【大都会 English script】第七章：水的世界 Watery Life

Chapter 7 : Watery Life
<Introduction>
All of life on earth emerged from the sea, and this exploration of nature in Western art concludes with water as habitat and subject. Many ancient civilizations developed in areas fed by water, a source of fertility for the land. Because travel was easier by boat than overland, the sea was the key avenue for transportation and trade for centuries. For these reasons, water has always been important to culture, and artists have depicted its creatures since early times. Fish, frogs, and other aquatic animals are not domesticated, however, and their strangeness is amplified in representation. Some artists present them in abstracted forms that capture their essence, while others render them with specificity, based on direct study.
Landscapes incorporating water as a key element are common to many artistic traditions. These images may represent an idealized golden age or record a particular setting with careful verisimilitude. They can convey the terror of a great wave or the quiet intimacy of an alpine pool. The history of landscape traditions, as discussed in the introduction to Chapter 6, also applies to the seascapes, riverscapes, and other water views in this section. Quality of brushstroke, point of view, and selection of scene, color, light, and composition affect what is depicted and our response—the artist is in control of all effects. Water's unique properties of movement, transparency, and reflectivity are a challenge and inspiration to artists through the ages.
（一）水的世界：水生百态
本部分展出的青蛙、鱼和其他海洋动物，它们的创作者可谓跨越了本次展览涵盖的整个历史阶段，呈现了多种创作风格和创作媒材。一条迈锡尼（Mycenaean）文明时期的章鱼拥抱着它所装饰的水罐，凸显了海洋在古希腊文化中的中心位置。被塑造成虾钳状和鱼状的器皿，则是一种披上海洋生物外衣的实用物品。一群群身体光滑的海底生物以一只文艺复兴时期的大浅盘为舞台，上演了一场海底秀。一只巨大的乔治·亨治尔（GeorgesHoentschel）出品的花瓶被誉为19世纪新艺术的典范之作，花瓶上描绘了漩涡形的水底世界，摇曳生姿的水草间潜伏着各种鱼类和甲壳动物。
I. Watery Life: Water Creatures
The frogs, fish, and other marine animals in this section, made by artists across the full scope of centuries represented in the exhibition, show a range of styles and media. The Mycenaean octopus, embracing the jar he embellishes, asserts the centrality of the sea in ancient Greek culture. Vessels in the shape of a lobster claw and a fish are functional objects in the guise of realistic sea creatures. Casts of actual slithery specimens were used in modeling a Renaissance platter. On the monumental Georges Hoentschel vase, a nineteenth-century masterpiece of Art Nouveau, a liquid world of water swirls around, fish and crustaceans lurking in the trailing seaweed.
                
                
Weight in the shape of a frog
Old Babylonian period, ca. 2000–1600 B.C.
Mesopotamian
Diorite or andesite
12.3 x 21.8 cm, WT. 4700 grams
Purchase, Leon Levy and Shelby White Gift, Rogers Fund, and Nathaniel Spear, Jr. Gift, 1988 (1988.301)
Carved in a hard, fine-grained dark stone, this weight from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the shape of a frog belongs to a long tradition in the ancient Near East of animal-shaped, or zoomorphic, weights. A cuneiform inscription on the frog's throat reads: "ten-mina frog, reliable weight of Shamash, belonging to Iddin-Nergal, son of Arkat-ili-damqa." Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god, is likely evoked here as guarantor of the weight's validity in his role as god of justice and truth. Based on the inscription, the weight has been dated to the Old Babylonian period. Since the Mesopotamian mathematical system is based on units of six, weights were divided into units of sixty, with one talent being equivalent to sixty mina, and one mina equal to sixty shekels. A mina is roughly five hundred grams, although ancient weight standards were based on the arbitrary concept of the talent as equal to the load that could be carried by a man or animal, and thus varied among different areas and time periods.
Duck-shaped examples are the most common zoomorphic weights, but frog- and toad-shaped ones have been found in Egypt and a set of zoomorphic bronze weights from the Uluburun shipwreck off the southwestern coast of Turkey includes a sphinx, a lioness, a frog, and even a fly. The great variety of zoomorphic weights suggests that they were not strictly utilitarian objects but were also meant to delight, especially unusual types such as the frog. One example comes from the site of Metsamor, in present-day Armenia, where an agate frog weight inscribed with the name of the Kassite king Ulam-Burariash, who may have ruled parts of Mesopotamia about 1475, was excavated in a rich burial dating to the early first millennium B.C. (Museum of History and Archaeology, Metsamor). It seems to have been an heirloom from a distant land placed in the tomb as a personal ornament or amulet, attesting to the valued status of such weights.
Reference:
Khanzadian, E. V., G. Kh. Sarkisian, and I. M. Diakonoff. "A Babylonian Weight from the Sixteenth Century B.C. with Cuneiform Inscription from the Metsamor Excavations." Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology 30, 4 (1992): pp. 75–83.
Oates, Joan. Babylon. London, 2005, p. 251.
Powell, M. A. "Masse und Gewichte." In Reallexikon der Assyriologie. Vol. 7. Edited by D. O. Edzard, pp. 457–517. Berlin, 1990.
                
                
Stirrup jar with octopus
Late Helladic IIIC period, ca. 1200–1100 B.C.
Mycenaean
Terracotta
H. 26 cm, Diam. 21.5 cm
Purchase, Louise Eldridge McBurney Gift, 1953 (53.11.6)
The shape of this vessel takes its name from the configuration of the spout and the two attached handles. Such jars were commonly used to transport liquids. Mycenaean artists adopted the aquatic motifs from the art of Minoan Crete, where a distinct naturalistic marine style flourished in the first part of the Late Bronze Age (1600–1050 B.C.). The jar is decorated with two large octopuses in dark paint rendered in an abstracted formal design characteristic of Mycenaean pictorial vase painting. The spiraling ends of their eight arms curve with the form of the vessel as if suspended in water. The eyes of each octopus take the shape of concentric circles, and quick strokes delineate their suckers. A pattern of intersecting, arching lines around the creatures' undulating bodies may indicate membranes between their limbs or the motion of water as they move. Fish and rosettes appear in the space between the arms.
Octopus stirrup jars are among the most characteristic ceramic vases produced at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean. Stylistic analysis of the shape and painted decoration and scientific analysis of the clay of some of these vases suggest that they were made for export at workshops on the islands of Rhodes, Naxos, and Crete, and in Attica. The vessels have been found at many different sites in the southern Aegean islands, in mainland Greece, and on the west coast of Asia Minor, attesting to the widespread connections between Mycenaeans at a time of impoverishment and uncertainty.
Reference:
Demakopoulou, Katie, ed. The Mycenaean World: Five Centuries of Early Greek Culture 1600–1100 B.C. Athens, 1988.
Mountjoy, Penelope A. Mycenaean Pottery: An Introduction. Oxford, 1993.
Picón, Carlos, et al. Art of the Classical World in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 43, 412, 7.
                
                
Attributed to the Class of Seven Lobster-Claws
Vase in the shape of a lobster claw
Classical period, ca. 460 B.C.
Greek, Athens
Terracotta, red-figure
Overall 7 x 7.3 cm
Rogers Fund, 1923 (23.160.57)
The ancient Greeks never lived far from the sea, and marine elements appear frequently in their art. Sculptural vases were especially popular in the Archaic (ca. 600–480 B.C.) and Classical (ca. 480–323 B.C.) periods, when they took on a wide variety of human and animal forms as well as aquatic motifs like sea monsters, cockleshells, fish, and lobster claws. The renowned scholar-philosopher Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, was an ardent naturalist who wrote some of the earliest known in-depth scientific descriptions of animals. In book four of Aristotle's History of Animals (ca. 345–322 B.C.), he describes the lobster in great detail: "[T]he lobster is all over grey-colored, with a mottling of black. Its lower feet, before reaching the big feet or claws, are eight in number; then come the big feet far larger and flatter at the tips than the same organs in the crayfish; and these big feet or claws are exceptional in their structure, for the right claw has the extreme flat surface long and thin, while the left claw has the corresponding surface thick and rounded. Each of the two claws, divided at the end like a pair of jaws, has both below and above a set of teeth: only that in the right claw they are all small and saw-shaped, these latter being, in the under part of the left claw, four teeth close together, and in the upper part three teeth, not close together. Both right and left claws have the upper part mobile, and bring it to bear against the lower one, and both are curved like bandy legs, being thereby adapted for apprehension and constriction."
The form of this vase adheres closely to Aristotle's description of the lobster's left claw.
Reference:
Aristotle. Historia Animalia. Vol. 2. Trans. by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, 1970, esp. pp. 20–21.
Beazley, John D. Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1963, pp. 777, 971, 6.
Mertens, Joan R. How to Read Greek Vases. New York, 2010.
                
                
Vessel in the shape of a fish
Late Roman or Early Byzantine period, 300–600
Copper alloy
22.4 x 7.1 x 4.1 cm
Fletcher Fund, 1962 (62.10.4)
Public baths were an important institution in ancient Rome, and they persisted in the early medieval world. Patrons would bring an array of personal effects for use in the bath, including towels as well as oils and perfumes, and could store these items in the changing rooms. This small vessel was likely used to keep and carry ointment. Several ancient baths had aquatic themes in their decorative mosaics or frescoes, and the choice of a fish is especially appropriate for a bathing accessory.
The fish is rendered naturalistically, with incised scales and fins. Ornamented with a butterfly, the vessel's stopper is located at the mouth of the fish, as if the animal were feeding. Thus, there is a real feeling for the representation of nature in this utilitarian object. Vessels of this type in the form of a fish were popular in the Late Antique period (roughly 4th–6th century). There are similar examples in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and the Benaki Museum in Athens. The creature's four-pronged tail serves as a base for the vessel to stand upright, or it can be suspended from the chain attached to its gills.
Reference:
Barnet, Peter, and Pete Dandridge, eds. Lions, Dragons, and Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages, Vessels for Church and Table. Exh. cat. New Haven, 2005, 178, 32.
                
                
Folio from Aja`ib al-Makhluqat (Wonders of Creation) by Abu Yahya Qazwini (ca. 1203–1283)
Second half of the 16th century
Iranian, Khurasan or Bukhara
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
14.7 x 14.0 cm (folio)
Bequest of George D. Pratt, 1945 (45.174.17)
Because of the vignette in the foreground, in which a sea creature devours a man, this painting was previously identified as a depiction of Jonah and the whale from Rashid al-Din's fourteenth-century text Jami al-Tawarikh (Universal History). However, even in period versions of the theme the whale was not confused with a dragon. Rather, this painting, removed from its original manuscript, is most likely an illustration for Aja`ib al-Makhluqat (Wonders of Creation), composed in the third quarter of the thirteenth century by Abu Yahya Qazwini. Written in Arabic and translated into Persian and Turkish, this manuscript remained extremely popular across the Islamic world well into the seventeenth century. Qazwini's text is divided into two parts: the first deals with the heavens, from astronomy, astrology, and angels to the calendar, and the second concentrates on the terrestrial world of minerals, animals, plants, and supernatural beings. Even the earliest volumes of Wonders of Creation contain illustrations, though often they are smaller and simpler than this one.
The subject of this painting appears to be the large tortoise standing on the shoreline with its front feet in the water. The tortoise is discussed toward the end of Qazwini's text, immediately following descriptions of the viper, a poisonous lizard, and one type of dragon. The dragon sitting on the back of the fish in the right foreground of the image may represent this type. Scholars have identified the tortoise as a Hawksbill (E. imbricata), a variety of sea turtle that is widely distributed across the world, including the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Critically endangered today, this creature once was the source of commercially traded tortoise shell.
Reference:
Pugachenkova, G., and O. Galerkina. Miniatury Srednei Azii. Moscow, 1979, esp. pp. 108–9.
                
                
Toad with young toad on its back
Probably early 16th century
Italian, Padua
Bronze
6.4 x 11.7 x 12.1 cm
Gift of Ogden Mills, 1925 (25.142.24)
The founders of Padua were probably the first to cast creatures from life, to the delectation of a clientele with a new passion for the natural sciences. Thus faithful bronze replicas of toads, frogs, and snakes reached the desks of doctors and professors, among other collectors. Eventually many were attributed, misguidedly, to the great Paduan sculptor Andrea Riccio (1470–1532).
This adult toad is of the genus Bufo volgaris, known across Europe. The baby clinging to its back probably issued from the modeler's imagination rather than from observed fact. The object once belonged to Achille Fould (1800–1867), a French banker and minister of finance during the Second Empire, the heyday of the revived interest in Italian bronzes that was centered in Paris.
Reference:
Planiscig, Leo. Andrea Riccio. Vienna, 1927, pp. 364–67 (for related casts from nature)
Scholten, Frits. "Nature Casting." In Bronze: The Power of Life and Death. Exh. cat. Leeds, 2005, pp. 64–67.
                
                
School of Bernard Palissy (French, 1510–1589)
Platter with aquatic motifs
1575–1600
Lead-glazed earthenware
52.1 x 39.7 x 7.1 cm
Gift of Julia A. Berwind, 1953 (53.225.52)
Bernard Palissy was both an inventive ceramist and a serious student of nature. He established a "little academy" in Sedan, in northeast France, where he taught the natural sciences, and his lectures were published in Paris in 1580 as Discours admirables (Admirable Discourses). Palissy's knowledge was based on direct observation, and in this spirit he kept a cabinet of curiosities filled with stuffed and preserved animals. This approach to nature informed his ceramics, which are often composed of clay forms taken directly from molds of flora and fauna.
This oval platter in the manner of Palissy centers on a snake slithering across a tiny island. Fish swim rather stiffly atop the raked surface of the water surrounding the islet, while other creatures that might be found near a riverbank—a crayfish, frog, lizards—are scattered decoratively across the surface. Bright nautilus and scallop shells mix with flowing fern and oak leaves to fill out this pastoral tableau. In the Renaissance, assemblages of animals were sometimes read as parables of the more powerful or deceptive species overcoming the weaker ones.
Palissy's surprising subjects and lustrous, colored glazes attracted patronage at the highest level of French society. The chief of the army, Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), collected his rustic platters. Queen Mother Catherine de' Medici (1519–1589) even commissioned Palissy to create an entire grotto for her Tuileries palace. This project was never completed, but the kilns the artist used to fire its animals and architectural elements as well as many fragments of his production were unearthed during recent excavations at the Louvre, in Paris. His ingenious clay creations inspired many followers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and were revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Reference:
Amico, Leonard. Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise. Paris, 1996.
Wardropper, Ian. "The Flowering of the French Renaissance." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 62, 1 (Summer 2004): pp. 37–38.
                
                
Caspar Bendel (German [Breslau; now Poland], master 1575–1599)
Standing cup with seashell
Late 16th century; shell and mount 19th century
Green turban snail shell and gilded silver
27 x 14 x 16.5 cm
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.600)
The depiction of objects from nature was not new to European artists of the sixteenth century. What was new, however, was the incorporation of shellfish, salamanders, frogs, and other small aquatic wildlife, sometimes directly cast from living creatures, in decorative motifs for goldsmiths' work, ceramics, and even small bronzes. Although their use may have originated in the artificial grottoes created for palace gardens, such casts are thought to have been the particular specialty of the ceramist Bernard Palissy (see cat. 118) in France and the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1509–1585) in Germany. However, this style of ornament, known as der stil rustique, influenced artists and craftsmen over a wider area.
The practice of mounting real seashells—rare and exotic objects in sixteenth-century Europe—was older and even more widespread. The snail shell in this cup is a replacement for the deteriorated original and required new strapwork and a new lip, which are ornamented in the style of about 1540–1550. Although not cast from living examples, the three salamanders on the base of the cup are the product of a goldsmith working in Breslau under the influence of der stil rustique. This prevailing influence may also have governed the artist's choice of the classical hero Hercules to support the shell. The myth of Hercules's extraordinary strength records twelve labors carried out in atonement for his actions during a fit of madness. The first labor was to strangle the Nemean Lion and the eleventh was to kill the serpent Ladon, the guardian of the golden apples on a tree in the garden of the Hesperides. The miniature sculpture that forms the stem of the cup thus wears the lion's pelt encircled by a snake.
Reference:
Hintze, Erwin. Die Breslauer Goldschmiede. Breslau, 1906, pp. 42, 45, fig. 13, pl. II, fig. 2, and pl. III, fig. 61.
Koeppe, Wolfram. "Chinese Shells, French Prints, and Russian Goldsmithing: A Curious Group of Eighteenth-Century Russian Table Snuffboxes." Metropolitan Museum Journal 32 (1997): pp. 207, 208, fig. 1.
Kris, Ernst. "'Der Stil Rustique': Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernard Palissy." Jahrhuch der Kunsthistorisches Sammlungen in Wien, n.s. 1 (1926): pp. 137–208.
                
                
Tiffany & Co. (New York, N.Y., 1837–present)
Vase with fish motif
1877
Silver
20.6 x 10.8 x 10.8 cm, WT. 464.5 grams
Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. H. O. H. Frelinghuysen Gift, 1982 (1982.349)
The applied fish and engraved seaweed motifs that ornament this vase, as well as their asymmetrical arrangement into a continuous wraparound scene, reflect the influence of Japanese art, which was strongly felt in the United States by the 1870s. Edward C. Moore (1827–1891), head designer at Tiffany & Co. from 1868 until his death, was a major promoter of the Japanesque style. Moore's keen interest in exotic cultures is manifest in the large collection of Asian and Near Eastern objects that he bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum. The firm founded in 1837 by Charles L. Tiffany (1812–1902) had developed by this time into a leading manufacturer and retailer of silver and jewelry, exhibiting at world's fairs, winning international competitions, and employing some of the most creative designers of the nineteenth century.
Tiffany's first use of this style was in its "Japanese" flatware pattern, which was patented in 1871. The shape of the vase and the design of the die-rolled borders and bracket feet were devised at Tiffany & Co. the following year, and a surviving drawing of the applied fish motif is dated 1877. The geometric fretwork border incorporates additional naturalistic elements, such as cranes with outspread wings, sprigs of cherry blossoms, and stylized leaves. This border was also used on other Tiffany objects of the period. The vase originally had a more variegated or pebbled surface created through oxidation, which provided subtle texture to this evocative underwater scene.
Reference:
Carpenter, Charles H. Jr., with Mary Grace Carpenter. Tiffany Silver. New York, 1978.
Loring, John. Magnificent Tiffany Silver. New York, 2001.
Venable, Charles L. Silver in America, 1840–1940: A Century of Splendor. Dallas, 1994.
                
                
Tiffany & Co. (New York, N.Y., 1837–present)
Tray with frog motif
1879–80
Silver, copper, brass, and gold
23.2 x 2.2 cm, WT. 544.3 grams
Rogers Fund, 1966 (66.52.2)
Silver objects decorated with colored metals and alloys, including some based directly on Japanese formulas, began to appear among Tiffany & Co.'s Japanesque designs in 1877. This delightful circular tray features a cast and applied copper-and-brass frog in a rippling pond with mosquitoes swarming above and beside him. The nocturnal scene is surmounted by an inlaid copper and gold moon, partially hidden behind clouds. Motifs in these colored metals were frequently set off by a chased and oxidized ground. Here, steel punches create the effect of a hand-hammered surface. The Museum also owns a similar silver tray by Tiffany & Co. ornamented with boldly scaled irises in the Japanese taste.
Surviving among the Tiffany & Co. archives is a preparatory drawing for this tray annotated with various production instructions. To the right of the inlaid moon, for instance, is written, "INLAID. / RED GOLD / NOT Colored," and at the lower right of the drawing is the inscription, "Grass, Water & Mosquitoes etched." The sheet is stamped "DEC / 18 / 1879," which helps establish the earliest possible date of manufacture. The underside of the tray is stamped with the firm's customary mark, "TIFFANY & Co / MAKERS / STERLING SILVER," and the additional words, "AND / OTHER METALS / PATENT APPLIED FOR," indicating that the firm intended to patent this particularly charming design.
Reference:
Carpenter, Charles H. Jr., with Mary Grace Carpenter. Tiffany Silver. New York, 1978.
Loring, John. Magnificent Tiffany Silver. New York, 2001.
Venable, Charles L. Silver in America, 1840–1940: A Century of Splendor. Dallas, 1994.
                
                
Designed by William de Morgan (English, 1839–1917)
Charger with fish motifs
ca. 1890
Lustered earthenware
Diam. 51.4 cm
Anonymous Gift, 1929 (29.32)
The Englishman William de Morgan, a painter and stained-glass artist who designed tiles and glass for the Arts and Crafts firm Morris & Company, began decorating pottery in 1869. In 1872, de Morgan set up his own pottery works in Chelsea, London, moving once again in 1881—to a larger site in Merton Abbey, Surrey, where William Morris (1834–1896) had recently established his own workshops.
The Arts and Crafts ideology he was exposed to through his friendship with Morris and his own inventive streak led de Morgan to explore the many technical aspects of his craft. Most importantly, in the mid-1870s he revived the medieval luster glazing technique used in early fifteenth-century to decorate Hispano-Moresque pottery and Italian majolica with an iridescent metallic surface. From about 1875 he favored a palette of "Persian" colors, including dark blue, turquoise, manganese purple, green, Indian red, and lemon yellow, made from such metallic oxides as silver and copper. These lusterwares were shown at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
De Morgan's design aesthetic was also influenced by his interest in the East, especially fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iznik wares of Turkey. He used many Islamic motifs, such as the meander pattern, palmette, leaf, tree, tendril, and floret. Much of his flora and fauna derived from Middle Eastern ornament and he gave many of his designs titles that reflect their origin in Islamic art. De Morgan's whimsical ceramics often include fantastic creatures—humorous birds, strange sea animals, even dragons—entwined in this rhythmic and exotic foliage. In this large plate, lustrous ruby-red and gold flying fish swirl through a sea of Persian-style foliage—flowers and leaves that would most certainly never appear underwater.
Reference:
Gaunt, William, and M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm. William De Morgan. London, 1971.
Greenwood, Martin. The Designs of William De Morgan. Ilminster, Somerset, England, 1989.
William De Morgan (1839–1917): An Exhibition Organized by the Friends of Leighton House. Exh. cat. London, 1972.
(二）水的世界：江河湖海
长期以来，艺术家们一直被威尼斯这座由群岛和运河组成的礁湖城市所吸引，并为其光影与水波交相辉映的独特效果所迷醉。这里展出的两幅威尼斯风景画，虽然描绘的几乎是同一处景色，但给人的感觉却截然不同—这一例子生动地说明了，作品效果主要取决于艺术家们所选择的表达手法，而非所描绘的景点。19世纪后期至20世纪早期的艺术家，包括克劳德·莫奈（ClaudeMonet）、保罗·塞尚（PaulCézanne）、温斯洛·霍默（WinslowHomer）等所创作的海景画均以不同方式探索了如何精确地再现水面的特殊效果，并着重彰显画面美景。
II. Watery Life: Sea and Stream
Mesmerized by its unique interplay of light and water, artists have long been attracted to Venice, a city on a lagoon built of islands and canals. The two paintings of Venice featured here depict almost the same spot in the city, and yet how different they are—a dramatic demonstration of the varying effects chosen by artists, not dependent upon the site that is painted. Marine views of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by artists such as Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Winslow Homer each explore different ways to evoke the special qualities of water while simultaneously emphasizing the physical reality of paint on canvas.
                
                
Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808)
Bridge over a Cascade
ca. 1776
Oil on canvas
81.3 x 137.5 cm
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906 (07.225.264a)
In 1754 Hubert Robert arrived in Rome and was admitted to the French Academy, where he became a pensionnaire (resident student artist). He had traveled to Italy in the following of his patron, Étienne François de Stainville (1819–1785), later duc de Choiseul and foreign minister of France. Robert was interested in ancient and modern architecture and in the ruins of the city and the surrounding countryside (he was called "Robert des ruines"). He returned to Paris in 1765 with quantities of drawings that would provide him with material for his work for years to come. In 1766, he was received and accepted into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and from 1767 until 1798 he exhibited at the Salon. He was Louis XVI's garden designer and painted suites of landscapes with pastoral staffage for the king, his courtiers, and wealthy private clients. Prolific and popular, Robert reportedly died with his brush in hand.
This overdoor is one of a pair; its pendant is Aqueduct in Ruins, also in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. The two were part of a larger ensemble that included another pair of overdoors and five canvases varying in height from 83 to 233 centimeters. All seem to have been commissioned or acquired by David Étienne Rouillé de l'Étang (1731–1811) for the house he remodeled at 6, place Louis XV, later place de la Concorde, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The house passed by descent to Marie Jeanne Louise Thérèse de Pastoret (1840–1890), marquise du Plessis-Bellière, who in 1870 removed the Roberts paintings to the château de Moreuil. They were sold in 1897. Here, the ancient bridge over the dam seems to be in use and in fairly good repair. In the foreground, one peasant leans on the back of a white horse while another kneels to cut reeds in the shallow water.
Reference:
Hôtel Drouot. Collection de Mme la Marquise du Plessis-Bellière. Paris, May 10–11, 1897, pp. III–V, 23, 72.
                
                
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) (Italian, 1697–1768)
Venice: Santa Maria della Salute
ca. 1740
Oil on canvas
47.6 x 79.4 cm
Purchase, George T. Delacorte Jr. Gift, 1959 (59.38)
Canaletto was a Venetian draftsman, view painter, and printmaker who commenced his career painting scenery for the theatre. He visited Rome, but returned to Venice by 1720 to devote himself to topographical painting. In 1725–26 he completed his first documented views, for Stefano Conti of Lucca (1654–1739). By 1730, Joseph Smith, his agent, was forwarding his work to English clients. Canaletto spent nearly ten years beginning in 1746 in London, but otherwise was faithful to his native city, where he was elected to the academy in 1783.
A bird's eye view is to a degree imaginary: Canaletto's is taken from high above the Grand Canal and the landing stage at Santa Maria della Salute. The panorama embraces the entrance to the canal with, at right, the magnificent white marble facade and dome of the church, one of the most splendid sights Venice affords. Beyond the church is the facade of the Seminario Patriarcale, and further on the tower of the Customs House rises above warehouse roofs. To the left, along the waterfront, are some of the most important buildings in the city: the mint, the library, one of the columns in the Piazzetta, the Palazzo Ducale, and the prison, with the Riva degli Schiavoni stretching in a gentle curve toward the right. In the foreground are gondolas; beyond, large numbers of oceangoing ships ply the baci
Santa Maria della Salute was designed by Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682) and built beginning in 1631, in thanksgiving for the deliverance of La Serenissima from the plague of the previous year. Canaletto's scene, compressed in depth and painted in a clear light with slanting shadows, is probably from about 1740. The artist's largest and most famous canvas of this subject (The Royal Collection, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) followed shortly thereafter.
Reference:
Constable, W. G. Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697–1768. 2 vols. Edited by J. G. Links. Vol. 2, p. 271, 175. Oxford, 1976.
Derstine, Andria. In La Serenissima: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Art from North American Collections. Edited by Hardy George, pp. 109, 115 nn. 23, 25, 124–25, 191, 35. Exh. cat. Oklahoma City, 2010.
                
                
Edward Hicks (American, 1780–1849)
The Falls of Niagara
ca. 1825
Oil on canvas
80 x 96.5 cm
Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962 (62.256.3)
The Quaker minister and painter Edward Hicks is best known for his so-called Peaceable Kingdom pictures representing the Old Testament messianic prophecy of Isaiah 11:6, which conveys the message of peace, harmony, and nature's bounty. He also pursued landscape painting, a means by which he sought to represent the religious experience of confronting the nation's greatest natural wonders.
Niagara Falls has been considered one of the most majestic sights in the United States since the eighteenth century, and generations of artists have attempted to capture its grandeur. Hicks, who visited the falls in 1819, later sought to convey Niagara's exalted nature in a composition based on an engraved inset on an 1822 map of North America published in Philadelphia. Viewed from the Canadian side, the falls are replete with a moose, a beaver, a rattlesnake, and an eagle, all traditional symbols of North America. To ensure that his picture was interpreted in a religious fashion, the artist, a one-time sign painter, carefully lettered lines from Alexander Wilson's poem "The Foresters" (1809–10) along the painting's four edges, as follows: "With uproar hideous first the Falls appear, / The stunning tumult thundering on the ear. / Above, below, where'er the astonished eye/ Turns to behold, new opening wonders lie, / . . . This great, o'erwhelming work of awful Time / In all its dread magnificence sublime, / Rises on our view, amid a crashing roar / That bids us kneel, and Time's great God adore." The poem had inspired Hicks's 1819 missionary trip to visit the Native Americans of upstate New York. The Quaker preacher intended that his depiction of Niagara serve as a landscape emblem of the continent, and that the poetic lines surrounding it function as an interpretive and literal framework by which the falls assume religious significance.
Reference:
Adamson, Jeremy Elwell, ed. Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C., 1985.
Ford, Alice. Edward Hicks: His Life and Art. New York, 1985.
Weekly, Carolyn, with Laura Pass Barry. The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks. New York, 1999.
                
                
Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775–1851)
Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute
ca. 1835
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 122.2 cm
Bequest of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1899 (99.31)
Joseph Mallord William Turner quickly developed from a young student trained in executing topographical watercolors to the creator of some of the most remarkable and original landscapes of his time. While in Venice in September 1833, he made a series of Romantic views of the city that convey the grandeur of nature and its magnificent light and color. For the Venice series, which is often seen as anticipating Claude Monet's later experiments, Turner drew on the spatial structure of Claude Lorrain (see cat. 1) and on the lessons of Canaletto (see cat. 125) and Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), who had so vividly memorialized the historic city in paint.
This picture, which is based in part on a sketch executed in August 1819, combines two viewpoints along the Grand Canal. The buildings on the left are seen from the corner of the church of Santa Maria della Salute; those on the right are seen from a vague position across the canal, near the Campo del Traghetto de Santa Maria del Giglio. Turner has also extended the height of the Campanile and added a building at the right.
In May 1835 Turner exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy, London, where it was largely well received. The Times considered it one of "his most agreeable works" and the Spectator called it a "superb painting." A writer for Fraser's Magazine voiced a dissenting opinion, cautioning Turner not to think "that in order to be poetical it is necessary to be almost unintelligible." The painting was commissioned by H. A. J. Munro of Novar (1797–1864), a Scottish collector who is said to have financed the artist's 1833 trip to Venice. Munro, who had expected a watercolor, was at first so disappointed by the oil that Turner almost declined the sale.
Reference:
Butlin, Martin, and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner. London, 1984, 362.
Warrell, Ian, ed. J. M. W. Turner. London, 2001, p. 151, 106.
                
                
William Bradford (American, 1823–1892)
An Incident of Whaling
ca. 1880
Oil on canvas
55.9 x 91.4 cm
Bequest of DeLancey Thorn Grant, in memory of her mother, Louise Floyd-Jones Thorn, 1990
The vast, frigid region known as the Arctic, which lies at the highest latitudes of North America, was a source of great interest throughout the nineteenth century for explorers, scientists, and artists as well as for the general public. Born in the whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the marine painter William Bradford was fascinated by the adventures of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane (1820–1857), an explorer and scientist who wrote popular accounts of his Arctic expeditions. Inspired by Frederic Church's (1826–1900) enormous 1861 painting The Icebergs (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas), which was the result of Church's trip north to Labrador, Canada, the previous year, Bradford made his first voyage to the coast of Labrador in 1861. He specialized in Arctic subjects for the remainder of his career.
Bradford journeyed to the far north in the spring of 1861 and returned for six successive summers to take sketches for his large-scale canvases. In An Incident of Whaling, the artist captures the perils of a voyage to the Arctic, where the ocean waters are open to navigation for only a few months a year. The whaling vessel in this scene is trapped in a forbidding polar landscape of sunlit glacial peaks. In the foreground, the crew gathers their small vessels and supplies to take back aboard the whaling ship.
Reference:
Kugler, Richard C. William Bradford: Sailing Ships and Arctic Seas. Exh. cat. New Bedford, Mass., 2002.
Wilmerding, John. William Bradford, 1823–1892. Lincoln, Mass., 1970.
                
                
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
The Manneporte (Étretat)
1883
Oil on canvas
65.4 x 81.3 cm
Bequest of William Church Osborn, 1951 (51.30.5)
The dramatic Normandy coastline stretching from Dieppe to Étretat—where it is punctuated by three spectacular pierced cliffs—attracted a steady stream of artists from Eugène Delacroix (see cat. 23) to Gustave Courbet (see cat. 101) in the nineteenth century. During this period, the sleepy fishing village of Étretat became a fashionable tourist resort, not unlike the beachside towns Claude Monet famously celebrated in his scenes of modern life of the 1860s and 1870s. By the 1880s, however, his focus had irrevocably shifted, as revealed in the successive painting campaigns he undertook in Étretat between 1883 and 1886.
Traveling off-season, when the beaches were largely deserted, and turning his back to the town, Monet weathered the chill of winter and battled back-breaking tides to confront nature in all its illustrious grandeur: "I reckon on doing a big canvas on the cliff of Étretat, although it's terribly audacious of me to do that after Courbet who did it so well, but I'll try to do it differently." The some seventy paintings Monet brought back from Étretat and finished in his studio marked a new plateau in his series paintings and in the representation of the trio of towering rock formations, sculpted by the sea: the Porte d'Aval, the Porte d'Amont, and the Manneporte.
This is one of the first two views of the eight he devoted to the Manneporte. Painted from an isolated beach accessible only by scaling a steep cliff at low tide, Monet faced westward to depict the hulking arch lit from behind, silhouetted by the setting sun. Two specklike figures dwarfed by the immensity of the huge limestone portal provide a sense of scale, if not a measure of his realized ambition: bearing witness to the sheer power of nature, under his brush's command, they stand like a footnote to the Romantic tradition of the sublime within a composition that more than holds its own against the works of the great Realist Courbet.
Reference:
Herbert, Robert L. Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867–1886. New Haven, 1994, pp. 86–88, 115–16, figs. 96–97.
Wildenstein, Daniel. "1882–1886: Peintures." In Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné. Lausanne, 1979. Vol. 2, pp. 10, 12, 38 n. 392, 44 n. 465, 45–46, 104–5, 832.
                
                
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906)
The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L'Estaque
ca. 1885
Oil on canvas
73 x 100.3 cm
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.67)
Paul Cézanne seems to have first visited the fishing village of L'Estaque about 1865. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) he sought refuge in this picturesque, sheltered port lodged between the mountains and the sea, near Marseilles. Upon his return there in the summer of 1876, he enthused to Camille Pissarro (1830–1903): "It is like a playing card. Red roofs over the blue sea. . . . The sun is so terrific here that it seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet."
Surveying the prospect from an elevated vantage point, often from a shady spot in the pine groves above town, Cézanne painted some twenty canvases of L'Estaque over the next decade, a dozen facing toward or across the gulf of Marseilles and beyond. He originally captured this panoramic view, looking east, in a work dating to the mid-1870s (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and he adopted it for another, comparably majestic, picture in the mid-1880s (Art Institute of Chicago). Atop the hill in the distance, just to the right of the jetty, the towers of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde stand watch over the city of Marseilles.
Reference:
Rewald, John, in collaboration with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman. The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York, 1996. Vol. 1, pp. 17, 412, 568, 570–72, 625, pl. 50; vol. 2, p. 211, fig. 625.
Stein, Susan Alyson. In Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800–1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 127, 220–21, 116.
                
                
Maurice de Vlaminck (French, 1876–1958)
Sunlight on Water
1905
Oil on canvas
38.2 x 45.7 cm
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.220)
Maurice de Vlaminck was at the center of an early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement known as Fauvism. The term Fauve, French for "wild beast," aptly characterized this group of revolutionary painters closely linked to Henri Matisse (1869–1954). These artists rejected Impressionist techniques and color in favor of bold brushstrokes and a highly keyed, unmodulated palette. During these years, Vlaminck shared a studio with fellow Fauve Andre Derain (1880–1954) in Chatou, a suburb northwest of Paris on the Seine. It was here that Vlaminck's career as a painter took hold. Sunlight on Water is one of his many canvases that explore light and atmosphere, and their collateral colors, in local settings. The title, inscribed by the artist on a label affixed to the back of the work, says it all.
Vlaminck appears to have been experimenting with dark and light tonalities. Quite unconventionally, he primed his small canvas with a middle-value blue and then added white, off-white, yellow, and persimmon red. His brushstrokes are bold and undisguised, so much so in the foreground that the horizontal strokes of water reflections appear to have emerged directly from the paint tube. The more blended brushstrokes defining the sky assert their presence in a cacophonous pattern. A lone red barge pole relieves the otherwise insistently horizontal composition. An artist whose passionate temperament matched his exuberant painting style, Vlaminck once said, with gusto: "I wanted to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with my cobalts and vermilions [sic] and I wanted to translate my feelings with my brushes without thinking of what had been previously painted."
Reference:
Brettell, Rick, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 3. New York, 2009.
Freeman, Judi. Fauves. Exh. cat. Sydney, 1995.
Vallès-Bled, Maithe. Vlaminck:Critical Catalogue of Fauve Paintings and Ceramics. Paris, 2008, pp. 198–99.
                
                
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
Alpine Pool
1907
Oil on canvas
69.9 x 96.5 cm
Gift of Mrs. Francis Ormond, 1950 (50.130.15)
Nature always refreshed John Singer Sargent's spirit and his approach to studio painting. During his peripatetic childhood, he and his family spent winters in cities such as Florence or Nice and then escaped summer heat and the threat of disease in the Pyrenees, the Alps, and other rural locales. As an adult, Sargent continued that pattern, enjoying long summer holidays with family members, friends, and fellow artists and always bringing along his painting supplies. After about 1900, when he withdrew from his successful and demanding career as a portraitist headquartered in London, he used his summer holidays to create the dazzling watercolors and oils that became his principal source of income and critical acclaim.
Each summer from 1904 to 1908, Sargent and his entourage established themselves at Purtud, a hamlet in the foothills of the Alps in the Val d'Aosta region of northern Italy. A glacier-fed brook that ran through the village provided a diversion for Sargent's younger companions and a motif for the artist. Sometimes Sargent used the brook as a setting for compositions showing figures dressed in exotic costumes. Other times, he simply captured it in watercolor and oil under varying conditions of light.
Sargent was fascinated by how water affects and reflects light and color, and he recorded it not only in the Val d'Aosta, but also during visits to Venice, the Italian Lake District, Norway, and ports around the Mediterranean. Here, he adopted a close vantage point that typifies his preference for intimate views of nature. The focus is the water's surface; only a bit of the grassy shore is visible, at the upper left. The artist shows how water changes the appearance of partly submerged rocks; suggests the brook's gentle flow with slightly blurred forms; and repeats the angular shapes of pebbles and larger rocks to create a nearly abstract pattern.
Reference:
Herdrich, Stephanie L., and H. Barbara Weinberg. American Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent. New York, 2000.
Kilmurray, Elaine. Sargent and Impressionism. Exh. cat. New York, 2010.
Kilmurray, Elaine, Richard Ormond, and Mary Crawford Volk, eds. John Singer Sargent. Exh. cat. London, 1998.