Four Periods in Art History: Journey Through Time

Art History Time Travel

Our first stop will be the eighteenth century, where we will investigate Neoclassical painting. We will be visiting Sir Joshua Reynolds, as he works on his 1770 oil on canvas "Portrait of a Black Man" -- and we will be asking if the heroic structure of the painting is meant to contain some sort of ideological message, for example asserting the humanity of his subject against the evils of slavery (which was then still common). We should also find out if indeed the portrait is of Dr. Samuel Johnson's servant Francis Barber, as Johnson's progressive attitude in opposing slavery (and his generous treatment of Barber, to whom he left his estate) might explain why this figure is treated heroically in the painting. Then we will visit Jacques-Louis David, as he works on his stark 1793 Neoclassical oil on canvas depiction of "The Death of Marat." We will interrogate David about his political purposes in this painting -- for example, his portrait of the dead Marat in his bathtub entirely avoids depicting the reason why Marat was in a bathtub when he died (he suffered from a horrible and disfiguring skin disease).

The time machine will stop next in the later nineteenth century, when we will investigate some Impressionist painting. Our first stop will be in London in 1875, to interrogate the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler about his oil on canvas study "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket." We will want to interrogate him about the lawsuit that he filed against the art critic John Ruskin, who accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" with this daring painting. We will also interrogate Whistler as to whether he would consider the painting to be Impressionist or not -- it seems like he may have considered it to be straightforward realism (fading fireworks in the night sky do look like this painting) but chose the obscure subject to illustrate a Wildean idea of art for art's sake. We will then move to Claude Monet's garden at Giverny, where we will attempt to catch him completing his 1897-8 "Nympheas" (one of his famous paintings of water lilies, now in the LA County Museum of Art). Monet is a textbook Impressionist painter, but we will interrogate him as to whether his problems with his own eyesight (he developed cataracts) had any influence on his signature style.