Rethinking Delaroche/Recovering Leighton
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10866568 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Barringer (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 9-24 |
| Publication date | 2001-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0042-5222 • E-ISSN: 1527-2052 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/vic.2001.44.1.9 |
| OpenAlex | W2047615513 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
When I first saw it a little more than a decade ago, Frederic Leighton's Lachrymae (c. 1895; fig. 1) was hanging in the remotest and most dimly lit room in the Metropolitan Museum's nineteenth-century painting galleries. 1 This compelling meditation on the nature of death and loss belongs among Leighton's final, and most extreme, explorations of the possibilities and limits of the painted surface. Yet, in accordance with art-historical orthodoxy, the museum positioned it quite literally at the margins of the canon, in a dingy Fifth Avenue salon des refusés from where one could only distantly hear the excited buzz of visitors clustered around works of Monet and Pissarro. In the airport-lounge, pine-and-burlap ambiance of those galleries, the massive gilt frame adorned with gesso pilasters could easily--and was, no doubt, expected to--appear absurdly vainglorious and anachronistic. Multiple allusions to artistic and cultural traditions permeate Lachrymae, in which a grieving woman with dark classical drapery is seen bowing her head in sorrow before a solitary Doric column. The painting's multivalent and eclectic relationship with the history of art constitutes, perhaps, a lament for the classical tradition, as well as a reflection on the mortality of the dying artist. Naturally, then, this work stands apart from the radical engagement with modern urban life, and ostensible abandonment of representational traditions, which have come to stand as the central, validating characteristics of good modern art. The powerful Modernist teleology constructed by the Metropolitan's main galleries, as in "universal survey museums" the world over (Duncan and Wallach), led from Géricault to Manet to Cézanne, then, in adjacent suites of rooms, from Picasso to Pollock, with no room for the artists that time and taste (according to this trajectory) left behind. Other narratives--such as the exposition of the history of British art formerly provided by the national collections at the Tate Gallery in London2-- were equally unsympathetic to the claims of [End Page 9] [Begin Page 11] Leighton's aestheticizing history paintings: "And the sea gave up the dead which were in it" (c. 1891-92), banished from the main suite of galleries and distorted by discolored varnish, hung for years over a dark staircase leading to the public bathrooms
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.04 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2002 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |