femme-de-lettres

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

James Northcote—a former student of Sir Joshua Reynolds’—painted Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3, in 1790.

The work depicts a moment that productions often skip, probably for dramatic tension.

In Romeo and Juliet, between Romeo’s death and Juliet’s, Friar Laurence pops his head in. You can imagine why the interchange is frequently dropped; separating the lovers’ speeches with

“Come, I'll dispose of thee Among a sisterhood of holy nuns���

seems, to modern ears at least, a little anticlimactic (Act V, Scene 3, lines 156–157).

Here, though, Northcote grants the moment its own power. Friar Laurence is at once judgmental and, with his two different light sources (a torch in hand and a lantern behind him), a literal beacon. Juliet is a picture of innocence, and surprising decisiveness: her face is collected, her arm extended in a gesture of dimissal.

(But Paris just looks really, really dead.)

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikipedia)

Abraham van der Eyk painted this, Allegory of the Dispute between the Arminianists and Their Opponents, in 1721.

Normally I think of allegorical works as being substantially pared down and abstracted; a single figure, maybe two. Here, the crowd itself seems deliberately symbolic.

The debate represented is an esoteric argument within Dutch Protestantism; while the details of both sides would likely illuminate some of the intricacies of the painting, you'll have to look them up to find out—I found them too dull to report.

What I do find interesting is the visual representation of the argument being played out. It may be a little trite, but there's something kind of charming about this group of serious men weighing their stacks of books and treatises against each other's.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

The French Symbolist Gustave Moreau, one of the most distinctive artists I can think of, painted Jupiter and Semele in 1894 and 1895.

It depicts the story of Zeus appearing to his mortal lover, Semele. It’s a tale that explains both Zeus’ habit of showing up to his sundry women in the guise of animals, money, gusts of wind, &c., and the danger of tiny old ladies who give you strange romantic advice: sometimes they’re actually the wives of your weird deity boyfriends trying to trick you into demanding a glimpse of said boyfriend in his highly lethal superhuman-being form.

In short, don’t sleep with Zeus.

Semele, unfortunately, did not take my advice, and here dies in a visual cacophony of flowers and partially clad figures.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Margaret Sarah Carpenter painted this portrait, possibly of her daughter Henrietta, in 1839.

She was, at the time, a successful portraitist, whose work had been exhibited at the Royal Academy for more than two decades.

In this painting, she puts her subject in an Orientalist impression of ambiguously Middle Eastern clothes. Such garb was briefly fashionable in portraiture of the eighteenth century as a representation of the wealth such access to foreign goods and travel implied, but by the nineteenth was more the domain of genre scenes (depictions of everyday life).

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

This beautiful painting—though slightly the worse for wear—is Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne.

Painted over the course of the last decade or so of his life, at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, this work shows both Leonardo’s rich, luminous style and the ill effects of his experimental media to good effect.

The poses of the figures are, it is worth noting, extremely strange: Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, sits on a difficult-to-decipher surface, while her daughter reaches for Christ, her son, who appears to be trying to ride a somewhat resistant lamb.

The close interaction between the gaze of Christ and his mother, and the lack of acknowledgement of Saint Anne, may refer to the fact that she is—to follow the strict linearity of the narrative—by this time long dead.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

This, the Spring fresco from Akrotiri, a Bronze-age Minoan city on an island in the Mediterranean, shows a colorful, rocky landscape filled with flowers and birds.

The fresco hints at the ultimate demise of the city as it was, and at the event that preserved this piece of its history so well: the colorful, strangely shaped rocks are volcanic.

The rest, dear reader, I suspect you can piece together for yourself.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

This portrait, Bianca Maria Sforza by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, probably painted in 1493, serves as an excellent example of Renaissance portraiture.

Ambrogio depicts Sforza in strict profile, which—in combination with her smooth, tightly fitted bodice and carefully bound and coiffed hair—gives her an air of restraint. Meanwhile the slight downward tilt of her head and her full-lashed eyes read as demure.

Although the richly embroidered textiles and many jewels that adorn her denote her social status, it is this representation of idealized Renaissance femininity—carefully controlled, but deferential—that best communicates her stature as a daughter of the Duke of Milan.

[femme-de-lettres]

Apologies

For the somewhat spotty posting as of late, dear readers! I've found myself unexpectedly in possession of a real adult human job, and that involves all sorts of moving and HR paperwork and similar excitement. I'm terribly pleased—a museum has me doing some little computer-y things, so it's right up my alley—but it does mean I've been focused on other things. So, apologies, dear reader! But not to worry: I'm hoping to go back to posting regularly in the next week or so!

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Edward Daniel Leahy painted this, Mary, Queen of Scots Leaving Loch Leven, in 1837.

It depicts an incident of English history. After an unpopular marriage to a man suspected to have murdered her previous husband, the Queen of Scotland—who also claimed a right to the English throne—had been imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle by a group of Scottish Nobleman.

However, on the second of May in 1568, she escaped. After a failed attempt to regain her throne, she fled to England, where she would remain in custody until her trial and execution for plotting against Elizabeth I.

Leahy depicts the moment of escape itself, as Mary prepares to board the small boat that will carry her off the island she has been imprisoned on.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, a Polish-born Danish artist, painted Egyptian Fellah Woman with her Child in 1872.

The work blends traditional depictions of Ancient Egypt with contemporary orientalist tropes.

The woman shading her baby with a palm frond evokes the story of Moses, pulled from the plant-lined Nile, and the richness of the scene—despite the woman’s social status as a “fellah,” often translated as “peasant”—suits Victorian imaginings of Ancient Egypt.

The openness of her translucent dress (with its single turquoise button undone at her neck), and the reclining languor she and her baby assume, however, speak more to the popular depictions of imagined harems.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Richard Redgrave painted this illustration of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, entitled Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer, in 1836.

Redgrave depicts a moment early in the second part of the book—in which Gulliver visits a land inhabited by giants—when Gulliver is being shown to the neighbor of the farmer who found him.

The neighbor, "who was old and dim-sighted, put on his spectacles to behold me better; at which I could not forbear laughing very heartily, for his eyes appeared like the full moon shining into a chamber at two windows."

Despite the textual specificity of the scene, Redgrave also includes visual references to other parts of the story: most obviously, a vast wasp suggests the battle Gulliver will have to do against a similar creature later on.

Better him than us, dear reader.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

This nineteenth-century painting by Jean Carolus, The Finishing Touches, captures a widespread taste for genre scenes—which capture every day life—set in the past, especially the eighteenth century.

Here, a lady’s maid makes a final adjustment to the subject’s elaborate dress. They sit in an elegant interior, which evokes eighteenth-century tastes while reinforcing the wealth of the woman being dressed: an imported carpet and a hand-painted wall are two lavish touches to a deceptively simple decor.

The title—though time (and translation from French) mean it may or may not be original to the piece—evokes the act of painting; Carolus perhaps intended it as a slightly joking reference to his own work, and to the “artistry,” so to speak, of the maid who prepares the lady’s dress.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Washington Allston, an American artist trained in England, painted Hermia and Helena sometime before 1818.

Their dress is deliberately ambiguous: they wear the high empire waists and curled hair of the Regency, but their slashed sleeves, squared necklines, and dark fabrics are more akin to nineteenth-century depictions of Medieval and Renaissance style.

Their clothing, and the wild landscape around them, give them a timeless, symbolic air: they are neither a contemporary portrait nor a rendering solely of Hermia and Helena (after Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) but a more abstract depiction of female friendship.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of two of his daughters, The Sisters (1826), is interesting as much for the family it relates to as for the painting itself.

Peale’s father, Charles Wilson Peale, was a portraitist, amateur scientist, and the founder of the Philadelphia Museum.

Rembrandt Peale and his eccentrically named siblings continued their father’s renaissance-man accomplishments: Rembrandt and Rubens worked in museums; the two of them, Titian, and Raphaelle were artists; Franklin was a civil servant and officer of the Philadelphia Mint; and Titian was a scientist.

The Tenenbaum-esque family didn’t stop at that generation. Rosalba Peale, pictured holding a paintbrush and sitting in front of her sister Eleanor Peale Jacobs, often served as an assistant to her father.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Henrietta Rae painted Miss Nightingale at Scutari (1854) in 1891. The image shown above is, in fact, of a chromolithograph after the painting rather than the painting itself.

The soldier Florence Nightingale attends to sits up in bed, his red uniform coat tied about his neck.

1854—when the painting is set—was the midst of the Crimean War, during which Nightingale gained her reputation as a nurse and a medical figure.

Rae chooses to depict the moment as one less of medicine than of religion, however, draping Nightingale in a white cloth; the choice was well in keeping with the romanticized contemporary view of Nightingale herself as the ���lady with the lamp”—which she prominently displays.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Adolf Stademann painted this, Winterliches Eisvergnügen (which I shan't translate for you, because it sounds silly no matter how I put it, but basically means they're having fun on the ice and it's winter), in the nineteenth century.

The people (and dog, and horse) are painted in a wide variety of poses and arrangements. The primary activities, though, seem to be skating and fishing.

(I post this, dear reader, because I'm currently in Brighton—and good heavens is it ever hot out.)

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

What fascinates me about this—Edward Middleton Manigault’s The Rocket (1909)—is that, while it breaks with the stylistic tradition of the Impressionists, it retains a subject most often associated with the movement.

His exaggerated, outlined clouds of color thus contrast with the almost-Whistlerian theme.