by Peter Clericuzio

Upon visiting the city of Nancy in 1909 for the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, the critic Max Durand wrote:

This summer, Nancy is a favorite destination for pilgrimage and excursion. One comes to learn, to be amused, to enjoy the natural beauty of a marvelous country, and to admire the fruits of its artistic, commercial, [and] industrial efforts.
…The [exposition's] promoters, men of goodwill and progress, motivated by the strongest patriotism, have drawn on the traditions of art and elegance which have made the former capital of [the duchy of] Lorraine a stylish and seductive city, among other things; but they have wanted also to show that the region of the East…has re-established its material prosperity and its prestige on new and durable foundations.[1]

With these words, Durand summarized well the enthusiasm for this exhibition that attracted some 2.2 million visitors between May 1 and October 31, 1909. The Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France—often called the 1909 World’s Fair—was an attempt by the leaders of this small city in eastern France to showcase the industrial and artistic progress made by their region of Lorraine over the previous forty years. The visual manifestation of this new prosperity was Art Nouveau, which had dominated the architecture and decorative art of Nancy ever since it had appeared there some two decades before, but had fallen out of favor virtually everywhere else in Europe by 1909. The staging of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France marked the apex of Art Nouveau in Nancy, and, indeed, the fair represents a landmark in the history of the style, though it is often overlooked even in the literature of this specific field.[2] In Nancy, the ability of Art Nouveau to ally itself with local and regional traditions (instead of being the result of a conscious search for a new universal aesthetic) allowed it to become the cornerstone of an alternative conception of modernity during the belle époque, and to remain popular for a quarter of a century before its demise during World War I.

I argue here that the Exposition’s emphasis on the cooperation between art and local industry, the political issue known as the “Alsace-Lorraine question,” and the nationwide movement towards political and cultural decentralization formed the basis for the projection of Nancy’s complex modern, yet regional identity, specifically as it was presented in the discourse surrounding the fair and its architecture. By 1900, Nancy had become a cosmopolitan regional center, receptive to artistic trends both from the Parisian métropole and from other countries such as Belgium and Germany, and many of these influences were readily apparent in the city’s artistic scene—including, as this paper shows, the architecture and decorative art of the 1909 Exposition. Its citizens, however, were also fiercely proud of their region and its rich cultural and political heritage, which was distinct from those of the rest of France or other countries. In spite of the marked influence of these national and international forces, then, both the leaders of the fair and its critics strategically chose to downplay and discredit them in favor of what they deemed to be local sources of artistic inspiration. Their impetus for doing so was, paradoxically, to address the larger issue of the strength of the French nation in its competition for cultural superiority then being waged with the other nations of Europe.

The Development of Nancy in the Late Nineteenth Century
Nancy experienced prodigious growth over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, catapulting it to prominence and enabling the city to consider hosting an exposition as the twentieth century dawned. Before then, it had been an unlikely place for a new art movement to spring up. In 1866, the city counted barely 50,000 residents, and was overshadowed by Metz, the other principal city of the region of Lorraine, which was slightly larger and held the prestigious distinction of having hosted its own “Exposition Universelle” in 1861. One could speak of a “Metz School” of painters, interior designers, glassmakers and stained-glass artists during the thirty years preceding 1870. The city’s Municipal Design School won a bronze medal at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, whereas at the same time, Nancy’s artistic scene was judged to be mediocre at best.[3]

Fig. 1, Map of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1919. Adapted in part from Barry Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine Since 1870 (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

Fig. 2, Emmanuel Héré de Corny and Jean Lamour, Place Stanislas, Nancy, 1750–55, as seen from southwest corner. Photograph by Richard G. Wilson. Courtesy of the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, University of Virginia.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, however, changed all that. German armies inflicted a swift and stunning series of defeats upon the French forces and captured Emperor Napoleon III, who was quickly deposed by a new government in Paris. In the Treaty of Frankfurt ending the conflict, the French ceded the region of Alsace and the northern third of Lorraine, including Metz, to the Germans (fig. 1). Nancy became the major city in the part of Lorraine retained by France, and consequently underwent a series of rapid changes and growth. The Germans gave the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine until October 1, 1872, to decide whether to become German citizens or to emigrate to France. By that date, some 70,000 people had flooded across the new border to settle in the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle, the area surrounding Nancy, and immigration from Alsace-Lorraine continued even afterwards.[4] Among the new arrivals in Nancy from the “lost provinces” were many prominent businessmen: the cotton magnate Emmanuel Lang brought his firm from Waldinghofen in Alsace; the printer Oscar Berger-Levrault and the barrel-maker Adolphe Frühinsholz transferred their companies from Strasbourg; and the Fould-Dupont Ironworks relocated from the city limits of Metz to the suburbs just north of Nancy (fig. 1).[5] They were joined by most of the artists of the Metz School, who over the following decades trained many of Nancy’s up-and-coming artists, several of whom hailed from families that had immigrated from the lost provinces after 1871.[6] So many Alsace-Lorrainers left for France that by the late 1870s one popular saying could justifiably assert that “Metz is no longer in Metz but in Nancy.”[7]

Nancy’s population boomed over the next four decades, more than doubling between 1866 and 1901 and peaking at nearly 120,000 in 1911.[8] Native-born Nancy residents graciously welcomed Alsace-Lorrainers, but realized that much of the city’s recent prosperity had come at the expense of their newly-arrived brethren who had been displaced from their homes.[9] Many of Nancy’s citizens, including the glass artists Emile Gallé and Antonin Daum, had fought in the Franco-Prussian War and bitterly resented the terms of the Frankfurt Treaty that had divided their province.[10] They hoped that the French nation would exact revenge upon the Germans for the disaster of 1870–71 and find a way to recapture Alsace-Lorraine, but they grew ever-more dismayed with the continued refusal of the national government to take action on the issue during the 1870s and 1880s. They sensed that with every new generation, both the memory of the terrible experience of the Franco-Prussian War and the opportunities to regain the lost provinces were fading fast.[11]

Fig. 3, Jean Lamour, Fountain of Amphitrite, Place Stanislas, Nancy, 1750–55. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 4, Photograph of the 1894 Exposition of Lorraine Decorative Art, Nancy. Louis Majorelle’s stand is in the background. Photograph © Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

Fig. 5, Victor Prouvé, Poster for the Ecole de Nancy’s exhibition at the Palais de Rohan, Strasbourg, 1908. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire, Strasbourg.

This issue, often called “the Alsace-Lorraine question,” was related to the debate in France in the late nineteenth century over political and cultural decentralization. Even before 1870, French citizens outside of Paris, especially in Lorraine, had come to resent the capital’s domination of national affairs. This political climate was not unlike the historically complicated relationship in Spain between the national government and its provinces such as Catalonia, a situation that likewise became tense at the turn of the century.[12] For centuries, Paris had dictated fashion and taste to the rest of the country, and was often viewed by residents of the provinces as a magnet that would attract their best and brightest citizens and corrupt them with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and loose social mores. Paris’s favored status was confirmed by Napoleon III, who lavished the city with the internal improvements that transformed it into the modern city we know today.[13] The resentment of this favoritism was felt by many of Nancy’s citizens, who relished the fact that before 1766 Nancy had been the capital of the independent Duchy of Lorraine and had enjoyed its own artistic renaissance under the popular duke Stanislas Lesczyznski (1677–1766), the former Polish king who had commissioned the city’s famous Rococo central square, the Place Stanislas (figs. 2, 3). By the turn of the twentieth century, Lorraine natives such as the writer and politician Maurice Barrès and the art critic and inspector-general of provincial museums Roger Marx had garnered national recognition with their impassioned pleas for devolved regional control of politics and culture as a means both to combat the centralized drain on local resources and to improve education.[14]

Art Nouveau and the Ecole de Nancy
These developments coalesced with the appearance of Art Nouveau in Europe during the 1890s. The support for decentralization among Lorraine artists grew increasingly stronger over the course of that decade. In the summer of 1894, the local architect Charles André organized an exposition on Lorraine decorative art at the Galéries Poirel in central Nancy, where seventy-five artists and architects from the region displayed some of their most recent work. The goal of the exposition was to “encourage the creators…who attest to the persistence of the artistic genius of Lorraine and contribute to determine the style…of our province and our time” as well as to show that “the collaboration between the artist and industrialist should be beneficial for each of them.”[15] The work displayed at the 1894 exposition was not revolutionary in a formal sense, however. Louis Majorelle, who would later go on to become one of the leading exponents of Art Nouveau, exhibited pastiches of Louis XV-style furniture (fig. 4) recalling the region and nation’s Rococo heritage that was popular in France in the 1890s. Nonetheless, critics immediately hailed the exhibition as a landmark event in the region’s artistic development, a veritable “renaissance” that would add another chapter to Lorraine’s artistic heritage, and called on all Lorrainers to resist the “prejudices, so often frivolous, of Paris.”[16]

In February 1901, the artistic heritage of Nancy reached its peak when Emile Gallé (1846–1904) founded, along with several other artists and architects, a group called the “Ecole de Nancy,” or, alternatively, the “Alliance Provinciale des Industries d’Art.”[17] Like other regional artists’ associations around Europe, such as the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Germany and La Nova Escola Catalana in Barcelona, they hoped to foster a collaborative effort among artists in diverse fields (furniture, glassmaking, ironwork, bookbinding, leatherworking, architecture, sculpture, and painting, among others) and aimed to ensure a high quality of work among artists in the Lorraine region. Keenly aware of the popularity of Art Nouveau at the time, the members of the Ecole saw themselves as some of the most prominent advocates of the style on the continent and explicitly made it the preferred stylistic vocabulary for their work. The organization was a “school” in the sense that its members shared common goals and artistic practices, but it was not an educational institution. Some of its members, such as Gallé, the brothers Antonin (1864–1931) and Auguste Daum (1853–1909), and the furniture manufacturer and ironworker Louis Majorelle (1859–1926), were artists who were heads of large enterprises. The Ecole de Nancy also included industrialists of various occupations, such as postcard magnates, barrel manufacturers, and printers. Still others were journalists and critics who acted as the mouthpieces of the group.[18]

Fig. 6, Société Lorraine des Amis des Arts, Exposition d’Art Décoratif/Ecole de Nancy, décor design by Eugène Vallin and Alexandre Mienville, Galéries Poirel, Nancy, 1904. Postcard, collection of the Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy.

The members of the Ecole were deeply influenced by the political, social, and cultural developments in Nancy over the previous thirty years. In their various exhibitions in Paris, Nancy, and Strasbourg over the following decade, the group continually pushed for a regionalist cultural and political agenda, and stressed the close relationship between their art and architecture and local industry (fig. 5).[19] Through their own scientific studies of the forms of local flora and plant life (endeavors which many of them, especially Gallé, passionately pursued)[20], they developed a system of semiotic vegetal motifs and local symbols to constantly make references to the Alsace-Lorraine question in their work.[21] For many Nanciens, the work of the Ecole represented the embodiment of modernity and proved that their city was at the forefront of cutting-edge European art.[22]

The Ecole de Nancy was fiercely committed to cultural decentralization within France, a stance that sometimes created tension between it and the artistic community in Paris. Upon the showing of the Ecole’s work at the Marsan Pavilion in Paris in 1903, for example, Emile Nicolas, a journalist and member of the Ecole, remarked,

It is good that Lorraine decorative art, with all its suggestions, again reminds Paris that it is one of those places that contains the deepest thought, logic, and truth…[since] in the great city…they have the haughtiness of dictating to the provinces fashions and tastes. The province is carefully pushed aside, especially when it shows its strong personality. It is only through the talent of our fellow citizens that we can claim and they can recognize our influence on the regeneration of the arts in France at the end of the nineteenth century.[23]

This haughty declaration was not well-received in the capital, where critics argued that the 1903 exposition merely showcased the luxury Art Nouveau pieces from Nancy department stores as a commercial ploy, not as the fruit of serious artistic development over the previous decade.[24] Yet, even though the Ecole’s works failed to impress the critics in Paris in 1903, other exhibitions of the group’s work revealed that the Nancy-Paris artistic dynamic could be quite cordial, and even friendly. When the group exhibited in Nancy in the fall of 1904 (fig. 6), Henri Marcel, the central government’s new Directeur des Beaux-Arts, remarked during the opening ceremonies that the decentralizing programs of Nancy had been merely a “half-success” that the Ecole de Nancy had shrugged off over the past year. In their place, he asserted, the Ecole had adopted a new “provincial patriotism,” which, “far from enfeebling French nationality… multiplies its force of influence and propaganda, [just as] the vitality of a country resides in the vigor and cohesion of groups that compose it.”[25] The artists of the Ecole de Nancy readily agreed with his words, emphasizing their continued devotion to the French nation as displayed in their works and downplaying the devolved local control for political and cultural matters that they fervently craved.[26] Thus the Ecole’s members frequently walked a fine line between cooperation and antagonism with their Parisian colleagues.

Planning and Designing the Exposition: Universal, Regional, or International?
Nancy’s civic leaders who planned the exhibition understood that it represented, on one hand, an opportunity to showcase their region’s achievements in business, industry, and culture, and that such an objective required strategically casting Nancy and Lorraine in a certain light. First proposed in 1904 by the editor of a local construction journal, Emile Jacquemin (1850–1907), the Exposition caught the attention of members of the Chamber of Commerce of Meurthe-et-Moselle, who initially planned to hold it in 1906, but conflicts with other European fairs caused the date of the exhibition to be pushed back to 1909.[27] The Exposition’s proponents advocated the fair’s “universal” nature, in the sense that it would offer exhibition space for all kinds of products, materials, and curiosities. Geopolitically, the exposition was conceived as having a “regional” and “cross-border” character.[28] These were, in fact, two different ideas; Jacquemin explained that the fair should demonstrate how the region had developed over the past forty years, and particularly that it should be “a decentralizing manifestation” that excluded any products that came from Paris, in order to show that Nancy could “produce and furnish it just as well, if not better than the capital.”[29] Within France, the fair was intended as an example of how local control over politics, culture, and economics was ultimately beneficial to the nation, as such administration allowed the provinces to develop their own vitality and strength.

In using the “cross-border” label, the exposition’s organizers recognized Nancy’s geographic position on the frontier, and specifically the special relationship that the city wanted to cultivate with the nearby regions and countries of Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. The exposition was intended to foster good relations with these areas, especially since the city’s leaders knew that some of the industrial prowess of Lorraine rested on foreign investment, such as the Belgian Solvay Company’s soda plant located just south of Nancy.[30] In particular, they hoped to strengthen the ties between French Lorraine and Alsace-Lorraine in order to remind both the central government in Paris and the Germans of their desire to see the lost provinces returned to France.

The fair’s directors quickly assembled a team of architects, all of whom were renowned for their Art Nouveau work in Nancy, to design the pavilions and grounds. They included Emile André, Gaston Munier, Louis Marchal, Emile Toussaint, Louis Lanternier, Eugène Vallin, Lucien Bentz, Charles-Désiré Bourgon, Paul Charbonnier, Lucien Weissenburger, Alexandre Mienville, Léon Cayotte, and Georges Biet. The choice of these men was very strategic: as one local magazine reported, “the group…affirms its artistic sympathy for the Ecole de Nancy, [such that] none of [them] remain indifferent regarding the Ecole’s work.”[31] The Ecole itself announced early on that it would have its own pavilion, designed by Vallin, whose completion was highly anticipated as one of the fair’s premier attractions.[32]

Fig. 7, Map of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909. The main entrance gate is at the upper right, and the exhibition was meant to be explored from there, down the long straight promenade, through the bucolic park at the center, and ending at the Blandan grounds (at the left). From Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France: Triomphe de l’Industrie, la Science et de l’Art Nouveau (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2008).

Fig. 8, Postcard showing miniature railroad at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909. Collection of the author.

Fig. 9, Photograph of the Blandan Grounds [Terrain Blandan], Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. The photograph was taken at the opposite end of the central court from the Palais des Fêtes. From Louis Laffitte, Rapport generale Exposition de 1909 à Nancy. L’essor économique de la Lorraine (Paris/Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1912).

Fig. 10, Daniel Burnham, John Root, and Frederick Law Olmstead, Plan, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. From James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed (Chicago/Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Fig. 11, H. Lokay, Plan Pratique de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 …contenant tous les Palais et Pavillons “Souvenirs de l’Exposition” (Paris: L. Baschet, 1900).

Fig. 12, Photograph of the Champ de Mars, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900, probably as seen from the Eiffel Tower. William Goodyear Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Fig. 13, Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. From James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed (Chicago/Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Fig. 14, “Neoclassical Architecture in the Government Building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” Photograph of U.S. Government Building, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904. From David Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1905), 91.

Fig. 15, Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte, Palace of Liberal Arts, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 16, Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte, Food Pavilion, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 17, Train sheds of the Gare St.-Lazare, Paris. Photograph by J. H. Mora.

Fig. 18, François Duquesney, Gare de l’Est, Paris, 1847–50. Photograph by Gilbert Bochenek.

Fig. 19, Charles-François Chatelain, Gare de Nancy-Ville, Nancy, 1853–56. Photo © groundspeak.com.

Fig. 20, Louis Lanternier and Eugène Vallin, Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 21, Eugène Vallin, preliminary drawing for façade of Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Courtesy of the Archives Municipales de la Ville de Nancy.

Fig. 22, Lucien Weissenburger, Maison des Magasins Réunis, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. From “Monographies de l’Exposition: de l’Exposition: Un Grand Magasin Moderne,” in L’Exposition de Nancy en 1909 4, no. 45 (July 1909): 398. Author’s photograph.

Fig. 23, Lucien Weissenburger, Eugène Vallin, and Jacques Gruber, Dining Room, Maison des Magasins Réunis, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Photograph. Courtesy of the Archives Municipales de la Ville de Nancy.

Fig. 24a, Emile Gallé, Le Rhin, 1889. Carved walnut, with inlaid ebony, plum, lemon, holly, rosewood, and pear. Nancy, Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy. Photograph courtesy of the European Institute of Cultural Routes, Luxembourg.

Fig. 24b, Emile Gallé, Le Rhin, 1889. Carved walnut, with inlaid ebony, plum, lemon, holly, rosewood, and pear. Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy. Photograph © Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

Fig. 25, Emile André, Alsatian Village, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 26, Alsatian residents performing daily chores, Alsatian Village, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 27, Pont-à-Mousson Foundries’ giant subway tunnel ring, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. From Frédéric Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France: Triomphe de l’Industrie, la Science et de l’Art Nouveau (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2008).

Fig. 28, Paul Charbonnier, Entrance Gate, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909. Postcard, collection of the author.

Fig. 29, Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1889, as seen at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

Fig. 30, René Binet, Entrance Gate, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..

The exposition was held in the Parc Sainte-Marie in the rapidly-expanding southwest part of Nancy. It was laid out in three distinct sections (fig. 7). From the entry gate, located at the eastern end on the rue Jeanne d’Arc, the visitor followed a long, straight promenade past the Alsatian Village and the local Ecole des Beaux-Arts before reaching the wooded parkland that contained the Ecole de Nancy’s pavilion and most of the smaller exhibition structures, which were laid out along winding paths. This part of the fair housed official services, a café, and the attractions for pure amusement, including a water chute, a children’s puppet theater, and a miniature railroad that encircled the grounds (fig. 8).

Finally, the visitor entered the Blandan grounds, named for the street bounding the exposition to the west (fig. 9).[33] This area contained a plaza surrounded by a U-shaped array of the seven major exhibition pavilions—the Palais des Fêtes (Main Building) in the center,[34] flanked by the individual themed structures: the Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy, the Electricity Pavilion, the Textiles Pavilion, the Food Pavilion, the Pavilion of Liberal Arts, and the Transportation Pavilion. At the center of the plaza was a small garden. This layout echoed the U-shaped court or lagoon around which the major structures were arranged at both the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; at each of these fairs the main (or administration) buildings were placed at the juncture of the two wings of the U (figs. 10, 11), as in Nancy in 1909.

Many of the architects of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France also derived their use of ornament from past World’s Fairs, décor that could hardly be described as Art Nouveau. The pavilions were wood-framed structures disguised by a covering of white stucco, with flamboyant Baroque- or Rococo-inspired ornament and décor that roughly resembled the structures at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris (fig. 12), the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (fig. 13), and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (fig. 14), but on a much smaller scale. Alexander Mienville and Léon Cayotte’s Palace of Liberal Arts[35] and Food Pavilion (figs. 15, 16), which sat side-by-side on the south side of the Blandan court, each recalled the design strategies used in railway stations in Paris and Nancy in the mid-nineteenth century. The three-gabled Palace of Liberal Arts, for example, which was illuminated by day by rows of skylights on its hipped roof, begs comparison with the roofs of train sheds for Parisian stations such as the Gare Saint-Lazare (fig. 17). The front of the pavilion, with its heavy modillions and molded cornice, recalls the gabled façades of the Gare de l’Est and Nancy’s own main train station (figs. 18, 19)—buildings that were pivotal travel points for most visitors to the exhibition. The barrel vault of the Food Pavilion, which also relied on skylights for illumination, resembled an alternative structural form used by contemporaneous architects for train sheds and main station concourses as well as for exhibition buildings. Surprisingly, however, none of these connections to such architectural types or monuments were made in print by either the directors of the exhibition or the attendees.[36]

The Relationship Between Art and Local Industry
One connection that the Exposition’s directors did hope to highlight was the link between art and industry in Lorraine, a theme that was explicitly celebrated in Louis Lanternier and Eugène Vallin’s Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy (fig. 20), the structure on the Blandan grounds that justifiably attracted the most attention. This building occupied the entire north side of the central court, and, like the other major pavilions, used a rectangular, open plan and hipped roof. Its Art Nouveau façade, however, clearly set it apart from the others. Vallin was responsible for its design, which consisted of five elongated sections of gridded windows usually seen in factories set into a framework of flat-topped arches. These arches were separated by spandrels decorated with the exaggerated imagery of chimneys rising above the pavilion’s long horizontal roofline. The ends of the façade were marked by stout, multi-sided pylons that were also supposed to evoke the forms of tall chimneys at a steel mill. Vallin had originally imagined these pylons and the spandrels to hold functional torches (fig. 21), and in the final design they were equipped with modern lamps that at night glowed red like the fiery exhaust from factory smokestacks.[37] Vallin’s son Auguste, meanwhile, painted several panels at the base of the façade that showed the steps in the fabrication of iron, leaving no doubt about the inspiration for the building’s design. Observers marveled at the connections that the building drew with the industrial architecture of the region,[38] and indeed, the pavilion essentially inverted the strategy used elsewhere on the Blandan grounds. Instead of hiding the industrial character of the structure behind a stucco covering, here Vallin allowed the true nature of the building to pierce through the white skin and become manifest on the exterior.

The connection between art and industry was also apparent in the central bucolic park, where visitors encountered the “Maison des Magasins Réunis,” the pavilion of the Nancy-centered Magasins Réunis, the only major French department store chain based outside of Paris (fig. 22). The store was headed by the Art Nouveau patron Jean-Baptiste Corbin, who had built the chain into a commercial empire of more than a dozen stores throughout Lorraine and in Paris.[39] Designed by Lucien Weissenburger, the company’s house architect, the rectangular pavilion was fronted by a stairway leading up to an arched doorway flanked by two towers, each terminating in a webbed metal sculpture. This design recalled not only the twin-towered scheme for department stores such as the Magasins Réunis in downtown Nancy, but also mimicked a cathedral façade (which led to the use of the nicknames “cathedrals of consumption” and “temple of commerce” for department stores).[40] The religious connotations were extended by Weissenburger’s use of an allegorical sculpture of commerce above the pavilion’s main entrance, like a tympanum over the main doorway of a church. Inside were several model rooms furnished for modern living, equipped largely with items that were sold in the store’s branches, including Art Nouveau furniture, vases and stained glass designed by members of the Ecole de Nancy (fig. 23). Thus the pavilion not only used Art Nouveau as a seductive means to advertise the industries of clothing and interior décor, but the use of the style in furnishings reminded visitors of the extent to which Art Nouveau permeated the everyday life of the residents of French Lorraine and remained the hallmark of the newest, most fashionable designs produced there.

Representing Alsace-Lorraine
The exposition’s organizers also specifically wanted the fair to demonstrate what they saw as a special relationship between French Lorraine and the lost provinces, a theme that was particularly evident in the Pavilion of the Ecole de Nancy. To the right of the entrance inside the structure, the group placed a portrait of its founder Gallé, who had died in 1904 and had become famous for injecting his works with explicit iconographic references to the Alsace-Lorraine question. One of Gallé’s most famous works, a large inlaid table known as Le Rhin (“The Rhine”), created for the 1889 World’s Fair (figs. 24a and b), sat under the pavilion’s central rotunda. The frieze that spans the tabletop depicts, in the center, a bearded god, representing the Rhine River, warding off an armed group of Germans, on the right, from a woman that he holds in his arms, representing Lorraine. On the left half of the frieze is an armed group of warriors, representing France. Inlaid above the scene are the words “The Rhine separates the Gauls [from] all of Germany,” a reference lifted from Tacitus.[41] Between the table’s legs, Gallé included the words “I cling to the heart of France,”[42] as well as a large thistle (a symbol of both Nancy and Lorraine associated with retribution). Gallé was referencing the German seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, and claiming that the natural border between Germans and Frenchmen really was the Rhine, the eastern border of Alsace. He implied that Lorraine sought retribution against those who sought to harm her, and specifically the Germans who had divided the region. Around the exterior walls of the pavilion stood individual booths containing the Art Nouveau work of the various members of the Ecole, as if to illustrate the centrality of Gallé’s political and artistic philosophy as an inspiration for them.

The explicit association of the region’s premier artists with the Alsace-Lorraine question was extended to Emile André’s design of the Alsatian Village, a cluster of buildings near the entrance to the fair that was supposed to evoke the countryside of the region (figs. 25, 26). Inside many of the buildings were genuine Alsatian residents dressed in traditional costume performing the everyday tasks of rural Alsatians. The attempt was to recreate the Alsatian landscape and regional architecture as closely as possible, implying that French citizens were innately familiar with Alsatian traditions and customs and that Alsace was naturally a part of France, not Germany.

The Alsatian Village helped to reawaken for many French visitors a sense that the issues surrounding the lost provinces remained unfinished political business. The tribute to Alsace-Lorraine went beyond the thinly-veiled claim that the region should be returned to French control, however. As we have seen, Nancy’s citizens realized that the growth and vitality of their city after 1871 was in large part due to the influx of immigrants from the lost provinces. According to one observer,

You know what has happened in Lorraine since the mutilation of 1871. Prosperity has flowed to heal the wound. We say “heal,” and not “close.” A great number of those from the lost provinces, wanting to remain French, brought to Meurthe-et-Moselle their home, their genius, their industriousness. A marvelous amount of work has been accomplished at the extreme frontier of the country. These are the fruits of this labor that they present us, in a sort of great basket.[43]

In some ways, therefore, Nancy’s residents viewed the exposition (and particularly the Alsatian Village) as a means of thanking their brethren for their contributions to the city’s newfound prosperity. It was even reported that since many of the members of the Ecole de Nancy had come from the lost provinces and “their patriotic exodus had only further imbued them with the qualities of the [French] race,” their experiences thus served as the inspiration for the erection of the Alsatian Village as a means to commemorate this “fecund alliance of fraternal efforts.”[44] The exhibit acknowledged that the heritage of the lost provinces was now an integral part of the construction of the city’s identity, in a way that was not apparent before 1871. The recognition of this “mixed” heritage extended to the celebrations that punctuated the exhibition’s run. Frequently, musical groups from Alsace-Lorraine were invited to perform at the exhibition, and one day of festivities even involved a parade of several people dressed up as characters from Lorraine history, including Jeanne d’Arc, who was popularly viewed as a protector of Lorraine and symbolized the hope for reunification of the northern part of the province with France.^[45]

Decentralization and Regional Pride
As noted above, as early as the planning stages of the fair, the discourse surrounding it was sympathetic to the longstanding movement in Lorraine towards political and cultural decentralization, aiming to demonstrate how the industrial activities of the provinces worked both in concert and in competition with the Parisian metropole. The exhibits of the iron foundries of the city of Pont-à-Mousson, just north of Nancy, illustrate the cooperative efforts of Lorraine industry with corporations in the capital. Between the Palace of Liberal Arts and the Palace of Textiles, the foundries installed a giant iron ring used for the construction of underground subway tunnels (fig. 27).[46] The company proudly adorned the ring with signs that advertised the fact that this was the model used for its fabrication of the recently-completed tunnels of the Paris Métropolitain running under the Seine.[47] Crowning the display was a small iron representation of a thistle symbolizing Lorraine, emphasizing the fact that the realization of the most modern and innovative constructions of French mass transport depended on the provincial industrial factories in Lorraine.

The importance of local enterprises to the overall industrial strength of the nation was likewise apparent in the main entrance gate to the exhibition. This skeletal steel structure designed by Paul Charbonnier (fig. 28) took the form of two tapering pylons some twenty-three meters high, flanking a horseshoe arch crowned by the coat of arms of the city of Nancy and six French flags. The entire gate was built by the Fould-Dupont steelworks in Pompey, the same company that had supplied the iron for the Eiffel Tower in 1889 (fig. 29), and despite obvious differences in overall design and scale, the Nancy structure no doubt recalled the Parisian tower from twenty years before: visitors similarly had entered the southern portion of the 1889 Fair by passing underneath Eiffel’s arches. Formally, however, Charbonnier’s gate invited a much closer comparison to René Binet’s monumental entrance gate to the 1900 World’s Fair (fig. 30), which consisted of an ornate three-legged horseshoe arch flanked by two obelisk-like pylons. In this sense the 1909 fair could be seen as a hybrid of these two previous manifestations of French Art Nouveau. The 1889 fair, held at the dawn of the style’s existence, had likewise celebrated the triumph of modern industry, while the 1900 fair had heralded the return to traditional, French craftsmanship by injecting the style with a Rococo-inspired classicism with organic, naturally-inspired décor.[48] The undulating scrolls that followed the span of the arch further suggested the gilded curves of the ornament covering Emmanuel Héré and Jean Lamour’s Rococo iron gates for the Place Stanislas from the 1750s (see fig. 3), thereby placing the design’s roots in line with Nancy’s own rich industrial and artistic heritage.

Observers, however, ignored any such connections that Charbonnier’s gate exhibited with models from either Paris or previous eras. According to Louis Laffitte, the director of the 1909 Exposition, the gate symbolized “the power and boldness” of Lorraine’s steel and iron industries,[49] while one Parisian observer was struck by the way that the gate was “picturesquely decorated with corrugated iron, folded rails, cartwheels, towing bars, [and] V-shaped iron pieces; in short, all the pieces which a great steelworks produces.”[50] For contemporary observers, the importance of the architecture of the Exposition lay primarily with its aspects that linked it to the region’s recent accomplishments, not with the capital, whose influence clearly also had contributed to Nancy’s success.

Reactions to the Fair
The reaction to Charbonnier’s monumental gate was typical of those to the exhibition in general. If the fair was profitable for Nancy in an economic sense, on a national level it was also highly successful in projecting an image of the city and region that confirmed the regional identity that the Exposition’s organizers had set out to mold. This success was mostly due to the enthusiastic Parisian response, which emphasized both the admirable example that Nancy set for the rest of the nation to follow as well as the contributions that Nancy and Lorraine had made to the French nation.

Significantly, both the national and regional press associated the exposition’s “home-grown” character with the issue of Nancy’s artistic progress over the previous forty years. As one publication insisted,

For those who know how to look, see, and appreciate, [Nancy] is more than simply a banal modern city loaded with all the advantages of hospitality. It is a home of art, a perfect poem of architecture and history of which all the edifices, all the monuments, all the stones recall a period or write a page in the annals of the city.[51]

The respect Nancy’s artists had shown for the city’s history was one of the keys to creating a modern and vibrant artistic movement. Nancy’s modernism was laudable precisely because it was not a complete break from the past, but fit into a sense of tradition. It was, according to one Parisian observer, the regional character of Nancy’s artistic development that had allowed its brand of Art Nouveau to succeed where that of the capital had failed:

It is in Nancy that the “modern style,”[52] after its somewhat-too-timid manifestation at the Paris World’s Fair, in 1900, seems to have found its voice…and in recalling the memories which it borrows from a visit to the galleries of the esplanade des Invalides, the amateur who travels to the real exposition at Nancy—the Palace of [Liberal Arts], the exposition of decorative arts, the Gas Pavilion, the various installations, and above all, the pavilion of the Ecole de Nancy—can measure the distance that has been established between an intense, yet too hasty effort…and the logical deduction of rational and fecund principles.

…The principle of “Lorraine art” is the same from which the “modern style” proceeded: the interpretation of nature; but from this premise, against its predecessor, it draws the rational consequences, with this practical sense, this taste, this measure, this equal aversion for that which is complicated and vulgar, which are the mother qualities of the Lorraine spirit.[53]

The careful devotion to the scientific study of nature, and the rational and practical application of the forms and designs of the natural world, as originally advocated by Gallé, had produced the admirable Lorraine brand of Art Nouveau. These qualities had resonated with Nancy’s residents and allowed it to overtake Paris as the leading center of Art Nouveau in France by the end of the first decade of the century.

Even more importantly, Parisian writers described the fair as a celebration of national unity and pride. The press jubilantly noted the patriotic oration made by Louis Barthou, the French Minister of Public Works, at the inauguration, which was received by a thunderous ovation. The Revue de Tourisme declared that “Nancy can offer to the artist, the observer, and to the tourist, an altogether complete and harmonious ensemble of the evidence of the genius of the race.”[54] As Jean Lefranc concluded in Le Temps, “The friends and the admirers of Lorrainers—that is to say, all Frenchmen—have no more dear desire than the perpetuation of this entente.”[55]

At first glance, it may seem surprising that, in light of the longstanding uneasy relationship between Paris and the provinces, Parisian observers remained complementary and seemingly unconcerned by this cultural challenge. However, as Nancy Troy has shown, in 1909 the French remained deeply worried about their empirical predominance in cultural—and particularly artistic—production among European countries, a position that had been growing ever-more precarious over the previous thirty years.[56] The French rivalry with the German-speaking countries was especially intense, and foreigners were well-aware of the historical tendency in France towards centralization and the complicated relationship between Parisians and the provinces. As the Frankfurter Zeitung declared, “When one speaks of France, ninety-nine times out of a hundred one means to say ‘Paris.’”[57] Some in Germany viewed the fair as evidence of growing decentralization, and documented the prodigious growth of Lorraine industry. They believed that because Parisians were worried about their cultural and economic dominance within France, they had purposely ignored such developments, an oversight that, the Nancy critic Pol Simon surmised, the Germans hoped would prove detrimental to the French nation.[58] It thus seems likely that, in emphasizing the issue of French decentralization, the Germans were attempting to drive a wedge between Paris and the provinces so as to thwart any such coordination of French industrial, economic, and cultural interests.

The Germans also credited the advances in Lorraine art and industry not to the French themselves, but to many of the Alsace-Lorrainers who had immigrated after 1871.[59] One reviewer from the Viennese paper Die Zeit argued that there was nothing interesting about the fair at all, as it was really merely the work of Germans who had moved to territory that had only a tenuous claim to being French.[60] Nancy critics dismissed the Austrian’s assessment as the work of a “pan-Germanist” who refused to give the French credit for their own progress,[61] but it seems that the writer was influenced by other concerns. The critic Eugène Martin began a review of the fair by recalling a 1904 piece from the Heidelberg revue Korrespondenz aus Südwestdeutschland that had expressed dismay over the fact that Nancy had grown so rapidly since 1871 that by 1900 it overshadowed both Metz and Strasbourg, the two major cities in German-controlled Alsace-Lorraine, as the undisputed “artistic capital of the entire region.”[62] The Germans were dismayed that France had benefited from the loss of territory in 1871 because most of the economic assets of the lost provinces had been transferred to the other side of the border. The reviewer for Die Zeit may thus have been hoping simply to downplay the entire exhibition altogether so as to assuage the German fears that the development of Alsace-Lorraine had not been as prodigious as the economic growth on the French side of the border.

Conclusion
From a wider perspective, then, the fair was not simply a means by which Nancy revealed to the wider world how Art Nouveau had developed into an emblem of regional economic, artistic, and industrial prowess. Instead, it indicated that Lorraine Art Nouveau and the industries associated with it had become a lightning rod for the ongoing cultural competition between France, Germany, and other European nations. Eventually, what some officials in France dubbed the “artistic war with Germany”[63] would be subsumed into the bloodbath of the First World War.

As with most temporary exhibitions, nearly all of the structures of the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France were destroyed within a year of the fair’s closing.[64] Nonetheless (and contrary to popular opinion), the fair did not represent the “swan song” of Art Nouveau in Nancy, which continued to attract both elite and bourgeois enthusiasts in Lorraine until 1914, encouraging collaboration in the style between architects, artists and industrialists of the Ecole de Nancy.[65] As a permanent reminder of the region’s economic and artistic vitality, the fair’s director, Louis Laffitte, produced a lavishly-illustrated 900-page report, which was not published until 1912 but remains the definitive account of the exhibition.[66]

It was, however, the war that put an end to Art Nouveau in Nancy; some of its artists moved away, many of the city’s decorative art firms never recovered, and a few of its major Art Nouveau landmarks were destroyed, including Corbin’s Magasins Réunis. The recapture of Alsace-Lorraine in 1919 meant that Strasbourg replaced Nancy as the most important city on the eastern frontier. Gradually, Nancy was re-assimilated into Parisian-dominated circles of French art, which fell under the spell of Art Deco after 1920.[67] Even so, the attitudes shown by Nancy’s citizens during the belle époque and the preservation of the dozens of surviving Art Nouveau monuments and furniture in Lorraine since then have marked the period as an integral piece of the region’s historical and current identity, still being rediscovered by art historians, that is unlikely to be relinquished.

[1] Max Durand, “Nancy, II: A Travers l’Exposition,” Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, August 8, 1909, 129.

[2] See, for example, Frank Russell, ed., Art Nouveau Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979); Paul Greenhalgh, ed., Art Nouveau 1890–1914 (London: V&A Publications, 2000); Béatrice Foulon, ed., 1900 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000); and Gabriele Fahr-Becker, Art Nouveau, trans. Paul Aston, Ruth Chitty, and Karen Williams (Cologne: Könemann, 2004).

[3] Pierre Barral, Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier, and Jean-Claude Bonnefant, “La Capitale de la Lorraine Mutilée (1870–1918),” in Histoire de Nancy, dir. René Taveneaux (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 393. On Metz’s predominance, see Christiane Pignon-Feller, “Les Fêtes de l’Art et de l’Industrie: Lieux d’Echanges entre Metz et Nancy,” in Metz/Nancy-Nancy/Metz: Une histoire de frontière, 1861–1909, ed. Monique Sary, Isabelle Bardiès, and Christian Debize (Metz: Musées de la Cour d’Or/Editions Serpenoise, 1999), 60–64.

[4] Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy: Une Ardente Histoire 1870–1914 (Haroué, France: Gérard Louis, 2002), 56.

[5] On the émigrés from Alsace-Lorraine to France, see François G. Dreyfus, “Le malaise politique,” in L’Alsace de 1900 à nos jours, ed. Philippe Dollinger (Toulouse: Privat, 1979), 99–101; Francis Roussel, Nancy Architecture 1900, vol. 1, De la rue de l’Abbé Gridel à la rue Félix Faure (Metz: Serpenoise, 1992), 5–6, 16; Jean-Pierre Klein and Bernard Rolling, Histoire d’un imprimeur: Berger-Levrault 1676–1976 (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1976), 98–104; David H. Barry, “The Effect of the Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine on the Development of Nancy” (PhD diss., University of London, 1975), 321–37 and 345–49; Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 116–49; and Barral, Charpentier, and Bonnefant, “Capitale de la Lorraine,” 406–10.

[6] See Barry, “Effect of the Annexation,” 398–432; and Sicard-Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 194–204.

[7] François Roth, “La Lorraine Divisée,” Taveneaux, Histoire de Lorraine, 392.

[8] Barral, Charpentier, and Bonnefant, “Capitale de la Lorraine,” 393.

[9] Sicard-Lennatier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 10, 216–20.

[10] Gallé and Daum both wrote about their wartime experiences. See Alain Dusart and François Moulin, Art Nouveau: l’épopée Lorraine (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue/Editions de l’Est, 1998), 13–15; and Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 19–20, 25–26.

[11] François Robichon, “Representing the 1870–1871 War, or the Impossible Revanche,” trans. Olga Grlic, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914, ed. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (Washington, DC/New Haven: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 2005): 82–99; and Robert Allen Jay, “Art and Nationalism in France, 1870–1914″ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1979), 211–12.

[12] See Judith Rohrer, “Artistic Regionalism and Architectural Politics in Barcelona, c. 1880-c. 1906″ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1984), for more on the turn-of-the century relationship between Barcelona/Catalonia and the Spanish government.

[13] On Napoleon III’s improvements, see David Pinckney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). On French regionalism and the Paris/province dynamic, refer to Alain Corbin, “Paris-Province,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, dir. Pierre Nora, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, dir. Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 427–64; also Jean-Claude Vigato, L’Architecture Régionaliste: France 1890–1950 (Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture/Editions Norma, 1994), esp. 19–73.

[14] Robert Gildea, The Past In French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 177–82. Also Richard Thomson, “Regionalism versus Nationalism in French Visual Culture, 1889–1900: The Cases of Nancy and Toulouse,” in Hargrove and McWilliam, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 210–11.

[15] “Programme de l’Exposition,” in Exposition d’art decorative et industriel lorrain, juin-juillet 1894: catalogue (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1894), n.p.

[16] X., “Exposition des Arts Décoratifs: Préliminaires,” in Le Progrès de l’Est, July 4, 1894, 2; and L. F., “Exposition des Arts Décoratifs,” in L’Est Républicain, July 7, 1894, 2; Emile Badel, Les Arts Décoratifs en Lorraine: Notice Sur l’Exposition de la Salle Poirel, Juillet 1894 (Nancy: Imprimerie A. Voirin et L. Kreis, 1894), 3–10; Emile Badel, “Exposition des Arts décoratifs—Visite d’ami. Les Oeuvres nouvelles,” in L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, July 29, 1894, 99–101.

[17] In English, the “School of Nancy,” and “Provincial Alliance of Industries of Art.”

[18] Many of them were listed in the original copy of the Ecole de Nancy: Statuts (Nancy: Barbier and Paulin, 1901).

[19] The Ecole de Nancy held expositions at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris in March 1903; at the Galéries Poirel in Nancy in October-November 1904, and at the Palais de Rohan of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 1908. On these, see Emile Gallé, “Programme de l’Ecole de Nancy,” in Exposition de l’Alliance Provinciale de Industries d’Art/Ecole de Nancy, Mars 1903 – Catalogue Officiel Illustré, 3–5; Emile Gallé, L’Exposition de l’Ecole de Nancy à Paris (Paris: A. Guerinet, 1903), n.p.; Emile Jacquemin, “Les Arts décoratifs lorrains – Salle Poirel à Nancy,” L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, October 30, 1904, 211. Also see “L’exposition d’art décoratif,” in L’Impartial de l’Est, October 26, 1904, 2; and Alexandre Tourscher, “Strasbourg-Nancy: Autour de l’exposition de l’école de Nancy en 1908,” in Strasbourg 1900: Naissance d’une capitale, dir. Rodolphe Rapetti (Paris/Strasbourg: Editions d’art Somogy/Musées de Strasbourg, 2000), 142.

[20] For more on this, see François Hirtz and Pierre Valck, “Nancy, Capitale de l’horticulture et de la botanique,” in Dossier de l’Art, April 1999, 62–69; Philippe Thiébaut, Emile Gallé: Le magicien du verre (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 72–74; François Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé, la botanique et les idées évolutionnistes à Nancy à la fin de XIX^e siècle,” in “Actes du colloque public en hommage à Emile Gallé,” special issue, Annales de l’Est 55 (2005): 73–94; Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, Maître de l’Art Nouveau (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue/Editions de l’Est, 2004); and Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier and Philippe Thiébaut, Gallé (Paris: RMN, 1985).

[21] Peter Clericuzio, “Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895–1914″ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, forthcoming 2011), esp. chap. 2, “The Ecole de Nancy and Nancy’s Artistic Scene, 1889–1914.” Emile Gallé himself kept extensive gardens around his estate, “La Garenne,” in Nancy, and was deeply involved in the scientific study of horticulture, eventually becoming a prominent member of the Société Centrale d’Horticulture de Nancy in the 1880s. See Hirtz and Valck, “Nancy, Capitale de l’horticulture,” 62–69; Thiébaut, Emile Gallé, 72–74; Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé, la botanique et les idées évolutionnistes,” 73–94; Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, Maître de l’Art Nouveau; and Charpentier and Thiébaut, Gallé.

[22] Hippolyte Langlois, “Nos Grandes Villes: Nancy,” L’Est Républicain, October 12, 1908, 2; G. Philbert, “Histoire de l’Art,” L’Impartial de l’Est March 23, 1909, 1; and “L’Exposition de la Cité moderne expliquée par le milieu,” Exposition Cité Moderne (Nancy: Chambre de Commerce de Nancy/Société Industrielle de l’Est, 1913), 237–43.

[23] Emile Nicolas, “Les artistes décorateurs lorrains à Paris,” L’Etoile de l’Est, February 28, 1903, 2.

[24] “A quoi sert le pavillon de Marsan?” in Occident, issue unknown, quoted in Emile Nicolas, “L’Exposition du Pavillon de Marsan,” La Lorraine Artiste, June 1, 1903, 174.

[25] His remarks were printed in “Discours de M. Marcel, Directeur des Beaux-Arts,” L’Impartial de l’Est, October 31, 1904, 2.

[26] Emile Nicolas, “L’Exposition d’Art Décoratif de Nancy,” Le Pays Lorrain, November 25, 1904, 349.

[27] E. Collin, Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, 1909: Guide Officiel (Nancy: L. Bertrand, 1909), 13. Also see Louis Laffitte, Rapport Général sur l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France – Nancy 1909 (Paris/Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1912), xi–xvii; and Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert, “The 1909 Nancy International Exhibition: Showcase for a Vibrant Region and Swansong of the Ecole de Nancy,” Art on the Line 1, no. 5 (2007): 3.

[28] Emile Jacquemin, “Les Caracteristiques de l’Exposition de Nancy,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1908, July 1906, 68.

[29] Also see Charles Georgin, “Lettre d’un Parisien de Lorraine,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1908, February 1906, 35–36.

[30] Members of the Ecole de Nancy cultivated especially close ties to the Solvay company. Ernest Solvay, whose town house in Brussels was designed by Victor Horta, established a major soda-producing factory at Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, near Nancy, and became good friends with Gallé, Majorelle, and other local artists. In 1903, he commissioned Gallé to create two vases celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of his plant in Lorraine. The example now conserved at the Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy depicts the Solvay factories, with droplets at the rim and crystalline forms at the base that evoke the process of soda production and the raw material. See François Roth, “Art et Industrie,” in Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier and others, Art Nouveau: L’Ecole de Nancy (Metz: Denoël/Serpenoise, 1987), 31. Also see Gallé to Roger Marx, September 30 and October 1, 1903, both transcribed in Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier, Emile Gallé—Roger Marx: Correspondance 1882–1904 (Thèse de doctorat, Paris, 1970), 470–71, 474–76.

The Nancy connections to Solvay also include Edouard Hannon (1853–1931), a Belgian who was the supervisor at Solvay’s Dombasle plant from 1877–83. A photography enthusiast, Hannon commissioned Gallé and Majorelle for the lighting and furniture of his Art Nouveau villa in Brussels, designed by Jules Brunfaut in 1903. The house is now a museum dedicated to photography and Hannon’s connections with Art Nouveau. On this, see Marcel M. Celis, L’Hôtel Hannon (Brussels: Editions Contretype, 2003).

[31] Lucien Humbert, “Chez les Architectes,” L’Exposition de Nancy en 1909, July 1907, 167.

[32] See “L’Ecole de Nancy à l’Exposition,” L’Immeuble et la Construction dans l’Est, March 1, 1908, 348; “Exposition de Nancy 1909: Les Travaux de l’Exposition de Nancy,” Revue Industrielle de l’Est, September 20, 1908, 792–93; “Nos décorateurs,” L’Etoile de l’Est, May 17, 1909, 2; and “L’Ecole de Nancy,” L’Eclair de l’Est, March 10, 1908, 2.

[33] Called the rue du Sergent-Blandan.

[34] Known in the original as the “Palais des Fêtes” (literally, “Palace of Festivals”), though obviously this term is somewhat awkward in English. The Main Building was the site of all the major celebrations and conventions held during the fair.

[35] Some of the pavilions were referred to as “pavilions” and some as “palaces,” in both the official and unofficial literature surrounding the fair. I refer to the fair’s buildings using the language of the period sources.

[36] I have found no primary sources that link the Nancy structures with the design of railway stations or specific previous exhibition buildings.

[37] Though modern observers have described these pylons as “blast furnaces,” observers of the time connected them with factory chimneys. See Eugène Martin, “Comment l’Exposition de Nancy manifeste la vitalité industrielle et artistique de la Lorraine,” La Croix, June 8, 1909, 3; cf. Frédéric Descouturelle, “De l’Art à l’Exposition,” in Frédéric Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909: Centenaire de l’Exposition internationale de l’Est de la France (Nancy: Editions Place Stanislas, 2009), 145–47; and Christian Debize, Emile Gallé and the “Ecole de Nancy,“ trans. Ruth Atkin-Etienne (Metz: Serpenoise, 1999), 45.

[38] Martin, “Comment l’Exposition de Nancy,” June 8, 1909, 3.

[39] By 1910, Corbin had stores in Toul, Pont-à Mousson, Charmes, Epinal, Charleville, Longwy, Lunéville, Troyes, Vaucouleurs, Joeuf, Neufchâteau, Lens, Alençon, St-Mihiel, and Paris, where he also operated the Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes. See Catherine Coley, “Les Magasins Réunis: From the Provinces to Paris, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850–1939, ed. Serge Jaumain and Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 237–39; Maisons des Magasins Réunis: Magasins de Vente, advertising flyer, c. 1907 (Archives of the Pharmacie Flesch, Commercy [France]); and the Liste des Principaux Travaux Executés Sous la Direction de Monsieur Lucien Weissenburger, Architecte Diplomé par le Gouvernment à Nancy (de 1888 à 1915), 32 pp. (Inventaire Général de la Lorraine, Dossier Weissenburger, Nancy).

[40] For a history of the development of the department store and its associations with religious architecture, see Meredith Clausen, “The Department Store—Development of the Type,” Journal of Architectural Education 39, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 20–29; also consult Serge Jaumain and Geoffrey Crossick, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change,” in Jaumain and Crossick Cathedrals of Consumption, 1–45.

[41] Tacitus, Germania, part 1, opens, “The whole of Germany is thus bounded; separated from Gaul, from Rhoetia and Pannonia, by the rivers Rhine and Danube.” Translation by Thomas Gordon; online text available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/tacitus-germanygord.html (accessed December 19, 2007).

[42] The original inscriptions are in French: on top, from Tacitus, “Le Rhin separe des Gauls tout de Germanie,” and, on long stretchers between the table’s legs, “Je tiens au coeur de France.”

[43] Emile Hinzelin, “La Belle Exposition de la Bonne Lorraine,” Le Petit Journal, June 7, 1909, 1.

[44] See Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy manifeste la vitalité industrielle et artistique de la Lorraine,” La Croix, August 3, 1909, 3.

[45] Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, “L’Exposition en Fête,” in Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909, 129–32.

[46] Another of these rings was installed just inside the entrance to Vallin and Lanternier’s Pavilion of Mines and Metallurgy. See Hélène Sicard-Lenattier, “Une Éclatante Démonstration du Savoir-Faire Lorrain,” in Descouturelle and others, Nancy 1909, 44–45.

[47] Ibid. For more on the planning, design, and construction of the first several lines of the Paris Métro, see Malcolm Clendenin, “Hector Guimard, Political Movements, and the Paris Métro: Natural Sympathies, Governing Harmony, and Social Change” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008).

[48] Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), esp. 1–4, 297–98.

[49] Laffitte, Rapport general, 3.

[50] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3. Also see Maurice Leudet, “L’Exposition de Nancy,” Le Figaro, June 21, 1909, 3, for similar observations.

[51] Maurice Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” Journal de l’Exposition de Nancy: Organe officiel de l’administration 26 (June 29 and 30, 1909): 3. This excerpt was taken from an article in the Revue du Tourisme.

[52] “Modern-style” was another name commonly given at the time to Art Nouveau.

[53] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3.

[54] Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” 3.

[55] Jean Lefranc, “Le progrès en Meurthe-et-Moselle,” Le Temps, June 30, 1909, 2. Also see Leudet, “Les Journaux Parisiens et l’Exposition,” 3.

[56] Nancy Troy, “Le Corbusier, Nationalism, and the Decorative Arts in France, 1900–1918,” in Nationalism and the Visual Arts, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Washington, DC/Hanover, NH: National Gallery of Art/University Press of New England, 1991), 64–88. Also see her monograph Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

[57] Lenore Ripee-Kühn, “Nancy, Aus Anlass der Internationalen Ausstellung,” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 30, 1909, page unknown; quoted in Pol Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” Laffitte, Rapport general, 836.

[58] “Ein neues industrielles Zentrum,” Dresdener Volkszeitung, September 4, 1909, 1, quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 837–38.

[59] Two installments of “Ein neues industrielles Zentrum,” Dresdener Volkszeitung September 4 and 9, 1909, n.p., quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 838–40.

[60] Article in Die Zeit, August 11, 1909, quoted in Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 841–44.

[61] Simon, “L’Exposition de Nancy et l’Opinion,” 841.

[62] Martin, “Comment L’Exposition de Nancy,” August 3, 1909, 3.

[63] Marius Vachon, an inspector of artistic education for the French government, was a fervent advocate for the improvement of national instruction in the decorative arts. During World War I he published a book, La guerre artistique avec Allemagne: L’organisation de la victoire (Paris: Payot, 1916), that likened the work of French artists to that of soldiers on the battlefield.

[64] With the notable exception of the Zutzendorf house, the main building of the Alsatian Village, which remains open to the public even today in the Parc Sainte-Marie.

[65] See Clericuzio, “Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895–1914,” esp. chap. 2. This phrase has been used by Dusart and Moulin, Art Nouveau: l’épopée lorraine, 121; also Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert, “The 1909 Nancy International Exhibition,” 11; and Anne-Laure Dusoir, “L’Ecole de Nancy à l’Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France,” (Paper presented at the conference Expositions internationales et universelles – Laboratoire Historique 1, Bruxelles-Brussel, Brussels, October 22, 2005).

[66] This is Laffitte’s Rapport Général. See note 27 above for the full citation.

[67] For more on this, see Catherine Coley, “L’effort moderne à Nancy dans les années vingt: Chronique du comité Nancy-Paris,” Le Pays Lorrain 67, no. 1 (January-March 1986): 5–20.

source:

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, a journal of nineteenth-century visual culture

http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring11/modernity-regionalism-and-art-nouveau-at-the-exposition-internationale-de-lest-de-la-france-1909

Nineteenth-century poetry will perhaps benefit more than any other aesthetic practice from a wholesale reconsideration across period lines, as Isobel Armstrong has argued most eloquently. Women’s writings are particularly important once again in this regard, falling largely outside the canonical lines that have organized the unsatisfactory Romantic/Victorian distinction in the first place, and revealing a transnational and transatlantic sensibility (visible in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) so popular in current scholarship. Poets Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans (who sold tens of thousands of volumes in the nineteenth century)14 remained influential well into the mid-nineteenth century, and share the credit for developing that supposedly Victorian genre, the dramatic monologue. And yet as recently as 2000, the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry was still content to rely on familiar assumptions of poets and genres springing fully formed out of that magical year, 1832:
When Tennyson portrays the artist in ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as enclosed feminine consciousness and figures her problems as both aesthetic and erotic, he inaugurates a century-long concern with the sex and gender of art and artistry.15
This is wrong on two counts: Tennyson neither inaugurates this concern, nor is it likely to be century-long if it begins in 1832. As the ‘ablest successor’ of Felicia Hemans according to Herbert Tucker,16 one who wrote ‘quite uninhibitedly as a woman’ according to Richard Cronin,17 Tennyson inherits the concern with ‘the sex and gender of art and artistry’ from writers like Hemans (in ‘Prosperzia Rossi’), Landon (in The Improvisatrice), John Keats (in Lamia), and Mary Robinson in her 1796 volume, Sappho and Phaon. Celebrated by Robinson as ‘the unrivalled poetess of her time,’ Sappho inaugurates this tradition, which nineteenth century poets, including Tennyson, continue, under the problematic sign of ‘poetess.’18
The nineteenth century did not begin in 1832 — that is my simple but oddly contentious thesis. Contentious because much literature scholarship that claims to encompass the nineteenth century in fact speaks of a traditionally defined Victorian period. Similarly, academic jobs advertised as ‘nineteenth century’ upon closer inspection, use the term synonymously with the Victorian period. I have read many self-described ‘nineteenth century’ studies that begin in the 1830s, with an introductory page or section describing the supposed Romantic certainties that the ensuing Victorian complexities overturn. Of course, any period’s claim to innovation and ‘modernity’ is typically built on the oversimplification of a previous ‘period,’ a necessary pitfall in the logic of periodization, as David Perkins outlined in Is Literary History Possible?19 Romantic-period studies are guilty of similar offenses, as in the
4
overstated claims of the Lyrical Ballads’s revolutionary departure from Augustan poetics. Those days are largely gone, however, as Romantic-period studies have been reinvigorated, for example, by investigating canonical Romanticism’s continuities with eighteenth-century cultures of sentiment, and by enlarging dramatically the number and kinds of contemporary writings against which canonical texts like the Lyrical Ballads are now read.
Isobel Armstrong’s suggestion that we ‘forget about a unified Victorianism’20 and instead refigure this era within a long nineteenth century seems a long way from being realized, given the tenacity with which Victorian studies relies on this period construct to help place its scholarship and its scholars in the academic marketplace. Romanticists of the canonical variety similarly guard their period borders, while those working on plebeian and women writers have largely led the way in reading more fluidly in history, both backwards and forwards. Exemplary studies like Jerome McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style and Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sappho21 are grounded in period-based understandings of the Romantic and the Victorian, respectively, but interrogate the usefulness of periodization by revealing the ongoing transformations that sensibility and Sappho enjoyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the continuities of gender, Anne Mellor, following Stuart Curran, offers a different strategy for resisting periodization, arguing that ‘[w]e should [...] think of women’s literary history between 1700 and 1900 not in terms of epistemic breaks or definable literary periods […] Rather, we should think of them as exploring a different psychological dyad, that of literary mothers and daughters.’22
Literary foremothers remain useful tropes within certain feminist literary histories, but in my own work, the engagement of women writers with their male counterparts, and vice versa, is so overwhelming that it would be impossible to encompass a tradition of mothers, daughters and sisters. For example, the single most important literary touchstone for women’s writings on the French Revolution is Jean-Jacques Rousseau — not only La Nouvelle Héloïse, but the underemphasized (in studies of women’s literature) Confessions and Reveries.23 Rousseau is also a crucial figure informing nineteenth-century discourses of domesticity, establishing an important nineteenth-century continuity if we refamiliarize ourselves with women’s revolutionary writings that re-presented Rousseauvian virtue to British audiences.

In my recent book, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World, I argued that women’s prolific writings on the Revolution and its aftermath elaborated a revolutionary cosmopolitanism and Francophilia that stubbornly resisted the increasingly strident demands for British patriotism and nationalism. These women’s writings on the Revolution and cosmopolitanism strengthen the case for revaluating nineteenth-century literature as a postrevolutionary phenomenon across period boundaries. I suggest that it would be fruitful to compare these women’s representations of the Terror, and especially of Maximilien Robespierre, to Carlyle and Dickens’s feminization of the Terror and of mob violence. Carlyle’s Maenads and Dickens’s Mme de Farge have remained part of the popular imagination and demonization of revolutionary fervor, well into the twenty-first century. The diversely feminist visions of Fanny Burney, Mary Robinson, Helen Craik and Helen Maria Williams, on the other hand, virtually disappeared from popular imagination in the counterrevolutionary 1790s backlash that also engulfed ‘Modern Philosophers’ like Godwin and ‘Female Philosophers’ like Wollstonecraft.
Yet these women’s narratives convey an even greater sense of urgency than their male literary descendants, as they were histories of the present, composed without the benefit of historical hindsight or favorable critical climate. They had instead the benefit of immediacy — the republican Williams emigrated to France in 1790 and lived there throughout the revolutionary regimes until her death in 1827; the monarchist Burney was self-exiled to France from 1802 to 1812 with her aristocratic French husband. Craik and Robinson, deeply read in Williams’s first-person accounts, continued to publish in a British critical climate increasingly hostile to women’s politicized prose. In their fascinating accounts of the Revolution, these four authors, sympathetic to the ‘rights of woman’ to varying degrees, sexualized the revolutionary crisis via the historical figure of Robespierre, and the Jacobin liberalization of marriage, inheritance and custody laws, in surprising ways. These women’s popular fictions of the Terror are important though neglected precedents for the feminization of the revolutions of 1789 and 1793, considered as the hallmark of later nineteenth-century retrospectives like those of Michelet, Carlyle and Dickens. In the condensed overview of this neglected historical fiction that follows, I want to offer potential starting points for new inquiries into a long nineteenth century perspective on the Revolution’s lasting effects, especially on the ‘woman question.’24

In Williams’s multi-volume Letters from France (1790-6), Robinson’s novel The Natural Daughter (1799), Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne with memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet (1800) and Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), Robespierre (or his agent) appears as the avatar of Terror itself.25 What is at stake here is not Robespierre’s role in literary history (as a new version of the Gothic villain, for example), but his role as the embodiment of certain revolutionary ideologies, and women writers’ critiques of revolutionary politics through such historical figures.26 One might assume that as the embodiment of the Terror, Robespierre appeared only as the ‘sanguinary monster’ of counterrevolutionary and Girondin caricatures. While Robespierre as monster is visible in the narratives of Robinson, Burney, and especially Williams (as in Southey and Coleridge’s play, The Fall of Robespierre), Robespierre and the Reign of Terror with which he is associated are also fundamentally concerned with virtue. At the height of the Terror in 1794, Robespierre famously linked virtue and terror as the twin attributes of revolutionary government; his evocative formulation of ‘terror [as] … an emanation of virtue’27 inspired women writers’ responses to revolutionary politics and their sexualization. Because of his unique role as the self-styled disciple of Rousseau and the embodiment of le peuple, Robespierre is a key figure in the gendered imaginary landscape of revolution. In these ambivalent feminist accounts, his rise and fall marks the dead end of one tradition of Virtue, originating in the writings of Rousseau, and indicates the persistent centrality of certain affective ideals, especially companionate marriage, to nineteenth-century British feminist projects.
In these representations of Robespierre as Terror we glimpse an unidentified strand of the historical novel, in which two specific historical crises — Robespierre’s crafting of the ideology of Terror, and the gender crisis of the revolutionary decade — are fused in sensationalized feminist narratives. While sexualization of politics is not unique to this revolutionary period, Robespierre’s sexualization in women’s writings elevates his rise and fall, like that of Marie Antoinette, to the level of a historical crisis in gender relations. The specifics of these representations are beyond the scope of this essay, but he is often depicted as a libertine dictator, in deliberate contrast to his self-presentation as Rousseauvian hero, a persona that had won him many female admirers during his life.
What interests these women writers is Robespierre’s apparent perversion of Terror as an emanation of Virtue, and his appeal to female admirers through his Rousseauvian persona.

Drawing heavily on Williams’s Letters from France, Robinson and Craik desire to sever Robespierre and the Terror from the virtuous Rousseauvian legacy of 1789. They wish to do this in order to support their far more limited (than Robespierre’s) claims for economic and political reform, but also for feminist ends. Middle-class republican feminists like Williams and Robinson were suspicious of Robespierre’s appeal to women and the working classes, and rejected his support of sans-culotte radical claims to economic justice. But they also jealously guarded their vision of Rousseauvian virtue, in direct competition with Jacobin interpretations. Thus, their illumination of the misogyny central to Robespierre’s ‘corruption’ of Rousseau’s ideal (i.e., their vision of a ‘Reign of Terror on women’) should not be isolated from the demonstrably counterrevolutionary, chivalric, and occasionally misogynist inflections of their own feminist visions.28 These fictions prefigured the displacement of ‘class conflict onto sexual relations’29 that Nancy Armstrong has described in 1840s domestic novels, and unfortunately feminist literary histories have too often reproduced this displacement in their readings of Robespierre’s ‘Reign of Terror’ on women.
This is where an intriguing development emerges in these women’s critiques of marriage, a central element of nineteenth-century novel traditions. One significant commitment shared by all these writers is their overtly feminist demystification of marriage as oppressive to women. All four writers transgressed either the conventions or laws of marriage in their controversial private lives,30 and all four politicized such transgression in their writings. Robinson, writing overtly in the ‘school of Wollstonecraft,’ was the most daring in this respect, as was her great admirer Craik. Craik began her novel about Charlotte Corday with bracing clarity: ‘Adelaide de Narbonne had the supreme felicity of finding herself a widow almost from the hour she became a bride.’31 Following eighteenth-century feminist practice, Robinson and Craik consistently liken marriage to slavery, and like Burney in The Wanderer, graphically illustrate the privations women endure as a result of their dependence. Given these writers’ conscious identification of marriage (alongside inheritance and property laws) as an institution in urgent need of reform, it is significant that they do not celebrate the French Revolution’s liberalization of divorce, marriage and inheritance laws.
On the contrary, like loyalist denunciations of the Revolution as a premise for sexual license, their nightmarish visions of ‘republican marriage’ deny the benefits to women of such liberalization, and seem instead to see only an intensification of men’s dominion by other

means. In effect they share (but in a nightmarish cast) Sade’s vision in Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795) of liberalized republican sexuality as a pornotopia: ‘All men therefore have equal rights of enjoyment in all women.’ The Sadean visions of Robespierre offered by these women writers in fact prove incorrect (as Burkean loyalists also insisted) Godwin’s optimistic prediction in the Enquiry that ‘[t]he abolition of the present system of marriage appears to involve no evils,’ certainly not those of ‘brutal lust and depravity.’32
It was Robespierre’s accumulated monstrous associations that women writers used to eclipse the potential feminist value of France’s new divorce and inheritance laws, seeing in these reforms a similar potential for radical libertinage as had Sade and Burke. Having already ended primogeniture, in August and September 1792, the Legislative Assembly had declared adults ‘no longer subject to paternal authority’ and established divorce, giving ‘mothers equal rights with fathers in control over the children’.33 As a civil contract, marriage was now dissoluble by either party. In September 1793, the National Convention went even further and ‘granted illegitimate children equal rights of inheritance’: ‘Society and the state,’ writes Lynn Hunt, ‘were now asserting the superiority of their claims over the family’.34 More radical yet, in December 1793 ‘the Convention voted to establish state-run primary schools, and a week later it made attendance obligatory in principle,’ with Robespierre’s approval: ‘The country has the right to raise its children,’ Robespierre declared; ‘it should not entrust this to the pride of families or to the prejudices of particular individuals.’35
While many of these reforms would be reversed by 1804, they remain important milestones in family and women’s rights. So why didn’t outspoken feminists like Robinson and Williams praise such laws in their writings, when these laws resembled the reforms they desired in Britain? Because, in replacing the authority of fathers with that of the state, the republican reforms simultaneously eliminated maternal authority, both literally and symbolically. Divorce and the equalization of custody and inheritance rights were part of British feminists’ agenda well into the Victorian period, but robbing families (and thus mothers) of their authority over children was unacceptable. Yet this had been Rousseau’s vision of public education, and Robespierre’s also. Thus, Robespierre instituted a version of Rousseauvian virtue that was anathema to feminists like Williams and Wollstonecraft; they admired selective elements of Rousseau’s sensibility and social contract that were favorable to middle-class women, and like many French women contemporaries ‘identified strongly with

Rousseau’s persona of persecuted virtue’.36 For these progressive English writers, Robespierre came to represent not only the corruption of their revolutionary ideals, but more specifically (and erroneously), the misogynist corruption of Rousseauvian virtue beyond feminist redemption.
It was Robespierre who appeared as the agent of this desacralization of marriage and the domestic affections in women’s narratives. In fact, what Robinson and Williams fear the most is the desacralization of women (and mothers) and the culture of sentiment that valued them. Robespierre becomes in their imagination, like Sade, the destroyer of the sacredness of women. One final episode crystallized Robespierre’s status as the demonic scourge of feminine virtue, and ironically it was not his own doing. One of the most notorious of the Jacobins, Jean Baptiste Carrier, shocked Jacobin and British alike with the mass drownings (noyades) he ordered at Nantes during the Terror. Williams describes these episodes in graphic detail:
Some of these victims were destined to die a thousand deaths; innocent young women were unclothed in the presence of the monsters; and, to add a deeper horror to this infernal act of cruelty, were tied to young men, and both were cut down with sabers, or thrown into the river; and this kind of murder was called a republican marriage.37
The inverse of long-sought liberalization, ‘republican marriage’ acquired a wholly nightmarish association as the nadir of oppression in women’s revolutionary history. ‘Republican marriage’ now signified the ultimate example of men’s sadistic abuse of women, and Robespierre the infernal bridegroom.
In these women’s writings, ‘republican marriages’ were the logical conclusion of radical misogyny, not feminist reform. British opponents of the Revolution would agree with this; they found much to object to in the Francophilic writings of Robinson, Williams, and Burney, and yet they had common concerns regarding the dangers of the French liberalization of marriage. According to an ubiquitous Burkean logic, these infectious French reforms will dissolve all ‘social ties subsisting in human nature — the parental, the filial, the fraternal affections, love, friendship, gratitude, are all obsolete or vulgar prejudices,’ as one polemic warned.38 And yet Williams and her fellow feminists, reviled by these same loyalists for publicly supporting French revolutionary politics, similarly characterized the Jacobin Republic as severing the sacred ties of family, marriage, and sentiment during the Terror, most

spectacularly in the murderous ‘republican marriages’ that parodied liberalized sexual relations.
For these early nineteenth-century feminists, the ‘republican marriage’ of Virtue and Terror in fact marked the intensification of ancien régime marriage (British and French) as domestic slavery and legalized libertinism, the perversion of their companionate marriage ideal. Forced marriage was the axis around which all progressive women’s narratives revolved; ironically, this feminist literary trope reached its most extreme evocation and found its most notorious villain at the same moment as the laws were reformed — in the Jacobin republic. Women in these revolutionary narratives return always to the same impossible choices — formerly marriage or convent, now marriage or the guillotine — a feminist acknowledgement of misogyny’s continuity across regimes, but also a stubborn attachment to the sentimental promise of companionate marriage, and women’s privileged role therein.
These Romantic-era writers’ sexualization of the Terror, and specifically of Robespierre, established a tradition that we currently only recognize via the feminization of the Terror in Carlyle and Dickens. Helen Maria Williams’s many volumes chronicling the Revolution for British audiences were among the most influential and widely read in the early nineteenth century; their influence resonates decades later in the revolutionary idyll of Vaudracour and Julia in Wordsworth’s Prelude, published in 1850, and in Carlyle’s French Revolution of 1837. The urgency of Williams’s impassioned celebration of the Revolution as ‘the most sublime spectacle which [...] was ever represented on the theatre of this earth’39 merits full scale comparison with Carlyle’s more pessimistic yet equally theatricalized vision of the Revolution as ‘a spectacle new in History’(16). The feminist visions of ‘republican marriage’ by Williams and her contemporaries also illuminate the widening class differences and priorities among early nineteenth-century women. Our histories of nineteenth-century British feminisms and fiction would benefit from a fuller examination of this unique historical dilemma faced by early nineteenth-century women writers, and how it may have shaped later traditions of historiography and historical novels.
The feminization of Revolution and the related fate of feminism are best understood by reincorporating the revolutionary decade of the 1790s into the long nineteenth century. Universal rights discourse, however imperfect in both theory and practice, also originated in its modern form in the 1790s; ongoing nineteenth-century debates over human rights, animal

rights, women’s rights, worker’s rights, children’s rights, all continue to test this revolutionary legacy. Hannah More’s rejection of rights and collective reform, in favor of duties and Christian self-improvement, like Wollstonecraft’s advocacy of collective human rights, together shape the nineteenth-century traditions that explain the unfortunate modern bifurcation of western feminism along the lines of equality and difference, and along lines of class and race. We exclude the revolutionary decades from our understanding of the ‘woman question’ as it developed from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century at our peril.
The rise and decline of Britain’s global empire in the nineteenth century likewise requires that we understand early nineteenth-century women’s formative role in developing British culture’s ‘interest in and sympathy for racial and cultural difference,’ so central to British colonialism’s self-image.40 Barbauld’s vision of a multifaith and multiracial British metropolis in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven shares much with the urban sensibility of the coming decades: ‘Streets, where the turban’d Moslem, bearded Jew, / And woolly African, met the brown Hindu; / Where through each vein spontaneous plenty flowed, / Where Wealth enjoyed, and Charity bestowed.’ The defiant cosmopolitanism that Barbauld shared with contemporaries like Helen Maria Williams and Lady Morgan likewise needs to be reintroduced into our accounts of Britain’s imperial projects in the postrevolutionary modern era.
Lest it seem that in my enthusiasm for looking before and after the Romantic/Victorian boundary, I am content to allow the Romantic period to begin safely in 1789, I will offer a final prediction for the future of Victorian studies: it will need to reconsider its relationship to the Romantic Century. Concerned by trends in the academic job market, in which Romantic-period studies were perceived to be increasingly marginalized by the long eighteenth century on the one hand, and the short nineteenth century (i.e., the Victorian period) on the other, Susan Wolfson and William Galperin proposed ‘The Romantic Century,’ from 1750-1850, as a means of rearranging traditional period boundaries.41 We could reimagine a Romantic Century by charting the rise of Romantic sentiment in 1740, the year in which Pamela was published, and winding down in 1850, the publication year of those two ‘Victorian’ masterpieces of sentiment, The Prelude and In Memoriam. Another version of a Romantic Century could encompass both Letters from France and Tale of Two Cities, as well as

Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. As Wolfson and a host of other scholars speculate, the Romantic Century may be uniquely valuable in our efforts to imagine what we know about periodization. I hereby propose that we reconvene next year for another symposium, on ‘The Long Romantic Century and the Future of Nineteenth-Century Studies.’
1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002).
2 Anne Grant, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814), p.143. Both Barbauld and Grant’s poems are available in electronic editions via the British Women Romantic Poets electronic archive at the University of California (location: digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/).
3 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case for Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1999), p.78.
4 Monthly Review, 67 (1812) 428-32; (p 428).
5 Quoted in William McCarthy, ‘A “High-Minded Christian Lady”: The Posthumous Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld,’ Romanticism and Women Poets, ed. by Stephen Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 165 – 191.
6 McCarthy, p.168.
7 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, Facsimile ed. with introduction by Caroline Franklin, 2 vols (London: Routledge / Thoemmes, 1825; repr. Routledge,1996), II, 158 – 9.
8 Barbauld,Works, II, 100.
9 S. J. Wolfson, ‘Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?’ PMLA, 116 (2001), 1432-1441; (p.1439).
10 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Msrepresentations: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, in Women‘s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian, ed. by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p.9. Of course, in historiography of the French Revolution, there is a long tradition of the ‘age of revolutions,’ for example Eric Hobsbawn’s The Age of Revolution: 1789 to 1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962) and François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Literary studies like the essay collection Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. by Tim Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2002) resist periodization by reconsidering literature’s relationships to such longer (and earlier) revolutionary historical processes. That literary and historical studies (as well as their different national contexts) operate according to different models of periodization is well known, as the interdisciplinary ‘Long Nineteenth-Century’ conference, for which this paper

was originally written, specifically addressed. I was invited to address the usefulness of the long nineteenth-century perspective with specific reference to the legacy of the French Revolutionary era, and especially women’s writings, for British literary studies. A discussion of the well-studied relationship of the Victorian period to continental revolutions is beyond the scope of this brief essay.
11 Thomas Carlyle, ed. by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen, The French Revolution: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter, ed. by Sharon Setzer, (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003). Charlotte Smith, Desmond, ed. by Antje Blank and Janet Todd (Broadview Press, 2001).
12 Barbara Caine, ‘Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Women’s Writing, 4 (1997), p.262.
13 See Chandler’s England in 1819 and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
14 On Hemans’s sales, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.607-8, pp.715-9.
15 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, ‘‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry’ Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.39.
16 Herbert F. Tucker, ‘House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1820s,’ New Literary History, 25 (1994) 521-58; (p.542).
17 Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824-1840 (Palgrave, 2002), p.107.
18 I discuss the continuities across period boundaries provided by the ‘poetess’ tradition (in male and female writers) in ‘Poetry, Sexuality, Gender,’ forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. by James Chandler and Maureen Mclane.
19 David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
20 Isobel Armstrong, ‘When is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet?’ Victorian Studies, 43
(2001) 279-92 (p.291).
21 Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
22 Anne Mellor, ‘Were Women Writers ‘Romantics’?’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62 (2001), 393-405. See also Stuart Curran, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 63 (2000), 575-90. This issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly is devoted to the topic of ‘Forging connections: women’s poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism.’
23 On La Nouvelle Héloïse and women’s novels, see Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the English Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
24 I discuss the impact of Robespierre (and Rousseau) on women’s writings in greater detail in chapter 3 of my British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave, 2005).
25 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties. Introduction by Margaret Drabble (London: Pandora, 1988).

26 For a recent overview of the state of Robespierre studies, see the essays in Robespierre, ed. by William Doyle and Colin Haydon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On Robespierre and Rousseau, see Carol Blum’s Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). On canonical male Romantics and Robespierre, see Greg Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
27 Robespierre, speech of 4 February 1794, reprinted in the anthology edited and translated by Richard Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.38.
28 In the ideological struggles of 1793 and 1794, ‘Robespierre the tyrant’ became a myth endowed with a bewildering series of contradictory significances, which I discuss in greater detail in British Women Writers and the French Revolution. Briefly, British feminists used the myth to allegorize institutionalized misogyny (men’s Reign of Terror on women). French Jacobins used the myth in their factional power struggles. For British radicals, the myth served as an oblique vision of England’s own domestic tyranny, as well as of the masculine agency of the male Romantic poet (for Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth). Counterrevolutionaries (French and British) used the myth as evidence for the heartlessness of French revolutionary principles and their inevitable descent into violence. Robespierre’s rise to power and his role in the Terror could also be read, then and now, as the tragic enactment of Rousseauvian virtue on the corrupting stage of revolutionary politics. The latter vision was Robespierre’s, shared by his women admirers (and later, politically sympathetic Marxist historians), in direct contrast to middle-class feminists like Williams and Robinson, who were particularly suspicious of his appeal to women and the working classes.
29 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.200.
30 Williams’s romance with the married John Hurford Stone, and her cohabitation with him after his divorce, generated unkind comments in England. Robinson’s extramarital relationships with men like the Prince of Wales and Charles Fox made her a notorious figure whom ‘respectable’ women shunned. Burney’s marriage to a French émigré in 1793 inspired a xenophobic reaction amongst the British elite. Craik’s personal circumstances are the most remarkable of the four. Briefly, Craik was the daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner, who probably had her laboring-class lover murdered, prompting her self-exile to England. There, Craik devoted her professional career as a novelist to dramatizing the dangers of paternal and sexual tyranny in feminist novels indebted to Robinson, Williams, and Radcliffe (see Adriana Craciun, ‘The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800,’ in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp.193-232.
31 Helen Craik, Adelaide de Narbonne, with Memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet, 4 vols (London: Minerva Press, 1800), I, 1.
32 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. by Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.763.

33 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p.42. For further reading by Hunt see ‘Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood.’ in The Terror, ed. by Keith Michael Baker, The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols, ed. by Keith Michael Baker and others (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994), (1990), iv, 195-208.
I34 Hunt, The Family Romance, p.66.
35 Ibid, p.67.
36 Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), p.5
37 Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, Introduction by Janet Todd, 8 vols, (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, repr.1975), II, 3, 42-43.
38 Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits; With Particular Reference to the Dangerous Opinions Contained in the Writings of Miss. H. M. Williams, 2 vols, (London: Carpenter, 1801), II, 202.
39 Williams, Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790, ed. by Neil Fraistat and Susan Lanser (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), p.63.
40 Anne Mellor, ‘Women Writers in the Romantic Century, 1750-1850,’ European Romantic Review, 11 (2000) 21-24 (p.23).
41 Wolfson outlined the Romantic Century in her essay ‘50-50? Phone a Friend? Ask the Audience? Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750-1850,’ published in a special issue of European Romantic Review devoted to the topic and co-edited with William Galperin (v. 11 (2000), 1-11); she elaborated her position in ‘Our Puny Boundaries,’ PMLA, 116 (2001), 1432-1441. In this same issue of PMLA, Charles Rzepka offers a dissenting opinion on the institutional crisis in Romanticism that Wolfson identifies (‘The Feel of Not to Feel It’, PMLA 116 (2001), 1422-1431) and Jerome McGann offers a larger perspective on nineteenth-century periodization and the liberal arts (‘Who’s Carving up the Nineteenth Century?’, PMLA, 116 (2001), 1415-1421).

Adriana Craciun, Birkbeck College

Courbet’s career was punctuated by scandal, often deliberately courted by the artist himself. Young Women from the Village (40.175), set in the outskirts of Ornans, generated further controversy at the Salon of 1852. Critics were nearly unanimous in reproaching Courbet for the “ugliness” of the three young women, for whom the artist’s sisters modeled, and for the disproportionately small scale of the cattle. Moreover, Courbet’s suggestive use of the term demoiselles (young ladies) to denote this trio of young village women further provoked his critics, who took issue with the blurring of class boundaries that the term implied. In the aftermath of the democratic uprisings in the countryside in 1848, Courbet’s depictions of a rural middle-class in his Ornans subjects unsettled his Parisian audience at the Salons.

In 1855, Courbet’s monumental canvas, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle. Courbet retaliated by mounting his own exhibition in his Pavilion of Realism, built within sight of the official venue, where he displayed, among more than forty other works, The Painter’s Studio. The meaning of Courbet’s unfinished painting remains enigmatic: the figures on the left suggest the various social types that appear in Courbet’s canvases, while on the right Courbet portrays his friends and supporters. The artist painted himself at the center of this universe, paradoxically painting a landscape within the confines of his studio. The accompanying exhibition catalogue included Courbet’s seminal “Realist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed his fidelity to subjects drawn from modern life.

Some of the first nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings were intended as propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule. Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835)—a pupil of Jacques-Louis David and a history painter in Napoleon’s employ who never traveled to the Near East himself—conveys this idea in Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa(1804; Musée du Louvre, Paris), featuring an Eastern architectural setting and figures in exotic dress. A propagandizing work, it depicts the then-general’s visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa. Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. Proponents of the Romantic movement, such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), also avidly took up themes of violence and cruelty in Oriental subjects. Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; both Louvre) embody in images of war and destruction the Romantic themes of human pathos, uncontrollable force, and emotional extremes. The emphasis on military brutality in many Oriental subjects by Western artists reflects ongoing conflicts throughout the century: the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), the conquest of Algeria by the French in the 1830s, and the Crimean War (1853–56).

While many Europeans relied on published travelogues and officially sanctioned literature like the Description de l’Égypte for their impressions of the Near East, many artists, including Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856), Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860), and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), made one or more journeys to the region. Genre painting, the prevalent form of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by artists’ direct experience of everyday life in Near Eastern cities and settlements. Gérôme popularized the theme of the bashi-bazouk, or Turkish mercenary soldier, often depicted in routine activities (05.13.4) or at leisure, as in a canvas by Charles Bargue (1825/26–1883). For Decamps, whose late career was shaped by the year he spent in Asia Minor (1828–29), depictions of military life (87.15.93) elevated genre subjects to the grandeur of history painting. These artists and their contemporaries also produced scenes of quiet domesticity, maternity—as in Chassériau’s Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine (1996.285)—and religious piety, seen in Gérôme’s Prayer in the Mosque.

Occasionally, the Near Eastern setting provided a backdrop for religious works with Christian themes. This approach appealed particularly to British artists, as the explicitness of detail encouraged in the Orientalist style upheld the Protestant necessity for iconographic clarity and fidelity to nature in religious art. From his sojourn in Palestine in the 1850s, William Holman Hunt produced paintings such as The Finding of Christ in the Temple (1860; Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery), which uses an Orientalist setting, and The Scapegoat (1854–55; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), a Christian allegory set in the Palestinian landscape.

Some of the most popular Orientalist genre scenes—and the ones most influential in shaping Western aesthetics—depict harems. Probably denied entrance to authentic seraglios, male artists relied largely on hearsay and imagination, populating opulently decorated interiors with luxuriant odalisques, or female slaves or concubines (many with Western features), reclining in the nude or in Oriental dress. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) never traveled to the East, but used the harem setting to conjure an erotic ideal in his voluptuous odalisques. Beyond their implicit eroticism, harem scenes evoked a sense of cultivated beauty and pampered isolation to which many Westerners aspired. The taste for Orientalism further manifested itself in Eastern architectural motifs, furniture, decorative arts, and textiles, which were increasingly sought after by a European elite. Proponents of the Aesthetic movement in Great Britain (1860s–80s), who collectively advocated an aesthetic of beauty for its own sake and valued form over content in art, took particular inspiration from Oriental interiors. This taste is exemplified in the Arab Hall (1877–79) in the London home of artist Frederic Leighton (1830–1896): glittering with mosaic tiles collected from Leighton’s journeys to the East, it served as a gathering place for like-minded aesthetes.

The potency of Orientalist images remained undiminished for many artists into the twentieth century, including Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom took up Orientalist themes.

Raised in Normandy, Monet was introduced to plein-air painting by Eugène Boudin (2003.20.2), known for paintings of the resorts that dotted the region’s Channel coast, and subsequently studied informally with the Dutch landscapist Johan Jongkind (1819–1891). When he was twenty-two, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre. His classmates included Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and other future Impressionists. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the 1860s. Yet many of the rejection of his more ambitious works, notably the large-scale Women in the Garden (1866; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), inspired Monet to join with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and others in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. Impression: Sunrise (1873; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), one of Monet’s contributions to this exhibition, drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honor, and subsequently called themselves “Impressionists” after the painting’s title, even though the name was first used derisively.

Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. His first wife, Camille (2002.62.1), and his second wife, Alice, frequently served as models. His landscapes chart journeys around the north of France (31.67.11) and to London, where he escaped the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Returning to France, Monet moved first to Argenteuil, just fifteen minutes from Paris by train, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside their host (1976.201.14). Yet Monet’s paintings cast a surprisingly objective eye on these scenes, which include few signs of domestic relations.

Following in the path of the Barbizon painters, who had set up their easels in the Fontainebleau Forest (64.210) earlier in the century, Monet adopted and extended their commitment to close observation and naturalistic representation. Whereas the Barbizon artists painted only preliminary sketches en plein air, Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. His quest to capture nature more accurately also prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Monet’s asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.

Monet’s interest in recording perceptual processes reached its apogee in his series paintings (e.g., Haystacks [1891], Poplars [1892], Rouen Cathedral [1894]) that dominate his output in the 1890s. In each series, Monet painted the same site again and again, recording how its appearance changed with the time of day. Light and shadow seem as substantial as stone in his Rouen Cathedral (30.95.250) series. Monet reports that he rented a room across from the cathedral’s western facade in 1892 and 1893, where he kept multiple canvases in process and moved from one to the next as the light shifted. In 1894, he reworked the canvases to their finished states.

In the 1910s and ’20s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond (1983.532) that he created on his property at Giverny. His final series depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of color and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died (a wealthy and well-respected man at the age of eighty-six), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.

Laura Auricchio
Department of Art & Design Studies, Parsons The New School for Design

The Aesthetic Movement was championed by the writers and critics Walter Pater (1839–94), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). In the decorative arts, the most important product of the Movement was the ‘Anglo-Japanese’ furniture of E. W. Godwin, constructed in simple and elegant designs—solid balanced by void—occasionally with painted decoration. His preferred material was ebonized mahogany, which he used for the buffet that he designed originally for himself in 1867 (e.g. London, V&A), inset with panels of embossed Japanese leather paper. In the house in London that he decorated for himself there were Japanese fans on the ceiling and skirting, and Japanese vases. Such items were imported and sold at Liberty & Co. in London and could be found in fashionable ‘Aesthetic’ interiors of the 1870s and 1880s.

In 1876 F. R. Leyland (1831–92) commissioned Thomas Jeckyll to design the dining-room (now in Washington, DC, Freer) of 49 Princes Gate, London, which was to be the setting for his collection of porcelain and Whistler’s painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–4). The walls behind Jeckyll’s elaborate shelving were covered with Spanish leather, which Whistler overpainted in 1877 in gold on a blue ground with motifs based on the eye and tail-feathers of the peacock; opposite his picture, which hung over the fireplace, he painted two peacocks in full plumage. In the fireplace stands a pair of wrought-iron fire-dogs designed by Jeckyllb in the form of sunflowers. With the peacock, the sunflower was a characteristic motif of the Aesthetic Movement, appearing in tiles painted by William De Morgan, embroidery designed by C. R. Ashbee, chintz and wallpaper designed by Bruce J. Talbert and in the painted face of a clock (1880; London, V&A) that was probably designed by Lewis Foreman Day.

The artists and craftsmen of the Aesthetic Movement sought to elevate the form of furniture, ceramics, metalwork and textiles to the status of fine art. William Morris, although at odds with much of the philosophy of the Aesthetic Movement, helped to extend its influence to the USA. By 1870 Morris’s wallpapers were on sale in Boston, and two years later Hints on Household Taste (1868) by Charles Locke Eastlake was produced in an American edition. This was important to the dissemination of the notion that art should be applied to all types of decoration. In 1876 the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia did much to familiarize Americans with reformed taste in England, and in 1882–3 Wilde made a lecture tour of the USA. Though satirized for his effeteness and posturing, he increased awareness of the Aesthetic Movement.

In the USA Herter Brothers produced its own version of Godwin’s ‘Anglo-Japanese’ style (e.g. wardrobe, 1880–85; New York, Met.), and Ott & Brewer of Trenton, NJ, made ceramics in the Japanese taste. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed jewellery and silver (e.g. vase, 1873–5; New York, Met.), as well as glass and interiors, and must be regarded as one of the principal American exponents of the Aesthetic Movement, as he was to be of Art Nouveau. John La Farge contributed decorations to the Japanese Parlor (1883–4) of the house (destr.) of William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–85) in New York, which was the epitome of fashionable taste.

Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

During the first phrase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by a group of young painters attending the Royal Academy Schools. The Royal Academy, founded in 1768, had been a critical institution for raising the respectability of painting and of painters in Britain as a professional class. In the nineteenth century, it continued under the burden of representing British national values, especially in the paintings that the Academicians chose for public exhibition. Yet the actual education given to the students at the Royal Academy was relatively uninspiring: students spent months copying works, receiving occasional criticisms from teachers, and hearing dry lectures on such topics as perspective or art history.

Given the Academy’s claustrophobia, it was hardly surprising that some young students would be eager to rebel against its strictures. Three gifted artists studying there, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, agreed to create a secret society dedicated to taking the arts in a new direction. Later, Rossetti’s brother William Michael, a critic; the sculptor Thomas Woolner; and the painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens joined the group. Rossetti’s teacher and lifelong friend, Ford Maddox Brown, part of an older generation of painters, was also closely associated with it, though he was never an actual member. The adjective “Pre-Raphaelite” seems to have been Hunt’s idea, while Rossetti added the “Brotherhood.” Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) was the first painting to include the actual initials “PRB” after his signature to denote membership in the group. Although what the initials stood for was supposed to be secret, their meaning quickly became common knowledge once the paintings began to attract the attention of art critics in London.

To further consolidate the group’s identity, the members planned a periodical entitled The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Literature, Poetry, and Art. Although The Germ lasted only four issues, it was notable in several respects. Unlike almost any other periodical of the day, it featured mostly poetry and essays on aesthetics, rather than the standard fare of book reviews, political essays, or serializations. It was an “in-group” publication, by artists for artists, as was underscored by the title chosen for its last two issues: Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts Towards Nature, Conducted Principally by Artists. It also broadened the significance of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by insisting that its importance was not confined solely to painting: it included literature and essays on aesthetics as well. An organ through which to formulate an aesthetic manifesto and to expand into other modes increased the perceived intellectual seriousness and weight of the Pre-Raphaelites’ endeavors. In it, important early poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“The Blessed Damozel” and “My Sister’s Sleep”) and Christina Rossetti (“Dream Land”) first appeared, as well as essays on art by Frederic George Stephens and Ford Maddox Brown. The core of the Pre-Raphaelites’ program in some ways recalled that of Wordsworth; their goal was “an endeavour to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature” (Rossetti, 1851, p. [X2]). Yet the Pre-Raphaelites’ invocation of nature, especially in relation to painting, had a particular edge, though not one made explicit in their manifestos: art had to recognize the challenge posed by technical developments in photography by developing higher standards of verisimilitude.

Though the results may seem less innovative now than they did in the 1850s, early viewers responded with real shock. Innovation and experimentation were not what they had come to expect from the staid exhibitions of the Royal Academy. Although early reviews were scorching, the Pre-Raphaelites were lucky to find a somewhat unexpected champion in the most distinguished aesthetician of the age, John Ruskin, who, as the scholar Isobel Armstrong notes, “probably managed to give … a more coherent account of Pre-Raphaelite principles than they could themselves” (Armstrong 1993, p. 233). Partly through the prestige of Ruskin’s work, hostility toward the Pre-Raphaelites diminished rapidly, and they quickly became some of the most praised artists of the day. The close association of the Brotherhood, however, was over by 1853.

While the label “Pre-Raphaelite” came to be something of an embarrassment for most in the Brotherhood, it deserves careful scrutiny. It was a self-consciously difficult term, one that presupposed considerable knowledge about the history of European art. The Italian Renaissance painter Raphael (1483–1520) had long been held up in England and in the Royal Academy as the model for aspiring artists. In a peculiar twist of events, a set of cartoons that he produced as designs for tapestries had an extraordinary afterlife in England; they were copied as paintings for Hampton Court, widely disseminated through engravings and copies, and became models for neoclassical taste. Lecture after lecture at the Royal Academy held up Raphael and his cartoons as ideals and as the source for what were easily felt to be arbitrary rules about good painting: all figures in a painting needed to be placed in an S-shape; the principal figure needed to have the most light; one corner always had to be in the shade; and others.

A suggestive ambiguity in the adjective “Pre-Raphaelite” characterizes exactly how the artists related themselves to Raphael. One interpretation is that the painters wished to associate themselves with whatever was before “Raphaelitism.” The members of the Brotherhood understood “Raphaelitism” as a shorthand for the perceived rigidification of Raphael’s influence, rather than for Raphael himself. As Holman Hunt wrote in his memoir, “Pre-Raphaelitism is not Pre-Raphaelism” (1905/1984, p. 23). The suffix “ite” marked the distinction in a mocking echo of Biblical usage (“Israelite,” “Canaanite,” “Moabite”), as if followers of Raphael were a lost tribe, keeping an allegiance to values sadly out of place in a modern setting. Through their label, the Pre-Raphaelites unmasked the Royal Academy’s precepts not as universally recognized aesthetic truths, but as products of a worn-out and derivative school, Raphaelitism.

In this context, the “pre-Raphaelite” had more of the force of “anti-Raphaelite” or even “post-Raphaelite.” The hallmark of this rejection of Raphaelitism in early Pre-Raphaelite paintings is an almost hallucinatory attention to detail, combined with the abandonment of traditional schemes for organizing painted figures, as in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853–1854) and Millais’s Ophelia (1851–1852). Such aggressive precision in the representation of detail was the quality most often noted by their early admirers. In their art, this realism went hand in hand with a marked assertion of Englishness, as if avoiding the “Raphaelite” meant avoiding turning away from the continent. Unlike J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and his famous images of Venice, the Pre-Raphaelites painted English people, English scenery, and scenes from English literature, so that even their Italian scenes, as in Holman Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851), were from English authors. A notable facet of this Englishness was the willingness of the Pre-Raphaelites to champion English poets who were still virtually unknown in Victorian Britain, including John Keats and William Blake.

After the Brotherhood

While “Pre-Raphaelite” could signal a rebellion against Raphaelitism, it also had a different meaning, in which it denoted instead a self-conscious imitation of artists who came before Raphael. In this reading, discarding the Academy’s promotion of Raphael pointed to medieval art as a preferable model. In fact, few of the Brotherhood had direct contact with early Italian art, for very little of it was available for viewing in England, and most of the painters had not traveled on the Continent to see it. Nevertheless, The Germ foregrounded the medievalizing aspects of the label through such works as Rossetti’s Hand and Soul, a short historical fiction imagining the life and struggles of a medieval Italian painter, and Frederic George Stephens’s essay on early Italian art. The choice of the term “Brotherhood” itself was also a potentially medievalizing gesture, insofar as it gave the group defiantly Catholic associations, in a period when the Oxford movement had given Catholicism a particular allure as intellectual forbidden fruit.

This medievalism emerged most strongly after the breakup of the initial Brotherhood in 1853, when Rossetti and some fellow artists traveled to Oxford in the summer of 1857 to paint Arthurian murals on the walls of the Oxford Union Society. Unfortunately, they did not prepare the walls of the Union well for mural painting, and their work began to decay almost immediately. What mattered more was that, while at Oxford, Rossetti cemented his already existing friendships with the artist Edward Burne-Jones and the artist and poet William Morris, and that he met Algernon Charles Swinburne, who nearly a decade later would emerge as the most famous and scandalous poet in England. Whereas no single member of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had really stood out as a leader, the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism was dominated by Rossetti. The young Oxfordians copied Rossetti so exactly that they started a journal like The Germ, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which lasted for twelve issues; it even reprinted Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” from The Germ.

As the subject of the Union murals indicates, medievalism was a more prominent, though never exclusive, motif in the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism than it had been for the Brotherhood itself. Elsewhere in Victorian literature, medievalism came burdened with a heavy weight of political and religious associations. Thomas Carlyle had used the chronicle of a medieval abbey as a model for charismatic leadership in Past and Present (1843); John Ruskin in “The Nature of the Gothic” in The Stones of Venice (1851) had treated the perceived grotesqueness of medieval art as a model of unalienated labor. The Pre-Raphaelite medievalism of Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones is often seen, in contrast, as a dreamy escape from contemporary reality into a fantasy past. But for the Pre-Raphaelites, the medieval was less an escape into fantasy than a representational style that let them reject mid-Victorian conventions of didacticism, religiosity, domesticity, and sentimentality. After the tortured psychological self-examinations of poets like Tennyson or Arnold, poems like Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” and “The Staff and Scrip” or Morris’s “The Defence of Guenevere” and “The Haystack in the Floods” were refreshingly dry, impersonal, and even brutal. They drew instead on the conventions of the literary ballad as exemplified by writers like Walter Scott, in which action dominated character analysis. Far from being otherworldly fantasy, these poems cut through layers of respectable conventions to focus on tense drama and elemental passions.

Aside from medievalism, the other major development in the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism was the growing artistic and intellectual significance of women. The most important woman writer associated with the Pre-Raphaelites was Dante Gabriel’s sister, Christina Rossetti, at once one of their closest associates and harshest critics. She published in The Germ and claimed to have benefited from her brother’s criticism of her poetry. Yet her poetry also offers a quiet but persistent critique of the Pre-Raphaelite treatment of female subjectivity. Her sonnet “In an Artist’s Studio” describes an artist who paints a woman “not as she is, but as she fills his dream,” thereby underlining the chasm between Pre-Raphaelite idealization and the actual woman involved. At the same time, it would be unfair to Christina Rossetti to view her work solely as a reflection on the work of the Pre-Raphaelites; her many books of theology, for example, need to be interpreted in quite different contexts. In addition to Christina Rossetti, many women artists contributed to the development of Pre-Raphaelitism, although their works were not always as publicly visible as those of the male artists: Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddall; Joanna Boyce; Anna Mary Howitt; and others.

In the final decades of Rossetti’s life, partly at the instigation of his patrons, his paintings increasingly turned toward obsessive fixations on female beauty, the long succession of what Swinburne called “stunners.” He sold most of these paintings directly to patrons, often newly rich urban industrialists eager to distinguish themselves from an older, aristocratic tradition of collecting the works of European Old Masters. The paintings therefore received no public exhibition, increasing the aura of mystery around them. What may be most “stunning” today about this series of works is the eerie solitude of Rossetti’s women: they rarely have context outside themselves, and the poems that Rossetti sometimes wrote to accompany them only reinforces their solitude. The paintings rivet attention on female faces, perched precariously between haunting beauty, blank prettiness, and idiosyncratic ugliness; the label “Pre-Raphaelite” is often used to refer particularly to this distinctive feminine appearance. Details of Rossetti’s biography further heightened his mystique: his wild life in London, living at times with Swinburne, the poet and novelist George Meredith, and the painter Simeon Solomon; Siddall’s suicide in 1862; his burial of his poems with her—and the even more dramatic exhumation of them in 1869; his affair with Morris’s beautiful wife; the scandal created by the attack on his collected poems (1870) in Robert Buchanan’s essay “The Fleshly School of English Poetry” (1871); and his final descent into depression and drug addiction.

After Rossetti’s death in 1882, his reputation was consolidated by a range of reviews, memoirs, and evaluations. Although the work of many of those associated with Rossetti, including Swinburne, Meredith, and Morris, took quite different directions after their initial Pre-Raphaelite associations, Rossetti’s work itself did not go out of date as the century progressed, either because, as in the case of The Bride’s Prelude, he did not publish it until the end of his life or because, as in the case of “Sister Helen,” he continued to revise previously published versions. Moreover, much of Rossetti’s art was not widely known because it never received public exhibition. As a result, knowledge of his art acquired an enviable edge of distinction, since it was only available to a small elite. More than any other artist, he bridged the art of mid-Victorian Britain and the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the fin de siècle: almost all the artists associated with these movements, including Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and William Butler Yeats, acknowledged their debt to Rossetti. Even T. S. Eliot, so often seen as a key figure in turning away from all that Rossetti represented, chose as the epigraph to his poem The Waste Land lines from Petronius that Rossetti had translated decades earlier.

More than any of the original Brotherhood could have predicted, the Pre-Raphaelite label turned out to be a canny piece of marketing. The aura of mystery surrounding the initials “PRB” fostered an explanation industry: commentaries, reviews, and evaluations that set out to teach the uninitiated just what Pre-Raphaelitism was. As early as the 1850s, this apparatus gave the Pre-Raphaelites a particular aura of intellectual rigor and interest, and it helps to explain how a rather small group of paintings and painters came to acquire such an enormous, unlikely influence. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, became one of the most famous painters and poets in England, even though he had completed very few paintings or poems. Despite a revulsion against Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century, Pre-Raphaelite images, with their unsettling ability to hover between kitsch and high art, have turned out to be one of the most enduring legacies of the Victorian era.

REFERENCE: Andrew Elfenbein