Rustic (queer?) music

Note: I'm not sure if the comparisons in this post have been made by Leighton scholars before – if they have, my apologies for the oversight!

During a visit to Leighton House Museum in the New Year, I saw this painting by Frederic Leighton (1830-96), entitled Rustic music:

Frederic Leighton, Rustic music, 1861, oil on canvas, 109 x 91 cm, Leighton House Museum, London. Source.

The sitter is John Hanson Walker (1844-1933). Walker was discovered by Leighton while he was working in his father's curiosity shop in Bath in the late 1850s. Leighton was struck by his beauty and chose him as a model. (This incident is eerily similar to the legend/fable/myth of Elizabeth Siddall being discovered by Walter Howell Deverell while she was working in a London hat shop.) In 1861 Leighton wrote to his sister: 'I have just returned from a fortnight in Bath, where I have finished the two Johnnies, I believe, and hope you will like them'.[1] The 'two Johnnies' refers to two paintings for which Walker had modelled: one was Rustic music, the other was entitled Duet. Leighton submitted both pictures to the 1862 Royal Academy exhibition, but only Duet was accepted.

Frederic Leighton, Duet, 1861, oil on canvas, 61.2 x 44.7 cm, Royal Collection Trust, London. Source. The painting was given as a birthday gift to Queen Victoria by the Prince of Wales in 1868.

Rustic music and Duet, painted simultaneously, depict near-identical subjects: a youth in an outdoor pastoral setting, wearing the same rustic outfit and holding the same metal flute in both pictures. They contain a suggestion of music – an interest among artists in the 1860s – and seem designed to emphasise the youth's good looks: his full red lips, tousled hair, flushed cheeks and thoughtful eyes. (Walker was around 17 years old when these paintings were made.) Plenty of scholars have speculated that Leighton had homosexual tendencies, although this is difficult to confirm through documentary evidence as he left no diaries behind and he was generally evasive about his personal life.[2] Certainly, he appreciated Walker's beauty enough to paint him, and he subsequently took on the young man as a pupil and studio assistant. We could even describe Walker as Leighton's 'muse' – a role typically assigned to women in heteronormative accounts of nineteenth-century art.

While Duet adopts a different compositional format, it doesn't take much effort to see in Rustic music a clear analogy to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Bocca baciata, painted around two years earlier in 1859:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bocca baciata, 1859, oil on panel, 32.1 x 27 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Source. The model was Fanny Cornforth, one of the most recognisable Pre-Raphaelite models.

Rossetti exhibited this small picture at the private Hogarth Club, of which Leighton was a member, in 1860 – there is no doubt that he would have seen it. Bocca baciata was the first of many images by Rossetti presenting a single female figure in a bust format with a ledge in the foreground and a compressed background containing flowers or other decorative elements. These are the images for which Rossetti is best remembered, and which have become synonymous with the term 'Pre-Raphaelite' for many viewers. Fair Rosamund, painted in mid-1861, several months before Leighton's Rustic music, continues the device:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fair Rosamund, 1861, oil on canvas, 51.9 x 41.7 cm, National Museum Wales, Cardiff. Source.

Leighton has clearly borrowed Rossetti's pictorial strategy of portraying women for his own painting of a male youth whom he considered beautiful. Rustic music has a shallow ledge in the foreground on which the boy's hands rest. The torso and head are viewed frontally and fill most of the space, with the head cocked slightly to the viewer's left (as in Bocca baciata), and the human figure is surrounded with natural objects – thistles and trees in this case. There is an additional similarity in Leighton's brushwork, which has a soft, luminous quality as in Rossetti's paintings at this time. (Rossetti acknowledged Venetian painting as an influence on Bocca baciata.) Rossetti's women are invariably shown clutching an object which accentuates their slender fingers placed on the shelf before them; the same quality is apparent in the boy's fingers grasping the flute, which have a delicate, dextrous appearance. Like Rossetti, Leighton has used highlights on the fingernails and knuckles to call attention to the boy's preparation to play music.

The suggestion of music in Leighton's picture finds its equivalent in Rossetti's painting made four years later, The blue bower, in which Fanny Cornforth's fingers are about to pluck the strings of her instrument – just as we might imagine the notes which will emerge from the boy's fingers once he raises the flute to his lips.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The blue bower, 1865, oil on canvas, 84 x 70.9 cm, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. Source.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Regina cordium, 1866, oil on canvas on panel, 59.7 x 49.5 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. Source. Another interesting point of comparison with Leighton's Rustic music.

Now, what can we take from this?

We must take care when reading the work of a deceased artist whose sexuality we cannot easily define. Leighton may simply have found this type of composition visually appealing, or he could see how popular (saleable) Rossetti's work in that line was becoming. The fact that Leighton was exploring the idea of transposing a male figure into a typically Rossettian pictorial space, where we would ordinarily expect to see a woman, is insightful in itself. Rustic music is not as clear in its intentions as, say, the work of Simeon Solomon produced contemporaneously in the 1860s, such as the now-famous Bacchus of 1867:

Simeon Solomon, Bacchus, 1867, oil on paper laid on canvas, 50.3 x 37.5 cm, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. Image: Birmingham Museums Trust.

Solomon, of course, was persecuted for his homosexuality in 1873, and his works can be more easily read as gay or queer in nature (several, including Baccus, were included in the exhibition Queer British Art at Tate Britain in 2017). Scholars have evidently had more difficulty with Leighton.

Perhaps I'm being too coy. It can be argued that Leighton was examining male beauty in much the same way as Solomon in his Rustic music. That the model, John Walker, was only 17 when it was painted – and he was still a boy when Leighton discovered him – is something we might also take with caution, although there is no evidence to suggest that anything sinister 'went on'. Walker seems not to have minded the older man's attentions, while Leighton supported Walker's burgeoning talents as an artist and painted a fine portrait of Walker's eventual wife in 1867:

Frederic Leighton, Mrs Frances (Nan) Hanson Walker (née Whitaker), 1867, oil on canvas, 46.4 x 41.3 cm, Tate, London. Source. Many thanks to Barbara Bryant for informing me of 'Nan's' proper name!

Given Leighton's central position in the British art world in the 1860s, and his acquaintance with avant-garde theories, it's also reasonable to see Rustic music simply as an expression of the developing Aesthetic Movement, with its lack of narrative and emphasis on music/sound. Earlier in 1861, Leighton exhibited at the Royal Academy his 'Lieder ohne worte' ('Songs without words'), a large, enigmatic painting inspired by Mendelssohn's cycle of piano pieces of the same title:

Frederic Leighton, 'Lieder ohne worte', exhibited 1861, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 62.9 cm, Tate, London. Source.

Hang on, haven't we seen the woman's face somewhere before? In fact, it's that of young Walker – a male figure modelling for a female one. If that isn't queer, I don't know what is.

I don't have any definite conclusions for this post, which arose out of my initial observations after seeing Leighton's Rustic music. But it gets us thinking about male beauty as depicted by men in the mid-Victorian period – a topic which has received relatively little attention in studies of British art. It's a subject I would like to examine more in my research, so this post seemed a good place to begin.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Mrs Russell Barrington [Emilie Isabel Barrington], The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (London: George Allen, 1906), vol. 2, p. 85. The letter was probably written in December 1861, owing to a reference to Prince Albert's recent death (on 14 December).

[2] See Richard Norton, 'Fay and Babbo: The Gay Love Letters of Henry Greville to Frederic, Lord Leighton' (2014) for a discussion of this subject.

Two triptychs

Pedro Weingärtner (1853-1929). Source.

Pedro Weingärtner (1853-1929) was a Brazilian academic painter. He was born in Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to German parents who had emigrated to Brazil (hence his German surname). In the late 1870s and 1880s he studied painting in Germany, as the pupil of Ferdinand Keller, and in France, where he was taught by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Thanks to a scholarship from the emperor of Brazil at the time, Pedro II, he continued his studies in Rome. For the rest of his career he split his time between Brazil and Italy.

Maker of angels

One of Weingärtner's most notable works is in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (São Paulo's oldest art museum, founded in 1905). Its Portuguese title is A fazedora de anjos, or The maker of angels. Painted in 1908, it was designed as a narrative triptych – divided into three compartments that tell a story when read from left to right.

Pedro Weingärtner, A fazedora de anjos (The maker of angels), 1908, oil on canvas, 151 x 375 cm, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. Source.

The story begins:

Two women descend from of a carriage at the entrance of a house. They are dressed for an evening party. The jubilant, costumed crowd behind them shows that this is Carnival season in Brazil (typically February, before Lent). The foremost woman glances at a man who stands in the shade behind the porch; he raises his hat to her in greeting. There is an implied connection between them. Note the man dressed as the Devil who leers at us from behind the top-hatted gentleman.

The large central canvas depicts a room in a basement. The central woman from the previous scene – identifiable by her dark hair, white gloves and veil – now sits at a table, cradling a baby on her lap. Her carriage waits for her at the top of the steps in the upper-left corner – further indicating her status as a high-society woman. She does not look down at her child, but gazes into the distance. We might read her expression as one of regret, or she may be contemplating the decision she is about to make. She does not engage, either, with the other woman in the room, who is older and who regards the young mother with a shifty expression. A clue to this older woman's role can be seen on the chair before her: a cloth, a small bowl and a milk bottle. She is a wet nurse who will be taking the baby off the younger woman's hands. Or is there something more sinister going on? On the stool beside the young mother we notice a small wallet or purse.

The right-hand compartment stages the tragic conclusion to this tale, as the meaning of the triptych's title, The maker of angels, becomes clear. The older woman from the previous scene stands beside a table on which she has emptied a bag of coins. The lit furnace behind her emits a plume of smoke in which the spectral faces of several infants materialise before her eyes. From this we can infer that the young mother, having been seduced by the top-hatted gentleman in the first scene, has paid to have her illegitimate child – the result of that affair – killed by the older woman, who is afflicted by visions of the other innocents she has murdered.

Weingärtner apparently based his triptych on a real event in Brazil, although I was unable to find out more about this. There is a PhD thesis devoted to the painting by Vivian da Silva Paulitsch,[1] but as it's in Portuguese I haven't been able to read it yet – ah, the aforementioned difficulties of studying Brazilian art!

Past and present and 'fallen women'

When I saw Weingärtner's painting in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, I was reminded of a similar narrative triptych by a British artist: Past and present by Augustus Leopold Egg (1816-65), which is in Tate Britain in London. When it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, the work was hung in the following formation from left to right:

All three images: Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and present, 1858, oil on canvas, each canvas 63.5 x 76.2 cm, Tate, London. Source.

John Ruskin summarised the narrative in his 1858 Academy Notes:

In the central piece the husband discovers his wife’s infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their mother; and their mother, from behind a boat under a vault on the river-shore.[2]

Ruskin does not mention another significant detail in the first picture: the mother under the bridge is sheltering a small child, the result of the seduction, under her shawl – you can just see the feet poking out in the bottom-left corner.

Egg's and Weingärtner's works complement each other, not least because they each tell a story of modern urban life which is divided into three dramatic sections like tableaux on a stage. The way the stories unfold could even be described as cinematic, using flashbacks and narrative cuts. The maker of angels and Past and present concern women who have, in nineteenth-century terms, fallen from grace. The female protagonists have each been 'seduced by a sham count, with a moustache' (to quote Ruskin)[3] and are forced to bear the consequences. I can't tell whether the central woman in Weingärtner's Maker of angels is married – I can't see a wedding ring in the reproductions, but perhaps there are other clues about her marital status elsewhere in the work.

Of course, the outcome of Weingärtner's triptych is far more disturbing than Egg's, in that the child born out of wedlock is eventually killed. Still, both artists prompt us to think about the societal pressures that were placed upon women in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – so that women were cast penniless onto the streets, and infanticide was considered as a legitimate means to prevent destitution. In some ways, we could view The maker of angels as offering a grim solution to the predicament of the mother in Past and present. As Annabel Rutherford has pointed out: 'In Egg's triptych, the fallen woman represents the outcast adulteress who, abandoned with illegitimate child, is left destitute, wandering the streets'.[4] Such a future would face the woman in Weingärtner's Making of angels, which is why she has taken her child to the murderous wet nurse. The two triptychs therefore enact different versions of the same kind of story.

'Mundane and celestial things'

When writing this post, another comparison came to mind regarding the ghostly babies in the final scene of Weingärtner's Maker of angels:

The slaughtered innocents bring to mind William Holman Hunt's hallucinatory The triumph of the innocents, which exists in three versions (I've included the 1883-4 Tate version below). It depicts the souls of the infants slaughtered during the Massacre of the Innocents, which caused the Holy Family to flee Bethlehem into the wilderness, materialising around the family as they cross a river:

William Holman Hunt, The triumph of the innocents, 1883-4, oil on canvas, 156.2 x 254 cm, Tate, London. Source.

There is a tension between naturalistic and supernatural elements co-existing within the same pictorial space – a space which is defined by an obsessive attention to realistic detail. This caused difficulties for Hunt even at the time. As a staunch upholder of Pre-Raphaelite ideals, he believed that a historical or religious subject should be depicted exactly as it happened – a practice which involved making careful studies of figures and landscapes from the material world and synthesising these observations into a cohesive composition. Frederic George Stephens, who had co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Hunt decades earlier, published his eloquent critiques of The triumph in 1885, declaring in one article:

We cannot see mundane and celestial things at the same time and on equal terms. Hence the realistic landscape and very human figures are in contradiction with the spiritual essences, and visionary bubbles and globes, and the water which is not of the earth, just as the over-solid forms and substances of the Innocents’ figures themselves set at defiance, so to say, their glorified condition.[5]

Elsewhere, Stephens wrote:

In this respect the picture fails completely, not, of course, through any defect of skill, studies, or power on the part of the artist, but simply because he has employed methods which could not succeed. He has endeavoured to represent spiritual essences with substantial appearances, including the varieties of the form, light, shade, and vivid colouring of the life. Naked figures and flying draperies err alike in this respect, and the very souls of the slaughtered children have substances which would weigh heavily in earthly scales. The glorified Innocents are not only splendidly illuminated by an unaccountable lustre, which casts shadows as strong as those of the sunlight when most powerful, but they shine with inner beams, and are self-radiant, though massive.[6]

We can see the same tension between 'spiritual essences' and 'substantial appearances', between 'mundane and celestial things', occurring much earlier in Pre-Raphaelite art, when Millais painted Ferdinand lured by Ariel in 1849-50. Millais depicts a very lush, very real garden,[7] containing a multitude of plants so carefully studied from nature that they could be identified by a botanist, alongside translucent sprites and the supposedly invisible figure of Ariel whispering in Ferdinand's ear:

John Everett Millais, Ferdinand lured by Ariel, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm, The Makins Collection, USA. Source.

What does this have to do with Weingärtner's Brazilian triptych? Quite a lot, I think. Something interesting happens when realist painters introduce unreal or supernatural elements into the midst of their pictures. The pictures no longer fit comfortably into one genre or another, but sit ambiguously between the two. Weingärtner's spectral innocents disrupt or unbalance the social realism of his narrative, which up until this point has been generally concerned with 'mundane' matters. Is the murderer merely imagining the faces in the smoke, or are they actual manifestations? Either way, the woman is haunted – whether by her conscience, or by real ghosts, or both, is left for the viewer to decide.

This post has offered only an introductory glance at these two triptychs.  There are clear stylistic differences between the two, Weingärtner having been more influenced by French art than British art. Egg's Past and present from 1858, and Weingärtner's Maker of angels from 1908 (but still a very nineteenth-century painting in its style and themes), both offer insights into how issues of 'illegitimate' children and 'fallen' womanhood were treated by male painters in Britain and Brazil in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The maker of angels also allows us to see a supernatural motif accorded the same realism as the human elements of the triptych – a problem which faced the Pre-Raphaelites earlier in the nineteenth century.

Notes

[1] Vivian da Silva Paulitsch, Impasses no exercicio da feminilidade e da maternidade no triptico La Faiseuse D'Anges do pintor Pedro Weingartner (1853-1929) [Impasses in the exercise of feminity and motherhood in the triptych La Faiseuse D'Anges by painter Pedro Weingartner (1853-1929)], PhD thesis, University of Campinas, 2009. There is an English version of the abstract but the thesis itself is in Portuguese.

[2] John Ruskin, Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: 1904), vol. 14, p. 166.

[3] Undated letter from John Ruskin to Mrs John Simon (probably 1858), quoted in Annabel Rutherford, 'A Dramatic Reading of Augustus Leopold Egg’s Untitled Triptych', Tate Papers, no. 7 (Spring 2007), note 6.

[4] Rutherford, 'A Dramatic Reading'.

[5] Frederic George Stephens, 'New Pictures', The Athenaeum, 7 March 1885, p. 318.

[6] Frederic George Stephens, 'The Triumph of the Innocents', The Portfolio (April 1885), pp. 81-82.

[7] Millais painted the outdoor elements of Ferdinand lured by Ariel in a real garden near Shotover Park, outside Oxford, in the summer of 1849.

Thoughts on Brazilian art

Me with Pedro Américo's vast canvas The battle of Avaí (1872-9) in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 10 May 2018

How do you begin to study or engage with historical Brazilian art outside Brazil, particularly when you are based in the UK? Immediately there are some problems.

Firstly, there have been very few books on Brazilian art written in English – especially art from the nineteenth century, the period I'm principally interested in. Plenty of books have been published in Brazil, but this requires a working knowledge of Portuguese (which I don't yet have) and access to a library which contains these books in the first place.

Secondly, there are very few examples of Brazilian art in museum collections outside Brazil – at least in the UK. A search of the Art UK website reveals a dearth of Brazilian artists. Certainly, there were artists who travelled from Europe to Brazil in order to document (and to idealise) the 'New World' and its landscapes and peoples: notable examples include the Dutch painter Frans Post (1612-80) and the British artist and biologist Marianne North (1830-90). Works by these artists are available in London museums, such as this Brazilian scene by Post:

Frans Post, Brazilian scene, ca.1665, oil on 48.7 x 64.7 cm, Guildhall Art Gallery, London

Or this vivid study of Brazilian flowers by North:

Marianne North, Brazilian wild flowers, ca.1873, oil on board, 51 x 29 cm, Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew  

This leads to the third, historical factor: in the same way that few British artists went to Brazil in the nineteenth century, few Brazilian artists came here, that I'm aware of. Virtually no art by Brazilians was produced in the UK, so it was not commissioned or collected (do let me know of any examples of this).

Fourth, Brazilian art is absent from many art history curriculums in schools and universities, leading to a lack of awareness even among academics. I was lucky enough to attend one of the few state sixth-form colleges which taught art history at A level (Truro College in Cornwall if you're interested). Our textbook was E. H. Gombrich's The Story of Art, which excludes Brazil from its 'survey of the history of art from the ancient world to the modern era'. This carried over into my undergraduate degree, which focused primarily on European painting and sculpture. My view of art history was therefore heavily Eurocentric; like a typical gringo, the only Latin American artist I could cite with any certainty was Frida Kahlo, who wasn't even from South America anyway.

Following on from this, it seems there have been relatively few exhibitions of historical Brazilian art in the UK. The Ashmolean in Oxford held an exhibition of Brazilian Baroque sculpture in 2001 (titled Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art). Last year, Tate Modern staged a retrospective of Hélio Oticica (1937-80), a twentieth-century artist who was integral to the 1960s Brazilian art movement known as Tropicália – not a pre-1900 figure, but still of great importance to the culture of Brazil. So UK audiences aren't accustomed to seeing works from Brazil even in temporary exhibitions.

Solutions

So, what can be done?

Obviously, learning Portuguese would help, in order to engage with both primary and secondary sources.

The most obvious solution to actually see things is to visit Brazil and spend time in its museums. In some ways, this is a unique situation for Europeans studying the history of Western art (Brazil is part of Western society after all): that, in order to see firsthand examples of artworks from a particular country, you must travel to that country. Generally, the same problem does not face admirers of art from Italy, or France, or the Netherlands, or Spain, for example, because works produced by these 'schools' or nations have been actively collected in the UK over the centuries and are easily available in museums across the country.

This in turn raises questions about the importance we place on seeing works of art 'in person' in the first place. Can we only 'know' a painting by examining the physical object instead of a reproduction? Thanks to the Internet, I can look at paintings from Brazil online in high quality – the collection of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, for example, has been made partially available by Google Arts & Culture. So why bother taking an expensive, twelve-hour flight all the way to the country of origin? Generally I don't follow Walter Benjamin's opinion that the reproduction of an artwork devalues the unique 'aura' of that work which can only be appreciated via in-person viewing – I believe the more museums open up their collections online for everyone to access, the better. However, I feel that in this case, given the lack of 'originals' to go by at all, having a real-world point of reference is crucial. If I have never had the experience of examining a painting by a Brazilian artist up-close in its own museum context, in São Paulo or Rio, how am I to really get an idea of its size, colour scheme, subtlety and draughtsmanship – among other visual qualities?

And frankly, looking at a painting on a laptop screen in rainy England means I can't go and enjoy a plate of rice, beans, farofa and fried manioc afterwards, or tea and carrot cake in Confeitaria Colombo as below:

The mirror-lined, Art Nouveau interior of Confeitaria Colombo in Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1894. Own photo.

Visiting Brazil is not something that can be done easily, though: you need time and funds. During my PhD I allocated myself enough money and time off (my longest trip to Brazil was three weeks) to go and spend time with Felipe and explore more of the country with him. This is something I cannot do in my present situation, although there are options on the horizon which I can work towards.

Another solution which proclaims itself noisily to me is that I should start researching and writing a book on historical Brazilian art for English-speaking audiences – hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why Brazilian art?

Now for a personal perspective. My complete lack of exposure to Brazilian art at university meant that I only encountered it relatively recently: in 2017, to be exact, when I met Felipe, my boyfriend, who is Brazilian. (Should I cite the Guardian article that was written about us last year in a footnote for context, or is that too self-indulgent/meta? Probably.) Felipe is a fellow art historian, which helps when it comes to museum-going and sharing insights.

My first visit to Brazil in May 2018 was an excellent introduction to Brazilian art. Felipe and I visited museums in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as his hometown, Juiz de Fora, where there is a wonderful collection, the Museu Mariano Procópio (sadly barely open at the moment because of lack of funding). Looking at the paintings together, Felipe explained the social, political and historical contexts behind them which I, as a gringo, simply didn't know. In this case it was necessary for art historical observation to be a shared experience; I couldn't have done it alone.

We also travelled to the highly picturesque colonial towns in Felipe's native state, Minas Gerais, which deserve to be described in posts of their own: Tiradentes and São João del Rei (on a later trip we stayed in Ouro Preto, a place I can't describe without tumbling headlong into flowery hyperbole). These Mineiro towns introduced me to Brazil's unique twist on the European Baroque style in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as exemplified in the sculptures and architectural designs of Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730/38-1814), better known by his nickname O Aleijadinho ('The Little Cripple').

Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Antônio Dias, Ouro Preto, Brazil, where Aleijadinho is buried. The façade is newly restored but at the time we visited (December 2018) it was closed to visitors. Own photo.

Ceiling of the Igreja de São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto, Brazil, painted by Manoel da Costa Ataíde (1762-1830). Own photo.

On top of this, I attended a series of presentations given by other doctoral art history students at the University of Juiz de Fora, where Felipe was presenting a paper on his own research (the iconographic representations of the daughters of Louis XV in French eighteenth-century art, FYI). Although the papers were in Portuguese, meaning their content was mostly lost on me, the majority were devoted to nineteenth-century Brazilian artists, so I could still admire the images onscreen. I noted down this intriguing painting by a woman artist, Abigail de Andrade (1864-90/91):

Abigail de Andrade, Um canto do meu ateliê (A corner of my studio), 1884, oil on canvas, private collection

The point of all this is that Brazilian art has a special significance for me; I associate it with happy memories and positive changes in my personal life. If I hadn't met my boyfriend, I would likely never have encountered Brazilian art or become so interested in it. Perhaps this is something which art historians shy away from acknowledging as a motivating factor in their work: that the academic study of a subject can develop out of one's personal life. Perhaps that's at the risk of seeming egoistic?

One of the purposes of this blog, then, is to begin navigating this art historical field which is new to me, in my own way and despite my limited resources. I've already thought of content for future posts, so watch this space!

'Indians' and Druids

Manuel Joaquim de Melo Corte Real, Nóbrega e seus companheiros (Nóbrega and his companions), 1843, oil on canvas, 222.5 x 323.2 cm, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Source.

This huge painting (over two metres high and three metres wide) hangs in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. I saw it in May 2018, during my first trip to Brazil, and I was immediately drawn to its dramatic subject and dynamic composition. The painter is Manuel Joaquim de Melo Corte Real (?-1848), and the title in Portuguese is Nóbrega e seus companheiros, or Nóbrega and his companions. In 1843, Corte Real submitted the painting to the Exposição Geral de Belas Artes (General Exhibition of Fine Arts), which is similar to the Royal Academy's annual summer exhibition in London – artists in Brazil would send their work to a large exhibition held in the school of fine arts in Rio.

Today, Corte Real's painting is troubling in its depiction of a 'savage' indigenous tribe. After first landing in Brazil (as the territory would later be named) in 1500, Portuguese colonisers discovered that the natives practised anthropophagy (cannibalism) – an indication of their perceived immorality which must be swiftly stamped out through diligent missionary work. Indigenous peoples came to be defined by their anthropophagy, and were typically depicted as bestial subhumans who needed to be 'civilised' by their European conquerors.

Padre António Vieria (1608-97) 'preaching' to indigenous men. Source.

The title of Corte Real's painting refers to Padre Manuel (or Manoel) da Nóbrega (1517-70), a Portuguese Jesuit priest who arrived in Brazil in 1549. He was involved with the founding of several Brazilian cities including Salvador, Recife and São Paulo (where there is a square named after him). Corte Real was evidently memorialising him as an important figure in the country's colonial history. Together with several other missionaries, Nóbrega set about converting indigenous peoples to Christianity. Naturally, the priests encountered a lot of resistance. As Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling have observed:

Catechism and civilisation were central to the whole colonial project [...] [The Jesuits] were eventually called 'the soldiers of Christ', and that is how they ended up, a veritable army of cassock-clad priests, fighting the Devil and at the ready to save souls [...] Missionary work in Brazil was seen as dangerous – after all Pedro Correia had been devoured by the Carijó Indians in 1554, and Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha [...] had been eaten alive by the Caeté Indians in 1556 [...] The best thing to do was to indoctrinate these people, who, unlike the natives of the East, 'lacked any faith or religion'.[1]

When Corte Real's painting was exhibited in 1843, it was accompanied in the catalogue with a description of the incident which the artist had depicted:

The historian of the Jesuits in Brazil reports that, wanting these missionaries to destroy the nefarious custom of anthropophagy [cannibalism] among the Gentiles, they dared to take from the hands of women, and from the stove already lit, the corpse of an Indian they were preparing to be devoured; the savages hesitated for a moment by such boldness; but soon afterwards they went to pursue the priests, forcing them to retreat to the village of São Salvador da Bahia; and it narrowly escaped being plundered on that occasion by a few thousand of these enraged cannibals.[2]

All this I learned later (and am still learning, as Brazil's history is long and complex). My immediate reaction to Nóbrega and his companions when I saw it in Rio was that it reminded me of a British Pre-Raphaelite painting that I know very well: William Holman Hunt's Converted British family:

William Holman Hunt, A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 111 x 141 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Source: Art UK.

Begun in 1849 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year, Hunt's painting depicts an imagined incident from early British history, when Christianity was brought to Britain by the Roman missionaries in the first centuries AD. The lengthy title explains it all: 'A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids'. The tension between the old and new religions is a violent one in Hunt's picture: things probably won't end well for the second missionary who is being captured outside the hut. He looks towards the hut in desperation, but we are to suppose that, as a true Christian, he won't betray his comrade inside. This is a painting about brotherhood, sacrifice and charity – and, one could argue, the demonisation of the Celtic, pre-Christian inhabitants of the British isles, romanticised by eighteenth-century antiquarians who helped to create our modern-day conceptions of 'The Druids'. Christians saved lives and spread peace; Celtic Druids practised weird pagan rituals and performed human sacrifice by moonlight in their stone circles.

Detail of Hunt's Converted British family. Source.

Hunt's conceit of contrasting violent, bloodthirsty 'savages'[3] with heroic, peaceful Christians chimes with Corte Real's Nóbrega and his companions, which explores a similar theme. Curiously, the two paintings were created within ten years of each other. Of course, it is impossible that Hunt could have seen or known of Corte Real's work, which has never (I think?) been exhibited in Britain. Brazil and Pre-Raphaelitism are never thought of in the same sentence. Corte Real's visual style is not Pre-Raphaelite; it does not have the painstaking natural detail and scorching brightness of Hunt's painting.

Yet are there similar forces at work here, at least thematically?

One similarity is the way in which both artists chose to depict the central male figures who are being rescued from the 'barbarous natives'. Scholars have already highlighted the complex Christian iconography displayed throughout Hunt's British family. The rescued missionary, clad in red and white, slumps lifelessly in the arms of the elder woman, dressed in Marian blue. Their poses easily evoke the pietà motif – Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus – popular in religious art:

Detail of Hunt's Converted British family

Gerard David, Lamentation, ca. 1515-23, oil on oak, 63 x 62.1 cm, National Gallery, London. Source.

Looking at Corte Real's Nóbrega, we can see a similar analogy to the dead Christ in the naked man being borne away by the Jesuits, his arms outstretched in a cruciform pose:

Detail of Corte Real's Nóbrega and his companions

Images of the semi-nude body of Christ being removed from the cross after the crucifixion are also common in Christian art – the subject categorised as the Deposition. Take this example by Raphael:

Raphael, The deposition (The entombment), 1507, oil on wood, 184 x 176 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome. Source.

Using this parallel between the dead Christ and the dead man – who is explicitly described in the 1843 account as an 'Indian' – Corte Real creates a visual metaphor for the conversion of the indigenous people by Jesuit missionaries: the dead indígena[4] has been saved from the 'nefarious custom of anthropophagy' and thus receives salvation through the Church. Stripped in death of his own religious and social customs – for all we know, he was perfectly willing to be cannibalised by his tribe after his death before the Jesuits interfered – he is transformed into a Christlike figure, a saved soul.

Comparisons between Corte Real and Holman Hunt are not perfect. There are the stylistic and technical variances already mentioned – Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism versus the academicism of Corte Real's picture. The racial differences between the Christians and 'savages' are far more pronounced, and more problematic, in Corte Real's painting, which has its roots in Brazil's colonial past. Indigenous people were slaughtered or exploited for labour by the Portuguese settlers in the sixteenth century – horrors which we are reminded of more easily when looking at Corte Real's painting than when we look at Hunt's picture. Admittedly, I do not know nearly enough about the spreading of early Christianity in Britain – whether this spread was relatively peaceful, or if it ever reached the same level of appalling violence as when the Portuguese colonised Brazil (this does seem unlikely).

William Holman Hunt, Study for the head of the missionary in 'A converted British family', ca. 1849, reproduced in Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), vol. 1, p. 195

In his journal for May 1849, William Michael Rossetti described the subject of Hunt's picture as a 'Monk succoured by the ancient Britons in time of persecution'.[5] The word 'persecution' was carried over into the painting's eventual title, suggesting that Hunt had it in mind from the earliest stage of the picture's development as a key concept or theme. Writing this now, I realise that I have never really questioned this title. 'A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids' – certainly, we tend to sympathise with the missionaries in the painting as they are undergoing a violent ordeal, yet were the Celts not also 'persecuted' to some extent, their religious beliefs suppressed by the Roman Catholics who had come to convert them? Other historians are better placed to answer that question.

This is all part of a much larger issue than this simple blog post can deal with – indeed, I was somewhat cautious in posting it as it touches on racial and religious issues which I somehow don't feel qualified to comment upon. Still, I hope to have shown that Brazilian art, unfamiliar as it is to most non-Brazilian viewers – is as potent and complex as the British pictures which we're so accustomed to studying. Comparing Hunt's Converted British family with Corte Real's Nóbrega has given me a new perspective on the former, and raises questions of race, religion and empire. It may be a superficial comparison, but it's compelling and may warrant further consideration. I hope to continue these kinds of comparisons in future posts.

Notes

[1] Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Brazil: A Biography, English edition (London: Penguin, 2018), pp. 26-27.

[2] Quoted in Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana-Bayona, 'Presença do passado no Brasil imperial: a tela Nóbrega e seus companheiros (1843)', Varia Historia, vol. 27, no. 45 (Jan./June 2011) – translated from the original Portuguese using Google Translate.

[3] William Michael Rossetti used the term 'savage' in relation to the Celts in Hunt's painting in his diary on 6 March 1850: '[Hunt] has done the priest's drapery, put in the other priest outside [...] painted [F. G. Stephens's] head for a savage outside, with various others'; William E. Fredeman, ed., The PRB Journal: William Michael Rossetti's Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1849-1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 61.

[4] The term 'Indian', while it may sound offensive to European readers, is still used by many Brazilians today to describe indigenous people in Brazil (including in Schwarcz and Starling's book Brazil cited above). However, some indigenous groups in Brazil have been promoting the term 'indígena' as a better alternative, and I have used it here.

[5] Fredeman, PRB Journal, p. 4 (19 May 1849).

Fresh starts and FGS

Welcome to my new blog!

Some of you may already know me from my old blog (I'm officially labelling it 'old'), Pre-Raphaelite Reflections. I started it during my BA in June 2013, and wrote content for it semi-regularly for four years. During this time I studied for my MA at York (2014-15) and started my PhD at Oxford Brookes (September 2016). Doctoral research, of course, takes up a lot of time and energy, and the blog fell by the wayside. My last post was in October 2017; it discussed the progress I had so far made on my doctoral research into the life, art and writings of Frederic George Stephens (to whom I affectionately refer as 'FGS'). Now that so much time has passed, and I have moved on academically, I have decided to put my old blog to rest, although I will certainly leave it up there for readers to (hopefully!) enjoy.

'Pre-Raphaelite Reflections' did result in a few nice things. At some point I started a Facebook page to accompany it, which is still running – although, like the blog, I rarely update this any more. At the time of writing it has accrued nearly 2,700 likes, which isn't bad.

I also had the pleasant surprise of one of my blog posts on Stephens being cited in the catalogue for the Tate loan exhibition Love & Desire which was held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2018-19. Stephens's painting The proposal – which I personally think is quite fabulous – was sent to Australia, complete with a shiny new catalogue entry which referenced my blog post in the footnotes. You can see it online here. Admittedly, my completed thesis has rendered the information given in the footnote (and in my original blog post) quite useless. Still, it was so satisfying to see my work on Stephens being acknowledged.

F. G. Stephens's The proposal (The Marquis and Griselda), 1850-1, on display in the exhibition Love & Desire at the National Gallery of Australia. Photo: Facebook.

I digress.

What, then, will this new blog be?

I passed my viva in November last year, and am currently in the process of submitting the final version of my thesis to Oxford Brookes.

As I navigate the postdoctoral landscape – 'What now?', 'Where do I go?', 'What do I publish?', 'How do I get funding?', 'Do I pursue a different career path in museums?' – I still think of art and literature. Pre-Raphaelitism is a continuous presence, a source of endless curiosity. But other cultural influences have entered my life. My boyfriend, whom I met in 2017 near the beginning of my PhD, is Brazilian and an art historian like myself. Through him I have 'discovered' the art of Brazil, a broad and fascinating subject which has received virtually no attention in Eurocentric accounts of art history. I would like to explore these topics in greater detail.

Really, this will be a general art history/literary research blog, with occasional personal posts added into the mix. A sort of blogging fresh start. I hope you enjoy reading it!