Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Painted Scenes - 19th century

Richard Parkes Bonington (England)
Venetian Scene
ca. 1828
watercolor
Wallace Collection, London

"According to Walter Benjamin, Western art moves away from having a sacred value towards having exhibition value. Art's value becomes secular, aesthetic and social. It moves from sacred buildings to private ones and gradually becomes more public: aristocrats and monarchs build collections of art and curious objects, which are displayed to their peers; the bourgeois class follows suit and the public museum is created. Eventually, the public, including members of the lower classes, are allowed in, to be educated into the great heritage of the culture that sits atop them: exhibition value constrains works to being portable, of recognizable form (e.g. a framed painting, a statue on a plinth), and exchangeable. From the late seventeenth century onwards, art as an institution develops, including galleries, museums, criticism and a public of connoisseurs. This setting of art excludes noise – audiences must behave correctly, demurely; buildings must clearly show works that are autonomous and simultaneously part of a narrative. Far from disrupting this, modern art leads to a booming of the art institution and fuels the idea of art history as a narrative, where we move from one picture to the next. But modern art does introduce noise, in the form of avant-gardism. Even if ultimately this adds to the teleological story of art, at any given stage from the 1850s onwards, some part of art was regarded as noise  as not carrying meaning, lacking skill, not being appropriate, being disturbing of morals, and so on."

 from Noise / Music : A History by Paul Hegarty (Continuum, 2007)

Carl Heinrich Bloch (Denmark)
Samson and the Philistines
1863
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Andrea Appiani (Milan)
Toilet of Juno
ca. 1811
canvas
Pinacoteca Civica, Brescia

Emile Bernard (France)
Women Bathing
1889
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bronemisza, Madrid

Carolus-Duran (France)
After swimming
1899
oil on canvas
private collection

Théodore Chassériau (France)
Sophie leaping into the sea from the Leucadian promontory
ca. 1840
watercolor
Louvre

Léon Lhermitte (France)
Market at Château-Thierry
1879
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (France)
Andromache and Astyanax
ca. 1813-24
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (France)
Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime
1805-06
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Carle Vernet (France)
Arrival of Emigrés with the Duchesse de Berry on the French Coast
early 19th century
oil on panel
private collection

Horace Vernet (France)
Mazeppa
1826
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle, Bremen

Horace Vernet (France)
Invalid submitting petition to Napoleon at parade in the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace
1838
canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (France)
Landscape with Aqueduct
1810
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Édouard Vuillard (France)
In the Room
1869
oil on cardboard
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg