Gender, Legends and Art French Painting

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Gender, Legends and Art French Painting

• Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki Department of Art Research
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Claude Deruet, c. 1643Madame de Saint-Baslemont
de Neuville

• woman warrior who actively defended her  manor
  during the Thirty Year War
• Athena (palm and laurel)
• topography
• angel (trumpet, stendards)
• putti (laurel, flowers, book-music-poetry)

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Madame de Saint-Baslemont de Neuville

• Class, possession, role, clothes the masculine
  powers symbols occulted the signifiers of
  femininity

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David, Napoleon at St. Bernard, 1800
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Jean Jacques Francois Le Barbier, 1871"Jeanne
Hachette at the Siege of Beauvais in 1472"

• Class
• Weapons rocks, burning brands
• Helpless male enemies

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Jeanne Hachette

• Temporary warriors
• Husbands cowardice
• Rouchers epic Le Mois Be men for them if they
  are women for you
• More militan than the men
• Exemplum virtutis, model for men and women
• Moral vervor, patriotic emotion

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VITAL-DUBRAY 1851Beauvais (Oise, France) Statue
de Jeanne Hachette
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Goya, c. 1810. They are acting like wild beast

• Absence of war propaganda
• Negative vision of the women warriors and of
  war in general
• The women are forced by war to behave like wild
  beasts
• They behave like something other than women men
  or animals

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Goya, Disasters of war
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Eugene Delacroix Liberty Leading People, 1830
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Venus of Melos
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Liberty

• Liberty is a bellicose leader not a peacemaker
• Is an allegory, not an historical figure
• Dramatic energy, convinction
• Leading a mixed group of males
• Ambiguity
• Semi-nudity of classical sculture and rought
  proletarian cloth of the working class
• Is idealized, but at the same time concrete and
  sensual
• Prototipal women-warrior in the history of art

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Liberty and sensuality

• Domesticity is irrilevant for Delacroix a dandy
• Liberty has the same sensual vividness of other
  paintings

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Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827)
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Honore Daumier the repubblic, 1848
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(No Transcript)
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Jacques-Louis David The Oath of the Horatii
1784 Horatii and Curatii
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Jacques-Louis David The Sabine WomenTatius,
Hersilia, Romolus
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Jacques-Louis DavidBelisarius, 1781 and St.
Roch and the Virgin, 1780
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• Men and women actives
• Women activism peacemakers

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Novellist - Activist

• In 19th Century France, two types of women
  writers stood out the novelist who intertwined
  her political view within the story, and the
  political activist who outrightly fought women's
  oppression in society and the household

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Negative warrior woman the feminist

• In 1848, Edouard de Beaumont created a series of
  images called Les Vesuviennes, which depicted the
  Parisian women as "women warriors" or feminists
• Beaumont used a type of role reversal to shock
  the viewer

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Beaumont'sBanquet Femino-Socialiste

• women's freedom was associated with the
  destruction of family
• Irony a pregnant women is, according to
  Beaumont, protesting against the family

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La Femme Libre ?
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Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

• A proper 19th century woman ?

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Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

• it expressed the faults of the moder woman
• Rather than tending to her maternal and spousal
  duties
• the woman "mindlessly sponge absorbing dangerous
  lessons from novels."
• Bergman-Carton, Janis. The Woman of Ideas in
  French Art, 1830-1848. Yale University Press, New
  Haven 1995. Page 111.
• fire and the darkness all around her only
  reinforces the sinful motif
• Fire hell, passion

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Madame de Stael Exiled for a novel

• Madame de Stael wrote the book Delphine.
• A story of one woman fighting the social codes of
  France in an attempt to gain individual freedom.
• Amongst other topics, the book addressed divorce
  and social unacceptance of spinsterhood.
• Napolean reacted to her book and her political
  views by exiling Stael from France

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George Sand , novellist

• I solemnly vow that I shall raise woman from
  her abject position, both through my self and my
  writing,
• God will help me!...let female slavery also have
  its Spartacus.
• That shall I be, or perish in the attempt."
• George Sand in a letter to Frederic Girerd, 1837

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Congres Masculino-Foemino-LiteraireAuthor unknown

• The woman on the right is probably George Sand
• She was notorious for wearing men's clothing
• common assumptions women writers were rude,
  vulgar and masculine women

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1836 Gazette des Femmes

• the Gazette was written by an elite upper class
  of both male and female bourgeois

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Nadar's Pictorial Biography of George
Sand(Barry, Joseph. Infamous Woman the life of
George Sand Doubleday Co, New York 1977)
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Flora Tristan author and date ?

• active in the feminist movement in the mid 1830s,
  arguing for divorce and against gender
  constraints
• she saw herself as "the woman messiah
• Flora Tristan was never actually arrested
• she was indeed under the surveillance of the
  police for the last few years of her life
• Christ-like stance