Raft of Terror! - Or how to fan the flames of scandal with one gigantic painting.

 In the 1820's and 30's if you had visited the studios of artists across Britain and Europe, amongst the various casts and other studio props you might very likely have seen hung on the wall, a reproduction death mask.  It would have been of a very gaunt face, almost skull like and with a straggly beard, the face of a man who has died after a long drawn out and debilitating illness.  Those artists of the time who had the mask on their walls, or near their easel used it almost as an icon, a talisman of good luck and a symbol of their artistic aspirations.  The thin worn face was that of Théodore Géricault.

Born in Rouen in 1791, the son of a lawyer, he was an early Romantic painter inspiring such artists as Delacroix and Chassériau, and was seen as representing great promise, and yet also unfulfilled ambition.  He was trained in the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin, but did a great deal of study on his own account, copying in the Louvre artists such as Rubens, Velázquez, Titian and others.  Like so many other French artists of this period he seems to have rebelled against his masters approach to art, who in turn held a disparaging opinion of him as an artist, and in this he was similar to Girodet who I wrote about recently.  In fact in some respects he might be considered as Girodet with taste.

The actual Raft of the Medusa.  A lithograph based on the carpenters drawings of the raft he built.  Wikipedia Commons.

He didn't have any contact with the painters of the Neo-Classic 'old brigade' such as David and Ingres, but he would have been only too well aware of their work and influence; he turned away from them and had the touch of genius to turn the progress of French painting along a different route.  His first major painting to be exhibited in 1812 was Chasseur on Horseback followed by The Wounded Chasseur, both of which were popular at the salon but which left the artist dissatisfied.  Above all Géricault was indecisive about what projects he wanted to pursue, often setting himself a task and then abandoning it while half finished or only in the preliminary stages.

Maybe he was undecided about being a painter at all, a pretty unpredictable profession at the best of times.  He decided to join the army and for a short time was garrisoned at Versailles.  After a failed love affair he left for Rome, (how he got out of the army I don't know ) to study the great Italian masters.  He started a large canvas of the Barbari Horses, but never finished it, starting a trend of unfinished projects.

Théodore Géricault. (1791 - 1824)  Wikipedia Commons

 

His most famous painting (because finished?) is the canvas, The Raft of the Medusa, which follows in the tradition of French historical painting by being Gigantic.  Painted between 1818 and 1819 It is sixteen feet one inch by twenty-three feet six inches, and the figures are larger than life size.  The paintings subject derives from a scandal that took place about a year previously in which a French ship was wrecked and the captain abandoned ship, leaving the passengers and most of the crew to their fate.

As the ship was slowly sinking the ships carpenter was able to quickly make a raft from the ships timbers and ropes, and everyone on board was able to take to the raft, setting out on rough seas with just a few barrels of water and wine and little food.  There were one hundred and forty seven people at the start of the perilous voyage, only fifteen survived after thirteen days on the raft.  There had been fighting between groups armed with knives and cutlasses, barrels of precious water had been lost to the waves in the tumult of violence, the weak had been killed and thrown overboard, others had been swept away in stormy seas and eventually the canibalism the people had been forced to resort to to stay alive helped project the story to the forefront of public attention.  The failings of incompetent public servants was held to blame, who were percived as ancien régime placeholders, merely in office because they were favoured by the returned monarchy.  And so the scandal flared,

When preparing himself for the work Géricault approached the task like a journalist, finding and interviewing two of the survivors, getting the carpenter who had survived to make a model of the raft from memory and reading any accounts he could find about the tragedy, finally resorting to studying corpses at the local morgue to get the 'look' of death correct.   This went to even creepier lengths, where Géricault, shaven headed (to prevent him leaving the studio on self indulgent nights out) obtained the guillotined head of a criminal and painted studies from it.  These and a number of studies of severed arms and legs are, however unpleasant, really powerful works.   Whether he was successful in capturing the look of death is debatable.  Like Girodet before him, his palette is dominated by greens, greys and muddy browns, and subsequently all the figures look deathly.  Perhaps he painted corpses to get into a state of mind, to conjure the atmosphere that reigned on the raft itself.

Théodore Géricault.  The Raft of the Medusa.  The figure lying face down with arm extended in the centre of the painting was modelled by Eugéne Delacroix.

 He used friends and assistants as models for the figures on the raft, most notably the young Eugéne Delacroix and painted the whole thing in about eight months.  The finished result impressed Delacroix when he first saw it, causing him to run back to his studio to begin work with new inspiration.  However, such works, that criticise establishment faults and seem to have a political content always cause controversy and fan the flames of existing scandal.  Conservatives hated the picture, although it also had many supporters.  It had the effect of keeping a scandal that the government had hoped would fade away with time, alive and before the public gaze.
 

A bronze reproduction of the death mask.  The mask has been altered during the mould making stage to include the open eyes.  Wikipedia Commons.

 Although Géricault made attempts to paint another large canvas they all came to nothing.  The 'Raft' had made money in a travelling show in England, but the artist had gone through bouts of depression and ill health.  Back in Paris he indulged his love of riding fast horses, and one evening as he was waiting for the city gate to be opened as he returned from the country, his horse threw him and he landed on his back.  The art critic Kenneth Clark suggests the injuries he received caused a cancer of the spine, but others have suggested that the illness that killed him was tuberculosis.   That gaunt sunken face of the death mask gives us no clues, for either illness could have been the cause, but the mask went on not just to represent Géricault but the actual ambition of subsequent artists, it was a kind of Romantic manifesto in the shape of a death mask.

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The silent isle.

Although very popular in his time, Arnold Böcklin is now something of an acquired taste.  He became associated with the Germanic side of Symbolism and had a strong influence on many artistic fields, not just that of painting, his influence carrying on after his death into the next century with the work of the early surrealists.

Arnold Böcklin was born in Basel Switzerland in 1827 and received his first teaching in drawing in the same city and from there went on to study landscape painting at The Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where he studied under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer.  In 1850, on the strong advice of the historian Jacob Burckhardt he traveled to Italy and soon after married a young Italian woman named Angela Pascucci.  He appears to have spent the rest of his life in Italy, dying at The Villa Bellagio in San Domenico di Fiesole in 1901.

Nessus and Deianeira by Arnold Böcklin (1827 - 1901) 
Böcklin was often accused of bad taste, this is the type of painting they meant.  Wikipedia Commons.

That influence I mentioned is very real; he was much favoured by the Swedish playwrite August Strindberg, who gave stage directions at the end of his play The Ghost Sonata, that Böcklin's painting The Isle of the Dead be displayed on stage as the lights go down.  This painting is by far his most famous work, and it does have a melancholy charm that seems to have appealed to a lot of people.  I note that no less than nine composers have written music inspired by the work which is impressive as music usually ignores the purely visual.  Its also ironic, as its about silence and meditation.  Böcklin said of the work 'It's a dream picture, it must produce such a stillness that one would be startled by a knock on the door.'

 Böcklin painted five different versions starting in 1880 (my favourite) the last being completed in 1886.  They're all slightly different, but only slightly.   The main difference is colour and the use of light.  I think the first is the most successful with its late afteroon storm light effect, as if a low sun had just come from behind dark cloud and lit the figures in a shaft of light.  The painting depicts a small island with two squarish crags of rock framing a stand of cypress trees which fill the centre of the isle.  It is surrounded by sea, and in the foreground a small boat can be seen in which are a rower and a standing figure draped in white.  In the boat before the standing figure is an object also covered in white which is usually identified as a coffin, but is actually quite indistinct.

The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin.  1880 version.  Wikipedia Commons

But a coffin is probably the best assumption as the crags of rock obviously have large niches cut in them that must be meant to represent tombs.   Böcklin's own name for the paintings was 'A Tranquil Place.'  The series of paintings started out as one unfinished painting on an easel in Böcklin's studio, waiting while other tasks were accomplished, and it was seen by a visitor to the studio, a Madame Marie Berna who had been recently widowed.  She liked it immediately and possibly offered to buy it, but settled for a smaller copy on wood, which she suggested some changes to.  She wanted an 'image to dream by', and proposed that Böcklin paint in the figures in the boat to increase the mysterious effect.  He must have seen the sense of this, for when the copy was finished he added the figures to the first painting.

Self Portrait with Death Playing the Violin by Arnold Böcklin 1872  Wikipedia Commons

 So many artists in different media produce their 'bread and butter' work, and then have one big success that makes all the difference and this was Böcklin's.  It has had a life throughout the twentieth century, being paraphrased by various painters like Dali and De Chirico, and sited in many novels and plays.  It has even had its moment in the cinematic spotlight when the RKO producer Val Lewton used it in a couple of 1940's horror films, 'I Walked with a Zombie', in which it is used as a very ominous wall decoration and then as the central idea of his film 'Isle of the Dead' which starred Boris Karloff.  Even  H. R. Giger did a tribute to the painting, though it is one of his more subdued efforts.

Böcklin's work became grimmer as he moved into old age, whether this might have been the result of the deaths of about five of his children or a general outlook on the world at large I'm not sure, certainly works such as War, painted in 1896 seem more violent, angry and grotesque than the previous gentle Grecian themes.  But, seeing the title of that late painting, maybe he'd read the future.

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Laughter in the rain

 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson was a fine painter, but by a quirk of cosmic fate was destined  (in my opinion - you may disagree) to paint the most unintentionally funny painting ever.  But before we get to that lets say something about the man and his career. Born in 1767 in Montargis, he was orphaned at an early age and adopted by Dr Benoît François Trioson, who raised him and the painter took his surname in 1812.  He served for a short time in the army, then studied architecture, and eventually turned to painting, becoming a pupil of Etienne-Louis Boullée.   On the suggestion of his master, he decided to apply to become one of the pupils of the leading Neo Classicist of the day J. L. David.

David seems to have favoured him, as he helped with the work on some of David's paintings, and on leaving his studies rapidly found the support of patrons.  However, he like a lot of Davids pupils, rebelled against the teachings of their former master.  'I will endeavour to free myself as much as is possible from the edicts of his approach, and to that end I will spare neither pain, nor study, nor model, nor plaster.  If I end up badly, then it is my own fault.'

Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson.  Self Portrait.

  He had, like a lot of French painters who had won the prix de Rome spent time in Italy, and had seen the sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo, and no doubt filled countless sketchpads with drawn notes and copies of these works and others.  He developed a very theatrical style, artificial and overwrought with mannerist figures and smooth wrinkle free skin.   Although his approach is realistic from a painterly point of view, it gives a highly unrealistic result.   He is usually said to be one of the first Romantic painters, choosing the kind of sturm und drang subjects usually associated with that movement.

His work was certainly liked by the people at the salons, in the 1790's, as it had a strange novelty, filled with misty light effects and bizzarre poses.  In a previous blog I have mentioned one of his paintings, Apotheosis of French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, and this work has all his film special effects on show.  Madame de Vendeul mentioned this painting, saying of its misty light  ...'pervading the whole is a magic, a soapy mousse which may be as skilled as it is clever, but which I cannot say is attractive.'

 He painted a large number of portraits and a number of history paintings, such as The Death of Atala, and mythological scenes such as The Sleep of Endymion, but perhaps his best work is The Revolt at Cairo.  This enormous painting (eleven foot, eight and a quarter inches, by sixteen foot, four and three quarter inches) in which presumably the figures are life size shows a desperate combat between Egyptian Mamelukes and French infantry and dragoons.  The design is one of a mass of many figures who seem to cascade upwards from left to right as the Mamelukes are driven back up a flight of stone stairs.  The writer Stendhal described the painting thus...'Imagine a nest of vipers discovered when an antique vase is picked up.  Only with difficulty is it possible to follow the same body.  To look at it for any length of time is to become lost in it.'

Anne- Louis Girodet-Trioson.  The Revolt at Cairo 1810

While the handling of some of the faces and the odd way the running of the charging dragoon is depicted certainly look mannered and unrealistic, on the whole the effect is very compelling, the amber light and detail drawing you in like a puzzle.  You see more and more detail, and more excellence in the way clothing and equipment is handled; it tells a story for each figure.

But before we get carried away, there is the matter of Scene of a Deluge.  I said at the beginning that I thought Girodet had painted the unintentionally funniest picture ever, and I site Scene of a Deluge as being that picture.  This is not just any deluge, its not one of those days where you're caught in the rain and the raindrops come down so fast they seem to bounce on the pavement.  No, this is a Biblical deluge which seems to have taken place very suddenly.  So suddenly, in fact, its as if you were walking down the street, and the next moment found yourself floating in the middle of the Atlantic.  It is again an enormous canvas (this time it's fourteen feet three and a quarter inches by eleven feet nine and three quarter inches) just so the enormity of this flood can be properly shown.

  It depicts a large naked and muscular young man clinging for dear life onto a jutting crag of sharp edged rock, while around his neck a decrepit old man hangs on with a strangulating neck lock, as his huge cloak billows in the wind.  He is also naked, but although he forgot to put on his heavy weather gear, he did remember to grab a small bag of valuables which he grips in his skeletal fist.  Beneath the rock, just lapping at their feet the stormy waves of the flood can be seen in which the head and shoulders of a drowned man are visible.  As if these gentlemen don't have enough troubles, the young man is holding on to a young woman with his right hand - her feet have just gained a precarious purchase on the rock.   He has a grip on her right arm, but unfortunately for her this isn't all that helpful as she has a couple of pesky kids, and one of them is hanging from her hair.  Yes, while she holds the one crying babe in her left arm, the other older boy is hanging on her hair over the water, pulling her head right back at a neck snapping angle.

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson. Scene of a Deluge. 1806

Could things get any worse?  Well yes actually they can, for I didn't mention that the young man is supporting them all by hanging onto a tree branch - a tree branch that is slowly cracking and splintering.  Phew - no wonder he has that particular expression on his face - as if he doesn't know which way to look.  Its true, when things go wrong, they really go wrong.  And around them the sky is filled with lightning bolts and rain.

The critics weren't kind.  '...Slick glassy paint, dull colours, and leaden shadows...' said
François Benoît in 1897, and of course Girodet's old tutor David had a grumble about it too, the essence of which can be pretty well summed up as - 'these young painters today; I don't know what the worlds coming to, where will it all end?

But it does bring us back to that statement of Girodet's quoted at the top of the page, 'if I end up badly, then it is my own fault'  At least he was determined to go his own way, and do what he wanted to do, and I suppose we can't fault him on that

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Art Deco's King and Queen.

Art Deco was essentially an arts and crafts movement, and didn't attract a lot of painters into its fold, or they aligned themselves with other modernist movements which we give different names to, such as cubism, fauvism and so on.  Even then in the twenties and thirties the term 'Art Deco' didn't exist, it having been coined in the late 1960's by art critic Bevis Hillier.  When it was new they would probably have termed it the 'modern style or something similar.

There were painters of course who stood out at the time as having the not completely ignoble ambition of making work that entertained and was beautiful to look at.  The two painter decorators of the twenties and thirties who are usually named as the epitome of the Deco style are Tamara de Lempika (1898 - 1980) and Jean Dupas (1882 - 1964).  Their work has been re-evaluated since the 1970's and has risen in popularity ever since.

Tamara de Lempicka.  Portrait of the Marquis d Afflito.  1925

It's notable that here we know more of the woman than the man.  Lempika's career and lifestyle has been celebrated since her death, and her work quickly became known through posters, prints and the many books that have been published on her life.  I first remember seeing her work in the Observer magazine around 1977 with a colour spread of several of her most famous works, so the revival started early.  She was a portrait painter so her work had to look as stylish as possible, and she made sure her own image was well known amongst the well heeled patrons who commissioned her.  Being good looking and always fashionably dressed, she was as well aware of image as any movie star.

Born Tamara Gorska she came from a wealthy Polish family and married a Russian lawyer named Tadeusz Lempitzski.  Together they were forced to escape Russia at the revolution and found themselves, living on little money in Paris.  Although expecting her first child, she split from Lempitzski, and decided to support herself and her daughter by making use of one of those skills that the women of the upper middle class were always taught - painting.  She took lessons from André Lhote for a short time, whose new style of cubism - so called 'synthetic cubism' she developed for her own ends.  But she is really the last of the 'Neo classicists', creating figures that are hard edged, marble smooth, and often muted in colour.  Not for nothing did one critic (rather unkindly) term her 'a perverse Ingres of the machine age'.

Tamara de Lempicka.  A second portrait of the Marquis d Afflito, looking strangely like movie actor Peter Lorre!

It must have been difficult for Tamara to come to terms, as all successful artists must I suppose, with the fading of their star; Tamara remarried to an aristocrat, the Baron Kuffner.  With the looming of the Second World War she emigrated to the US where she spent the rest of her life, living long enough to see the new emergence of interest in her work.

For a long time I knew only the bare bones of the career of Jean Dupas, that of a painter and designer, in fact even now I have never seen a photograph of him either in a book or on a website.  However thanks to the Stephen Ongpin Auction rooms website, I now know a little more.  They state (in their small biography of Dupas) that Dupas was the son of a merchant marine captain and first worked as a merchant seaman, but due to illness had to give up this career, and decided to go into painting and design.  In this he is similar to Lempicka, who due to difficulties with the life she had mapped out for herself decided to make use of her latent skills as an artist.

An old photograph of the tea rooms on board the SS Ille de France.  I had seen this photo some time ago, but have never seen a modern image of this painting.  I wonder if it still exists, or is it hidden away in a private collection.

Dupas was born in Bordeaux, and once he had decided on art he went to art school first in Bordeaux and then Paris.  He won the painters Prix de Rome in 1910 at the age of twenty eight, with the proposed subject 'Eros, conquered by the god Pan,' and then studied at the Académie de France in Rome.  His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, but he was already thriving in the new style by the twenties.  His first triumph would be the large-scale oil painting Les Perruches.  (The Parrots 1925)

This appeared as a set piece in the Grande Salon of the 'Hôtel  d'un collectionneur' at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925, the very exposition from which Art Deco derives its name.  From then he followed the usual path of designers, working on advertisements, posters, magazine art and private commissions.  He worked for Harpers Bazaar, and Vogue magazine, and on a series of posters for London Transport, depicting various leisure activities in London.

Jean Dupas.  Detail of the glass frieze decoration onboard the ocean liner SS Normandie. 

He went on to grander schemes when he was commissioned to decorate the first of a series of large ocean liners built by France in the late twenties and early thirties.  The first was the Ile-de-France in 1926, a large and ultra modern cruise liner, the interior and exterior of which looked startlingly new.  Soon after he worked on the SS Liberté, another modernist luxury liner, but the most famous work he achieved in liner decor was that for the liner SS Normandie.

For this ship he designed his most famous work, a huge glass frieze entitled 'The History of Sail'  which can now be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Lempicka and Dupas shared many traits of style and approach, and are classicists at heart.  If she was the Ingres of the machine age, then surely he was its David.


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Rackham and Dulac

The years between 1890 and 1920 could be said to be the golden age of British illustration.  The number of periodicals throughout the 1890s and into the Edwardian era was large and always needed a good supply of fresh talent to do the pen and ink line illustrations, which accompanied their stories and articles.  Two such artists were Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Arthur Rackham was born in Lewisham in 1867 and worked for a time as a clerk in the Westminster Fire Office.  He took night classes at Lambeth School of Art and began to get work illustrating for magazines such as The Windsor Magazine, usually supplying an end design for an article or story, often a silhouette or small roundel.  His first book illustration was for 'To the Other Side' by Thomas Rhodes, which appeared in 1893, and he then followed this with illustrations for 'The Dolly Dialogues' by Anthony Hope, in 1894.

Arthur Rackham

But his first big success came in 1905 when he was commissioned to illustrate Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle'.  He produced no less than fifty-one colour plates for this, which must have been a struggle, but it put him at the forefront of the luxury-book gift market.  He followed it equally successfully with 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,' By J. M. Barrie.  He produced beautiful colour work for some wonderful books, some of his best being for Wagner's Ring cycle, that really capture the dark northern world of gods and dwarves, dragons and heroes.  
 

'Loge, Loge, appear!'  Arthur Rackham.  One of the best Rackham images from his work on Wagner's 'Ring 'cycle, depicting the God Odin calling on the God Loki.  At the time that Wagner and Rackham were working, it was thought that Loki was a fire God (which he wasn't) and that's why he's shown in flames.

 He really did  for the 'Ring of the Nibelung,' what Alan Lee later did for the 'Lord of the Rings.'  When Rackham died in 1939 he had produced a wide range of superbly illustrated storybooks, always indulging his love of twisting pen lines and the grotesque; his world is one of dark gnarled forests, wild mountains and is rugged and bracing.  It is overlaid with a certain sweetness but is never far from the threatening and mysterious.  

Edmund Dulac

  But for most of his career Rackham had a rival, in the form of Edmund Dulac, another brilliant exponent of  luxury book illustrations who was born in Toulouse, France in 1882.  At first he set out to become a lawyer, but soon left his studies and went to study art instead at the École des Beaux Arts, and then briefly at the Académie Julián.  He did work illustrating magazines in Paris, but came to London in 1905, and was soon given a commission to illustrate 'Jane Eyre,' which was followed by nine other Brontë novels.  In Britain, like Rackham, he regularly contributed to popular periodicals and magazines, and went on to illustrate 'The Arabian Nights,' and then Shakespeare's 'The Tempest.'  Dulac became naturalised in 1912.

Dulac's work is softer and sweeter than Rackhams; the Englishman tended to use pen and ink lines to define his images, colouring them with watercolour, so his work has a harsher look - it's spiky, with lines of varying thickness to delineate masses and forms.  Dulac was essentially a painter, and rarely picked up a pen, his work is almost completely watercolour and Gouache.  Both artists understood the new printing techniques that were being used in the early twentieth century, and knew exactly how their work would look, varying it slightly to accommodate types of paper.

Scene from the Tempest, by William Shakespear.  Edmund Dulac.  I love the use of space in this design, that great cloud of mist billowing down, so that the figures stand out really well, and look at the movement of both the creature and the men!

 And of course these two artists weren't really rivals, as the kind of work they did suited particular types of subject.  Rackham was great for northern fairly tales, and tales of knightly quests and Nordic gods, while Dulac fitted 'The Arabian Nights' and Chinese and Persian subjects beautifully, although there was some overlap in the subjects they tackled.

Dulac lived further into the twentieth century than Rackham, being a little younger but does seem to have experimented more with the look of his work than Rackham who's work, however good was fairly static in it's approach.  There is a noticable change in Dulac's work, as he moved through the thirties, where something of Art Deco painting starts to show up in the way he paints the human figure, and the decorative way he did landscapes.  His last work was for the 1951 Great Exhibition and stamp designs commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second.  He died in 1953.

Together they represent the short time when these kind of lavish colour works would have been a fixture of children's Christmas gifts, filled with pictures that were realistic, exacting, and intelligent.  What a shame they will probably never appear again.  

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Shades of the northern Homer.

We've all heard of Homer and his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, which tell the story of the outbreak and the aftermath of the Trojan Wars.  They are not only epic poems but have had an epic influence on world literature, for they've been known and studied for centuries, as they are thousands of years old.  The Romans liked to associate themselves with the events of the poem and claim decent from the hero's whose deeds it records, and then every European kingdom and society after them wanted to at least claim sympathy with Homer.

So that was the poetry epic of the south, but what about the north?  All those cold chilly countries that were gaining ascendancy wanted to have a really important epic work of literary greatness to help buttress their ideas about themselves.  Step forward James Macpherson, (1736 - 1796) a Scottish poet and translator who starting in 1760 began to publish fragments of Gaelic manuscripts he claimed to have found in his researches around the Western Isles.  Then, in 1761 he claimed to have discovered a complete epic poem on the subject of Fingal by the ancient poet Ossian, thought to be the son of the legendary Irish king Finn Mac Cumhail.

James Macpherson by George Romney.  Wikipedia Commons

This was published to huge success throughout Britain, and celebrated as one of the literary finds of the century.  It also had an influence on other writers of the period, although Dr Samuel Johnson was very scathing about it.  Artists were also influenced to paint pictures based on the poem, most famously JMW Turner, but as the eighteenth century drew to a close they seemed less enthusiastic.  Meanwhile its popularity started to spread into Europe, for the German Romantic poet Goethe translated part of the epic to include in the climactic scene of his poem 'The sorrows of young Werther'.

As the nineteenth century got under way, more and more European artists began to do Ossian inspired work, especially the French as the poem was an especial favourite of the emperor Napoleon.  The young radical classicist painter Maurice Quay (an odd figure if ever there was one) is quoted as saying,

'Homer - Ossian, the sun, the moon.  That is the question.  In truth I prefer the moon, as it is more primitive.'

Quay was a member of a small number of artists in the studio of J. L. David who had decided to live as ancient Greeks, called themselves the 'Barbus' or bearded ones and wandered Paris dressed in Greek robes and sandals.  They believed that to live a 'primitive' life away from luxury and wealth was the only way for a decent person to exist.  Apart from giving Paris something to laugh at, they had little impact as almost nothing of their work survives.  But Quay admired Homer, the Bible and Ossian and felt almost no other literature was worth a second look.

Fingel defeats the spirit of Loda by Asmus Jacob Carsters. (1754 - 1798)

The list of European artists who painted Ossian inspired work reads like the neoclassic painters hall of fame induction list, starting with mister big himself,  J.A.D. Ingres, then Ary Scheffer, Paul Duqueylar, François Gérard, Nicolai Abildgaard, Johan Peter Krafft, and Asmus Jacob Carsters.  To name just a few.

 Anne Louis Girodet, another pupil of David also wanted to suck up to Napoleon by painting him a big Ossian inspired work, and this time he had the idea of combining the fallen French heroes of the Napoleonic wars with Ossian.  He painted a six foot by six foot painting of these fallen soldiers being welcomed into a kind of Ossianaic Valhalla by Odin and Ossian himself, all realised with a bizarre light glow flooding over everything.  It has the sleep inducing title of - Apotheosis of French Heroes who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation.
 

Anne Louis Girodet (1767 - 1824) Apotheosis of French Heroes who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation. 1802.

As might be expected it didn't please everybody, but it was a brave and honest attempt to do something different.  Its difficult to take in everything in a picture as busy as this so you really need to see a high resolution image to appreciate what's going on, but it has real three dimensional depth and is even cinematic in its realisation of a supernatural event.  When he saw it David said,

'Ah, that picture!  Girodet, is he mad?  .  .  . either he is crazy or I no longer understand my own trade.  Those are figures of Glass that he's produced.  What a shame; with his beautiful skills he will never achieve anything but follies.' 

Well, you can't please the people all of the time, and that also applied to James Macpherson when they finally realised what Dr Johnson had been saying decades before was right.  Ossian was a fake, concocted from scraps and fragments of written and spoken verse that Macpherson had collected and mixed with a goodish amount that he'd penned himself.  The British had realised this towards the end of the eighteenth century and this was responsible for the cooling off of their enthusiasm for the poem, but in Europe the craze was only just starting in the latter years of the century - and well, Napoleon wasn't in a mood to take advice from the British.
 

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. (1780 - 1867)  The Dream of Ossian 1813

 
So the craze had to burn itself out like any other fever, and was still throwing up paintings and other works as late as the eighteen twenties.  Macpherson's work is deemed to be a pretty good pastiche and his skills as a poet of his time were not unworthy.  It's a little unclear what his motives were, but I suppose he just thought there'd be more interest in his poems if they were deemed to be a lost work of ancient origin, however the fraud would never have taken the imagination of the artists and thinkers of the time if they'd had no merit whatsoever.  So he had an idea, and for a time something big grew from it.  It often happens that away.

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As cheap as a pot of ink.

 Ètienne de Silhouette was a French finance minister in the middle of the eighteenth century who because of pressures caused by the seven years war found himself (and the country) a bit out of pocket.  So in 1759 he brought about changes(as finance ministers so often do) that forced strict economic measures on the people, especially the rich.  This meant that everybody had to make cutbacks and economise in their daily lives and so the ministers name was applied to anything that was deemed cheap.  Like a small cut out portrait.

I suppose this dose of harsh living may have helped to lead the French to their revolution later in the century, and it did introduce a new word to the English language - Silhouette.  And the cheap cut out or painted portraits which came to bare the finance minister's name were much quicker and easier to have made than the traditional miniature portrait.   

Actually the name Silhouette wasn't generally applied to English cutout miniatures until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and there was at least a century long tradition of making them before the name was applied.  They were the ideal thing for small business, could be cut out of black card with a pair of scissors at a fete or fairground or as a party piece at a drawing room gathering.  Or a pot of ink and a brush together with some fancy paper and some skill was all that was needed.  Of course there's always a sliding scale of such things, and more expensive versions were produced on glass, gesso and stone.

Aubrey Beardsley:  self portrait in sillhouette.

The ancient Greeks were using black figure images on their pots and amphrora thousands of years ago and Pliny the Elder states that he believed that painting itself originated when ancient artists painted around a shadow cast on to a flat surface.  We usually think, however, of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century as the heyday of this art form, and a number of practitioners made quite a good living once it became fashionable, even having prime ministers and presidents as their clients.  Photography pretty much put an end to the widespread desire for such images, after all why pay for a mere black outline when you can have a realistic face or image of someone you know sitting there as if they were real, for little more in outlay?

Cinderella by Arthur Rackham.  Wikipedia Commons.

But in the world of illustration silhouette's continued to be used by some very famous artists to help the process of telling a story and to decorate chapter headings.  Aubrey Beardsley, a natural black and white artist occasionally used silhouettes early in his career, and Arthur Rackham used them as extra decoration to the luxury illustrated works he published in the early twentieth century. 

One of the most magical uses of silhouette I have seen however was with the publication of 'The kingdom Under the Sea' by Joan Aiken with illustrations by Jan Pieńkowski in 1971.  My young brother had only just been born and this was one of his first books.  I took a keen interest in it as the approach was novel, it being a method I'd not seen used in illustration before.  The pictures used marbling of paper, where liquid oil paints are floated on water in a tray, and paper is then placed onto the surface for long enough for the swirls of colour to be transferred onto the paper.  I assume the paper was then stretched as quickly as possible and allowed to dry before the actual work was done.  He then painted his silhouette's on to the paper.  This is merely my interpretation of his approach, because I remember trying this at about the age of 15, and finding it hellishly difficult.

By Jan Pieńkowski from 'The Kingdom under the Sea' by Joan Aiken.  This story involves the hut of the Russian witch the Baba Yaga.  Click on the picture to go to Jan's website.

I've probably got the whole thing wrong, as marbled paper has been used as end papers for expensive books for a hundred years and more, printed obviously but probably from a source that was a lot easier to produce than my efforts.  Maybe Pieńkowski's silhouettes were cutouts that were glued onto the paper, I don't know but the effect was exceptional.  As I write this in the early hours of Friday the 4th, by complete coincidence I see on Google that it would have been Joan Aiken's 91st birthday today, and so thanks Joan,  - and you too Jan for a great book.

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