A rich description of a vivid work! Thanks for making the connection to Japonisme—fascinating stuff.
I’m convinced from this that Toulouse-Lautrec was a painter of modern life in Baudelaire’s sense, the voyeur who extracts something heroic from the banal.
“…. this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flaneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call `modernity'; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.
“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 1863)
You're welcome! And yes, thank you for bringing in Baudelaire's Painter of Modern Life. It's interesting that he is mostly brought in for discussions of better-known contemporary painters, such as Manet--but as he was writing, he almost certainly was talking about Ernest Meissonier, the painter to whom my dedicatee, Professor Hungerford, dedicated her scholarly written life.
Ah, I’ve never heard of Ernest Meissonier—interesting! Baudelaire referred specifically to Constantine Guys in that essay, an obscure water color painter who would probably be completely unknown… if not for his champion Charles.
A rich description of a vivid work! Thanks for making the connection to Japonisme—fascinating stuff.
I’m convinced from this that Toulouse-Lautrec was a painter of modern life in Baudelaire’s sense, the voyeur who extracts something heroic from the banal.
“…. this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flaneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call `modernity'; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.
“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 1863)
You're welcome! And yes, thank you for bringing in Baudelaire's Painter of Modern Life. It's interesting that he is mostly brought in for discussions of better-known contemporary painters, such as Manet--but as he was writing, he almost certainly was talking about Ernest Meissonier, the painter to whom my dedicatee, Professor Hungerford, dedicated her scholarly written life.
Ah, I’ve never heard of Ernest Meissonier—interesting! Baudelaire referred specifically to Constantine Guys in that essay, an obscure water color painter who would probably be completely unknown… if not for his champion Charles.