Posters by Unknowns

Anonymous Printmaker
The Evening Star
ca. 1895
lithograph (poster)
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Anonymous Printmaker
Philadelphia Sunday Press
ca. 1895
lithograph (poster)
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Anonymous Printmaker
Borussia Malz-Bier
ca. 1898
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Printmaker
Ault & Wiborg Co. - Printing Inks 
ca. 1900
lithograph (poster)
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Anonymous Printmaker
Gand Hôtel Royal, Stockholm
ca. 1905
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Printmaker
Grand Hotel Eden, Nervi
ca. 1905
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Printmaker
Avoid Colds - Dress Properly
ca. 1905
lithograph (poster)
Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Printmaker
Wanted - Red Blooded Men
1914
lithograph (poster)
Dallas Museum of Art

Anonymous Printmaker
Boys - Come over here - you're wanted
ca. 1915
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Winter in Switzerland
ca. 1928
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Telling the Enemy
ca. 1940-45
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Cut Your Loaf This Way
ca. 1947
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Chambers Brothers
Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco
1967
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Nureyev
ca. 1975
offset print (poster)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Printmaker
La Révolution Française au Musée Carnavalet
1939
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Anonymous Printmaker
Great Leap Forward in Production
ca. 1978
lithograph (poster)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Mirror Image

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as

the image of my father, whose life

was spent like this,

thinking of death, to the exclusion

of other sensual matters,

so in the end that life

was easy to give up, since

it contained nothing: even

my mother's voice couldn't make him

change or turn back

as he believed

that once you can't love another human being

you have no place in the world. 

– Louise Glück (1990)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - The Turkish Bath

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The Turkish Bath
painted 1852-59, modified 1862
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Musée du Louvre

Anti-Romantic

Ingres was the greatest portraitist of his age.  All of French society passed through his studio, from baronesses to bankers.  Guardian of an academic artistic tradition, he felt himself obliged to paint ambitious narrative canvases referencing Antiquity – mythological stories were accordingly depicted at regular intervals throughout his career.  To a lesser degree he also explored the Middle Ages as a setting, but it is his taste for the perceived exoticism of the Orient (where in fact he never traveled) that informs The Turkish Bath.

The Orient as Destination

Although the French Romantics did sometimes set their scenes in Antiquity, as Delacroix did for the ceilings of the Senate library, they were primarily inspired by the Near East.  British Romantics did not share this unique fascination, probably because the British Empire was so much more extensive and varied.  In France during the 19th century the voyage to the Orient had become an artistic imperative.  There grew up at this time a fashion, focused on the Near East, for pondering the mutability of civilizations, as first encapsulated in The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolution of Empires (1791) by Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, soon reinforced in Travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land through Egypt (1811) by François-René de Chateaubriand.  Writers and painters took it upon themselves to re-enact Chateaubriand's Travels, producing their own variations, appendices, elaborations.  This vogue was taken up by Alphonse de Lamartine, Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval; then carried forward to the end of the century by Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Barrès and André Gide. 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
La Grande Odalisque
1814
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Sleeping Odalisque
ca. 1830-40
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Odalisque and Artist's Model

Ingres found the Orientalist fantasy irresistible.  His erotic preferences centered on the harem, the seraglio which allowed him to present women as offered up, entirely nude, having been unveiled for the pleasure of their lord and master.  In the two Odalisques, as in The Turkish Bath, women wait, idly resting and infinitely available.  The master, the turbaned and mustached warrior, can possess them with absolute ease at any time.  

We can compare the odalisque to a female model in the studio, posing nude and assuming whatever position was requested at the École des Beaux-Arts, shielded to some extent by the multiple gazes of a group of male art students competing one against another.  

     

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Valpinçon Bather
1808
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Headdresses

In The Turkish Bath, all the women are unclothed and disposed in various postures, but the heads of several are ornamented – in the foreground, seen from the back, one wears a turban (which we recognize as identical to that worn by a much earlier Bather).  Another wears something like a jeweled crown, not to mention the golden coiffure that flows over the shoulder of the woman in silhouette at lower right.  Nude bodies but covered heads, like the last resistance of the Muslim veil amidst this whirlwind of flesh.  These women twine around and among one another, as if taunting the viewer – who is, of course, not only viewer, but voyeur.    

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

Canaletto - The Thames from Somerset House Terrace

Canaletto 
The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards Westminster
ca. 1750-51
oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Water

Painter of Venice and its festivals, Canaletto ended his life in London under radically different light-conditions.  He depicts the Thames here on a majestic scale, employing a perspective that renders it even wider.  The layout is not unlike one of his vast Venetian canals, except that the colors are so much colder.  The figures, observed with the same precision as their Venetian counterparts, are quite different in their costuming and comportment.  

The view is from Somerset House, famous in latter-day mystery novels as the repository of wills and marriage contracts.  The river curves at this point, and the bank on which we find ourselves spreads out before us.  Westminster Bridge, only recently completed, marks the horizon.  Standing on the same spot today, we would see two additional bridges – Waterloo and Charing Cross.  Floating above a row of waterside houses are the important monuments of Whitehall and Westminster Abbey, not yet joined by the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben.  St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower, and the port are invisible to our right.  Chimneys against the sky make a pattern resembling archaic musical notation. 

Nostalgia

The Thames strikes us not only by the softness of its colors but by its horizontality.  In Venice, rows of narrow palaces structure the space within the canvas, while here, countryside seems to merge with townscape. Traffic between the two banks is conducted by numbers of small boats with flat bottoms – English versions of the gondola – which look lost, impatient to rejoin the big ships in the port, seagoing vessels bound for remote destinations.  On the river's surface at upper left, a barge with prominent cabin and a company of rowers reads like a souvenir of the now-lost Most Serene Republic, where the artist will no longer return, ardently as he may wish to.   

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

Jean-Étienne Liotard - Self Portrait

Jean-Étienne Liotard
Self Portrait
1751-52
pastel on paper, mounted on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève

Traveler in Turkey

During the Romantic Age, journeys to the Orient were much in vogue.  There was an established Orientalist movement in art and culture.  But in the 18th century such interests and excursions were rare.  Certain citizens of Geneva had, however, already sought out this destination.  Liotard passed a substantial share of his life in Istanbul, capital of a huge empire that was still a great power and whose cultural prestige (in European eyes) derived from the Thousand and One Nights, translated by Galland, one of the diplomats sent to the Sublime Porte by Louis XIV.  Back in Europe, Liotard produced "Turkish" pictures that enjoyed great popularity.  Western women suddenly wished to be painted in Turkish costumes, lounging in Turkish interiors.   

Jean-Étienne Liotard
Portrait of François Tronchin with Danaë by Rembrandt
1755
pastel on vellum
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Virtuoso of the Self Portrait

The artist's technique with pastels outshone all his contemporaries, however well-regarded in this medium.  There is a pastel portrait of a Genevan banker posing with the highlight of his art collection, a Danaë by Rembrandt.  This is an oil painting with thick impasto, which Liotard managed to render convincingly, despite the inherent antagonism between oil paint and pastel, the one glossy and the other flat.  

Certain painters have been immersed in the study of their own faces, most famously Rembrandt and Van Gogh.  A great number of self portraits by Liotard survive, created at different ages and in different attitudes.  The one shone here is in his "Turkish" manner, complete with an extravagant beard which he depicts so meticulously that one seems able to distinguish each of its curling strands.          

Beards

Long beards most commonly make reference to Biblical patriarchs, such as the famous Moses of Michelangelo.  Hermits in their solitude were also routinely portrayed with prominent beards.  

It must have taken years for Liotard to grow such a beard, yet he didn't keep it.  His face continued to transform itself from one picture to another.  We can say of each: it looks like him, but it doesn't, he isn't just this, he shifts, he tries things on.  He won't stay the same, bearded or shaved, with hat or without.  To take in his true portrait, we ought to have a movie of all his portraits.  Diderot said: "In one day I have a hundred different faces, according to what affects me."  Liotard seems to say: "I had a hundred different faces, depending on where I was and what was happening around me."

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

Painted Views - Nineteenth-Century Preferences (I)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Le Petit Chaville near Ville d'Avray
ca. 1823
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jacques-Raymond Brascassat
Via Appia outside Rome
1830
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

William James Müller
Tivoli
1839
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

John Linnell
The Timber Wagon
1872
oil on canvas
Guildhall Art Gallery, London

John Brett
Rocks, Sicily
1873
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Camille Pissarro
Quai du Pothuis at Pontoise after Rain
1876
oil on canvas
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Karl Joseph Kuwasseg
Waterfall among Mountains
before 1877
oil on canvas
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham

from The Prelude

                       The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light –
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

– William Wordsworth (final version published posthumously in 1850)

Edward Lear
Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling
1877
oil on canvas
National Museum Cardiff, Wales

Gustave Courbet
Le Ruisseau du Puits Noir
before 1877
oil on panel
Manchester Art Gallery

Charles-François Daubigny
Landscape with Figures on a Bank
ca. 1875-78
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Claude Monet
Vétheuil
1880
oil on canvas
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

Georges Seurat
The Morning Walk
1885
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Paul Gauguin
Martinique Landscape
1887
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Auguste Renoir
La Roche Guyon
ca. 1885-86
oil on canvas
Aberdeen Art Gallery

Paul Sérusier
Bretonne au Champ de Blé
ca. 1890-95
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787) - Portraits of Grand Tourists

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of The Reverend Utrick Fetherstonhaugh as Apollo
1751
oil on canvas
National Trust, Uppark, Petersfield, Sussex

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh with Wreaths of Fruit and Corn
1751
oil on canvas
National Trust, Uppark, Petersfield, Sussex

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Sarah Lethieullier, Lady Fetherstonhaugh, as Diana
1751
oil on canvas
National Trust, Uppark, Petersfield, Sussex

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Katherine Durnford, later Mrs Utrick Fetherstonhaugh, as Flora
1751
oil on canvas
National Trust, Uppark, Petersfield, Sussex

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Lascelles Raymond Iremonger with Wreaths of Corn and Roses
1751
oil on canvas
National Trust, Uppark, Petersfield, Sussex

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Francis Hutchinson
before 1787
oil on canvas
National Trust, Hatchlands, Surrey

"Baton's portraits without exception manifest great objectivity and simplicity; this was a field of painting toward which the particular nature of his talents in large measure predisposed him.  In this field of painting one may compare him only with the greatest of northern portraitists; among his Italian contemporaries none was able to rival him in his cool and yet always appealing objectivity, or in his unassertive and non-rhetorical noblesse.  If Carlo Maratti and Giovanni Battista Gaulli had been the preordained portraitists of the opulent, stately world of the Roman prelates, in Batoni's portraits we meet the cosmopolitan man of the 18th century, the enlightened aristocrat of bourgeois-intimate mien, the educated connoisseur of classical antiquity who had come to Rome in order to expand his intellectual horizons, as, thanks primarily to the English aristocracy, it had now become the general practice."

– Hermann Voss, from Baroque Painting in Rome (1925), revised and translated by Thomas Pelzel (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1997)

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Ralph Howard, 1st Viscount Wicklow
1752
oil on canvas
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of John Rolle Walter
1753
oil on canvas
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Gregory Page-Turner
1768
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of John Monson, 3rd Lord Monson (detail)
1774
oil on canvas
private collection

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Lady Mary Fox
1767
oil on canvas
private collection

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Richard Milles
ca. 1760-70
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of Gordon
ca. 1760-65
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Philip Metcalfe
ca. 1750-60
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Pompeo Batoni
Portrait of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn,
Thomas Apperley and Captain Edward Hamilton
ca. 1768-72
oil on canvas
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff