Eighteenth-Century Physiognomies Rendered by Artists

George Romney
Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) as Miranda
1785-86
oil on canvas
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria

Nicolas de Largillière
Portrait of Charles-Léonor Aubry, Marquis de Castelnau
1701
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Nicolas de Largillière
Self Portrait
ca. 1725
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Rosalba Carriera
Young Girl holding a Monkey
ca. 1721
pastel
Musée du Louvre

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of Antoine Pâris
1724
oil on canvas
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

A Hundred Bolts of Satin

All you
have to lose
is one
connection
and the mind
uncouples
all the way back.
It seems
to have been
a train.
There seems
to have been
a track.
The things
that you
unpack
from the
abandoned cars
cannot sustain
life: a crate of
tractor axles,
for example,
a dozen dozen
clasp knives,
a hundred
bolts of satin –
perhaps you
specialized
more than
you imagined.

– Kay Ryan (2000)

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of Graf Philipp Ludwig Wenzel-Sinzendorf
1729
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Mrs Henry Hill (Anna Barrett)
ca. 1765-70
pastel on paper, mounted on linen
Art Institute of Chicago

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Daniel Hubbard
1764
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Mrs Daniel Hubbard (Mary Greene)
ca. 1764
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Sèvres Manufactory
Bust of Louis, Dauphin of France
1766
porcelain
Art Institute of Chicago

John Flaxman
Self Portrait
ca. 1779
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Jacques-André Portail
Portrait of François Boucher
before 1759
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Antoine Watteau
The Dreamer (La Rêveuse)
ca. 1712-14
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Pietro Antonio Rotari
Young Woman weeping over a Letter
1707
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

from A Pillow Book

A Great Book can be read again and again, inexhaustibly, with great benefits to great minds, wrote Mortimer Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World program at the university where my husband will be going up for tenure next fall, and where I sometimes teach as well, albeit in a lesser, "non-ladder" position. Not only must a Great Book still matter today, Adler insisted, it must touch upon at least twenty-five of the one hundred and two Great Ideas that have occupied Great Minds for the last twenty-five centuries.  Ranging from Angel to World, a comprehensive list of these concepts can be found in Adler's two-volume Syntopicon: an Index to the Great Ideas, which was published with Great Fanfare, but not Great Financial Success, by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. Although the index includes many Great Ideas, including Art, Beauty, Change, Desire, Eternity, Family, Fate, Happiness, History, Pain, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, Time, and Truth, it does not, alas, include an entry on Pillows, which often strike me, as I sink into mine at the end of a long day of anything, these days, as at the very least worthy of note. Among the five hundred and eleven Great Books on Adler's list, updated in 1990 to appease his quibbling critics, moreover, only four, I can't help counting, were written by women – Virginia, Willa, Jane, and George – none of whom, as far as I can discover, were anyone's mother.

– Suzanne Buffam (2016)

Romantic Sensibility, Romantic Energy, Romantic Exoticism

Auguste Bernard (called Bernard d'Agesci)
Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard
ca. 1780
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Théodore Géricault
Prancing Horse
ca. 1808-1812
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Théodore Géricault
Sheet of Studies
ca. 1813-14
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anne-Louis Girodet
Sketch for The Revolt of Cairo
ca. 1810
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Anne-Louis Girodet
Portrait of the Katchef Dahouth, Christian Mameluke
1804
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Delacroix
The Death of Sardanapalus
1827
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Eugène Delacroix
The Death of Sardanapalus
(smaller replica painted by the artist)
1844
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eugène Delacroix
Figure Study for The Death of Sardanapalus
ca. 1827
drawing (pastel)
Art Institute of Chicago

ROMANTICISM – It was recognized at the time and has been agreed since that there was a shift of priorities, a loss of shared certainties and a corresponding emphasis on individual experience of the world which showed its first signs in, and at the time of, the French Revolution and climaxed in the 1830s, after the French monarchy had been restored and the first revolution (1830) against it had reminded society that all systems were under scrutiny.  These were international portents.  Romanticism was a European movement, significant contributions coming from all sides.  The word 'romantic' referred in the first place to verbal and visual attempts to echo the pre-Renaissance simplicities of medieval chivalric romances; it came to imply a valuing of the imagination over reason and a preference for irregularities over conventional order.  German writers, among them Goethe, claimed that the best creative impulses originated in dark regions of the mind untouched by reason and questioned the need for consequentiality and harmony.  Everywhere the concepts of an organic universe and of creativity as an organic process gained ground, becoming the tacit premise for innovation in art.  . . .  Originality and authenticity were offered as yardsticks, on occasion also moral virtue though it was at once countered with the claim that the satisfactions art offered were self-justifying and need not reflect ethical systems.  A more general, and essentially Romantic, moral principle was invoked: The artist should paint not only what he sees before him but also what he sees within himself. But if he sees nothing within himself he should also forego painting what he sees before him – (Caspar David Friedrich).

 – The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists by Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton (Yale University Press, 2000)

Eugène Delacroix
Sketches of Tigers and of Men in 16th-century Costume
1828-29
drawing, with watercolor
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Delacroix
Lion Hunt
1860-61
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Delacroix
The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan
1826
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

attributed to Theodor von Holst
Descent to Hell
before 1844
wash drawing, with gouache
Art Institute of Chicago

Theodor von Holst
Scene from Goethe's Faust - Auerbach's Cellar
before 1844
watercolor and gouache
Art Institute of Chicago

Giuseppe Bernardino Bison
Study of a Lion
before 1844
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

America vs Europe chez Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Jacopo de' Barbari
Two Old Men Reading
ca. 1509-1515
engraving
Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam

Lady Clementina Hawarden
Clementina Maude Reading
ca. 1862-63
albumen print
Victoria & Albert Museum

follower of Baccio Baldini or follower of Maso Finiguerra
King Minos in a Landscape of Books
(from The Florentine Picture Chronicle)
ca. 1470-75
drawing
British Museum

Umberto Boccioni
Young Woman Reading (Ines)
1909-1910
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Parmigianino
Youth with Book
ca. 1518-40
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum

Alessandro Allori
Kneeling Young Woman with Open Book
(study for figure of Mary - Christ in the House of Martha and Mary)
ca. 1580
drawing
British Museum

Hendrik Jacobus Scholten
Sunday Morning
ca. 1865-68
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anders Zorn
The Artist's Wife Reading
1889
pastel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Albert Bartholomé
The Artist's Wife Reading
1883
pastel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from Sempre Susan, a memoir by Sigrid Nunez (Atlas & Co, 2011) –

Susan was one of those literary Americans for whom European writers would always be superior to native ones . . .

The gaps in my knowledge didn't really surprise her.  She had a low opinion of American education and of American culture in general, and she took it for granted that I could learn more in a year at 340 [Sontag's apartment at 340 Riverside Drive in Manhattan] than I had in six years at an American university.

But she had no more use for most contemporary American fiction (which, as she lamented, usually fell into either of two superficial categories: passé suburban realism or "Bloomingdale's nihilism") than she did for most contemporary American film.  . . .  What thrilled her instead was the work of certain Europeans, for example Italo Calvino, Bohumil Hrabal, Peter Handke, Stanislaw Lem.  They, along with Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, were creating far more daring and original work than her less ambitious fellow Americans.

Also, in public appearances, she often came across as not merely humorless but ill-tempered.  Especially during question-and-answer periods, she was inexplicably quick to anger – I'm surrounded by idiots was the message her eyes flashed – quick to insult.  (The problem, according to her, was the usual one: compared to European audiences, Americans were vulgar and uninformed and their questions were usually trivial.)

With Susan, on the other hand, I felt as if I were being given permission to devote myself to these two vocations – reading and writing – that were so often difficult to justify.  And it was clear that, no matter how hard or frustrating or daunting it was – no matter how much like a long punishment writing a book could be – she would not have chosen any other way; she would not have wanted any other life than the life she had.
     "A writer's standards can't ever possibly be too high."
     "Never worry about being obsessive.  I like obsessive people.  Obsessive people make great art."
     She liked outsiders, too.  It pleased her to see herself as an outsider.
     And just because you were born an American didn't mean you couldn't cultivate a European mind.
     To read a whole shelf of books to research one twenty-page essay, to spend months writing and rewriting, going through one entire ream of typing paper before those twenty pages could be called done – for the serious writer, this was, of course, normal.  And, of course, you didn't do it to feel good about yourself.  ("My first feeling about everything I write is that it's shit.")  You didn't do it for your own enjoyment (unlike reading), or for catharsis, or to express yourself, or to please some particular audience.  You did it for literature, she said.  And there was nothing wrong with never being satisfied with what you did.  (Indeed, if you weren't regularly tormented by self-doubt, your work probably was shit.)
     "The question you have to ask yourself is whether what you're writing is necessary."  I didn't know about this.  Necessary?  That way, I thought, lies writer's block.

She was so New York.  And in her boosterism, in her energy and ambition, in her can-do, beat-whatever-the-odds spirit, in her childlike nature – and in her belief in her exceptionalism and in the power of her own will, in self-creation, and in the possibility of being reborn, the possibility of endless new chances, and of having it all – she was also the most American person I knew.  
     
"Well, here we are," she says huddling against Joseph [Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet and Sontag's lover].  "Not even middle-aged, and struck by the top two killer diseases."
     The talk turned to Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of life under Stalin, in which she compares that hell to the pain and suffering of normal family life.  "What wouldn't we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!"  
     Joseph shrugs, unmoved.  "Trust me, she had plenty of those, too."  And, after a broody pause: "You know, in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in life.  Not suffering.  Not happiness or unhappiness.  Not illness.  Not prison.  Nothing."  
     Now, that's European. 

Simone Cantarini
Sibyl Reading
ca. 1630-35
oil on canvas
Banca Popolare dell' Adriatico, Pesaro

Albert Engström
Portrait of the Artist's Father Reading a Newspaper
1892
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Sydney Prior Hall
Gladstone Reading
1890s
gouache (grisaille)
National Portrait Gallery, London

Lady Edna Clarke Hall
Justin Reading
1932
watercolor
Tate Gallery

Rembrandt
Scholar Seated at Desk
1634
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

Nineteenth-Century Figure Studies (Draped)

Jacques-Louis David
Empress Josephine kneeling at her Coronation
(study for painting)
1806
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Andrea Appiani
Figure of Temperance
(study for fresco)
1808
drawing
British Museum

Simon Andreas Krausz
Study of Draped Arm
before 1825
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Study for the figure of Stratonice
ca. 1834-40
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville
Seated Man Reading
before 1849
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you  may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

– Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

Pietro Fancelli
Drapery Study of Reclining Woman
before 1850
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Victor-François-Eloi Biennourry
Roman Soldier
(study for mural)
1851-52
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edgar Degas
Studies of Draped Figure
1857-58
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edward Burne-Jones
Winter - Study of Flying Drapery
1866-67
drawing
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (West Midlands)

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

Théodore Valério
Studies of Draped Woman
before 1879
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Henri Lehmann
Draped Lamenting Figure
before 1882
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Louis-Georges Brillouin
Drapery Study
before 1893
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Man reclining on steps reading
(study for Boston Public Library mural)
ca. 1895
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum