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| Pedro Weingärtner (1853-1929). Source. |
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.
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| 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!
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:
John Ruskin summarised the narrative in his 1858 Academy Notes:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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| All three images: Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and present, 1858, oil on canvas, each canvas 63.5 x 76.2 cm, Tate, London. Source. |
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:
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| William Holman Hunt, The triumph of the innocents, 1883-4, oil on canvas, 156.2 x 254 cm, Tate, London. Source. |
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:
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| John Everett Millais, Ferdinand lured by Ariel, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm, The Makins Collection, USA. Source. |
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.
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