Similarities and Differences of Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg - Essay Example

College: Similarities and differences of Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg, 1841 and Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress, 1888-90 Chasseriau used the portrait of the Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg to express his subtle defiance through diverting from his master’s approach and subverting to a new approach that enabled him to cast casting a melancholic mood over the painting. Moreover, elegance beauty and touch of class is expressed through the use of bright colors, and bringing out the meticulous naturalism, relation of figures in the portrait through the use of smooth polish (Prat 76). The stylized and painterly depiction expressed in the portrait indicates a societal relationship whereby people of different classes are closely related with nature and have a profound relation with the spiritual world. On the other hand, Paul Cezanne used Madame Cezanne’s portrait to express classical calm and ultimate simplicity. In the portrait, Cezanne does not capture the social status of his wife and therefore there is nothing to express her status as a model, lines and other artistic features are used to express emotional distance (Athanassouglou-Kallmyer, and Provence 234). This essay will give a brief biography of both artists and expound on similarities and differences of Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg and Madame Cezannes portraits as mediums of expression. Theodore Chasseriau was born in Samana Dominican republic and his family moved to Paris when he was the age of three. His artworks have been influenced by Ingres and therefore his paintings, drawings and styles exhibited in his finished works are relatively close to the works of Ingres. Chasseriau started working at the Master’s Studio at the age of eleven where he met Ingres and continued working until Ingres left to lead the Academic de France in Rome in 1834. Through his brother’s connections, he was able to draw portraits of elites in both the church and the state and his works were easily accepted in the society. He started producing his artworks in 1836 and moved to Rome in 1841 to join his mentor Ingres. Chasseriau’s greatest artworks were the Othello etchings in 1844 and a trip to Algeria exposed him to Orientals subjects that he was learning and was interested in exploring in the field of art. After his death, the staircase for Cour-des-Comptes that symbolized war and peace were destroyed by fire in 1846. Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence in France in a well-off family that assured his financial stability and supported him in his artistic works, an advantage that was missed by most artists of the time. Cezannes father wanted him to study law and he was forced to study Law at the University of Aix. However, he inherited a vivacious and romantic touch from his mother, and in 1857 he went for drawing classes under Joseph Gilbert at the Free Municipal School of Drawing at Aix. Because of a strong desire to pursue his passion, Cezanne went against his father’s wishes and under the encouragement of Zola, delved into artistic works, and moved to Paris where he developed his artistic skills, through the mentorship of Camille Pissarro. In his early works, Cezannes paintings were majorly large heavy figures in the landscape that were painted through imagination. However, as he developed, he advanced to working and painting from direct observation and this culminated into a light airy painting style. He struggled to create a connection between his observations and classical compositions. The Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg portrait is symmetrical, with its proper positioning and proportional utilization of space allowing the artist to fix the background and other natural features in a proper proportion and distance in reference to the subject. On the other hand, the portrait of Madame Cezanne in a red dress her posture sitting on the yellow chair and the details of wall bring out a very symmetrical relation of the different features that have been captured. The Primary colors, which are blue, red and yellow, are used to bring out the finer details and communicate emotions in the portrait. Her face is painted using numerous hues and the three colors around the mouth are used to indicate her status as a model in the society. For the Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg portrait, the painting brushwork is invisible and the finesses of the finishing enable Chasseriau to express a delicate and fine skin of a young beautiful woman and bring out an oval shape and gauzy chin that were associated with beauty (Guegan et al 567). On the contrary, Cezanne uses repetitive and explorative brushstrokes that are recognizable to express feelings and relations between features captured in the portrait. The planes of color and brushstrokes express the complexity of Cezannes understanding of his wife and desire to bring out her real character behind the calm mask. In the Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg portrait, direction of the sunset rays is indicated through shading of the ocher vegetation in the background. Upon the exhibition of the portrait in 1841, critics objected to the expressive elongation of the head, the shape of the eyes, and the extreme delicateness of the skin but currently, they are the features that have made the portrait stand out in different art galleries around the globe. To bring out the delicateness of the portrait, Chasseriau used a white lush color to express romanticism in the finished painting. The scene is emphasized through the use of shading, color and impressionistic lines. Moreover, at the top of coliseum, dark ocher’s in the light of the sunset are brought into vision through a different shade to give the painting a fine touch (Rishel, et al 123). In the Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg painting emphasizes contours and the image was observed from the front and this enables Chasseriau to express dark ocher’s, the shade of the surrounding vegetation and space, which is the church domes that can be seen from a distance. Lines and contours are emphasized enabling him to bring out the folds of the subject’s dress giving an elegant finishing to the painting. On the other hand, the organization of the Madame Cezanne’s portrait through the use of both horizontal and vertical lines brings out contours, defines different objects and their proximity to one another in the portrait. For instance, the diagonal arrangement of lines on the face brings out a predefined shape, size and shadow on the face. The Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg portrait is observed from a front sitting position making her appear tall and the features on the background overlapped as they appear from the top of her head and on the sides. Chasseriau used a model and the painting was done from direct observation because Charlatto de pange posed for the portrait in her garden at Palazzo Colonna in Rome in 1840. On the other hand, Madame Cezannes portrait was observed from the front, with the painter standing, thus enabling him to see so many details at the background both above her shoulder and on the sides. Madame Cezanne was an artist’s model and Cezanne’s wife and throughout their marriage, Cezanne painted 27 portraits of her in oil but the one in a red dress sitting on a yellow chair was done through direct observation. The background shows a mottled blue wall and the mirror slightly above the fire place shows the apartment occupied by Cezanne between 1888 and1890 at 15-Quai d’Anjou. The content of the portrait is based on everyday life of an ambassador’s wife with the work done at her garden not in the confines of a studio. The Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg painting is an example of a dress worn in 1841 by the elite class with a tiered bertha and bracelet colored in sky blue to bring out a sense of fashion and class. In The background Chasseriau uses colors to captures nature, with green and blue used to indicate vegetation and the sky respectively. In Madame Cezannes portrait, the still pose and lack of expression is a culmination of the tension between the couple, indicating the everyday’s family life in strained marriages and the trials of juggling her wifely and professional duties that made her husband feel like they were living in different worlds. The person depicted in the portrait and its fine finishing depict both political and social issues of the elite class and the cropping of the church at the background shows the importance of religion in our daily lives. In addition, the fleshiness and fineness of the painting indicate the importance of beauty and elegance to the elite class in different societies. The symmetry, brushwork, use of lines and the expression of color and light indicate the importance of combination of different elements in communication and to ensure that pieces of art stand the taste of time (Museum of Art and Archaeology 112). The Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg painting gives a warm expression of elegant, elite class in France that is in contrast with middle class ones who dressed in flowing robes and different splashes of color to define their contours. The painting of Madame Cezanne wearing a shawl-collared red dress and also indicates an elaborately furnished interior of Cezannes apartment. Madame Cezanne was seated on a high yellow chair that has a leaning place enabling her to bend and shift her weight into a sitting position. The portrait indicates a tilting, spatially complex composition and an elaborate use of colors to bring out different features within a small space in an elaborate and developed artistic way (Sidlauskas and Cezanne 12). The background shows a mottled blue wall and the mirror slightly above the fire place shows the apartment occupied by Cezanne between 1888 and1890 at 15-Quai d’Anjou. In conclusion, for Chasseriau the painting of Ingres’ wife represented his subtle defiance to his mentor. The portrait was a three quarter length exhibiting young beautiful and costumed lady that conformed to the art and painting style of Ingres. However, Chasseriau’s creativity and diversion from his master’s approach was evident in his artistic expression of a melancholic mood, through banishing of bright colors to make the figure appear relatively monochrome. On the contrary, despite his status in the society, Madame Cezannes poses were reduced to a sitting position and Cezanne uses this to express classical calm and ultimate simplicity. In the portrait, Cezanne does not capture the social status of his wife and therefore there is nothing to express her fissionability: there is no hat, jewels and the chair used is found in middle class houses. Cezanne captures his wife’s face looking like a mask, with just almond eye slits and a simple nose, a symbol of lack of real expressions and hidden character. Works cited Athanassouglou-Kallmyer, Nina, Cezanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture, Chicago: 2003. Lewis, Mary Tompkins, Cezanne, London: 2000. Guegan, Stephane, Vincent Pomarede and Louis-Antoine Prat, Theodore Chasseriau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and New Haven: 2002. Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830-1848, exhibition catalogue, Columbia: 1990. Prat, Louis-Antoine, “The Drawings of Chasseriau: Some Particulars”, Drawing, 12, no. 4 (November-December 1991), pp. 73-77 Rishel, Josepha and Katherine Sachs, org., Cezanne and beyond, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia: 2009. Sidlauskas, Susan, Cezanne’s other: The Portraits of Hortense, Berkeley: 2009. Smith, Paul, Interpreting Cezanne, New York: 1996. Read More