Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
THE DAZZLING COLLABORATION in the late 1750s of Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale and some of the finest cabinet-makers of mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh ensured that Dumfries House in Ayrshire was a spectacular manifestation of neo-Palladianism. Nearly two and a half centuries later, it remains one of Britain’s most completely preserved country houses. That Dumfries still contains nearly every piece of furniture commissioned or purchased for it by the 5th Earl of Dumfries, who built the house, along with original stucco decorations, remarkable tapestries and fine domestic wares is nothing short of miraculous. This is in part attributable to the fact that for much of its existence since the 5th Earl took up residence in 1760, Dumfries was never a principal family home. It was emphatically not one of those typical country houses that, in Evelyn Waugh’s words, ‘have been buggered about’ for centuries. Thus, the ‘thousand things’ recommended by Adam to his patron ‘that would answer charmingly for your habitation and that would tempt a saint’ were, once in place, hardly ever subjected to the wear and tear of family life. When the 5th Earl died in 1768 with no direct male heir, everything passed to his nephew whose daughter Elizabeth married Viscount Mountstuart, later to become the 2nd Marquess of Bute. His family owned extensive properties elsewhere (such as Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute and Cardiff Castle), and Dumfries House became more or less surplus to requirements. It was not entirely left in aspic, however, and some sympathetic additions and alterations were made in the 1890s by the architect Robert Weir Schultz. Meanwhile, the Adam rooms with their outstanding ceilings and the Chippendale and Edinburgh furnishings assumed an almost mythical status among scholars and historians of the period, talked about rather than seen because, unlike, for example, the Saloon at Saltram in Devon – another great combination of Adam and Chippendale – Dumfries was rarely visited, written about or photographed. The eventual awakening of this sleeping princess came about through the smacking kiss of publicity that followed the present marquess’s announcement, three years ago, of his intention to sell the house, contents and land.
EXHIBITED AT THE Salon of 1876 and the Exposition universelle of 1878, Salome (Fig.1) astonished and fascinated Gustave Moreau’s contemporaries. Attracting a great deal of critical attention for Moreau after a period of withdrawal from the Salon, Salome helped to re-establish his reputation as one of the most interesting, original and controversial history painters of his time. Yet, despite its remarkable stylistic and iconographical originality, the picture now owes its celebrity above all to the long passages devoted to it in J.-K. Huysmans’s novel A rebours (1884). These highly subjective and extravagant descriptions, which are among the most discussed pages in Huysmans’s œuvre, have assured Moreau a place in the history of French literature. They are also largely responsible for Moreau’s misleading reputation as a ‘decadent’ artist, a reputation from which he has only recently begun to re-emerge. Hanging in the retreat of the reclusive aristocrat Jean de Floressas des Esseintes, in the company of its companion watercolour The apparition, lithographs by Odilon Redon and etchings by Jan Luyken and Rodolphe Bresdin, Salome has been imprisoned in the perverse fictional world of Huysmans’s eccentric aesthete. Few attempts have been made to rescue the picture from its gilded, literary cage and to re-inscribe it in an appropriate art-historical context. Although, mediated by the distorting mirror of A rebours, Moreau’s Salome and The apparition (Musée du Louvre, Paris) gave a decisive impulse to the extraordinary vogue enjoyed by the daughter of Herodias in fin-de-siècle iconography, in reality they have little in common with the morbid ‘idols of perversity’ of artists such as Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnoppf, Gustav Klimt, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer or Jean Delville. The purpose of this article is to situate Salome in relation to important currents in nineteenth-century French history painting, to present it as a particularly developed example of Moreau’s highly personal poetics and to draw out its allusive political content.
EUGÈNE VIOLLET-LE-DUC, the nineteenth-century architect of the restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, in an article for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts concerning his reconstruction of the spire, began on a wry note: he was constantly asked whether there ever had been a spire on the crossing of the cathedral, some people even insisting that it existed only in his head. In his defence, Viollet-le-Duc cited historical testimony and depictions of the spire before it was torn down in 1793 by order of the Revolutionary government, presumably for its lead covering. He went to great lengths to detail and defend his choice of method, material and design for the Gothic timber spire that was to replace the thirteenth-century original which had dominated the Parisian skyline for more than five hundred years.
ON 2ND JULY 1889 Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence congratulating him on his recent marriage and delighting in the fact that the event seemed to have rejuvenated their mother. He enclosed drawn copies of paintings he had made since his arrival at the asylum almost two months earlier, keen to convey to his brother that he was both well and working productively: ‘Afin que tu aies une idée de ce que j’ai en train je t’envoie aujourd’hui une dizaine de dessins, tous d’après des toiles en train’.
IN HIS REVIEW of Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval’s Vuillard: Critical Catalogue of the Paintings and Pastels, Merlin James illustrated a small painting previously ascribed to Edouard Vuillard that has been dropped, without further comment, from the artist’s accepted œuvre. Yet, as he observes, when in 1969 La Poursuite (Fig.40) was exhibited by the Tooth Gallery, London, as a work by Vuillard, it was lent to that exhibition by Vuillard’s nephew Jacques Roussel. Notwithstanding the impeccable family provenance and the faint ‘E. Vuillard’ signature at lower right, the authors of the catalogue were correct to discount this small horizontal work in oil on paper as being by Vuillard. Although its present whereabouts are unknown, its true author can now be identified as Charles Hodge Mackie rsa (1862–1920). Its former presence in the Roussel collection testifies to a fascinating short-lived relationship that developed between this Scottish artist and Gauguin and the Nabi group during the last decade of the nineteenth century.
