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-Art 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)

Aline Fruhauf – MIdcentury Tastemakers

Aline Fruhauf
Muriel King (fashion designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Louise Barnes Gallagher (fashion designer)
1942
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Helen Cramp Cookman (fashion designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Aline Bernstein (stage designer)
1943
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Clare Potter (fashion designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Fira Benenson (fashion designer)
1942
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Nettie Rosenstein (fashion designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Omar Kiam (fashion designer)
1942
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Tom Brigance (fashion designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
William Pahlmann (interior designer)
1939
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Sally Victor (milliner)
1942
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Lilly Daché (milliner)
1942
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Pola Stout (textile designer)
1941
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
James Berryman (cartoonist)
1949
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Aline Fruhauf
Duncan Phillips (art collector)
1949
ink and watercolor on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Santarém

Of course, I may be remembering it all wrong

after, after – how many years?

That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;

more than anything else I wanted to stay while

in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,

grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.

Suddenly there'd been houses, people, and lots of mongrel

riverboats skittering back and forth

under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,

with everything gilded, burnished along one side,

and everything bright, cheerful, casual – or so it looked.

I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.

Two rivers. Hadn't two rivers sprung

from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four

and they'd diverged. Here only two

and coming together. Even if one were tempted

to literary interpretations

such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female

– such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off

in that watery, dazzling dialectic. 

In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather,

there was a modest promenade and a belvedere

about to fall into the river,

stubby palms, flamboyants like pans of embers,

buildings one story high, stucco, blue or yellow,

and one house faced with azulejos, buttercup yellow. 

The street was deep in dark gold river sand

damp from the ritual afternoon rain,

and teams of zebus plodded, gentle, proud,

and blue, with down-curved horns and hanging ears,

pulling carts with solid wheels.

The zebus' hooves, the people's feet

waded in golden sand,

dampered by golden sand,

so that almost the only sounds

were creaks and shush, shush, shush.

Two rivers full of crazy shipping – people

all apparently changing their minds, embarking, 

disembarking, rowing clumsy dories.

(After the Civil War some Southern families

came here; here they could still own slaves.

They left occasional blue eyes, English names,

and oars. No other place, no one

on all the Amazon's four thousand miles

does anything but paddle.)

– Elizabeth Bishop (1978)

Idiosyncratic Spaces

Andrea Locatelli
Scene of Sorcery and Black Magic
ca. 1740-41
drawing
(study for painting)
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Charles Delafosse
Edward Young composing Night Thoughts
1783
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Nicolò dell'Abate
Scene of Aristocratic Dissipation
ca. 1565
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Pieter de Josselin de Jong
Iron-Workers
ca. 1880-1900
pastel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Hubert Robert
The Artist's Studio in Rome
1760
oil on canvas
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

follower of Canaletto
Portico with a Lantern
ca. 1741-45
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Dutch Artist
Tavern Interior
(pissing into wooden tub in foreground)
1619
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste Lallemand
Architectural Caprice inspired by Antique Baths
ca. 1750
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte
Weaving Workshop
1893
drawing
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Anonymous Japanese Photographer
Greenhouse with Peonies
ca. 1887
hand-colored albumen print
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Italian Photographer
Conservation Workshop in Florence, treating paintings by
Francesco Salviati, Agnolo Bronzino, Fra Angelico and Giotto 
2006
photograph
Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Fortezza da Bassio, Florence

attributed to Louis-Jean Desprez
View of Excavated Pompei
ca. 1777-84
watercolor
Musée du Louvre

John Piper
Approach to Fonthill
1940
oil on canvas
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Jenaro Pérez Villaamil
Seville Cathedral
(interior with Corpus Christi procession)
1835
oil on canvas
Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid

Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin
Ball at Versailles
(honoring the Marriage of the Dauphin to Marie Antoinette)
1770
drawing, with watercolor
Musée du Louvre

Girolamo Marchesi (Girolamo da Cotignola)
View of a City, with Chained Bear
ca. 1520
oil on panel
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara

"The Art of Perspective, which hath the eye for its Principle, to whom Nature hath given more vivacity and more Perfections than to the other senses, and which holdeth amongst them the Rank and the Advantages that the Soul hath above the Body, is likewise the fairest and most delightful of all the Parts that the Science of the Mathematicks hath put forth into light.  This Science may will boast itself to be the soul and the life of Painting, seeing that it is it which giveth unto Painters the Perfection of their Art, which in its ordering the heights and the measures of the Figures, the Moveables, the Architectures, and other Ornaments of a Picture: It instructeth what colours he should use, lively or sad, in what place he ought to apply the one and the other, what he ought to finish, and what ought not so to be: where one is to give a light, and where there is no need of it: in a word, it is this that ought to begin and finish, seeing that it ought to go throughout all.  Without help, the best Master will make as many faults as draughts, principally in Architectures, wherewith they would enrich their Works, as I have seen in Pieces well esteemed, where they have failed so foully, that this in part hath been the motive of my design, for to cause them to know their errours without naming them, and to teach the young ones to avoid them.  How excellent a Painter soever one is, he must observe all these Rules, or he shall content none but ignorants, and a Reasonable Painter that shall know and use these well, shall do wonders to every one's content." 

– Jean Dubreuil, from Perspective Practical (1651), translated by Robert Pricke (1672)

Panoramic - I

workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni
The Assassination and Funeral of Julius Caesar
ca. 1455-60
tempera on panel, transferred to canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Dosso Dossi
Aeneas at the Entrance to the Elysian Fields
ca. 1520
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

attributed to Hans Krell
The Battle of Orsha
1525
tempera on panel
National Museum, Warsaw

Lambert Sustris
Baptism of Christ
ca. 1550
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

Lucas van Valckenborch
Autumn Landscape
1585
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Hans Bol
Park Landscape with Castle
1589
watercolor on vellum
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adriaen van Stalbemt
Allegorical Composition with Burnt Offering
ca. 1610-20
oil on panel
National Museum, Warsaw

Jacob de Wit
Moses choosing the Seventy Elders
1736-37
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Johann Michael Wittmer
Scene at Constantinople
1837
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Vintage Festival
1871
oil on canvas
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Jan Matejko
The Battle of Grunwald
1878
oil on canvas
National Museum, Warsaw

Léon Frédéric
All Things Die but All will be Resurrected through God's Love
(panels 1-3)
1893-1918
oil on canvas
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan

Léon Frédéric
All Things Die but All will be Resurrected through God's Love
(panel 4)
1893-1918
oil on canvas
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan

Léon Frédéric
All Things Die but All will be Resurrected through God's Love
(panels 5-7)
1893-1918
oil on canvas
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan

Oddleiv Apneseth
Funeral of Olav Aahaug, Ålhus
2008
inkjet print
Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Norway

AES+F (art collective)
The Feast of Trimalchio - Panorama #8
2010
C-print
Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø

When the Spring began to appeare like the welcome messenger of Summer, one sweet (and in that more sweet) morning, after Aurora had called all carefull eyes to attend the day, forth came the faire Shepherdesse Urania, (faire indeed; yet that farre too meane a title for her, who for beautie deserv'd the highest stile could be given by best knowing Judgments).  Into the Meade she came, where usually shee drave her flocks to feede, whose leaping and wantonnesse shewed they were proud of such a Guide: But she, whose sad thoughts led her to another manner of spending her time, made her soone leave them, and follow her late begun custome; which was (while they delighted themselves) to sit under some shade, bewailing her misfortune; while they fed, to feed upon her owne sorrow and teares, which at this time she began againe to summon, sitting downe under the shade of a well-spread Beech; the ground (then blest) and the tree with full, and fine leaved branches, growing proud to beare, and shadow such perfections.  But she regarding nothing, in comparison of her woe, thus proceeded in her grief:

"Alas Urania," said she, "(the true servant to misfortune); of any miserie that can befall woman, is not this the most and greatest which thou art falne into?  Can there be any neare the unhappinesse of being ignorant, and that in the highest kind, not being certaine of mine owne estate or birth?  Why was I not stil continued in the beleefe I was, as I appeare, a Shepherdes, and Daughter to a Shepherd?  My ambition then went no higher then this estate, now flies it to a knowledge; then was I contented, now perplexed.  O ignorance, can thy dulnesse yet procure so sharpe a paine? and that such a thought as makes me now aspire unto knowledge?  How did I joy in this poore life being quiet? blest in the love of those I tooke for parents, but now by them I know the contrary, and by that knowledge, not to know my selfe.  Miserable Urania, worse art thou now then these thy Lambs; for they know their dams, while thou doest live unknowne of any."

– from The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, by the right honourable the Lady Mary Wroath, daughter to the right noble Robert, Earle of Leicester, and neece to the ever famous and renowned Sʳ Phillips Sidney knight, and to ye most excellant Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke, late deceased (London: John Marriott and John Grismand, 1621)