Fashionable Women of the Nineteenth Century

Édouard de Beaumont
A Lady Promenading
ca. 1880
watercolor and tempera on bristol board
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

"In the 1880s a bustle pad, or a tier of stiffened horsehair or fabric frills, was introduced.  After 1887-1888 the bustle went out of fashion.  Towards the end of the 19th century the rate at which the fashionable silhouette changed quickened.  The increasing popularity of paper patterns and the growth of women's fashion periodicals encouraged home dress-making during the second half of the 19th century.  The withdrawal of the paper tax in the middle of the 19th century had stimulated the growth of publications, especially magazines aimed at women.  It was during this period that magazines introduced paper patterns.  By the 20th century the pace of change in the fashionable silhouette became ever more rapid as the expanding fashion industry, in conjunction with the media, became more effective at stimulating demand for a constant flow of new styles."

Florent Willems
The Important Response
ca. 1880
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

William Merritt Chase
Ready for the Ride
1877
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Giovanni Boldini
Lady with a Guitar
ca. 1873
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"The 1870s and 1880s introduced styles that revealed the natural silhouette.  A popular style was the 'princess line' dress, which was made without a waist seam to reveal the figure.  Skirts fitted tightly and required streamlined all-in-one underwear combinations.  Corsets became longer and were more rigidly boned.  The busk, known as the spoon busk because of its shape, extended to the stomach.  Sleeves were tight."  

William Morris Hunt
Priscilla
ca. 1873
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jules Breton
Woman with a Taper
1873
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Fairfax Murray
Portrait of Clara Sentance
1870
watercolor and tempera on paper
Morgan Library, New York

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Woman and Flowers 
(representing ancient rather than contemporary dress)
1868
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Frederic Leighton
Painter's Honeymoon
ca. 1864
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"In the 1860s the skirt was very full and worn over a cage crinoline, a petticoat supported by a frame of steel hoops that held it away from the legs.  A boned corset was worn over a chemise."

Franz Xaver Winterhalter
Portrait of Wiencyzyslawa Barczewksa, Madame de Jurjewicz
1860
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Henry Wyatt
Vigilance
1835
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Martin Archer Shee
Portrait of Miss Moffat
1826
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"In the 1820s and 1830s the waistline deepened, returning to its natural position.  As the natural waist returned, the bodice required a tighter fit and in contrast the skirt became fuller and bell-shaped.  There were several different sleeve styles but short puffed sleeves were generally worn for evening, and long sleeves for day.  Corsets continued to be worn.  These were lightly boned and quilted, with a deep busk.  Several layers of petticoats with frilled hems, sometimes of horsehair, were worn to support the full skirts."

Thomas Lawrence
Portrait of the Marchioness of Sutherland
ca. 1816
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Giuseppe Longhi
Head of a Young Woman wearing a Turban
ca. 1808-1812
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

– quoted text from curator's notes at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Beautiful Pictures According to the Nineteenth Century

Martin Johnson Heade
Magnolia Grandiflora
ca. 1885-95
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mariano Fortuny
An Ecclesiastic
ca. 1874
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Henri Fantin-Latour
Plate of Peaches
1862
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Eugène Delacroix
Christ on the Cross
1846
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Edwin Austin Abbey
A Pavane
1897
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gustave Caillebotte
Man at his Bath
1884
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mary Cassatt
Mrs Duffee seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading
1876
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Voice

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where
Latin ashes and the dust of Greece
mingled with novels, history, and verse
in one dark Babel.  I was folio-high
when I first heard the voices.  'All the world,'
said one, insidious but sure, 'is cake –
let me make you an appetite to match,
and then your happiness need have no end.'
And the other: 'Come, O come with me in dreams
beyond the possible, beyond the known!'
that second voice sang  like the wind in the reeds,
a wandering phantom out of nowhere, sweet
to hear yet somehow horrifying too.
'Now and forever!' I answered, whereupon
my wound was with me – ever since, my Fate:
behind the scenes, the frivolous decors
of all existence, deep in the abyss,
I see distinctly other, brighter worlds;
yet victimized by what I know I see,
I sense the serpent coiling at my heels;
and therefore, like the prophets, from that hour
I've loved the wilderness, I've loved the sea;
no ordinary sadness touches me
though I find savor in the bitterest wine;
how many truths I trade away for lies,
and musing on heaven, stumble over trash . . .
Even so, the voice consoles me: 'Keep your dreams,
the wise have none so lovely as the mad.'

– Charles Baudelaire, from the Additional Poems published with Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) in Richard Howard's translation (David R. Godine, 1982)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The Model Resting
1889
tempera on panel
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

James McNeill Whistler
Street in Old Chelsea
ca. 1880-85
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Henry Oliver Walker
Narcissus
1890s
oil on board
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Grieve Family
Theatre Design, probably representing Baghdad
1843
tempera on paper
Victoria & Albert Museum

Robert Henri
Café by Night with Japanese Lanterns
ca. 1895
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

William Morris Hunt
Italian Peasant Boy
1866
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edwin Landseer
Victoria, Princess Royal with a Pony
1842
oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Great Britain

French Subjects from the Nineteenth Century

follower of Jacques-Louis David
Portrait of an Elderly Lady
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Honoré Daumier
The Prison Choir
ca.1860
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Honoré Daumier
The Loge
ca. 1856-57
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Edgar Degas
Degas's Father listening to Lorenzo Pagans playing the Guitar
ca. 1869-72
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edgar Degas
Portrait of the Duchessa di Montejasi (Degas's Aunt Fanny) and her daughters Elena and Camilla
ca. 1876
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society.  The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite.  Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in women its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master.  The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination.  But therefore equally bad.  Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion about nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation.  If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth.  The woman who feels herself wounded when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband.  The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated and adapted, but what passes for nature in civilization is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object.  The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence – masculine violence – to be: a she-man.  One need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have their femininity at their finger-tips – deploying it just where needed, flashing their eyes, using their impulsiveness – to know how things stand with the sheltered unconscious, unmarred by intellect.  Just this unscathed purity is the product of the ego, of censorship, of intellect, which is why it submits so unresistingly to the reality principle of the rational order.  Without a single exception feminine natures are conformist.  The fact that Nietzsche's scrutiny stopped short of them, that he took over a second-hand and unverified image of feminine nature from the Christian civilization that he otherwise so thoroughly mistrusted, finally brought his thought under the sway, after all, of bourgeois society.  He fell for the fraud of saying 'the feminine' when talking of women.  Hence the perfidious advice not to forget the whip: femininity itself is already the effect of the whip.  The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication.  Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it."

– Theodor Adorno, from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, published in German in 1951, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott and published in English in 1974

Edgar Degas
Portrait of Estelle Balfour (Degas's blind cousin, a war widow)
ca. 1863-65
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Jean-François Millet
Peasant Girl Daydreaming
1848
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-François Millet
Women Sewing by Lamplight
ca. 1853-54
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Alphonse Legros
Head of a Man
1876-77
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum

Ernest Meissonier
Two Soldiers
1849
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Camille Pissarro
Turkey Girl
1884
tempera on paper
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Hope
1872
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Édouard Manet
Portrait of René Maizeroy
ca. 1882
pastel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Édouard Manet
Music Lesson
1870
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Landscapes as Painted by Baroque Artists (Europe)

Antonio Tempesta
Gathering of the Manna
ca. 1600
oil on alabaster
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Antonio Tempesta
Joseph explaining his Dream to his Brothers
ca. 1600
oil on alabaster
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Antonio Tempesta, best known as a prolific printmaker, also specialized in oil paintings on unusual stone supports.  In this pair, groups of figures echo the alabaster's patterning, with the veining transformed into rolling restless landscapes."

Joachim Wtewael
Actaeon watching Diana and her Nymphs bathing
1612
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Roelant Savery
Forest Scene with Hunters
ca. 1615
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Savery traveled in 1603 to Prague, where he worked for Emperor Rudolf II.  Probably painted after the artist returned to Amsterdam, this landscape draws on Savery's memories of the mountainous scenery of the Tyrol, Rudolf's menagerie of birds and animals, and castles that the artist passed on his way along the Rhine."

Pensionante del Saraceni
St Stephen mourned by St Gamaliel and St Nicodemus
ca. 1615
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

attributed to Antonio Carracci
Landscape with Bathers
before 1618
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"The nude bathers climbing onto a rocky ledge in the middle ground are quoted from Michelangelo's celebrated Battle of Cascina.  That painting, commissioned for a public space in Florence, was never completed, but Michelangelo's finished cartoon became an object of study for other artists (though it too failed to survive beyond the sixteenth century).  The figures retained their influence through an abundance of reproductive prints and drawings that continued to circulate." 

Martin Ryckaert
River Landscape with Mining
ca. 1620-29
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"Mining was an important industry in the southern Netherlands, Germany and Austria in the 15th-17th centuries.  As many powerful figures with significant interests in mining were also great patrons of art, as Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, the theme became quite popular for landscape painting."

Peter Paul Rubens
Landscape with an Avenue of Trees
ca. 1635
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"This late panoramic landscape sketch depicts the area surrounding Het Steen, an estate outside Antwerp that Rubens acquired in 1635.  A country house, perhaps the artist's own, is visible in the distance at right.  The painting once belonged to the famed connoisseur and Rubens patron Everhard Jabach (1618-1695), in whose collection it was described as unfinished.  The cloud-filled sky, foliage of the trees at right, and foreground strip were added at a later date, presumably to make the painting more saleable."

Gaspard Dughet
Landscape with St Jerome and the Lion
ca. 1638
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"By the mid-eighteenth century this landscape was in a London collection and firmly attributed to Nicolas Poussin.  As Dughet's kinsman and master, and a far more famous artist, Poussin's name became attached to many Dughet canvases.  The work was exhibited as a Poussin throughout the nineteenth century, and when auctioned in 1920 it was still so identified.  By the time Colnaghi's sold the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1951, the Poussin attribution had fallen away and the artist was held to be Francisque Millet.  It was not properly restored to Gaspard Dughet until the second half of the twentieth century, after it had reached Boston."

Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1640-50
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jan Asselijn
River Landscape with Fort Saint Jean and the Château of Pierre Seize in Lyon
ca. 1650
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Willem de Heusch
Pan and Syrinx
ca. 1650
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Nicolaes Berchem
Landscape with an Elegant Party on a Stag Hunt
ca. 1665-70
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Giuseppe Recco
Flowers by a Pond with Frogs
ca. 1670-79
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"This close-up of flowers, frogs, and insects is presented from what seems to be the low viewing angel of a naturalist searching for specimens in the underbrush on the edge of an upland meadow.  However, the knowledgeable viewer would recognize that this is a fantasy.  Tulips were expensive, carefully cultivated flowers that were only to be found in well-tended gardens.  Recco was the foremost painter of still lifes in 17th-century Naples.  His works reveal the influence of Dutch painters working in Italy who introduced such "underbrush" subjects."

– texts based on curator's notes from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Walters Art Museum, Baltimore