Salon Painting (19th Century)

Marie-Gabrielle Capet
Scene in the Studio of Madame Vincent
 (Salon of 1808)
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet
Young Woman mourning Dead Pigeon
 (Salon of 1808)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras

François-Joseph Heim
The Bloody Robe of Joseph brought to Jacob
(Salon of 1817)
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Pierre-Henri Révoil
Joan of Arc imprisoned in Rouen
(Salon of 1819)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Eugène Delacroix
The Death of Sardanapalus
(Salon of 1828)
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Joseph-Laurent Bouvier
The Egyptian
(Salon of 1869)
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Jean-Jacques Henner
Woman on a Black Divan
(Salon of 1869)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse

Alphonse Eugène Félix Lecadre
Le Sommeil
(Salon of 1872)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Alexandre Antigna
Aragonaises d'Anso
(Salon of 1872)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans

Élie Delaunay
David Triumphant
(Salon of 1874)
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ
Homer the Blind Wanderer
[Odyssey, left panel – right panel, Iliad]
(Salon of 1882)
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Henry Jones Thaddeus
The Wounded Poacher
(Salon of 1881)
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Charles Ronot
The Last Montagnards
(Salon of 1882)
oil on canvas
Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille

Léon Comerre
Pierrot playing Mandolin
(Salon of 1884)
oil on canvas
Musée départemental des Hautes-Alpes, Gap

Paul-Emmanuel Péraire
Gust of Wind
(Salon of 1892)
oil on canvas
Musée Salies, Bagnères-de-Bigorre

Paul Gervais
Folly of Titania
(Salon of 1897)
oil on canvas
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

Poem

About the size of an old-style dollar bill,

American or Canadian,

mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays,

– this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)

has never earned any money in its life.

Useless and free, it has spent seventy years

as a minor family relic

handed along collaterally to owners

who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.

It must be Nova Scotia; only there

does one see gabled wooden houses

painted that awful shade of brown.

The other houses, the bits that show, are white.

Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple

– that gray-blue wisp – or is it? In the foreground

a water meadow with some tiny cows,

two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;

two minuscule white geese in the blue water,

back-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick.

Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,

fresh-squiggled from the tube.

The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring

clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky

below the steel-gray strom clouds.

(They were the artist's specialty.)

A specklike bird is flying to the left.

Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!

It's behind – I can almost remember the farmer's name.

His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,

titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,

filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,

must be the Presbyterian church. 

Would that be Miss Gillespie's house?

Those particular geese and cows

are naturally before my time. 

A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath,"

once taken from a trunk and handed over. 

Would you like this? I'll probably never

have room to hang these things again.

Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,

he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother

when he went back to England.

You know, he was quite famous, an R.A.  . . .

I never knew him. We both knew this place,

apparently, this literal small backwater,

looked at it long enough to memorize it,

our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,

or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).

Our visions coincided – "visions" is

too serious a word – our looks, two looks:

art "copying from life" and life itself,

life and the memory of it so compressed

they've turned into each other. Which is which?

Life and the memory of it cramped, 

dim, on a piece of Bristol board,

dim, but how live, how touching in detail 

– the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

About the size of our abidance

along with theirs: the munching cows,

the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

still standing from spring freshets,

the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

– Elizabeth Bishop (1976)

Brady Portraits (for P.T. Barnum)

Mathew Brady
Paul Kinney and Anna Swan
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
James Murphy and Edward Newell
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Minnie Warren
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
George Washington Morrison Nutt
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Group Portrait
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Circassian Beauty
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Rudolph Lucasie and Family
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Hannah and John Battersby
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Hannah Battersby
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Fat Baby
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Fat Lady
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Living Skeleton
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Fiji Island Cannibals
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Chang and Eng Bunker
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Annie Jones
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1870-75
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Bearded Lady
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosities" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Charles Tripp
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Thin Man with Violin
(P.T. Barnum's "Human Curiosity" 
in his American Museum, New York City)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Metamorphoses

    When Jove behelde how all the worlde stoode lyke a plash of raine,

    And of so many thousand men and women did remaine

But one of eche, howbeit those both just and both devout,

He brake the Cloudes, and did commaund that Boreas with his stout

And sturdie blasts should chase the floud, that Earth might see the skie

And Heaven the Earth: the Seas also began immediatly

Their raging furie for to cease. Their ruler laide awaye

His dreadfull Mace, and with his wordes their woodnesse did alaye.

He called Tryton to him straight his trumpetter, who stoode

In purple robe on shoulder cast, aloft upon the floode.

And bade him take his sounding Trumpe and out of hand to blow

Retreat, that all the streames might heare, and cease from thence to flow. 

He tooke his Trumpet in his hand, hys Trumpet was a shell

Of some great Whelke or other fishe, in facion like a Bell

That gathered narrow to the mouth, and as it did descende,

Did ware more wide and writhen still, downe to the nether ende:

When that this Trumpe amid the Sea was set to Trytons mouth,

He blew so loude that all the streames both East, West, North and South,

Might easly heare him blow retreate, and all that heard the sounde

Immediatly began to ebbe and draw within their bounde.

Then gan the Sea to have a shore, and brookes to finde a banke,

And swelling streames of flowing flouds within hir chanels sanke.

Then hils did rise above the waves that had them overflow,

And as the waters did decrease the ground did seeme to grow.

And after long and tedious time the trees did shew their tops

All bare, save that upon the boughes the mud did hang in knops.

– Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), translated by Arthur Golding (1567)

Brady Portraits

Mathew Brady
Self Portrait with Juliet Brady
and Ellen Brady Haggerty
ca. 1851
daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Angiolina Bosisio
before 1859
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Adelaide Ristori
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Hannah Albertine
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
John McCullough
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Mary Todd Lincoln
1861
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Martin Jenkins Crawford
ca. 1860
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Kate Morenski
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Unknown Woman
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative-
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Unknown Woman
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Emily Horne Jordan
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Nathaniel Hawthorne
ca. 1860-64
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Giacomo Glech
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Jennie Cleever
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Maggie Mitchell
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Laura Keene
(Keene was on stage performing before Lincoln when he was shot)
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mathew Brady
Mary Crisp Gladstone
ca. 1860-70
albumen print from glass-plate negative
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Metamorphoses

 

    Then sprang up first the golden age, which of it selfe maintainde,

    The truth and right of every thing unforst and unconstrainde.

There was no feare of punishment, there was no threatning lawe

In brazen tables nayled up, to keepe the folke in awe.

There was no man would crouch or creepe to Judge with cap in hand,

They lived safe without a Judge, in everie Realme and lande.

The loftie Pynetree was not hewen from mountaines where it stood,

In seeking straunge and forren landes, to rove upon the flood.

Men knew none other countries yet, than where themselves did keepe:

There was no towne enclosed yet, with walles and diches deepe.

No horne nor trumpet was in use, no sword nor helmet worne,

The world was suche, that souldiers helpe might easly be forborne.

The fertile earth as yet was free, untoucht of spade or plough,

And yet it yeelded of it selfe of every things inough.

And men themselves contented well with plaine and simple foode,

That on the earth of natures gift without their stravell stoode.

Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes, by cornelles, plummes and cherries,

By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares, and lothsome bramble berries,

And by the acornes dropt on ground, from Joves brode tree in fielde.

The Springtime lasted all the yeare, and Zephyr with his milde

And gentle blast did cherish things that grew of owne accorde,

The ground untilde, all kinde of fruits did plenteously auorde.

No mucke nor tillage was bestowde on leane and barren land,

To make the corne of better head, and ranker for to stand.

Then streames ran milke, then streames ran wine, and yellow honey flowde

From ech greene tree whereon the rayes of firie Phebus glowde.

– Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), translated by Arthur Golding(1567)