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)

Baziotes

William Baziotes
Abstraction
ca. 1943
mixed media on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

William Baziotes
The Parachutists
1944
enamel on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

William Baziotes
Night Figure no. 1
ca. 1945
watercolor, ink, gouache and graphite on paper
Guggenheim Museum, New York

William Baziotes
Green Form
1945-46
oil on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

William Baziotes
The Falcon
1947
oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Lee Francis
William Baziotes in the Studio
ca. 1947
gelatin silver print
Archives of American Art, Washington DC

William Baziotes
Pierrot II
1948
oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

William Baziotes
Pink Figure
1949
watercolor, charcoal and ink on paper
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Rudy Burckhardt
Ethel and William Baziotes
with gallery directors Samuel and Jane Kootz
ca. 1950
gelatin silver print
Archives of American Art, Washington DC

William Baziotes
Dusk
1954
oil on canvas
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

William Baziotes
Congo
1954
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

William Baziotes
Black Night
1954
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

William Baziotes
Watercolor #1
1958
watercolor on paper
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

William Baziotes
Watercolor #5 / Verso: Composition
1958
watercolor on paper
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

William Baziotes
Untitled
ca. 1962
watercolor on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

William Baziotes
Untitled
before 1963
watercolor on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

from Strato in Plaster

Out of the blue, in plaster from wrist to bicep

Somebody opens a beer, pretending to be 

My friend Strato. Years or minutes – which? –

Have passed since we last looked upon each other.

He's in town for his sister's wedding

To this elderly thin-lipped sonofabitch

Who gets the house for dowry – enough to make

A brother break with the entire family.

Considering it, his eyes fairly cross

With self-importance. That, I recognize.

Here at hand is a postcard Chester sent

Of the Apollo at Olympia,

Its message Strato as he used to be. 

Joy breeds in the beautiful blind gaze,

The marble mouth and breastbone. I look hard

At both the god and him. (He loves attention

Like gods and children, and he lifts his glass.)

Those extra kilos, that moustache, 

Lies found out and letters left unanswered

Just won't do. It makes him burst out laughing,

Curiously happy, flecked with foam.

– James Merrill (1972)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - Recollection of Mortefontaine

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Recollection of Mortefontaine
1864
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

The Two Corots

After his Italian period, characterized by a warm and expansive technique, rendering atmospheres of clear unobstructed light that prefigured Cézanne, Corot, returning to France, found himself succumbing to an enchantment with mists.  

An Earlier Wind

Set against blocks of foliage reflected in a lake, two trees grow: at right, the larger which seems to have several trunks, or at least one larger and one smaller; and at left another, nearly leafless, whose trunk inclines along the same diagonal.  One speculates that they must have been bent over time by the same strong wind.  However, the rest of the picture fails to justify that speculation.  Clearly, it was an earlier wind.  In the mountains just in this way trees commonly are shaped by prevailing winds. 

At the instant captured by the painter, nothing belies the presence of any wind at all: the three figures, a young woman and two little girls, go about their business with notable tranquility.  The artist has succeeded in allying the evidence of past violence with a mood of serenity. 

Between Reality and Allegory   

The color palette inclines us to think this is an autumn evening.  The figures pursue a mysterious activity: the young woman seems to be cutting branches; she could alternatively be hanging an inscription or a small wreath.  The picture's title underlines this gentle hint of the funerary, the elegiac.  

This "recollection" of Mortefontaine might signify Corot's memory of passing such a spot, but also evoke an intimate ceremony of remembrance, as enacted by the protagonists.  Such an interpretation seems confirmed by the melancholy character of the landscape.  

Numerous works painted by Corot in this autumnal and misty period are inhabited by allegorical figures.  These canvases should not be read as simple realism – they also constitute allegories of memory.  Obviously the title plays an important role: the name "Mortefontaine" makes one think of a spring that has ceased to flow, of stagnant waters that cannot be reanimated. The gesture of hanging some object on the tree-trunk may be a way of transmitting a treasured memory to the children.  If this involves a memory belonging to Corot himself, he offers it to us in this allegorized fashion. 

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019) 

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (in Edinburgh)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Ville d'Avray - Entrance to the Wood
ca. 1825
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Man scything by a willow grove, Artois
ca. 1855-60
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Souvenir of the environs of La Ferté sous Jouarre (morning)
ca. 1865-70
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

"Corot spent much of his life without widespread appreciation by France's artistic establishment or the public.  Undeterred and blessed with an independent income, he pursued his own course: to preserve the freshness of his impressions of nature.  The impressionists, whom he later befriended, embraced this intention, but unlike them, Corot painted only sketches outdoors; he composed his finished paintings in the studio.  . . .  In the 1850s Corot began painting the silvery, feathery landscapes that brought him such popularity – and were frequently forged, even in his own lifetime.  Still later, for his own pleasure, he painted figures, which he seldom exhibited.  Kindly 'Père Corot' was universally beloved and generous.  He supported Jean-François Millet's widow and bought a house for the ailing, destitute Honoré Daumier."  

– curator's notes from the Getty Museum

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Landscape with two cows
ca. 1864-75
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Landscape at Coubron
ca. 1870-72
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The Ruin
ca. 1865-70
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The Goatherd
ca. 1872
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The watering place
before 1875
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Gathering primroses
before 1875
oil on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Evening landscape
before 1875
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Landscape with a small cottage
before 1875
etching
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Souvenir de Toscane
before 1875
etching
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Woman writing at a table
before 1875
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The Artist's Mother (Marie-Françoise Oberson)
ca. 1835-40
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

"Corot's mother Marie-Françoise was born in Switzerland.  Along with her husband Louis-Jacques Corot, she ran a milliner's shop in the Rue du Bac in Paris, where Corot and his sister were brought up.  The business was extremely successful and afforded the young Corot considerable financial independence when he decided to pursue a career as a painter.  Corot was devoted to his mother, referring to her as 'la belle dame'.  He later spent all his evenings with her when he was in Paris until her death in 1851 (aged 82).  Judging from her clothing and hairstyle in this picture, it was probably painted around 1835-40, when she would have been in her late sixties."

– curator's notes from the National Galleries of Scotland

Preserved Fragments of Selective Visibility from the 1850s

Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story-Maskelyne
Charlton House, Malmesbury, Wiltshire
1856
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Photographer
Portrait of seated Man with Skull
1855
stereograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

William Edward Kilburn
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1852-55
daguerreotype
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
Glass Fountain by Follett Osler in the Crystal Palace
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
Doors decorated with malachite
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
 Pedestal carved by Friedrich Drake for King Frederick William III of Prussia
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
Repoussé Vase in Silver by Antoine Vechte for Hunt & Roskill
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
 Sculpture of Hunter with Dog by John Gibson
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
Sculptures of Nymph and Hunter by Edward Hodges Baily
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Claude-Marie Ferrier & Friedrich von Martens
Sculpture of Youth on Riverbank by Henry Foley
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
 1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

attributed to Hugh Owen
Sèvres Porcelain
at the Great Exhibition of 1851, London
1851
salted paper print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

1851: A Message to Denmark Hill

     The writer is John Ruskin, on his wedding journey in Venice

My dearest father, it is the year's First Day
     Yet so like the Last, in Venice, no one
          Could tell this birth from the lees.
               I know it is some while
Since you received a word of mine: there has been
     The shabbiest sort of interruption
          To our exchanges (to mine
               At least) in the shape
Of a fever – nights of those imaginings,
     Strange but shameful too, of the Infinite
          By way of bedcovers and
               Boa constrictors,
With cold wedges of ice, as I thought, laid down
     At the corners of the bed, making me
          Slip to its coiling center
               Where I could not breathe.
You knew from my last, I think, I had again
     Gone to the Zoological Gardens
          And seen the great boa take
               Rabbits, which gave me
An idea or two, and a headache. Then
     I had too much wine that same night, & dreamed
          Of a walk with Nurse, to whom
               I showed a lovely
Snake I promised her was an innocent one:
     It had a slender neck with a green ring
          Round it, and I made her feel
               The scales. When she bade
Me feel them too, it turned into a fat thing, like
     A leech, and adhered to my hand, so that
          I could scarcely pull it off –
               And I awakened
(So much, father, for my serpentine fancies)
     To a vermillion dawn, fever fallen,
          And the sea horizon dark,
               Sharp and blue, and far
Beyond it, faint with the trebled distance, came on
     The red vertical cliffs in a tremor
          Of light I could not see without
               Recalling Turner
Who had taught me to see it, yet the whole
     Subdued to one soft gray. And that morning
          I had your letter, father,
               Telling of the death
Of my earthly master. How much more I feel
     This now (perhaps it is worth noting here
          The appearance of my first
               Gray hair, this morning)
– More than I thought I should: everything
     In the sun, in the sky speaks of him,
          So mourns their Great Witness lost.
               Today, the weather
Is wretched, cold and rainy, dark like England
     At this season. I do begin to lose
          All faith in these provinces.
               Even the people
Look to me ugly, except children from eight
     To fourteen, who here as in Italy
          Anywhere are glorious:
               So playful and bright
In expression, so beautiful in feature,
     So dark in eye and soft in hair – creatures
          Quite unrivalled. At fifteen
               They degenerate
Into malignant vagabonds, or sensual
     Lumps of lounging fat. And this latter-day
          Venice, father! where by night
               The black gondolas
Are just traceable beside one, as if Cadmus
     Had sown the wrong teeth and grown dragons, not
          Men. The Grand Canal, this month,
               Is all hung, from end
To end, with carpets and tapestries like a street
     Of old-clothes warehouses. And now there is
          Even talk of taking down,
               Soon, Tintoretto's
Paradise to "restore" it. Father, without
     The Turner Gallery, I do believe
          I should go today and live
               In a cave on some
Cliffside – among crows. Oh what fools they are, this
     Restoring pack, yet smoothing all manner
          Of rottenness up with words.
               My Turner would not
Phrase like these, and only once in all the years
     I knew him said, "Thank you, Mr. Ruskin."
          My own power, if it be that,
               Would be lost by mere
Fine Writing. You know I promised no Romance –
     I promised them Stones. Not even bread.
          Father, I do not feel any
               Romance in Venice!
Here is no "abiding city," here is but
     A heap of ruins trodden underfoot
          By such men as Ezekiel
               Angrily describes,
Here are lonely and stagnant canals, bordered
     For the most part by blank walls of gardens
          (Now waste ground) or by patches
               Of mud, with decayed
Black gondolas lying keel-upmost, sinking
     Gradually into the putrid soil.
          To give Turner's joy of this
               Place would not take ten
Days of study, father, or of residence:
     It is more than joy that must be the great
          Fact I would teach. I am not sure,
               Even, that joy is
A fact. I am certain only of the strong
     Instinct in me (I cannot reason this)
          To draw, delimit the things
               I love – oh not for
Reputation or the good of others or
     My own advantage, but a sort of need,
          Like that for water and food.
               I should like to draw
All Saint Mark's, stone by stone, and all this city,
     Oppressive and choked with slime as it is
          (Effie of course declares, each
               Day, that we must leave:
A woman cannot help having no heart, but
     That is hardly a reason she should have
          No manners), yes, to eat it
               All into my mind –
Touch by touch. I have been reading Paradise
     Regained lately, father. It seems to me
          A parallel to Turner's
               Last pictures – the mind
Failing altogether, yet with intervals
     And such returns of power! "Thereupon
          Satan, bowing low his gray
               Dissimulation,
Disappeared." Now he is gone, my dark angel,
     And I never had such a conception
          Of the way I must mourn – not
               What I lose, now, but 
What I have lost, until now. Yet there is more
     Pain knowing that I must forget it all,
          That in a year I shall have
               No more awareness
Of his loss than of that fair landscape I saw, 
     Waking, the morning your letter arrived,
          No more left about me than
               A fading pigment.
All the present glory, like the present pain,
     Is no use to me; it hurts me rather
          From my fear of leaving it,
               Of losing it, yet
I know that were I to stay here, it would soon
     Cease being glory to me – that it has
          Ceased, already to produce
               The impression and
The delight. I can bear only the first days
     At a place, when all the dread of losing
          Is lost in the delirium
               Of its possession.
I daresay love is very well when it does not
     Mean leaving behind, as it does always,
          Somehow, with me. I have not
               The heart for more now,
Father, though I thank you and Mother for all
     The comfort of your words. They bring me,
          With his loss, to what I said
               Once, the lines on this
Place you will know: "The shore lies naked under
     The night, pathless, comfortless and infirm
          In dark languor, still except
               Where salt runlets plash
Into tideless pools, or seabirds flit from their
     Margins with a questioning cry."  The light
          Is gone from the waters with
               My fallen angel,
Gone now as all must go. Your loving son,
                                                     JOHN
             
– by Richard Howard, originally published (1969) in Untitled Subjects, a book that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1970           

Francis Frith
Pyramids at Giza
ca. 1856-60
albumen print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Francis Frith
Pyramids at Sakkara
ca. 1856-60
albumen print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Francis Frith
Pyramid of Amenemhat at Dashur
ca. 1856-57
albumen print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam