Monday, July 16, 2018

18th-century Painting from Northern Europe in Stockholm

Balthasar van den Bossche
Visit to Sculptor's Studio
1704
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Pieter Angelis
Sculptor's Studio
1716
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Hieronymus van der Mij
Portrait of unknown man
ca. 1715-30
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Hindric Sebastian Sommar
Letter Rack - Trompe l'oeil
ca. 1748
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

"Depicting feigned letter racks, cabinet doors, or framed pictures, these paintings are now considered examples of trompe l'oeil, even though the term did not come into use until around 1800.  Academic theorists in the eighteenth century and later opined that, in attempting to deceive the viewers with heightened verisimilitude, the trompe l'oeil failed to express ideas and truths, which ought to be the highest goal of art.  More recently, scholars such as Baudrillard, Marin, and Charpentrart have argued that trompe l'oeil paintings raise profound questions about perception and representation.  Baudrillard highlights the radical nature of such pictorial creations by referring to them as "anti-painting."  What Baudrillard implicitly defines as "painting" seem to correspond to the istoria described by Leon Battista Albert in De Pictura.  Against the narrative scenes staged in perspectival spaces, trompe l'oeil images – according to Baudrillard – offer painted surrogates of things in the "unreal reversion to the whole representative space elaborated by the Renaissance."  In other words, the quality of trompe l'oeil paintings that disturbed academic authors, i.e. the collapses of the distinction between image and referent, is what intrigues modern commentators.  . . .  In psychoanalytic terms, linear perspective is an instrument of pleasure and power in that it purports to be constructed around the viewer's vantage point, allowing him or her a mastering gaze over the representation.  The trompe l'oeil, by inverting that scheme, threatens this relationship between viewer and picture."   

– Angela Ho, from an article on Gerrit Dou's Enchanting Trompe-l'Oeil, published in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (Winter 2015)

Georg Engelhard Schröder
Juno, or, Allegory of the Element of Air
before 1750
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Lorens Pasch the Younger
Dancing Children
ca. 1765-70
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Elias Martin
Villa of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) at Twickenham
1773
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

"Alexander Pope came to live in Twickenham in the spring of 1719.  He took a lease of some riverside land owned by Thomas Vernon of Twickenham Park.  There were several cottages on the land, in the middle of a small working community.  . . .  He brought with him his elderly mother, his childhood nurse, Mary Beach, and a hound named Bounce, the first of many so named.  Demolishing one of the cottages and lodging in another, possibly newly built by Vernon, he built his villa.  He may have been assisted by James Gibbs, but the design was not of a high standard: the amateur hand of Pope himself, celebrating his association with Burlington and the Palladian movement, is surely apparent.  At the time he obtained a licence to construct a tunnel beneath the road, Cross Deep, to give access to about five acres of land which he leased and enclosed to form a garden.  . . .  The land between the villa and the river became what he described as his 'grass plot,' flanked with planting which included a weeping willow.  Later, this tree acquired considerable fame.  The cellars of his villa were at ground level facing the river and in the centre portion he established his first grotto.  Seven years of translating Homer's Iliad brought him both money and a delight in classical mythology.  The latter, naturally enough, found expression in the creation of the grotto.  Complete by 1725, he wrote to his friend Edward Blount that, having found a spring of water it lacked nothing but nymphs.  These he never did find."

– from curator's notes at the Twickenham Museum 

Pehr Hilleström
At the Embroidery Frame
ca. 1770
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Pehr Hilleström
Two Maid-servants at a Brook
ca. 1780-90
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Johan Gottlob Brusell
Vaulted Staircase
1778
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Johan Gottlob Brusell
Temple Staircase
ca. 1780
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Nicolai Abildgaard
The Spirit of Culmin appears to his Mother
(episode from Ossian)

ca. 1780
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

"Abildgaard's appreciation of the Ossianic poems was almost certainly a result of his association with the British artists in Rome, and he appears to be one of the first artists outside Great Britain to have illustrated the work of the Celtic bard (the veracity of which was eventually disputed).  His interest extended to the acquisition of several annotated editions of James Macpherson's poems of Ossian, in which Abildgaard had marked scenes suitable for artistic treatment.  Time and again, Abildgaard returned to this circle of themes, choosing to depict somber, tragic scenes from the heroic poems. . ."

Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, edited by Christopher John Murray (Routledge, 2013)

Johan Tietrich Schoultz
Battle of Fredrikshamn, 1790
(attack by the Swedish fleet on the Russian fleet)

1792
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Pierre-Jacques Volaire
Bathing Men
before 1799
oil on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm