Tuesday 21 May 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers....

Part Three
GERMAINE DE STAËL by Vigée Le Brun
Painter: Vigée Le Brun. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

"Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris 
are friendship, fame, and love."
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817), writer of fiction, political propaganda, moral and feminist essays, literary criticicism and autobiography, held the most influential salon in France during the Directoire, was committed against the principles of Empire and became one of Napoleon's most eloquent opponents, moving her centre of power to her family home in Geneva after he exiled her from Paris.

Ambitious and passionate, a profuse lover and loyal friend, she was an intellectual of international significance, who analysed the prevailing cultural and political trends of her age in the eye of the storm, and identified the whole of humanity's frailty in her own emotional needs - "We cease to love ourselves if no one loves us". She felt and lived in the C-minor key of Romanticism in all its anguished yearning and exhilarating self-assertion, writing in  Réflexions sur le suicide: "Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love."

The classical motifs of this painting of her in the role of her own literary heroine Corinne, do not conceal either the subjective Romanticism of de Staël, daughter of Necker, the Swiss Protestant outsider appointed to reform the finances of the ancien régime, or the playful Rococo sophistication of Vigée Le Brun, who had achieved prominence through the patronage of Marie-Antoinette. Neither artist nor subject look fully at ease with the disciplines of neoclassicism from which de Staël's irreppressible energy bursts out in rebellion, making her the main force of nature in the landscape. She said she would rather suffer than be bored.

FASHION and EMANCIPATION 
Madame de Stl's Turban

Turbans of various kinds, simple or decorated with plumes and jewels, that had reappeared as informal headwear for fashionable women, for the first time since the Renaissance, in the pre-revolutionary 1780s, became a craze after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798 -1801). 

The headdress acquired prestige among intellectuals through its association with Madame de Staël, who wore enormous, attention-grabbing turbans of brightly coloured silks:

 Germaine de Staël in one of her famous turbans, c.1810, in a detail of a painting attributed by different sources to François Gérard or, more likely from the style and background, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson.

Thursday 9 May 2013

Indolent thoughts

Under the “killing sun”1 of Romanticism, an individual is reborn through love and empathy, their creative imagination kindled, and art, poetry and music thrive for the benefit of us all: “I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…”. And months, or minutes later, the same person feels they have been cheated into a fire: “I fly with HORROR from such a passion….”2
John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781) Image source: Wikipedia
In the spring of 1798, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse was reconciled to the man she truly loved, an artist who was the slave of the feeling of the moment, who....