Category: Rousseau

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Selective Roman virtues

Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1783. A Welsh former lady’s maid, Sarah Siddons went on to be recognized as the greatest tragedienne of her age. As an actress she was outside social mores. She was painted by both Gainsborough and Reynolds, whose portrait of her is more typical of a male “status portrait” of the time.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, women  were essentially invisible in the public sphere. This was in part due to society’s selective embrace of Roman values.
The ancient Romans, although in some ways progressive for their time, were explicitly patriarchal. The paterfamilias maintained strict authority over his family and household. Nevertheless, Roman women did have important rights and privileges, such as the right to carry on business, remarry, and own property. Women played a prominent role in the official cults, including the Vestal Virgins, who were Rome’s only full-time professional clergy.
Comtesse de la ChĂątre (Marie Louise Perrette AglaĂ© Bontemps), 1789, painted by Élisabeth Louise VigĂ©e Le Brun, who was the most famous woman painter of the 18th century. This is a more typical female portrait in that the subject’s social status is conveyed by her dress and surroundings.
What a surprise that the men of the Enlightenment selectively chose what Roman virtues to apply! Once again, we can look to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Ă‰mile for insight into their interpretation of Roman patriarchy.  Émile, as the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing.  Sophie, the ideal woman, is educated to be ruled by her husband.

Rousseau’s theory of sexuality is still repeated by some today:

Who can possibly suppose that nature has indifferently prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other and that the first to feel desire should also be the first to display it. What a strange lack of judgment! Since the consequences of the sexual act are so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should engage in it with equal boldness? How can one fail to see that when the share of each is so unequal, if reserve did not impose on one sex the moderation that nature imposes on the other, the result would be the destruction of both and the human race would perish through the very means ordained for its continuance. Women so easily stir men’s senses and awaken in the bottom of their hearts the remains of an almost extinct desire that if there were some unhappy climate on this earth where philosophy had introduced this custom, especially in warm countries where more women than men are born, the men tyrannized over by the women would at last become their victims and would be dragged to their deaths without ever being able to defend themselves.
Is it any wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft felt compelled to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792? Not that it had much of an immediate impact: Feminism would not get traction until the middle of the 19th century.

Mme de Wailly, sculpted by Augustin Pajou, 1789. After the second century BC, the wearing of togas by respectable women was a faux pas associated with prostitution and adultery. Women wore the stola, which was a long, pleated dress, worn over an undergarment called the tunica intima. In other words, real Roman matrons did not wander around with their breasts hanging out.
This week I am considering six forms of portrait painting that reached maturity during the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. These posts are based closely on the Royal Academy of Art’s 2007 show, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Enlightenment family values

Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and Their Daughter Anne, 1786, by Henry Walton.
Those of us who look with dismay on recent trends in family structure might be surprised to learn that we are not the only age that has redefined family relationships.
Prior to the Enlightenment, very few children appeared in paintings. Unless you were the Baby Jesus, John the Baptist, a royal prince, or a bit player in a grand historical melodrama, the chances of you appearing in a portrait were slim. Of course, that reflected the role of children in society in general.
The Braddyll Family, 1789, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The strong pyramidal structure emphasizes their familial stability, and if you missed that they embody virtue and citizenship, then the copy of the Medici Vase (a famous Roman antiquity) is there to remind you. 
That changed with the need to explain society in terms of intellectual, rather than religious, values. To the eighteenth century man of letters, the family was the cradle of virtue and good citizenship. Children were no longer seen as stained by Original Sin; rather they became symbols of innocence. The child’s relationship with his parents changed (at least in the homes of the educated classes). It was less formal and more affectionate.
Gainsborough’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, 1756. Thomas Gainsborough painted his daughters many times. They are exquisitely affectionate portraits.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a great impact on the attitude of the Enlightenment toward children. “If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated,” said Rousseau. Rousseau believed that the countryside was a more natural and healthy environment for children. He believed children learned from the consequences of their actions, so their teachers should be more along the lines of a Roman tutelary deity—keeping the kid from hurting himself—than an old-fashioned pedagogue.
If any of this wants to make you snort milk up your nose, bear in mind that Rousseau gave up each of his children as newborns to a foundling hospital. Like all the best educational theorists, he was an idealist, not a practitioner. Nonetheless, his ideas influenced child-rearing across Europe, although in practice they were modified to meet the exigencies of reality.

The Byam Family, Thomas Gainsborough, 1762-66. George Byam and his wife Louisa sat for the original portrait in the early ‘60s. A few years later, they returned with their first child, Selina, and Gainsborough added her to the portrait.
Rousseau and other 18th century thinkers were borrowing from the classical writers in extolling the virtues of the countryside over city life. This extended to their preference for informal gardens in the naturalistic English style over the formal gardens of old Europe.  As one father told his son, “one of the main reasons we live in the country both summer and winter is to teach us from an early age that simplicity, moderation and industry are inextricably bound to our basic happiness.”*
Thus the family portrait on the grounds of an estate was meant not primarily to express the wealth of the sitter, but to place the family in a natural environment, with all the blessings that implied.
This week I am considering six forms of portrait painting that reached maturity during the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. These posts are based closely on the Royal Academy of Art’s 2007 show, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. 
*Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary by Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Diane Webb. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!