19th Century Landscape - The Crowd
The Crowd
"Work" and the City
Quotations:
George Simnel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, (1900) in R. Sennett Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities 1969
“… the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity I the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life.”
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge 1977
“Silence in public became the onky way one could experience public life, especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed. In the mid-nineteenth century there grew up in Paris and London, and thence in other Western capitals, a pattern unlike what was known in London or Paris a century before or is known in most of the non-Western world today. There grew up the notion that strangers had no right to speak to other, that each man possessed as a public right an invisible shield, a right to be left alone.
Public behaviour was a matter of observation, of passive participation, of a certain kind of voyeurism. The “gastronomy of the eye” Balzac called it; one was open to everything, one rejects nothing a priori from one’s purview, provided one needn’t become a participant, enmeshed in a scene. This invisible sail of silence as a right meant that knowledge in public was a matter of observation – of scenes, of women and men, of locales. Knowledge was no longer to be produced by social intercourse”
Guy Debord, The Modern City: Spectacle and Commodity, The Society of the Spectacle Paris, 1977
“The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.”
Tim Clark on Paris, The Painting of Modern Life
“… the implications for capitalist society of the progressive shift within production towards the provision of consumer goods and services, and the accompanying “colonization of everyday life”. The word “colonization” conjures up associations with the Marxist theory of imperialism, and is meant to. It points to the massive internal extension of the capitalist market – the invasion and restructuring of whole areas of free time, private life, leisure, and personal expression which had been left in the first push to constitute an urban proletariat, relatively uncontrolled. It indicates a new phase of commodity production – the marketing, the making into commodities, of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday life…
“consumerism”, for instance, or “the society of leisure”, the rise of mass media, the expansion of advertising, the hypertrophy of official diversions (Olympic Games, party conventions, biennales)… Certainly the Paris that Meyer Shapiro was celebrating, in which commercialized forms of life and leisure were so insistently replacing those “privately improvised”, does seem to fit the preceding description quite well. And it will be argued that the replacement was not a matter of mere cultural and ideological refurbishing but of all-embracing economic change: a move to the world of grands magasins and grands boulevards and their accompanying industries of tourism, recreation, fashion and display – industries which helped alter the relations of production in Paris as a whole.”
“…the beach… which a little while ago delighted us, looks on my return like a terrible masquerade” Boudin
We are going to consider the above statements (though made about Paris) in terms of the following pictures:
James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Wapping, 1861-4
The literature excepts above all speak of the City as being fragmented. The lack of interaction between the elements, detachment. In the above we can see this pictorially. The girl (presumed to be a prostitute – see openness of pose, lack of reticence in her gaze) seems detached from the men – even in the scumbling of the painting technique she is handled separately/differently. The three figures are detached from the scene behind (raised up, strong dark colours against the lightness of the water, relaxing vs. the industry behond). What is the relationship between the three and to the scene behind? Unclear, problem of legibility.
The city and images of the city continually throw up this unreadability.
Is this a conventional composition? Foreground detail, strong verticals, winding route through to the horizon. But the strong light/dark contrasts suggest a photographic/print-like quality. The individual elements seem fragmented, even in their treatment. Reminds people of the work of Manet (though look at the date, pre Dejeuner sur l’herbe/Olympia). In its individual loneliness think Caillebotte. Summed up as a glance, not a gaze. Compare to other images of the River Thames [hardly comparing like with like!]:
John Constable, Opening of Waterloo Bridge, 1829 JMW Turner, Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday,
exhibited 1819
Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-63
Christian socialists (far right) - the brainworkers
Immigrants below them – out of work
Orange seller in right distance is being prevented from working
Flower man – never taught to work
Do-gooders/volunteer ladies behind flower man – unpaid work (supported by other workers, their husbands)
Aristocrats – don’t need to work
Heroic central figure and other physical workers – seven ages of man? Manual work equated to artists toil – see figure in front of girl is sifting earth, as the artists sifts his information. Pot-man with newspaper indicating he can read.
Kids are our instincts –
Dogs – metaphor for domesticity
But is this legible? If we didn’t know the above, could we discern from picture? It is certainly a fragmented composition, an accumulation of detail. BUT IS IT A LANDSCAPE? From mid-century the genres are being broken down, categories fragmenting. This is literally about the creation of a city – bringing in piped water to the suburbs.
What connects the Whistler and ‘Work’? Very different artists and philosophies but their subject matter – the city – is new and has therefore caused them to search for a material vision which has produced similar results: fragmentation, figures and landscape not quite connecting.
Consider these figured compositions to John Atkinson Grimshaw[1]:
London Bridge: Half Tide, 1884
Grimshaw is still addressing the industrialness of the City – working ships – but his nighttime preference, long view (creating a vista), monotone palette heightened by dusk/dawn time slows down the pace of life. Note the harmony of the even warehouses on the left, the strong horizontal of the bridge, the rhythm of the water. This is an aesthetic response. Note how images of St. Paul’s address a nationalist tone, the river and the cathedral as a pivotal image is a frequent motif.
Grimshaw, Nightfall Down the Thames, 1880 Vicat Cole, The Pool of London, 1888
Grimshaw’s images of the streets in his favourite theme of nighttime, capture perfectly the ‘spectacle’ aspect of late 19th century city life. Gas lighting came first to London (not Paris) – 1812 and with plate glass transformed the urban, inner city landscape – both commercially and visually. Shops with windows became points of display, for people to peruse. A passion for gilded advertisements reflected in the lit windows to create a pleasurable experience, with light came increased safety and increased people onto the streets. Grimshaw’s paintings capture this.
Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, 1887 Boar lane-Leeds, 1881
Of course this mingling of people on the same streets brought problems, the previous structure of society was more difficult to read, the spaces they occupied less defined.
William Powell Frith specialized in commentaries on the juxtaposition of society in the new spaces. He did a series of engravings commenting on Regent Street at different times of the day. At Noon a mixed clientele of chaperoned ladies, families whereas at 2.00pm the flaneurs and their ‘traviatas’ (high class prostitutes).
In Paddington Station (1862) he adopts a landscape format to produce a series of incidences which are polarized – at different ends of the social spectrum. These are generalized ‘types’. In Derby Day (1856-8) the city and the countryside are united, on the edge.
People were now aware of the different strata of society, being brought face to face with it and we will see the growth of charity, charitable works, and images to encourage charity….. but of course they are very much addressed to the middle class market.
Frith, Poverty & Wealth, 1888 Gustave Dore[2], Wentworth St-Whitechapel, Dore, Over London by Rail,
1870 1870
Rosetti’s ‘Found’ (1853) is an extraordinary picture – never finished. [Carol into raptures over the brick wall! – building up of paint replicating the building of the wall itself, metaphor for industrial revolution, mass production. Extraordinary clarity, workmanship, richness of texture/detail, etc].
What does it mean? The bridge in the background bridges city and country (her rich colour of urban clothes, his subdued country smock). This is all about polarity, opposites. What is the netted calf on the cart saying about their relationship? What is that embedded cannon/bollard blocking the way? This is an unresolved image. Many images of the city are unresolved.
Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon-Hampstead 1853, 1852-3
[1]
John Atkinson Grimshaw was born in
Leeds in 1836. His parents were strict
Baptists and his mother strongly disapproved of his interest in
painting and on one occasion she destroyed all his paints.
In 1852 Grimshaw became a clerk at the
Great Northern Railway office in
Leeds. The city had several art galleries and Grimshaw was able to
see the work of
Holman Hunt (The Light of the
World),
Henry Wallis (Death of Chatterton)
and
William Powell Frith (Derby Day).
Grimshaw decided to become a full-time painter in 1861. His paintings
were sold in two art galleries, smaller picture dealers and a couple of
bookshops in Leeds. One of his main customers was Thomas Fenteman, who
owned an antiquarian booksellers. Fenteman was a deeply religious man
and would only buy the pictures after Grimshaw had confirmed that they
had not been painted on a Sunday.
William Agnew, a
London art dealer, began purchasing his work. Further success came
when a picture by Grimshaw was accepted by the
Royal Academy.
Until the early 1870s Grimshaw's paintings were predominantly still
lifes with a few landscapes of the
Leeds area. However, he gradually became interested in painting
night scenes. These paintings often included the smoke pollution and
damp fogs that were common in industrial cities in the late 19th
century.
Dore's English Bible (1865) was a great success and in 1867 Gustave Dore had a major exhibition of his work in London. This led to the foundation of the Dore Gallery in New Bond Street.
In 1869, Blanchard Jerrold, the son of Douglas Jerrold, suggested that they worked together to produce a comprehensive portrait of London. Jerrold had got the idea from The Microcosm of London, that had been produced by Rudolf Ackermann, William Pyne and Thomas Rowlandson in 1808.
Dore signed a five-year project with he publishers, Grant & Co, that involved him staying in London for three months a year. Dore was paid the vast sum of £10,000 a year for the proposed art work. The book, London: A Pilgrimage, with 180 engravings by Dore, was eventually published in 1872.
Although a commercial success, many of the critics disliked the book. Several were upset that Dore had appeared to concentrate on the poverty that existed in London. Gustave Dore was accused by the Art Journal of "inventing rather than copying". The Westminster Review claimed that " Dore gives us sketches in which the commonest, the vulgarest external features are set down".
Copyright 2006, Ms S. Sharpe
