Dr. Barbara J Larson

Some of artist Edwin Landseer's conversations with Friedrich Keyl were recorded by the latter, in manuscripts that are now in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. Keyl, an animal painter and zoological illustrator, had been a pupil or studio assistant of Landseer and was often invited back to his house in the later 1860s. Keyl seems to have jotted down notes or 'memos' of their conversations after he got home, perhaps with the idea of writing a memoir of Landseer at a later stage. However, Keyl himself died in 1871, and none of the manuscripts were ever published. They are often very difficult to decipher and contextualise but do nevertheless throw light on Landseer's psychology and moods in his later years. The vitality, sociable charm, and humour of his youth and middle years had gradually given way to a bitterly cynical state of mind, an ingrained pessimism, and his passionate but conflicted feelings about wild animals took on a dark tone. Many of these conversations, often in the presence of other visitors, were gossip about the art world and high society, but Landseer's hostility to religion, his general cynicism, and his strong views on art and science also emerge.

This volume is an edited collection of primary sources which throw light on the interplay between zoology and visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. A great extension of knowledge of the natural world in the Victorian era was accompanied by a flowering of new forms of scientific illustration, which ranged from prints and taxidermy to dioramas and early photography. The notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ inspired imaginative artists such as Landseer, who expressively pictured animals’ strife and suffering in the wild. At the same time, however, wild nature was presented as a thing of beauty, especially in decorative designs featuring birds in natural settings – often influenced by Japanese art. Finally, the book exemplifies the Victorians’ strategies for communicating new scientific knowledge visually to the lay public, whether in museum displays, zoos, aquaria, popular publications or illustrated lectures that combined education with entertainment. This title will be of great interest to students of the History of Science and Art History. (from publisher)

This chapter examines the medical paintings of working-class children by Naturalist artist Jean Geoffroy. It argues that while officially commissioned paintings and illustrations follow the Pasteurian hygiene campaign, others are steeped in traditions of folk remedies and anticipated divine intervention on behalf of sick children. It fleshes out the politics of medicine against a conservative Catholic background that continued to exercise significant influence over working-class families in France. Geoffroy's "Catholic" medical paintings are devoid of irony and appear to sympathetically address the case of support for sisterhoods devoted to nursing that were being threatened politically, the reality that a concerning number of children died in the hospital in late-nineteenth-century France, and that hygienic measures and spaces of care for children instituted or encouraged under the Third Republic were less than adequate where the life and health of children were concerned.
This chapter also discusses regional and local resistance by doctors as well as institutions to state-wide measures in medicine and Geoffroy's engagement in these issues. It acknowledges Geoffroy's political savviness in focusing on women and girls rather than males in his medical paintings that demonstrated some form of resistance to Third Republic policies, arguing that they were less likely to attract controversy. Ultimately, we find that Geoffroy engaged in a conflicted response to the serious reality of continued staggering statistics of the death of children and babies due to contagious illness in late-nineteenth-century France.

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity.

The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization.

Art history emerged as an academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, the few existing art historians teaching within universities or art institutions rarely claimed to be teaching in a specialization, but rather were regarded as generalists. The positivism of some of art history’s earliest chairs, rooted in new scientific methods and ideas in biology, had the uniform goal of objectivity. However, the approach varied. Philosophical positivism beginning with Auguste Comte holds that science provides the model of real knowledge. Hippolyte Taine offered a way of understanding the history of art through a combination of social psychology and positivism, an approach in keeping with the scientific agenda of the late Second Empire and early Third Republic. Taine divided the superior European south from the inferior north. Yet he turned to Netherlandish Renaissance art seeking the best of the Germanic (northern) race.

In 1897 Gauguin wrote a lengthy philosophical document entitled “The Catholic Church and Modern Times” in which he detailed his thoughts on science and the soul, the potential for a harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world, and the current moment as ripe for social regeneration. In his treatise the artist rejected the doctrines of institutional Catholicism, discussed comparative religion, followed a broadly Buddhist-based theosophical program in which the soul reincarnates and argued for the compatibility of the organization of the physical body with spiritual life through neurology. This essay will examine Gauguin’s interest in neo-vitalism as a way to combat pervasive materialism through science itself and how his philosophy of life, imbued with a spiritual and communal message (of which vitalism was an important part) , was to be projected to his audience through art.