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Time and Again: Staging Pompeii in 19th-century London

Sophie Thomas (Ryerson University)

Excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the discovery of extraordinary objects at those sites of antiquity frozen in time, inspired a wide variety of literary and visual genres, sensational popular spectacles and theatrical productions. The most striking works in paint include John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a canvas first exhibited at William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in 1822, and the Russian painter Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii of 1833. Martin made concerted efforts to accurately recreate the buildings from archaeological documentation available in works such as Gell and Gandy’s Pompeiana (1819). He was, moreover, directly influenced by the poem composed by his friend, Edwin Atherstone, on The Last Day of Herculaneum (1821), and both are roughly contemporaneous with the fireworks displays in Vauxhall Gardens in 1821 which included simulated eruptions of Vesuvius. Meanwhile, Bryullov’s painting is thought to have inspired Bulwer-Lytton’s novel by the same name. These clustered productions and lines of possible descent, only sketchily indicated here, demonstrate how Pompeii provided a set of malleable themes that could flow into a variety of cultural forms. In this paper, I would like to explore, in particular, the traffic between Martin’s painting, its museum display, and literary and stage productions that render catastrophe in affective human terms. I aim to show how the drama of the ‘last day’, played out between evocative subjects and objects, and before various audiences in early 19th-century London, provided a vehicle for the negotiation of the relationship between the temporal, the temporary and the contemporary.

Travelling Through: Virtuality and antebellum US touring pictures

Catherine Holochwost (La Salle University)

Histories of early-19th-century art and theatre have not been adequately studied, and the American sites in this network even less so. Nevertheless, there was a rich mix of theatrically-staged single-picture exhibitions and dioramas that toured in cities from Savannah to Saratoga during the 1820s and 1830s, often attracting thousands of viewers in a single stop. My paper summarises this history, explaining how the critical reception of paintings such as François-Marius Granet’s Choir of the Capuchins Church in Rome in the 1820s anticipated the somewhat later reception of dioramas that played on their success, including a copy of Belshazzar’s Feast by the Irish painter Hugh Reinagle after John Martin, which was exhibited at a New York pleasure garden in the 1830s.

The multisensory and sublime rapture that these spectacles apparently induced in their viewers was diametrically opposed to the gimlet-eyed scepticism that Americans were encouraged to cultivate, lest their republic suffer the same fates as corrupt European powers. I explain the apparent incompatibility of these two modes of spectatorship by defining these visual experiences as virtual, not only in the broad strokes of a distributed network that spread across continents, genres and media, but also at the level of the painted surface itself, which used light, painted or actual, to induce a sense of author-less ‘allographic’ (per Nelson Goodman) performance.

Art, Spectacle and Control: Copyright and visual culture in the 19^th century

Elena Cooper (CREATe, University of Glasgow)

Humanities scholars understand the 19th century to be a time of blurred boundaries between visual and theatrical arts. What insights can copyright history provide into how we understand this cultural development? Drawing on the first in-depth and longitudinal study of the history of copyright concerning the visual arts (E. Cooper, ‘Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image’, CUP, 2018, concerning art and copyright 1850–1911), this paper will consider three 19th-century court cases which involved attempts to control trans-medial culture: attempts to prevent the unauthorised reproduction/exhibition of paintings/engravings as popular works of spectacle. In Martin v Wright (1833), John Martin failed to prevent an unauthorised exhibition of Belshazzar’s Feast as a diorama in a bazaar on London’s Oxford Street. Later in the century, in Hanfstaengl v Baines (1895), the House of Lords held that the owners of copyright in a painting, could not prevent an exhibition of Living Pictures at the Empire Palace Theatre, where people were arranged and dressed so as to reproduce the design of the painting. By contrast, in Turner v Robinson (1861), the owners of the painting The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis were successful in preventing the reproduction and sale of unauthorised stereoscopic pictures taken from a posed scene in the defendant’s studio imitating the painting. In comparing and contrasting these cases, and setting them in a wider aesthetic context, this paper will explore the complex relations between law, culture and control at stake in the meeting of art and spectacle in the court-room.

Before and After the Duel: Delaroche in the genealogy of Gérôme’s Duel after the Masquerade

Stephen Bann (University of Bristol)

Gérôme’s Duel after the Masquerade was shown for the first time at the Salon of 1857, and not only established his reputation, but soon became one of the most widely reproduced of 19th-century paintings. For some years, it has been customary to draw attention to the connection between this work and the Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1835) by Gérôme’s teacher Paul Delaroche. The debt owed by Delaroche to contemporary Romantic drama (particularly in respect of the latter painting) has also been signalled by the more recent study of drawings from around 1830 that represent the Duc de Guise as he appears in the final act of Alexandre Dumas’ Henri III et sa cour. Yet up to now there has been no opportunity to explore another very likely source for Gérôme’s work which is Delaroche’s painting, La Suite d'un duel, first shown at the Salon of 1827/28, and now lost, though it was recorded as still being extant in the catalogue of Delaroche's posthumous exhibition in 1857. This paper focuses the argument on an anonymous lithograph, published in London in 1829 under the title, Un Duel [The Duel]. I will argue that this is in effect a reproduction of Delaroche’s lost composition. Situating the latter with regard to the diverse cross-currents of French visual culture in the 1820s may help to explain the basis of its eventual importance for Gérôme.

The Tableau of the Féerie and Romantic Visual Aesthetics: From the drama of human intrigue to the pre-eminence of sensation and wonder

Marika Takanishi Knowles (University of St Andrews)

The féerie was one of the most popular theatrical genres in early 19th-century France. A ‘quest’, initiated by a fairy (fée), motivated the protagonist’s journey through a series of spectacular scenic environments, each one of which constituted a ‘tableau’. As a structural principle, the tableau of the féerie replaced the ‘act’ of the traditional drama or comedy. An animated stage picture composed of décor, dozens or even hundreds of costumed extras (figurants), and novel lighting effects, the tableau of the féerie differed profoundly from Diderot’s 18th-century concept of the tableau of the drame bourgeois. Instead of offering a pictorial dramatisation of an emotional denouement, the tableau of the féerie presented an entire world, the character of which was either utterly fantastical or geographically or temporally exotic. Nevertheless, critics recognised a debt to the 18th century in the genre’s evocation of Rococo ‘landscapes’, ornamental arabesques and Chinoiserie.

This paper will explore the relationship between the féerie and visual art by 1) enumerating the connections drawn by contemporary critics between the féerie and visual art and 2) positing a relationship between the visual aesthetics of the féerie and the ‘romantic landscape’ as practised by the painters Paul Huet, Narcisse Diaz de la Pena and Célestin Nanteuil. The féerie advanced a model of visual experience that challenged the long-standing pre-eminence of the ‘tragic scene’ and its associated pictorial modes, most notably the French tradition of history painting. Reflecting new priorities for visual experience, the féerie modelled the tableau – both staged and painted – as an enveloping and wondrous experience of luminous and tactile sensations.

Panoramic Spectacle of History in Contemporary Museum Practices: Yadegar Assisi’s Pergamon Panorama under the light of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Jean-Léon Gérôme

Gülru Çakmak (University of Massachusetts)

This paper considers the legacy of 19th-century visual technologies of mass spectacle in history painting as it resurfaces in contemporary curatorial engagements with absorptive digital technologies. The case study will be the Pergamon Panorama by the contemporary artist Yadegar Assisi. Spanning three stories encircling a central viewing platform, the 360-degree monumental panorama is housed in a building constructed for the occasion under the auspices of the Berlin State Museums in a bid to make the past accessible and relevant to present-day museum visitors. Showing hundreds of life-size figures from a steep bird’s-eye perspective inhabiting a digitally-generated architectural and topographic reconstruction of ancient Pergamon, the panorama offers a phenomenological experience of absorption into a specific day in the year 129 CE. While Assisi’s project is enabled by contemporary digital technologies, my paper will argue that the pictorial and compositional devices that it uses in order to absorb the viewer into an embodied encounter with its historical fiction hark back to an earlier moment in 19th-century European visual culture, and in particular to a series of innovations in the genre of history painting by Gérôme and Alma-Tadema. The work of these painters, characterised as ‘theatrical’ in their lifetimes and ‘proto-cinematic’ in contemporary scholarship, in my reading emerge as responses to the strain experienced in the conventions of history painting under pressure from a growing sense of an insurmountable distance between the modern subject and the historical past, coupled with the pervasive transformation of conditions of spectatorship under the influence of emerging technologies of sequential vision epitomised in the panorama and the diorama.