Following six weeks of independent work, the three men appeared before the Congress to present their respective designs. Somewhat surprisingly, two of the three came back with similar designs. Both Franklin and Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal depict a scene from the narrative of the Israelite exodus from Egypt.[1] Franklin’s design depicted Moses “lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his chariot, overwhelmed with the Waters,” with the inscription “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” surrounding the image (fig. 1). Jefferson similarly proposed that the seal depict the Israelites “led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.”[2] These ideas were eventually discarded for the now-familiar eagle, but it is significant that each man envisioned the Israelite exodus as the one narrative that could symbolically encapsulate and articulate their new nation.

Almost fifty years later, three artists in Britain coincided in painting the exodus on large-scale canvases. They were not politicians, yet their works were no less political than the designs of Jefferson and Franklin. In 1824, three years after the success of John Martin’s (1789–1854) epic Belshazzar’s Feast, a painting that became a public phenomenon and which caused Sir Thomas Lawrence to refer to Martin as “the most popular painter of the day,” he exhibited his depiction of The Seventh Plague of Egypt (fig. 2) to great acclaim.[3] Martin’s popularity and commercial success inspired a number of other artists to follow in his footsteps and attempt to make their reputations with similar subjects and styles of painting. Francis Danby (1793–1861) exhibited his The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt (fig. 3) in 1825, and David Roberts (1796–1854) presented The Departure of the Israelites out of the Land of Egypt (fig. 4) in 1829. Both artists painted in what was widely recognized as “the style of Martin,”[4] and they generally garnered the types positive public sentiments Martin’s works had. Yet while these artists painted in a similar style and chose the same biblical story for their subjects, each of the three artists painted different moments from the story and emphasized different ideas in their works.

The fact that the narrative of the exodus was painted on such substantial canvases within a five-year period suggests that it possessed special significance in the 1820s. To account for this, it is useful to consider the various public discourses in which the exodus narrative appeared. The story of the exodus was commonly preached from the pulpit in large and small churches, often with an emphasis on the commonalities between the Israelites and the British people, a connection that will be explored later. Yet the story also began to be used in a more secular and politicized manner in the early nineteenth century.

One place the exodus story frequently appeared was in reformist political publications. The narrative lent itself to political interpretations because in the early 1800s it was viewed fundamentally as a historical account of political liberation, despite its source in a religious text. As one writer stated in 1830, “the veracity of Moses is . . . generally acknowledged to be unimpeachable, even by those who do not regard the Pentateuch as written by divine inspiration,” due to the inclusion of the Israelite exodus in other secular histories.[5] Thus, while from a twenty-first century perspective the miraculous nature of the story might place it firmly in the realm of myth, in the early nineteenth century the exodus was considered an incontestable historical event that resonated in religious and political arenas. The exodus was a paradigmatic shift in the history of the Israelites that resulted in both the liberation of a captive people and the birth of a fundamentally new type of society.

The early nineteenth century was an age of apocalyptic fervor, and these three paintings were invariably bound to the idea of apocalypse. The onset of the French Revolution caused many to envision themselves as actors in the end-of-the-world drama described by St. John in the Book of Revelation, and that belief continued to pervade during the 1820s.[6] One might assume that in an age of apocalyptic expectation, representations of mass destruction would be emblematic of a bleak religious outlook allied with conservative political ideologies. However, the history of the period complicates those assumptions. Martin’s and his follower’s paintings were dynamic entities that could have been appropriated for a range of political purposes. As one reviewer noted in 1833, “In painting one picture [Martin] paints a thousand.”[7] The exodus narrative touched on some of the most pressing political issues of the 1820s—slavery, the oppression of the poor, and the obsession with unrestrained economic expansion. Most importantly, this new Israelite society carried rhetorical weight for reformers because it contained a political structure believed to be designed by God himself. I believe that these works specifically engaged in promoting reformist political ideas by suggesting that protection from future apocalyptic destruction hinged on a collective type of salvation produced by properly conceived social and political institutions, rather than on individual repentance or righteousness.

The Three Exodus Paintings
John Martin first exhibited his painting of The Seventh Plague of Egypt to an “expectant and crowding public” at the inaugural exhibition of the Society for British Artists in 1823.[8] The painting was described as “one of the very best performances of this artist” who “is without rival” when painting this type of subject.[9] Another reviewer called it a “singular work” that was “executed with a power of pencil no less conspicuous than original.”[10] The painting was also exhibited in London the following year at a special exhibition of contemporary British artists that included works by Turner, Thomas Lawrence, Benjamin Haydon, and David Wilkie. In contrast to the Royal Academy exhibitions which commonly had over 1000 works on display, or the Society for British Artists exhibition which had roughly 750, this exhibition was limited to 141 works of only the most eminent living artists.[11] The Seventh Plague of Egypt was also disseminated widely throughout British society in print form. A slightly altered version of the scene was included in Martin’s large-scale steel mezzotint illustrated Bible issued in the 1830s. The print was also sold as a single-sheet mezzotint, some of which sold for as little as one guinea apiece.[12] The image was also reproduced as a wood engraving in a number of cheaply produced annuals, in addition to the cheaply produced Westall and Martin illustrated Bible.[13] The favorable public and critical response to the painting in two prominent exhibitions, and its widespread distribution in reproductive prints, points to the need to explore its resonance with broader issues in British society of the 1820s and 1830s.

In Martin’s painting, Moses stands in the left foreground on a raised architectural landing with outstretched arms clutching a rod, as described in the Book of Exodus.[14] At his side, his companion Aaron crouches in apparent fear and reverence at the miraculous scene before him. Directly above Moses and Aaron, streaks of dark rain and cloud descend like black daggers from the sky being thrust into the back of Egypt. In the center of the canvas the scene opens both to Egypt below and the sky above. On the ground, the storm-tossed, wrecked ships in the harbor evince the turmoil caused by the hailstorm. In contrast to this turmoil, bright white light shines down from above, piercing through the swirling vortex of darkness. The heavenly light illuminates monumental Egyptian architectural forms, including immense pyramids in the distance and a series of lengthy colonnades. The right side of the canvas is dominated by a characteristic feature of Martin’s paintings—painted architecture—which here frames the cowering figure of Pharaoh and the myriads of Egyptians. By contrasting the minute figures spread across the architecture and the enormous Egyptian columns, colonnades, porticoes, and layers of terraces, a sense of urban magnificence is created. As one reviewer noted, The Seventh Plague of Egypt combined “the most dreadful phenomena of nature, with gorgeous piles of architecture, ranges of temples, palaces, towers, which the devastating elements seem about to overwhelm in universal ruin. The whole scene is impressed with an appearance of awe and horror.”[15] Beyond their sheer entertainment value, however, these elements take on alternative implications when considered in the historical context of the early nineteenth century.

The Positive Plague: A Warning to the Nation
Despite the repeated moments of tragedy and destruction in the exodus narrative, for most nineteenth-century spectators the story was about freedom, liberation, and triumph. In an 1824 Methodist Magazine article an author, after recounting the violence of the plagues of Egypt, immediately followed with comments on how those plagues evince God’s “remarkable mercy” and “special kindness.”[16] A poem from the Evangelical Magazine of 1830 entitled “The Tenth Plague,” contained this same juxtaposition. The early portion of the poem details the heartrending impact of the plagues sent by God:

Then o’er her young babe did the mother’s tears run,
As she prest to her bosom her first born son;
For its smiles they were fled and bereft of its breath,
It convulsively writhed in the tortures of death.

It is hard to conceive of a scene more tragic than a child “convulsively writh[ing] in the tortures of death” in its mother’s arms. Yet following this emotional stanza, wherein God has smitten the first born child of every Egyptian, a different sentiment and tone pervades:

But Hark! On the wind rolls the voice of a song,
Now louder and louder it echoes along,
Still higher and higher the swelling notes rise,
Tis the paean of multitudes piercing the skies…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The men of that host are the children of Shem;
The fall of Egyptia is freedom to them;
No more shall the taskmaster torture his slave,
Nor the Hebrew be laid in the bondsman’s vile grave.[17]

Despite the theme of violence in the story of the exodus, the poem emphasized how that violence punished the wicked and facilitated the liberation of God’s chosen people—for “the Fall of Egyptia is freedom to them.” For both the ancient Israelite and nineteenth-century Christian, the violence perpetrated by God on the Egyptians through the plagues, along with their ultimate demise in the Red Sea, were considered signs of God’s mercy, rather than evidence of his vengeance.

Martin visually alluded to the merciful and liberating aspects of the story by painting a bright circle of light at the center of the composition which acts as a foil to the storm and abates its consequences, even amidst the destruction on the periphery of the canvas. At least one contemporary reviewer of a reproduction of Martin’s painting noted how this feature represented the mercy of God, rather than his wrath.[18] A critic from The Monthly Review wrote:

The Israelite [Moses] looks, indeed, like a minister of heaven, rolling back the deluge and the tempest, which threatened the magnificent city before him with destruction, had not the obstinate king released the tribes from their bondage. The sun-light breaking through the overwhelming clouds, and flashing on the turbid waters; the pyramid in the distance dimly catching the return of the day; the mountains, and the more elevated buildings near them, already rejoicing in its gladness, and the crowds of human beings pouring forth the voice of gratitude for their unexpected deliverance, combine to fill up every part of this noble design with topics of the highest interest, and to impress it with a character of sublimity.[19]

This critic noted two significant aspects of Martin’s treatment of the subject that reveal an entirely new set of meanings associated with it. First, the critic viewed the destruction besetting Egypt as a result of the King’s “obstinate” refusal to free the Israelites. Human agency caused the plague, not God. Second, this reviewer described Moses as “rolling back” the plague, rather than calling it down. From the perspective of this critic, Moses stood as the deliverer from destruction. This interpretation is supported also when examining an early sketch of the scene done by Martin in which the Moses figure stands directly beneath the falling hail. In the final version, Martin shifted Moses slightly to the right, and instead of calling down the hail, Moses seems to be communing with the light piercing through the clouds. And if, in fact, Moses could be seen as pushing back the storms and as a conduit for sparing the Egyptians, then he would assume his traditional role as the political representative of God on earth whose primary function is to deliver, rather than destroy.

Moses as a Political Reformer
A significant feature of Martin’s painting is the elevation of the figure of Moses over that of Pharaoh. Martin’s Moses commands much more visual attention than Pharaoh, who is painted on a much smaller scale and hidden amidst a sea of other figures in the right foreground of the canvas. In contrast, Moses is flanked only by the crouching figure of Aaron, whose bright white robes draw the viewer’s eye to the dramatic figure of the prophet. The architecture also elevates and frames Moses. Martin created an architectural gap between the massive plinths upon which the Egyptians stand on the right side of the canvas and the platform on which Moses stands, causing the single figure of Moses to act as a counterbalance to the masses of Egyptians. The directional flow of light and dark in the sky above also assists in focusing the viewer on Moses: the black shards of rain and hail angle down toward Moses, while the light creates a diagonal form which culminates in his figure.

This emphasis on the figure of Moses was crucial because of the political overtones that accompanied his representation during this period. Moses was described in the 1820s more often as a political leader than a prophet. In both religious and political publications, Moses was frequently referred to as “the Jewish legislator, historian and prophet,” “the first legislator of the Jews,” “the great legislator,” or “The Hebrew lawgiver.”[20] In Reverend Michael Russell’s book on the history of the Jewish people (1827), the first chapter gives an overview of the civil and political constitutions of the ancient Hebrews; religion is not even mentioned until the second chapter.[21] In The Examiner‘s visual description of Martin’s painting, the author described the two foreground figures as “the supernaturally gifted Hebrew leaders,” rather than Moses and Aaron, thereby sublimating their prophetic role to their political one.[22] The fundamentally political nature of Moses is crucial to an understanding of the resonances Martin’s painting had in the early nineteenth century.

Moses also began to be associated with a distinct type of politics during the nineteenth century. In the two decades after Martin’s painting was exhibited, Moses and the exodus narrative appeared in the writings of Karl Marx and early British socialists such as Moses Hess.[23] An echo of these radical political connections was still made in the early the twentieth century in Lincoln Steffens’s defense of Leninist politics, entitled “Moses in Red.”[24] Political philosopher Michael Walzer notes that not only does the exodus story “loom large in the literature of revolution,” but that “exodus has often been imagined as a program for revolution” with Moses positioned as the political leader.[25] While Moses was not canonized by Hess and Marx as a progressive political figure until the middle of the nineteenth century, the early formulation of Moses’s political connotations and their relationship to social reforms began to germinate during the early decades of the century.

Moses’s biography made him a powerful political symbol. Because the narrative describes him as being raised within the institutions of Egyptian power, and then opposed to the very system that offered him personal comfort, convenience, and power, he seemed a figure of the ideal reformer. He was also willing to use violence to deliver his people from oppression. In the extremely popular two-penny journal The Political Register, the influential radical writer William Cobbett lauded this specific quality. Cobbett wrote that “Moses resisted oppression in the only way that resistance was within his power. He knew that his countrymen had no chance in any court; he knew that petitions against oppressions were all in vain,” and thus “he resolved to begin the only sort of resistance that was left him.”[26] In 1816 when this was published, the readership of Cobbett’s journal was estimated at 200,000 people, making it more widely read than any other newspaper or periodical.[27] Though Cobbett was not overtly religious, he employed the language of religion, and particularly the example of Moses, to explicate and justify his political positions. As Cobbett noted, when other peaceful political options were cut off, Moses led a violent revolution at the behest of God. By placing such a politically charged figure at the center of his painting, Martin engaged the radical political discourses into which Moses was rhetorically woven.

Francis Danby and David Roberts: “In the Style of Martin”
John Martin’s fame and financial successes in the early 1820s prompted a range of reactions from other artists in Britain. Some were disgusted at his lack of academic training. Others, perhaps jealous at his popular success, condemned his work as virtual theater, rather than fine art. Still others “plunged [their] plowshare into the same soil” as Martin in the hope that it would facilitate their artistic rise.[28] The two artists best known in the 1820s for painting in “the style of Martin” were Francis Danby and David Roberts. Though both artists later in their careers concentrated on landscape painting, eliminating overt references to narratives, they produced Martin-esque biblical canvases during the height of Martin’s popularity. Critics often attacked them for imitating Martin, yet Danby and Roberts garnered the type of popular praise and attention that Martin enjoyed. One reviewer called Danby’s The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt “one of the most extraordinary pictures ever painted,” while another critic described Roberts’s Departure of the Israelites as “impossible not to be struck with.”[29] Both paintings elicited popular acclaim and professional advancement for their makers. Within two years of their exhibiting these paintings, each was offered a prestigious role in the British art world, Danby in 1826 as a Royal Academy Associate, and Roberts as the President of the Society of British Artists in 1831.[30]

Fig. 5, After David Roberts, The Departure of the Israelites out of Egypt, 1832. Woodcut. The Saturday Magazine, July 28, 1832.

Fig. 6, Francis Danby, The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt, 1833. Woodcut. The Saturday Magazine, January 5, 1833.

In addition, Danby’s and Roberts’s paintings entered the collective imagination of the British populace through broadly distributed prints. Martin had become successful by selling mezzotints of his works during the 1820s, and Danby and Roberts followed suit by producing reproductions of their works as well.[31] On an even more popular level, Danby’s and Roberts’s paintings were both featured as wood-engraved frontispieces in The Saturday Magazine, a cheap Christian alternative to the popular Penny Magazine, in the early 1830s. The Saturday Magazine rarely featured history paintings on its cover, generally opting for generic views of cathedrals or foreign landscapes, yet in 1832 they made an exception for an engraving after Roberts’s The Departure of the Israelites out of the Land of Egypt (fig. 5).[32] The next year, the magazine featured Danby’s work, citing the popularity of the Roberts piece as the reason for commissioning a wood engraving after Danby (fig. 6).[33] Roberts’s painting was also turned into a large-scale diorama that was displayed in London, New York and Boston.[34] Following the exhibition in New York, the American Monthly Magazine called Roberts’s diorama “the most magnificent painting that has ever been exhibited in the United States.”[35] In all three cases, these paintings of the exodus were not only viewed by thousands of spectators at major art exhibitions, but were purchased by wealthy collectors as steel plate engravings, viewed by tens of thousands who saw the illustrated covers of penny magazines, and gazed at as massive public spectacles.

David Roberts’s The Departure of the Israelites out of the Land of Egypt in Context
In 1824 a relatively unknown stage painter named David Roberts exhibited his first attempt at fine art, a modest landscape painting, in the same exhibition as Martin’s Seventh Plague of Egypt. Though his early successes were limited, which required his continued employment as a stage painter, Roberts made a splash in 1829 with his first large-scale history painting, The Departure of the Israelites out of the Land of Egypt.[36] The story of the exodus had previously proven to be fertile ground for Martin and Danby, and Roberts decided to paint a more subdued, yet intensely dramatic scene. Rather than focusing on a moment of miraculous intervention, Roberts depicted the Israelites in a crowded procession funneling out of the great city they had helped construct. As if perched atop the city walls of Egypt, the viewer of Roberts’s painting looks down with a bird’s eye view over the city onto a broad boulevard flooded by the newly freed Israelites. On each side of the boulevard, multi-colored columns create lengthy terraces that in turn support thousands of Egyptian onlookers. Egyptian statuary, monumental pillars, grand entrances, vast porticoes, and great pyramids cover the left-hand side of the array. The sky above seems to be bisected by the morning sun as it illuminates the scene in the distance and casts much of the foreground in shadow. Apart from the sky and the elevated walkway in the foreground, every inch of the canvas is packed full of architecture and figures, creating a sort of visual claustrophobia. Martin’s paintings were characterized by towering architectural forms and thousands of tiny figures; Roberts took that formula to new extremes in The Departure of the Israelites out of the Land of Egypt.

Almost every review of Roberts’s painting emphasized two of its features: the unique way it represented masses of Israelites, and the dramatic impact of the architecture. Whereas the drama in Martin’s paintings was often conveyed through convulsions in nature, Roberts’s composition is more subdued and creates drama through scale, figures, depth, and monumental architecture. In what follows below, I want to suggest that Roberts’s painting represented the Israelites in the guise of a modern nation, while the scale of the architecture alluded to their former role as slaves. By representing Israel as a modern nation, Roberts’s work emphasizes the parallels between the chosen nation of Israel and the possible chosen status of modern Britain, and by alluding to issues of slavery and freedom, Roberts’s work recalls a salient contemporary political issue that was significantly influenced by Christian theology and morality.

Israel as a Nation
One unique aspect of Roberts’s work is his virtual elimination of the major actors in the story in favor of the crowds that line a grand boulevard. Both Pharaoh and Moses are difficult to locate on the canvas, even though each appears in the foreground of the painting. Neither is given the type of space and focus they had in Martin’s Seventh Plague of Egypt. In Roberts’s painting, Pharaoh’s small seated figure is arrayed in glorious robes and golden decorations that cause him to merge with his lavish surroundings, rendering him almost camouflaged in the scene. Moses’s figure is only slightly more visible in the right middle ground of the painting, as it is turned away from the viewer and covered entirely in shadow. Reduced to a small silhouette with upraised arms, Moses holds a rod to indicate his identity. Viewing either figure requires the spectator to inspect the painting up close and with a high degree of precision, whereas the crowd of Israelites leaving Egypt en masse would have been visible to all onlookers. The perspective, the lighting, and the architectural elements all lead the viewer’s eye down onto the broad boulevard flooded with Israelites. This emphasis on the Israelites as the key subject in the painting, and their conception as a single mass, significantly alters the possible political associations of the painting.

Roberts’s painting suggests visually that the Israelites are leaving Egypt as a unified nation. Some of the more striking details in the painting are the flags, banners, and ensigns carried by the Israelites on their way out of the city. Rather than appearing as a disheveled conglomeration of downtrodden peoples, as one might expect a recently oppressed people to appear, Roberts presents them with the accoutrements of modern nationhood. This sense of unity is also emphasized by the perceived movement in unison across the canvas. A number of critics noted this visual phenomenon in their exhibition reviews. The Literary Gazette wrote that the painting contains a “multitude of human beings actuated by one great impulse.”[37] The Belle Assemblée claimed it to be “impossible” that “the effect of immense masses of people could be given upon canvas with greater accuracy,” adding that “those masses appear almost to possess the attribute of motion.”[38] The New Monthly Magazine described how the sensation is great from a distance, but as the canvas is approached “a spectator finds that what appears to be a multitude of human beings is merely a number of dabs of color, without shape or form, he becomes astonished, as a very trifling distance converts them into an animated crowd.”[39] The crowd of Israelites is described by these various reviewers as “animated,” in “motion,” and “actuated by one great impulse”—all alluding to the way the Israelites seemed to come to life as a unified body in motion. This sense of unified movement by the Israelites, combined with the flags as markers of modern nationalism, results in the representation of Israel as a nation.

The significance of this pictorial device lies in the rhetorical connections made between ancient Israel and Britain in the early nineteenth century. Numerous commentators connected Britain, in both literal and metaphorical terms, to the ancient nation of Israel.[40] Israel was described as an elect society of God that gained heavenly protection amidst calamity, rather than suffering the effects of those calamities. Many people believed that the destiny of modern Britain connected to the children of Israel. Israel was the key example of an exception to the destruction sent by God. Many Britons believed that while calamities would accompany the impending apocalypse, it was possible for Britain to assume the role of the Israelites and be delivered, rather than destroyed.[41]

Britain as Israel
Both religious and secular leaders cited various sources to assert the confluence of these two societies, and thus posit the possibility for Britain’s deliverance amid catastrophe. Some viewed Britain’s role in the Protestant reformation as an example of her chosen status as a modern day Israel. In 1810 Claudius Buchanan preached that “at the present era Great Britain stands conspicuous in the eyes of the world … and has become, by Divine Providence, the constituted Guardian, in a manner, of the religion and liberties of men.” He taught that “Great Britain’s survival was as directly providential as God’s protection of Israel.”[42] Many pointed to Britain’s immunity from the ravages of the Napoleonic wars as evidence that they had been “delivered” from tyranny in the manner of the Israelites. In the 1820s Reverend George Croly, who was a close friend of John Martin’s and would later write the text for Roberts’s illustrated books on the Holy Land, also cited Britain’s protection during the French Revolution from external invasion as evidence of its chosen status. While preaching about Britain’s future in the midst of the apocalypse, Croly said:

The fate of our own country in this visitation may well exercise that deepest interest of piety and human nature. She may well be severely tried; it is scarcely conceivable that in so vast and extent of suffering she should remain untouched. But she has been hitherto sustained in a manner little short of a miracle. In the fearful trial which has so lately passed upon Europe, England was of all nations placed in the most direct road of peril. In the revolutionary race we had the natural means, and hereditary powers, the right, to have flung even France behind; a more democratic constitution, a more democratic spirit than any other monarchical people . . . yet from this unrivaled peril England was saved and more than saved; raised to be successively the refuge, the champion, and the leader of the civilized world.[43]

Croly’s statement placed Britain under the divine protection of God, but not necessarily through super-human means. Rather than the opening of a Red Sea, Croly cited the “more democratic” form of government as the God-given gift which enabled England to be saved. It is crucial to recognize that although the miraculous emancipation of the Israelites from Egypt was constantly proposed as a type for modern Britain, the otherworldly aspects of their deliverance were often translated into more concrete and prescient political terms when positing Britain’s possible deliverance.

David Bogue made another telling statement in his widely popular tract On Universal Peace, which was based on an 1813 sermon and republished many times throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Bogue employed reason to assert the logic of Britain’s future deliverance and its connection to ancient Israel:

Is it at all unreasonable to suppose that a nation living under the influence of the spirit of the Gospel . . . would experience the peculiar protection of the great governor of the world? How remarkable in this respect was his care over Israel of old, when they faithfully kept his covenant and his testimonies! . . . is it irrational to conceive, that if any one country were to be regulated in all its domestic measures, and in all its foreign relations, by the spirit of the Gospel, it would be the peculiar charge of God, and enjoy the smiles of his approbation, and the guardianship of his providence—in a degree hitherto unknown since the commencement of the Christian era, because such Christian conduct in a government has been unknown? Individuals will have rewards and punishments dispensed to them in a future state—but fair, nations as such, will have no existence. Is it improper then to argue, that virtuous and pious nations will consequently have their reward in the present world?[44]

Based on the prototype of ancient Israel, Bogue concluded that only a country “regulated in its domestic measures, and in all its foreign relations, by the spirit of the gospel” could obtain the protection of “the great governor of the world.” He further stated that it would be “Christian conduct in government” that would facilitate the British nation’s deliverance. This emphasis on government reform as the mechanism by which Britain could mirror ancient Israel is a key component in understanding the impact of monumental paintings of the exodus. And it was not an idea confined to conservative political circles. After government troops killed innocent protestors in Birmingham at what came to be known as the “Peterloo Massacre,” the radical publication The Medusa reported that the day of retributive justice could be forestalled if the English government did “works meet for repentance.”[45] Each of these writers—Croly, Bogue, and the Medusa correspondent—cited government as the key component in the formula that might either gain the favor of God or lose it. It is also important to note the conditional nature of these statements. For instance, Bogue carefully inserted the word “if” right before describing what a country might do to obtain God’s divine protection. In this theoretical program Britain is not guaranteed its place as the elect of God; rather it could become such through “Christian conduct in government.”

But what did “Christian conduct in government” mean in the 1820s, when Roberts, Danby, and Martin were exhibiting their paintings of the deliverance of the Israelites? If Britain only became the modern day incarnation of the ancient Israelites through effectively implementing Christian-based government reforms, what precisely were those reforms? The most significant and successful implementation of Christian principles into government policy in the early nineteenth century came in response to another social ill alluded to in Roberts’s painting—slavery.

Stone Testaments to Slavery
Reviewers of Roberts’s painting were particularly struck by the dramatic architecture of Egypt in The Departure of the Israelites, as noted earlier. In the painting, the architecture itself becomes a crucial actor in the painting. Critics described it as “remarkable for its distinctness, force, and truth,” and “replete with grandeur.”[46] Another reviewer described the architecture as producing “an overpowering effect” upon viewers.[47] In The Saturday Magazine, the author marveled over “the admiration we have felt in musing upon this wondrous scene, letting the eye swim, as it were, over sculptured temple and tower.”[48] For most nineteenth-century viewers the repeated columns and colonnades stacked one upon another were a prime attraction in the painting. Yet when they are described merely as attractions, there is a danger of minimizing the significance of the ideas suggested by these painted forms. The juxtaposition of such massive buildings with the crowds of departing Israelites alluded to the slave labor that had built such grandiose architecture. A review of the painting in the Morning Journal described the paintings as representing “the tens of thousands of the chosen people depart[ing] from the house of bondage, arrayed in the borrowed jewels of their masters, who gaze on them with fear and anxiety from the rich palaces of their masters.”[49] As this reviewer noted, the narrative of the painting is fundamentally about the freeing of an enslaved people. The slavery of the Israelites is also emphasized by the visualized extremes of class difference—the “rich palaces” of the masters in counterbalance with the “borrowed jewels” the Israelites wear. Roberts’s work compels the viewer to think about the issue of slavery through juxtaposing the Israelites with the immense buildings they labored to build.

While the foreground is dominated by extensive colonnades, Roberts included the pyramids of Egypt prominently on the horizon. At this time, the pyramids were largely considered as markers of slavery, or “monuments of the miseries of their erection,” as much as they were wonders of the world.[50] One author described the pyramids as nothing more than “huge piles of brick or stone, with square bases and triangular sides, reared by slaves for tyrants to moulder in.”[51] Voltaire published what was probably the most widely-read opinion on the subject in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), where he wrote, “These very pyramids are monuments of their slavery, for the whole nation must have been made to work on them, otherwise such unwieldy masses could never have been finished.”[52] C. F. Volney’s On the Ruins of Empires (1793) offered a personal account of witnessing dramatic Egyptian architecture:

Elevated as we are with so exalted a proof of the power of man, when we consider the purpose for which these amazing works were intended, we cannot but view them with regret. We lament, that to construct a useless sepulcher, a whole nation should have been rendered miserable for twenty years: we shudder at the numberless acts of injustice and oppression the tiresome labors must have cost, in conveying, preparing, and piling up such an immense mass of stones and we are inflamed with indignation at the tyranny of the despots who enforced these barbarous works, a sentiment indeed which too frequently recurs on viewing the different monuments of Egypt. Those labyrinths, temples, and pyramids, by their huge and heavy structure attest much less to the genius of a nation, opulent and friendly to the arts, than the servitude of a people who were slaves to the caprices of their monarchs.[53]

The pyramids of Egypt, and for that matter all of the Egyptian architecture, including “its labyrinths” and “temples,” alluded to the substantial number of slaves required to build such large structures. Rather than viewing these monuments with admiration, these authors focused on the utter uselessness of such buildings; their descriptions revealed the pyramids to be little more than monstrous stone witnesses to the whims of foolish monarchs and the existence of slave labor in Egypt. Most people believed that it was in fact the Israelite slaves who constructed the pyramids.[54] The representation of the pyramids and the other large Egyptian architectural forms would have especially connoted the idea of Israelite slavery in nineteenth-century Britain.

Slavery was the political cause that prompted many Christians to see their religion through a new political lens. The debate over slavery set a precedent for other Christian-inspired political movements. In contrast to those who believed Christianity to be a fundamentally private matter, the legislative intervention into the economics of slavery set a precedent whereby Christian morality could justifiably be turned into law. In 1817 John Ovington wrote against “any kind of policy that would fetter the conscience” on the basis of Christian morality, and described the fight to end slavery as the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” He wrote, “the Slave Trade, that odious traffic in the flesh and blood of human beings, was abolished by a steady union of talents, wealth, and influence. Precisely in the same way should we assail all the remains of barbarism, which are yet to be found in our laws and institutions.”[55] The debate over slavery near the turn of the nineteenth century had fundamentally altered the relationship between Christianity and politics in Britain: rather than religion acting as a bulwark against changes to a traditional social structure, religion began to inspire progressive political movements. By the 1820s the rhetoric of abolition was defined in even broader terms by early Christian Socialists.

The term “wage-slave” was coined during these decades as a way of extending Christian abolitionist rhetoric to the fight against forms of domestic oppression. In the years after Waterloo, radical journals such as The People asserted that “[the working classes in Britain] are enslaved—legally . . . forestalled by our good parliament.”[56] In the same year Thomas Evans, the Spencean radical, wrote in his popular Christian Policy that the policies of land enclosure[57] and high taxation have reduced the majority of Britons “to a pauper, a slave. A Slave! Aye, more a slave than the poor African in the plantation; the Africans master is bound to feed him, though he be unemployed, but the lawmaking landlords after robbing the poor of their all, wish to bind themselves to nothing.”[58] The legislative achievements of the abolitionist movement set a precedent for Christian socialist reformers who continued to attack the injustices of the system throughout the century. Thus, when Roberts exhibited his painting in 1829, the picturing of abolition in a biblical context could have resonated with the causes of freeing African slaves in the new world and alleviating domestic wage slavery as well.

The Government of God under Moses
Because Roberts’s painting dealt with the idea of slavery within the exodus narrative, it is necessary to explore the specific ways in which Christian socialists also blended their calls for ending wage-slavery with the Mosaic account from the Bible. Christian socialist reforms took many legislative shapes, each of which could have been alluded to generically through the representation of freeing the Israelites from bondage, since the bondage of British factory workers took the form of physical and economic oppression. Christian reformers had successfully lobbied for restraints on child labor in 1819—including age and hour limitations in factories.[59] They also argued for a more progressive structure of taxation, and the institution of usury laws, minimum wage laws, and other legislative checks against the exploitation of the working classes.[60] In essence, Christian reformers were attempting to create an earthly government that mirrored their conception of a heavenly government. Politically laden phrases such as “the moral Governor” and “the great Governor” were commonly employed in reference to God’s role in the administration of the universe.[61] The challenge was how to translate the theoretical governance of the universe into the realities of early nineteenth-century British politics. The radical journal The Republican, which often contained anti-religious rhetoric, printed a long article in 1825 entitled “Sacred Politics” that aimed to examine the Bible and ascertain the type of government it favored. After examining both the Old and New Testaments, the author came to the conclusion that,

The scared writings give the fullest and most satisfactory account of the moral government of God, which is a government of justice and benevolence; they hold it up to our view, and propose it to our imitation; so that the scriptures are most decidedly in favour of that government which is most like God’s . . . the New testament inclines strongly in favor of that government, whatever may be its name and form, in which the poor are taken from the background of forgetfulness and contempt, and brought forward to be held up to view as important and respectable; where virtues, not riches, place the laurel on the brow. And that government which casts contempt upon the poor, and neglects the virtuous, has the greatest reason to dread being tried by the touchstone of revelation.[62]

This passage is interesting for two key reasons. First, the rhetoric of the apocalypse was specifically employed, even in an anti-religious journal like The Republican. The final phrase, condemning a government that “casts contempt upon the poor” as having “the greatest reason to dread being tried by the touchstone of revelation,” directly referenced an impending apocalyptic judgment that was believed to befall the wicked. Second, the passage is striking for its vague generalities when describing the government of God; the author used generic phrases such as “whatever may be its name and form” rather than naming a specific republican or democratic system. I chose this passage because in some ways it encapsulated the challenge of how to outline the government of God. So many different systems of government were recorded in the Bible that it would be difficult to draw firm conclusions as to which type of earthly government God prefers. Christian reformers were left with a series of basic principles centered on the protection of the poor, but with very few concrete policies or detailed government models.

The only section in the Bible that defied this vagueness was the system of government instituted by Moses for the Israelites. Reformers recognized and proclaimed that on this sole occasion in the Bible God himself directed the institution of a government system, thereby providing a precise pattern to follow. The writer for The Republican concluded that despite the many things relating to civil government in the Bible, “the chief part [in the Bible on civil government] is contained . . . in the dispensation of the religion which God gave to the Jews,” because in it God “not only laid some restraints upon the civil administration, but absolutely appointed of what kind the government should be.”[63] The author further noted that “the Mosaic constitution” was difficult to identify by any single name, but it was in any case not an aristocracy or a monarchy determined by birth or wealth. He asserted: “We may call it a Federal Republic . . . We are constrained to acknowledge the democratic nature of the constitution which God framed for the Jews . . . the strain of the Old Testament runs in favor of democracy.”[64] Because of this categorization of the Mosaic system of government as a democratic Federal Republic, the depiction of Moses and the Israelites was by nature politicized. Yet the final painting I will discuss, Francis Danby’s The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt, further encouraged a political reading through the inclusion of a number of salient details that allowed the painting to allude to the government of God as revealed by Moses.

Francis Danby’s The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt in Context
John Martin’s painting elevated the figure of Moses as the political leader of the Israelites; David Roberts work pictured Israel in the guise of a modern nation; and Francis Danby brought the exodus narrative to a conclusion by representing the climactic moment of the Red Sea crossing. From the moment Danby exhibited his work critics noted its similarity to the work of Martin. Yet despite the subject and stylistic similarities, Danby did not merely copy Martin. Danby’s artistic skills were of a different sort than Martin’s or Roberts’s. Danby was more adept at painting the human figure, and his work features a number of detailed foreground figures that evince a series of emotions and perform a number of actions. Aside from these figures, Danby integrated a number of details into the scene that depart from the biblical text and only make sense within the larger framework of Israelite history. The combined effect of these artistic mechanisms was the production of a single narrative moment that also referred to the future Israelite government under the leadership of Moses.

Francis Danby emigrated from Ireland in 1813 with a small group of artists, all intent on becoming successful painters in London. He spent much of his first decade in England in Bristol trying to make ends meet, but things changed dramatically in 1823 after one of his paintings was admitted into the Royal Academy exhibition and later purchased by its President, Sir Thomas Lawrence. On the heels of this success, Danby attempted to create a much more dramatic painting that would capture the attention of all London. When he exhibited The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt in 1825, it was heavily praised and sold for the substantial sum of 500 guineas. One reviewer called it “the grand attraction at Somerset House” that year.[65] Danby was elected the following year as an Associate of the Royal Academy.[66] A large mezzotint of the painting was made in 1829, when one reviewer referred to it as “universally known and appreciated.”[67]

Danby chose the dramatic moment when Moses commanded the Sea to close on Pharaoh’s armies. The composition positions the viewer on a raised bluff along with the Israelites who look back at the spectacle of the waters crashing in upon the Egyptians. Most of the Israelites gaze out toward the Red Sea and have their backs turned on the viewer. The painting integrates the spectator into the scene by placing him or her alongside the Israelites, and by so doing causes the viewer to identify with them. Danby divided the canvas nearly in half with a dark rocky precipice that stretches upward and outward above the banks of the Red Sea. The small and relatively inconspicuous figure of Moses is positioned on a smaller outcropping in the middle ground, and his figure would be virtually invisible were it not for the contrast between the dark shadows produced by the rocky peak behind him and his white robes. Waters rush on the left hand side of this bisecting precipice, caving in toward the Israelites and the viewer. Remnants of Pharaoh’s grand army can be detected in the gushing white waters. Danby represents the “countless multitudes of Israel” at the base of the white water and overflowing into the foreground.[68] These masses then pour over to the right and gather around the pillar of fire hovering in the air over the Ark of the Covenant. In the foreground, Danby painted a number of highly detailed figures, many of whom are overcome with emotion, and a number of others who appear engaged in various activities. Some are carrying and piling up goods, others are praising God, and some are cowering in fear. Miriam, the sister of Moses, sits prominently on a bright red carpet located in the right foreground of the canvas. In the far distance, the great pyramids of Egypt are silhouetted against an ominously red sunset. Like works by Martin, the public popularity of Danby’s painting can be attributed to its scale, its minute figures, the familiarity of the biblical narrative, and the sheer drama of the subject.

The Equitable Economics of Moses and British Reformist Politics
At the heart of the Mosaic system of government was a radical mechanism for ensuring a more economically equitable society. Because of the Israelites’ tendency to focus on earthly comforts and possessions, the Mosaic system of government contained a series of checks against property accumulation, along with incentives designed to discourage pernicious social practices that preyed on the poor. Many reformers pointed to this system as the prototype Christian government that should be mirrored by modern Christian nations like Britain, largely because it was believed to have been established by God himself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge summed up the key elements of the Israelite system of government as follows:

The Jewish government was founded on an original Contract. The Constitution was presented to the whole nation by Moses, and each individual solemnly assented to it. By this Constitution the Jews became a Federal Republic . . . The country contained 15 millions of acres, which were equally divided among the people, 25 acres to each man . . . To preserve this equal division it became necessary to prevent alienation—to this end interest for money was forbidden and an act of grace for the abolition of all debts passed every sixth year . . . but as abuses might gradually creep in, and as all constitutions require to be frequently brought back to their first principles, on every 50th year a solemn Jubilee was appointed, in which all lands were restored, and the estate of every family discharged from all encumbrances returned to the family again . . . Property is power and equal property equal power. A poor man is necessarily more or less a slave. Poverty is the death of public freedom—it virtually enslaves individuals, and generates those vices, which makes necessary a dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch. If we except the Spartan, the Jewish has been the only republic that can consistently boast of liberty and equality.[69]

Coleridge’s statement is telling for a number of reasons. First, he employed the language of Republican politics. He spoke of the Jewish “Constitution,” described their system as a “Federal Republic,” and cited it as the historical emblem of “liberty and equality.” The mere use of this type of language in the 1790′s would have positioned the system of Moses as fundamentally radical since it so closely mirrored the calls of the French revolutionaries. Second, he outlined the specific policies that made the Mosaic system successful, including equal distribution of land, democratic consent, a prohibition against charging interest on loans, and periodic abolition of debt. It is not difficult to conceive of how these ideas might appeal to large sectors of the British public, many of whom had recently lost access to common lands due to “enclosure” and were now struggling under the various debts incurred in the process of migration to urban areas. Virtually every level of abuse allowed in the British social economy was prohibited in the Mosaic Republic.

The economic system of Moses was an especially powerful prototype for reformers for three crucial reasons. First, it offered a supposed historical precedent of a successful legislative structure that achieved many of the goals reformers aimed to accomplish. Second, it was an example that carried the authoritative weight of the Bible. Third, for believing Christians, it was a system considered to be designed by the hand of God. For these reasons, reformers cited the Mosaic government consistently in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Charles Hall, one of the most influential reformers and earliest Socialist thinkers[70] cited the Mosaic system for these very reasons—positing it as the antidote to the evils allowed under the British system. Hall believed that a progressive tax should be instituted, primogeniture should be done away with, and a punitive tax on luxury goods should be introduced, and for each of these proposals he cited the Mosaic system as evidence of its feasibility, wisdom, and practicality.

Nevertheless, despite the prevalence of these ideas within political circles, Danby did not paint a series of social policies—he painted the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt and the closing of the Red Sea on the Egyptians. Connecting the social and economic policies of the Mosaic system of government with this specific biblical moment might seem unlikely. However, when the details of Danby’s painting are considered carefully, the work contains a series of visual markers that signify both the political authority of Moses and the conditions that prompted the institution of the precise social policies reformers were citing at the time.

Fig. 7, Francis Danby, The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt, 1825 (detail). Engraving. Yale Center for British Art. Photograph by Chris Coltrin.

The Anachronistic Ark
The first of these markers is perhaps he oddest detail in Danby’s painting—the Ark of the Covenant (fig. 7). Its oddity stems from the simple fact that the Ark of the Covenant did not exist yet at this point in the biblical narrative. One reviewer noted the anachronism: “The Ark of the Covenant appears in the distant van of the multitudinous line of the Israelites. This is an anachronism, for the Ark was not yet made.”[71] The Ark was not constructed until much later in the narrative, following Moses’s receipt of the Ten Commandments.[72] Danby’s inclusion of the Ark does not reveal an indifference to anachronism, rather, it reveals his utilization of anachronism as a storytelling mechanism.

The inclusion of the Ark of the Covenant was significant because the Ark represented, as theologian John Owen put it, “the most eminent pledge of the especial presence of God among the people.”[73] But the Ark was more than a spiritual marker, it was also a political one. It held “the law,” or the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Moses was the “Hebrew Legislator” and the Ark symbolized the divine origin of his political authority, as stemming from “the Great Governor” of the universe. The Ark was also used as a political symbol by early nineteenth-century writers. Writing in 1816, one British author asserted, “the constitution is our Ark of the Covenant.”[74] By drawing parallels between the modern constitution and the Israelite Ark, writings like these re-inscribed the fundamentally political nature of the Ark of the Covenant. By anachronistically including the Ark in a scene of the Red Sea closing, Danby’s painting breaks free from the constraints of the single moment depicted, while simultaneously alluding to the political authority on which the Israelite nation was based.

The Ark of the Covenant is further highlighted in this painting, as it resides beneath the glowing pillar of light. Because of the visual complexity of a scene such as this, certain details functioned as markers for guiding viewers to crucial details; one of these markers was the pillar of light that contrasts with the dark background on the right-hand side of the canvas. Reviewers of the painting marveled at the way in which Danby painted this pillar of light that hovers above and points to the Ark. The critic for the London Magazine and Review was captivated with the effect created by the pillar:

In colour, it is of a livid and ominous bluish green; a pervading hue of death and dismay; it seems the element where life dies and death lives, which only Dante or Milton could imagine, and only Danby has painted. It appears to emanate from that wondrous light where locally resides the author or agent of the miracle. In painting this pillar of fire, the artist appears to have dipped his pencil,—not in pigments, but in the essence of light itself. Instead of a column of fire, it takes the more extraordinary form of a lengthened parabolic spindle of light . . . the ominous light which we have endeavored to describe, gleams on the countless multitudes of Israel, which seems to consist of “numbers without number.”[75]

The pillar of fire interested this critic as a symbolic form and also guided his eye to the minute “multitudes of Israel” on the right-hand side of the canvas and the object they gather around. As another critic pointed out, “The effect produced by the pillar of fire, in illuminating the ark, is wonderfully illusive.”[76] The Ark is a tiny component in a large painting; nevertheless it gains visual prominence because the pillar of light compels viewers to seek out what lies beneath its glow.

The Flesh-Pots of Egypt
The Ark of the Covenant signified Moses’s political authority and alluded to the future of the Israelites under his leadership, but it did not, by itself, speak to any specific aspect of the Mosaic government. However, other elements of Danby’s painting pointed more specifically to the social reforms that concerned nineteenth-century reformers. Many parts of the Mosaic government were aimed at countering the Israelite tendency to forget God’s mercy and instead long for the comforts they experienced in Egypt. One of the most oft-quoted passages from Exodus was, “And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full.”[77] The term “flesh-pots” was often used in the 1820s in reference to the enticements, comforts, and luxuries of the world.[78] In 1817, one author who was attempting to stamp out revolutionary sentiment made connections between the British and the “Rebellious Israelites” by asserting, “But you, Briton, my countrymen, are invited to rebel and cry out for the flesh-pots which your fathers had not,—for the comforts they never enjoyed.”[79] The author equated the Israelite desire for the “flesh-pots” of Egypt with the desire among nineteenth-century Britons who were discontent with simply having their needs met, but rather wanted more of everything. This phrase is significant because in Danby’s painting the foreground contains the enticing flesh-pots of Egypt.

Fig. 8, Francis Danby, The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt, 1825 (detail). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, England. Photograph by Chris Coltrin.

One of the most unexpected and eye-catching portions of the canvas is the bottom left corner, where a large mound of luxury objects lies. The pile has been created by an individual who continues to carry objects even during the closing of the Red Sea beneath (fig. 8). Due to his labors, a mound of shining armor, jeweled cups, golden helmets, and numerous other luxury objects sits on the precipice above the Red Sea. One reviewer concluded, based on the fact that the Israelites were newly freed slaves and would not have possessed such objects themselves, that these were “the riches of which Egypt ha[d] been despoiled, consisting of splendid armor, magnificent vases, and other costly matters.”[80] This is one of the oddest episodes in the painting, because the figure’s actions seem counter-intuitive; rather than turning and acknowledging the convulsing waters, which are painted with such drama that they almost seem to have an audible effect on the viewer, this figure stares down at a large golden vase on a fine red carpet.

This motif of distraction by luxury goods during the moment of miraculous deliverance is then repeated across the canvas. The bottom right corner contains another mound of objects, along with a group of oblivious individuals who unload a camel laden with goods. In addition, Danby placed in the middle ground of the painting a series of figures pushing a cumbersome golden chariot loaded with goods up the hill. I would argue that through these various episodes Danby evokes the “flesh-pots” of Egypt. Though not part of the biblical account of the closing of the Red Sea, Danby represents the Israelites as clinging to the fine things of Egypt even as they leave them behind. Thus, the still lifes in the foreground, and the figures engrossed in them, point to a broader moral in the story of the exodus regarding the greed and selfishness among the Israelites, even when confronted with the evidence of God’s power and presence.

Danby also represents a variety of emotional responses among the foreground figures. Instead of unified rejoicing at their deliverance, some figures bury their heads in their hands, so consumed with grief that they are unaware of God’s intervention on their behalf. Danby paints the Israelites as torn between fundamental impulses: gratitude and greed, faith and doubt, selflessness and selfishness. Even when witnessing the miraculous hand of God before their eyes, those impulses persist. This point is crucial in reference to contemporary British politics in the nineteenth century. Those arguing for government reformation based their arguments on the notion that because mankind was inherently inclined toward oppressing one another, government intervention was required in order to stabilize and harmonize society.[81] The laissez-faire approach preferred by conservatives was based on the notion that self-correction and the ability of religion to provide that self-correction freed government from any responsibility toward that end. Yet Moses was a religious leader who felt compelled to institute social and economic policies to counter mankind’s inherent tendencies, rather than place his faith in the power of religion alone to produce social harmony. Thus, by depicting the very selfish and greedy tendencies of man when confronted with his miraculous deliverance, Danby’s painting makes an implicit case for the government policies Moses instituted, and reformers cited as templates, for modern Britain.

During the 1820s the rhetorical employment of the Mosaic government as a precedent for parliamentary reform was continued in publications like The Imperial Magazine, which featured an article “On the Legislation of Moses” in 1823. The article stated that under the Mosaic system, “the restraining laws on usury, and against every kind of oppression, convincingly teach the humanity of the legislator; and certainly afford a profitable warning to every state, against the growing and overpowering evils of national pauperism.”[82] As the debate regarding the reformation of the “poor-laws” became even more heated in the early 1830s,[83] the working-class journal The Co-operator again cited the Mosaic system of government as a pattern to be followed, stating that “the avarice and rapacity of the rich of those days [meaning the days of the Israelites under Moses], and the natural tendency to accumulate, were guarded against by a law which prevented the perpetual alienation of small properties.” But under the system of Moses, “Neither force nor cunning could despoil a man of his little inheritance.”[84] Perhaps the Spencean Allen Davenport put it most succinctly in 1836—”the only question to be decided is which is right, the Bible, or the landlord’s title-deeds.”[85]

Conclusion
Martin, Danby, and Roberts cohered in choosing to paint the narrative of the exodus, though they each emphasized different elements of it. Martin, in his The Seventh Plague of Egypt, revealed the power of God behind the plague, and highlighted the role of Moses as the instrument whose agency facilitated the will of god on earth. Roberts’s painting of The Departure of the Israelites distanced itself from such miraculous moments of the narrative, opting instead for visualizing the nation of Israel exiting Egypt. By representing the Israelites with the trappings of modern nationhood, including banners and ensigns, Roberts’s work engaged the contemporary discourse that aligned modern Britain with the elect nation of Israel. Also, his painting alluded to the slavery of the Israelites by juxtaposing them with the immense architectural structures they built. Danby’s painting of The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt concluded the exodus narrative by representing the Red Sea closing on the Egyptians. He emphasized the Israelites’ failure to recognize the intervention of God on their behalf by painting some figures as longing instead for the comforts of Egypt. Through these prominent motifs, along with an anachronistic inclusion of the politically-charged Ark of the Covenant, Danby’s painting transcended the single moment depicted and alluded to the future travails of Israel in the wilderness.

Each of these works invoked ideas that were politically potent in the early nineteenth century. Martin elevated Moses, a figure constantly characterized in the early nineteenth century as a political lawgiver and legislator enacting the government of God. Roberts’s painting engaged the heated debate on slavery and abolition—an issue that was especially pertinent to a religious painting given the influence of Christianity on the abolitionist movement. Danby’s anachronism and conceptions of Israelite character alluded to the legislative policies instituted under Moses as a check on the selfish social behavior depicted in his painting. This message was especially salient in the early nineteenth century, when land reformers and early Christian socialists cited Mosaic government policies as their inspiration and evidence of their divine sanction.

Christian reformers in the nineteenth century sought to understand and define the government of God as contained in the Bible. God was frequently described in political terms as the monarch of all creation. Yet the Bible does not reveal which government system God favors for mankind in the absence of a perfect monarch. For centuries, kings in Europe had cited the monarchy of God as a precedent for their rule on earth. However, by the early 1800s reformers had begun to use religious discourse as a means of combating absolute monarchy. Reformers pointed to the Mosaic society of the Israelites as the only place in the Bible where God had instituted a legislative program. Under Moses, monarchy was supplanted by a “Federal Republic” that had a series of laws assuring economic equality. The contrast between the Egyptians and the Israelites in all three of these paintings emphasized this point. God destroyed the oppressive monarchical system of Egypt. Out of its ashes he created a new system among the Israelites that inverted everything upon which Egypt’s destruction had been premised. The juxtaposition of Egypt and Israel in these three paintings made them fundamentally political works. In the context of early nineteenth-century politics, where the abolition of slavery, alleviation of wage-slavery, and land-redistribution were core components of the reformist platform, these works visualized the synchronization between the Bible and modern reformist politics.

[1] For a summary of the history of the seal see James Parton, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (London: Trubner and Co., 1864), 2:131.

[2] Ibid., 368.

[3] Leopold Martin, “Reminiscences of John Martin,” Newcastle Observer, March 30, 1889.

[4] “The British Institution,” London Magazine, September, 1825, 68; “The Passage of the Red Sea, Engraved by Phillips,” Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle, March 11, 1829, 152; “Engravings,” Examiner, March 29, 1829, 200.

[5] “Art IV: The Veracity of the Five Books of Moses,” Eclectic Review, April 1830, 334.

[6] See Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (New York: Clarendon Press, 1999); Christopher Burdon, Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unraveling, 1700-1834 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Stephen Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millenniallists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

[7] “On the Genius of John Martin,” Arnold’s Magazine of the Fine Arts, December 1833, 101.

[8] “Fine Arts,” Examiner, April 25, 1824, 262.

[9] “Society of British Artists,” Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science, and the Fine Arts, January 1824, 307.

[10] “Fine Arts,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, May 1824, 201.

[11] For an overview of the number of works on display at the Royal Academy, see Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School; with Critical Notices of Their Works, and an Account of the Progress of Art in England (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1866), 2:574. For information on the Society for British Artists exhibition numbers, see “Society of British Artists,” 307. For information on the 1825 exhibition of contemporary British artists, see “Monthly View of New Publications, Music, the English and Foreign Drama, the Fine Arts, Literary and Scientific Intelligence,” Belle Assemblée; or Court and Fashionable Magazine, June 1825, 261.

[12] For details on the editions see Michael J. Campbell and York City Art Gallery, John Martin: Visionary Printmaker (England: Campbell Fine Art in Association with York City Art Gallery, 1992), 39–40; William Feaver, The Art of John Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 84.

[13] John Hobart Caunter, Richard Westall, and John K. L. Martin, Illustrations of the Bible by Westall and Martin, with Descriptions by the Rev. Hobart Caunter (London: Edward Churton, 1835); Frederick Shoberl, Forget-Me-Not, a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1828, (London: R. Ackerman, 1828), 203.

[14] Exod. chap. 9.

[15] “Gallery of British Artists, Suffolk Street,” Literary Chronicle, April 17, 1824, 253.

[16] “Divinity: The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, October 1824: 660.

[17] “The Tenth Plague,” Evangelical Magazine, July 1830, 301–2, italics added.

[18] As mentioned before, The Seventh Plague was re-produced as an engraving in a number of annuals, one of those being the Schobler, Forget-Me-Not of 1828. This quote is taken from a review of the print contained in this publication.

[19] “Book Review,” Monthly Review, November 1827, 40.

[20] Mrs. Sherwood, Bible History, or Scripture Its Own Interpreter Illustrated from the Birth, to the Death of Moses (London: Knight and Lacey, 1823), 33; “The Bible,” Co-operator, June 1,1830, 3; “Art XVII: The Principal Events in the Life of Moses,” British Critic, January 1816, 109; “On Miracles,” Republican, November 24, 1826: 612, 616.

[21] Michael Russell, A Connection of Sacred and Profane History (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1827).

[22] “Exhibition of the Society of British Artists,” Examiner, May 2, 1824, 276.

[23] Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 6.

[24] Lincoln Steffens, Moses in Red: The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1926).

[25] Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 1.

[26] William Cobbett, “To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,” Cobbett’s Political Register, November 2, 1816, 556.

[27] See James P. Huzel, The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 109; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 101.

[28] “Fine Arts: Suffolk Street Gallery,” Literary Gazette, March 28, 1829, 212; “The Genius of John Martin,” Arnold’s Magazine of the Fine Arts, December 1833, 97–104.

[29] “Monthly View of New Publications,” (1825), 261; “Monthly View of New Publications, Music, the English and Foreign Drama, the Fine Arts, Literary and Scientific Intelligence,” Belle Assemblée; or Court and Fashionable Magazine, May 1829, 223.

[30] Clara Clement, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and their Works: A Handbook Containing Two Thousand and Fifty Biographical Sketches (Houghton: Osgood, 1879), 181; James Ballantine, The Life of David Roberts (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1866), 36.

[31] “New Engravings,” Monthly Magazine, or, British Register, May 1829, 550–51.

[32] Saturday Magazine, July 28, 1832, 5.

[33] Saturday Magazine, January 5, 1833, 33.

[34] Kevin J. Avery, “Dioramas in New York, 1826-1849,” Panorama; the Newsletter of the International Panorama and Diorama Society, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 6–7.

[35] “The Fine Arts, Literature, Science, the Drama, &C.,” American Monthly Magazine January 1, 1835, 285.

[36] Due to the centrality of the biblical narrative in understanding these works, I have chosen to structure my analysis of the three paintings of exodus around the chronology of the narrative moments they represent, rather than considering them in the temporal order in which they were created. So although Roberts’s painting was painted last of the three, I will consider Roberts’s painting prior to Danby’s, as it represents a moment that takes place in-between those narrative moments painted by Martin and Danby.

[37] “New Publications,” Literary Gazette, May 26, 1832, 330.

[38] “Monthly View of New Publications,” (1829) 223.

[39] “Fine Arts,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, May 1829, 206.

[40] For example, see Robert Mudie, Babylon the Great: A Dissection and Demonstration of Men and Things in the British Capital (London: privately printed, 1825), 13; E. M. Butler, ed., A Regency Visitor, the English Tour of Prince Puckler-Muskau Described in His Letters 1826-28 (London: Collins, 1957), 189.

[41] John Wilson, Lectures on Ancient Israel, and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1840); Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (London: Edward Gray, 1794); Claudius Buchanan, Three Sermons on the Jubilee, Preached at Welbeck Chapel, London (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810), 42; Christopher Wordsworth, The Expostulation of Moses against the Murmurings of Israel a Warning to England: A Sermon (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1817), 17–18; George Croly, The Apocalypse of St. John (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1827), 439–40.

[42] Buchanan, Three Sermons on the Jubilee, 42.

[43] George Croly, The Apocalypse of St. John (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1827), 439–40.

[44] David D. D. Bogue, On Universal Peace; Being Extracts from a Discourse Delivered in October 1813, Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace. Tract. No. 6 (London: Bensley and Son, 1819), 13.

[45]Julianus Probus, “A View of the Future State of the Country and Arrival of the Day of Reckoning,” Medusa, April 24, 1819, 76.

[46] “Monthly View of New Publications,” (1829), 223; “Fine Arts: Suffolk Street Gallery,” 212.

[47] “Exhibition of the Society of British Artists,” Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle, April 8, 1829, 222.

[48] “The Departure of the Israelites out of Egypt,” Saturday Magazine, July 28, 1832, 34.

[49] Cited in William Cosmo Monkhouse, Masterpieces of English Art, with Sketches of Some of the Most Celebrated of the Deceased Painters of English School from the Time of Hogarth to the Present Day: Illustrated with Twenty-Six Photographs (London, Bell and Daldy, 1869), 148.

[50] “Book Review,” Metropolitan Magazine, June 1842, 41.

[51] “Antiquity,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, August 8, 1835, 221.

[52] M. De Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary (New York: George H. Evans, 1830), 7.

[53] Constantin François de Count Volney, The Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires: With Notes Historical, Geographical and Explanatory (London: T. Davison, 1819), 283.

[54] William Carpenter, “The Biblical Companion; or, an Introduction to the Reading and Study of the Holy Scriptures … Compiled from the Best Authors … and Adapted for Popular Use” (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1836), 454.

[55] John Ovington, The Labouring Man’s Advocate: An Appeal to the Justice and Humanity of the British Public Respecting the Wages of Labour (Clapham Common: J. Ovington, 1817), xxvi–xxvii.

[56] People, July 5, 1817, 348.

[57] “Enclosure” is the term for a legislative process by which common land, which traditionally had been used by the lower classes for farming and animal grazing, became privatized. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century thousands of acres of common land were “enclosed” and many poor farmers who had relied on access to those lands for their subsistence were forced to seek alternative forms of employment. This process peaked in 1801 with the passage of the “Inclosure Consolidation Act.”

[58] Thomas Evans, Christian Policy the Salvation of the Empire. Being a Clear … Examination into the Causes that Have Produced the Impending, Unavoidable National Bankruptcy (London: privately printed, 1816), 17.

[59] R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London: R. Routledge & K. Paul, 1969), 12.

[60] John Ovington, The Sin and Danger of Oppressing the Poor: Selected from the Scriptures for the Benefit of All Classes of Society (London: Pewtress, Low, and Pewtress, 1819), 58, 74; Charles Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (London: privately printed, 1805); William Benbow, Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes (London: privately printed, 1832).

[61] Charles Peers, “The Siege of Jerusalem: A Poem,” The British Review, and London Critical Journal, November 1823, 165; “Idolatry: A Poem in Four Parts,” Eclectic Review, May 1827, 440.

[62] “Sacred Politics,” Republican, February 4, 1825, 148.

[63] Ibid., 133–37.

[64] Ibid.

[65] “Monthly View of the New Publications, Music, the English and Foreign Drama, the Fine Arts, Literary and Scientific Intelligence,” Belle Assemblée; or Court and Fashionable Magazine, May 1829, 288.

[66] For details on Danby’s life, see Francis Greenacre, Francis Danby, 1793-1861, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1988).

[67] “Fine Arts Exhibitions,” Monthly Magazine, or British Register, May 1829, 550.

[68] “Monthly View of the New Publications,” (1825), 288.

[69] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lewis Patton, and Peter Mann, eds., Lectures, 1795, on Politics and Religion (London: Routledge & K. Paul,1971), 124–26.

[70]See Charles Ryle Fay, Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 168; Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study, Yale Studies in Economics 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 148.

[71] “Fine Arts,” Examiner, May 15, 1825, 305.

[72] Exod. 25:10–22.

[73] John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews: With the Preliminary Exercitations, rev. and abr. Edward Williams, 2nd ed. (London: James Black, 1815), 218.

[74] “Art XI,” Quarterly Review, October 1816, 253.

[75] “The Fine Arts,” London Magazine and Review, June 1825, 256.

[76] “Monthly View of New Publications,” (1825) 26 1.

[77] Exod. 16:2–3

[78] For example, see “Mediocrity,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1821, 287; Joseph Hall, Contemplations on the Historical Passages of the Old and New Testaments (London: William Baynes and Son, 1825), 99.

[79] “To the People of England,” The Good Old Times! A New light for the People of England, June 28, 1817, 176.

[80] “The Fine Arts,” Examiner, May 15, 1825, 305.

[81] See Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816-34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (London: Verso, 1993), 107–20.

[82] T. Yates, “On the Legislation of Moses,” Imperial Magazine, May 1823, 403.

[83] The English Poor Laws were measures designed to alleviate poverty and provide for basic subsistence to the poor. In 1834, Parliament passed the “Poor Law Amendment Act” which made obtaining relief much more difficult, and was universally reviled by poor Britons.

[84] “The Bible,” Co-operator, June 1, 1830, 3.

[85] Allen Davenport, The Life, Writings and Principles of Thomas Spence, Author of the Spencean System, or Agrarian Equality … With a Portrait of the Author (London: Wakelin, 1836), 11.

source: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, a Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring11/paintings-of-the-exodus-by-john-martin-francis-danby-david-roberts

Pastel Portraits begins with Gustavus Hamilton (1710-46), “Second Viscount Boyne” and the beautiful “Young Woman with Pearl Earrings” by Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera, who became a favorite of Grand Tourists in Italy and who visited Paris to acclaim in 1720. It features a number of important pastels by Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean Baptiste Perronneau, two of the outstanding artists working in this medium in mid-18th-century Paris. Among the highlights of the exhibition are “Jacques Dumont le Romain” by La Tour  (1701-81) and “Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet (1684-1761), Maréchal de France”; “Olivier Journu (1724-64)” by Perronneau; “Madame Elisabeth de France (1764-94)”, the sister of Louis XVI, a recent gift to the Metropolitan Museum by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; “Young Woman in Turkish Costume with a Tambourine” by Jean Étienne Liotard, and “John Collins of Devizes” by John Russell. The popularity and appeal of pastel in the 18th century reached as far as Boston, where John Singleton Copley, who was self-taught and had never seen an important European work in the medium, created exceptional portraits. Two Copleys, also recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, are on view.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Central Park, along “Museum Mile” in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often called “the Met”, is one of the world’s largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location, at “The Cloisters”, in Upper Manhattan, which features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Today, the Met measures almost 1/4-mile (400 m) long and occupies more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The Met’s permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street Transverse Roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone “mausoleum” was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux’s ambitious building was not well-received; the building’s High Victorian Gothic style being already dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project “a mistake.” Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father’s death. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The modernistic sides and rear of the museum were the work of Roche, Dinkeloo, and Associates in the 1970s and 1980s. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.metmuseum.org/

by Peter Clericuzio

Upon visiting the city of Nancy in 1909 for the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, the critic Max Durand wrote:

This summer, Nancy is a favorite destination for pilgrimage and excursion. One comes to learn, to be amused, to enjoy the natural beauty of a marvelous country, and to admire the fruits of its artistic, commercial, [and] industrial efforts.
…The [exposition's] promoters, men of goodwill and progress, motivated by the strongest patriotism, have drawn on the traditions of art and elegance which have made the former capital of [the duchy of] Lorraine a stylish and seductive city, among other things; but they have wanted also to show that the region of the East…has re-established its material prosperity and its prestige on new and durable foundations.[1]

With these words, Durand summarized well the enthusiasm for this exhibition that attracted some 2.2 million visitors between May 1 and October 31, 1909. The Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France—often called the 1909 World’s Fair—was an attempt by the leaders of this small city in eastern France to showcase the industrial and artistic progress made by their region of Lorraine over the previous forty years. The visual manifestation of this new prosperity was Art Nouveau, which had dominated the architecture and decorative art of Nancy ever since it had appeared there some two decades before, but had fallen out of favor virtually everywhere else in Europe by 1909. The staging of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France marked the apex of Art Nouveau in Nancy, and, indeed, the fair represents a landmark in the history of the style, though it is often overlooked even in the literature of this specific field.[2] In Nancy, the ability of Art Nouveau to ally itself with local and regional traditions (instead of being the result of a conscious search for a new universal aesthetic) allowed it to become the cornerstone of an alternative conception of modernity during the belle époque, and to remain popular for a quarter of a century before its demise during World War I.

I argue here that the Exposition’s emphasis on the cooperation between art and local industry, the political issue known as the “Alsace-Lorraine question,” and the nationwide movement towards political and cultural decentralization formed the basis for the projection of Nancy’s complex modern, yet regional identity, specifically as it was presented in the discourse surrounding the fair and its architecture. By 1900, Nancy had become a cosmopolitan regional center, receptive to artistic trends both from the Parisian métropole and from other countries such as Belgium and Germany, and many of these influences were readily apparent in the city’s artistic scene—including, as this paper shows, the architecture and decorative art of the 1909 Exposition. Its citizens, however, were also fiercely proud of their region and its rich cultural and political heritage, which was distinct from those of the rest of France or other countries. In spite of the marked influence of these national and international forces, then, both the leaders of the fair and its critics strategically chose to downplay and discredit them in favor of what they deemed to be local sources of artistic inspiration. Their impetus for doing so was, paradoxically, to address the larger issue of the strength of the French nation in its competition for cultural superiority then being waged with the other nations of Europe.

The Development of Nancy in the Late Nineteenth Century
Nancy experienced prodigious growth over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, catapulting it to prominence and enabling the city to consider hosting an exposition as the twentieth century dawned. Before then, it had been an unlikely place for a new art movement to spring up. In 1866, the city counted barely 50,000 residents, and was overshadowed by Metz, the other principal city of the region of Lorraine, which was slightly larger and held the prestigious distinction of having hosted its own “Exposition Universelle” in 1861. One could speak of a “Metz School” of painters, interior designers, glassmakers and stained-glass artists during the thirty years preceding 1870. The city’s Municipal Design School won a bronze medal at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, whereas at the same time, Nancy’s artistic scene was judged to be mediocre at best.[3]

Fig. 1, Map of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1919. Adapted in part from Barry Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine Since 1870 (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

Fig. 2, Emmanuel Héré de Corny and Jean Lamour, Place Stanislas, Nancy, 1750–55, as seen from southwest corner. Photograph by Richard G. Wilson. Courtesy of the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, University of Virginia.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, however, changed all that. German armies inflicted a swift and stunning series of defeats upon the French forces and captured Emperor Napoleon III, who was quickly deposed by a new government in Paris. In the Treaty of Frankfurt ending the conflict, the French ceded the region of Alsace and the northern third of Lorraine, including Metz, to the Germans (fig. 1). Nancy became the major city in the part of Lorraine retained by France, and consequently underwent a series of rapid changes and growth. The Germans gave the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine until October 1, 1872, to decide whether to become German citizens or to emigrate to France. By that date, some 70,000 people had flooded across the new border to settle in the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle, the area surrounding Nancy, and immigration from Alsace-Lorraine continued even afterwards.[4] Among the new arrivals in Nancy from the “lost provinces” were many prominent businessmen: the cotton magnate Emmanuel Lang brought his firm from Waldinghofen in Alsace; the printer Oscar Berger-Levrault and the barrel-maker Adolphe Frühinsholz transferred their companies from Strasbourg; and the Fould-Dupont Ironworks relocated from the city limits of Metz to the suburbs just north of Nancy (fig. 1).[5] They were joined by most of the artists of the Metz School, who over the following decades trained many of Nancy’s up-and-coming artists, several of whom hailed from families that had immigrated from the lost provinces after 1871.[6] So many Alsace-Lorrainers left for France that by the late 1870s one popular saying could justifiably assert that “Metz is no longer in Metz but in Nancy.”[7]

Nancy’s population boomed over the next four decades, more than doubling between 1866 and 1901 and peaking at nearly 120,000 in 1911.[8] Native-born Nancy residents graciously welcomed Alsace-Lorrainers, but realized that much of the city’s recent prosperity had come at the expense of their newly-arrived brethren who had been displaced from their homes.[9] Many of Nancy’s citizens, including the glass artists Emile Gallé and Antonin Daum, had fought in the Franco-Prussian War and bitterly resented the terms of the Frankfurt Treaty that had divided their province.[10] They hoped that the French nation would exact revenge upon the Germans for the disaster of 1870–71 and find a way to recapture Alsace-Lorraine, but they grew ever-more dismayed with the continued refusal of the national government to take action on the issue during the 1870s and 1880s. They sensed that with every new generation, both the memory of the terrible experience of the Franco-Prussian War and the opportunities to regain the lost provinces were fading fast.[11]

Fig. 3, Jean Lamour, Fountain of Amphitrite, Place Stanislas, Nancy, 1750–55. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 4, Photograph of the 1894 Exposition of Lorraine Decorative Art, Nancy. Louis Majorelle’s stand is in the background. Photograph © Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

Fig. 5, Victor Prouvé, Poster for the Ecole de Nancy’s exhibition at the Palais de Rohan, Strasbourg, 1908. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire, Strasbourg.

This issue, often called “the Alsace-Lorraine question,” was related to the debate in France in the late nineteenth century over political and cultural decentralization. Even before 1870, French citizens outside of Paris, especially in Lorraine, had come to resent the capital’s domination of national affairs. This political climate was not unlike the historically complicated relationship in Spain between the national government and its provinces such as Catalonia, a situation that likewise became tense at the turn of the century.[12] For centuries, Paris had dictated fashion and taste to the rest of the country, and was often viewed by residents of the provinces as a magnet that would attract their best and brightest citizens and corrupt them with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and loose social mores. Paris’s favored status was confirmed by Napoleon III, who lavished the city with the internal improvements that transformed it into the modern city we know today.[13] The resentment of this favoritism was felt by many of Nancy’s citizens, who relished the fact that before 1766 Nancy had been the capital of the independent Duchy of Lorraine and had enjoyed its own artistic renaissance under the popular duke Stanislas Lesczyznski (1677–1766), the former Polish king who had commissioned the city’s famous Rococo central square, the Place Stanislas (figs. 2, 3). By the turn of the twentieth century, Lorraine natives such as the writer and politician Maurice Barrès and the art critic and inspector-general of provincial museums Roger Marx had garnered national recognition with their impassioned pleas for devolved regional control of politics and culture as a means both to combat the centralized drain on local resources and to improve education.[14]

Art Nouveau and the Ecole de Nancy
These developments coalesced with the appearance of Art Nouveau in Europe during the 1890s. The support for decentralization among Lorraine artists grew increasingly stronger over the course of that decade. In the summer of 1894, the local architect Charles André organized an exposition on Lorraine decorative art at the Galéries Poirel in central Nancy, where seventy-five artists and architects from the region displayed some of their most recent work. The goal of the exposition was to “encourage the creators…who attest to the persistence of the artistic genius of Lorraine and contribute to determine the style…of our province and our time” as well as to show that “the collaboration between the artist and industrialist should be beneficial for each of them.”[15] The work displayed at the 1894 exposition was not revolutionary in a formal sense, however. Louis Majorelle, who would later go on to become one of the leading exponents of Art Nouveau, exhibited pastiches of Louis XV-style furniture (fig. 4) recalling the region and nation’s Rococo heritage that was popular in France in the 1890s. Nonetheless, critics immediately hailed the exhibition as a landmark event in the region’s artistic development, a veritable “renaissance” that would add another chapter to Lorraine’s artistic heritage, and called on all Lorrainers to resist the “prejudices, so often frivolous, of Paris.”[16]

In February 1901, the artistic heritage of Nancy reached its peak when Emile Gallé (1846–1904) founded, along with several other artists and architects, a group called the “Ecole de Nancy,” or, alternatively, the “Alliance Provinciale des Industries d’Art.”[17] Like other regional artists’ associations around Europe, such as the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Germany and La Nova Escola Catalana in Barcelona, they hoped to foster a collaborative effort among artists in diverse fields (furniture, glassmaking, ironwork, bookbinding, leatherworking, architecture, sculpture, and painting, among others) and aimed to ensure a high quality of work among artists in the Lorraine region. Keenly aware of the popularity of Art Nouveau at the time, the members of the Ecole saw themselves as some of the most prominent advocates of the style on the continent and explicitly made it the preferred stylistic vocabulary for their work. The organization was a “school” in the sense that its members shared common goals and artistic practices, but it was not an educational institution. Some of its members, such as Gallé, the brothers Antonin (1864–1931) and Auguste Daum (1853–1909), and the furniture manufacturer and ironworker Louis Majorelle (1859–1926), were artists who were heads of large enterprises. The Ecole de Nancy also included industrialists of various occupations, such as postcard magnates, barrel manufacturers, and printers. Still others were journalists and critics who acted as the mouthpieces of the group.[18]

Fig. 6, Société Lorraine des Amis des Arts, Exposition d’Art Décoratif/Ecole de Nancy, décor design by Eugène Vallin and Alexandre Mienville, Galéries Poirel, Nancy, 1904. Postcard, collection of the Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy.

The members of the Ecole were deeply influenced by the political, social, and cultural developments in Nancy over the previous thirty years. In their various exhibitions in Paris, Nancy, and Strasbourg over the following decade, the group continually pushed for a regionalist cultural and political agenda, and stressed the close relationship between their art and architecture and local industry (fig. 5).[19] Through their own scientific studies of the forms of local flora and plant life (endeavors which many of them, especially Gallé, passionately pursued)[20], they developed a system of semiotic vegetal motifs and local symbols to constantly make references to the Alsace-Lorraine question in their work.[21] For many Nanciens, the work of the Ecole represented the embodiment of modernity and proved that their city was at the forefront of cutting-edge European art.[22]

The Ecole de Nancy was fiercely committed to cultural decentralization within France, a stance that sometimes created tension between it and the artistic community in Paris. Upon the showing of the Ecole’s work at the Marsan Pavilion in Paris in 1903, for example, Emile Nicolas, a journalist and member of the Ecole, remarked,

It is good that Lorraine decorative art, with all its suggestions, again reminds Paris that it is one of those places that contains the deepest thought, logic, and truth…[since] in the great city…they have the haughtiness of dictating to the provinces fashions and tastes. The province is carefully pushed aside, especially when it shows its strong personality. It is only through the talent of our fellow citizens that we can claim and they can recognize our influence on the regeneration of the arts in France at the end of the nineteenth century.[23]

This haughty declaration was not well-received in the capital, where critics argued that the 1903 exposition merely showcased the luxury Art Nouveau pieces from Nancy department stores as a commercial ploy, not as the fruit of serious artistic development over the previous decade.[24] Yet, even though the Ecole’s works failed to impress the critics in Paris in 1903, other exhibitions of the group’s work revealed that the Nancy-Paris artistic dynamic could be quite cordial, and even friendly. When the group exhibited in Nancy in the fall of 1904 (fig. 6), Henri Marcel, the central government’s new Directeur des Beaux-Arts, remarked during the opening ceremonies that the decentralizing programs of Nancy had been merely a “half-success” that the Ecole de Nancy had shrugged off over the past year. In their place, he asserted, the Ecole had adopted a new “provincial patriotism,” which, “far from enfeebling French nationality… multiplies its force of influence and propaganda, [just as] the vitality of a country resides in the vigor and cohesion of groups that compose it.”[25] The artists of the Ecole de Nancy readily agreed with his words, emphasizing their continued devotion to the French nation as displayed in their works and downplaying the devolved local control for political and cultural matters that they fervently craved.[26] Thus the Ecole’s members frequently walked a fine line between cooperation and antagonism with their Parisian colleagues.

Planning and Designing the Exposition: Universal, Regional, or International?
Nancy’s civic leaders who planned the exhibition understood that it represented, on one hand, an opportunity to showcase their region’s achievements in business, industry, and culture, and that such an objective required strategically casting Nancy and Lorraine in a certain light. First proposed in 1904 by the editor of a local construction journal, Emile Jacquemin (1850–1907), the Exposition caught the attention of members of the Chamber of Commerce of Meurthe-et-Moselle, who initially planned to hold it in 1906, but conflicts with other European fairs caused the date of the exhibition to be pushed back to 1909.[27] The Exposition’s proponents advocated the fair’s “universal” nature, in the sense that it would offer exhibition space for all kinds of products, materials, and curiosities. Geopolitically, the exposition was conceived as having a “regional” and “cross-border” character.[28] These were, in fact, two different ideas; Jacquemin explained that the fair should demonstrate how the region had developed over the past forty years, and particularly that it should be “a decentralizing manifestation” that excluded any products that came from Paris, in order to show that Nancy could “produce and furnish it just as well, if not better than the capital.”[29] Within France, the fair was intended as an example of how local control over politics, culture, and economics was ultimately beneficial to the nation, as such administration allowed the provinces to develop their own vitality and strength.

In using the “cross-border” label, the exposition’s organizers recognized Nancy’s geographic position on the frontier, and specifically the special relationship that the city wanted to cultivate with the nearby regions and countries of Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. The exposition was intended to foster good relations with these areas, especially since the city’s leaders knew that some of the industrial prowess of Lorraine rested on foreign investment, such as the Belgian Solvay Company’s soda plant located just south of Nancy.[30] In particular, they hoped to strengthen the ties between French Lorraine and Alsace-Lorraine in order to remind both the central government in Paris and the Germans of their desire to see the lost provinces returned to France.

The fair’s directors quickly assembled a team of architects, all of whom were renowned for their Art Nouveau work in Nancy, to design the pavilions and grounds. They included Emile André, Gaston Munier, Louis Marchal, Emile Toussaint, Louis Lanternier, Eugène Vallin, Lucien Bentz, Charles-Désiré Bourgon, Paul Charbonnier, Lucien Weissenburger, Alexandre Mienville, Léon Cayotte, and Georges Biet. The choice of these men was very strategic: as one local magazine reported, “the group…affirms its artistic sympathy for the Ecole de Nancy, [such that] none of [them] remain indifferent regarding the Ecole’s work.”[31] The Ecole itself announced early on that it would have its own pavilion, designed by Vallin, whose completion was highly anticipated as one of the fair’s premier attractions.[32]

Fig. 7, Map of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909. The main entrance gate is at the upper right, and the exhibition was meant to be explored from there, down the long straight promenade, through the bucolic park at the center, and ending at the Blandan grounds (at the left). From Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France: Triomphe de l’Industrie, la Science et de l’Art Nouveau (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2008).

Fig. 8, Postcard showing miniature railroad at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909. Collection of the author.

Fig. 9, Photograph of the Blandan Grounds [Terrain Blandan], Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. The photograph was taken at the opposite end of the central court from the Palais des Fêtes. From Louis Laffitte, Rapport generale Exposition de 1909 à Nancy. L’essor économique de la Lorraine (Paris/Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1912).

Fig. 10, Daniel Burnham, John Root, and Frederick Law Olmstead, Plan, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. From James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed (Chicago/Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Fig. 11, H. Lokay, Plan Pratique de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 …contenant tous les Palais et Pavillons “Souvenirs de l’Exposition” (Paris: L. Baschet, 1900).

Fig. 12, Photograph of the Champ de Mars, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900, probably as seen from the Eiffel Tower. William Goodyear Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Fig. 13, Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. From James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed (Chicago/Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Fig. 14, “Neoclassical Architecture in the Government Building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” Photograph of U.S. Government Building, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904. From David Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1905), 91.

Fig. 15, Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte, Palace of Liberal Arts, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 16, Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte, Food Pavilion, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 17, Train sheds of the Gare St.-Lazare, Paris. Photograph by J. H. Mora.

Fig. 18, François Duquesney, Gare de l’Est, Paris, 1847–50. Photograph by Gilbert Bochenek.

Fig. 19, Charles-François Chatelain, Gare de Nancy-Ville, Nancy, 1853–56. Photo © groundspeak.com.

Fig. 20, Louis Lanternier and Eugène Vallin, Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 21, Eugène Vallin, preliminary drawing for façade of Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Courtesy of the Archives Municipales de la Ville de Nancy.

Fig. 22, Lucien Weissenburger, Maison des Magasins Réunis, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. From “Monographies de l’Exposition: de l’Exposition: Un Grand Magasin Moderne,” in L’Exposition de Nancy en 1909 4, no. 45 (July 1909): 398. Author’s photograph.

Fig. 23, Lucien Weissenburger, Eugène Vallin, and Jacques Gruber, Dining Room, Maison des Magasins Réunis, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Photograph. Courtesy of the Archives Municipales de la Ville de Nancy.

Fig. 24a, Emile Gallé, Le Rhin, 1889. Carved walnut, with inlaid ebony, plum, lemon, holly, rosewood, and pear. Nancy, Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy. Photograph courtesy of the European Institute of Cultural Routes, Luxembourg.

Fig. 24b, Emile Gallé, Le Rhin, 1889. Carved walnut, with inlaid ebony, plum, lemon, holly, rosewood, and pear. Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy. Photograph © Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

Fig. 25, Emile André, Alsatian Village, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 26, Alsatian residents performing daily chores, Alsatian Village, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 27, Pont-à-Mousson Foundries’ giant subway tunnel ring, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. From Frédéric Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France: Triomphe de l’Industrie, la Science et de l’Art Nouveau (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2008).

Fig. 28, Paul Charbonnier, Entrance Gate, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 29, Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1889, as seen at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

Fig. 30, René Binet, Entrance Gate, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

The exposition was held in the Parc Sainte-Marie in the rapidly-expanding southwest part of Nancy. It was laid out in three distinct sections (fig. 7). From the entry gate, located at the eastern end on the rue Jeanne d’Arc, the visitor followed a long, straight promenade past the Alsatian Village and the local Ecole des Beaux-Arts before reaching the wooded parkland that contained the Ecole de Nancy’s pavilion and most of the smaller exhibition structures, which were laid out along winding paths. This part of the fair housed official services, a café, and the attractions for pure amusement, including a water chute, a children’s puppet theater, and a miniature railroad that encircled the grounds (fig. 8).

Finally, the visitor entered the Blandan grounds, named for the street bounding the exposition to the west (fig. 9).[33] This area contained a plaza surrounded by a U-shaped array of the seven major exhibition pavilions—the Palais des Fêtes (Main Building) in the center,[34] flanked by the individual themed structures: the Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, the Electricity Pavilion, the Textiles Pavilion, the Food Pavilion, the Pavilion of Liberal Arts, and the Transportation Pavilion. At the center of the plaza was a small garden. This layout echoed the U-shaped court or lagoon around which the major structures were arranged at both the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; at each of these fairs the main (or administration) buildings were placed at the juncture of the two wings of the U (figs. 10, 11), as in Nancy in 1909.

Many of the architects of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France also derived their use of ornament from past World’s Fairs, décor that could hardly be described as Art Nouveau. The pavilions were wood-framed structures disguised by a covering of white stucco, with flamboyant Baroque- or Rococo-inspired ornament and décor that roughly resembled the structures at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris (fig. 12), the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (fig. 13), and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (fig. 14), but on a much smaller scale. Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte’s Palace of Liberal Arts[35] and Food Pavilion (figs. 15, 16), which sat side-by-side on the south side of the Blandan court, each recalled the design strategies used in railway stations in Paris and Nancy in the mid-nineteenth century. The three-gabled Palace of Liberal Arts, for example, which was illuminated by day by rows of skylights on its hipped roof, begs comparison with the roofs of train sheds for Parisian stations such as the Gare Saint-Lazare (fig. 17). The front of the pavilion, with its heavy modillions and molded cornice, recalls the gabled façades of the Gare de l’Est and Nancy’s own main train station (figs. 18, 19)—buildings that were pivotal travel points for most visitors to the exhibition. The barrel vault of the Food Pavilion, which also relied on skylights for illumination, resembled an alternative structural form used by contemporaneous architects for train sheds and main station concourses as well as for exhibition buildings. Surprisingly, however, none of these connections to such architectural types or monuments were made in print by either the directors of the exhibition or the attendees.[36]

The Relationship Between Art and Local Industry
One connection that the Exposition’s directors did hope to highlight was the link between art and industry in Lorraine, a theme that was explicitly celebrated in Louis Lanternier and Eugène Vallin’s Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy (fig. 20), the structure on the Blandan grounds that justifiably attracted the most attention. This building occupied the entire north side of the central court, and, like the other major pavilions, used a rectangular, open plan and hipped roof. Its Art Nouveau façade, however, clearly set it apart from the others. Vallin was responsible for its design, which consisted of five elongated sections of gridded windows usually seen in factories set into a framework of flat-topped arches. These arches were separated by spandrels decorated with the exaggerated imagery of chimneys rising above the pavilion’s long horizontal roofline. The ends of the façade were marked by stout, multi-sided pylons that were also supposed to evoke the forms of tall chimneys at a steel mill. Vallin had originally imagined these pylons and the spandrels to hold functional torches (fig. 21), and in the final design they were equipped with modern lamps that at night glowed red like the fiery exhaust from factory smokestacks.[37] Vallin’s son Auguste, meanwhile, painted several panels at the base of the façade that showed the steps in the fabrication of iron, leaving no doubt about the inspiration for the building’s design. Observers marveled at the connections that the building drew with the industrial architecture of the region,[38] and indeed, the pavilion essentially inverted the strategy used elsewhere on the Blandan grounds. Instead of hiding the industrial character of the structure behind a stucco covering, here Vallin allowed the true nature of the building to pierce through the white skin and become manifest on the exterior.

The connection between art and industry was also apparent in the central bucolic park, where visitors encountered the “Maison des Magasins Réunis,” the pavilion of the Nancy-centered Magasins Réunis, the only major French department store chain based outside of Paris (fig. 22). The store was headed by the Art Nouveau patron Jean-Baptiste Corbin, who had built the chain into a commercial empire of more than a dozen stores throughout Lorraine and in Paris.[39] Designed by Lucien Weissenburger, the company’s house architect, the rectangular pavilion was fronted by a stairway leading up to an arched doorway flanked by two towers, each terminating in a webbed metal sculpture. This design recalled not only the twin-towered scheme for department stores such as the Magasins Réunis in downtown Nancy, but also mimicked a cathedral façade (which led to the use of the nicknames “cathedrals of consumption” and “temple of commerce” for department stores).[40] The religious connotations were extended by Weissenburger’s use of an allegorical sculpture of commerce above the pavilion’s main entrance, like a tympanum over the main doorway of a church. Inside were several model rooms furnished for modern living, equipped largely with items that were sold in the store’s branches, including Art Nouveau furniture, vases and stained glass designed by members of the Ecole de Nancy (fig. 23). Thus the pavilion not only used Art Nouveau as a seductive means to advertise the industries of clothing and interior décor, but the use of the style in furnishings reminded visitors of the extent to which Art Nouveau permeated the everyday life of the residents of French Lorraine and remained the hallmark of the newest, most fashionable designs produced there.

Representing Alsace-Lorraine
The exposition’s organizers also specifically wanted the fair to demonstrate what they saw as a special relationship between French Lorraine and the lost provinces, a theme that was particularly evident in the Pavilion of the Ecole de Nancy. To the right of the entrance inside the structure, the group placed a portrait of its founder Gallé, who had died in 1904 and had become famous for injecting his works with explicit iconographic references to the Alsace-Lorraine question. One of Gallé’s most famous works, a large inlaid table known as Le Rhin (“The Rhine”), created for the 1889 World’s Fair (figs. 24a and b), sat under the pavilion’s central rotunda. The frieze that spans the tabletop depicts, in the center, a bearded god, representing the Rhine River, warding off an armed group of Germans, on the right, from a woman that he holds in his arms, representing Lorraine. On the left half of the frieze is an armed group of warriors, representing France. Inlaid above the scene are the words “The Rhine separates the Gauls [from] all of Germany,” a reference lifted from Tacitus.[41] Between the table’s legs, Gallé included the words “I cling to the heart of France,”[42] as well as a large thistle (a symbol of both Nancy and Lorraine associated with retribution). Gallé was referencing the German seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, and claiming that the natural border between Germans and Frenchmen really was the Rhine, the eastern border of Alsace. He implied that Lorraine sought retribution against those who sought to harm her, and specifically the Germans who had divided the region. Around the exterior walls of the pavilion stood individual booths containing the Art Nouveau work of the various members of the Ecole, as if to illustrate the centrality of Gallé’s political and artistic philosophy as an inspiration for them.

The explicit association of the region’s premier artists with the Alsace-Lorraine question was extended to Emile André’s design of the Alsatian Village, a cluster of buildings near the entrance to the fair that was supposed to evoke the countryside of the region (figs. 25, 26). Inside many of the buildings were genuine Alsatian residents dressed in traditional costume performing the everyday tasks of rural Alsatians. The attempt was to recreate the Alsatian landscape and regional architecture as closely as possible, implying that French citizens were innately familiar with Alsatian traditions and customs and that Alsace was naturally a part of France, not Germany.

The Alsatian Village helped to reawaken for many French visitors a sense that the issues surrounding the lost provinces remained unfinished political business. The tribute to Alsace-Lorraine went beyond the thinly-veiled claim that the region should be returned to French control, however. As we have seen, Nancy’s citizens realized that the growth and vitality of their city after 1871 was in large part due to the influx of immigrants from the lost provinces. According to one observer,

You know what has happened in Lorraine since the mutilation of 1871. Prosperity has flowed to heal the wound. We say “heal,” and not “close.” A great number of those from the lost provinces, wanting to remain French, brought to Meurthe-et-Moselle their home, their genius, their industriousness. A marvelous amount of work has been accomplished at the extreme frontier of the country. These are the fruits of this labor that they present us, in a sort of great basket.[43]

In some ways, therefore, Nancy’s residents viewed the exposition (and particularly the Alsatian Village) as a means of thanking their brethren for their contributions to the city’s newfound prosperity. It was even reported that since many of the members of the Ecole de Nancy had come from the lost provinces and “their patriotic exodus had only further imbued them with the qualities of the [French] race,” their experiences thus served as the inspiration for the erection of the Alsatian Village as a means to commemorate this “fecund alliance of fraternal efforts.”[44] The exhibit acknowledged that the heritage of the lost provinces was now an integral part of the construction of the city’s identity, in a way that was not apparent before 1871. The recognition of this “mixed” heritage extended to the celebrations that punctuated the exhibition’s run. Frequently, musical groups from Alsace-Lorraine were invited to perform at the exhibition, and one day of festivities even involved a parade of several people dressed up as characters from Lorraine history, including Jeanne d’Arc, who was popularly viewed as a protector of Lorraine and symbolized the hope for reunification of the northern part of the province with France.^[45]

Decentralization and Regional Pride
As noted above, as early as the planning stages of the fair, the discourse surrounding it was sympathetic to the longstanding movement in Lorraine towards political and cultural decentralization, aiming to demonstrate how the industrial activities of the provinces worked both in concert and in competition with the Parisian metropole. The exhibits of the iron foundries of the city of Pont-à-Mousson, just north of Nancy, illustrate the cooperative efforts of Lorraine industry with corporations in the capital. Between the Palace of Liberal Arts and the Palace of Textiles, the foundries installed a giant iron ring used for the construction of underground subway tunnels (fig. 27).[46] The company proudly adorned the ring with signs that advertised the fact that this was the model used for its fabrication of the recently-completed tunnels of the Paris Métropolitain running under the Seine.[47] Crowning the display was a small iron representation of a thistle symbolizing Lorraine, emphasizing the fact that the realization of the most modern and innovative constructions of French mass transport depended on the provincial industrial factories in Lorraine.

The importance of local enterprises to the overall industrial strength of the nation was likewise apparent in the main entrance gate to the exhibition. This skeletal steel structure designed by Paul Charbonnier (fig. 28) took the form of two tapering pylons some twenty-three meters high, flanking a horseshoe arch crowned by the coat of arms of the city of Nancy and six French flags. The entire gate was built by the Fould-Dupont steelworks in Pompey, the same company that had supplied the iron for the Eiffel Tower in 1889 (fig. 29), and despite obvious differences in overall design and scale, the Nancy structure no doubt recalled the Parisian tower from twenty years before: visitors similarly had entered the southern portion of the 1889 Fair by passing underneath Eiffel’s arches. Formally, however, Charbonnier’s gate invited a much closer comparison to René Binet’s monumental entrance gate to the 1900 World’s Fair (fig. 30), which consisted of an ornate three-legged horseshoe arch flanked by two obelisk-like pylons. In this sense the 1909 fair could be seen as a hybrid of these two previous manifestations of French Art Nouveau. The 1889 fair, held at the dawn of the style’s existence, had likewise celebrated the triumph of modern industry, while the 1900 fair had heralded the return to traditional, French craftsmanship by injecting the style with a Rococo-inspired classicism with organic, naturally-inspired décor.[48] The undulating scrolls that followed the span of the arch further suggested the gilded curves of the ornament covering Emmanuel Héré and Jean Lamour’s Rococo iron gates for the Place Stanislas from the 1750s (see fig. 3), thereby placing the design’s roots in line with Nancy’s own rich industrial and artistic heritage.

Observers, however, ignored any such connections that Charbonnier’s gate exhibited with models from either Paris or previous eras. According to Louis Laffitte, the director of the 1909 Exposition, the gate symbolized “the power and boldness” of Lorraine’s steel and iron industries,[49] while one Parisian observer was struck by the way that the gate was “picturesquely decorated with corrugated iron, folded rails, cartwheels, towing bars, [and] V-shaped iron pieces; in short, all the pieces which a great steelworks produces.”[50] For contemporary observers, the importance of the architecture of the Exposition lay primarily with its aspects that linked it to the region’s recent accomplishments, not with the capital, whose influence clearly also had contributed to Nancy’s success.

Reactions to the Fair
The reaction to Charbonnier’s monumental gate was typical of those to the exhibition in general. If the fair was profitable for Nancy in an economic sense, on a national level it was also highly successful in projecting an image of the city and region that confirmed the regional identity that the Exposition’s organizers had set out to mold. This success was mostly due to the enthusiastic Parisian response, which emphasized both the admirable example that Nancy set for the rest of the nation to follow as well as the contributions that Nancy and Lorraine had made to the French nation.

Significantly, both the national and regional press associated the exposition’s “home-grown” character with the issue of Nancy’s artistic progress over the previous forty years. As one publication insisted,

For those who know how to look, see, and appreciate, [Nancy] is more than simply a banal modern city loaded with all the advantages of hospitality. It is a home of art, a perfect poem of architecture and history of which all the edifices, all the monuments, all the stones recall a period or write a page in the annals of the city.[51]

The respect Nancy’s artists had shown for the city’s history was one of the keys to creating a modern and vibrant artistic movement. Nancy’s modernism was laudable precisely because it was not a complete break from the past, but fit into a sense of tradition. It was, according to one Parisian observer, the regional character of Nancy’s artistic development that had allowed its brand of Art Nouveau to succeed where that of the capital had failed:

It is in Nancy that the “modern style,”[52] after its somewhat-too-timid manifestation at the Paris World’s Fair, in 1900, seems to have found its voice…and in recalling the memories which it borrows from a visit to the galleries of the esplanade des Invalides, the amateur who travels to the real exposition at Nancy—the Palace of [Liberal Arts], the exposition of decorative arts, the Gas Pavilion, the various installations, and above all, the pavilion of the Ecole de Nancy—can measure the distance that has been established between an intense, yet too hasty effort…and the logical deduction of rational and fecund principles.

…The principle of “Lorraine art” is the same from which the “modern style” proceeded: the interpretation of nature; but from this premise, against its predecessor, it draws the rational consequences, with this practical sense, this taste, this measure, this equal aversion for that which is complicated and vulgar, which are the mother qualities of the Lorraine spirit.[53]

The careful devotion to the scientific study of nature, and the rational and practical application of the forms and designs of the natural world, as originally advocated by Gallé, had produced the admirable Lorraine brand of Art Nouveau. These qualities had resonated with Nancy’s residents and allowed it to overtake Paris as the leading center of Art Nouveau in France by the end of the first decade of the century.

Even more importantly, Parisian writers described the fair as a celebration of national unity and pride. The press jubilantly noted the patriotic oration made by Louis Barthou, the French Minister of Public Works, at the inauguration, which was received by a thunderous ovation. The Revue de Tourisme declared that “Nancy can offer to the artist, the observer, and to the tourist, an altogether complete and harmonious ensemble of the evidence of the genius of the race.”[54] As Jean Lefranc concluded in Le Temps, “The friends and the admirers of Lorrainers—that is to say, all Frenchmen—have no more dear desire than the perpetuation of this entente.”[55]

At first glance, it may seem surprising that, in light of the longstanding uneasy relationship between Paris and the provinces, Parisian observers remained complementary and seemingly unconcerned by this cultural challenge. However, as Nancy Troy has shown, in 1909 the French remained deeply worried about their empirical predominance in cultural—and particularly artistic—production among European countries, a position that had been growing ever-more precarious over the previous thirty years.[56] The French rivalry with the German-speaking countries was especially intense, and foreigners were well-aware of the historical tendency in France towards centralization and the complicated relationship between Parisians and the provinces. As the Frankfurter Zeitung declared, “When one speaks of France, ninety-nine times out of a hundred one means to say ‘Paris.’”[57] Some in Germany viewed the fair as evidence of growing decentralization, and documented the prodigious growth of Lorraine industry. They believed that because Parisians were worried about their cultural and economic dominance within France, they had purposely ignored such developments, an oversight that, the Nancy critic Pol Simon surmised, the Germans hoped would prove detrimental to the French nation.[58] It thus seems likely that, in emphasizing the issue of French decentralization, the Germans were attempting to drive a wedge between Paris and the provinces so as to thwart any such coordination of French industrial, economic, and cultural interests.

The Germans also credited the advances in Lorraine art and industry not to the French themselves, but to many of the Alsace-Lorrainers who had immigrated after 1871.[59] One reviewer from the Viennese paper Die Zeit argued that there was nothing interesting about the fair at all, as it was really merely the work of Germans who had moved to territory that had only a tenuous claim to being French.[60] Nancy critics dismissed the Austrian’s assessment as the work of a “pan-Germanist” who refused to give the French credit for their own progress,[61] but it seems that the writer was influenced by other concerns. The critic Eugène Martin began a review of the fair by recalling a 1904 piece from the Heidelberg revue Korrespondenz aus Südwestdeutschland that had expressed dismay over the fact that Nancy had grown so rapidly since 1871 that by 1900 it overshadowed both Metz and Strasbourg, the two major cities in German-controlled Alsace-Lorraine, as the undisputed “artistic capital of the entire region.”[62] The Germans were dismayed that France had benefited from the loss of territory in 1871 because most of the economic assets of the lost provinces had been transferred to the other side of the border. The reviewer for Die Zeit may thus have been hoping simply to downplay the entire exhibition altogether so as to assuage the German fears that the development of Alsace-Lorraine had not been as prodigious as the economic growth on the French side of the border.

Conclusion
From a wider perspective, then, the fair was not simply a means by which Nancy revealed to the wider world how Art Nouveau had developed into an emblem of regional economic, artistic, and industrial prowess. Instead, it indicated that Lorraine Art Nouveau and the industries associated with it had become a lightning rod for the ongoing cultural competition between France, Germany, and other European nations. Eventually, what some officials in France dubbed the “artistic war with Germany”[63] would be subsumed into the bloodbath of the First World War.

As with most temporary exhibitions, nearly all of the structures of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France were destroyed within a year of the fair’s closing.[64] Nonetheless (and contrary to popular opinion), the fair did not represent the “swan song” of Art Nouveau in Nancy, which continued to attract both elite and bourgeois enthusiasts in Lorraine until 1914, encouraging collaboration in the style between architects, artists and industrialists of the Ecole de Nancy.[65] As a permanent reminder of the region’s economic and artistic vitality, the fair’s director, Louis Laffitte, produced a lavishly-illustrated 900-page report, which was not published until 1912 but remains the definitive account of the exhibition.[66]

It was, however, the war that put an end to Art Nouveau in Nancy; some of its artists moved away, many of the city’s decorative art firms never recovered, and a few of its major Art Nouveau landmarks were destroyed, including Corbin’s Magasins Réunis. The recapture of Alsace-Lorraine in 1919 meant that Strasbourg replaced Nancy as the most important city on the eastern frontier. Gradually, Nancy was re-assimilated into Parisian-dominated circles of French art, which fell under the spell of Art Deco after 1920.[67] Even so, the attitudes shown by Nancy’s citizens during the belle époque and the preservation of the dozens of surviving Art Nouveau monuments and furniture in Lorraine since then have marked the period as an integral piece of the region’s historical and current identity, still being rediscovered by art historians, that is unlikely to be relinquished.

[1] Max Durand, “Nancy, II: A Travers l’Exposition,” Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, August 8, 1909, 129.

[2] See, for example, Frank Russell, ed., Art Nouveau Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979); Paul Greenhalgh, ed., Art Nouveau 1890–1914 (London: V&A Publications, 2000); Béatrice Foulon, ed., 1900 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000); and Gabriele Fahr-Becker, Art Nouveau, trans. Paul Aston, Ruth Chitty, and Karen Williams (Cologne: Könemann, 2004).

[3] Pierre Barral, Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier, and Jean-Claude Bonnefant, “La Capitale de la Lorraine Mutilée (1870–1918),” in Histoire de Nancy, dir. René Taveneaux (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 393. On Metz’s predominance, see Christiane Pignon-Feller, “Les Fêtes de l’Art et de l’Industrie: Lieux d’Echanges entre Metz et Nancy,” in Metz/Nancy-Nancy/Metz: Une histoire de frontière, 1861–1909, ed. Monique Sary, Isabelle Bardiès, and Christian Debize (Metz: Musées de la Cour d’Or/Editions Serpenoise, 1999), 60–64.

[4] Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy: Une Ardente Histoire 1870–1914 (Haroué, France: Gérard Louis, 2002), 56.

[5] On the émigrés from Alsace-Lorraine to France, see François G. Dreyfus, “Le malaise politique,” in L’Alsace de 1900 à nos jours, ed. Philippe Dollinger (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 99–101; Francis Roussel, Nancy Architecture 1900, vol. 1, De la rue de l’Abbé Gridel à la rue Félix Faure (Metz: Serpenoise, 1992), 5–6, 16; Jean-Pierre Klein and Bernard Rolling, Histoire d’un imprimeur: Berger-Levrault 1676–1976 (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1976), 98–104; David H. Barry, “The Effect of the Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine on the Development of Nancy” (PhD diss., University of London, 1975), 321–37 and 345–49; Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 116–49; and Barral, Charpentier, and Bonnefant, “Capitale de la Lorraine,” 406–10.

[6] See Barry, “Effect of the Annexation,” 398–432; and Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 194–204.

[7] François Roth, “La Lorraine Divisée,” Taveneaux, Histoire de Lorraine, 392.

[8] Barral, Charpentier, and Bonnefant, “Capitale de la Lorraine,” 393.

[9] Sicard-Lennatier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 10, 216–20.

[10] Gallé and Daum both wrote about their wartime experiences. See Alain Dusart and François Moulin, Art Nouveau: l’épopée Lorraine (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue/Editions de l’Est, 1998), 13–15; and Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 19–20, 25–26.

[11] François Robichon, “Representing the 1870–1871 War, or the Impossible Revanche,” trans. Olga Grlic, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914, ed. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (Washington, DC/New Haven: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 2005): 82–99; and Robert Allen Jay, “Art and Nationalism in France, 1870–1914″ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1979), 211–12.

[12] See Judith Rohrer, “Artistic Regionalism and Architectural Politics in Barcelona, c. 1880-c. 1906″ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1984), for more on the turn-of-the century relationship between Barcelona/Catalonia and the Spanish government.

[13] On Napoleon III’s improvements, see David Pinckney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). On French regionalism and the Paris/province dynamic, refer to Alain Corbin, “Paris-Province,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, dir. Pierre Nora, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, dir. Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 427–64; also Jean-Claude Vigato, L’Architecture Régionaliste: France 1890–1950 (Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture/Editions Norma, 1994), esp. 19–73.

[14] Robert Gildea, The Past In French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 177–82. Also Richard Thomson, “Regionalism versus Nationalism in French Visual Culture, 1889–1900: The Cases of Nancy and Toulouse,” in Hargrove and McWilliam, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 210–11.

[15] “Programme de l’Exposition,” in Exposition d’art decorative et industriel lorrain, juin-juillet 1894: catalogue (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1894), n.p.

[16] X., “Exposition des Arts Décoratifs: Préliminaires,” in Le Progrès de l’Est, July 4, 1894, 2; and L. F., “Exposition des Arts Décoratifs,” in L’Est Républicain, July 7, 1894, 2; Emile Badel, Les Arts Décoratifs en Lorraine: Notice Sur l’Exposition de la Salle Poirel, Juillet 1894 (Nancy: Imprimerie A. Voirin et L. Kreis, 1894), 3–10; Emile Badel, “Exposition des Arts décoratifs—Visite d’ami. Les Oeuvres nouvelles,” in L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, July 29, 1894, 99–101.

[17] In English, the “School of Nancy,” and “Provincial Alliance of Industries of Art.”

[18] Many of them were listed in the original copy of the Ecole de Nancy: Statuts (Nancy: Barbier and Paulin, 1901).

[19] The Ecole de Nancy held expositions at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris in March 1903; at the Galéries Poirel in Nancy in October-November 1904, and at the Palais de Rohan of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 1908. On these, see Emile Gallé, “Programme de l’Ecole de Nancy,” in Exposition de l’Alliance Provinciale de Industries d’Art/Ecole de Nancy, Mars 1903 – Catalogue Officiel Illustré, 3–5; Emile Gallé, L’Exposition de l’Ecole de Nancy à Paris (Paris: A. Guerinet, 1903), n.p.; Emile Jacquemin, “Les Arts décoratifs lorrains – Salle Poirel à Nancy,” L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, October 30, 1904, 211. Also see “L’exposition d’art décoratif,” in L’Impartial de l’Est, October 26, 1904, 2; and Alexandre Tourscher, “Strasbourg-Nancy: Autour de l’exposition de l’école de Nancy en 1908,” in Strasbourg 1900: Naissance d’une capitale, dir. Rodolphe Rapetti (Paris/Strasbourg: Editions d’art Somogy/Musées de Strasbourg, 2000), 142.

[20] For more on this, see François Hirtz and Pierre Valck, “Nancy, Capitale de l’horticulture et de la botanique,” in Dossier de l’Art, April 1999, 62–69; Philippe Thiébaut, Emile Gallé: Le magicien du verre (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 72–74; François Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé, la botanique et les idées évolutionnistes à Nancy à la fin de XIX^e siècle,” in “Actes du colloque public en hommage à Emile Gallé,” special issue, Annales de l’Est 55 (2005): 73–94; Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, Maître de l’Art Nouveau (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue/Editions de l’Est, 2004); and Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier and Philippe Thiébaut, Gallé (Paris: RMN, 1985).

[21] Peter Clericuzio, “Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895–1914″ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, forthcoming 2011), esp. chap. 2, “The Ecole de Nancy and Nancy’s Artistic Scene, 1889–1914.” Emile Gallé himself kept extensive gardens around his estate, “La Garenne,” in Nancy, and was deeply involved in the scientific study of horticulture, eventually becoming a prominent member of the Société Centrale d’Horticulture de Nancy in the 1880s. See Hirtz and Valck, “Nancy, Capitale de l’horticulture,” 62–69; Thiébaut, Emile Gallé, 72–74; Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé, la botanique et les idées évolutionnistes,” 73–94; Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, Maître de l’Art Nouveau; and Charpentier and Thiébaut, Gallé.

[22] Hippolyte Langlois, “Nos Grandes Villes: Nancy,” L’Est Républicain, October 12, 1908, 2; G. Philbert, “Histoire de l’Art,” L’Impartial de l’Est March 23, 1909, 1; and “L’Exposition de la Cité moderne expliquée par le milieu,” Exposition Cité Moderne (Nancy: Chambre de Commerce de Nancy/Société Industrielle de l’Est, 1913), 237–43.

[23] Emile Nicolas, “Les artistes décorateurs lorrains à Paris,” L’Etoile de l’Est, February 28, 1903, 2.

[24] “A quoi sert le pavillon de Marsan?” in Occident, issue unknown, quoted in Emile Nicolas, “L’Exposition du Pavillon de Marsan,” La Lorraine Artiste, June 1, 1903, 174.

[25] His remarks were printed in “Discours de M. Marcel, Directeur des Beaux-Arts,” L’Impartial de l’Est, October 31, 1904, 2.

[26] Emile Nicolas, “L’Exposition d’Art Décoratif de Nancy,” Le Pays Lorrain, November 25, 1904, 349.

[27] E. Collin, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909: Guide Officiel (Nancy: L. Bertrand, 1909), 13. Also see Louis Laffitte, Rapport Général sur l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France – Nancy 1909 (Paris/Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1912), xi–xvii; and Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert, “The 1909 Nancy International Exhibition: Showcase for a Vibrant Region and Swansong of the Ecole de Nancy,” Art on the Line 1, no. 5 (2007): 3.

[28] Emile Jacquemin, “Les Caracteristiques de l’Exposition de Nancy,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1908, July 1906, 68.

[29] Also see Charles Georgin, “Lettre d’un Parisien de Lorraine,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1908, February 1906, 35–36.

[30] Members of the Ecole de Nancy cultivated especially close ties to the Solvay company. Ernest Solvay, whose town house in Brussels was designed by Victor Horta, established a major soda-producing factory at Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, near Nancy, and became good friends with Gallé, Majorelle, and other local artists. In 1903, he commissioned Gallé to create two vases celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of his plant in Lorraine. The example now conserved at the Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy depicts the Solvay factories, with droplets at the rim and crystalline forms at the base that evoke the process of soda production and the raw material. See François Roth, “Art et Industrie,” in Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier and others, Art Nouveau: L’Ecole de Nancy (Metz: Denoël/Serpenoise, 1987), 31. Also see Gallé to Roger Marx, September 30 and October 1, 1903, both transcribed in Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier, Emile Gallé—Roger Marx: Correspondance 1882–1904 (Thèse de doctorat, Paris, 1970), 470–71, 474–76.

The Nancy connections to Solvay also include Edouard Hannon (1853–1931), a Belgian who was the supervisor at Solvay’s Dombasle plant from 1877–83. A photography enthusiast, Hannon commissioned Gallé and Majorelle for the lighting and furniture of his Art Nouveau villa in Brussels, designed by Jules Brunfaut in 1903. The house is now a museum dedicated to photography and Hannon’s connections with Art Nouveau. On this, see Marcel M. Celis, L’Hôtel Hannon (Brussels: Editions Contretype, 2003).

[31] Lucien Humbert, “Chez les Architectes,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1909, July 1907, 167.

[32] See “L’Ecole de Nancy à l’Exposition,” L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, March 1, 1908, 348; “Exposition de Nancy 1909: Les Travaux de l’Exposition de Nancy,” Revue Industrielle de l’Est, September 20, 1908, 792–93; “Nos décorateurs,” L’Etoile de l’Est, May 17, 1909, 2; and “L’Ecole de Nancy,” L’Eclair de l’Est, March 10, 1908, 2.

[33] Called the rue du Sergent-Blandan.

[34] Known in the original as the “Palais des Fêtes” (literally, “Palace of Festivals”), though obviously this term is somewhat awkward in English. The Main Building was the site of all the major celebrations and conventions held during the fair.

[35] Some of the pavilions were referred to as “pavilions” and some as “palaces,” in both the official and unofficial literature surrounding the fair. I refer to the fair’s buildings using the language of the period sources.

[36] I have found no primary sources that link the Nancy structures with the design of railway stations or specific previous exhibition buildings.

[37] Though modern observers have described these pylons as “blast furnaces,” observers of the time connected them with factory chimneys. See Eugène Martin, “Comment l’Exposition de Nancy manifeste la vitalité industrielle et artistique de la Lorraine,” La Croix, June 8, 1909, 3; cf. Frédéric Descouturelle, “De l’Art à l’Exposition,” in Frédéric Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition internationale de l’Est de la France (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2009), 145–47; and Christian Debize, Emile Gallé and the “Ecole de Nancy,“ trans. Ruth Atkin-Etienne (Metz: Serpenoise, 1999), 45.

[38] Martin, “Comment l’Exposition de Nancy,” June 8, 1909, 3.

[39] By 1910, Corbin had stores in Toul, Pont-à Mousson, Charmes, Epinal, Charleville, Longwy, Lunéville, Troyes, Vaucouleurs, Joeuf, Neufchâteau, Lens, Alençon, St-Mihiel, and Paris, where he also operated the Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes. See Catherine Coley, “Les Magasins Réunis: From the Provinces to Paris, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850–1939, ed. Serge Jaumain and Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 237–39; Maisons des Magasins Réunis: Magasins de Vente, advertising flyer, c. 1907 (Archives of the Pharmacie Flesch, Commercy [France]); and the Liste des Principaux Travaux Executés Sous la Direction de Monsieur Lucien Weissenburger, Architecte Diplomé par le Gouvernment à Nancy (de 1888 à 1915), 32 pp. (Inventaire Général de la Lorraine, Dossier Weissenburger, Nancy).

[40] For a history of the development of the department store and its associations with religious architecture, see Meredith Clausen, “The Department Store—Development of the Type,” Journal of Architectural Education 39, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 20–29; also consult Serge Jaumain and Geoffrey Crossick, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change,” in Jaumain and Crossick Cathedrals of Consumption, 1–45.

[41] Tacitus, Germania, part 1, opens, “The whole of Germany is thus bounded; separated from Gaul, from Rhoetia and Pannonia, by the rivers Rhine and Danube.” Translation by Thomas Gordon; online text available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/tacitus-germanygord.html (accessed December 19, 2007).

[42] The original inscriptions are in French: on top, from Tacitus, “Le Rhin separe des Gauls tout de Germanie,” and, on long stretchers between the table’s legs, “Je tiens au coeur de France.”

[43] Emile Hinzelin, “La Belle Exposition de la Bonne Lorraine,” Le Petit Journal, June 7, 1909, 1.

[44] See Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy manifeste la vitalité industrielle et artistique de la Lorraine,” La Croix, August 3, 1909, 3.

[45] Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, “L’Exposition en Fête,” in Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909, 129–32.

[46] Another of these rings was installed just inside the entrance to Vallin and Lanternier’s Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy. See Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, “Une Éclatante Démonstration du Savoir-Faire Lorrain,” in Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909, 44–45.

[47] Ibid. For more on the planning, design, and construction of the first several lines of the Paris Métro, see Malcolm Clendenin, “Hector Guimard, Political Movements, and the Paris Métro: Natural Sympathies, Governing Harmony, and Social Change” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008).

[48] Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), esp. 1–4, 297–98.

[49] Laffitte, Rapport general, 3.

[50] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3. Also see Maurice Leudet, “L’Exposition de Nancy,” Le Figaro, June 21, 1909, 3, for similar observations.

[51] Maurice Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” Journal de l’Exposition de Nancy: Organe officiel de l’administration 26 (June 29 and 30, 1909): 3. This excerpt was taken from an article in the Revue du Tourisme.

[52] “Modern-style” was another name commonly given at the time to Art Nouveau.

[53] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3.

[54] Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” 3.

[55] Jean Lefranc, “Le progrès en Meurthe-et-Moselle,” Le Temps, June 30, 1909, 2. Also see Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” 3.

[56] Nancy Troy, “Le Corbusier, Nationalism, and the Decorative Arts in France, 1900–1918,” in Nationalism and the Visual Arts, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Washington, DC/Hanover, NH: National Gallery of Art/University Press of New England, 1991), 64–88. Also see her monograph Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

[57] Lenore Ripee-Kühn, “Nancy, Aus Anlass der Internationalen Ausstellung,” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 30, 1909, page unknown; quoted in Pol Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” Laffitte, Rapport general, 836.

[58] “Ein neues industrielles Zentrum,” Dresdener Volkszeitung, September 4, 1909, 1, quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 837–38.

[59] Two installments of “Ein neues industrielles Zentrum,” Dresdener Volkszeitung September 4 and 9, 1909, n.p., quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 838–40.

[60] Article in Die Zeit, August 11, 1909, quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 841–44.

[61] Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 841.

[62] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3.

[63] Marius Vachon, an inspector of artistic education for the French government, was a fervent advocate for the improvement of national instruction in the decorative arts. During World War I he published a book, La guerre artistique avec Allemagne: L’organisation de la victoire (Paris: Payot, 1916), that likened the work of French artists to that of soldiers on the battlefield.

[64] With the notable exception of the Zutzendorf house, the main building of the Alsatian Village, which remains open to the public even today in the Parc Sainte-Marie.

[65] See Clericuzio, “Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895–1914,” esp. chap. 2. This phrase has been used by Dusart and Moulin, Art Nouveau: l’épopée lorraine, 121; also Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert, “The 1909 Nancy International Exhibition,” 11; and Anne-Laure Dusoir, “L’Ecole de Nancy à l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France,” (Paper presented at the conference Expositions internationales et universelles – Laboratoire Historique 1, Bruxelles-Brussel, Brussels, October 22, 2005).

[66] This is Laffitte’s Rapport Général. See note 27 above for the full citation.

[67] For more on this, see Catherine Coley, “L’effort moderne à Nancy dans les années vingt: Chronique du comité Nancy-Paris,” Le Pays Lorrain 67, no. 1 (January-March 1986): 5–20.

source:

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, a journal of nineteenth-century visual culture

http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring11/modernity-regionalism-and-art-nouveau-at-the-exposition-internationale-de-lest-de-la-france-1909

When Cardinal Odoard Farnese was looking to decorate the barrel-vaulted gallery of his lavish 16th-century palace, the cardinal’s brother, the Duke of Parma, Piacenza and Castro, recommended Annibale Carracci. In 1597 Carracci took up the commission with instructions to base his composition on the theme of the “Loves of the Gods” to mark the wedding of the Duke of Parma to the grandniece of Pope Clement VIII, Margherita Aldobrandini.

The cycle consists of a series of mythological scenes set within frames and architectural elements. The composition’s centrepiece, The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, depicts the lovers in tiger- and goat-driven chariots. The ceiling took 11 years to complete, during which time Carracci enlisted the help of his brothers Agostino, Ludovico and Antonio, as well as artists from his workshop including Giovanni Lanfranco and Domenichino.

Work to stabilise the vault was first undertaken in the late 17th century by artist Carlo Maratta and various initiatives to protect and secure the ceiling were carried out in 1923, 1936 and most recently, in 1994.

Plans for the restoration project are still being finalised and the scientific committee tasked with overseeing the project has yet to be announced. Carracci’s use of both true fresco as well as a secco (pigments tempered with egg, oil or glue are applied to dry plaster) techniques in the ceiling’s decoration may complicate the restoration as conservators will need to make sure that certain delicate elements such as shading, which was often executed in a secco, are not removed during the cleaning process.

By Emily Sharpe | From issue 226, July-August 2011
Published online 27 Jul 11 (Conservation)

Even though, was the response, people would walk over them with heavy boots? Yes, she replies: “They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy…”
“Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” came the reply from Gradgrind. “Fact, fact, fact!” was all that was required.

Mid-19th-century Britain was a place that was experiencing very rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and – for some – a rapid increase in wealth and comfort. With that new wealth came brashness, arrogance and – in the eyes of some – utter lack of taste. As Stephen Calloway, curator of the exhibition, puts it, the Aesthetic Movement expressed “the desire to escape the ugliness and increasingly vulgar materialism of the age and create a new ideal of beauty”.

Beauty – in wallpaper, painting, architecture, textiles, poems – was the keynote. William Morris and his friends began to design furniture and fittings in a romantically medieval style. Soon this developed into a novel decorative style emphasising natural patterns and richly harmonious colour.

The houses of artists such as Morris, Frederick Leighton and Whistler became works of art in themselves. At Oxford in the mid-1870s Wilde decorated his room with peacock feathers and oriental porcelain, claiming, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” There he came under the influence of Walter Pater (1839-94), a fellow at Brasenose who was one of the ideological fountainheads of Aestheticism.
Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry was, Wilde noted, a “book that has had such a strange influence over my life”. Ostensibly about 15th and 16th-century Italian painting, this famous work contained some celebrated remarks on how to live. Existence was short; the point was to enjoy it with maximum intensity. “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” A sign of Pater’s membership of the Aesthetic Movement was the Morris wallpaper on the walls of his house.
Pater was denounced by the Bishop of Oxford and hauled before the university authorities, who suspected – rightly – that this kind of talk would have an affect on the young. Burning with a “hard, gemlike flame” sounded suspiciously like a recipe for ignoring conventional morality and existing for the sensation of the moment. It was a 19th-century equivalent to Timothy Leary’s celebrated formula “Turn on, tune in, drop out” (it is no accident that the Sixties counterculture was obsessed with the final phase of Aestheticism, namely decadence).

The young aesthetes were enthusiastic about Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), especially the stanza that runs: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,/A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness —/Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” That sounds very much like a call to drop out and forget about Victorian industry, enterprise and morality, let alone Mr Gradgrind’s “facts, facts, facts”.

The leading poet of the movement was Algernon Charles Swinburne (1839-1909), whose Poems and Ballads (1866) caused a huge sensation because of the sexuality of some of the contents. Swinburne was considered the leader of “The Fleshly School” of poetry (with Rossetti another member). Naturally, this attitude was not only scandalous but also highly fashionable. In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience (1881), the poet Bunthorne is partly based on Swinburne. He and another poet, Grosvenor, declaim their works to an adoring audience of women.

Two military men, out of favour, complain, “It’s quite clear that our only chance of making a lasting impression on these young ladies is to become as Aesthetic as they are.” They try some “medieval” poses: “By hook and crook you try to look both angular and flat.”

Swinburne took his cue from the French poet Baudelaire, who extolled sex and drugs (rock and roll not having yet been invented). The Parisian doctrine of L’art pour l’art, translated into English as “Art for Art’s Sake”, was the slogan of the Aesthetic avant-garde. In painting, for example, it meant leaving behind the old-fashioned belief that art should contain some religious truth or improving moral message.

As far as an artist such as Whistler was concerned, it was all about form and colour. It was not even about the careful imitation of nature. To ask a painter to copy nature as it is, he thought “is to say to the player, that he may sit upon the piano”. The point was to make a harmonious or melodic arrangement on the canvas. Pater had suggested that “all art aspires to the condition of music”; Whistler accordingly gave his works musical titles: Symphony in White, Harmony in Blue and Gold.

The Aesthetic movement was, in part, a development towards abstraction and what became modern art. Paradoxically, however, it also led to a shopping opportunity. In about 1865, Lady Temple Mount’s house was decorated in what she regarded as charming French wallpaper, until poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti came to dinner.

“Instead of admiring my room and decorations, as I expected,’’ she recalled, “he evidently could hardly sit at ease with them.” She asked him to advise her on how to improve things. He replied, “Begin by burning everything you have got.” Soon her house was redone, with William Morris’s wallpapers in the hall. After that, ”all our candid relations and friends intimated that they thought we had made our pretty little house hideous.’’
But probably her circle soon changed their minds. The later 19th century was a golden age of style manuals, beginning with Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (1866). A stream of books on interior decoration appeared, advocating – in the title of one of Wilde’s lectures – ”The House Beautiful’’.

This was the first age of designer chic. E W Godwin – the architect of Whistler’s White House and the interiors of Wilde’s home on Tite Street, Chelsea – also designed wallpaper and textiles. He became consultant to Liberty’s dress department. In Italy, what we call art nouveau is dubbed lo Stile Liberty, which is a tribute to the kudos of that shop.

The Aesthetic movement remains influential. In 1880 William Morris advised, “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. We may not keep to that, but we are still buying Morris wallpaper.
Reader offer: save at Liberty, flagship store of Aestheticism
In 1874, Arthur Lasenby Liberty took on the lease of half a shop at 218a Regent Street in London. Liberty’s specialised in ornaments, homewares and fabrics for dresses and furnishings, many designed by leading lights of the Aesthetic Movement. In 1887 Arthur Silver devised this stunning peacock-feather motif, known as Hera after the Greek goddess of women. It remains one of the most enduring images of the period, and a bestseller at Liberty. For the duration of the V&A show, Liberty has displays and promotions of merchandise inspired by the Aesthetic Movement, and Telegraph readers can benefit from a discount of £30. Just present the coupon on p3 of today’s Review, which details the full terms and conditions.

Never mind Tracey Emin’s drunkenness, Damien Hirst’s diamond skulls or Grayson Perry’s skirts: if you want a magnificent example of artistic perversity, take a look at Magritte. Or rather, at his work: René Magritte himself looked just like a good bourgeois and acted like one, which may be how he initially discovered the layered lies a plain appearance can tell. He wore suits and bowler hats, stayed married for 45 scandal-free years (and promised his wife, Georgette, “the calm of a nice steady bourgeois life”) and came from Belgium. His favourite subjects were as unimpeachably ordinary as he was – pipes, bowler-hatted men, balustrades, musical instruments – although Magritte, that mild-looking gentleman, might have asked what, precisely, you meant by ordinary. His paintings certainly force us to wonder what we mean by a pipe.
“This is not a pipe”: the phrase has mostly been taken as a Surrealist joke, since we can see perfectly well that what’s painted above it is, in fact, a pipe. Yet one of the image’s titles (it was part of Magritte’s perversity to make many pictures of the same things, and give them very different names) is The Treachery of Images. This is not a pipe: you can’t hold it and you certainly can’t smoke it. And if Magritte were to paint a similar image (in a painted frame, with smoke wisping from the pipe) and call it “The Air and the Song”, then where are you?
Fittingly, Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition, René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, has a fair few meanings of its own. Magritte was a joyous connoisseur of Freudian pleasures, on canvas if not in life, and this exhibition includes some decidedly erotic works which may startle those expecting nothing more phallic than a pipe. But it’s not all sex and psychoanalysis. Part of the pleasure of Magritte is simple: unlike so many artists, he had a fully functioning sense of humour, and entering into his mind games is fun.
Take the painting he actually called The Pleasure Principle, a 1937 portrait of the collector Edward James – if you can refer to a picture of a suited man in which his head is replaced by a shining light bulb as a portrait. Is this about thought or inspiration, or might it be an attempt to foil precisely that kind of interpretation? Magritte hated symbols. In fact, Magritte hated a lot of things, including his own past and anyone else’s “resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts… Boy Scouts, the smell of mothballs, events of the moment and drunken people.” (Sorry, Tracey.)
He claimed to want to put the real world on trial. “If the spectator finds that my paintings are a kind of defiance of ‘common sense’, he realises something obvious,” he said. “For me, the world is a defiance of common sense.” Which surely goes as far as anything can to explaining the painting titled Pleasure, in which a young woman gnaws on a bird while its living fellows look on.

Was all this defiant oddity, the irascibility and wilful provocation enclosed in a suit and tie, the result of his mother’s suicide in 1912, when he was 14? Certainly, living with that kind of ominous uncertainty (she was depressive, and had tried to kill herself several times before) must have been hard for the three Magritte boys. Apparently, young Magritte witnessed her retrieval from the river, with her nightgown wrapped around her head; some critics have drawn parallels with the sheeted faces of the couple in The Lovers.
The artist’s own love was clear-sighted. He met Georgette at a fairground the year after his mother’s death, and married her in 1922. All his painted women are based on her, physically at least. The wild-thinking man was a creature of habit in other ways, too: after 10 years discovering Futurism and Surrealism, during which he sometimes completed a canvas a day despite having to make a living as a commercial artist, Magritte settled fully into the style of deceptive clarity that he was to keep throughout his life. One departure showed Magritte at his most perverse. In 1943, he began daubing like an Impressionist, albeit with the lunatic colour scheme – a nude with one green arm and one red, and a yellow leg – of a bedlam Renoir. His stated aim was to counter the greyness and depression of the German occupation. The Renoir Period lasted four years, despite a notable lack of enthusiasm from the public and Magritte’s dealer, Alexandre Iolas. Another person’s disapproval had more effect: Georgette disliked the new style, so Magritte went back to the old one.
And quite right, too: it is the best of all Magrittian paradoxes that he managed to evolve while staying so very much the same. His preoccupations – with memory, love, death, logic and the impossibility of painting any of those things – did not change, yet he never grew stale. The problem with this exhibition won’t be boredom but mental overload: look at enough Magrittes in quick succession and you start to feel as though you will never think again. He makes it impossible to judge his work by appearances – no mean feat, for an artist.
Magritte died aged 69, in 1967, leaving many admirers but few direct followers: the man in the dark suit and bowler hat is, pretty much, inimitable. As he maintained to his dying day, “I think as though no one had ever thought before me.”
‘René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle’ is at Tate Liverpool from June 24 until October 16; www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

Nineteenth-century poetry will perhaps benefit more than any other aesthetic practice from a wholesale reconsideration across period lines, as Isobel Armstrong has argued most eloquently. Women’s writings are particularly important once again in this regard, falling largely outside the canonical lines that have organized the unsatisfactory Romantic/Victorian distinction in the first place, and revealing a transnational and transatlantic sensibility (visible in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) so popular in current scholarship. Poets Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans (who sold tens of thousands of volumes in the nineteenth century)14 remained influential well into the mid-nineteenth century, and share the credit for developing that supposedly Victorian genre, the dramatic monologue. And yet as recently as 2000, the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry was still content to rely on familiar assumptions of poets and genres springing fully formed out of that magical year, 1832:
When Tennyson portrays the artist in ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as enclosed feminine consciousness and figures her problems as both aesthetic and erotic, he inaugurates a century-long concern with the sex and gender of art and artistry.15
This is wrong on two counts: Tennyson neither inaugurates this concern, nor is it likely to be century-long if it begins in 1832. As the ‘ablest successor’ of Felicia Hemans according to Herbert Tucker,16 one who wrote ‘quite uninhibitedly as a woman’ according to Richard Cronin,17 Tennyson inherits the concern with ‘the sex and gender of art and artistry’ from writers like Hemans (in ‘Prosperzia Rossi’), Landon (in The Improvisatrice), John Keats (in Lamia), and Mary Robinson in her 1796 volume, Sappho and Phaon. Celebrated by Robinson as ‘the unrivalled poetess of her time,’ Sappho inaugurates this tradition, which nineteenth century poets, including Tennyson, continue, under the problematic sign of ‘poetess.’18
The nineteenth century did not begin in 1832 — that is my simple but oddly contentious thesis. Contentious because much literature scholarship that claims to encompass the nineteenth century in fact speaks of a traditionally defined Victorian period. Similarly, academic jobs advertised as ‘nineteenth century’ upon closer inspection, use the term synonymously with the Victorian period. I have read many self-described ‘nineteenth century’ studies that begin in the 1830s, with an introductory page or section describing the supposed Romantic certainties that the ensuing Victorian complexities overturn. Of course, any period’s claim to innovation and ‘modernity’ is typically built on the oversimplification of a previous ‘period,’ a necessary pitfall in the logic of periodization, as David Perkins outlined in Is Literary History Possible?19 Romantic-period studies are guilty of similar offenses, as in the
4
overstated claims of the Lyrical Ballads’s revolutionary departure from Augustan poetics. Those days are largely gone, however, as Romantic-period studies have been reinvigorated, for example, by investigating canonical Romanticism’s continuities with eighteenth-century cultures of sentiment, and by enlarging dramatically the number and kinds of contemporary writings against which canonical texts like the Lyrical Ballads are now read.
Isobel Armstrong’s suggestion that we ‘forget about a unified Victorianism’20 and instead refigure this era within a long nineteenth century seems a long way from being realized, given the tenacity with which Victorian studies relies on this period construct to help place its scholarship and its scholars in the academic marketplace. Romanticists of the canonical variety similarly guard their period borders, while those working on plebeian and women writers have largely led the way in reading more fluidly in history, both backwards and forwards. Exemplary studies like Jerome McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style and Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sappho21 are grounded in period-based understandings of the Romantic and the Victorian, respectively, but interrogate the usefulness of periodization by revealing the ongoing transformations that sensibility and Sappho enjoyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the continuities of gender, Anne Mellor, following Stuart Curran, offers a different strategy for resisting periodization, arguing that ‘[w]e should [...] think of women’s literary history between 1700 and 1900 not in terms of epistemic breaks or definable literary periods […] Rather, we should think of them as exploring a different psychological dyad, that of literary mothers and daughters.’22
Literary foremothers remain useful tropes within certain feminist literary histories, but in my own work, the engagement of women writers with their male counterparts, and vice versa, is so overwhelming that it would be impossible to encompass a tradition of mothers, daughters and sisters. For example, the single most important literary touchstone for women’s writings on the French Revolution is Jean-Jacques Rousseau — not only La Nouvelle Héloïse, but the underemphasized (in studies of women’s literature) Confessions and Reveries.23 Rousseau is also a crucial figure informing nineteenth-century discourses of domesticity, establishing an important nineteenth-century continuity if we refamiliarize ourselves with women’s revolutionary writings that re-presented Rousseauvian virtue to British audiences.

In my recent book, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World, I argued that women’s prolific writings on the Revolution and its aftermath elaborated a revolutionary cosmopolitanism and Francophilia that stubbornly resisted the increasingly strident demands for British patriotism and nationalism. These women’s writings on the Revolution and cosmopolitanism strengthen the case for revaluating nineteenth-century literature as a postrevolutionary phenomenon across period boundaries. I suggest that it would be fruitful to compare these women’s representations of the Terror, and especially of Maximilien Robespierre, to Carlyle and Dickens’s feminization of the Terror and of mob violence. Carlyle’s Maenads and Dickens’s Mme de Farge have remained part of the popular imagination and demonization of revolutionary fervor, well into the twenty-first century. The diversely feminist visions of Fanny Burney, Mary Robinson, Helen Craik and Helen Maria Williams, on the other hand, virtually disappeared from popular imagination in the counterrevolutionary 1790s backlash that also engulfed ‘Modern Philosophers’ like Godwin and ‘Female Philosophers’ like Wollstonecraft.
Yet these women’s narratives convey an even greater sense of urgency than their male literary descendants, as they were histories of the present, composed without the benefit of historical hindsight or favorable critical climate. They had instead the benefit of immediacy — the republican Williams emigrated to France in 1790 and lived there throughout the revolutionary regimes until her death in 1827; the monarchist Burney was self-exiled to France from 1802 to 1812 with her aristocratic French husband. Craik and Robinson, deeply read in Williams’s first-person accounts, continued to publish in a British critical climate increasingly hostile to women’s politicized prose. In their fascinating accounts of the Revolution, these four authors, sympathetic to the ‘rights of woman’ to varying degrees, sexualized the revolutionary crisis via the historical figure of Robespierre, and the Jacobin liberalization of marriage, inheritance and custody laws, in surprising ways. These women’s popular fictions of the Terror are important though neglected precedents for the feminization of the revolutions of 1789 and 1793, considered as the hallmark of later nineteenth-century retrospectives like those of Michelet, Carlyle and Dickens. In the condensed overview of this neglected historical fiction that follows, I want to offer potential starting points for new inquiries into a long nineteenth century perspective on the Revolution’s lasting effects, especially on the ‘woman question.’24

In Williams’s multi-volume Letters from France (1790-6), Robinson’s novel The Natural Daughter (1799), Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne with memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet (1800) and Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), Robespierre (or his agent) appears as the avatar of Terror itself.25 What is at stake here is not Robespierre’s role in literary history (as a new version of the Gothic villain, for example), but his role as the embodiment of certain revolutionary ideologies, and women writers’ critiques of revolutionary politics through such historical figures.26 One might assume that as the embodiment of the Terror, Robespierre appeared only as the ‘sanguinary monster’ of counterrevolutionary and Girondin caricatures. While Robespierre as monster is visible in the narratives of Robinson, Burney, and especially Williams (as in Southey and Coleridge’s play, The Fall of Robespierre), Robespierre and the Reign of Terror with which he is associated are also fundamentally concerned with virtue. At the height of the Terror in 1794, Robespierre famously linked virtue and terror as the twin attributes of revolutionary government; his evocative formulation of ‘terror [as] … an emanation of virtue’27 inspired women writers’ responses to revolutionary politics and their sexualization. Because of his unique role as the self-styled disciple of Rousseau and the embodiment of le peuple, Robespierre is a key figure in the gendered imaginary landscape of revolution. In these ambivalent feminist accounts, his rise and fall marks the dead end of one tradition of Virtue, originating in the writings of Rousseau, and indicates the persistent centrality of certain affective ideals, especially companionate marriage, to nineteenth-century British feminist projects.
In these representations of Robespierre as Terror we glimpse an unidentified strand of the historical novel, in which two specific historical crises — Robespierre’s crafting of the ideology of Terror, and the gender crisis of the revolutionary decade — are fused in sensationalized feminist narratives. While sexualization of politics is not unique to this revolutionary period, Robespierre’s sexualization in women’s writings elevates his rise and fall, like that of Marie Antoinette, to the level of a historical crisis in gender relations. The specifics of these representations are beyond the scope of this essay, but he is often depicted as a libertine dictator, in deliberate contrast to his self-presentation as Rousseauvian hero, a persona that had won him many female admirers during his life.
What interests these women writers is Robespierre’s apparent perversion of Terror as an emanation of Virtue, and his appeal to female admirers through his Rousseauvian persona.

Drawing heavily on Williams’s Letters from France, Robinson and Craik desire to sever Robespierre and the Terror from the virtuous Rousseauvian legacy of 1789. They wish to do this in order to support their far more limited (than Robespierre’s) claims for economic and political reform, but also for feminist ends. Middle-class republican feminists like Williams and Robinson were suspicious of Robespierre’s appeal to women and the working classes, and rejected his support of sans-culotte radical claims to economic justice. But they also jealously guarded their vision of Rousseauvian virtue, in direct competition with Jacobin interpretations. Thus, their illumination of the misogyny central to Robespierre’s ‘corruption’ of Rousseau’s ideal (i.e., their vision of a ‘Reign of Terror on women’) should not be isolated from the demonstrably counterrevolutionary, chivalric, and occasionally misogynist inflections of their own feminist visions.28 These fictions prefigured the displacement of ‘class conflict onto sexual relations’29 that Nancy Armstrong has described in 1840s domestic novels, and unfortunately feminist literary histories have too often reproduced this displacement in their readings of Robespierre’s ‘Reign of Terror’ on women.
This is where an intriguing development emerges in these women’s critiques of marriage, a central element of nineteenth-century novel traditions. One significant commitment shared by all these writers is their overtly feminist demystification of marriage as oppressive to women. All four writers transgressed either the conventions or laws of marriage in their controversial private lives,30 and all four politicized such transgression in their writings. Robinson, writing overtly in the ‘school of Wollstonecraft,’ was the most daring in this respect, as was her great admirer Craik. Craik began her novel about Charlotte Corday with bracing clarity: ‘Adelaide de Narbonne had the supreme felicity of finding herself a widow almost from the hour she became a bride.’31 Following eighteenth-century feminist practice, Robinson and Craik consistently liken marriage to slavery, and like Burney in The Wanderer, graphically illustrate the privations women endure as a result of their dependence. Given these writers’ conscious identification of marriage (alongside inheritance and property laws) as an institution in urgent need of reform, it is significant that they do not celebrate the French Revolution’s liberalization of divorce, marriage and inheritance laws.
On the contrary, like loyalist denunciations of the Revolution as a premise for sexual license, their nightmarish visions of ‘republican marriage’ deny the benefits to women of such liberalization, and seem instead to see only an intensification of men’s dominion by other

means. In effect they share (but in a nightmarish cast) Sade’s vision in Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795) of liberalized republican sexuality as a pornotopia: ‘All men therefore have equal rights of enjoyment in all women.’ The Sadean visions of Robespierre offered by these women writers in fact prove incorrect (as Burkean loyalists also insisted) Godwin’s optimistic prediction in the Enquiry that ‘[t]he abolition of the present system of marriage appears to involve no evils,’ certainly not those of ‘brutal lust and depravity.’32
It was Robespierre’s accumulated monstrous associations that women writers used to eclipse the potential feminist value of France’s new divorce and inheritance laws, seeing in these reforms a similar potential for radical libertinage as had Sade and Burke. Having already ended primogeniture, in August and September 1792, the Legislative Assembly had declared adults ‘no longer subject to paternal authority’ and established divorce, giving ‘mothers equal rights with fathers in control over the children’.33 As a civil contract, marriage was now dissoluble by either party. In September 1793, the National Convention went even further and ‘granted illegitimate children equal rights of inheritance’: ‘Society and the state,’ writes Lynn Hunt, ‘were now asserting the superiority of their claims over the family’.34 More radical yet, in December 1793 ‘the Convention voted to establish state-run primary schools, and a week later it made attendance obligatory in principle,’ with Robespierre’s approval: ‘The country has the right to raise its children,’ Robespierre declared; ‘it should not entrust this to the pride of families or to the prejudices of particular individuals.’35
While many of these reforms would be reversed by 1804, they remain important milestones in family and women’s rights. So why didn’t outspoken feminists like Robinson and Williams praise such laws in their writings, when these laws resembled the reforms they desired in Britain? Because, in replacing the authority of fathers with that of the state, the republican reforms simultaneously eliminated maternal authority, both literally and symbolically. Divorce and the equalization of custody and inheritance rights were part of British feminists’ agenda well into the Victorian period, but robbing families (and thus mothers) of their authority over children was unacceptable. Yet this had been Rousseau’s vision of public education, and Robespierre’s also. Thus, Robespierre instituted a version of Rousseauvian virtue that was anathema to feminists like Williams and Wollstonecraft; they admired selective elements of Rousseau’s sensibility and social contract that were favorable to middle-class women, and like many French women contemporaries ‘identified strongly with

Rousseau’s persona of persecuted virtue’.36 For these progressive English writers, Robespierre came to represent not only the corruption of their revolutionary ideals, but more specifically (and erroneously), the misogynist corruption of Rousseauvian virtue beyond feminist redemption.
It was Robespierre who appeared as the agent of this desacralization of marriage and the domestic affections in women’s narratives. In fact, what Robinson and Williams fear the most is the desacralization of women (and mothers) and the culture of sentiment that valued them. Robespierre becomes in their imagination, like Sade, the destroyer of the sacredness of women. One final episode crystallized Robespierre’s status as the demonic scourge of feminine virtue, and ironically it was not his own doing. One of the most notorious of the Jacobins, Jean Baptiste Carrier, shocked Jacobin and British alike with the mass drownings (noyades) he ordered at Nantes during the Terror. Williams describes these episodes in graphic detail:
Some of these victims were destined to die a thousand deaths; innocent young women were unclothed in the presence of the monsters; and, to add a deeper horror to this infernal act of cruelty, were tied to young men, and both were cut down with sabers, or thrown into the river; and this kind of murder was called a republican marriage.37
The inverse of long-sought liberalization, ‘republican marriage’ acquired a wholly nightmarish association as the nadir of oppression in women’s revolutionary history. ‘Republican marriage’ now signified the ultimate example of men’s sadistic abuse of women, and Robespierre the infernal bridegroom.
In these women’s writings, ‘republican marriages’ were the logical conclusion of radical misogyny, not feminist reform. British opponents of the Revolution would agree with this; they found much to object to in the Francophilic writings of Robinson, Williams, and Burney, and yet they had common concerns regarding the dangers of the French liberalization of marriage. According to an ubiquitous Burkean logic, these infectious French reforms will dissolve all ‘social ties subsisting in human nature — the parental, the filial, the fraternal affections, love, friendship, gratitude, are all obsolete or vulgar prejudices,’ as one polemic warned.38 And yet Williams and her fellow feminists, reviled by these same loyalists for publicly supporting French revolutionary politics, similarly characterized the Jacobin Republic as severing the sacred ties of family, marriage, and sentiment during the Terror, most

spectacularly in the murderous ‘republican marriages’ that parodied liberalized sexual relations.
For these early nineteenth-century feminists, the ‘republican marriage’ of Virtue and Terror in fact marked the intensification of ancien régime marriage (British and French) as domestic slavery and legalized libertinism, the perversion of their companionate marriage ideal. Forced marriage was the axis around which all progressive women’s narratives revolved; ironically, this feminist literary trope reached its most extreme evocation and found its most notorious villain at the same moment as the laws were reformed — in the Jacobin republic. Women in these revolutionary narratives return always to the same impossible choices — formerly marriage or convent, now marriage or the guillotine — a feminist acknowledgement of misogyny’s continuity across regimes, but also a stubborn attachment to the sentimental promise of companionate marriage, and women’s privileged role therein.
These Romantic-era writers’ sexualization of the Terror, and specifically of Robespierre, established a tradition that we currently only recognize via the feminization of the Terror in Carlyle and Dickens. Helen Maria Williams’s many volumes chronicling the Revolution for British audiences were among the most influential and widely read in the early nineteenth century; their influence resonates decades later in the revolutionary idyll of Vaudracour and Julia in Wordsworth’s Prelude, published in 1850, and in Carlyle’s French Revolution of 1837. The urgency of Williams’s impassioned celebration of the Revolution as ‘the most sublime spectacle which [...] was ever represented on the theatre of this earth’39 merits full scale comparison with Carlyle’s more pessimistic yet equally theatricalized vision of the Revolution as ‘a spectacle new in History’(16). The feminist visions of ‘republican marriage’ by Williams and her contemporaries also illuminate the widening class differences and priorities among early nineteenth-century women. Our histories of nineteenth-century British feminisms and fiction would benefit from a fuller examination of this unique historical dilemma faced by early nineteenth-century women writers, and how it may have shaped later traditions of historiography and historical novels.
The feminization of Revolution and the related fate of feminism are best understood by reincorporating the revolutionary decade of the 1790s into the long nineteenth century. Universal rights discourse, however imperfect in both theory and practice, also originated in its modern form in the 1790s; ongoing nineteenth-century debates over human rights, animal

rights, women’s rights, worker’s rights, children’s rights, all continue to test this revolutionary legacy. Hannah More’s rejection of rights and collective reform, in favor of duties and Christian self-improvement, like Wollstonecraft’s advocacy of collective human rights, together shape the nineteenth-century traditions that explain the unfortunate modern bifurcation of western feminism along the lines of equality and difference, and along lines of class and race. We exclude the revolutionary decades from our understanding of the ‘woman question’ as it developed from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century at our peril.
The rise and decline of Britain’s global empire in the nineteenth century likewise requires that we understand early nineteenth-century women’s formative role in developing British culture’s ‘interest in and sympathy for racial and cultural difference,’ so central to British colonialism’s self-image.40 Barbauld’s vision of a multifaith and multiracial British metropolis in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven shares much with the urban sensibility of the coming decades: ‘Streets, where the turban’d Moslem, bearded Jew, / And woolly African, met the brown Hindu; / Where through each vein spontaneous plenty flowed, / Where Wealth enjoyed, and Charity bestowed.’ The defiant cosmopolitanism that Barbauld shared with contemporaries like Helen Maria Williams and Lady Morgan likewise needs to be reintroduced into our accounts of Britain’s imperial projects in the postrevolutionary modern era.
Lest it seem that in my enthusiasm for looking before and after the Romantic/Victorian boundary, I am content to allow the Romantic period to begin safely in 1789, I will offer a final prediction for the future of Victorian studies: it will need to reconsider its relationship to the Romantic Century. Concerned by trends in the academic job market, in which Romantic-period studies were perceived to be increasingly marginalized by the long eighteenth century on the one hand, and the short nineteenth century (i.e., the Victorian period) on the other, Susan Wolfson and William Galperin proposed ‘The Romantic Century,’ from 1750-1850, as a means of rearranging traditional period boundaries.41 We could reimagine a Romantic Century by charting the rise of Romantic sentiment in 1740, the year in which Pamela was published, and winding down in 1850, the publication year of those two ‘Victorian’ masterpieces of sentiment, The Prelude and In Memoriam. Another version of a Romantic Century could encompass both Letters from France and Tale of Two Cities, as well as

Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. As Wolfson and a host of other scholars speculate, the Romantic Century may be uniquely valuable in our efforts to imagine what we know about periodization. I hereby propose that we reconvene next year for another symposium, on ‘The Long Romantic Century and the Future of Nineteenth-Century Studies.’
1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002).
2 Anne Grant, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814), p.143. Both Barbauld and Grant’s poems are available in electronic editions via the British Women Romantic Poets electronic archive at the University of California (location: digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/).
3 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case for Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1999), p.78.
4 Monthly Review, 67 (1812) 428-32; (p 428).
5 Quoted in William McCarthy, ‘A “High-Minded Christian Lady”: The Posthumous Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld,’ Romanticism and Women Poets, ed. by Stephen Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 165 – 191.
6 McCarthy, p.168.
7 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, Facsimile ed. with introduction by Caroline Franklin, 2 vols (London: Routledge / Thoemmes, 1825; repr. Routledge,1996), II, 158 – 9.
8 Barbauld,Works, II, 100.
9 S. J. Wolfson, ‘Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?’ PMLA, 116 (2001), 1432-1441; (p.1439).
10 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Msrepresentations: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, in Women‘s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian, ed. by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p.9. Of course, in historiography of the French Revolution, there is a long tradition of the ‘age of revolutions,’ for example Eric Hobsbawn’s The Age of Revolution: 1789 to 1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962) and François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Literary studies like the essay collection Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. by Tim Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2002) resist periodization by reconsidering literature’s relationships to such longer (and earlier) revolutionary historical processes. That literary and historical studies (as well as their different national contexts) operate according to different models of periodization is well known, as the interdisciplinary ‘Long Nineteenth-Century’ conference, for which this paper

was originally written, specifically addressed. I was invited to address the usefulness of the long nineteenth-century perspective with specific reference to the legacy of the French Revolutionary era, and especially women’s writings, for British literary studies. A discussion of the well-studied relationship of the Victorian period to continental revolutions is beyond the scope of this brief essay.
11 Thomas Carlyle, ed. by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen, The French Revolution: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter, ed. by Sharon Setzer, (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003). Charlotte Smith, Desmond, ed. by Antje Blank and Janet Todd (Broadview Press, 2001).
12 Barbara Caine, ‘Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Women’s Writing, 4 (1997), p.262.
13 See Chandler’s England in 1819 and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
14 On Hemans’s sales, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.607-8, pp.715-9.
15 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, ‘‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry’ Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.39.
16 Herbert F. Tucker, ‘House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1820s,’ New Literary History, 25 (1994) 521-58; (p.542).
17 Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824-1840 (Palgrave, 2002), p.107.
18 I discuss the continuities across period boundaries provided by the ‘poetess’ tradition (in male and female writers) in ‘Poetry, Sexuality, Gender,’ forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. by James Chandler and Maureen Mclane.
19 David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
20 Isobel Armstrong, ‘When is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet?’ Victorian Studies, 43
(2001) 279-92 (p.291).
21 Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
22 Anne Mellor, ‘Were Women Writers ‘Romantics’?’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62 (2001), 393-405. See also Stuart Curran, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 63 (2000), 575-90. This issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly is devoted to the topic of ‘Forging connections: women’s poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism.’
23 On La Nouvelle Héloïse and women’s novels, see Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the English Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
24 I discuss the impact of Robespierre (and Rousseau) on women’s writings in greater detail in chapter 3 of my British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave, 2005).
25 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties. Introduction by Margaret Drabble (London: Pandora, 1988).

26 For a recent overview of the state of Robespierre studies, see the essays in Robespierre, ed. by William Doyle and Colin Haydon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On Robespierre and Rousseau, see Carol Blum’s Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). On canonical male Romantics and Robespierre, see Greg Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
27 Robespierre, speech of 4 February 1794, reprinted in the anthology edited and translated by Richard Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.38.
28 In the ideological struggles of 1793 and 1794, ‘Robespierre the tyrant’ became a myth endowed with a bewildering series of contradictory significances, which I discuss in greater detail in British Women Writers and the French Revolution. Briefly, British feminists used the myth to allegorize institutionalized misogyny (men’s Reign of Terror on women). French Jacobins used the myth in their factional power struggles. For British radicals, the myth served as an oblique vision of England’s own domestic tyranny, as well as of the masculine agency of the male Romantic poet (for Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth). Counterrevolutionaries (French and British) used the myth as evidence for the heartlessness of French revolutionary principles and their inevitable descent into violence. Robespierre’s rise to power and his role in the Terror could also be read, then and now, as the tragic enactment of Rousseauvian virtue on the corrupting stage of revolutionary politics. The latter vision was Robespierre’s, shared by his women admirers (and later, politically sympathetic Marxist historians), in direct contrast to middle-class feminists like Williams and Robinson, who were particularly suspicious of his appeal to women and the working classes.
29 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.200.
30 Williams’s romance with the married John Hurford Stone, and her cohabitation with him after his divorce, generated unkind comments in England. Robinson’s extramarital relationships with men like the Prince of Wales and Charles Fox made her a notorious figure whom ‘respectable’ women shunned. Burney’s marriage to a French émigré in 1793 inspired a xenophobic reaction amongst the British elite. Craik’s personal circumstances are the most remarkable of the four. Briefly, Craik was the daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner, who probably had her laboring-class lover murdered, prompting her self-exile to England. There, Craik devoted her professional career as a novelist to dramatizing the dangers of paternal and sexual tyranny in feminist novels indebted to Robinson, Williams, and Radcliffe (see Adriana Craciun, ‘The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800,’ in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp.193-232.
31 Helen Craik, Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet, 4 vols (London: Minerva Press, 1800), I, 1.
32 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. by Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.763.

33 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p.42. For further reading by Hunt see ‘Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood.’ in The Terror, ed. by Keith Michael Baker, The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols, ed. by Keith Michael Baker and others (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994), (1990), iv, 195-208.
I34 Hunt, The Family Romance, p.66.
35 Ibid, p.67.
36 Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), p.5
37 Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, Introduction by Janet Todd, 8 vols, (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, repr.1975), II, 3, 42-43.
38 Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits; With Particular Reference to the Dangerous Opinions Contained in the Writings of Miss. H. M. Williams, 2 vols, (London: Carpenter, 1801), II, 202.
39 Williams, Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790, ed. by Neil Fraistat and Susan Lanser (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), p.63.
40 Anne Mellor, ‘Women Writers in the Romantic Century, 1750-1850,’ European Romantic Review, 11 (2000) 21-24 (p.23).
41 Wolfson outlined the Romantic Century in her essay ‘50-50? Phone a Friend? Ask the Audience? Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750-1850,’ published in a special issue of European Romantic Review devoted to the topic and co-edited with William Galperin (v. 11 (2000), 1-11); she elaborated her position in ‘Our Puny Boundaries,’ PMLA, 116 (2001), 1432-1441. In this same issue of PMLA, Charles Rzepka offers a dissenting opinion on the institutional crisis in Romanticism that Wolfson identifies (‘The Feel of Not to Feel It’, PMLA 116 (2001), 1422-1431) and Jerome McGann offers a larger perspective on nineteenth-century periodization and the liberal arts (‘Who’s Carving up the Nineteenth Century?’, PMLA, 116 (2001), 1415-1421).

Adriana Craciun, Birkbeck College

It is the electronic journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Every summer and winter, the journal publishes issues of peer-reviewed articles that focus on art produced in the Netherlands (north and south) during the early modern period (c. 1400-c.1750), and in other countries and later periods as they relate to Netherlandish art. Submissions are encouraged on painting, sculpture, graphic arts, tapestry, architecture, and decoration, from the perspectives of art history, art conservation, technical studies, museum studies, historiography, and collecting history.

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Mindfulness of death coupled with the personal obligation to pious behavior and good works were pervasive in Byzantine religious thought and practice. This ethos was succinctly expressed by Archbishop Symeon of Thessaloniki (d. 1429) in the opening of his sermon on death: “We are unendingly and ceaselessly in every moment obliged to care for the things concerning the fearsome and inexorable end of our lives.” Regular prayers offered by the living on behalf of the dead were believed to increase the likelihood of the soul’s favorable judgment. In Theodora Synadene’s charter for the nunnery of the Virgin of Sure Hope in Constantinople (1327–35), the foundress makes this point clear: “[May] the commemorations of the departed be celebrated, as I have instructed, with all zeal and diligence. Thus may the Lord look mercifully and graciously on the souls of those who are commemorated, and give them rest in a bright place . .” In Byzantine religious practice, prayers could be spoken on behalf of the dead to increase the likelihood of a favorable judgment for that individual at the end of time. Such prayers for the dead in Byzantium were performed in a number of contexts, including: in personal prayers spoken by individuals remembering deceased relatives and loved ones; in monastic rites of commemoration for individuals or families, conducted by nuns and monks at the request of a monastery’s original founder or later benefactors; and in the brief prayers for the entire community of the dead spoken during the regular performance of the Divine Liturgy, or Eucharistic service. Artistic imagery related to death and salvation often served as the immediate backdrop for these rites in honor of the dead.

Important views concerning death were expressed in rich narrative scenes such as the Virgin’s Koimesis, or “falling asleep,” a scene known in the Latin West as the Dormition (17.190.132). The Virgin’s peaceful falling asleep in death, combined with Christ’s tender embrace of her soul—represented in Byzantine art as a swaddled infant—rendered an ideal image, one in which the Virgin’s soul was conveyed to heaven immediately upon her death. Scenes including the Virgin’s Koimesis, the Crucifixion of Christ (17.190.715ab), and Christ’s Anastasis, also known as the “Harrowing of Hell”, appeared in monumental scale in fresco and mosaic on the walls of churches, often surrounding tombs, and on more intimate objects of personal devotion, including portable icons and pendant reliquaries, displayed at tombs. Entire decorative programs focused on these themes, as well as the Last Judgment, were featured in funerary chapels placed to the north, west, or south of the main church, as well as in annex spaces below the church, in some cases referred to as crypts. One such famous example is the southern funerary chapel in the Church of Christ in Chora, Constantinople, a foundation restored and enlarged by the imperial prime minister, Theodore Metochites, in 1316–21. Chapels were popular interior locations for tombs, as was the church nave (the church’s central ritual space) and the western narthex, or entrance vestibule.

Among the most elaborately decorated funerary monuments in medieval Byzantium was the niche tomb, or arcosolium. The niche tomb was set against or built into the church wall and framed a sarcophagus below. Portraits of the deceased alone or in family groups popularly decorated such arcosolia. These portrayals of the deceased could be executed in large-scale fresco painting or mosaic on the back wall of the arcosolium, or they could be completed in relief carving on the sarcophagus itself. Such images conveyed the physical attributes of the subject, as well as signs of his or her social and economic status, including membership in the elite families of the empire. One of the most significant characteristics of such Byzantine funerary portraiture was the portrayal of the subject as if he or she were still alive, rather than asleep in death. In this context, the deceased stands beside family relations, and can also be shown praying to saintly intercessors in the same composition.

The decorated stone sarcophagus, a centerpiece of the niche tomb, had long been a standard in Early Christian as well as pagan burial in the Mediterranean world (1991.366). This tradition was continued in medieval Byzantium, although increasingly the body of the deceased was laid to rest below the church paving. The decorated sarcophagus—without a corpse inside it—was maintained as a symbol of the body’s presence nearby, and connected this tradition with the earliest Christian burials. Sarcophagi were decorated with a wide range of motifs in relief carving, including intricate floral and vegetal forms, geometric patterns, sacred narratives, and inscriptions naming the deceased. In more rare examples, sarcophagus panels could be decorated with the ancient mythological figure of the griffin (2000.81), which served as a guardian for the tomb and drew upon Byzantium’s longstanding ties to Greco-Roman art and culture. In the Metropolitan’s panel, which formed the short end of a rectangular sarcophagus, the griffin is framed by a medallion and is surrounded by rich intertwining vines and pomegranates at the panel’s four corners, a symbol of eternal life. The seeds of the pomegranate fruit were a common ingredient in the traditional offering of kollyba, a mixture of grains and fruits, distributed on commemorative occasions.

Tombs were also located outside the Byzantine church in adjacent open-air cemeteries, forming an integral part of both the public and sacred landscapes around the church. Gravemarkers in stone, wood, and ceramic were commonly placed in these outdoor cemeteries to identify individual graves, and the most elaborate examples could combine both text and images. A parallel for this type of medieval Christian gravestone comes from the former Byzantine territory of Egypt: a stone gravemarker dating from the seventh to ninth century that records the name of the deceased in the local Coptic language.

Women of various ages also took part in specific religious festivals, some of which even included men—the Panathenaia in honor of the goddess Athena, the Eleusinian Mysteries that honored Demeter and Persephone, and the Anthesteria sacred to Dionysos (17.190.73). Other festivals were restricted to women, such as the Thesmophorian, the Haloa, and the Skira, all of which emphasized the correlation of a woman’s generative capabilities with the renewal of vegetation and, thus, the survival of society. Religious rituals reserved for young girls probably had the most significant impact on young unmarried women. For example, young girls between the ages of five and puberty were selected to serve the goddess Artemis in her sanctuary at Brauron. As “little bears,” they acted out the role of untamed animals that eventually would be domesticated through marriage. Thus, the self-perception of a young girl in Classical Greece was manipulated through behavioral instruction in the home, through the myths that reiterated social values, and through their participation in rituals that educated them in the values and mores of their community.

The culmination of a young woman’s socialization was her marriage (56.11.1), which usually took place at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Marriage did not require a young bride’s consent, as she was simply passed from the protection of her father to that of her husband. A young woman in Classical Athens lacked any rights of citizenship, and could only be described as the wife of an Athenian citizen. However, a bride brought to her marriage a dowry that was not available for the husband to spend. In fact, on the rare occasion that the marriage failed, the dowry was returned to the wife’s father. The consummation of marriage signaled the end of a young woman’s status as a kore, or young maiden, as she was then classified as a nymphe, or bride, until the birth of her first child, when she became a gyne, or woman. The life expectancy of the average woman was about forty years old.

Despite the extreme social restraint on women in classical antiquity, it is interesting that they had a number of powerful female goddesses of the type that were never available to Christian women. Demeter was able to retrieve her daughter Persephone, Artemis could send a fatal arrow, and Athena had the ability to resist marriage and motherhood, and to provide advice to respected Greek heroes. Aphrodite, Hera, Hestia, and Hekate were also powerful goddesses, intensely honored and greatly admired by women and men alike.

Colette Hemingway
Independent Scholar