1. the Swing, About 1766, Jean-Honoré Fragonard 1732-1806 (French)

#4 Slide Set

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

1. The Swing, about 1766, Jean-Honoré Fragonard 1732-1806 (French)

· Rococo period is characterized by an opulence, grace, playfulness, and lightness.

· Rococo motifs (a repeated idea, pattern, image, or theme) focused on the carefree aristocratic life and on lighthearted romance rather than heroic battles or religious figures; they also revolve heavily around nature and exterior settings.

· “Light creates volume in the towering clouds and breaks through in patches on the ground to illuminate the small figures as if they were on a distant stage.” (www.nga.gov)

· This painting was designed to be hung with another painting called, Blindman’s Bluff.

· Both paintings are about youthful love and its playfulness.

· The youth who is pulling on the swing is in the shadows between the lion fountains on the lower left side of the painting.

· It was inappropriate at this time in history for a young lady of such a high social level to show her bare legs and ankles in public.

· Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawing and etchings).

2. The Roast Beef of Old England, W. Hogarth (English)

· He painted satires (to ridicule, often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. The humor of satire tends to be subtle).

· The artist is one the left, sketching. This sketching got him arrested at one time. “Hogarth…has run a great risk since the peace [of Aix-la-Chapelle]; he went to France, and was so imprudent as to be taking a sketch of the drawbridge as Calais. He was seized and carried to the governor, where he was forced to prove his vocation by producing several caricaturesof the French; particularly a scene of the shore, with an immense piece of beef landing for the lion d'argent, the English inn at Calais, and several hungry friars following it. They were much diverted with his drawings, and dismissed him.” (www.library.yale.edu/Walpole/BAC?Gate_of_calais-Z.htm)

· Back home, he immediately executed a painting of the subject in which he unkindly represented his enemies, the Frenchmen, as cringing, emaciated and superstitious people, while an enormous sirloin of beef arrives, destined for an English inn as a symbol of British prosperity and superiority.

· Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became immensely commercialized; something no longer just exhibited in churches and the homes of connoisseurs, but viewed in shop windows, taverns and public buildings and sold in print shops.

· His satirical engravings are often considered an important ancestor of the comic strip.

3. Paul Revere, 1765-70, John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815 (American)

· John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart were among the few leading American Artists of the 18thCentury who stand as giants of the emerging Federal Period in American history.

· Copley is generally considered the finest painter of colonial America.

· Copley was born into humble beginnings in Boston. His father died when he was young and mother remarried when he was about 10 years old. Began his career when he was 15 years old.

· His step-father was an engraver and recognized Copley’s artistic talents and influenced his being an artist.

· By 1765, he had become the leading portrait painter of the most important people in New England.

· Copley had good color sense and the ability to pose his clients in a natural and satisfying way.

· In 1771, he painted 37 portraits in 7 months period.

· He eventually married a woman who came from a wealthy Tory family, went to Europe before the American Revolution where he gained an artistic and financial fortune. He did come back to America for a while, but eventually emigrated to London in 1775.

· He suffered an artistic decline in his latter years.

· This painting is unusual because it shows the person, Paul Revere, not as a “gentleman,” but as the artisan he was. Revere carved picture frames, published prints, and is known as a silversmith.

· Longfellow wrote a poem about The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, which is not altogether historically correct, but works poetically.

· http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/copley/

4. George Washington, Gilbert Stuart, 1755-1828 (American)

· Stuart was commissioned to paint this, but never finished the original one.

· “Stuart recognized that he should use this portrait to fulfill his many orders for replicas and received Washington's permission to keep it. Washington agreed to this and requested a replica for himself, but Stuart never delivered portraits to the Washington family.” (http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Gilbert_stuart/gallery_06.1.asp)

· Has unfinished one of Martha Washington, too.

· Somewhere between 50-70 original paintings of this exact painting were created.

· One hangs in the Diplomat Room in the White House in Washington, DC.

· He was extremely prolific but quite often failed to finish works, especially if the sitters annoyed or bored him.

· He commanded high prices for his work but constantly teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.

· He was charming and cantankerous, tolerant and opinionated, curious and dogmatic, easily offended but resilient, articulate, and verbose.

· He worked in both Britian and Ireland painting portraits as well in America.

· In the twelve years he spent in New York and the American capital cities of Philadelphia and Washington, he attracted a steady stream of sitters, including George Washington (1732–1799), John (1735–1826) and Abigail Adams (1744–1818), and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Stuart was considered the most successful portraitist of the new country.

· www.metmuseum.org/special/Gilbert_stuart/index.asp

5. Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826 (American)

· Monticello is Italian for “little mountain” and is located near Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia of which he was the architect.

· Architectural style is a fine example of Roman neoclassicism, having Doric columns and white portico.

· 1stAmerican home to have a dome.

· It was designed and redesigned and built and rebuilt for more than 40 years. Construction began in 1769 according to Jefferson's first design, which was completed (except for porticoes and decorative interior woodwork) when he left for Europe in 1784. Work on a new design for remodeling and enlarging the house began in 1796 and was complete by 1809.

· House is basically 11,000 square feet with 13 skylights, 8 fireplaces, and 33 rooms in the house, from the cellar to the 3rdfloor.

· Inventions found in this house: Clock with not only the hour, but days of the week; dumbwaiter in the dinning room; a walk-in closet that had portals for lighting; an apparatus that would write when he wrote so that he had an immediate copy of his letters/writings…1stcopying machine?

· Monticello is the only house in America on the United Nations’ prestigious World Heritage List of sites that must be protected at all costs.

· Jefferson began building Monticello when he was twenty-six years old. Three years later, he married Martha Wayles Skelton, with whom he lived happily for ten years until her death. Their marriage produced six children, but only two survived to adulthood.

· You have to have Jefferson DNA in order to be buried in the family cemetery.

· www.monticello.org

6. Execution of the Third of May, 1814, Goya, Spanish

· This painting represents an event that took place, when the citizens of Madrid rose up against the French invaders I 1808 and received barbarous punishment the next day by the French and is considered an excellent example of human suffering. It’s considered the greatest symbol of independence and of the defense of liberty of the Spanish people and has become a universal statement about war and its consequences.

· Goya’s strong emotional content and use of vivid colors (typical Goya) mark the work as being in the Romantic style.

· Goya was one of the greatest Spanish artists who painted for more that 60 years.

· Goya would make political statements and sometimes satires of existing situations which got him into trouble with the ruling powers.

· This violent, moving image depicts a scene from the Spanish war of liberation when many innocent citizens were shot by Napoleon's troops. Note that the troops are well dressed, armed, and seem like faceless robots who are cold and unfeeling.

· This image shows the massacre of Spanish citizens by soldiers, carried out in reprisal for the insurrection.

(The ‘insurrection’ was the efforts made by the Spanish to dispel the French from their country.)

· Guy in front reminds us of Christ and the lantern reflects the light and brings out the faces of the unarmed.

· Guy on the ground echoes stance of Christ-like guy.

· A monk among the condemned civilians reminds us of the Spanish Inquisition. Some believe that someof these men being killed are facing justice; the table of oppression has turned against them! (The Spanish Inquisition is a whole, separate and interesting story!). The monk is giving last rites and shows how ruthless the troops were.

· The Spanish intellectuals of Goya's time were frustrated because various ruling kings of Spain refused to give the Spanish a constitution: (Kings Charles IV (English) and Ferdinand (Spanish).

· And the brutality of Napoleon (French military leader) ended whatever affection and hope the Spanish liberals had for the promises made by the French during its six-year occupation.

· Just so you know, the Spanish committed atrocities against the French as well in response for their actions.

· After the Napoleonic Wars were over, Ferdinand had promised to rule with a written constitution. But when he went back on this promise (he was a real jerk), this sparked a liberal revolt in Spain in the 1820s.

7. The Raft of the Medusa, Gericault (French)

· The Medusa was a French frigate in 1816, with an inexperienced captain, that was one of the most notorious shipwrecksof the Age of Sail.

· The incident led to the death of 140 crew and passengers and led to a scandal in the French government because of the incompetence of the ship's captain and the feeble rescue effort.

· The special difficulty that he faced in the Medusawas to express the human reality of his subject, its content of terror, anguish and tension.

· Gericault painted the raft close to the foreground to make the viewer feel involve in its drama rather than a detached observer.

· He intensified the effect of extreme distance between Raft and rescue. (The rescue is way way way far away on the horizon!)

· Gericault made this painting by studying and combining 4 different groups of people:

a. the dead, dying or despondent men

b. the four men who stand, alert and watchful, on the other side of the mast

c. men who struggle to rise to their feet

d. three men who mount some barrels at the Raft's forward end and signal to the Argus that is most

important

· He studied actual dying bodies and heads in a hospital morgue, to make his painting more realistic and for this painting created an actual life-sized raft and wax figures in order to “get it right”.

· The horror of his finished painting was toned down by depicting the raft at the moment of rescue, with the Arguson the horizon.

· Gericault was independently wealthy, so he could paint the way he wanted to and paint anything that he wanted to create.

8. In the Catskills, Thomas Cole, (British American)

· Thomas Cole is considered to be the founder of the Hudson River School of American paintings.

· He was born in England, the son of a textile manufacturer, and labor unrest and financial difficulties forced the family to relocate to the United States in 1818.

· Cole found work as an engraver's assistant and a drawing instructor.

· He was painting portraits in oil by 1821, but he shifted to landscape.

· Four years later he settled in New York and began producing the Hudson River landscapes for which he became famous.

· Cole's landscapes were created in the studio from sketches drawn during trips up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountain region of New York.

· Cole departed from his sketches to create imagined views related to the English landscape.

· Although a number of leather tanneries were operating in the Catskills, and improved transportation was bringing large numbers of tourists to the region, Cole ignored these realities and focused instead on the virgin wilderness.

· Nostalgia for a pre-industrial state inspired many American industrialists to purchase Cole's landscape paintings (and we’ve been doing it ever since).

· The Native American population in the Catskill region had by 1826 been decimated by disease and warfare, but Cole's inclusion of the figure would have enhanced the symbolic associations of the painting.

· Cole wanted his paintings to show history and landscape, and his ambivalence over the inclusion of such symbols as the Native American reveals his concern for the careful balance of the real and the ideal.

· In the center of the painting stands the small figure of a Native American. Prior to a 1964 cleaning of the painting, this figure was not visible, and there is some evidence that the artist may have decided to paint it out.

9. Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham (American)

· Many of Bingham’s paintings were inspired by his winter stay in Missouri in 1845, even though he had painted commissions from people like King George III of England where Bingham had spent some in Europe before going out west.

· The solemn, motionless scene immortalizes the vanished world of the American frontier, constructed for a northeastern audience.

· Bingham’s style of painting, his “genre”, is very distinctive, with hardly anyone having produced artwork like his. He worked mainly as a historical painter, but did do some religious and portrait work.

· Before producing works of art such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, he created portraits and some religious works.

· His compositions are strikingly spare, geometric compositions (remember, we’re talking “1845 geometric” style).

· He was an advisor to three generations of artists.

10. The Third Class Carriage, Daumier, 1808-1879 (French)

· French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor.

· Daumier is a perfect representative of Realism. In his lifetime he was known chiefly as a political and social satirist, but since his death, recognition of his qualities as a painter has grown.

· Daumier tends to depict urban subjects and scenes. He represented the human condition.

· His subjects did not pose for him.

· He used grids to transform his sketches into paintings. Often you can see his grids because he used thin washes with which to paint.

· He used muted tones and colors and focused on people.

· The Third Class Carriageis an image of working-class travelers.

· Here we see commonplace lower class citizen in the back of the railway compartment. These were the only seats they could afford.

· Daumier's intention is not to engage the viewers’ emotion but to show these people as they ordinarily appeared. Their look on their faces is vague, impersonal, and blank