Introduction: ‘What’s she like?’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
French Art ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Definition Of

The introduction provides an overview of the origins of the Parisienne type in nineteenth-century French art and culture. It traces these origins to specific works of art and literature, including the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Dumas fils; the paintings of Renoir, James Tissot, Toulouse-Lautrec; and the numerous physiognomies written on the type. The origin of the term la Parisienne is examined and two key features of her mythology are identified: visibility and mobility. A provisional definition of la Parisienne as ‘a figure of French modernity’ and ‘more than just a female inhabitant of Paris’ is then offered. Both the technological (railways, printing press, fashion plates, photography) and cultural (art, literature, advertising, print media) developments in nineteenth-century France which provided the basis for the emergence of la Parisienne as a dominant cultural figure are then discussed. Also introduced here is the main theoretical approach of the book: iconography.The iconography of la Parisienne can be categorised according to the following concepts: visibility and mobility (both social and spatial); style and fashionability, including self-fashioning; artist and muse; cosmopolitanism; prostitution; danger; consumption (the consumer and the consumed); and transformation.

scholarly journals The ‘Unknown Arts’ of Ancient America: Challenging Classical Art Canons in 19th-Century France The Reception of Pre-Columbian Art before the Primitivist and Surrealist Avant-gardes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Stüssi Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
19Th Century France ◽  
The 19Th Century

Pre-Columbian artefacts have been collected and exhibited in Europe since the 16th century. For a long time, they were considered exotic curiosities, ‘grotesque’ attempts at art by inferior peoples. This was a judgement stemming from a Eurocentric definition of art and, during the 19th century, indissociable from colonial and imperialist ideology. We present some views held in scholarly circles about pre-Columbian art in nineteenth-century France and focus on two artists, Jean Frédéric de Waldeck (1766-1875) and Emile Soldi (1846-1906), who drew from contemporary ethnographic and archaeological research, and pre-Columbian history to challenge the limits of academicism and the Beaux-Arts system.

scholarly journals From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Juliet Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
French Art ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Understanding ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
Definition Of

This article investigates the nature and prevalence of aristocratic liberalism in post-revolutionary France. Defenders of the aristocracy, it argues, departed from a specific conception of liberty, which can be distinguished both from a purely negative definition of liberty as the ability to do what one wanted to do, and from a republican conception of liberty as something that could be guaranteed through self-government alone. To legitimate the role of the aristocracy in post-revolutionary France, publicists and politicians developed a conception of liberty as a condition that could be guaranteed only through the existence of ‘intermediary powers’ between the central government and the people. Although this conception of liberty was severely criticized by Restoration liberals such as Benjamin Constant, it had a considerable impact on the debate about the best way to safeguard liberty in nineteenth-century France, as appears from texts by important political thinkers such as Tocqueville and Dupont-White.

Picturing walls

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-508
Author(s):  
Freya Spoor ◽  
Robert Lethbridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Art Writing ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
Art And Culture

Abstract Émile Zola’s literary oeuvre continues to provide scholars with one of the most comprehensive accounts of nineteenth-century art and culture. Yet the magnitude of this material has resulted in the works of art acquired by Zola over the course of his lifetime being largely overlooked. By focusing on how this ad hoc collection of more than fifty contemporary works was gathered and subsequently dispersed, this article elucidates the influence of close friendships and professional reciprocity on the reputation of artist and critic alike. It offers an unprecedented corrective to the pioneering article by Jean Adhémar (1960) which partly reproduced the procès-verbal from the posthumous auction of Zola’s estate held in 1903. Using the original version of this document, together with available sales catalogues, letters and Zola’s art writing, it provides the most comprehensive inventory of the works owned by Zola and how they relate to his life and work.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

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