Patrick Bade
Jean-Ètienne Liotard and Henry Fuseli: Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

Patrick Bade - Jean-Etienne Liotard and Henry Fuseli: Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

- And welcome back into my Paris flat. I’m very glad to be here, in a place where the internet actually works. I’ve been struggling for some years now to find an internet server that works in Islington, but it, it’s very hard. I’m getting a new one, the fourth one, in a week or so. Now, I’m sure you all know the famous Harry Lime quote from “The Third Man” about Rome of the Borgias, the notorious Renaissance popes, producing Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci; and Switzerland, in 400 years of brotherly love, producing the cuckoo clock. Well, it’s complete… It’s funny, of course, but it’s completely wrong. And you will know from Trudy’s lectures, and Phil’s, that the Swiss have actually never been particularly known for brotherly love. But there have been many, many wonderful and great Swiss artists, Ferdinand Hodler, Bocklin, Vallotton, Giacometti, and so on and so on, many, Le Corbusier. And I’m talking about two very fascinating Swiss artists of the 18th century who seem to be opposite poles. One represents all the qualities we associate with the Enlightenment, and the other, with the Romantic movement, with a capital R. So we have Jean-Etienne Liotard on the left-hand side, and Henry Fuseli, Heinrich Fussli, on the right-hand side. Already we can learn a lot, I think, from their self-portraits. I’ll come back to those two self-portraits at the end of this talk. Now, oh, here again, two, these are probably the most famous works of these two artists, is “The Chocolate Girl” in Dresden, by Fuseli, and “The Nightmare”, no, by Liotard, of course, and “The Nightmare” by Fuseli on the right-hand side. You could hardly imagine two more different works from artists of the same nation and in the same century.

So Jean-Etienne Liotard, here you see him in front of a Geneva landscape. He was born in Geneva, as I said, in 1702. Rather interestingly, I mean, he, as I said, he represents the ancien regime, the Enlightenment. He dies very conveniently in the year 1789, the year that the French Revolution breaks out. And this is a strange work, really, isn’t it? Composition, the way the window frame intrudes on the right-hand side. My strong suspicion is that this was a work created with a camera obscura, a primitive form of camera that could project an image into a box. That, to me, it has a very photographic quality to it. Now, he was born into a family of French Huguenot emigres, and he was trained initially as a miniaturist. And there is always, even though he worked sometimes on quite a large scale, that precision is something, the precision of the miniaturist is something that stays with him. So, in the the 1720s, he moves to Paris. He’s obviously very ambitious, and I think he realises that Geneva is rather provincial, and if he really wants to progress, he has to go to Paris. And initially, I think he wanted to be accepted as a history painter. You have this hierarchy of categories of art in the 18th century, and history painting is the top, where you have large paintings with heroic figures, either nude or draped. But I think he came to realise that this was just not his metier, it was not his talent. And the artist in Paris who really attracted him was Chardin. And in fact, I think he’s looking over his shoulder at Chardin, really, throughout his career.

We’ll see in this talk how again and again you can make quite direct comparisons between them. This is Chardin on the left-hand side, and Liotard on the right-hand side, and, you know, there are so many elements here, aren’t there? The child absorbed in an occupation, seen in profile, not turning around to look at the viewer, the table with the open drawer, which is an illusionistic tromp-l'oeil device to make you feel that, you know, the drawer is coming out of the picture’s space into your space. All of these things are things he’s taken from Chardin. And here again, a comparison that I think shows him looking very closely at Chardin.. This is Liotard, “Still Life” by Liotard, top left, and by Chardin, bottom right. And this delightful “Still Life”, which is in the Getty Museum, of an oriental tea set, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, so important for the economies of Europe in the 18th century; of course, precious and expensive products that only the upper classes would have been familiar with. You know, peasants and working class people would never have encountered tea, coffee, or hot chocolate. Here are details of this very delightful “Still Life”. Sugar too would have been a great luxury in the 18th century. And here again, he’s in parallel with Chardin. This is a painting that’s actually in Glasgow, in the Hunterian, of “A Lady Taking Tea”. And I’m sure if Liotard didn’t see this particular one, he saw others like it. And here is another very famous, this is actually in Munich, in the Alte Pinakothek, of “A Lady Being Served Hot Chocolate”. Always makes me think of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”, the scene where Despina serves hot chocolate to her mistresses and steals a teaspoon of hot chocolate, something that, of course, that a serving maid would never normally be allowed to drink. So he, he’s looking around.

Of course, any artist, young artist, forming the style is looking at what’s happened before him. And I think he’s very interested in Dutch painting. Dutch painting was becoming fashionable in both France and England in the 18th century. And here, we see “A Lady Drinking Coffee” on the left-hand side, by Liotard, and on the wall behind her is a painting of a Dutch church interior. Nobody has been able to track down that particular painting. Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. But even it’s so accurately represented in Liotard’s painting that we can make an attribution of that painting to a Dutch artist called e Emanuel de Witte; and there is an Emanuel de Witte on the right-hand side. So Chardin started off as a still life specialist. It was the lowest rung, really, of the hierarchy of the genres in the 18th century. And he moved up to, in inverted commas, “genre painting”, where you have everyday life scenes with people, and they’re intimate, charming, domestic, and very often including children. This is one of his most famous paintings, “La Benedicite”, by Chardin. And this, this wonderful work, it’s a pastel painting by Liotard, has just recently been acquired by The National Gallery. I love this little girl with her hair all in, you know, in the ringlets all tied up. And what I think is a quality, great quality, that both Chardin and Liotard share is a complete absence of cuteness or sentimentality. There’s a kind of directness and truthfulness in their work. Now, as I said, I think he was quite an ambitious and pushy artist, and in 1736, he goes down to Rome. Rome at this time was a great meeting place for the wealthy and the influential. It was the final destination of the Grand Tour. Every northern European, particularly British, aristocrat, it was part of their education, went off on a grand tour of Europe, might take two or three years.

They’d take somebody like me along with them. It was the sort of 18th century equivalent of Martin Randall tours, I suppose the one I’ve just done. And they had a very good time, these aristocrats. They ate and drank and fornicated, and then they went back to their homes in northern Europe with paintings like this one by Panini, souvenir paintings like, they were grand picture postcards, really, to remind them of their happy days in Rome. Bottom right is a painting by Reynolds, who went on the Grand Tour in the 1740s. A rather sceptical painting really, of the English milordi and cognoscenti in a parody of Raphael’s “School of Athens”, but transformed into a kind of Strawberry Hill Gothic. So Reynolds recommended that every artist who wanted to go up in the world and achieve success should go to Rome. My strong feeling about Liotard is that he was actually not the least bit interested in the kind of art that he would have found in Rome. He wasn’t interested in the antique or the ideal, nor was he interested in Raphael and the high Renaissance. What I think he was interested in was patrons, that he thought that he would find a wealthy patron there. And he did. He found this man, William Ponsonby, later Earl of Bessborough, and he made this pastel drawing, which you can see is, it’s a piece of tromp-l'oeil. It’s showing that it’s a portrait of Ponsonby as if it were an antique cameo. And so, after Rome, William Ponsonby decided that he wanted to go to Constantinople. This was much, much bolder, much more ambitious and unusual for a grand tourist in the 18th century. And it was a new thing, really. And so he invites Liotard to accompany him to Constantinople in 1738. This is the period, this is the period of, as I said, of the Enlightenment.

And one of the great things about the Enlightenment was its curiosity about the world, and curiosity about other cultures and about other religions. So it’s in the Enlightenment that people can look at Jews and Muslims and see them as human beings like us, and be interested in them, and not to demonise them. Now, one of the books that comes out of this, or that wasn’t published until a bit later, in the 1760s, that transformed attitudes to the Islamic world were the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. And she was the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottomans. And she was there from 1716 to 1718, and she wrote letters back to England with wonderfully vivid descriptions of life, particularly inside the seraglio, where all the wives of the Emperor were kept, and these really caught the imagination of Western Europe. And so the Turks, of course, in the 16th and 17th century, the Turks were a kind of existential threat to Christendom. In the Mediterranean, they got as far as Malta before being defeated, and then defeated on the sea in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. They besieged Vienna twice, the second time in 1683. If they’d taken Vienna, well, it was really touch and go, they could have done, they would’ve been in the heart of Western Europe. But after that defeat of 1683, the Ottomans were gradually driven back in the late 17th, early 18th century, and they ceased to be a really serious threat, so that Europeans could see them in much less threatening terms. And another great masterpiece of the Enlightenment, of course, is Mozart’s opera, “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail”, “The Abduction from the Seraglio”.

And this dates from 1781, and it’s very remarkable, because the most honourable person in that opera, the person who really turns out to be the mensch, the really good human being, is a Muslim; and this would’ve been, I think, unthinkable a generation or so earlier. So here are two English aristos that Liotard has decked up in Turkish clothes and shown them as though there were Ottoman Turks. There is his patron again on the right hand side, William Ponsonby, and the notorious gambling Fourth Earl of Sandwich, to whom the invention of the sandwich that we all eat from time to time is invented. He was an inveterate and compulsive gambler and didn’t want to be, to lose any time away from the gambling table, so he had his meals served to him in the form of a sandwich. This is a man, a British man who accompanied Ponsonby and Liotard to Ottoman Turkey. And while he was there, Liotard made this drawing of him in Turkish clothing. He then left, and Liotard completed the picture in colour, I think this is actually an oil painting rather than a pastel, in the absence of the sitter, and then sent it on to him in England afterwards. So the portraits that he makes in Constantinople are mostly of English aristocrats. This is an exception. This is a pastel in The National Gallery of London, and this is a Turkish vizier, presumably made by Liotard out of his interest, his curiosity, rather than commissioned from the Turkish vizier. But he’s very interested. You know, this is the period, of course, the great, greatest achievement of the Enlightenment was the “Encyclopedie”, the “Encyclopaedia”, which sought to offer objective, religion-free knowledge and information to the world; of course, hated and banned by the Catholic Church. And so Liotard is an example of this kind of curiosity, so he, and he wants to satisfy the curiosity of his fellow Europeans.

So he makes his wonderful studies showing the life of Turks, how they dressed, and what their musical instruments looked like. This is, oh. Yeah, here again, you can see drawings of local Turkish costumes, very detailed notes on the drawing. And here again, musical, Turkish musical instruments. And this is a rather interesting drawing, showing that this whole process of curiosity and discovery was a two-way process, ‘cause here we have two Turkish musicians making music on Western European instruments, on violins. So he is in Turkey for four years, 1738 to 1742. And then he comes back to Europe, and he becomes very peripatetic. He travels from city to city, from Vienna to Paris, to Amsterdam, to London. And in 1743, he hits Vienna and he attracts the attention of the Empress Marie Therese, and makes her portrait, actually, makes several portraits of her, and she commissions, she liked his work very much and she commissioned portraits of all her children. And here are two daughters of Marie Therese. The one on the right is of the very young Marie Antoinette before she went off to France to marry the future Louis XVI. And there’s a wonderful truthfulness about this. I mean, we have so many portraits of Marie Antoinette made later, but I think, I think this little drawing gives you far greater sense of what she really looked like and what she was actually like than any of the later portraits by Vigee Le Brun and all the others who were really painting flattering or propaganda portraits. Now, flattery was one thing that Liotard didn’t do. Following year, 1744, he comes to London. He was not liked, really, by the English art establishment, but he was very successful with the English aristocracy. And I find this quite surprising. This is the Countess of Guilford on the left-hand side, and the Marchioness of Hartington on the right-hand side. And he certainly pulls no punches. These are not flattering portraits. I’m quite surprised, in a way, that the English aristocracy were willing to accept such unvarnished, unflattering portraits.

He also found favour with the British royal family. At this time it would’ve been George I, and this is a portrait of a royal princess. This is Princess Louisa Anne, and I find this in an incredibly touching portrait. He doesn’t try to prettify her or sentimentalise her. She’s a rather sad little girl with a slightly gormless expression on her face, and we just sense her fragility. And she in fact did have very fragile health, and died of tuberculosis just a few years later. So different. I mean, here is some compare and contrast. This is Liotard. Here are more typical 18th century portraits of children, Fragonard on the left and Greuze on the right, which, to me, are quite revoltingly cutesy and sentimental. And this is a portrait that he made of his, one of his children. And delightful, affectionate, intimate, I love the depiction of the doll as well, but not smothered in sugar and sentimentality. And another thing I like about him very much is that he likes old ladies. He has a real affinity. Mainly 'cause I loved my granny so much, I have a great affinity, really, with older women. I feel comfortable with them and I enjoy their company. Of course, I’m getting so old now, there aren’t that many around who are much older than me. But this is a Madam Tronchin, who you see on the left hand side. And I feel that he, you know, it’s often said that as women get older, they become invisible and that people take no notice of them. But he clearly did take notice of them. I think he, he found these two women interesting as human beings. And he clearly liked them. They’re drawn with just enormous affection.

Now we move on to our other artist, and that is Henry Fuseli, who was born in Zurich. So Liotard would’ve been French-speaking. Henry Fuseli, born in 1741 in Zurich was, would have been German-speaking. In fact, his birth name is Heinrich Fussli. And he was the son of a minor artist, but he was initially a religious and took holy orders, was going to become a minister, a Protestant minister, of course, in Zurich. But he was involved in a scandal and he abandoned that, and he abandoned his idea to be a minister or a priest. And in 1766, he came to England. This is not a self-portrait. This is a portrait of him by another English artist called James Northcote. So he comes to London in 1766 and he meets Sir Joshua Reynolds, who’s not yet, I don’t think… When is it? I think the Royal Academy is founded in 1768 and he becomes the president of it. But he’s still already a very influential and important figure on the English art scene, and he thinks that Fuseli’s drawings are interesting and he encourages him. But he says to him what he said to every artist later on, which is that you, if you want to, you should try and be a history painter, 'cause that’s the thing to be, and also, that you need to go to Rome. And so he does go to Rome in 1770, and he stays there till 1779. And, in a way, it was an just quite an exciting time to arrive in Rome. In the 1760s and into the '70s, you have one of the great pendulum swings in western art, the reaction against the late Baroque and the birth of the new Neoclassical style. And the great prophet of Neoclassicism was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who you see on the left-hand side. And he was telling everybody that if you want to be great you have to go back to the origins of western art, the ancient Greeks;Anton you have to look at and imitate the Greeks. And his sort of pet protege was a German artist called Anton Raphael Mengs.

This is a picture called “Parnassus”, and it was painted in the late 1760s, so it’s certainly one of the things that Fuseli would have gone to see. But Rome was full of Northern European artists at this time. I’m going to be talking about Benjamin West very shortly, I think in my next lecture to you, who was there at this time. And they’re all working in this Neoclassical style. And although Fuseli is usually categorised as a Romantic in terms of his subject matter and his attitude towards it, his actual style is Neoclassical, with idealised nude figures, nude or draped figures. And I think, unlike Liotard, he was really interested in the antique. And there’s this famous drawing, I suppose it’s a self-portrait of the artist crushed by this, the grandeur and the magnitude of ancient art, these two fragments of a giant ancient statue you see on the left-hand side. But he hung around in Rome till the end of the decade. And this rather curious drawing on the right-hand side, of a sort of idealised figure that looks like the Laocoon, but apparently shitting, was his drawing, is his farewell to Italy in 1779. So despite what he gained from Rome, I think it was not perhaps altogether a happy experience. But so, again, this comparison between two artists who’ve both been to Rome, but as I said, I don’t really think that Liotard was ever very interested in the Classical ideal. I mean, he’s not an idealising artist. This is a portrait of a Madame Giradot. She was a very wealthy widow. She commissioned this portrait actually as a gift for her doctor, who had greatly, who had treated her and cured her of her health problems.

And it, I think it’s the only thing I know by Liotard that shows his, any knowledge or interest of Classical art, and it’s a statue, Aesculapius, he’s the ancient Roman god of medicine. And so this is a portrait of Madam Giradot paying homage to the God of medicine, because, as I said, she commissioned it as a gift for her doctor. And it makes a very interesting comparison with this strange, enigmatic drawing of a bare-breasted, scantily clad lady contemplating the famous statue of Laocoon. So if you think that’s a bit weird, there’s another version which is even weirder, where the woman is, I don’t know how well you can see it in this image, but she seems to be raising her skirts to bare her sex, and apparently masturbating while contemplating the hunky, muscular torso of the Laocoon. So Fuseli comes back to London in 1779 and he spends the rest of his career as a long-lived artist well into the 19th century in London, and had very, very considerable success. He was accepted into the Royal Academy, ARA and then RA. Liotard, at one of his later visits to London, attempted this, and was rejected. But this painting is a key work of the Romantic movement. So Romanticism… Enlightenment, Romanticism, of course, are polar opposites, rational and irrational, and this painting is a marvellously vivid and disturbing depiction of the irrational. So Romanticism has got all these kind of revolutions going on in the 18th century. And you could say, in a way, Enlightenment was already a very, it’s the revolution that actually precedes all the other revolutions, 'cause it’s the first, really, break. There’s a rebellion against the power of the Christian churches, particularly the Catholic Church, and a rebellion against religious dogma and superstition, and opening up the human mind to discovery and to knowledge; but an idea, really, that the whole world, all the problems the world, are open to solving through rational discussion and thought. And it’s been continuing, you know, this battle between rational and irrational. It’s gone all the way on ever since, you could say, in western culture. The origins of Romanticism are in Northern Europe.

And I suppose the two great Romantic nations, with a capital R, are Germany and Britain. So the earliest stirrings of Romanticism are probably in Britain, and this is a famous example of it. Remember, in the 18th century, when you’ve got Baroque, late Baroque, Rococo, in much of Europe, you also have a lot of continuing Classicism, particularly in France and England. In England, you’ve got Palladian architecture, which is very Classical. But this is Strawberry Hill, which was begun in 1749, and it was commissioned by a wealthy called Horace Walpole, who was the son of a very corrupt and very wealthy prime minister; and he inherited an enormous amount of money, and that enabled him to collect and live a rather decadent lifestyle. And so he’s breaking with this, This was a radical break with the architectural taste of the time, to build a house that’s, it’s the first great Neo-Gothic house, but it’s not Gothic built along any of the principles of the original Gothic style. Later, in the 19th century, with Pugin and so on, who were really looking at the fundamental principles of Gothic and trying to revise those, they despised this kind of Gothic, which they saw merely as sort of stage scenery, or decorative. And so the term “Strawberry Hill Gothic”, actually, in the 19th century, became a term of abuse. I mean, the fact that, for instance, in the room on the right-hand side, you have these beautiful fan vaults, very elaborate fan vaults, more or less copied from the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster. But these are fake. They’re not made in stone, they’re actually made in plaster and have absolutely no functional or structural function at all.

So Horace Walpole, very influential in ideas and matters of taste. And in, let’s see, what date is it, yes, 1764, he had a terrible nightmare, an irrational nightmare about a huge hand coming down from the skies in the middle of the night. And this inspired the first horror novel, called “The Castle of Otoranto”. It was a bestselling book, came out in the 1760s, and it’s the first Gothic novel. When I say “Gothic”, for, oops, for this house, or for the style of architecture, or this novel, it would be written with k on the end, 'cause that’s how he wrote it, “Gothick” with ck. And it’s a very particular type of 18th century Gothic revival. Following through with the comparison between Fuseli and Liotard, I mean their lives, there’s a full generation, or generation-and-a-half, I suppose, between them, but they’re both very long-lived artists, so their careers overlapped for many decades. And here are two works by them that are exactly, or more or less exactly, contemporary. “The Nightmare” is 1781, and “Still Life with Plums” by Liotard is 1782. So, you know, worlds apart, really, in their aesthetic. This is a characteristic painting by Fussli, Fuseli, on a large scale. It’s called the “Three Women of Hastings”. It’s enigmatic, it’s mysterious. Doesn’t really… It seems to have a narrative, but the narrative is not explained to us. It’s a very mysterious picture. And this is a picture, based on Norse mythology, of Thor, god Thor, and this dates from 1790. And this he submitted as his diploma work. When you’re accepted into the Royal Academy, you had to offer a diploma work to the Royal Academy. And as I said, he was highly regarded, very, very successful in the late 18th, early 19th century. I must say, I don’t like these paintings.

He has no painterly qualities. The paintings don’t have an attractive surface, they don’t have attractive colour, and even the drawing strikes me as very clumsy. But when it comes to the drawings, I mean, he’s a marvellous draughtsman. And the drawings are much more personal, they’re much more revealing of his rather complex inner life. And this is a drawing he made of his wife, Sophia, who seems to have been, she was an artist’s model. Of course, in the 18th century, early 19th century, if you were an artist’s model, you were effectively a prostitute. And they certainly had very, they had a very turbulent relationship. And he’s particularly fascinating, I think, when he depicts women. And he has a very ambivalent attitude to women. He was obviously strongly sexually attracted and fascinated by them, but I think there’s a funny mixture here, isn’t there, of attraction and repulsion. They’re very different from Liotard, with his matter-of-fact, truthful rendition of women. These women are very idealised, because idealising artists, I’ve mentioned this many times before, will tend, will elongate the figures, will put extra inches into the neck. So these, his women are, they’re sexual, these bare breasted women. They’re rather scary, aren’t they? They’re dominatrixes. And a very extraordinary drawing on the left-hand side, with this amazingly elongated neck. And it’s a period of very, very elaborate hairdos that enormously increased the height of women.

He’s got a total fixation on women’s derriere, on their bottom. He’s absolutely bottom-fixated, and there are some very explicitly erotic, even pornographic, drawings, like the one, the pen and ink drawing that you see on the right-hand side. So, yes, very different attitude to women, very different view of women. Liotard on the left-hand side, this is, you know, she’s an attractive, pretty woman, but he doesn’t dwell on the sexual side in the way that Fuseli does. I mean, this, Fuseli’s woman is really giving us the eye, isn’t she, in a seductive, but even as, but also a slightly sinister way. Here are their wives. That’s quite interesting to compare the two, Mrs. Liotard and Mrs. Fuseli. Mrs. Liotard with one of her children. So she’s a pleasant-looking woman. She’s not idealised, she’s not sexualized. She’s shown in a very domestic situation with her daughter. She was Dutch, and he met her when he went to Amsterdam. He was already middle-aged. She was quite a lot younger. He proposed to her. At the time, he was wearing a beard, I’ll talk more about that in a minute, and she found that very unattractive, so she only agreed to marry him if he would shave off his beard. And here is Mrs. Fuseli on the right. Does he love her? Is he affectionate towards her? Mm, not sure. Interestingly… I think, in loving women, men loving women, you can love women in all sorts of different ways, and I think Liotard obviously liked women, and I think he respected them. The 18th century, of course, was a great age of, amongst upper classes, at least, where women were aspiring to education.

The major salons in Paris and in London, and in other places, in Berlin, were often run by women. And fashionable portraits in France and elsewhere of this period, women are very often sh shown holding books or reading books. And this Liotard, you can see this is a woman who’s clearly intelligent and capable of both writing, you’ve got writing instruments, and reading a book. Fuseli was quoted as saying that he didn’t like intelligent women 'cause they were just troublesome, they were too much trouble to bother with. So here is a group of Fuseli women, who are doing needlework and things, but these aren’t the kind of women, I think, that read books. Funny enough, I got into trouble, one can get into trouble so easily for saying things these days. There is a new documentary film out about Klimt, and somebody pointed out to me that in a review of the film, I’m castigated for saying that Klimt liked women and they liked him, and that the review is saying I’m just making an excuse for womanising. Well, that wasn’t my idea at all, but I think it’s perfectly true. You know, there are men who sleep with enormous numbers of women and like women sexually, but don’t actually like them. And my guess is that was the case with Fuseli. But that clearly wasn’t the case with Klimt. I mean, you can say you disapprove of the fact that Klimt slept with his models and had illegitimate children, and slept with his wealthy sitters and was very promiscuous. You can approve or disapprove of that. But I think saying that he actually liked women, as well as being attracted to them, I think there is a distinction to be made there.

So anyway, I hope I’m not stirring up a huge hornet’s net with those remarks. Now, there are many drawings by Fuseli that suggest to me that he was into some pretty kinky sexual fantasies of sadomasochism. This drawing on the left, based on Nordic mythology, he was, again, ahead of his time, being interested in Nordic mythology. And it shows Brunhilda with Gunther. If you know “The Ring”, she’s forcibly married to Gunther. And in this drawing he’s tied up and hanging from the ceiling, and she’s sitting there languorously looking up at him. And what on earth is going on in that drawing on the right-hand side? Something very strange and very disturbing, with a hand coming out of what looks like a well, and a woman who’s sort of teasing or tormenting, we presume it’s the hand of a male. And these are two drawings that were in the recent exhibition of Fuseli drawings at the Courtauld Institute galleries. And again, we wonder what is actually going on in these drawings. And the drawing on the left in the catalogue is entitled, “Two Courtesans Performing an Indistinct Action”. Well, I dread to think exactly what that action may be. And I’m going to finish off by talking about self-portraits, 'cause they both produced very remarkable self-portraits. I started off with these two. So here is Liotard approaching old age, and he, it’s a very honest drawing really, isn’t it? He doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to flatter himself. He shows his missing tooth, he’s grinning at us, and it’s a cool, rational observation of himself, a kind of assessment of himself. Now we look at Fuseli. There are two very famous Fuseli self-portrait drawings.

So he is, oh, this is very disturbing, isn’t it, very intense, and he’s really in your face. You know, he’s right up close, closer than you may want to be with him, and with this extremely intense and troubled expression. So he’s certainly a man who’s troubled with many demons. And this, even more so in this one, and you can see how, once again, he absolutely fills up the page so that you’re really on top of him. He’s staring at himself in a mirror, and it’s a very intense and very disturbing image of the artist as outsider, a troubled, complex human being. Liotard was prolific as a self-portraitist, and you could do a whole wonderful exhibition of Liotard’s self-portraits that would be as interesting, in its way, as an exhibition of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And like Rembrandt, these, collectively, these portraits form a kind of autobiography from… And, of course, he was never a particularly handsome man, and he doesn’t aspire to be, and he never attempts to flatter himself. So the portraits are, you know, from his youth to his old age, are a very objective, in a way, assessment of his development physically and psychologically as a human being. Now, there’s a whole series of self-portraits that he made when he came back from Turkey, where he is depicting himself as a Turk. And these, I think, were done as self-promotion. There’s this curiosity throughout Europe about this exotic empire of the Ottomans, and he went around with a big trunk of Turkish clothes and lent them to his sitters, so that they could pretend to be Turks. So I think the self-portraits, where he exaggerates his rather exotic appearance with this incredible, incredible bushy beard, they’re a kind of self-promotion, self-advertising. Here’s another one. But also another extraordinary thing in this portrait is, I mean, showing himself with an open mouth.

This is something of course that Rembrandt also did. A commissioned portrait, you would never really get a chance to depict someone with it. If you’re paying for a portrait, nobody wants to have themselves painted with a gormless expression and an open mouth. Again, you can make a, I think, a very interesting comparison with Chardin, this wonderful self-portrait of Chardin in old age. He was about 80 when he made this self-portrait, and what a sympathetic character. It’s so lacking in any kind of pretension, and you sense the experience and the wisdom of old age. And I feel that about both these portraits, the Chardin on the left and the Liotard on the right. And this is the very last self-portrait of all, again, with that kind of honest assessment of himself and his appearance. A very touching drawing. By this time, his wife had died. She predeceased him, although she was much younger. And after she died, he indulged himself by growing back his bushy beard. So I think that’s all I’ve got to say. We seem to have a few questions. Let’s see what they are.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh yes, that somebody saw… I haven’t. I can’t bear to see it, actually. I don’t think I can bear to go and see it. It’s awful thing to see yourself on a big screen.

Q: “Was this portrait etching the inspiration for Munch’s "Scream”?

A: Well, I think you could make a link between Fuseli and Munch, the idea of the artist as a sort of doomed outsider. That’s an idea that, you know, is very strong in Klimt’s self-portraits.

Thank you, Cheryl. I’m very, very glad to be back with you.

And Hannah has also seen the Klimt. Let me see. That’s it.

Yeah, interesting point, Shelly, saying that the woman doesn’t have her hair covered. Well, I can’t answer that, but it’s quite interesting to think about. Yes, extraordinary headgear, isn’t there, in the Fuseli depictions of women. I mean, it’s not… That is personal to him, but there are also, 'cause have a look at the headgear of some of the Gainsborough portraits of the 1780s. And there were a lot of caricatures at the time, funny comments on the incredibly elaborate wigs and headgear of women, and caricature drawings of hairdressers climbing up ladders in order to construct these strange pieces of headgear.

Somebody thanking who has enjoyed the Trembleur. That’s very good. I didn’t get to go there on this recent trip.

Q: “Who would’ve been the artistic of Fuseli?” Would Klimt have known him?

A: I’m not sure. But I think, you know, he certainly anticipates the symbolists at the end of the 19th century. And in some ways, Klimt is a symbolist. Yes, I think you could make that connection. Thank you very much, Rita.

Oh, thank you, Hannah. And, Goya, yes. And Goya, there are many very interesting parallels. I mean, one would love to know if it was… Probably not possible that Goya and Fuseli knew each other. Maybe more possible that Goya knew Fuseli, actually, 'cause Goya was interested in English art and English graphic art. He might, Goya might have known prints after Fuseli. But they are, of course, both artists rebelling against the rationality of the Enlightenment. So, very, very interesting. Actually, well, there you’ve got interesting parallels between Goya and both of them, 'cause Goya with his honesty in his portraits, but Goya with his dark fantasy in his graphic work.

Yeah, well, don’t tell me about the internet service. I was tearing my hair out last week.

Yes, I like that, Cherie. I do feel that the last self-portraits, like the last Rembrandt self-portraits, of course, I do think have a very philosophical quality. And it looks like I’m doing, I should take a percentage from the Le Train Bleu, the number of people I recommend to go there.

Thank you, Rhonda. And yes, prostitutes in art, that is a very interesting theme, isn’t it? I have done lectures more specifically about French 19th century depictions of prostitutes.

And very true. I think that there is this idea that, I mean, Degas came up with, or Rops. Rops would be another person you could say comes out of Fuseli, the Belgian symbolist artist. That women are a different species from men and they’re not quite human; they’re actually somewhere between the animal and the human.

Yes, Yonna, it’s about the uncovered hair. But as you say, within the harem, how did he get in there? 'Cause Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she was allowed into the harems, and gave very, very detailed descriptions of the life of the inmates of the harems.

That seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much. And I am very, very happy to be back with you and doing lectures for you. And I should be doing one on Wednesday, but I’ll have to find, I may have to beg Trudy to let me do it from her house, as I won’t have my new internet server until the middle of the month. Thank you all. Bye-Bye.