The comparing two Different Paintings Created by Giovanni Baldini and Gustave Courbet - Report Example

Giovanni Boldini, Duchess of Marlborough and Her Son 1906 and Gustave Courbet, The Young Bather 1866 The of this paper will be to compare twodifferent paintings created by Giovanni Boldini and Gustave Courbet. The paper will concentrate on exploring the pieces and the artists in order to discover how the subjects of each work are differentiated from each other. The compositions of the relevant works will also be scrutinized along with the techniques used in order to create these pieces. This will be utilized to decipher the meaning(s) portrayed by the work through a look at its style, iconography and function. The artistic movements that influenced these works will also be looked at briefly and will be related to the works to decipher any special meaning or styles. Giovanni Boldini gained prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an established portrait painter. Boldini was not able to claim much fame and recognition throughout his life because the subject of most of his works was to document the families of the rich and the famous. His prominence in elite social circles was overwhelming and by the early twentieth century nearly everyone who was someone was looking for Boldini to get a portrait done. Perhaps Boldini’s only remarkable addition to contemporary art was the utilization of his swish style that received wide acclaim. After his death Boldini was also claimed as the “Master of Swish”1. The distinctive swish present in Boldini’s works was able to attract a number of wealthy patrons including nobility, industrialists and other such patrons. Hence, most of Boldini’s pieces are essentially portraits including the piece currently under scrutiny titled Consuelo Duchess of Marlborough with her son Ivor Spencer Churchill. In contrast to Boldini, Gustave Courbet was more of a maverick both in terms of style as well as the subject of his works. Courbet can be seen as the leader of the Realist movement that was seen in the nineteenth century that took prominence before the Impressionism of Boldini and his contemporaries. While the content of Boldini’s work was documenting the rich and the famous, Courbet instead concentrated on bringing social commentary through his work. Often Courbet’s social commentary was bold and innovative. The current piece under discussion by Courbet also represents somewhat of a social taboo for the time – the nude female figure. Courbet was an early libertarian and his work certainly represented this influence in great detail. While placing the more conventional symbols and techniques in his paintings, Courbet was concentrating instead on the content in order to stir the audiences. This he accomplished through the use of libertarian ideas that became the subject of his paintings2 which applies equally well to his work under scrutiny. It is equally important to contrast the subjects of the works in order to decipher the intent of the artists. The subject chosen by Bouldini was more commercial in nature than anything else. The commercial success of Bouldini made him a favorite for the creation of portraits in Paris. The current work being studied depicts the Duchess of Marlborough, Consuelo Vanderbilt and her young son Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill lounging around in their daily lives. One look at the painting reveals the pleasant atmosphere being carried in the household of the Churchill family. The painting is more or less an attempt by the artist to depict an affluent patroness and her son as being happy and enjoying their time together. The Duchess is shown in a suggestive manner as she glances across the floor depicted towards the artist. Her son is crouched next to her in a kneeling posture. The Duchess is seated on a sofa and is attempting to get up while her son is trying to hold her down as many children would hold down their mothers when they are being adamant. The smile on the Duchess’ face is only interrupted by her apparent beauty depicted in the painting. Much like modern celebrities the Duchess is represented as a creation mired in perfection from the look on her face to the clothes she is wearing. Her young son is shown in a similar manner and is depicted wearing a two piece that would be highly formal for a child that age. The focus of the entire picture is the Duchess and her son along with the sofa that they are seated on. The artist has used his legendary swishing skills in order to make everything else look ordinary by placing them out of focus through his brushstrokes. In contrast to Boldini’s work, the work presented by Courbet depicts a woman standing alongside a stream or possibly along the shallow bank of a river for bathing. Her arms are stretched over her head while her left foot dips in the water. The artist has titled the piece as The Young Bather although the picture would seem to depict a rather mature woman possibly in her thirties given the proportion of her body especially the torso and the hips. The bather is depicted in a rather intimate position that most people might keep private to themselves throughout their lives. The bather is dipping her foot in the water possibly to gauge the temperature to see if she can bathe in the water. Alternatively, it may be argued that the bather has begun to acclimatize herself with the water to take a bath. In any case, the bather is represented in a rather private moment given that the picture depicts no one else around. The subject of the painting is thus an ordinary person in ordinary circumstances doing ordinary things. The disproportionate body of the female figure might have been influenced by the artist’s desire to portray the woman as common. When compared to the well set Duchess and her son, the subject of Courbet’s picture is rather trite. Possibly one of the more noticeable things about Courbet’s work is the attention to detail about everything. The young bather has been depicted near a stream or river in the woods judging by the amount of trees and bushes on the bank. The leaves on the trees as well as their branches are well represented and depicted. Another important aspect is the depiction of the stream that can be seen as flowing out of the picture judging from the small drop in height experienced by the water. Without any doubt the piece by Courbet is full of detail whether the female nude figure is considered or whether her surroundings are considered. In a sense this is the artist’s method of portraying everything as being on the same level as the depiction remains the same for both animate and inanimate objects. Perhaps the greatest difference in style between both works arises from the subjects they portray and how they portray the subjects. On the one hand, Boldini’s work epitomizes the rich and the famous by placing them in the focus and on the other hand Courbet’s work portrays a common private moment by portraying everything in the same amount of detail. The iconography of Boldini’s work that relates it to Impressionism is the suggestive posture of the Duchess as if she is about to move. This characteristic is repeatedly available in the portrayals of human beings in Impressionist pieces of art. Another of the more prominent Impressionist feature of the work is the brush strokes themselves. The brushstrokes are thin though visible and tend to bring out the various nuances of light that is highly characteristic of Impressionist works3. This very technique has been exploited by the artist in order to bring the Duchess and her son into the central focus while everything around them is left in a blur. Even though the blur exists but the changing character of light is still visible and recognizable in Boldini’s piece. The work of Courbet on the other hand is mired in Realism. As with other works cast through Realist ideology, the piece tends to represent a real situation that tends to exist in third person objective reality4. The main purpose behind the piece is to depict something that most women in the countryside would have experienced which is bathing in the local stream or river. In the eighteenth century artistic domain, it was taboo to bring forth personal moments such as bathing. Instead, paintings and other works of art had depicted the female nude for portraying higher ideals such as those derived from politics and religion. Courbet can be seen as portraying a more personal Realism through his work as he portrays one woman in a common situation with an accurate and realistic depiction of the surroundings. Bibliography Giovanni Boldini, “The Complete Works”, http://www.giovanniboldini.org/, (accessed May 6, 2012) Courbet, Gustave. Letters of Gustave Courbet translated by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu. University of Chicago Press, 1992. Denvir, Bernard. The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of Impressionism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Baron, Christine and Manfred Engel. Realism/Anti-Realism in 20th-Century Literature. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Read More