Exhibition details
This exhibition was curated by Cyndy Basil, ’25, under the direction of Gallery Director Sarah Kate Gillespie, and Kolbe Summer Scholar Isobel Debenham, ’25, under the direction of Professor Felicia Else, Art History. The show received support from the Provost’s Office, the Department of English, the Department of French, and the Program in Public History, Gettysburg College.
September 4 – December 14, 2024
Location
Main Gallery
Reception
September 4, 2024, 4-6pm
Lecture
- Gallery Talks by Student Curators, September 4. 2024, 4pm -
“‘Extravagant genius’? A Portrait of the Artist,” by James Clifton, Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, September 18, 4pm, followed by a reception until 6pm
“‘Extravagant genius’? A Portrait of the Artist,” by James Clifton, Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, September 18, 4pm, followed by a reception until 6pm
Image: Jean-Jacques de Boisseau, Self-Portrait, 1796, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston
Works on display
Consisting of fifty-one prints on loan from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this exhibition examines how artists depicted themselves and their profession from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The show includes artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Salvator Rosa, William Hogarth, Claude Lorrian, and Francisco Goya, among others. Created during a period when the social status of artists was in flux, the prints represent both artists’ lives and work, and the roles that both artists and the arts held in society. Full of allegory and rich in satire, the works include self-portraits, representations of artists at work, and exhibition and academy spaces.
Pietro Antonio Martini’s print depicts the hustle and bustle of eighteenth-century Exposition au Salon Du Louvre, or Exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, filled the walls and floors of the Louvre Museum with spectacle. Held in the Galerie d’Apollon and the Salon Carré, crowds flowed through painting-lined rooms, where works of all subjects and sizes were hung from floor to ceiling. Visitors observed these paintings, and one another, with equal enthusiasm. The public exhibitions, which were free of charge, attracted guests of all backgrounds. Groups gather to discuss the works or perhaps to consult their official livret (catalogue). These guidebooks were sold to turn the Academy a profit off the otherwise free event. They catalogued each work on display and indicated its artist These small pamphlets would have pointed out to guests about such paintings as the now instantly recognizable The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David (center bottom) or Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s famous portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette (left of doorway). And still, even the smallest of pictures were studied by attendees: in the leftmost corner of the rear wall, two men lean in to see Henri Horace Roland Delaporte’s crisp but modest still life of bread, fruit, and milk, entitled The Little Snack.
“How the genius painter / Makes us see here / The excellence of painting! / And how beautiful this art seems to me, / When it imitates nature, / By the marvels of the brush! // He whose noble manner / Joins shadows to light / In a thousand different paintings; / Is not one of those vulgar painters, / Who pass for ignorant / In their ordinary works // He executes, and brings to light / All that War and Love / have that is memorable and strange; / And it seems to whoever sees his designs, / That it is Apelles or Michelangelo / Who guides his art and his hands. // Whether he represents Bellona, / Or Pallas with her Gorgon, / Or Cupid armed with arrows; / He places himself in such high esteem / By his admirable portraits, / That everyone says he animates them. // But when he paints us the laurels / Of Louis, honor of warriors, / And true portrait of Victory / He makes a priceless masterpiece / For this great King, who in history / Is the object of the best Spirits.” The above is the translated inscription from Abraham Bosse’s (1602-1676) etching, The Noble Painter (Le Noble Peintre). The poem runs along the bottom of the print, which depicts a gentlemanly artist in his large, tidy workshop. The painter is poised atop a cushioned seat, in an open pose, angled away from his easel, the finery of his clothes on display. To the left, an equally well-dressed man observes the artist. The surrounding workshop is devoid of any messy tools of the craft, apart from a carefully balanced pallet and brushes. The walls are lined with paintings, and a shelf of books. The carefully maintained and curated studio distinguishes the painter as an intellectual, and as the title and poem emphasize, one of established noble status. Amongst French society of the seventeenth century, such noble status was signaled and regulated through distinctly visual means. Decrees were routinely issued to the court, asserting that some finery, such as silks and laces, were to be exclusively worn by those of noble rank. While some achieved their ennobled position as reward for a great service or achievement, noble rank was still undeniably an issue of heredity. Even those most praised painters, seated in any French court, did not fully escape association with the humble craftsman. Bosse’s subject, then, seems to have achieved unprecedented distinction as an artist, true ennoblement. He is praised in the poem for his execution of King Louis XIII’s portrait, as well as bringing to light “all that War and Love have that is memorable and strange.” This line heralds his mastery of History paintings, the most highly regarded tradition in painting. However, all such elevation of the Noble Painter is potentially made parody by one inclusion in the etching. A young servant or “lackey” holds a print up to the painter for his consideration. A regular inclusion in Bosse’s prints, the lackey figure often functions to reveal the pretentions of others, reversing the superficial interpretation of the work. In this print, he is displaying an image by Andries Both which depicts a threadbare artist with his wife and children. Both’s painting was quite popular, having been reprinted at least six times. Its subject, a man brought down by the humble associations of his craft, is in obvious contrast with the state of the noble’s studio. Thus, the lackey holds it up, perhaps as a reminder to the painter of his unprecedented nobility.
