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AR913 Representing Others in Eighteenth Century Art
This course is concerned primarily with the way people are represented in the art and visual
imagery of the eighteenth century. It is also a course concerned with representing the underdog,
the outcast and those who existed on the margins of eighteenth-century society.
In England the development of Empire, in England and France the Enlightenment in all its forms,
all contributed to new ways of seeing images and picturing the contemporary world.
Art, whatever it is, is never neutral, and its meaning is bound up with the forms in which it is expressed.
The course will begin with an account of these forms in portraiture, landscape, history and subject pictures,
and will consider the ideal of the 'Gentleman', and the problem of the representation of middle-class life.
This will be followed by a consideration of the representation of labourers in a rural and then an urban context,
looking critically at idyllic scenes and the construction of 'the Mob'.This course concentrates particularly on
outsiders, aliens, drunks, criminals the insane and people who do not fit into the enlightenment mould. It
also looks at Hogarth and Goya, among others, who were particularly concerned with reaching a visual definition
of 'the people'. Women will be considered in the light of changing roles and the growth of sentimentalism.
Both men and women of devious sexuality will be looked at in terms of the masquerade, its dress and style,
the behaviour at masquerades and the growth of prejudice and homophobia during the period, particularly within
the context of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Venetian balls and British centres of entertainment.
The representation and stereotyping of foreigners will be considered, and close attention will be paid
to changing attitudes towards African and other non-Europeans, in the light of ideas of primitivism and emancipation.
The artistic genius and the Outcast Poet will examine the imagery of creativity from Hogarth's
'The Distressed Poet' to Reynolds Portrait of Oliver Goldsmith; Goya's portraits of Jovellanos and Melendez Valdes,
and Flaxman and Blake's imagery of poetic illustration and a series of key self portraits of the period.
Painting, sculpture and caricature will be used as appropriate.
This course also aims to pursue issues related to some of the main developments in European painting and sculpture
in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
To encourage students to visit major collections in London, and to lead them in the comparative study
of the Rococo, Neoclassicism and Romanticism in Britain, France, Spain and other European countries.
It will also introduce students to specialised debates in past and recent literature around the interpretation
of art of this period
To raise student awareness of different methods of approaching the discipline through analysis of chosen texts.
Basic Reading
D Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine, British Museum Pubs. 1989
Linda Colley, Britons, Tale UP 1992
H Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. IV, Harvard UP, 1989
Perez Sanchez et al, Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment, Yale, 1989
Sarah Symmons, Art and Ideas: Goya, Phaidon paperback, 1998
Anita Brookner, Greuze, the Rise and Fall of An 18th century phenomenon, Elek 1972
M Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 1980
T Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 1985
E Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, Yale UP,1994
Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, Hodder,1993
Sarah Symmons, Flaxman and Europe
Castle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization, The Carnivalesue in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Methuen, London, 1986
Castle, Terry, The Apparitional Lesbian, Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993
Belsey, Hugh, Gainsborough's Beautiful Mrs Graham, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003
Donaghue, Emma, Passions between Women, British Lesbian Culture, Scarlet Press,London 1993
Dormandy, T, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, London,1999
Foreman, Amanda, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Harper Collins,London 1998,paperback edition 1999
McCreery,Cindy, The Satirical Gaze, Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-century England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004
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AR938 Romantics and Supermen
This course examined the growth of large paintings in the public salon and in public
buildings in France during the first half of the nineteenth century; in addition,
it examines the lives of the extraordinary artists who provided these images, their
need for privacy as well as celebrity, their self imagery and their interaction with the society of their time.
These are some of the themes examined on this course although the students are encouraged to seek out their own:
Self-Portraits
The nineteenth century is famous for redefining the idea of what a self portrait might be and for developing
the modern ideal of self portraiture. The Atelier by Courbet forms a high point in self portraiture of the period.
Class members debate what is a self portrait and select one or two further nineteenth-century self portraits (not necessarily French )
to compare with Courbet's achievement.
Insanity and Reason in an Age of political controversy
How did the Enlightenment artist's attempts to deal with the representation of insanity
change in France during the early 19th century? Why did key painters associated with
romanticism turn so frequently to images of transfigures states, outsiders, lunatics and eccentrics?
This theme is looking at the images of insanity from Hogarth's last scene of the Rake's Progress,
to Flaxman's sculptural interpretation of Ovid's image of madness, to texts from Ovid and Dante,
to Delacroix's images of Tasso and Ovid, Goya's studies of the insane and Gericault's portrait
of the insane from 1822-24
The Shipwreck
A study in detail of the sketches for Géricault's Raft of the Medusa together with Byron's account
of a shipwreck in canto 2 of Don Juan; who takes the most positive/optimistic view of human nature,
painter or poet? Can you isolate the number of changes to the subject matter of the Medusa which the
artist made? In what order would the thematic changes of the sketches for the great painting be placed?
How can failure and/or disaster be represented as heroic? David's Leonidas, Géricault's Wounded Cuirassier
are both apparently paintings of defeat. How can this idea of defeat contribute to the concept of heroism?
Delacroix's Diary: Superman's Common-Place book?
This theme examines the following questions:
What type of literature is a diary?
How accurate is a diary as historical documentation?
What is strange about Delacroix's Diary?
Delacroix has a reputation for selecting tragic themes and treating them
in a particularly expressive way which in his day was considered new and
daring and hard for audiences to come to terms with although he also
received great critical praise, especially from Baudelaire, and much government support.
Although our seminars focus on some of the works listed here although this does not preclude
students adding their own favourite works. The subjects of each paper are:
Delacroix's tragic themes: The Massacre of Chios, Sardanapalus, Ovid Among the Scythians
Delcroix's Imagery of Women: Women of Algiers, Medea, Greece expiring, the Pietè
Paintings for buildings: Palais Bourbon; Luxembourg Palace and Saint Sulpice.
Other themes to be examined include Ingres and the Sphinx: Paper on the use of Antique myth in the work of Ingres.
The Portrait
Women and Fashion
The Hermetic Interior
Male Portraits: Dandies or Heroes?
Art and Criticism in France 1820-1850
This examines the critical writing of Charles Baudelaire, especially his salons of 1845,
1846, his obituary of Delacroix and his reappraisal of David's Marat
The class also looks briefly at the influence of the critical writings of Gautier and Stendhal
Daumier, caricaturist, painter or republican?
Who was Daumier and how did he fit with the class-ridden, competitive and controversial ambitions
of the other artists of his generation?
Courbet: early portraits and the revolution of 1848, classpapers
We shall be considering some of Courbet's portraits and assessing his reaction to the 1848 revolution in this seminar.
Each student will be asked to present a short analysis of a chosen painting by Courbet and its historical and aesthetic background.
Basic Reading
E Delacroix, Journal, Ed. A Joubin, 3 vols, Paris, Plon, 1931-2 (the fullest and most comprehensive French edition)
There are two translations of edited selections from the diary:
- Walter Pach, Hacker Art Books, 1980
- Lucy Norton, Phaidon 1980
Elizabeth Fraser, Delacroix, art and patrimony in post-revolutionary France, Cambridge University Press,2004
Jack J Spector, Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus, Allen Lane, 1974
T.J.Clark, Image of the People, The Absolute Bourgeois, London,Thames and Hudson 1973
James H Rubin, Courbet, Art and Ideas, Phaidon, 1997
Sarah Symmons, Daumier, 2004
Charles Baudelaire, Salons 1845, 1846, 1859; Essays, The Painter of Modern Life, translated by Jonathan Mayne; French edition Pleiade, Complete Works
Byron, Don Juan, Canto 2
