Getty Museum Photographs from Olden Days

Sir Coutts Lindsay
Oak Tree
ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Louis-Rémy Robert
Still-life with statuette and vases
1855
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"In these deplorable times, a new industry has developed, which has helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith and to ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind.  Of course, this idolatrous multitude was calling for an ideal worthy of itself and in keeping with its own nature.  In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly-wise is this: 'I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature. Thus, if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art.'  An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude.  Daguerre was his messiah.  And then they said to themselves: 'Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee  of exactitude' (they believe that, poor madmen!), 'art is photography.'  From that moment onward, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate.  A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshipers.  Strange abominations manifested themselves.  By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these 'heroes' to 'hold' their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and charming scenes of ancient history.  It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite.  I am convinced that the badly applied advances of photography – like all purely material progress, for that matter – have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius, already so rare.  Poetry and progress are two ambitious men who hate each other with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along the same road one of them must give way."

– Charles Baudelaire, from his report on the Salon of 1859, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiliand and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Louis Fleckenstein
A Pastorale
ca. 1903
Kallitype
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Jabez Edwin Mayall
The Prince of Wales
ca. 1856
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Roger Fenton
Billiard Room at Mentmore
ca. 1858
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Gertrude Elizabeth Rogers
Gnarled Tree
ca. 1860
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri
Portrait of artist Rosa Bonheur
ca. 1861-64
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Charles Aubry
Peaches
ca. 1860-69
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Felice Beato
Pappenberg Island, Bay of Nagasaki
ca. 1865
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Adolphe Braun
Hunting Still-life, France
ca. 1867
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Giuseppe Ninci
View of Roman Forum
ca. 1868
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Braun, Clément & Co.
Roman Forum
ca. 1870
carbon print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

W. & D. Downey, Photographers
Sarah Bernhardt as Empress Theodora
1884
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Kusakabe Kimbei
Young woman standing near tree
ca. 1870-90
hand-colored albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Greek Statuettes in Terracotta

Aphrodite kneeling in a seashell
300-275 BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

"Aphrodite was also worshiped by prostitutes. Epithets such as Hetaira ('courtesan') and Porne ('prostitute') show her as protectress of this profession, whose essential stock-in-trade was seduction. Corinth was particularly well known for the beauty and luxurious living of its prostitutes, who certainly revered the local Aphrodite. All the same it is unlikely that her sanctuary on Acrocorinth was the location of an institutionalized form of what is usually called 'sacred prostitution'. The only source for such a remarkable practice in a Greek context, Strabo, places it in a vague past time, and is surely influenced by the eastern practices with which he was familiar. Herodotus also mentions a similar practice in several parts of the Mediterranean area, and his silence in regard to Corinth should invite caution."

– André Motte, writing in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford, 1996)

Aphrodite leaning on a pillar
3rd century BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Statuette of Aphrodite
300-200 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Warrior falling from galloping horse
4th-3rd century BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Statuette of Apollo
200-100 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles 

Woman playing knucklebones
4th century BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Woman playing knucklebones
4th century BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Actor wearing ass's head
and playing the cithara
1st century BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Actor dressed as a woman
325-225 BC
Greek terracotta statuette
Louvre, Paris

Statuette of a mime
225-275 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Statuette of Eros
200-100 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Statuette of a woman dancing
400-200 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Statuette of a woman mourning
300-250 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Statuettes of women mourning
325 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Sculptural group
 Seated poet and Sirens
350-300 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"A seated man is flanked by sirens, creatures part bird and part woman, in this nearly life-size terracotta group. In Greek mythology, the singing of the sirens lured sailors to their deaths; thus the creatures have general funerary connotations. The seated man is also a singer, as shown by his open mouth and the pick (plektron) with which he plays his now-missing lyre, once cradled in his left arm. His precise identity, however, is uncertain. He might be Orpheus, who was famous for his singing and who traveled to the land of the dead and was able to return. But in art of this period, Orpheus is usually shown wearing a specific Eastern costume not seen here. Therefore, this man may just be an ordinary mortal, perhaps the deceased, in the guise of a poet or singer."

– from curator's notes at the Getty Museum

Terracotta Personalities

Fragment of a head
440-430 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Herodotus says: 'I think that the age of Hesiod and Homer was four hundred years before my time and no more. These are the ones who created for the Greeks a theogony, gave to the gods their titles, selected their offices and skills, and reported their different appearances. Since modeling and painting and sculpting were not yet in existence, likenesses of the gods were not even considered. Then there appeared Saurias of Samos, Crato of Sicyon, Cleanthes of Corinth, and a Corinthian maiden. Drawing with shadows was developed by Saurias, who drew a horse in the sun. Painting was invented by Crato, who outlined the shadow of a man and woman on a white tablet. From the maiden came the art of modeling small figures. Enamored with someone, she outlined his shadow on the wall as he was sleeping. Her father, pleased by the precision of the likeness (and being a clay-worker), applied clay to the outline and carved a relief of it. The cast is still preserved at Corinth." 

– from Catalogus Architectorum: a lexicon of artists and their works by Franciscus Junius, first published in Latin in 1694, translated and edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl and Raina Fel for University of California Press, 1991

Bust of a youth
425-300 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a male banqueter
400-300 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
340-300 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
350 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
350-250 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
350 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
425-350 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a woman
450-350 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a youth
300-100 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a youth
300-250 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Musuem, Los Angeles

Head of a man
325-275 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a man
425-400 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Head of a goddess
350-300 BC
Greek terracotta from South Italy
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

According to Getty Museum curators, the ancient Greek colonists in Southern Italy made more use of terracotta as material for sculpture than their fellow Greeks on the mainland because the colonists had less access to sculpture-quality marble.

17th-century Oil Paintings in Los Angeles

Rutilio Manetti (Siena)
Dido and Aeneas
ca. 1630
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Dido – Properly a surname of the Phoenician goddess of the moon, the wandering Astarte, who was also the goddess of the citadel of Carthage.  The name of this goddess and some traits of her story were transferred to Elissa, daughter of of the Tyrian king Mutton (the Belus or Agenor of the Greeks).  Elissa came from Tyre to Africa, where she founded Carthage.  She was flying from her brother Pygmalion, the murderer of her husband, and paternal uncle Sicharbaal or Sicharbas (called in Greek Acerbas and in Latin Sychaeus).  To escape wedding the barbarian king Iarbas she erected a funeral pyre and stabbed herself upon it.  According to the later story, followed or invented by Virgil, the tragedy was due to her despair at her desertion by Aeneas. 

– from Oskar Seyffert's Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Religion, Literature, and Art, published in German in 1882, translated into English in 1891

Pietro da Cortona (Rome)
Saint Martina
ca. 1635-40
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Antoine Le Nain (France)
Three Young Musicians
1630
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Philippe de Champaigne (France)
Saint Augustine
ca. 1645-50
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Giacomo Cavedone (Bologna)
Ascension of Christ
ca. 1640
oil on copper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Jacob Jordaens (Flanders)
Allegory of the Poet
ca. 1660
canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Hendrik Goltzius (Netherlands)
Sleeping Danaë being prepared to receive Jupiter
1603
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Rembrandt (Netherlands)
Portrait of Dirck Jansz. Pesser
1631
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Antoine Coypel (France)
Baptism of Christ
ca. 1690
oil on canvas
Los Angles County Museum of Art

Isaac Moillon (France)
Sophonisba drinking poison
1653
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Johann Rottenhammer (Germany)
Suffer the Little Children to come unto Me
1607
oil on copper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Georges de La Tour (France)
The Magdalene with smoking flame
ca. 1638-40
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Luca Giordano (Naples)
St John the Baptist Preaching
ca. 1695
oil on copper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Jacques Stella (France)
Jacob's Ladder
ca. 1650
oil on onyx
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

There was a brief Baroque vogue, as seen above, for composing small paintings on a surface of variegated stone, such as this one on onyx.