Full Description
Before Modernism, narrative painting was one of the most acclaimed and challenging modes of picture-making in Western art, yet by the early twentieth century storytelling had all but disappeared from ambitious art. France was a key player in both the dramatic rise and the controversial demise of narrative art. This is the first book to analyse French painting in relation to narrative, from Poussin in the early seventeenth to Gauguin in the late nineteenth century. Thirteen original essays shed light on key moments and aspects of narrative and French painting through the study of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Charles Le Brun, Jacques-Louis David, Paul Delaroche, Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin. Using a range of theoretical perspectives, the authors study key issues such as temporality, theatricality, word-and-image relations, the narrative function of inanimate objects, the role played by viewers, and the ways in which visual narrative has been bound up with history painting. The book offers a fresh look at familiar material, as well as studying some little-known works of art, and reveals the centrality and complexity of narrative in French painting over the course of three centuries.
Contents
ContentsList of Figures viiNotes on Contributors xiiAcknowledgements xvIntroduction: Narrativity and (French) Painting Peter Cooke and Nina LubbrenSection IAncien Regime1 Units of Vision and Narrative Structures: Upon Reading Poussin's Manna Claudine Mitchell2 Figures of Narration in the Context of a Painted Cycle: The North Bays of the Grande Galerie at Versailles Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc3 The Crisis of Narration in Eighteenth-century French History Painting Susanna Caviglia4 Obscure, Capricious and Bizarre: Neoclassical Painting and the Choice of Subject Mark LedburySECTION IIRestoration and July Monarchy 5 Delacroix and `The Work of the Reader' Beth S. Wright6 Narrative and History in Leopold Robert's Arrival of the Harvesters in the Pontine Marshes Richard Wrigley7 Narrative Strategies in Paul Delaroche's Assassination of the Duc de Guise Patricia SmythSECTION IIISecond Empire and Third Republic 8 Eloquent Objects: Gerome, Laurens and the Art of Inanimate Narration Nina Lubbren9 Tyrannical Inopportunity: Gustave Moreau's Anti-narrative Strategies Scott C. Allan10 Theatricality Versus Anti-Theatricality: Narrative Techniques in French History Painting (1850 1900) Pierre Serie11 The Conflicted Status of Narrative in the Art of Paul Gauguin Belinda ThomsonSECTION IVKey Issues of Pictorial Narrative 12 Narrativity, Temporality and Allegorisation, from Poussin to Moreau Peter Cooke13 Towards a Study of Narration in Painting: The Early Modern Period Etienne JolletIndex
