly, trembling, as if they feared ridicule before the reproduction of the beauties in modern life. Those who are master of their craft, who are endowed with an aesthetic sentiment, are afraid to compromise their established position and reputation by making fresh attempts; the others, those who would take the risk or who are taking it, are unable to place at the service of a vulgarity of imagination without parallel more than a capricious talent, one that occasionally and by surprise rises a little above the mediocre—but one never fully in control and master of itself!68



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Chesneau’s plea to already established artists to experiment with realism and his attack on hard-core realists again testified to the consensus view of the regime and distinctly underscored the ideology of official realism. This article’s appearance in the conservative Revue des deux mondes is significant. The editors of this journal considered the revolution of 1848 a catastrophe and were very much relieved by the coup d’état.69 Their critics in the interim attacked Courbet mercilessly. Once the danger of social revolution became remote, however, the publication assumed a more liberal tone. Its early bias against realism was reinforced by its politics, and it generally identified realist tendencies with democratic aspiration. It began to make concessions to the realist movement in the mid-fifties and early sixties, now identifying the growth of realism with a rising middle class motivated by practical concerns. Planche, for example, believed that the division of property led to a lowering of the taste for the ideal, since the bourgeoisie possessed neither sufficient leisure nor tradition for its appreciation. In any case, both Champfleury and Buchon published in the Revue during the mid-1850s, and conservatives like Montégut admitted that, despite its vulgarity, realism was valid as a reflection of its epoch. The Second Empire’s firm grasp of the ideological potential of realism was implied already in 1856 by a rare document written by Frédéric de Mercey, then director of Beaux-Arts, to Achille Fould, minister of state: Not many years have gone by since the Emperor Napoléon III was called to govern France, first as President, then as Emperor, and this short period has been distinguished by many memorable deeds and glorious events. It is for art, as for history, to consecrate its memory in a striking manner. Indeed, the artist may, through the means at his disposal, give an air of reality to the fact which narrative cannot achieve, and historical painting alone may preserve the image of contemporary personages in a precise and certain manner, show them to us actively engaged, indicate the disposition of the locales, the exact style of their clothes, reproduce, in short, the physiognomy of the era whose events it traces.70

Except for the specific aim of this program—the apotheosizing of the emperor—this is the language of realism and compares closely to statements made by Duranty and Champfleury in roughly the same period.71 The allusion to “the exact style” of contemporary costume especially recalls the development of an idea first articulated by Baudelaire. It may be recalled that Courbet’s own manifesto stated that he wanted “to be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch”—language borrowed by Mercey for his proposal to Fould. Courbet’s later declaration that “historical art is by nature contemporary” also found confirmation in the official aesthetic.72 Mercey further proposed the creation of a museum to house the images commemorating “civil and military deeds.” One set would depict the outstanding domestic events of the last eight years of Louis-Napoléon’s

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reign, including the proclamation of the empire, Queen Victoria’s visit, the distribution of awards at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, the completion of the Louvre, the marriage of the emperor, and the baptism of the imperial prince. The other set would center on the great victories of the Crimean War and would be exhibited in a special gallery. Mercey evidently responded to a previous exchange with Fould, as he noted that the minister understood that “our epoch must not be neglected,” and that there already existed a body of pictures for the new museum, including AngeTissier’s Submission of Abd el Kader, as well as military commissions assigned to people like Yvon and Beaucé (who researched battle locations in Africa and in the Crimea). Mercey added that now that peace reigned, both art and industry could progress, and a new series of pictures might be commissioned. These images could include The Visit of the Grand Corps de l’Etat to Saint Cloud during the Night of 1 December 1852 by Cabanel, The Distribution of the Eagles by Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize, The Opening of the Exposition Universelle by Gérôme, The Visit of the Queen of England by Charles Jalabert, The Distribution of Awards at the Closing of the Exposition Universelle by Félix Jobbé-Duval, and land and sea battles by Pils, Yvon, Théodore Gudin, and Antoine Léon Morel-Fatio. What was unusual in this projection was the presence of so many younger academic disciples, some of whom numbered among the Neo-Greeks. General Observations on Second Empire History Painting

The generation of military painters emerging during this period manifested a preoccupation with historical accuracy. Although their ultimate task was to aggrandize the emperor, they often overcame this constraint through a close attention to the environment and to particular detail. They also followed Napoléon III’s lead in resisting a mythologizing character inconsistent with events, so that often he was shown in informal poses appropriate to the contemporary trend. In fact, his informality made it difficult for artists to deal with him in more idealizing media like coins and medallions (figs. 8.13–14). Chesneau described the military painters in the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in terms reminiscent of the contemporary criticism of the realists: “Today our battle painters are less artists—that is, beings endowed with passion and sensibility—than chroniclers, editors of military bulletins. They report the facts and nothing but the facts.”73 Another Bonapartist critic, Olivier Merson, devoted a major section of his review of the Salon of 1861 to subjects of contemporary history, commenting that modern dress and ideas were not antipathetic to art and that the “beau idéal” was a relative concept contingent on time and place.74 The most important category under this heading was military painting, and the work he most admired was Pils’s Battle of Alma (fig. 8.15). He quoted the description of the event in the Salon catalogue, which provided the exact date and time, the names of the individuals involved, and the type of

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opposite 8.13  Eugène-André Oudine, The Accession of Napoléon III to the Empire, medal, 1852. Musée du

Louvre, Paris. 8.14  Edouard Detaille, Napoléon III Crowned with Laurel and Smoking a Cigarette, pen drawing, 1860s.

Musée National du Château, Compiègne. 8.15  Isidore Pils, The Battle of Alma, Salon of 1861. Musée National du Château, Versailles. bottom right 8.16  Ernest Meissonier, The Emperor Napoléon III at the Battle of Solferino, Salon of 1864.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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maneuver executed. He complained, however, that the artist translated too literally the official bulletin, that it lacked “the blast of true combats, the bellicose energy.”75 A commonplace criticism of left-wing realism was its lack of discrimination in the selection of details and narrative features. Olivier Merson also uttered this complaint in connection with several of the military pictures at the 1861 exhibition.76 He preferred Yvon’s Solferino to all the rest in the category of Solferino pictures, which nevertheless portrayed the emperor on the summit of Mount Fenile, just ahead of his general staff, with “unpardonable vulgarity.”77 Despite Olivier Merson’s professed sympathy for realism, it was evident that he had not entirely outgrown the bombastic military scenes of Louis-Philippe’s Galerie des Batailles. The battles of the Second Empire were less a question of hand-to-hand heroics or adventurous warriors on horseback than of complicated logistical problems and long-range artillery. Indeed, the battle of Alma actually centered on a telegraph station. The French had no cavalry troops, and the conflict of the Crimea anticipated the technological character of modern warfare. Then too, the soldier of the Second Empire could no longer be visualized as either classic warrior or delirious conqueror; he was regarded, and even saw himself, as a pawn in a chess match who had been moved into position on orders from a remote headquarters. In his Salon of 1864 About singled out Meissonier’s Battle of Solferino as the most distinguished work, praising especially the artist’s concentration on the emperor’s general staff (fig. 8.16).78 The emperor himself, posted two steps in front of his general staff, studied the battle “like a

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cold-blooded player studies his chessboard.”79 Although occupying a central role, his position was not at all heroic: he was a safe distance from the battle, whose outcome was as yet unclear. Meissonier was actually present at the battle in northern Italy (he depicted himself in the picture), and his focus on the general staff to which he was attached was revealing of Second Empire realism both in its ideological and aesthetic structure.80 Besides battle painters, the emperor’s stable of artists included an emerging group of Orientalists who recorded his colonialist aspirations in North Africa, the Near East, and Southeast Asia. Unlike the July Monarchy phantasms of Delacroix, Ingres, and Vernet, these recent bouts with Orientalism were executed with photographic accuracy and reflected the growing influence of ethnographical studies and contemporary travel accounts. Mercey’s report mentioned Ange-Tissier’s overtly propagandistic Submission of Abd el Kader, a work also shown at the 1861 Salon (fig. 8.17). Ange-Tissier’s vast canvas depicts the moment at the Château d’Amboise when the emperor granted the Algerian chieftain his freedom. Napoléon III has entered the room of detention, where Abd el Kader is surrounded by his family and servants. The emir’s elderly mother advances and leans over to kiss the hand of his imperial benefactor, who is accompanied by the Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, Baroche, and the generals Goyon and Roguet. In the center of the composition are two Arab children who stare at the emperor “avec une surprise naïve,” while here and there other Arabs and blacks are scattered in the Gothic enclosure. Napoléon III stressed the civilizing influence of the empire on the Algerian peoples, and during his



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opposite 8.17  Ange-Tissier, The Submission of Abd el Kader, Salon of 1861. Musée National du Château, Versailles. bottom 8.18  Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Napoléon III Receiving Abd el Kader at Saint-Cloud, marble bas-relief,

1853. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes.



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regime the image of Abd el Kader underwent a profound transformation.81 As long as he resisted the French forces he was demonized as a ferocious militant leader, while during the Second Empire he came to be seen as a benign, almost saintly figure. This evolution in the French public perception corresponded to his political neutralization, which was the real subject of Ange-Tissier’s picture. The Arab entourage is represented submitting to a new crusade under the aegis of a vaulted medieval chapel. The ceremony was dominated by the emperor and his military advisers; Saint-Arnaud, who was Morny’s strong right arm during the coup d’état, had earned his reputation in Algeria fighting Abd el Kader. This humbling of the Arab leader is crowned by the grateful mother greeting the emperor as the savior of her son and, by extension, of the Arab peoples.82 The importance of visually recording the imperial ascendance in Franco-Algerian relations is seen in a similar composition by the then aspiring young sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (fig. 8.18). Carpeaux’s arrived at his theme in a deliberate attempt to gain government recognition, and went to considerable length to sketch the protagonists from life. He scurried to the Opéra to catch a glimpse of the Algerian chieftain and attended reviews of the troops and official ceremonies like the wedding of the emperor and future empress at Notre-Dame. As in the case of Ange-Tissier, he shows the emir humbling himself before the emperor, kneeling to kiss his hand in the presence of the military officers who defeated him on the field of battle. The sculptor emphasizes the authority and prestige of the emperor at the expense of the abased North African hero who had made France’s Algerian

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conquest such a prolonged process. Henceforth, French colonization of Algeria would proceed with a free hand, and Napoléon III could boast that he was as much the emperor of the Arabs as he was of the French. The star of the Orientalists, Jean-Léon Gérôme, who made regular trips to the Near East, Egypt, and Asia Minor, was chosen by the administration for one of the new faculty positions at the Ecole.83 His Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie at Fontainebleau, 27 June 1861, executed during the period 1861–1864, further exemplified the Second Empire’s craving for overseas markets (fig. 8.19). The painter perceived the powerful Siamese delegation as a group of servile primitives overwhelmed by the pomp and splendor of an advanced European culture and the venerable presence of their august hosts. There were other visual alternatives to his presentation, and though the delegates indeed genuflected in the emperor’s presence, Gérôme’s version creates a cookie-cutter pattern that heightens their abasement (fig. 8.20). Gérôme’s commission commemorated the visit of the diplomatic mission from P’ra Maha Mongkut (Phrachomklao or Rama IV), emperor of Siam, to the emperor and empress of France, who received them in the Salon d’Hercule, Château de Fontainebleau, in 1861. This meeting highlighted a broad trading and political treaty signed by both France and Siam on 15 August 1856, negotiated by the French ambassador to Siam, Charles de Montigny, who appears in the picture at the head of the Siamese delegation together with the abbé Lanardie, Catholic missionary and interpreter. Mongkut, awed by Napoléon’s success in the Crimean War, permitted the French navy and merchant community more privileged access than that extended to Great Britain and the United States. As a trade-off, he hoped that the French presence would serve as a bulwark against his enemies in Cochin China.84 This work typifies one crucial aspect of the official realism, what I wish to term myopic realism, verisimilar in its painstaking detail but ringing false in the whole. It is a complex picture, revealing a thorough knowledge of traditional ceremonial and processional events, yet comparable in some ways to Courbet’s radical Funeral at Ornans; both represent official rites, are based on portrait studies, convey the indifference and even boredom of certain participants, and studiously avoid artful groupings and a central thematic and psychological focus. Courbet’s picture, nevertheless, may be termed an example of hypermetropic realism, less veridical than Gérôme’s when viewed closely but more convincing as a whole in its capacity to obtrude itself on immediate reality. Naturally, the two artists conveyed their understanding of reality from opposing ideological perspectives, but Gérôme met the demands of a dominant elite projecting absolute power, while Courbet analyzed the structure of authority in the countryside and pointed to class differentiation.85 The former did not question the structure of control with which he identified; the latter did. It is known that Gérôme nearly went mad trying to satisfy the demands of various officials who wanted to be placed as close as possible to the locus of power, the imperial

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8.19  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie at Fontainebleau, 27 June 1861. Musée National du Château, Versailles. 8.20  Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by the Emperor of the French at the Palace of Fontainebleau, wood engraving from L’Illustration,

6 July 1861.

throne. And while there is no central psychological focus, the kneeling delegates and their offerings are ingeniously orchestrated to direct attention to Napoléon III and Eugénie, at the far right. Indeed, Gérôme clearly lavished his energy on the gifts, which later entered the empress’s collection of foreign curios and objets d’art. Although Mongkut and Lanardie hoped that the gifts would give the court a representative sample of Siamese crafts and culture, Gérôme presents them as quaint objects within the dazzling setting of Fontainebleau. Thus even the scrupulously painted accessories actually betray the artist’s imperialist vision.86 Gérôme’s progress from a Neo-Greek phase to official realism was already marked at the 1855 World’s Fair, for which he designed allegorical personifications of important maritime towns for a lighthouse exhibit and at the same time exhibited his colossal Age of Augustus, based on a passage in Bossuet’s universal history (fig. 8.21).87 The passage recounts the stages of Roman hegemony over the peoples of North Africa, the Near East, and Asia and notes that the Germanic tribes were checked and that universal peace was assured: “The entire universe lives in peace under his power and Jesus Christ enters the world.” Clearly Augustus stood for the French emperor’s persona, an identification that was common in official propaganda. Napoléon III’s embellishments of the capital were often compared to the precedent set by the Roman emperor. As early as 1842, he wrote from prison that he wanted “to be a second Augustus, because Augustus . . . made Rome a city of marble.”88 When we further recall Napoléon III’s words at Bordeaux, “The empire is peace,” and his close identification with



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opposite 8.21  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Age of Augustus, Salon of 1855, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 14 July 1855.



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the church in this period, the correspondence becomes even more striking. Gérôme here equated the Second Empire with the Age of Augustus and alluded to the dynastic and imperialistic designs of the new regime. Not surprisingly, the date of the commission, 30 October 1852, foreshadows by little more than a month the actual coronation of the emperor.89 (Significantly, the director of fine arts noted in the margin of the arrêt commissioning the picture to leave “the amount of payment open,” a sign of the administration’s attempt to win the full adherence of Gérôme—a previously eager contestant in the competition for the symbolic figure of the Republic.90) Gérôme was one of the original members of the Neo-Greek movement, which inadvertently contributed to Second Empire realism and to the regime’s campaign to neutralize the radicals. The Neo-Greeks, inspired by Charles Gleyre and who included Hamon, Picou, Aubert, and Toulmouche, extended history painting into new areas by depicting the ancients in their daily life as if they were Parisian middle-class types. This captivated a bourgeois audience unable to relate comfortably to erudite classical subjects by appealing to their vanity. In addition, the Neo-Greeks often painted their subjects with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, somewhat akin to Meissonier, with whose eighteenth-century scenes they had much in common. It would seem that the Second Empire’s sense of insecurity and illegitimacy was marked on the one hand by strenuous attempts to identify itself with the great dynasties of the past, and on the other by the mocking of established convention. It required as one part of its cultural program a mechanism for ridiculing the erudite, the aristocratic, and the classical— another subtext of its realist preference.91 The member of the court who promoted this style was Prince Jérôme, the so-called liberal of the Second Empire hierarchy, who went so far as to commission a mansion on the avenue Montaigne in the Pompeiian, or Neo-Greek, style.92 Gustave Boulanger’s Rehearsal of “The Flute Player” in the Atrium of H.I.H. the Prince Napoléon shows how the prince lived out his fantasy in everyday life (fig. 8.22). The subject is a play about antiquity, in which the roles are enacted by the prince and his friends, including the art critic and novelist Gautier, the dramatist Augier, and well-known professional actors. Gautier’s central position in this work attests to his actual participation in the Neo-Greek movement. He posed as their ardent champion and almost always had unqualified praise for Gérôme, whose Age of Augustus he claimed merited the painter “the number one position among the new generation.”93 A noted critic of the Moniteur and a favorite at the imperial court, Gautier was the linchpin in the government sponsorship of the young Neo-Greeks. Next in standing to Gérôme in this school, Hamon was admired by Gautier as its “purest” representative. Starting in 1852 government patronage enabled Hamon to devote himself full-time to the fine arts.94 His famous Salon work of 1853, My Sister Is Not at Home, was bought by the the second empire’s official realism

8.22  Gustave Boulanger, Rehearsal of “The Flute Player” in the Atrium of H.I.H. the Prince Napoléon, 1861. Musée National du Château, Versailles. opposite 8.23  Jean-Louis Hamon, My Sister Is Not at Home, Salon of 1853. Present whereabouts unknown. 8.24  Jean-Louis Hamon, The Human Comedy, 1852. Musée National du Château, Compiègne. 8.25  Eugène Guérard, Théâtre de Guignol (Champs-Elysées), lithograph, 1856. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.



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empress to decorate her apartments at Saint-Cloud (fig. 8.23). Although it represents an innocuous situation involving adolescents, Gautier went into raptures over it, lauding its grace, simplicity, and poetry while pointing to its sense of actuality.95 Another work by Hamon, The Human Comedy, was purchased by the government: first shown in 1851 and exhibited again at the 1855 World’s Fair, it enjoyed a popular success despite its somewhat puzzling subject (fig. 8.24). Hamon set his scene in the mythical Elysian Fields, the realm of the blessed heroes of the past, and invited his Salon audience to join the populace in contemplation of a diverting spectacle where “Love is hanged, Bacchus is thrashed, and Minerva, who eternally settles everyone’s accounts, provides plenty of amusement for the curious passersby in the ideal abode. . . .” The picture’s focus is an outdoor puppet show entitled Théâtre Guignol, the name of a real marionette show located at the Champs-Elysées, which inspired Hamon’s pun on the Elysian Fields.96 Like the Italian comedy (and the Balzacian concept as well), the outdoor entertainment was often referred to as a “petite comédie humaine,” where a few primal characters summed up the whole of human experience. A print of 1856 depicts the actual Théâtre Guignol, with its repertoire of the Commissary of Police, the Devil, and Punchinello (fig. 8.25). Aimed primarily at children, it evidently fascinated adults as well. This justifies the mixed audience in Hamon’s scene, with the exception that here the adults comprise illustrious types such as Homer, Dante, Diogenes, Alexander, Socrates, and Aeschylus. A parody of Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer, it mocks erudite classicism by reducing the eminent protagonists to the level of frivolous juveniles entranced by popular culture. At the same time, it gives a chapter eight

8.26  Jean-Louis Hamon, Conjuror, Salon of 1861. Musée des BeauxArts, Nantes.

familiar scene antique trappings; Gautier, who adored the work, wondered about the anachronistic appearance of the flower girl and the woman passing the collection plate, who came straight off the boulevard des Italiens.97 This interfacing of actuality and anachronism points to the administration’s requirement for an alternative realism and its sponsorship of a revival of popular culture and folk art in this period.98 A few years later Hamon displayed his Conjuror, which also enjoyed an enthusiastic reception (fig. 8.26). Like The Human Comedy, it built on anachronisms, but its contemporary features were more readily recognizable. Hamon depicted the mixed reactions of various social types to the street charlatan performing his tricks. Schoolmasters and philosophers speculate on the mysteries occasioned by the conjuror’s confidence game, while an astronomer with his telescope gazes at the heavens. All of these are conjurors in their own right and are ridiculed by the artist. Olivier Merson, who was thoroughly captivated by this picture, noted that the entire scene had a familiar ring: “Haven’t we seen this pot, this charlatan, this inscription [‘Mort aux rats’], and these hanging animal skins at the Place de la Bastille?”99 Except for the Athenian clothing, he declared, this could be contemporary Paris with its crowds of saltimbanques and costermongers. Merson’s recognition of the motif meshes with the prints and texts of the Second Empire that attest to the multitude of street hawkers, peddlers, organ grinders, jugglers, magicians, and saltimbanques on the streets of the major cities. They constituted a lumpen group, which often menaced the regime with their subversive potential.100 Hamon defused this threat but also pointed to a deeper level of the regime’s fears concerning its legitimacy. Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that on 2 December



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8.27  Auguste Toulmouche, Forbidden Fruit, Salon of 1865. Present whereabouts unknown.



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the February revolution was “conjured away by a cardsharper’s trick,” and that Bonapartists of dubious origin depended for their success on “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.”101 Hamon’s Neo-Greek realism, however, was consciously exploited by the administration to counterbalance the radicals. In 1861, the year of Boulanger’s picture of Prince Napoléon’s Pompeiian house, Merson lumped the Neo-Greeks and the realists together, noting their common preoccupation with exactitude and minutiae.102 But he endorsed the Neo-Greek approach, claiming that it would merit a prominent place in the history of Second Empire art because it arrived just in time to neutralize the impact of the radical realists. Like Gautier, he emphasized the repugnance of the Neo-Greeks for extravagance, vulgarity, and the more flawed aspects of nature; as a result of their tastes, they found writers to glorify them and recommend them to an adoring crowd. He concluded: “It is incontestable . . . that their diversion has been very useful and their part in the victory merits a title too honorable to ever let them be forgotten or ignored.” This candid statement makes understandable the government’s protection of this style; not unexpectedly, Merson found that Jules Breton had much in common with the Neo-Greeks, suggesting an even more direct relationship with the government-sponsored realists.103 The critic also referred to Auguste Toulmouche in this context, an exNeo-Greek now painting contemporary subjects; but if he was no longer at Corinth or at Pompeii, his Neo-Greek background kept him from being submerged “amid . . . modern pressures.”104 Toulmouche’s Forbidden Fruit, exhibited in 1865, reflected the transition to modernity while keeping the artificial character and upper-middle-class pretensions of the Neo-Greek style (fig. 8.27). When we recall, moreover, that Toulmouche advised his cousin Claude the second empire’s official realism

Monet to study with his master Gleyre, then we cannot ignore the role of the movement in early impressionism (which often depicted fashionably dressed women in moments of leisure) or, more importantly, the ultimate impact of the Second Empire patronage on the second- and third-generation realists. A Curious Collaboration

The curious alliance of Gérôme and Millet for the decoration of a special railway wagon presented to Pope Pius IX by the French government is still another example of the government’s strategy.105 French engineers were commissioned to build the carriage in 1857, and the main task of construction and ornamentation was subcontracted to Emile Trélat, professor of architecture and engineering at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.106 Froment-Meurice, the emperor’s silversmith, ornamented the interior, and Trélat assigned Gérôme to decorate the throne room with a frieze of the Apostles and to execute two designs for the vaults of the carriage showing the Pope blessing steamships and locomotives.107 He then charged Millet to do a painting of the Immaculate Conception for the oratory of the wagon, a subject of topical concern since Pius IX had promulgated the controversial doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 (figs. 8.28–29).108 Although the papal response to Millet’s work seems to have been lukewarm, the conjoining of these two artists in the semi-official commission further expands on the novel art policies of the Second Empire. On the one hand, the enterprise encouraged the academic painter to portray modern subjects, and on the other, it lured a radical painter into doing traditional and even conservative themes. The railway boom affected almost everyone in this era.109 The government stimulated railway speculation and subsidized railroad entrepreneurs. Railroad expansion stimulated the rapid growth of the iron industry with enormous orders for rails, bridge framework, railway stations, locomotives, and rolling stock. Various artists such as Thomas Couture and his pupil Edouard Manet seriously considered the railroad as a subject for contemporary painting. But perhaps the most impressive testimony to the cultural and commercial proclivities of the state regarding the railroad comes from the inevitable Sainte-Beuve, the government’s propagandist in the realm of literature. In a letter of 22 April 1862 to the writer Charles Duveyrier, he wrote: I was talking the other day to Courbet; he is a solid, energetic fellow who also has ideas, including what is I think the important one of creating a monumental form of painting in tune with modern society. . . . His idea is to turn the big railway stations into churches for the painter’s benefit: those great walls could be covered by all kinds of highly suitable subjects, such as previews of the main sites through which the traveller will pass; portraits of great men associated



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8.28  Jean-François Millet, Immaculate Conception, 1858. Present whereabouts unknown. 8.29  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pope Pius IX Blessing Locomotives, 1858. Musei di Roma, Rome.

with cities in the line of route, picturesque and moral themes, industry and metallurgy—in short all the “saints and miracles” of modern times.110

Sainte-Beuve hoped that Duveyrier could mediate between Courbet and the Péreire brothers—railway and credit tycoons—to translate this concept into reality. Sainte-Beuve flattered Duveyrier, calling him a maternity doctor for men and ideas, and urged him to help develop and clarify Courbet’s ideas. “In short, aid him so that he can aid you.” This letter is especially intriguing when we recognize that Duveyrier was one of the pamphleteers for the Second Empire and a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres—the organization through which SainteBeuve advised the emperor to gain control of the literary establishment.111 His pioneering work in advertising and promotion brought him to the attention of Prince Napoléon, who introduced him to the emperor. The ex-Saint-Simonist Duveyrier was commissioned to do several pamphlets, including L’Avenir et les Bonaparte, which prepared the public for a “liberal” empire.112 The Salon

The Second Empire skillfully manipulated a combination of press, Salon reviews, and imagery. One of Napoléon III’s favorite propaganda devices was the “whistle stop” tour throughout the countryside.113 It was a novel idea made possible by the railway expansion; during the ancien régime the kings had visited towns hard hit by natural disasters, but no previous ruler had used the tour so systematically or made such a planned effort to develop personal contacts with his subjects. Louis-Napoléon often employed this type of propaganda in areas where leftist opposition was strong or where there was a previous history of radical opposition. The local officials, notified of his trips in advance, curtailed potential protest, organized groups, prepared gala celebrations and fireworks, reviewed the troops, and even distributed government-subsidized gifts to the poor. Reports of the local procureurs généraux and the prefects frequently commented upon the favorable impression created by these visits. During the floods of 1856, the procureur général of Douai reported that the emperor’s visits “have had a great effect here; they have resulted in new conquests, particularly among the popular classes.” The propaganda value of these tours was not confined to the towns and regions visited by the emperor and empress. Newspapers, pamphlets, and placards throughout France reported their movements in detail; they emphasized the enthusiastic crowds and the gifts that the emperor gave to workers along his route.114 Napoléon III used the “official” realists to publicize these events. The 1857 Salon was especially rich in Second Empire realism; in addition to the innumerable battle pictures commemorating the victories in the Crimea, there were a number of works depicting domestic events such as

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8.30  William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Entrance of the Emperor at Tarascon, 14 June 1856, Salon of 1857. Mairie de Tarascon, Tarascon.

the emperor’s visits to the various regions hard hit by the flooding of the Rhône and Loire rivers in the summer of 1856. The portrayal of the emperor amid combat and domestic crisis revealed him as a compassionate ruler at home as well as a victorious leader abroad. To this end the administration exploited the Prix de Rome laureates and the semi-independent artists such as Antigna, Janet-Lange, Emile Lassalle, and Louis Moullin, as well as a number of others who painted subjects on their own initiative when they sensed a sure sale.115 Perhaps the most unexpected example of Second Empire realism is by William Bouguereau, whose Entrance of the Emperor at Tarascon, 14 June 1856 perfectly manifested the taste of the regime (fig. 8.30). The painter’s letter of introduction to the prefect of the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône charged him to furnish Bouguereau with all the facilities he required. 116 Bouguereau visited the flood site, sketched the mayor and others who were present, and made drawings of the surrounding landscape. Newspaper reports were also used, which noted how the emperor reached Tarascon and was conducted in a boat guided by two oarsmen, accompanied by Rouher, minister of public works, and generals Niel and Fleury.117 Despite the ruinous conditions, every house was decorated, and people shouted “Vive l’Empereur!” while extending their arms in blessing. Bouguereau faithfully reported the details of the scene, including the man on the rooftops lifting his hat to salute the chief of state, and such homespun accessories as the old mattresses. From the myopic point of view everything is rendered convincingly and accurately, but the emperor domi-



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nates the scene, and, as in the Gérôme, one senses the ideological manipulation of those who greet Napoléon III. The flood victims run to him as a savior, and his Christlike role is accentuated by the spire of the Tarascon cathedral that Bouguereau has sited just above his head. Still, in terms of verisimilitude, it is an advance over earlier portrayals of royal almsgiving, such as Hersent’s Louis XVI Distributing Alms to the Poor during the Rigorous Winter of 1788 (1817), discussed in volume 3.118 Playing on the traditional images of Christian charity, Hersent managed to give the king a “sacred” position directly in the center, isolated from the rest. Bouguereau’s ruler, on the other hand, is off-center and in close touch with the oarsmen and the crowd of victims. He assumes a more informal pose, with one foot poised on the rim of the boat, and his dress is a field uniform rather than ceremonial garb. Although both pictures show moments of real hardship for a rural population, Bouguereau’s emerges as a more authentic image of crisis conditions. Finally, however, the implications of charity-giving are similar in the two cases. Both protagonists are shown taking money from a purse and distributing it to an adoring populace, who reveal their social status by bowing reverently. Charity had traditionally substituted for equitable social programs, but it made sense only when it appeared in the guise of a special favor and under special conditions. The dispensation of benevolence was most effective during natural catastrophes, when even able-bodied workers could be deprived of their livelihood. Both the emperor and the empress were great believers in almsgiving and paternalistic gestures in return for submission at the work site. Since relief was a favor, it was best to have it administered under the aegis of the church by the Sisters of Charity, or in the secure presence of high-ranking military and civil officials. The emperor’s visit to Tarascon was also consistent with the strategy of the tours; the town represented a major agricultural market with a strong leftist tradition.119 In the elections of May 1849 over 30 percent of the electors voted for radical slates. Although Tarascon voted overwhelmingly for the empire in 1852, there was always a potential for an organized group that could be called upon in a moment of crisis. This was particularly true for Trélazé, near Angers in the department of Maine-et-Loire. Two of the seven works depicting the tour to the floodlands showed the emperor visiting the slate quarries of Trélazé, one by Moullin and the other by Antigna. Moullin’s picture is presently lost, but the Salon catalogue carried a lengthy description. The painting depicted a vast lake formed by the floodwaters; the ridges of the slate quarries were barely glimpsed. The emperor arrived after his visit to Angers; he advanced alone in the middle of a crowd of slate workers, who received him “with an immense and prolonged cheer.” In appreciation of his visit, four slate splitters demonstrated their skill by laying open a thick block and dressing a piece of slate. Duly impressed, the emperor smiled and handed out a large amount of money to the laborers.120 Significantly, the only major insurrection against the Second Empire occurred in this region in the previous year—1855. During the period

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1853–1855 the population of Trélazé suffered dearly from low wages and the high cost of bread, which was maintained at artificial price levels by a monopoly of local grain merchants. The slate workers were particularly affected, since their average daily wage of 2.58 francs—well below the average of the Parisian laborer—could not keep pace with inflation. They were ill organized in contrast with the owners and the managers of the slate quarries, who often owned the farmland as well. The conditions in 1855 did not permit the slate worker to live on his salary, and in desperation a number of socialists, republicans, and dissatisfied Bonapartists organized a branch of the secret society known as the Marianne. During the night of August 26 and 27, a body of six to seven hundred workers, mainly from the slate quarries, staged a coup against the arsenal of Trélazé and then attempted to take over the town hall at Angers. The coup failed and bitter repression followed: many of those arrested were deported to Cayenne and to several fortified prisons, where they eventually died.121 The insurrection convulsed the government, which tried to blame the uprising on a gang of socialist hoodlums bent on no other aim than simple robbery. Meanwhile, newspapers reported that the government was striking successfully at the organization of the Marianne.122 That the emperor’s trip to this region was carefully orchestrated in conjunction with this event is demonstrated in a Moniteur article of 13 June 1856: No sooner had he arrived at Angers than the Emperor crossed by boat over the various flood areas and immediately made for the slate quarries, where an immense crowd of workers, their wives and children assembled on the heights to greet him. At the sight of His Majesty, the cry of Vive l’Empereur! let loose from all their mouths with an enthusiasm that cannot be described: these workers, formerly led astray, recognize and acclaim as their best friend he who has braved the danger to aid them and console them. After having left the token of his munificence . . . the Emperor departed amid universal blessings.123

Antigna labored to translate the official fantasy in accordance with the need for realism in detail, but, understandably, he could not resolve all the complexities (fig. 8.31). The emperor is situated slightly off-center, and this time one of the generals distributes money to the crowd. Napoléon III stands as if in a contrite position, while before him are a group of slate workers reacting with contrasting gestures of enthusiasm, inquiry, and defiance. Behind him are the faithful: his retinue of military and civil officers, the Archbishop of Angers, and several local officials. In contrast to the Bouguereau, there is a striking sense of ambivalence in the presentation, directly owing to the actual circumstances in the area. One clue to Antigna’s dilemma is the image of the wounded veteran of the Crimean campaign in the center middle ground. His downward cast makes him conspicuous amid the fervent swarm around him. At the trial of the Mariannistes at Trélazé, one of the defendants equated the

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8.31  Alexandre Antigna, The Visit of the Emperor to the Slate Quarry Workers of Angers during the Floods of 1856, Salon of 1857. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers. opposite 8.32  Ange-Louis Janet-Lange, Napoléon III Distributing Alms to the Flood Victims of Lyon in June 1856,

Salon of 1857, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 1857.

revolutionaries with the heroic victors at Sebastopol, which so infuriated the presiding magistrate that he imposed strict silence on the court.124 Antigna evidently had difficulty juggling his imagery to satisfy the tension between imperialism abroad and repression at home. He extended official realism in the direction of radical realism, setting the scene in a lugubrious landscape relatively unaffected by the hierarchy of social rank. It may be recalled that critics hostile to the radical realists positioned Antigna, along with Rosa Bonheur and Jules Breton, as a viable alternative to them. Although it would seem that in this particular instance he was influenced by Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans, Gautier could comment that Antigna “does not systematically seek out ugliness like M. Courbet, but he does not flee from it when he meets it.”125 The emperor moved south on his tours, visiting Lyons, Arles, and Avignon—areas of traditionally strong radical activity. His trip to Lyons especially was widely publicized, with the local accounts converging with the official realist combination of observed detail and blatant propaganda.126 Janet-Lange’s scene in Lyons was described in the catalogue with an extract of an article published in the Moniteur (fig. 8.32): [The Emperor] contemplated all these disasters with a look of profound sadness and appeared visibly moved; nothing can explain what passed between the



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sovereign of France and this poor people. . . . The Emperor was without guards and almost without retinue in the midst of this multitude of workers. . . . Poor women, poor children pressed around his steed; the Emperor halted with an extreme gentleness and benevolence, and appeared to gravitate by choice to the weakest. He had a leather sack attached to his saddle in which he plunged each instant, distributing his bounty himself. The population, electrified by their encounter with the sovereign in the midst of their misfortune, regarded him as a consoling angel; it burst out in enthusiastic acclamation much easier to understand than to describe.127

Other Examples of Second Empire Visual Intervention

This final section presents other individual cases of cultural intervention to demonstrate the widespread government control. It has already been shown in the chapter on the radical realists to what lengths the administration was willing to go to convert Millet and Courbet to its visual regime, and in this closing section I wish to review some additional dramatic case studies. It may be recalled that Thomas Couture was working on the Second Republic’s major commission, The Enrollment of the Volunteers, when the coup d’état broke out. Shortly afterwards, he received a visit from the duc de Persigny, who condemned the work as a “tableau de démagogues.” Couture subsequently negotiated with the regime to soften the effect and efface the image of Liberty; in return, he was promised, but never received, a commission to decorate the Pavilion Denon in the Louvre with largescale paintings glorifying the Second Empire. The centerpiece of the cycle would have shown the Empire Relying on the Church and the Army to Suppress Anarchy. The scheme also made a place for the emasculated Enrollment, which would have been decorated on the borders with imperial eagles. The government did award him the commission for The Baptism of the Prince Imperial, a major event heralding the continuation of the Napoleonic dynasty and signaling closer ties with the papacy in the mid-1850s (fig. 8.33). The work typified consensus realism in its photographic depiction of the sovereigns, members of the court, military personnel, and the papal envoy, but added the allegorical complement of Napoléon I occupying a lofty place

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8.33  Thomas Couture, The Baptism of the Prince Imperial, 1856– 1879. Musée National du Château, Compiègne. opposite 8.34  Rosa Bonheur, Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849. Musée National du Château, Fontainebleau. 8.35  Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.



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in the transept of Notre Dame. Objections were raised by the emperor’s own entourage that this motif suggested the ruler’s inability to stand on his own two feet. Nevertheless, the work attempted a synthesis of Second Empire ideology in celebrating its awesome diplomatic and military prestige in 1856.128 Even Rosa Bonheur’s animal imagery was affected by the changing political conditions. She painted a forceful Barbizon-like picture for the republican government, Ploughing in the Nivernais (fig. 8.34). While based on the lyrical opening chapter of George Sand’s bucolic La Mare au diable, it showed an image of enormous power concentrated in the oxen working the land.129 As in the majority of her works, animals dominate the human;130 but in Nivernais the oxen move in accordance with a specific task, here accentuated by the processional character of the action. The Nivernais region was not particularly fertile, but its animal husbandry was well known throughout France. Bonheur appropriately centered her depiction of labor on the driving team of the celebrated breed of Morvan oxen. Her glorification of labor also coincided with a region with a well-organized Left, one of the few rural areas that courageously took up arms against the coup d’état. By 1853 Bonheur exhibited her panoramic Horse Fair together with a Vaches et Moutons, which was purchased by the duc de Morny (fig. 8.35).131 The Horse Fair was in many ways an homage to the horse fanciers of the Second Empire; Morny, for example, was an expert on horses, belonged to the fashionable Jockey Club, and cut quite a figure at the race track. The animals in this work were again a specific type, la percheronne, the native chapter eight

French breed from Normandy. The percheronne was identified with a highly conservative region and carried national and traditional associations. Napoléon III was especially fond of the breed; the imperial stable was filled with them, and they were employed to draw coaches and the imperial posting service, which supplemented the railway in some parts of the country. Brigades of the posting service always followed the court to Compiègne, Fontainebleau, and other parts of the provinces. Indeed, the government demand for these horses raised their market price. The Horse Fair thus glorified the Second Empire, just as the earlier work manifested sympathy for the young republican regime.132 At this moment, conservative critics positioned Bonheur as an alternative to the coarser realists: Delaborde, who refused even to mention the dreaded Courbet, noted that Bonheur’s picture was set in a specific time and place and drew for its substance on actuality, yet retained its authenticity as a work of art. It was not simply an affair of horses or working people in blouses, but a scene where the elements of nature were ennobled.133 Delaborde’s downgrading of the workers’ role also converged with Bonheur’s typical subordination of the male figure to her animals. Here the animals do not work as in the Nivernais, but are paraded on display for the benefit of buyers and spectators. They functioned as adjuncts to the razzledazzle of the imperial court. Significantly, the imperial regime conferred upon Bonheur the first Légion d’Honneur ever awarded a French woman. The career of Jules Breton is a singular example of the influence of the government’s program on the younger generation. A key role model for the administration’s preferred realism, Breton had been identified with the revolution of 1848 and early focused his attention on the plight of the poor.134 He exhibited Misery and Despair at the 1849 Salon and Hunger at the Salon of 1851, where Millet’s Sower and Courbet’s Stonebreakers were also shown. By 1852 he was in touch with the Neo-Greeks Gérôme and Toulmouche. His outlook gradually changed in this period as he turned with loathing from lugubrious subjects. While still in touch with his radical friend Ernest Delalleau, he completed a Return from the Harvest—a transitional work whose “skying” in the Salon of 1853 severely shamed him. This prompted him to see the comte de Morny, to whom Breton’s representative in the Chamber of Deputies had recommended him. Breton prepared his Gleaners for the Exposition Universelle of 1855; it was spotted prior to the opening by Alfred Arago, inspector of Beaux-Arts, who assured him of a positive reception (fig. 8.36). Breton, whose reminiscences published near the end of his life treated the peasants from his village condescendingly, softened the theme of rural labor, which Millet and Courbet sought to expose in all its drudgery. He based his work partly on the master of the Neo-Greeks, Gleyre, whose Ruth and Boaz furnished a biblical setting for field work (fig. 8.37). In addition, Breton designed his composition to emphasize the presence of the garde-champêtre, the rural policeman supervising the gleaners. Although the artist drew nostalgically upon his native village

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8.36  Jules Breton, The Gleaners, 1854. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 8.37  Charles Gleyre, Ruth and Boaz, 1853–1854. Present whereabouts unknown. 8.38  Evariste Luminais, The Fair Grounds, Salon of 1861, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 31 August 1861.

opposite 8.39  François Bonhommé, The Barricade of Canal Saint-Martin, 23 June 1848, 1850, lithograph.

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. 8.40  François Bonhommé, Diploma for a Mutual Aid Society, pen design, 1852. Musée de

l’Histoire du Fer, Jarville.



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of Courrières for inspiration, the garde-champêtre—benevolent as he may appear—embodied state authority in preserving the principle of private property and guarding the imperial forests. His friendly looking expression puts a benign front on authority, while at the same time assuring the bourgeois Salon audience that rural life is subject to control. Gautier especially admired Breton’s work, enjoying the fact that the gleaners were regimented, “these poor Ruths who will probably not find their Boaz at the end of the day.”135 This was no unique feature in Second Empire painting: in 1861 Evariste Luminais exhibited Champ de Foire (an image of a horse fair strongly influenced by Rosa Bonheur), where a rural gendarme at the far left maintains the public order (fig. 8.38). According to one reviewer, “The gendarme, no less peaceable than a peace-maker, dominates the gathering and the silver braids of his respected tricorn [sic] appear resplendent in the eyes of the reassured public.”136 Breton made one very revealing confession about his career: he was astonished that success came so quickly to him; that the greatest art critics of the time said the most extravagant things about his pictures. They kept seeing Virgil, Ruth, and Theocritus in his work where he had not intended them, but in turn he made up his mind to live up to their claims. He noted that the art critic Paul de Saint-Victor especially admired him, and that he was fortunate that Saint-Victor often served on Salon juries.137 Saint-Victor, a fervent Bonapartist, is perhaps most remembered for his vicious attacks on Millet: his enthusiasm for Breton says a great deal. Breton’s personal position coincided with the government’s artistic policy; he criticized both Courbet and Millet for their extremism. Other government critics like Gautier and Chesneau contrasted Breton and Millet as the chiefs of opposing camps, praising the former unreservedly and citing the vulgarity of the latter. Chesneau saw in Breton the true artist who exacted from his models “a nobility of gesture, an elegance of contour, a majesty of line,” embellishing nature and making rural life more sympathetic and appealing to a city audience for whom the peasant often had a frightening aspect.”138 Since the Second Empire actively encouraged industrial expansion, there were cultural producers who openly propagandized the achievements of the regime and the energy of the new entrepreneurs. One of these artists was François Bonhommé, a middle-of-the-road painter who opposed the June insurrection, as suggested by the images he created at the time of the 1848 revolution. Examples are his popular lithograph exhibited in 1849 showing the invasion of the National Assembly by the radicals Blanqui, Barbès, and Huber—part of the prelude to June, and the attack of Cavaignac on the barricade of Canal Saint-Martin (fig. 8.39). At one time, Bonhommé wanted to publish a series of worker images under the title of Soldiers of Industry, in which he concentrated on the individual character of factory or mine workers. With his republican ties undermined by the events of the period, Bonhommé disappeared from public visibility chapter eight

between 1849 and 1851, only to reappear at the Salon of 1852 as an advocate of the prince-president.139 In 1852 Bonhommé received the commission for the mutual aid society diplomas showing the prince-president in the center of improvident workers, women, and children—paternalistic images like the examples of the

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1856 tours (fig. 8.40).140 From then on he exhibited regularly at the Salon, receiving a third-class medal at the prestigious World’s Fair of 1855. Now encouraged and subsidized by the regime, Bonhommé tempered his liberalism to become the official painter of the newly industrialized economy. He urged the administration—including the emperor himself—to retain him on the order of the military painters so that he could document the imperial industrial triumphs and the life of the veterans of the Crimean and Italian campaigns as they reentered the labor force.141 He flattered the emperor, claiming that the ruler’s encouragement of industrial progress and regard for the working classes inspired his aesthetic concern for “technical truth.” Bonhommé declared that French artists must portray the working classes for the sake of “the posterity and history of the imperial reign, on the battlefield and in the camps, and also in industrial life, on the terrain of pacific conquests where imperial France hosts the nations.” As Gabriel Weisberg notes, Bonhommé served Schneider as the official painter of the industrial complex at Le Creusot.142 He did his first studies of Le Creusot in the mid-1850s and continued through most of the next decade. In 1867 he exhibited two watercolors at the World’s Fair showing views of the Schneider manufactory about ten years apart, thus documenting not only the incredible growth of the enterprise but also the remarkable industrial expansion of the Second Empire. At Le Creusot Bonhommé concentrated on recording machinery and factory structures; he no longer painted close-ups of individual workers but showed them either swallowed up in the vast expanse of industrial terrain or as insignificant appendages to the mechanical apparatus of the factory interior.143 We may conclude this section with Meissonier, yet another painter who established close ties with the Second Empire. Already established by the end of the July Monarchy through the patronage of the haute bourgeoisie, he manifested profound realist tendencies in Souvenir of Civil War, exhibited at the Salon of 1850–1851. He subsequently received regular visits from Morny, who purchased at least three of his six Meissoniers between 1852 and 1854.144 Une rixe (A Brawl), a genre scene set in the seventeenth century, was a hit at the 1855 World’s Fair and was purchased by the emperor for the unprecedented sum of 25,000 francs. By decade’s end, the emperor was inviting Meissonier to join his military campaign in Italy to gather material for painting The Battle of Solferino. At the same time, Meissonier projected a series illustrating the momentous events of the First Empire.145 Thus the Meissonier of the Souvenir was a potential threat to the Second Empire ideology and had to be brought into the fold; accordingly, we find Morny once again entering the scene during the pivotal years 1852– 1854. Morny purchased Les Bravi, which hung at the Salon of 1852; Young Man Reading while Dining, on exhibit in 1853; and Amateur Studying Drawings, which was purchased the following year. These revert to Meissonier’s earlier style, which now again received the official stamp of approval, although even here the critical events of the period affected his themes.

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Bravi, depicting two hired assassins waiting expectantly behind a closed door, was unusual in his work for its implied violence and carried an allusion of the real threat of assassination in the wake of the coup d’état (fig. 8.41). Members of the Left were systematically hounded, and in turn Bonapartists feared reprisals against the prince-president. Several such attempts were made in 1852, including bogus ones designed to shore up sympathy for Louis-Napoléon. Meissonier’s picture, while set in the time of Henri III, conveyed specific hints of the heated aftermath of 2 December.146 According to the Economist of 29 November 1851, the stock exchanges of Europe regarded Louis-Napoléon as “the sentinel of order”; Meissonier’s many single figures of guards, musketeers, sentinels, and even offduty soldiers served as efficient reminders that the imperial army—whose barracks were everywhere—was continually present to suppress the “hydra-headed monster of anarchy.” While his single guardsmen wear the costume of earlier epochs, he was ultimately pressed into the service of contemporary official realism. Saint-Victor and other Bonapartist critics went after him in the 1850s for his limited repertoire, then praised him 8.41  Ernest Meissonier, Les Bravi, Salon of 1852. Wallace Collection, London.



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enthusiastically for his Battle of Solferino when it was exhibited in 1864. About’s remarks recalled somewhat the effect of the Souvenir; he commented that the dead Austrian troops had been “reduced to the state of scrap.” But now the stark realism served the ideals of the Second Empire; the emperor observes from atop the hill the impending defeat of the enemy. At the same Salon, Meissonier exhibited, as a kind of pendant to Solferino, The Retreat of 1814, where Napoléon I is shown retreating after his setback in Laon in March of that year. Solferino was thus the antithesis of this work and pointed up Napoléon’s legacy of military genius to his triumphal nephew. The Solferino commission actually grew out of an earlier (1849) government assignment to do a typical Reader, but the artist kept delaying the project to get a higher price, and in this the later administration seems to have acquiesced. By 1856 Meissonier received a commitment of 20,000 francs and now aspired to greater things; Napoléon III invited him to Solferino and he abandoned his old genre style in favor of a modern battle picture. This transition marked an advanced stage in the government’s manipulation.147 Even in the case of the two most dominant realists of the period—Millet and Courbet—the power and influence of the Second Empire managed to affect the way they worked and their choice of theme and style. Although the methods employed by the regime varied, and are certainly not unique by standards of other periods or centuries, the fact that such a systematic control of the arts was at work just when the seeds of modernism were being sown is worth examining in detail. The government managed to blunt and neutralize the political potential of the radical realists, while at the same time elevating its own realist approach on the basis of the innovations of their regime. The regime rightly saw that the only way that it could remain in power was to cultivate popular support; to accomplish this meant manipulating the press and the visual arts to convey a clear message to the populace. To this end they spared no expense to create a propaganda milieu that shaped public opinion. By establishing their own brand of realism, they furthered a mode of contemporaneity that was closely tied to the technological and expansionist policies of the regime and ultimately glorified the French nation—features that would be assimilated by the avantgarde during the Third Republic. Finally, the Second Empire established a precedent for pervasive control of the media, which became the hallmark of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. The regime’s policies stimulated an economic boom in the 1850s and it continued to promote economic development more systematically than any other government of the period. The French state fostered this growth through a combination of tax incentives and laws encouraging investment. The creation of the Crédit Mobilier for awarding special investment funds launched a tidal wave of entrepreneurialism that facilitated manufacture, railway expansion, and the grand public works projects

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including the elaborate rebuilding of the Paris infrastructure and the city’s great boulevards and parks. These vast undertakings in city planning were done in true imperial style as slums and working-class quarters were cleared and their unruly inhabitants displaced, boulevards widened and elongated to facilitate traffic and hamper insurrection, and Paris redesigned as the transportation hub of the nation. The court of Napoléon III and Eugénie dazzled by its splendor, but the tradeoff was an authoritarian government and regimented society. Holding the reins of domestic power ever so tightly, Napoléon III felt free to engage in ambitious foreign ventures and colonial expeditions. The conquest of Indochina was initiated in this period, the French grip on Algeria was strengthened, and trade negotiations from a position of power were carried out with Japan and Siam. Finally, Napoléon III even took the risk of gaining a foothold in the New World by intervening in the politics of Mexico and imposing the Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperor of Mexico in 1864. Unexpected Mexican resistance and American opposition forced the French to withdraw, but Maximilian, who bravely refused to abandon his post, was defeated and executed in 1867. The Second Empire ushered in the modern colonial enterprise. Its defeat by Prussia in 1870 allowed the Prussian ruler to claim the title of emperor, and the ensuing era not only witnessed the emergence of a full-blown colonialism but also an international array of rulers who governed or pretended to govern one form of empire or another. Although Hobsbawm dates the Age of Empire from the last quarter of the century, it is clear that the diplomatic and colonial practices of the Second Empire nurtured those of the Third Republic that vastly extended them. The transformation of Paris and imperial expansionism proceeded in tandem, stimulating the imaginations of creative minds everywhere and totally revamping culture. We can imagine a kind of internal urban theme park waiting to be strip-mined by modernists and an external fantasy realm holding out infinite possibilities for novel experiments. The modern metropolis organized sensations to cope with the institutionalized labyrinth, while the world without offered the appeal of individual daring and dramatic action not possible within the urban setting. These will be the central themes of the next volume, Art in an Age of Empire, where I explore the relationships of urban renewal and colonization to new forms of visualizing concepts of leisure, gain, conquest, and glory.



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9 Edouard Manet: Man About Town

9.1  Henri Fantin-Latour, Portrait of Edouard Manet, 1867. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.



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If rough-and-tumble Courbet exploited the image of the yokel to scandalize the bourgeois, his disciple Manet assumed the persona of the free-floating cosmopolitan to create his niche as the ultimate insider. He occasionally shocked his audience in the process of mocking their conventions, but his real aim was to strip away the masks of everyday life as an index of his cleverness. This explains why he coveted official honors and refused to be seen in company with the impressionist upstarts. Assuming the guise of the city slicker in contrast to Courbet’s country bumpkin, Manet appeared on the stage as a dandified version of the consummate hipster. Now subsumed under the category of flâneur, his rebellious bourgeois type flourished under the Second Empire as a covert digger of the urban “scene.” When I say “rebellious,” I do not mean to imply he engaged in overt political activity; the flâneur of the Second Empire flourished in a period when radical politics were banned and the Left had to go underground, only to surface again at the time of the regime’s collapse. During most of the twenty-year reign, however, the bourgeoisie was politically stagnant, and the revolutionary energies of the working classes were drained off in the vast urban renewal program. The response of middle-class moderates like Manet was to create a kind of fashionable Bohemia, committed on the one hand to a life of pleasure that ranged from the grand monde to the demimonde, and, on the other, to a cosmopolitan intensity on the boulevards that offered a venue for critical insights into the nature of Second Empire society. Setting Fantin-Latour’s famous portrait of Manet against Courbet’s self-image in The Meeting helps put their contrary personas into perspective (fig. 9.1). Where Courbet wears rugged outdoor gear, Manet dons fashionably cut attire and a tall silk hat, and where Courbet sports a walking stick, Manet twirls a cane in his kid-gloved hands. Manet was as consistent as Courbet in maintaining his persona in the town as well as country, in both low and high haunts. (Manet’s close friend Antonin Proust noted that when the situation demanded he would exaggerate his gait and affect the

drawl of a Parisian gamin.) Both Courbet and Manet were radical realists to some extent in their range of subject matter and shared a Faustian ambition to sum up their era in paint. Both plunged into unexpected corners of their world in search of subject matter, only to return to the studio to complete the job. Neither Manet’s elegant and dapper appearance nor Courbet’s rough-and-ready mask could have allowed unlimited access to the actual space of all of their subjects. Hence the need to work mainly in the studio rather than on the spot, even when, as in the case of Manet, it was necessary to depict urban performers on the go, as in The Street Singer. In retrospect, it appears that the personas of both represented a privileged male position, even when deployed as a disguise to mask more liberal ideals at a time when an authoritarian regime discouraged overt political expression. Naturalism versus Realism

The personality and lifestyle polarities of the mature Manet and Courbet may be further contextualized within the shift from realism to naturalism—a shift evident in the Salon des Refusés of 1863 but only fully articulated in criticism after the emergence of impressionism. Although the lines between these stylistic categories are fluid, to a large extent they are distinguished by a new awareness of time, motion, and space in the metropolitan centers.1 The conscious effort of realists to find a scene in actuality that fit their ideological agendas was opposed by a greater sense of detachment, whose model was the methodology of the natural scientist. Courbet’s realism was unsentimentalized and deadpan, but the moments he captured signaled an engagement with the brutalities and social inequities of his time. Sometimes the narrative in his major works appears obscure, but it is nevertheless built around a univocal theme, whereas in Manet the major works seem more random, fragmented, and loosely painted, as if sketched on the fly. The detachment is more on the order of a snapshot without aim as opposed to a formal photograph taken in the studio. Both the naturalist and the realist went into the field with the mindset of an anthropologist, but the former assumed a neutral stance modeled on the scientific approach while the latter sought out subjects that could serve as clinical case studies. The realist presupposed a coherent material substratum underlying phenomena that could be grasped in its entirety once the deceptions of ideology were unveiled. Naturalists also believed in an independent, objective representation of this reality, but rejected the idea of a coherent, static picture of it. They analyzed its constituent and ambient elements such as light, color, and energy as if to capture people and inanimate objects by their negative (in the sense of a mold) impress on the environment surrounding them. Although the slice of life chosen by the naturalist still represented a selection rooted in personality and class consciousness, the goal was to accurately observe on the spot without appearing judgmental. Hence the craving for more trivial glimpses of everyday

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life that challenged the conventional prejudices and routinized attitudes of entrenched styles. The result is that the beholder is forced to read the more incoherent naturalist image primarily in terms of its psychological complexities, whereas in the realist work, no matter how obscure the imagery, there remains the possibility of a systematic thematic interpretation. Naturalism received its most succinct analysis in Zola’s important essay Le Roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880), where the author traces the origins of his application of the scientific method to writing novels. Zola’s model is Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (Introduction to a Study of Experimental Medicine, 1865), a widely popular work that provided a detailed view of the physiologist’s scientific process. Zola boasted that the experimental method informed his “naturalist” novels, in which he carefully constructed the bloodlines and genetic inheritances of his Rougon-Macquart families to insure “scientific” behavior and appropriate responses to the environmental pressures he invented for them. Here the process would seem to rule out the element of unpredictability or spontaneity, but Zola insists that “if the experimental method leads to the knowledge of physical life, it should also lead to the knowledge of the passionate and intellectual life.”2 Using Bernard’s distinction between the sciences of observation and the sciences of experiment and his definition of the latter as “provoked observation,” Zola argued “that the spontaneity of living bodies is not opposed to the employment of experiment.” And he further amplified Bernard’s thesis: The difference is simply that an inanimate body possesses merely the ordinary, external environment, while the essence of the higher organism is set in an internal and perfected environment endowed with constant physico-chemical properties exactly like the external environment; hence there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena, for the living as for the inanimate bodies. He calls determinism the cause which determines the appearance of these phenomena. This nearest cause, as it is called, is nothing more than the physical and material condition of the existence or manifestation of the phenomena. The end of all experimental method, the boundary of all scientific research, is then identical for living and for inanimate bodies; it consists in finding the relations which unite a phenomenon of any kind to its nearest cause, or, in other words, in determining the conditions necessary for the manifestation of this phenomenon.3

Bernard distinguishes between observer and experimentalist: the first studies phenomena in which he can never intervene, in the manner of the astronomer, while the second employs the investigative process to modify natural phenomena in pursuit of some end, submitting them to conditions other than those readily perceived in nature. Observers operate like photographers of phenomena, but once they grasp the facts an idea or hypothesis

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springs to mind and the experimentalist emerges to interpret the data. Experimentalists test their ideas through the reciprocal play of observation and experiment. The result, however, must be honestly observed without any preconceived idea, so that the experimentalist is turned once more into the observer. How this might be achieved in Manet’s work is exemplified in the account given by the painter Charles Toché, who met up with Manet in Venice in 1875. By then, Manet had thought deeply about making pictures, and willingly shared his methods with Toché. Watching Manet at the easel, Toché was surprised to see how much time Manet spent on seemingly trivial details to achieve the desired look. He then bore witness to Manet’s conceptual process when the two were observing a regatta spectacle at Mestre; Manet conceived of a picture on the spot and described his idea to Toché, who recorded the words verbatim in his notebook. Manet began with his selection of “the characteristic episode” from the welter of phenomena, delimiting the picture as if he saw it “already framed.” He perceived as the salient features the masts decorated with multicolored pennants, the tricolor flag of Italy, the undulating line of boats spilling over with spectators, the straight-arrow row of gondolas moving away from the horizon, and, at the top of the picture, the waterline, the finish line, and in the remote distance the vaporous islands. Manet admitted that it would be a struggle to obtain the different values rising tier upon tier that vanish according to the laws of atmospheric perspective. He planned to concentrate on the lagoon as the gathering site for the boats and passengers, and although mirroring the sky it also possessed its own color derived from the crowd and the colorful accessories. He emphasized concentration on light and color values rather than precise outlines of moving things, for when accurately observed the values yield “the true volume, the unquestionable outline.” The motifs of individual spectators, seated or gesticulating, clothed in dark or dazzling fabrics, their umbrellas, their handkerchiefs, their hats forming a crenellation, have to be interpreted in terms of the different values that provide the necessary foil and interest to the planes. He would render the crowd, the rowers, the flags, and the masts like a colored mosaic, while simultaneously straining to maintain the “instantaneity of gestures, the quivering of the banners, the rocking of the boats.” Finally, the sky would operate like an immense, dazzling canopy, enveloping the entire scene and shedding light on people and things. The last entry of the account reads: “The touches will be impulsive, frank. No kitchen recipes, and you will pray to the god of good and honest painters to come to your aid!”4 Except for the proverbial comment at the end, this recitation could stand as a clinical case study of Zola’s experimental artist. Having scrutinized the scene in all of its complexities, Manet set up his experiment by focusing on the ambient air, light, and color and their interaction with people and things. Next, he establishes the relations that unite phenomena as well as seeking their causal wellsprings in the physical and material conditions

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of their existence. Disregarding any overt attempt at narrativizing or formulaic procedures, he ranges over all the phenomena under the conditions in which he first observed them and concocts an experiment within a controlled framework. The final effect is one of an unpremeditated, informal view of nature and society, yet located in a specific time and place that reveal “the conditions necessary for the manifestation of this phenomenon.” Zola considers the novelist both an observer and an experimentalist, initially scrutinizing certain types in the crowd and then placing them in conditions that allow them to act out in accordance with genes and temperament. This leads to scientific knowledge akin to the experiments of the physiologist and physician. Zola quotes Bernard on the connection between the experimentalist’s idea and his or her originality: “The appearance of the experimental idea is entirely spontaneous and its nature absolutely individual . . . it is a particular sentiment, a quid proprium, which constitutes the originality, the invention, and the genius of each one.” Zola then repeats that an observed fact sparks an experiment to attain knowledge of the truth, the results of which are judged with the “freedom of mind” of one who accepts only facts that obey the fixed laws of nature. But what Zola calls the “determinism of phenomena” I see as the reflection of his own evolution as a writer under the Second Empire, when Haussmannization created the grid of a bourgeois society and gave rise to the flâneur. The determinism of which he writes complements the social and cultural restraints imposed on society by Napoléon III’s innovative authoritarianism. There was also a deeper social reason for the respective personas of Courbet and Manet: like Walt Whitman, Courbet deliberately assumed the guise of the peasant to serve as a role model for the autodidact and freethinker blocked by hierarchical restraints, while Manet’s fashionable dress emphasized the artist’s professionalism and respectability. Courbet’s outfit symbolized his emancipative stance, Manet’s his demand for the artist’s social recognition. Manet had to defend his choice of career against the wishes of his upper-class parents by distancing himself from the popular image of the bohemian-type artist luridly characterized in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie bohême (1851) and restaged in the student rituals of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts directly across the street from the familial residence. His posturing is brought home vividly in an interview with a critic at a time when he was under intense public scrutiny: “Look at me, I’m not one of those long-haired types, I’m a bourgeois—like you—like everybody else. I don’t look like an artist, do I?”5 Thus he could justify his dandified costume as a form of camouflage that guaranteed him entry into his parents’ social circles as well as the meanest cabaret. Manet’s Family Background

Yet Manet was still exceptional in the range of his urban themes, as if desiring to fulfill Baudelaire’s ideal of the “painter of modern life.” We would

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want to know how it was that this scion of distinguished parents could assume a much more liberal posture than they, eventually coming close to an overt critique of the government in his Execution of Maximilian. There is his rebellion against the parental choice of profession, and the independence of his visual production, but he clearly retained close ties to his family, even to the point of heroically protecting his father’s reputation after the elder Manet sired a son with the family piano tutor by eventually marrying the tutor and adopting the son himself. There is his experience in 1848, witnessing the workers’ uprising and its suppression, and his experience in December 1851, during Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, when he again witnessed violence in the streets. This explains, perhaps, his sympathy for the Communards in the aftermath of their defeat in 1871 and brutal treatment during “Bloody Week.” Although he could never accept their politics, he blamed the government for its ruthless reprisals against the Communards. In a way, the flâneur had to rise above class interests since part of the persona had to do with demonstrating ease of mobility within every nook and cranny of the social realm. This clubman persona suggests that Manet’s hunger for official recognition was less a self-aggrandizing posture than an effort to legitimatize independent activity. When explaining why he refused to show with the independents, he declared: “I will never exhibit in the booth [baraque] next door; I enter the Salon through the main door, and fight with the others.”6 Politically, he began and ended a republican moderate with liberal views on social issues. He revealed this disposition early in life as an apprentice naval cadet on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro. Persuaded momentarily against the life of the artist and rejecting the law profession of his father, he compromised by considering a career in the navy. Admission to the naval academy at his age (then seventeen) required a prior apprenticeship aboard a commercial vessel, and young Manet signed up with other sons of good families aboard a ship specially outfitted for the purpose. Setting sail in December 1849, it reached its destination of Rio de Janeiro the following February. Manet was immediately struck by the racist structure of Brazilian society: “In this country all the Negroes [Les Nègres] are slaves. This is quite a revolting sight for us. The Negro men wear trousers; occasionally, a linen jacket, but as slaves, they are not allowed to wear shoes. The Negro women are for the most part naked to the waist. Some wear a scarf around their neck that falls over the chest. They are generally ugly; however, I have seen quite a few pretty ones.”7 Although in his eyes Black was not Beautiful, and he made ethnic distinctions in labeling only the whites “Brazilian,” as an adolescent he already indicates awareness of social injustice and race prejudice. He also shows an unexpected political astuteness in writing his father after learning that Louis-Napoléon had been elected president of the Republic: “Try to keep for our return a healthy Republic, for I am very much afraid that Louis-Napoléon is not very republican.”8 His comments attest to the family’s liberal position and support for the moderate Republic, but

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9.2  Edouard Manet, Portrait of M. and Mme Auguste Manet, 1860. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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he accurately expresses pessimism about the new president’s future course of action. In December 1851 Manet would witness the street fighting of the coup d’état, and was even arrested while observing the shelling of residential sections in Paris. After his release, he visited the cemetery of Montmartre with several fellow students to sketch the hundreds of victims laid out for identification. These scenes would haunt him all his life, and he would subsequently seize other opportunities to covertly expose the duplicity and brutality of Napoléon III’s imperialist policies. Manet nevertheless was advantageously positioned in society thanks to his family background and wealth. His independence derived partly from lifelong financial security and partly from his heightened political consciousness. His father, Auguste Manet, descended from a long line of landowners in the countryside northwest of Paris, held a sinecure as magistrate at the court of the Seine, while his mother, née Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, belonged to a family that boasted several career officers and diplomats. By all accounts, the father was rigid and punctilious, and the mother long-suffering though encouraging of her son’s efforts. In addition to Edouard, the first-born, the Manets would bring into the world two other males, Eugène and Gustave, who would serve as surrogates for their older brother in several of his paintings. We get a keen sense of the parental tension in Manet’s double portrait of his parents, begun in 1859 and shown at the Salon of 1861(fig. 9.2). It is a strange and unconventional half-length portrait, where neither parent looks out but averts the gaze of the artist/viewer by glancing downward. The father’s expression is severe and his right hand clenched in a fist, as if in concentrated in thought or profoundly disturbed. The mother seems more visibly anxious as she glances downward absentmindedly while sifting through her basket of fabrics. Neither communicates with the other, but hierarchy is maintained through the position of the woman behind the patriarch and in her diminutive stature. Although psychologically separate they are united visually in unremitting black, relieved only by incidental details like the basketful of colorful fabrics, the blue of the mother’s bonnet ribbon, and the red flash of the father’s Légion d’Honneur. Two years before Manet began his picture Auguste was stricken with paralysis and ultimately forced to retire; he was treated by a specialist edouard manet: man about town

in venereal disease and the records suggest that he suffered from tertiary syphilis. In the midst of this horrendous familial trauma, Manet courageously confronted his sitters with the realist detachment of a Meissonier, a Courbet, a Menzel. Neither he nor his parents could face one another directly, but he solved the problem by deflecting their glances downward. Although a striking image of the couple’s estrangement, the drama as presented without knowledge of the historical background could pass as a tension between the stern male carrying the burden of responsibility and the perplexed spouse straining to be supportive. Manet’s painful struggle to put a proper face on these circumstances while still remaining true to his vision may have influenced his mature ambition to cut through the pretenses of modern society. By the time he painted this portrait, he had already undergone a private trauma of his own involving the entire family that ever after forced him to live a double life.9 While still in his teens, Manet’s musically minded mother hired a young Dutch piano teacher named Suzanne Leenhoff to teach him and Eugène the keyboard basics. Suzanne soon became Edouard’s mistress and on 29 January 1852 gave birth to a son named on the birth certificate Léon-Edouard Koëlla. The child was taken in society for Suzanne’s younger brother Léon Leenhoff, and, until Nancy Locke’s study, it was generally assumed by most specialists that Manet fathered the child. Léon was baptized only in 1855, when Manet served as the child’s godfather. It is curious that even after Manet married Suzanne in a civil ceremony in 1863 he still did not recognize Léon as his son, even though there were legal channels for doing so. Manet certainly cared for the boy, who is statistically the single most frequent subject of his canvases. Manet’s will perhaps hints at the mystery of Léon’s paternity; he left his estate to Suzanne with the proviso that she in turn bequeath it in toto to Léon, noting somewhat cryptically that his brothers should “find these dispositions quite natural.”10 In view of his concern for Léon it seems surprising that he never legitimized him and refused responsibility as the biological father. Nancy Locke makes a convincing case in favor of Auguste Manet as the actual father of the child, and that it was his reputation as a civil judge that the family tried to shield. If Auguste did in fact father Léon, then under the law governing the offspring of adulterous relations Léon could not have been legitimized. Thus the fact that Edouard cared deeply for the child yet never recognized him strongly suggests that Léon was not eligible for legitimation.11 In any case, Manet and his family had to ceaselessly weave a fabric of lies, concealments, and denials that surely shrouded his waking life. It is perhaps this camouflaged existence that explains the conspicuous lack of revealing personal documents that might shed light on the painter’s personality and pictorial intentions. Significantly, Manet exploited his professional activity to work through his secrets and sense of guilt. An early work, The Nymph Surprised, combines two iconographical precedents that would have touched on his

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private anxieties: Susanna and the Elders and the Finding of Moses (fig. 9.3). Antonin Proust, Manet’s boyhood chum and fellow student in Couture’s atelier, informs us in his early recollections that Manet began a large canvas, Moses Saved from the Waters, in his studio on the rue Lavoisier (hence before 1860) which he subsequently destroyed save for only one figure— the nude nymph.12 The model for the nude was none other than Suzanne, whose pose is almost a literal quotation from a lost Rubens painting of Susanna but well known in reproduction. Manet’s projection of the Dutch Suzanne as the biblical “Susanna” in association with one of his cherished heroes from the Low Countries has too many reference points to dismiss it as coincidental, including her Rubensian proportions. In her present state, the “chaste” Suzanne/Susanna stares out at the leering elders whom she subsequently spurns but who try to avenge themselves by publicly accusing her of illicit sex with a young man. She is ultimately “rescued” by the young Daniel, who catches the elders in a lie and metes out death as their punishment. Now if we recall that the matronly Suzanne was two years older than Manet and something of a mother figure, the subject immediately takes on Oedipal implications. The lusting elder in real life who forced his attentions on a vulnerable female is analogously dethroned by the rival son, who rescues the “mother” and preserves her chastity. 9.3  Edouard Manet, The Nymph Surprised, 1859–1861. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.



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9.4  Edouard Manet, La Pêche, 1861–1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The theme of Moses Saved from the Waters is similarly transparent in its relevance to the family’s history: the child Moses is a foundling, rescued on the banks of the Nile by a maidservant (who is prominent in the oil sketch) of the daughter of Pharaoh. The child is then nursed by the biological mother, but ultimately given to the royal princess, who adopts him as her son. This is a narrative about switching places, the role of a servant in the royal household, ambiguous parentage, and a male child raised in ignorance of his true birthright. When we put the two halves of the puzzle together we realize that Manet plunged into tradition to come up with the means to allegorize his intimate liaison with Suzanne and the family trauma. When the attempt at veiling the allusions failed, he destroyed the original canvas in a fit of panic. In an effort to remove it from any associations with Suzanne and Léon, he cut out the nude figure of Suzanne, called it a nymph, and added a leering satyr (eliminated after Manet’s death) in the background foliage. Manet’s mischievous identification of himself and family members in thin allegorical guise, however, did not end there. It may be stated that a mark of his modernity is his self-conscious rivalry with the Old Masters as he invades their archaic world with his private space. An excellent early example is La Pêche (Fishing, fig. 9.4), painted between 1861and 1863, in which Manet represents himself and Suzanne in seventeenth-century Flemish



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costume. Although inspired by two compositions by Rubens, the actual landscape shows the banks of the Seine at Ile Saint-Ouen, near Gennevilliers, where Manet’s family on his father’s side owned property for over two centuries. In this sense, Manet’s outdoor scene is typical of nineteenthcentury landscape, which tended to celebrate rural property, and it seems certain that the extensive panorama hints at the family patrimony. The diminutive figures of Manet and Suzanne appear in the right foreground as actors on a stage, with Manet beckoning with the index finger of his right hand into the distance as he tries to console a disconsolate Suzanne. The heads of both are turned away from the sight of a tiny Léon seated alone on the opposite bank of the river concentrating on his fishing. The river separates the pair from Léon, a gulf emphasized by the conspicuous presence of the fishing boat in the compositional center and anonymous fishermen. Their prominent role in the picture may represent a common play on the title La Pêche, since the verb pêcher, to fish, is a homonym of the verb pécher, to sin.13 On the distant horizon we glimpse a rainbow and church steeple— conspicuous allusions to hope, promise, and a sanctified covenant. On the surface, the painting appears as an allegory of confessed transgression and an expression of wanting to do the right thing. The promise of a bright future through the legacy of the extensive family land holdings may even symbolize the father’s potential reparation. At the same time, the many degrees of separation between the lovers and Léon attest to ambiguous feelings about his place in their future plans. Kept at a safe distance in isolation, the child will have to learn to survive on his own. After the couple married in 1863 they led curious lives, with Manet preferring to dine at his mother’s apartment and leaving Suzanne to the child-raising. Although Proust and others claimed that Manet cared for the boy as a father who indulged his every whim, our main evidence for the connection is the frequency of Léon’s appearance in the artist’s work. In most of his appearances, however, he is seen isolated or in ambiguous circumstances that hint at his provisional social status. It is perhaps noteworthy that Léon’s death notice in 1927 gives the fictitious surname Koëlla recorded on the birth certificate rather than the name Leenhoff, bestowed upon him by Suzanne and Edouard.14 Manet and Couture

Manet’s nautical apprenticeship galvanized his future plans, and by the time he returned in June 1849 knew exactly what he wished to do with the rest of his life. He had been appointed the ship’s art teacher for off-hour activities, and during the voyage managed to compile a portfolio of drawings. Now determined on an artist’s career, he chose as his master Thomas Couture, a painter who had created a sensation at the Salon of 1847 with his Romans of the Decadence and at the time of Manet’s decision was working on the highly publicized Enrollment of the Volunteers. Although Couture never

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9.5  Edouard Manet, Portrait of Antonin Proust, 1855–1856. Národní galerie, Prague. 9.6  Thomas Couture, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1851. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau.

won the coveted academic prize known as the Prix de Rome, he won all the official honors and established an international reputation for his portraiture. He represented to Manet and his generation a refreshing alternative to the tired, outmoded classical tradition still haunting the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Couture’s atelier was located on a street now called rue Victor-Massé, located near the Place Pigalle on the southeastern edge of the Batignolles, a large artists’ quarter where Manet would set up shop for the rest of his career. Manet entered the studio in January 1850 and remained a disciple of the master until the spring of 1856.15 Despite this lengthy apprenticeship many historians would have us believe that Manet remained more or less impervious to Couture’s instruction. In fact, the opposite is true: Manet’s entire career is imbued with the pictorial, philosophical, and social ideals of the master. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Manet’s early debt to Couture is his portrait of his friend and fellow student, Antonin Proust, dating from 1855–1856 when his six-year apprenticeship was coming to a close (fig. 9.5). Its filiation with Couture’s Portrait of a Woman is immediately apparent (fig. 9.6). Although the pitted surface is not as exaggerated in Manet’s picture, the pigment has been similarly harried and spread over the ébauche (underpainting), leaving tiny holes in the encrusted surface texture.



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9.7  Edouard Manet, The Bark of Dante, ca. 1854, after Delacroix. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons. 9.8  Edouard Manet, The Bark of Dante, ca. 1854, after Delacroix. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.



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Proust’s jacket, moreover, has been treated in the master’s typical manner for costume details. Manet’s thick, facile contours and combination of fluid and grainy strokes might easily be mistaken for Couture’s hand. But if a pupil’s production would be expected to betray the teacher’s influence, it should be observed that in this case Manet anticipates his mature work as well: the bravura strokes, the informal and distended contours, and the strong presence of the ébauche persist as permanent features of Manet’s style. Like his master, he sought a delicate balance between thin and thick paint, between summary and labored execution, between broadly swept, untidy brushwork and a well-aimed, precise touch. Manet especially profited from Couture’s programmatic practice of what I call the “sketch-copy,” in which students were encouraged to retrace Old Master processes by broadly replicating a work’s essential structure. Here Couture’s curriculum deviated from the traditional academic requirement of scrupulously finished copies, demonstrating his rejection of the tidily polished surface and instead emphasizing the underlying idea that informed the final product. Significantly, Manet’s earliest known productions are copies of masters like Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Velázquez that affirm Couture’s taste for models of painterly technique. In one instance, Manet made two copies of Delacroix’s The Bark of Dante (see volume 3 in this series), a carefully finished reproduction and a smaller and freer version (figs. 9.7–8). Both were done in the same period and show a conscious application of the generative-executive categories of traditional studio procedure. Although unusual, I believe that in this instance Manet conducted a kind of experiment with a careful copy that he could study at leisure outside the precincts of the Luxembourg while carrying out the freer version. The sketch-copy is essentially a study of Delacroix’s color harmonies and compositional effect, and it is significant that the technique he used is stamped indelibly by Couture’s methods. We know that Manet also copied Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita, for which he probably registered in the Louvre in the edouard manet: man about town

9.9  Edouard Manet, The Infanta Margarita, 1859–1860. Private Collection, United States.



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period 1859–1860.16 The presumed physical absence of this copy has been one of the most vexing lacunae in his oeuvre. Although an excellent contender for the missing picture has been proposed for several years, its lack of provenance and signature has cast a dubious pall over its origins. First published by Anne Coffin Hanson in 1977 in her seminal work Manet and the Modern Tradition, she described it “as the best contestant for the place” of the work long known to have existed but never located and presumed lost or destroyed (fig. 9.9).17 Although she added that it was impossible in the present state of knowledge to firmly identify the picture and consigned it to unknown authorship, she argued that of all the copies after the popular painting that had surfaced over the years this was the one that came closest to approximating the methods, colors, and vivacity of Manet’s style. Since Hanson published the painting the work has been rigorously submitted to stateof-the-art scientific analysis. The outcome of the application of the latest forensic methods by Walter McCrone of the McCrone Institute and Alexander Kossolapov of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, should eradicate whatever remaining reservations art historians and art critics may still hold regarding it. Previously, Hanson and others entertained the possibility of this sketchcopy being a Manet simply on the basis of external appearances and the historical record. Indeed, the internal evidence of The Infanta in favor of a Manet identification—style, paint layer, and physical structure—has never been disputed by the critics and historians, and, now that all the scientific data has been assembled and analyzed, the attribution is assured. There is no need to rehearse the abundant historical data of Manet’s profound admiration for Velázquez that he inherited from Couture; during his trip to Spain in September 1865 he wrote of the Spanish master in rapturous terms, the mere sight of whom seemed a fulfillment of his most cherished pictorial ideals. After registering in the Louvre on 1 July 1859, Manet copied two paintings then attributed to Velázquez, Reunion of the Thirteen Cavaliers, usually dated 1859–1860, and presumably The Infanta Margarita, reportedly executed concurrently with Edgar Degas’s reproduction of the same work in 1859.18 Velázquez’s portrait in the Louvre of the infanta has since 1816 been located in the Salon Carré, and became an object of great interest during the Second Empire at the height of the Spanish revival. Manet did not fail chapter nine

9.10  Edouard Manet, Portrait of Roudier, sanguine drawing, ca. 1860. Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris. 9.11  Thomas Couture, Portrait of a Man, black chalk drawing, ca. 1855. Private Collection, Beauvais.



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to acknowledge this connection in his most provocative Salon display of the 1860s, Olympia; he slyly transferred the pink flower from the head of the innocent Infanta to the head of the brazen courtesan to complicate still further his parodic challenge to tradition. Manet’s paraphrase of The Infanta concentrates on a smaller portion of the actual work in the Louvre, turning what is essentially a three-quarters length figure into a portrait bust that iconically centers the object. What is remarkable in both the drawn and painted copies of his early phase is his tendency to reduce the actual torsos of the originals to primarily head and shoulders—typical of Couture’s drawing style—and to centralize them. Manet’s portrait of Roudier of 1860, for example, showing head and shoulders only of the sitter, could easily pass for Couture’s work (figs. 9.10–11).19 Couture’s formula left its mark on Manet, who continued this practice throughout most of his career, especially noticeable in a series of portrait studies of females in the 1880s, in his drawn portraits of Courbet, Monet, and Edgar Allen Poe, and the etched portrait in profile of Baudelaire (ca. 1862–1865).20 At every stage of his curriculum Couture stressed freshness and purity of color, which he sought to achieve through a minimum of mixing colors and by hitting the canvas with the exact tint he desired without disturbing it afterwards. Rather than disturb it, he preferred to scrape away an unfortunate touch and repaint it later. Although Couture preached a strict adherence to the traditional preparation of a painting with an ébauche, or underpainting, even here he developed his own singular approach in edouard manet: man about town

exploiting it as a positive feature in the definitive work. He permitted the rich red-brown of the earth tone to show through in shaded areas and rough-textured objects, and, at the same time, exposed it in the interests of pictorial expressiveness and freshness of execution. In addition, he dragged over the underpainting with a tone used for brighter areas, giving a greater depth and transparency to the shadows. He also employed the ébauche as a device for simplifying the palette. By giving full authority to the underpainting, he could divide a single tone into a grade series, spreading the pigment and attenuating its viscosity over the ground. This process not only expedited his execution, but imparted an air of spontaneity to it. The play between the canvas texture, thinly covered in the red-brown tone, and heavier impastoed areas added a flickering and luminous quality to the pictorial surface. As the critic Armand Dayot summed up his technique: Couture later used this fine, clear pigment, the colors of which were almost unmixed, in different thicknesses, and by spreading it more or less densely on the ébauche layer that was actively brought into play in the final stage, he obtained delicate half-tints.21

Couture thus employed the ébauche to eliminate extraneous demi-teintes: Why set out to mix special half-tones? However clever you may be, your fleshtints will take on colors that do not belong to them and will look wrong. A half-tint simply means a less bright light, and this you can achieve by a judicious softening of your principal light over the ébauche surface.22

Manet, however, wanted to go even further than his master in eliminating gradations from dark to light, and experimented with methods for achieving more immediate transitions. Couture once asked his opinion on a recently painted portrait, and Manet answered that its color scheme seemed to him too much encumbered by half-tones. Couture replied: “Aha! I know why you say that. You refuse to see the succession of intermediate tones between dark and light.” But, for Manet: Light appeared to the human eye with a unity such that a single tone was sufficient to render it; moreover it was preferable, crude though it might seem, to pass suddenly from light to darkness rather than accumulate features that the eye does not see and that not only weaken the force of light but attenuate the coloring of shadows which it is important to emphasize, for the coloring of the dark areas is not uniform, but extremely varied.23

For Manet, the effect was intimately related to the intensity of light, and the accumulation of demi-teintes only served to diminish this intensity. Light alone was the unifying factor, requiring only a single tone for its execution. In a sense, Manet took the premeditated content out of the aca

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demic method by insisting on the elimination of tones that escaped the vision in a drawing or painting session. This would have significant implications for later independents like the impressionists. Yet Manet’s notion ultimately derives from the master’s instruction. Couture did not wish to reduce his luminosity through the addition of a middle tone, but aimed to preserve its vitality by dragging the same tone across the ébauche surface. Manet went one step further, ultimately eliminating the reddish-brown underpainting and closing the gap between the most brilliant light and the darkest shadow. Nevertheless, both master and pupil shared the same goal: the preservation of the luminosity of the brightest light. The Absinthe Drinker By the end of the 1850s Manet was struggling to emancipate himself from his scholastic years, and his first major independent effort, Le Buveur d’absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker), marked his professional debut (fig. 9.12). A representation of a single iconic figure against a plain background, it could stand as Manet’s urban riposte to Millet’s solitary peasants. Although no longer enrolled in the studio, Manet continued to seek his teacher’s advice and show him work in progress. By his own admission, he prepared the underpainting of this work according to Couture’s recipes, and this is confirmed by the red-brown tonality peeking through in the area of the protagonist’s cloak and the wall behind him. The heavy outlines of his trousers, the warm patchwork in the face and sliver of white collar also attest to Couture’s lingering sway over his pupil. Perhaps intending to ingratiate himself with the master who still possessed official clout, Manet invited him to preview the work in his studio. After viewing the painting, his former teacher unsympathetically informed his disciple of six years: “My friend, the only absinthe drinker here is the painter who produced this insanity.”24 Needless to say, this cruel comment terminated their relationship and, to add insult to injury, the Salon jury of 1859 rejected the work. The derelict creature wrapped in a tattered old cloak and wearing a battered top hat was modeled after a ragpicker and peddler of scrap iron named Colardet whom Manet happened upon in the Louvre and invited to pose in his studio. Colardet belonged to the tribe of colorful urban outcasts attractive to someone of Manet’s age, a sweet-natured but cynical social dropout and con artist seemingly full of wisdom and surprising explanations about the vexing riddles of the universe.25 Existing on the fringes of the modern city and scrounging for castoffs at odd times of the day, such solitary types latched on to idealistic, antibourgeois youths who also prowled the urban environment during off hours seeking alternative lifestyles. The mere fact of the exchange between ragman and dandy in the Louvre suggests a shared sense of culture that collided with the dominant view. These destitute yet appealing characters on the margins of civilized society gave off a nostalgic

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opposite 9.12  Edouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker, 1859. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.



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whiff of “what might have been,” while making light of the pretensions to worldly fame. Manet interpreted the tipsy ragpicker as a streetwise sage: he subsequently grouped The Absinthe Drinker with his series of so-called philosophers, actually vagabonds of one sort or another, in the tradition of Velázquez’s analogous images of beggar-philosophers Menippus and Aesop. Here he may have been inspired by another ragpicker named Christophe, known as “the philosopher” for his sharp tongue and worldly wisdom, but who bitterly insulted passers-by, and from a distance threw a disdainful laugh “whose vibrations echoed in your breast and made you sick.”26 Manet locates his antihero in a shadowy corner remote from his own affable environment, perhaps reflecting contemporary accounts of the ragpicker’s world as a modern-day equivalent of the “hideous and mephitic streets that confined the swarming and sinister Jewish population of the Middle Ages.”27 In addition to the bizarre castoff clothing worn by the ragpicker, Manet identifies him with the trademark, triangular-shaped glass of absinthe at his side and the empty bottle at his feet. These attributes of his “calling” have iconographic significance, and key us to his strange posture. A certain morbid stage of alcoholism, often showing hallucinatory symptoms, was known as absinthisme. In what appears as a half-sitting and half-standing pose, Colardet prepares to rise from his seat on a ledge to perform a dance for his fascinated spectator (presumably the artist). He steps out with his left foot forward, his right dragging behind in a gesture that Fournel described as characteristic of ex-con ragpickers who had tugged a ball and chain.28 Absinthe has liberated him momentarily from his despair, corresponding to the contemporary notion of drink as the primary consolation as well as worst vice of the poor.29 Although Manet’s blatant and unsentimentalized depiction of a modern alcoholic ragpicker offended Couture, the gloomy solitude and shadowy residual romanticism could not have been alien to his sensibility. Manet’s moody treatment, vague background, and symbolic attributes of the absinthe glass and bottle recall analogous traits in Couture’s Love of Gold, Supper after the Masked Ball, Drummer Boy, and the Illness of Pierrot. The gesture of the Drinker has been likened to the aristocrat in the center of The Enrollment of the Volunteers, both of whom engage in a curious dance-like movement. As Michael Fried has pointed out, however, another source of the Manet is Watteau’s Indifférent, no doubt the common source for both master and disciple.30 For Couture, the eighteenth-century aristocratic gesture gave authenticity to his history painting; for Manet, it gave his bum a touch of dandified elegance that contrasted with the drabness of his actual existence. Proust tells us that he was with Manet and Baudelaire in the studio on rue Lavoisier when news of the jury’s rejection reached them. Manet’s one consolation was hearsay that Delacroix, also on the jury, voted to accept the picture. Baudelaire’s admonition confirms Manet’s effort to pander to his master’s taste: “The conclusion is that one has to be oneself.” Although Manet protested the implications of Baudelaire’s suggestion, it edouard manet: man about town

is significant that the poet was standing by at this time to provide moral support. Although ragpicking as an occupation acquired a special mystique in the Parisian imagination, most likely Baudelaire’s “Le Vin des chiffonniers” (The Ragpickers’ Wine) from Les Fleurs du mal (1857), with its intoxicated protagonist “banging his head against the walls like a poet,” inspired Manet’s painting. Set in one of the old faubourgs where ragpickers congregated (perhaps the old Faubourg Saint-Marceau in the vicinity of the Latin Quarter, where chiffonniers flocked), the poem pictures a lurid street lamp gleaming red in a darkened niche while a ragpicker “pours out his heart in glorious projects.” Compensating for his burdensome toil, he dreams impossible schemes: He takes great oaths, dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims, Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy, He is drunk with his own splendid virtues.

Ragpickers return from their hunt as from war “through triumphal arches” magically erected for them, and are greeted with deafening music and shouts, bringing “glory to the love-drunk folks at home.” Baudelaire’s final verse, however, abruptly changes course as he makes the ragpicker run headlong into the reality principle: To lull these wretches’ sloth and drown the hate Of all who mutely die, compassionate, God has created sleep’s oblivion; Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.

Baudelaire perceived drunkenness as both a strategy for the urban poor to make it through the day, and a means for the artist to achieve an exalted state of imaginative insight. The poem’s protagonist shares with Manet’s Absinthe Drinker this dual perception of the ragpicker as a defeated member of society who nevertheless refuses to accept his degradation, relying on alcohol to help him create an alternative universe. Manet’s solitary inebriate rises to the beat of a different drummer and hoofs off his troubles to the plaudits of his charmed audience of one, Manet himself. Manet’s subject for his Salon debut was probably carefully chosen with a view to exploiting the obvious appeal of the type who survived by his wits—what one would now refer to as a “hobohemian.” Hanson reminds us that the Salon of 1859 displayed two ragpicker pictures, and that popular imagery and sociology had elevated the figure into an archetypal occupant of the streets akin to the flâneur, the creative stroller.31 Densely populated urban precincts, modern industrial processes, and consumerist mania gave trash a fresh value, thus increasing the numbers of Parisian ragpickers, who needed nothing more than a sack, a stick with a prong on the end of it (croc

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or crochet), and a lantern to set up shop. Bartering with middlemen of all sorts, they transacted business in the lowest depths of society. But it is especially the double life of the chiffonnier that attracted Manet: the bifurcated existence of the pinched survivalist, on the one hand, and dreamer of impossible schemes, on the other, must have resonated with the painter who for several years had been developing the fine art of camouflage and masquerade. This split in the ragpicker’s personality is signaled by the looming shadow on the wall behind him and his cloaked avatar. According to Fournel, the gesture of brandishing a crook in shadowy haunts gave the ragpicker the air of a “fallen angel.”32 The ragpicker’s costume at any given time constituted a form of disguise, and Manet’s ragpicker sports what once must have been a dashing cape and elegant top hat that were relegated to the dustbin, only to be retrieved and recycled into a reinvented identity. Indeed, the ragpicker’s costume would have mutated daily in accordance with his scavenging of discarded treasures, leading Ewa LajerBurcharth to shrewdly observe that the ragpicker’s secondhand wardrobe sentenced him “to the condition of permanent disguise.”33 We have already seen that Manet’s lifestyle required considerable roleplaying and masquerade, and that his subjects often address these themes. There is an unmistakable link between his social masking and the nature of the regime that governed during the period of his maturation. Of course, at all times and places individuals are called upon to assume different parts in life’s charade and are more or less conscious of performing these parts. The Second Empire is unique in this regard, however, since the ruler himself thoroughly exploited the name and historical renown of the first Napoléon to bolster his domestic standing. Caricaturists had a field day even before the elections of 10 December 1848 depicting Louis-Napoléon wearing his uncle’s trademark costume, and in one jibe at his political campaign a sideshow clown calls upon the electorate to nominate only the costume itself. Louis-Napoléon was also caricatured as Robert-Macaire, the gentlemanly con artist popularized on the stage by the actor Frédérick Lemaître.34 In his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx opens with the unforgettable paraphrase of Hegel’s dictum that all facts and personages of great importance in world history repeat themselves: “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The nephew behaved like other cautious actors in revolutionary crisis, falling back on the spirits of the past, borrowing “from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in the time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.”35 Thus the eerie sense that it was only a supporting cast in an imperial comic opera must have haunted the whole of Second Empire society. One indication that this feeling trickled down into the ranks of the ragpickers is indicated by their own internal social divisions, a sort of send-up of the empty political categories of the day. Their favorite hangout, a cabaret near the barrière at Fontainebleau, was divided hierarchically into three major rooms: ragpickers of the “first class” occupied the space known as

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the Chambre des pairs, the next group the Chambre des députés, and the least attractive room, for the use of the “last class,” was designated the Réunion des vrais prolétaires.36 Although their social construct was a defensive measure against being pigeonholed as “monstrous types” by the dominant classes, it also demonstrates that even the most brutalized sector of the society could step back and perceive itself as participating in the imperial farce. All the sociologies and picturesque narratives of ragpickers stressed their addiction to aromatic drinks and eau-de-vie as relief from a wretched existence driven by rage and revenge fantasies. One source of their revolutionary spleen was the unfair wine tax, whose rates remained constant for the cheapest as well as the most expensive brands, thereby operating as a regressive tax penalty on the poorest segment of the population. It particularly harmed impoverished city dwellers by placing them at the mercy of sleazy cabaret owners in the faubourgs who served adulterated and imitation wines. In Manet’s picture, the sickly, yellowish tint of what was normally green absinthe may allude to such practices. Manet here charges the government with a double standard for rich and for poor, just as Haussmannization privileged the wealthy strata and victimized the lumpenproletariat. During Louis-Napoléon’s presidency, there were several feints in the direction of abolishing the tax, and the unfulfilled promises aroused the indignation of poor urban dweller and peasant alike. On 19 May 1849 the National Assembly abrogated the wine tax as of 1 January 1850, but just ten days before the new law was to go into effect it got cold feet and voted the retention of the tax. To legitimize their apparent vacillation, the National Assembly appointed a committee of inquiry into the justice of the tax retention that promptly rubber-stamped the principle of the regressive tax in its report of 14 June 1851. If, as some observers would have it, the absinthe drinker’s gesture reflects an act of provocation, it would have been aimed at Louis-Napoléon’s broken faith with those who voted him into office. The combination of this spirited dance of defiance and the brooding aura may have contributed to the picture’s rejection in 1859. Manet’s character simply did not live up to its colorful “type,” safely tucked away in the slums and barrières of Paris, but secretly aspired to broader reaches. The arriviste of the Second Empire hardly wished to be reminded of the slippage in the class structure. If mere wealth was an index of social status, then the achievement of this status meant little in the way of superior skills or acumen. The meanest ragpicker might win the lottery and be awarded crossover status in the haut monde. The stereotype of the occupations that in truth attempted to fix and thereby control the dangerous classes through an ideal social structure was seen to be a fiction sustained by bourgeois society. The chiffonnier’s ability to overcome class differences may have taken place solely in fantasy, but the leveling process and social mobility of the Second Empire gave the “rags-to-riches” story a new twist. The movement could also take place in a reverse direction, as in the case of the magistrate’s son who wished to become an artist.

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Manet’s chiffonnier, with his fancy footwork, battered top hat, and threadbare cape, has to be seen as the painter’s counterpart—the obverse of the elegant flâneur. Both scavenge the streets in search of the magic bullet that will transform their lives, although their schedules and relationship to the crowd differ drastically. The act of “chiffonnerie” may be said to constitute the dark side of flânerie. The ragpicker creates narratives out of the flotsam and jetsam of the trash he collects by imagining the prior history of things, while the flâneur spins an analogous tale from the prior histories of the faces in the crowd. Manet’s absinthe drinker therefore operates as the painter’s alter ego, acting the part of a character in an imagined drama. The Boy with the Cherries and The Gamin of Paris The same year that Manet painted the The Absinthe Drinker, he produced another work in a similar vein inspired by Couture’s precedent, The Boy with the Cherries (fig. 9.13). It, too, established a connection with Baudelaire. Couture’s red-brown sauce is once again in evidence, as is the rough impastoed surface that also owes something to their common idol, Chardin. This image inaugurates a series of solitary adolescents (often modeled by Léon) engaged in seemingly innocuous acts modeled after Couture’s allegorical gamins and urchins. Couture’s Falconer and Drummer Boy set the youth in 9.13  Edouard Manet, The Boy with the Cherries, 1859. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.



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a potentially risky situation by identifying him incongruously with the military or a barbarous sport. The child innocently plays his part, oblivious to the destructive potential of the circumstances. Manet’s The Boy with the Cherries and, later, his Soap Bubbles and Youth Peeling a Pear signify the trope of the transient state of human existence. All the accessories hint at the fragility of life on earth and the short-lived happiness associated with youth, steeping the works themselves in a peculiar mood of melancholy and resignation that belie the cryptic smiles and lackadaisical attitudes of the protagonists. Couture’s Drummer Boy, painted in 1857, belongs to the category of images that probably influenced The Boy with the Cherries (fig. 9.14).37 Even the ripe grape clusters dangling overhead invoke Manet’s central motif. Drummer Boy, however, is more overtly propagandistic in conjuring up the popular enthusiasm for the imperial army in the wake of the Crimean War. In this case, the youth has not yet enrolled in the ranks, but his elation at finding the military drum and its accessories leaves no doubt as to his future plans. The poorly clad urchin was interpreted by one critic as an example of the typical Victorian rags-to-riches theme, eminently compatible with 9.14  Thomas Couture, Drummer Boy, 1857. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.



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the ideology of the Second Empire that encouraged the romantic view of success: “Ah! I understand the boy clearly in the process of analyzing him: he smiles at the future does he not, my dear Couture? And he already beats the charge in some imaginary battle, and he will enlist in an army of volunteers, and perhaps he will be in a revolution, he will become a general, a maréchal of France,—and will become rich enough to buy your very expensive painting!”38 Despite the surface message of Drummer Boy, there are a number of disturbing aspects about the picture. The somber backdrop that casts a gloomy aura over the scene contradicts the apparent joy of the gamin. The would-be drummer boy takes up the drumsticks in the ominous shadow of the stacked rifles leaning against the wall—like horrific echoes of the batons. The youth also seems much too pampered and refined for his tattered clothing, thus suggesting costume. The sense of incongruity is heightened by the child’s mawkish smile—hinting at the artist’s own repugnance for the character. Couture’s loathing for his subject is reflected in the contrast between the child’s vacuousness and the degree of naturalism lavished by the artist on the inanimate objects. Just as the idle schoolboy of Couture’s Soap Bubbles wiles away his valuable moments building castles in the air, so the drummer boy, dreaming of military glory, is destined for obliteration by the French military machine. Manet’s The Boy with the Cherries strikes the viewer as more consistent in its portrayal of a coarse, streetwise gamin smiling mischievously over his latest haul. He conforms more directly to the type described in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, who is prey to two passions: hunger and liberty. He continually obsesses about his next meal and his restlessness keeps him on the move. A preadolescent, he is hardened into grownup precocity by the abandonment of uncaring and abusive parents. Like the flâneur, he knows the entire city by heart, its streets, boulevards and passages, and has made a thorough study of the faubourgs, the streets, quays, promenades, and intersections. He attends all the spectacles and celebrations, but his favorite hangout is the stalls of the Funambules. Forced to eke out his existence by hustling on the streets, he develops a variety of survival skills that enable him to perform the duties of apprentice in various crafts. He embodies a mixture of all the vices and virtues and is a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary, not on principle or for personal gain but by a naturally rebellious and independent sensibility.39 The model for Manet’s picture was a street urchin named Alexandre who more or less fit this profile, hired by the painter to clean his brushes and tend to studio chores (fig. 9.15). His gamin’s trademark cap tilted rakishly to one side (“la casquette sur l’oreille”40), the boy looks out poignantly at the spectator as he leans on a ledge fondling a paper wrapper filled with plump red cherries. The rosy-cheeked and ruby-lipped child is identified with the fruit, as in the French expression “être rouge comme une cerise.” Manet must have felt some affinity with the kid, not unlike his sympathetic

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9.15  Le Gamin de Paris, wood engraving. Reproduced in J. Janin, “Le Gamin de Paris,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes

(1853 ed.), 1:107.



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association with Colardet, but here memorializing him at the moment of his triumphal harvest. He was forever pilfering sweets and liqueurs (including Kirschwasser—a cherry brandy?) from Manet’s cabinet, until one day the painter severely reprimanded him for his petty thievery and threatened to send him back to his parents. When Manet returned to the studio later that day, he found that the lad had hung himself from a rope attached to a nail in the ceiling. The incident so unnerved him that he moved to a new location. He subsequently told the story to Baudelaire, who composed a “prose-poem” about the experience and dedicated it to Manet. Entitled “La Corde” (The Rope) and first published in L’Artiste, its core theme, as recounted by the painter-narrator, is the myth of the steadfastness of maternal love. Following the suicide, the thought of having to inform the parents tortures the painter endlessly. At last, he summons sufficient courage to confront them but is horrified to learn that the mother is quite unmoved. “Not a single tear rose from the corner of her eye.” The father, in turn, only comments, “Perhaps it’s better that way after all, as he’d have come to a bad end in any case.” Later, the painter thinks the mother has a change of heart when she returns to recover the rope and the nail—but he discovers that her intention in doing so is to sell these items as souvenirs. Baudelaire’s short tale not only relates the incident but addresses the issue of parenting that weighed so heavily on Manet. The artist in the poem asked the impoverished parents of the gamin to hand him over to his care, essentially stepping in as a surrogate father. He cleans the child, provides him clothes and pocket money, and creates a more congenial environment than the boy’s family hovel. Hence he considered himself in the first instance as a superior parent, but after the reprimand and the suicide he recognized his miscarried effort. His hesitation to appear before the boy’s biological parents is bound up with his sense of failure, and he may have exaggerated the coolness of the parents in the face of the catastrophe as a means of assuaging his own guilt and self-blame. In Manet’s case, the circumstances would inevitably invoke Léon’s ambiguous status and Suzanne’s insistence on relating to the child as a brother, a distance forced upon Manet that may have pressured him into seeking alternative paths to fatherhood. In the story, the artist adores the child’s “lively and alert” appearance and derives much pleasure from his foolish antics. These are the appealing chapter nine

9.16  Edouard Manet, The Fifer, 1866. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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traits of childhood absent in the relationship of Manet and Léon, but vividly portrayed in The Boy with the Cherries. The boy’s pixielike expression, awkward charm, and exultation in the day’s haul display the qualities that attracted the painter in Baudelaire’s short story, and point to what Manet was missing in his actual family entanglements. At the same time, the artist in the story was shocked from time to time to observe the little fellow’s “singular fits of precocious depression”—a sort of presentiment of things to come. In the picture, the somber backdrop and the flaccid silhouette of the child slumped over the ledge lends an air of vulnerability to the urchin reminiscent of Couture’s Drummer Boy. Here I wish to leap ahead chronologically to examine Manet’s painting of 1866, The Fifer, a work that resonates with both the example of the master and his own Boy with the Cherries (fig. 9.16). It may be recalled that the drum and fife most often constituted the field music in the nineteenth century, and that in military tradition they were inseparable instruments. Manet’s model was a “petit troupier” brought to his studio by Major Lejosne of the Imperial Guard. The young fifer in his resplendent uniform exemplified the current revival of Napoleonic flamboyance. The popular enthusiasm for the musicians of the Imperial Guard was shown by the huge crowds that jammed their performance at the Palais de l’Industrie in July 1867. Manet’s image, however, is disturbingly singular in its total extirpation of flag-waving rhetoric.41 As in the Couture, we are confronted with the vulnerable child-soldier whose plump, awkward fingers have not yet developed the resilience required for technical excellence. Manet carried out the theme more effectively than his master through the distracted, almost helpless air on the boy’s face and through the neutral background that isolates the figure like a target in a gunner’s sight. Couture’s gamin has now volunteered as a military mascot, decked out in fancy apparel for the public and reduced to the status of an object like a toy soldier. Considering the conventional presentation of drummer and fifers, the chilling effect of Manet’s image becomes evident and anticipates his peculiar spin on The Execution of Maximilian conceived the following year. Fournel’s gamin of imperial Paris imagines wild military fantasies sparked by the contemporary penchant for martial dramas in popular edouard manet: man about town

theater, swept up not only by chauvinist desire but also by the sheer love of crashing sound, noisome cannon, drum and powder: “All of that goes to his head and intoxicates him like a dose of hashish.” The gamin of Paris craves action and can be found on the barricades or field of combat. “Leave him be in his blue blouse, he’ll be a champion of the next revolution; put him in epaulettes and red pantaloons, he will be an infantryman—or a Zouave.” This remarkable creature, Parisian to the roots, is a living contradiction: The gamin of Paris . . . represents life and death, honor and shame, the ruin and sometimes the prosperity of the great capital; he is the aborted product of progress, of which he is the scourge. We might consider him as the bastardized fruit of a horrible, monstrous adulterous commerce between civilization and barbarism. He is by turn, and sometimes at the same time, work and idleness, peace and war, today the mortal enemy, and without knowing why, of society; tomorrow its heroic champion, always ready to kill himself on a breach and to die in the folds of the first flag that will have seduced his adventurous adolescence.42

Here is a paragraph redolent with relevant references to Manet’s social world, and bridging The Boy with the Cherries and The Fifer. Although the original model for The Fifer was an actual boy trooper, it is likely that Léon—who modeled for so many of Manet’s pictures of the period—posed for the head. Léon, then, the “bastardized fruit” of an adulterous relationship, abandoned by his father and prey to the temptations of the world, is fused in Manet’s imagination with the gamin, The Boy with the Cherries, for whose death Manet felt personally responsible. The sense of parental guilt that he experienced in the two cases he now projects in the form of a visual analogue to the literary panegyrics devoted to the Parisian gamin by contemporary writers (Victor Hugo’s Gavroche in Les Misérables [1862] almost apotheosizes the street urchin) seeking archetypal symbols within the changing city. Many of these writers described the gamin as a pureblooded flâneur, a sort of rudimentary version of themselves who shares their “enthusiastic taste for the spectacles of the boulevard.”43 Baudelaire’s painter-narrator of the prose poem stresses his flânerie as the source of his initial attraction to the boy: “My profession as a painter presses me to scrutinize people’s faces and general appearance that appear on my route—and you know what pleasure we obtain from the faculty that enhances life and makes it more meaningful in our eyes than it is in other people.” Strolling about in the neighborhood of his studio, he frequently noticed the sprightly gamin, who captivated him and who posed for him on several occasions. Thus the street kid, himself a master of the ways and byways of the city, fell within the purview of the flâneur, who made a career from inviting ragpickers, street singers, and urchins encountered in the public space into the privacy of his studio. This amounted to a kind of paternalism—in his case, however, less in the sense of “father knows best” than out of a need for communal love.

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Flânerie and Modernity Antonin Proust reported that Manet embodied the quintessential Parisian flâneur, an archetypal figure achieving near-mythic status in nineteenthcentury accounts of urbanization and modernity. The artist’s artful dodging and camouflaged lifestyle found an outlet in flânerie—the fine art of strolling in Haussmannian space—and would make it central to his thematics. The type had been definitively fixed in the July Monarchy, when the flâneur was characterized as a wholly French creation and Parisian to the core. Only a large city could serve him as the necessary “theater for his unceasing explorations,” and, like the chiffonnier, he had an eye for harvesting “incredible riches from this vast field of observation.” He could be distinguished both from the badaud, a superficial gazer, and the flâneur déguisé, a fraud whose air of superiority and mocking smile betrayed his claim to the title. The ideal flâneur sampled everything—an opera by Meyerbeer, a painting by Ingres, an ode by Hugo—and he could be encountered at all the parks and gardens, the comic operas, the concerts, Sunday sermons, the Funambules, the salons, the puppet show, and everywhere on the streets from the boulevard de Gand to the rue de la Grande Truanderie. He had a special passion for the commedia dell’arte, for Polichinelle and Pierrot, and was a fanatical partisan of Debureau at the Funambules. His quick eye and experience enabled him to read between the lines of the newspaper and police report, and he could dissect the most eloquent speeches of the politicians. A fount of artistic information, the flâneur not only knew the location of every beautiful picture gallery in town but also owned the only existing self-portrait by Raphael.44 In short, he was everything a privileged male intellectual in the Big City aspired to be. According to Fournel, one of the first to aggrandize the flâneur, the life of such an urbane stroller, far from being merely passive, is rich in aesthetic potential, perhaps the most active and fertile in useful results: an intelligent and conscientious stroller [badaud], who scrupulously fulfills his obligations, that is to say, who observes all and remembers all, may play one of the highest roles in the republic of art. This type of person is a mobile and passionate daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and reproduces them, with their changing reflections, the march of progress, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomies of the public esprit, the beliefs, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd.

The flâneur is capable of making great discoveries—after all, it was “in strolling on the ocean [en flânant sur l’Océan] that Christopher Columbus discovered America.” Now there remain “new Americas to discover, in strolling . . . in certain unexplored domains of the Parisian Ocean.” There is a world of experience in marginal corners of Parisian streets open to the

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serious flâneur, who can savor the variations of the barrel-organ, take in the jugglers, acrobats, and hypnotists, and even contemplate the stonebreakers with a degree of admiration.45 Fournel distinguished the simple flâneur or badaud from the authentic version: the former is always self-conscious and guards his individuality, while the latter, “under the influence of spectacle, becomes an impersonal being, no longer a man: he becomes the public, the crowd.”46 Baudelaire’s prose poem “Les Foules” (The Crowds [1861]), a key text in clarifying the commonly used and abused term of flânerie, reiterates this thought: Not everyone is capable of taking a crowd-bath: enjoying crowds is an art; and the only person who can binge on vitality at the expense of human kind is he into whom a fairy infused him at birth with a bent for disguises and masks, hatred of home, and a passion for traveling.

He goes on to state that “multitude and solitude are equal and interchangeable terms for the active and productive poet. Anyone who doesn’t know how to populate his solitude, doesn’t know how to be alone in a bustling crowd.” Next he claims for the poet what his dear friend Manet practiced habitually: The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able, at will, to be both himself and other people. Like those wandering souls seeking a body, he can enter the personality of anyone else, whenever he likes. For him alone, everything is a vacancy; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is because in his view they are not worthy of a visit. The solitary and thoughtful stroller [promeneur] derives a special kind of intoxication from this universal communion. The person who can readily identify with the crowd enjoys ecstatic delights that are forever denied the selfish person locked in a coffer, and the lazy, confined like a mollusk. He adopts every profession as his own, as well as all those joys and miseries that circumstances may present to him.47

Baudelaire here elaborates on his idea of the flâneur, or incognito stroller, already formulated in his influential essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” written about 1860. According to Proust, Baudelaire and Manet were by then close friends and Manet profoundly influenced his thesis.48 Although Baudelaire’s seminal essay conceals Manet’s role in its formulation by using another artist—a reportorial illustrator named Constantin Guys—for his clinical case study, his profile of the “Man of the Crowds” is an ideal match for Manet as well. There Baudelaire amplifies the previously codified notion of the flâneur (a certain type of creative bourgeois idler already typecast in the July Monarchy49) as merely an insightful observer of the urban scene to a productive intelligence actively participating in that scene by documenting it with reference to himself.

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The crowd is [the flâneur’s] element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.50

The flâneur, however, is not content with the passing pleasure but aims at the biggest prize of all: the distillation, from the pageant of the now, of the poetry that can be transmitted to posterity as the legacy of the present. He grasps the quality of “modernity”—the distinguishing traits of the contemporary that will remain the historical residue of the future. Baudelaire then expands on this notion of modernity: By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Every old master had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have come down to us from former generations are clothed in the costume of their own period. They are perfectly harmonious, because everything—from costume and coiffure down to gesture, glance and smile (for each age has a deportment, a glance and a smile of its own)—everything, I say, combines to form a completely viable whole.51

Baudelaire here justifies the independent artist’s rejection of past models in favor of the external life of the present; indeed, one’s originality depends on immersion in the external life of the present, “for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.” Of course, Baudelaire never tells the reader how to accomplish the process of distillation other than to pay attention to overt signs of modernity like costume, deportment, and hairstyles. The reason for this failure of explanation is his belief that the process of distillation is the affair of the genius, and not given to every face in the crowd. Indeed, the painter of modern life, who is also the dandy rising in distinction above the common herd, is the equivalent of the Old Master who managed to extract from his or her era the “other half ” of the contingent, the immutable in the ephemeral. In the end, Baudelaire subscribes to another form of elitist philosophy that rationalizes the advance of the bourgeois modernist to the role of spokesperson for the emerging capitalist era. But what is crucial for our study is Manet’s identification with Baudelaire’s formulation, as well as his dipping for pictorial inspiration into the various categories outlined by the poet in spelling out the subject matter of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin understood the flâneur as a kind of detective on the prowl, searching the physiognomies and gestures of the crowd for clues

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to lifestyle and private fantasies.52 What he had in mind here was the conspiratorial dimension of the creative stroller in a time of repression (Benjamin actually uses the stronger word “terror”), perhaps extrapolating from Baudelaire’s explanation that the modernist/dandy/flâneur is a creature of disorderly transition periods, when “democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall.” At such moments, the dandy/flâneur sees himself as forming a new kind of aristocracy of talent. Baudelaire’s prose poem intimates that it is to gain control of the street that one assumes the guise of a flâneur, disdainfully rationalizing those instances in which he feels excluded as those unworthy of his presence. The flâneur moves against the crowd as a poet composing his words or an artist visualizing a composition, identifying the faceless and anonymous masses with a metaphorical namesake. Like a good mythologizer, he concretizes the unknown for himself and his society; this is more than a form of self-indulgence or self-amusement, but an act of imaginative “crowd control.” Victor Fournel, a self-proclaimed flâneur of the period, confirmed this trait in his examination of passers-by: “Each individual furnishes me, if I wish, with the material of a complicated novel; and, like Cuvier reconstituting an animal from one tooth, and a whole world from one animal, I reconstitute all these scattered lives; I make move, think, and act at my will this theater of automatons whose strings I hold.”53 More importantly for Manet’s developing lifestyle, Baudelaire’s flâneur exploits his assumed anonymity by an ability to put on various disguises and mentally inhabit the bodies of everyone else around him. This role was made to order for Manet, whose ambition to record every Parisian type underscored his need to choreograph society according to a definite scenario. Forced to abide a double life, he compensated for his tentative social status by constantly being on the move and living out a communal existence in public spaces. Like an actor, his identity consisted of multiple guises in which he played everyone except himself. The chance encounter of these types in the street offered the opportunity to orchestrate his own urban drama. The anonymity of the crowd and the monetization of social relations could hide all sorts of personal secrets. This also constituted the mark of his modernity, for it was the erosion of traditional communal solidarity brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and secularization that created the conditions of flânerie. Baudelaire underscores the need for the painter of modern life to seek expeditious technical means to capture the transitory and fleeting events of cosmopolitan existence. The Heraclitean flux of trivial external events demands quick reflexes and speed of execution from the artist, just the opposite of the conventional painter of heroic or religious subjects who seeks the look and feel of perpetuity. Hence creative flânerie is synonymous with the esquissateur—the artist who exploits the non-finito as both an economy of means and as an intrinsic quality of the accelerated tempo of urban experience.54

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Fournel, an astute critic of Haussmannization, summed up the Parisian flâneur in a brilliant passage where he describes the sensations aroused by the new urban experience and the way the flâneur negotiates this experience freely and smoothly. Discussing the creation of the new parks and promenades through industrial artifice, the critic claimed that they were not designed for those who actually pined for rural seclusion and the beauty of nature, but for those who enjoyed solitude in crowds and to whom any work was artistic in proportion to its artificiality. For the true Parisian male the countryside has become “only an affair of custom and genre.” Thus the potted geranium on the balcony amply satisfies his bucolic instincts: He detests the empty spaces where no one is to be seen, where there are no pubs, where one encounters while promenading only water, grass, trees, flowers, and swarms of tiny insects; where one does not know how to kill time. If he rents a villa, he takes care to choose a fashionable location, not far from the railroad. . . . In showing you his garden, he boasts with pride: “The railroad runs past only two steps away and I hear all the trains.” His ultimate dream would be the construction of cities in the country, or the shifting of the country to Paris. The public gardens have been created to respond to this fantasy.55

This witty yet insightful glimpse into the mindset of the flâneur perfectly characterizes Manet and his circle, whose daily routine rotated around the new spaces of leisure. Fournel implies that even the hybrid landscape of the suburb was fast becoming a commodified artifact, exemplified in Manet’s depiction of his property at Gennevilliers in La Pêche with all of its costumed accessories and symbols. His daily social life centered on the boulevards, with their theaters, restaurants, cabarets, and cafés—especially the Café Tortoni on the corner of the rue Taitbout and boulevard des Italiens, where he regularly ate lunch before going for a stroll in the Tuileries gardens, and to which he returned for drinks in the evening. It was within the interstices of the controlled spaces of the Haussmannian grid that the flâneur operated, public spaces that seemed to offer opportunities for the mingling of all the classes but whose advantages were available to the few. Although flânerie could be interpreted as a form of opposition to capitalist production, this type of idling unfolded within the world capitalism created. Rather than resist the system, he had the resources to exploit it and relished his ability to manipulate it to his advantage. For the rest the Haussmannian grid merely structured leisure as an extension of structured work. One way of understanding commodification of life during the Second Empire is to look at our culture’s pervasive spread of the shopping mall. In many ways, the mall is an updated version of the Parisian arcades, the glass-enclosed passageways lined with elegant shops—a hybrid crossing of an interior and a street—that Benjamin defines as the locus of the flâneur’s haunts. We shop, dine out, look at art, and go to the movies in a single

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place. Yet even when enclosed in glass and steel (again analogous to the Parisian arcades) these sites are designed to retain the traditional appearance of promenades, street shops, corner restaurants, and hawkers of ready-toeat snacks. But the spectacle presented to us is only a virtual image: the old mom-and-pop stores have disappeared, and downtown commercial districts have been destroyed while the mall seduces its car-driving customers with vast parking facilities. Tradition has been replaced by a simulacrum subject to endless manipulation, transformed into a theme park whose paradigm is Disneyland. Disneyland is a totally regulated environment that boasts exceptional crowd control; but once inside you can freely glide from one event to another with all the aplomb of the flâneur. Of course, a second look reveals a compulsive cleanliness that belies the behavior of the roving multitude, and through absence of human debris we can glimpse what has been lost. Here there are no homeless, and no signs of poverty other than what can be read into the Pirates’ Cove or Frontierland fantasies. The Second Empire similarly built a structure of nodal points of pleasure that determined the mobility and freedom of the flâneur. Inside the mall and theme park social class seems to be homogenized and rank vanishes; the crowds in the Beverly Hills Mall are not necessarily different from those in less affluent areas. Yet the mall is self-contained and totally private—public protest and even acting up are outlawed. Middle-class flânerie permitted the kind of social mobility required to access the less elitist urban sources of inspiration, but at the same time helped sustain the social hierarchy. Despite the presence of vagabonds, ragpickers, prostitutes, and street performers in Manet’s early works, he reveals his liberal outlook in his paradoxical modes of representing them. His progressivism reduces to “radical chic,” the revelation of trendy, condescending radicalism that best explains the authentic attitude of the flâneur. Like the modern conservative who considers the homeless to be in a state of voluntary and free detachment from civil society, the supposedly liberated flâneur perceived his impecunious subjects as free spirits. Of course, one can imagine here certain traits of identification, as even the privileged independent artist experienced marginalization within the Beaux-Arts system. No longer able to enjoy a stable social role, the independent gravitated to the outcasts of society as part of an extended family. Nevertheless, at day’s end the flâneur returned to his favorite café to mingle with his peers, sip an absinthe, and discuss aesthetics. This retreat to familiarity is perfectly summed up in Concert in the Tuileries, which is in effect a representative lineup of a club of flâneurs analogous to a seventeenth-century Dutch guild portrait (fig. 9.17). Here Manet holds court with top-hatted colleagues and celebrities of the Second Empire like critics Baudelaire, Champfleury, and Gautier, witty journalist Aurélien Scholl, Beaux-Arts ministerial official Baron Taylor, and popular composer of comic opera (opéra bouffe) Jacques Offenbach—all habitués of the

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9.17  Edouard Manet, Concert in the Tuileries, 1862. Trustees of the National Gallery, London.



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boulevards. Despite Manet’s modest positioning of himself at the extreme left edge of the picture, he resembles all the other groupies and dilettantes in comportment and dress and even indulges in a bit of satiric wit in posing as genius in this brilliant company. Sandblad pointed out in his essay on the Concert that Manet assumed the analogous position of his hero Velázquez in the courtly picture in the Louvre then attributed to the Spanish master, The Little Cavaliers, implying that he played an equivalent role in documenting upper-class Second Empire society.56 Since the beholder of the picture is denied the view of the musicians whose concerts took place twice a week in the Tuileries, attention is concentrated on the elegant clique gathered to hear them. They are strung out parallel to the shallow horizontal picture plane for the entire world to see. As with Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans—the image that probably inspired this work—the stated occasion of the picture is only a pretext to display a society in microcosm. Although formally structured by the verticals of the shade trees that relieve the dominant horizontality, the composition projects an improvised look of a lively crowd divided into clusters of individuals engaged in animated conversation. The absence of a strong central focus and the random, casual look resembles journalistic illustration of the type found in the burgeoning illustrated press of the period. Manet may have taken his cue from Courbet’s exploitation of popular imagery to overcome academic constraints, but more likely he followed Baudelaire’s prototype of edouard manet: man about town

the modern artist, Constantin Guys, whose illustrations for the Illustrated London News looked like sketches taken on the fly. Manet certainly completed this work in the studio from outdoor studies, but the final effect is closer to Guys than to Courbet. The combination of the women and their dandified consorts all dressed in the latest fashions, the asymmetrical groupings, and sense of aimless chatter effectively communicates a slice of contemporary life. Significantly, this scene of splendidly dressed people unfolds in the shade of the formal gardens of the imperial palace, a kind of bourgeois shadow of the dazzling court. The establishment of the Second Empire created an explosion in the drapery trade and the world of high fashion. The formation of the new court and the wedding of Napoléon III and Eugénie de Montijo in 1853 sparked an enormous demand among the wealthy classes for beautiful clothes. The emperor’s taste for display and impeccably tailored uniforms and Eugénie’s obsession with etiquette and ceremony galvanized haute couture. The transformation and enlargement of Paris enriched many thousands of entrepreneurs who in turn emulated the social elite in the taste for grandeur. The emergence of the department store in this period also allowed the middle classes to buy readymade clothing at a reasonable price that imitated high fashion. The males wore faultlessly fitting jackets, and the widening skirts of their wives and lovers kept pace with the widening streets. In Manet’s painting, the men and women in his entourage have invaded the imperial precincts to assert their pride of place in the social structure. But I believe that Manet was after bigger game in this taxonomic display of his social circle: what is unfolding in this work is an unmistakable statement on flânerie and its leading exponents. The public gardens of the Tuileries are presented as a site of a regrouping or launching stage of the flâneurs prior to invading the streets of their favorite haunts. The scene actually reverses the standard trope of the stroller in his element in the crowd, for here the crowd comprises almost exclusively the flâneurs themselves. Typically, they observe but never interact with the crowd from which they remain hidden; but now Manet reverses field and submits the flâneurs to the public gaze. No longer acting as single, solitary operatives, they are identified as a corporate body in a specific social and class setting. They have been “outed” so to speak, stripped of their anonymity, their covers blown; a theme of mask and disguise once more hovering dangerously close to the anxieties experienced by Manet every day of his life. The Old Musician The largest and most eccentric picture Manet painted prior to Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia of 1862–1863, The Old Musician is a valedictory to Old Paris and a reminder of the human costs of the New (fig. 9.18). This poor man’s street “concert” reveals the social flip side of the fashionable

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9.18  Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.



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outdoor Concert in the Tuileries. Manet brings together a disparate cast of characters—gypsies, Jews, street urchins, and ragpickers—straight out of the pages of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes57 to perform a pantomime about their common displacement from the demolished slums they once inhabited. It is a kind of tragic “family portrait” of the nomadic flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the outskirts of the city by Haussmann’s program of urban renewal. Inspired in part by Courbet’s L’Atelier, Manet also critiques that painting with his choice of outdoor setting and arrangement of social types. His work is realist in its absence of conventional compositional staging, but it differs from say Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans in that the figures seem less like members of an indivisible community than a ragtag representation of different tribal and caste types tossed together willy-nilly by events beyond their control. Their physical and psychological separation bear witness to the dismantling of picturesque Paris. Despite the absence of an embracive narrative or unifying motif, all of the figures were individually posed in edouard manet: man about town

Manet’s studio at one time or another and thoughtfully positioned in the composition. He brought them in off the streets to test his social and political observations, as proof of the validity of his ideological flânerie. Some of the models Manet employed for his street urchins originated from a mean and sordid ghetto known as La Petite Pologne, home to the most wretched and “dangerous” sector of French society, including the street entertainers, saltimbanques, and every type of desperado surviving on the fringe. Their indigent status and appeal to the popular classes (to whom they often conveyed antigovernment messages) made them especially vulnerable to police regulation and harassment. Haussmann targeted Petite Pologne as a district filled with criminals and subversives, and razed it to make way for the new boulevard Malesherbes.58 Death stalks this devastated wilderness and its victims. In Baudelaire’s prose-poem “La Corde,” the Manet character reflects on the remote part of the city where he rented his studio, “and where considerably grassy areas are still to be found between building sites, I often noticed a boy whose lively and alert appearance at once appealed to me more than any I had seen.” This was Alexandre, the gamin who posed for The Boy with the Cherries, and who would soon take his own life following Manet’s severe rebuke. Although his exact portrait does not appear in The Old Musician, Baudelaire’s protagonist recalled that for pictorial purposes he sometimes turned the boy into “a little gypsy” (petit bohémien) and painted him carrying a “vagabond’s violin.” The small boy standing beside the gypsy violinist with his arm around the “Gilles” character undoubtedly refers to Alexandre, another martyr of modernization. Manet had recently rented a studio on the rue Guyot in the Batignolles district nearby, and observed with rapt fascination the leveling of the terrains and the ruinous appearance caused by the demolitions. Proust expressly associated Manet’s observations of the process with his flânerie, and at every step Manet would point out to is friend the destructive effects on the landscape. In one instance, he called attention to a cedar tree standing isolated in the middle of a ruined garden, its long branches like arms seemingly searching for “its clusters of destroyed flowers.”59 Consistent with his flânerie, Manet brought together familiar Parisian types from the squalid quarters of the metropolis into a dreamlike setting that invokes the spectator’s participation and acknowledgment of their condition in never-never land. The emperor inaugurated the boulevard Malesherbes on 13 August 1861 amid great fanfare, and the ironic contrast between the celebratory space and the wasteland of the victims could not have been more apparent to Manet. That these marginalized urban vagrants, street urchins, and itinerant musicians are cast into a desolate, quasi-rural precinct signifies a fate worse than death, for it means that the sources of their scanty subsistence no longer exist. The seemingly unrelated figures are grouped around a seated musician who has momentarily ceased playing his violin to gaze at the beholder in

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what I read as a questioning expression. He sits on an old suitcase next to a vagrant’s sack that indicates his itinerant status. It is not mere coincidence that he was posed by Jean Lagrène, the leader of a band of gypsies who earned a hand-to-mouth living in the Batignolles district as an organ grinder and artist’s model. The dominant figure in this group, he bears a striking resemblance to Manet, thus serving as a persona for the displaced artist as well. That he is a gathering point for the motley crew in the picture suggests that he offers the bare minimum of aesthetic consolation in this ravaged wasteland. The orphan girl, or “big sister” at the left, burdened with the care of an infant, awaits the musician’s concert as the operational symbol of this needy audience. The bearded old man partially cropped at the far right was posed by Guéroult, the “old Jew with a white beard” mentioned by the artist in his notebook. That he was another familiar neighborhood type is suggested by Henry Tuckerman, an American visitor to Paris in 1867, who encountered at the Théatre des Italiens, “in his old seat . . . the old Jew, with snowy beard and velvet cap—an ancient figure, whose attention showed the hereditary love of music, and whose isolation, even in that temple of Euterpe, marks one the race ‘whose badge is sufferance.’”60 Here the profile of Tuckerman’s “Titianesque” Jew matches the character in Manet’s painting: ancient and venerable, with snowy beard and velvet hat, he is drawn to music, and yet is trapped in utter isolation as an inevitable outcome of his ethnic heritage. These are solid grounds for associating this character with the traditional folk image of the “Wandering Jew”—the sinner who mocked Christ on his way to Golgotha and was condemned to tread the globe until he recognized the divinity of Christ upon his Second Coming. Always out of sync with his times, he trudges through history as a solitary, unloved pariah—the quintessential outcast and symbol of social dislocation. Although Gobineau’s singularly racist Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines appeared in 1853 (if it does not mention Jews, his theory of the decline of the Nordic strain in French culture could be interpreted to include them), the status of the Jewish middle and upper middle classes actually improved during the period of the Second Empire. Notable figures such as the Péreire brothers, founders of the Crédit Mobilier, and Achille Fould, minister of finance, as well as the Rothschilds, played prominent roles in keeping the Second Empire government afloat. Manet himself enjoyed the patronage and friendship of several middle-class Jews, including Charles Ephrussi, Antonin Proust, Zacharie Astruc, and Alphonse Hirsch, and unlike Courbet, his teacher Couture, and several of his colleagues, neither his recorded conversations nor his correspondence reveal the taint of anti-Semitism. Indeed, his depiction of Guéroult shows his understanding that the Jewish millionaire was an exception and that a significant proportion of French Jews lived in impoverished conditions. Even the anti-Semitic Fournel associated the Temple district of the old-clothes merchants—a place where

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even “the inoffensive flâneur” might fear to tread—with the lowest rung of the social ladder: The Temple is appropriately named. What ironic and cruel energy in this denomination borne by a zone of equal turpitude! Here in fact is the temple of rags and scraps, the temple of theft, of chicanery and usury, of the lie, of avarice and profit! Everything there smacks of the Jew, oozing rapacity, exhaling a stench of petty cupidity and shrill haggling. . . . Nothing exists outside, neither sun, nor nature, nor love; life is there in its entirety, harnessed to an implacable cogwheel that grinds it to the point of suffocation.61

Manet, on the other hand, by depicting the Jew as victim sharing the same mean conditions as the other refugees in his composition, demonstrates that he still retained his youthful idealism expressed in his observations of the Brazilian slaves. Manet’s image of the Wandering Jew assumes a positive connotation as a symbol of perennial suffering. This is Manet’s riposte to Courbet’s swaggering rabbi at the far left of L’Atelier who tightly clasps his jewelry box and mutters to himself that he has the best of it. It is crucial that Manet reproduces The Absinthe Drinker in the composition, positioning the ragpicker—this time in broad daylight—behind the gypsy violinist. His incorporation of this figure is not only an indication of the importance he attached to the work, but also that the motif of the dancing figure who tries to surmount his subterranean privation is relevant to the central theme of The Old Musician. In their wretchedness, these homeless vagabonds behave analogously to slaves on a Southern plantation—who sang and danced to improvised music as a strategy for survival. Apologists for slavery always pointed to these actions as evidence of their contentment, but, as the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass retorted: “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. . . . The singing of a man cast away on a desert island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”62 The curious presence of the gamin in Pierrot costume is perhaps the one real clue we have to the connection between this ragtag group of vagabonds, clochards, street musicians, orphans, and mountebanks and Haussmann’s demolitions.63 The boulevard du Temple, torn up the very year the picture was painted, was once the scene of lively street festivities and theaters of every kind, including the Théâtre des Funambules—the French equivalent of the commedia dell’arte with its star Debureau fils—which gave its farewell performance on 15 July 1862. Fournel’s dithyramb on the gamins of Paris stressed their fanatical love of Debureau, who, at the first sign of Pierrot, “hurled themselves down from the third gallery to the stage . . . only to kiss the tip of his shoe.”64 In addition to the professionals, the boulevard du Temple swarmed with pierrots and pierettes, harlequins and columbines during the festive celebrations of the last three days of the Paris

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9.19  Charles Monginot, Caught in the Act, 1864. Reproduced in L’Illustration, 1864.

Carnival. Thus the vanished tradition of the boulevard du Temple—one of the favorite haunts of the flâneur and the gamin—is symbolized by the lost waif in the costume of Pierrot. It should also be noted that Couture began a major series of Harlequin and Pierrot during the late years of Manet’s apprenticeship in his studio, and such a major shift in the direction of his work would have decisively affected his students. Charles Monginot, a Couture disciple and friend of Manet who lent the latter the sword for Child with a Sword, painted a picture for the 1864 Salon showing an adolescent in a Pierrot costume confronting the spectator (fig. 9.19). Although Monginot may have derived the idea from Manet, it is more likely that the two shared the master’s legacy of using characters from the Funambules to comment on topical events. The gamin’s clear reference to Watteau’s Gilles further calls our attention to the abundant ink spilled in Manet criticism to explain the artist’s numerous borrowings from the Old Masters in The Old Musician. In addition to Watteau for the gamin, the pose of the violinist has been modeled on a Roman replica of a Hellenistic statuette representing the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos, the orphan girl with the infant is based on a picture by Puvis de Chavannes, and the composition itself has been likened to Velázquez’s Drinkers and a painting by one of the Le Nain brothers, Louis Le Nain’s Halt of the Horseman. A creative artist’s motivation for using sources of the Old Masters derives mainly from the need to legitimize experimental activity and ground it in the original formal solutions of the past. In the case of The Old Musician, Manet further deployed his numerous Old Master references to lend his outcasts an aura of gravity and dignity associated with the art of the museums. His borrowings expose through contrast the dark side of Haussmannian fallout, and, at the same time, reveal the human dimension missing from the “types” described in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. The Street Singer Manet’s fascination and sympathy with itinerant musicians is seen again in his painting of The Street Singer, first exhibited at the Galerie Martinet in 1863 with several other canvases, including The Gypsies and The Old Musician (fig. 9.20). Proust mentioned their encounter with the street singer just after discussing Manet’s flânerie in the zone of demolitions for the boulevard Malesherbes. A young woman suddenly exited a dingy cabaret, lifting



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her skirt and gripping her guitar at the same moment. Manet went straight up to her and asked her to pose for him in his studio. She laughed in refusing, but the painter had recourse to his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, who subsequently posed for the picture.65 In the painting, he added a few details unnoticed by Proust: as the woman strides into the street she cradles a wrapper of loose cherries in the crook of her left arm while grabbing a bite with her right hand. Her left arm and hand seem overburdened by the multiple tasks of lifting the skirt, clutching the guitar, and cradling the bunch of cherries. Behind her, the swinging green doors of the sleazy joint are freeze-framed in an open position as we catch a glimpse in the interior of three or four customers seated at a table, hats hanging on the wall (except for the top hat worn by one of them), and the rear of a standing waiter wearing the familiar white waist apron. The entire image—figure and background—is cinematically conceived to convey the flâneur’s random, instantaneous capture of a person in motion.



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opposite 9.20  Edouard Manet, The Street Singer, ca. 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 9.21  Frédéric Bazille, The Italian Street Singer, 1866. Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

What previous scholars have emphasized as a movement of transition and instantaneity is the flâneur’s insight into the continuum of a particular social type’s existence other than the specific occupational stance that fixed the figure in the popular imagination. No one could have cared less about a street singer when not at her job, and it is to Manet’s credit that he allows us a glimpse into the everyday exigencies of the performer and the pressures she endured behind the scenes. The street singer is no notorious celebrity, but a survivalist on society’s periphery like the protagonists of The Old Musician. We see her in a rush to return to work, stopping only for a moment to relieve herself and grab a snack, signs of the moment-to-moment stress of her occupation. This is no romantic or anecdotal image of a chanteuse des rues, but a poignant glimpse into a harried life. The comma-like shadows at the top of the nose (misread in the nineteenth-century as eyebrows slipping from the horizontal position!) accentuate her anxious look. Manet’s unique vision is more easily grasped when we compare his street singer with the same subject by Frédéric Bazille, an emerging impressionist whose Italian Street Singer was painted seven years later, in 1869 (fig. 9.21). Standing isolated in the street at the vertex of a V-shaped intersection that falls away in two directions, she pauses in her performance as she gazes upward with a fierce expression at some malicious lookeron. Her unfashionable hat and ragtag outfit lend her a pathetic air, while all around her passers-by avoid her like the plague. Bazille, younger than Manet, nevertheless exploits the contemporary taste for sentimentalism and pathos in the treatment of the subject; although Manet’s female also sports an unfashionable hat and slovenly reveals the bottom of her petticoat, his studious avoidance of anecdote and pathos grants her a degree of humanity that raises it above anecdote. Just as he refuses the stereotype, so he refuses to be a mere observer—actively seeking displaced soul mates in Haussmann’s Paris. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe There is a dialectical relationship between the male flâneur and the female prostitute in Second Empire France, both déclassé (though starting out from opposite ends of the social ladder), living on the edge, and preoccupied with selling themselves in the marketplace. In the arcades, the new department stores, the parks, the Folies-Bergère, and the corner café, and on the grand boulevards built by Haussmann, the loitering dandy could meet his dressy sister, “the street-walker.”66 Manet’s flânerie involved a variety of erotic experiences on the street, and themes of prostitution preoccupied him throughout his career. Like Manet’s own subterfuge, the prostitute had to camouflage her social relations in public spaces by playing the role of another. The infamous Déjeuner sur l’herbe, originally entitled Le Bain or The Bath, for example, is a distinct send-up of one aspect of Second Empire



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social life as well as a modernized version of the high art trope of classical nudity as constitutive of the traditional ideal (fig. 9.22).67 It was his largest effort to date, a genre theme done on the scale of history painting reminiscent of Courbet’s infamous blockbusters. Rejected by the Salon jury of 1863, Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit this, and two other refused paintings, in the equally notorious Salon des Refusés. The official jury had been particularly severe that year, accepting less than half of the 5,000 paintings submitted. A storm of protest followed, and Napoléon III, trying to appear as an impartial judge, decided to investigate the circumstances himself. As a result, he commanded that an exhibition be held outside the official Salon to display the rejected works and let the public decide for itself. This Salon des Refusés was attended by a record seven thousand visitors the first day, and the public and critical outcry in response to Manet’s work made him a hero to the younger generation that met at the Café Guerbois on the rue des Batignolles.



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opposite 9.22  Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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Manet’s “shocking” composition nevertheless came with solid credentials. It reworked the early sixteenth-century painting by Giorgione entitled Pastoral Concert, where two musicians clothed in typical Renaissance costume squat in an idyllic landscape, blissfully unaware of the presence of two nude females in the foreground. The women haunt their reveries as unseen muses, but do not share their world and avoid the glances of the spectator from whom they modestly avert their gaze, if not their naked flesh. As already shown, Manet had copied several celebrated works in the Louvre, including The Infanta of Velázquez, testing his personal talent against traditional rivals by modernizing their conventions. In addition to the Giorgione, Manet borrowed figural motifs from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s lost Judgment of Paris, a deliberate plagiarism recognized in his own time and hardly meant to be disguised. It operated like a cookie cutout whose disguised but felt presence added a ghostly complexion to the picture. Manet appropriated the three figures in the lower right of the engraving—a water nymph and two river gods who sit idly by a riverbank during the fateful selection of the fairest goddess in creation and the ruinous consequences of the apple of discord. It is these figures that Manet transformed into the brazen naked female who stares openly at the spectator, and her two male student companions dressed to the nines in the latest Parisian fashion. By using Renaissance sources and ancient allusions for his scene of contemporary French society, Manet created a kind of opéra bouffe on the order of Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in Hades, 1858). Offenbach’s controversial comic opera satirized Olympian gods, and was attacked by Jules Janin in the Journal des débats for profaning “glorious antiquity, in a spirit of irreverence that borders on blasphemy.” Boredom and the attempt to alleviate it is a major motif of the operetta: in the first act, the audience learns that Orpheus and Eurydice have grown bored with each other, but while she begs the gods for deliverance from her husband, he insists they cannot part for fear of offending Public Opinion (allegorically depicted as a character in the piece). Meanwhile, Jupiter is tired of Mount Olympus, with its continual diet of nectar and ambrosia. Everyone descends into Hades to escape the tedium of their existence, where a bacchanalian revel engages the gods, goddesses, and nymphs. This is followed first by a staid minuet and then by an abandoned cancan—an electrifying contrast that shocked and startled contemporary audiences. In addition, gods wore carnival costume and cracked jokes in the idiom of the boulevards.68 Both Offenbach’s comic opera and Manet’s painting represented an admixture of classical setting and characters with Second Empire frivolities that mocked antiquity and added up to a stinging satirical commentary on the pretensions of contemporary moral codes. The males are peculiarly disengaged from each other and from the naked female in their midst. Now in both the Giorgione and the Marcantonio Raimondi there is a curious narratival disjunction in the interaction of edouard manet: man about town

Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

the protagonists: in the first neither the females nor the males appear to be cognizant of one another, and in the second the nymph and river gods are seemingly ignorant of the results of the central action. It is precisely this sense of disjunction that Manet aimed to impart to his painting; in its modernized paraphrase it conveys an understated deadpan that became the painter’s cosmopolitan trademark. What today one calls “cool,” and in Manet’s time “blasé,” points to the urban sophisticate’s capacity to take everything in stride and never be caught unawares even by the most unexpected events. The flâneurs in the picture appear not only blasé but also bored out of their minds; they evidently have failed to overcome their world-weariness by a sudden plunge into illicit pleasure. Manet transformed the Giorgione dreaminess into Second Empire aimlessness, and that is why the work seems to lack any kind of resolution despite its vivid focus on the nude. He deliberately created two registers in conflict with one another, one in which there is a kind of Renaissance reverie and another that conveys a sense of instantaneous impression belonging to the modern world that does violence to the reverie. These two registers are also marked by the hybridized landscape, the foreground of which is rendered in a highly naturalistic style whereas the background has the look of a painted studio backdrop.69 Visitors to the Salon of 1863 knew that bathing areas along the Seine were separated by gender, and that absolute nudity was prohibited.70 But there were numerous hidden alcoves on the riverbank and infractions of the rule must have been commonplace (fig. 9.23). After all, there was no



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opposite 9.23  Charles de Marville, Scene at the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, albumen, ca. 1865. J. Paul

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law forbidding mixed-sex picnicking, and who was there to stop someone from suddenly taking a dip? Manet’s portrayal of the bizarre foursome is meant to point up the inconsistency between Second Empire legality and Second Empire reality. The men in black try to preserve appearances by tuning out the women after the manner of the males in the Giorgione, as if to pretend that de jure separation of the sexes actually existed, while the viewer cannot miss the actual de facto circumstances. The gesturing male sprawling beside the seated bather tries to carry on normal conversation with his inattentive companion, who nevertheless studiously avoids any eye contact with the principal nude. She breaks this façade of false decorum and betrays its underlying moral hypocrisy by refusing to be tuned out in compliance with the double standard. She turns up the heat in inverse proportion to the blithe behavior of her male companions. She, in fact, carries the punch line: she looks out at the beholder with a knowing glance, privy to the artist’s inside joke. This is typical of nineteenth-century genre, as seen in works by the Americans William Sidney Mount and Lilly Martin Spencer and the French Courbet, where a figure looks out slyly at the spectator. Although feminist writers certainly have a point in emphasizing her total absence of shamefulness and confrontational gesture, I believe that what is operative in Déjeuner, as well as in the notorious Olympia, is not the liberated female returning the male gaze but the knowing female winking at both the knowing female and male spectators. Unlike the marginal figures in typical genre who betray the joke, the brightly lit seated nude is a commanding presence who monopolizes the scene and disrupts the pretense. Manet also had access to a modern source that had previously exploited the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving, an 1861 lithograph by Eugène Guérard entitled Long Live Wine, Long Live the Juice Divine, a bawdy picnic scene featuring a reclining male in the position of the river god at the right of the engraving (fig. 9.24).71 Although all the figures are clothed in the lithograph, what is crucial here is the attempt to smuggle the subject matter of high art into popular culture, a subversion consistently practiced by Manet and a hallmark of his modernism. Manet’s picnic scene strips Guérard’s of its vulgarity and makes more apparent its classical sources, again attesting to a subtler and more nuanced approach that nevertheless brings down magisterial art a notch or two in favor of a fresh bourgeois synthesis. Part of the joke also relates to the demi-monde of Second Empire society, the transgression of the borders between high and low society for which Manet sought a visual expression. As we will see in the study of Olympia, a hierarchical ranking existed in the netherworld: we may distinguish more or less precisely grisettes at one end of the scale and the high-paid courtesan at the other. The grisette was a lower-class working woman who attached herself to students and artists and incarnated a kind of free spirit. Neither venal nor ambitious, she represented the courtesan of the people.72 Often, students would pick up grisettes at one of the gates to the city for a tryst in

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9.24  Eugène Guérard, Long Live Wine, Long Live the Juice Divine, lithograph, 1861. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. 9.25  A. Morlon, Boating Party on the Banks of the Seine, lithograph, 1860. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

the park, an event which I believe is being enacted in the Manet Déjeuner. These scenes were reenacted often enough in popular illustration, as in the Guérard lithograph where fully clothed couples could be seen cavorting on the grass (fig. 9.25).73 The grisette (so-called for the plainness of her costume) was a familiar type associated with the streets and flânerie; she was seen as mother and

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sister to the gamin, who similarly knew every nook and cranny of the city.74 Often, they came from the ranks of the street entertainers and female ragpickers. Earlier, I noted that the prostitute was the female corollary of the flâneur, the “street-walker” who sized up the (male) crowd on her daily rounds. Significantly, all the categories of prostitute in nineteenth-century France were identified with either specific streets or quartiers in Paris: grisettes populated the rue Vivienne and populating the rue Bréda in the vicinity of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette were the lorettes. Around 1840 the term lorette entered the literary vocabulary for a certain type of venal prostitute. It was invented by the journalist Nestor Roqueplan to describe certain women in the quartier located around the church that provided the name. Modest and with a slight education and fortune, the lorettes cohabited with every level of society and were sympathetically treated in the literature. The rich bourgeois in quest of gallant adventures looked for this special type of prostitute, whose venality was masked by playing at love. Zola’s Nana and other novels in the Rougon-Macquart series feature the various levels of prostitution, aping Manet’s visual attempts to show the importance of the role of the prostitute in modern life. At the high end of the hierarchical ranking in the demi-monde was the elegant courtesan, a term already rich in historical associations and connoting a female prostitute who enjoyed a certain degree of power and prestige. Elegant prostitution flourished with the expansion of industrialization that produced speculation and quick fortunes which in turn encouraged an epicurean existence. Here I wish to stress the hierarchical divisions of the practice as well as their sociological categories exploited by the prefecture of police to regulate prostitution in an attempt to monitor venereal disease. Of course, only women were held accountable for spreading disease; their clients were never liable. Manet’s Déjeuner and Olympia attest to his recognition of these hierarchical categories and divisions, and demonstrate his commitment to a flâneur’s sociology of Paris. During the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, prostitution was classified as either public or clandestine, registered or unregistered.75 The registered prostitute (fille soumise) was regularly submitted to an examination by police agents, while the unregistered (fille insoumise) or clandestine prostitute escaped all surveillance. The grisette fell under the division of the public prostitute and was examined twice a month; she was required to dress decently and forbidden to directly solicit passers-by in public settings. She worked part-time as a seamstress, flower seller, or model, but was kept by a lover who paid for her room and board. Law and medical students were clients of choice for this group of women, accustomed to receive “only men of good company, and who themselves are endowed with a high intelligence.”76 Significantly, she often worked as an artist’s model and performed various roles for the history painter. In his chapter on the grisette, Janin creates an imaginary case study involving an interaction between himself as an

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artist and his grisette/model “Jenny.” Wishing her to pose for him, he imagines her morally transformed in the heady confines of the studio, where he can purify her in paint and surround her with poetry. The artist can make her a queen, a noble lady, even the Holy Virgin, and if she falls into the right pose he can even render her the mistress of Raphael and Rubens! Finally, he envisions the definitive tableau on display, but bemoans the lack of appreciation for her role in its success while the artist gets all the credit: “They see the picture: Isn’t this woman beautiful! What a look! What a hand! What vehement inspiration in that head! They carry the artist to the clouds, shower him with gold and honors; but there is nothing for poor Jenny: yet it’s Jenny who made the picture!”77 This sentimentalized image of the grisette and romanticized view of painting was rejected by Manet, but he glommed on to the idea of crediting the female model with her part in the creative process. He achieved this by the shocking confrontation of the nude with the spectator, a nude staring back without the slightest sense of shame, her picnic basket overturned and spilling out such erotic goodies as oysters, cherries, figs, peaches, and a silver flask, and piled up beside her a heap of fashionable clothing as if to emphasize her status as undressed, naked, as opposed to nude. She is soumise, but insouciant, sexually active, and totally up front about it. The males fit the conventional profile of the grisette’s lovers—Manet’s brothers Eugène Manet and Gustave, who posed for the male figures, had been law students, and the tasseled cap worn by the reclining figure was the popular student faluche. Manet, however, insisted on the honest depiction of the grisette as both naked and self-possessed, with a fresh, candid glance, and in the process deconstructed the bohemian idealization of the grisette as totally beholden to male fantasies about self-sacrificing whores. He must have shared this narratival gambit with the model for the central nude herself, Victorine Meurent, who had previously posed for The Street Singer, and sensed the importance Manet assigned to her part in the evolution of his work. She wrote the recently widowed Suzanne Manet in August 1883 about her special agreement with the painter: You doubtless know that I posed for a large portion of his paintings, notably for Olympia, his masterpiece. M. Manet was concerned about me and often said that if he sold his pictures he would set aside a gratuity for me. I was young then, and carefree. I left for America. When I returned, M. Manet, who had sold a large number of pictures to M. Faure, told me that a share of that was mine. I refused, thanking him warmly, and added that when I could no longer pose I would remind him of his promise. That time has come sooner than expected.78

Manet’s expressed obligations to Meurent suggest some mutually shared idea of her productive participation in the history of his work. That he was willing to set aside a portion of the purchase by the noted opera star and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure—the first owner of Déjeuner sur l’herbe

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suggests his willingness to also share the credit of his success with her. It is this openness in their relationship that constitutes the thematics of the painting and unravels its riddle. The painting is a statement about “truth” in naturalist painting—and the series of contradictions within the work act as a catalyst for revealing it. Proust recalled that on the Sunday prior to Manet’s beginning the picture, the two of them were at Argenteuil watching the passing white sails striking a brilliant note against the deep blue waters. Some women were bathing, and Manet’s eye was fixed on the flesh of those leaving the water. “I’m told,” he said to me, “that I must do a nude. Very well, I’m going to make them one. Back in our studio days, I copied Giorgione’s women, the women with the musicians. That’s a dark picture. The background has retreated. I intend to redo it, and do it in the transparency of the atmosphere, with figures like those you see over there.” Manet then confessed his appreciation of Courbet’s example: “There’s something very French about that master painter—it goes without saying, we in France have a basic honesty that always brings us back to the truth, in spite of all the acrobatic tours de force. Look at the Le Nains, the Watteaus, the Chardins, David himself. What a feeling for the truth!”79 Manet’s method of achieving his brand of truth was to put into conflict tradition and modernity, the patina of the past and the light and transparency of the present, the nude of the Old Masters and the honest-to-goodness naked grisette of contemporary Paris. Meanwhile, “the acrobatic tours de force” went on unabated in the Salons sustained by Napoléon III’s perpetual maneuvering to keep the country in a unceasing state of anxiety and block opportunities for cool reflection. When invited to view the Salon des Refusés, he stopped for a long time in front of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe before declaring it offensive to good taste. Yet the scandalous events of the Court revealed that the boundaries between the demi-monde and the respectable fashionable world had all but evaporated. Offenbach’s Orpheus in Hades made contemporary allusions to the current regime through the character of Jupiter, who eyed every pretty woman in the operetta, while his wife, Juno, was consumed with jealousy, and the Jovian court on Mount Olympus followed the example of the master. The emperor’s various mistresses included several of the empress’ ladies-in-waiting, all of whom wore the latest fashions. Winterhalter’s famous 1855 group portrait of the Empress Eugénie and her ladies-in-waiting is staged in a park setting reminiscent of the artificial backdrop of the Déjeuner (fig. 9.26). In both pictures, the seated figures form a V-shaped accent that aligns itself with the clearing in the woods leading to a vista of the bright sky. The woman seated to the right of the empress rests her head on her hand like the naked female in Déjeuner, and various costume accessories like the beribboned straw hat and still-life details in the foregrounds of both suggest a more than coincidental affinity. In the Déjeuner, the woman has disrobed her fashionable summer garments and piled them at her side, suggesting a transition from a clothed state to an undressed state.

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9.26  Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies-in-Waiting, 1855.

Musée National du Château, Compiègne.



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Just the reverse is the Winterhalter, where the skirts (perhaps held by wired petticoats) are depicted so copiously as to dominate the pictorial space. The width of Second Empire skirts intimated the wealth and status of the wearer and/or her sugar daddy: the wealthier the owner the wider became its circumference and the more fabric required to cover it. Ultimately, the perfected crinoline—a light metal or whalebone cage of horizontal hoops bound by curved ribs—revealed the razzle-dazzle of spectacle dear to the imperial agenda. In this picture, Eugénie wears a dress from the Maison Gagelin and designed by the haute couturier Charles Frederick Worth.80 The empress not only displayed the latest fashions herself but wanted to be surrounded by beautiful, well-dressed ladies-in-waiting who showed off the court in its best light. To the left of the empress is the princesse d’Essling, grand maîtresse; the baronne de Pierres and the vicomtesse de Lezay-Marnésia, dames du palais; to the right, the duchesse de Bassano, dame d’honneur; the comtesse de Montebello, the baronne de Malaret, the marquise de Las Marismas, and the marquise de la Tour-Marbourg, dames du palais. Mérimée noted: “The portrait of the Empress by Winterhalter is detestable in my opinion, but nothing must be said about it to the court. It is a troop of tarts in a garden, all dolled up, with petty affected looks. It could be used as a dance hall signboard for the Bal Mabille.”81 Mérimée’s comparison of the scene with the Bal Mabille, a public dance arena, is telling: a famous trysting place for encounters with grisettes and lorettes, its notorious meeting ground and the wild gyrations of its participants were dubbed by conservatives as obscene. Similarly, critics were reminded of Bréda—the street where lorettes congregated—and of the Closerie de Lilas, chapter nine

another popular dance hall, when viewing the Manet.82 Mérimée’s description of the women as “tarts” further alludes to their role as sexual playmates of the emperor. Hence the copious skirts simultaneously conceal and reveal the truth of the empress’s entourage—an official version of Barbizon woodland eroticism. Thus Déjeuner parodies the Winterhalter, unmasking the pretensions of the court while disguising Manet’s own stratagem with an ingenious twist of Renaissance conventions. The central female protagonist mocks the ladies-in-waiting by undressing in a lush woodland site and flaunting her nudity as a natural, matter-of-fact gesture. While in the Winterhalter all the women avert their gaze from the spectator, Manet’s protagonist looks directly out at you. She throws off all constraints, including the bothersome skirt that encumbered female movements. But her look is not brazen or confrontational as often stated; she looks directly outward but with a somewhat quizzical, ironical look. Salon des Refusés

Manet’s controversial picture has to be understood as a display in an already overdetermined environment—the Salon des Refusés of 1863. This event may well represent the most decisive institutional development in the progress of modern art, serving as the model for all subsequent independent and counter-Establishment shows. It marked the official sanction of the artist’s right to demonstrate freely the fruits of his or her labor without regard to stylistic classification. It further implied that freedom of exhibition was inextricably linked to freedom of pictorial expression. The refusés—especially as represented by Manet and Whistler and the future impressionists—celebrated qualities of spontaneity and originality that critics then perceived as incompleteness. Organized by a conservative jury to accommodate the numbers of rejected painters, the Salon des Refusés was the first government alternative to the official salon. The timing was strategic: the government was launching its so-called “Liberal Empire” phase, trying to win support of moderates to offset losses on both Left and Right. Renewed republican activity and Catholic censure of his forays into Italy induced the emperor to appeal to the center. In acceding to the demand for an alternative exhibition to showcase the rejectees, however, the government deliberately framed the exhibition to appear as public entertainment. Initially, the surintendant des Beaux-Arts, Nieuwerkerke, left the spurned artists the option of withdrawing their works from the Salon des Refusés—an ingenious attempt to neutralize to some extent the impact of the radical institution. Over six hundred works were withdrawn—undoubtedly by those very artists who best exemplified the arbitrariness of the jury’s verdict. Nieuwerkerke exploited their fear of ridicule by creating a risky public situation and possible humiliation for those who still aspired

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to official honors. The jury itself invited public derision and took pains to show what they considered the worst pictures in the most conspicuous places. The administration could thus appear liberal, while sustaining the aristocratic concept of the Salon by isolating and heaping ridicule on the rejectees. The scheme, however, backfired: in allowing the spurned artists to exhibit under the official aegis, the administration provided them with a conspicuous and highly publicized venue. At the same time, there appeared among the rejected artists a sufficient number of realists and naturalists to constitute a kind of “school”—a coherent trend which could be identified by the public.83 Although the Salon des Refusés proved to be an agglomeration of disparate examples, the vivid presence of the independents gave it the cast of a unified show revealing characteristic features. The jury’s systematic exclusion of the radical realists and naturalists now appeared as part of a conspiratorial design. The radical critic Théophile Thoré drew the following conclusion from the Salon des Refusés: “We can . . . perceive . . . despite the current indifference to the art, that there is in painting two hostile directions, that perpetuate, in other terms, the ardent battle between the Classics and the Romantics, or, if you wish, between the conservatives and the innovators, tradition and originality.”84 Another critic wrote of the Refusés: “Singular school, isn’t it? Where there is neither master nor student, and whose only principles are independence, sincerity, and individualism!”85 Visual evidence for the sense of fraternity among the younger generation of independents and the elevating of Manet to a leadership position is seen in the work of Fantin-Latour, an artist who developed a tamer version of the new style and, significantly, exhibited in both the official Salon and the Salon des Refusés. We have already looked at his elegant portrayal of Manet, and in two major group portraits of the decade he documented the communal participation and leadership position of Manet. The first, Homage to Delacroix (1863–1864), initially sprang from a desire to memorialize the older painter, who died on 13 August 1863, and rectify the lack of official recognition at his funeral, but in the end was exploited as a pretext for bringing together and celebrating the youthful members of the new movement (fig. 9.27).86 That Delacroix is only the pretext rather than the central theme is seen in the indifference of the group to his portrait; they casually turn their back on it and face the spectator as if in possession of some piece of secret knowledge. Nevertheless, by grouping the ten artists and critics around an elevated portrait of Delacroix in the background, Fantin-Latour also categorically affirmed the roots of the group’s innovative ideal and through this connection declared the legitimacy of their movement. Five of the six artists depicted—Fantin-Latour himself, Legros, Whistler, Manet, and Bracquemond—had been included with the Refusés and thus felt a shared sense of community. Legros’s entry in the Refusés was a portrait of Manet,

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9.27  Henri Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix, 1863–1864. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

again affirming Manet’s leadership position in the new tendency. The other artist portrayed, Albert de Balleroy, was a close friend and studio mate of Manet and appears by his side in Concert in the Tuileries. The important realist writers and critics Edmond Duranty and Champfleury are given key positions in the front row, and Baudelaire, a bridge between generations, is shown seated at the far right, closing out the composition. By the end of the decade, Fantin-Latour shifted the thematic focus of his previous group portrait to a frank celebration of Manet himself and his immediate followers, now occupying center stage (fig. 9.28). The title of the painting, The Atelier in the Batignolles, derives from the new hangout of Manet and his circle—the Café Guerbois located at 11 Grande rue des Batignolles (now the avenue de Clichy).87 Manet is depicted painting a portrait of his friend, the poet and critic Zacharie Astruc, and standing over them, observing the proceedings, are Otto Scholderer, a German disciple of Couture and Courbet, and Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, future impressionists. Grouped around the tall, lanky Bazille are Emile Zola, Edmond Maître, an amateur musician who shared the group’s aesthetic views, and, at the extreme right, a phlegmatic Claude Monet. Zola gazes dreamily out of the canvas, while the other two self-consciously address the beholder. The net effect of the work is a profound solemnity, an ideological intent to divest the public of the notion that this group is a flighty cast of characters from Murger’s novel of bohemian life. As if to emphasize this theme of gravitas, Fantin-Latour included a statuette of Minerva—goddess of Truth and Wisdom—on the table just to the left of Manet’s easel. Another still-life object on the table further points to the group’s communal sense of purpose, the ceramic pot designed by Laurent-JosephDaniel Bouvier. Bouvier’s absorption in Japanese art, reflected in the pot’s



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9.28  Henri Fantin-Latour, The Atelier in the Batignolles, 1870. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

design, was shared by Manet, Whistler, and their circle. Just then coming into vogue, Japanese styles and motifs held up a standard of purity of color, unconventional compositional arrangements, and flat modeling that appealed to the Parisian avant-garde. Worldwide imperialism, beginning with the forced opening of the Japanese ports by Commodore Matthew Perry and the eventual Meiji Restoration, assured exposure of Japanese artifacts at the world’s fairs and private galleries. The fascination for Asian products also signaled a new official interest in encouraging the lowering of the bar between fine and decorative arts to promote the national taste and heighten the general public’s awareness of good design. A group of independent art teachers emerged outside the academic system in response, calling for the popularization of art instruction and the dissemination of this instruction among the proletariat. One of these was Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, teacher of Fantin-Latour and Legros, who not only wanted to introduce art instruction to the working classes for their general enlightenment but also to raise the level of French industrial design. The emerging avant-garde displayed active support for this program, and the Old Guard often compared their sketchlike works to the reductive patterns of industrial products. It may be recalled that the poor showing of its products in the British Great Exhibition of 1851 and its own World’s Fair of 1855 prompted the French government to embark on a systematic review of art instruction with an eye to major reform. The year of the Salon des Refusés it issued the landmark decree wresting control of official art instruction from



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the Académie des Beaux-Arts and advocating sweeping changes aimed at telescoping the distance between high and industrial art production. The same year a group of entrepreneurs founded the Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts Appliqués à l’Industrie, an organization that even a moderate like Charles Blanc heralded as the beginning of the regeneration of the fine arts in France.88 Among its manifold activities, the Union sponsored special exhibitions of the decorative arts; Bouvier, for example, received critical praise for his ceramics at the Union’s exhibition of 1869. Significantly, Renoir began his career as a porcelain decorator and throughout his career emphasized the need for a close working relationship between art and industry. Thus Fantin-Latour’s second group portrait again reunites a community of artists organized around shared assumptions announced at the Salon des Refusés. Manet’s satire of Second Empire society doubly profited from the loosening of the tight censorship imposed by the government in its first decade. Its content spoofed the hypocrisy of the court and at the same time did so in a vaudevillian context that offered maximum publicity for the spurned artists. Although Manet’s work sustained criticism for its lewdness and indifference to public morality, most of the discussion centered on his want of skill and the sketchy nature of the Déjeuner and his other entries. Indeed, some works in the official Salon gained more attention for their more explicitly sexual display, although cloaked in classicizing visual rhetoric and titles. Two of the more controversial works, Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus and Paul Baudry’s The Pearl and the Wave (Persian Fable), were purchased prior to the opening of the Salon by the imperial couple and betray the hypocrisy in Napoléon III’s comments on the Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Despite the swag of cupids flying overhead to add a touch of wholesome daintiness, Cabanel’s supine nude, angled in the direction of the viewer, practically invites rape, while Baudry’s nude, seen from the rear stretched out along the water’s edge, twists her body like a pretzel to cast a knowing glance at her admiring onlooker (fig. 9.29). Here again Manet’s frank yet puzzling image seems to address the issue of the licentiousness of the imperial court. Almost in anticipation of the reception of a large number of academic nudes in mythological and bathing scenes at the official Salon, Manet submitted a work that deconstructed them. Most critics tried to ingratiate themselves with the court and referred to their idealized qualities and even tolerated their seductive glances as signs of passion appropriate to the subject. Critics of the regime, however, saw in the nudes contemporary studio models whose classicizing associations fooled no one. Their prostrate bodies contorted into inconceivable positions recalled less the goddesses of Mount Olympus than the Parisian boudoir and bordello. Zola later described Cabanel’s Venus as having “the air of a delicious lorette, not made of flesh and bone—that would be indecent—but made of a sort of white and pink almond paste.”89 One clue to Manet’s deconstructive strategy is the obvious studio-like backdrop that

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9.29  Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

serves as the landscape background: its synthetic appearance conjures up both the artificial lakes and grottoes constructed in the Bois de Boulogne and other parks of the period and the fake settings concocted by Cabanel and Baudry for their classical nudes. The insertion of the finch and the frog as vertical brackets for Manet’s nude indexically points to what is omitted in the works of his academic rivals. Manet’s unclad woman accompanied by two clad males in a modern setting, candidly painted and unselfconsciously gazing at the viewer, appears as an innocent by contrast. Her very lack of flirtatiousness and seductiveness constitutes a riposte to the academic nudes; Manet modernizes the high art ideal through the representation of contemporary Parisian bodies in an outdoor setting exploiting some of the stylistic qualities and eroticism of Barbizon realism. It was to disrobe these contradictions and reveal the necessary conditions for consistency in contemporary art that Manet produced his unique visual dialogue between past and present. Olympia Though it was painted the same year as Déjeuner, Manet waited until 1865 to show what turned out to be an even more controversial Salon work.90 The two pictures were surely conceived as pendants, thematically and sociologically spanning the social categories of prostitute. The 1867 Paris Guide’s section on prostitution begins by contrasting masculine control with feminine weakness—“Woman was not born to struggle, but instead destined to fall”—and spells out her ineluctable fate: “She begins as Fantine the grisette, and she finishes as Fantine the whore. She was the mistress of a student, she



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9.30  Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

became the concubine of the Public: a stain that could have vanished has become an indelible blemish.” The author, Alfred Delvau, tearfully regretted this heartbreaking development, but it could not be helped: woman was a creature so inherently inferior, so lacking in moral understanding, that he could not even bring himself to chastise her with his contempt.91 If the grisette in Déjeuner was a fille soumise or fille isolée, the courtesan of Olympia was a fille insoumise—submerged in the lifestyle and trappings of the bourgeoisie (fig. 9.30).92 Rich protection enabled the courtesan to escape the Bureau of Morals, otherwise she would be at the mercy of the police, like the grisettes and residents of a maison close. Olympia, however, shares many features with her counterpart on the grass: she is naked rather than nude—the heavy gold bracelet on her arm, the thin black choker around her neck, the flashy red flower borrowed from Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita in her hair, and the satin slippers dangling or fallen away from her feet, all betray a state of undress. Again turned toward the spectator as if in conspiratorial agreement, she extends the genre-like motif of the internal character conveying insider’s information to a knowing spectator. She is neither coy nor flirtatious à la Cabanel or Baudry, and her facial expression is even less cheeky than her Déjeuner counterpart. Only this time the spectators



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received mixed signals about the woman’s social category, hence the confusion on the part of many of the critics struggling to identify her. She inevitably resisted precise classification for the reason that the lifestyle of the Second Empire courtesan of grande marque embraced many of the social and cultural traits of the bourgeoisie, and overt class distinctions in dress and comportment were breaking down. In the female-dominated space of the department store or at the Opéra, the demi-mondaine easily merged with the femme honnête. The demi-mondaine’s boudoir was identical in furnishings and accessories to that of the mondaine, except that the former would receive visitors there in the evening. Manet’s deadpan woman is socially several notches above the grisette of the Déjeuner; her sobriquet Olympia, and the fact that she is attended by a maidservant, suggest the highly paid courtesan, the grande horizontale, the upper echelon of the prostitute’s profession. The maid is delivering a bouquet of flowers to her mistress, a gift offer from a “john” or “Arthur” (a term often used at that time) waiting unseen and impatiently for an answer in an alcove on the other side of the curtains. Imagine that a male client has called upon her unexpectedly or wishes to patch up a quarrel, hoping for acceptance or forgiveness by his offer of flowers. In a slow burn, Olympia gazes quizzically at the male or female spectator as if to inquire, “What would you do in my position?” There is a curious freezing of action in this picture—a sense of time transfixed, as if the protagonists were held in a state of suspended animation. Olympia rises from her pillow but halts half-way up with one of her slippers dangling, the maid tarries for an answer, the cat arches its back and unfurls its tail in mid-air—all of which convey an air of suspense. Manet’s reductive modeling and cookie-cutter patterning reinforces this feeling: the outlined shapes of the figures and plush bedding immediately detach themselves as a congealed mass and heighten the sense of expectancy. Olympia’s surroundings are consistent with the requirements of her profession. The courtesan was especially powerful in her seductive silk and satiny milieu and luxurious, perfumed toilette. The entire environment exuded sexuality and fortified her dominance over her clients. Curtains are everywhere in evidence as well as hints of a waiting-room and hidden entrances and exits. This is no maison de passe, or short-term lodging house catering to the prostitution trade, or even a maison de tolérance—a bordello with women in residence—as described by Parent-Duchâtelet, but clearly an elegant townhouse or sumptuous apartment indicating a “demi-mondaine de grande marque.”93 Although there were occasional caustic references to Olympia’s dependence on older sources—most notably, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, with which it bears a strong resemblance—I believe the majority of the critics deliberately withheld mention of the connection so as not to dignify Manet’s exhibit (fig. 9.31). Manet in no way tried to disguise his source, but, as in the case of the Marcantonio Raimondi motif in the Déjeuner, openly declared it through ingenious pairings of the pose, animal, and servant as a means

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9.31  Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

of underscoring his modernity. Of course, the relaxed position, limp hand gestures, and demure glance of Titian’s female differ drastically from Manet’s Olympia in conforming to the mold of the conventional nude. Yet critics who did not deign to recognize it in their reviews could not have missed Olympia’s earlier precedents, including Couture’s central motif in Romans of the Decadence. Both the female of the Romans and that of Olympia differ from the more “natural” woman of the Déjeuner in being identified with the luxury and corruption of a patrician class, and cast aspersions on their respective societies. Even the cutout design of Olympia is unmistakably affiliated with the central female and her immediate surroundings in Romans. If we could mask out the background details we should find the shapes remarkably similar: Manet’s maid corresponds with the female orgiast filling the cup of her reclining companion in the Couture, while Olympia’s pillow replaces the celebrant whose thigh supports the supine arm of the courtesan. Excepting his head and left arm, the line of his shoulder and the indentation formed by his deltoid and biceps muscles conform to the outline of the cushion. The V-shaped area between the two couples in Romans anticipates the detached configuration of Olympia and her maid. Finally, the strong vertical of the wall in Manet’s picture echoes the column behind Couture’s courtesan. All of this went unnoticed by the critics, however, who hesitated to lend any historical credibility to Manet’s exhibit or grant it any legitimate Salon status.



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In fact, Manet did a sort of end run around his bewildered reviewers past and present, for in some ways the declared derivation from Titian and Couture was only a decoy mischievously planted to divert attention from his main source: Lambert Sustris’s Venus, which he either saw in Amsterdam in the fall of 1863 or knew from an engraving (fig. 9.32). Active in the mid-sixteenth century, the Dutch painter himself owed a conspicuous debt to Titian, with whom he studied in Italy. He copied the Venus of Urbino, then made his own version that preserves the soft, pliant flesh and swelling abdomen of his master’s original, as well as the position of her legs and the background anecdotage. Sustris’s deviations from his teacher, however, in several crucial details bring his Venus much closer to Manet’s courtesan: she sits upright on her bed at almost the same angle as Olympia, her right arm is bent at a similar angle with her elbow causing analogous creases in the pillow, her wrist bracelet is also identically placed, the flowers strewn across her bed resemble the floral pattern on Olympia’s cashmere shawl, arcing over her head is a similar fragment of a curtain, and, above all, she stares with total self-possession and even assertiveness at the onlooker.94 Underlying Manet’s Olympia is a fusion of Titian and Sustris—the Dutch and Italian schools—to vindicate his French version of a modern courtesan.95

9.32  Lambert Sustris, Venus, ca. 1550s. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.



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If Sustris’s special contribution to the Manet remained the painter’s little secret, it nevertheless played an unseen role in the equivocal character of the composition. The silence of the critics on the spectral presence of the Old Masters in Manet’s picture attested to their unforgiving posture on his perceived liberties with the stereotype. This was a modern whore on her own turf in full control of the situation. If only she had sagged a bit in the bed, loosened her grip on her thigh, and gazed outward from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. She did none of these things for her beholders, and they in turn vented their outrage on her. Olympia’s relative inexpressiveness and indifference, the absence of any coy or flirtatious facial or body gesture, her lack of flattering attention to the beholder threw the Salon audience for a loop. Critics more or less recognized her professional status, but perceived her as a bizarre combination of puniness and ugliness. She was characterized as filthy, diseased, and even cadaverous—in some ways, responses to Manet’s modeling recalled criticism of Courbet. Gautier, for example, wrote: “We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful, carefully studied, heightened by some splendid effect of color. The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color.”96 Once again, “ugliness” was invoked as the favorite weapon in the conservative critic’s arsenal to put down experimental work. But Olympia was strange in other ways—a sort of hybrid creature that forced the critics to abandon their formulaic responses to Salon nudes. One reviewer of the Salon of 1863 noted that it abounded in “Venuses” that year, and then settled into a cliché-ridden discourse about the fresh ways artists like Cabanel and Baudry maintained the old tradition. Manet, however, did not permit the critics to fall back on timeworn positions; like Courbet, he challenged them to travel on his turf and look freshly at his imagery and their evaluative criteria. His choice of model complicated matters; Meurent was hardly a match for the fleshy, bosomy, and coquettish types of the Salon. Her short hair, angular, taut body, and small breasts possessed an almost boyish quality, and her imperturbable gaze struck a defiant note. Even her hand gestures disturbed; the left hand on her thigh concealing her crotch seems to have been brought down with a resounding slap. She was clearly no glamorous fille de marbre—the expression for a hardened prostitute—instead, her plain features and diminutive frame gave her the quality of a former grisette rather than that of a dazzling courtesan of the first rank. Claretie called her “a base model picked up I know not where,” while Sensier (under the pseudonym of Ravenel) described her as a “little faubourienne”—an expression implying her working-class origins.97 Part of the confusion also had to do with the critics’ familiarity with the high-level cocottes, who enjoyed celebrity status in the press much as movie stars do today. Indeed, critics shared several traits of identification with courtesans: like them, the critics jumped class barriers to attach themselves to fashionable bohemia, and like them they often “prostituted” their talents for the sake of money and worldly success. This is already a major

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theme in Balzac’s Illusions perdues, where newspaper offices are characterized as “bordellos of thought” and courtesans and journalists pursue their careers of corruption in common. Couture’s painting The Love of Gold of 1844 exemplified this dual sellout of woman and journalist; bare-breasted women and writers alike offer themselves to the leering miser playing with his gold. Gautier noted in his review of the painting: “The virgin offers her beauty and the poet his genius: the two most horrifying prostitutions.” Then in a curious turnabout he directed his critique to the Salon public: Monsieur Couture’s canvas stops many spectators, but among them are a large number who admire the gold pieces above everything else! Young ladies do not find the usurer too ugly, and they calculate the dresses, the necklaces, the carriages concentrated in the piles of coins; mamas think that he would make quite an acceptable match; men of letters would like to have him provide the funds for a daily newspaper, in return for being praised in it everyday. So the lesson is lost, and the devil with the horns is unable to frighten anyone.98

Gautier’s allusion to the corrupting influence of journalism on contemporary writers reflected a real fear among intellectuals that their livelihood was dependent upon the editorial whims of newspapers and governmental pressures. This was even more pronounced during the Second Empire, when overt politics were relegated to the background. Gautier himself, a sellout to the imperial government, and his ally Aurélien Scholl, a gossipy columnist and lightweight satirist—both of whom appear in Concert in the Tuileries as quintessential flâneurs—typified their profession in this period. Thus a sympathetic but perhaps unspoken bond was established between the journalist and the courtesan, who often rendered each other mutual services in the way of fresh items of gossip and sexual favors.99 These relationships were idealized if only to protect journalists from damaging their self-image of intellectual integrity. Hence Manet’s equivocal projection of the courtesan’s social status and realistic treatment of her body threatened to betray the critics’ own class mobility and trivializing brand of journalism. This is one disguised source of their confusion and frustration in front of the picture. The dark-skinned servant also came under sharp critical attack as the “hideous Negress,” yet her presence is crucial in marking the crossover status of the courtesan from fille du peuple to denizen of upper-class society. (There is plenty of evidence to suggest she hated the bourgeois or aristocrat who bought her body and gladly ruined him in an act of class resistance.) Consistent with his previous work, Manet tried to suppress the social realities with the ambiguous social status of his subjects. The maid who invariably presided over this hothouse environment was generally a confidante of the mistress who shared all her secrets. She received tips from clients, and in Manet’s picture a gratuity has probably motivated her to take the gift

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of an impromptu caller to her mistress. The black maidservant is a figure only cursorily discussed in the literature, looked upon as primarily an accessory to establish local “color” or to heighten the whiteness of her lady’s skin. (It is true that in the nineteenth century the association of blacks with harems was interpreted as a deliberate strategy for “bringing out the white beauty of the odalisque.”100) Identified as West Indian (from Guadeloupe or Martinique) by her calico bandanna (“mouchoir d’indienne”), “Laure” (no surname known) fulfills the role of the black slave in Orientalist themes who establishes a haremlike environment (fig. 9.33). Hence she confirms the high status of Olympia in the social hierarchy. The courtesan does not even deign to look at the maid (like David’s Socrates ignoring the cup of hemlock), who is clearly seeking a response, thereby reinforcing the difference in status. Early commentators understood the pairing of the two as Manet’s aesthetic pretext for black-and-white contrast, but since hierarchical values were attached to skin color and social position the so-called pretext still retains a powerful social and political significance. Although the maid is not overtly eroticized as nude slaves usually are in the harem scenes of nineteenth-century painters, blacks generally and black women in particular were considered oversexed and their very representation connoted uninhibited female sexuality.101 This is further demonstrated by the presence of the macabre black cat at the right of the bed, stemming from the mythic belief that cats are especially highly sexed creatures. Slang for

9.33  West Indian Women Laundering. Scene reproduced in “Le Nègre [Antilles],” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Province

(1840–1842 ed.), 3:328.



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female genitalia is often associated with the cat, and brothels are commonly called “cathouses.” The symbolic link between women, cats, and forbidden sexuality was once so close that in the Middle Ages many a witch was burned at the stake with her cat at her side. It is no coincidence that Sensier/ Ravenel saw Olympia as a page straight out of Goya’s Caprichos. I would also suggest the influence of the American Civil War on the motif of the black maid. Manet’s painting of The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama indicates his absorption in the Civil War, which had profound implications for the government of the Second Empire; Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie always tilted in favor of the South, but the strong antislavery sentiments of large segments of the population and the intelligentsia forced the emperor to declare an official policy of neutrality. Slavery had been abolished in the French colonies in 1848, and French ideas of the situation in America had been significantly affected by the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Ellery Channing. Although not a slave in a traditional harem scene, the black maidservant would have been conflated with the Orientalist precedent for the Parisian public and thus connected with the household servant in the American South. In addition, the verses by Zacharie Astruc accompanying the entry in the Salon catalogue (from his poem “La Fille des îles”) specifically used the term “slave” to metaphorically allude to an exotic tropical locale: Quand, lasse de songer, Olympia s’éveille, Le printemps entre au bras du doux messager noir; C’est l’esclave, à la nuit amoureuse pareille, Qui vient fleurir le jour délicieux à voir: L’auguste jeune fille en qui la flamme veille. When, tired of dreams, Olympia awakens, Spring enters on the arms of the sweet black messenger; It is the slave, like the amorous night, Who comes to make the day bloom, delicious to see: The august young girl in whom the flame burns.

Recall now young Manet’s comments on the condition of blacks when an apprentice seaman in Rio: “In this country all the Negroes are slaves. This is quite a revolting sight for us.” Thus when he was painting Olympia in 1863 Manet’s motif of the maidservant could not have been a mere sexual symbol, but surely was linked in his mind to the wider political and international context. Hence the power of the courtesan to command black bodies would have taken on added significance in the context of imperial society’s conflict over white supremacy in the Southern states. Manet’s coupling of black maidservant and courtesan further suggests his awareness of the reformist literature that compared prostitution itself to a form of slavery. Alphonse Esquiros, the Saint-Simonist sociologist

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and psychologist, made this leap on the grounds that prostitutes often possessed no authentic identity in the civil order. (The name Olympia, for example, was a common sobriquet of the demi-monde, and prostitutes often changed names and addresses depending on the pressure of circumstances.) Esquiros went even further in maintaining that woman herself, in whatever condition, was deliberately repressed in a state of bondage and demanded her immediate emancipation. Like children, women were not really free; rather, they were economic dependents who derived their social status from father or husband. It is man’s commodification of love and sex that devalues the female and reinforces her status of inferiority. Well aware of the various sides of the controversy, Manet empowers his courtesan with the aid of the maidservant to choose her condition from momentto-moment. Her sex grants her a share of social and purchasing power that emancipates her from the truly enslaved but reminds the audience that this condition is always contingent. Courtesans occupied a powerful position in the Second Empire as signifiers of wealth and successful speculative enterprises. Béraud’s seminal study of prostitution under the July Monarchy had already singled out the courtesan as the most dangerous of all whores, for she combines with her personal attraction qualities of the most brilliant and varied education: music, singing, dance, good language, a clever mind, exquisite taste, and the most delightful spontaneity; everything is at her command for dazzling those who come close. There is no Proteus comparable to her; she may take any form in order to harmonize with the character, the mood and the inclination of the man to whom she clings like a leech. Sentiment and tears, joy and madness, jealously and anger are brought into play in turn in order to weld the irons on her slave. Fortunate is he who wears those shameful chains for no more than a day and whose reason, enlightened by experience, becomes a sure safeguard against the power of women of intrigue.102

Béraud here reflects the sexual fantasies of the epoch as much as he provides a sociological analysis. Although promising his readers more eyewitness testimony than his clinically minded predecessor, the physician and hygienist A.-J.-B. Parent-Duchâtelet—who pioneered the categories and hierarchy of modern prostitution—Béraud winds up projecting an image of the brilliant and beautiful courtesan trapping innocent males by all the arts of seduction. Thus the image of the alluring courtesan appeared even in the supposedly disinterested writings of the scientific observer. Since money earned from speculative enterprises went as quickly as it came, the object was to spend it on pleasures of the moment. For both the bourgeois upstart and decadent aristocrat alike the courtesan represented an ideal commodity on which to lavish their newly gained income. Her extravagant lifestyle rapidly consumed their patrons’ money, often mercilessly fleecing them before abandoning them. Many of them vied with the

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empress in the style they maintained, and several, including the notorious La Païva and Cora Pearl, even hired her couturier, Worth, for their dresses.103 Here they may have acted less out of ruthlessness than from a sense of the impersonal conditions of the marketplace in which wealth defined social status. Since they had generally risen from working-class conditions, they well understood the power of money in the emerging age of capital. Manet’s Olympia is a work of enormous significance to the study of social art history of the modern era. The figure’s ambiguous social status and subversion of the sacred tradition that allowed whores to be smuggled into visual production as Venuses created the conditions for questioning the contemporary aesthetic criteria for high art. Then, too, Manet’s brilliant technique took no prisoners but left his viewers strewn on the Salon battlefield as so many wounded warriors. They sputtered and muttered in condemning his esquisses and ébauches, when all the time they were rationalizing their discomfort with having to rethink the categories he so successfully challenged. For himself personally Olympia constituted one more link in the chain of problematized social realities and relationships that served to normalize his own contingent social status. As a sign of Second Empire society, the “amphibious” courtesan highlighted a major component of the glitz proffered by Napoléon III as cosmetic gloss to his authoritarian regime. But if the political commitments of 1848 had lost their former urgency, Manet found a way to probe the rottenness of the society’s belly from underground, or, should we say, from the demi-monde. The World’s Fair of 1867

The Second Empire appeared in all its glory for the last time at the Universal Exposition of 1867. A huge elliptical structure of iron and glass had been built on the Champ de Mars across the Seine on the Place de l’Alma, and the grounds surrounding it contained an artificial lake, a variety of sideshows, and the pavilions and booths of the various participating nations. The main exhibition space consisted of seven halls radiating from the center, including one devoted to contemporary art from around the world. In addition to the special exhibition of the fine arts in the international exhibition, the Salon of 1867 ran concurrently in the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Elysées. Given the two venues of unequal stature, however, at least one critic believed that the public would see the Champs-Elysées show as a Salon des Refusés, that is, a show of also-rans shut out of the glitzier international show. As a result, he naively concluded that the juries would show themselves extremely indulgent and would even create a space for younger artists. He thought this appropriate in allowing the vast throngs drawn to Paris to decide for themselves the contested merit of the masters and their disciples.104 Just the opposite occurred, however: the juries, responding to international rivalry, once again judged admissions severely, especially on the grounds of execution, and the independents

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were completely shut out. The disillusioned rejectees again requested an official Salon des Refusés, but the several petitions were turned down by the administration. Both Courbet, who was unhappy with the way three of his works were hung in the international exhibition, and Manet, who had been denied his place in the preferred display of French painting and was wary of rejection in the secondary venue, organized their own private retrospective shows on the fairgrounds. The two leaders of their respective takes on realism built their pavilions back to back on the Place de l’Alma, the rural-realist and the urban-realist at last joined in battle against the Academic and bureaucratic dinosaurs. In taking his case to the public with a private show, Manet presented a revealing manifesto in the preface of his catalogue. He emphasized the need of an artist to be seen, an opportunity denied him so often by the Salon juries. He then justified his methods that critics persistently condemned as ébauches and esquisses: The artist does not say today come and see flawless works, but come and see sincere works. It is the effect of sincerity that imparts to his work the character of protestation, when in fact the artist only considered rendering his impression. M. Manet never wished to protest. . . . He has only sought to be himself and not another.105

He further noted that in exhibiting one finds “friends and allies for the struggle”—affirming the primal value of the Salon des Refusés and his role in the new movement. Despite Manet’s remonstration, however, and a remarkable sampling of his production, the Alma show culminated in critical and public failure. He also responded to his marginalization with an unusually large panoramic glimpse of the city and the fairgrounds that he painted between June and August of 1867, coincident with the production of The Execution of Maximilian (fig. 9.34). Typical of topographical printmakers, Manet seized on a few key landmarks like the columnar French lighthouse at the left, the huge elliptical exhibition hall, and the English electric lighthouse of prefabricated metallic parts at the right to summarize the grandiosity of the scene. He chose his viewing station on the Trocadéro hillside on the bank of the Seine opposite to that of the Champ de Mars, at the intersection of the rues Vineuse and Franklin, and, using a low vantage point and telescoping the distance, concentrated on the flânerie of strollers and loiterers along a path bordering the circular lawn external to the fairgrounds. Since the Seine and its quays virtually disappear in this perspective (although the Pont de l’Alma, near the site of Manet’s show, is conspicuous at the extreme left of the picture), the strollers appear much closer to the exhibition than would have been possible in actuality. Once again, Manet enlarged flânerie’s frame of reference, including in his parade of sightseers a gardener watering the lawn in the left foreground,

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9.34  Edouard Manet, The Universal Exposition of 1867, 1867. Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.

two working-class women identified by their dumpy figures and clothing, a cocotte and her entremetteuse, a bourgeois couple, an amazone or female horse rider, two street kids, two classic flâneurs, three imperial guardsmen on break (one of them slouching on the lawn), and in the right foreground closing off the composition is a dandified Léon Leenhoff trying to rein in his huge dog. (Manet shows that he still has an eye for the latest fashion, especially in the women’s dresses, where the crinoline has been supplanted by more plain-fronted, narrower, and shorter skirts.) This cross-section of Parisian society appears much more scattered than the tightly knit clusters of Concert in the Tuileries, with wider gaps between the groupings and abrupt shifts in their distances from the frontal plane. None of the types represented reveal the slightest interest in the exposition or in penetrating its portals: the gardener turns away from the view as he hoses, the working-class women pause to address one another, the cocotte and her companion cruise the area, the bourgeois couple and the two dandies are fixed on the balloon, the horsewoman is clearly indisposed, the street urchins recline on the grass, the guardsmen are taking a break from patrolling the grounds, and Léon strolls right out of the picture. This is no celebratory or optimistic view of French material and cultural progress as touted by the official rhetoric surrounding the Exposition Universelle, but a vivid picture of Manet’s sense of alienation. Blocked from a singular official opportunity to be viewed by an international public, Manet expressed his disappointment in the form of an externalized view of the event that touches only on its periphery. His only representation in the institutional venues was indirect, in the form of his portrait by Fantin-Latour, and even then the critics preferred to gang up on the subject rather than the artist. Gautier, now a paid government hack



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and member of the Salon jury, castigated the model for keeping his head covered with a top hat while sitting for the portrait, hinting at his regal arrogance: “If Monsieur Manet wished to suggest by this singular behavior that he considered himself the equal of a Spanish nobleman vis-à-vis the king-public, he should have to reproach himself for doing an injury to the talent of Monsieur Fantin-Latour.”106 Manet’s disappointment could only have been compounded by news that his friend Albert de Balleroy received a medal for his showing in the 1867 Salon. The hot-air balloon rising out of the composition at the upper right— an apparent metaphor of future progress but in this instance more akin to the bubbles of a vanitas theme—points symbolically to the vanishing hopes of Manet for international exposure and recognition. Ironically, the balloon was part of the fair’s daily attractions and tethered to the earth by a cable (evident in Manet’s painting). Engineered for ascensions captives, the balloon took visitors into the air like some sort of elevator, never actually getting free of the ground.107 This is no nod to his friend Nadar (GaspardFélix Tournachon)—an aeronautical pioneer as well as photographer—for it emblematizes the failure of his experiments rather than their success.108 Nadar’s immense balloon, Le Géant, crashed ignominiously in every attempt he made since its trial flight on 4 October 1863, and in the process he lost an enormous personal investment. Hence the balloon’s presence in the picture is a metonym for what Manet perceived as the sham spectacle of the 1867 Exposition Universelle.109 Portrait of Zola Emile Zola, soon to emerge as one of France’s leading realist novelists, had early ventured into art criticism to make ends meet. A boyhood chum of Paul Cézanne, he identified with the independents who breached the walls of the academic fortress with the Salon des Refusés. He took on the establishment by mounting a formidable defense of Manet and dissecting the jurors who had rejected the artist’s recent submissions in his serial review of the 1866 Salon in L’Evénement. He praised Manet as an artist of conviction and uncompromising temperament, and advised would-be art collectors to invest in his paintings for a “place is marked for Manet in the Louvre.”110 Manet expressed his gratitude to Zola in a note on 7 May and looked forward to meeting him to thank him in person. Several months later, on 1 January 1867, Zola published another piece on Manet, this time a more developed essay (issued as a pamphlet later that year) inspired by a visit to the artist’s studio to review the projects he planned to submit to the Exposition Universelle. To express appreciation of his sprightly journalistic publicity, Manet offered to do Zola’s portrait for the next Salon of 1868.111 The young writer (then only twenty-seven) posed from late 1867 through early 1868, and Manet depicted him at almost full length in profile seated in his study against an emblematic array of personal possessions

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9.35  Edouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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and mementoes that identify his craft and tastes (fig. 9.35). It is less a study of a singular personality than an attempt to define a creative mind by the things that he chooses to surround himself with in his working space. In this sense, the portrait serves as one more projection of Manet’s haunted ego, a strategic meeting of minds between artist and model that provided a convenient mask for the painter’s troubled persona. Zola is Manet’s “secret sharer.” I think of the work as a double portrait whose manifold allusions tell us as much about the invisible painter as the visible sitter. Zola’s peculiarly vacant gaze toward the right of the painting and flat, silhouetted presentation actually allows for more intense scrutiny of the background accessories. In this reading, the Portrait of Zola becomes a pretext for an allegory of modernist creativity. Zola nevertheless considered the portrait one of Manet’s finest hours and was proud to be its subject—a harmonious resolution of a complex image.112 His review of 1868 implies that he identified himself completely with the painter’s aims. One obvious tip-off to Manet’s intention is the calculated spread of books on the desk that gives prominence to the pamphlet Zola issued in the artist’s defense: it is tilted at the same angle as the open book in Zola’s hand, and the title, bearing Manet’s name, is framed by the feather of Zola’s quill pen jutting out of the porcelain inkstand along the same diagonal. Although the author’s name is also glimpsed above the title, the faded miniscule letters put the emphasis on the painter’s name, which does double-duty as a signature. As if this conspicuous gesture was not enough self-assertion, Manet located a monochromatic reproduction of Olympia just above Zola’s tract. His parodic touch is revealed by the nodding glance of the courtesan in the direction of Zola, a sort of inside joke connected with the writer’s vigorous defense of the work he unabashedly termed the artist’s masterpiece. Above the Olympia is an etched print by Goya of Velázquez’s Los Borrachos (The Drinkers), another reference to the painter’s personal take on the art of the past with still another witty aside. Zola defended Manet against accusations of plagiarism from the Spanish masters, arguing that though he may have begun in their debt he soon discovered his individual voice and now no one of sound mind could find in him “only a bastard offspring of Velázquez and Goya.”113 In addition, Zola holds in his hand a volume of an important encyclopedic series on the history of art by Charles Blanc, chapter nine

former director of the Beaux-Arts administration during the Second Republic. Fired for his republican views, Blanc devoted the remainder of his career to his writing projects, including the copiously illustrated Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, which enjoyed a huge reputation and constituted a major sourcebook for Manet. Blanc’s section on the Spanish school described Los Borrachos as “a prodigy of palpable reality, of sturdy, brutal, violent naturalism.”114 Just to the left, also on the clipping board hanging above Zola’s desk, is a colored woodblock print of a sumo wrestler by the Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kuniaki II (1835–1888), a Japanese contemporary of Manet’s. This interest in Japanese art—whose flatness, bold coloring, absence of contrasting dark and light areas, and, to Western eyes, eccentric perspectives, reinforced modernist taste—is also seen in the Japanese screen that serves as a bookend to the Kuniaki and guards Zola’s privacy. In discussing Manet’s simplified tonal scheme in his monograph, Zola countered the commonplace that his work imitated popular imagery and claimed it would be more accurate to compare it “with Japanese prints that resemble it by their eccentric elegance and magnificent touches.”115 As Fantin-Latour’s Atelier in the Batignolles demonstrated, Manet and his circle shared a more than perfunctory interest in the mania that would subsequently be termed Japonisme. All told, the clipping board forms a synecdoche of Manet’s modernity—a fragment of older art plus Japanese influence culminates in Olympia. No doubt the image of the wrestler is another of those shared symbols, alluding to Zola’s description of Manet as “a fighter of conviction” (un lutteur convaincu116) and metaphorically highlighting Zola’s willingness to do battle with the Beaux-Arts system. The presence of the Japanese artifacts signals as well the importance of the exhibition at the popular Japanese pavilion at the Exposition Universelle the year before. Chesneau’s review of the Japanese display invoked terms such as invention, avoidance of symmetry, quotidian themes, and realist accuracy that Zola associated with Manet’s work. Chesneau even denied the superiority of Western representation of the human figure modeled after the ancient Greek tradition; Japanese artists substitute for stereotyped academic gestures “a lively feeling, a very profound science of the expressive character of the human form. In this respect, their drawings are superb in vigor and precision.” He then referred to Hokusai’s drawing albums on display, whose sketches catch the most complicated gestures of the human body “with an incomparable verve, a sureness of hand, and a flow of imagination, a charm and spirit of observation.”117 Chesneau began his discussion with a preamble on the superiority of Japanese culture to Chinese, and a plea to regard Japanese civilization as equal to the European. The important role Japanese culture assigned to women, the powers of invention, and industrial and technological progress implies a vast potential that Western peoples should respect. He mentioned that since the first American steamship sailed into Tokyo Harbor,

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the Japanese, quick learners, have established their own dockyards and constructed steamships to ply the seas with their newly produced exports. Here he touches on the imperial issues in the wake of Commodore Matthew Perry’s forced opening of the Japanese ports in 1853, and the mad scramble of Western nations to attain favored trading status with Japan. It is significant that in 1868, the year of the completion and exhibition of Portrait of Zola, a new era opened for Japan. The official change began in January 1868 with the adoption of the word Meiji, meaning “enlightened government.” The foreign intrusion that led to the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa with Perry proved to be the catalyst for the overthrow of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of the Tenno, or Heavenly King (known as Mikado in the West). The Tenno, once the ultimate power, had been forced into seclusion by the shoguns, or feudal overlords, who actually conducted the affairs of state. Since 1603 the shoguns descended from the house of Tokugawa, but its steadily declining power and prestige reached its nadir with the signing of the treaty with Perry. Anti-foreign forces orchestrated by the daimyo (feudal chieftains) and their samurai eventually overthrew the system and transferred power back to the emperor, who inaugurated the Meiji Restoration and the emergence of Japan as a modern state. The French imperialists (along with other Western powers) had entered into diplomatic relations with Japan as early as 1858, marking the end of more than two centuries of general isolation and sparking the internal conflict that led to the overthrow of the Bakufu (as the administration of the shogun was called).118 The treaty contained a most-favored-nation clause and guaranteed the right of foreigners to reside and trade at key Japanese ports. Between the years 1864 and 1868, the French minister to Japan, Léon Roches, cultivated a special relationship to the shogunate to secure special trading privileges in rivalry with the British minister, Sir Harry Parkes. The French played a pivotal role in modernizing first the Tokugawa regime and then the fledgling Meiji government. Roches’s emphasis on trade induced the Bakufu to lift the restrictions on the export of silk and silkworm eggs to France, and secured a mutual agreement on a Société Française d’Exportation et d’Importation that would make Japan a French market. In the end, French engineers and military experts helped modernize Japan, and in turn Japanese products circulated in France (and England) to inform and inspire the modernist movement. Both the shogunate and the Meiji government participated in the French Expositions Universelles as part of their export trade; in 1867, for example, many of the exhibits in the Japanese pavilion were bought by collectors eager to participate in the new trend. Dealers in antiques or art curios in Paris seized the opportunity to pander to the growing taste, while Japanese entrepreneurs and their representatives energetically promoted the export of their products and moved to expand the market. The real breakthrough was the fair of 1867, when Japan won four of the sixty-four

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gold medals. That same year Manet’s friend Astruc extolled the Japanese talent for synthesizing naturalism and artistry and declaimed: “Let us make ourselves Japanese!”119 Thus the appearance of the Japanese artifacts in Zola’s portrait not only affirms the cutting-edge position of artist and sitter, but corresponds to the wider role of French imperialism in international diplomacy. The availability of cultural materials providing a fresh visual stimulus required above all these diplomatic and commercial channels aimed at increasing French prestige in international waters. Manet and Civil War Abroad and at Home

Napoléon III’s ambitious design of extending French influence to the Far East overlapped with his desire to establish an economic and religious beachhead on the shores of the United States. The internal disruptions in the United States sparked by the American Civil War allowed both British and French conservatives—generally favorable to the South and King Cotton—to make economic and political hay while the Union was embroiled in its nationwide struggle. Despite a declared policy of neutrality by both England and France, British sea rivalry with the United States allowed ship builders to skirt the law and manufacture raiders for the Confederacy while France seized the moment to install a puppet regime on the throne of Mexico. It is a tribute to Manet’s political awareness and liberal politics that he depicted two key incidents connected with these historical events that disclose sympathy with the Union side. His early observations on the status of blacks in Brazil and the startling role of the West Indian maid in Olympia are both of a piece with his support of the North. Support of the Union by French liberals like Manet also revealed a desire to bring about modifications of the political structure of the Second Empire. Denied direct and programmatic efforts at reform, they acted vicariously by an enthusiastic display of affection for the United States and its republican institutions. The failure of the Mexican expedition set the stage for the Second Empire’s collapse, and here again the liberal opposition—including Manet—contributed to that outcome by their agitation on behalf of the United States during the Civil War. The Kearsarge and the Alabama On Sunday, 12 June 1864, the U.S. steamer Kearsarge lay at anchor in the Scheldt, off Flushing, Holland. It received the message that the notorious Confederate cruiser the Alabama was then docked for repairs at the French port of Cherbourg. The Alabama, built in England, was an exemplary specimen of the last phase of predominantly wooden naval manufacture and was manned by daring officers and a well-disciplined crew. Its mission from the moment of its launching was to inflict as much damage as possible on

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Northern merchant shipping around the world, ruin the Union carrying trade and force influential shippers to press the federal government for a peaceful settlement with the South. The Alabama’s unmatched record of destruction (fifty-five Union merchant ships, one battleship, and the looting of nearly a dozen others), demoralized the carrying traders and hindered their activities. Denied access to their own ports by the effective Union blockade and thus denationalized, the Alabama and other Confederate corsairs roamed the high seas dependent on the sympathy of friendly foreign powers for their necessary pit stops. These long jaunts at sea, however, often had a deleterious effect on a ship’s ability to operate, as would be shown in the case of the Alabama. A Southern agent had engaged the famous Birkenhead Ironworks of the Laird brothers on the Mersey River across and over from Liverpool to build the Alabama, protecting the project from the neutrality policy of the Crown by omitting military hardware and drawing up plans without apparent belligerent intentions. As reported by Marx and others, leaked news that the corsair’s battery and projectiles were manufactured and installed elsewhere sparked a controversy about British violation of neutrality and complicity in the outfitting of Confederate warships. Although British shipyards were still subject to suspicion, they eluded the Union spies and local authorities thanks to the benign neglect fostered by British maritime rivalry with the United States.120 American merchant shipping appeared invincible in 1860, and British conservatives gladly accepted Confederate gold and cotton in return for raiders and supplies. On occasion, British sailors and officers even staffed the cruisers, and although this complicity was more mercenary than ideological, its long-range effect was to further undermine United States’ merchant traffic. The gradual liquidation of the once flourishing American carrying trade and the reduced threat to its own shipping now encouraged a more confident and stringent British policy on the neutrality laws, ultimately leading to the dismantling of the Confederate shipbuilding program.121 In the end, however, thanks to the Confederate raiders Britain regained its trade superiority on the high seas and held on to it until World War II. Captain John Winslow was the commander of the Kearsarge, whose dual mission was to destroy Confederate raiders operating out of Europe and protect American trade vessels. Although the Alabama was designed for maximum speed and maneuverability, the Kearsarge, built for searchand-destroy missions, enjoyed a decided advantage in size and guns. The commander of the Alabama was also unaware that during the Alabama’s perpetual seafaring its powder had deteriorated, another deficiency that proved fatal in his duel with the Kearsarge. At first hesitant, he finally accepted Winslow’s challenge, and the two vessels sailed toward one another seven miles beyond Cherbourg harbor on Sunday, 19 June 1864. The French ironclad frigate La Couronne escorted the Alabama outside the limit

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of French waters then immediately steamed back to port. Meanwhile, an English steamer, the Deerhound, flying an English yacht flag, approached the scene of action and proceeded to stand by in close observation. The two antagonists traveled at full steam, engaging in a circular strategy of fighting, each steering around a common center. The Alabama’s crew, confident of easy victory, fired first but missed its target; the Kearsarge then advanced and sustained two more harmless broadsides. When within 900 yards of the Alabama, it opened with its starboard battery. The firing of the Kearsarge cannons was more precise, and the Alabama suffered far more casualties and material damage. His crew decimated, his rudder and propeller disabled, Captain Raphael Semmes reluctantly surrendered to Captain Winslow as his sinking ship failed to enter the neutral waters of the French coast. The entire encounter lasted ninety minutes. The mysterious British yacht, the Deerhound, now played a decisive role in the outcome. The Deerhound rescued several wounded aboard the Alabama, including the captain, thirteen officers, and twenty-six sailors (some of whom were British mercenaries) and took off for Southampton, thus enabling Semmes and part of his crew to evade capture. But the once mighty terror of Northern commerce was no more; in a dramatic visual display it shot up out of the water in a perpendicular position and went straight down stern first. The duel at sea inevitably became the stuff of Second Empire spectacle: Cherbourg was a popular resort, and an excursion train from Paris arrived that Sunday, bringing hundreds of tourists who were unexpectedly favored by the spectacle of a sea fight. At least fifteen thousand spectators on the southern heights above the harbor observed an event that monopolized the conversation of Parisian society long afterward. Manet’s imagination was riveted by the event in an era when battle painting, heretofore almost always depicted in a romantic manner, began to assume a more photographically accurate appearance. At the moment the encounter took place, his Dead Christ and the Angels, an attempt to rejuvenate religious painting in a realist mode, was on view at the Salon of 1864, and now he eagerly seized the opportunity to picture a topical event with majestic associations. Here was an episode of international consequence, involving a key moment in the American Civil War whose implications were revealing of the Southern bias on the part of British and French conservatives, who were infinitely more sympathetic to the Alabama’s adventurous crew than to the singular-minded staff of the Kearsarge. His urgency is demonstrated by his exhibition of the marinescape in July in the window of Alfred Cadart’s print shop and gallery at 79, rue de Richelieu.122 Manet’s design focuses on the Alabama on the verge of sinking, stern first, with all her jibs still set to make for the shore and neutral waters (fig. 9.36). The horizontally disposed corsair is set off by a small French sailboat speedily approaching it at a sharp angle from the left, flying the French colors and the blue-framed white flag of pilot boats. Its ostensible aim is the rescue of the wounded, one of which is seen floating in the water near

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opposite 9.36  Edouard Manet, The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama, 1864. John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.



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by clutching some flotsam and jetsam. The English steamer that rescued Semmes and others is seen way off on the distant horizon at the extreme right, thus deceptively giving the French pride of place in the rescue mission. The Kearsarge, off to the left on the horizon, is almost totally obscured by smoke and explosions. The emphasis on the French sailboat bounding to the rescue diminishes in significance the visual presence of the American and English vessels, and is the apparent key to Manet’s thematic intention. It is curious to learn that public revelations of clandestine sanction of a Confederate shipbuilding program in France and violation of neutrality emerged less than a month prior to the showdown of the Kearsarge and the Alabama. In late April the French press announced that the Shanghai and the San Francisco, two Confederate corsairs built in Nantes, had been launched. But it was not until the arrival of the Alabama at Cherbourg that the status of the Confederate corsairs in France sparked a national debate on illegal Southern efforts in France. At that time, Captain Semmes and his crew were feted in port by pro-Southern supporters, and William Dayton, the American minister, complained. The embarrassing publicity surrounding the sinking of the Alabama and pressure from Union sympathizers, the American minister, and his consul-general forced the government in 1864 to disown the program it had initially, if clandestinely, sanctioned.123 Thus to a large extent both the duration of the war and especially this specific incident could be laid at the doorstep of Napoléon III and his sympathies toward the South. By encouraging the South’s efforts and hope for recognition, both France and England prolonged the war and the war’s fallout. The government of Napoléon III had proposed a plan for joint mediation with Great Britain and Russia in October 1862 to end the European economic crisis brought about by the stress in the cotton and exporting industries, but the liberal faction suspected that mediation would turn to imposition of arbitration by force and opposed every form of intervention. The liberal newspaper La Presse, read by Manet, observed that the proposal for mediation had nothing to say about ending slavery, the only condition for a lasting peace.124 Le Siècle, a republican paper, noted that the proposal clearly favored the South in that it involved a suspension of the blockade. In the end, the British and the Russians rejected the proposal, and the American minister to France Dayton designated it as a propaganda ploy to mollify manufacturers and workers at home. In January 1863 the French government put forward a second mediation effort, this time a unilateral proposal that the Union open a dialogue with the Confederates at a neutral site to determine whether their interests were irreconcilable. This attempt met with no more success than the first, and invited the ridicule of Secretary of State William Seward, who demanded of France in effect to advise the insurgents first to recognize the Union as a first step in a cessation of hostilities. The Orléanist Revue des deux mondes was also critical, describing the proposal as a “sterile” gesture whose only result was to suggest that France desired a restoration of peace in America. chapter nine

Once again progressive newspapers criticized the armistice proposal for its conspicuous omission of the slavery issue. In Manet’s painting, the lone sailboat conspicuously flying the French colors and charging the sinking vessel exemplifies the paltriness and even the absurdity of the government’s efforts to intervene in the American civil

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war. As it now symbolically speeds to the rescue with its limited resources, its last-minute heroic effort is represented by Manet as too little, too late. The emphasis given to the surging briny seascape, tilted almost on a vertical to allow for maximum extent, establishes a billowing field that all the more heightens the isolation and feeble status of the pilot boat. France’s encouragement of Confederate hopes for recognition played no uncertain role in the continuing bloodshed, and its half-hearted efforts at mediation culminated in the disaster at Cherbourg. The subject of a great nation first promoting the efforts of a pawn in its own foreign policy schemes and then withdrawing its support under pressure to allow its “dupe” to suffer alone the consequences of unexpected circumstances is the central theme of Manet’s other notable Civil War picture, The Execution of Maximilian. It is no coincidence that Manet again exhibited his Kearsarge and Alabama at his independent exhibition of 1867, the year of his reconstruction of Maximilian’s downfall. The Execution of Maximilian Napoléon III’s pro-Southern stance has been explained in the context of his Mexican policy. A divided United States, with a Southern ally bordering Mexico, would present the most propitious circumstances for a French-supported puppet on the throne of Mexico. Despite the many motivations prompting the expedition to Mexico, it is unlikely that the idea of founding an empire in Mexico would have been entertained by the French government if the Civil War had not totally absorbed the energies of the United States. Once the South was defeated, the French expedition lost the only foothold it possessed. Thus the Mexican debacle represented yet another foreign policy failure connected with the Civil War. If it is true that French intervention in Mexico ruined the Second Empire, then the example of the United States, as French liberals used it, contributed to that outcome. Lincoln’s reelection forced the French government to consider its impact on both domestic and foreign policy, as it aroused the liberal opposition and menaced the empire in Mexico. Just twenty years earlier, America itself had gone to war with Mexico, and in the end acquired the territory needed to complete its sweep to the Pacific. The Monroe Doctrine—originally formulated in 1823 for a specific time and place—now allowed America to rationalize its expansion at the expense of the European powers on its continent. President Polk declared war in 1846 in the face of sharply divided opinion. In retrospect his action can be seen as an aggressive grab of a neighbor’s land, but his secretary of state expressed his intent in terms that have by now become commonplace in manipulative statecraft: “We go to war with Mexico solely for the purpose of conquering an honorable and just peace.”125 America won decisively over an inferior opponent. One of the few Mexican officers to distinguish himself was the young Mejía, who, together with Maximilian and

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Miramón, was later to die at the hands of his own countrymen in another fratricidal conflict. The war with Mexico ended in 1848, the year Europe was swept by revolution and Louis-Napoléon came to power. Just prior to the Civil War and the French intervention in Mexico, America’s annexationist spirit made itself felt a second time; there was national clamor for the occupation of Mexico itself, especially Sonora and Chihuahua.126 Mexico seemed on the verge of being swallowed up by her neighbor, an eventuality that seriously disturbed the governments of Spain, France, and England. Napoléon III foresaw America’s destruction of all Latin influence in the New World and ultimate mastery of world trade on two oceans. His wish, encouraged by the aspirations of the empress and her advisers, was to check by Latin Catholicism the expansion of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and to establish a French economic grip in the New World. And he could not get out of his mind the embittering memory of his uncle’s cession of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803—one of the worst transnational real estate deals in history. On the pretext of trying to collect its debts from the unstable regime of Juárez, France joined in a tripartite agreement with Spain and England to send an expedition to Mexico. Difference of objectives and tactics soon caused disagreement among the allies, and when the others re-embarked the French remained, eventually launching a full-scale war against Mexico and engineering Maximilian’s ascent to the throne of a Catholic Empire. Although they suffered a severe defeat at Puebla (5 May 1862), reinforcements were sent and eventually the French forced the surrender of Mexico City on 10 June 1863. Napoléon III took advantage of the American Civil War, the unfolding of which was closely related to the events in Mexico. He, the empress, and their supporters tacitly favored the South (which welcomed the French intervention in Mexico), for a victory over the North could enable the Confederacy to ally itself with Maximilian and supply France with enormous economic privileges. The primacy of King Cotton stimulated French dreams of expansion, and the French legacy in the South further encouraged the Mexican venture. Once the Civil War ended, however, America turned to the Mexican problem, diplomatically pressuring Napoléon III to hastily withdraw his supporting forces, and leaving Maximilian’s empire in ruins. The entire episode was clouded from the outset in ambiguity and deception. The most deceived of all was Archduke Maximilian (whom the British journalists labeled “archdupe”), a Habsburg noble motivated by the romantic sentiments of Viennese light opera. Their belated recognition of French duplicity led to Maximilian’s death and to his wife Carlotta’s madness. Napoléon III’s lack of wholehearted commitment to the project resulted both from America’s proximity and from sharply divided opinion at home; a strong appeal to patriotism (except in the early stages of the expedition when French “honor” was at stake) did not suit the occasion,

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and French people wondered why their soldiers lay dying in defense of Mexican soil. In addition, the venture placed heavy economic burdens on the French, now faced with increasing taxes in financially hard times: their genuine affection for Maximilian could not obscure the costs of the Mexican expedition. It is partly in the context of sensitivity to contemporary parallels with these nineteenth-century events and the continuity of their justificatory rhetoric that provides the point of departure for my interpretation of a work that, like Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, has already been subjected to much systematic scrutiny and analysis.127 Despite several fascinating readings of the picture, its eccentricities—and conventionalities—remain unresolved in the critical literature. Finally, I believe that Manet’s work—



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opposite 9.37  Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1867–1868 (signed and dated 19 June 1867). Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim.



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created under the impact of sensational headlines as a kind of documentary—takes on fresh meaning in an age of mass media, which make of sensational events an immediate and pervasive experience. On 19 June 1867 Maximilian was executed by the Mexican liberals near Querétaro, together with his loyal generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía. By coincidence, the event fell on the third anniversary of the battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama, and Manet, ever alert to such coincidences, would have connected the two events to the Civil War and the failed foreign policy of Napoléon III. Not long after the incident Manet began his composition, which exists in five versions—four oil paintings and a lithograph (fig. 9.37). Although Manet’s contemporaries noted that the project contradicts his stated antagonism to history painting, in this instance he again took up the challenge of past art in an effort to reinvigorate a traditional genre that had fallen on bad times. He would have been motivated by critics in the 1860s complaining of the absence of the vital historical picture. Additionally, he still needed to justify his choice of profession in a large-scale, multifigured work of contemporary historical import. Like his master Couture, whose ambitious Romans of the Decadence was also a proof of capacity, Manet had to deal directly with the legacy of history painting both as a test of strength in his battle with his critics and as a supporting medium for communicating personal ideas. Maximilian was thus one of the supreme challenges of his career, and its conception coincides with a period of profound anguish, one aspect of which was his anticipated exclusion from the arts section of the Exposition Universelle of 1867. It was not fortuitous that Manet chose for his subject in this fateful time an event of military notoriety. His earliest encouragement as an artist came from his maternal uncle Edmond Fournier, a captain in the artillery, who gave his young nephew an album of lithographs by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, perhaps the foremost military draftsman of the nineteenth century.128 Manet’s apprenticeship with Couture exposed him to several of the master’s official commissions dealing with military motifs. The first major artist to befriend him was Auguste Raffet, second only to his teacher Charlet as a military specialist.129 Raffet’s fame derived mainly from his lithographs of army life, in which he treated with remarkable feeling the movement of massed troops and the everyday behavior of the common soldier. Finally, the Second Empire’s imperialist policies stimulated a revival of military painting—an extension of the emperor’s desire to participate in the Napoleonic legend. Thus, of all the categories of history painting in this period, the most popular was that of the military scene. It was undoubtedly Horace Vernet who contributed most to the transformation of the battle picture, at once rendering the anonymous aspect of modern military encounters and divesting them of allegorical associations. In his magnum opus shown at the Salon of 1845 (see volume 3), Capture of the Smalah of Abd el Kader, the vast panorama (over sixty feet long) of the French seizure of the mobile camp of the Algerian resistance leader, Vernet edouard manet: man about town

depicts a string of several episodes lacking any central focus or dominant accent. Obsessed with military exactitude, Vernet compensates for the general anonymity with specificity of detail. More scrupulous than his predecessors, Vernet studied uniforms, carefully collated military documents, interviewed combatants, and went over the actual terrain upon which the battles were fought. He completely identified with the military, using its vernacular and slang and telling war stories as if he were an old veteran. This play-acting is also reflected to a degree in his work, which often conveys a theatrical quality and bluster more appropriate to the melodramatic moment of the “cavalry charge” that would one-day climax Hollywood Westerns. Despite the artificial atmosphere of many of Vernet’s works, however, his individual soldiers radiate authenticity, and he enabled the French public—troopers and civilians alike—to bask in the glorious exploits he portrayed. It is no exaggeration to state that Vernet was the most popular painter in France from the Restoration through the Second Empire. Although his special exhibition at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 was the crowning event of his career, his greatest triumphs occurred under the reign of Louis-Philippe, whose favorite scheme, the Galerie des Batailles at Versailles, marked the climax of the old-fashioned taste for epic battle scenes. But in the twilight of his career Vernet extended his influence further as official painter to Napoléon III; in 1854 he spent several months with the French army in the Crimea, sketching sites and taking notes for a projected series of paintings glorifying the exploits of Napoléon III’s imperial army. The one major work emerging from this project was The Battle of Alma (Crimea, 20 September 1854), exhibited in the Salon of 1857, and he left unfinished another major commission from the Second Empire, Napoléon I Surrounded by Marshals and Generals Dead on the Field of Battle—and these works incidentally revert to the traditional visual and ideological focus on a dominant warrior. Vernet died in 1863 but his impact is immediately discernible in the generation of military painters emerging during the Second Empire who were deeply preoccupied with historical accuracy. Since their aim was the aggrandizement of Louis-Napoléon, it may also be said that this preoccupation with exactitude entailed a concern for contemporaneity. As shown previously, official policy advocated monumental commissions depicting the crucial civil and military events of the Second Empire, emphasizing the artist’s ability to “give an air of reality to the fact which narrative cannot achieve . . . and preserve the image of contemporary personages in a precise and certain manner, show them to us actively engaged, indicate the disposition of the locales, the exact style of their clothes, reproduce, in short, the physiognomy of the era whose events it traces.”130 As we have also seen, Chesneau described military painters in the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in terms reminiscent of contemporary criticism of the realists: “Today our

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battle painters are less artists . . . than chroniclers, editors of military bulletins. They report the facts and nothing but the facts.”131 Among the younger artists most influenced by Vernet were Ernest Meissonier, Adolphe Yvon, and Isidor Pils. Although Meissonier’s Napoléon III à Solferino—an episode from the Italian campaign in 1859—projects the emperor in the central role, his protagonist does not participate heroically in the action but calmly views the event from a strategic position above. Yvon’s exhibition of The Capture of the Tower of Malakoff in 1857, which depicts an episode from the Crimean War, elevated him to a leading position among the military artists of his generation. An immense battle scene recalling in many ways Vernet’s Capture of the Smalah, it exhibited an entangled mass of combatants in which friend and foe are barely distinguishable. Yvon was thankful that Napoléon III did not personally command the French troops in Crimea, since the artist felt himself at liberty to express his reconstruction of the engagement in a wholly contemporary format. In his words, he seized the opportunity to abandon the conventional tradition of placing the spectator square in the center of the battle. The authentic combatants, the soldiers, engage directly in bodily struggle; they are the heroes, disregarding rank, from general to simple trooper and bugler. Here is an energetic confusion, the blows aimed and struck amid the fusillades and shell explosions. The splendor of the victory is in direct proportion to the bitterness of the resistance; finally, the body language of the conquered should be, in my opinion, worthy of the fury of the conquerors.132

Unlike Vernet, whose soldiers generally display bluster and exuberance, Yvon shows a wide range of emotional states and physical gestures, conveying every attitude from hesitation to gung-ho ardor. He tried to suggest by physiognomic distortions the inward effect of combat: while Vernet’s troopers relish it, Yvon’s suffer its consequences, both physically and psychologically. Absent from Yvon’s work is the heroic warrior exemplified by Gérard and Gros and the free-swinging champions of Vernet. The soldier of the later nineteenth century could no longer be visualized as either classic warrior or mindless conqueror: he was looked upon as a pawn in a chess match acting on orders from a remote headquarters; he did not make personal decisions but functioned obediently as part of a mass whose every move was dictated by an impersonal authority.133 Pils’s remarkable Zouaves in the Trenches of 1859 and Battle of Alma both typify this new approach: in the former, the Zouaves (an elite fighting cadre modeled after a North African model), their impersonality guaranteed by their hooded parkas, wait to be moved like beads strung along the wires of an abacus; in the latter, the troops move mechanically into position to execute a maneuver preparatory to battle (figs. 9.38 and 8.15). As we saw in the previous chapter, one critic, though he admired the painting, complained that the Alma lacked

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9.38  Isidore Pils, Zouaves in the Trenches, 1859. Present whereabouts unknown.

“the inspiration and bellicose fever of true combats,” and that the artist translated too literally the official report: His artillerymen and turcos [Algerian troops] execute a maneuver whose unfolding is ingeniously expressed, nothing more. These guys act as if they are at home, tranquil, indifferent, without care for balls or bullets, lacking warrior transports.134

The critic had not outgrown the bombastic visual rhetoric of the Galerie des Batailles and failed to grasp that Pils’s soldiers were simply obeying orders. This sense of the documentary and the humbler attitude that underlies it were picked up by the youngest of the military painters, who would later be celebrated for their portrayal of the Franco-Prussian War. One of these was Paul-Alexandre Protais, who enjoyed great popularity thanks to his successful pendants shown in the Salon of 1863, Morning, before the Attack and Evening, after the Attack.135 Absorbed by the psychological stress experienced by soldiers in the field, Protais avoided direct combat scenes in favor of the moments prior to engagement and the feelings in the aftermath. It was a formula that appealed to his adoring middle-class patrons, who were undoubtedly guided by the knowledge that Napoléon III himself purchased the two works for his private collection. Military painters were abundantly represented in the Exposition Universelle of 1867, and their pictures were incontestably the most popular. Alexandre noted the “military infatuation in that epoch,” and Chesneau wrote that in France, “modern battle painting, of all the genres, guarantees for those who exploit it the most rapid popularity.”136 Manet’s attempt to redeem a desiccated history genre through his military theme corresponded to this condition of heightened public awareness of the battle picture.

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Even the critic Théodore Duret, Manet’s close friend and future biographer, found it necessary to devote a major section of his Les Peintres français en 1867 to the battle painters, and his discussion, often ignored in the Manet literature, supplies many clues to Manet’s treatment of Maximilian.137 The author begins by singling out Vernet for praise, because, despite the artist’s flaws, he expressed himself freely and not as a government hack: “In all the pictures where Horace Vernet has fixed on canvas the soldiers of his time that he directly observed, he produced authentic works of art, works rendering visible, in an original form, a wholly interior and vivid side of things.” Vernet, then, was one of the few who overcame the limitations of having to paint a commemorative event; most military artists had neither the natural aptitude nor the imagination to treat programmatic assignments. Duret lamented Vernet’s passing in 1863, which he felt left a void among the painters of his category, at the current head of which he placed Yvon. Although Duret acknowledged the new direction established by the younger painter, he was especially hard on the artist for the way in which he exaggerated individual emotional states in the Malakoff, a work exhibited in the Exposition: The most complex and terrible emotions expressed by the human animal in combat—rage, the bloodthirstiness, the fury of the unchained beast, the terror of some, the anger, the delirium of others—are difficult to render even by the most talented artist, and M. Yvon, totally out of his depth, has simply replaced them in his work by atrocious grimaces.

Duret proscribed exaggerated emotional expression in art, and his major criticism of the romantic movement was its melodrama: “The overemphasis, an often inflated style, exaggeration of movement, gestures, and action” were essential errors. But if he deplored certain characteristics of early nineteenth-century movements and of the current military group, he considered them manifestly superior to what he called “the modern school,” which lacked noble themes and dealt trivially with contemporary life. Having built up to this conclusion, he pessimistically warned that, unless circumstances were radically altered, the total degradation of French painting was inevitable. These observations must have affected Manet, since Duret’s analysis provides a vantage point for understanding the conception and development of Maximilian. Confronted with the animosity of both public and critics in that fateful year, Manet took up the challenge of one of the traditional genres. His choice of the military theme—setting aside for the moment the impact of the immediate event that inspired it—was not picked at random: it was the unique category of history painting conveying elements of contemporary life, and if it was regressive in terms of his primary focus, it was the least inimical to his taste for modernity. He could, moreover, easily

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rationalize his regressiveness by assuming the attitude of a graphic reporter recording a major contemporary event. Finally, military scenes were the greatest crowd-pleaser, and we know that the Maximilian was particularly motivated by Manet’s need to ingratiate himself with the public. Duret’s negative observations on the melodramatic aspects of romantic painting and the strained expressions in Yvon must have compelled Manet to rethink the character of the military picture. While the precedent of Goya’s Massacres of the Third of May, 1808 is invariably invoked in connection with Maximilian, none of its raw eloquence or bombastic rhetoric is present in Manet’s work. Manet’s flat delivery clearly understates his case, even though—again unlike Goya—he depicts the event at the moment of maximum violence. His uninflected rendering of the scene is abetted by even lighting—totally at odds with the explosive contrast of light and dark in the Goya. Manet glimpsed the irony in the historical reversal of the thematic roles of the protagonists: in the Goya Napoleonic aggressors suppress insurgents, whereas in Manet’s picture insurgents suppress Napoleonic aggressors. Manet’s lack of emotional expressiveness and detached approach to point-blank execution shares several features with the matter-of-fact realists among the contemporary military artists, including Protais, Guys, and Meissonier, and otherwise adopted the prevalent trend in the depiction of military events. If later he criticized Meissonier’s Cuirassiers, 1805—“Everything is in iron, except the armor-plates [cuirasses]”—he nevertheless analogously reduced everything to homogenized substance and took over from Meissonier the cool, passionless view of military experience.138 Like the work of this artist and the others, the Maximilian is essentially a welldocumented reconstruction, an attempt to portray a contemporary occurrence as accurately as possible. Also common to their work is its singular omission of distinguishable heroes and foes, with courage here defined, if at all, by the way the protagonist accepts his obliteration. Furthermore, Manet almost entirely abandons formalized gestures and central focus; and the fact that the firing squad is diagonally disposed from a point closer to the spectator than to the victims involves the spectator directly, as if she were peering over the shoulders of the executioners. Although, unlike the majority of his peers working in this genre, Manet could only inform himself from the eyewitness accounts of others, he nevertheless endeavored to collect the most reliable material, and his several versions of the picture attest to conscientious preparations. His method was confirmed by his later statement to the painter Henri Detouche: “Undertaking a history painting after the chronicles of the time is equivalent to the description of an individual in his passport.”139 One major source of information about the execution—heretofore neglected—was American newspapers: news and diplomatic dispatches were funneled through Houston, New Orleans, and New York, in natural consequence of the significance of the event for the United States.140 Indeed,

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9.39  Execution of Maximilian, wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, 10 August 1867.

Napoléon III and Eugénie received the news of Maximilian’s death in a coded cablegram from Washington. Threatened by a major foreign power on her border in apparent violation of the Monroe Doctrine, America was perhaps even more caught up in the events than France. The French quite naturally monitored the American press, continually quoting it in their leading journals. On 10 August 1867 America’s most important illustrated newspaper, Harper’s Weekly, published an extensive account of the execution and illustrated it with a remarkable drawing based on eyewitness testimony (fig. 9.39).141 Whether it is reconstruction or on-the-spot transcription is uncertain, but in several details it follows very closely the written accounts available in Paris. In any case, it is an astonishing document, apparently unique, and one that Manet must have known, since it displays several motifs used by him in the several versions of his picture. It is generally accepted that the first of these versions is the Boston ébauche, an unfinished and contradictory attempt abandoned before it could be satisfactorily resolved (fig. 9.40). For this work Manet planned to garb the executioners in Mexican guerrilla costume, but further revelations prompted him to reconsider their uniforms and contributed to the abandonment of the picture. The most curious of these figures is the barely visible officer at the extreme right facing outward and leaning on a saber, the right half of his body cut off by the picture plane; his head is placed frontally while the rest of the body stands in profile, creating a disjunctive relationship between the two parts. The fragmented and contradictory character of this figure, and especially its failure to hold itself in the



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9.40  Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, ébauche (underpainting), 1867. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

composition, suggest a last-minute addition. It may well have been another factor in his decision to quit this version. This partial figure derived ultimately from the Harper’s illustration. At the far left of the magazine sketch, two fighters are seen standing in reserve behind the firing squad of five men. The one on the right, shown in profile, wears a sombrero, flared trousers, and riding chaps and leans on a drawn saber quite like the trooper in Manet’s painting. The other figure behind him looks outward toward the spectator, like the head of the figure in the Boston ébauche. Unlike the neighboring officer in the illustration, he wears a uniform resembling that of the sergeant in the subsequent versions of Manet’s picture. It may be inferred that Manet had progressed on the Boston canvas to the point of fixing the soldiers in reserve responsible for delivering the coup de grâce, when he made the discovery of the Harper’s illustration. Bent on including the two figures of that design, he ended with a confused synthesis that all but vitiated his composition. This would explain the somewhat perplexing character of the costumes: while Manet clearly began the Boston version with Mexican guerrilla costumes, passages around the headgear of the firing squad resemble the képis of the Harper’s picture. What must have added to Manet’s confusion is the mixed uniform style in the newspaper sketch, whose motley character conveys an authentic effect: in actuality, the juaristas were ill-equipped and their guerrilla forces wore the costume of the campesino. The discovery or knowledge of photographs taken and distributed by François Aubert in carte de visite form showing the firing squad wearing standard Western military dress persuaded Manet to eliminate the incon

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9.41  François Aubert, The Execution Squad, contact print from the original glass negative, 1867. Musée Royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire Militaire, Brussels.

sistencies of the uniforms and depict conventional martial attire (fig. 9.41). In the later versions the sergeant in reserve appears in the traditional military costume of the period. Again, however, he is derived in part from the Harper’s figure at the extreme left, as confirmed by the trousers: of all the soldiers, the sergeant alone wears no leggings, or gaiters, and his left trouser leg is identical with the exposed trouser leg of the Harper’s officer. This resemblance not only comprises the rumpled contours and slightly bowed shape, but also the frontal position of the foot. Manet was extremely sensitive to such details, for it is obvious that he also adapted the tight stovepipe trouser legs and pointed shoes of the Harper’s Miramón in the conception of his counterpart. Except for Maximilian (familiar enough to the French from photographs and portraits), the Harper’s portrayal of the protagonists is surprisingly accurate, and may have assisted Manet in his reconstruction. Mejía, on the left, is shown with his hair combed close to his scalp and with dark skin suggesting Indian ancestry, while Miramón, on the right, has an oval face and debonair beard, exactly as Manet has depicted them. Although Manet brings the prisoners together with their hands clasped, in conformity with some newspaper accounts, Maximilian comes forward and dominates the group, as in the Harper’s drawing. In both cases, the figure of Maximilian is placed on a diagonal with the legs apart and turned on its axis. Still another unmistakable affinity between the Harper’s image and all versions subsequent to the London fragment (the second in the series), is the prominent, thick wall behind the prisoners. Especially in the definitive tableau at Mannheim, it can be observed that Manet reproduced the

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rounded cornice of the wall and its slight suggestions of individual adobe bricks. Manet relied heavily on this wall as a unifying device, and its absence from the London fragment may explain why he abandoned this second version as well. Apparently, he wanted the Boston and London compositions to depend solely on life-size figures for coherence, but, dissatisfied with the results, he then returned to the illustration for the wall motif. It is most conspicuously displayed in the lithograph, where it turns at right angles behind the figures, and the fact that in the same version the emperor wears his sombrero as in the Boston painting suggests that the wall was used here for the first time. It may be concluded that the Harper’s illustration reached Manet at a transitional stage in his work, compelling him to modify and ultimately abandon his first two versions, which, incidentally, are most unlike all later pictures in the series. Newspaper accounts of the execution in Le Figaro of 8 July and the Mémorial diplomatique of 10 October substantially corroborate the data provided by the Harper’s print.142 They reported the presence of two Franciscan priests; that the prisoners were set at a distance of three paces from one another; that seven men were involved in each execution, including those in reserve. The Figaro further related that the execution procession had ended at the thick exterior wall of a cemetery, and provided these additional details: “The three benches with wooden crosses were adjoined to the wall, the three firing squads, composed of five men, each with two N.C.O.s in reserve to deliver the coup de grâce, approached to within three paces of the condemned.”143 While these accounts vary slightly from the picture (mainly the reputed distance between the firing squad and the prisoners), the Figaro report confirmed that Mejía and Miramón were blindfolded, but that the emperor was not. The Mémorial diplomatique, basing its account on the eyewitness testimony of Tudos, Maximilian’s valet, claimed that there were four men on the firing line and three in reserve, but the Figaro text tallies with the Harper’s drawing except for the report of three squads.144 Another contradiction in the accounts concerns the positions of the emperor and the generals; Tudos claimed that the emperor yielded his place in the center to Miramón, while the Figaro and most other reports declared that Maximilian stood in the middle.145 Curiously, the text accompanying the Harper’s illustration reported that Maximilian did in fact yield his place to the general, so that Manet seemed deliberately to have ignored the textual account in favor of the dissenting illustration. The source may also explain why Manet placed Mejía on the left and Miramón on the right of Maximilian, in apparent contradiction of the Tudos report. The major variation in Manet’s picture (excepting the obvious omissions) from the illustration and the newspaper articles is in the number of soldiers he introduced. Manet placed six on the line, one in reserve and one off to the side who gives the signal to fire. The photographs of the firing squad mentioned earlier showed eight men, so that in number Manet’s squad seems to follow the photograph rather than the illustration and the

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textual reports. But a close look at the Harper’s source reveals a somewhat remote figure in the left middle distance between the N.C.O. with the sombrero and the firing squad, who may be the officer ready to give the signal to fire. Hence, Manet could have derived the eighth figure from the illustration as well. Needing to isolate one figure, he brought one of the noncommissioned officers up on the line and made the squad consist of six men. Another curious parallel between the Harper’s print and Manet’s definitive composition is the balanced distribution of formal and psychological emphasis. There are three main divisions: the soldiers waiting in reserve, the firing squad proper and the victims. Discounting the priests in the newspaper illustration, both works arrange the three divisions along a prominent diagonal and unify the whole by the horizontally disposed wall. In the two cases, the protagonists exhibit a bizarre nonchalance and cool detachment: not only is the historical rupture on the Cerro de las Campanas enacted without remorse or regret on the part of the executioners, but the victims themselves behave with exceptional self-control and indifference, marked by the absence of tenseness in their bodies, and the lackadaisical N.C.O. leaning on his saber is complemented by the insouciant veteran calmly cocking his weapon. Although Manet tried to contrast the courage of the victims with the cool professionalism of their executioners, paradoxically they participate in an identical detachment, from which even the crowd of anxious spectators fails to detract. Such balance and aloofness are notably absent from the Boston version: there the soldier in reserve waits in tense readiness for the tragic dénouement, as if conscious of the historical implications of the event, and his dominating presence overwhelms the composition. He imparts to the picture an aura of immanence and melodrama, a decidedly baroque or rhetorical character entirely opposed to that of his dispassionate counterpart in the later versions. Additionally, he is a fairly conventional figure derived from a prototype of older images of military executions. Here again the Harper’s print interceded between the first and subsequent works in the series, monitoring Manet’s romantic inclinations and showing him how to adopt his plan to the contemporary agenda he ultimately chose. With the discovery of this source and the photographic documents, this figure proved to be untenable for his purpose. The transformation in the later versions is not only manifested in costume detail but in the figure’s psychological disposition as well: at this stage Manet suppressed all overt drama from the scene. He conceived the sergeant’s insouciant demeanor and made him key to unraveling the painter’s meaning. For this figure Manet looked to Alexandre Protais, the most celebrated of the younger military painters. As already noted, Protais’s fame rested on his psychological treatment of soldiers, and though his sincerity has been disputed, it does seem that he genuinely wished to de-glamorize war and its effects. A veteran of the Crimean War, he perhaps had to express his firsthand

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opposite 9.42  Paul-Alexandre Protais, Morning, before the Attack, Salon of 1863, Exposition Universelle, 1867. Musée Condé, Chantilly. 9.43  Paul-Alexandre Protais, Evening, after the Attack, Salon of 1863, Exposition Universelle, 1867. Musée Condé, Chantilly.



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experience in straightforward terms and not in false patriotic sentiments. His two triumphal pendants of the 1863 Salon, Morning, before the Attack and Evening, after the Attack, were shown again in the Exposition Universelle of 1867, where they repeated their earlier success (figs. 9.42–43).146 Manet was attracted to the motif of the old veteran in the center of Morning, who coolly examines the lock of his musket just prior to engaging the enemy. In the specific gesture, general bodily posture, and even physiognomy, this figure bears an unmistakable affinity with Manet’s sergeant. Their association is further reinforced by the slight variations in Manet’s figure as it evolves in the different versions: in the London fragment the near-frontal position of Protais’s head is more closely approximated, and in the definitive Mannheim picture Manet reproduced the buttons above and below the arm on the front of the blouse worn by Protais’s soldier. Even more significantly they share similar psychological attitudes: Protais’s veteran is reserved and businesslike, in contrast with the fearful and anxious recruits just entering combat for the first time. Just as Manet’s sergeant is detached from his surroundings, so Protais’s professional soldier isolates himself from the recruits, who feel called upon to distinguish themselves in the line of fire. The meaning in both cases is analogous: to a romantic sensibility war presents an opportunity to demonstrate heroism and self-sacrifice, but this attitude is belied by those who habitually command, since they see war as a series of tasks that must be disposed of in a workmanlike manner. Maximilian’s courageous confrontation with the firing squad is nullified by the sergeant’s methodical gesture; just as the hopes and fears of the novices are rendered meaningless by the “pro” for whom war is a pay-as-you-go affair. If the better part of humanity may be manipulated through appeals to their patriotic sympathies, it is also true that the aristocratic classes are themselves victims of a gross deception known as the “Code of Honor.” In this sense, Maximilian and the working-class recruits share a similar delusion: both are victimized by the related myths of aristocratic courage and proletarian patriotism, and both act under the aegis of what they believe to be their “cause” or “duty.” When news of the tragedy of Querétaro reached Paris, a critic compared Maximilian’s execution to that of Maréchal Ney.147 His comparison, betraying a large measure of agitation, is an index of the impact of this event on French society. The Gazette de France called the execution an “assassination” and labeled Juárez a “butcher.”148 Inevitably, the execution or assassination of a beloved figure in government or popular life profoundly disturbs the emotional state of a populace.149 In one sense, this is owing to the aura of invincibility with which we are disposed to invest our leadership; but in another, it derives from a sense of guilt attending the vindictive pleasure the death of a charismatic figure in authority generates; we envy those in high position and secretly wish their downfall. For this reason assassinations become indelibly traced in the social consciousness. This is a complex phenomenon that cannot be analyzed here; suffice it to note that edouard manet: man about town

the occurrence of one brings in its wake the memory of all the others. It is understandable that the critic recalled Ney and other assassinated French leaders: in recent history, the shock of successive assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Anwar Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin recalls all the rest from Lincoln onward, establishing a collective psychical continuity compounded of reverence and vindictiveness. This syndrome should be considered in order to gauge the terrible impact of Maximilian’s execution on the French, and on Manet in particular. First there was stunned disbelief, then guilt feelings and emotional catharsis in the form of national mourning. Although France had been sharply divided over the intervention in Mexico (much like America during the Vietnam and Iraq wars), it genuinely adored the quixotic Maximilian. It is not fortuitous that the exiled Victor Hugo, a bitter enemy of the Second Empire, cabled Juárez to plead for Maximilian’s exoneration, for misguided Max had the stuff of a fairy tale prince, whose life mission was to redeem a downtrodden people. Indeed, Napoléon III’s whole abortive Mexican expedition could appear as a splendid adventure in the New World, not simply as the gesture of an imperialist opportunist pursuing a course of mad ambition. Years afterward, during the Third Republic, the academic painter Jean-Paul Laurens could still exploit Maximilian’s hold on the French imagination in a commemorative work, The Last Moments of Maximilian, a sympathetic rendering of the archduke consoling his distraught supporters (fig. 9.44). 9.44  Jean-Paul Laurens, The Last Moments of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 1882. Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.



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For Manet, who elected to work out his personal trauma in concrete form, the shock of the execution must have been especially devastating. Sandblad was the first to call attention to the evidence of identification in Manet’s work.150 As previously shown, there are explicit autobiographical references in Manet’s paintings of the 1860s presented in disguised form. These references point to a sense of personal insecurity and desire to camouflage his social relations, while his self-styled role of flâneur allowed him to escape his predicament by stepping into the shoes of another. Meyer Schapiro observed that Manet chose his subjects because they “related intimately to his person or outlook,” and in the period of the Maximilian there were considerable pressures that could only have intensified his masking disposition.151 As the eldest son, he had become head of his family when his father died in 1862; the following year he participated in the Salon des Refusés and legitimized his thirteen-year liaison with Suzanne in a civil ceremony, assuming some formal responsibility for Léon, who remained illegitimate. In the same period, he emerged as the nominal leader of the younger generation of realists. At the center of large constellations of human relationships, his disappointments of 1867 must have been bitter in inverse ratio to his grandiose projections; for at the moment when Manet conceived the Maximilian, he was grieving the loss of Baudelaire—the poet, to whom he was close, died on August 31—sustaining the attacks of critics who made short work of his private exhibition on the Place de l’Alma, shaking off the jeers of the public and generally considering himself the most persecuted artist in France. Years later, reflecting philosophically on this period of anxiety, he acknowledged the pressures he felt and stressed his need for patience, “because the attacks of which I have been the object broke my will to live. You just don’t know what it’s like to be constantly attacked.”152 The threat to his self-image on all sides and the pressure to maintain appearances led him to the desperate move of setting up his independent show, employing in the catalogue such metaphors as “combat” and “battling with equal arms” and referring to his critics as “adversaries.” At loggerheads with the verdict of the Salon jury and his critics, he probably considered his exhibition on Place de l’Alma as his “Battle of Alma.” Zola allegorized Manet’s paranoidal situation in the form of a group of stone-throwing urchins (the public) protected by the law (the critics) to whom Manet had fallen victim.153 Given Manet’s state of mind at that moment, it may be assumed that the figure of Maximilian is in some way a repository for the displaced projection of Manet’s feelings about himself. There are more tangible associations between the two men. A comparison of a photograph of Maximilian with Fantin-Latour’s 1867 portrait of Manet reveals a startling resemblance between them (fig. 9.45). Although Maximilian’s head is more oval, the similarity of high forehead, sharp nose, reflective eyes, and soft mouth is unmistakable. Both were blond with blue eyes, and both wore their carefully trimmed beards parted in the middle.

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9.45  Photograph of Maximilian, ca. 1863.



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They were of the same age (born in 1832), fastidious about their dress, and obsessed with Spanish art and culture. Maximilian’s aristocratic heritage was paralleled by Manet’s worldly elegance, a fact that is evident from the illustrated comparison, where emblems of the emperor’s rank are more than matched by the artist’s dandified accessories. (Recall the reviewer’s comments on Fantin-Latour’s portrait of Manet that the sitter comported himself as “the equal of a Spanish nobleman vis-à-vis the king-public.”154) Whether or not the critic divined correctly, it seems certain that Maximilian’s passionate ambition to rule finds an echo in Manet’s hunger for official honors and public esteem. Maximilian’s quest to Mexico surely would have evoked Manet’s youthful voyage to Rio, as well as invoked memories of his sympathy for the oppressed peoples of Latin America. It is even possible that Manet was struck by the curious coincidence of all three names of the victims—Mejía, Miramón, and Maximilian—beginning with the letter “M,” and felt that in some mystical way he participated in their fate. Maximilian’s personal secretary noted that the emperor signed only his initial “M” on the drafts of documents submitted for his approval—a practice analogous to Manet’s stamp on his rough drafts and sketches. Yet the resemblance ends here: for it was Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, and not Manet, the celebrated refusé, who enjoyed all the worldly honors and badges of prestige. He incarnated, indeed, the secret fantasies of all French flâneurs: young, rich, aristocratic, intelligent, cultivated, and married to a beautiful princess, and wishing only to use his power to ameliorate the world’s ills; and it is altogether unsurprising that Maximilian personified Manet’s aspirations and fantasies, occupying a role desired by the artist and possessing those characteristics that he himself lacked. Where Maximilian seemed to rule, Manet felt hopeless; where one had direction, the other was disoriented; where one belonged, the other felt isolated. Thus the emperor’s person was made to order as a site for Manet’s displaced projections, a distinct parallel existing between Manet’s glorified self-image and the idealized body of Maximilian. Had Manet’s sense of personal identity been stronger, it is possible that he would not have had to see himself in terms of this institutionalized image. At the same time, however, Maximilian was Manet’s inescapable secret rival: chapter nine

so long as the emperor inhabited a lofty plateau, Manet’s identity was insecure, since the position he coveted was occupied by another, and the disparity between the reality of his beleaguered situation and the exalted image of Maximilian could not have been more apparent in 1867. Maximilian could only have aroused in Manet ambivalent emotions of love and envy, admiration and vindictiveness. The news of Maximilian’s execution reached Paris at the end of June and the beginning of July, ironically coinciding with the whirl of festivities for the Exposition Universelle. Napoléon III and Eugénie were playing host to many of the crowned heads of state, and they learned of the event officially in the midst of preparations for the awards ceremony. At almost the same time, Manet was nursing his disappointment over the failure of his private show and found himself in a condition of the utmost nervous irritation. His awareness of the contrast between the activities of a high society from which he yearned for recognition and his currently dismal situation established the backdrop for his reaction to the news. One can only speculate on its immediate effect on Manet, and the length of time it took him to pull himself together. At any rate, it was Maximilian—the embodiment of his most cherished dreams—and not himself who had been executed, and Manet, inevitably torn between his affection and admiration on the one hand, and vindictive pleasure and guilt on the other, embarked on more production of cathartic consequence. It may be assumed that the identification with Maximilian constituted a severe psychological regression, since it entailed a partial renunciation of Manet’s own identity, making him define his own role in terms of the role of the other. Thus Manet’s normal proclivities were checked, and not surprisingly he sought resolution of his conflicts in a regressive pictorial mode. It was through this psychic process that the theme of Maximilian’s downfall had become the stuff of Manet’s projected triumph. The image of Maximilian courageously confronting his annihilators is the heroic dream-projection of Manet himself—the exalted position between two others an inevitable reference to the Crucifixion—and constitutes what may be called the loving side of Manet’s identification. (It was reported that Maximilian likened his betrayal and sacrifice to Christ, and Manet, who painted a Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers for the Salon of 1865, transformed his sombrero into a kind of halo.155) Simultaneously, the sergeant who prepares his musket for the coup de grâce acts out the vindictiveness Manet felt toward the rival who possessed everything he himself lacked. Manet is thus both victim and executioner, and the macabre equilibrium of the composition results from these mutually counteracting forces. Its power to move the spectator despite its apparent deadpan look resides in the ambivalently controlled energies of the artist’s emotional state. The tension is further expressed thematically in the double-sided presentation of military virtue—the heroism of the condemned Maximilian and the callous indifference of the executioners. Indeed, I would suggest that instead

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of presenting an inexpressive picture, Manet communicates a pervasive set of antithetical emotions that balance out pictorially. His “aloof ” treatment is in reality the complement of Maximilian’s brave passivity and of the soldiers’ indifferent aggression: both the painter and his subjects react to the event with a kind of stoical restraint. When Manet terminated his series, he signed his definitive canvas “Manet 19 juin 1867,” the date of Maximilian’s execution—for he had in fact relived the tragic episode. Manet and the Commune

The event dealt a severe blow to the prestige of the Second Empire, and it is not surprising that the Salon of 1868 was conspicuously lacking in works devoted to the subject. Only one artist who undertook the project, JulesMarc Chamerlat, managed to squeak past the jury with a pair of pictures, Emperor Maximilian at the Capuchin Convent and Evening of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian (Querétaro, 19 June 1867), depicting the before-and-after of the incident, but these were more expressive of France in mourning than in soul-searching. Certain photographic documents were banned in France, and Manet himself experienced the general censorship in unofficial assurances that any attempt to exhibit his painting would be met with rejection; furthermore, the government flatly refused to authorize the publication of his lithographic version. Zola argued that what the censors found most objectionable in Manet’s representation was the similarity of the uniforms of the firing squad to those worn by French troops, thus suggesting in the end that imperial France bore the heaviest share of responsibility in the death of Maximilian. Zola’s argument would be confirmed two years later following the collapse of the regime during the Franco-Prussian War and the repression of the Commune. In the wake of Napoléon III’s surrender to Prussian troops at Sedan in September 1870 and the proclamation of a provisional French government, Paris mobilized all of its population to hold out against the Prussian invasion. Paris finally capitulated at the end of January 1871, and the provisional government established in the interim gave way to a conservative elected National Assembly that first met in Bordeaux and then moved to Versailles rather than a still rebellious Paris. Under the presidency of Adolphe Thiers, the nervous government attempted but failed to disarm the leftist contingent of the mobilized Parisian populace, and the radical municipal council declared the Paris Commune and called for a national insurrection against the Versailles government. But on 21 May the Versailles troops, strengthened by the addition of released Prussian prisoners, entered the city and in the next few days crushed the Commune with relentless fury. During what has become known as “Bloody Week,” some 20,000–30,000 Parisians were killed and thousands more arrested and deported to France’s penal colony New Caledonia. The brutal and wanton destruction of the Commune equaled the uncontrollable slaughter of the

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American Civil War, and only its short duration saved it from the massive butcheries of its predecessor. Manet’s work of the 1860s demonstrated his intense awareness of the American Civil War and his own government’s strategic association with it. He could not have missed the tragic parallels of the civil uprising of the Commune and its ruthless suppression with the bloodiest war in history, especially so soon after the fall of the Second Empire, whose sympathy for the South and incursion into Mexico fanned the flames of Southern expectancy for European recognition and hence its long-term survival. I believe it is no coincidence that his visual responses to this event invoke parallels with the American Civil War and his own work on The Execution of Maximilian. His acute sense of the topical is shown in his repeat exhibition of the Kearsarge and Alabama at the Paris Salon of 1872—the first official Salon following the Commune. Théodore Duret, Manet’s patron, friend, and biographer, wrote that the painter had entered Paris just prior to the end of the Commune and witnessed the bloody repression in the streets. And he noted somewhat tersely: “In a lithograph, entitled La Guerre civile, he pretty much synthesized the horror of that struggle and the repression that followed it” (fig. 9.46).156 An unknown Communard, in the uniform of the National Guard, lies prostrate behind a barricade in the vicinity of the church of La Madeleine, and in the lower right-hand corner the upturned shoes and striped trousers of a comrade in arms wearing civilian clothes jut into the scene. The event took place at the intersection of the boulevard Malesherbes and the rue de l’Arcade, and the Madeleine is recognizable by the columns and grating in the background (fig. 9.47). Here one of the first massacres of Bloody Week occurred (on 23 May), when hundreds of National Guardsmen who had sought refuge in the church were executed near the barricade. The visible presence of the church hints at the conservative Catholic majority constituting the government responsible for calling down this bloody reprisal on the Commune and showing no Christian mercy in the treatment of prisoners. Signed and dated 1871 on a paving stone of the type used in the barricade construction, the lithograph was published three years later with the title “Guerre civile”—thus applying to the Commune the French label for the American war that had become a commonplace in the French press in the previous decade. The other work of this period, The Barricade, brings together several of the ideas sparked by the decade-long epoch of civil struggle from 1861 to 1871 (fig. 9.48). Manet depicts a squad of Versaillais mowing down a group of Communards beside their barricade. For his composition he traced the outlines of the lithographed version of his Execution of Maximilian, then reworked the design in ink and watercolor on the verso of the sheet. Though ending reversed in the lithograph, the firing squad here is identical to that of The Execution of Maximilian, reinforcing Zola’s contention that Manet’s uniformed soldiers allude to government complicity in

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9.46  Edouard Manet, La Guerre civile, lithograph, 1871. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 9.47  Charles de Marville, Fountain, Place de la Madeleine, albumen, ca. 1870. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

9.48  Edouard Manet, The Barricade, lithograph, 1871. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.



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the execution of its imperial client. The presence of the troops in The Barricade implicate the government in the destruction of its own citizens, and the dual reference to Maximilian and the Commune makes the point about the breakdown of traditional boundaries between foreign invasion and civil war. Speaking truth to power in its bald sympathy with the Communards and antipathy to the nascent republican regime of Thiers and MacMahon, Manet’s lithograph remained unpublished during his lifetime. The wholesale massacre of the Communards went on day and night and lasted through 13 June, the government opportunistically seizing the occasion to exterminate once and for all every vestige of leftist opposition. These “legal” shootings by the Versaillais were far more terrible than the slaughter during the battle, and shocked even the bitterest foes of the Commune. In a letter of 5 June 1871, Berthe Morisot’s mother informed her that her brother Tiburce, a lieutenant in the Versailles army, had “met two Communards, at this moment when they are being shot . . . Manet and Degas! Even at this stage they are condemning the drastic measures used to repress them. I think they are insane, don’t you?”157 Manet, of course, was no political radical and certainly no Communard. He could be classified as a moderate republican with profound sympathies for the underdog. During the Second Empire, he could be counted among the covert opposition whose feelings were expressed in the subjects of his flâneurie. The two powerful works devoted to the Commune are both framed by Haussmann’s buildings and continue to reveal him as the streetwise stroller seeking evidence of social and political injustice. Whatever “doubling” he experienced in his daily existence he channeled into socially constructive unmasking of the hidden deceits of public life.

edouard manet: man about town



i0 The Franco-Prussian War, the French Commune, and the Threshold of Impressionism

It was déjà vu all over again. Although the Paris Commune sprang from a complex set of historical circumstances, it immediately invoked memories of the insurrection of June 1848. In addition to disgust with the loss of the war with Prussia, the misery of the four-month siege of Paris, and the struggle of republicanism against dynastic rule, the working class reacted to the moderates’ brake on socialist aspirations at an opportune moment to redress social and political inequities. All of which combined explosively into revolutionary action and civil war. Despite its brevity (18 March to 28 May), the Commune remained the largest urban insurrection in modern European history until the Warsaw uprisings of 1943–1944: somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in the street massacres of the Commune’s last days. In addition, the more than fifty thousand sentences meted out to prisoners taken during and after the Commune, including over four thousand deportations to the islands of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, made it the most extensive judicial repression of the century. It not only destabilized social relations and discredited the infant Third Republic’s claim to democratic rule, but it engendered such violent counter-reactions in its aftermath that it left a permanent scar on the French body politic. By threatening conservatives and moderates alike in their attachment to property, the event profoundly affected art and literature as well as politics for many years afterward. Even liberal intellectuals, who had consistently attacked the materialism of the Second Empire and were bound in sympathy to the working classes, moved to the right in their revulsion from the excesses of the “mob.” Until quite recently, the Commune was off the radar screen of most art historians who specialized in studies on impressionist thematics.1 Yet my own investigation of its impact on this modernist formation demonstrates that it was central to its development as a movement and to its content. As the Communards retreated from their urban stations, they set official buildings on fire to cover their flight. Ironically, it had been the work of

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“Haussmannization” to eradicate the threat of insurrection, and now this very “modernity” was turned inside out. When it was all over and the last barricade destroyed, Paris lay in ruins. The working class—previously evicted from its old place in the city’s center to make room for progress— had reclaimed Paris only to wreak vengeance on the new society and its monuments. So it appeared to the bourgeoisie, whose goal was not only to restore the look (as it existed in memory) of the now despised Second Empire, but to insure that the last remaining signs of the Commune disappeared from urban view. In The Civil War in France, Karl Marx sets out a justification for the Communards’ use of fire to cover their retreat, since the government of Versailles had stigmatized the burning of buildings as a crime against the state and proceeded to hunt down its enemies as suspect of professional incendiarism. Noting that in war, “fire is an arm as legitimate as any,” he declared: To be burned down has always been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in the front of battle of all the regular armies of the world. But in the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history, this is by no means to hold good! The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence. They used it to stop up to the Versailles troops those long, straight avenues which Haussmann had expressly opened to artillery-fire; they used it to cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese, in their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least as many buildings as the fire of the Commune.

After emphasizing that the Communards understood that their opponents cared less for the lives of Parisians than for Paris buildings, Marx elaborated: If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising and an old one breaking down.2

I will treat the impressionists more extensively in volume 5, but for now it should be noted that their formation in the years 1871–1874 brackets the critical period of rebuilding Paris following the brutal hammer blows of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune—Victor Hugo’s “l’année terrible.” In this concluding chapter, I wish to problematize the technique and content of the painters to open up the possibility of a connection and, at the same time, attempt to deal with the inherent contradiction of their avant-garde position and what I will characterize as their Third Republic compromise. I will argue that the impressionists preeminently politicized

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their creations by reimagining and reconstructing symbolically their partially destroyed country and disrupted social hierarchy.3 T. J. Clark concludes his searching account in The Painting of Modern Life with his central theme that the impressionists failed to “find a way to picture class adequately” and ultimately to forge an authentic iconography of modern life.4 He sees the impressionists bound by the major myths of representing Paris and its suburbs as sites of recreation, leisure, and pleasure, a world of nature to be enjoyed on weekend excursions. By so doing, they fudge class relations and suggest their fluidity in the public spaces of entertainment. Although Griselda Pollock specifically faults Clark’s analysis for its incapacity to embrace a female-experienced modernity, both would agree that what structured the terrain of Manet and his followers was the hierarchy of class and gender during the Third Republic that regulated the unequal exchange between men and women in the urban spaces. In one of his rare but trenchant allusions to the Commune, Clark includes in a footnote a quotation from a Communard that speaks of the retaking of central Paris by “the true Parisians” who had heretofore been relegated either to the peripheries or to ghettoized communities by Haussmannization.5 These “true Parisians” were the working classes segregated in outlying quartiers, essentially rendered invisible and incapable of organized protest by Second Empire gerrymandering. This is a clue to the unmistakable impact of the Commune on the structuring of social relations in its aftermath. For what is most remarkable about the short-lived Commune is its picturing of modern life in all of its social potential and its uniting of people across the bounds of nationality, sex, and class. This is most strikingly revealed in the group photographs of the participants by the “true reporter of the Commune,” Auguste Braquehais (figs. 10.1–2).6 I suspect that these photographs were done for, and preserved by, people sympathetic to the Commune, and many of them show neighborhood barricades guarded by those who made them and who were prepared to defend them. The photographs often display a cross-section of Communard society including members of the working class not shown at their regular occupations. Usually, photographers posed laborers in their specific workaday activities and particular costume, establishing an updated version of the picturesque social types so familiar in popular imagery. Braquehais, however, shows them emancipated from their assigned niche in the social hierarchy and proudly manifesting their amplified potential in the more egalitarian space established under the Commune. In the several group photographs taken at the base of the soon-to-bedemolished Vendôme Column, we see working-class men and women not only posed in ceremonious gestures heretofore reserved for the privileged classes, but even disrupting the formality by striking their own idiosyncratic attitudes. One worker, balancing himself on the edge of an upraised cushion destined to absorb the shock of the falling debris, places his hand

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opposite 10.1  Auguste B. Braquehais, Communards Posing at the Base of the Vendôme Column, photograph,

1871. Collection Daniel Wolf, New York City. 10.2  Auguste B. Braquehais, Communards Posing, 1871. Photograph. Collection Daniel Wolf, New York City. top right 10.3  Cham, Souvenirs et regrets, wood engraving from Le Monde illustré, 6 April 1872.



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across his abdomen in mock imitation of the famous Napoleonic gesture, while in another example a Federal in full-dress uniform sprawls on the ground in the front ranks of his more decorously poised colleagues. Such deviations from the formal group photograph attest to the sense of liberation and newly won confidence experienced by the previously socially disadvantaged participants.7 It is noteworthy that the reactionary caricaturist Cham mocked the defeated ex-Communards by depicting them restored to their subjugated working-class niche, dreaming of their previous moment of glory under the Commune (fig. 10.3). The Commune had tried to carve out a democratic public space where people of all classes could meet and interact on a plane of equality and participate in the critical decisions that affected their daily lives. I would not wish to over-idealize the flawed efforts of Communard leaders, but only to point out that the opening they created inspired a whole host of novel social possibilities. Much of their innovation had its roots in the new organizational forms generated out of the transformation of Paris and the liberalization of the Second Empire in its final years.8 Courbet, for example, wrote home at the height of Commune optimism on 30 April 1871: “Paris is a true paradise! No police, no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it could stay like this forever. In short, it is a beautiful dream. All the government bodies are organized federally and run themselves.”9 Despite their fumbling and differences, the Communards shared a hope of maximizing the franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

freedom and autonomy the city offered and of making these available to all classes and groups. The cessation of normal work and trade during the brief Commune period granted a rare opportunity to working-class men and women to promenade along the boulevards and in the parks and to mingle with other classes during weekdays. Workers and bourgeois queued up in the same lines and argued with one another on the streets. Upperclass and working-class women organized together in behalf of their mutual needs, and artisans in the uniform of the National Guard protected the boulevards and the municipal buildings. Together, representatives of every class and station helped build barricades and keep a lookout for sneak attacks by the Versaillais. Not only did the Communards reclaim the streets, they also renamed them in honor of the Commune.10 Communards rejected the “official” public city created by Napoléon III and Haussmann and took up what had been considered the marginalized, fragmented aspects of Parisian street life. Thus they shifted the trivial and marginal to center stage and in the process incurred the detestation and fear of ruling governments everywhere. The mainstream Western press vilified them as unspeakable monsters and savages who had to be suppressed at any cost. Let me backtrack for a moment and recapitulate the events leading up to this world-historic moment. Napoléon III’s debacle in Mexico severely weakened the Empire, creating conditions that turned a quest for diplomatic success into military disaster. The French government vigorously opposed the Hohenzollern candidature to the vacant Spanish throne in July 1870 and seized upon it as a stratagem to humiliate Prussia and restore confidence in the imperial court. Under intense French pressure, King Wilhelm of Prussia made his nephew withdraw his acceptance of the Spanish crown. The war party in the Tuileries, however, hoped to squeeze more out of the situation and demanded an apology and assurances that it would not happen again. When Wilhelm refused to be pressed that far, the emperor’s bellicose entourage steered the nation into a war for which it was ill prepared. French forces suffered one defeat after another, and by the end of August 1870 their main army had been soundly thrashed and surrounded at the fortress of Sedan. On 2 September 83,000 French troops, with the emperor himself at their head, surrendered. News of the emperor’s defeat set the stage for the upheaval in Paris. Two days later the Second Empire was overthrown and a provisional Third Republic proclaimed in Paris. As the enemy approached the capital, the elite bourgeois remnants of the Corps Législatif organized a Government of National Defense, mobilizing all of its local resources—including unprecedented working-class units of the National Guard—to withstand the expected siege. The siege began on 19 September and lasted four months, with the city subject to heavy bombardment from Prussian artillery. Since working-class militants had been inducted into the National Guard and armed, the chiefs of the provisional government gradually grew alarmed at the possibility of an

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insurrection on the order of June 1848. They thought it less inimical to their interests to negotiate with the foreign foe than to empower the working classes and persuaded the populace to capitulate to the Prussians on the grounds that continued resistance would lead to total annihilation. Meanwhile, the working people of Paris, exploiting their advantage, began organizing themselves during the period between September 1870 and March 1871. Vigilance committees were set up in each district of the city, charged with the mission to prevent sabotage of the city’s defense network and monitor the actions of the authorities. A Central Committee, made up of the representatives of the districts, was organized, and finally, in the early days of March the Federation of the National Guard (hence the other term Fédérés or Federals for the Communards) was established. The aspiration of these working-class organizations to bring about radical changes in the social structure found expression in the demand for the democratic election of a municipal council, the Paris Commune. The capital had been deprived of self-government since the French revolution of 1789, and government power invested in a police and bureaucratic apparatus peaked under the Second Empire. In nationwide elections for the new National Assembly held in Bordeaux in February 1871, events took on a sinister cast. Most of the country rejected the revolutionary ideas of Paris, resulting in a National Assembly comprising mainly monarchists of all stripes and a mere handful of republicans. Adolphe Thiers headed the interim government they formed as chief of the executive power, leaving unresolved the nature of a permanent government. Before adjourning, the body agreed to meet next at tranquil Versailles rather than radical Paris. The preliminary peace treaty between France and Prussia was signed in Versailles on 26 February 1871, with France ceding the greater part of Alsace and Lorraine to the victor and agreeing to pay a war indemnity of 5 billion francs. Prussian troops were to remain on French soil until the National Assembly ratified the treaty. Soon the new government went about its main task of subduing revolutionary Paris. In the early hours of 18 March 1871, regular troops, now the Versaillais, made an effort to disarm the working-class battalions of the National Guard, by capturing its artillery installed on the high ground commanding the city: Montmartre, Belleville, and Chaumont. But women who had set out to market began to crowd around the soldiers and sounded the alarm. National Guardsmen rushed to their assembly points, while soldiers in the regular forces began to fraternize with the people and refused orders to fire at them. Late in the evening the rebels seized the Hôtel de Ville and hoisted a red flag over it. The Central Committee of the National Guard was now in control of the city—the first workers’ government in history. The Versaillais pulled out of Paris, allowing the Communards to take over the city and consolidate their position, thus exposing a coherent and identifiable presence easily targeted for reprisal. Thiers literally disowned

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one segment of civil society within a certain geographical zone, and by abandoning territory formerly under the jurisdiction of the government, the Versaillais recapitulated in the domestic realm the territorial losses in the recent Franco-Prussian War. This may explain the terrible vengeance the enraged Versaillais (many of them former Prussian prisoners released to aid Thiers) wreaked on the Communards in the last week of May, bent, as it were, on exorcizing the double humiliation. Edmond de Goncourt wrote with personal invective three days after the end of Bloody Week: It is good that there was neither conciliation nor bargain. The solution was brutal. It was by pure force. The solution has held people back from cowardly compromises. The solution has restored confidence to the army, which learned in the blood of the Communards that it was still able to fight. Finally, the bloodletting was a bleeding white; such a purge, by killing off the combative part of the population, defers the next revolution by a whole generation. The old society has twenty years of quiet ahead of it, if the powers that be dare all that they may dare at this time.11

Yet those left in Paris were wholly within their right to organize control of the institutional structures, and did so through the democratic process. The Communards were in fact a more representative body of the populace than their counterparts at Versailles. At this moment, the working class and their bourgeois allies created a historical coalition that totally transformed both power and gender relations. External pressures forced them to develop new identities and mutual bonds: women, for example, advanced in this environment, forming clubs and actively participating in the decisionmaking process. Their presence on the barricades during Bloody Week made them infamous in the international press, which especially singled them out for the most barbed assaults. The frantic suppression of the Commune and the enormous swell of literature devoted to justification of this suppression is proof of the threat to the bourgeoisie of the suspension of traditional hierarchy. It is certain, moreover, that the conservative form the early Third Republic assumed in the aftermath was decisively shaped by the Commune. The ruthless extermination of thousands of Communards and the mass deportation of thousands of others abruptly destroyed the Left and created a vacuum in the class structure. The loss of such a large segment of skilled workers recalled the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when the pursuit of the Huguenots led to a massive transfer of talent from France to the rest of the world. In the later period as well, the politically motivated working classes were not merely politically invisible but physically absent, although the new French government persuaded a part of the peasant population to migrate to Paris to replace them. The city that the impressionists now confronted was one systematically bombarded and ravaged by Prussian and Versaillais bombs and Communard covering fires, and one depleted of its

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10.4  Rebuilding, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 8 April 1871.



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artisanate class. It was this absent but indexical body of militant manual workers, both male and female, and a physically present but psychologically intimidated bourgeoisie, that populated the environment of early modernist visual practice. Thus the fluidity of class relations and the gender inequality inevitably shaping the subjective construction of the modern may owe a significant debt to the Commune. The problem for the conservatives and their fearful moderate allies was how to preserve the semblance of what in fact had been realized in part by their avowed enemy, since the Communards realized in actuality what had mainly been uttered rhetorically by the Versailles government. Here the new role of the public space in modern life was indispensable, in providing an opportunity for the mingling of the classes in the streets while yet masking their social and spiritual dissonances. The authentic republic—the Commune—had to be demonized to make a space for the inauthentic Third Republic and its democratic pretense. Here it could mobilize the power of its predecessor to generate glamorous spectacles and luxuries close enough for all to see and even to touch (if not to buy), an outward show so dazzling that it could conceal the dark contradictions within. The devastation that struck Paris in this period gives rise in the aftermath to the reigning metaphors of regeneration and restoration, both visually and textually (figs. 10.4–5). Little by little, one commentator observed, Paris regains its old appearance [physionomie], “that is, its appearance prior to the Commune, the siege and the National Guard . . .”12 Another critic sighed: “Before the war, before the Commune! Here are the words that crop up again and again so often beneath the pen of the chronicler; one is able only gradually, and by a series of painful examples, to give an idea of the perturbation that these lugubrious events have caused.”13 In July 1871 newspapers gleefully reported that the civil engineer Alphand, a crucial player in Haussmann’s park system, was already putting his talents to work restoring “to its original state . . . the lawns of the Trocadéro!”14 The Third Republic’s obsession with effacing the traces of the Communard presence is seen in its unexpected outrage at the toppling of the Vendôme Column—the beloved symbol of the Bonapartists. Courbet was scapegoated for the event, since he had publicly proposed during the siege to unbolt it and move its pieces to the Hôtel de Monnaie.15 Yet this identification becomes franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

opposite 10.5  Karl Fichot, The Principal Monuments of Paris during the Course of the Year 1873, wood engraving from Le Monde illustré,

20 December 1873. 10.6  Charles de Marville, The Restoration of the Vendôme Column after the Commune, albumen,

1871. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.



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less important to the conservatives than the fact that its destruction was wrought by the Commune (fig. 10.6). The symbolic nature of its restoration is seen in the fact that the refurbished statue of Napoléon was hoisted to the pinnacle on the same day that the remains of Versaillais generals Lecomte and Thomas (shot in the mêlée on 18 March) were transplanted from Montmartre to the Père Lachaise cemetery and honored in a highly publicized ceremony.16 Both events signaled the government’s dedication to rectifying and redeeming the actions of the detested Communards. An entire cottage industry cropped up devoted to the documentation of the defeat of the Commune and the gutted buildings and burned rooftops left in its wake. Photograph albums of the destroyed façades of once-beautiful buildings served as memorials to the destructive effects of political radicalism. The lavish quarters and parks built under Haussmann had been reduced to charred timbers and piles of rubble. Despite the frightful appearance of Paris in June 1871, however, the thoughts of Goncourt and his friend, the art critic and moderate republican Philippe Burty, turned to the possibilities of renewal: “We speak of the sad state of things and we see no resurrection for France except through her admirable capacity for hard work, through the ability to work day and night which other countries do not have . . .”17 Is it a coincidence that Burty, soon to become one of the leading apologists for the impressionists, commends the artists in his review of the second impressionist exhibition of 1876 for being “hard-working,” and lauds their efforts in the first show of 1874 for clarity, freshness, and the “virginal” rendering of the general aspect of the landscape?18 Thus scenes of the impressionists are complicit with the subsequent intensive campaign to rebuild Paris and its beautiful suburbs, coinciding with the official line of the period. It is not by chance that Monet exits Paris at the end of 1871 to reestablish his career in the suburb of Argenteuil, or that 1871 is often taken as the starting date for the formal emergence of impressionism and even Manet’s incipient break with the past. Recalling his moves just after the suppression, Renoir stated: “When order was restored to Paris, I rented an atelier on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.”19 Key patrons of impressionist scenes, including their dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, Jean-Baptiste Faure, Théodore Duret, Gustave Caillebotte, Ernest Hoschedé, Victor Chocquet, Henri Rouart, Georges Charpentier, Edmond Maître, and Georges de Bellio, also rejected the Commune principle.20 Ironically, the impressionists continued the direction of their work of the late 1860s, forging a continuity with the Second Empire analogous to Thiers’s government undertaking the rebuilding of Paris according to the shape it had taken under Napoléon III. Reclaiming the space physically was insufficient for the victorious; they also had to reclaim it symbolically in representation. Once the military and political work was accomplished, the urban and intraurban sites transgressed by the Communards needed to be reinvested and reappropriated once again for bourgeois culture. The Communards had constructed a new identity for themselves and in the process franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

gave that urban space a new identity. What made the Commune insurrection unique was not its seizure of the means of production, but its appropriation and transformation of a particular sector of civil society. Although the city center in the modern epoch is inevitably the site of popular insurgency, the worker-Communards, victims of Haussmann’s architectural and social reorganization, descended into the center to reclaim the public space from which they had been evicted, to reoccupy streets they formerly inhabited.21 Their dismantling and transformation of that social and physical space, however, differed from changes made by previous governing bodies only in its class perspective. Throughout French history, as royal pageants, entries, and coronations demonstrate, new ruling regimes carved out zones of control as an act of legitimation and to promote a narrowly conceived class identity. Often, this implied recapturing the symbolic space of a previous regime and deleting and replacing its signs of authority. This remaking of the social signage required the talents and skills of art producers to create the required trappings, to retrace the route to power, and then to recreate history. The impressionists, whether unconsciously or not, would recover the Parisian territory from the canaille, who had rejected the privileged organization of that space, and reinvest it with bourgeois sensibility and symbolic value. There is a telling testimony by the critic Armand Silvestre, who hung out with the impressionists in their favorite haunts in the period just prior to the opening of their first group venture. Remembering the vibrant spectacle of Montmartre and the lively encounters in the Café Guerbois, he declared: I was attracted to the area shortly after the war by the combination of its material and intellectual advantages. Paris, still breathing from the final convulsions of civil war, had a deep yearning for quietude and forgetfulness of the past. Flowers were already beginning to grow from the blackened ruins, and to show themselves from among the blood-stained cobbles. Inanimate matter, no more than men, is not made to suffer protracted grief. It is true that one thought a bit about those who had been proscribed by the government, but youth, infatuated with sunshine and spring, had reasserted its rights. Only deep thinkers wondered how long the shock of this recent jolt would last. Because beneath these surfaces, so rapidly calmed, like those of great lakes after a storm, there seethed a dark pool of hate and anger, and, in these mysterious depths, bubbled crazy desires for revenge and expiation. What was to become of the mind condemned to live amid such currents? Would French art and its sacred precincts survive for long after this catastrophe? We experienced anxiety about all this in the face of the apparent indifference of a crowd whose revolts had been too high-pitched to be so suddenly appeased.22

Silvestre suggests here the psychological motivation for impressionist activity in the wake of the recent upheavals, activity sparked as much by a

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preoccupation with the political conditions as with the future of French art. This is a group distanced from the crowd (la foule) yet yearning to appease it. Significantly, when Silvestre reviewed the first exhibition of the impressionists he praised “their pleasant colors and charming subjects,” whose influence he felt would extend to all contemporary art by reinvigorating the range of pictorial possibilities. The Critical Reception

Trying to persuade James Tissot—an exile in London since the end of the Commune—to join with him and his colleagues in the first impressionist exhibition, Degas exhorted his friend to put aside all commercial concerns and think patriotically: “So forget the money side for a moment. Exhibit. Be of your country and with your friends.”23 This appeal to nationalism on the part of one of the key organizers of the show leads us to a critical examination of the curious mixed reception of the impressionists at their inaugural exhibition in April 1874, one that ran the gamut from muted praise to bitter invective. (It is also true that even some of the most abusive reviewers found something positive to say about the qualities of individual works.) Almost all complained about the incompleteness of the efforts and lack of clear definition of the forms, despite the praise for the look of freshness and “elements of renewal and progress” produced by the sketchy technique. But the label of radicalism so often leveled at the participants stigmatized the show as a subversive political act. We may well inquire just why it is, given their qualities of escapism and unconstrained freedom that we so much admire today, that the impressionists were perceived to be inimical to the state’s interests in 1874. The answer to this lies in the overdetermination of their reception in the light of the experience of the Commune. Their group formation, experimental diversity, look of difference, and antihierarchical content and technique made them suspect to conservative spectators still influenced and threatened by the bitter memories of the outrageous actions of the Commune.24 Emile Cardon, for example, writing for La Presse, entitled his caustic appraisal “L’Exposition des révoltés.”25 Another commonly used term to describe the group was intransigeants, a specific political allusion to the extreme left wing of Spanish radicalism in 1873.26 In actuality, this period of hostility lasted for only a short time, and by the late years of the decade the impressionists were more accurately understood as representatives of the post-Commune and anti-Commune era. This conflict is played out in the contradictory signals communicated by the critics during the reception of the impressionists, particularly evident in a review by Zola of the independents in 1876. He claims that Monet’s pictures communicate to him “une impression de jeunesse, de belles croyances, de foi hardie et enflammée.” This is the utopian, restorative side that Zola shared with the impressionists in the wake of the Commune, but

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at the same time he characterizes Monet, Pissarro, and their colleagues as “revolutionaries” whom he predicts are destined to transform the French school in twenty years.27 Perhaps one of the most telling reviews in this respect is one by a leading republican feminist, Maria Deraismes, who was writing in outrage over the rejection of Eva Gonzalès, a former disciple of Manet, by the Salon jury of 1874. Deraismes claimed that it was Gonzalès’s affiliation with the realist Manet that led to her rejection, and that for the conservatives the realist is to painting what the “radical is to politics.” She went further in relating this kind of thinking to the current wave of reaction: Manet is a realist, but so was Courbet. Therefore from realism to the Commune, there is but one short step. In this case, it is not just a question of a school, but a question of general security. Oh, the depth of politics!28

Deraismes goes on to contrast the differing attitudes of the realists, whom she characterizes as the “sincères,” and the conservatives, whom she describes as the “non-sincères,” emphasizing the explicit links between aesthetic principles and political ideologies. Written less than two months after the closing of the first impressionist exhibition, Deraismes’s words clarify the wellsprings of contemporary hostility toward the newcomers, with whom she could identify as a persecuted feminist.29 By the late 1870s, however, both the impressionists and the liberal feminists could make claims to public legitimation and respectability. In 1878 the Republic seemed stable enough for the feminists to organize the first French Congress for Women’s Rights, articulating a moderate program wholly acceptable to the future Opportunists of the early 1880s. Although the impressionists’ second exhibition in 1876 continued to arouse intense controversy, it did so because the work now had legitimate claim to a niche in the Parisian art world.30 It is a tribute to their success that distinguished critics of the leading journals now descended into the arena to take their measure. The violently anti-Communard paper Le Gaulois, whose tirades against the insurgents fired up the Versaillais pending their invasion of Paris and which remained staunchly opposed to amnesty, was surprisingly sympathetic to the impressionists from the start. 31 Its reviewer had kind words to say for the entire group, including Cézanne, and concluded by apologizing for his lack of space to discuss the painters in detail, adding that “we would be very happy to see the artists of this new society succeed.” He declared that their efforts deserve to be encouraged, because with slight resources they are making a valiant attempt that promises a bright future.32 In 1876, another reviewer for the same paper confronted the accusations of aesthetic subversion as coded references to political subversion and asked for public understanding:

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Are these artists who for a second time are appealing directly to the public revolutionaries as some love to repeat, when they are not being treated idiotically as communards? No, of course not. They are dissidents at most, associated and organized for the purpose of showing the ensemble of their work under optimal conditions unavailable in the Salon.

He admonished the public not to judge them too hastily, and that it not be put off by some “inevitable exaggerations at the dawn of a new school whose disciples possess not only the qualities of youth, but also the general defects that go with it. . . . It should consider only one thing, the new idea, the fertile renewal of the French school, the affirmation in a word, of an art principle whose results could be considerable.” He then admonished his readers to momentarily step outside the range of aesthetic discourse, and rhetorically inquired: “Isn’t it consoling, in the aftermath of our disasters, to witness a young generation, full of life and vigor, willing to forgo for the sake of a noble conviction an easy success in another genre, to sustain often unjust criticism, sometimes even discomfort, in order to uphold an idea it has made an article of faith?”33 Finally, Silvestre could deploy an analogy with music to underscore his related response: “As for me, I find here the mildness of a perfect concord after an avalanche of dissonances. It is not an orchestra, it is a diapason.”34 What counts for Silvestre and the reviewers of the Gaulois are the implications in their work of regeneration and renewal, and these overshadow the technical flaws inherent in their experimental and youthful exuberance. Philippe Burty’s defense of the impressionists is motivated in large part by ideological desire, and harks back to his conversation with Edmond de Goncourt on the rebuilding of the French nation. The purification of the landscape—both urban and suburban—meant first removing from it the souvenirs of the recent catastrophes and then reinvesting it symbolically through the new aesthetic formulation. He delighted in the “amiable” look of their sites and their “virginal” representation.35 What counts representationally is neither the presence of the “human race” nor the physicality of property, but the “illusion of light and freshness” and “the masterly harmonizing” of all the elements in nature. The potential threat to this harmony—the disruptive “human race” or “mob”—is suitably repressed. Yet the “harmony” in reality can only be achieved at the expense of “hardworking” French laborers and symbolically represented by the impressionist “go-aheads” (Burty’s English) such as Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro. The aesthetic and intellectual “workers” of the bourgeoisie need to be recruited to metaphorically contain the threat of the working classes who in principle have access to the same spaces of leisure. Nevertheless, the timing of the impressionists’ entry insured a controversial reception for their positivist solutions. Tucker shrewdly interpreted Monet’s Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) as a possible “vision

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10.7  Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Musée Marmottan, Paris.

of a new day dawning” for France (fig. 10.7). 36 Yet less than a year before Monet painted the picture, Louise Michel, the revolutionary feminist, wrote a poem during her deportation to New Caledonia for her participation in the Commune, including the verses: “L’avenir grandira superbe / Sous le rouge soleil levant” (The future will swell superbly / Under the red sunrise).37 It should be recalled that there remained Communard prisoners who were still being tried, deported, and executed at the time the exhibition of the independents opened on 15 April 1874.38 The fact that the drama of the Commune was still unfolding preserved the ascendance of the conservatives, who kept up the pressure on left-leaning politics. Both in their organization and in their venue the impressionists implicated themselves in the current radical political discourse. Organized as an artists’ cooperative, the group appeared as an independent collective aimed at undermining the authority of the official system. Their novel technical recipes—striking many spectators as bordering on decorative and industrial design—gave an artisanal cast to the look of the exhibition. Thus, they were indirectly identified with the Fédération des Artistes de Paris, the Commune’s organization for artists presided over by Courbet, who grouped decorative and industrial artists with the fine artists to create ties with the artisanate. Louis Leroy, who coined the term impressionism, claimed that wallpaper in its primal state was more developed than Monet’s Impression, soleil levant, and even Burty and Silvestre, early apologists for the group, associated the



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independents with the “décorative.” Etienne Carjat claimed that in this case a “worker . . . could replace the artist,” and warned that they could end up as “sign painters working for coal dealers and moving men.” In the circumstances of 1874, such symptoms identified by the critics implied an ambiguous and even benevolent attitude toward the Commune and suspicion of the government. It has not yet been previously noted, but the fact that they chose to exhibit in the photographer Nadar’s former studio at 35, boulevard des Capucines, already surrounded their collective debut with a political aura. First of all, the street was the scene of heavy fighting during Bloody Week, when the Versaillais, advancing down the rue Caumartin, attacked the barricade of the rue Neuve des Capucines at the boulevard’s entrance.39 Although Nadar personally disapproved of the moment of the Commune and predicted that its poor timing would lead to inevitable massacre, his reputation for supporting left-wing causes gave rise to rumors about his arrest in early June 1871. He also concealed in his rooms two prominent escapees of the Commune, Félix Pyat and Jules Bergeret, and persuaded Thiers (who imagined Nadar to have been shot) to give Bergeret and his wife a safe conduct and false papers.40 Burty went out of his way to identify the location as the house of “the famous photographer Nadar, compared in his youth from his long fiery red hair, and the swiftness of his walk, to a wandering comet”—a not-so-subtle hint at the photographer’s politics.41 Thus Nadar’s old signboard left on the vacated premises of the boulevard des Capucines already implicated the first impressionist exhibition in the memories of the insurrection. At the same time, the hostile critics were not totally off the mark in reading the novel forms of impressionism as a counter aesthetic discourse. To reclaim the space of Paris the impressionists had to recode the concept of everyday life to give the illusion that the utopia envisioned by the Communards had in fact been realized within bourgeois society. This fiction was presented through the elevated perspectives that grasped the traffic of pedestrians and carriages on the boulevard as an anonymous crowd comprising all classes treated equally, as Ernest Chesneau put it when he referred to Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines as an “indecipherable chaos of palette scrapings” (fig. 10.8). Although the elevated vantage point (socially expressed through the top-hatted observers on the balcony at the right) and absorption in the everyday content of public spaces is itself a giveaway of the artist’s class position, the result is the antithesis of the monumental and historical and thus of conventional hierarchy. In this sense, the memory of the Commune forces the painters to affirm the relative identity of the social spaces they depict and give up the idea of their immutability. The shared memory of the disrupted infrastructure impinges powerfully on their imagination as they seek to heal the social wounds (fig. 10.9). The continually changing space they study is a social product shaped anew every day and is antihierarchical in time and space.

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opposite 10.8  Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. 10.9  The Ruins of Paris: Porte Maillot and the Avenue de la Grande Armée, wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 24 June

1871.



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Further, the notion of swarming humanity had always struck conservatives like Thiers as the threatening tidal wave ready to engulf the dominant class. The blurry “black tongue-lickings” down in the street were always only one step away from the mob, the demonstration, the insurrection. The anonymous brush gestures may be faceless and stripped of their individual objectivity, but this was true also of the ghosts of the recently crushed rebellion threatening at any time to be reincarnated in the floating mass of people. The antidemocratic formulator of “crowd psychology” Gustave Le Bon, whose ideas were decisively shaped by his experiences during the siege of Paris and the Commune, noted that crowd-pleasing images evoked by such words as “democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, etc.,” are “the most ill-defined” and “vague” and lend themselves to manipulation.42 Analogously, the “ill-defined” impression of an anonymous multitude in the exhibition could be just as easily read as the movement of the swarming mob. Thus the Commune’s threat to authority could still be conjured up in the reception of the scenes of the impressionists and explains in part the venomous response of some conservative critics. Berthe Morisot’s academic teacher, Joseph-Benoît Guichard, was shocked to see her work exhibited with “les fous” at Nadar’s in 1874. His explanation for some of the paintings on view was “madness,” a similar kind of answer proffered to explain the actions of the Communards. Guichard wrote to Morisot’s mother about her works on display: “If Mlle Berthe is set on doing something violent she should pour petrol on these things and set them alight rather than destroy all she has done so far.”43 Here Guichard makes allusion to the bloodthirsty, inebriated image of the Communard woman constructed by the conservatives as a pétroleuse. This image of the unsexed female pouring kerosene on buildings and setting them on fire had been exploited to execute hundreds of women and adolescent females and import thousands more to the penal colonies. Marx wrote regarding the pétroleuse that the “story is one of the most abominable schemes that has ever been invented in a civilized country.”44 The Right like the Left often symbolized the Commune as a militant female, but for the right she brought fiery destruction rather than social justice. Although women participating in the defense of Paris during the Prussian siege were praised for their courage and patriotism, these same attributes were downplayed when displayed by the female activists of the Commune.45 The issue of gender did not come up until women fought for social justice. Then the mythical pétroleuse, the female incendiary who flouted her true nature, provided the Versaillais with a demonized image of the Commune’s warrior maid. Bertall’s wild and roughly attired female—a satire of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—on the barricade waving a red flag was typical (fig. 10.10). As seen in Dubois’s malevolent caricature, her emblems are not the liberty cap or the level of equality, but the petrol can and the torch (fig. 10.11). Even more telling, Girard’s sketch franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

10.10  Bertall, La Barricade, colored lithograph, 1871. Reproduced in Les Communeux 1871, no. 37. 10.11  Dubois, Une pétroleuse, lithograph, 1871. Reproduced in Paris sous la Commune (1872). 10.12  Eugène Girard, The Emancipated Woman Shedding Light on the World, lithograph, 1871. Reproduced in Series J. Lecerf, no. 4. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

10.13  Title page from V. Fournel, Paris et ses ruines (1872).



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of a wild-eyed incendiary captioned, “La Femme, émancipée, répandant la lumière sur le monde” (fig. 10.12). The basic contradiction of the conservative Third Republic is that it springs from protest against the Second Empire and Bonapartism and yet is forced by the Commune to reconstitute them in their cultural guise. The acute pain of bourgeois Parisians in the face of the abrupt end of prosperity and the rebuilding of Paris is seen most dramatically in the publication of Victor Fournel’s Paris et ses ruines en Mai 1871 (fig. 10.13). The former cynical critic of Haussmannization before 1870 changed his tune when confronted with the devastation of the Commune. He fulminated against the vandals who laid waste to the “splendor” of the monuments and boulevards created by the Second Empire. He saw the irony of Shakespearian tragedy in the destruction of the “Haussmannienne epic” by three successive plagues of bombardment, siege, and civil war. Although firmly convinced that Bismarck and Moltke had aimed at the start at destroying Haussmann’s Paris, he saved the nastier part of his diatribe for the “depraved professors of civil war and anarchy” who brought Paris to its catastrophic finale with the “now dishonored name of the Commune.” After retracing the glory that was Paris, he lauds the administration of Thiers for rebuilding even Bonapartist monuments like the Vendôme Column. Glimpsing the stirrings of a resurrection, he adds: “Now it remains only to wash away the blood, to erase the traces of battle, to dress the wounded, to bury the dead, to raise up the ruins, to bring about a rebirth of order, security, work, to repair the disasters of the two sieges.”46 The work of Zola, the contemporary and early defender of the impressionists, may be seen as prototypical of the group’s response to the Commune.47 He published the first book of the Rougon-Macquart series in 1871, shortly after the Commune. La Débâcle (1892), the nineteenth and last but one of the series of novels, brings to a thundering near finale the great saga of the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, while the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal (1893), ends with a vision of the brave new world of science and progress about to be born. La Débâcle concludes obsessively on a note of rebuilding, with Jean Macquart walking “into the future to set about the great, laborious task of building a new France.” Paris, destroyed by fire, is compared to “the franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

field ploughed up and cleansed so that the idyll of a new golden age might spring up into life.” Zola’s equivocation here seems to correspond to the ambiguous position of the impressionists: as the fire and smoke from the buildings billow upward, a great clamor could be heard, “maybe the last death-cries of the shot victims in the Lobau barracks, or perhaps happy women and happy children eating out of doors after a nice walk or sitting in outside cafés.” Thus the impressionist vision already displaces the horrors of civil war. After having just undergone a series of traumatic shocks, Jean suddenly experiences an extraordinary sensation: It seemed to him, as day was slowly dying over this burning city, that a new dawn was already breaking. Yet it was the end of everything, fate pursuing its relentless course in a series of disasters greater than any nation had ever undergone: continual defeats, provinces lost, milliards to pay, the blood-bath of the most dreadful of civil wars, whole districts full of ruins and dead, no money left, no honour left, a whole world to build up again. . . . And yet, beyond the still roaring furnace, undying hope was reviving up in that great calm sky so supremely limpid. It was the sure renewal of eternal nature, the renewal promised to all who hope and toil, the tree throwing up a strong new shoot after the dead branch, whose poisonous sap had yellowed the leaves, had been cut away.

Here is precious testimony from a writer who had been close to Manet and his followers, and stated in retrospect as if it had been thought for the first time. Zola was writing history as he recalled it and as he had lived it, and the “great calm sky so supremely limpid” could only have been a metaphor resonating with his memories of the past. This corresponds exactly to the sentiment of a letter written by Zola to Cézanne in July 1871, soon after the streets of Paris had been cleared of the debris of war and Communard bodies and the month Zola launched the Rougon-Macquart series in print: “I have never been more hopeful or desirous of working. Paris is being reborn. As I have often told you, our reign has begun!”48 This was the mandate to the impressionists during a period of conservative political backlash. Impressionism retraces the damaged sites of the Commune, urban intersections, parks, and streets and presents them as bright, flourishing spaces. It glosses the ruins and minimizes the tension of the postwar culture, promoting the official political ideology with unofficial aesthetic effects. It strategizes in behalf of a pre-civil-war idyll and privileges a “return to normal” exuberance that extends Haussmannization into the present. Impressionism deals with this contradiction by depicting its motifs from increasingly weird angles and points of view and by employing blurry outlines, spectral objects, and hidden and disguised features of the landscape sites. Impressionists had to find a way of appearing modern, advanced, and positivist, while returning to prewar cultural ideals of leisure and pleasure. They continue to represent recreation, resort life, the

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et le Docteur Tant-Mieux, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 1871.

private garden and park, but by revealing it as transient and ephemeral they rid their imagery of nostalgia. In this way, they managed to keep up the pretense that it was the same old Paris, and still link their activities to the positivism and materialism of modern life expressed in Third Republic science, entrepreneurialism, and colonialism. By year’s end, L’Illustration could publish a cartoon showing a bedridden France being attended to by a pair of physicians each grasping one of her wrists and uttering their pronouncements (fig. 10.14). The pessimistic “Docteur Tant-Pis” (Doctor Much Worse) and the optimistic “Docteur Tant-Mieux” (Doctor Much Better) express this dual attitude in the wake of the hammer-like blows of the two sieges. Doctor Much Worse intones: “The crisis has been terrible! So much the worse! Such a crisis will inevitably be followed by others. Lost health, debilitating infirmities, foreseeable disorganization, shock to the moral system, sick brain, lack of energy, beliefs destroyed, deplorable symptoms; everything must be changed, everything to be redone, little hope.” But Doctor Much Better delivers the benign diagnosis: “The crisis has been serious! So much the better! Henceforth, her health can only improve. Forewarned by the past, she will follow a wise diet; she will avoid imprudent actions, deviations, and mistakes; a little reflection, plenty of work, and everything will be restored to normal.”49



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10.14  Bertall, Le Docteur Tant-Pis

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Degas internalized this psychological state in the immediate aftermath of the two sieges, escaping to the United States in the autumn of 1872 at the suggestion of his brother René to recover and reorder his priorities. Americans were for Degas a “new people” who had forgotten more of “their English origins” than he expected. After a short stay in New York, he made his way to New Orleans where his mother’s family lived, and where his brothers Achille and René worked in the cotton trade owned by their uncle. The uncle, Michel Musson, was a wealthy cotton broker and exporter of cotton to France and England. Coincidentally, Degas arrived at a time when Louisiana and, indeed, the entire South itself were still recovering from the devastating effects of the Civil War and trying to find their way through the chaos of Reconstruction. Thiers himself had likened the Communards to the southern Confederacy, and perceived himself as a sort of French Lincoln.50 Degas’s family had been proslavery and had joined other brokers in encouraging French intervention in the Civil War in favor of the Confederacy. In punishment, Major General Butler—the ruthless Union officer charged with the occupation of New Orleans after its capture—taxed Musson’s firm (along with the others who joined the boycott) to help relieve the city’s starving populace.51 Degas’s correspondence demonstrates that he shared his family’s racist position, attesting as well to his conservative social bias. He seemed genuinely amused to learn that the Louisiana press deigned “to give Mr. Thiers expert advice on republicanism.” He delighted in seeing blacks still serving whites, especially the women “of all shades,” and responded warmly to the “contrast between the business offices with their bustle and order and the immense, black animal vitality . . .”52 “I am thirsty for order” (J’ai soif d’ordre), Degas writes to his friend and patron Henri Rouart on 5 December 1872. And he closes with a show of pride in his brothers’ success: “They will make a great fortune.”53 The novelty and possibilities of the United States fascinates him, and at the same time he feels a need to discipline himself to emulate the business success of his brothers. His mind is teeming with fresh ideas (“that would take . . . ten years to realize”) and he plans a series of sketches later to be reworked in Paris. A subsequent letter of 18 February 1873 to his friend James Tissot in London likens his valuable mental assets to an insurable cotton bale, and expresses the wish that there were insurance companies who dealt in his particular brand of assets.54 Here Degas consciously conceives of his ideas as commodities to be disposed of as those of his brothers, thus declaring himself as an emerging entrepreneur in his own right. It is no coincidence that in this same letter Degas announces to Tissot that he is in the process of completing a major picture provisionally called Intérieur d’un bureau d’acheteurs de coton à Nlle. Orléans, Cotton Buyers’ Office (fig. 10.15). He stated that it was “destined for Agnew,” and that it should be sold in Manchester, “to any cotton spinner” particularly desirous of having a fine representation of his trade. He even knew that in Manchester

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10.15  Edgar Degas, The Cotton Office, New Orleans, 1873. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau.



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there was “a wealthy spinner, who has a famous collection. A fellow like that would suit me perfectly, and Agnew even better. But let’s be cautious about it, and not count our chickens too soon.” Despite the cautionary note, it is clear that Degas has exploited his brothers’ business both as subject matter and as conduit to an expected Manchester buyer—who is both purchaser of the family’s cotton and a collector of art! The painter used his time in America to launch a new entrepreneurial venture and carefully selected the content with an eye to the client. As with Monet and Renoir, the dislocation and economic hardship caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune predisposes Degas to begin his career afresh from the ground floor up. He originally planned to take the work directly to London, and at Tissot’s prompting even considered settling there, where his friends were selling their work at high prices. He made the cryptic remark that if he did go there he would first have “to sweep the said place a little, and clean it by hand.”55 franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

This remark, like the painting itself, is a displaced metaphor of his own desires for a “reconstructed” life in post-Commune Paris. Degas described his image of the interior of a cotton broker’s office as a “vital picture if ever there were one,” with about fifteen figures energetically crowding around a table covered with cotton samples. The picture, completed in 1873 but not exhibited until the second impressionist show of 1876, gives us a rare insight into the briskness of new urban industry recovering from the onslaught of civil war. It represents the Degas family enterprise in full force: his uncle is seated in the foreground carefully inspecting a cotton sample, his brother René is seen reading the New Orleans Daily Picayune, his brother Achille leans against an open window at the left while awaiting the outcome of a transaction, while others examine the cotton at the central table, look at ledgers at a desk, or engage in miscellaneous clerical tasks behind the cashier’s window. Although not everyone is busily at work, what struck critics was the sense of bristling energy coming through the unusual depiction of the office. The figures appear unrelated compositionally, randomly scattered throughout the scene and falling into casual poses that seemed both peculiarly American and bourgeois at the same time. Once critic observed that the scattered and detached figures reminded him of “a wholesaler’s shop on the rue du Sentier”—the Parisian garment district.56 This allusion to the frenetic activity of the rue du Sentier thus suggests a larger frame of reference for Degas’s picture. It is located in the second arrondissement not far from the Bourse, or stock exchange, the financial heart of the capital. It is bounded on the north by the grands boulevards and on the east by the boulevard de Sébastopol. During the Commune, the Bourse was cordoned off by the National Guard and the neighborhood sealed off except to inhabitants and shop owners. Its strategic location brought down heavy fighting all around it in the final days of May, especially in the vicinity of the barricaded zones on Sébastopol and rue Montmartre.57 Almost all retail and wholesale commerce had ceased during the Commune, decisively affecting one of the impressionists’ major patrons, Ernest Hoschedé, a textile merchant who owned a shop on the rue du Sentier.58 Although set in the United States, Degas’s scene exploits American alacrity and diligence as a model for a French regeneration, and its many traits of self-identification attest to his own desire for an entrepreneurial jump start. It is in this sense that we may understand his active role in the organization of the first impressionist exhibition, a cooperative business enterprise legally authorized under the rubric Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. He and his colleagues were embarking on a commercial venture with brand-new “commodities” targeted for a middle-class clientele. This was their collective participation in the rebuilding and healing process, for themselves as well as for the nation.



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The Impressionist Agenda

10.16  Jean Béraud, A Soirée in the Hôtel Caillebotte, 1878. Private Collection, Paris.

I want to begin this section with the case study of Gustave Caillebotte, both patron of, and participant in, the impressionist collective. He was the youngest (born 1848) and most well off of the group, and the most conservative in style and content. His major works attest to a thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of the fledgling Third Republic trying to define itself in the wake of the Commune and in opposition to the formidable monarchist bloc. Although listed as a potential member for the first show, he joined the group for their second exhibition, held at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, 11, rue Le Peletier. Independently wealthy, he not only amassed an extraordinary collection of impressionist works that he eventually bequeathed to the Louvre but he also paid for or otherwise subsidized the painters’ later exhibitions. A vivid pictorial souvenir of Caillebotte’s milieu is the painting by Jean Béraud, Une soirée dans l’hôtel Caillebotte, exhibited at the Salon of 1878, which conveys the luxurious surroundings and haute-bourgeoisie circle of the family that includes diplomats, aristocrats, high-ranking military officers, and bankers (fig. 10.16). This is not a group that harbored sympathetic feelings for the Commune. Indeed, the family, of old Norman stock, had a long history of counterrevolutionary activity dating from the French revolution of 1789.59 Caillebotte’s father expanded the fortune of the family’s textile business by supplying bedding to the imperial army of Napoléon III. During the



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Franco-Prussian War, Caillebotte served in the Garde Mobile de la Seine for nine months, a privileged and safe bastion for the sons of the well-todo.60 Soon after his discharge, he entered the studio of Léon Bonnat, soon to become one of the regime’s favorite official artists. Bonnat’s political sympathies were with the moderate republicans, and following the termination of the war with Prussia he traveled to Spain to wait out the period of the Commune.61 Caillebotte accepted the call of Burty for a class-based modernism that secures the prerogatives of the bourgeoisie while conveying the illusion of a shared public space. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paris Street, Rainy Weather, his most monumental work (approximately seven by ten feet), which plunges the spectator into a vast public space bathed in the cool fresh air of a drizzly day (fig. 10.17). The scene represents pedestrian traffic at a starburst intersection formed of the crossing of the rues de Moscou, Turin, St. Petersbourg, and Hambourg in the vicinity of the Pont de l’Europe. For many scholars this work has become the canonical example of modernity, inextricably linked with the depiction of Haussmannian Paris. The district was planned from the start as a residential zone for the grand bourgeoisie and almost entirely constructed within the artist’s lifetime. Here was a microcosm of the impeccably clean, wide, and uniform look imposed by Haussmann’s boulevards, countering the unsanitary, crooked, densely packed and dark urban picturesqueness of the old city. At the same time, the sight of the uniformly and impeccably groomed bourgeois pedestrians strolling (either singly or in pairs) isolated from the others also prompts thoughts on the effects of Haussmannization on their behavior and psychology. Scholars seek answers to the question: To what extent are these wandering strangers, regimented yet seemingly unconnected psychologically, the result of their modern environment? The critics reviewing the impressionist exhibition of 1877 did not mention the fact of the pedestrians’ isolation, suggesting that their comportment seemed entirely consistent with the expected norm of street interaction. They complained about the uniformity of the surface treatment that made secondary details and accessories such as paving stones and umbrellas as important as the main elements of the composition. Despite the methodical perspectival scheme, the picture’s consistent allover handling of the surface lacked the accents of some ordering principle. They observed the modern costume and contemporary physiognomies of the figures in the foreground, for example, who seemed to have taken their umbrellas “from the racks of the Louvre [department store] and the Bon Marché.”62 Thus there is recognition of the new society’s bourgeois orientation, with the feeling, however, of a homogeneous surface that fails to distinguish between paving stones, umbrellas, and the human participants. At least two critics perceived the rain in metaphorical terms, as a cleansing action. Lepelletier claimed to see the “sidewalks and paving-stones washed by the waters of the sky, like the old bricks of Amsterdam by the

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10.17  Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Weather, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Dutch housewives,” while Jacques saw “well-built, sumptuous houses” jutting out “on to a pavement that is washed, clean, measured with a patience . . .”63 The sanitary action of the rain on the paving-stones was a gratifying recollection of the social “cleansing” and purification of the streets once stained by the physical presence as well as by the blood of the Communards. Although the wide Haussmannian boulevards were designed in part to forestall the type of barricade that so effectively blocked off the old narrow streets of semi-medieval Paris, the worker-engineers of the Commune still managed to forge monumental barricades across the boulevards with the Second Empire’s own paving stones. Indeed, “les pavés sanglants” become a pervasive metaphor for both the supporters of the impressionists and the enraged reactionaries who wanted to scrub Paris clean of Communard traces.64 The conspicuous treatment of the paving stones and their rain-drenched and light-reflecting radiance symbolically constitute a Paris restored to its pristine Haussmannian appearance and a Paris recuperated for the bour-



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opposite 10.18  Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876. Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva. 10.19  A. Lamy, The Pont de l’Europe and the Gare Saint-Lazare, wood engraving from L’Illustration, 11 April 1868.

geoisie. The even distribution of emphasis on the surface and seemingly random placement of the figures further allows the painter to imagine an egalitarian public space. I have found two working-class types among the pedestrians, both observed within the background space framed by the umbrella of the couple in the right foreground: one is a house painter in a smock carrying a ladder seen just behind the head of the male, and the other is a house servant just exiting a shop at the right of the woman’s head. Caillebotte can theoretically claim to have depicted a public space with no purposeful hierarchy of social content or privileged theme, but in fact the diminutive working-class figures—represented with their specific occupational attributes—do constitute a minor note in this “snapshot” of the modern thoroughfare. Hence whether it be Monet’s blurry atmospheric effects or Caillebotte’s more methodical treatment of the surface, the effect of both is to neutralize the physical presence of the potential insurgent threat in their midst. Le Pont de l’Europe, one of three major Parisian street scenes that Caillebotte showed in the impressionist exhibition of 1877, celebrates Haussmann’s transportation system (fig. 10.18). Here Caillebotte focuses on the new Paris, choosing a vista constructed under the Second Empire and the locale of heavy fighting during the Commune (fig. 10.19). Part of the new network of boulevards that reorganized the flow of people and commodities, it inevitably became an important strategic site for the Communards.65 Victor Fournel, weeping over the destruction of Haussmann’s Paris and railing against the wicked Communards, tried to recover the pristine memory and magisterial importance of the site: The Place de l’Europe is perhaps one of a kind; at its central core is a bridge of cast iron one hundred meters wide that spans innumerable junctions of the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest: three thousand five hundred kilograms of cast iron were used in the arches of this monumental bridge. At the Place de l’Europe the streets of Vienna, Madrid, Constantinople, Saint-Petersburg, Berlin and London all converge.66

Fournel’s work aimed at a restorative policy, but such a policy had to be predicated on never forgetting the “Communard executioners” always waiting in the wings for their opening. Caillebotte responds to this agenda by setting out the modern metropolis with all of its remarkable engineering feats to now function as awesome spectacle overwhelming its potential dissidents. In the painting we are looking down the rue de Vienne, with the Place de l’Europe at the left and the railroad yard at the lower right. Gazing contemplatively into the yard below is a young worker in a smock, who casually leans on the iron parapet of the recently constructed Pont de l’Europe. Moving toward the spectator at a brisk pace along the sidewalk is a bourgeois couple, conversing and strolling in a spacious ambience that suggests

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opposite 10.20  Claude Monet, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1877. Musée Marmottan, Paris. 10.21  Claude Monet, Gare SaintLazare, 1877. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.



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freedom of action. Although the perspective lines converge on the couple, the worker is positioned so prominently in the foreground that he sets up a visual opposition to them. As Herbert suggests, this opposition between bourgeois and worker is seen in the other figures as well, with the laborers on the inside of the walkway captivated by the metal trusswork—a metonym for industrial practice—and the upper-class types on the outside distanced from this realm and uninhibitedly engaging in a flirtatious exchange.67 Thus although present in the same space as the bourgeoisie, the potentially unruly classes are shown as totally absorbed in their own world of industry and work and allow their social superiors to go about their business free from disturbance. Caillebotte’s plunging perspective again conveys the dynamic rhythm of the city restored to its functions. The conspicuous metallic girding that commands the composition expresses the technological potential of the new Paris. If it disrupts the picturesque look of the old city, it provides a visual metaphor for both the mixing and separation of the classes in a modern urban and industrial space. This is all the more persuasive when we learn that the smartly dressed stroller accompanying the elegant woman is Caillebotte himself, and that the scene is in a neighborhood that adjoined his own: the Quartier de l’Europe, a new residential district so-called because several of its streets were named after the capitals of Europe. Hence his self-representation in the industrial zone signifies his own personalized desire for the emblematic opposition and fusion of the classes in a neighborhood close to his own. Devoted to the signifiers of contemporary urban life, he maintains a distance consistent with the lifestyle of the privileged bourgeoisie. It is in this sense that the painter meshes his work with the ideological proclivities of the moderate republican regime. The iron trellises of the Pont de l’Europe fascinated other impressionists in the 1870s, seen in a memorable example of an important series of railway imagery by Monet (figs. 10.20–21). Monet’s Le Pont de l’Europe, one of several of his contemporary views depicting the Gare Saint-Lazare, would seem to be at the opposite pole of the political spectrum by taking us down into the trenches, into the infernal realm of the railroad yards and their denizens. Looking up from the edge of the suburban quai to the imposing metallic bridge dramatically crossing over to the rue de Rome, we see one of the six streets that converged on the immense construction that spanned the yards of the railway station. At the left is a puffing locomotive attended by two railway workers, who stand facing it as if transfixed by the technical marvel. The spectator looks on the scene from a slightly higher level, so that it appears as if the trainmen are on a lower level. The entire scene is shrouded in puffing clouds of smoke and steam rising to the top of the picture and blending with the atmospheric conditions in the sky. Almost all of the critics commented on the near indecipherability of this and the other six views of the station exhibited in 1877. Typical is the chapter ten

remark of Le Gaulois critic Louis de Fourcade, who, while appreciating the picture’s merit, claimed that all the vapor made it “look like an illegible scrawl.”68 One of the most sympathetic reviews of the railroad series was written by Georges Rivière, writing in the new journal L’Impressioniste: Like a spirited, impatient beast stimulated rather than fatigued by the long journey [the locomotive] has just finished, it shakes its smoky mane, which billows against the glass roof of the vast hall. Men swarm around the monster like pygmies at the feet of a giant. . . . We hear the shouts of the workers, the sharp whistles of the engines blasting their cry of alarm, the incessant noise of iron and the formidable and heavy huffing and puffing of the vapor.69 opposite 10.22  Claude Monet, The Railway Bridge, Argenteuil, 1874. John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. 10.23  Claude Monet, The Roadbridge at Argenteuil, 1874. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Monet has set up the picture to contain the presence of the working classes, even openly invading their work space to do so. The melding of nature and artifice in the alembic of steam, sunlight, smoke, and clouds creates a new atmosphere that dissolves key aspects of modern life and history. Rivière gratefully sees the workers reduced to pygmy-like status in the shadow of industrial power, and their shouts are not a call to arms but responses to the overwhelming complexity of the new technology. This went well with the republicans’ optimistic forecast of the role of railroad technology in the future of France. As in the case of America, the railroad introduced the modern corporate system, coordinating on a vast scale the processes of production and distribution and establishing a managerial elite dear to the heart of the utopian capitalists. The railroads also required vast amounts of capital that not only conduced to centralizing industrial technology but also stimulated the growth of the stock exchange for trading and speculating in railroad securities. Deraismes wrote in 1873 that the coalitions of capital and organizational efforts for railroad expansion furnished a model for large-scale social cooperation. As she noted: In this vast organization, wholly analogous to a mechanism ingeniously put together, each employee, each worker, constitutes an indispensable spring, no matter if he is lowly or elevated. There the greaser of the wheels, the engine stoker, and the switchman are as necessary as the engineer and the director. From this results the idea of equality of the services: not that we are pretending that there is an equivalence in the quality and value of the functions, individually considered, but because from the general point of view, there is an equality of indispensability. Aside from this, each employee feels himself as useful, by virtue of his contribution, as the top person in the hierarchy.70

Similarly, Monet’s indistinguishable workers could be rationalized in the same way as Burty, Mallarmé, and other moderates generally rationalized impressionist informality and lack of compositional centrality in democratic terms—their painted presence was no less important than any other dab or “cog” in the well-oiled machine.

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opposite 10.24  Claude Monet, The Wooden Bridge at Argenteuil, 1872. Private Collection. Photo courtesy of Christie’s, London. 10.25  Claude Monet, The Roadbridge at Argenteuil under Repair, 1872. Collection Late Lord Butler of Saffron Walden, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.



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The French railroad system lost 835 kilometers of rail when the Prussians annexed Alsace and most of Lorraine, and many railway stations and lines were badly damaged during the war and the Commune. These events entailed a drastic shakeup of the rail industry throughout the 1870s.71 In 1876 and 1877 both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies appointed commissions to study the railway in relation to the state, culminating with the Freycinet Plan of 1878, which called for the government to take over ailing lines and reorganize the system. Monet’s choice of the railroad station owned by the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest could hardly have been arbitrary, since the Gare Saint-Lazare was the oldest, largest, and most important station serving Paris. It serviced long-distance lines to Normandy and Brittany and heavily used commuter lines to Argenteuil and other towns west of Paris and around its periphery. This network embraced such fashionable seaside resorts as Boulogne, Deauville, and Trouville, which had early on attracted the impressionists, and included Monet’s hometown, Le Havre. During the Commune, service at Gare Saint-Lazare was either suspended for long periods or interrupted, and it served as a bastion of defense for the Communards.72 Departing from this station was also incommodious at that time because passengers were systematically subject to searches by the National Guard. Here and at the Place de l’Europe there was a major showdown between the Communards and the Versaillais under General Clinchant.73 Monet’s series of a bustling, thriving railway industry not only recuperates the station for the bourgeoisie and celebrates a national comeback, but may also yield an insight into his own optimistic anticipation of the possibilities of unconstrained mobility. Lying between Paris and Pontoise is Argenteuil, the goal of steady suburban flight in this period, where Monet took up residence at the end of 1871. Here Monet became preoccupied with the impressive railway bridge, rebuilt after its demolition during the Franco-Prussian War, as well as the nearby highway bridge that had also been destroyed and reconstructed. Monet would paint these bridges many times between the years 1872 to 1874 (figs. 10.22–23). In this instance, what I would call his obsessive interest in the reconstruction of these bridges as a metonym for the regenerative national impulse predisposes him to include views of them under repair (figs. 10.24–25). Argenteuil, still tied to the apron strings of Paris, had been going through a rapid growth spurt prior to the war; while parts of it were still quite rural, others had become heavily industrialized. Factories dotted the landscape and polluted the river, but it held its own as a resort for the Parisian bourgeoisie and gained a reputation (since 1867) for its sailing facilities. But it paid dearly for its part in the war. The Prussians, who had used the town as an observation post for their artillery, had extracted a special fine of over 15,000 francs from the inhabitants on leaving. Its factories had been shut down and both its bridges destroyed. The pedestrian and highway bridge, which led directly to Paris, had been burned down by the French chapter ten

10.26  Le Pont d’Argenteuil, 1871. Photograph. Collection Viollet, Paris.

army in its retreat toward the French capital in the autumn of 1870. The railway bridge, a few hundred meters upstream, had suffered the same fate. It had been blown off its concrete pillars and lay in the water, its cast-iron girders sagging as if made of some soft material (fig. 10.26). Despite this physical destruction, the town was already recovering from the upheavals by the time Monet arrived. The two bridges were girded in scaffolding, and Monet’s two studies of the roadbridge under repair attest to the continuity of everyday activity though reconstruction remains incomplete. Pedestrians walk to and fro on the bridge, while below a steamboat belching smoke prepares to sail beneath one of the arches. Here the prominent timbers of the scaffolding enveloping the stone piles seem to work as part of the wooden remnants of the old structure and create the effect of pontoons. Monet thus integrates the scaffolding with the bridge itself and minimizes the appearance of ruin and repair. This is seen even more strikingly in a second study of the unfinished bridge in 1872, this time looking through the opening of a single arch. Monet’s high viewpoint and muted, almost silhouetted framework of the scaffolding and its reflection in the water frame the distant view of the river rather than call attention to the scaffolding itself. This framing function is further reinforced by the stark simplicity and symmetry of the design. Through the opening we see signs of activity and progress, and high on the roadbridge we see a bustling traffic of pedestrians and a rolling horse-drawn carriage. Monet’s 1873 painting of the new railroad bridge, The Railroad Bridge Viewed from the Port, is an unmistakable paean to French industrial and



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10.27  Claude Monet, The Railroad Bridge Viewed from the Port, 1873. Private Collection, London.

spiritual recovery (fig. 10.27). The gleaming iron trestle rests on elegant columns of poured concrete and spans the river from a height and vantage point that dominates the landscape. Trains hurtle across the bridge in both directions, while below sailboats cavort in pleasure, thus reassuring the spectator that commercial and leisure pursuits proceed apace and are inseparable from modern living. The topos of the admiring spectators in the picture spells it out more directly, recalling those inside cover illustrations of American school texts projecting a bright future with two adolescents watching a parade of technological marvels. But Monet’s unprecedented luminosity, color, and daring brushwork imbue the renovations with the look of modernity, and surpass the school illustration by divesting the scene of its anecdotal and sentimental potential. Thus it is altogether unsurprising that the independent impressionists espoused with more conservative artists the primary aims of the government. Although lacking a willing dynastic head, conservatives expressed their position through a call for a revival of the monarchie chrétienne. Everywhere in France pilgrimages were organized to famous shrines and the church preached a veritable crusade. The National Assembly, dominated by monarchists, voted on 24 July 1873 to erect a great basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacré Coeur) on Montmartre—the site of the Commune’s origins— to expiate the sins of the nation and the crimes of the Communards. France had to atone for the frivolity of the Second Empire, whose disorders had brought down the fires of heaven.



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Zola observed the ethereal qualities of Puvis de Chavannes’s L’Espérance in the Salon of 1872, a sort of compromise image of the period striding both official and avant-garde camps (fig. 10.28). Puvis’s picture tries to counter the negative stereotypes of a prostrate Paris then circulating in popular illustration, but is itself steeped in the visual rhetoric of these allegories (fig. 10.29). He deployed conventional allegorical language to make the point about the recent travails: a pubescent girl surrounded by signs of regenerative springtime holds an olive branch as token of peace against a contrasting backdrop of low-keyed emblems of waste and ruin. It may not be a coincidence that one of the earliest patrons of the impressionists, Henri Rouart, owned a replica of this work, whose original title was Hope Blossoming on the Ruins.74 It was sold to him by Durand-Ruel and praised by Armand Silvestre in his preface to an album of prints of the paintings in the dealer’s gallery including the young impressionists. Silvestre’s interpretation of the young girl as a “flower hanging on the lone green branch in this ravaged sector, flower drooping towards the earth, flower of the sweet soil of the Nation,” recalls his metaphorical comments on the budding impressionists gathering their forces as summer blossoms began shooting up from the blood-stained cobblestones.75 In this painting Mother Nature has been replaced by her nymphet daughter, awaiting impregnation and the conception of a revivified nation. This Parisian daughter substitutes for a virgin nymph, playing on the traditionally feminine characterization of nature and opposing the wild, uncontrollable nature of the female Communards so conspicuous in the right-wing imagery of the period. Disordered nature in the form of the female participants had to be dominated, but devastated French manhood in the period required something gentle and vulnerable like Puvis’s Hope. Her turned-in feet and delicate gesture suggest passivity and incapacity to act aggressively as the Communard women: less a nurturing mother than a consoling angel, she soothes the anxieties of a distraught male populace needing to restore their lost manhood. The ruins of the Tuileries were surprisingly the subject of another major official painter of the period, Meissonier, who led the opposition to Courbet’s entry in the Salon of 1872 for his participation in the Commune (figs. 10.30–31). Meissonier could represent the ruins from a conservative position as a warning and as an example of what French society had to surmount. (He himself associated this work with his Barricade—Souvenir de guerre civile of 1848, which carried a similar message.) He chose a spectacular perspective through the burned-out windows of the Salle des Maréchaux, fixing on the distant quadriga atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel— once the threshold of the Tuileries Palace. The far doorway through which we view the triumphal arch is flanked by two decorative shields commemorating the glorious Napoleonic victories of Marengo and Austerlitz. For Meissonier, “the two words shine in history, just as they shone over the ruins of the palace.” Although the quadriga is seen from the rear as if leaving

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10.28  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Hope, 1872. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 10.29  Title page from J. Claretie, Histoire de la Révolution de 1870–71

(1872).

10.30  Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Ruins of the Tuileries, May 1871, 1871. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 10.31  Alphonse Liebert, Interior of the Salle des Maréchaux, albumen, 1871. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

the scene—the painter lamented, “Victory turns away on her chariot, she abandons us!”—it nevertheless produces the illusion that it is rising above the ruins and riding triumphantly into the future. This interpretation is confirmed by the Latin text Meissonier affixed to the bottom: “The glory of the ancients remains beyond the flames—May, 1871.”76 His pictorial fetishization of the Napoleonic moment of glory amidst the squalorous wreckage of the Commune was hardly unique, and explains the outrage of even the royalists over the destruction of the Vendôme Column. Popular illustration abroad featured the Salle des Maréchaux in the prewar era to convey the opulence of the regime (fig. 10.32). In the postCommune period photographs and popular illustration focus on the Salle des Maréchaux as an emblem of the heroic past (fig. 10.33). One writer noted that amid the ashes and scorched walls he could make out a decorative shield with the ineffaceable inscription “Jena”—the battleground of Napoléon’s decisive victory over the Prussians in 1806—which he admonished Parisians to preserve as a precious souvenir of the “great nation.”77 The Tuileries ruins were to stand untouched for twelve years both as a sign of Communard crimes against the nation and as a warning against



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10.32  A State Ball at the Tuileries [Salle des Maréchaux], wood engraving from Illustrated London News, 6 March 1869. 10.33  M. Val Elven, Ruins. Interior of the Tuileries. Current State of the Vestibule of the Salle des Maréchaux, wood engraving from Le Monde illustré, 1 July 1871.

future revolution, an exhibition in its own right.78 The embodiment of this elite theological and political program was Joan of Arc, symbol of both the militant church and the martyred victim. While she became the darling of the right wing, she could embody for all factions their longing for social stability, unanimity, and reconciliation. She represented the Third Republic’s answer to Carpeaux’s male genius of the Danse, and certainly to the failed male hero at Sedan. She also represents the Christianized version of the female warrior of the Commune, a depraved prostitute and virago. A striking example of this attitude in poetry is Victor de Laprade’s “A Jeanne d’Arc,” which captures the mood of the conservatives in the wake of foreign and domestic upheaval. It addresses itself to French women—“sisters of Joan”—admonishing them to raise a new generation of males devoted to France and ready to engage in illustrious combats in their mothers’ honor. The conventional sexism of the poem explains the rush to celebrate Joan: the threat of actual women voting and soldiering in the wake of the Commune (in which they were particularly active) needed to be neutralized and displaced onto a transcendental sign which essentially safeguarded the male hierarchy. At the very moment when Joan was championed, the conservative backlash effectively squelched real women’s rights and feminist agitation for those rights. During the 1870s images of Joan of Arc could be seen everywhere in Paris. The most celebrated of all was the equestrian version by the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet inaugurated on 20 February 1874, a little less than two months before the opening of the first impressionist exhibition (fig. 10.34). Depicting Joan as the militant Christian facing the Tuileries, it soon became a cult object; in 1878 Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans—hero of the fusionist party and hostile enemy of the Commune—suggested that Catholic women should assemble and lay flowers at the foot of the statue as a reply to the impending hundredth anniversary of Voltaire’s death. (Moderate republicans gained increasing control of the Assembly and voted a national celebration of the centenary, and disgruntled conservatives organized a counterdemonstration at the base of Frémiet’s statue.) Erected on the Place des Pyramides near the site where the heroine was wounded during a battle against English invaders, the Joan of Arc was a highly charged political statement from the moment of its unveiling. The crowd at that event included several outspoken revanchists like Paul Déroulède who bewailed the loss of the Alsace Lorraine provinces. Indeed, the desire for the recovery of Alsace Lorraine after 1870 was one of the main props of French patriotism in this period and immediately politicized Joan of Arc, whose native region was Lorraine. At the same time, memories of the Provisional Republic’s poor handling of the defense of Orléans during the Prussian siege of Paris also caused ill feeling at the time of the inauguration, especially since the suspicion that the Government of National Defense had sold the workers down the river fueled popular support for the Commune.

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10.34  Emmanuel Frémiet, Joan of Arc on Horseback, bronze, 1899. Place des Pyramides, Paris.

The other side of Frémiet’s production are his wild beasts, the flip side of his fascination for medieval heroes and saints. From the moment of its sensational appearance in the Salon in 1887, Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying Off a Human Female conjured up not only the “savage” of colonialized territories, but also a vision “of the lowest side of human nature” (fig. 10.35). The appeal of Frémiet’s work to the conservatives lay in its encoding of the “terrible past”—now given its true identity. More than one anti-Commune writer classified the Communards with wild beasts and monsters; in an outburst of rage, Gautier wrote: “Des cages ouvertes, s’élancent les hyènes de 93 et les gorilles de la Commune.”79 Taine conjured up stampeding beasts, including bloodthirsty baboons,80 while as early as 8 June 1871, Villemessant, the reactionary publisher of Le Figaro, combined both purgatorial and bestial metaphors in an editorial: There remains an important task for M. Thiers, that of purging Paris. Never has a better opportunity presented itself for curing Paris of its moral gangrene that has been consuming it for twenty years. . . . What is a republican? A savage beast.



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franco-prussian war, french commune, impressionism

10.35  Emmanuel Frémiet, Gorilla Carrying Off a Human Female, plaster, 1887. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

Come on, honest people, a swift bold stroke to finish once and for all the vermin, both democratic and international. . . . We must track them down in their lairs like wild animals.81

The metaphorical representations of the crusading Joan of Arc and the rampaging great ape map the limits of conservative thinking in the postCommune era. What is most striking in this metaphor is its alignment with the nascent imperialist thought of the Third Republic, which paradoxically embarks on a colonial quest soon to overshadow the overseas involvement of the Second Empire. Thus domestic “barbarians” are equated with tribal peoples in West Africa to justify repression both at home and abroad. The Third Republic eventually had to confront the prospect that its imperialism had become barbarism, not its alternative. The opposition of imperialism versus barbarism will constitute one of the central themes of the next volume in this series, Art in an Age of Empire, 1871–1914, which takes up the rise and fall of the impressionists and their modernist heirs.

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Coda: Menzel and the Transition to Empire

We have already examined the work of the German painter Adolph Menzel in relation to the Berlin revolution of 1848 and his developing conservative alignment with the Prussian ruling elite. Just the opposite of his French counterparts, Menzel could express a triumphalist version of history, as he did most effectively in several pictures glorifying the Hohenzollern regime on the eve and in the wake of the Franco-Prussian conflict. His Coronation of King William I at Königsberg (1865) was deeply imbued with the propagandistic policies of the regime that dictated the moment the king raised his sword and scepter as symbols of his divine right to rule while reciting the formula in the sermon given to him by the court preacher. The effect of the brief war was to generate a German national state, cause the fall of the French Second Empire, and, after bitter internal conflict, bring about the establishment of the Third Republic in France. The harsh terms of peace—France was required to pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs and to cede Alsace and Lorraine—assured that the enmity between France and Germany would henceforth be a central issue of international relations. The German plan to annex Alsace-Lorraine was mainly a military decision, intended to protect Germany’s flank on the Rhine in the event of future conflicts with France. But it also responded to a vociferous demand of German nationalists, and Bismarck needed their support. His overriding aim was the unification of Germany, and even before the French capitulation he had begun the complex and thorny negotiations with each of the South German states. They joined in fighting France, but it took all sorts of concessions, bribes, threats, and his considerable diplomatic skills before Bismarck induced the German states, Prussia’s generals, and the king to accept his terms for a permanent union. When they did, William I was crowned once again, this time as Kaiser (emperor) in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871. The Second Reich (the first being the old Holy Roman Empire) was from its inception a powerful nation. Germany in 1871 was not only more

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populous than France, but her rate of demographic growth led all the other European nations. Less than half the population was engaged in agriculture after the first decade of unification, and the nation’s industrial production—stimulated by the French reparations—increased at a remarkable rate. Since Germany developed later than Great Britain and more rapidly than France, its industrial technology was more modern. The government promoted manufacturing efficiency by investing heavily in railroads, granting tax incentives, establishing tariffs, and encouraging the formation of large combines—the origin of the notorious German cartels. The accelerated growth proved disruptive to German society, as the old ruling classes began to reel under the impact of modernity. Nationalists fell back on the traditional values of the Volk, and nowhere were materialistic, commercial, and urban values more intensely attacked than in industrial Germany. Although directed primarily against an expanding but defensive middle class, the attacks often focused on the Jewish community as the antithesis of the Volk, and anti-Semitic political parties now emerged, predicating their platform on the express association of the modernizing developments with the Jews. Pressured by the domestic issues, Bismarck sought to solidify the supremacy of the state by moving against two apparently vulnerable groups who opposed Prussian policies as too Protestant and centralized, on the one hand, and too conservative on the other: first the Catholic Church and its political expression in the Catholic Center party and then the emerging Social Democrats. Known as the Kulturkampf (literally, “Battle of the Civilizations”), the conflict with the church centered on new laws requiring state approval of church appointments, state supervision of Catholic education even in seminaries, and the abolition of religious orders. These measures constituted an effort at “Germanization” (Poland and Alsace were heavily Catholic) to undermine the residual anti-Prussian feeling. Passed in the period 1871–1875, they came at a time when the church appeared intransigently opposed to modern society, and they won the support of National Liberals, many conservative Lutherans, and much of the Left. Although the Kulturkampf failed to achieve the desired goals owing to strong resistance from the church and the Catholic Center party, it brought about a larger realignment of German politics. The conservatives and Catholics who had initially resisted the new Germany won concessions from Bismarck and came to accept it, while the liberal faction, torn by Bismarck’s accomplishments and democratic principles, declined in strength. Economic troubles, the effect of the nation’s rapid growth, and a European agricultural depression further bolstered Bismarck’s position among manufacturers and landlords, who clamored for, and received, strong protective tariffs. In the end, he gained the support of Junkers (diehard Prussian aristocratic landholders), Rhineland industrialists, and other powerful interest groups in favor of his conservative state, while weaker entities such as Jews and liberals were allowed to suffer the consequences of social transformation.

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11.1  Adolph von Menzel, The Departure of King William I for the Army, 31 July 1870, 1871. National-

galerie, Berlin.



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Menzel’s work during this period attests to his active participation in the changing social, political, and cultural circumstances. In 1871 he completed painting The Departure of King William I for the Army, 31 July 1870, an event he himself witnessed (fig. 11.1).1 Indeed, as soon as he heard the news of the declaration of war, he immediately terminated his summer vacation in Saxony and returned to Berlin. On the day of his arrival, he witnessed the enthusiastic commotion of the Berliners aroused by the departure of the king traveling toward Potsdam station. Typically, he situated himself in an upper story on the broad, busy Berlin avenue lined with magnificent lime trees and thus known as Unter den Linden (“Under the Lime Trees”). The Brandenburg Gate, surmounted by Schadow’s famous Quadriga of Victory, stood at the west end, while the royal palace culminated the eastern end of the avenue—a site further accentuated by Rauch’s equestrian monument of Frederick the Great (1851). (Here the crowds would gather to

menzel and the transition to empire

celebrate the news of the French surrender at Sedan on 3 September 1870.) In Menzel’s picture, the king and queen are shown descending the avenue from their apartments in the palace in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. The Unter den Linden was a fashionable promenade as well as a triumphal route of the military—the equivalent of the Champs-Elysées in Paris. The royal pair in the carriage display their gendered attributes, he by a military salute and the Pickelhaube—the Prussian spiked helmet—she by her tears and face-concealing handkerchief. But what Menzel emphasizes here is less the presence of the king and queen than the immense cheering crowd turned out to greet them and the fluttering national flags that echo the handkerchiefs waved by the bystanders in the balconies. Unlike the divided and fragmented assemblage of The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution, here the homogeneous crowd—made up almost entirely of the bourgeoisie and their proletariat servants—unites solidly behind its sovereign on the way to the front. By the time the work was completed and exhibited in Berlin, the same community would have been celebrating Prussia’s victory and the crowning of their king as Kaiser. In May–June 1871 Menzel participated in the decoration of the Berlin Academy—situated on the triumphal route of the procession of returning Prussian troops—painting two celebratory images commissioned by the town magistrate of Bismarck and General von Moltke.2 The city shelled out the enormous sum of 150,000 taler (1 taler = 3 marks) for the parade, and after it ended Menzel was one of the many artists selected to celebrate the new empire with a rash of monumental decorations. The idea was to give the people a kind of immediate apotheosis of their triumph. Berlin was made over to exude power and success, and a new national bluster displaced the old Biedermeier sobriety and restraint. Earlier the same year Menzel had sketched French prisoners of war at the railway station in East Berlin on the way to the fortress at Spandau.3 Menzel was so bent on depicting them that he waited patiently several hours for the train to arrive. The arrival of the prisoners signaled their humiliation, and they were greeted with the same jubilance reserved for the royal pair on the day the king rode to the front. Menzel’s watercolors, gouaches, and drawings represent the prisoners as dejected, grimacing, dehumanized creatures. His gouache Soldier of the Prussian Landwehr and French Prisoners is especially revealing, depicting a stalwart Prussian guard in full uniform, with fixed bayonet and firmly in control of his descending wards: faceless blobs, naked to the waist, and slumped over in utter helplessness and defeat (fig. 11.2). Menzel betrayed his nationalistic impulses in earlier works more or less related to the imperial ideology he subsequently embraced. He demeaned ethnic communities in stereotypical ways, especially Jews and Africans. A youthful lithograph of 1832, a Good Luck Greeting Card, depicts a Jew standing perplexed while pointing with his left hand to the cargo of two litter bearers, one of whom holds his nose in disgust. Beneath the image is a good luck wish for a moneybag filled with 92219562 taler. When the

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11.2  Adolph von Menzel, Soldier of the Prussian Landwehr and French Prisoners, gouache, 1871. Kupfer-

stichkabinett, Berlin.



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numbers are reversed in a mirror they spell out “Scheisse”—the German word for shit. It turns out that the litter is filled with excrement, and the scatological link with the Jew and the “filthy lucre” sends a clear message to the recipient.4 If the “greeting card” had been an adolescent’s attempt at humor, a later example, Jesus among the Doctors, painted near the end of 1851 for the annual Christmas exhibition of transparent panels at the Berlin Academy, betrays a persistent anti-Jewish attitude in his work. Reproduced and distributed soon after in the form of a lithograph, the scene shows exaggerated physiognomies of the Jewish priests pushed to the point of grotesque caricature (fig. 11.3).5 In a sketch of these Pharisees that he included in a letter to Ernst Otto Lindner, he made the heads even more cartoon-like and gave them weird Yiddish names like “Schamson v. Damaskus,” “Foschuah,” “Sermihaihu,” “Hillel v. Jeruschalaim,” and “Schmuhl v. See Tiberias.”6 Perhaps his most grotesque take on Judaism is his late gouache entitled End-of-the-Day of Atonement (The Habdalah), where a phantasmagoric image of a Jew engaged in the ritual of lighting a candle, his head covered with a prayer shawl, appears like a sorcerer working a spell of black magic (fig. 11.4). This and other images demonstrate that despite Jewish patronage and friendships, Menzel entertained an idea of Jews as an exotic, alien people in his midst.7 Menzel’s Jewish patronage induced him to confine his anti-Semitism to the “respectable” kind pervasive in German drawing-room culture in the period.8 In his correspondence, he would use with tongue-in-cheek the menzel and the transition to empire

coded word “Persern” (Persians) when he wished to refer to Jews.9 As in the case of his friend, the poet, journalist, and novelist Theodor Fontane, his anti-Semitism has generally been glossed over in the literature.10 Analogous to Menzel, Fontane was deeply beholden to his Jewish bourgeois readership for his livelihood, but his novels and private correspondence betray his social and cultural anti-Jewish biases.11 It would seem that these prejudices were reinforced by the wave of anti-Semitism ushered in by the depression of the early 1870s. His poem “An meinem Fünfundsiebzigsten,” with its famous last line, “Kommen Sie, Cohn,” betrays his profound ambivalence to his Jewish supporters. Relating to his huge anniversary celebration, the poem expresses his disappointment in his failure to attract the Junker crowd and in his hurt vanity poked fun at the majority of his guests with humble names like Meyer, Pollack, Isack, and Israel. In one curious note to himself, published posthumously, Fontane attempted to distance both himself and Menzel from the extreme forms of Jew-hatred, but in the process implicates both of them in the anti-Semitism of the period: [Hermann] Ahlwardt and his unbelievable actions [Ungeheuerlichkeiten]. This should first be discussed in depth and shown as impossible. Menzel. I am not really a philo-Semite. I prefer the Germanic in all things. I prefer a beautiful Germanic woman to a Jewish beauty. I prefer the country life to city life, partially because the Jewish element is not existent there; I love those countries (unfortunately, there are only a few of them left) where the people are Germanic, like Scandinavia.12 opposite 11.3  Adolph von Menzel, The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple,

lithograph, 1852. Kunstbibliothek, Berlin. 11.4  Adolph von Menzel, Endof-the-Day of Atonement (The Habdalah), gouache, 1901. Georg

Schäfer Collection, Schweinfurt.



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The abrupt insertion of Menzel’s name in this passage next to the rabid Jew-hater Ahlwardt suggests that Fontane is also defending his friend from charges of programmatic anti-Semitism. Thus their much-vaunted humanism had its limits, and a limited humanism ceases to be humanism. Fontane was keenly aware of the Jewishness of his friends and business associates like Georg Friedländer, who actually came from a converted family. Fontane admires his good qualities, but in the end “he is wholly Jewish” and therefore makes a splendid specimen of study for the novelist. His most damning letter about his friend starts out by recalling some ideal past when Germans lived in harmony, when suddenly along came the Jews to take advantage of the circumstances and “make a mess” (vermanschen) of everything. “Despite all their endowments they are a terrible people, not a potent and brisk addition to the general leaven, but a ferment in which the hideous forms of the fermentation remain living—a people that from the beginning attached itself to something suspicious and untrustworthy, with whom now the Aryan world can no longer contract . . . and everything is ineradicable.”13 In short, for Fontane Jews have primordial traits that can never be eliminated. Fontane shared other temperamental and intellectual traits with Menzel, whom he greatly admired as a genius of the first order. Like the menzel and the transition to empire

painter, he was a realist who avoided the “ugly” in his work. His poem “Unter ein Bildnis Adolf Menzels” emphasizes that while “aptitudes” and “talent” are common to all, only Menzel possesses above all that dedication of purpose and assiduity [Fleiss] that are the true hallmarks of genius.14 Although in his youth Fontane belonged to the liberal camp, he gradually shifted from moderate to conservative politics, rejecting universal suffrage and espousing Prussian nationalism and eventually even colonialism. During the decade 1860–1870 he worked for the ultra-right-wing, anti-Jewish newspaper Die Kreuzzeitung, and came to disown the popular will and democratic politics. In his late novels, he would point to the declining fortunes of the Junker class, but it is clear from the contexts and protagonists that his sympathies lay first and foremost with this caste. Indeed, an episode reported in Die Kreuzzeitung about one Benno Cohn reacting disrespectfully on the street to the anti-Semitic remarks of a Prussian nobleman and his companion really ticked him off: in Fontane’s chauvinistic and class-based social structure such conduct on the part of those he deemed his social inferiors menaced the very foundations of the Prussian state. It is perhaps in his late novels that we find the plainest evidence of Fontane’s anti-Semitism, often sugarcoated and subtle in its innuendo and rhetoric, but pronounced nevertheless. In his first work on Berlin society, L’Adultera (The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1882), the heroine is married to a converted Jew and arriviste who Germanizes his name, and his boorishness causes her to suffer deep stress in social gatherings. Subsequently, she falls in love and elopes with an unconverted Jew, Ebenezer Rubehn, a more sympathetic figure (Fontane opposed Jewish conversion and assimilation) but one who leads the protagonist inevitably to her estrangement from family and friends. A later novel, Die Poggenpuhls (1896), contrasts a gallant but historically irrelevant Junker family—forced to sell off their country property for a threadbare Berlin apartment to maintain a good face—to an up-and-coming Jewish banking family. The youngest daughter of the Poggenpuhls, Manon, hopes to revive the family fortunes by marrying off her brother Leo to a daughter of the rich Bartensteins. In fact, she tries to prove to Leo that the House of Bartenstein is socially respectable by pointing out that the family owns “several paintings by Menzel in their gallery, one is a court ball, I think, and the other a sketch for a coronation scene.” Fontane, however, makes it clear that he decries the circumstances in which the Poggenpuhls must kowtow to the Bartensteins—simultaneously signaling German decadence and Jewish ascendance. But the sharpest example of outright anti-Semitism in his writing occurs in Der Stechlin (1899) in connection with the Jewish character Baruch Hirschfeld. The old Junker Dubslav von Stechlin, proprietor of the estate that bears his name, is on friendly terms with the pious Baruch, owner of a dry-goods shop in the neighboring town, and considers him almost saintly. At the same time, he detests Baruch’s son Isador, an irreligious Social Democrat who hides his mercenary dreams under a humanistic cover.

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While Stechlin’s peer, Count Barby, attacks rich and upper-class Jews as backward and antediluvian, Stechlin confesses to a “philo-Semitic tendency” and declares that he prefers to look at individual cases, although admittedly, “there’s many an individual case that doesn’t appeal to me.” By novel’s end, however, an enfeebled Stechlin realizes that Hirschfeld was out to grab his estate all along. Duped into a relationship of trust, Stechlin realized that in his declining state Hirschfeld’s “cloven hoof and horns have popped out in the end after all.” His sudden insight that he had been deceived by Hirschfeld’s guile and charm is bitterly disillusioning; and since Stechlin is generally recognized as Fontane’s persona, this final observation on Hirschfeld’s duplicity must be seen as Fontane’s definitive statement on the Jewish Question. Fontane posited colonialization as one solution to the economic woes of the nobility. In Die Poggenpuhls, Leo discusses with the family’s house servant Friederike his future prospects. He asserts that if nothing came of the plan to marry him to Flora Bartenstein, “then it’ll have to be blacks, real, genuine blacks, because then I’ll have to go to Africa.” In posing the alternatives of Jewish wealth and colonial enlistment, Fontane creates a Scylla and Charybdis for the old Prussian nobility. Menzel, too, showed a fascination for “darkest Africa” in his striking image of the Zulus, dated to around 1863, a spectacle of wild southeast African dancers on a stage-like proscenium reminiscent of a nineteenth-century sideshow.15 Three figures leap and tumble violently, one of them twisting in total abandon as he draws a blade from a scabbard and practically falls out of his feathered skirt, while another crouches like an animal with large popping eyes and mouth agape, exposing canine-like teeth. As if the point was not clear enough, Menzel has made the figures rhyme with the variety of exotic jungle creatures—serpent, tigers, parrots, and monkeys—leaping, flying, and cavorting on the painted circus backdrop. An inscription on the tiger’s back reads “No-one walks among the palm trees with impunity,” a paraphrase of a quote by Goethe that in this context clearly evokes the dangers inherent in tribal society. When Friederike hears Leo’s plan for enrolling in the colonial army, she replies: “Oh Lord, Leo, dear! And I’ve just been reading about that. Oh, my goodness me, but they kill everybody there and cut poor Christian folks’ throats.” Leo immediately responded: “They do that here too. It’s the same everywhere.” Of course, German colonialism did not reach its apogee until Bismarck created an empire in East and Southwest Africa five times the size of the Reich in the mid-1880s. German expansionism was widely understood as an anti-British gambit and supported by a wave of wild chauvinism. Colonialism in Germany, like everywhere else, was justified by the standard economic and ideological arguments of imperialist aggression: it furnished new overseas markets, had the potential to produce great mineral wealth, could serve as a vent for the domestic social tensions, and would extend the “civilizing mission” of the other Great Powers. Menzel’s bestialized Zulus

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menzel and the transition to empire

would certainly have contributed to the justificatory arguments for colonialism, allying the painter with those boosting national prestige through overseas expansion. In addition to his participation in the political events of 1870–1871, Menzel continued to address the experience of rapid industrialization in the early years of the Empire. It is especially in the immense opportunities represented by the new German industries that Menzel seems to have found his greatest inspiration. We have already seen his fascination for railway technology, but he also was attracted to factory labor. In 1863 he painted Factory on Fire, and in 1869 he painted a curious commemorative diploma for the fiftieth anniversary of the Heckmann metallurgical factory—specializing in the production of brass, copper, and iron. Within the decorative frame Menzel provides two glimpses of scenes showing laborers working at the forge.16 Nevertheless, his previous examples do not prepare us for the astonishing and almost demonic portrayal of laborers in The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops), begun in 1872 and completed in 1875 (fig. 11.5).17 It is a veritable labyrinth of men and machinery, a densely woven, claustrophobic composition in which human limbs are transformed into extensions of cogwheels, flywheels, tongs, pulleys, and cables. Menzel made the flywheel—a ubiquitous visual object in the industrial environment of Upper Silesia—the symbolic focus of the composition (fig. 11.6). The arc of the huge flywheel in the middle ground signifies a cyclical operation that reveals itself in the continuous round of labor shifts, as groups of workers momentarily pause to refresh themselves through bathing or snacking amid the furious activity, readying themselves to return to the mechanical process. Totally oblivious to the exertions of the laborers, the manager, his back turned to the bustle and standing just to the left of the flywheel, looks up to check on the operation of the machinery. He represents the state’s support of the owners of production to maintain international competitiveness, as well as its lack of concern for adapting working conditions to human needs. Here at last is Menzel’s ideal proletariat grouping, united in an effort to aggrandize the new national state. What we view is a metaphorical projection of a powerful but illiberal society—an expression of heightened progress in the material realm but a step back from the hopes and dreams of 1848. Whereas his fashionable bourgeois crowd in The Departure of King William I for the Army unites in patriotic display and leisure around chauvinistic dreams of empire, his laborers are trapped in perpetual obeisance to the dictates of capitalist production. In this vicious cycle of unceasing toil, there is no time or opportunity for demagogic appeals to egalitarian ideals of social justice or decent living standards. Now at last the threat was lifted—the very threat that induced the bourgeoisie to renounce its political potential and autonomy in favor of the authoritarian Bismarckian state. Thus The Iron Rolling Mill is the class-conscious counterpart to The Departure of King William I, separating the classes into unified wholes with

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11.5  Adolph von Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops),

1872–1875. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 11.6  Laminoirs de Lipine (Society of Zinc, Mines, and Foundries of Upper Silesia). Reproduced in J. F. Turgan, Les Grandes Usines: Etudes industrielles en France et à l’ étranger (1876–1885), 9:120–121.

out the messy intermingling of The Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution. Above all, the workers now not only know their place in the scheme of things but they have no escape hatch by which to foment social conflict. Menzel celebrates the demoniac takeoff of the Second Reich as a full-blown conservative committed to Bismarckian social order. There is an interesting parallel to Menzel’s painting in his friend Theodor Fontane’s novel Irrungen, Wirrungen (Delusions, Confusions), first serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1887. In a crucial scene that has the aristocratic protagonist resigning himself to a loveless marriage within the rigid caste system and rejecting the working-class woman whom he loves, Baron Botho von Rienäcker rides into the open country seeking solace for his decision. He comes upon a large factory complex, a steel rolling mill or a machine workshop [Walzwerk oder eine Maschinenwerkstatt], marked by huge chimneys belching forth smoke and fire. The factory is run on shift labor, and some of the workers sit outside in the shadows partaking of a meal brought to them by female servants. Von Rienäcker is mesmerized by the sight and thinks to himself: “Work, daily bread, and order. When our Brandenburg folk marry, it’s not passions and love they talk about. They just say, ‘I’ve just got to have my order.’ And that is a beautiful trait in the life of our people and not at all prosaic. Order means a great deal, sometimes it’s everything.” This insight enables him to safely embrace the precepts of the social order that sustains the Bismarckian political system. Menzel aestheticizes his baldly ideological image by invoking the “industrial sublime” of the British painters John Martin and Joseph Mallord William Turner and the French François Bonhommé, and fusing it with mythological allusions to Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s partnership with the Cyclops who helped him manufacture the accessories of the Gods of Olympus. It is no wonder that Menzel, later reminiscing about his experience at Königshütte, could declare: “I ran the constant risk of being laminated myself, so to speak. For weeks, from morning to night, I stood among those enormous hand wheels, conveyor belts and the cast iron and I sketched. Technology, the modern world of Cyclops, is very rich in terms of subjects.” Here in a nutshell Menzel betrays his engagement on the one hand with the Burkean notion of “delightful horror” (his fear of being laminated and awe of the industrial environment) and on the other his mythological reading of the modern world.18 He also hints at his total absorption in the industrial process qua process and the workers’ operations within it. The scene depicts the huge ironworks at Königshütte in Upper Silesia. Menzel himself was born in Breslau, and felt a special attachment to his native region. Although major iron production took place in the Rhineland, the rapid industrial expansion in Germany after unification now spread to Upper Silesia. The region had distinct practical advantages in its proximity to both iron ore and coal; though iron ore was less abundant than in the Ruhr, there was so much coal that it proved profitable to move in ore from other places by water and rail.

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The ironworks at Königshütte specialized in the production of bars and rails for the railways. The dynamic center of the picture concentrates on a group of workers manipulating long-handled tongs in feeding a chunk of white-hot cast iron into a series of laminating cylinders that will compress it into the desired length and width. Whereas his earlier depictions of locomotives, railway stations, and the interior of passenger compartments took the form of outward spectacle, now Menzel enters into the very belly of the beast to actively engage with the productive process underlying the railroad’s economic and political development. As we have seen in the work of Turner in the previous volume, the development of the railway became a capitalist obsession from around mid-century. In the 1850s and 1860s, as in Britain, France, and America, railroads became the most important area of investment, their shares dominating the German stock market. They also constituted a source of high unemployment and demoralization among the teamsters and freighters, who fought a losing battle against the locomotive. Wagoners were hit hard by the success of the railway boom and constantly petitioned government authorities for restrictions on railroad transportation. In April 1848 a crowd of wagoners and shippers wrenched a section of the Taunus railroad near Cassel in the province of Hessen-Nassau, tearing up ties, threatening employees, and demolishing a station house. Troops were called in and with the aid of the civic guard restored order. Menzel would have surely taken note of the incident as one more example of rogue action excited by false illusions of egalitarianism. After the unification in 1870–1871 railroads again became a source of speculation, fired in part by Bethel Henry Strousberg’s ambitious scheme of the late 1860s in Rumania.19 Strousberg, known as the “railroad king,” had gained a reputation for successful railway enterprises, and Bismarck had favored the construction of the Rumanian railroad network in the interest of German commerce. Strousberg’s consortium, which comprised major Silesian magnates as well as royal princes and some of the first aristocratic families, demonstrates the appeal of railway investment to the upper ranks of Prussian society. Eventually Gerson von Bleichröder, Bismarck’s key financial adviser and agent, had to be called upon, and he founded a new joint-stock company to take over the interests of Strousberg, but the problem was solved only years later when the Rumanian government was persuaded to purchase the railway network. The collapse of Strousberg’s project, however, contributed in the short term to the crash of 1873. A converted Jew, Strousberg’s failure played into the hands of the anti-Semites, who emerge in full force in this economically depressed period. It is by no means coincidental that Strousberg collected Menzel’s work in the late 1860s and early 1870s or that the painter chose as his paradigmatic expression of German industry the iron rolling mill in Königshütte, since this site was known for the quality of its rails and thus was tied to a crucial German industry.20 A number of aristocrats in Upper Silesia owned vast interests in railway enterprises and industrially related businesses, and many of these

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had invested in Strousberg’s scheme as well. As previously pointed out, in the early 1870s the exuberance aroused by military victory and the sudden influx of billions of French francs launched an unparalleled boom and speculative excitement. These early years launched what historians of German history call the Gründerzeit of the Bismarck era—among other things, years of delirious economic promotions and creations marking a period for the founding of empires, both political and economic. This new spirit found a dramatic focus in the stock market. Built in the early 1860s, in lavish neo-Renaissance style, the Berlin Börse in the next decade became the universally discussed arbiter of hopes and expectations. For a short time prior to the crash it was everyone’s Temple of Seduction, soon to be denounced as the Jewish Temple—the imagined threshold of Jewish ascendance in the new state. The speculative extravaganza completed the Germans’ new perceptions of themselves: it was in the moment of capitalism in caricature that they came to realize the degree to which the new economic system had come to dominate their society. They experienced a shock of recognition following the crash of 1873 from which they never fully recovered—and from henceforth, anticapitalism and antiSemitism ran in tandem as they developed into strong social forces in German life. Berlin evolved into a city of extremes: the rich built themselves palaces in the west while the poor lived in proletarian barracks, Mietskasernen, as they were called, in the east. The gaudiness of the wealthy appeared in stark contrast to the ghettoization of the poor, and the social life of the city was marked by the uneasy interplay between the newly rich and the old elite, with the penniless kept in a state of benign neglect. The imperial court remained the pinnacle of society; the old aristocracy clung to its posts in the upper reaches of government, the bureaucracy, and the now much admired and much displayed officer corps. The new classes—the magnates of commerce and industry and the financial elite—however, contributed the dynamism of the city, its power and affluence. These new rich coveted the cultural traditions of the old elite, emulating them in decorations and titles and striving to add “von” to their surnames. The old aristocracy in turn despised and coveted the resources of the new upstarts. Thus in aping their impoverished betters the bourgeois lost a golden opportunity to establish their own standards and values and helped sustain the cultural supremacy of the Junker class. Under the new empire, industrial capitalism determined the face and growth of German society; to an extent greater than elsewhere, German bankers had a controlling influence over the policies of the major industrial enterprises. One banker instrumental in the reorganization of Upper Silesian mining and iron-producing enterprises was Gerson von Bleichröder (1822–1893), who, prior to unification, was a cautious investor and financial planner. He served as Bismarck’s financial agent and adviser and helped negotiate the war reparations with France, and in 1872 became the first

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Prussian Jew to be elevated to a “von” without having had to convert to Christianity. After 1871 Bleichröder shifted his imperial proclivities to the economic realm and the modern world of industry. He helped restructure the Silesian coal and iron complex known as Laurahütte, and he promoted the new corporate creation in 1873 of the West German coal mine known as Hibernia. The Laurahütte was one of the pioneer metalworking plants, founded in 1839 by the Henckel von Donnersmarck family, major Silesian landowners (fig. 11.7). Bleichröder’s involvement in this enterprise gave him major interests in the mining and metallurgical industries that belonged to the fastest growing sector of the economy. He also expanded his connections with various railroad enterprises, and persuaded Bismarck to invest heavily in the railway systems in the 1870s. He helped found the Reichs Continental Eisenbahnbaugesellschaft, which in turn organized the Weimar-Gera and the Posen-Kreuzburg railroads. Bismarck ultimately hoped to nationalize these systems but failed to achieve this aim during his tenure in office. The Laurahütte complex merged with the Königshütte factory in 1871, and after a rapid period of integration with another rolling mill and zinc mine emerged under the corporate logo of “Vereinigte Königs- und Laurahütte A. G.,” a joint-stock corporation that managed to weather the crash thanks to creative financing and restructuring by Bleichröder and his colleagues. Bankers like Bleichröder financed the great expansion of the economy, and in the first three years of the empire as many ironworks, blast 11.7  Donnersmarck-Hütte. Reproduced in Turgan, Les Grandes Usines, 9:168–169.



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furnaces, and machine production factories were founded as had been created in the preceding seventy years. The patron who commissioned Menzel’s picture in 1872 was one of Bleichröder’s Jewish associates, the banker Adolph von Liebermann, an uncle of the painter Max Liebermann. It is most likely that he and Menzel had mutual connections with Bleichröder’s Jewish banking circle: we have seen that Bleichröder had to rescue Strousberg’s railway scheme after the latter’s default, and Menzel’s painting Weekday in Paris passed from the collection of Strousberg to Liebermann after Strousberg’s bankruptcy; another of Bleichröder’s associates, the banker Franz Mendelssohn, of the famous Mendelssohn House, also collected Menzel’s work.21 Although Menzel claimed that he chose the subject of The Iron Rolling Mill himself and that Liebermann “was very surprised to start with,” we may well imagine that the surprise soon wore off and that the theme was eagerly embraced as a manifestation of the current excitement of the unprecedented economic boom. The fiery atmosphere and frenzied activity of the scene indeed corresponds to the fever then gripping the ebullient public. Tragically, the collapse of the market in 1873 and his financial ruin forced Liebermann to liquidate his collection of German masters in 1876. Already in mid-July 1875, after possessing the work for only a few months, Liebermann approached the new Nationalgalerie with a view to selling it. Max Jordan, director of the museum, justified the purchase to the minister of culture by interpreting the picture as a “glorification of rough work in modern cultural life,” and as an expression “of the heroism of duty,” a euphemistic gloss that supports my interpretation of the scene as Menzel’s insertion of the workforce into a conservative ideological niche. Surely, he and the patron shared a fundamental outlook on this score— the identification with the nascent takeoff of heavy German industry, the embrace of the prosperity that came in the wake of unification, the need to project confidence in the wake of the crash, and a sense of gratitude to the Reich for facilitating the economic pursuits of the bourgeoisie. But in the years following the crash Liebermann may have had another motive for bestowing on the soon-to-be inaugurated cultural institution Menzel’s important masterpiece. The depression that brought about the crash of 1873 had unleashed a virulent wave of anti-Semitism that took off in the mid-1870s.22 Conservative and Catholic critics read the crash as a kind of moral reckoning against capitalist enterprise and blamed liberals and Jews for the catastrophe. In June 1875 the Kreuzzeitung, the voice of the Junker and agrarian interests, accused Bismarck of selling out to Jewish interests and intimated that German rulers were tools of the Jews who operated behind the scenes.23 The older, fashionable anti-Semitism had now given way to the notion of a Jewish threat to the German nation, helpless before a giant conspiracy. Indeed, it was in this very decade that the term “antiSemitism” entered the rhetoric of racist ideology, coined by Wilhelm Marr to distinguish between the object of the commonplace anti-Jewish

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backbiting of the salon and club and what Marr described as an ineluctable drive to world domination. German Jews had only been formally emancipated on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War in 1867–1869, an act opposed by conservative groups. The crash gave a pretext for formal expressions of opposition in the Reichstag, and a series of anti-Semitic parties began to organize. I suspect that Liebermann’s highly publicized sale to the Nationalgalerie was meant in part to blunt the accusation of a Jewish financial conspiracy against the Reich through a philanthropic contribution to the national patrimony. Menzel produced his image of German madcap industrial growth and displayed the peak of his own power at the very time when Europe entered the last, frenzied phase of its territorial expansion. From the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, European powers established or extended their control over large parts of Asia and Africa. Even the French Third Republic and the Americans entered the fray to attempt to annex and colonize huge chunks of the globe. Although contemporaries of this imperialist phase may have convinced themselves of the necessity of “civilizing missions” to save souls and open their societies to modernizing trade agreements, we look back and see a history of ruthless exploitation and the imposition of a select brand of material progress on tribal societies that in retrospect lived in harmony in their geographical niche, blissfully ignorant of the machine age and the imperial steeplechase. Of course, this penetration of these societies on the margins of the world unleashed a wave of artistic inspiration, as people of culture adopted a “primitive” persona to register their protest against bourgeois conformity and values. But this is a story that must await the fifth volume in our series, Art in an Age of Empire.



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Notes

chapter 1









1. P. H. Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848 (Princeton, 1975), pp. 36–37. 2. K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (Moscow, n.d.), p. 53. 3. G. Sand, Correspondance, ed. G. Lubin, 26 vols. (Paris, 1964–1995), 8:412. 4. A. Lebey, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte et la révolution de 1848, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907–1908), 1:84–90; G. Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution, trans. A. Carter (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 201–202. 5. A. de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York, 1970), pp. 136–137. 6. The appeal of Fourier’s self-contained communities inspired a plethora of variations on his plan, and Fourierism continued to grow throughout the century, reaching a peak in 1848, when it was all but suppressed during the aftermath of June. A major center of reform propaganda and meeting place for radicals during the time of the Provisional Republic was the Fourierist newspaper La Démocratie pacifique, which proposed radical restructuring of the administrative branch of government and called for a practical trial of a Fourierist Association. Several Fourierist experiments were carried out in the United States around mid-century (minus his fantastic ideas on sexuality and sexual relations). Key figures such as Albert Brisbane, Horace Greeley (editor of the New York Tribune), Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley helped launch Fourierist associations, the most famous of these being Brook Farm near Boston. Many of these were short-lived, but the spread of such communities attested to their appeal to reform-minded Americans. 7. La Réforme, 4 April 1848. 8. E. Cabet, Révolution de 1830 et situation présente (November 1833) (Paris, 1833). 9. P.-J. Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de février (Paris, 1851), pp. 16, 18, 21. 10. L. Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la révolution de février 1848 (Brussels, 1850), pp. 117, 136. 11. A. de Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848, trans. F. Durivage and W. Chase (London, 1849), p. 554. 12. A. Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (London and New Haven, 1980), pp. 189–229. 13. Proposals for reform of the Salon jury system already began circulating on the eve of the revolution: see R. H. Herbert, “A Pre-Revolutionary Proposal for Reforming the Salon Jury, 1848,” Oxford Art Journal 25 (2002): 29–40. 14. “Faits divers,” La République, 15 March 1848. 15. J. Champfleury, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1894), p. 101.

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16. F. Sartorius, “Revue de la semaine,” L’Artiste, 4e sér., t. 11 (1848 [26 December 1847]): 127. 17. C. Blanc, “Rapport au citoyen ministre de l’intérieur, sur les arts du dessin et sur leur avenir dans la République,” Le Moniteur universel, 10 October 1848. 18. C. Blanc, “Duc, Daumier, Couture,” Le Temps, 12 April 1879. 19. L.-M. Caussidière, Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1849), 1:5–8. 20. Le Moniteur universel, 8 March 1848. 21. C. L. Chassin, L’Armée et la révolution (Paris, 1867), pp. 66, 107–109. 22. Assemblée Nationale, session of 7 June 1848, cited in A. Merckens, “Thomas Couture’s ‘Enrôlement des volontaires de 1792’ and the Republic of 1848” (master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1968), p. 19 and n. 53. 23. V. Cousin, Du vrai, du beau, et du bien (Paris, 1836), pp. 280–281. 24. J. Boime, Violence and Utopia: The Work of Jerome Boime, ed. A. Boime (Lanham, Md., 1996), pp. 144–149. 25. Blanc, Pages d’histoire de la révolution de février 1848, pp. 117, 136. 26. R. Ballu, Catalogue des oeuvres de Th. Couture (Paris, 1880), p. x; A de Lostalot, Chronique des arts, 4 September 1880; E. Cardon, “Thomas Couture: L’Homme et l’oeuvre à propos de son exposition,” Le Soleil, 13 September 1880; M. Vachon, “Exposition des oeuvres de Thomas Couture,” La France, 2 September 1880. 27. R. Redmond, Les Etats-unis devant l’opinion française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 2:849–850 and notes 68, 70. 28. Musée de Compiègne, Couture Family Archives, ledger, “Quelques Lettres,” MS. p. 289. 29. A. Lireux, Assemblée nationale comique (Paris, 1850), p. 137. 30. E. Got, Journal, 1822–1901 (Paris, 1910), p. 223. 31. Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848, pp. 2, 96, 98. 32. A. de Lamartine, History of the Girondists; or, Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution, trans. H. Ryde, 3 vols. (New York, 1847), 3:538. 33. Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 53. 34. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, n.d.), p. 15. 35. Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848, pp. 390–401. 36. G. Sand, Souvenirs de 1848 (Paris, 1880), pp. 6, 8–9. 37. J. Michelet, Cours professé au Collège de France, 1847–1848 (L’Etudiant) (Paris, 1848), pp. 126–127, 177. 38. J. Michelet, Histoire de la révolution française, 9 vols. (Paris, 1877–1883), 4:181–185, 188–189, 261–262, 285–287. 39. T. Couture, Méthode et entretiens d’atelier (Paris, 1867), p. 279. 40. Couture Family Archives, Compiègne, rough draft for a projected letter to surintendant des Beaux-Arts Nieuwerkerke. Apparently, “démagogue” was a favorite term of Louis-Napoléon’s zealous henchman: see duc de Persigny, Mémoires, ed. H. de Laire (Paris, 1896), pp. 48, 74. 41. The key modern references for the competition are A. Boime, “The Second Republic’s Contest for the Figure of the Republic,” Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 68–83; M.-C. Chaudonneret, La Figure de la République: Le Concours de 1848 (Paris, 1987); M. Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge, U.K., 1981), pp. 73–88; A. Boime, “The 1848 Contest for the Symbolic Figure of the Republic as a Vent for Domestic and Foreign Reaction,” in Album Amicorum Kenneth C. Lindsay, ed. S. Stein and G. McKee (Binghamton, N.Y., 1990), pp. 257–296. 42. “Jugement du concours pour la figure symbolique de la république française,” Le Moniteur universel, 24 October 1848. 43. O. M., “Art in Continental States,” Art-Union 10 (1848): 338.

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44. L. Blanc, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1870), 1:287. 45. “Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Concours pour la figure symbolique de la république française,” L’Illustration 12 (28 October 1848): 130–131. 46. C. Isnard, “Concours des figures symboliques de la République,” L’Artiste 5e sér., t. 1 (1848): 161. 47. Paris, Archives Nationales, F21.566, petition addressed to the Minister of the Interior, 26 March 1848, and signed by Gendron, Papety (a Fourierist), and Alexandre Hesse, among other participants in the competition. 48. O. M., “Art in Continental States,” Art-Union 10 (1848): 199. 49. Pr. H., “La Direction des Beaux-Arts depuis la révolution de février. III: Distribution des travaux: Le Concours et le choix,” Le National, 17 December 1848. 50. Nouradj, “Exposition des monnaies du type de la République,” Le Crédit, 17 November 1848. 51. T. Gautier, “Concours pour la Figure de la République,” La Presse, 21 May 1848. 52. A. J. D., “Concours national: Figure symbolique de la République française,” L’Illustration 11 (6 May 1848): 158. 53. L. Jan, “Beaux-Arts: Portrait de la République,” Le Siècle, 27 November 1848. 54. T. Gautier, “Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts: Exposition des figures du concours pour la République; Envois de Rome,” La République, 5 December 1848. 55. Quoted in P. Villard, Les Idées économiques et sociales de Louis Reybaud (Aix-en-Provence, 1968), p. 247. 56. H. Delaborde, Lettres et pensées d’Hippolyte Flandrin (Paris, 1865), pp. 369–370, 372; L. Flandrin, Hippolyte Flandrin (Paris, 1909), pp. 205–218. 57. Champfleury, Oeuvres posthumes, p. 98. 58. Quoted in H. P. Vincent, Daumier and His World (Evanston, Ill., 1968), p. 120. 59. Quoted in M. Thibert, Le Féminisme dans le socialisme français de 1830 à 1850 (Paris, 1926), p. 8. 60. M. Emerit, “Les Saint-Simoniens en Grèce et en Turquie,” Revue des études sud-est européennes 13 (1975): 246. 61. “De la position précaire des femmes,” La République, 6 March 1848. 62. See the discussion of Comte in J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1991), pp. 174–189. 63. “L’Humanité s’éveille,” La Démocratie pacifique, 1 March 1848. 64. Quoted in the article “République,” in P. Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols. (Paris, 1866–1870, 1877–1890), 13: 1016. 65. A. J. D., “Concours national: Figure symbolique de la République française,” L”Illustration 11 (6 May 1848): 158. 66. Jan, “Portrait de la République.” 67. “Bertall à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques, à l’exposition de l’Ecole des BeauxArts,” L’Illustration 27 (6 May 1848): 149. 68. L. Reybaud, Jérôme Paturôt à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques, 4 vols. (Paris, 1848). 69. Ibid., pp. 55–60. 70. The list of the original ten semifinalists may be found in Jean-Jacques Feuchère’s dossier “Statue Figure de la République,” Archives Nationales, F21.29. 71. G. F., “Décision du jury pour le concours de la république française,” L’Illustration 12 (27 January 1849): 352. 72. H. Jouin, David d’Angers, sa vie, son oeuvre, ses écrits et contemporains, 2 vols. (Paris, 1878), 2:3–4, 8–9, 32, 74, 372. 73. A. J. D., “Exposition des concours pour la statue colossale de la République et pour un monument à élever à la mémoire de l’Archevêque de Paris,” L’Illustration 12 (13 January 1849): 314; A. Boime, Hollow Icons: The Politics of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, Ohio,

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1987), pp. 58–60. 74. Lord Pilgrim, “Mouvement des arts,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 2 (1849): 206. 75. J. Lethève, “Une statue malchanceuse, ‘La République’ de Jean-François Soitoux,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6e pér. (1963): 229–240. 76. Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848, p. 390. 77. La Réforme, 24 October 1848. 78. A. Gaiffe, “Variétés: Concours pour les types monétaires de la République,” L’Evénement, 11 December 1848. 79. La République, 26 September 1848. 80. “The Chartist Demonstration,” Times, 10, 11 April 1848; “Manifestation chartiste,” La République, 12 April 1848. 81. “Pictures of the Republic,” Punch 15 ( July–December 1848): 236. 82. Punch 16 ( January–June 1849): 28–29. An indication of the reciprocity of these images between conservative journals is the altered reproduction of this print in L’Illustration, with a French family in the central scene. See L’Illustration 12 (10 February 1849): 373. 83. X. M., “La Danse des morts en 1848 (Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahre 1848),” L’Illustration 13 (28 July 1849): 347–348. 84. “Sentiments and Symbols of the French Republic,” Blackwood’s Magazine 63 ( June 1848): 770– 771. 85. Sand, Correspondance, pp. 329–330, 527. 86. Fab. P., “Beaux-Arts: Exposition de 1849, aux Tuileries,” Le Moniteur universel, 4 July 1849. 87. Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848, p. 401. 88. Blanc, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 1:88–89. 89. “Republican Paris,” Blackwood’s Magazine 63 (May 1848): 575. 90. V. Schoelcher, History of the Crimes of the Second of December (London, 1853), p. 167. 91. G. P. Weisberg, The Realist Tradition (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 132–134. 92. For discussions of this picture, see T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 24–29; M. J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, 1996), pp. 109–110, 232–233 n. 64; C. C. Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), pp. 52–63. 93. O. Gréard, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, ses souvenirs, ses entretiens (Paris, 1897), p. 218. 94. E. Delacroix, Journal, ed. A. Joubin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1932), 1:270. 95. Sand, Correspondance, pp. 544–545. 96. F. Lammenais, De l’art et du beau (Paris, 1885), pp. 10–11; P. Martino, L’Epoque romantique en France, 1815–1830 (Paris, 1944), p. 139.

chapter 2





1. G. Lukács, Studies in European Realism (London, 1972), p. 11: When the genuine realist experiences conflict between “his most cherished prejudices” and the situations he has created, “[he] will, without an instant’s hesitation, set aside these his own prejudices and convictions and describe what he really sees, not what he would prefer to see.” 2. C. Baudelaire, Journaux intimes, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. C. Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975–1976), 1:679. 3. A. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet (Paris, 1881), pp. 244–245. 4. P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (Paris, 1865), pp. 311–312. 5. Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants, exposés au Palais national le 30 décembre 1850 (Paris, 1850), p. 6. 6. R. Price, ed., 1848 in France (London, 1975), p. 23.

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7. M. Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), p. 77. 8. R. L. Herbert, “City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin,” Artforum 8 (February 1970): 44–55. 9. For a recent and methodically researched investigation of Millet’s career, see L. Lepoittevin, Jean-François Millet (Au-delà de l’Angélus), Colloque de Cerisy (Paris, 2002). 10. A. Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1971), p. 113. 11. E. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 3 vols. (Paris, 1921), 1:45, 47–48. 12. J. Champfleury, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1894), p. 32. 13. H. Naegely, J. F. Millet and Rustic Art (London, 1898), pp. 30–31. 14. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, pp. 72–74. 15. R. Muther, Jean François Millet (New York, 1905), p. 13. 16. M. Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1996), pp. 110–142. 17. Quoted in ibid., p. 199. 18. P. Bourdrel, Histoire des juifs de France (Paris, 1974), p. 179; A. Perchenet, Histoire des juifs de France (Paris, 1988), p. 150. 19. Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 196–197. 20. K. Lindsay, “Millet’s Lost Winnower Rediscovered,” Burlington Magazine 116 (1974): 239–245. 21. See Archives Nationales, F21.47, dossier “M. Millet, tabl: Le Repos des Faneuses. 4 July 1848, 1800 fr.” The original commission, Agar dans le désert, has been struck out on the cover. A letter from Millet dated 30 April 1849 refers to his finished project, and I think it refers to the Faneuses, not the Hagar, as T. J. Clark concludes. The payment of the following month, which refers to the Hagar, must reflect the confusion surrounding the commission, or the original title was inserted to cover the substitution for official purposes. See T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois (Princeton, 1982), pp. 75–76. 22. T. Gautier, “Salon de 1848,” La Presse, 2 May 1848; “Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts: Exposition des figures du concours pour la république,” La Presse, 5 December 1848. 23. Fab. P., Beaux-Arts: Salon de 1848,” Le Moniteur universel, 11 April 1848. 24. E. Wheelwright, “Personal Recollections of Jean-François Millet,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (September 1876): 274. 25. A. Comte, Correspondance générale et confessions, ed. P. E. de Berrêdo Carneiro and P. Arnaud, 8 vols. (Paris, 1973–1990), 4:214, letter of 18 December 1848. 26. See The Essential Comte: Selections from Cours de philosophie positive, ed. S. Andreski (London, 1974), pp. 7–13. 27. Comte, Correspondance, 4:145–146, letters of 3 and 5 April 1848. 28. Ibid., 6:198, letter of 26 December 1851. 29. R. Grew, “Picturing the People: Images of the Lower Orders in Nineteenth-Century French Art,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Summer 1986): 219. 30. Herbert, “City vs. Country.” 31. B. L. Grad and T. A. Riggs, Visions of City and Country: Prints and Photographs of NineteenthCentury France (Worcester, Mass., 1982), p. 16. 32. E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), pp. 3–4, 12. 33. W. Bürger, “Salon de 1846,” in Salons de T. Thoré (Paris, 1868), p. 205. 34. Cited in P. Grate, Deux critiques d’art de l’époque romantique (Stockholm, 1959), pp. 177–178. 35. Wheelwright, “Personal Recollections of Jean-François Millet,” pp. 262–263. 36. I am using the English translation of The Devil’s Pool by H. Miles (London, 1929). 37. Ibid., p. 21. 38. G. Sand, François le Champi (Paris, 1935), pp. xii–xxx.

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39. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 413–418. 40. Sand, Correspondance, 8:536, letter of 14 July 1848. 41. G. Sand, La Petite Fadette, ed. P. Salomon and J. Mallion (Paris, 1958), pp. 3–13. 42. Ibid., pp. 14–17. 43. M. Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (1941): 172. 44. R. Bonniot, Pierre Dupont, poète et chansonnier du peuple (Paris, 1991), pp. 57–59. 45. Ibid., p. 65. 46. K. Marx, Capital, ed. F. Engels, 3 vols. (New York, 1992), 1:647–648 n. 2. 47. Bonniot, Pierre Dupont, p. 74. 48. J. Berger, “Millet and the Peasant,” in About Looking (New York, 1980), p. 69. 49. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 472. 50. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, p. 126. 51. J. Michelet, Le Peuple, trans. J. P. McKay (Urbana, Ill., 1973), p. 32. 52. Quoted in Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, p. 127 53. Ibid., p. 134; Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, fig. 71; R. L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, Arts Council of Great Britain (London, 1976), pp. 81–82, no. 39. 54. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, pp. 78–79, no. 37; T. J. Clark, Image of the People (Princeton, 1982), pp. 94–95. 55. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, p. 130. 56. Ibid., pp. 111–113. 57. Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852, p. 85. For a study of one aspect of this campaign, see E. Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton, 1984). 58. Quoted in Clark, Image of the People, p. 86. 59. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 39–40. 60. Ibid., pp. 248–249. 61. Clark, Image of the People, pp. 86–87; Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, pp. 77, 106. 62. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, pp. 218–219. 63. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, ed. W. Pach (New York, 1961), p. 294. 64. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, p. 194. 65. Ibid., pp. 392–393. 66. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 1:113–114. 67. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, p. 142. 68. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, p. 81. 69. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, p. 152n. Proudhon’s fascinating discussion of Robert’s picture should be read in its entirety: ibid., pp. 146–152. 70. Price, 1848 in France, p. 170. 71. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 1:111–112. 72. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, pp. 158–161; Herbert, Jean-François Millet, pp. 82–83; K. Herding, “Jean-François Millet: ‘Le Cri de terre,’” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 34 (1995): 170–173. 73. T. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 2 vols. (Paris, 1855–1856), 2:57–59. 74. P. Petroz, L’Art et la critique en France depuis 1822 (Paris, 1875), pp. 233–234. 75. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 2:41–42. 76. For a good overview of this history, see L. Vardi, “Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France,” American Historical Review 98 (October–December 1993): 1424–1447.

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notes to pp. 105–123













77. P. Degrully, Le Droit de glanage (Paris, 1912), pp. 1, 24, 75, 90–101, 107–112, 121–126. 78. Petroz, L’Art et la critique en France, p. 234. 79. Quoted in Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, pp. 179–180. 80. Ibid., p. 175. 81. Ibid., p. 166. 82. P. Busoni, “Courrier de Paris,” L’Illustration 21 (29 January 1853): 68–69. 83. Ibid., 5 February 1853, pp. 92–93. 84. Wheelwright, “Personal Recollections of Jean-François Millet,” p. 268. 85. Bonniot, Pierre Dupont, p. 74. 86. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, p. 240. 87. E. M. Hurll, Jean François Millet (Boston and New York, 1900), pp. 37–38. 88. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet ranconté par lui-même, 2:81. 89. The grandmother’s correspondence with Millet is particularly religious in content, and it is clear that she played upon his guilt for abandoning the hearth and the rituals of Catholicism. See Naegely, J. F. Millet and Rustic Art, pp. 19–29. Writing on 22 March 1847, she acknowledges his labors for the Salon, but then adds: “I am still more anxious to know whether you have taken any steps in order to profit by the indulgences accorded this Jubilee Year. It would be most unfortunate for us if we did not do our best to become worthy of so great a grace, and if we were not partakers of the Easter Communion.” 90. S. Dalí, Le Mythe tragique de L’Angélus de Millet: Interprétation “paranoïaque-critique” (Paris, 1963). 91. Naegely, J. F. Millet and Rustic Art, p. 27. 92. C. Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, trans. J. Mayne (New York, 1956), p. 281. Several anecdotes tell of Millet’s intervention in the field to show harvesters how to mow or bind hay. Naegely, J. F. Millet and Rustic Art, p. 121. 93. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, p. 87. 94. Ibid., p. 89; Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, p. 191; Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 2:69–70. 95. Herding, “Jean-François Millet,” pp. 162–164. 96. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, pp. 224, 236. 97. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 2:134–135. 98. Quoted in J. W. Mollett, The Painters of Barbizon: Millet, Rousseau, Diaz (London, 1890), pp. 23–24. 99. E. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art (Paris, 1868), pp. 307–308. 100. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, p. 242. 101. J. C. Chamboredon, “Peinture des rapports sociaux et invention de l’éternel paysan: Les deux manières de Jean-François Millet,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 17/18 (November 1977): 6–18. 102. See L. Meixner, “The ‘Millet Myth’ and the American Public,” in An International Episode: Millet, Monet, and Their North American Counterparts, Dixon Gallery and Gardens (Memphis, 1982), pp. 68–87. 103. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-Francois Millet, p. 238. 104. T. Silvestre, Les Artistes français, 2 vols. (Paris, 1926), 1:185–191. 105. E. About, Salon de 1864 (Paris, 1864), p. 162. 106. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, pp. 262–263; Sensier quoted in Herbert, JeanFrançois Millet, p. 142. 107. Sensier, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, p. 302. 108. C. W. Evans, Collis Potter Huntington, 2 vols. (Newport News, Va., 1954), 2:663–664; O. Lewis, The Big Four (New York, 1959), pp. 240–241.

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notes to pp. 124–136

chapter 3







1. E. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 3 vols. (Paris, 1921), 2:158–159. 2. T. Thoré, “Salon de 1861,” Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870), 1:91–94. 3. G. Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre (Paris, 1906), pp. 1–3. 4. Letters of Gustave Courbet, trans. and ed. P. ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 31. 5. Courbet’s letter to his family of 25 January 1841 describes the standard academic studio routine and not that of the Académie Suisse: see ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 36. 6. A. Pératé, La Galerie des Batailles au Musée de Versailles (Paris, 1916), pp. 2, 8. 7. M. Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe (New Haven and London, 1988), p. 173. 8. Ibid., pp. 25, 28. 9. E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), p. 228. 10. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 48. 11. Ibid., pp. 98–99. 12. Ibid., p. 64. 13. Ibid., p. 76. 14. Ibid., p. 77. 15. Ibid., pp. 78–79. 16. Ibid., pp. 80–81. 17. M. Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London, 1990), pp. 67–68. 18. P. ten-Doesschate Chu, ed., Courbet in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, 1977), p. 13. 19. Courbet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, ed. P. Courthion, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1948–1950), 2:47; L. Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (New York and London, 1976), pp. 2, 59, 72–85. 20. A.-J.-D., “Salon de 1849,” L’Illustration 13 (18 August 1849): 393. 21. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 194. 22. Ibid., p. 88; Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-même, 1:87–88. 23. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 413–418. 24. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, especially pp. 201–202. 25. Ibid., p. 203. 26. A.-J.-D., “Salon de 1849,” p. 393. 27. Feu Diderot [pseudonym], “Salon de 1849,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 3 (1849): 129–130. 28. Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-même, 2:186–187. 29. F. de Lagenevais, “Le Salon de 1849,” Revue des deux mondes, nouv. pér., t. 3 ( July–September 1849): 578–579. 30. “Agriculture,” Le Moniteur universel, 5 August 1849. 31. A. Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount (New York, 1975), pp. 152, 156. 32. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 83. 33. Ibid., p.103. 34. Ibid., p. 99. 35. Ibid., p. 122. 36. G. Courbet, “Le Réalisme,” in Exhibition et vente de 38 tableaux et 4 dessins de l’oeuvre de M. Gustave Courbet (Paris, 1855), p. 2. 37. L. de Geofroy, “Le Salon de 1850,” Revue des deux mondes, nouv. pér., t. 9 ( January–March 1851): 928, 965.

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notes to pp. 139–157







38. T. Gautier, “Salon de 1851: Distribution des recompenses aux artistes,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 6 (1851): 118. 39. Quoted in ten-Doesschate Chu, Courbet in Perspective, pp. 14–15. 40. G. Lukács, Studies in European Realism (London, 1972), p. 11. The great realist sets aside his prejudices and “describes what he really sees, not what he would prefer to see.” 41. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 88, with modifications based on original text. 42. Ibid., pp. 92–93, letter to Champfleury of February–March 1850. 43. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, p. 102. 44. A. de Lamartine, History of the French Revolution of 1848 (London, 1849), p. 324. 45. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 203–204. 46. Geofroy, “Le Salon de 1850,” pp. 928–929. 47. A.-J. Dupays, “Salon de 1850,” L’Illustration 17 (31 January–7 February 1851): 72. 48. F. Pillet, “Beaux-Arts.—Peinture. Salon de 1850–1851,” Le Moniteur universel, 13 February 1851. 49. P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (Paris, 1865), pp. 236–242. 50. “Partie non officielle: Intérieur,” Le Moniteur universel, 22 february 1851. 51. F. Pillet, “Salon de 1850–1851,” Le Moniteur universel, 13 February 1851. 52. Buchon’s advertisement in T. J. Clark, Image of the People (Princeton, 1982), pp. 162–164. 53. Bonnemère, Histoire des paysans, quoted in R. L. Herbert, “City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin,” Artforum 8 (February 1970): 48. 54. F. Pillet, “Salon de 1850–1851,” Le Moniteur universel, 13 February, 9 March 1851. 55. See A. Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1971), pp. 149–165. 56. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 109. 57. Ibid., p. 93. 58. Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” p. 170. 59. Riat, Gustave Courbet, p. 77. At the time Riat published his monograph on the painter (1906), he claimed that the old-timers of Ornans could still name everyone in the picture. 60. The best case is made by C. R. Mainzer, “Who Is Buried at Ornans?,” in Courbet Reconsidered (Brooklyn Museum, 1988), pp. 77–81. 61. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 95. 62. See T. J. Clark, “A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet,” in ten-Doesschate Chu, Courbet in Perspective, pp. 88–107. 63. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 120. 64. Hélène Toussaint was the first to discuss Courbet’s Masonic links, but she does not specify the sources of the imagery: see Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877, Royal Academy of Arts (London, 1978), pp. 210, 212, 269–271. 65. L. Clément de Ris, “Salon de 1851,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 6 (1851): 34–35. 66. Dupays, “Salon de 1850,” pp. 71–72. 67. Geofroy, “Le Salon de 1850,” pp. 929–930. 68. Pillet, “Salon de 1850–1851.” 69. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, pp. 207–212. 70. Clark, Image of the People, pp. 127–128. 71. Champfleury, “In Defense of the Funeral at Ornans,” in ten-Doesschate Chu, Courbet in Perspective, pp. 69, 71–73. 72. C. Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques (Paris, n.d.), pp. 205–206. 73. A.-J. Dupays, “Salon de 1850,” L’Illustration 17 (14–21 February 1851): 104.

809

notes to pp. 157–182









74. A.-J. Dupays, “Salon de 1850,” L’Illustration 17 (31 January–7 February 1851): 72–73. 75. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, pp. 188–202. See also J. H. Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton, 1980), pp. 69–71. 76. H. d’Ideville, Gustave Courbet: Notes et documents sur sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1878), p. 39. 77. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, pp. 373–376. 78. Nochlin, Gustave Courbet, p. 176. 79. Bonniot, Pierre Dupont, poète et chansonnier du peuple (Paris, 1991), pp. 233–234. 80. Nochlin, Gustave Courbet, p. 174. 81. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, pp. 107–108. 82. Ibid., p. 106. 83. A.-J. Dupays, “Salon de 1852,” L’Ilustration 19 (22 May1852): 346. For a modern interpretation of the work, see P. Mainardi, “Gustave Courbet’s Second Scandal: Les Demoiselles de Village,” Arts Magazine 53 ( January 1979): 95–109. 84. L. Clément de Ris, “Le Salon de 1852,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 8 (1852): 99–100. 85. G. Planche, “Le Salon de 1852,” Revue des deux mondes, nouv. pér., t. 14 (April–June 1852): 670–672. 86. J. Laprade, “Les Paysans,” L’Illustration 18 (30 October–6 November 1851): 278; ibid. (13–20 November 1851): 310–311. 87. J. Laprade, “Erreurs et préjugés des paysans,” L’Illustration 19 (8 January–15 January 1852): 23. 88. A. Deplaces, “Le Socialisme dans l’art,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 8 (1852): 184–185. 89. A.-J. Dupays, “Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts: Réalisme,” L’Illustration 26 (28 July 1855): 71. 90. For the Wrestlers the indispensable study is K. Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 43. 91. Riat, Gustave Courbet, p. 104. 92. A.-J. Dupays, “Salon de 1853,” L’Illustration 21 (18 June 1853): 393–393. 93. I also believe that Courbet’s painting metaphorically challenges the erotic fantasies of the Barbizon school, rapidly becoming à la mode among the Second Empire bourgeoisie. Several critics characterized the stout bather as a “bourgeoise,” not in the exclusively pejorative sense of Dupays but as suggestive of actual class status. Here they were informed no doubt by the presence of the silk dress, short cloak, and fashionable hat hanging on the tree to the bather’s left. Courbet’s two women, towering in all their physical amplitude in an arcadian landscape setting, contrast dramatically with the wispy, diaphanous nymphs of Corot or the diminutive erotic escapades of his peers and those of the Prix de Rome landscape competitions. This is what Gautier means, I believe, when he calls Courbet the “Watteau of the ugly” in his critique of the painting. Courbet had taken to task the pastoral tradition and its contemporary offshoots, actualizing and foregrounding the fantasy veiled in the landscape and realizing it in all of its gross substance on a heroic scale. One possible clue to his intention is the conspicuous inscription of his graffiti-like signature on a rock in the right foreground—the sign of his physical presence in the secluded sous-bois. Not surprisingly, his disrobing of the deceptions of bourgeois culture to disclose the unadorned enormity beneath aroused the hostility of partisans and enemies alike of that culture. 94. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, pp. 212–217. 95. Herding, Courbet, pp. 24–25, 190–192. 96. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 97. Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, pp. 23–28. 98. P. Bordes, “Montpellier, Bruyas et Courbet,” in Courbet à Montpellier, Musée Fabre (Montpellier, 1985), pp. 23–38. 99. L. Nochlin, “Gustave Courbet’s Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew,” Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 209–222.

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notes to pp. 183–202

100. J. Champfleury, Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (Paris, 1886), p. 2, claims that since the late eighteenth century “billions” (milliarde) of copies were made each year and could be found everywhere in the town, in the cabaret, and in the peasant’s cottage. 101. G. K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, 1965). 102. J. Champfleury, Les Excentriques (Paris, 1855), p. 91. 103. Cited in Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-même, 1:115. 104. V. Schoelcher, History of the Crimes of the Second of December (London, 1853), pp. 354, 418–419. 105. C. Perrier, “L’Art à l’Exposition Universelle,” L’Artiste, 5e. sér., t. 15 (1855): 15–16. 106. Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-même, 2:79–84. 107. Letter of December 1854, reproduced in Bordes, “Montpellier, Bruyas et Courbet,” pp. 127–128. 108. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet (with modifications), pp. 131–133. 109. Ibid., pp. 134–135. 110. Herding, Courbet, pp. 45–61. 111. It may be noted that the book held so impractically by Baudelaire is tilted at an angle similar to the way the Bible is displayed on Masonic altars. 112. D. Ligou, Dictionnaire de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris, 1987), p. 83. 113. M. Morton and C. Eyerman, Courbet and the Modern Landscape, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, 2006), pp. 1–19. 114. Letter of 28 November 1864, modified version of translation in ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 249. 115. Bonniot, Pierre Dupont, pp. 207–208. 116. For a rare investigation of Proudhon’s attitude toward the Jews, see E. Silberner, “Proudhon’s Judeophobia,” Historia Judaica 9–10 (April 1948): 61–80. 117. P.-J. Proudhon, Manuel du spéculateur à la Bourse, 5th ed. (Paris, 1857), pp. 177–178. The term actionnaires pervades the entire book. 118. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, pp. 161, 164, 165–167. 119. J. Troubat, Une amitié à la d’Arthez (Paris, 1900), pp. 181–182. 120. A.-J. Dupays, “Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts: Réalisme,” L’Illustration 26 (28 July 1855): 71–73. 121. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art, pp. 283–284. 122. Champfleury, “Du Réalisme, Lettre à George Sand,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 16 (1855): 1–5. 123. C. Perrin, “Du Réalisme, Lettre à M. le Directeur de L’Artiste,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 16 (1855): 85–89. 124. F. Desnoyers, “Du Réalisme,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 16 (1855): 197–200.





chapter 4



1. An excellent summary of Pre-Raphaelite achievement is found in E. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, 2000). 2. W. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (New York, 1905–1906), 1:138. 3. F. H. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London, 1896), p. 63; Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:100–101, 140. 4. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:141. 5. Ibid., pp. 196–197. 6. “The Chartist Demonstration,” Times, 10 and 11 April 1848; “Manifestation chartiste,” La République, 12 April 1848. 7. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:101–102.

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8. Ibid., pp. 114, 195. 9. “The Year of Reaction,” Blackwood’s Magazine 67 ( January 1850): 1. 10. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:130. 11. Ibid., p. 253. 12. Ibid., pp. 370–371. 13. Ibid., pp. 154–155. 14. A. Agresti, I Prerafaellisti (Turin, 1908), p. 169. 15. W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, His Family Letters, with a Memoir, 2 vols. (London, 1895), 1:3–19. 16. G. Rossetti, A Versified Autobiography, trans. and ed., W. M. Rossetti (London, 1901), pp. 41– 45, 50. See also Z. Benelli, Gabriele Rossetti: Notizie biografiche e bibliografiche (Avezzano, 1982 [reprint of 1898 edition]), pp. 17–22. 17. This is from the original manuscript; the printed version substitutes “Cromwells” for the “Sands” and “Louvels.” See Benelli, Gabriele Rossetti, pp. 19, 71. 18. W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:15. 19. Benelli, Gabriele Rossetti, pp. 65–66, 134–136. Also D. A. Ludley, “Sources for the ‘Early Christian’ Style and Content in the Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1981), pp. 106–107, 113. 20. Ibid., p. 118; D. Ligou, Dictionnaire de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris, 1987), p. 877. 21. Ligou, Dictionnaire de la Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 367. 22. G. Rossetti, A Versified Autobiography, p. 119. 23. I am using C. Ward’s English translation, G. Rossetti, Disquisitions on the Antipapal Spirit which Produced the Reformation, 2 vols. (London, 1834), 1:148–156, 200–201, 216, 227–228, 248, 251, 257. 24. G. Rossetti, Il Mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo, 5 vols. (London, 1840), 5:1393–1567. 25. G. Rossetti, Disquisitions on the Antipapal Spirit, p. 143. 26. W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:46. 27. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:82; 2:440, 451. 28. Ibid., 1:104. 29. E. Bulwer-Lytton, Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, 3 vols. (London, 1848). 30. Ibid., p. 51. 31. Eventually, however, he too is deposed for his exactions from the populace and dies at the hands of an enraged mob in 1354. 32. As George P. Landow has suggested, the conspicuous role of a symbolic painting set up in the marketplace at the foot of the Capitol in chapter 9 of the novel also may have influenced Hunt’s choice of subject. The typological interpretation of the allegorical seascape by Pandulfo di Guido, a political ally of Rienzi, helps persuade the immense crowd that the stormtossed Roman ship of state is threatened by the nobles and requires the intervention of Rienzi. The idea that art could directly serve and even change society was one that all Victorians cherished, and was a motivating factor in the Pre-Raphaelites’ formation in 1848. G. P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven and London, 1979), pp. 22–23. 33. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:107. 34. Ibid., 1:111–112. 35. Ibid., 1:150. 36. Ibid., 2:460. 37. C. M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants (Philadelphia, 1911), pp. 42–43, 100–102, 138–139, 280–283; E. T. Nash, One Hundred and One Legends of Flowers (Boston, 1927), pp. 17–19, 70–78, 129, 319–320; V. Quinn, Stories and Legends of Garden Flowers

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(Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 82–85, 220–224. 38. V. Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), 1:9–11, no. 40; The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery (London, 1984), pp. 64–65, no. 15. For a recent appraisal of Rossetti’s contributions, see J. Treuherz, E. Prettejohn, and E. Becker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, 2003). 39. See C. Cruise, “‘Sincerity and Earnestness’: D. G. Rossetti’s Early Exhibitions, 1849–53,” Burlington Magazine 146 ( January 2004): 4–12. 40. “Free Exhibition of Modern Art,” Athenaeum, no. 1119 (7 April 1849): 362. 41. M. Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1898), p. 7. 42. C. Rossetti, The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge and London, 1979– 1990), 3:103. 43. W. M. Rossetti, ed., The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1911), p. 173. 44. D. G. Rossetti, Letters, ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1965–1967), 1:48. 45. “The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” Tract 54, Tracts for the Times, 6 vols. (London, 1833–1841), vol. 2 (1834–1835), pp. 1–12. It also quoted St. John (15:1): “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman”—particularly apt for Rossetti’s painting of St. Joachim in the garden. 46. See A. Grieve, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church, Burlington Magazine 111 (May 1969): 294–295. 47. Bell, Christina Rossetti, p. 20; G. Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life (London, 1981), pp. 36–39; J. Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London, 1994), pp. 58–62, 69–72; Christina Rossetti, Maude; Dinah Mulock Craik, On Sisterhoods, ed. E. Showalter (New York, 1993), vii–xxi. 48. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, pp. 58–59. 49. Christina Rossetti, Maude, pp. 32–39. 50. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, pp. 87–88, no. 33; B. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York, 1986), pp. 12–15. 51. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:294. 52. J. Ruskin, “The Pre-Raphaelite Artists,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London, 1903–1912), 12:320–321. 53. A. I. Grieve, The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Pre-Raphaelite Period, 1848–50 (Hingham, Norfolk, 1973), p. 8. 54. S. P. Casteras, The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Victorian Womanhood (New Haven, 1982), p. 25. 55. S. L. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement (London, 1915), pp. 161–162. 56. J. Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (New York, 1985), p. 23. 57. Casteras, The Substance or the Shadow, pp. 31–32; J. Treuherz, ed., Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (London, 1987), pp. 24–26. For the plight of the seamstress, see E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London, 1991), pp. 33–34. 58. Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed. J. Clubbe (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 305–307. 59. See E. P. Thompson, “The Political Education of Henry Mayhew,” Victorian Studies 11 (1967–1968): 46–51. 60. C. Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (Oxford and New York, 1983), p. 103. 61. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 215. 62. F. H. Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lewiston, N.Y., 1993), pp. 171–182. 63. Both poems are in W. M. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 209–210. 64. W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:160.

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65. T. Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites (New York, 1970), p. 35. 66. C. Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London, 1957), p. 302. 67. “Fine Arts: National Institution,” Athenaeum, no. 1173 (20 April 1850): 423–424. 68. A. B. R[each], “Town Talk and Table Talk,” Illustrated London News 16 (4 May, 1850): 306. 69. Student Register, 1825–1890, Archives of the Royal Academy. Hunt was admitted on 18 December 1844 under the sponsorship of Sir Richard Westmacott; Woolner, on 16 December 1842 on the recommendation of William Behnes. See also A List of the Students of the Royal Academy Who Have Obtained Premiums of Gold and Silver Medals, in Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The Subjects, Sketches, etc., and the Year When Given: 1843, silver medal, drawing, Antique Academy, by John Everett Millais; 1847, gold medal, painting, The Young Men of the Destroyed Tribe of Benjamin Seizing Their Destined Brides in the Vineyards—Judges 21, by John Everett Millais ( J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 2 vols. [New York, 1899], 1:12, 18). Millais’s son, however, mistakenly claimed his father was ten when he entered the Academy. Fortunately, we now have a new biography of Millais that serves as a corrective to the son’s work: G. H. Fleming, John Everett Millais: A Biography (London, 1998). 70. W. P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 3 vols. (London, 1887–1888), 1:26, 30–38, 40–41, 44–45, 47, 50, 55. 71. C. Wainwright, “Furniture,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, ed. P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright (New Haven, 1994), p. 134. 72. J. Keats, “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London, 1973), p. 179. All but the last two lines were printed in the catalogue of the 1849 exhibition at the Royal Academy, along with stanza 21. 73. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy Paintings,” Athenaeum, no. 1127 (2 June 1849): 575. 74. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, pp. 245–246, no. 163. 75. C. Kingsley, Yeast, A Problem (London, 1888), pp. 78–80. 76. For a full discussion of the picture, see A. Boime, “Sources for Sir John Everett Millais’s ‘Christ in the House of His Parents,’” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, September 1975, pp. 71–84. 77. Exhibition of the Works of Sir John E. Millais, Bart., R. A., Grosvenor Gallery (London, 1886), notes by F. G. Stephens, pp. 12–16; J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:74–78; Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:204–206, 216–219; D. S. MacColl, “A Picture That Shocked the 1850s,” Listener 34 (1945): 729–730; The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, pp. 77–79, no. 26. 78. “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Times, 9 May 1850. 79. F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (London, 1958), pp. 36, 75. 80. “The Pictures of the Season,” Blackwood’s Magazine 68 ( July 1850): 82. 81. C. Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words 1 (15 June 1850): 265–267. 82. “State of France,” Illustrated London News 16 (4 May 1850): 297. 83. L. Errington, Social and Religious Themes in English Art, 1840–1860 (New York, 1984), pp. 26–28. 84. Ibid., pp. 50–53; L. E. Elliott-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era (London, 1953), pp. 123–124. 85. Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, p. 369. 86. Ibid., p. 379. When climbing the steps leading from the Piazza di Spagna to the church of the Trinità del Monte, Dickens spotted at every stage the models employed by artists (who tended to gather in the area), including one venerable old man who “has gone half through the catalogue of the Royal Academy.” Then he came upon those who posed for images of “Domestic Happiness” and Holy Families, characterizing them as “the falsest vagabonds in the world, especially made up for the purpose, and having no counterparts in Rome or any other part of the habitable globe.” 87. W. M. Rossetti, The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1849–1853 (Oxford, 1975), p. 71. Ironically, the notoriety of Millais’s picture ultimately reached the Queen, who, unable to attend the Royal Academy exhibition due to her recent

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childbirth, ordered it sent to her directly to see what all the fuss was about. 88. “Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1179 (1 June 1850): 590. 89. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:194–195. 90. E. Morris, “The Subject of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 343–345. 91. “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” Tract 89, Tracts for the Times, vol. 6 (1840–1841), p. 113. 92. Grieve, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church,” p. 294. 93. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Illustrated London News 16 (11 May 1850): 336. 94. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:221. 95. “The Gorham Case,” Illustrated London News 16 (16 March 1850): 176–177; Elliott-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era, pp. 227–228. 96. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:93. 97. Ibid., pp. 120–123. 98. Ibid., p. 133; Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:288. 99. Ibid., p. 301. 100. M. Lutyens, “Selling the Missionary,” Apollo 86 (November 1967): 380–387. 101. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:104–105. 102. “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” p. 153. 103. “Royal Academy Exhibitions,” Illustrated London News 18 (24 May 1851): 463–464. 104. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Times, 7 May 1851; “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum (1851): 609. 105. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:134–135. 106. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Times, 14 May 1852. 107. A. Wood, Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1815–1914 (Essex, 1982), p. 188. 108. When describing Collins’s St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in which the Athenaeum’s reviewer detected the influence of Millais, the critic noted coolly that the hinges of the chapel door were “most mediaeval and Puginesque.” He could state with confidence that “neither Giotto nor Cimabue, were they now living, would reject the modern discoveries and appliances of science and cling to the ways and means of the painters of missals and of glass windows.” Thus there was a strategic withdrawal by Millais from the Tractarian tendencies of the early phase of the movement, noticeably influenced by his relationship with the Combes. He did so mainly in response to his critics who, not having to deal with the religious issue, soon warmed to his natural abilities. But at the time he painted Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop there can be no doubt of his involvement—whether characterized as a youthful infatuation or conscious political choice—with the ideology of the Oxford Movement. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1282 (22 May 1852): 581–582. 109. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:101. 110. Ibid., pp. 101–102. 111. J. C. Reid, The Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore (London, 1957), pp. 206, 209–210. 112. B. Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 1:85. Patmore’s request to Ruskin is confirmed by William Michael Rossetti: see W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:179. 113. The poem was modified over the years: see C. Patmore, Poems, intro. B. Champneys (London, 1928), pp. 411–415. 114. Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2:14. 115. The gesture is reminiscent of the street urchin begging for money in Millais’s drawing of the Blind Man (1853) in the Yale Center for British Art. 116. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 86, no. 32.

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117. R. Williams, Culture and Society (New York, 1958), p. 88. 118. Quoted in the introduction by S. Gill to G. Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 20–21. 119. W. Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (New Haven, 1979), p. 210. 120. See [F. G. Stephens], “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” in The Germ: A PreRaphaelite Little Magazine, ed.R. S. Hosmon (Coral Gables, Fla., 1970), pp. 58–64. 121. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:145. See also Millais’s description of the plant life in his letter to Martha Combe of 28 July 1851, ibid., pp. 122–123. For the artist’s general interest in the natural sciences, see J. F. Codell, “Empiricism, Naturalism and Science in Millais’s Paintings,” in John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, ed. D. N. Mancoff (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 119–147. 122. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Times, 14 May 1852. 123. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1282 (22 May 1852): 581. 124. G. Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (New York, 1989), p. 41; Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 9–10. 125. For Lizzie Siddal and the P.R.B., see Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 15–78; Daly, PreRaphelites in Love, pp. 31–94. See also The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 279, no. 217. 126. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 266, no. 198. See also the discussion in L. Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Supermodel (London, 2004), pp. 90–92. For the fascination of the Pre-Raphaelites generally for this theme, see C. Poulson, “Death and the Maiden: The Lady of Shalott and the Pre-Raphaelites,” in Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays, ed. E. Harding (Hants, U.K., 1996), pp. 173–194. For female artists associated with the movement, see J. Marsh and P. G. Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (Manchester, 1997); Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 67–84. 127. M. Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins (New York, 1967), p. 209. 128. Ibid., pp. 122–124, 129, 150, 180, 257, 263. 129. R. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 101–123. 130. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:152. 131. A. Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (London, 1973), pp. 51–52. 132. A. L. Gully, “Sermons in Stone: Ruskin and Geology,” in John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, Phoenix Art Museum (1993), pp. 159–183. It was Ruskin, seeking truth in nature as well as in art, who translated geological forms into aesthetic concepts before declaring them the handiwork of God. Ruskinian religion equated the relationship between geology (or science in its broader sense) and art with the Supreme Being. 133. C. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols. (London, 1830–1833), 3:365–367, 372–373. 134. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV, in Works, 6:149–151. 135. Ibid., pp. 151–153. 136. His “sell-out” has been recently disputed: see Mancoff, “John Everett Millais: Caught between the Myths,” in Mancoff, John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, pp. 3–19. 137. “The P.R.B.,” in C. Rossetti, Complete Poems, 3:223–224. 138. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 2:372–375. 139. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:245. 140. Ruskin, “Academy Notes,” in Works, 14:22–23. 141. Review of Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover, by Dr. Doran, Athenaeum, no. 1445 (7 July 1855): 784; “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1541 (9 May 1857): 602; “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1437 (12 May 1855): 558. 142. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:247–248.

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143. C. Dickens, “The Fire Brigade of London,” Household Words 1 (1850): 145–151. 144. J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1:248–249. 145. “The Crimean Board of Inquiry,” Times, 7 May 1856; report on House of Lords, Times, 10 May 1856. 146. Ruskin, “Academy Notes,” in Works, 14:56–57. 147. Ibid., p. 47. 148. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:365. 149. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 21. 150. Cited in J. D. Macmillan, “Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd: Some Reflections on a Victorian Pastoral,” Art Bulletin 54 ( June 1972): 188. 151. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy.—(Private View),” Times, 1 May 1852; “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1282 (22 May 1852): 581–582. 152. G. Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. T. Pinney (New York, 1963), p. 268. This review originally appeared in Westminster Review, July 1856. 153. Macmillan, “Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd,” p. 188. 154. See Errington’s long and engaging analysis of The Hireling Shepherd in Social and Religious Themes in English Art, pp. 293–328 155. The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. J. Keble, 3 vols. (London, 1888), 1:121; Errington, Social and Religious Themes in English Art, pp. 301–303. 156. Ruskin, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, in Works, 12:556–558. 157. The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, 2:509. 158. “On the Controversy with the Romanists,” Tract 71, Tracts for the Times, vol. 3 (1835–1836), p. 3. 159. Elliott-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era, pp. 68–71. 160. Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, p. 194. 161. Lord John Russell’s open letter of 4 November 1850 to the Bishop of Durham, quoted in D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, 1992), p. 10. 162. Elliott-Binns, Religion in the Victorian Era, p. 39. 163. W. G. Peck, The Social Implications of the Oxford Movement (New York, 1933), p. 163. 164. A. C. Amor, William Holman Hunt: The True Pre-Raphaelite (London, 1989), pp. 105–106. 165. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:289. 166. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1384 (6 May 1854): 561. 167. Ruskin, “The Light of the World,” in Works, 12:328–332. 168. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:355–356. 169. Ibid., 1:244. 170. Ibid., 1:406; 2:8. 171. See the discussion in A. Boime, “William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat: Rite of Forgiveness/Transference of Blame,” Art Bulletin 84 (March 2002): 97–100. 172. Cited in The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 119, no. 57. 173. “Urim and Thummim,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1916), 12:384–386. 174. J. E. Bronkhurst, “Holman Hunt’s Picture Frames, Sculpture and Applied Art,” in Harding, Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 240. 175. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:307–308; Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art, p. 224. 176. Agresti, I Prerafaellisti, pp. 205–206. 177. J. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1995). 178. M. Edgeworth, Harrington, in Tales and Novels, 10 vols. (London, 1893), 9:1–3. 179. A. and R. Cowen, Victorian Jews through British Eyes (Oxford, 1986), p. 4. 180. A. Gilam, The Emancipation of the Jews in England, 1830–1860 (New York and London, 1982),

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pp. 100, 141. 181. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:9–10. 182. Ibid., 1:296–297, 299–300. 183. Ibid., 1:366. 184. Ibid., 2:336–338. 185. Ibid., 2:429–430. 186. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1384 (6 May 1854): 561. 187. Ruskin, “The Awakening Conscience,” in The Works, 12:333–335. 188. The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (New York, 1857), pp. 240–241. 189. Illustrated London News 22 (14 May 1853): 380, 388–389 190. E. Bulwer-Lytton, Ernest Maltravers (London, 1857), p. 24. 191. The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 121, no. 58. 192. Casteras, The Substance or the Shadow, p. 37. 193. W. Tait, Magdalenism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and Consequences, of Prostitution in Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1840), pp. 159, 162. 194. J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, U.K., 1980), p. 39. 195. Ibid., p. 35. 196. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Magdalenism: Its Nature, Extent, Effects, Guilt, Causes, and Remedy (New York, 1843), pp. i, 4–5. These lectures were first delivered in Glasgow in May and June 1842. 197. Ibid., p. 34. 198. For Annie Miller, see D. Holman-Hunt, My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves (London, 1969), pp. 66–68, 94–99, 135–140, 144–145, 165–171, 174–185, 195–210, 215–229; Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love, pp. 101–137; Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 57–66, 100–103, 107–109, 160– 168, 223–230. 199. See Boime, “William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat,” pp. 94–114; T. Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven, 1999), pp. 118–125, 130–132. 200. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:381, 491. 201. Ibid., 1:484–485. 202. J. Dunlop, Memories of Gospel Triumphs among the Jews during the Victorian Era (London, 1894), p. 65. Discussion of the scapegoat is found in Tractate Yoma, chaps. 4, 5, 6. I am using the Socino Hebrew-English edition of the Babylonian Talmud, vol. 10, Yoma, ed. I. Epstein (London, 1974); and M. Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides, Book Eight: The Book of Temple Service (New Haven, 1957), pp. 396, 407. 203. K. P. Bendiner, “William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat,’” Pantheon 45 (1987): 124, 128 n. 4. 204. Hunt to Millais, 10–12 November 1854, London, British Museum Library, Add. MS. 41340, fol. 156. 205. Ibid. 206. Cited in The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery, p. 153, no. 84. 207. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 2:108–109. 208. For the historical connections between the goat and black magic, see E. Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. A. E. Waite (New York, 1972), p. 135. Sorcerers and witches were long thought to have a particular affinity with the goat, and it was also believed that the Jew was magically connected with it. See R. Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 48, 117. According to Girard, the “Lamb of God” not only implies substitution of one sacrificial victim for all the others, it also replaces “all the distasteful and loathsome connotations of the goat with the positive associations of the lamb.” 209. W. H. Hunt, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Fight for Art,” Contemporary Review 49 ( January–June 1886): 829; Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, p. 66. 210. “Fine Arts: Royal Academy,” Athenaeum, no. 1489 (10 May 1856): 589–590.

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211. Ruskin, “Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy [1856],” in Works, 14:61–65. 212. Hunt, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” p. 826. 213. Quoted in J. E. Bronkhurst, “‘An Interesting Series of Adventures to Look Back Upon’: William Holman Hunt’s Visit to the Dead Sea in November 1854,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. L. Parris, Tate Gallery (London, 1984), pp. 114–115. 214. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1:424, 498. 215. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 62, 369–370n. 216. “Dinner at the Royal Academy of Arts,” Times, 5 May 1856. 217. Quoted in Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, p. 68. 218. See, for the connection between the Jew and imperialist ideology, T. Parfitt, “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. I. D. Kalmar and D. J. Penslar (Hanover and London, 2005), pp. 56–57. 219. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, p. 70; L. Nochlin, “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman,” Art Bulletin 60 (March 1978): 139–153. 220. F. G. Stephens, cited in Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:27, no. 64. 221. Cited ibid., p. 28. 222. See A. I. Grieve, The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Norwich, 1976), pp. 2–16, for the most comprehensive analysis of the picture and its sources. 223. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 140–146, 153–159, 233–240. 224. W. M. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 36–43. 225. Ibid., p. 233. 226. Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols. (New York, 1970), 1:135–152, 289, 324. 227. W. M. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 221. 228. C. Dickens, “The Cattle-Road to Ruin,” Household Words 1 (29 June 1850): 325–330. 229. Quoted in G. Chadwick, The Works of Sir Joseph Paxton, 1803–1865 (London, 1961), pp. 212–213. 230. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 2:143. 231. Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:93–94, no. 168. 232. Quoted in ibid., 1:94. 233. “Fine Arts: Pictures by Mr. Rossetti,” Athenaeum, no. 2294 (14 August 1875): 219–221. 234. “Fine Arts: Mr. Rossetti’s New Pictures,” Athenaeum, no. 2581 (14 April 1877): 486–487. 235. W. M. Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 226. 236. William Holman Hunt to Ford Madox Brown, 23 January 1877, British Museum Library. 237. This painting has given rise to an entire cottage industry: for starters, see A. Boime, “Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle, and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century,” Arts Magazine 56 (September 1981): 116–125; G. Curtis, “Ford Madox Brown’s Work: An Iconographical Analysis,” Art Bulletin 74 (December 1992): 623–636; K. Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, Pa., 1998), pp. 91–93; C. Trodd, “The Laboured Vision and the Realm of Value: Articulation of Identity in Ford Madox Brown’s Work,” in Harding, Re-framing the Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 61–80; and, most recently, the thorough study of T. Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 2005), pp. 21–81. 238. T. Newman and R. Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London, 1991), p. 117. 239. J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, 4 vols. (Boston, 1868), 2:267–268. 240. Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, p. 364. 241. Letter from Plint to Brown dated 24 November 1856, quoted in Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown,

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p. 112. For Plint, see ibid., pp. 111–112; R. V. Taylor, The Biographia Leodiensis; or, Biographical Sketches of the Worthies of Leeds and Neighbourhood (London and Leeds, 1865), pp. 497–498; W. M. Rossetti, ed., Ruskin: Rossetti; Preraphaelitism (New York and London, 1899), pp. 193–194, 223, 249; B. Lewis, “Thomas E. Plint—A Patron of Pre-Raphaelite Painters,” unpublished MS. 242. J. F. C. Harrison, Social Reform in Victorian Leeds: The Work of James Hole, 1820–1895 (Leeds, 1954). 243. Ibid., pp. 5–6, 8, 16, 62n, 67n; J. Mayhall, Annals of Leeds, York, and the Surrounding District (Leeds, 1862), p. 705; Taylor, The Biographia Leodiensis, p. 471; G. J. Holyoake, The Jubilee History of the Leeds Industrial Co-operative Society Limited (Manchester, 1896), pp. 35ff. 244. Mayhall, Annals of Leeds, p. 575; Taylor, The Biographia Leodiensis, p. 498; E. C. Green, “In Memoriam.—T. E. Plint, Esq.,” Leeds Intelligencer, 3 August 1861; T. E. Plint, Hymns and Sacred Poetry (London and Leeds, 1862). 245. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. V. Surtees (New Haven, 1981), p. 98. 246. Kingsley, Yeast, A Problem, p. 81. There is a vast literature on the navvy: see S. Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, 5 vols. (London, 1874–1879), 5:205ff.; T. Brassey, On Work and Wages (London, 1873), pp. 17–18, 36ff., 225ff., 230ff.; F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1968), pp. 149–151; M. Robbins, The Railway Age (London, 1962), pp. 77ff.; L. T. C. Holt, Victorian Engineering (London, 1970), pp. 39–40. 247. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, p. 189. 248. F. H. Hueffer, Memories and Impressions (New York and London, 1911), p. 213. 249. Chadwick, Works of Sir Joseph Paxton, p. 248. 250. W. H. Russell, Despatches from the Crimea, 1854–1856, ed. N. Bentley (New York, 1967), pp. 174–175; G. Lawson, Surgeon in the Crimea, ed. V. Bonham-Carter (London, 1968), pp. 160– 162; “Navvies for the Crimea,” Illustrated London News 26 (13 January 1855): 28–29; “The Navvies at Balaclava,” Illustrated London News 26 (10 March 1855): 225–226. 251. J. Linton, The Cross in Modern Art: Descriptive Studies of Some Pre-Raphaelite Paintings (London, 1916), p. 37. 252. M. Vachon, Puvis de Chavannes (Paris, 1895), p. 83. 253. M. Kitson, “‘Work,’ by Ford Madox Brown,” Listener 74 (1965): 383. 254. J. F. Harrison, “The Victorian Gospel of Success,” Victorian Studies 1 (1957–1958): 155ff.; K. Fielden, “Samuel Smiles and Self-Help,” Victorian Studies 12 (1968–1969): 155ff.; A. Briggs, Victorian People (Chicasgo, 1972), pp. 116ff.; R. D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York, 1973), pp. 170–171, 255–256. 255. S. Smiles, Autobiography (New York, 1905), pp. 143, 156, 105. 256. S. Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (Boston, 1860), p. vi. 257. S. Smiles, Life and Labour; or, Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture, and Genius (London, 1887), p. 1. 258. Ibid., pp. 4, 40–41, 184, 356; Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, p. 250. 259. Mayhew is the subject of a large bibliography and in recent years has been revived by sociologists and historians from all sides of the political spectrum: Mayhew’s London, ed. P. Quennell (London, n.d.); E. P. Thompson, “The Political Education of Henry Mayhew,” Victorian Studies 11 (1967–1968): 41ff.; E. Yeo and E. P. Thompson, The Unknown Mayhew (New York, 1971), pp. 11ff.; P. E. Razzell and R. W. Wainwright, eds., The Victorian Working Class (London, 1973), pp. xiii ff.; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 240–241, 249–251, 257, 261–262, 265–266, 316, 437, 440. For the extent of his contemporary influence, see V. Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter and Poet, City Museum and Art Gallery (Birmingham, 1973), p. 30; J. Nicoll, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York, 1976), pp. 86, 91; H. S. Nelson, “Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20 (1965–1966): 207ff.; Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 7.

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260. H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 3:12ff.; Yeo and Thompson, The Unknown Mayhew, p. 54. 261. Mayhew, London Labour, 3:97, 147; 1861–1862 ed., 1:149, 153ff. 262. Ibid., 1:iv. 263. F. D. Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. J. F. Maurice, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 2:35. 264. J. D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass (New York and London, 1961), p. 105. 265. “Work” was one of three lectures subsequently assembled under the title The Crown of Wild Olive: see Ruskin, Works, 18:385–432. 266. Ibid., pp. 403–405, 412–415, 417–418, 431–432. 267. Hunt recalled a discussion of Henry VIII’s ruthless treatment of vagabonds which Carlyle justified by invoking the desperate state of the country at the time, and he then added on a personal note: “If anyone here would like to come to me at Chelsea to-morrow morning I would undertake to lead him to a spot, a hundred yards from my door, where we should find thirty vagabonds leaning against the rail which divides the river from the road, and although these men have never been, as far as I know, convicted of any particular crime, whatever, I will not hesitate to affirm that they would be all the better for hanging, both for their own sakes and for every one concerned” (Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 2:131–132). 268. T. Carlyle, Past and Present (London, 1897) (vol. 10 of the centenary edition of the Works), pp. 205–207. 269. Cited in R. Ironside and J. Gere, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (London, 1948), p. 23. 270. For Carlyle’s references to Bobus Higgins, see Past and Present, pp. 31–33, 35, 293, 295. 271. K. Marx, “Wages,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (New York, 1975–), 6:16, where he makes use of Carlyle’s Chartism; G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography (New York, 1936), pp. 41, 45–46, 55; D. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York, 1973), pp. 131, 235, 258ff.; Williams, Culture and Society, p. 72. 272. Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Marx-Engels, Collected Works, 3:305. 273. P. Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets (Chicago and London, 1967), pp. 34ff.; S. Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York, 1974), pp. 102ff. 274. Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (New York, 1974), 1:166. The original German reads “Geldbesitzer,” but since Engels edited the English version he would have interpreted Marx’s intention accurately. 275. It was Engels who brought Marx into contact with Carlyle’s writings. Engels mentioned Carlyle for the first time in May 1843 in an article for the Schweizerischer Republikaner. He subsequently read Carlyle’s Chartism and then turned immediately to the recently published Past and Present, which occupied him off and on for nearly a year. Engels wrote a critical analysis of the book for Marx’s short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which was actually projected as the lead article of a series on the English working classes that later became his well-known Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. See Engels, “Briefe aus London,” Schweizerischer Republikaner, 16 May 1843, in Marx-Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1958–), 1:468ff.; “Die Lage Englands: ‘Past and Present’ by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844, in Werke, 1:525ff.; Collected Works, 3:617 n. 187. Engels notes in his review-essay that Carlyle’s book was the only one worth reading that year and the only one expressing a compassionate, humanitarian outlook. He quoted extensively from Carlyle’s section on “Modern Labor” and agreed with the author that what was at stake was nothing less than the future of work itself. Engels extended his appreciation of Carlyle to the Condition of the Working-Class, where he quotes throughout from Chartism and Past and Present, which he praises for its “splendid description of the English bourgeoisie and its disgusting money greed,” and even gives it the final footnote in the conclusion (Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, pp. 104–105, 132–133, 312, 332–333). Marx and Engels jointly reviewed Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets for the Neue Rheinische Zei-

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tung in 1850 and demonstrated the extent to which they were immersed in his writings. But this was the last instance of their positive appraisal of his work; while crediting him for his contributions to the critique of industrial society, they recognized his reactionary position which hardened after 1848, and Marx even refers to Carlyle’s change of heart in a footnote to volume one of Capital. (Marx-Engels, “‘Latter-Day Pamphlets,’ edited by Thomas Carlyle,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 1850, in Werke, 7:255–259; Marx, Capital, 1:255–256 n. 1. 276. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, p. 376. 277. For the entire interview, see H. Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1861–1862 ed.), 3:410ff. 278. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, pp. 86–87, 102. 279. Kitson, “‘Work,’ by Ford Madox Brown,” p. 382. One of the models for the navvies was an employee in William Morris’s decorating firm, “a man engaged to do the rough work of packing and so on.” See A. Vallance, William Morris, His Art, His Writings, and His Public Life (London, 1897), p. 57.

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1. This chapter is essentially a condensation of my book on the subject: see A. Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Chicago and London, 1993). I refer the reader to this work as the only extended sociopolitical interpretation of the Macchiaioli either in English or Italian. For other major studies of the movement, see N. Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987); D. Durbé and C. Folcini, La Firenze dei Macchiaioli: Un mondo scomparso (Rome, 1985). For more recent accounts, see S. Bietoletti, I Macchiaioli: La storia, gli artisti, le opere (Florence, 2001); I Macchiaioli: Origine e affermazione della macchia, 1856–1870, ed. A. Marabottini and V. Quercioli (Rome, 2000). 2. An immense literature exists on the Risorgimento: for starters, see D. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento (London, 1971); and The Making of Italy, 1796–1870 (New York, 1968). 3. In Italian macchia di sole is a “sunspot” and macchia d’inchiostro is an “ink spot.” A secondary sense refers to the dense underbrush of uncultivated landscape and to those marginalized from civil society: hiding out in the woods is termed fare alla macchia, while living as an outlaw is vivere alla macchia. 4. Following the defeat of Napoléon and the restoration, the Austrian Habsburgs returned to Lombardy, the Spanish Bourbons to Naples, the Austrian grand duke to Tuscany; Venice became a province of Austria, and in between stretched the states of the church, ruled by the pope as a supranational sovereign and fierce opponent of national unification. Uprisings, inspired by events in France, broke out in the major cities in 1831 and again in 1848, as attempts were made to unseat the grand duke in Tuscany and to form a republic in Rome, and Milan revolted against Austria, giving King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia his chance to march into Lombardy in support of the rebellion. But his campaign ended in disastrous defeat, and hegemonic forces everywhere returned to power. 5. This becomes evident in the heated journalistic exchange of 1862 between the painter Telemaco Signorini and the critic Giuseppe Rigutini (who signed themselves anonymously as “X” and “Luigi,” respectively), in which the term Macchiaioli appeared for the first time in print; Rigutini employed it to deride a review by Signorini of the first group show in which he praised several of his young colleagues. (See the translations of these articles in E. Cecchi and M. Borgiotti, The “Macchiaioli” [Florence, 1963], pp. 25–31.) A conservative, Rigutini was a prominent linguist and philologist who had a field day punning on the multiple applications of the root word macchia, identifying the work of the artists with shapeless blobs that demonstrated their tortured striving for “the effect [effetto],” a key term in the aesthetic lexicon of the nineteenth century. Rigutini evidently grasped the connection between the Mac-

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chiaioli’s concentration on the effect and their radical nationalism, which he stigmatized as their willful ambition “to reform art.” Rigutini also made disparaging allusions to Signorini as “un nuovo Europeo” and one of “i nuovi Europei,” tying him to the left-wing journal La Nuova Europa, an opposition paper with a republican viewpoint and supportive of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Rigutini wrote for the Gazzetta del Popolo, a moderate conservative and antiMazzinian journal supporting the constitutional monarchy of Vittorio Emanuele. In his response of 3 November 1862, Rigutini marveled that “the new Europeans of today [had] such a strange taste in art,” and quickly spelled out his moderate position: “If I criticize the Macchiaioli, it is not because I prefer polished, smooth painting like miniatures on porcelain; however, the artist can easily choose a middle way between an oily smoothness and a rugged crust, between forms without any effect and effects without any form.” This was the cultural equivalent of Cavour’s juste milieu program for the House of Savoy, which tried to isolate the right-wing clerical party on the one hand and the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini on the other. Rigutini derided the Macchiaioli’s aesthetic experiments just as his political counterparts derided the republicans for their “utopian” schemes for the Italian masses. 6. C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 4–5. 7. T. Signorini, Caricaturisti e caricaturati al Caffè Michelangiolo (Florence, 1952). These recollections were originally published in 1893. 8. Times, 24 March 1864. See also “A Sketch of Garibaldi,” Times, 26 July 1859. 9. Garibaldi: Arte e Storia, 2 vols. (Florence, 1982). 10. Cited in G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1848–1849) (London, 1949), p. 119. See also R. Maggio Serra, “Italie, 1848–1849: Images d’actualité et de lutte entre le document historique et l’oeuvre d’art,” in Les Révolutions de 1848: L’Europe des images, Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1998), pp. 81, 83. Among the Macchiaioli who painted Garibaldi’s portrait or otherwise alluded to him in their work are Borrani, Lega, De Tivoli, Fattori, and Cabianca. For a history of the fascination of Italian artists with Garibaldi, see Pittura Garibaldina da Fattori a Guttuso, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna (Rome, 1982); for De Tivoli’s less well known portrait, see C. Benedicti, “Serafino De Tivoli,” Liburni civitas 2 (1929): 146, 149. 11. The matrix of the new Italy was the independent state of Piedmont in northwest Italy, with Turin its capital. Piedmont—ruled by the House of Savoy, the oldest ruling dynasty in Europe—had been joined politically with Sardinia and possessed the important shipping center of Genoa. Piedmont-Sardinia enjoyed the greatest freedom from Austrian hegemonic designs and profited from what then passed for European notions of “the balance of power.” It gradually turned revolutionary under the son of Carlo Alberto, Vittorio Emanuele II, and Vittorio Emanuele’s prime minister, Camillo Cavour, who together exploited republican uprisings to push their expansionist agenda of constitutional monarchy as the only viable alternative to the radical Left. 12. A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, Opere, 22 vols. (Turin, 1947–), 4:73. 13. E. Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston and New York, 1910), pp. 149–151, 154–156, 163, 165– 166, 171. Vedder also recalled the great time everyone had that evening at the Caffè Michelangiolo. 14. R. Ciampini, Il ’59 in Toscana (Florence, 1958), pp. 213–215. 15. “Atti Governativi,” La Nazione, 25 September 1859. 16. Even the most cursory examination of the competition themes reveals the programmatic intent of the contest. First, the ruler of the two powers that alone can guarantee Tuscany its independence from Austria; next, two themes from ancient history relating to Italian—one ancient and one medieval—victories over Germano-Austrian forces. Marius was a Roman general and consul who defeated the Cimbri, an ancient Germanic tribe that constituted a threat to Rome in the late second century b.c. The battle took place at Campi Raudii not far from the Piedmontese town of Vercelli. Frederick I, or Frederick Barbarossa, was the great German king of the Holy Roman Empire who, anxious to assert imperial power in

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Italy, undertook a series of expeditions across the Alps to suppress independent movements. It was he who overthrew the republican Arnaldo da Brescia in Rome and handed him over to Pope Adrian IV, who in return crowned Frederick in 1155. Later, he was opposed by the Lombard towns forming the Lombard League that finally defeated him at the battle of Legnano in 1176. No one could have missed the connection between these two historical themes and recent events in Lombardy, with the idea of unity as the effective antidote to oppression. Giovanni Battista Niccolini’s drama of Arnaldo da Brescia fired the enthusiasm of Florentine audiences in February 1860, while Verdi’s Battle of Legnano was one of his most important contributions to the Risorgimento. Ricasoli’s two modern themes went straight to the heart of his political position; the first expressed his adamant conviction that the grand duke would not be received back under any circumstances, and the second expressed his assumption of Vittorio Emanuele’s acceptance of the Tuscan request for annexation to Piedmont. The four battle pictures recalled key conflicts of 1848 and 1859: Curtatone, where the Tuscan volunteers fought courageously but hopelessly against Radetzky’s troops; Palestro, which the Piedmontese troops accomplished largely by themselves; Magenta, one of the main wars of the Risorgimento won primarily by the French; and San Martino, which the Sardinians won on 24 June under the leadership of Vittorio Emanuele. 17. “Atti Governativi,” La Nazione, 19 October 1859. For the background of these individuals, see Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, pp. 143–144. 18. A. Zobi, Cronaca degli avvenimenti d’Italia nel 1859 corredata di documenti per servire alla storia, 2 vols. (Florence, 1859), 1:655–656. 19. G. Fattori, Scritti autobiografici editi e inediti, ed. F. Errico (Rome, 1980), p. 23. 20. Il Gazzettino delle arti del disegno di Diego Martelli, 1867, ed. A. Maria Fortuna (Florence, 1968), pp. 197–199. The date of this article was 6 July 1867. 21. Ibid., p. 206, 15 July 1867. 22. Francesco Protonotari, an economist and law professor who edited the exposition catalogue and drew up the general report, was quite specific about the intentions of the exposition: “A more powerful need, a more inward reason, a more noble inspiration than mere abundance of production, which at bottom is nothing but self-interest, lay behind the Italian Exposition. This was a political motive, which desired to see the recent triumph of unity immediately embodied in some great event, by representing and containing in itself the might of all its citizens, as the plebiscite had contained their wills, to repeat to Europe, which is bewildered and still uncertain whether Italy is or is not, the assertion of the ancient philosopher to the deniers of motion: Behold, I move!” F. Protonotari, “Relazione generale,” Exposizione italiana tenuta in Firenze nel 1861, 3 vols. (Florence, 1864–1867), 1:5–6. 23. D. Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor, 1959), p. 36. 24. Yorick, Viaggio attraverso l’Esposizione italiana del 1861 (Florence, 1861), p. 180. A critic for La Nuova Europa offered the following vivid description of Borrani’s painting: “In a small atticroom you admire a darling young woman, who is seated on an arm-chair intent on threading a needle in order to sew a tricolor flag: her gracious figure, the simplicity and the exquisite taste of her clothing. The work table. Another completed flag [sic], a window through which is perceived a neighboring roof below, are so masterfully illuminated that the surface of the canvas disappears and in its place we see a lovely stereoscopic view” (“La Esposizione,” La Nuova Europa, 2 February 1862). 25. One dramatic testimony to this liberal tendency under Cavour was the response of Turin’s press to the notorious case of the papally sanctioned kidnapping of Edgar Mortara, the sixyear-old child of Momola Mortara, a Bolognese Jew who had violated a municipal law in keeping a Christian nurse for his children. Edgar was kidnapped on 23 June 1858 on the allegation that two years previously he had been subjected to the rite of lay baptism by the nurse. He was placed in an institution and withheld from his parents under the express sanction of the pope. It was clear to almost everyone that the papal authorities concocted this pretext to punish Mortara for violating the municipal law. But although the incident

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aroused international controversy, the Piedmontese papers were the only Italian journals that dared to criticize the pope. One of the most influential works on Italian Jews came from the pen of Piedmontese aristocrat writer and painter Massimo D’Azeglio, whose On the Civil Enfranchisement of the Jews, published in 1847, had a major impact throughout the peninsula. He contended that Jewish emancipation was not only required by Christian duty but that it was ultimately linked with that of the Italian people as a whole. 26. Cited in A. Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin, 1963), p. 532. 27. On 28 May 1859 a solemn memorial commemorating the Tuscans who fell in 1848 at Curtatone was held at Santa Croce, with two bronze tablets bearing the names of the fallen set on either side of the high altar. These tablets played a major role in bringing down the House of Lorraine. They had originally been installed a few months after the event by the municipality, and services were conducted there in subsequent years. In 1851, the occupying Austrian troops were ordered not to allow the commemorative service to take place. The citizens, however, forbidden to sing mass or light candles for the departed, brought garlands to hang upon the votive tablets, and were immediately repulsed by disguised police. On resisting, they were met by more plainclothesmen, who issued from hiding in the sacristy and fired on the crowd in the body of the church. Tuscans were still mourning the death of the victims of the day’s demonstration when the government ordered the tablets removed and concealed at the Fortezza da Basso. The bitterness aroused by this event etched itself deeply into Tuscan memory, and, not surprisingly, one of the first acts of the Provisional Government in 1859 was to restore the tablets to their original site in Santa Croce. One month after liberation dense crowds filled the Piazza Santa Croce before the church opened. Over each of the three portals an inscription was placed: the central one proclaimed the anniversary of the struggle for Italian independence; the one on the right read “Enter, on this day at least, safe from impious and murderous orders, to do honor to the slain vanguard of the liberation of the country”; while the one at the left admonished the crowds to “bring not hither tears and lamentations, but crowns of laurel to those who laid down life against the Austrian tyrant.” From the roof of the nave hung a huge black velvet banner over a colossal military catafalque with the words “Today we celebrate the morrow of 1848.” 28. One of Lega’s most moving paintings is his deathbed portrait of the great patriot, Mazzini morente (Giuseppe Mazzini on His Deathbed, 1873). It is located in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. One of Lega’s closest friends in Modigliana was the Mazzinian priest Don Giovanni Verità, whose likeness he painted at least twice. Verità had joined Giovine Italia early on and was one of Garibaldi’s most ardent supporters among the clergy. 29. For democrats the fight for female suffrage was always waged within the context of the larger struggle for the democratization of all Italian political and social institutions. Long before the approval of the Civil Code of 1865, democratic deputies had sponsored bills to enfranchise women and to reform the patriarchal character of Italian family law. Thus it was inevitable that women as well as men would be politicized during this movement and actively engaged in political agitation. Italian feminists tended to be anticlerical, focusing their attack on the church and the patriarchal state. This heady involvement of women in democratic politics disrupted the boundaries between political and private life, and even traditional domestic roles assumed political significance. Once unification was achieved, women participants in the Risorgimento could turn the political networks they helped develop into organizations for the improvement of female status in all spheres of Italian national life. For an overview of Italian feminism, see F. P. Bortolotti, Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia, 1848–1892 (Turin, 1963). Also J. J. Howard, “Patriot Mothers in the Post-Risorgimento: Women after the Italian Revolution,” in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. C. Berkin and C. M. Lovett (New York, 1980), pp. 237–258. We may also note that Italian unification inspired women everywhere to take up the cause: see P. G. Nunn, “Liberty, Equality and Sorority: Women’s Representations of the Unification of Italy,” in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. A. Chapman and J. Stabler (Manchester and

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New York, 2003), pp. 110–136. 30. A. Falassi, Folklore by the Fireside (Austin, Tex., 1980), pp. 106–124 et passim. 31. Ibid.

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1. See V. Green Fryd, “Hiram Powers’s America: ‘Triumphant as Liberty and in Unity,’” American Art Journal 18 (1986): 65. 2. Quoted in ibid., pp. 67–68. 3. Ibid., p. 69. 4. Yorick, Viaggio attraverso l’esposizione italiana del 1861 (Florence, 1861), p. 87. 5. The occulting of slavery is one of the leitmotivs of the recent study by S. Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004). 6. N. Rash, The Painting and Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 1. 7. For Clay’s views on slavery and the Indians, see C. Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Boston and Toronto, 1957), pp. 116–117, 118–133; R. V. Remini, Henry Clay, Statesman for the Union (New York and London, 1991), pp. 313–314, 439–440, 483–484, 525–526, 617–619, 693–694. 8. For a major recent study of this work, see D. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 55–105. 9. M. B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 2 vols. (Frankfort, 1992), 1:xi–xii. 10. T. H. Benton, Thirty Years’ View; or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years from 1820–1850, 2 vols. (New York, 1854), 1:29. As he wrote: “The foundation was laid for the future removal of the Indians, which was followed up by subsequent treaties and acts of Congress, until the southern and western states were as free as the northern from the incumbrance of an Indian population; and I, who was an actor in these transactions . . . and advocated the treaties which brought this great benefit to the south and west, and witnessed the cordial support of members from the free States, without whose concurrence they could not have been passed—I, who wish for harmony and concord among . . . all the sections of this Union, owe it to the cause of truth and justice, and to the cultivation of fraternal feelings, to bear this faithful testimony to the just and liberal conduct of the non-slaveholding States, in relieving the southern and western States from so large an incumbrance, and aiding the extension of their settlement and cultivation.” For an excellent study of plantation culture cast into visual form and the bizarre absence of the menial workers who dominated it, see J. M. Vlach, The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (Chapel Hill and London, 2002). 11. Benton, Thirty Years’ View, p. 137. 12. Ibid., pp. 577–580. For another view of Bingham and the slave issue, see B. S. Groseclose, “Painting, Politics, and George Caleb Bingham,” American Art Journal 10 (November 1978): 7–14. 13. E. H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana, 1967), pp. 43, 47. 14. Bingham to Rollins, in “Letters of George Caleb Bingham to James S. Rollins,” Missouri Historical Review (hereafter MHR), vol. 33 (October 1938): 59–60. 15. Ibid., pp. 66–67. 16. MHR 33 (April 1939): 380. 17. MHR 32 ( January 1938): 171. 18. C. R. Barnes, ed., The Commonwealth of Missouri: A Centennial Record (St. Louis, 1877), pp. 424–428. 19. Rash, The Painting and Politics of George Caleb Bingham, pp. 189–207.

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20. Quoted in A. Christ-Janer, George Caleb Bingham, Frontier Painter of Missouri (New York, 1975), p. 54. 21. “Letters,” MHR 33 (October 1938): 52–53. 22. Archives of American Art, Lilly Martin Spencer, 1822–1902. Papers, ca. 1840–1865, roll no. 131, letter dated 21 January 1842. See also Lilly to Angélique Le Petit, 11 October 1850. For an excellent recent discussion of Spencer, see W. Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati (Columbus, Ohio, 2002), pp. 27–85. 23. Archives of American Art, roll 131, letter to parents, 18 July 1847. 24. C. Longworth de Chambrun, The Making of Nicholas Longworth (New York, 1933), p. 91. 25. Archives of American Art, roll 131, Longworth to Hildreth, 18 September 1841. 26. Ibid., Lilly to her parents, 30 May 1848 and 9 July 1848. When her mother urges her to attend a feminist gathering, Spencer replies: “With regard dear mother to the subject of the convention of women, dear mother I heard nothing but some slight notices in the paper that we take, and what you told me in your letter. My time dear mother to enable me to succeed in my painting is so entirely engrossed by it, that I am not at all able to give my attention to anything else . . . and you know, dear mother, that I cannot leave my little babys [sic] nor my business to attend those meetings if they were even closer than they are. . . . You know dear mother that that is your point of exertion and attention and study like my painting is mine, and you know dear mother as you have told me many a time that if we wish to become great in any thing we must condense our powers to one point.” Besides the condescending repetition of “dear mother” and the insistence on going her own way, Lilly plays on her mother’s guilt like a concert violinist fine tuning the strings of her instrument. She has the unmitigated gall to attribute her willful act of independence to her mother’s own instruction, essentially declaring that Angélique Le Petit has only herself to blame for Lilly’s denial of her request. 27. Ibid., Angélique Le Petit to Wendell Phillips, sometime in 1854. 28. Ibid., undated letter from Sarah Bagley to Angélique Le Petit. 29. Of course, the black children in her genre works had no one to speak for them as did their white counterparts: “I wish you to paint a picture of our little girl—Baby Lou, full length, representing her undressed, playing on a leopard skin. She is a merry little romp, full of antics and I wish your genius to help preserve her on canvas, as she is ready for bed, waiting a romp with papa” (ibid., letter from client Mark M. Pomeroy to LMS, 7 June 1875). 30. Ibid., letter of LMS to unknown correspondent, ca. 1896, and manuscript entitled “Blind Faith,” 1896. A second description in the form of a note to herself develops the theme in more detail: Represents a dark beauty who like many of a fairer type is taking advantage of the blind faith of one who trusts her. She tells him to shut his eyes and oppen [sic] his mouth, and that [she will] give him something that will make him wise, which he certainly does, expecting something very different than he will get which is a live katydid. But whether it will make him wise or not, we do not know. But that he will be thoroughly fooled is as evident as the pleasure it gives her to do it, as she stands with laughing eyes, and shrugged shoulders, holding the wriggling thing between her fingers and tells the spectator to see the fun. But whether it will turn out so funny or not we do not know. But that she herself may have the sadness if not the wisdom to find out, seems to be the idea of the time tonight, and reluctantly amused old mother. Topsey in the background who probably found it and brought it, and had it snatched from her with a “Give me that! and we’ll have some fun with him!” Topsey has nothing to fear, but to laugh at the proceedings whatever way they turn out. She may learn, to think before she acts and to examine well before believing.





31. G. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, Va., 1857), pp. 29–31. 32. K. M. Adams, Black Images in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature: An Iconologi-

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cal Study of Mount, Melville, Homer and Mark Twain (Ph. D. diss., Emory University, 1977), pp. 10–60; “The Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 7 (November 1975): 42–59; E. Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven and London, 1991), pp. 107–108, 116–127. 33. A. Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount (New York, 1975), p. 365. 34. Ibid., p. 385. The English traveler Harriet Martineau observed so many instances of blacks as the targets of jokes that she began “to suspect that one use of slaves is to furnish topics for the amusement of their owners” (Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. [New York, 1838], 1:198). Even Northern Republicans accepted this demeaning status of blacks: the photographer Alexander Gardner, whose moving photographs of the Civil War would suggest a more sympathetic portrayal of the ex-slaves, wrote a tongue-in-cheek description of a camp servant named John Henry who had “an unusual capacity for the care of boots and other attentions.” Gardner continued, “Although his head resembled an egg . . . his moral and intellectual acquirements were by no means common.” He had a strong sense of biblical history and always considered Moses a remarkable quartermaster in getting across the Red Sea without pontoons, and then conducting “the Children of Israel forty years through the desert without a wagon train” (Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 2 vols. [Washington, D.C., 1866], vol. 1, no. 27, “What do I want, John Henry?”). For a broader view of this theme, see M. Simpson, “The Bright Side: ‘Humorously Conceived and Truthfully Executed,’” in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco, 1988), pp. 47–63. 35. M. B. Codrey and H. W. Williams, Jr., William Sidney Mount, 1807–1868, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1944), p. 31. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 31, cat. nos. 138–139; Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, pp. 440–441. 38. H. Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, Okla., 1962), pp. 35ff. 39. J. J. Jarves, The Art Idea, ed. B. Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 225; H. T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York, 1966), p. 581; L. Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York, 1903), p. 220; C. H. Caffin, American Masters of Sculpture (New York, 1913), pp. 44–45. See also L. I. Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward, Dean of American Sculpture (Newark, 1985), pp. 41–43. 40. F. H. M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation (Washington, D.C., 1916), pp. 18–19 41. Quoted in D. H. Donald, J. H. Baker, and M. F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2001), p. 332. 42. “The National Sailors’ Fair,” Boston Transcript, 11 November 1864 (Merl M. Moore Archive, Washington, D.C.); also “Edmonia Lewis: The Famous Colored Sculptress in San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 August 1873. 43. W. W. Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion (New York, 1971), pp. 69–73. 44. “The Marble Group,” Daily Evening Transcript, 18 October 1869 (Merl M. Moore Archive, Washington, D.C.). 45. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, p. 226. 46. See S. A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History 80 ( June 1993): 148–149; K. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997). 47. H. T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York, 1867), pp. 467, 470. 48. For the situation of slavery in the national capital, see J. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 70–75. 49. “The National Academy of Design,” Crayon 6 ( June 1859): 189. 50. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 468.

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51. W. E. Channing, “Slavery,” in The Works of William E. Channing, 5 vols. (Boston, 1903), 2:92. 52. H. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York, 1857), p. 28 et passim. 53. H. B. Stowe, Three Novels, ed. K. K. Sklar (New York, 1982), p. 133. 54. “Negro Emancipation,” Harper’s Weekly 7 (10 January 1863): 18. 55. For black folklore in Kentucky, see A. A. Dunnigan, The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Traditions (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 7–10, 17–18; E. J. Gorn, “Black Spirits: The Ghostlore of Afro-American Slaves,” American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984): 326–330, 338–344. 56. Noble executed the painting in 1865 and exhibited it in St. Louis the following year. In October 1866 the artist moved to New York and subsequently exhibited it at the National Academy; next it went to Boston, and in February and March of 1867 it was displayed in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. In August it was shown again in St. Louis, and at the end of November it could be viewed at the Opera House Gallery in Chicago. Ultimately destroyed in a Chicago fire, it is known from an 1870 replica in the Missouri Historical Society. The replica was painted when Noble lived in Cincinnati and includes portraits of himself, members of his family, and friends. On one level, the portraits of his immediate circle might indicate the personal importance of the work for him. On another, however, the exhibition record suggests that he aimed the work at Northern audiences and clients. The work reached Washington the year Congress approved the Reconstruction Act, motivated by the refusal of most Southern states, including Kentucky, to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment protecting black citizenship, and its exhibition coincided with the emergence of the Black Codes of slavery days and by growing violence against African Americans. 57. Cited in J. D. Birchfield, “Thomas S. Noble,” in J. D. Birchfield, A. Boime, and W. J. Hennessey, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1835–1907 (Lexington, Ky., 1988), pp. 44–45. 58. A. Jingle, “Fine Arts: Noble’s ‘Last Sale,’” St. Louis Times, 12 August 1866. 59. See “The Fugitive Slave Case before U.S. Commissioner Pendery,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 31 January 1856; W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1967), pp.302–303; L. H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington, 1978), p. 91. 60. C. Sumner, Complete Works, 10 vols. (New York, 1969), 3:312. Noble’s picture was based on an actual event, but it is significant that a similar incident unfolded in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the chapter entitled “The Quadroon’s Story,” Cassy, whose children from a previous relationship had been snatched from her, gives her two-week-old baby laudanum and holds him close “while he slept to death.” Determined not to allow another of her children to grow up in slavery, she tearfully concludes, “What better than death could I give him, poor child.” 61. For an excellent general study of Civil War imagery, see H. Holzer and M. E. Neely, Jr., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York, 1993), especially the section on cycloramas and panoramas, pp. 170–203. 62. This is seen in Walt Whitman’s poignant collection Drum-Taps, the representation of his inner conflicts brought about by the Civil War. In “The Dresser,” he recuperates the dead in the landscape, “Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground.” Even more vivid is his “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All,” where an allegorical personification is merged with Mother Nature: Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried—I charge you, lose not my sons! Lose not an atom; And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood; And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly; And all you essences of soil and growth—and you, O my rivers’ depths; And you mountain sides—and the woods where my dear children’s blood, trickling, redden’d; And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees,



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My dead absorb—my young men’s beautiful bodies absorb—and their precious, precious, precious blood; Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me, many a year hence, . . .















See the facsimile edition edited by F. DeWolfe Miller, Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–6) (Gainesville, 1959), pp. 32, 71. 63. A. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York, 1989), pp. 71–118; M. Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, D.C., and London, 1997). 64. Gardner consistently referenced the landscape in his commentaries on the sacrifices of the victims: “Localities that would scarcely have been known, and probably never remembered, save in their immediate vicinity, have become celebrated, and will ever be held sacred as memorable fields, where thousands of brave young men yielded up their lives a willing sacrifice for the cause they had espoused” (Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, vol. 1, non-paginated preface). 65. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, p. 99; T. Sweet, Traces of War (Baltimore and London, 1990), pp. 120–137. 66. See A. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca and London, 1993), pp. 209–241. 67. Reproduced in Henry Mosler Rediscovered: A Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Artist, curated by B. C. Gilbert, Skirball Museum (Los Angeles, 1995), plate 3. 68. Reproduced in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, fig. 20. 69. See D. C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church (New York, 1966), p. 61; F. Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 118–119, 123, 125; G. L. Carr, In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church (New York, 2000), p. 59 and plate 36. 70. These events influenced Walt Whitman’s moving “Song of the Banner at Day-Break,” in his post–Civil War collection Drum-Taps (1865). The voices of the banner, a poet, a child and father engage in a kind of dialogue, while all gazing “In the upward air where their eyes turn, / Where the banner at day-break is flapping.” The child hears the flag beckoning to him and exclaims, “It is so broad it covers the whole sky!” But the father wants his child to resist its siren call, and discourages his idealism: “. . . behold not banners and pennants aloft; / But the well-prepared pavements behold—and mark the solid-wall’d houses.” Meanwhile, the poet mediates their exchange to aestheticize the flag by invoking the virtues of patriotism, honor, and glory. He acknowledges that the flag is “out of reach—an idea only—yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death—loved by me!” but in the end glosses over the conflict as a legitimate ideological position. See Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–6), pp. 9–16. 71. Archives of American Art, roll 132, letter of LMS to Angélique Le Petit, 11 August 1852. Much of the following section is based on my research for The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, D.C., and London, 1991). 72. See the discussion of Thomas Cole in B. J. Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision (Chicago, 1982), pp. 186–200. 73. W. Whitman, “Our Territory on the Pacific” (7 July 1846), in The Gathering of the Forces, ed. C. Rodgers and J. Black, 2 vols. (New York, 1920), 1:246–247. 74. Whitman, “More Stars for the Spangled Banner” (29 June 1846), ibid., pp. 244–246. 75. Whitman, “American Futurity” (24 November 1846), ibid., pp. 27–28. 76. Whitman, “The New World and the Old” (26 June 1846), ibid., pp. xlii–xliii. 77. See the discussion of K. W. Maddox, “Asher B. Durand’s Progress: The Advance of Civilization and the Vanishing American,” in The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change, ed. S. Danly and L. Marx (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 51–69. 78. The wild and entangled thickets in the foregrounds of such paradigmatic examples of the

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magisterial gaze as Cole’s Ox-Bow and Cropsey’s Autumn—On the Hudson River are metonyms for the Indian presence and hence that primitive past in the process of being effaced by the signs of cultivated progress down below. The landscapist DeWitt Clinton Boutelle (1820–1884) replicated the typical Hudson River arrangement, but spelled out what Cole and others merely suggested in a blasted tree trunk or overgrown promontory. He set Native American hunters on rocky ledges overlooking the Hudson, literally designating the wilderness undergoing transformation. 79. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker 42 ( July 1853): 95. 80. A. B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” Crayon 1 (1854–1855): letter 2, pp. 34–35. 81. P. Trenton and P. H. Hassrick, The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Norman, Okla., 1983), pp. 73–74. 82. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, pp. 157–159. 83. Wolfgang Born, who first defined the panoramic convention in American landscape, saw it too literally in terms of the theatrical spectacle known as the Panorama. He also erred in identifying a “shifting vanishing point,” as if the panoramic gaze that I call “magisterial” lacked the traditional standards of unity of space. Thomas Cole’s famous Ox-Bow is a case in point: here a distinct diagonal moving from left to right is established by the brow of the hill, the oxbow below, and the open vista through the hills. Born had clearly been trained in the Renaissance tradition to see landscape synoptically and not as an unfolding or temporal process. See W. Born, American Landscape Painting, An Interpretation (New Haven, 1948), pp. 75–86. 84. For an account of some of these experiences and the literature inspired by them, see M. H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York, 1959). The Swiss (Salomon Gessner, Bénédict de Saussure, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), German (Goethe), and English ( James Thomson, Lord Byron, John Keats, J. M. W. Turner, and John Ruskin), to name only a few, all experienced rapture on the heights. But nowhere else except in the American nineteenth-century tradition do we find such a major body of visual and literary texts sharing a spatial and chronological coherence and constituting a collective expression of the “peak” experience. It is this systematic projection of the unlimited horizons as a metonymic image of America’s futurity that makes this body of material unique in its geographical, national, and temporal setting. It is less unique in its appeal to and hold over the individual imagination than as a manifestation of the collective and characteristic expression of the privileged national ideal, the ruling-class aspiration for American society that still endures. 85. See C. Fabricant, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics, ed. R. Cohen (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 56–57. 86. J. Thomson, “Spring,” in The Poetical Works of James Thomson, 2 vols. (Boston, 1863), 2:41–42, lines 948–954. 87. Ibid., “Autumn,” p. 128, lines 40–42. 88. Ibid., “Winter,” pp. 200–201, lines 393–394, 414–423. 89. Ibid., p. 221, lines 961–987. 90. G. Byron, The Works of Lord Byron (London, 1841), pp. 182–184. 91. J. Keats, The Poetical Works of John Keats (Oxford, 1958), pp. 42–43, lines 1–14. 92. A recent study of American nineteenth-century landscape by British scholars draws valuable parallels with British painting: see A. Wilton and T. Barringer, The American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1880, Tate Gallery (London, 2002). 93. E. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark, Del., 1989), pp. 133–134. 94. W. C. Bryant, “Thomas Cole: A Funeral Oration, Delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848,” in Orations and Addresses (New York, 1873), pp. 40–41; quoted in D. B. Lawall, Asher Brown Durand: His Art and Theory in Relation to His Times (New

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York and London, 1977), p. 519. 95. J. Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington, D.C., and London, 1992), pp. 141–173. 96. Ibid., pp. 148–149. 97. Quoted in ibid., p. 145. 98. That this gaze implied for Americans something inherent in their culture is hinted at in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). When the American sculptor, Kenyon, visits Count Donatello’s country villa, situated on a height over a broad expanse of valley, he is struck by the house’s fortresslike tower, which is the most prominent object in the landscape. Kenyon’s fascination for the tower and his impatience to climb it are misunderstood by Donatello, who is indifferent to it. When Kenyon attains the summit, he feels “as if his being were suddenly magnified a hundredfold; so wide was the Umbrian valley that suddenly opened before him.” Kenyon’s eye sweeps across the spacious map and passes from the rural to the urban tracts, following the meandering path of gleaming river. “It seemed as if all Italy lay under his eyes in that one picture.” Significantly, the vista recalled to Kenyon’s mind “the fondly remembered acres of his father’s homestead.” Hence the image of vastness in the aristocratic Italian setting is transposed to American patriarchal authority. In an impassioned expression of gratitude to his host for providing the opportunity to glimpse the majestic prospect, Kenyon translates the experience into spiritual uplift, comparing the climb to an ascent “into the higher regions of emotion and spiritual enjoyment,” whose concrete embodiment are the “grand hieroglyphics” of the expansive landscape. The ascent is further rationalized as a leap above “the common level” and a “wider glimpse of [God’s] dealings with mankind!” Kenyon now shifts the grounds of the discussion from actual topographical data to an abstract plane that essentially identifies his father’s authority over the land with the transcendental control of the Godhead. Finally, these insights are seen as peculiarly American: Donatello throws up his hands in frustration, “striving with unwonted grasp to catch the analogies which so cheered his friend,” only to give up with a gloomy confession, “You discern something that is hidden from me.” See N. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Boston, 1860), pp. 208–209. 99. D. Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1978), pp. 18–21. 100. E. S. Ellis, “Seth Jones,” in Dime Novels, ed. E. L. Wheeler (New York, 1966), p. 3. 101. Jones, Dime Novel Western, p. 19. 102. See the discussion in P. Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, D.C., and London, 1991), pp. 97–98. 103. For the background to this work, see R. H. Stehle, “Westward Ho! The History of Leutze’s Fresco in the Capitol,” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Washington, D.C., 1970– 1972), pp. 306–322; B. S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816–1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 60–62; V. G. Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 209–213. 104. E. Lies, “Westward, Ho!” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, new series, vol. 24 ( January 1849): 43. Other stanzas of the poem are perhaps even more revealing: Is it that all earthly things Westward ply their restless wings, Problems of their being to solve? Faith and Knowledge, Commerce, Wealth, Valor, Strength and manly Health Do they, like the stars, revolve? ……… Europe’s noon hath long been past; All her vain insignia cast



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Lengthening shadows on her brow; Soon she’ll mourn, in darkness shrouded, For her blue sky, dimly clouded, Ev’n as Asia mourneth now. Westward, ho! the morning breaks; Lo! a younger world awakes; There the day-god long shall rest; Nor can wild Hesperian dreams, Dreams of golden earth and streams, Lure him to a further west.



105. A. Brewster, “Emanuel Leutze, The Artist,” Lippincott’s Magazine 2 (November 1868): 536. 106. N. Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters,” Atlantic Monthly 10 ( July 1862): 46; quoted in Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” p. 117. 107. J. Gray Sweeney, The Artist-Explorers of the American West, 1860–1880 (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1975), p. 58. 108. See the discussion in F. Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 68–72. 109. Ibid., pp. 115–116. Kelly sees this as Church’s nostalgic concern for the wilderness, while I see it as internally consistent with the main body of his work and the taste of his patrons. 110. See Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the Natural Landscape, p. 119. Kelly notes also that the artist derived the idea of substituting a tree for a flagpole from the repoussoir in Twilight. 111. The description of the work by Church’s close friend Louis L. Noble emphasizes the destructive energies of the volcano and its toll on human lives and property: see K. Manthorne, Creation and Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church, National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C., 1985), p. 63. See also R. Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton, 2001), pp. 81–83. 112. See Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, pp. 67–68; essays by J. E. Adamson and E. McKinsey, in Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901, ed. J. E. Adamson (Washington, D.C., 1985), pp. 11–101. 113. A. Badeau, The Vagabond (New York, 1859), p. 123. 114. Quoted in Adamson, Niagara, p. 67. 115. W. D. Hoyt, “Documents: Journey to Niagara, 1815,” New York History 32 (1942): 331, 334. Typically, Willis recommends for “the seasoned traveller” the view from the terraces of the exclusive Niagara hotel known as the Clifton House, where one could endlessly calculate “the force, speed, and change of the tremendous waters” and provide oneself with “amusement and occupation enough to draw the mind from anything—to cure madness or create it.” N. P. Willis, American Scenery (Barre, Mass., 1971 [originally published 1840]), pp. 66–68. 116. See B. Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York, 1980), pp. 175–176; R. Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850–1900 (New York, 1953), pp. 149–150; Trenton and Hassrick, Rocky Mountains, p. 78; Danly and Marx, The Railroad in American Art, pp. 5–30. 117. L. Marx, “The Railroad-in-the-Landscape: An Iconological Reading of a Theme in American Art,” in Danly and Marx, Railroad in American Art, pp. 198–199. For the fullest exposition of Marx’s theory of the middle landscape, see his The Machine in the Garden (New York, 1964), pp. 139ff. See also the excellent review of the railroad literature in D. Lubin, “A Backward Look at Forward Motion,” American Quarterly 41 (September 1989): 549–557. See also A. F. Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York, 1990), chapter 2. 118. R. Stein, Susquehanna: Images of the Settled Landscape (Binghamton, N.Y., 1981), pp. 62–63. 119. Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 220; N. Cikovsky, Jr., “George Inness and the Hudson River



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School: The Lackawanna Valley,” American Art Journal 2 (Fall 1970): 36–57; N. Cikovsky, Jr., “George Inness’s The Lackawanna Valley: ‘Type of the Modern,’” in Danly and Marx, Railroad in American Art, pp. 71–91. 120. Acts of the Legislatures of the States of Pennsylvania and New York Relating to the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company (New York, 1856), pp. 58, 84–85. 121. Ibid., p. 84.

chapter 7





1. M. von Boehn, Biedermeier: Deutschland von 1815–1847 (Berlin, 1920), pp. 344–346. 2. Ibid., pp. 290–299. 3. See M. O. Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (New York, 1994), pp. 24–25, 27. 4. See the excellent introduction of G. Norman, Biedermeier Painting, 1815–1848 (London, 1987), pp. 7–15. 5. S. Hitchman, The World as Theatre in the Works of Franz Grillparzer (Berne, 1979). 6. Von Boehn, Biedermeier: Deutschland, pp. 334–335. 7. M. Oppenheim, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1924), pp. 89–90. 8. J. Blum, Noble Landowners and Agriculture in Austria, 1815–1848: A Study in the Origins of the Peasant Emancipation of 1848 (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 23–25. 9. B. Grimschitz, “Waldmüllers Familienbildnis des Dr. Josef August Eltz,” Amicis: Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Galerie (Vienna, 1926), pp. 21–25. 10. A. Werner, “Ferdinand Georg Waldmueller: An Austrian Artist Re-evaluated,” Art Journal 30 (1970–1971): 369–373. 11. B. Grimschitz, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Salzburg, 1957), pp. 7–8. 12. F. G. Waldmüller, Das Bedürfnis eines zweckmässigen Unterrichts in der Malerei und plastischen Kunst (Vienna, 1846), p. 25. 13. Bürgersinn und Aufbegehren: Biedermeier und Vormärz in Wien, 1815–1848 (Vienna, 1987), no. 5/4/20, “Entlassungsdekret für Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1857.” 14. R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Die Reform des Kunstunterrichtes und Prof. Waldmüllers Lehrmethode (Vienna, 1848), pp. iii–iv. Von Eitelberger went back into Waldmüller’s past and attributed his faulty theorizing to his experience as a slavish copyist of Old Masters unable to penetrate beneath the surface. Waldmüller’s rejection of the study of perspective and antiquity and his superficial dismissal of other parts of the academic curriculum attest to his fragmented and sporadic instruction, which stood in the way of his complete cultural formation. Analogously, when Waldmüller went out into the field he copied nature slavishly without regard for its spiritual significance. Thus von Eitelberger tried to portray his antagonist as too steeped in materialism to be able to produce works with that higher sensibility that governed true works of creation. He claimed that Waldmüller confused composition and invention whereas he, von Eitelberger, distinguished between the mechanical grouping of parts of the picture with the real effort of invention and “historical truth.” Finally, von Eitelberger rejected Waldmüller’s emphasis on nature study as incompatible with the pedagogic imperative to develop the student’s imaginative and inventive faculties. 15. F. G. Waldmüller, Andeutungen zur Belebung der vaterländischen bildenden Kunst (Vienna, 1857), p. 3. 16. Ibid., pp. 4, 8. 17. A. F. Grafen von Schack, Meine Gemäldesammlung (Stuttgart, 1881), p. 52. 18. W. H. Riehl, The Natural History of the German People, ed and trans. D. J. Diephouse (Lewiston, N.Y., 1990), pp. 48–49, 84–85, 155. 19. G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution (London, 1920), p. 485; Freiligraths Werke in einem Band, ed. W. Ilberg (Berlin, 1976), pp. 72–74.

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20. W. E. Windegg, Künstlers Erdewallen: Briefe von Moritz v. Schwind (Munich, 1912), p. 1. 21. See M. Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th Century Music 12 (Spring 1989): 193–206. 22. For a description of the entire commission, see G. Pommeranz-Liedtke, Moritz von Schwind, Maler und Poet (Vienna and Munich, 1974), pp. 29–32. 23. Windegg, Briefe von Moritz von Schwind, letter to Schober of 18 September 1836, p. 30; Pommeranz-Liedtke, Moritz von Schwind, p. 19. 24. S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York, 1966), pp. 141–142. 25. R. Muther, The History of Modern Painting, 3 vols. (London, 1895), 1:274. 26. S. Wichmann, Spitzweg: Begegnungen mit Moritz von Schwind und Arnold Böcklin und die kleine Landschaft (Munich, 1985). See also K.-L. Hofmann, Carl Spitzweg “Das ist deine Welt”: Gemälde—Aquarelle—Zeichnungen (Stuttgart, 2003). 27. In this Spitzweg reminds me of an American painter of the next generation, Albert Pinkham Ryder, who also sought alternative venues for his work, painted in small format on pasteboard and cigar box lids, and represented nocturnal solitude among other escapist themes. 28. H.-J. Raupp, “Cartl Spitzweg: Der arme Poet,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 46–47 (1985–1986): 253–271. Raupp is less inclined to see this work as a satire, and argues for its status as a contemporary literary trope. 29. Letter of 7 August 1836, in S. Wichmann, Carl Spitzweg und die französischen Zeichner Daumier, Grandville, Gavarni, Doré (Herrsching, 1985), p. 24. In reality, Spitzweg was obsessed with the cholera which broke out sporadically in his lifetime. 30. I. N. Bamberger, The Viking Jews: A History of the Jews of Denmark (New York, 1983), pp. 25– 27. 31. U. Haxen, Kings and Citizens: The History of the Jews in Denmark, 1622–1983, 2 vols. ( Jewish Museum, New York, 1983), 2:17, 47–48, no. 42. 32. W. Häusler, “‘siegende geschlagene’—Demokratie und soziale Bewegungen in der Wiener Revolution von 1848,” in Bürgersinn und Aufbegehren: Biedermeier und Vormärz in Wien 1815– 1848, pp. 637–641. 33. See, for example, his watercolor, “A Masked Ball in the Imperial Ballroom” (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien), in Vienna in the Biedermeier Era, 1815–1848, ed. R. Waissenberger (New York, 1986), plate 73. 34. H. Honour, Romanticism (New York, 1979), pp. 226–227. 35. J. Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, 1991), pp. 78–79. 36. The most recent studies of this work is M. Hettling, “Revolution, Tod und Opferkult: A. Rethels ‘Auch ein Totentanz’ von 1849,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, vol. 70, no. 2 (1988): 443– 489; A. Boime, “Alfred Rethel’s Counterrevolutionary Death Dance,” Art Bulletin 73 (December 1991): 577–598. 37. J. Ponten, Studien über Alfred Rethel (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1922), pp. 49–55; H. Schmidt, Alfred Rethel, 1816–1859 (Neuss, [1959]), pp. 136–148; W. Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (London and New Haven, 1980), pp. 15ff.; T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois (Princeton, 1982), pp. 26–27; P. Paret, “The German Revolution of 1848 and Rethel’s Dance of Death,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 17, no. 1 (1986): 233–255; Paret, Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1988), pp. 104–130. He agrees with Schmidt, Alfred Rethel, p. 140. But see Rethel’s first major biographer, J. Ponten, Alfred Rethel (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1911), p. L. 38. See J. M. Clark, The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein (London, 1947), p. 7. 39. T. S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871 (Princeton, 1972), p. 228; Paret, Art as History, pp. 79–80. 40. The hat with the cock’s feather is the so-called “Heckerhut,” named for the leader of the

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Baden uprising, Friedrich Hecker. The bane of the conservatives, he was hardly the fanatical rebel they made him out to be. He and his colleague Stuve refused to admit workers and peasants to their councils, and he took to the field only when the preliminary parliament (convoked to work out the details for the definitive parliament at Frankfurt) refused to give republicanism a place on the agenda and voted against a place for him on the committee of fifty named to supervise the election of delegates to the national assembly. Once in the field, Hecker hesitated to fire on government troops, and it was their commander who finally ordered the attack on Hecker’s ragtag bunch and easily subdued them. Hecker escaped to the United States and settled on a farm in Illinois. He became a fervent supporter of Lincoln and spoke out against slavery, distinguishing himself during the Civil War when he rose to colonel in the Union Army. 41. “Shield of David,” Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 10 vols. (New York, 1943), 10:506. 42. Rethel’s disposition was bound up with an insecure identity: his father was an Alsatian who worked for the French administration in the Rhineland during the Napoleonic occupation, married a local woman, and stayed in Germany after the defeat of the French. Rumor had it that the father was Jewish, but this has never been confirmed. See Paret, Art as History, p. 79. 43. Ponten, Studien über Alfred Rethel, pp. 53–54; Schmidt, Alfred Rethel, p. 143. 44. L’Illustration, 28 July 1849. 45. Le Socialisme: Nouveau Danse des morts, comp. and design by Alfred Rethel; lithography by A. Colette; published by Goupil, Vibert et Cie (Paris, 1849). 46. See Champfleury, “La Danse des Morts de l’année, 1849,” L’Artiste, 5e sér., t. 2 (1849): 185– 186. Champfleury was both attracted anbd repelled by the series. He recognized that neither Rethel nor Reinick (the versifier) “marched in solidarity with the German revolutionaries,” but he also declared that the authors were “so convinced of their message that even the reddest republicans would admire it if they understood the Beautiful.” And he concluded that the lesson, “as sinister by the crayon as by the pen, could be as well applied to France as Germany, to Paris as well as Leipzig.” 47. O. J. Hammen, “Economic and Social Factors in the Prussian Rhineland in 1848,” American Historical Review 543 ( July 1949): 825–840. 48. Norman, Biedermeier Painting, p. 136. 49. J. Ponten, Alfred Rethels Briefe (Berlin, 1912), p. 119. Although the letter is undated except for “Dienstag Morgen,” the internal evidence helps us to pinpoint it to Tuesday, 8 May, the last day of the uprising, when it was almost totally suppressed. 50. Ponten, Alfred Rethels Briefe, pp. 118–119, letter to his mother dated 4 May 1849. 51. Ibid., p. 117, letter of 22 April 1849. 52. Ponten, Studien über Alfred Rethel, pp. 10–40; Schmidt, Alfred Rethel, pp. 76–123; F. Kuetgens, Die Karlsfresken Alfred Rethels (Bonn, 1940); H. v. Einem, Die Tragödie der Karlsfresken Alfred Rethels (Cologne and Opladen, 1968). 53. Ponten, Alfred Rethels Briefe, pp. 56–58, letter to the Oberbürgermeister of Aachen dated 28 April 1841. 54. The church fathers in Aachen also complained that the subject of one of his murals, the Frankfurt Synode, was unimportant for Charlemagne’s career and had been used in the past to divide Protestants and Catholics, and that the program calls for a “Protestant” version of the theme. This last issue concerned the Reformation’s rejection of imagery for adoration, and Rethel said he would change the wording in the program to include a Catholic text in Latin that shared the Protestant view that images were important for the commemoration of historical events. See Ponten, Alfred Rethels Briefe, pp. 56–58. 55. Ibid., pp. 100–105, letter to his mother dated 3 March 1846. 56. Ponten, Studien über Alfred Rethel, pp. 26–27; von Einem, Die Tragödie der Karlsfresken Alfred Rethels, p. 22. This was Friedrich Schlegel’s translation of the Song of Roland after the socalled Turpin Chronicles.

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57. One moderate “forty-eighter” close to the events could state unequivocally: “There was in the general insurrection of the citizens of Dresden and Leipzig no socialistic element, and the leaders were men of acknowledged worth and position.” See E. Oswald, Reminiscences of a Busy Life (London, 1911), p. 133. 58. Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, ed. F. Curtius, 2 vols. (New York, 1906), 1:43. 59. F. Eyck, The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848–1849 (London, 1968), pp. 136, 201–202 60. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, p. 177. 61. T. S. Hamerow, “The Elections to the Frankfurt Parliament,” Journal of Modern History 33 (1961): 18. 62. See R. Hoppe and J. Kucynski, “Eine Berufs bzw. auch Klassen und Schichtenanalyse der Märzgefallenen 1848 in Berlin,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 4 (1964): 200–276. 63. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, p. 102. 64. Ibid., p. 327. 65. Sperber, Rhineland Radicals, pp. 149–150. 66. P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton, 1966), pp. 42, 62, 64. 67. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Revolution of 1848–1849: Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (New York, 1972), p. 45. 68. Ponten, Alfred Rethels Briefe, pp. 116–117, letter of 22 April 1849. 69. R. Wagner, My Life (New York, 1939), pp. 433–504. Wagner does not mention Rethel by name, but he was in contact with the artist’s colleagues in Düsseldorf, including his close friend and collaborator on the Auch ein Todtentanz project, the poet-painter Robert Reinick. Wagner’s account has to be measured against his biographer’s analysis: see E. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (New York, 1933–1946), 2:3–17, 35–103. 70. R. Wagner, “Die Revolution,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 5th ed., 12 vols. (Leipzig, 1911), 12:243–249. I relied heavily on Newman’s translation, but compared it carefully with the original text and made slight changes. See Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, pp. 54–55. 71. Prior to the revolution there existed a “folksy” type of paper known generically as the Volksblatt, roughly akin to today’s community papers. Thus the leftists succeeded in politicizing the concept in step with the heightening political awareness. For the broadsheet tradition, see K. Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago and London, 1989), pp. 19–34. 72. W. A. Coupe, “The German Cartoon and the Revolution of 1848,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 9, no. 2 ( January 1967): 159. 73. See the discussion (somewhat marred by Cold War mongering) by F. Stern, “Remembering the Uprising,” New York Review of Books, 3 December 1987. 74. Freiligraths Werke in einem Band, ed. W. Ilberg (Berlin and Weimar, 1976), pp. 128–132. 75. W. Hütt, Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, 1819–1869 (Leipzig, 1964), pp. 59–65, 100–101, 117–120; E. Kratz, “Johann Peter Hasenclever, ein Meister der Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” Malkastenblätter, vol. 20, no. 5 (May 1975): 1–5; K. Soiné and W. Albertz, “Die Malerei von Johann Peter Hasenclever” (unpublished diploma thesis for certification to teach in Gymnasien im Lande Niedersachsen, 1977); H. Gagel, “Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule in der politischen Situation des Vormärz und 1848,” in Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, ed. W. von Kalnein, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (1979), pp. 74–75, nos. 91–97; H. Bestvater-Hasenclever, J. P. Hasenclever, ein wacher Zeitgenosse des Biedermeier (Recklinghausen, 1979). The latest work devoted to Hasenclever is a rich compendium of facts relating to his background and career: see S. Geppert and D. Soechting, eds., Johann Peter Hasenclever (1810–1853): Ein Malerleben zwischen Biedermeier und Revolution (Mainz am Rhein, 2003).

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76. Sperber, Rhineland Radicals, pp. 5–6. 77. Hütt, Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, pp. 40–44, 85–104, 120–127. 78. B. S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816–1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 41–42. 79. Ibid., pp. 34–41. 80. I am using Groseclose’s translation, ibid., p. 36. 81. K. Marx, “Financial Failure of Government—Cabs—Ireland—The Russian Question,” New York Daily Tribune, 12 August 1853. See also Eleanor Marx’s comments on the letter in F. Engels and K. Marx, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New York, 1969), p. 7. Marx’s earlier allusion to the Camphausen ministry as “a sort of legal Jobsiade” may also speak to his awareness of Hasenclever’s series based on the satirical epic of Karl Arnold Kortum, or at least attest to a common pool of thematic interests among the Rhenish Left. See Marx and Engels, The Revolution of 1848–1849, p. 177 (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 10 December 1848). 82. For Freiligrath’s correspondence with Marx and Engels touching on Hasenclever’s picture, see M. Häckel, ed., Freiligraths Briefwechsel mit Marx und Engels, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1968), 1:40, 48– 49, 67–68; 2:52, 61–62. 83. R. L. Stehle, “The Düsseldorf Gallery of New York,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 58 (October 1974): 305–314. 84. Catalogue of a Private Collection of Paintings, nos. 3–5, 23, 54–55, 105. 85. “The Exhibition at the Crystal Palace: Honorable Mention,” New York Daily Tribune, 21 January 1853. 86. For Freiligrath’s experiences in London, see R. Ashton, Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (Oxford and New York, 1986), pp. 79–96. 87. Bestvater-Hasenclever, J. P. Hasenclever, pp. 19–51, and Soiné and Albertz, “Die Malerei von Johann Peter Hasenclever,” pp. 98–112, are the most complete accounts of the picture in German sources. See also the pioneering essay by J. Christof Roselt, “‘Arbeiter und Stadtrat’ von Johann Peter Hasenclever,” Romerike Berge, no. 2 (November 1966): 73–79. 88. A. W. Rutledge, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1807–1870: Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues (Philadephia, 1955), p. 94; Crayon 4 (December 1857): 375; Catalogue of an Exhibition by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of Choice Paintings Loaned from Private Galleries of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1877), p. 9, no. 68. For the various peregrinations of the picture and its eventual return to Düsseldorf, see A. Boime, “Social Identity and Political Authority in the Response of Two Prussian Painters to the Revolution of 1848,” Art History 13 (September 1990): 350. 89. “Pictures by the Living Painters of the Schools of all Countries,” Athenaeum, no. 1250 (11 October 1851): 1074–1075. 90. Official Catalogue of the Pictures Contributed to the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in the Picture Gallery of the Crystal Palace (New York, 1853), p. 3, no. 16. 91. One explanation may be Freiligrath’s press and literary connections. He was a friend of Longfellow, Bulwer-Lytton, and William and Marty Howitt, who praised and translated his poems for the Athenaeum in the mid-1850s. See Ashton, Little Germany, pp. 55, 81, 83, 90–92. 92. The fullest information on these events may be found in Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1848, Bilder und Dokumente (Düsseldorf, 1948), pp. 56–57. See also “Aus Düsseldorf,” Düsseldorfer Journal und Kreis-Blatt, 11 October 1848. 93. E. Shinn, The Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1879–1882), 2:30–31. 94. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, undated letter to Hilgers in Dreer’s Collection of Painters and Engravers. 95. Bestvater-Hasenclever, J. P. Hasenclever, pp. 39–40. 96. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1848, pp. 54–56. 97. Ibid., pp. 57–59. Some of this is synthesized and telescoped to meet the exigencies of drama

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in the popular novel by Clara Cohn Viebig, Die Wacht am Rhein (Berlin, 1906), pp. 247, 267. 98. C. G. Brandis, ed., “Briefe von Ernst Moritz Arndt aus dem Frankfurter Parlament,” Deutsche Rundschau 81 (1894): 119. 99. For these and other episodes involving the town halls see C. E. Maurice, The Revolutionary Movement of 1848–9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary and Germany (New York, 1969), pp. 247–248, 402. What makes this work reliable (originally published in 1887) is the author’s debt of gratitude to “the late Dr. Karl Marx” for the kind loan of the run of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. 100. Bestvater-Hasenclever, J. P. Hasenclever. 101. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1848, pp. 31–34. 102. Ibid., pp. 53–54; “Assisenverhandlung zu Düsseldorf,” series on the trial printed in the Düsseldorfer Journal und Kreis-Blatt, 5–8 October 1848. 103. See the ads in the Düsseldorfer Journal und Kreis-Blatt, 4 October 1848. 104. Reproduced in Düsseldorf 1848, between pages 56 and 57. 105. P. Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, 1980), p. 118. For accounts of the Berlin revolution, see R. Stadelmann, Social and Political History of the German 1848 Revolution (Athens, Ohio, 1975); V. Valentin, 1848: Chapters of German History (Hamden, Conn., 1965). 106. O. von Bismarck, The Memoirs, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 1:46. 107. L. Blanc, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870), 1:99–100. 108. J. C. Legge, Rhyme and Revolution in Germany (New York, 1970), pp. 335–337. 109. “Berlins grossen Todten,” Düsseldorfer Kreisblatt und Täglicher Anzeiger, 23 March 1848. 110. The most complete analysis of the picture thus far is C. B. With, “Adolph von Menzel and the German Revolution of 1848,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 42 (1979): 195–214; F. ForsterHahn, “‘Die Aufbahrung der Märzgefallenen’: Menzel’s Unfinished Painting as a Parable of the Aborted Revolution of 1848,” Festschrift Werner Hofmann (Munich, 1988), pp. 221–231; Paret, Art as History, pp. 93–104; Boime, “The Response of Two Prussian Painters to the Revolution of 1848,” 365–383. See also W. Hütt, Adolph von Menzel (Leipzig, 1965), pp. 19– 22; F. Forster-Hahn, “Adolph Menzel’s ‘Daguerreotypical’ Image of Frederick the Great: A Liberal Bourgeois Interpretation of German History,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 260–261; “Authenticity into Ambivalence: The Evolution of Menzel’s Drawings,” Master Drawings 16 (1978): 263–264; E. von Radziewsky, “Menzel—ein Realist?,” in Menzel—der Beobachter, ed. W. Hofmann (Munich, 1982), pp. 20–21. On Menzel generally, see G. Lammel, ed., Exzellenz lassen bitten: Erinnerungen an Adolph Menzel (Leipzig, 1992); C. Keisch and M. U. Riemann-Reyher, eds., Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (New Haven and London, 1996); M. Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London, 2002). 111. A. von Menzel, Briefe, ed. H. Wolff (Berlin, 1914), pp. 126–132. 112. Ibid., pp. 125–126. 113. Here is the complete passage: “Several houses were considerably damaged, for example, one on Freidrichstrasse where I counted 31 shrapnel holes; but the biggest number of all was in the d’Heureuse Pastry Shop on the Kölnische Fischmarkt. In the wide street across from it a strategic barricade had stood, and when the artillery raked the street this house offered its entire front to the grapeshot. I counted, including the windowpanes, over 190 shrapnel holes. On top of that, two grenades had torn considerable holes in the corner wall. And in the same place, in the door of a closed shop next to two boarded shop windows, both not more than 9 feet wide, were 46 bullet holes!” I am using the translation in C. B. With, “Adolph von Menzel: A Study in the Relationship between Art and Politics in NineteenthCentury Germany” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1975), p. 133. 114. In a letter to Arnold of 3 May 1848, he expresses disappointment over his “poor luck” (Pech) in having missed an uprising in Kassel and arriving in Berlin after another had ended. He then makes the remarkable statement: “I regret very much not having experienced one, and

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thereby deepening my feelings and practical knowledge.” This statement would seem to me to exemplify his remoteness and distance from the actual human cost of revolution. Briefe, p. 133. 115. A number of the key events during the March days centered on the balcony of the palace. See H. Jessen, ed., Die deutsche Revolution 1848/49 in Augenzeugenberichten (Düsseldorf, 1969), p. 91. 116. Briefe, pp. 103–104. Menzel apologists for this remark usually point to his curious letter of 7 April 1848 to Puhlmann (Briefe, p. 132) that begins: “Bist du gleich garde—und ich durchaus plebejisch-gesinnt,” which may be roughly translated as, “If you have the mindset of the Civic Guard—and I am thoroughly proletarian-minded . . .” But this phrase, taken out of context, has little meaning and loses the ironic signification it was intended to convey. The fuller statement runs: “Bist du gleich garde—und ich durchaus plebejisch-gesinnt welches Erstere ich hiermit ferner getadelt haben will; so will ich Dir doch wenig verhalten wie ich gestern bei Drake dem Bildmacher draussen gewesen, und habe seine Venus besichtiget . . .” This passage cannot be translated literally, but it negates the self-deprecating prose and turns it against Puhlmann as a form of reverse snobbery. The general sense is this: “If you insist on assuming a military posture I will be deeply critical of you because I am thoroughly plebeian; moreover, I will not hide from you the fact that yesterday I went to see Drake’s naked Venus . . .” In this roundabout form of humorous, flowery language known as “Blödelei,” Menzel puts down Puhlmann for being a stuffed shirt and insists that he is just “plain folks.” Menzel’s letters to Puhlmann (whom he calls “Kriegsgurgel,” or “Old Warhorse”) are almost always written in this satirical vein (see in particular I. Wirth, Mit Adolph Menzel in Berlin [Munich, 1965], p. 81). One letter starts out: “Der Niegesehene an den Niegesehenen” (roughly, “The never-seen to the never-seen”), probably implying that Puhlmann does not visit Menzel often enough or does not invite him frequently enough (Briefe, p. 174). In any case, the remark in the letter of 7 April 1848 cannot be used to support a position of sympathy for the popular classes. At the top of this letter he drew two cartoon figures corresponding to his polar categories: a member of the bourgeois Civic Guard and a regimental guard, suggesting his affiliation with the moderate Berlin Bürgerwehr. Forster-Hahn mentions (“Adolph Menzel’s ‘Daguerreoptypical’ Image,” p. 261) that Menzel did a study of a Red Proletarian that he sent to a friend in Paris, but not knowing what the image looks like we have no way of knowing how the subject was portrayed. We do have his chalk drawing of a Volksredner of ca. 1850, a stereotypical “Communist” of the period with ragged coat and scruffy beard—a decidedly unsympathetic representation akin to Daumier’s contemporary caricatures of Ratapoil, the quintessential agent provocateur. For the reigning governments in Germany the “Volksredner” constituted a menace: “Volksredner gruppieren das Volk um sich.” See Jessen, Die deutsche Revolution, p. 54. 117. Briefe, p. 133, letter to Arnold, 3 May 1848. 118. With, “Adolph von Menzel,” p. 117. 119. Forster-Hahn, “‘Die Aufbahrung der Märzgefallenen,’” p. 230. 120. Quoted in Paret, Art as History, p. 101. 121. Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, p. 43. 122. K. Scheffler, Adolph Menzel (Leipzig, 1938), p. 18. 123. K. Scheffler, Adolph Menzel, Der Mensch/Das Werk (Berlin, 1929), pp. 101–102. 124. With, “Adolph von Menzel,” pp. 31–32. 125. Formerly Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, DDR, Nationalgalerie Gemälde, Zeichnungen Ausstellung (Adolph Menzel, 1980), pp. 332–333, nos. 114, 116. 126. P. Meyerheim, Adolph von Menzel, Erinnerungen von Paul Meyerheim (Berlin, 1906), p. 38; Hofmann, Menzel—der Beobachter, p. 87, no. 432. Some of this argument has been stimulated by M. Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), pp. 39–41.

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127. See G. Bartoschek, “Zur Entstehung des Krönungsbilde,” Nationalgalerie Gemälde, Zeichnungen Ausstellung, p. 55. 128. With, “Adolph von Menzel,” p. 255. 129. Ibid., p. 99. 130. K. Scheffler, Adolph Menzel, Der Mensch/Das Werk, p. 26. 131. Forster-Hahn presents evidence that Menzel did not disapprove of the work nor conceal it from the public, but the fact remains—as she herself agrees—that the memories of the past conjured up by the picture continued to fester in his consciousness. See Forster-Hahn, “‘Die Aufbahrung der Märzgefallenen,’” p. 229. 132. G. Pauli, ed., Alfred Lichtwark: Reisebriefe. Briefe an die Kommission für die Verwaltung der Kunsthalle, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1924), 1:30–31. 133. Marx and Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 123–126, 190–191, 194–195 (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 14 September and 31 December 1848). Much of Marx’s invective here relates to the powerful role of David Hansemann as minister of finance in the Auerswald cabinet.

chapter 8











1. To cite only one critical example: the Salon des Refusés. See A. Boime, “The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art,” Art Quarterly 32 (1969): 411ff. Reflecting the Second Empire’s sympathy for realism, the Salon des Refusés encouraged the aspirations of the second-generation realists. This chapter is a reprise of my earlier essay, “The Second Empire’s Official Realism,” in The European Realist Tradition, ed. G. P. Weisberg (Bloomington, 1982), pp. 31–52, 85–123. 2. G. Weisberg, “The Realist Tradition: Critical Theory and the Evolution of Social Themes,” in The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830–1900, Cleveland Museum of Art (1981), p. 14. For the relative character of realism and its application to specific historical epochs, see N. Hadjinicolaou, “L’Exigence de réalisme au Salon de 1831,” in “Les Réalismes et l’histoire de l’art,” ed. M. Estrella, special issue, Histoire et critique des arts, nos. 4/5 (May 1978): 21ff. The close connection between the government and the arts is seen in one critic’s comment that Nieuwerkerke’s salon had as many generals and deputies (MPs) as artists. See E. Gebaüer, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1855 (Paris, 1855), p. 114, discussing François Biard’s picture (Catalogue du Salon, no. 2561). See also L. Nochlin, “New York, Brooklyn Museum: The Realist Tradition,” Burlington Magazine 122 (1980): 263ff. 3. J. M. Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State (New York, 1996), pp. 1–17. See also R. King, The Judgement of Paris: Manet, Meissonier and an Artistic Revolution (London, 2006). 4. C. Baroche, Second Empire: Notes et souvenirs (Paris, 1921), pp. 356–357; H. de Viel-Castel, Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1942), 1:238–239. This attitude coincided with that of the champion of the realists, Castagnary. See J. Castagnary, Salons, 1857–1879, 2 vols. (Paris 1892), 1:105–106. 5. D. G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 1852–1870 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 5ff.; R. C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871 (New York and London, 1935), pp. 41ff. For the interest in photography, see The Second Empire: Art in France under Napoleon III, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1978), pp. 401ff. The court had its official photographer, Comte Olympe Aguado. 6. D. I. Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda under the Second Empire (San Jose, 1969), p. 78. Realism, of course, was not the exclusive concern of the Beaux-Arts program but rather constituted a major component of the official Salon style. Members of the imperial family privately relished eighteenth-century imagery, as well as the erotic pictures of a Cabanel or a Galimard. Galimard’s Léda, purchased by the emperor from the Salon of 1857, provoked a lively scandal (Catalogue du Salon de 1857, no. 1092, “La Séduction de Léda”). Proudhon, Courbet’s friend, was shocked by it and does not even bother to mention the name of the painter. See P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination

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sociale (Paris, 1865), p. 262. The imperial family also stimulated the medieval fantasies of Viollet-le-Duc, but this reflected their desire to secure legitimacy through identification with the great dynasties of the past. Second Empire medievalism was mainly expressed through architecture, but there was a conservative type of religious painting tied to the government’s renewed links with the church. The eighteenth-century taste—even when translated by a Chaplin—was related to the old decor of the imperial palaces and the personal preference of the empress. See E. A. Vizetelly, The Court of the Tuileries, 1852–1870 (London, 1912), pp. 159– 163; S. O. Simches, Le Romantisme et le gout esthétique du XVllle siècle (Paris, 1964), p. 3; Charleton, Positivist Thought in France, pp. 12, 14, 67–70; A. Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (London and New Haven, 1980), pp. 266–271, 298. 7. For the Second Empire’s universal expositions, see P. Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven and London, 1987). 8. M. Z. Brooke, Le Play: Engineer and Social Scientist (London, 1970), p. 60. 9. W. Walton, France at the Crystal Palace (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992). 10. Archives Nationales, F21.519, Mercey’s draft for a report; Exposition Universelle de 1855, Catalogue du Salon de 1855, Prince Jérôme Napoléon’s speech of 29 December 1853, p. xiii. 11. F. B. de Mercey, Etudes sur les Beaux-Arts, 3 vols. (Paris, 1855–1857), 3:192–93. 12. For Haussmann see D. H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, 1972); D. P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), pp. 23–78; M. Carmona, Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris (Chicago, 2002). 13. G.-E. Haussmann, Mémoires, intro. F. Choay (Paris, 2000), p. 825. 14. C. Merruau, Souvenirs de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris 1848–1852 (Paris, 1875), p. 188. 15. The pioneer scholar of prostitution in Paris, Parent-Duchâtelet, wrote: “Prostitutes are as inevitable in a great urban center as are sewers, roads, and rubbish dumps. The attitude of the authorities should be the same in regard to the former as to the latter.” Quoted in V. Rounding, Grandes Horizontales (London, 2003), pp. 9–10. 16. Haussmann, Mémoires, p. 825. 17. Merruau, Souvenirs, p. 496. 18. K. Marx and V. I. Lenin, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York, 1988), p. 78. 19. D. J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art (New Haven and London, 1986), pp. 43–44. 20. Catalogue du Salon de 1853 (Paris, 1853), pp. 9ff. 21. J. Breton, La Vie d’un artiste (Paris, 1890), pp. 226–227. 22. P. de La Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, 7 vols. (Paris, 1899–1905), 1:53, 2:106ff.; T. Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (London, 1958), p. 5. 23. B. A. Granier de Cassagnac, Souvenirs du Second Empire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1879–1882), 2:84–85. 24. Papiers et correspondance de la famille impériale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1870), 1:27ff. See also the report from the prefect of police to the soon-to-be emperor in October 1852 (ibid., 3:283): “The Empire is accomplished, it will be proclaimed, but it is necessary that it be done soon, that it be done tomorrow; for the sake of everyone concerned it must be done to put a halt to the rumors and threats of criminal assault, to close the door forever on ambitious types who conspire in the shadows, to bring home the doubtful, convince the indifferent persons, and to seal forever the attachments which are certainly sincere but which may still anticipate the possibility of a change in regime. Finally, it must be done to perpetuate the great enterprise of the Emperor. . . .” 25. A. Lireux, Assemblée Nationale Comique (Paris, 1850), pp. 219, 360–362. 26. Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class, pp. 38ff.; also the excellent study by N. Isser, The Second Empire and the Press (The Hague, 1974). See also I. Collins, The Government and the

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Newspaper Press in France, 1814–1881 (Oxford, 1959), chapters 10 and 11, pp. 115ff., 136ff. 27. Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 45ff.; Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 19ff. 28. La Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, 2:82–83; Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 58ff.; Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 25ff. 29. La Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, 1:118; Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 125ff.; Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 27–28. 30. Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 80ff.; Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 15ff. I am using Professor Robert Herbert’s happy turn of phrase here. 31. Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 86ff. As an illustration of press manipulation in connection with the brochures, we may note that Le Siècle, informed by About, claimed that the pamphlet was authorized by the government, while Le Pays denounced this claim as erroneous, declaring that the government did all it could to prevent the pamphlet (which had been published in Brussels) from being circulated in France. Later, About wrote La Prusse en 1860 in collaboration with Fould and Napoléon III, yet at the meeting with the German princes at BadenBaden in June 1860, the emperor attacked About’s views and lamented its publication. 32. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 33. Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III, pp. 16–17. Persigny early signaled to the prefects the need to gain support of the masses in favor of Bonapartist candidates. A draft of his letter of 1852 for local elections sums up the government’s policy: “It matters little that a few notorious enemies should be elected to the conseil général, what matters is that there should be no canton where the hand of the government has not at least sapped the foundations on which the old influences rested. . . . Overthrow the hold of the old influences on the minds of the people. . . . Do not fear to fight against old parties . . . our business above all is to create a [new] party.” 34. Papiers et correspondance de la famille impériale, 1:257ff. 35. A. Poulet-Malassis, Papiers secrets et correspondance du Second Empire (Paris, 1877), pp. 315, 345. 36. Sainte-Beuve observed that most working writers already belonged to the Société des Gens de Lettres, an organization that, for modest dues, admitted all authors who published at least one volume. Its leadership, however, was weak, and the steering committee scarcely had the opportunity to consider the material interests of hard-up colleagues. The Société des Auteurs Dramatiques was somewhat more specialized but differed from the other in name only, and the two could be easily fused. The emperor, with his ample skills of persuasion, would win them over handily, as shown in the case of other kinds of laborers. 37. Sainte-Beuve’s plans for organizing writers also included close contacts with artists. His secretary, Jules Troubat, knew Champfleury intimately, and through him Max Buchon—both intimate friends of Courbet’s. In fact, Champfleury was a protégé of Sainte-Beuve’s, and it was he who persuaded Sainte-Beuve to hire Troubat. Champfleury was also a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres, and Troubat claimed that through him Sainte-Beuve mediated between the apostles of realism and the critics. J. Troubat, Une amitié à la D’Arthez (Paris, 1900), pp. 31ff., 270, 153ff., et passim. 38. Isser, The Second Empire, p. 11; P. Barbier and F. Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons, 8 vols. (Paris, 1957–1959), 8:74–75, 76–78, 88, 127–130; Poulet-Malassis, Papiers secrets, pp. 200ff. The administration’s obsession with popular songs and its peculiar approach to culture is seen again later on, when during the so-called Liberal Empire the problem of the Marseillaise came up. The El Dorado, a popular café-concert, asked for permission to allow its performers to sing the national anthem. The bureaucrat who prepared the report noted that there were two opinions on the case within the government ranks. One faction thought that the government should give a positive authorization and thereby eliminate the rebellious potential of the song. The opposing government faction advanced the opinion that, given the present state of mind, the proliferation of performances of the Marseillaise in public places “would be a new and dangerous source of stimulation. Its exclusively revolutionary character is only too well known and accepted to hope that the generosity of the government

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would neutralize its impact” (Poulet-Malassis, Papiers secrets, pp. 200–202). It was the latter view that ultimately prevailed. 39. Poulet-Malassis, Papiers secrets, pp. 202–207. 40. Ibid., p. 205. 41. E. P. Spencer, “The Academic Point of View in the Second Empire,” in Courbet and the Naturalistic Movement, ed. G. Boas (New York, 1967), pp. 64ff.; P. de Chennevières, “Le Comte de Nieuwerkerke,” in Souvenirs d’un directeur des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1883–1889), 2nd part, pp. 92ff. 42. F. Ravaisson, “De l’enseignement du dessin dans les lycées,” Le Moniteur universel, 18–19 January 1854. 43. J. C. Sloane, French Painting between the Past and the Present (Princeton, 1951), pp. 24ff.; H. C. and C. A. White, Canvases and Careers (New York, 1965), pp. 95–96. 44. C. H. Stranahan, A History of French Painting (New York, 1888), p. 265. 45. Catalogue du Salon de 1853, pp. 10–11; Catalogue du Salon de 1857, p. xxxiii. For views of the government at the Salons, see Sloane, French Painting, pp. 44ff. The emperor’s attempt that year to win over the artistic community is shown by the 40 Légion d’honneur decorations, 240 medals and 222 honorable mentions. 46. Catalogue du Salon de 1853, p. 11. 47. Ibid., pp. 7–9, 11. 48. Exposition Universelle de 1855, Catalogue du Salon de 1855, pp. vii ff. 49. Ibid., pp. xlv ff. 50. Catalogue du Salon de 1857, pp. xxx ff., xxxviii; Brooke, Le Play, pp. 60–61. Le Play was an engineer who taught at the Ecole des Mines and later became a sociologist who did pioneering fieldwork among the Parisian and foreign working classes and peasant populations. His work was biased by his desire to find the “ideal,” morally upright working-class and peasant family and to elevate this type to the norm under the Second Empire. His “consensus” type characterized still another example of Second Empire propaganda and its influence on contemporary social science. 51. Catalogue du Salon de 1859, pp. viii ff. 52. Ibid., p. ix. By 1857 the government assumed a negative stance to bring the younger generation into line with its view of realism. Fould was gratified in 1859 to find that while no great genius had yet emerged, there was an absence of those “presumptuous singularities which a false taste inspires.” There was more study, less haste; fewer ébauches were presented as serious efforts. The return to sane conditions reflected the emperor’s solicitude and the administration’s policy and merited the praise of the “enlightened public.” That year Daubigny, an imperial favorite, earned a rappel of the first-class medal, and Breton and Armand Leleux received rappels of the second-class medal. 53. Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III, p. 104. 54. Catalogue du Salon de 1863, pp. viii ff. 55. Archives Nationales, F21.486, draft for a report to the minister of state (1862) outlining the progress of the English: “The International Exhibition at London demonstrates a quite remarkable progress in thc taste of English manufacturers. Those English products which are based on design, if they have not yet surpassed our analogous manufactures, are making giant strides toward them. . . .” See also A. de Beaumont, “Les Arts industriels en France et l’exposition de 1863,” Revue des deux mondes, 2e pér., t. 47 (September–October 1863): 986– 1001; A. Boime, “The Teaching Reforms of 1863 and the Origins of Modernism in France,” Art Quarterly 1 (1977): 5, 9. 56. Catalogue du Salon de 1864, pp. viii, x. 57. Ibid., pp. xiii–xiv. 58. Already in 1854 Auguste Couder, member of the Academy and government partisan, proposed at one of the Academy’s weekly meetings the following topics for the Prix Bordin:

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“On the Influence of the Graphic Arts on Industry” and “On the Influence of Journalism on the Fine Arts.” Both themes showed the major preoccupations of the government in its desire to direct the course of the arts. See Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Procès-Verbaux, January 1851–December 1855, Séance of 19 August 1854. The final selection, “De l’influence des arts du dessin sur l’industrie,” was announced in 1856. See L’Institut: Académie des Beaux-Arts, Séances publiques 13 (1854–1858), Programme . . . (7 October 1854): 13ff. The conditions stipulated that essays had first to analyze those qualities which distinguished the products of French industry and to seek out their roots; then to indicate the advantages resulting from these qualities both for the honor of the nation and for its resources; and finally to propose suggestions for helping preserve France’s high place in industry, for strengthening it, and for encouraging fine artists to inspire with their example the industrial sector of the economy that contributes to industrial expansion. Clearly, this was an unusual project for the Academy and especially for the launching of a new prize. 59. Boime, “The Teaching Reforms,” pp. 2–3, 27 (notes 15–16); “An Unpublished Petition Exemplifying the Oneness of the Community of Nineteenth Century French Artists,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 345ff. 60. J. Guiffrey and M. J. Barthélemy, Liste des pensionnaires, 1663–1907 (Paris, 1908), pp. 121, 124. 61. Boime, “The Teaching Reforms,” pp. 1ff.; M. Ivens, “La Liberté guidant l’artiste,” Les Révoltés logiques, no. 11 (Winter 1979–1980): pp. 48ff. 62. T. Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870), 2:375–376. 63. P. de Saint-Victor, “L’Académie des Beaux-Arts et les réformes,” La Presse 8–9 ( January 1864). Saint-Victor was a confirmed Bonapartist and was later made inspector-general in the Ministry of Fine Arts. See Sloane, French Painting, p. 225. 64. E. Chesneau, Le Décret du 13 novembre et l’Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1864). Chesneau, a protégé of Nieuwerkerke and of Saint-Victor, worked at the Louvre and wrote for Le Constitutionnel starting in 1863. He collaborated with Duveyrier—one of the other government pamphleteers—on the Grande Encyclopédie and wrote an essay on Morny’s collection as well as on a luxury edition of the imperial collection at Compiègne. In 1869 he was appointed an inspector of fine arts. Chesneau dedicated his book on Carpeaux to Nieuwerkerke, drawing attention to their more than twenty years of “constante amitié.” See Chesneau, Le Statuaire J.-B. Carpeaux, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1880), pp. i–ii. Also Sloane, French Painting, pp. 49, 219. 65. Chesneau, Le Décret, pp. 14ff. 66. Chesneau, “Le Réalisme et l’esprit français dans l’art,” Revue des deux mondes, 2e pér., t. 46 (1 July 1863): 218ff. 67. Ibid., pp. 229ff. My understanding of Champfleury’s brand of realism has been greatly enhanced by T. J. Clark, Image of the People (Greenwich, Conn., 1973), pp. 53ff. 68. Chesneau, “Le Réalisme,” p. 237. Still further indication of a concerted effort on the part of the government-inspired hacks to prepare the public for the reforms is Sainte-Beuve’s article on Champfleury in the Moniteur on 5 January 1863. Anticipating several of the arguments of Chesneau, Sainte-Beuve insisted on the charm of realism for serious minds but emphasized that it needed to be “refreshed” by “style” and feeling. Further: “You (i.e., realism) also need . . . a certain something which fulfills and completes you, which corrects without falsifying you, which elevates you without making you lose contact with the earth, which gives you all the spirit possible without ceasing for a moment to appear natural, which leaves you still recognizable to all, but more luminous, more adorable and more beautiful than ordinarily in life—in short, that which is called the ideal.” See C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, “Les Frères Le Nain: Peintres sous Louis XIII par M. Champfleury,” in Nouveaux lundis, 13 vols. (Paris, 1864–1878), 4:137–38. 69. T. E. Duval, Jr., The Subject of Realism in the “Revue des deux mondes,” 1831–1865 (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 46ff. 70. Archives Nationales, F21.487, “Rapport à Son Excellence le Ministre d’Etat” [1856].

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71. Champfleury, Le Réalisme (Paris, 1857), p. 275; E. Duranty, “Notes sur l’art,” Réalisme, 10 July 1856; “Esquisse de la méthode des travaux,” Réalisme, 15 November 1856; “M. Max Buchon et le réalisme,” Réalisme, 15 December 1856. 72. G. Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre (Paris, 1906), p. 133; Courbet raconté par lui-meme et par ses amis, ed. P. Courthion, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1948–1950), 2:205. 73. E. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art (Paris, 1868), pp. 224–225. 74. O. Merson, La Peinture en France (Paris, 1861), pp. 63ff. 75. Ibid., p. 81. 76. Ibid., pp. 66, 69ff. 77. Ibid., p. 87. 78. E. About, Salon de 1864 (Paris, 1864), pp. 74ff. 79. See the excellent study by C. C. Hungerford, “Ernest Meissonier’s First Military Paintings: 1: ‘The Emperor Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino,’” Arts Magazine 54 ( January 1980): 89ff. Also A. Boime, “New Light on Manet’s Execution of Maximilian,” Art Quarterly 36 (1973): 178. 80. O. Gréard, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, ses souvenirs, ses entretiens (Paris, 1897), pp. 39ff., 242, 260, 262. 81. Merson, La Peinture en France, pp. 66ff.; D. Bernasconi, “Mythologie d’Abd-el-Kader dans l’iconographie française au XIXe siècle,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6e pér., t. 77 (1971): 51ff. (Bernasconi erroneously attributes the painting to Horace Vernet [ibid., p. 56, fig. 10].) 82. Naturally, the civilizing influence of the colonists converts the “heathen,” and thus it is that French Christians could ask for and receive the protection of Abd el Kader during the massacres in Damascus in July 1860. 83. For Gérôme, see G. M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, with a Catalogue Raisonné (London, 1986), pp. 44–77, 78–83. 84. M. Etienne-Gallois, L’Ambassade de Siam au XVlle siècle (Paris, 1862), pp. 181ff.; C. Meyniard, Le Second Empire en Indo-Chine (Paris, 1891), pp. 228ff., 262ff., 265n, 403ff., 443ff.; G. M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dayton Art Institute (1972), pp. 54–55; Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Second Empire, pp. 307–308; Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, pp. 214–215. 85. No mention of the political implications of Courbet’s work in the Salon of 1850–1851 can omit reference to T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Greenwich, Conn., 1973). 86. See Meyniard, Le Second Empire en Indo-Chine, pp. 316ff., 319–320, for the implications of the gifts from the perspective of the Siamese (although actual reference is to 1856 rather than to 1861). Gérôme, of course, was the paradigm of the younger generation of academic painters carefully cultivated by the regime. During 1848 he was a moderate republican, participating in the contest for an image of the Republic but also serving in the National Guard during the June Days. The commission for the Siamese delegation opened the doors to him at Compiègne, where he often designed charades and staged tableaux vivants for the court. While working on the commission he married the daughter of Goupil, the famous art dealer and print publisher who also happened to be a fanatical Bonapartist. Gérôme developed a reputation for depicting ethnic types, but it should be noted that he sometimes ran diplomatic errands during his voyages to the Near East. Napoléon III made concerted efforts to maintain and increase the French influence in this area, and Gérôme’s photographic approach suited the more modern colonizing techniques of the emperor than the blushingly romantic and exotic images of Delacroix. 87. C. Moreau-Vauthier, Gérôme, peintre et sculpteur (Paris, 1906), pp. 100ff.; T. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 2 vols. (Paris, 1855–1856), 1:218ff. 88. Quoted in Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, p. 3. 89. Archives Nationales, F21.83, dossier “M. Gérôme, tableau: Le Siècle d’Auguste, 30 8bre 1852,

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20,000 francs.” 90. The final price, 20,000 francs, would have represented a small fortune for the twenty-eightyear-old artist. 91. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 2:35ff.; P. Petroz, L’Art et la critique en France depuis 1822 (Paris, 1875), pp. 164–166. One of their favorite targets for satire was Ingres; see Moreau-Vauthier, Gérôme, p. 100 and 100n. 92. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Second Empire, pp. 63–64, 259–260; Merson, La Peinture en France, pp. 23ff. 93. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 1:218. 94. Hamon’s first job was at the Sèvres manufactory, where he worked as a potter and a decorator during the years 1848–1852. In 1852 the government’s purchase of The Human Comedy freed him to work full time as a Salon artist. See E. Hoffmann, Jean-Louis Hamon, peintre (1821–1874), with a preface by Gérôme (Paris, 1903), pp. 58ff., 64–65. But he continued to work independently on porcelain in the shop of Deck and later moved in the circle of Bracquemond. This would suggest that the taste for “Japonisme” is related to the decorative aims of the Neo-Greek movement and forges another link between Gleyre’s first-generation disciples and the second, who became known as the impressionists. 95. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 2:42. 96. J. Breton, La Vie d’un artiste (Paris, 1890), pp. 257–258; Hoffmann, Jean-Louis Hamon, pp. 70ff., 89, 92; Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Second Empire, pp. 313–314. 97. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 2:44. 98. M. Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (1941): 175–76; R. Ponton, “Les Images de la paysannerie dans le roman rural à la fin du 19e siècle,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 17/18 (November 1977): 62 and 62n. 99. Merson, La Peinture en France, pp. 198–199. 100. T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Greenwich, Conn., 1973), pp. 120–121; G. Duby and A. Wallon, Histoire de la France rurale, 4 vols. (Paris, 1976), vol. 3, Apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne, 1789–1914, p. 360. 101. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1969), pp. 18, 75. 102. Merson, La Peinture en France, pp. 183ff. 103. Ibid., pp. 188–189. 104. Ibid., pp. 190–191. 105. For the background on this project, see the excellent piece by G. M. Ackerman, “Three Drawings by Gérôme in the Yale Collection,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 36 (Fall 1976): 8ff. 106. E. Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-meme, 3 vols. (Paris, 1921), 2:47–54. 107. Gautier, who saw the designs in 1858, wrote: “The pope, a railway carriage!—Strange juxtaposition of terms, which sum up so well the present epoch: the old spirit and the modern spirit, the immutable tradition blessing infinite progress.” See Gautier, “A travers les ateliers,” L’Artiste, nouv. sér., t. 4 (1858): 18. Strange juxtaposition indeed! The Pope, Pius IX, was the same reactionary who promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and the Syllabus of Errors, who condemned material progress and the open society. The original order for the wagon came down from the Società Pio-Latino that built a railroad from Rome to Frascati within the Papal States. The pope only permitted a few short lines in papal territory for fear that larger lines would contribute to political unification of Italy. That his concerns were related to events in France is certain: the following year Napoléon III assisted the Risorgimento by combating the Austrians at Solferino and Magenta, and his approval of the annexation of part of the papal territory to the new Kingdom of Italy unleashed a violent campaign against him on the part of conservative Catholics at home and abroad. Pius IX’s benediction on industrial progress and the cooperation of the French in the production of his special gift wagon must have been seen by both sides as a gesture of friendly persuasion.

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At the very least, it represented a major concession on the part of Pius IX to the industrial expansion promoted by Napoléon III. 108. Baunard, Un siècle de église de France, 1800–1900 (Paris, 1901), pp. 160, 228–229. 109. G. P. Palmade, French Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century, trans. G. M. Holmes (Newton Abbot, Devon, 1972), pp. 122ff., 155. 110. Arts Council of Great Britain, Gustave Courbet, 1819–1877 (London, 1978), p. 36; Courthion, Courbet raconté par lui-meme, 1:163–164. 111. Isser, The Second Empire, pp. 34ff., 61–62, 123ff. 112. C. Duveyrier, L’Avenir et les Bonaparte (Paris, 1864). 113. Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 69ff. 114. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 115. Archives Nationales, F21.83, dossier “M. Génod, peinture. Inondations de Lyon, 17 8bre 1857, 2000 francs. Musée de Lyon (Rhône).” Génod wrote to the minister of state on 9 October 1857 to persuade the administration to purchase his Une scène des inondations des Brotteaux, which he referred to as “Cette oeuvre toute gouvernementale,” and further reminded the minister that he was a professor at the Ecole Impériale des Beaux-Arts at Lyons. A second letter, dated 10 October, proved to be the clincher: “As professor of an imperial school, I wish only to have the honor to show Lyons as well as my students that the Emperor’s government knows how to appreciate the works of a Lyonnais master.” 116. Archives Nationales, F21.66, dossier “M. Bouguereau, peinture. Entrée de l’Empereur à Tarascon, 14 juin 1856, 5000 francs (Musée de Tarascon, Bouches-du-Rhône),” rough draft of a letter dated 14 June 1856 to the prefect of the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône. See also M. Vachon, W. Bouguereau (Paris, 1900), pp. 85–86. 117. See the Salon catalogue entry under Lassalle, Catalogue du Salon de 1857, no. 1585. Also E. F. Fleury, Souvenirs, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897), 1:345ff. 118. See R. Rosenblum’s discussion in French Painting 1774–1830: The Age of Revolution, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (1975), pp. 492–93. 119. L. A. Loubère, Radicalism in Mediterranean France (Albany, 1974), p. 52. 120. “Partie non officielle,” Le Moniteur universel, 10 June 1856; Catalogue du Salon de 1857, nos. 58 and 1976; Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, Jean-Pierre Antigna (Orléans, 1978), no. 18. 121. For the insurrection at Trélazé and the Marianne, see the following: “Faits divers,” La Presse, 2 September 1855; “Tribunal de police: Correctionnelle d’Angers; Affaire dite des carrières,” Le Constitutionnel, 23 September 1855; F. Attibert, Quatre ans à Cayenne, ed. L. Watteau (Brussels, 1859), pp. xxv, 5ff.; H. Chabanne, Evasion de L’île du Guiane (Guyane française), Paris, 1862; Guerre à l’ignorance (Pouilly-sur-Loire [Nièvre], 1867); F. Remi, La Marianne dans les campagnes (Auxerre, 1881), p. 53; F. Simon, La Marianne, société secrète au pays d’Anjou (Angers, 1939), pp. 41 and 41n, 46, 49ff., 79ff., 83ff., 101ff., 118; J. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964–1966), 1:116–17, 166–67; 2:372–73; 3:77, 396; M. Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L’Imagerie et la symbolique républiçaine de 1789 à 1880 (Paris, 1979), p. 17. For a government-subsidized, arch-conservative view of the Marianne, see the anonymously published La Marianne; ou La Jacquerie de toutes les époques (Paris, 1856). 122. “Cours et tribunaux—Société secrète.—Ramifications de la Marianne dans La Nièvre.— Onze prévenus,” La Presse, 31 August 1855; “Tribunaux,” Le Siècle, 31 August 1855; “Tribunal de police: Correctionnelle d’Angers; Affaire dite des carrières,” Le Constitutionnel, 23 September 1855. 123. “Partie non officielle,” Le Moniteur universel, 13 June 1856. Emphasis mine. 124. La Marianne; ou La Jacquerie, p. xi. 125. Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 2:102. 126. Quoted in “Faits divers,” Le Moniteur universel, 6 June 1856: “It is literally impossible to say how enthusiastic the reception was for His Majesty on the entire route of his itinerary: the

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cries of Vive l’Empereur! resounded from everywhere . . . the entire population has made a point of thanking the sovereign for the happy thought which brought him to us, bearing consolations and hope. . . . At each step, the Emperor encountered the suffering victims ruined by the flood, who beseeched him for aid; His Majesty was accompanied by General Niel, his aide-de-camp, who held a sack of gold, and he plunged an open hand into it and gave to all the unfortunates a first aid destined to sweeten their present afflictions.” 127. Catalogue du Salon de 1857, no. 1424. 128. Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision, pp. 225, 263ff. 129. Paris, Archives Nationales, F21.16, dossier “Mlle R. Bonheur, peinture. Animaux dans un pâturage, 2 juillet 1848, 3000 francs.” The work was completed in 1849. In his report to the minister on 18 April 1849, Inspector of Fine Arts Garraud called the painter number one in the animal field and emphasized that the animals in her picture “are treated in a very remarkable style and the entire work expressed a genuine feeling for nature.” 130. As I have shown elsewhere, her foregrounding of animals, subordination of the male human in comparison, cross-dressing, and championing of women’s rights are related to her samesex inclinations: animals allowed her to get beyond the compartmentalized gender roles of the period. See A. Boime, “The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Art History 4 (December 1981): 384–409. 131. The Horse Fair was involved in controversy over its original destination: Bonheur claimed that that she presented it to the state for purchase but Morny turned it down, while others claimed that the state offered to purchase it but she went elsewhere for a better offer. Either way, there is no question that Bonheur painted it with the Second Empire taste in mind. For a summary of the issues, see G. P. Weisberg, “Rosa Bonheur’s Reception in England and America: The Popularization of a Legend and the Celebration of a Myth,” in Rosa Bonheur: All Nature’s Children, Dahesh Museum (New York, 1998), p. 1, n. 2. 132. E. A. Vizetelly, The Court of the Tuileries, 1852–1870 (London, 1912), pp. 300ff., 304–305, 309– 310. 133. H. Delaborde, “Salon de 1853,” in Mélanges sur l’art contemporain (Paris, 1866), pp. 81–83. 134. Breton, La Vie d’un artiste, pp. 194, 197, 199, 206; A. B. Lacouture, Jules Breton: Painter of Peasant Life (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 59–77. 135. Breton, La Vie d’un artiste, pp. 214–15, 226–27; Weisberg, The Realist Tradition, pp. 82ff.; Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts, 2:62. Breton felt proud of the fact that he had eliminated the traditional biblical reference from his work—that he did the first modern picture of gleaners. Yet he certainly idealized rural chores. He preferred crepuscular moments when figures could be silhouetted and the effects of labor diluted. Discussing his Weeders, he recalled the original twilight scene that inspired it: “It was like a natural transfiguration of the humblest of labors.” He added further that never before did he understand so clearly “that work is a prayer.” See Breton, Un peintre paysan (Paris, 1896), p. 111. 136. A. M., “Salon de 1861,” L’Illustration 38 (31 August 1861): 136. 137. Breton, Un peintre paysan, p. 281. 138. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art, p. 300. The different attitudes of Breton and Millet on the question of work is related to their class backgrounds. Although both came from conservative well-to-do families, Millet’s father was a farmer who worked the land, while Breton’s father managed estates and workers for an aristocratic landowner. (For Breton’s family and background, see Lacouture, Jules Breton, pp. 21–36.) Breton’s discomfort in the presence of poor people and indigents is revealed in his childhood memories of a trip he made with his father to collect payment from woodcutters and lumber merchants. See Breton, La Vie d’un artiste, pp. 93ff., 98. 139. G. P. Weisberg, “François Bonhommé and Early Realist Images of Industrialization, 1830– 1870,” Arts Magazine 50 (April 1980): 133–34. 140. Weisberg, “François Bonhommé,” p. 133; Kulstein, Napoleon III, pp. 85–87.

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141. Archives Nationales, F21.65, 120; J. F. Schnerb, “François Bonhommé,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 4e sér., t. 9 ( January 1913): 11ff.; ibid. (February 1913): 132ff.; K. Janke and M. Wagner, “Das Verhältnis von Arbeiter und Maschinerie im Industriebild: Rekonstruktion einer Bilderfolge zur Schwerindustrie von François Bonhommé,” Kritische Berichte 5–6 (1976): 5ff.; L. Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (New York, 1977), pp. 111ff.; P. Le Nouëne, “Les Soldats de l’industrie de François Bonhommé: L’Idéologie d’un projet,” in “Les Réalismes et l’histoire de l’art,” ed. M. Estrella, special issue, Histoire et critique des arts, nos. 4 /5 (May 1978): 35ff.; Weisberg, “Bonhommé,” pp. 132ff.; Weisberg, The Realist Tradition, pp. 71ff. 142. Weisberg, “Bonhommé,” pp. 134–135. For the relationship between Schneider’s position in society and his taste, see A. Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, ed. E. C. Carter II, R. Forster, and J. N. Moody (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 139, 141. Schneider typifies the new breed cultivated by the Second Empire; the son of a notary, he served his apprenticeship in a bank and as manager of a local ironworks. Then with his brother as the financier and negotiator, he laid the foundations of the great complex at Le Creusot, which became the leading producers of locomotives, steel rails, machinery, and armaments in France. He represented Le Creusot in the Legislative Assembly during the period 1852–1870 and held the appointed offices of minister of agriculture, commerce, and public works (during the presidency of Louis-Napoléon), and later, president of the legislature. The government named him to committees for the organization of the World’s Fairs and revered him as the founder of an immense industrial complex. 143. This approach is expressed in his own descriptions of pictures of Le Creusot prepared for the Ecole des Mines: “1er tableau: le marteau pilon, machines et figures; 2ème tableau: vue générale du Creusot, exploitation figures; 3ème tableau: forge de laminoirs à rails, figures.” See Archives Nationales, F21.65, letter from Bonhommé to Tournois, 16 June 1857, and the accompanying sketches. 144. Morny started buying Meissonier’s work in 1852: see C. C. Hungerford, “The Art of JeanLouis-Ernest Meissonier: A Study of the Critical Years 1834 to 1855” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1977), pp. 312–14, nos. 43–44, 46, 50. For Morny’s direct contact with the painter (although at a later date), see Gréard, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, p. 287. Three of the seven works Meissonier exhibited in the World’s Fair of 1855 belonged to Morny. 145. C. C. Hungerford, “Ernest Meissonier’s First Military Paintings: II: ‘1814, The Campaign of France,’” Arts Magazine 54 ( January 1980): 98ff. 146. M. de Maupas, Mémoires sur le Second Empire (Paris, 1884), pp. 526, 530–531; I. de SaintAmand, Napoleon III and His Court (New York, 1898), pp. 55ff. Une rixe, also unusual in its tumult, enjoyed a great success at the 1855 World’s Fair. It shows two men putting an end to a fight in a cabaret. The central character, who steps in between the two rowdies and disarms the one at the right, bears a distinct resemblance to the emperor himself. We may recall that at this moment he was not only insuring peace at home by suppressing all factionalism but also waging war in the Crimea and intervening between Turkey and Russia. No wonder that he and Prince Albert—his ally in the Crimea—loved this work; the emperor bought it for 25,000 francs—astronomical for a genre picture—and then presented it to Albert as a gift. 147. Naturally, the relationship between the first Napoléon and his nephew was earnestly advertised at the outset of the Bonapartist campaign, but it was gradually modified to demonstrate that Napoléon III could stand on his own two feet. The meaning of the pendants by Meissonier is anticipated in the following statement by a Bonapartist apologist: “Un jour viendra peut-être où, au point de vue des intérêts de l’humanité, le plus beau titre de gloire de Napoléon Ier, ce sera d’avoir été le précurseur de Napoléon III.” In C. Sosthène-Berthellot, Essai sur le caractère et les tendances de l’Empereur Napoléon III (Paris, 1858), p. 339. For the Solferino commission and its background, see Hungerford, “Ernest Meissonier’s First Mili-

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tary Paintings: I: ‘The Emperor Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino,’” Arts Magazine 54 ( January 1980): 89–90; Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 115–121; M. J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, 1996), pp. 150–151.

chapter 9













1. Manet’s close friend, the poet and critic Zacharie Astruc, wrote in an 1860 exhibition review: “Tradition is only a pale principle of teaching; romanticism, a soul without a body, a curiosity of the library that cannot be of the slightest general practical usage. The future therefore entirely belongs to the young generation. They love the truth and devote all their ardor to it. The things made directly after nature have neithere time or place. They will never go out of date and will remain beautiful!” Z. Astruc, Le Salon intime: Exposition au boulevard des Italiens (Paris, 1860), p. 108. 2. I am using E. Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. B M. Sherman (New York, 1964), pp. 1–54. 3. Ibid., p. 3. 4. Toché’s notes were published in A. Vollard, Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux (Paris, 1937), pp.170–180. See also B. A. Brombert, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston and New York, 1996), for partial translation, pp. 370–371. 5. Quoted in Brombert, Edouard Manet, p. 376. 6. J. Baudot, Renoir, ses amis, ses modèles (Paris, 1949), p. 53. 7. E. Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même, 2 vols. (Paris, 1926), 1:12–13; Manet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, ed. P. Courthion and P. Cailler, 2 vols. (Lausanne, 1953), 1:43. 8. Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même, 1:16. 9. This idea was inspired by Brombert, Edouard Manet, chapter 3 et passim. 10. Ibid., 2:102–103. 11. N. Locke, Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton and Oxford, 2001), pp. 116–118. This possibility is contested by Brombert, Edouard Manet, pp. 98–100. 12. A. Proust, “Edouard Manet: Souvenirs,” La Revue blanche, February–May 1897, p. 168. In the expanded version of 1913, Proust left out this particular recollection. 13. M. J. Brisset, “Le Pêcheur des bords du Seine,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 8 vols. (Paris, 1840–1842), 2:116. 14. Brombert, Edouard Manet, p. 211. 15. A. Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (London and New Haven, 1980), pp. 458–473. 16. A. Boime and A. Kossolapov, “Manet’s Lost Infanta,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 42 (2003): 407–418. The precise picture he copied has not been documented, but most Manet specialists agree that he painted The Infanta when he registered in 1859 to copy. 17. A. C. Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition (New Haven, 1977), pp. 155–156 and n. 108. 18. T. Reff, “Copyists in the Louvre, 1850–1870,” Art Bulletin 46 (December 1964): 556; J. S. Boggs, “Degas Notebooks at the Bibliothèque Nationale II: Group B (1858–1861),” Burlington Magazine 100 ( June 1958): 196, 200. 19. Boime, Thomas Couture, pp. 408, 410–414, 417–424, 468–469, 478–479. See also D. Rouart and D. Wildenstein, Edouard Manet: Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Lausanne and Paris, 1975), vol. 2, no. 453 (hereafter referenced as “RW” and the number of the illustration. 20. RW21, RW418–419, RW423, RW428–431, RW441–442, RW513. In the case of The Infanta, Manet’s skillful cropping adapted an off-center figure to his favorite centering mode. This tendency to compositional centrality and symmetry in his early portraiture and copying practice has been analyzed by Andrew Brainerd in what he describes as the “Manet Matrix” (A. Brainerd, The Infanta Adventure and the Lost Manet [Michigan City, Ind., 1988], pp. 41–65). Another conspicuous trademark of the copy is the radiographic evidence of scraping in sev-

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eral places: Michael Wilson and other scholars have called attention to the artist’s singular propensity for scraping and rescraping down to the ground (M. Wilson, Manet at Work, National Gallery [London, 1983]; J. W. Bareau, The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the Artist’s Working Processes, Courtauld Institute Galleries [London, 1986], pp. 28, 34, 37, 44–45, 85). These material traits substantiate the chemical evidence as analyzed by McCrone, whose findings on the pigments in two established early Manet paintings—The Spanish Ballet of 1862 and Woman Pouring Water of ca. 1858–1860 (RW55, RW20)—demonstrated unique optical and chemical properties common to all three, and that the white lead of the two control samples and that of The Infanta probably originated from the same production lot. (For the full text of the McCrone Report, see Brainerd, The Infanta Adventure, pp. 155–157.) This means that Manet and the author of The Infanta copy used the same pigments from the same supplier or suppliers in approximately the same time period. McCrone estimated the probability of coincidence in trace element concentration at one chance per billion—that is, an agreement almost as certain as a DNA identification. Finally, the scrupulous x-radiography and special photographic analysis by Kossolapov further confirms the validity of McCrone’s findings in revealing aspects of methods—preparatory painted contours, the scraping down to the darker underpainting (ébauche), the modeling brushstrokes, heavily impastoed light area, abrupt passages from light to dark—typical of other Manet paintings and once again pointing to the hallmarks of Thomas Couture. 21. A. Dayot, Exposition des oeuvres de Thomas Couture (Paris, 1913), p. 18. 22. T. Couture, Thomas Couture (par lui-même et par son petit-fils) (Paris, 1932), p. 118. 23. A. Proust, Edouard Manet, Souvenirs (Paris, 1913), pp. 31–32. 24. Ibid., pp. 32–33. 25. Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même, 1:25–26. 26. L.-A. Berthaud, “Les Chiffonniers,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853), 2:191. 27. V. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris, 1858), p. 327; E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London, 1991), pp. 54–55. 28. Ibid., p. 328. 29. H.-A. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1840), 1:80–86. 30. M. Fried, Manet’s Modernism (Chicago and London, 1996), pp. 34–37. 31. A. C. Hanson, “Popular Imagery and the Work of Edouard Manet,” in U. Finke, French 19th Century Painting and Literature (Manchester, 1972), pp. 142–143. 32. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, p. 327. 33. E. Lajer-Burcharth, “Modernity and the Condition of Disguise: Manet’s ‘Absinthe Drinker,’” Art Journal 44 (Spring 1985): 20. Lajer-Burcharth, however, in an attempt to theorize the notion of “disguise,” reads into it several meanings that ultimately diffuse her thesis. 34. C. Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900, 3 vols. (Paris, 1900), 2:352–359. 35. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, n.d.), p. 15. 36. Berthaud, “Les Chiffonniers,” p. 196. 37. A. Boime, “Thomas Couture’s Drummer Boy Beating a Path to Glory,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 56 (1978): 109–131. 38. L. Lurine, Catalogue des tableaux modernes composant le cabinet de M. J. V. (Paris, 1857), pp. 12–13. 39. J. Janin, “Le Gamin de Paris,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1853 ed.), 1:105–110. 40. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, p. 331. 41. Boime, “Thomas Couture’s Drummer Boy,” pp. 118–119. 42. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, pp. 338–341. 43. Ibid., p. 333. 44. A. de Lacroix, “Le Flâneur,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1853 ed.), 2:112–117.

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45. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, pp. 261–262. 46. Ibid., p. 263. 47. C. Baudelaire, The Complete Verse, ed. F. Scarfe, 2 vols. (London, 1986–1989), vol. 2, The Poems in Prose, pp. 58–59. I have deviated somewhat from Scarfe’s translation to make it conform more precisely to the original. 48. Proust, Edouard Manet, p. 39. 49. During the July Monarchy, even a fisherman, for want of occupation, could be considered “a variety of flâneur.” See Brisset, “Le Pêcheur des bords de la Seine,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–1842 ed.), 2:117. Siegfried Kracauer has many interesting things to say about the aimlessness of the July Monarchy stroller, whose main object “was to kill time, not to give it a meaning.” S. Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher (New York, 1938), pp. 92–93. See also E. Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review, no. 191 ( January/February 1992): 90–110. Wilson shows that in one of the earliest accounts of the flâneur, the figure has an income that allows for idling, but is déclassé and “outside production.” Wilson argues against Janet Wolff, who claims that the “literature of modernity describes the experience of men,” and that the notion of the flâneur is an exclusively male concept. See J. Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 34–50. My position is closer to Wilson’s, but the discussion has to be postponed until volume 5 of the Social History of Modern Art. See A. Boime, “Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère as an Allegory of Nostalgia,” in 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, ed. B. R. Collins (Princeton, 1996). pp. 47–70. 50. C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. J. Mayne (Greenwich, Conn., 1964), p. 9. 51. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 52. W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1985), pp. 35–66. 53. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, pp. 270–71; quoted in R. L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 44. Herbert neatly summarizes the history and various guises of the flâneur: ibid., pp. 33–57. 54. An interesting piece in the American journal Art Review noted that “no one who walks about New York in that receptive condition of mind characteristic of the artistic flâneur, can have failed to note the increasing love of color everywhere manifested.” And it continued: “The glittering, metallic atmosphere of the metropolis and its suburbs throws the color of its streets into sharp relief. . . . Half-tones, demi-tints, subtleties of all sorts are missing.” See C. Adams, “Color in New-York Streets,” Art Review, September 1886, p. 17. 55. V. Fournel, Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur (Paris, 1865), pp. 90–92. Benjamin repeats Fournel’s idea when he states that the flâneur “goes botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 36). 56. N. G. Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund, 1954), pp. 37–39. 57. A. C. Hanson, “Manet’s Subject Matter and a Source of Popular Imagery,” Museum Studies, Art Institute of Chicago 3 (1969): 63–80; Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, pp. 63, 65. 58. T. Reff, Manet and Modern Paris, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 171– 173. 59. Proust, Edouard Manet, pp. 39–40. 60. H. T. Tuckerman, Maga Papers about Paris (New York, 1867), p. 20. Tuckerman further notes, “He looked so exactly as in years past, that one could easily fancy he had sat there, like a picture on Titian’s canvas, during all the intervening time.” 61. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, pp. 321–322. 62. F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Written by Himself, ed. B. Quarles (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 38; F. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New

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York, 1855), p. 100. 63. G. Mauner, Manet, Peintre-Philosophe: A Study of the Painter’s Themes (University Park, Pa., 1975), pp. 53–55. 64. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, p. 333. 65. Proust, Edouard Manet, pp. 39–40. 66. S. Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique, no. 39 (Fall 1986): 119–124; Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” pp. 105– 10 67. See P. H. Tucker, ed., Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Cambridge, 1998), for a comprehensive examination of the picture. 68. Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris, pp. 172–184. 69. Fried calls attention to the dynamic execution of the bird in flight as a point of contrast with the “stillness” of the motif, producing a sensation of “cognitive dissonance” that Fried interprets as allegorizing the relationship between eye and hand, “seeing and rendering.” His formalized reading complements my perception of Manet’s two registers of conflict. See Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 319–320. 70. Locke, Manet and the Family Romance, p. 22 71. Boime, Thomas Couture, p. 307. 72. F.-F.-A. Béraud, Les Filles publiques de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1839), 2:301–306. 73. Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, p. 94. 74. Janin, “Le Gamin de Paris,” p. 110; Janin, “La Grisette,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1853 ed.), 1:313. See also Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, pp. 55–56, 91. 75. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses, 1:153–191. 76. Ibid., p. 164. 77. Janin, “La Grisette,” p. 314. 78. Quoted in Brombert, Edouard Manet, pp. 114–115. 79. Proust, Edouard Manet, pp. 43–44. 80. E. Saunders, The Age of Worth: Couturier to the Empress Eugénie (London, 1954), pp. 44–45. 81. P. Mérimée, Correspondance générale, ed. M. Parturier, 17 vols. (Paris and Toulouse, 1941– 1961), 1:480–481. 82. L. Etienne, Le Jury et les exposants: Salon des Refusés (Paris, 1863), p. 30; A. Paul, “Salon de 1863—Les Refusés,” Le Siècle, 19 July 1863. 83. A. Boime, “The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art,” Art Quarterly 32 (1969): 411–426. This “school” is what Fried refers to as “the generation of 1863” (Fried, Manet’s Modernism, p. 7). 84. T. Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870), 2:375–376. 85. F. Desnoyers, Salon des Refusés: La Peinture en 1863 (Paris, 1863), p. 122. 86. D. Druick and M. Hoog, Fantin-Latour, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, 1983), pp. 167– 180. 87. Ibid., pp. 203–214. 88. A. Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, ed. E. C. Carter II, R. Forster, and J. N. Moody (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 174–179. 89. E. Zola, Salons, ed. F. W. J. Hemmings and R. J. Niess (Geneva, 1959), p. 111. 90. For the interpretation of this picture, see T. Reff, Manet: Olympia (New York, 1977); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (New York, 1985), pp. 79–146. 91. A. Delvau, “L’Assistance publique à Paris,” in Paris Guide, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), 2:1879. In an earlier work, he blamed the male for sullying female purity: Grandeur et décadence des grisettes (Paris, 1848), p. 95.

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92. V. Rounding, Grande Horizontales (London, 2003), p. 11. 93. A.-J.-B. Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1836), 1:329–330. 94. It has generally been assumed that Manet completed Olympia prior to leaving for the Netherlands in October of 1863, but the intimate connection between these two works suggests that Manet completed Olympia after returning from the Netherlands. 95. An idea inspired by my absorption in Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 23–184. 96. Quoted in G. H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), p. 75. 97. Ibid., p. 73; Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p. 88. 98. T. Gautier, “Salon de 1844,” La Presse, 28 March 1844. 99. Comtesse de la Vigne, Les Usages du demi-monde (Paris, 1909), p. 127. The author (who here uses a pseudonym) had been mistress of Napoléon III and known as “La Marechale.” 100. M. Roseval, “Le Nègre,” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Province (1840–1842 ed.), 3:308. See also the discussions of the maid in S. L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in H. L. Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago and Lon don, 1986), pp. 225–261; G. Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York, 1999), pp. 277–287. 101. Ibid., pp. 314–315. 102. Béraud, Les Filles publiques, 1:46–47. 103. J. P. Worth, A Century of Fashion (Boston, 1928), pp. 102–110. 104. G. Raymond, “Revue Artistique,” L’Illustration, 16 February 1867, pp. 109–110. 105. Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même, 1:86–87. 106. T. Gautier, “Salon de 1867,” L’Illustration, 18 May 1867, p. 310. 107. W. de Fonvielle, “Le Grand Ballon de l’Exposition Universelle,” L’Illustration, 5 October 1867, pp. 219, 221. 108. It turns out that Nadar believed that the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines, but simply used the balloon trials as sensational displays to gain public support for his true pursuits. See N. Gosling, Nadar (New York, 1976), p. 13. 109. The Géant did make one more attempt in mid-August, after Manet had departed for Boulogne, but Nadar did not fly it this time—it was operated by Louis and Eugène Godard, assisted by M. Yon, who just barely saved it from another crash landing. See W. de Fonvielle, “Troisième Ascension du Géant,” L’Illustration, 7 September 1867, p. 158. 110. Zola, Salons, p. 68. 111. T. Reff, “Manet’s Portrait of Zola,” Burlington Magazine 117 ( January 1975): 35–44. 112. Zola, Salons, pp. 124–125. 113. Ibid., p. 93. 114. Quoted in Reff, “Manet’s Portrait of Zola,” p. 40. 115. Zola, Salons, p. 91. 116. Ibid., p. 67. 117. E. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales dans l’art (Paris, 1868), pp. 415–454. 118. R. Sims, French Policy towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan, 1854–95 (Richmond, Surrey, 1998). 119. Z. Astruc, “L’Empire du Soleil Levant,” L’Etendard, 27 February 1867. See also Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 161–162. 120. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Civil War in the United States (New York, 1937), pp. 214–216. 121. F. J. Merli, Great Britain and the Confederate Navy (Bloomington, Ind., 1970), pp. 3–4; C. G. Hearn, Gray Raiders of the Sea (Camden, Maine, 1992), pp. xiii–xiv. 122. J. Wilson-Bareau and D. Degener, Manet and the Sea, Philadelphia Museum of Art (New Haven and London, 2003), p. 59. 123. S. Gavronsky, The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War (New York, 1968), pp.

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228–231. 124. G. M. Blackburn, French Newspaper Opinion on the American Civil War (Westport, Conn., 1997), pp. 100–101. 125. C. L. Dufour, The Mexican War (New York, 1968), p. 16. 126. D. Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston and Toronto, 1963), p. 113. 127. The most important of these studies are Sandblad, Manet, pp. 109–158; A. Boime, “New Light on Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, “ Art Quarterly 36 (1973): 172–208. I have based this section to a large extent on my article. See also Edouard Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, Department of Art, Brown University (Providence, 1981); J. Wilson-Bareau, Manet: The Execution of Maximilian, National Gallery (London, 1992). 128. R. Rey, Manet (Paris, 1938), p. 8. 129. Proust, Edouard Manet, pp. 22–23. 130. See Paris, Archives Nationales, F21.487, “Rapport à Son Excellence le Ministre d’Etat,” n.d. [1856]. 131. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales, pp. 224–225. 132. H. Jouin, Adolphe Yvon (Paris, 1893), p. 36. 133. E. Leclercq, Caractères de l’école française moderne de peinture (Brussels, 1881), p. 79. 134. O. Merson, La Peinture en France (Paris, 1861), p. 81. 135. M. du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition Universelle et aux Salons de 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866 et 1867 (Paris, 1867), p. 22, in which the author claims that Morning, before the Attack has “the rare merit to be a real picture from the perspective of art. . . . It attracts the crowd and rivets their attention.” 136. A. Alexandre, Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (Paris, 1889), p. 274; Chesneau, Les Nations rivales, p. 224. 137. T. Duret, Les Peintres français en 1867 (Paris, 1867), pp. 141–173. While this section is headed “L’Art officiel,” it is primarily devoted to military painting. 138. Proust, Edouard Manet, p. 105. Proust simply identified Meissonier’s work as Cuirassiers and, while probably referring to the 1805 (Chantilly), may have meant Friedland, 1807 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). 139. Cited in Sandblad, Manet, p. 120. 140. See D. G. d’Auvergne, “L’Empereur Maximilien,” Le Figaro, 5 July1867, where d’Auvergne noted that telegrams relating to the event came through New Orleans and were “transmitted from there to Europe by transatlantic cable”; also d’Auvergne, “Exécution de Maximilien,” Le Figaro, 8 July 1867; A. Cochut, “Nouvelles du Mexique,” Le Temps, 18 July 1867; United States State Department, Correspondence Relating to Recent Events in Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1867), pp. 6–8, 10, 20–21. 141. “The Execution of Maximilian,” Harper’s Weekly 11 (10 August 1867): 497. 142. D’Auvergne, “Exécution de Maximilien,” Le Figaro, 8 July 1867; Sandblad, Manet, pp. 114– 115. 143. The wooden benches were used in all Mexican executions, giving the prisoners the option of sitting down instead of standing on the ground: d’Auvergne, “Les Exécutions au Mexique,” Le Figaro, 7 July 1867. 144. It seems, however, that there were five men on the line, the traditional number of a Mexican firing squad, although it is problematic how many were kept in reserve: the night before the execution, the prisoners discussed having to confront “las cinco ballas.” See the memoirs of Maximilian’s private secretary, J. L. Blasio, Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, trans. and ed. R. H. Murray (New Haven, 1934), p. 226. 145. Most accounts positioned Maximilian in the middle, with Mejía at his left and Miramón at his right, but it is uncertain whether this situation was relative to the spectator or to Maximilian. The Harper’s artist and Manet both chose to interpret it as being from the spectator’s

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viewpoint. But Mejía must have been initially assigned to stand on the emperor’s left, since the night before the execution Mejía recalled Christ’s dying between two thieves and said he did not wish to be associated with the unrepentant thief on Christ’s left. See Blasio, Maximilian, p, 226. 146. Chesneau, Les Nations rivales, p. 226. An American observer at the World’s Fair wrote: “Nearly five per cent of all the pictures exhibited in the French department were battle pieces. The three which from their real sentiment and vigor of drawing attracted the most attention were by Protais: ‘The Morning before the Attack,’ the ‘Evening after the Combat,’ and the ‘Return to Camp’ . . . by . . . Bellanger.” See Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, ed. W. P. Blake, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1870), 1:24. 147. U. Ladet, “Bulletin du jour,” Le Temps, 6 July 1867. 148. Quoted in “France and Mexico,” New Orleans Bee, 25 June 1867. 149. J. F. Kirkham, S. G. Levy, and W. J. Crotty, Assassination and Political Violence (New York, 1970), p. 92. 150. Sandblad, Manet, pp. 37–38, 42–45, 149–150. See also S. L. Faison, Jr., “Manet’s Portrait of Zola,” Magazine of Art 42 (1949): 165–168, where Zola becomes Manet’s ideal self; and T. Reff, “The Symbolism of Manet’s Frontispiece Etchings,” Burlington Magazine 104 (1962): 184–187, where the self-identification is developed in the context of Manet’s prints. 151. M. Schapiro, review of J. C. Sloane, French Painting between the Past and the Present, in Art Bulletin 36 (1954): 164. 152. Sandblad, Manet, p. 149. 153. E. Zola, “Le Public,” in Courthion and Cailler, Manet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, 1:66–67. 154. T. Gautier, fils, “Salon de 1867,” L’Illustration 49 (18 May 1867): 310. 155. Sandblad, Manet, pp.147–148. See also “The Act of Blood at Querétaro,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 11 July 1867. 156. T. Duret, Histoire de Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris, 1906), p. 125. 157. D. Rouart, ed., Berthe Morisot: The Correspondence, trans. B. W. Hubbard (London, 1987), p. 73. Actually, Mme Morisot thought that the Manet in question was his brother Eugène, and it was only a few days later that she learned that Tiburce had actually referred to Edouard.

chapter 10





1. But see now A. Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution (Princeton, 1995); J. Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France, 1870–1871: Myth, Reportage and Reality (New Haven and London, 2000); H. Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871) (Chicago and London, 2002). 2. K. Marx and V. I. Lenin, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York, 1988), pp. 77–78. 3. E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford, 1985), p. 177. 4. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), p. 259. 5. Ibid., p. 276 n. 61. 6. For Bracquehais, see J. C. Gautrand, “1870–1871: Les Photographes et la Commune,” PhotoCiné-Revue, February 1972, pp. 52–63. 7. Ibid., p. 61; J. Wiener, “Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin,” Radical History Review 32 (March 1985): 59–70. 8. D. Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore, 1985), p. 217. 9. Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. P. ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 416. 10. A. de Balathier Bragelonne, Paris insurgé: Histoire illustrée des événements accomplis du 18 mars au

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28 mai 1871 (Paris, 1872), pp. 85, 125, 211, 243, 244–245, 279, 342, 389, 414–415, 423. 11. J. and E. de Goncourt, Paris under Siege, 1870–1871: From the Goncourt Journal, ed. G. J. Becker (Ithaca and London, 1969), p. 312. 12. C. Monselet, “Courrier de Paris,” Le Monde illustré 28 (10 June 1871): 354. 13. Petit-Jean, “Courrier de Paris,” Le Monde illustré 29 (19 July 1871): 42. 14. P. Véron, “Courrier de Paris,” Le Monde illustré 29 (15 July 1871): 34. 15. J. M. Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State (New York, 1996), pp. 150–159. 16. “Translation des cendres des généraux Lecomte et Clément Thomas”; “Restauration de la colonne Vendôme: Mise en place de la statue de Napoléon Ier,” Le Monde illustré 38 (8 January 1876): 22. 17. J. and E. de Goncourt, Paris under Siege, p. 316. 18. Burty’s reviews appeared in English in Academy 9 (April 15, 1876): 364; La République française, 25 April 1874; in J. Lethève, Impressionnistes et symbolistes devant la presse (Paris, 1959), pp. 67– 68. 19. A. Vollard, Renoir (Paris, 1920), p. 62. 20. L. Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionnisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939), 1:10; H. Adhémar, “Ernest Hoschedé,” in Aspects of Monet, ed. J. Rewald and F. Weitzenhoffer (New York, 1984), p. 56; A. Callen, “Faure et Manet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6e pér., t. 83 (March 1974): 160. Charpentier belonged to an upper-class intellectual circle calling themselves “Les Tracqueurs,” all of whom avoided the Commune save one who joined the insurrection as a lark, according to Dreyfous (Charpentier’s close associate), in order to subvert it. During the siege of Paris, Charpentier served in the staff headquarters editing the reports of General Jules Trochu for the Journal officiel. Charpentier was a moderate republican, identified later with the Opportunists Gambetta, Lockroy, and Floquet; they rejected the Commune but decried the repression and later voted for amnesty. M. Dreyfous, Ce que je tiens à dire (Paris, 1912), pp. 257, 277–280; and Ce qu’il me reste à dire (Paris, 1913), pp. 158, 166; C. Becker, Trente années d’amitié, 1872–1902: Lettres de l’éditeur Georges Charpentier à Emile Zola (Paris, 1980), pp. 68–69. Rouart, the “grand bourgeois français,” was a captain of artillery during the Prussian siege and evidently followed Degas, who served under him, in studiously avoiding the Commune. A. Alexandre, La Collection Henri Rouart (Paris, 1912), p. 18. For Maître, see F. Daulte, “A True Friendship: Edmond Maître and Frédéric Bazille,” in Frederic Bazille and Early Impressionism, Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1978), p. 29. Georges de Bellio descended from an old Romanian family and was related to Prince Georges Bibesco, an ordinance officer in the French army serving under General du Barail, whose cavalry formed part of Thiers’s plan of attack against the Commune. Bibesco offered to use his influence to find Renoir a comfortable position in the military, and it was Bibesco who helped the artist again after he left Paris during the Commune and ran afoul of the Versailles military authority. Evidently, Bibesco introduced de Bellio to the painter. (R. Nicolescu, “Georges de Bellio, l’ami des impressionistes,” Revue roumaine d’histoire de l’art, vol. 1, no. 2 [1964]: 213; G. Rivière, Renoir et ses amis [Paris, 1921], pp. 13–14; Vollard, Renoir, pp. 62–63.) Although Renoir’s testimony, as recorded by Renoir, differs from Rivière’s on the identity of the officer who offered assistance, the painter confirms Bibesco’s early influence in behalf of his career. For du Barail’s role in suppressing the Commune, see Rapport du maréchal Mac-Mahon sur les opérations de l’armée de Versailles depuis de 11 avril, époque de sa formation, jusqu’au moment de la pacification de Paris, le 28 mai (Paris, 1871), p. 4. 21. Goncourt, Paris under Siege, pp. 258–259, 279, 295. 22. A. Silvestre, Au pays des souvenirs (Paris, 1887), pp. 152–153. 23. M. Guérin, Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas: Letters, trans. M. Kay (Oxford, 1947), p. 39. 24. See A. Alexandre, “Durand-Ruel: Bild und Geschichte eines Kunsthändlers,” Pan Halbmonatsschrift 2 (16 November 1911): 120. 25. E. Cardon, “L’Exposition des révoltés,” La Presse, 29 April 1874.

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26. S. F. Eisenman, “The Intransigeant Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in C. S. Moffett, The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 (San Francisco, 1986), pp. 51–59. 27. E. Zola, Oeuvres complètes, ed. H. Mitterand, 15 vols. (Paris, 1966), 12:970–971. 28. M. Deraismes, “Une exposition particulière: De l’école réaliste,” L’Avenir des femmes, 5 July 1874. 29. Deraismes was a leader of the bourgeois feminist movement in France, and the resistance to this movement in the early years of the Third Republic provides an intriguing parallel to that of the independent artists in the period. She belonged to the moderate, antisuffrage wing of French feminism that threw its support behind the liberal republic. Her position coincided with that of center-left politicians like Edouard de Laboulaye, Edouard Lockroy, Victor Hugo, and Louis Blanc, who in turn supported her brand of French feminism. Like them she deplored the conduct of the Communards, but also advocated amnesty for prisoners and condemned the harshness of the retaliation and discriminatory verdicts rendered against the so-called pétroleuses. In 1873 she published France et progrès, a tract defending French culture in the face of defeat and meeting its accusers on their own ground, condemning the excesses of the Commune and ridiculing bourgeois fears of socialism, rejecting repression and opting in favor of “solidarity” of class, gender, and race, extolling republican patriotism, and anticipating a national rebound from the recent disasters. (M. Deraismes, France et progrès, in Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols. [Paris, 1895–1896], 1:3–11, 146, 176–181, 186, 189–191, 224–248.) In other articles of the period she discussed the “regeneration” of France, calling for a mental healing rather than a resort to discipline and the forging of arms, and admonished the intellectuals to remain optimistic. The “mind worker” either believes in infinite progress and works with “une ardeur invincible,” or lapses into despair and routine. The routinization of French society—a tempting route to take in view of the twin shocks to the system—would guarantee that anything out of the ordinary would be perceived as a danger to the state. She especially demanded the recognition of women’s civil rights and the release of feminine energies as the basis for the progress of the battered state. (M. Deraismes, “La Régénération de la France,” L’Avenir des femmes, 5 November 1871; “Soyons Francs,” L’Avenir des femmes, 6 July 1873; P. K. Bidelman, Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889 [Westport, Conn., 1982], pp. 57, 73–88, 99–105.) Despite her moderate proposals, Deraismes and her peers were highly suspect in the reactionary climate of the post-Commune period. In March 1873, M. de Goulard, Thiers’s minister of the interior, refused to authorize Olympe Audouard’s public lecture on “La Question des femmes,” citing female conferences “as only a pretext for the gathering of numerous over-emancipated [trop-émancipées] females,” and condemning Audouard’s theories as “subversive, dangerous, and immoral.” (L. Ricjer, “Silence aux femmes!” L’Avenir des femmes, 16 March 1873.) Clearly, the recent events had politicized the context in which bourgeois French feminism was struggling. The massive, extraordinary, momentous participation of women in the Commune proved such a threat to French patriarchy that conservatives attempted to stigmatize the participants as viragos and criminals. The legacy of the Commune for women was the image of the female incendiary—a frightening image of uncontrollable and therefore “subversive” women. As in the case of the impressionists and the academicians, women were divided into two categories: the savage pétroleuses who go berserk under stress, and the angelic females who remain at home or perform social nurturing like nursing. French society yearned for stability after the double trauma of war and civil disorder, and women’s emancipation in the aftermath was viewed by conservatives and moderates alike as potentially disruptive of that stability. The feminist movement after 1871 would be bourgeois and liberal, but even this was considered threatening in the heated political climate. 30. As Philippe Burty, a republican with close ties to the Opportunists, wrote about the second exhibition: “This present attempt has been much better received by the public than the first, and this is not merely the impression of one who, as I do, personally sympathises with the feelings that prompt these artists as a body, but that of a paper also which is the organ of the purest academical doctrines, La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, a weekly fly-leaf of the

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Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The step is considerable, and was for many reasons to be foreseen. The public are fired with a kind of tender interest in this group of honest earnest-minded, hard-working, original young artists, men yearly victimised by the majority who bear tyrannous rule over the official Salon, its entrance, and its awards. They regard this exhibition with favourable eyes, as being both a tribute to their judgment and to men chiefly poor, who, in a country, in a society, that has no notion of the advantages of material or moral co-operation, have succeeded in forming an association among themselves, for their mutual benefit” (P. Burty, “Fine Art: The Exhibition of the ‘Intransigeants,’” Academy 94 [15 April 1876]: 363–364). 31. The paper argued against amnesty as late as 1876: see “Echos de Paris,” Le Gaulois, 10 April 1876. 32. L. de Lora, “Petites nouvelles artistiques: Exposition libre des peintres,” Le Gaulois, 18 April 1874. 33. E. Blavet, “Avant le Salon: L’Exposition des réalistes,” Le Gaulois, 31 March 1876. 34. Lethève, Impressionnistes et Symbolistes devant la presse, p. 78. 35. “Exposition de la Société anonyme des artistes,” La République française, 25 April 1874. 36. P. Tucker, “The First Impressionist Exhibition in Context,” in Moffett, The New Painting, p. 110. 37. L. Michel, La Commune (Paris, 1898), p. 346. 38. J. Vallès, La Commune de Paris, ed. M.-C. Bancquart and L. Scheler (Paris, 1970), p. 350n. 39. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871, trans. E. M. Aveling (London, 1886), p. 335. 40. R. Greaves, Nadar; ou Le Paradoxe vital (Paris, 1980), pp. 303–310. 41. P. Burty, “The Paris Exhibitions: Les Impressionistes—Chintreuil,” Academy 5 (30 May 1874): 616. In his review in the French press he likened the illuminated site of Nadar’s to “the passage of a fireball” [le passage d’un bolide]. See “Exposition de la Société anonyme des artistes,” La République française, 25 April 1874. 42. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Marietta, Ga., 1982), pp. 96, 108n, 169. 43. Quoted in B. Denvir, ed., The Impressionists at First Hand (London, 1987), p. 85. 44. Marx’s interview for the New York Herald, 3 August 1871, quoted in E. Thomas, The Women Incendiairies (New York, 1966), p. 168. The reporter agreed, stating that he had yet to meet with a single person who actually saw a woman with kerosene. 45. L. de Bernard, “Les Femmes de Paris pendant le siège,” Le Monde illustré 28 (11 February 1871): 87, 89–90; V.-F.-M., “Les Incendiaires,” ibid., 3 June 1871, pp. 342–343. 46. V. Fournel, Paris et ses ruines en mai 1871 (Paris, 1872), pp. i–vi. 47. For Zola and the Commune, see R. Ripoll, “Zola et les Communards,” Europe 46 (April– May 1968): 16–26. 48. J. Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography (New York, 1986), p. 91. 49. Bertall, “Le Docteur Tant-Pis et le Docteur Tant-Mieux,” L’Illustration 58 (1871): 424. 50. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 415. 51. A. Boime, “Thomas Nast and French Art,” American Art Journal 4 (Spring 1972): 61–62. 52. M. Guérin, ed., Lettres de Degas (Paris, 1931), p. 5, 8. 53. Ibid., pp. 11, 13. 54. M. Guérin, Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas: Letters, trans. M. Kay (Oxford, 1947), pp. 29–32. The English edition contains several letters, including this one, not published in the original French edition. 55. Ibid., pp. 70–71. 56. M. Chaumelin, La Gazette [des étrangers], 8 April 1876; cited in Moffett, The New Painting, p. 171. 57. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871, p 347.

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58. A. Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, ed. E. C. Carter II, R. Forster, and J. N. Moody (Baltimore and London, 1976), p. 154; Adhémar, “Ernest Hoschedé,” p. 55. 59. M. Berhaut, Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1978), p. 7. 60. R. Tombs, The War against Paris 1871 (Cambridge, U.K., 1981), pp. 17–18. 61. J. Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, 2 vols. (Paris, 1883–1884), 2:134. 62. E. Lepelletier, “Les Impressionnistes,” Le Radical, 8 April 1877, reprinted in K. Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven, 1987), p. 188. 63. Lepelletier, “Les Impressionnistes,” Le Radical, 8 April 1877; Jacques, “Menu Propos,” L’Homme libre, 12 April 1877; in Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte, p. 189. 64. Silvestre, Au pays des souvenirs, p. 152; E. King, Descriptive Portraiture of Europe in Storm and Calm (Springfield, Mass., 1885), pp. 490–491. 65. Rapport du Maréchal Mac-Mahon, p. 16; Goncourt, Paris under Siege, p. 235; M. du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris, 4 vols. (Paris, 1878–1880), 2:347–348; E. A. Viztelly, My Adventures in the Commune (London, 1914), p. 318. 66. Fournel, Paris et ses ruines en mai 1871, p. 4. 67. R. L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London, 1991), pp. 23–24. 68. Moffett, The New Painting, p. 224. 69. Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionisme, 2:312. 70. Deraismes, France et progrès, pp. 162–164. 71. See J.-J. Rovel, Etude sur les chemins de fer envisagés au point de vue militaire (Constantine, 1874); and the review of the book, “Les Chemins de fer au point de vue militaire,” La République française, 22 June 1874. 72. Balathier Bragelonne, Paris insurgé, pp. 87, 158. 73. Rapport du Maréchal Mac-Mahon, p. 16; Viztelly, My Adventures in the Commune, p. 318. 74. Alexander, La Collection Henri Rouart, p. 42. 75. L. d’Argencourt and J. Foucart, Puvis de Chavannes, 1824–1898, Grand Palais (Paris, Editions des Musées Nationaux, 1976), pp. 114–115, nos. 91, 92. 76. V. C. O. Gréard, Meissonier, His Life and His Art (London, 1897), pp. 266–267. 77. M. Vauvert, “Les Tuileries,” Le Monde illustré 29 (1 July 1871): 6. 78. K. Varnedoe, “The Tuileries Museum and the Uses of Art History in the Early Third Republic,” in Saloni, gallerie, musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli XIX e XX, ed. F. Haskell, Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte (1981), pp. 63–68. Coincidentally, Meissonier exhibited his Ruins of the Tuileries in 1883 when the last remnant of the palace had been demolished. See P. Mainardi, The End of the Salon (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 99, 101, 104. 79. T. Gautier, Tableaux du Siège, Paris, 1870–1871 (Paris, 1872), pp. 372–373. 80. S. Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 73–92, 100–104. 81. M. de Villemessant, “Enterprise générale de balayage parisien,” Le Figaro, 8 June 1871.

coda





1. See the catalogue entry in C. Keisch and M. U. Riemann-Reyher, eds., Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 350–354, no. 134. 2. Ibid., pp. 349–350, no. 133. 3. Ibid., pp. 345–348, nos. 130–131. 4. P. Dittmar, “‘Der zwölfjährige Christus im Temple’—Zu einer Lithographie von Adolph

861

notes to pp. 762–787



















Menzel: Ein Beispiel für den Antijudaismus im 19. Jahrhundert,” IDEA: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 6 (1987): 87–88. 5. E. Bock, Adolph Menzel: Verzeichnis seines graphischen Werkes (Berlin, 1923), nos. 88 and 406. Dittmar rightly pointed out that Menzel was less interested in seeking ethnographical authenticity through costume than through stereotypical physiognomies. Dittmar, “Der zwölfjährige Christus im Temple,” p. 83. 6. This sketch has been reproduced in M. U. Riemann-Reyher, “Friedrich Eggers und Menzel,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, new series, vol. 41 (1999): 259. 7. See the catalogue by J. C. Jensen, Adolph Menzel: Gemälde, Gouachen, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung-Dr.-Georg-Schäfer-Stiftung, Schweinfurt (Munich, 1998), nos. 41, 49, 119. Menzel also got the ritual confused: the Habdalah marked the end of the Sabbath, not Yom Kippur. 8. One German scholar has recently taken up the question of Menzel’s anti-Semitism and disputes Dittmar’s contentions, claiming that the artist depicted Jews that one could see on the streets of Berlin. He sees Menzel testing and struggling with the stereotypes on two tracks, one realist and the other more phantasmagoric. He concludes that “Adolph Menzel, with his Jewish pictures, has made an important contribution to a realist iconography of Judaism in the nineteenth century.” See H. Brülls, “Pharisäer, Börsenjuden, fromme Greise: Das Bild des orthodoxen Judentums im Werk Adolph Menzels und in den Augen des zeitgenössischen Publikums,” in Jensen, Adolph Menzel, pp. 51–62. 9. M. Fleischer, “Kommen Sie, Cohn”: Fontane und die “Judenfrage” (Berlin, 1998), pp. 100, 203, 320. 10. See especially P. Paret, Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1988), pp. 63–75, 158–165, 180–195. Also W. Paulsen, “Theodor Fontane, the Philosemitic Antisemite,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 26 (1981): 306. 11. In a popular book on Berlin society of the 1880s, published under a pseudonym but now attributed to Princess Catherine Radziwill, the author noted: “There is no city in the entire world where the children of Israel are more repulsed by society or where that society makes greater use of them” (Comte P. Vasili, La Société de Berlin [Paris, 1884], p. 153). 12. Fleischer, “Kommen Sie, Cohn,” p. 206. 13. Cited in Paulsen, “Theodor Fontane,” p. 310. 14. T. Fontane, Werke, ed. W. Keitel, 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1955), 1:61. 15. Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, pp. 313–314, no. 104. 16. Ibid., pp. 312, 343–344, nos. 103, 129. 17. On the Iron Rolling Mill see the catalogue entry in ibid., pp. 379–385, no. 160; F. ForsterHahn, “A. Menzels Eisenwalzwerk: Kunst im Konflikt zwischen Tradition und Wirklichkeit,” in Die nützlichen Künste, ed. T. Buddensieg and H. Rogge (Berlin, 1981), pp. 122–129; C. Keisch, Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings from the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, National Gallery (London, 2001), pp. 132–134, no. 45. 18. Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, pp. 384–385 and note 12. It was Max Jordan, director of the Nationalgalerie, who attached “Modern Cyclops” to the title of Menzel’s painting. Evidently, it was commonly used, and even Marx punned on the term in connection with an exploitative firm named Cyclops Stahl-und Eisenwerke der Herren Cammel et Co. For a sexual reading of Menzel’s work, see M. Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 121–124. 19. For Strousberg, the “railroad king,” see F. Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), pp. 358–366. 20. Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 1815–1905, pp. 341–342, no. 127. 21. Ibid., pp. 335–337, no. 124. 22. Stern, Gold and Iron, pp. 494–531, has the most succinct discussion of this tendency. 23. Ibid., p. 187.

862

notes to pp. 787–798

Photo Credits

1.5: Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA, James Philip Gray collection. 1.16: RF 1644, Paris, musée d’Orsay, donation Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1906. 1.17, 1.18: Courtesy Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts/UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. 2.6: By permission of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 2.7: © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1972.19. 2.12: Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 2.14: RF 1877, Paris, musée d’Orsay, legs Alfred Chauchard, 1909 3.6: RF 339, Paris, musée d’Orsay; photo courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 3.10: RF 325, Paris, musée d’Orsay, don de Mlle Juliette Courbet, soeur de l’artiste, 1881. 3.23: RF 2257, Paris, musée d’Orsay. 4.1: Private Collection, England. Photograph courtesy of Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. 4.4: The FORBES Magazine Collection, New York. All rights reserved. 4.5: Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. 4.6: Board of Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries of Merseyside (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). 4.17: Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. 4.19: From a private collection. 4.20: Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935. 4.25: © Manchester Art Gallery. 4.27: Courtesy of Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main. 4.28: Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. 4.32: Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935. 4.33: © Copyright The British Museum. 4.37: Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. 5.3: Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano. 5.6: Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 6.1: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Museum Purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson. 6.4: Cincinnati Art Museum. 6.23: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; © The J. Paul Getty Museum. 6.25: The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries of The Johns Hopkins University.



863

6.30: Yale University Art Gallery, John Hill Morgan, B.A. 1893, Fund. 6.31: Courtesy Walton Family Foundation. 6.33: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum. 7.1: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich 7.4, 7.5: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln. 7.6, 7.7: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien; photo courtesy of Österreichische Galerie, Vienna. 7.8: Archiv des Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand-Museums, Schloss Artstetten, A-3661 Artstetten. 7.9: Albertina, Wien. 7.10, 7.11: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. 7.12: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien; photo courtesy of Österreichische Galerie, Vienna. 7.14, 7.15: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. 7.18: Copyright Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; photo, Ursula Gerstenberger. 7.23: From the Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library. 7.25, 7.26, 7.27, 7.28: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. 7.34: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. 7.41, 7.42, 7.43, 7.44, 7.45: Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf in Ehrenhof. 7.46: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851; (97.34) photograph © 1997, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 7.47: Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf in Ehrenhof. 8.8, 8.9: Courtesy Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts/UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. 8.16: MI 756, Paris, musée d’Orsay, déposé au musée national du château de Compiègne, 1986. 9.1: Photography, Art Institute of Chicago. 9.2: RF 1977-12, Paris, musée d’Orsay; Photo courtesy Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 9.16: RF 1992, Paris, musée d’Orsay, legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911. 9.18: Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, Chester Dale Collection, Image © 2004 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 9.20: Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 9.22: RF 1668, Paris, musée d’Orsay, donation Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1906. 9.27: RF 1664, Paris, musée d’Orsay, donation Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1906. 9.28: RF 729, Paris, musée d’Orsay 9.30: RF 644, Paris, musée d’Orsay. 9.31: Uffizi, Florence, Italy; photo courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 9.34: © The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo. 9.35: RF 2205, Paris, musée d’Orsay, donation de Mme Emile Zola sous réserve d’usufruit, 1918. 9.40: Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 9.41: Collections Royal Army Museum, Brussels, Belgium. 9.42: Musée Condé, Chantilly, France; photo courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 9.43: Musée Condé, Chantilly, France; photo courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 10.8: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: acquired through the Kenneth A. and Helen F. Spencer Foundation Acquisition Fund) F72-35). 10.28: INV. 20117, Paris, musée d’Orsay 10.30: RF 1248, Paris, musée d’Orsay, déposé au musée national du château de Compiègne, 1953.



864

photo credits

Index

Abbati, Giuseppe, 366, 395–97 Abildgaard, N. A., 504 About, Edmond: and Courbet, 205; and Meissonier, 603; and Millet, 124–25, 134; pamphleteering, 588–89, 592, 843n31 Absinthe Drinker, The (Manet), 649–55, 672 Abuert, 609 Académie de Musique, 591 Académie des Beaux-Arts, 689 Académie du Suffrage Universel, 590 Académie Suisse, 85, 142 Academy, 597–98 Achenbach, Andreas, 512, 538 Ackermann, Heinrich Wilhelm, 479 Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (Palmer), 469–70 Adam Bede (Eliot), 262, 297 Adultera L’ (Fontane), 790 African Americans, 446, 462–63; depictions of, 406–7, 431–43; in genre painting, 475; racist depictions of, 409–25, 828n34 After Dinner at Ornans (Courbet), 143, 150–55, 158, 178 After the Seizure: The Homeless (Waldmüller), 491 Age of Augustus (Gérôme), 608–9 agricultural crisis (1846–1847), 96, 113 Agulhon, Maurice, 43, 83 Ahlwardt, Hermann, 789 Akademie der bildenden Künste, 479 Albert. See Martin, Alexandre Algeria: and France, 605–6 Allasseur, Jean-Jean, 57 allegory: of America, 403–5; in Courbet’s work, 205; Dance of Death, 516; in Republic contest, 41, 58 Allston, 407



865

Alton Locke (Kingsley), 248, 297, 346, 358 Amateur Studying Drawings (Meissonier), 628 Amaury-Duval, Eugéne-Emmanuel, 38 America (Powers), 402–3 America. See United States of America “American Futurity” (Whitman), 449 American Civil War, 4, 404, 443–48; depiction of aftermath, 443–48 American Indians. See Native Americans American Masters of Sculpture (Caffin), 425 American Progress (Gast), 449–50 American Scene, 408 anarchism, 12 Anatomy of Expression (Bell), 227 Ancona, Vito D’, 366–67, 391 Andeutungen zur Belebung der vaterländischen bildenden Kunst (Waldmüller), 490 androgyny, 48, 148 Angel in the House, The (Patmore), 276 Angelus, The (Millet), 126–28 Angers, David d’, 57 Ange-Tissier, 596, 601, 604–5; Submission of Abd el Kader, 601, 604–5 Anhalter Railway Station by Moonlight, The (Menzel), 559, 561 animal imagery, 622–24 Anneke, Friedrich, 533 Annunciation (Tintoretto), 305 Annunciation, The (D. G. Rossetti), 251 anticlericalism, 180–81, 395 Antigna, Alexandre, 595, 596, 617, 619–20 Antiquarian, The (Spitzweg), 501 anti-Semitism: and clothing trade, 248–51; and Courbet, 215–16; in Denmark, 505; in folklore, 203, 494, 671; and Fourier, 10; in England, 260, 302–6, 347; in France, 114; in Germany, 520, 784–91,

anti-Semitism (continued) 795–96; and Hunt, 322; and Menzel, 786–91, 862n8; and Millet, 93; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 302 Antoinette Hébert (Millet), 87–88 Apostle Jean Journet Setting Out for the Conquest of Universal Harmony, The (Courbet), 203–4 Apotheosis of Homer (Ingres), 172, 213, 610 Appleton, Thomas G., 130 Arago, Alfred, 6, 36, 584, 624 Archduchess Sophie Accompanying Her Children in the Evening Prayer (Fendi), 483–84 Arnold, Carl Heinrich, 560, 572 Arrival of the Harvesters at the Pontine Marshes (Robert), 117 Art Review, 853n54 artiglieria toscana a Montechiaro, L’ (Signorini). See Tuscan Artillerymen at Montechiaro Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic: A Day to Remember, The (Spencer), 417–18 artist unions, 15 Artiste, L’ (France), 154, 207, 212, 219, 592, 658 Artists’ Excursion on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 452 “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (Whitman), 221 Association of All Classes of All Nations, 11 Astarte Syriaca (D. G. Rossetti), 341–44 Astruc, Zacharie, 671, 687, 698, 707, 851n1 Atelier in the Batignolles, The (FantinLatour), 687–88, 705 Atelier Scene (Hasenclever), 536–37 Atelier, L’ (Couture), 669, 672 Athenaeum (Germany): review of D. G. Rossetti, 254, 340–41; review of Freiligrath, 541; review of Hunt, 293–94, 299, 310, 314; review of Millais, 266, 271–72, 287 Aubert, François, 722–23 Auch ein Todtentanz (Rethel), 515–35, 553, 554 Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848 (Rethel), 62–64 Audubon, 407 Audouard, Olympe, 859n29 Auerbach, Berthold, 149 Auerswald, Rudolf von, 575 “Aus dem schlesishen Gebirge” (Freili-



866

grath), 495 Autumn—On the Hudson River (Cropsey), 831n78 Avenir et les Bonaparte, L’ (Duveyrier), 616 Awakened Conscience (Brooks), 313–14 Awakening Conscience (Hunt), 299, 308–19, 326, 328, 336, 338 Azeglio, Massimo d’, 394 Babcock, William Perkins, 130 Bagley, Sarah, 416 Ball, Thomas, 430 Balleroy, Albert de, 687, 703 Banjo Player, The (Mount), 417 Banti, Cristiano, 366 Baptism of the Prince Imperial, The (Couture), 621 Baptism of Wittekind, The (Rethel), 528 baptism, 267–68; and P.R.B., 267–68; and Tractarianism, 268 Barbès, Armand, 106 Barbizon school, 25, 38, 83, 88, 499, 594; and Keats, 455 Bark of Dante, The (Delacroix), 645 Bark of Dante, The (Manet), 645 Barnard, George N., 444–46 Baroche, Jules, 584, 593 Baron, Henri, 146 Barre, Jean-Auguste, 57, 59–60; Seal of the Republic, 59, 60 Barricade of Canal Saint-Martin, The (Bonhommé), 626–27 Barricade, La (Bertall), 755–56 Barricade, La (Hervier), 69–72 Barricade, The (Manet), 733, 735 Barricades on the Michaelerplatz on the Nights of the 26th and 27th of May 1848 (Ziegler), 509–10 barricades: Paris reconstruction, 581–91; role in French revolutions, 156; as symbolism, 69–76, 535 Barricade—Souvenir de guerre civile (Meissonier), 444, 776 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste, 58; Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi), 58, 60 Basler National Zeitung (Germany), 558 Bathers, The (Courbet), 196–99, 200, 208, 212, 219, 220 Bathers, The (Millet), 113 Battle of Alma (Crimea, 20 September 1854) (Vernet), 715 Battle of Alma (Pils), 601–3, 717 Battle of Cordova, The (Rethel), 528–29

index

Battle of Magenta, The (Fattori), 382–91 Battle of Poitiers (Steuben), 142 Battle of Solferino (Meissonier), 603–4, 628, 630 Battle of the Huns, The (Kaulbach), 472 Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama, The (Manet), 698, 707–12, 733 Baudelaire, 75, 210, 600; and Courbet, 144, 153, 181–82; “Corde, La,” 658–60, 670; and Couture, 24–25; and Dupont, 108, 188; and flânerie, 662–64; Fleurs du mal, Les, 652; “Foules, Les,” 662; Journaux intimes, 80; and Manet, 651, 667–68, 687, 729; and Millet, 129; “Painter of Modern Life, The,” 662; and popular culture, 149 Baudry, Paul, 689, 691, 695 Bauernfeld, Eduard von, 495, 498 Bazille, Frédéric, 687 Beata Beatrix (D. G. Rossetti), 336–41 Beaucé, 601 beauty, 137, 163, 197, 220; Millet’s view of, 125; and realism, 81. See also ugliness Beaux-Arts, 85, 584; and the Second Empire, 591–601; and Zola, 705 Begas Family, The (Begas), 477 Begas, Karl, 477 Bell, Charles, 227 Bellio, Georges de, 747, 858n20 Beloved (Morrison), 441 Bendiner, Kenneth, 322 Benjamin, Walter, 663, 665 Bennett, William, 269 Benton, Thomas Hart, 409 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 591 Béraud, Jean, 699, 763 Bergeret, Jules, 753 Bergisches Museum, 546 Berkeley, George, 460 Berlin Academy, 786 Berlin–Potsdam Railroad, The (Menzel), 559, 561 Bernard, Claude, 635, 637 Bertall à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques (Bertall), 54–55 Bertall, 54, 755–56 Besson, Faustin, 146 Bezzuoli, Giuseppe, 378–79 Bible, 292, 299 Biedermaier, Wieland Gottlieb, 473 Biedermeier school, 471–576; furniture design, 474–75 Bierstadt, Albert, 452

Bigneron, Pierre-Roch, 43–45, 53 Bingham, George Caleb, 407–13, 417; County Election, The, 410; Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 408–9; Order No. 11, 411–13; Stump Speaking, 410; Verdict of the People, The, 410–11 “Bingham Resolutions,” 409 Birth of Venus (Cabanel), 689–90 Bitzius, Albert, 149 Blackwood’s Magazine, 229, 263 Blanc, Charles, 16, 17, 36, 82, 689, 704 Blanc, Louis, 14, 80, 859n29; and French revolutions, 6, 12–13, 21, 37, 51, 66; and Freemasonry, 7; and La Réforme, 8 Blätter (Rethel), 534–35 Blechen, Karl, 477 Bleichröder, Gerson von, 796–97 Blind Faith (Spencer), 419 Blum, Robert, 531–32 Boating Party on the Banks of the Seine (Morlon), 680 Bodmer, Karl, 595 “Boeufs, Les” (Dupont), 107, 183 bohemianism, 149 Boime, Jerome, 20 Boisbaudran, Horace Lecoq de, 688 Boker, John Godfrey, 541, 545 Bon, Gustave Le, 755 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon. See Napoléon III Bone Player, The (Mount), 417 Bonheur, Rosa, 595, 622–24, 849n130; as alternative to radical realism, 620; and animal imagery, 578, 626; Horse, Fair, 197, 622–23, 849n131; Laboring in the Nièvre, 101; Ploughing in the Nivernais, 183, 622–23; Vaches et Moutons, 622 Bonhommé, François, 595, 626–28, 794 Bonnard, Camille, 256 Bonnat, Léon, 764 Bonnemère, Eugène, 83, 101, 167 Bonvin, François, 38, 144 Bookworm, The (Spitzweg), 501 Borglum, Gutzon, 454 Born, Wolfgang, 831n83 Borrani, Odoardo, 366, 389 Borsig, August, 558 Bosio, Astyanax-Scévola, 57 Botteleurs de foin (Millet), 82 Bouguereau, William, 617–18



867

Boulanger, Gustave, 609 Boulevard des Capucines (Monet), 753–54 bourgeoisie society: and Courbet, 214–20, 810n93; depicted by Caillebotte, 763–66; in Germany, 485; and the Paris Commune, 738–45; personification of, 198 Boutelle, DeWitt Clinton, 831n78 Bouvier, Laurent-Joseph-Daniel, 687, 689 Bowness, Alan, 292 Boy with the Cherries, The (Manet), 655 Brackett, Edward, 427 Bracquemond, Félix, 99, 686 Brady, Matthew, 441, 443, 445 Brainerd, Andrew, 851n20 Braquehais, Auguste, 739–40 Brasserie Andler, 149 Bravi, Les (Meissonier), 628 Break of Day, The (Mount), 422–23 Breton, Jules, 624–26, 849n135n; as alternative to radical realism, 620; Gleaners, The, 125, 584, 624–25; Hunger, 624; Misery and Despair, 624; and NeoGreek movement, 613; Return from the Harvest, 624; and the Salon, 595, 596; and work, 849n138 Brion, Gustave, 594, 596 Brisbane, Albert, 801n6 Brooks, Thomas, 313 Brown, Ford Madox, 227, 277, 329, 338, 343–64; Heath Street, Hampstead, 349; Last of England, 362–64; Work, 336, 344–64; Wycliffe Reading His Translation of the Bible, 241 Brown, William Wells, 429; Negro in the American Rebellion, 429 Bruyas, Alfred, 178, 200–202, 204–8, 212, 216, 217 Bryant, William Cullen, 456, 463 Buchon, Max, 144, 149, 166, 175–76, 600, 843n37 Buddenbrooks (Mann), 471 Bulletin of 14 July 1859, Announcing the Peace of Villafranca (Induno), 374–75 Bulwer-Lytton, 233–35, 314; Ernest Maltravers, 314; Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, 233–35 Burty, Philippe, 751, 752–53, 764, 770, 859n30 Bust of Robert Gould Shaw (Lewis), 427–28 Byron, Lord, 455 Ça ira! (Freiligrath), 539–40

index

Cabanel, Alexandre, 597, 691, 695; Birth of Venus, 689–90 Cabet, Etienne, 9, 11 Cabianca, Vincenzo, 366, 374 Cadart, Alfred, 709 Café Fuerbois, 748 Caffè Michelangiolo, 367, 388; and Macchiaioli, 367 Caffin, Charles, 425, 427 Caillebotte, Gustave, 747, 763–68; Paris Street, Rainy Weather, 764–65; Pont de l’Europe, 766–67 Camphausen, Ludolf, 559 Camphausen, Ludwig, 532 Cantador, Lorenz, 550 canto dello Stornello, Il (Lega). See Singing the Stornello Capestro, the Carpenter of Antwerp Preaching in his Work-Yard (Leys), 348 Capitaine Henriot (Sardou), 591 Capital (Marx). See Kapital, Das capitalism, 228, 364 Caprichos (Goya), 698 captialism, 2–3, 9, 164 Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, The (Millet), 92 Capture of the Smalah of Abed el Kader (Vernet), 715, 717 Capture of the Tower of Malakoff (Yvon), 717 Carbonari, 230. See also secret societies Cardon, Emile, 749 caricatures, 54 Carjat, Etienne, 753 Carlsbad Decrees, 476 Carlyle, Thomas: and Brown, 351, 364; and Hunt, 301–2; influence on Victorian writers, 358–61; and Mazzini, 369; and Patmore, 274; and the PreRaphaelites, 226–27; and reformism, 262; treatment of poor, 821n267 Carnot, Hippolyte, 48 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 605–6 Cassatt, Mary, 25 Castagnary, Jules: and Courbet, 139, 140, 150, 152, 157; and Ingres, 598; and Millet, 131 Casteras, Susan, 315 Catholicism, 265, 296; in England, 265, 296; in Germany, 784 Catlin, 407 Causidière, Louis, Marc, 14, 18, 30, 51 Cavaignac, Louis Eugéne, 14, 18–19, 21, 26 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 372–76

Cecioni, Adriano, 366 censorship: and Courbet, 214; Danish Golden Age, 507; and the Second Empire, 591, 732 Census of Religious Worship (1851), 296 Ceruti, Giacomo, 131 Cézanne, Paul, 25, 750; and Zola, 758 Chamerlat, Jules-Marc, 732 Champ de Foire (Luminais), 625–26 Champfleury, 836n46; and Courbet, 149– 50, 159–61, 171, 178, 181, 191, 204, 208–19 passim, 588, 599, 687; and Couture, 24–25, 87; and Delacroix, 16; Histoire de l’imagerie populaire, 202; and Republic competition, 46; and Sainte-Beuve, 843n37 Channing, William Ellery, 126, 434, 698 “Chanson des foins, La” (Dupont), 108 “Chant des ouvriers” (Dupont), 108 “Chant des paysans” (Dupont), 108 Chardin, 599, 655 Charivari (France), 500 Charlet, 715 Charpentier, Georges, 747, 858n20 Chartism, 227–28, 264, 346–47, 354 Chasm of the Colorado, The (Moran), 459 Chassériau, Théodore, 38 Chauchard, Alfred, 130 Cheap Clothes and Nasty (Mayhew), 248 Chenavard, 38, 172, 207, 210 Chesneau, Ernest: and Breton, 626; Constitutionnel, Le, 845n64; and Japanese art, 705–6; and military painters, 601, 716; and Millet, 132–33; and Monet, 753; and November, 1863 reforms, 598–99 Chien-Caillou (Champfleury), 219 Child with a Sword (Monginot), 673 children: depiction of, 655–60 Chocquet, Victor, 747 Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (Christ in the House of His Parents) (Millais), 81, 260–64, 266–67, 271, 274, 348 Christ Knocking on the Door of the Soul (Veit), 304 “Christian and Jew” (C. Rossetti), 249 Christian Socialism, 296–97, 346–48; and work, 348–64 Christianity: and Judaism, 302–6, 320–27; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 292, 344; and theme of the fallen woman, 315 Church of England, 268, 296 Church, Frederic, 446–47, 464–66



868

Civil War in France, The (Marx), 738 Claiborne Fox Jackson, 408 Clarendon Press, 245, 268–69 Claretie, 695 Clark, T. J., 739 Clasen, Lorenz, 550 class struggle, 8–9, 484–85, 525, 530; England, 259, 276, 295, 319, 352–53, 364; France, 649–55; funerals, 180–81; Germany, 796; and the Paris Commune, 741–45; and rise of modernism, 83 Classical Walpurgis Night (Courbet), 149, 196 classicism, 78, 210, 211, 578 Clay, Henry, 405, 408 clericalism, 229 Clésinger, 198 Cliffs of the Hague (Millet), 85–87 Cloister of Santa Croce, The (Abbati), 396–97 Cloister, The (Abbati), 395–97 Closerie de Lilas, 684 clothing, 142–43, 160–61, 181–82; haute couture, 668; in the Second Empire, 684; as social signifier, 161–62, 194 clubs. See political clubs Cochin, 42 Cogniet, Léon, 36, 71 Cole, Thomas, 455–56, 459, 463, 488, 831n83 Collins, Charles Allston, 244–45, 247, 251, 269–70, 273, 314 Collinson, James, 226, 268 Colombel, Evariste, 25 colonialism: France, 604–14, 630; Germany, 791–92, 799 Combe, Charles, 283, 286, 299 Combe, Martha, 271–73, 299 Combe, Thomas, 245, 268–70 Communards Posing (Braquehais), 740 Communards Posing at the Base of the Vendôme Column (Braquehais), 740 Commune. See Paris Commune communism, 9, 531 Communist Manifesto (Marx/Engles), 2, 8–9, 74, 176 Compagnon du tour de France (Sand), 205 Competition of the Minnesingers (Schwind), 496 competition: Millet, 91–92; for Republic symbol, 35–38, 82, 144; Prix de Rome, 85 Compromise of 1850 (U.S.), 408 Comte, Auguste, 49, 98–100, 214

index

Concert in the Tuileries (Manet), 666–68, 669, 687, 696, 702 Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, Les (Proudhon), 12 Coningsby (Disraeli), 246 Conjuror (Hamon), 612 Connoisseurs, The (Meissonier), 72 conservative realism, 79 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 614 Constable, 78 Constitutionnel, Le (Chesneau), 845n64 Constitutionnel, Le (France), 588 Constitutions of the Free-Masons, 205–6 Consuelo (Sand), 149 Conti, Tito, 404 Contrasts (Pugin), 277 Convent Thoughts (Collins), 244–45, 247, 251, 269–70, 314 convents, 242–44 Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, A (Hunt), 245, 267, 270, 295 Copenhagen Academy, 504 Copy of a Cast of Fighting Gladiators (Millais), 257 Copy of a Cast of the Apollo Belvedere (Millais), 257 “Corde, La” (Baudelaire), 658–60, 670 Cornelius, Peter von, 472, 511 Cornforth, Fanny, 329–30, 332 Cornu, Sébastien-Melchior, 50–51 Coronation of King William I at Königsberg (Menzel), 572–73, 783 Coronation, The (Rethel), 528 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 82, 83, 499, 503, 595 Corps Législatif, 742 Corwin, Thomas, 414 Costa, Giovanni, 392 Costumes historiques (Bonnard), 256 Cotopaxi (Church), 465 Cotton Office, New Orleans (Degas), 760–62 Couder, Auguste, 844n58 County Election, The (Bingham), 410 Courbet, Gustave, 139–58; After Dinner at Ornans, 143, 150–55, 158, 178; Apostle Jean Journet, 203–4; Bathers, The, 196– 99, 200, 208, 212, 219, 220; and bourgeois society, 214–20, 810n93; and Chesneau, 598–99; Classical Walpurgis Night, 149, 196; Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire, 188–90, 220; and depiction of death, 74; Draughts Play-

ers, The, 151; Funeral at Ornans, 158, 161–62, 169, 170–83, 187, 211, 213, 216, 606, 620, 667, 669; Guittarero, 146–47; and heroism, 188–90, 220, 288; and Hunt, 293; Lot and His Daughters, 219; Man with the Leather Belt, The, 148, 169; Man with the Pipe, 157, 191, 200; and Manet, 633, 637, 640, 671, 679; and Meissonier, 574; Meeting, The, 200–206, 211, 214, 217, 223, 494, 633; Midday, 149; and Millet, 83, 92, 101, 263; and naturalism, 634; Painter’s Studio, The, 150, 208–20, 223; and the Paris Commune, 741, 745; Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, 183–88; and realism, 78, 81, 594; and Republic competition, 38; Return from the Conference, 132, 598; and the Salon, 82, 596; and the Second Empire, 606, 616, 621, 624, 626, 630; Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, 147–48; Sleeping Spinner, The, 200; Stonebreakers, The, 158­–70, 211, 352, 624; and Whitman, 220–23; and the World’s Fair of 1867, 701; Wrestlers, The, 196–97, 199–200, 220; Young Ladies of the Village, 191– 96, 211, 219 Courbet, Régis, 140, 151, 185 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte), 99 Cousin, Victor, 19 Couture, Thomas, 14–35; Atelier, L’, 669, 672; Baptism of the Prince Imperial, The, 621; and Courbet, 184; and Deforge, 146; Drummer Boy, 651, 655–57, 659; and Düsseldorf school, 512; Enrollment of the Volunteers, 14–28, 28–35, 58, 66–67, 575, 621, 643; Father and Son, 27; French Volunteer, 24; Illness of Pierrot, 651; Jocondo, 146; Love of Gold, 651, 696; Man Pulling a Cannon, 24; and Manet, 643–49, 651, 655, 671, 673, 693, 695, 715; and Millet, 87, 89; and Noble, 437–38; and railroads, 614; Realist, The, 184; and Republic competition, 36, 38, 72; Romans of the Decadence, 14, 17, 19, 33–34, 217, 643, 693, 715; Soap Bubbles, 656, 657 Cox, Sarah. See Cornforth, Fanny Crayon, 283 Crédit Foncier de France, 121 Crédit Mobilier, 630 Crédit, Le, 39 Crémieux, Isaac Adolphe, 6, 7, 93



869

Crimean War, 289, 326, 349, 373 Crocker, Charles, 136 Cropsey, Jasper, 467 Cross in the Mountains (Friedrich), 458 Crowning of Ludwig the Virtuous in Aachen, The (Rethel), 528 Crusades, The (Kaulbach), 472 Crystal Palace, 334, 347 Cuirassiers, 1805 (Meissonier), 720 cult of the hero. See heroism Currier and Ives, 470 Curtis, G. W., 466 Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen, 452 Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 762 Dalí, Salvador, 128 Dana, Charles A., 540, 801n6 Dance of Death, The (Sand), 101–2 Dance of Death: and Rethel, 516 Danhauser, Josef, 475 Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (Bingham), 408–9 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 279 Dante and His Circle (D. G. Rossetti), 339 Dante, 231–32 “Dantis Tenebrae” (D. G. Rossetti), 339 Daphnis and Chloe (Millet), 88 Darwin, Charles, 2 Das Kapital (Marx/Engels). See Kapital, Das Daubigny, Charles-François, 594, 595, 844n52 Daumier, Honoré, 75; and Couture, 25; Divorcées, The, 48–49; “Fair Lady, Will You Accept My Arm?” 586; Last Council of the Ex-Ministers, 47; New Toy Launched by Ratapoil, 586; Ratapoil, 585; and Republic competition, 36, 38, 45–50, 108; Rue Transnonain, 68; and Spitzweg, 500; Uprising, The, 67–69 David Copperfield (Dickens), 308 David, Jacques-Louis: and Courbet, 187; Couture, 18; and Eckersberg, 504; and Ingres, 598; and Krafft, 481; Leonidas, 217; Oath of the Tennis Court, 16, 17, 26; Sabine Woman, 27; Sabines, 27 Dawn of Day (Politically Dead) (Mount), 423 Dayot, Armand, 648 Dead Christ and the Angels (Manet), 709 “Dead to the Living, The” (Freiligrath). See “Todten an die Lebenden, Die” Death and the Woodcutter (Millet), 115

index

Death and the Woodcutter (Wheelwright), 101 death: personification of, 175–76, 516–35; realistic view of, 173; treatment in French society, 180 Débâcle, La (Zola), 757–58 Debureau, 672 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel, 36, 499 Deforge, 87, 113 Degas, Edgar, 749; Cotton Office, New Orleans, 760–62; and the U.S., 760–62 Dei Sepolcri (Foscolo). See On Tombs Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le (Manet), 675–85, 689, 691, 692–93 Delaborde, 623 Delacroix, Eugène, 686–87; Bark of Dante, The, 645; and Courbet, 154, 187, 197, 211, 212, 214; Liberty Leading the People, 16, 21, 41, 66, 71, 72, 163, 522, 524, 755; and Manet, 651; and Meissonier, 74; and Millet, 115; and Republic competition, 36, 38; and the Salon, 82, 595; and the Second Empire, 578, 591, 593 Delalleau, Ernest, 624 Delaroche, Paul, 36, 38, 85, 172, 210, 512 Delvau, Alfred, 691 démocrate-socialiste. See démoc-soc Démocratie pacifique, La (Weill), 8, 93, 112, 801n6 démoc-soc, 112, 114 Demoiselles of the Village (Courbet). See Young Ladies of the Village Denmark: and Biedermeir period, 503–10 Departure of King William I for the Army, 31 July 1870 (Menzel), 785, 792 Departure of the Firemen Rushing to a Fire (Courbet), 188–90, 220 Deputation before the Magistrates (Hasenclever), 541 Deraismes, Maria, 750, 770, 859n29 Deroin, Jeanne, 49 Dérouléde, Paul, 780 Descent of Man (Darwin), 2 Desnoyers, Louis, 51, 220 Destruction of Jerusalem, The (Kaulbach), 472 Detouche, Henri, 720 Dévaulx, Théodore-François, 57 Deverell, Walter Howell, 227, 279 Devéria, Achille, 38 Devil’s Pool, The (Sand). See Mare au Diable, La Diaz, Narcisse, 25, 36, 38, 87, 499, 503 Dickens, Charles: and Carlyle, 358;

Dickens, Charles (continued) David Copperfield, 308; Dombey and Son, 314–15; and heroism, 288–89; and Millais, 81, 264–66, 286; and Patmore, 274; and Pre-Raphaelites, 226; and reformism, 262; and working class, 333, 353 Die fiedelen Bauern (Hasenclever), 545 Diébolt, Georges, 57 Diez, Julius, 520 Diploma for a Mutual Aid Society (Bonhommé), 626–28 Disneyland: and flânerie, 666 “Dirge for the Days of June, A” (Dupont), 108 Disraeli, Benjamin, 226, 231, 249, 262, 325, 353; Coningsby, 246; Tancred, 302, 320, 343 Disraeli, Isaac, 231 Distribution of Awards at the Closing of the Exposition Universelle ( Jobbé-Duval), 601 Distribution of the Eagles, The (Glaize), 601 Divine Comedy, The, 231–32, 336–37, 340 Divorcées, The (Daumier), 48–49 “Dixie” (Emmett), 424 Docteur Pascal, Le (Zola), 757 Docteur Tant-Pis et le Docteur Tant-Mieux (Bertall), 759 Dodsworth, William, 241–42 Dolfi, 370 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 314 Donnersmarck, Henckel von, 797 Doré, 500 Douglas, Stephen, 405 Douglass, Frederick, 421, 672 Draughts Players, The (Courbet), 151 Dred (Stowe), 435 Dreer, Ferdinand J., 541, 545 Drinkers (Veláquez), 673 Drummer Boy (Couture), 651, 655–57, 659 Drum-Taps (Whitman), 449, 829n62, 830n70 Dubois, 755–56 Dunant, Jean Henri, 386 Dupays, A. J. 169, 178, 182, 195–96, 218 Dupont, Pierre, 107–8, 144, 149, 188, 215; “Boeufs, Les,” 107, 183; “Chanson des foins, La,” 108; “Chant des ouvriers,” 108; “Chant des paysans,” 108; “Dirge for the Days of June, A,” 108; Paysans, chants rustiques, Les, 107; “Républicaine, La,” 108 Durand, Asher B., 282–83, 450–52, 456–57



870

Durand, John, 283 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 747 Duranty, Edmond, 600, 687 Duret, Théodore, 57, 719, 733, 747 Düsseldorf Academy, 511–12, 538 Düsseldorf Artist’s Mutual Aid Society, 541 Düsseldorf Gallery of New York, 541 Düsselford school, 475, 479, 510–15, 525 Duties of Man, The (Mazzini), 398 Duveyrier, Charles, 614, 616 Dyce, William, 266–67, 269 Ecce Ancilla Domini! (D. G. Rossetti), 251– 54, 332, 341 Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm, 504–6; Nathanson Family, The, 505–6 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 85, 172, 644 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx), 360 Economist, 629 Edgeworth, Maria, 304, 306 Egg, Augustus, 325 Eichrodt, Ludwig, 473 Eichthal, Gustave d’, 93 1848 revolutions. See revolutions of 1848 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 29, 612–13, 653 Eitelberger, Rudolf von, 490 Elections de 1863, Les (Ferry), 134 Eliot, George, 140; and “ugliness,” 81; Felix Holt, the Radical, 246; Adam Bede, 262, 297; and the fallen womam, 277; Daniel Deronda, 279 Ellis, Edward S., 460 Emancipated Woman Shedding Light on the World (Girard), 755–57 Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Murray), 425 Emancipation Group (Ball), 430–31 Emancipation Proclamation, 425, 427, 431, 436–37 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 126 Emmett, Dan, 424–25 Emperor Maximilian at the Capuchin Convent (Chamerlat), 723 Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies-inWaiting (Winterhalter), 683–84 End-of-the-Day of Atonement (The Habdalah) (Menzel), 787 Enfantin, Père, 48 Engels, Friedrich; and the American Civil War, 4; and capitalism, 228; and Car-

index

lyle, 821n275; Communist Manifesto, 2, 8–9, 74, 176; and the German revolution, 531, 535; and O’Connor, 354; on Proudhon, 11; and the working class, 263, 359–62 England: baptism, 268; and Catholicism, 265, 296, 305; Chartism, 228; colonialism, 319, 327; and France, 580, 584, 596; imperialism, 343–44; and Judaism, 304–8; prostitution, 315–17; public health, 333–35; reaction to Republic contest, 60–62; rivalry with U.S., 707; sexuality, 332–33 social reform, 260; women, 314–19, 337, 343–44 Enrollment of the Volunteers (Couture), 14–28, 58, 66–67, 575, 621, 643; and realism, 28–35; Springfield sketch, 23 Entrance into Pavia (Rethel), 528–29 Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence (Bezzuoli), 379 Entrance of Kaiser Franz into Vienna after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1814 (Krafft), 480–81 Entrance of the Emperor at Tarascon, 14 June 1856 (Bouguereau), 617–18 Ephrussi, Charles, 671 Equestrian Lesson, The (Millet), 87 Ere des Césars, L’ (Romieu), 588–89 Ernest Maltravers (Bulwer-Lytton), 314 eroticism, 91, 197–98, 245, 251–53, 332, 341, 503; and Courbet, 810n93; and Millet, 84 Errington, 265, 295 Esméralda, La (Steuben), 141 Espérance, L’ (Puvis). See Hope Esquiros, Alphonse, 698–99 Esquisse d’une philosophie (Lammenais), 75 Etex, Antoine, 99 Etudiant, L’ (Michelet), 16, 32, 34 Euchel, Gottlieb, 505 Eure, Dupont de l’, 6, 7 Evénement, L’ (France), 703 Evening of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian (Querétaro, 19 June 1867) (Chamerlat), 723 Evening, after the Attack (Protais), 718, 726–27 Evenings of the Hemp Dresser, The (Sand), 106 Execution of Maximilian (Manet), 638, 659, 701, 712–32, 733 Execution Squad, The (Aubert), 722–23 Exhibition of the Works of Foreign Artists in St. James’s Square, 541

expansionism: France, 707; U.S., 713 Exposition Universelle. See World’s Fair Expulsion of the Austrians from Solferino, The (Signorini), 389, 394 Expulsion, The (Masaccio), 412 Factory of Friedrich Harkort at Burg Wetter, The (Rethel), 519 Factory on Fire (Menzel), 792 “Fair Lady, Will You Accept My Arm?” (Daumier), 586 fairy tales, 149, 476, 478, 479; Rübezahl, 493–95 Falassi, Alessandro, 399 Falconer (Couture), 146, 655 Fall of the Irmin Column, The (Rethel), 528 Family Reunion (Fendi), 481–82 Fanchon the Cricket (Sand). See Petite Fadette, La Fantin-Latour, Henri, 632–33, 686–89, 702; Atelier in the Batignolles, The, 687–88, 705; Homage to Delacroix, 686–87 Father and Son (Couture), 27 Fattori, Giovanni, 366–67, 378–80, 382–91 Faure, Jean-Baptiste, 682, 747 February revolution (1848), 5–6, 29, 228 federalism, 25 Fédération des Artistes de Paris, 752 Felix Holt, the Radical (Eliot), 246 Female Haymakers Resting (Millet), 95 feminism, 9, 33–34, 35, 48–49, 859n29; in Italy, 397–401; in Manet’s Déjeuner, 679; and realism, 750; and Spencer, 827n26 femmes fatales, 337, 341, 344 Fendi, Peter, 481–84; Archduchess Sophie, 483–84; Family Reunion, 481–82; Seizure, The, 48, 483 Ferry, Jules, 134 festivals, 30 Fête de la Concorde, 30 Fête de la Fraternité, 30, 31 Fête de la Liberté, 31 Feuchère, Jean-Jacques, 57, 59 Feuillet, 588 Fifer, The (Manet), 659–60 Figaro, Le (France), 121, 134, 724, 781 “Fille des îles, La” (Astruc), 698 Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (Hunt), 303, 324–25, 348 Fire, The (Antigna), 82, 189 First Republic, 43 “Flag of Stars, Thick-Sprinkled Bunting”



871

(Whitman), 449 Flandrin, Hippolyte, 36, 38, 45, 165 flânerie, 633, 661–68, 670, 674–75, 701–2, 853n54 Flaubert, Gustave, 33–34, 75 Flemish Burghers (Meissonier), 72 Fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 652 Fliegende Blätter (Germany), 473, 499, 503 Flocon, Ferdinand, 6, 7, 8, 36 folk art, 97, 476 folk songs, 107–8, 399 folklore. See fairy tales Fontane, Theodor, 140, 789–91 Forbidden Fruit (Toulmouche), 613 Forever Free (Lewis), 428–29 Foscolo, Ugo, 396–97 Fossey, 53 Fould, Achille, 216, 589, 671; and Second Empire realism, 584, 593–94, 600, 601, 844n52 “Foules, Les” (Baudelaire), 662 Found (D. G. Rossetti), 327–44 Fountain Place de la Madeleine (Marville), 733–34 Fourcade, Louis de, 770 Fourier, Charles, 9, 10, 45, 215 Fourierism, 8, 801n6; in America, 415–20 Fournel, Victor: and the Communards, 766; and flânerie, 661–62, 665; and gamin imagery, 659, 672; and Manet, 651, 653; Paris et ses ruines en Mai 1871, 757 Français peints par eux-mémes, 657, 669, 673 Français, Louis, 207, 212, 595 France et progrès (Deraismes), 859n29 France: and Algeria, 605–6; battles of the Second Empire, 603; colonialism, 604–14, 630; and Denmark, 504; 1848 revolutions, 5, 40, 80–83, 97; FrancoPrussian War, 3, 742–43; funerals for barricade victims, 555–56; and Germany, 471, 479, 783; and Italy, 373; and Japan, 706; July Monarchy, 5; Napoléon III, 1; Paris Commune, 737–45; Paris reconstruction, 581–91; peasant uprisings; policy toward Mexico, 712–13; popular culture, 590; reaction to Auch ein Todtentanz, 523; Second Empire, 577–631; and Siam, 606; and Spain, 742; wine tax, 654. See also Second Empire; Second Republic; Third Republic François le Champi (Sand), 104

index

Franco-Prussian War, 3, 742–43 Frankfurt Assembly, 515 Fraser’s Magazine, 259 fraternal order, 20 Free Exhibition of Modern Art, 238 Free Institution of Modern Art. See National Institution Freedman, The, 425–27 Freemasonry, 7, 177–78, 205, 213, 230–32, 262, 370; in Divine Comedy, 232, 340; in Italy, 370; Masonic symbols, 7, 177–78, 205, 213, 452–54, 520; and Pre-Raphaelites, 230 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 541, 547, 550– 54, 838n91; “Aus dem schlesishen Gebirge,” 495; Ça ira!, 539–40; “Schwarz-Rot-Gold,” 558; “Todten an die Lebenden, Die,” 535, 551, 553 Frémiet, Emmanuel, 780–82; Gorilla Carrying Off a Human Female, 781–82; Joan of Arc on Horseback, 780–81 French colonies: slavery, 408 French Congress for Women’s Rights, 750 French revolutions, 233; influence on PreRaphaelites, 335. See also revolutions of 1848: France; Paris Commune French Soldiers of ’59 (Fattori), 378–80 French Volunteer (Couture), 24 Frere, John Hookham, 231 Freud, Sigmund, 498–99 Fried, Michael, 147, 651 Friedländer, Georg, 789 Friedrich, Caspar David, 452–54, 458, 476 “From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird” (Whitman), 449 Froment-Meurice, 614 Fugitive Slave Act, 406, 441–42 Führich, Josef, 229 Funeral at Ornans (Courbet), 170–83, 187, 213, 216, 667; and Antigna, 620; difference from Manet, 669; myopic realism, 606; rejection by Exposition Universelle, 211; reviews of, 161–62, 169; timeline with Stonebreakers, 158 Funeral of Count Orgaz (El Greco), 172 Funeral of Phocion (Poussin), 172 furniture design: Germany, 474–75 Galerie des Batailles, 141 Gambart, 325 Gamin de Paris, Le, 657–58 gamin, 655–60, 672 Garcin, 156

Garde Mobile, 8 Gardner, Alexander, 443–44, 828n34, 830n64 Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 443–44 Garibaldi at Palermo (Fattori), 386–87 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 232, 369–73, 375–76, 387 Garner, Margaret, 441–43 Garnier, Charles, 583 Garnier-Pagès, 6, 7, 25 Garrison, William Lloyd, 420, 427, 429 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 248, 277, 313, 315, 353 Gast, John, 449 Gaulois, Le (France), 750, 751, 770 Gaunt, 241 Gautier, Théophile: and Antigna, 620; and Breton, 626; and Courbet, 157, 189, 194, 196, 199; and Dance of Death series, 101; and Frémiet, 781; and Hamon, 612; and Manet, 695, 696, 702–3; and Millet, 96, 111, 113, 117, 132; and the Moniteur, 588; and political writing, 592, 609, 696; and Republic competition, 39, 41 Gavarni, 500 Gazette de France, 727 Géant, Le (France), 703, 855n109 Génod, 848n115 genre painting, 406, 414, 421, 436, 448, 475; and Biedermeier school, 473, 512, 536, 545; racism in, 438; and the Salon, 594; and Spitzweg, 499; and Waldmüller, 487, 488–90 Geofroy, Louis de, 157, 161, 179, 184 Gérard, 717 Géricault, Théodore, 18, 199, 599 Germ, 274, 277 Germany, 3; and Biedermeier culture, 503–76; Carlsbad Decrees, 476; and France, 783; March revolution, 554–59; reaction to Republic contest, 62–64; Second Reich, 783–99; spring uprisings of 1849, 549 Gèrôme, Jean-Léon, 846n86; Age of Augustus, 608–9; and Breton, 624; and Millet, 119, 614–16; and nudes, 198; Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors, 606–7; and Republic competition, 38, 50; role in Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 597 Geschichte der Deutschen (Menzel), 514 Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (Kugler), 514



872

Ghetto di Venezia (Signorini). See Venice Ghetto, The Gilles (Watteau), 673 Giorgione, 677 Giovine Italia. See Young Italy Girard, Eugène, 755–57 Girlhood (Gaunt), 241, 247 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The (D. G. Rossetti), 238–39, 245–47, 250–51, 262, 271, 330, 332 Glaize, Auguste-Barthélemy, 601 Gleaners, The (Breton), 125, 584, 624–25 Gleaners, The (Millet), 121–25, 129 Gleyre, Charles, 609, 614, 624 Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (Pugin), 256 Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas (Ruskin), 286 Goncourt, Edmond de, 744, 747, 751 Gonzalés, Eva, 750 Good Luck Greeting Card (Menzel), 786 Gorham case, 268 Gorilla Carrying Off a Human Female (Frémiet), 781–82 Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century (Pugin), 256 Gothic Revival, 299 Gotthelf, Jeremias. See Bitzius, Albert Gottschalk, Andreas, 533 Goudchaux, Michel, 93 Gould, Charles, 452 Goya, 163, 720 Gramsci, Antonio, 376 Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, The (Moran), 459 Grande Encyclopédie (Duveyrier), 845n64 Grandville, 500 Gravelot, 42 Great Barricade at the Entrance of the Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, from the Place de la Bastille, 70 Great Exhibition of 1851, 225, 273, 347 Greeley, Horace, 801n6 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 27 Grieve, 333, 338 Grillparzer, Franz, 477, 495, 498 Gros, 18, 717 Groseclose, 539–40 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Hegel), 474 Guardian, The, 267, 441 Gudin, Théodore, 601 Guérard, Eugène, 679 Guéroult, 671

index

Guerre civile, La (Manet), 733 Guichard, Joseph-Benoît, 755 Guittarero (Courbet), 146–47 Gundrisse (Marx), 360 Guys, Constantin, 662, 668 Gypsies, The (Manet), 673 Habsburg family, 479 Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert (Millet), 95 Halt of a Horseman (Nain), 673 Hamburg Kunsthalle, 568 Hamon, 38, 594, 609–13, 847n94; Conjuror, 612; My Sister Is Not at Home, 609–11 Hanson, Anne Coffin, 646 Happy Farmers, The (Hasenclever). See Die fiedelen Bauern Hard Times (Dickens), 358 Harkort, Friedrich, 517 Harper’s Weekly, 440–41, 721–25 Harrington (Edgeworth), 306 Harrison, Gabriel, 222–23 Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863, A (Gardner), 443–44 Harvesters of the Pontine Marshes, The (Robert), 91, 185, 186 Harvesters’ Meal, The (Millet), 116 Hasenclever, Johann Peter, 476, 512, 536–54; Atelier Scene, 536–37; Deputation before the Magistrates, 541; Jobsiade series, 537, 541 Haussmann, Georges, 1, 581–91, 670, 672; and the Paris Commune, 738, 739, 742 Hawkins, Micah, 424 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 463, 832n98 Hayes, Rutherford B., 442 Hayez, Francesco, 380 Heath Street, Hampstead (Brown), 349 Hebel, Johann Peter, 149 Hecker, Friedrich, 836n41 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 30, 471–74 Hegel’s Absolute, 21 Height of Fashion (Spencer), 417 Heimann, Adolph, 249 Heimann, Amelia, 249 Heine, Carl Friedrich, 538 Heine, Wilhelm, Josef, 538 Helper, Hinton, 422, 435 Herbert, John Robert, 101, 129, 245, 262, 767 Herding, 199, 213 Hermann, 538

heroism, 288, 359 Hervier, Adolphe, 69–72, 74 Herzen, Alexander, 74 Hess, Moses, 538 Hess, Peter, 500 Hesse, August, 53, 142, 144 High Church, 241, 245, 266, 271; and Millais, 271 Hildebrandt, Theodor, 511 Hilgers, Kurt, 545, 550 Hills, Pat, 460 Hiram: and Masonic symbolism, 177 Hireling Shepherd, The (Hunt), 292–97, 299, 302, 327–28 Hirsch, Alphonse, 671 Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (Champfleury), 202 Histoire des Girondins (Lamartine), 28, 29 Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (Blanc), 705 Historical Presentation of the Position of the Jews in Denmark, Mainly in Copenhagen, A (Nathanson), 505 History of the French Revolution (Michelet), 31, 32 History of the French Revolution of 1848 (Lamartine), 28 history painting, 545, 676; and Manet, 707–32, 715–32; and the Second Empire, 601–14 Hodgkinson, Mary, 259 Hogarth, William, 536 Holbein, Hans, 516 Hole, James, 348, 354 Homage to Delacroix (Fantin-Latour), 686–87 homosexuality: homoeroticism, 495–99; lesbianism, 139, 140 Hood, Thomas, 247 Hooker, Richard, 295 Hope (Puvis), 776–77 Hopkins, Mark, 136 Horse, Fair (Bonheur), 197, 622–23, 849n131 Hoschedé, Ernest, 747 Household Words (Dickens), 288 Houssaye, 219, 588, 592 Howitt, Marty, 838n91 Howitt, William, 838n91 Hübner, Karl Wilhelm, 512, 525–26, 538, 540, 550; Silesian Weavers, 525–26, 545 Hudson River landscapes, 449 Hudson River School, 448, 450, 455–66 Hugo, Victor, 165, 214, 589, 728, 738, 859n29; Misérables, Les, 660



873

Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, A (Millais), 271–73, 292 Huguenots, Les (Meyerbeer), 271–72 Human Comedy, The (Hamon), 217, 610–11, 612, 847n94 Humboldt, Alexander von, 558 Hunger (Breton), 624 Hunt, William Holman, 232–38, 292–328; Awakening Conscience, 299, 308–19, 326, 328, 336, 338; depicting ugliness, 263; and D. G. Rossetti, 241; Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 303, 324–25, 348; and G. Rossetti, 232; in Holy Land, 319–28, 343–44; letter to Brown, 343–44; Light of the World, The, 131, 270, 298–308, 319, 327; Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse, 259–60; and Millais, 227–28, 233–34, 238, 245, 256, 286, 299, 322; and P.R.B., 226–30, 269; Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice, 228, 233–37, 260; Scapegoat, The, 319–28; and Siddal, 279; and Woolner, 277 Hunt, William, Morris, 130, 595 Hunted Life, The; or, The Outcasts of the Border (Willett), 460 Huntington, Collis P., 136 Hussite Sermon (Lessing), 512–14, 540 hypermetropic realism, 606 I promessi sposi (Manzoni), 233 “I Sing the Body Electric” (Whitman), 220 Iconologia (Ripa), 42 Iconologie par figures (Gravelot/Cochin), 42 identity politics, 98 Illness of Pierrot (Couture), 651 Illusions perdues (Balzac), 696 Illustrated London News, 264, 267, 271, 313, 668 Illustration, L’ (France): coverage of Rethel, 523; coverage of Republic competition entrants, 39–40, 52, 54, 60; and peasantry, 194; political cartoons, 759; review of Courbet, 153–54, 162, 178; review of Stowe, 126 Immermann, Karl Leberecht, 511–12 Impending Crisis of the South (Helper), 422 Impression, Sunrise (Monet), 751–52 impressionism, 80, 634; agenda, 763–82; critical response to, 749–62; and Hunt, 294; and Neo-Greek move-

index

ment, 614; and the Paris Commune, 737–82; and realism, 577 Impressioniste, L’, 770 Incendie, chant des pompiers (Dupont), 188–89 Incendie, L’ (Antigna). See Fire, The Indians. See Native Americans Indifférent (Watteau), 651 Induno, Domenico, 374–75 industrialism, 526, 530; in Germany, 792–98 Infanta Margarita (Manet), 645–47, 851n20 Infanta Margarita (Velázquez), 645–47, 691 Ingres: Apotheosis of Homer, 172, 213, 610; and Courbet, 210, 211; and nudes, 198; and Republic competition, 36, 38; and the Salon, 595; and the Second Empire, 593, 578 Inness, George, 468 Interior of the Salle des Maréchaux (Liebert), 776, 778 International Red Cross, 386 International Working Men’s Association, 3 Interrupted Pilgrimage, The (Waldmüller), 491 Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (Bernard), 635 Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops) (Menzel), 792–93, 798 Irrungen, Wirrungen (Fontane), 794 Isabella (Millais), 255–60 “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” (Keats), 255 Isabey, 38 Italian Legion, 370 Italian National Exposition (1861), 388–89, 404 Italian Street Singer, The (Bazille), 674–75 Italy, 3; D. G. Rossetti’s political view of, 232; and feminism, 397–401; and France, 373; nationalism, 365; objectives of, 367–68; political unrest, 230; propaganda in, 380–82; revolutions of 1848, 365–66; Risorgimento, 365–401; unification leaders, 369–76; women’s suffrage, 825n29n; working class, 398 Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott), 305 Jalabert, Charles, 601 Jaley, Jean-Louis-Nicholas, 57 Jan, Laurent, 40–41, 52–53 Janet-Lange, Ange-Louis, 42–43, 617 Janin, Jules, 677, 681–82

Japan, 705–7 Jarves, James Jackson, 425 “Jeanne d’Arc, A” (Laprade), 780 Jeanron, Auguste, 36, 95 “Jenny” (D. G. Rossetti), 330 Jérôme Napoléon, Prince, 584, 589, 609 Jérôme Paturôt à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques (Reybaud), 56 Jesus among the Doctors (Menzel), 787 Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers (Manet), 731 Jewett, William S., 460 Jewish Disabilities Removal Act, 249 Jews: in Denmark, 505–6; in Germany, 557, 784–91, 795–96; in Italy, 824n25; portrayal by Manet, 671–72; portrayal by Menzel, 786–89; school integration, 231; treatment by Courbet, 214–16; in Victorian England, 302–4; Wandering Jew theme, 202–3. See also anti-Semitism; Judaism “Jim Crow” (Rice), 424 Jingle, Alfred, 440–41 Joan of Arc on Horseback (Frémiet), 780–81 Joan of Arc: as symbol, 780–82 Jobbé-Duval, Félix, 601 Jobsiade series (Hasenclever), 537, 541 Jocondo (Couture), 146 Johannot, Tony, 56 John Brown Led to Execution, 441 John Ross House, Ringold, Georgia, The (Barnard), 445 Johnson, Eastman, 431–37; Negro Life at the South, 432–35; Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves, A, 436 Jones, Ernest, 361 Journal des débats (France), 104, 210 Journal des débats ( Janin), 677 Journal officiel (France), 858n20n journalism. See media Journaux intimes (Baudelaire), 80 Judaism: and Christianity, 302–6, 320–27; and Hunt, 320–27; concept of scapegoat, 320–27; in England, 304–8; funerals, 172; and the Macchiaoli, 391–95; and Millet, 92–93; symbolism, 520 Judeo-Christian themes: scapegoat, 320– 22, 328 Judgment of Paris (Raphael), 677 Juif errant, Le (Sue), 126, 181, 203 Juifs, rois de l’époque; hisotire dee la féodalité financière, Les (Toussenel), 215 July Monarchy, 5, 6, 18; and Enrollment, 28



874

“June Revolution, The” (Marx), 533 June uprising (1848), 51, 52, 69, 72–75, 80–81; Courbet’s reaction to, 145–46; German depiction of, 532; Millet’s role, 112–13; in music, 108 Jung Brothers with Their Tutor, The (Oppenheim), 478 Kaiser Franz Giving a Public Audience (Krafft), 480–81 Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, 404 Kapital, Das (Marx), 2, 108 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 472 Keats, John, 255, 256, 258–60, 455–57 Kindred Spirits (Durand), 282–83, 456–57 Kingsley, Charles, 227, 351; Alton Locke, 248–49, 297, 346; and Carlyle, 358; and Christian Socialism, 354; and Keats, 260; and W. Morris, 364; and working class, 353; Yeast, 260, 349 Kiss, The (Hayez), 380 Kitson, 353 Knight Kurt’s Bridal Journey (Schwind), 498 Købke, Christen, 506 Koëlla, Léon-Edouard, 640–43, 658, 702 Kortum, Karl Arnold, 838n81 Kossolapov, Alexander, 646 Krafft, Johann Peter, 479–81 Kreuzzeitung, Die (Germany), 790, 798 Kugler, Franz, 514 Kulturkampf, 784 Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westphalen, 538 Kussmaul, Adolph, 473 labor class. See working class labor reform, 7 Laboring in the Nièvre (Bonheur), 101 Laboulaye, Edouard de, 859n29 Lackawanna Valley (Inness), 468 “Lady of Shalott, The” (Tennyson), 280 Lady of Shalott, The (Siddal), 280 Lafosse, Jean-Baptiste Adolphe, 417 Lagenevais, 154–55 Lagrène, Jean, 671 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 653 Lamartine: and American politics, 25–26; Hisotrie des Girondins, 28–31; and June uprising, 80; and the Provisional Government, 6, 7; and Republic competition, 36; and the working class, 14, 66 Lammenais, 75, 588

index

Land und Leute (Riehl), 494 Landelle, Charles, 51 Landscape in the Riesengebirge (Friedrich), 453 landscape painting, 149, 444–70, 479, 504; and Biedermeier school, 473, 491–92, 512; and Købke, 507; and the Salon, 594; and Waldmüller, 487–88 Lanno, François-Gaspard Aimé, 57 Lanoue, Félix-Hippolyte, 596 Laprade, Victor de: “Jeanne d’Arc, A,” 780 Larken, Edward, 354 Lassalle, Emile, 617 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 547 Last Calf: The Forced Sale, The (Waldmüller), 491 Last Council of the Ex-Ministers (Daumier), 47 Last Moments of Maximilian (Laurens), 728 Last of England (Brown), 362–64 Last Roll Call of the Revolution (Müller), 217 Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, The (Noble), 438–41 Laurens, Jean-Paul, 728; Last Moments of Maximilian, 728 law of three stages (Comte), 99 Le Petit, Angélique Perrine, 414–16 Le Play, 593, 594, 595, 844n50 Lear, Edward, 312, 314 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 220–23 Léda (Galimard), 841n6 Ledru-Rollin: and 1848 revolutions, 51, 93, 97; 1849 attempt at revolution, 68, 156; and Millet, 95; and the Provisional Government, 6, 7; Réforme, La, 8; and Republic competition, 36, 43, 47 Leeds Times, 354 Lega, Silvestro, 366, 398–401 Legros, 686, 688 Leleux, Adolphe, 38, 64–66 Leloir, 41 Lenox, James, 465 Leonidas (David), 217 Lepelletier, 764 Leroux, Pierre, 49, 104, 588 Lessing, Carl Friedrich, 511, 512–13, 538, 540, 550 Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb, 460–63, 538–40; Washington Crossing the Delaware, 538–40; Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 460 Lewis, Edmonia, 427–31 Leys, 348

Liberal Empire, 133–34 liberalism, 2 Liberator, 420–21, 427 liberty bonnets, 30–31, 52–53, 59, 95 Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix), 16, 21, 41, 66, 71, 72, 163, 522, 524, 755 Liberty: personification of, 15, 17, 33–34, 58; popular symbolism, 52 Lichtwark, Alfred, 568, 574–75 Liebermann, Adolph von, 798 Liebermann, Max, 798 Liebert, Alphonse: Interior of the Salle des Maréchaux, 776, 778 Lies, Edward, 460, 832n104 Life and Labour (Smiles), 354 Light of the World, The (Hunt), 131, 270, 298–308, 319, 327 Linton, John, 352 Lisle, Leconte de, 75 Lisle, Rouget, de, 18 Little Cavaliers, The (Velázquez), 667 Locke, Nancy, 640 Lockroy, Edouard, 859n29 London exhibition of 1862, 596 London Jews’ Society, 303 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 248, 355 London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, 303 Long Live Wine, Long Live the Juice Divine (Guérard), 679–80 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 838n91 Longworth, Nicholas, 414 Lorentzen, Christian August, 506 Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse (Hunt), 259–60 Lost Cause (Mosler), 445–46 Lot and His Daughters (Courbet), 219 Loudun, Eugène, 199 Louis XVI Distributing Alms to the Poor during the Rigorous Winter of 1788 (Hersent), 618 Louis-Philippe, 60 Louvre, 601, 763 Love of Gold (Couture), 651, 696 Lovett, Clara, 368 Low Church, 245, 266, 296 Lower Austrian Peasant Wedding (Wedding in Perchtoldsdorf) (Waldmüller), 489–90 Lowlands art, 97 Ludlow, J. M., 348 Luminais, Evariste, 595, 626 Lundi (France), 589



875

Luxembourg Gallery, 16 Luxembourg Museum, 16 Luynes, Albert de, 36 Lyell, Charles, 231, 284 Lyttelton, George, Lord, 454 Mabille, Bal, 684 Macchiaioli, 365–401; and feminism, 397– 401; and Garibaldi, 371; and Judaism, 391–95; linguistic roots of, 822n5; and photography, 384; and religion, 391–97; vs. academia, 376–80; vs. Pre-Raphaelites, 391 Macculloch, 284 Magdalenism, 316–18. See also sexuality; women: fallen women theme Magenta, 4 June 1859 (Yvon), 384–85 Magenta. See Battle of Magenta, The (Fattori) magisterial gazes, 448, 450, 452–66; in literature, 459–60 Maître, Edmond, 687, 747 Malakoff (Yvon), 719 Malkasten group, 512, 538 Mallarmé, 770 Man Grafting a Tree (Millet), 119, 130, 207 Man Pulling a Cannon (Couture), 24 Man with the Glove (Titian), 148 Man with the Hoe, The (Millet), 130–33, 136 Man with the Leather Belt, The (Courbet), 148, 169 Man with the Pipe (Courbet), 157, 191, 200 Manet and the Modern Tradition (Hanson), 646 Manet, Auguste, 638, 639–40 Manet, Edouard, 25, 577, 614, 633–735; Absinthe Drinker, The, 649–55, 672; Bark of Dante, The, 645; Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama, 698, 707– 12, 733; Boy with the Cherries, The, 655; Concert in the Tuileries, 666–68, 669, 687, 696, 702; Dead Christ and the Angels, 709; Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le, 675–85, 689, 691, 692–93; Execution of Maximilian, 638, 659, 701, 712–32, 733; Fifer, The, 659–60; Guerre civile, La, 733; Infanta Margarita, 645–47, 851n20; Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, 731; Nymph Surprised, The, 640–41; Old Musician, The, 668–73, 675; Olympia, 647, 679–81, 690–700, 704– 5, 855n94; Pêche, La, 642–43, 665; and the Third Republic, 739 Manet, Eugéne, 639, 682

index

Manet, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, 639 Manet, Gustave, 639, 682 Manet, Suzanne Leenhoff, 640–43, 658, 682 Manfred (Byron), 455 Manifest Destiny, 405, 443–66 Manin, Daniele, 392 Mann, Thomas, 471 Manual of the Stock Exchange Speculator, The (Proudhon), 217 Manzoni, Alessandro, 233 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), 463, 832n98 Mare au Diable, La (Sand), 101–4, 105, 107, 108, 113, 175, 622 Margaret Garner (Noble), 440–43 Marianne figures, 43 Marianne, 619 Marie, 6, 7, 14 Märker, Friedrich August, 572, 575 Markham, Edwin, 135–36 Marr, Wilhelm, 798–99 Marrast, Armand, 6, 26, 72 Marseillaise (Rouget), 18, 834n38 Marsh, Jan, 251, 326 Martin, Alexandre (pseud. Albert), 6, 7 Martin, John, 334–35, 459, 794 Martineau, Harriet, 828n34 Marville, Charles de, 581, 678, 733–34 Marx, Karl: and the American Civil War, 4; on Blanc, 12; and capitalism, 100; and Carlyle, 821n275, 838n81; Communist Manifesto, 2, 8–9, 74, 176; and the 1848 revolutions, 29; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The, 612–13; and German revolution, 531, 540–41; and Haussmannism, 583; Kapital, Das, 2, 108, 360; Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 535; and O’Connor, 354; and the Paris Commune, 738, 755; on Proudhon, 11–12; and the Provisional Government, 6; and the working class, 33, 228, 359–62, 576 Marx, Leo, 467 Marxism, 2–3, 360–62 Masonry. See Freemasonry Massacres of the Third of May, 1808 (Goya), 163, 720 Mathieu, 149 Mathilde, Princess, 589 Maude (C. Rossetti), 242, 246–47 Maupas, 593 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 297, 348, 351, 354, 356–58

Maximilian, 712–13, 729–31 Mayhew, Henry, 248, 262, 355–56, 358 Mazzini morente (Lega), 825n28 Mazzini, 231–2; Italy, 231–32 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 369–70, 373, 375 McCracken, Francis, 253–54 McCrone, Walter, 646, 852n20 media, 5–6, 8; American coverage, 720–21; political freedom, 14, 533; propaganda in the Second Empire, 584–91, 598, 630, 843n31; and prostitution, 695–96; and realism, 79; and the Salons, 592. See also by individual newspaper name Meeting of Jacob and Rachel (Dyce), 267 Meeting, The (Courbet), 200–206, 211, 214, 217, 223, 494, 633 Meigs, Montgomery C., 460 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 628–30; Amateur Studying Drawings, 628; Barricade—Souvenir de guerre civile, 444, 776; Battle of Solferino, 603–4, 628, 630; and the Beaux-Arts, 591; Bravi, Les, 628; Connoisseurs, The, 72; Cuirassiers, 1805, 720; Flemish Burghers, 72; Napoléon III à Solferino, 384, 717; and realism, 173, 475, 574, 578, 609, 640; and Republic competition, 36; Retreat of 1814, The, 630; Ruins of the Tuileries, 776, 778; and the Salon, 595; Souvenir of the Civil War, 72–76, 82, 523, 628; and Vernet, 717; and the working class, 113 Mejía, Tomás, 712, 715 Melville, Herman, 466 Mémoires (Haussmann), 581 Mémorial diplomatique (France), 724 Mendel Levin Nathanson’s Elder Daughters, Bella and Hanna (Eckersberg), 505 Mendelssohn, Franz, 798 Menzel, Adolph von, 783, 785–99, 840n116; Anhalter Railway Station by Moonlight, The, 559, 561; Berlin–Potsdam Railroad, The, 559, 561; Coronation of King William I, 572–73, 783; Departure of King William, 785, 792; depiction of death, 173; End-of-the-Day of Atonement, 787; Factory on Fire, 792; Good Luck Greeting Card, 786; Iron Rolling Mill, 792–93, 798; Jesus among the Doctors, 787; and Manet, 640; My Father’s Hand, 571; political views, 514; Public Funeral, 559–76, 786, 794; racism of,



876

785–99, 862n8; Soldier of the Prussian Londwehr and French Prisoners, 786–87 Menzel, Wolfgang, 514 Mercey, Frédéric de, 36, 578, 580, 600, 604 Méricourt, Théroigne de, 26, 31, 33–34 Mérimée, 589, 684 Merruau, Charles, 582 Merson, Oliver, 601–3 metempsychosis, 104 Metternichean system, 2 Meurent, Victorine, 674, 682–83, 695 Mexico, 712 Michel, Louise, 752 Michelet, Jules: and Daumier, 47, 49; Etudiant, L’, 16, 32, 34–35; History of the French Revolution, 31, 32; Peuple, Le, 32, 109, 111; political views of, 80; and Toussenel, 215; Women of the Revolution, 31 Midday (Courbet), 149 Middle East: Hunt’s travels in, 319 military painting, 503, 601–4, 709, 715–32 Milkmaid, The (Millet), 87 Mill, John Stuart, 2, 346 Millais, John Everett, 815n108; Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, 81, 260–64, 266–67, 271, 274, 348; and Combe, 245; Copy of a Cast of the Apollo Belvedere, 257; Copy of a Cast of Fighting Gladiators, 257; and Dickens, 286; fireman as hero, 288; and Hunt, 233–34, 238, 299, 322; Ophelia, 281; Peace Concluded, 289–91; Portrait of Ruskin, 281–83; and P.R.B., 226–27, 233; Rescue, The, 286–89; Return of the Dove to the Ark, The, 270–73; and Siddal, 281; and the Salon, 595; Waterfall, The, 283–84 Millais, William, 288 Millaud, Moïse-Polydore, 585 Miller, Annie, 318–19, 328 Millet, Catherine Lemaire, 89, 90, 118 Millet, Jean-François, 83–97, 109–37; Angelus, The, 126–28; Antoinette Hébert, 87–88; Bathers, The, 113; Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, The, 92; Cliffs of the Hague, 85–87; comparison to Courbet, 143, 159; and Couture, 25; and Dance of Death series, 101; Death and the Woodcutter, 115; Equestrian Lesson, The, 87; Female Haymakers Resting, 95; Gleaners, The, 121–25, 129; Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, 95; Man Grafting a Tree, 119, 130, 207;

index

Man with the Hoe, The, 130–33, 136; Milkmaid, The, 87; Monsieur Ouitre, 87–88; Peasants Bearing to Their Farmhouse a Calf Born in the Field, 134; and realism, 81, 168, 191, 263, 594, 293; and religion, 807n89; and Republic competition, 38; Return from the Fields, 90–91; and the Second Empire, 614–16, 621, 626, 630; Shepherdess Guarding Her Flock, 134; Sower, 82, 92, 109–13, 115, 133, 494, 624; Stoning of St. Stephen, The, 85–87; Temptation of Saint Jerome, The, 89; Winnower, The, 92, 93–97, 113; and work, 849n138 minstrelsy, 424–25 Miramón, Miguel, 713, 715 Misérables, Les (Hugo), 660 Misery and Despair (Breton), 624 Missouri Compromise, 408 mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo, Il (G. Rossetti), 232 Moby Dick (Melville), 466 Modern Painters, 282 modernism, 35, 83; and realism, 630 modernity, 663, 705 Mohl, Moritz, 532 Monet, Claude, 577, 613–14, 751; Boulevard des Capucines, 753–54; Impression, Sunrise, 751–52; Pont de l’Europe, Le, 768; and railways, 768–75; and Zola, 749–50 Monginot, Charles, 673 Moniteur universel, Le (France): coverage of agriculture, 155; as propaganda in the Second Empire, 587–88, 589, 591, 609, 619, 620; review of Courbet, 162, 166, 169, 179 Monroe, James, 442 Monsieur Ouitre (Millet), 87–88 Moore, Thomas, 311–12, 314 moral code, 488 moral standards, 361 Moran, Thomas, 458–59 More, Thomas, 11 Morel-Fatio, Antoine Léon, 601 Morisot, Berthe, 755 Morlon, A., 680 Morning Chronicle, 248, 262, 355 Morning Hour (Schwind), 492–93 Morning, before the Attack (Protais), 718, 727–27 Morny, Charles-Auguste-Louis-Joseph, duc de, 578, 584, 588, 589, 593, 622

Morris, Edward, 266 Morris, Jane (Burden), 342–43 Morris, William, 342, 364 Morrison, Toni, 441 Morse, 407 Moses Saved from the Waters (Manet), 641–42 Mosler, Henry, 445 Mot d’Ordre, Le (Leleux), 65, 68 Moullin, Louis, 617, 618 Mount Ktaadn (Church), 464–65 Mount, William Sidney, 417, 421–25, 679; Banjo Player, The, 417; Bone Player, The, 417; Break of Day, The, 422–23; and Courbet, 155–56, 159; Dawn of Day, 423; Power of Music, The, 155–56 Mountain of the Holy Cross (Moran), 458 Müller, Wilhelm, 552 Munich Accademy, 511 Munich Kunstverein, 500 Murger, Henri, 144, 637 Murray, Freeman Henry Morris, 425–27, 429–30 Music Hath Charms (Mount), 155–56 music, 107–8, 145, 155, 535; and the Marseillaise, 843n38; minstrelsy, 424–25; as propaganda, 591 Muslims: depiction of, 528 “My Beautiful Lady” (Woolner), 277 My Father’s Hand (Menzel), 571 My Sister Is Not at Home (Hamon), 609–11 myopic realism, 606, 617–18 Mystères de Paris, Les (Sue), 100–101, 264 Nadar, 703, 753, 855n108, 855n109 Nain, Louis Le, 673 Nana (Zola), 681 Napoléon I Surrounded by Marshals and Generals Dead on the Field of Battle (Vernet), 715 Napoléon III à Solferino (Meissonier), 384, 717 Napoléon III Distributing Alms to the Flood Victims of Lyon in June 1856 ( JanetLange), 620–21 Napoléon III Receiving Abd el Kader at SaintCloud (Carpeaux), 605 Napoléon III, 14, 34, 57, 850n147; in art, 601–2, 653; British reaction to, 283; and Courbet, 191; and Italy, 373; and the media, 584–91; and Mexico, 712, 742; and realism, 577; and the Salon des Refusés, 683; Salon of 1850–1851, 82; and the United States, 4; whistle-



877

stop tours, 616 Nashville from the Capitol (Barnard), 444 Nathanson Family, The (Eckersberg), 505–6 Nathanson, Mendel Levin, 505–6 National Academy of Design, 432, 441 National Era, 435 National Institution, 254 National La (France), 39 National Workshops, 7, 8–14, 20 nationalism, 504 Native Americans, 408, 460, 462, 468, 831n78 naturalism, 23, 140, 683; and Düsselford school, 511; and realism, 577, 634–37 Nazarene school, 479 Negro in the American Rebellion (Brown), 429 Negro Life at the South ( Johnson), 432–35 Neo-Greek movement, 601, 609, 847n94; and realism, 613 Neue Rheinische Zeitung (Marx/Engels), 533, 535, 537, 538, 545 New Moral World, 316 New Toy Launched by Ratapoil (Daumier), 586 New York Herald, 423 New York Sun, 136 New York Tribune, 540–41, 801n6 Newman, Robert Loftin, 95, 268, 296 Niagara (Church), 465–66 Niboyet, Eugénie, 49 Nieuwerkerke, Alfred-Émilien, comte de: and the Academy, 597; and art in the Second Empire, 578, 584; and Courbet, 207–8, 211; and Republic competition, 58, 59; and the Salon, 592, 593, 596; and the Salon des Refusés, 685 Noble, Thomas Satterwhite, 437–43 Nochlin, Linda, 188, 332 North Star, 421 Northern Star, 228, 354 Notes on Shepherds and Sheep (Dyce), 269 Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (Ruskin), 269, 295 Notre Dame, 622 nudes, 690; and radical realism, 196 Nuova Europe, La (Italy), 824n24 Nymph Surprised, The (Manet), 640–41 “O Solitude!” (Keats), 455 O’Connor, Feargus, 228, 354 Oastler, 262 Oath of the Tennis Court (David), 16, 17, 26,

index

163, 599 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 295 Offenbach, 677 Old Kentucky Home. See Negro Life at the South ( Johnson) Old Man Leaning on a Spade (Ceruti), 131 Old Musician, The (Manet), 668–73, 675 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 264 Olympia (Manet), 647, 679–81, 690–700, 704–5, 855n94 “Of My Lady in Death” (Woolner), 277 “Oft, in the Stilly Night” (Moore), 311–12 On Liberty (Mill), 2 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 2 On Tombs (Foscolo), 396–97 Ono, Pauline-Virginie, 87 Opening of the Exosition Universelle, The (Gérôme), 601 Opéra-Comique, 591 Ophelia (Millais), 277–79, 281, 292 Opinion nationale (France), 589 Oppenheim, Moritz, 478–79; Jung Brothers with Their Tutor, The, 478; Talmud Torah School, 479 Order No. 11 (Bingham), 411–13 Organisation du travail (Blanc), 12 Orientalism, 604–8, 698 Orphée aux Enfers (Offenbach), 677 Orpheus in Hades (Offenbach), 683 Oudot, Jean-Antoine, 140, 150, 152, 153, 173, 176 Our Banner in the Sky (Church), 446–47, 465 Our Saviour Subject to His Parents at Nazareth (Herbert), 245, 262 Ouseley, Gore, 231 “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice” (Whitman), 449 Owen, Robert, 9, 10–11 Ox-Bow (Cole), 831n78, 831n78 Oxford Movement, 241, 246, 266–69, 273, 296, 299; and Millias, 815n108 Oxford University Press. See Clarendon Press Oxford University, 245 Paigné, Octavie, 594 Paintbox group. See Malkasten group “Painter of Modern Life, The” (Baudelaire), 662 Painter’s Studio, The (Courbet), 150, 208–20, 223 Painting of Modern Life, The (Clark), 739

Palmer, Fanny, 470 pamphleteers, 588–89 Papeleu, Victor de, 130 Papety, Dominique-Louis, 45 Parent-Duchâtelet, A.-J.-B., 692, 699, 842n15 parenting: and Manet, 658 Paris Commune, 3–4, 737–82, 858n20; influence on impressionism, 749–82; and Manet, 732–35; and women, 859n29 Paris et ses ruines en Mai 1871 (Fournel), 757 Paris Street, Rainy Weather (Caillebotte), 764–65 Paris reconstruction, 581–91, 630. See also urban planning Parisian National Guard Leaves for the Front in September 1792 (Cogniet), 71 Parito d’Azione (Party of Action), 376 parody: Courbet’s Peasants, 183 “Passover in the Holy Family, The” (D. G. Rossetti), 249–50 Password, The (Leleux). See Mot d’Ordre, Le Past and Present (Carlyle), 358–61 Pastoral Concert (Giorgione), 677–78 Paternal Curse (Greuze), 27 paternalism, 237 Patmore, Coventry, 274–79, 295 Patrie, Le (France), 588 patriotism: in America, 447 Paxton, Joseph, 334–35, 347, 350 Pays, Le (France), 588, 843n31 Paysans (Balzac), 101 Paysans, chants rustiques, Les (Dupont), 107 Peace Concluded (Millais), 289–91 Peace in Land (Spitzweg), 503 Peale, 407 Pearl and the Wave (Persian Fable) (Baudry), 689 Peasant Grafting a Tree (Millet). See Man Grafting a Tree peasantry, 83–84, 99–101, 137, 194–95, 495; and conservatism, 121; as depicted by Courbet, 158–70; as depicted by Millet, 96–97, 109–37; as depicted by Waldmüller, 488–91; in Germany, 484–85; political involvement, 113; and religion, 129, 296; urban vs. rural, 82–83, 114. See also working class Peasants Bearing to Their Farmhouse a Calf Born in the Field (Millet), 134 Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (Courbet), 183–88



878

Pêche, La (Manet), 642–43, 665 Peintres français en 1867, Les (Duret), 719 Peisse, Louis, 74, 154, 159 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 541 Péreire, Emile, 93, 216, 593, 616, 671 Péreire, Isaac, 93, 216, 616, 671 pergolato, Il. See Trellis, The (Lega) Perrin, Charles, 207, 219–20 Persigny, Fialin, duc de, 34, 578, 589, 593, 621 Petit Journal, Le (France), 585 Petite Fadette, La (Sand), 105–7 pétroleuse, Une (Dubois), 755–56 Petroz, Pierre, 120–21, 124, 125 Peuple, Le, (Michelet), 32, 109, 111 Phillips, Wendell, 415 philosophical realism, 78 Philosophy of Poverty (Proudhon), 9, 11 Philosophy of Right (Hegel). See Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (Barnard), 444 photography, 443–44; and Macchiaoli, 384; and the Paris Commune, 739–40; post-Commune, 747; and realism, 80; and the Second Empire, 577 Phrygian bonnets. See liberty bonnets Picot, François-Edouard, 36 Picou, 609 Pictures from Italy (Dickens), 265 Pilgrims Returning from the Feast Day of the Madonna dell’Arco (Robert), 91 Pillet, Fabien, 162–63, 179 Pils, Isidore, 595, 596, 597, 601–3, 717–18; Battle of Alma, 601–3, 717 Pissarro, 750, 751 Planche, Gustave, 193–94, 600 Plint, Thomas Edward, 347–48, 354, 364 Ploughing in the Nivernais (Bonheur), 183, 622–23 Poggenpuhls, Die (Fontane), 790, 791 Polidori, Gaetano, 230, 239 political cartoons, 160 political clubs, 5–6, 14, 30, 150. See also by individual name; secret societies Pollack, Griselda, 739 Pont de l’Europe (Caillebotte), 766–67 Pont de l’Europe and the Gare Saint-Lazare, The (Lamy), 766 Pont de l’Europe, Le (Monet), 768 Poor Poet, The (Spitzweg), 185, 500–501 popular societies. See political clubs Portico (D’Ancona), 367–68

index

Portrait of a Man (Couture), 647 Portrait of a Woman (Couture), 644–45 Portrait of Adolphe Moreau (Couture), 87 Portrait of Antonin Proust (Manet), 644–45 Portrait of Edouard Manet (Fantin-Latour), 632–33 Portrait of Emile Zola (Manet), 703–7 Portrait of Ferdinand Freiligrath (Hasenclever), 551–52 Portrait of Franz von Schober (Schwind), 496–97 Portrait of M. and Mme Auguste Manet (Manet), 639 Portrait of Roudier (Manet), 647 Portrait of Ruskin (Millais), 281–83 Portrait of the Notary Dr. Josef Eltz, His Wife Caroline, and Their Eight Children in Bad Ischl (Waldmüller), 485–86 portraiture: Danish Golden Age, 505; and Manet, 647; and Waldmüller, 485–87 Pose, Eduard Wilhelm, 512 positivism, 98–100, 137 potato revolution (Berlin), 524 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx), 12 Power of Fashion (Spencer), 417 Power of Music, The (Mount), 155–56 Powers, Hiram, 403–5, 429 Pradier, 198 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.), 226–29, 233, 242, 253; and baptism, 267–68; and religion, 298; dissolution of, 336 Pre-Raphaelites, 225–364; and Christianity, 292, 344; Nazarene influence, 304; origins of, 225–91; and realism, 236– 37; and revolutions of 1848, 225–364; and Tractarianism, 273 Presbyterian British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. See London Jews’ Society press. See media Presse, La (France), 588, 598, 710, 749 Preuss, Johann David Erdmann, 563 Preyer, Gustav, 512 Preyer, Johann Wilhelm, 512 Princess, The (Tennyson), 312 Princeton University Art Museum, 276 Prisoner’s Dream, The (Schwind), 498 Prix de Rome competition, 85 Progress (Durand), 450–52 Promised Land—The Grayson Family, The ( Jewett), 460–61 propaganda: and the Civil War, 444; and

Couture, 656; use by the Second Empire, 578–80, 584–91, 598, 616–30; and slavery, 434 prostitution, 315–17, 330, 333; and Manet’s Olympia, 690, 699; in the Second Empire, 675, 681, 842n15, 845n68 Protais, Paul-Alexandre, 718, 725–27; Evening, after the Attack, 718, 726–27; Morning, before the Attack, 718, 727–27 Protonotari, Francesco, 824n22 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 217; Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, Les, 12; and Courbet, 178–81, 198–99, 215, 218–19, 841n6; and Daumier, 49; and Millet, 117; Philosophy of Poverty, 9, 11–12; and realist-rural discourse, 185–88; and the Second Empire, 588; on slavery, 126; on “ugliness,” 81; on the working class, 114, 163–66 Proust, Antonin, 641, 644, 661, 662, 671, 673–74, 683 Provisional Republic, 40; education, 48; and peasantry, 113 Proviso, Wilmot, 405 Prusse en 1860, La (About), 843n31 Prussia, 510–15 Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution, The (Menzel), 559–76, 786, 794 public works projects: in Paris, 580–91, 630 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore: influence on Hunt, 235, 241, 277; influence on Millais, 255–56, 263; influence on Patmore, 274; and the Pre-Raphaelites, 226, 229 Puhlmann, 840n116 Punch (England), 247, 350, 500; and antiSemitism, 260, 305; coverage of Republic competition, 61–62; and working class, 347 “Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art, The” (Stephens), 277 Pusey, 241–42, 266, 269 Püttmann, 538 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 352, 776 Pyat, Félix, 36, 753 Quaglio, Domenico, 476–77, 500 racism, 199, 215–16, 347, 407, 462; in American genre painting; and Menzel, 786–91; identified by Manet, 638, 697–99. See also anti-Semitism;



879

slavery radical realism, 78–80, 139–223 Radziwill, Catherine, 862n11 Raffet, Auguste, 715 Raft of the Medusa (Géricault), 163 ragpickers, 649–55 Railroad Bridge Viewed from the Port, The (Monet), 774–74 railroads: American imagery, 466–70; in France, 614; in Germany, 559, 795– 96; post-Commune, 770–75 Railway Bridge, Argenteuil, The (Monet), 770–71 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 677–78, 679, 692 Ranelagh, Viscount, 319 Ranke, Leopold von, 563 Raphael, 227 Ratapoil (Daumier), 585 Ravaisson, Félix, 591 Ravenel. See Sensier Reach, Angus B., 254–55 Reading Room (Hasenclever), 536 realism, 23, 25, 38, 69, 74–76, 77–137, 139–223; vs. academia, 495; and Biedermeier school, 475, 509; Danish Golden Age, 504; and death, 173; and Enrollment, 28–35; and feminism, 750; and Hunt, 294; and Menzel, 559–76; and military painting, 720; and Millais, 262; vs. naturalism, 634–37; and Pre-Raphaelites, 236, 293, 352; Second Empire, 577–631; and Stonebreakers, 165–70; and working class, 277 Realist, The (Couture), 184 realist-rural discourse, 97–109, 194; and Courbet, 139, 143, 145, 169–70, 182– 83, 187, 214; and Millet, 115, 135; and Petroz, 120–21 Realpolitik, 3 Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors by Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie at Fontainebleau, 27 June 1861 (Gérôme), 606–7 red caps. See liberty bonnets Red Republic, 52 Redgrave, Richard, 248, 250 Reed, Luman, 451–52, 456 Reformation, The (Kaulbach), 472 Réforme, La (France), 8, 59 Regnault, Jean-Baptiste, 478, 593 Rehearsal of “The Flute Player” in the Atrium of H.I.H. the Prince Napoléon (Boulanger), 609–10

index

Reinick, Robert, 527, 530, 533, 836n46, 837n69 Reiter, Johann Baptist, 475 religion: and American nationalism, 458; in Courbet’s Funeral, 173–74; debate in Victorian England, 295; and Düsseldorf school, 512–14; and the Macchiaoli, 391–97; and Millet, 127–29; and P.R.B., 266; religious reform, 229; and science, 298; vs. social change in Victorian England, 246; and work, 359 Renoir, Auguste, 687, 689, 858n20 Republic of 1848, 15, 17 Republic: contest for symbol of, 35–38, 82, 144; foreign reaction to, 60–76; Millet, 91–92; in painting, 39–57; personification of, 93, 111; in sculpture, 57–60 “Républicaine, La” (Dupont), 108 République, La (France), 8 République, La ( Johannot), 56 Rescue, The (Millais), 286–89 Rethel, Alfred, 101, 512, 514, 557, 559, 836n42; and Champfleury, 836n46; Auch ein Todtentanz, 515–35, 553, 554, 837n69; Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848, 62–64; Baptism of Wittekind, The, 528; Battle of Cordova, The, 528–29; Blätter, 534–35; Coronation, The, 528; Factory of Friedrich Harkort at Burg Wetter, The, 519; Fall of the Irmin Column, The, 528 Retreat of 1814, The (Meissonier), 630 Return from the Conference (Courbet), 132, 598 Return from the Fields (Millet), 90–91 Return from the Harvest (Breton), 624 Return from the Island of Elba (Steuben), 141–42 Return of the Dove to the Ark, The (Millais), 270–73 Reunion of the Thirteen Cavaliers (Velázquez), 646 reverential gazes, 452, 458 “Revolution, Die” (Wagner), 533 revolutions of 1848, 225–364; and America, 403; Biedermeier culture, 590–10; France, 2, 3, 5, 40, 97; Germanic nations, 471–576; and Courbet, 150; Italy, 365; and Judaism, 93; Paris reconstruction, 581–91; and PreRaphaelites, 225–364; and Prussia,

revolutions of 1848 (continued) 510–15; realist reaction to, 80–83; and Rethel, 515–35. See also revolutions by month Revue des deux mondes (France), 154, 157, 179, 193, 598, 600, 710 Reybaud, Louis, 56–57 Reynaud, Jean, 104, 588 Rheinische Zeitung (Germany), 513 Riat, Georges, 152 Ricasoli Competitions: and Fattori, 382– 91; as propaganda, 380–82 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth, 424 Richard Hooker (Keble, ed.), 295 Richter, Ludwig, 476, 499 Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves, A ( Johnson), 436 Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein, The (Schwind), 496 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 494 Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions (Hunt), 228, 233–37, 260 Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes (BulwerLytton), 233–35 Ripa, Laudadio della, 42, 391 Ripley, George, 801n6 Ris, Clément de, 178, 192–93, 199 “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps” (Whitman), 449 Rise of Greece, The (Kaulbach), 472 Risorgimento, 3, 230, 233, 365–401; and Cavour, 372; and feminism, 397–401; and Garibaldi, 369; and Mazzini, 369; and Powers, 403; and socialism, 388 Ritter, Henry, 538 Rivière, Georges, 770 rixe, Une (Meissonier), 628, 850n146 Roadbridge at Argenteuil under Repair, The (Monet), 772–73 Roadbridge at Argenteuil, The (Monet), 770–71 Robert, Léopold, 91, 117 Robert-Fleury, 36 Roberts, Marshall O., 452, 464 Rodriguez, Olinde, 93 Roguet, Louis, 57, 58 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Roman experimental, Le (Zola), 635 Roman Question (About), 589 Romans of the Decadence (Couture), 14, 17, 19, 33–34, 217, 643, 693, 715



880

romantic love, 245 romanticism, 78, 148, 149, 173, 210, 211, 578; and Biedermeier school, 474 Romieu, Auguste, 119, 578, 588–89 Rooster Standing upon a Dead Negro, A. See Break of Day, The (Mount) Roqueplan, Nestor, 499, 681 Rosabell (W. B. Scott), 332 Rossetti, Christina, 239, 241–43, 246–47, 249–53; “Christian and Jew,” 249; as depicted by D. G. Rossetti, 250–53, 268, 285; Maude, 242, 246–47; “Solitary Rose, The,” 239 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: Annunciation, The, 251; Astarte Syriaca, 341–44; Beata Beatrix, 336–41; on Brown, 359; Dante and His Circle, 339; “Dantis Tenebrae,” 339; depicting ugliness, 263; Ecce Ancilla Domini!, 251–54, 332, 341; Found, 327–44; Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 238–41, 262, 271; and Miller, 319; and Plint, 348; posing for Hunt, 234; posing for Millais, 259; and P.R.B., 226–27, 229, 233; and religion, 245–47, 249; rivalry with C. Rossetti, 250–51; and Siddal, 279; and W. Morris, 364 Rossetti, Frances, 241, 246, 339, 341 Rossetti, Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe, 230–33, 239, 261, 339–40, 369; mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo, Il, 232 Rossetti, Maria, 239, 241, 246 Rossetti, William Michael: and Crayon, 283; and D. Rossetti, 251, 339; and Judaism, 249; posing for Hunt, 234; and P.R.B., 226, 233, 253, 259; and “religious community,” 245 Rothschild family, 215, 671 Rothschild, James de, 93 Rouart, Henri, 747, 760, 776, 858n20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 40, 82, 98, 121, 124, 182 Rousseau, Théodore, 101, 121, 125 Royal Academy Exhibition: of 1851, 271–72, 274, 289; of 1853, 313; of 1856, 322 Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen), 506 Royal Academy, 226, 238, 256 Roys, Harlow, 441 Rübezahl (Schwind), 493 Rude, François: Victory, 21, 58 Rue de Gindre (partie de la rue Madame)

index

(Marville), 581 Rue Transnonain (Daumier), 68 Ruge, Arnold, 532 Ruins of the Railraod Depot, Charleston, South Carolina (Barnard), 444 Ruins of the Tuileries (Meissonier), 776, 778 Ruins. Interior of the Tuileries. Current State of the Vestibule of the Salle des Maréchaux (Val Elven), 779 Ruskin at Brig o’Turk in the Trossachs (Millais). See Portrait of Ruskin Ruskin, Euphemia (“Effie”) Chalmers, 281–83, 289 Ruskin, John: and Carlyle, 364; and Christian Socialism, 357–58; on Convent Thoughts (Collins), 245; and Courbet, 140; and D. G. Rossetti, 232; Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, 286; Gothic revival, 229; and G. Rossetti, 262; and Hunt, 235, 301, 305, 311, 325–26; and Millais, 266–67, 281–86, 289, 291; Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, 269, 295–96; and Patmore, 274; and Pre-Raphaelites, 238, 261, 272, 298; Royal Academy Exhibition (1856), 291–92; social criticism, 226; and Tintoretto, 305 Ruth (Gaskell), 248, 313, 315 Ruth and Boaz (Gleyre), 624–25 Ruth and Boaz (Millet). See Harvesters’ Meal, The Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 835n27 Sabatier-Ungher, François, 74, 112, 200 Sabine Woman (David), 27 Sabines (David), 27 Sailor’s Wedding (Woodville), 475–76 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin: and political reporting, 588, 589–90, 592, 845n68; and Proudhon, 217; and the Salon, 593; and Second Empire, 597, 614–16; and writers societies, 843n36, 843n37 Saint-Simon, Henri, 9 Saint-Simonism, 8, 48; and Judaism, 93, 99, 216 Saint-Victor, Paul de: and Breton, 626; and Millet, 117, 121–24, 132; and November 1863 reforms, 598; and the Salon, 592 Salon des Refusés, 634, 676, 683, 685–90, 703 Salon of 1864 (About), 603

Salon, 592, 616–21; of 1831, 141; of 1838, 142; of 1844, 87; of 1846, 87, 101; of 1847, 89; of 1848, 91, 92; of 1849, 151, 156; of 1850–1851, 82, 156, 166, 169, 185, 189; of 1852, 190–96; of 1853, 115, 117, 196–200; of 1857, 616–21; of 1864, 134, 139, 384; of 1868, 732 Salut, Le, 144 San Francisco Examiner, 135 Sand, George, 100–107; and Champfleury, 150, 219; Compagnon du tour de France, 205; Consuelo, 149; Dance of Death, The, 101–2; Evenings of the Hemp Dresser, The, 106; Mare au Diable, La, 101–4, 105, 107, 108, 113, 175, 622; and Millet, 112; Petite Fadette, La, 105–7; political views, 6, 64, 80; and realism, 75; and realist-rural discourse, 118–19; Souvenirs de 1848, 31; and Stowe, 126 Sandblad, 667, 729 Sardou, Victorien, 591 Sass, Henry, 256 Scapegoat, The (Hunt), 319–28 Scene at the Bois de Boulogne (Marville), 678 scène des inondations des Brotteaux, Une (Génod), 848 Scene from “Manfred” (Cole), 455–56 Scènes de la vie bohême (Murger), 637 Schadow, Wilhelm von, 511–12 Schanne, 144 Schapiro, 211 Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes (Hebel), 149 Schaus, William, 417 Schiller, 475 Schirmer, Johann Wilhelm, 512 Schneider, 593 Schnetz, 36 Schober, Franz von, 495–96, 498 Schoelcher, Victor, 68 Scholderer, Otto, 687 Scholl, Aurélien, 696 Schrödter, Adolf, 512, 538 Schubert, Granz, 495 Schurz, Carl, 550 “Schwarz-Rot-Gold” (Freiligrath), 558 Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Auerbach), 149 Schwind, Moritz von, 476, 477, 491–99, 500; Competition of the Minnesingers, 496; Knight Kurt’s Bridal Journey, 498; Morning Hour, 492–93; Prisoner’s



881

Dream, The, 498; Ride of the Knight of Falkenstein, The, 496; Sleeping Knight, 496–98 Schwingen, Peter, 538 science: naturalism vs. realism, 634–37; and realism, 79; and religion, 298 Scott, Sir Walter, 280, 305 Scott, William Bell, 332 Sculptor, The (Courbet), 146 sculpture: contest for Republic figure, 57– 60; Lewis, 427–31; Ward, 425–27 Seal of the Republic (Barre), 59, 60 Seasons, The (Thomson), 454 Second Empire, 34, 633, 653; class struggle, 654; 1867 World’s Fair, 700; and Judaism, 671; and Manet, 675–85; and the media, 696; realism, 577–631; Salon de Refusés, 685–90; vs. Third Republic, 757 Second Reich, 783–99 Second Republic, 28, 34, 57; festivals, 30; identity in art, 35–76 secret societies, 5, 177, 619; Carbonari, 230; in England, 265; similarity to PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 229–30, 261. See also by individual name “Seed of David, The” (D. G. Rossetti), 249 Seillière, 593 Seizure, The (Fendi), 48, 483 Seizure, The (Waldmüller), 483–84 self-consciousness: in art, 477–78 Self-Help (Smiles), 354 Self-Portrait with a Black Dog (Courbet), 147–48 Sempstress, The (Redgrave), 248 Sensier: and Manet, 695; and Millet, 90, 112–20 passim, 130–35 passim Sensitive Plant (Shelley), 245 Sentimental Education (Flaubert), 34 Sernesi, Raffaello, 366–67 Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (Ellis), 460 Seward, John. See Stephens, Frederic George sexuality, 89, 279, 316, 698; in England, 332–33; repression, 251, 276; as sin, 328; Victorian fear of, 308. See also eroticism; homosexuality Shapiro, James, 304 Shee, Martin Archer, 256 Shelley, 245 Shepherdess Guarding Her Flock (Millet), 134 shopping malls: and flânerie, 665–66 Siam: and France, 606

index

Siddal, Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Eleanor, 279– 81, 304, 328, 336–38, 341–42 Siècle, Le (France), 51, 588, 710, 843n31 Signorini, Telemaco, 366, 368, 388–89, 392–96 Silesian Weavers (Hübner), 525–26, 545 Silhouettes of Freiligrath and Wulff (Müller), 552–53 Silvestre, Armand, 748–49, 751, 752–53, 776 Silvestre, Théophile, 134, 135 Singing the Stornello (Lega), 398–99 Sisley, 751 sisterhoods. See convents Sittenbild painting, 488 sketch-copies, 645–47, 677, 704 sketches: in Republic contest, 39–60 slavery, 125–26, 475; in France, 698; and propaganda, 434; and Powers, 403–5 Sleeping Knight (Schwind), 496–98 Sleeping Spinner, The (Courbet), 200 Smiles, Samuel, 354, 357–58 Smith, Denis Mack, 389 Soap Bubbles (Couture), 656, 657 Socetà Nazionale Italiana, 372–73 Social Darwinism, 2 social reform: and P.R.B., 260 socialism: in Auch ein Todtentanz, 524; in Courbet’s work, 195; and Risorgimento, 388; roots of, 9–14 Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., 762 Société des Auteurs Dramatiques, 843n36 Société des Gens de Lettres, 616, 843n36, 843n37 Société Positiviste, 98–99 Sohn, Carl, 511 Soiré in the Hôtel Caillebotte, A (Béraud), 763 Soitoux, Jean-François, 57–58 Soldati francesi del ’59. See French Soldiers of ’59 Soldier of the Prussian Londwehr and French Prisoners (Menzel), 786–87 Solferino (Yvon), 603 “Solitary Rose, The” (C. Rossetti), 239 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 220 “Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (Whitman), 830n70 “Song of the Shirt, The” (Hood), 247–48 Sortie, La (Leleux), 64–65, 82 Soup in the Cloisters (Waldmüller), 491 Souvenir of the Civil War (Meissonier), 72– 76, 82, 523, 628

Souvenirs de 1848 (Sand), 31 Souvenirs et regrets (Cham), 741 Sower (Millet), 82, 92, 109–13, 115, 133, 494, 624 Spain: and France, 742 Spanish Ballet, The (Manet), 852n20 Spectre rouge de 1852, Le (Romieu), 119, 589 Spencer, Lilly Martin, 413–20, 448, 679; Artist and Her Family, 417–18; Blind Faith, 419; Height of Fashion, 417; and feminism, 827n26; Power of Fashion, 417 Spenser, John, 295 Spirit of American Progress. See American Progress (Gast) Spitzweg, Carl, 185, 476, 499–503, 536, 835n27; Antiquarian, The, 501; Bookworm, The, 501; Peace in Land, 503; Poor Poet, The, 185, 500–501 St. Elizabeth of Hungary (Collins), 815n108 St. Louis Times, 440–41 Stadtrat (Hasenclever), 545 Staley, 284 Stanford, Leland, 136 Starrucca Viaduct (Cropsey), 467 Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi), 58, 60 Stechlin, Der (Fontane), 790 Stephens, Frederic George, 226, 259, 277, 302, 318 Steuben, Karl von, 141 Stevens, Alfred, 595 Stevens, Arthur, 130 Stieler, Joseph Karl, 500 Stillman, William James, 283 stoicism, 134 Stonebreakers, The (Courbet), 158­–70, 211, 352, 624 Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 357 Stoning of St. Stephen, The (Millet), 85–87 stornelli. See folk songs Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 126, 406, 420, 435, 698 Street Singer, The (Manet), 634, 673–75, 682 Strousberg, Bethel Henry, 795 Study of the Mayor of Paris as George Washington (Couture), 26 Stump Speaking (Bingham), 410 Sturges, Jonathan, 456 Submission of Abd el Kader (Ange-Tissier), 601, 604–5 Sue, Eugène, 100, 126, 203, 264 suffrage: and peasantry, 113; universal male rights, 6, 7, 29, 509, 533; women’s



882

rights, 49, 825n29 Sullo spirito antipapale che produsse la Riforma (G. Rossetti), 232 Sumner, Charles, 442 Supper after the Masked Ball (Couture), 651 Sustris, Lambert, 694; Venus, 694 Swinburne, Agernon Charles, 369 Sybil (Disraeli), 246 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Cornu), 51 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Daumier), 46 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Egalité) (Millet), 91–92 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Flandrin), 44–45 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Gérôme), 51 Symbolic Figure of the Republic ( Janet-Lange), 42–43 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Landelle), 52 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Papety), 46 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Soitoux), 57–58 Symbolic Figure of the Republic (Vigneron), 54 symbolic realism, 299 symbolism: animals, 328; barricades, 69– 76, 535; Christianity, 303, 458; colonialism, 327; embroidery, 246–47, 279; entrapment, 314; goats, 818n208; homoeroticism, 496; Joan of Arc, 780–82; Masonic, 237; monarchy, 36; nature, 240, 314; plant and flower, 237–40, 245, 276, 278, 330; and P.R.B., 336; red, 531, 535; religious, 240–41, 262; republican left, 532; sewing, 283; sexuality, 283, 333; Star of David, 520; Vendôme Column, 745; of women, 246–47, 283 Tableau-Solution (Courbet), 200 Taft, Lorado, 425 Tait, William, 315 Talmud Torah School (Oppenheim), 479 Taluet, Ferdinand, 57 Tancred (Disraeli), 302, 320, 343 Tassaert, Octave, 595 “Tears, Idle Tears” (Tennyson), 312 Temptation of Saint Jerome, The (Millet), 89 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 274, 280, 312 Tepidarium (Chassériau), 217 Tetti al sole (Sernesi), 367–68 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 312 theater, 29; and Düsseldorf school, 511–12; in the Second Empire, 591. See also by individual theater name

index

Théâtre de Guignol (Champs-Elysées) (Guérard), 610–11 Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin, 591 Théâtre des Funambules, 672 Thiers, Adolphe, 743–44, 753, 755, 760 Third Republic, 43, 60, 737, 745, 859n29; and impressionism, 763, 782; vs. Second Empire, 757 Thomas, William Cave, 277 Thomson, James, 454 Thoré, Théophile: and Courbet, 149, 218; and Millet, 87, 90, 139; and realism, 598; and Republic competition, 36; and the Salon des Refusés, 686; and working class, 114 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 504 Tidemand, 595 Tillot, Charles, 199 Times (London): and Garibaldi, 369–70; and Hunt, 293; and Millais, 263, 271–72, 278–79, 289–91; in Peace Concluded (Millais), 289–91; and Ruskin, 301, 311 Tintoretto, 305 Tissot James, 749, 760 Titian, 148; Venus of Urbino, 692–93 Tivoli, Serafino De, 366, 391, 396 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 8, 29–30, 41 “Todten an die Lebenden, Die” (Freiligrath), 535, 551, 553 Tom, chant des Noirs (Dupont), 126 Toubin, 144 Touché, Charles, 636 Toulmouche, Auguste, 609, 613, 624 Tournachon, Gaspard-Félix. See Nadar Toussaint, Hélène, 152, 212–13, 216 Toussenel, Alphonse, 215 Tower of Babel, The (Kaulbach), 472 Town Council, The (Hassenclever). See Stadtrat Tractarianism: and baptism, 268; and Christianity, 296, 298–99, 305; and Christian Socialists, 297; and Hunt, 298–99; and Judaism, 305; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 273 Traveler above the Fog (Friedrich), 453 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 405, 407 Trees of Liberty, 5 Trélat, Emile, 614 Trellis, The (Lega), 400–401 Troubadour (Couture), 146 Troubat, Jules, 843n37 Troyon, Constant, 25, 183, 578, 595

True Principles of Pointed Architecture and Specimens of Gothic Architecture (Pugin), 241 truth: and realism, 79 Tucker, 751 Tuckerman, Henry T., 425, 431–32, 671 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 459, 559, 794 Tuscan Artillerymen at Montechiaro, The (Signorini), 393–94 Twelfth Night (Deverell), 279 Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple (Menzel), 788–89 26th of April, 1859, The (Borrani), 389–91 Twilight in the Wilderness (Church), 465 Two Women Sewing (Millet), 119 ugliness, 105–6, 137, 219–20, 433; criticism of Courbet, 196; and realism, 80–83. See also beauty Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 126, 406, 435, 439, 441, 829n60 Underground Railroad, 466 Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts Appliqués à l’Industrie, 689 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 460 United States of America: Civil War, 4, 404, 443–48, 707–32; and Degas, 760–62; and Fourierism, 801n6; French view of, 25–26; and Manet, 707–32; Manifest Destiny, 405, 443–66; merchant shipping, 708; patriotism, 447; personification of, 403; policy toward Mexico, 712–13; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 283; reaction to global politics, 542, and revolutions of 1848, 403; slavery, 403–43; women’s rights, 411 Univers, L’ (France), 114 Universal Exposition of 1867, The (Manet), 701–3 Universal Exposition. See World’s Fair Unto This Last (Ruskin), 357 Uprising, The (Daumier), 67–69 urban planning: in America, 2; in Paris, 1– 2, 580–91; and the Paris Commune, 737–38; post-Commune, 748 urban realism, 190, 288 Utagawa Kuniaki II, 705 Utopia (More), 11 utopian socialism, 104 Uzielli, Gustavo, 391



883

Vaches et Moutons (Bonheur), 622 Vaillant, 596 Val Elven, M.: Ruins. Interior of the Tuileries. Current State of the Vestibule of the Salle des Maréchaux, 779 Vallès, Jules, 150 Van Praët, 130 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 312 Vedder, Elihu, 376–77 Veit, Philipp, 304, 478 Velázquez, 646, 651 Vendôme Column, 58, 745–46 Venice Ghetto, The (Signorini), 392–95 Venus (Sustris), 694 Venus Jealously Pursuing Psyche (Courbet), 139 Venus of Urbino (Titian), 692–93 Verdict of the People, The (Bingham), 410–11 Verlat, 594, 595, 596 Vernet, Horace, 36, 604, 715–16, 719 Versailles Museum, 141, 142 Veuillot, Louis, 114 Victorian morality, 329–30 Victory (Rude), 21, 58 Viennese Academy, 490 View of Østerbro from Dosseringen (Købke), 507–8 View of a Street in a Copenhagen Suburb, Morning Light (Købke), 506–7 View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen (Købke), 507–8 View of the Dachstein and Hallstatt Lake from the Hütteneck Alp near Bad Ischl (Waldmüller), 487–88 Villemessant, 781 Vinchon, Auguste, 19–20 Viollet-le-Duc, 597 Virgin Child (D. G. Rossetti), 342 Visit of Otto III to the Crypt, The (Rethel), 528 Visit of the Emperor to the Slate Quarry Workers of Angers during the Floods of 1856 (Antigna), 619–20 Visit of the Grand Corps de l’Etat to Saint Cloud during the Night of 1 December 1852 (Cabanel), 601 Visit of the Queen of England, The ( Jalabert), 601 Volksblätter (Germany), 533, 534 Volksklub, 547–49, 551 volunteer enlistment, 32–33 Volunteer Enrollment of 1792, The (Vinchon), 19–20

index

Vormärz era, 471–72, 486 Vossische Zeitung (Germany), 794 Vote universel, Le (France), 166 Voyage en Icarie (Cabet), 9, 11 Vraie République, La (France), 101 Wagner, Richard, 531, 533, 837n69 Wagoner, The (Holbein), 516 Waldmüller, Ferdinand Georg, 477, 483– 91, 500, 834n14; After the Seizure: The Homeless, 491; Andeutungen zur Belebung der vaterländischen bildenden Kunst, 490; Interrupted Pilgrimage, The, 491; Last Calf: The Forced Sale, The, 491; Lower Austrian Peasant Wedding (Wedding in Perchtoldsdorf), 489–90; Portrait of the Notary Dr. Josef Eltz, 485–86; Seizure, The, 483–84 Walewski, Count, 596 Walt Whitman (Harrison), 222–23 Walters, William T., 465 Wandering Jew (Sue), 167 Wandering Jew theme, 202–3, 494, 671 War News from Mexico (Woodville), 406–7 Ward, John Quincy Adams, 425–27 Wardlaw, Ralph, 316–18 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze), 538–40 Waterfall, The (Millais), 284 Weber, 152 Weeders (Breton), 849n135 Weekday in Paris (Menzel), 798 Weill, Alexandre, 93 Weisberg, Gabriel, 628 Wesendonck, Hugo, 532, 547 Western realism, 79–80 Westfälisches Landesmuseum (Münster), 547 “Westward, Ho!” (Berkeley/Lies), 460, 832n104 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Leutze), 460 Wey, Francis, 143, 154, 158, 173 Wey, Marie, 154, 158, 173 What Is Property?(Proudhon), 11 Wheelwright, Edward, 101, 126 Whistler, 685, 686 Whitman, Walt, 140, 288, 448–49; “American Futurity,” 449; “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” 221; and Courbet, 220–23, 637; Drum-Taps, 449, 829n62, 830n70; “Flag of Stars, Thick-Sprinkled Bunting,” 449;

Whitman, Walt (continued) “From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird,” 449; “I Sing the Body Electric,” 220; Leaves of Grass, 220–23; “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” 449; “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps,” 449; “Song of Myself,” 220; “Song of the Banner at Day-Break,” 830n70 Widow’s Mite, The (Millais), 256 Wilkie, David, 536 Willett, Edward, 460 Williams, Raymond, 277 Willich, August von, 533 Wilson, Michael, 852n20 Wine-Tasting in a Cellar (Hasenclever), 536 Winnower, The (Millet), 92, 93–97, 113 Winterhalter, Franz Xaver, 683–85 Wiseman, Cardinal, 265 Wolf, Caspar, 452 Woman with a Parrot (Courbet), 218 Woman Pouring Water (Manet), 852n20 Women of the Revolution (Michelet), 31 women, 35; in America, 411, 415; depicted by Courbet, 140–41, 174–75; depiction of girlhood, 242–44, 246–47; in England, 314–19; fallen women theme, 276–77, 308, 314–19, 327–44, 690–91; gender bias, 477; and impressionism, 750; in Italy, 397–401, 825n29; and the Paris Commune, 744, 755–57; post-Commune, 780, 859n29; Pre-Raphaelite veiw of, 327, 342; prostitution, 315–17, 330; and Risorgimento, 397–401; in the



884

Second Empire, 679–82; sexism, 462; Victorian image of, 244–45, 250, 278–81, 283, 343; women’s rights, 48–49. See also feminism Wooden Bridge at Argenteuil, The (Monet), 772–73 Woodman’s Daughter, The (Millais), 274–76, 278 Woodville, Richard Caton, 406–7, 475–76; Sailor’s Wedding, 475–76; War News from Mexico, 406–7 Woolner, Thomas, 226–27, 253, 277 Work (Brown), 336, 344–64 Work (Puvis), 352–53 Workers Confronting the Magistrature (Hasenclever), 541, 542–54 working class, 367, 495, 545–54, 619; Chartism, 227–28; and Christian Socialism, 348–64; depicted by Caillebotte, 766, 767; depicted by Menzel, 792– 95; and Franco-Prussian War, 742– 43; in Germany, 483–84, 524, 531–35; and Haussmann, 739; as heroes, 190, 288–89; in Italy, 398; labor vs. machines, 163–64, 168; and Millais, 273; and National Workshops, 8–14; and Paris Commune, 737–45; Paris reconstruction, 581–91; participation in festivals, 30–31; Pre-Raphaelite view of, 349–64; and realism, 263; and religion, 296; Volksklub demonstrations, 547–48; and women, 247–48 Working Men’s College, 357 World’s Fair: of 1855, 207, 225, 580; and Bonhommé, 628; and classicism,

index

578; and Gérôme, 608; and Millais, 286; and Millet, 121; and naturalism, 511; panel jury selection, 592, 593; of 1867, 595–96, 700–703, 706, 718 Worth, Charles Frederick, 684 Wrestlers, The (Courbet), 196–97, 199–200, 220 Wulff, Julius, 547, 551 Wycliffe Reading His Translation of the Bible (Brown), 241 Yeast (Kingsley), 349 “Yet Another Dance of Death in the Year 1848” (Rethel). See Auch ein Todtentanz aus dem Jahre 1848 Young England, 231, 265 Young Italy, 231, 369, 392 Young Ladies of the Village (Courbet), 191– 96, 211, 219 Young Man Reading while Dining (Meissonier), 628 Young Shepherdess Seated (Millet), 92 Youth Peeling a Pear (Couture), 656 Yvon, Adolphe, 384, 601, 603, 717, 719 Ziegler, Anton, 509 Ziem, Félix, 595 Zola, Emile, 635–37, 689; and Manet, 703– 7, 729, 732, 733; and impressionism, 749–50, 757–58, 776 Zouaves in the Trenches (Pils), 717–18 Zulus (Menzel), 791–92