Painting and Narrative in France: From Poussin to Gauguin ed. by Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren (review)

This is a study of visual narrative in French art—predominantly history painting—from its rise in the seventeenth century to its controversial demise at the end of the nineteenth century. In this connection, art history needed to catch up to take account of the work of literary narratologists such as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gérard Genette, and Mieke Bal. The ut pictura poesis doctrine, inherited from the Italian Renaissance, was key to the development of history painting in post-Renaissance France, with painting being lauded as silent poetry and linear temporality being deemed virtually unattainable through image alone. Yet, in Poussin's Les Israélites recueillant la manne dans le désert (1637–39), Claudine Mitchell highlights the simultaneous representation of successive actions, and Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc applies the theories of Genette very effectively to the north bays of the Grande Galerie at Versailles. In the first years of the reign of Louis XV there was a glitch, vividly described here by Susanna Caviglia, when history painting eschewed glorious action for states of static 'absorption' (notably in the works of François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire), casting doubt on the viability of narrative painting and leading, as a reaction, to a revival of serious history painting in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The experience of the French Revolution challenged the emphasis of classical historiography on a single hero acting in a single place and time. New mass audiences were addressed and drawn into empathy with a much wider spectrum of subjects than the antiquity and mythology of the earlier period. As shown masterfully by Beth Wright, Delacroix puts the reader to work, inspiring spectators to create their own mental pictures. This approach also informs Patricia Smyth's presentation of Paul Delaroche, whose Assassinat du duc de Guise au château de Blois en 1588 (1834) is so often characterized as the work of a 'literary' painter, but is shown here to challenge the spectator's mental conception of everyday objects. Indeed, inanimate things are shown by Nina Lübbren to be treated by painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-Paul Laurens in the same pictorial register as animate humans, thus foreshadowing the ultimate abolition of generic distinctions. Gustave Moreau, as presented by Scott Allan, fought a rearguard action in defence of history painting: although he deplored its theatricality and its loss of 'plastic' identity, Moreau sought to preserve its ideals on new pictorial grounds, pivoting between rigorous selection and inspired choice of ornament. The over-dependence of art on its literary and narrative aspects was highlighted, in very different ways, by the Impressionists and later by Gauguin, who nevertheless, as outlined by Belinda Thomson, integrated verbal commentary and wordplay into his painting. The outstanding essay in this excellent volume is that of Peter Cooke, in which he brings all these strands together, showing the ubiquity of temporality, despite its Protean existence as a function of the ever-changing roles of the viewer.