Patrick Bade
Painting at the Paris Salon

Patrick Bade | Painting at the Paris Salon | 07.25.21

- [Speaker] All right, Patrick, whenever you’re ready, you can take us away.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thanks a lot, thanks a lot. Well, I’m going to be showing you some absolutely jaw dropping images this afternoon. I can’t claim that a great many of them could be described as great art. Some of you may think that some of what I’m going to show you is very bad art, or I’ll be interested to know how people react to it at the end. I do hope that there will be pictures that you will like and enjoy. But the main reason to look at these pictures is actually not aesthetic. It’s what they tell us about life in the 19th century, attitudes in the 19th century. And the two artists we got on the screen, William Bouguereau, a painting of a porn and nymphs on the left hand side, and on the right hand side, a painting by Henri Gervex. It may be that you’ve not heard of either of these artists, but, and don’t feel bad if you haven’t, but they were incredibly famous.

They were superstars. They earned enormous sums of money. They were far, far more celebrated than Manet, Degas, Monet not to mention Gauguin, Van Gogh and all those sorts of people and their paintings were often bought directly by the French state. They won medals. They were exhibited internationally, and they were on the walls of museums around the world. Lot of American museums bought these pictures at the time. And then of course, you have the triumph of modernism, triumph of impressionism. And after the first World War, these pictures disappeared off the walls of museums. They went down into the sellars, or they went up into people’s attics. And by the middle of the 20th century, they were complete. They were worthless. You couldn’t have given away pictures like these.

Things change in the late 1960s, early 70s, there was a renewed interest that was partly commercial. It was driven by, first of all, Sotheby’s really led the way and then Christus followed. And if you want to be really cynical, you could say, well, of course, Christus and Sotheby’s had run out of great impressionists to sell. And what can we voiced on our clients? And there’s tonnes of this stuff, but it was also driven by what was called the new art history. A new art history. These were art historians, I suppose it was the generation, my generation really, or just immediately before, who are not really interested in works of art for primarily for their beauty, but as I said for what they tell us about society. So they’re really looking at these pictures as social historical documents.

Now, the picture on the screen is by Paul Delaroche. In a way, he’s the prototype of all the artists I’m talking about today. And he made a big impact at the Paris Salon in the 1830s. This was one of his first huge successes at the Salon 1834. And it’s the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Now, that was sold a couple of times in 19th century for very large sums of money then it was bequeath to the National Gallery, and then it suffered the same fate as all these other pictures. You know, by 1914, nobody was interested in it anymore. So it was actually rolled up and stored in the base of the Tate Gallery. And in 1926, there was a disastrous flood, and there were big panics about whether, you know, they were trying to save all the paintings of Turner and so on and nobody even bothered to check on this picture, which apparently had been inundated with water, whether it survived or not. It just continued rolled up.

Then we get to this situation, early 70s, where these pictures are being exhibited again, and they’re being sold quite large sums of money. And the Tate gallery thought, whoops well, we better check and see what happened to this picture. They weren’t really expecting it to have survived, but in fact it was barely damaged and in very salvageable condition. And so they cleaned it. And I remember it very well cause, you know, I was a young historian in London at the time, and a 19th century specialist. It was put on view in the National Gallery in 1975, and there was a little pamphlet that went with it, written by Cecil Gould, who is a deputy head of the National Gallery in which he said, well, you know, he was sort of embarrassed.

He said, I mean, he was a great Renaissance specialist. So he said, well, we know that this really isn’t art, but you know, we think it’s interesting and we hope the public will not be too outraged by it. Well to the astonishment of the National Gallery, this instantly became one of the most loved paintings in the museum. I believe it sells more postcards than any other picture in the museum except Van Gogh sunflowers. And I know from experience of taking dozens, if not hundreds of tours around the National Gallery, you cannot walk a group past this picture. Everybody is drawn to it. Everybody is fascinated by it.

And there are two things that fascinated people. One is the storytelling. And Delaroche is certainly a brilliant storyteller. He’s like a novelist, and you stand in front of this picture you read the details and you become very involved in the drama. Of course, English people know what happened, but most non-Brits, you know, people would say to me, oh, did was she rescued? You know, did they really cut her head off? You know, what happened? I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to let you find out for yourself what happened to Lady Jane Graham. But we’ve got all these details like, you know, the way the man is very solicitous guiding her towards the block where her head will be chopped off, and he’s removing her hair.

Because if you have your head chopped off, you don’t want anything to get in the way. For the same reason the women on the left hand side, who are having these wonderful theatrical hysterics are holding her jewels, because you don’t want to deflect the axe if possible you want your head to come off in one go, not in several go’s. And of course, there is a very perverse, slightly kinky, I would say sexual element to this picture as well. You’ve got this very beautiful young girl with a pale, exquisite skin and her lovely white dress that’s soon going to be covered in blood. And you’ve got the straw in the foreground that’s there to soak up the blood, and you’ve got this rather sexy, hunky executioner on the right hand side in his blood red tights with his axe, and the light lovingly depicted along the edge of the acts.

Now, this kind of slight sexual perversity undertone, this is also a big theme of the paintings exhibited at the Salon in the 19th century that I’m going to be talking about today. Now, the second thing, I mean, having asked me, what happened ? The next thing people always said standing in front of this picture is that dress. The dress is absolutely amazing. You feel that you could touch it, that white silk dress. The people who were really impressed by the skill of the artist. And so this brings me to one of my main points that is how skilled all these artists are that I’m talking about today.

But it was a kind of skill that was, you could say, mechanically acquired. And by the end of the 19th century, it had become devalued. These are drawings and you can find them all over Paris. I saw lots yesterday at the flea market. These 19th century academic drawings that people did, the every artist did when they were training. This is a room in my flat. It’s the room next to this one. And as you can see, that room in effect used these 19th century academic drawings as wallpaper. And they probably cost me less than a or considerably less than an expensive wallpaper would have cost.

Now, sometimes people say to me, oh, I wish I could draw. I can’t draw. I just can’t draw. And I always say to them, well, if you had a time machine, if you had 10 years to spare, you could go back to Paris in the 19th century and you could learn how to draw. And if you really applied yourself, you went through the motions of this training, after those 10 years, you would be able to draw very, very competently. So Paris was the art centre of the world. Everybody came here to train. Americans came, Germans came, Brits, Italians, everybody was attracted to Paris. And what you did was you tried to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but you also had to enrol in the studio of a well-known academic artist. And we’ve got Léon Gérôme here, and anybody of who remembers Paris, say 30, 40 years ago, will remember that all over Paris.

There were these, there was a little supermarkets corner stores, really like Tescos in England. I’m sure that they had lots of equivalents in America called Felix Potter, where you could get anything you needed for a daily life. And Felix Potter failed to adapt to the modern world and went bankrupt, I suppose, in the late 20th century. But one of the things they did in the 19th, early 20th century, to keep their customers was to produce these little cards of celebrities, you know, famous actors, actresses, politicians, royalty, and famous artists like Leon Gerome. Here we, on the right hand side, you see Gerome. What we do, you enrol in his studio life models or plaster cast provided you to draw from the master comes once a week with his top hat. And I can just see on his collar, his little rosette of the Legion d'honneur, and he would comment on the work of the students and maybe add some improvements.

Here again, we’ve got Bouguereau on the right hand side, Joe on the game, on the left hand side. These were the two of the top masters. This is the studio of Cormon, Fernand Cormon. And amongst his students were Van Gogh, Emile Bernard and Toulouse-Lautrec. You can just, you can see Toulouse-Lautrec in the foreground, bottom left. So you start off, there are these engravings, and again, I really like them. I think they’re very decorative. You can find them at the flea market for five or 10 euros. And these engravings, your first exercises would be laboriously line by line to copy these engravings then you move on and you draw from something three-dimensional, and that’s a plaster cast.

And you start off simply, you might draw a plaster cast of a hand or a foot, or a torso or a head, and then you move on to more elaborate figures. This is a drawing by Seurat of a plaster cast of a classical statue that was in the École des Beaux. This is the central hall of the École des Beaux as it was until 1968. But during the student riots, they went berserk and they rather tragically, they smashed all of these plaster cast as a symbol of everything they wanted to do away with. Now, once you draw from a plaster cast because you want to be completely imbued with a classical ideal so that when you are confronted with a real body, a man with no clothes on, I mean, this is actually scenes from this photograph, be rather beautiful young man who actually doesn’t look unlike a classical statue, but you are so brainwashed with his classical ideal that if he has any defections you correct them.

Here again, you can find these drawings. Anybody who wants to come to Paris and wants to buy drawings like these, I can tell you where to go. And they won’t cost you a lot of money, unless they happen to be signed by a famous artist. But, you know, most of them are unsigned moreover the same. Here these are by famous artists. These are a very beautiful drawings. I love this one of the aged Indian men. What a tender! Beautiful, lovely drawing that is. These are by George Seurat.

Every artist went through this. All the famous artists that we now love and admire went through some kind of training like this. You wouldn’t really know who did these drawings, but I’m going to tell you, it’s Edvard Munch on the left hand side, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec on the right hand side. These are drawings that I think would’ve won no prizes. That’s Van Gogh on the left-hand side and Suzanne on the right. Neither artist really ever fully acquired the kind of academic skill that I’m talking about in this lecture. You had would’ve had courses, lectures on anatomy. You would’ve had to draw from dissected bodies to understand how the body is put together.

And from écorchés, a écorché is, it must been revolting. I think especially, you know, pre refrigeration to draw from a body that’s had its layer of skin removed so that you can understand the muscle structure. You were also expected to be able to not just draw from reality, but to invent. And there were various exams and competitions every year. And this is an exam for where the artists were given a subject, you know, Mars and Venus or in some or a subject from classical history. And they all have, each artist has his little cubicle and he has to work up a sketch from imagination.

Now, the Salon. Salon just means, well, what it means in English really, a large room. And the Salon is called this because at the foot, the salon was, it’s a summer exhibition, and it was organised in the late 17th century by Louis XIV Minister of Culture, Colbert. And it took place in the Salon Decono, the Salon of Apollo in the Louvre. So this is what the Salon looked like in the 17th century. It’s a big room, but it’s just one room. Here, we move into the 18th century. It’s gradually growing inside. It’s still one room, a really enormous room, and quite a lot of paintings in that room frame to frame floor to ceiling.

But it’s really in the, it’s after the French Revolution that the Paris salon really takes off both in size and importance. Before the French Revolution, of course, your patronage was either likely to come from the Catholic church or the Royal Court, or from the aristocracy that changes with the revolution. Artists have to find another way to reach the public, and they do so through the Salon. And it just grows enormously. You know, in the 18th century, there might have been a couple of hundred pictures, but what might get to the mid 19th century, we’re talking about thousands of pictures being exhibited in this.

This is where the salon took place from 1855. This is the Palais de l'Industrie that was built for the Paris World Exhibition of 1855. This is Daumier’s caustic comment on it. Opening day at the Salon, only the true connoisseurs, all 60,000 of them. The pictures had to be submitted to a jury. And the Paris, the jury of the palace Salon was notoriously corrupt. A lot of wheeler dealing, a lot of bargaining. It was really the art of the deal. You know, one member of the jury would say, well, I’ll vote for your pupil if you vote for my pupil. And of course, enormous numbers of pictures were refused.

Again, this is Daumier’s caustic comment on that. This is, oh, this is a chilling image of all the stacked up pictures that have been refused by the Salon. Now, if you were accepted and you won a medal, then it was likely and or you won an honourable mention, or you’ve got wonderful reviews, it was likely the French state was investing a lot of money in all of this and your picture would be bought, and it would at all your sculpture, and it would be displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg cause that still exists next to the Luxembourg Gardens for until 10 years after your death and then a decision was made. If you thought, yes, you’ve turned out to be such a genius, a great artist. You can enter the Louvre. If not, your picture was sent out to all over France.

Every every town has its provincial museum. This is the museum in Poitiers as it used to be. So all these French provincial museums have enormous, enormous collections of this kind of art. Back to the artists here, the big superstars, Bouguereau, Monet, Cabanel, Cormon, Amiel, Gervex and so on. And as I said, they lived magnificently. This is the studio of Benjamin Constant very luxurious as you can see. And this is the studio of Bastien-Lepage And which also very luxurious, bit ironic because actually he made his reputation or by painting pictures of rural poverty, like the one you see on the right hand side.

So here we are in the Salon in the 1860s. You’ve got, you might have as Daumier says, on a day where the entrance is free, you might have 60,000 people walking through at thousands and thousands of pictures. How do you get noticed? You’ve got to do something to attract the attention. And one method, of course, is size. So a lot of these pictures are absolutely enormous. But this kind of art, it was a popular art. And so I think we really have to compare it with, you know, popular entertainment. Something like a TV series like, the Crown and pictures that tell stories were very much loved at the Salon and the Royal Academy in London, of course.

Delaroche again on the left hand side, got the two little princes in the tar saying their prayers before going to sleep and a little dog has noticed that there’s somebody outside the door, and it’s those nasty men you see on the right hand side who’ve come in and they’re going to murder little princes. So people enjoy these pictures as stories. But, you find there’s often with there’s a trivialization and anecdotalization of the subject, the famous David the death of Marat on the left hand side. That dates, of course, from the time the revolution in the early 1790s.

This is a Salon version of the same subject. And it is much more cluttered. There’s much more going on. There’s much more anecdotal detail and key element. There’s a gorgeous woman you have that is key to the salon. The sex appeal of the female subjects. Historical going in back to my theme of historicism in the 19th century. You get lots of paintings like this Gerome which look like Hollywood movies, you know, blockbuster movies recreating the ancient World or in this case this is 17th century. It’s Carbanel, again 17th century.

Gerome looks exactly like a scene from a Hollywood film of the 1950s and 60s with its rather gaudy colour, lavish costumes. And so artists, they’re always looking for novelty. You had to attract the attention, as I said. So you find them going to oh, here’s an artist who’s obviously been inspired by Darwin on the left hand side, and an artist called Cormon, who as I mentioned was the teacher for a while of Van Gogh, who specialised in recreations of the Stone Age. Though I must say the Stone Age woman here on the left, her corset looks remarkably 1880.

Again Cormon, so people, they like to go back into history but they also like to, through these paintings, to travel to far places, particularly North Africa in the Middle East, where France was building up its empire during the 19th century. So these are paintings by Leon Gerome. And the one on the left, of course, is a harim picture. These were immensely popular. Suppose they fed the sexual fantasies of the French Bourgeois. And this brings me to what was the great theme of the Paris Salon and that is the Female nude.

And this is a publication again that I picked up at the flea market. You can find them all over the place there, which is really a kind of upmarket girly magazine. It’s a selection of all the most gorgeous female nudes that were shown at the Salon of 1897. And so the strange thing is that in Britain, between let’s say 1850 and 1890s, a big chunk, you know, of the 19th century where the female nude disappears almost totally from the walls of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. By contrast, in London, there are enormous number of pictures of young boys, either prepubescent or adolescent with no clothes on. And, you know, you think, well, I bet that you know French thought, yeah, that’s the English for you.

Remember the French Prime Minister, Madam Cresson saying she thought that all Englishmen were secretly homosexual. But anyway, at had no trouble with the female nude at the Paris Salon. It’s everywhere you look. And almost anything, any subject could be represented by the female nude, an artist inspiration, for instance, inevitably that’s going to be a female nude. Luck or fortune, la fortune here la fortune depicted in the ancient world. Here is la fortune on the steps of the Paris Bourse Stock Exchange, about 10 minutes walk from where I am now. I’d love to see that a lady zooming down the steps on a cycle with no clothes that’d be rather spectacular. And big, big philosophical themes like this.

The one on the left is the conflict between love and duty. And the one on the right, as you can see, is called love in death. And so this is another painting, which is, you know, meant to represent some high-minded philosophical theme. Classical mythology that’s always an excuse for nudity. Venus, two very famous paintings of the birth of Venus. Bouguereau on the left hand side, Cabanel on the right hand side both shown. Cabanel was, the star Cabanel rather, was the star of the Paris Salon of 1863, from which you probably know, Manet was rejected partly on grounds of indecency. And you think, what? How was it that Manet was thought to be indecent?

And this is thought to be decent. Daumier has as usual his funny comment of the, you know, Bouguereau women complaining, oh, Venuses venuses. Why do we have to be surrounded by all these Venuses every year? So this is a painting by Henri Gervex, and as we shall see the, this kind of academic painting was not something fixed. There were certain underlying things that carry through, but it was a style that evolved. And Gervex was one of those artists who was basically working in an academic manner, but trying to update it and looking a little bit impressionist and so on. And, of course, it’s very much based on the Cabanel.

But, so this painting to my eye, of course, pornography is in the mind of the beholder. Indecency is in the mind of the beholder. And I’m not a puritan as I hope you realise by now. But I do actually think this painting is indecent and what is indecent about it? It’s not the nudity, I don’t find any indecency in the human body. I think what makes this painting indecent is the smile. It’s that come hither, come on big boy, you know, come over and show me your whatever. That’s the expression on the face. I call this the Salon smile. And here details of other Salon paintings with this race concilacious come hither smile that is so typical of all these paintings.

And so now, well I hope I’m not going to totally gross you up, but I’m going to go through quite rapidly a lot of these Salon nudes. This is Bouguereau, you know this, we’re Pre-Freud here. So I think we don’t look at these pictures quite in the way that 19th century people did. But nevertheless, I think there is a lot of these pictures. There is a very Freudian and undertone to them. Lots of paintings of naked women frolicking with animals. I don’t think we’ll go too far with that one. The stock Salon nude is a reclining nude. And of course there is this great tradition of the reclining female nude going back to their journey and all this kind of thing.

But if you are a Salon artist, of course the reclining nude is the easiest thing to do. It’s the easiest thing for the model. Cause, you know, all she has to do is lie there and think of France or whatever. Holding a standing pose is much more difficult. So there would’ve been just acres and acres of these reclining nudes. But again, artists, you see them, they’re putting on their little thinking cap and thinking, well, I can’t just send a painting and call it nude, reclining nude. I’ve got to give it a title. I’ve got to give it. I’ve got to justify the fact that I’ve got this woman in my studio and I got her to take her kit off.

This one is called floya and so it’s really a sort of poetic evocation of spring. And she’s in the spring time of her life and she’s surrounded by spring flowers. This guy has gone back to a classical mythology. So it’s leader in this one. Again, classical mythology, This is Danae and the golden shower. This one is just simply called bather, although that seems a rather strange way to bathe. And this one is just called ecorche a woman lying down. I’m going to go through. There is something very kind of hilarious about some of these pictures.

The one on the left is called Lost Huntress. And you think, well, what’s she doing out in the woods hunting with no clothes on? Again, the one on the right hand side is called surprised though I think the man who’s come across I dunno which one is more surprised really and this one’s called in a hayfield. You find these nudes everywhere or even, you know, on buildings. This one’s called Getting warm, on the left hand side. You think that, well, getting dressed might be a way to get warm and shipwrecks that’s always an excuse to lose your kit, I suppose. There are lots and lots of these pictures of nude women in shipwrecks.

This one I love. I think it’s really hilarious. I don’t know, I love. I mean, I love it as a joke. These two, a black woman and a white woman who’d been shipwrecked on an island and the black woman is pointing to the rescue ship coming to get them. And the white woman, she’s probably saying, oh my God, and I haven’t got a stitch to wear. A Freudian, this is Bouguereau again, the wave, you know, with its sexual connotations of sexual ecstasy plenty of those. Women and cats, there’s a whole thing. I think somebody did actually suggest that there could be a whole lecture on this that could be, there are an awful lot of them women and cats and snakes.

Now there’s a Freudian images for you. And how about Freudian for these two. I mean, this is very May West, isn’t it? You know, is that a gun in your pocket or are you glad to see me? This is by an artist called Garnier. And of course, this is a social comment picture. France was Catholic and the only way to get a divorce was through a proven adultery. You had to have witnesses. So this is what’s happening in this picture. This one, this is an extraordinary picture, really by Gervex. It illustrates a narrative about a young man who’s very dissolute.

And he’s used up all his money and his last money he spends on a night with this gorgeous girl. And he’s woken up in the morning and he takes one look at her lovely body before shooting himself. Now this picture was actually rejected by the Salon on moral grounds, but it was exhibited privately and it created a sensation and it actually made the artist’s reputation that you may say, well, excuse me, look, what about those pictures we’ve just been looking at? You know, there’s women frolicking with donkeys and goats and God knows what, how is this more indecent than all the pictures I’ve just shown you? And I’ll tell you what is more indecent about this picture.

In 19th century eyes, it’s the clothes in the foreground. Apparently it was Degas who suggested to Gervex that he should do this. So that you can see her corset. To actually have adulterous sex in the 19th century, if you were a Bouguereau person, it was quite a business getting a woman undressed. There were so many layers with all of the corset and skirts and ribbons and god knows what. So there you’ve got this pile of corsets and clothes that’s been, so this is suggestion. This has been this frenzy of ripping off the clothes and the clothes are in the foreground and perhaps the most peak end and indecent detail of all is his top hat on top of her underwear.

So that’s what was considered indecent about this picture. If you can bring religion, sex and religion, whoa, that’s a very powerful combination. This is another painting that was a sense, this was shown at the Salon by Jean Forain, another friend of Degas actually. And it caused a great sensation and it’s got the title you can see is Mary Magdalene, before Christ. But it’s the scene is taking place at a smart Paris dinner party. And the fat man in the centre is El Nest Renar, who’d written a very controversial life of Jesus in which he questioned his divinity.

So this is an adulterous woman, as you can see. She’s fashionably dressed in modern Persian clothes and Christ said would be a bit alarming, I must say, at a dinner party if Jesus suddenly turns up unannounced. And this woman is overcome with remorse and she repents. And so this painting was a tremendous succeed scandal for all partly because everybody in the painting, they’re all recognisable people who knew they were including the Mary Magdalene and she was one of the top, what they called She was one of the most expensive prostitutes in Paris. And she was particularly famous for the utter perfection of her buttocks.

Got two photographs of her. I mean, all the photographs you find of her at the flea market, she’s always posed or turned in such a way as to suggest that the wondrous, the lustrousness of her buttocks. And you can see the artist exploiting same feature of this woman. So what I find sort of intriguing in a way about these Salon pictures is the incredible layers of hypocrisy. I mean this is presented as a sort of Catholic religious picture but there are all these kind of undertones and there are endless paintings of holy men being attempted by I’ll go through these quickly. Hilarious really, these two in particular.

Some poor priest he’s just come into a church for a quiet prey and all these Salon nudies suddenly jump on him. And there’s a hermit in his cave. And you’ve got the salon nudes with their salon smile coming up from underneath the carpet. The harim, of course, this is not a.. show at the salon. I’m not sure he showed this picture. I don’t think he did actually. But he, this is of the theme of the harim is one of the big themes of the salon. This is Leon Gerome again, two more paintings by Gerome. Gerome is one of the top, top successful salon painters. The sexist, I mean sexist is not the word for all of this really, is it?

It’s a male fantasy of women as a commodity. And this outrageous painting by Delacroix. We have all the silly women wives in the harim being compared to the, you know, chatting and being compared to the twittering of birds in the background. And two more harim paintings that really must have got the juices going of the Bouguereau male visitors on the left hand side, you see the master of the Harim coming in to take his pick of his wives for that night. And on the right hand side that it is actually rather sinister painting cause it’s the new favourite. So, the old favourite is going to be taken away and beheaded by the palace. And yeah, some of these, yeah, they’re pretty, what can I say?

Yeah, I mean that’s awful. That painting of on the right hand side of a slave market and the woman having her teeth inspected as if she’s an animal. And there are also a lot of violent pictures that have fantasies of violence towards women. Like this painting titled Norman Parrots of the 19th century. This artist Delacroix made a whole career of painting big pictures of violence towards women that sort of rape fantasies like this one of it’s called after the victory of the wars. And you see all these white women fainting in the arms of big black muscular men. This is Delacroix again, go through these quickly, don’t we?

This one’s interesting. This is also Delacroix because we move on to another theme, really. Cause yes, this is another one of these rape fantasy pictures that you saw at the salon every year. This one is different cause the title is The Pillage of a Gallo-Roman dwelling by the Hans. Now a painting with that title and of this subject in Paris in the 80s or 90s would’ve immediately been seen in a political context. And that would’ve evoked memories of the Franco-Prussian war. So the Gallo-Romans French civilised Hans, German, Barbarians, that’s what this painting is telling us. And so what you may be glad to know, well temporarily anyway, we’ve left sex behind us.

We’re now moving on to patriotism and military subjects, which also very popular. This is a picture called pour le pays, for the country. You can see the soldiers died for his country and for his religion. And so it’s a very potent mixture again of religion and patriotism. I did ask the question a week or so ago, whether people thought that more deaths had been caused by patriotism or by religion in the 20th century. The affair, of course, is very much part of this furthered atmosphere of both patriotism and religiosity. So after 1870, there were always not quite as many as there were nudes, but there were always lots and lots of paintings celebrating French military history.

This one is a painting of a battle in the Franco-Prussian war. This is an artist called Deti who did nothing but these military pictures. And you see his studio with all the military props in the studio. The other very famous artist for military subjects was El Nest and this is Napoleon returning from Moscow in 1812. I’m going to move on quickly. Now, I’m going to finish off, left myself 15 minutes to look at just some of the major figures amongst these sound artists, the big stars. And starting off with Thomas Hutio this is his most famous picture. It’s the centrepiece in a way of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It’s the biggest picture in the museum.

And Parisians, you know, if you go to the museum and you go off and you do your separate things, the meeting place. It’s called the Romans of the decadence. And so a Parisian will say, I’ll meet you at lunchtime under the decadence. And it was shown at the salon of 1847, caused a sensation, won a gold medal, was walked by the state. And it’s another one of these, this kind of, in a way hypocrisy of these salon pictures because it’s meant to be somewhere a bit like English tabloid newspapers, you know, getting very indignant about something, but actually licking the lips.

This is a painting of an orgy in ancient Rome before the fall of Rome. And the moral of the picture is it’s meant to be a warning to modern Brazilians. If you carry on like this, you know, with Paris as the Babylon of the modern world, things will come to a bad end as they did for the Romans. Here it is in the centre of the Musee d'Orsay sense of its enormous scale. And he was, of course, he’s apart from this picture, he’s most often mentioned in books as the teacher of Manet. Manet actually stayed in his studio for six years. So he must have learned something from Hutio.

One thing he learned not to do was to pose his figures like this. I mean, here is a man presumably throwing up in the foreground. He’s had too much to drink. We know that because we can see the vine leaves in his head. He’s vomiting, but he vomits gracefully, exquisitely. And the whole picture is choreographed like a ballet. And of course Manet’s famously he used to get very irritated with his models if they went into these kind of cliched grade school poses. The other star picture of the 1847 salon was very important Salon from that point of view was Gerome, this picture.

To me this is also, I find this a very unpleasant picture that the mixture of sex and cruelty, which is a big thing with Gerome. I wouldn’t like to get to know what was going on inside his head who got him onto a psychoanalyst couch. Here he is in his studio. He paints lots of these like Hollywood epic pictures. This is the death. And it’s very filmic, isn’t it? It really does look like a still from a Hollywood film. It’s the death of Julius Caesar. And he loves doing these very gory paintings of Christian martyrs. How about this one? Yuck, really is horrid after dinner with the lions and lots of these harim pictures that he does.

But he’s a very skilled artist. And as long as you can get him off sex and sadism, I think the pictures can be very beautiful. Like this one of Oriental carpet dealer lovely drawing of a young Arab man on right hand side. That’s a really beautiful drawing. Again, Gerome and I think he’s at his best with these oriental pictures. This is Leon Bonnat. I find that a very poetic and beautiful picture. It’s called the Barber of Suez. Cabanel so famous for the Venus who seems to be laid out on a couch rather than floating on a way with her, come hither dreamy expression and the famous comparison that’s always made in art history courses.

These two pictures, the Manet on the right hand side. Look at the difference, the one thing I’ll say here, and I’ll talk about it more detail when I get to Manet. The difference in the body language and the facial expression. Of course, Cabanel is totally passive. She’s offering herself to you very passively. I think what people were shocked by with the Manet is that she is victory Manet is model. She’s not passive. She’s actually quite challenging in her expression. Now, this painting, I must admit, and I dread to think what you’ll think of me, if somebody gave me this, I really would hang it over my mantle piece.

I do think this is the most extraordinary image and the title is it’s by Cabanel and it’s Cleopatra trying out poisons on her lovers. She had a nice little number going. She’d have a lover for the night and when he’d done his stuff, she’d dispense with him by poisoning his corn flakes. And that’s what’s happening on the left hand side. Of course she got all the cliches of the thumb for tar with the leopard. That’s almost part of her. So it makes an interesting comparison also, I think, and could be a whole talk on that really of the Manet Olympia top left, the Cabanel bottom right. And it also remind cause there was this play based on a story by about this Cleopatra, you know, poisoning her lovers. And it was a great vehicle for Salon.

Here you see her in the role of Cleopatra and she toured around the world with this play. It was a huge hit. She came to London and that was the origin of the famous story of the two old ladies who went to see Bernard in Cleopatra and Cleopatra were terribly shocked by what went on the stage. And as they came out of the theatre, somebody overheard them sing. So unlike the home life of our own dear queen. Bouguereau, he was financially probably the most successful mainly cause he appealed to Americans. I think this day about three quarter of his paintings are in American museums or collections.

And he boasted that he could make more money per minute than any other artist used to say. Every time I go for a while I’m painting, it cost me so much. More biblical girl. I don’t think we need to dwell on those. huge star again. I always say in real terms, he earned more money per square inch than any other artist who’s ever lived. Cause the paintings are tiny. And he had a huge villa on outskirts of Paris with his own private railway so that he could follow Galloping horses to paint them for his military scenes.

He’s a very skilled artist. And those of you in London, you can see lots of his work at the Wallace collection. Tiny works recreating meticulously different historical periods and they have a very photographic look to them that makes them, of course, look very 19th century. And this brings me to another theme that, or the influence of photography. You know, by the second half of 19th century, art photography was very freely available to these artists and lots of them were making use.

This is Daniel Bouguereau, well both these pictures about him. And so the artists reacted, of course at photography in different ways. The Salon artists competed with photography. They wanted to make their pictures look more real than photographs. Gauguin, other artists said, well this, now we’ve got photography, we don’t need to try and copy the world exactly. We can do something totally different. So we’ve got two Breton themes here, inspired by Mediaeval Breton sculpture with Danielle Bouguereau on the left and Gauguin on the right.

Here, I’ll leave you to decide. One of these is a painting and one is a photograph pretending to be a painting. While you can probably tell it’s the photograph on the right hand side. And so you get that a real interaction, a very close interaction between photography and this kind of painting. Now, move on quickly. And the other thing which I mentioned earlier is that by the time you get to the 1870s, 80s and 90s, there were new generations of these academic artists who wanted to, they wanted to novelty, the public wanted novelty, and they wanted to refresh what had become a rather stale formula.

And the way they did this was looking over their shoulders at Manet, at Degas and the impressionists taking themes, of course, Fragonard is the first person to paint his mistress in the back garden in direct in the sunlight with a play of light and shade on her skin. When he showed that in 1876, the critics in public couldn’t make head or tail of it. They’d never seen anything like that. But now you find, so these academic artists looking at this and thinking, yes, I’m going to take that idea and I’m going to present it to the public in a way that’s more palatable to them. Degas, keyhole nudes, again, very radical approach to depicting the female nude as though seen through the keyhole of the bathroom.

This is Degas on the right hand side, this is Baldini, I think reducing it to something slightly sleazy, and again slightly pornographic on the left hand side. Degas scene of prostitution backstage at the Paris Opera with this meat market, with the young dancers and the Bouguereau top hatted men. This theme is picked up by. Manet on the left, Gervex on the right cafe scenes, the roller I’ve already talked about go on about that. Here is Gervex again, painting a picture. He’s trying to update Rembrandt anatomy lesson, but of course you can’t have a visioned male body at the salon. It’s got to be a gorgeous female body.

So this is a sext up version of the Rembrandt. And so this is the last artist I’m going to talk about. Shabas, shabas and he had this painting, it’s actually the early 20th century. It’s one of the last paintings that really belongs to this tradition I’m talking about. It was a huge, huge success, a world success. And it was bought for an enormous sum of money by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It’s there to this day. Very, very famous, very, very much reproduced. It’s called September Mourn.

And when I was a child, my grandmother lived, actually did on the Wick Bear estate. And there was a lady in a very nice mock Tudor house, and there was a Belgian lady next door called, her name was About but we called her Auntie Birdie and she claimed to be the model of this picture, and that was her claim to fame. And she gave my grandmother a framed reproduction of it. My grandmother was not pleased, she really didn’t want to hang it, but she, you know, she didn’t want to offend her neighbours. So she hung it in the sun parlour at the back of the house. And I can remember it would’ve been about six years old.

We call this painting. My sister and I, we always used to call this painting Auntie Birdie Bear. And I can remember Auntie Birdie saying that Shaba posed her like this because she had difficulty drawing hands and feet. And it’s, you know, as a six year old, it’s the sort of thing that sticks in your mind. And then, oh, I suppose 20, 30 years later I saw this painting by Shaba, nine pubescent girls and not a finger or a toe to be seen amongst any of them. And I thought, oh, I think Auntie Birdie she had a point there. I think perhaps she was correct about Shaba. So that’s it.

I’m going to, what have I got? And I need to go into the chat, don’t I? Is it chat Q and A?

Q&A and Comments

Q: Is there a market for Elizabeth Gardner? Bouguereau’s wife? A: Yes, she was married to an American woman. I’m sure there is a market. You know, as I said, Bouguereau’s in the 1950s you wouldn’t have been able to give one away. But I reckon, you know, a good quality academic painting, they go for serious money. Yes, they do. That would definitely, if you’ve got one, either hang onto it or make sure you sell it at Christie’s or Sotheby’s.

The painting on the left, yes, Matisse dance. Cause Matisse would’ve known paintings like that. But that would be a very interesting compare and contrast, I must say, to put the two on the screen and talk about them.

A veneration of hedonism. Yes, I think so. And of materialism. Yes, I think that’s true.

Somebody saying very correctly, I don’t understand the distinction between good art and bad art. Quite right, I mean, used to say actually, and this is too long to read out, but I absolutely agree with what you are saying here. It’s a nonsense really to talk about good art and bad art and that they’re simply different. I agree with that. Every word that you said.

Q: How many students would pass through the academy every year? A: Hundreds I would think. Yes, definitely hundreds.

Q: Who decided on the Salon regulations after the revolution? A: Well, the Salon went through regulations, went through a number of different reforms, but immediately after the revolution was actually Jacques-Louis David, who decided on the regulations. But there were several reforms of those regulations during the 19th century.

Q: Is the sexy woman in the death of Marat meant to be Charlotte Corday? A: The answer is yes, she is. A lovely story that Anita Brookner tells on the day that Charlotte Corday murdered she knew she was going to go into history and she didn’t want to go into history on a bad hair day. So she actually went, she called in a hairdresser to do up her to make her hair look nice before going and stabbing Marat.

So many similar news. Doesn’t that get, it must have got very boring. I reckon the salon the, you know, to go around a salon and see those reclining news. That’s why there’s the air of desperation, I think about trying to come up with novel reasons for the nudity and novel subjects.

Yeah, and so many agree with you, so many of those reclining nudes. And that was partly the point I wanted to make, that it’s very repetitive and very mechanical.

Q: What do I mean by academic style? A: Oh my goodness. I mean, artists who’ve been trained, been through this system and trained in this way. It puts a primary emphasis on drawing and on idealisation.

Q: Celebration of lasciviousness. Does this reflect the area itself? A: Yes, it does. I think it does, particularly Paris, of course. This is the period where Paris got its very naughty reputation for Lasciviousness. Though I’m not sure it’s any more lascivious than London or New York these days.

Somebody’s saying yes. I mean, they could be, you know, when you buy late 19th century magazines and of these paintings, and as I said, you can find them. I bought two of them from flea market yesterday. Sometimes you have to really look and say, am I looking at a photograph or am I looking at a photograph of a painting? They really can look very, very alike.

Q: What can I tell you about the lives of the models? A: I could actually tell you quite a lot if I had the time, of course, models were regard, it was, they were effectively prostitutes. They were certainly treated as prostitutes. A book that it’s not on my list that I sent you, but it’s a very fascinating book and I have mentioned it before. It’s called The Pretty Women of Paris. And it lists all the women in Paris who are available for sex. And it actually specifically mentions that many of them have worked as artists, models. There are some who are very well known, like God, I mentioned her name earlier, Manet’s model for Olympia and the (indistinct).

Well, I hope people are giggling and I hope they’re not offended. Good, thank you. Thank you Marilyn. I’m glad you’ve laughed. There were time, you know, I used to do this lecture reversion of it at Christie’s. There were a couple of years where people completely failed to see the joke and were really outraged by some of the pictures. Now, I suppose they’re outrageous, but hey,

Q: Did female artists paint nude? A: Now there’s a whole lecture on that really because through much the 19th century women were not allowed to learn to draw from the nude model. It was only in the later years of the century and under extreme restrictions and we absurd restrictions that we were able to draw from the nude body and the great artists in Philadelphia. Sorry, having who’s the really great American realist, he was actually a pupil of. Somebody will tell me in a minute. Sorry, I’m just getting to that stage where I can’t think of anything. Who he was sacked from the academy in Philadelphia because he allowed his female students to see a nude male corpse.

See as somebody who thinks very differently about it all thanks. God we’re finished with the 19th century. Well, glad you enjoyed the humour, you know, this is a very interesting comment.

Vivian Anderson, similar attitude in England was to the prudish influence of Victoria, actually by the standards of Victorian England, Victoria herself was not prudish. She was actually surprisingly unprudish.

Q: Which flea market? A: Well of course there are two, there are several in Paris. The one I regularly go to on a Saturday is the one at Port Lavaca.

I think this is a good point too, and I hope I help to make that point about sometimes you know, the paintings I’ve shown you today tell you a hell of a lot more about the attitudes of the 19th century than a still life of apples by Suzanne, or a haystack by Monet. So that you know and actually I don’t want to totally the earlier comment about, you know, good painting and bad painting. It’s all very personal. I hope I’ve shown you some really quite beautiful paintings as well.

Tiso, yes. Well, Tiso doesn’t usually get a French of course, but he does usually, he did exhibit at the salon but his most important part of his career is in Britain. And when he’s discussed, he’s usually discussed in the context of Victorian painting rather than French painting.

Were the French Victorian artists. Well, I mean, yes. I dunno quite how to answer that, because yes, the strange thing is that Paris and London, by train and boats, you could in a day you could go from Paris to London, but they might as well have been on different planets. They were so different. I feel it.

Akins, thank you very much, Thomas Akins. Such a wonderful artist. Now this is, you know, the gentleman who was talking about good art and bad art. I mean, these things are so subjective, but, you know, I think Akins is a really, really great painter. And yet his technique and his star are very close to what I’ve been talking about today. This is totally subjective. To my mind in Aiken’s work, there’s an element of truthfulness. I think there’s a lying element in a lot of the stuff I’ve shown you, a hypocrisy, a falseness. But of course, I make a statement like that, how can I prove it? It’s a purely subjective reaction.

Suzanne Valadon, of course. Now what a wonderful woman she was. And, of course, she was an artist model for Shavan, for all these people, a very good artist. And of course she did male nudes. In fact, her son was carried home drunk one night by a hunky young friend. And Suzanne Valadon sort of looked him down and thought, hmm, I’ll have some of that. And she married him and used him as her model. Although he was young enough to be her son.

And at the end of the comments, nearly. Yeah, I agree about Akins, of course. I will be giving to us and lectures as soon as I’m allowed, I’m booked for two tours in Paris, one in November, one over Christmas with just, it’s in the hands of God or whoever.

Two artists I should at the beginning were Bouguereau. The names are on the list, and Gervex. Yeah, good, right.

Did I say that the advent of photography led to the.. No, I didn’t. I didn’t say that at all. That’s quite a complicated one.

Q: Were artists model viewed in the same way? A: Yes, of course. I think they were actually, and there’s that whole, you know, of course it was a very dodgy thing for for Rosetti and for Millie.

Right, I think that’s it. Thank you very, very much indeed. And I’ve got one more lecture to give you in Paris. That will be a week today before I attempt to go back to London.

Thank you all. Bye-bye.