From Today, Painting is Dead - Historic Photos at the Barnes Foundation

From Today, Painting is Dead  - Early Photography in Britain and France

The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia 

February 24 - May 12, 2019

By Ed Voves

Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) was famous in his day for painting historically accurate depictions of tragic scenes of French and English history. Except for The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, painted in 1833, Delaroche is forgotten today as an artist. Instead he is remembered as a prophet.

“From today," Delaroche exclaimed after seeing one of the first photographs in 1840,  "painting is dead!” 

Delaroche's famous (if undocumented) prediction was somewhat premature. Instead, his prophecy serves as the dramatic title of an outstanding exhibition on the history of early photography, currently at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Two hundred-fifty original print photos document the rise of photography from 1839, when two rival photographic processes were demonstrated, to the 1880's.

From Today, Painting is Dead surveys both British and French photos. Last year, I reviewed a notable exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, Salt and Silver. This was devoted almost exclusively to early British photos. The first decades of photography were noteworthy for a competitive relationship between British and French artists/scientists intent on "fixing a shadow" as the photographic process was at first called. The Barnes exhibition enables visitors to grasp how this cultural cross-pollination took place.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Gallery view of From Today, Painting is Dead at the Barnes Foundation. The photo shows a display of Daguerreotypes.

The photographs on view at the Barnes come from a private collection belonging to Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg. A husband and wife team, they began to collect vintage photos as a hobby in the 1980's. Their collecting is not a matter of self-indulgence or buying at a whim. Mattis is a physicist, Hochberg a linguist. With backgrounds in rigorous scholarship, they amassed a vast array of original prints from the dawn of photography to Diane Arbus. 

William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China,1844

It needs to be emphasized that the Mattis-Hochberg collection photographs are not copies of copies. When we read the names on the exhibition photo credits - William Henry Fox Talbot, Félix Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, among others - we are seeing prints which these pioneers made themselves. These astonishing images are nothing less than the "birth certificates" of photography, historical documents as well as unforgettable visual masterpieces.

 From the very moment upon entering the exhibition, you are confronted with the Janus-like impact which photography made during its first half-century.

 The sensational impact of  photography was much the same as the revolutionary implications of railroad travel. When the first railroad line, the Stockton and Darlington Railroad in the north of England, commenced operation in 1825, only freight was pulled by steam locomotives. People traveled on horse-drawn rail cars until 1833 when it was deemed safe for human beings to entrust their fate to an "iron horse."

Six years later, William Fox Talbot, introduced the ancestor of negative photography,the calotype. This process used sheets of paper coated with silver nitrate, followed by a  wash of potassium iodide. This made it possible to make multiple copies of the same picture. 

Fox Talbot had gone public with his invention in part because of the announcement of a rival method by the French artist, Louis-Jacques Daguerre, earlier in that year, 1839. Daguerreotypes were unique, "one-off" photographs, made with iodized silvered plates which were developed by being exposed to mercury fumes.

Anonymous. Young Frenchman with Gilt Background, 1847

Initially, Daguerreotypes had more appeal to the public because of the clarity and relative permanence of the image. Fox Talbot could make multiple prints but faced a severe challenge of fading. Thus the first years of photography were marked by concentration on technical problems and copyright issues. But it wasn't long before human and social concerns nudged aside "pure" science or technological innovation, as had occurred with the first railroads.

Wasn't photography really a form of creative expression rather than a branch of science? That was the theory propounded by Gustave Le Gray in 1856.

Since its first discovery, photography has made rapid progress, especially as regards the instruments employed in its practice. It now remains for the artist to raise it to its proper position among the fine arts.

Le Gray's photos astonished viewers, earning his landscapes and seascapes wide-spread acclaim. A powerful statement of photography as an art form had been made and thanks to the collecting savvy of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg, two of Le Gray's sensational photos are on view at the Barnes.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) 

   Display of photographs by Gustave Le Gray

The relationship of photography and painting was a curious one during the 1840's and 50's. The determination to direct the new medium along an artistic path siphoned-off some of the scientific spirit of the early pioneers of "fixing a shadow." 

Gustave Le Gray's magnificent photos of sea and sky are among the great art works of the nineteenth century. Le Gray achieved his brilliant results by what today we would call "photoshop" methods. He combined two negatives, one for the sky and one for the sea (or ground in other pictures), joined at the horizon line. 

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857

This seamless combination created a finished photograph which did not suffer from the normal distortions of focus. Thus, a photo by Le Gray which we view on the gallery wall, replicates how the human eye would see the vista and how a painter would depict it.

A science-conscious photographer (especially during the 1800's) could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Le Gray's method is a case of "stacking the deck" in favor of photography as art. All is fair, however, in love, war - and photography

The law of unintended effect soon came into play. Two attempts of "guided photography" - one for using photos as source material for painting, the other for narrating biblical or allegorical stories with artfully posed photos - proved that photography was capable of unique creative achievement without putting on art salon "airs."

William Fox Talbot's calotypes found a ready advocate in Scotland, Sir David Brewster. He, in turn, taught the calotype process to Robert Adamson, a twenty year-old chemist who was  keen to learn. At that time, the early 1840's, Scotland was convulsed by a controversy over religious doctrine. Adamson convinced the painter, David Octavius Hill (1802-1870), to use photo portraits of some of the Scottish clergymen involved in the dispute as source material for painting a group portrait.

The resulting painting, which I saw in the 2016 exhibit, Painting the Shadow, was remarkably lifeless. Hill and Adamson, being stubborn Scots, decided to continue experimenting with the camera to create portraits of their countrymen.

In an amazing creative leap, Hill and Adamson dispensed with painted final versions. The photograph itself would be the intended masterpiece and that is exactly what the incredible pictures  they took of the seafaring folk of Newhaven, a fishing village near Edinburgh, are.

Masterpieces.

The Mattis and Hochberg collection has several of the photos of Hill and Adamson. The picture of the fisherman, Sandy Linton, and his sons, or "bairns" to use the colloquial Scottish word, is surely one of the greatest photos ever taken.

D.O. Hill & Robert Adamson, Sandy Linton, his Boat and his Bairns, New Haven, 1845

After examining Hill and Adamson’s calotypes, the aged watercolor painter, John Harden (1772-1847) declared, “The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved.” 
After studying Sandy Linton, His Boat and His Bairns, it is difficult to disagree with Harden's view.

Hill and Adamson spent the next few years making over 2,500 calotype photos of breathtaking beauty and originality. Then, as so often happened to artists and writers during the 1800's, the young Adamson fell sick and died in January 1848. A precious moment of genius was cut short but the status of photography as an art form had been established beyond doubt.

The second instance of the law of unintended effect involved one of the most remarkable artists and photographers of the 1800's: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).

Cameron's family belonged to the Anglo-Indian colonial elite. Normally, these empire-builders occupied their spare time by shooting tigers while in India and hunting foxes during their leave-time in England. In 1863, Cameron's elder daughter and her husband gave her a camera as a present. Cameron was back in England, living on a rural estate called Freshwater.

"It may amuse you, Mother to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater."

Photography did amuse Cameron. A gregarious, if eccentric, person, Cameron had a circle of friends among England's literary and artistic elite, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She began to photograph friends, family members and servants in recreated scenes from the Bible, Shakespeare, the Arthurian legends and other epic tales. 

Julia Margaret Cameron, King David and Bathsheba, 1869

For a photo of the aged King David and his love-interest, Bathsheba, Cameron posed Sir Henry Taylor, a poetry-writing official of the Colonial Office, and a young house maid named Mary Hillier. 

At first glance, Cameron's David and Bathsheba seems suffused with Victorian sentimentality. Closer examination shows that this photo, and virtually all of Cameron's tableaux vivants, are profound studies of the human personality under stress or grappling with desires which cannot be satisfied.

Usually, a survey exhibition only has one or two of Cameron's photos on display. Thanks to the brilliant collecting of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg, the Barnes exhibit is so well endowed with examples of Cameron's oeuvre that we can readily appreciate the depth of her insight into human nature. Furthermore, many of the photos by Cameron on view are ones not often displayed in exhibitions held in the United States.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) 

   Display of 4 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron returned to Britain's Indian empire, where she died in 1879. Less than a decade later, in 1888, George Eastman's Kodak camera was introduced. Pre-loaded with a role of flexible film, the Kodak enabled amateurs to take one hundred pictures. Development of the photos was entrusted to professionals. The "heroic" age of photography was over.

The debate over whether photography was an art or a science - or a bit of both -continued.  At the very end of the era which the Barnes exhibition covers, a British photographer, Peter Henry Emerson, sparked a controversy over the status of photography which gained attention around the world. Ironically, it is Emerson's 1885 photo, Gathering Water Lilies, which appears in a near life-size print at the entrance of the exhibition.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2019), The entrance to the From Today, Painting is Dead exhibition. The wall-illustration shows Peter Henry Emerson's Gathering Water Lilies.

This superbly composed image was part of a series of photographs which Emerson took of rural people living in the marshes of eastern England known as the Norfolk Broads. Emerson documented the folk ways of this region as social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution began reaching this remote region. Gathering water lilies was no Sunday-afternoon activity but a matter of necessity. The people of the Norfolk Broads used the water lilies in fish traps, an activity Emerson wanted to record for posterity.

Emerson, like Robert Adamson, had a background in science. He published a book collection of his photos in 1888, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and the following year he authored a major treatise, Naturalistic Photography for the Students of the Art. With these books and his impressive body of photographs, Emerson was poised to become a major force in the cultural world such as Alfred Stieglitz was shortly to do in the United States.

A year later, Emerson made a complete "about-face". He declared "Photography not Art"  and published a pamphlet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography. Emerson was much influenced by Darwin's theories of evolution and the many and conflicting schools of psychology. Trying to incorporate all that mass of scientific data into an all-embracing philosophy of art was too much even for a brilliant man like Emerson.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) 

   Detail of Peter Henry Emerson's Gathering Water Lilies, 1885.

Emerson would have been better advised to follow his own earlier advice by devoting himself to what he could do and do it well - in short to focus and take great pictures. Let the photos speak for themselves!

Fortunately for us, Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg, are extremely accomplished at the art of focusing and collecting great photographs. This superb exhibition of masterpieces of early photography at the Barnes Foundation is a testament to their dedication as collectors and for allowing the "voice" of these wonderful photographs to be heard.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                                           
Images courtesy of the Barnes Foundation and the Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg Collection.  Gallery photos courtesy of Anne Lloyd.

Introductory Image: 
Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) Gathering Water Lilies, 1885. Platinum print.    7 7/8 x 11 3/8 inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Gallery view of the From Today, Painting is Dead exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The photo shows a display of Daguerreotypes.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877). Articles of China, 1844. Salt print from calotype negative. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg

Anonymous. Young Frenchman with Gilt Background, 1847. Sixth-plate French daguerreotype. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. 

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Gallery view of the From Today, Painting is Dead exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The photos shown here are works by Gustave Le Gray. 

Gustave Le Gray (French,1820-1884). The Great Wave, Sète, 1857. Albumen print from two collodion-on-glass negatives. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg

D.O. Hill (British, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (British, 1826-1848). Sandy Linton, his Boat and his Bairns, New Haven, 1845, Salt print from a calotype negative, 7 5/8 x 5 3/4 inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.


Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879). King David and Bathsheba (Henry Taylor and Mary Hillier), 1869. Albumen print from collodion-on-glass negative. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Gallery view of the From Today, Painting is Dead exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The photos shown here are (clockwise from top-left) Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, 1864; Dora as Bride. (Annie Chinery Cameron), 1869; The Dream, 1869; Summer Days (May Prinsep, Mary Ryan, Freddy Gould & Elizabeth Keown), c. 1866.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Photo of the entrance to the From Today, Painting is Dead exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The wall-illustration shows Peter Henry Emerson's photo, Gathering Water Lilies, 1885.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo 2019) Detail of Peter Henry Emerson's Gathering Water Lilies, 1885.

Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America at the American Folk Art Museum

Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America

                                                                                           

American Folk Art Museum

October 6, 2016–February 26, 2017

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Teddy bears and fairy tales were not part of the bedtime ritual of children in early America. Instead, the sobering prayer from The New England Primer was chanted, sing-song, for nearly two hundred years:

Now I lay me down to sleep,  
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

A profoundly moving exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City provides insight into the haunting presence of Death during the colonial era and the formative years of the American Republic.

To modern sensibilities,The New England Primer prayer may seem morbid, indeed harmful to a young child. Look about the gallery walls of the American Folk Art Museum and you will come to understand why Death was acknowledged each long-ago night. 

The paintings in Securing the Shadow all portray deceased people, for the most part children. Many of the works are posthumous portraits, painted after the moment of death. Several paintings belong to a second category, begun when the subjects were hale and hearty, only to be finished after Death had snatched them away.

People in early America were well aware of Death - and not just because of the New England Primer prayer.

Well into the nineteenth century, the number of babies born into an American family normally ranged between eight to ten. On average, five of these children would likely die before reaching adolescence. Temperate regions like Pennsylvania tended to be healthier than Tidewater Virginia or bitterly cold New England. Yet sudden outbreaks of disease could strike anywhere. The dreaded Yellow Fever killed 5,000 people in Philadelphia in 1793. In a few short months, half the population of the City of Brotherly Love was wiped out.

Charles Willson Peale, Rachel Weeping), 1776

One of the first paintings on view in Securing the Shadow comes from Philadelphia. Charles Willson Peale originally painted this as a solo portrait of his deceased daughter, Margaret, in 1772. Little Margaret died that year of smallpox. Later, during the momentous year of 1776, Peale added the grief-stricken countenance of his wife, Rachel, to the enlarged work.

Rachel Peale had cause to weep. Margaret was her second child to die and a third, Eleanor, died the following year. Mrs. Peale died in 1790 after having give birth to ten children. A year later, Charles Willson Peale married Elizabeth DePeyster from New York who bore him six more children before she died in 1804. Of Peale's seventeen children from the two marriages, six died during childhood. This is an "average" figure for the period.

There are no "average" emotions involved in losing a loved one, particularly a child.

Hiram Powers is chiefly known for his  1844 statue, The Greek Slave, which scandalized many and inspired others. Six years earlier, Powers' first born child died from a brain tumor. The grief-stricken sculptor made a cast of the head of the four year old boy. Some of the eyelashes, eyebrows and hair were embedded in the plaster. 

Hiram Powers, James Gibson Powers, c. 1838

Powers' love for his "Jimmy" was mixed in too. As a result, this plaster cast projects a sense of earthly realism and spiritual immortality that few other works of art in the exhibit can match, poignant and powerful though they are.

And the other works in Securing the Shadow are poignant and powerful. What really sets most of the paintings apart from Powers' cast of his son is a more subtle difference. The posthumous portraits share a coded visual language familiar to the people of the time, but now mysterious to us.

Joseph Goodhue Chandler, Charles H. Sisson, 1850

The majority Americans of the pre-Civil War era shared an evangelical Christian heritage. Almost all would have recognized the whip in the hand of young Charles H. Sisson as a symbol of Christ's agony and martyrdom. The New England artist, J.G. Chandler, painted the portrait of Charles H. Sisson, who died on December 8, 1850 aged three years and ten months. The parents of the little boy were indeed martyrs, enduring the deaths of four of their eight children at young ages.

Ambrose Andrews, The Children of Nathan Starr,1835

The Children of Nathan Starr seem a much healthier family - deceptively so. The youngest  - a little boy - clad in a gray dress points not at the badminton shuttlecock but toward heaven. Little Edward Starr died in 1835, the year that Ambrose Andrews, an itinerant New England artist, painted this picture.

Four years later, Oliver Tarbell Eddy created a similar work. Here another little boy in a dark dress holds objects related to his early death. Eddy's The Alling Children is a masterpiece of Christian symbolism.

Stephen Alling, holds a hammer with wooden boards and nails at his feet. This alludes to Christ's death on the Cross in the same way that medieval depictions of Jesus as an infant had done. Young Stephen Alling was just four years old when he died  in 1839. He seems  much more mature in Eddy's painting, just as the little Jesus had been depicted in icons as more of a man than a child.

Oliver Tarbell Eddy,The Alling Children, Ca. 1839

In a final touch, the three sisters of Stephen, Mary, Cornelia and Emma regard their deceased brother with the mournful solemnity of Christian saints like Mary, Christ's mother, and Mary Magdalen at the foot of the cross. 

The father of these Alling children was a wealthy New Jersey jeweler. Stephen Ball Alling (1808–1861) could pay for the services of a major artist like Eddy. Most bereaved parents in the U.S, during  the late 1830's, especially after the Panic of 1837, could only afford lesser talents to memorialize their children.

A fairly typical example of these "naive" portraits is Mary and Francis Wilcox by Joseph Whiting Stock. The title of the book on the stole bears the title "Remember Me." The child Mary points toward heaven just as little Edward Starr had done. In a very touching gesture, the actual toys that the two children pose with in the picture, a porcelain doll and a Staffordshire bank, are placed next to their portrait in the Securing the Shadows exhibit.

Joseph Whiting Stock, Mary and Francis Wilcox, 1845

Joseph Whiting Stock's paintings exemplified the "naive" or folk tradition in American art. Stock was also a model of Yankee ingenuity and his journal and account book provide us with detailed records of life and art in early America.

Stock's journal also grimly records the constant reckoning of Death. Some of the entries for commissions read tersely, "Jane Livsey, her daughter from corpse." The joint portrait of Francis and Mary Wilcox was noted  on  February 15th, 1845. "deceased children of P.f. Wilcox."

Other entries in Stock's journal are more emotional. On February 28, 1838, he wrote of the death of a seven year old boy he had painted a few years before:

Eugene B. Sperry who departed this life the 26th inst. at 10 minutes past 1 o clock, A.M. O. Eugene! Thou wast a brave little fellow and generous' But thou art gone to thy happy home to join thy father ...

Stock empathized with the sorrows of those he painted for he was not stranger to suffering. Stock was born in 1815 in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1826, he was crippled from the waist down when an oxcart fell on him. He took up art and using a specially constructed wheelchair was able to begin a professional career.

Stock was one of the first Americans to make regular use of railroad travel to conduct business, traveling throughout New England and New York to paint portraits. In 1839, tragedy struck again when he was badly burned mixing a batch of varnish. An emergency hip operation to prevent infection saved his life and he quickly returned to his wide-ranging travels. He died, aged 40, of tuberculosis in 1856.

As his life ebbed, the ever-resourceful Stock painted portraits based on daguerreotypes. These early photographs were used by others to record the image of deceased persons and thus were a form of competition to the portraits of the dead that Stock frequently painted. 

Young Woman with Rose, c. 1844

Securing the Shadows presents a special installation of postmortem daguerreotypes from the Burns Archive. Some of the deceased are posed with grieving family members or individually, as in the example included here, with a hand-tinted rose.

Death was so constant a factor of life in early America that the boundary between portraits of the living and those of the dead are sometimes hard to tell. The wonderful, Picking Flowers, which serves as the introductory image to this review is a case in point. 

We do not know if this unnamed little girl was painted from life or was, to borrow Stock's journal phrasing, a "daughter from corpse." Yet, she steps on a crushed flower, a cat seizes hold of a mouse at her feet. These are symbols of death. The goldfinch in the branches above the child is a Christian symbol of the Resurrection.

Ultimately, the works of art on view in Securing the Shadow are about redemption. These paintings and photographs preserved an image of the fleeting lives on earth of those who have passed on to immortal life with God in heaven.

The Soul, as these compelling images proclaim, does not perish with the Body.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Introductory Image
Picking Flowers, attributed to Samuel S. Miller (c. 1807–1853), probably New England, 1840–1850, oil on canvas, 44 1/2 x 27 1/2 in., collection Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, gift of Stephen C. Clark, N0255.1961. Photo by Richard Walker

Charles Willson Peale (American, 1741-1827) Mrs. Peale lamenting the death of her child (Rachel Weeping), 1772, enlarged 1776; retouched 1818. Oil on canvas. 36 13/16 x 32 1/16 inches (93.5 x 81.4 cm)  Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1977-34-1 Gift of The Barra Foundation, Inc., 1977

Hiram Powers (American, 1805-1873) James Gibson Powers, modeled c. 1838. Plaster. 11 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 5 5/8 in. (28.7 x 16.0 x 14.4 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson  1968.155.110

Joseph Goodhue Chandler (American, 1813-1884) Charles H. Sisson, 1850. Oil on canvas.
122.2 x 63.7 cm (48 1/8 x 25 1/16 in.) Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch 1953.5.5 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Ambrose Andrews (American, 1801–1877) The Children of Nathan Starr,1835. Oil on canvas, 28 3/8 x 36 1/2 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Nina Howell Starr, in memory of Nathan Comfort Starr (1896–1981), 1987, 1987.404. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Oliver Tarbell Eddy (1799–1868) The Alling Children, c. 1839. Oil on canvas. 47 1/8 x 62 7/8 in. (119.7 x 159.7 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1966 Accession Number: 66.242.21  © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Joseph Whiting Stock (American, 1815-1855) Mary and Francis Wilcox, 1845.
Oil on canvas. 122 x 101.6 cm (48 1/16 x 40 in.) Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch 1959.11.2  National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 

Young Woman with Rose, artist unidentified, United States, c.1844, tinted sixth-plate daguerreotype, collection of Stanley B. Burns, MD. Photo courtesy Stanley B. Burns MD & The Burns Family Collection and Archive.