Blog Category: On this day

Edgar Degas | Arabesque over the right leg, left arm in line, 1882-1895 | yellow-brown wax | Photograph by Gauthier| Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas is primarily known for his painting, having exhibited only one sculpture during his lifetime: The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1881. It was not until after his death in 1917 that more than 150 pieces of sculpture of dancers, horses, and nudes, mostly made of wax, clay, and plastiline (a type of modeling clay), were discovered in his studio (read the intriguing story of the posthumous castings on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website).

Edgar Degas | Horse galloping on right foot, 1865-1881| brown wax; pieces of cork in the base | Photographer: Hervé Lewandowski | Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas | Dressed dancer at rest, hands behind her back, right leg forward, 1896-1911 | brown wax | Photograph by Gauthier| Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas | Arabesque over the right leg, left arm in line, 1882-1895 | yellow-brown wax | Photograph by Gauthier| Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas | Woman washing her left leg, 1896-1911 | yellow and red wax; the 'basin' is a small pot of green porcelain | Photograph by Gauthier | Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas | Dancer putting on her stocking, 1896-1911 | brown wax, pieces of wire wound around the lifted foot | Photograph by Gauthier | Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Edgar Degas | Grande arabesque, first time, 1882-1895 | green wax | Photograph by Gauthier | Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Left: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | Self Portrait, 1858 | Galleria degli Uffizi Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y. Right: Eugène Delacroix | Self-Portrait, c. 1837 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

The rivalry between Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugene Delacroix, the two titans of 19^th century French painting, is often seen as embodying the conflict between the era’s tradition-based neoclassicism and non-conformist Romanticism. Writing for the journal Art History, Andrew Carrington Shelton quotes an article from 1832 by an anonymous critic as the first time the dispute was presented:

It’s the battle between antique and modern genius. M. Ingres belongs in many respects to the heroic age of the Greeks; he is perhaps more of a sculptor than a painter; he occupies himself exclusively with line and form, purposefully neglecting animation and colour […] M. Delacroix, in contrast, willfully sacrifices the rigours of drawing to the demands of the drama he depicts; his manner, less chaste and reserved, more ardent and animated, emphasizes the brilliance of colour over the purity of line.

The antagonism seems to have extended into the personal. In 1883, the New York Times featured a surprisingly gossipy account of a party in which the two stars had a confrontation. The famously testy Ingres doesn’t come across too well in the exchange:

After dinner, holding in his hand a cupful of coffee, he brusquely went up to Eugene Delacroix, who was standing by the fire, and said to him: “Drawing, sir, drawing is honesty! Drawing, sir, drawing is honor!” In his agitation the cup of coffee capsized and poured over his shirt and waistcoat. He seized his hat in a fury… “This is too much! I shall go; I will not let myself be insulted any longer.”

After Ingres left, Delacroix showed admirable restraint, speaking of the qualities that made lngres an eminent painter, adding: “Talent is apt to be exclusive: narrowness is often the condition of its existence.”

Left: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | Self Portrait, 1858 | Galleria degli Uffizi Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y. Right: Eugène Delacroix | Self-Portrait, c. 1837 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

Eugène Delacroix | Saint George Fighting the Dragon (Perseus Delivering Andromeda; Saint Georges Combattant le Dragon; Persee Delivrant Andromede), 1847 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | Roger and Angelica, 1819 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

Eugène Delacroix | Odalisque, c. 1848-1849 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y. artres.com

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | The Grand Odalisque, 1814 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com

For this slide show, we searched the Artstor Digital Library for some images that highlighted the formal differences between the two artists. Among the hundreds of choices, we chose these examples from the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives, and the Scala Archives. From viewing the artworks alone, could you have predicted which of these two artists would be more likely to get so agitated at a party that he would spill coffee on himself?

–  Giovanni Garcia-Fenech

Frank Lloyd Wright | Frederick C. Robie House, Exterior: Front Porch, 1908-1910 | © 2008 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York | Photographed by: Cassy Juhl | Image and data from the Trustees of Columbia University, Visual Media Center, Department of Art History and Archaeology

The influential American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867. Wright designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works, including the Robie House in Chicago, Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

The Artstor Digital Library features more than 1,000 images of Wright’s work. Of special interest are 50 QuickTime Virtual Reality Panoramas (QTVRs) from QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (Columbia University). Search for Frank Lloyd Wright QTVR to see 360° spherical views of sites such as the architect’s home and studio, the Mies van der Rohe buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Louis Sullivan’s Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, and Chicago’s popular Millennium Park.

On June 4, 1919, U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote, and sent it to the states for ratification. To celebrate this momentous anniversary, we are featuring an essay by Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator and director of exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, on an anonymous 19th-century artist’s “Crazy” quilt (i.e., a quilt with no repeating motifs) and its message about women’s suffrage.

Artist unidentified; initialed “J.F.R.” | Cleveland-Hendricks Crazy Quilt, Cleveland-Hendricks Crazy Quilt | American Folk Art Museum, folkartmuseum.org

The constitutional amendment giving the vote to American women was not ratified until 1920. Therefore, the unidentified maker of this quilt voiced her political sentiments in one of the only socially acceptable means available to her in the late nineteenth century. Using the idiom of the Crazy quilt, she constructed a strong statement of Democratic sympathies in a highly fashionable format.

Dorothea Lange | The Road West | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art |

Documentary photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895. Her photographs for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) depicted the human impact of the Great Depression and were tremendously influential, both politically and in the field of documentary photography.

Among her many other achievements, Lange received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, photographed the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps in 1942, and co-founded the photography magazine Aperture in 1952. She died on October 11, 1965.

This haunting photograph depicting highway U.S. 54, the west-bound route taken by many families who hoped to find work in California, comes to us from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Lady Lilith, 1867 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Writer and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born May 12, 1828 in London. Disenchanted with the formula-driven painting being produced by the Royal Academy, Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The Brotherhood embraced l’art pour l’art—art for art’s sake—and aimed to reform the art of their day by emulating the art of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe until the time of Raphael.

This gouache of Lady Lilith comes to us from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and carries an inscription in the back that reads “”Beware of her hair, for she excells (sic) / All women in the magic of her locks / And when she twines them round a young man’s neck / she will not ever set him free again” from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s never-completed translation of Goethe’s Faust. Search for Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Artstor Digital Library to find dozens of more works by the highly-influential artist.

Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun, 1333-1323 BCE | Tomb of Tutankhamun, Valley of the Kings, Thebes| Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com scalarchives.com

On May 9, 1874, future archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was born in London, England. Carter would find fame in 1922 upon discovering the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. Search the ARTstor Digital Library for Tutankhamun to find images of many of the breath-taking treasures found in the tomb, including this funerary mask from Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives). Don’t miss H. Parkinson’s drawing of the contents of the tomb, from Plans of Ancient and Medieval Buildings and Archaeological Sites (Bryn Mawr College). When you’re done, check out Wikipedia’s eerie entry on the so-called “curse of the pharaohs.”

You may also be interested in: Unwinding mummies

William Glackens | May Day, Central Park, circa 1905 | Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | Image and data from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

May 1^st, or May Day, celebrates the beginning of summer. The tradition has been manifested throughout different eras and cultures as the Roman festival of Flora, the Germanic Walpurgisnacht festival, and the Gaelic Beltane. It is also International Workers’ Day, in commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago.

This painting of May Day in Central Park by William Glackens comes to the Artstor Digital Library from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Collection.

She-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, 16th century | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. artres.com / artres.com

Twin brothers Romulus and Remus founded Rome on April 21, 753 B.C. on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants.

Roman | Ara Casali | Museo Pio-Clementino | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
artres.com / scalarchives.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

According to the legend, the twins were the sons of Rhea Silvia and the war god Mars. Fearing that they would claim his throne, Rhea’s uncle Amulius ordered them drowned in the River Tiber. Thanks to help from the river deity Tiberinus, the twins were safely washed ashore at the foot of the Palatine hill, where they were suckled by a she-wolf. They were rescued by a shepherd, who raised them as his own. Once grown, the twins killed Amulus and went on to found a town on the site where they had been saved. After a disagreement on the exact location of the site, Romulus killed by his brother and became ruler of the settlement, which he named “Rome” after himself.

The image of the 16^th century sculpture of the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus comes to us from Art, Archaeology and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives), the Casali Altarpiece from the 2^nd century C.E. comes from Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives), and Nicholas Mignard’s 17^th century painting comes from the Dallas Museum of Art Collection. Search for Remus and Romulus to find many more related images, including the series of prints by Giambattista Fontana from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Collection.

Nicholas Mignard | The Shepherd Faustulus Bringing Romulus and Remus to His Wife, 1654 | Dallas Museum of Art | Image and data from the Dallas Museum of Art

Hishida Shunso | Black Cat, 1910 | Eisei Bunko Foundation, Tokyo, Japan | Huntington Archive of Asian Art

Everyone knows that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day, right? According to Wikipedia, there is no record of this superstition existing before the late 19th century, and different cultures ascribe the unfortunate day to Tuesday the 13th or Friday the 17th. Meanwhile, many superstitions popular in the Middle Ages did not make it to our era. Visit the Illustrated Bartsch collection of Old Master European prints in the Digital Library and search within it for superstition to find some surprising beliefs, such as “Digging for Coal Upon Seeing a Swallow Guarantees Freedom from Fever and Headaches for a Year,” and “Man Encountering a Goose, a Good Omen for the Day.”