April 2021 – Art in the Nineteenth Century

Sisters

William Bouguereau

He was immensely popular both in France and the United States. Because of the nature of his work he was intensely disliked by the impressionists, and Degas coined the word Bouguereauté to describe any work in the style of the academic painter. He was notable for his sentimental portraits, and also for his female nudes, aimed at the taste of rich Americans.

Left, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Sur la grève, 1896, oil on canvas, 142 x 92 cm, Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI and right, La Soeur ainée, 1869, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, for which he used is daughter, Henriette, and son, Paul, as models

In passing, and with reference to the previous post, he also painted a version of the wave.

William Bouguereau, La vague, 1896, oil on canvas, 121 x 161, Private Collection

John Everett Millais

The girls are Millais’ daughters, Mary, on the left aged eight, Effie, ten, and Alice Caroline, five. The idea of the artist using his own daughters as models was new at the the time. Apart from the fact that thet were cheap, if not always willing, the picture is an indication of the love he had for his family.

John Everett Millais, Hearts are Trumps, 1872, oil on canvas, 166 x 220 cm, Tate Gallery, London, UK

Millais was commissioned to paint this portrait by writer and art collector Walter Armstrong. It features Armstrong’s daughters Elizabeth, Diana and Mary. Armstrong hoped the painting would help to raise the social profile of his family. The card game, and the title of the work, hint at competition over who would marry first. This was seen as important at the time for women of their social class. This work presents the social structures and expectations of the period as a game that these women have learnt to play skilfully.

Two portraits of Effie Gray. Left, George Frederick Watts, Euphemia (Effie) Chalmers Gray, Mrs John Ruskin, Later Lady Millais, 1851, a drawing in the possession of the Nationa Trust, UK, and right Thomas Richmond, Euphemia (‘Effie’) Chalmers (née Gray), Lady Millais, (detail), 1851, oil on board, 32 x 21 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.

She married John Ruskin, but the marriage was unconsummated and annulled. She then married Millais, and the couple had nine children. Millais had a complicated relationship with Effie’s sister, Sophie, and painted her when she was thirteen years old.

John Everett Millais, *Portrait of a Girl*, 1857, oil on paper overlaid on paper, 30 x 23 cm, Private Collection

Théodore Chassériau

The relationship between Théodore Chassériau and his sisters Adèle and Aline was close, and at the time was rumoured to be incestuous. Although in this painting they could be taken as twins, Adèle, on the left was thirty three and Aline was twenty one. Théodore himself was twenty three.

Bramwell Brontë

The only known portrait of the Brontë sisters.

From left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. The portrait was known from a description of it by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who saw it in 1853. It was thought to have been lost until it was discovered folded up on top of a cupboard by the second wife of Charlotte Brontë’s husband, the Reverend A.B. Nicholls, in 1914. In the centre of the group a male figure, previously concealed by a painted pillar, is now visible; it is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, their brother Branwell Brontë.

Edwin Landseer, attributed, *The Brontë Sisters?,* 1830s?, watercolour, … Private Collection

This painting is beset by many question marks, and the claim that it is a group portrait of the Brontë sisters has yet to be established.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Irene was the eldest daughter of Louise Cahen d’Anvers and her banker husband Louis Raphaël Cahen d’Anver. He had met the family through the collector Charles Ephrussi, who was proprietor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and also Louise’s lover.

Louise paid Renoir 1,500 francs for the painting.

Afterwards, the family decided that the other two sisters would be painted together. Elisabeth, and Alice, in February 1876, when they were six and five years old.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, *Rose et bleu, les demoiselles Cahen d’Anvers*, 1881, oil on canvas, 119 x 74 cm, Museu de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil

In 1895, Alice married the British Army officer Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend who led his command to its destruction at Kut al Amara in 1916. Alice lived until 1965 and died in Nice, aged 89.

After divorcing her first husband, the diplomat and count Jean de Forceville, Elisabeth married Alfred Émile Denfert Rochereau, whom she later divorced as well. Although she had converted to Catholicism at a young age, she was sent to Auschwitz because of her Jewish descent and died on the way to the concentration camp in March 1944, aged 69.

The Wave

Courbet spent the summer of 1869 at Etretat on the Normandy coast and painted several pictures of waves breaking on the shore. The motif of the single wave was inspired by Japanese colour prints which were widely available in Paris in the 1860s.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave at Kanagawa, c1829-1833, polychrome woodcut, 25 x 37 cm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France

Other artists had been to Etretat, and were fascinated by the sea, and especially by the cliffs.

Claude Monet, Mer agitée à Etretat, 1883, huile sur toile, 81 x 100 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France

Eugène Boudin, Etretat, La falaise d’aval au soleil couchant, 1890, oil on canvas, 46 x 65 cm, Private collection

Eugène Delacroix, Les Falaises d’Etretat, 1849, gouache on paper, 15 x 24 cm, Museum, Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Delacroix did not have the luxury of the train, but visited Normandie on several occasions, the first in 1829.

Courbet himself also painted the cliffs

Gustave Courbet, La Falaise d’Etretat après l’orage, 1870, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, Musée d’orsay, Paris, France

Gustave Courbet, Les Falaises d’Étretat , 1869, oil on canvas,
Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen

But it was the idea of the single powerful wave which fascinated him.

Courbet, Gustave, La Vague, 1870, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Courbet, Gustave, La Vague, 1870, oil on canvas, 73 x 93 cm,
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan

Courbet, Gustave, La Vague, 1869, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK

Courbet, Gustave, La Vague, 1869, oil on canvas, 72 x 117 cm, Museum of modern art André Malraux, Le Havre, France

In the periodical “Gil Blas” on 28th September 1886, Guy de Maupassant recounted a visit he made to Courbet during his stay at Etretat: “In a huge, empty room, a fat, dirty, greasy man was slapping white paint on a blank canvas with a kitchen knife. From time to time he would press his face against the window and look out at the storm. The sea came so close that it seemed to batter the house and completely envelope it in its foam and roar. The salty water beat against the windowpanes like hail, and ran down the walls. On his mantelpiece was a bottle of cider next to a half-filled glass. Now and then, Courbet would take a few swigs, and then return to his work. This work became The Wave, and caused quite a sensation around the world”.

Courbet, Gustave, La Vague, 1870, oil on canvas, 66 x 91 cm, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon, France

In this work, the water has become almost solid and rises like a cliff against the sky.

As can be seen by the dates, Courbet made sketches of what he saw, and the works were painted later, from his memory and his imagination.

Paul Baudry also painted a well known image of a wave…

Paul Baudry, La perle et la vague, 1862, oil on canvas, 84 x 178 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

…but it is possible that he was more interested in the model than the wave.

Jeanne Duval

Edouard Manet, *La Maîtresse de Baudelaire*, 1862, oil on canvas, 90 x 113 cm, Szépmüvészeti Müzeum, Budapest, Hungary

“Sorcière au flanc d’ébène, enfant des noirs minuits”

I saw this painting in 2016, in an exhibition entitled “Chefs-d’œuvre des musées de Budapest”, in the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris. A small watercolour study for the work is in Bremen.m

Edouard Manet, Jeanne Duval: La Maîtresse de Baudelaire, 1862, watercolour, 17 x 24 cm, Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany

Manet was thirty when he painted this sad and superficially ugly portrait of the mistress of his friend, the poet Baudelaire, 1821-1867. She was suffering from syphilis, partially paralysed and almost blind. She is thought to have died shorlty afterwards, although it has been claimed that she was seen years later, in an even more pitiable state.
Almost nothing is known about her life, not even her real name: the only document, since destroyed in a fire, is from the Maison de Santé Dubois, where she was treated in 1859. In it, she is identified as being thirty two years old and having been born in Haiti. If this is correct, then she would have been fifteen when she met Baudelaire in 1842.

« La taille est longue en buste, bien prise, ondulante comme couleuvre, et particulièrement remarquable par l’exubérant, invraisemblable développement des pectoraux. Rien de gauche, nulle trace de ces dénonciations simiesques qui trahissent et poursuivent le sang de Cham jusqu’à l’épui sement des générations»

Nadar, Charles Baudelaire intime, Obsidiane, 1985, p. 10.

She was a marginal figure, existing as a part time actress, prostitute and of course the mistress of Baudelaire, who set her up in an apartment on the Ile de la Cité.

Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire, photographed by Nadar

Constantin Guys, Portrait of Jeanne Duval, ink and watercolour, sd, Private Collection

This painting by Constantin Guys, 1802-1892, is presumed to be a portrait of Jeanne, although not certain. There appears to be little similarity between it and Nadar’s photograph, adding to the mystery. Guys was the anonymous model for Baudelaire’s long essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne”; 1863.

Gustave Courbet, *L’Atelier du peintre*, 1855, oil on canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

In Courbet’s monumental work, L’atelier du peintre, the figure of Jeanne was originally placed next to Baudelaire against a pillar. At Baudelaire’s request, probably after one of the couple’s many quarrels, her image was erased by the artist. In the work, the depiction of Baudelaire was based on Courbet’s earlier portrait.

Gustave Courbet, Portrait de Charles Baudelaire, 1848, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Manet and Baudelaire were friends. Baudelaire was a supportive critic of Manet’s work. As well as Jeanne, they both died of syphilis, one of the great killers of the nineteenth century. The cause of the disease was not identified until 1895, and the first effective treatment was not available until 1910.