Nostalgia for the Past Nostalgia Can Take

Nostalgia for the Past Nostalgia can take many forms, but can perhaps be summarized by the phrase 'appropriating selected aspects of the past for the use of the present'. It tends to involve an emotional or spiritual response to the past rather than a rationalizing one, and as a result is associated with the art of sentiment rather than of intellect.

As we shall see, however, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists who made use of nostalgia were prepared to shape its appeal in intellectual as well as purely sentimental or aesthetic forms. Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) was a passionately political artist, a proponent of history painting in its most elevated form and of the neoclassicist aesthetic.

His 'The Oath of the Horatii' of 1784 (Louvre, Paris) depicts a scene from the Roman historian Livy: the three Horatii brothers pledge to fight the three Curiatii brothers in order to settle a dispute between their respective cities of Rome and Alba -- they do this despite the pleadings of their mother and their sisters, one of whom is betrothed to one of the Curiatii (while one of the Curiatii sisters is betrothed to one of the Horatii).

The painting is an austere one, with the figures -- the Horatii on the left, the elder Horatius, their father, in the center, and the lamenting women on the right -- grouped against an almost abstract architectural setting of three bare, massive arches. This is not the kind of image that might come to mind when the term 'nostalgia' is used, but this is a deeply nostalgic image, looking back to the supposed virtues of Ancient Rome as a model through which the contemporary world can be renewed.

The subject is one of unyielding honor and bravery, charged with fate and grief as well as nobility and self-sacrifice. The figures are heroic, with the three Horatii united in their oath, their taut strength, and the intensity with which they focus on the swords upheld in their father's hands; while the women are arranged in decorous hopeless grief on the right-hand side.

All the figures are garbed with classical simplicity and are visually united by the color scheme of subdued greys and blues lit by glowing red and flesh tones. The implication here is of a cleaner, more honorable, more moral social order, in which the noble ideals of self-sacrifice, physical courage and spiritual virtue are upheld. The modern world, David implies, has fallen below this standard, but can redeem itself by seeking to emulate it. At a time of social and political revolution in France, this was a powerful visual message.

A very different message of social and political conservatism is embodied in the second picture to be considered, 'Merry Christmas in the Baron's Hall' (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) painted in 1838 by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806-70). This large panoramic picture shows a scene of Christmas merriment as the artist imagined it might have looked in the hall of a seventeenth-century baron. He is seen seated at the center of a raised dais, a canopy over his seat and a soldier standing guard at his side.

Around his table are finely-dressed lords and ladies. In the foreground, the ceremonial bringing in of the boar's head is taking place, with servants, ceremonial pikemen and musicians accompanying the dish down the stairs into the hall. All around are scenes of merriment and jollity with men, women and children in fine clothes drinking, eating, joking and laughing.

Father Christmas distributes gifts on the right; a young man plays flirtatious games with a group of young women on the left; a jester and a juggler entertain the party, and everywhere there is decoration, food and drink, enjoyment and plenty. This is a vision of 'Merrie England', an England without industrialization or great cities, or a hungry and discontented working class.

Society here is clearly hierarchical -- the squire presiding over all from the high table as his people benefit from his generosity and paternalism -- but it is contented. At a time when the poor were hungry and were feared to be in revolutionary mood, with the period known as the 'hungry forties' just beginning, such imagery represented a desirable and reassuring use of the past for the purposes of the present.

Maclise's canvas is filled with people and activity; there is scarcely a square inch in which something exciting, lively and enjoyable is not going on. It is an intensely human scene of color, bustle and festivity. A very different spirit is to be found in 'The Gate of the Churchyard' (Kunsthalle, Bremen) painted in 1822 by the German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). There are no people at all in this scene of a churchyard gate at evening, with the church itself visible beyond in the gentle sunlight.

A worn path bordered by bare trees ascends from the bottom right of the canvas towards the church, on high ground to the left; a wall of old stone backs up against the path. Through the golden stone archway of the gate the graveyard can be glimpsed, with dark stone crosses visible on the bright green grass, outlined against the sunlit wall of the church beyond. The atmosphere is one of repose and meditative tranquillity.

Yet this picture is similar to the Maclise in its nostalgic appeal to the values of a preceding age. For Friedrich the values he seeks to express are those of the Christian community of the pre-industrial, pre-urban, pre-revolutionary age. The ascending path represents the path of the soul, aspiring to salvation, represented by the church on the hill.

The worn slabs and steps speak of the many feet that have trodden that path, the feet of the faithful of previous ages, and the church itself represents what their faith has built -- an enduring structure of piety and communal devotion to spiritual rather than earthly values. The bare trees speak, like the crosses of the graveyard, of death, but the sunlit scene through the arch conveys the hope of resurrection granted to the faithful.

The picture appeals to the eternal values of a society of faith and urges the onlooker to recreate those values so that the souls of today may put out new leaves, just as the bare trees to either side of the path are doing. Thus, the David can be said to represent political nostalgia; the Maclise, cultural and social nostalgia; the Friedrich, spiritual nostalgia. All these images resurrect a vision of the past in order that it can teach the present a lesson.

The French realist painters of the later nineteenth century are not normally thought of as being infected with nostalgia, but many of the works of such artists as Jules Breton (1827-1906) and Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) have a message of nostalgia in what aspire to be straightforwardly naturalistic depictions of peasant life. Breton's 'The Calling in of the Gleaners' of 1859 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris) depicts the women and girls who have been gathering corn in the fields all day returning at evening carrying the fruits of their labours.

Their tired faces bear witness to their hard work, but their figures and postures are idealized, suggesting the heroic qualities of the peasant life. The scene itself is a beautiful one, with the crescent moon just visible in the late summer evening, golden light on trees and fields, sheep grazing peacefully, and flowers visible among the corn-stalks.

The nostalgic message here would have been clear to the bourgeois society of Second Empire France, a country reasserting itself after the revolution of 1848 and seeking to establish an image of stability and modernity; the true soul of the nation lay in the country, and in the healthy, virtuous people who won their living from the French soil, amid the fertile beauty of the French countryside -- fertile as the peasant women themselves as they carry their sheaves of wheat to be stored in the barn.

A similar idealization of the peasantry is occurring in Millet's 'The Angelus' of 1857-9 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), depicting a peasant couple pausing in their evening labor in the fields to pray in response to the bell of the angelus, ringing from the church visible in the background.

In contrast to the almost pagan cult of natural fertility present in the Breton, this is a celebration of the spiritual virtue of the rural life, a nostalgic celebration of the true values of life -- with the implication that in the cities and the boulevards of bourgeois society, those values have been lost. All the pictures discussed above seek to convey a message through their nostalgia, whether it be social, cultural, political or spiritual.

The final example in this paper is of escapist nostalgia that is largely unburdened with such messages: 'The Mill' of 1882 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98). It shows a riverside scene at evening, with a mill of archaic appearance backed by a sylvan landscape, and three young women dancing on the grass in the foreground while another, on the right, plays a medieval musical instrument.

The figures are dressed in generalized medieval or classical draperies; the buildings behind them have the appearance of ancient Roman or early medieval structures; the whole has the impression of another time and another place, without being specific, but a time and place characterized by peace, innocence, lapping water, evening sunshine, and the unpressured pursuit of beauty and happiness. Everyone can feel nostalgia for such a scene, for it is a dream transformed into paint.

It is an image intended to evoke the longing for a time of contentment that is not only forever lost, but which almost certainly never existed. Question 6: Urbanization and Industrialization In 1801 the French artist Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), who was working in England, painted 'Coalbrookdale by Night' (Science Museum, London). This dramatic scene embodies the impact of the new industries on the rural landscape of England: the flames of the forges belch out across the night sky, bathing the scene in unnatural red light.

To the left and right trees can be seen, reminding the viewer that this is essentially a rural scene; in the foreground a team of horses of the kind normally to be seen pulling a plough or a haywain are conveying a metal casting away from the foundries. These details emphasize the degree to which industry is transforming a pastoral landscape. The artist represents that transformation as beautiful and sublime, in the true romantic tradition, but it is also potentially disruptive, even terrifying, in its scale, power, and uncontrollability.

The period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth saw Britain transformed from an agrarian society to an industrialized, urbanized society -- the first in the world in which more people lived in towns than in the country, and in which more worked in industry than in agriculture. By the end of the nineteenth century much of the rest of Europe had followed in the same path.

This transformation was reflected in the art of the period, although not all artists reflected it in the same way or to the same degree, and some responded by denying the reality or importance of that transformation altogether. The painter Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) painted several paintings that reflected industrial scenes. One of the most interesting in the tension it reveals between rural setting and industrial process is 'The Iron Forge viewed from Without' from 1779 (State Hermitage Museum, St.

Petersburg) which appears to show a conventional moonlit landscape, painted with virtuoso skill, of a cottage in a rural scene beside a road leading off among the fields. But the entire wall of the cottage has been torn away to reveal a scene of fire and activity; four figures, dramatically lit in reds and yellows, are clustered around a forge that belches flame and sparks and illuminates the whole interior of the building.

It is as if within the stone walls of this cottage is a cave of fire, a mouth leading to hell itself. There is an even more dramatic discontinuity between industrial process and the landscape in which it is set here than in the Loutherbourg of 1801, suggesting simultaneously a nation in denial about its new industrial nature, and the power of that new industry to overturn accepted views of landscape, society, and human activity. The English painter J.M.W.

Turner (1775-1851) was deeply affected by the transformation he saw going on around him and reflected it in numerous works of art ranging from paintings of the expanding industrial city of Leeds to the coal wharfs on the working river of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 'Rain Steam and Speed' (National Gallery, London) which he painted in 1843-4, Turner depicted one of the chief agents of that transformation: the railway.

He painted an express train from London to the west of England, crossing the Thames river at Maidenhead in a swirl of cloud, steam, fire and movement. The train is powerfully present in this picture as an agent of change: located in the centre of the canvas and rushing out at the viewer along an energetic diagonal, the train is carrying not only people, goods and ideas, but the energy of the metropolis itself from which it has emerged.

It thus represents simultaneously urbanization and industrialization, and dramatically suggests the role of the railways as the arteries of the new energies that are shaping the destiny of the nation and the world. Like Loutherbourg, but unlike Wright, Turner appears to welcome this transforming agency. Impressionist art in France depended on the modern world, for its modern chemical paints, its galleries and patrons, and its subjects. Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted many pictures that reflected the industrialization and urbanization of France that was going on around him.

Here we are going to look at two in detail. The first, painted in 1873, is 'The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil' (private collection). Argenteuil, upstream from Paris on the river Seine, was a favorite location both for day trips to the country among Parisians and for painters who relished its clear air and attractive settings. By the 1870s, however, industry and urban growth was changing the formerly small village of Argenteuil dramatically.

The railway had come and a frequent service linked the town to Paris; holiday homes and hotels were springing up to house Parisian pleasure-seekers and holiday makers; the river itself was increasingly a working river carrying barge traffic; and Paris's main waterworks had been built on the bank of the Seine just downstream of the town, drawing in clean water.