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The 18th and 19th
Centuries
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Neoclassicism and Romanticism
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(Neoclassicism,
Romanticism and
Art Styles in 19th century -
Art Map)
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Orientalism
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Luigi Mayer
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Following the British expansion in India during the first half of
the 18th century, Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign in 1798, and the
French conquest of Algeria in 1830, an idle curiosity about these
distant lands grew into a specific interest that influenced
European taste in general. An element of the exotic permeated trends
in literature, music, and the visual arts throughout the 19th
century.
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In the early 18th century, the influence of the Orient in art was
of a purely decorative nature. Viewed through Western eyes, the
Orient evoked by Western artists was a fanciful and distinctly
Europeanized place, exemplified by the works of
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,
Francois Boucher, Nicolas Lancret, and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The
increasing interest in the East was echoed in the realm of music,
for example in the compositions of Rameau and Mozart, particularly
Rameau's Les Indes gakmtes (1735), and Mozart's Die Entfuhrung
aus dem Serail (1782). By 1770. the vogue for chinoiserie - the imitation
of Chinese style, primarily in decoration and furniture - that had
been popular in the Rococo period was beginning to fade. However,
there remained a number of notable enthusiasts of the Chinese style,
not least in the field of architecture. In 1799. for example, Venanzio Marvuglia (1729-I8l4) created a "Chinese Palace" at Villa
La Favorita in Sicily as a refuge for King Ferdinand IV. Soon after,
at the beginning of the 19th century. Oriental style was
extravagantly revived by John Nash (1752-1835) in his reconstruction
of the Royal Pavilion in the English seaside resort of Brighton.
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Jean Etienne Liotard
Woman with a Tamburine
1735
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Pre-Orientalism
Although Orientalism did not become a well-defined style until the
19th century, its roots can be traced to a general love of exotica
in the 18th century. Artistic treatment of Eastern subjects took the
form of charming, picturesque recordings of artists' travels through
Eastern countries, with scenes clearly refined to suit the tastes of
a European audience. Of particular note is the work of the Swiss
pastel painter and engraver
Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-89). who
painted women dressed in Turkish costume, paving careful attention
to detail and displaying an unprecedented degree of sensitivity to
the subject. After spending four years in Constantinople from 1738,
Liotard even chose to retain the Turkish dress and beard that he had
adopted while abroad. Another 18th-century artist to venture east
was Luigi Mayer (c. 1755-1803), who travelled through the Ottoman
Empire between 1776 and 1794, sketching and painting panoramic
landscapes, ancient monuments, and the Nile and its surroundings.
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Luigi Mayer
(1755-1803)
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Luigi Mayer
Egyptian Antiquities in the
Vestibule of a Country House at Bulac
1802
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Luigi Mayer
Women of Caramania
1803
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Luigi Mayer
The Pool of Bethesda, Jerusalem
1801
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Luigi Mayer
The Tomb of Jeremiah
1801
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Luigi Mayer
A Sarcophagus from the Tombs of the
Kings, Jerusalem
1801
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Luigi Mayer
The Fountain of Siloah, Jerusalem
1801
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Luigi Mayer
Jerusalem with the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre
1801
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Luigi Mayer
The Tomb of Absalom, Jerusalem
1805
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Luigi Mayer
Views in Egypt
1801
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Luigi Mayer
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Luigi Mayer
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Luigi Mayer
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Luigi Mayer
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Luigi Mayer
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__________
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Antoine-Jean Gros
Bonaparte Visits the Plague Victims of Jaffa
1804
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The Egyptian Influence
During the late 18th century, the East was not only a rich source of
inspiration for decorative themes and motifs, but also yielded great
scientific discoveries. In order to meet the need to give a sound
methodological basis to these new studies, in 1793 a special school
was set up in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris for the teaching
of Arabic. Turkish, and Persian. Egyptology, followed later by
Assyriology. soon became the fashionable hobby of the educated
classes. Much admired were the works by Baron
Antoine-Jean Gros
(1771-1835) and Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
(1767-1824), that documented Napoleon's Egyptian campaign; these
were elevated to the rank of "great" paintings and accorded the
status of official art. For the first time, the East was explored,
reorganized, reassembled, and finally reborn in the monumental
Description de I'Egypte. This
study was published in 24 volumes (1809-28) by the Institut d'Egypte,
founded by Napoleon for the purpose of studying Egyptian
civilization. In Rome, at the Palazzo Braschi, an Egyptian Room was
established to display all the gifts brought by Napoleon to Pope
Pius VI. His successor, Pius VII, acquired the collection of Andrea Gaddi, and along with statues from Thebes and other Egyptian
articles, housed them at the Vatican. Here, in 1836, Gregory XVI
opened the Egyptian Museum, its walls painted like those of the
palaces on the banks of the Nile, and its ceilings adorned with
golden stars sparkling against a cobalt-blue sky.
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Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
The Revolt of 21 October 1798 in Cairo
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The Temple of Hermopolis, "Champollion"
Sevres vase
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THE EGYPTIAN STYLE
Following Napoleon's campaign of 1798, the Egyptian style became
fashionable throughout Europe. It was favoured for the furnishings
of grand town houses and was also adapted to less ostentations
dwellings. Decorated furniture, fabrics, goldwork, jewellery, and
porcelain all featured such details as sphinxes and caryatids. The
French ceramics manufacturer Sevres produced dinner services with
sumptuous designs of hawks, sphinxes, and hieroglyphs. Many villas
and palaces displayed the popular taste for the Egyptian style:
Napoleon's residence at Elba, the Villa di San Martino. where he
was exiled between 1814 and 1815, was a triumph of the interior
decorator's art, complete with Egyptian room and gardens embellished
with pillars and obelisks. Tombs shaped like small pyramids and
obelisks begin to till cemeteries, such as Montparnasse and Pere
Lachaise in Paris and Kensal Green in London. These were derided by
the English architect and propagandist of the Gothic Revival
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) in his Apology for the
Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843).
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Jacques Swebach (1769-1823)
Mosque at Rosetta
Sevres plate from the Egyptian dinner service
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PUBLIC DISPLAY
With the advent of the 19th century, grand monuments to conquests of
exotic lands appeared increasingly in the public squares and avenues
of Europe. To commemorate his Egyptian campaign. Napoleon ordered
the erection of a fountain adorned with exotic decorations, and he
gave Parisian streets Egyptian names, including me Damiette and rue
du Caire. Subsequently, the fashion for Egyptian ornamentation was
widely embraced — disseminated through D-V Denon's illustrated
Voyage dans la Haute et dans la Basse Egypte (1802) and the Institut
d'Egypte's magisterial Description de I'Egypte (1809-28) - and
became particularly successful in the US.
In England, to commemorate Nelson's victory in the Battle of the
Nile in 1798, several Egyptian-style buildings and
interiors were created. Egyptian features were freely mixed with
other styles, such as Neo-Gothic and Neoclassical.
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Jean-Antoine Alavoine
Fontain sketch for Place de la Bastille
1814
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INTERIOR DESIGN
Between l750 and 1753,
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted a series of
frescos at the residence of the Prince Archbishop of Wurzburg. These
included personifications of the four continents on the ceiling of
the staircase in the Kaisersaal. Painted with triumphant, whimsical
verve, the theme was widely imitated in simpler forms in private
houses. Exotic countries and voyages to faraway lands provided the
subject matter for spectacular papiers panora-miques— brilliantly
coloured wallpapers that adorned drawing and dining room walls. The
sources of such images of distant imaginary worlds were often found
in literature, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's story, La Belle Sauvage, Montesquieu's
Lettres persanes, and the writings of
Voltaire, Diderot, and Bougainville.
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Jean-Gabriel Charvet
The Savages of the Pacific Ocean
1804
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Sir William Chambers
Pagoda at Kew Gardens, London
1757-62 |
THE CHINESE INFLUENCE
Rococo asymmetry lent itself to the incorporation of chinoiserie,
which readied the height of its popularity in the 18th century.
European craftsmen drew freely on the decorative motifs found on
goods imported from China. The first major application of the
Chinese style for an interior design was in Louis Le Vans Trianon de
porcelaine at Versailles. built in 1670 and later destroyed. The
style was adopted in court residences across Europe. Schonbrunn
Palace (1695-1711), the summer residence of the Habsburgs just
outside Vienna, had a Chinese room, as well as gardens - laid out in
about 1705 by Jean-Nicolas Jadot de Ville-Issey - that included
pagodas and tea houses. The second quarter of the 18th century saw a
revolution in garden design, as irregular Chinese models replaced
formal designs. In England, the Chinese example was combined with a
romantic eclecticism to produce the Anglo-Chinese garden. In 1757,
the English architect Sir William Chambers published his Designs of
Chinese Buildings... and, in 1772, his Dissertation on Oriental
Gardening, condemned by Horace Walpole as disgraceful. Despite its
detractors, the Chinese theme was taken up in garden and palace
design throughout Europe. Most memorable are the pavilion at Sans Souci in Potsdam (1754—57) and Catherine the Great's Chinese palace
at Oranienbaum in Germany (1762—68); the Chinese palace in the
grounds of Villa La Favorita in Sicily; the Chinese pavilions in the
gardens at Cibalka in Prague (1818-24); and at the Wilanov Palace in
Poland (c.1805). During the 19th century, chinoiserie was superseded
by other exotic-tastes, such as Turkish, Egyptian, Gothic, and
Greek.
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Venanzio Marvuglia
Chinese palace in the grounds of
Villa La Favorita
Palermo, Sicily
1799-1802
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