Tag Archives: Etching

L-M Boutet de Monvel in his Times

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Art, Children's Literature, France

≈ 12 Comments

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Jeanne d’Arc, p. 6

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Jeanne d’Arc, p. 7 (detail)

“God will help you.”
On a Summer day, when she was thirteen, she heard a voice calling to her. It was noon and she was in her father’s garden. She saw a flash of light and Michael the Archangel appeared to her.
He told her to be good and to go to church. He then spoke of the great misery that had befallen the kingdom of France and announced that she would rescue Charles VII, the heir to the throne of France, and lead him to Reims where he would be crowned.“Sir, I am but a humble girl. I would not know how to ride a horse and lead soldiers into battle.”
“God will help you,” replied the angel.
The child was overwhelmed and covered in tears.

 

Illustrations

  • the applied arts
  • Sir John Tenniel
  • Japonisme

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel was a man of his times. His Vieilles chansons de France pour les petits enfants, published in 1883, and his Jeanne d’Arc, published in 1896, are products of an important turning-point in the history of European art: the acceptability of the applied arts. Successfully illustrated children’s literature could make it easier for artists to earn a living while remaining artists. Such had been and was the case in Britain. Sir John Tenniel was a cartoonist for Punch when he was asked to illustrate Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1872).[1]

If brilliantly illustrated, children’s literature could help ensure a better lifestyle for Sir John Tenniel, it could also benefit Boutet de Monvel without his having to choose a completely different profession. The required attributes were both the quality of the written text and that of its illustrations. Illustrated by John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll‘s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were a perfect marriage of word and art. Therefore, although he lived across the English channel, Tenniel was a precursor.

Japonisme, again

However, Louis-Maurice’s art was influenced by Japonisme, as was Walter Crane‘s (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915). Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s illustrations are characterized by his use of flat colours. This was a feature of the Japanese prints that flooded Europe in the second half of the 19th century.

For example, in the images shown above, Louis-Maurice’s black is a flat black. But Louis-Maurice also expressed dimensionality by juxtaposing a light and darker shade of the same colours. Joan’s hair is an example of this technique. However, simplicity is the chief characteristic of Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s art, including battle scenes where several human beings are depicted standing, riding a horse, or lying dead.

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Jeanne d’Arc, p. 26

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Jeanne d’Arc, p. 30 (le couronnement de Charles VII)

Word and Art

As for the combination of word and art, Boutet de Monvel’s text is mostly in boxes placed inside the page. Word and art are therefore integrated. Moreover, the text is told by Louis-Maurice himself. He may have had a source, but no author is named. In this regard, the art of Boutet de Monvel resembles the art of Beatrix Potter, except that Louis-Maurice did not invent the story of Joan of Arc. It had been told. Alexandre Dumas had written a Jeanne d’Arc (Internet Archives).

The Technique: Watercolours in Zincotype

In the case of Jeanne d’Arc, Louis-Maurice made a series of watercolours that were reproduced in zincotype, “a new photo engraving process using etching in conjunction with coloured inks.” (See Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Wikipedia.) Great progress had been made since the invention of the printing press. In fact, Europe had entered its industrial revolution for more than a century, which meant that duplicating images had become quite inexpensive.

Nevertheless, etching remained a good starting-point. If colours were used, however, it was a time-consuming endeavour. Yet, colours were used. Later, Louis-Maurice’s son, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, perfected etching and “became the undisputed master of this technique.” (See Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Wikipedia.)

Artist and Illustrator

Louis-Maurice’s trajectory is somewhat unique. He was at first an artist who painted one-of-a-kind art works. After he married and his son Roger was born, he needed to supplement his income. He therefore turned to illustrating books for practical reasons only to realize he liked this kind of work. He had many customers. Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France was one of Louis-Maurice’s customers.

But Louis-Maurice also had projects of his own. The first was his Vieilles chansons de France pour les petits enfants (1883). French organist and composer Charles Marie Widor set the words to music. Louis-Maurice’s second project was Jeanne d’Arc (1896). His illustrations were so exquisite that the books he illustrated sold well, which enabled him to be both an illustrator and the creator of one-of-a-kind works of art.

A Lifestyle & a Social Life

Therefore, Boutet de Monvel is one of the artists who inaugurated a lifestyle for today’s artists. It is not uncommon for artists to produce both relatively inexpensive prints and rather expensive paintings. This is how several artists put bread on the table, so to speak. In the early 20th century, artists also hand coloured photographs or combined in some other way photography and painting.

Louis-Maurice’s illustrations also allowed him a rich social life. He befriended not only writers but also artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who made posters, and Edgard Degas, who was a printmaker and taught this technique to Mary Cassatt. Moreover, artist Édouard Detaille (1848 – 1912) introduced him to members of the newly-established Société des aquarellistes français (“the society of French watercolourists”). Louis-Maurice showed one work for approval and it was well received. Consequently, he was voted a member of the Société almost immediately. However, he had already been an ‘artist’ and had continued to produce original paintings.

(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)

Jeanne d’Arc, p. 11 (Joan identifies Charles VII)
Jeanne d’Arc, p. 32 (The people and Jeanne d’Arc)
p. 44
p. 45

Jeanne d’Arc identifies Charles VII
The people and Jeanne d’Arc
Jeanne d’Arc’s trial
Jeanne d’Arc sentenced to death

The Arts and Crafts Movement

Painters may become illustrators, but illustrators do not necessarily turn to painting. Nowadays, however, an illustrator is considered an artist, but someone had to lead the way. More than anyone else, William Morris was eclectic, and so were the artists associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. The comparison is unavoidable. The Arts and Crafts movement validated the applied arts thereby broadening the realm of things artistic and it spread abroad to countries where circumstances paralleled the British experience.

Moreover, not only did Louis-Maurice meet the writers whose work he illustrated, but he was also invited to participate in the Exhibition of Viennese Secession of 1899, the Jugendstil that supported the applied arts and avant-gardisme. (See Art Nouveau, Wikipedia.) Gustav Klimt is the best-known representative of the Vienna Jugendstil.

We associate Alphonse Mucha with Art Nouveau. His art was curvilinear, but Art Nouveau also incorporated innovative art and total art. It was a synthesis: Gesamtkunstwerk, a feature associated with the last years of the 19th century.

In short, Louis-Maurice was a man of his times, as would be his son, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, his nephews, George Barbier and Pierre Brissaud, and ‘artists’ everywhere.

 

With kind regards to all of you. ♥

RELATED ARTICLES

Sources and Resources

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[1] “Sir John Tenniel”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 11 janv.. 2016
<http://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tenniel>.

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Music: Carmina Burana by Carl Orff (1935-36)
The Siege of Orleans (12 October 1428 – 8 May 1429)

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Jeanne d’Arc arrested

© Micheline Walker
11 January 2016
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James McNeill Whistler: a Subtler Art

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Art, United States

≈ 11 Comments

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The North Sea, 1883 (watercolour)
Green and Silver: The Bright Sea, Dieppe, 1883-85 (gouache and watercolour)
Blue and White Covered Urn (no date) 
 
 
Photo credit: Wikipaintings.org
The Athenæum
 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 10, 1834 – July 17, 1903)

Biography

I do not know the name of the lady who sat for Whistler’s Head of a Young Woman (1890).  This portrait was painted at the height of Whistler’s career, two years after his marriage to Beatrix Birnie Philip, when the couple resided in Paris.

Interestingly, Whistler was not altogether wrong when he claimed he was born in Saint Petersburg.  He was in fact born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but he moved to Russia in 1843, a year after his father, George Washington Whistler, a prominent engineer, was hired to build a railroad connecting Saint Petersburg and Moscow.  He was 9 years old when he joined his father in Russia.  Those were formative years.  It could be said that Whistler was an “expat,” and one of the first American artists to settle in Europe, mingle with soul mates and enjoy both a bohemian lifestyle and the pleasures of a café society.

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At the age of eleven, young James enrolled in Saint Petersburg‘s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where it was soon noticed that he was a gifted artist.  While his father was working in Russia, Whistler also visited England accompanied by his mother.  He met Francis Haden, a surgeon by profession, but also an artist.  Francis Haden married Whistler’s sister and would become the very distinguished Sir Francis Seymour Haden.  After his trip to England, James informed his father of his wish to pursue a career as an artist, writing “I hope, dear father, you will not object to my choice” (See James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Wikipedia).  However, James was about to lose his father to cholera.  George Washington Whistler died in Russia.

After James’ father passed away, the Whistler family was forced to return to the United States.  But they left Lowell, Massachusetts to settle in Pomfret, Connecticut, James’ mother’s hometown.  Whistler was therefore brought up in a more frugal manner than would otherwise have been the case.

Yet, despite his father’s untimely death, James would become an artist.  A career as a minister was Mrs Whistler’s first choice for her son.  However, James had no inclination for life as a member of the clergy, nor, for that matter, could he enter the military successfully.  He did attend West Point, failed an exam, misbehaved, and was dismissed by no less than Colonel Robert E. Lee.  He then worked as draftsman “mapping the entire U.S. coast for military and maritime purposes[,]” but drawing “sea serpents, mermaids, and whales on the margins of the maps, at which point he was transferred to the etching division of the U. S. Coast Survey.” (See James McNeill Whistler, Wikipedia.)

Whistler lasted two months as an etcher, but his training in this medium would be invaluable in the career he would embark upon after a stay with a wealthy friend, Tom Winans.  Winans, who lived in Baltimore, provided Whistler with a studio, pocket-money and, in 1855, with the funds that would allow Whistler to leave for Paris to perfect his skills as an artist.  Whistler never returned to the United States.  He is buried in Chiswick, near London.

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Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean, 1866-1872 (oil)
Nocturne: The Thames at Battersea, 1878 (lithograph)
Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket, c. 1875 (oil, bottom of post)
 

Tonalism

When Whistler arrived in France, realism was all the rage.  He became a disciple of Gustave Courbet and befriended Henri Fantin-Latour. However, he was also influenced by the art for art’s sake movement, associated with writer Théophile Gauthier.  In the early 1860s, after he had settled in London, he visited Courbet and painted seascapes with him.  He also visited Brittany (1861) and the coast near Biarritz (1862).

But although his paintings reflect his exposure to realism and, to a certain extent, the Barbizon School (1830 through 1870), Whistler developed a rather personal style called tonalism.  Tonalism is also associated with George Inness and, to a certain extent, with the Russian mood landscapes of Aleksey Savrasov[ii] and Isaac Levitan.[iii]  It is perhaps best described as a “veiled” form of realism, a subtler art, except that Whistler’s use of colour reflects musical keys.  Whistler built a close relationship between his colours or tones, as though they were painted in a key, usually in one of the more plaintive minor keys.  Many of his paintings are called “Nocturnes,” à la Chopin, Symphonies, Harmonies and Notes.  Whistler’s paintings therefore herald Impressionism as do Édouard Manet’s.  However, printmakers practice a certain linearity, a technique not altogether compatible with imprecise Impressionism.  Whistler produced several etchings and lithographs.

Also evident in the art of James McNeill Whistler is the influence of Japonisme and Orientalisme (FR).  In this respect, Whistler is very much a contemporary of middle to late 19th-century French artists: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso.  Japonisme also permeates the emerging, yet soon to be the golden age of the poster: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile Steinlen and Art Nouveau.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Whistler is known for his “his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs.”  He is also known for his “congenial themes on the River Thames, and the etchings that he did of such subjects garnered praise from the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire when they were exhibited in Paris.”[iv]

However, when he showed Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket (shown at the bottom of this post), Whistler did not garner praise from eminent British critic John Ruskin.  On 2 July 1877, in his Fors Clavigera, John Ruskin wrote:

“For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay [founder of the Grosvenor Gallery] ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”  (quoted in James McNeill Whistler, Wikipedia)

Modernism was happening across the English Channel.  Yet, the jury returned a verdict in favour of James McNeill Whistler.

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Moreby Hall, 1883–1884 (watercolour)

[i]  “Aleksey Kondratyevich Savrasov.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2013.            
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1773613/Aleksey-Kondratyevich-Savrasov>.
 
[ii] “Isaak Ilyich Levitan.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2013.            
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/337990/Isaak-Ilyich-Levitan>.
 
[iii] “James McNeill Whistler”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2013
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/641961/James-McNeill-Whistler>.
 
composer: Edvard Grieg (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907)
Morgenstimmung 
 
 
451px-Whistler-Nocturne_in_black_and_gold (1)© Micheline Walker
14 April 2013
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