The Europeans

Photos

1. Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Pauline Viardot, oil on canvas, 1840. Scheffer said of her that she was ‘dreadfully ugly, but if I were to see her again, I would fall madly in love with her’.

2. The fiery Manuel Garcia in the role of Rossini’s Otello. Engraving by Pierre Langlumé, c. 1821.

3. Louis Viardot, c. 1839, during his directorship of the Théâtre Italien.

4. Maria Malibran as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello (oil on canvas, c. 1830).

5. The earliest known photographic image of Ivan Turgenev, taken at the time of his first acquaintance with Pauline Viardot. Daguerreotype by Josef Weninger, St Petersburg, 1844.

6. No Handel opera was performed in full during the entire nineteenth century, but Pauline Viardot kept alive an interest in his operas’ arias by singing them in recitals. This arrangement of her celebrated version of ‘Lascio ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo was published in London in 1840, shortly after she had sung it there.

7. The cult of Beethoven reached its peak in Europe during the 1840s. In Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano by Josef Danhauser (oil on canvas, 1840) George Sand and Rossini (standing over Liszt) are pictured in a group of diverse artists united in their veneration of the German composer.

8. Courbet’s large-scale painting A Burial at Ornans (oil on canvas, 1849–50) was attacked by critics for its coarsely realist representation of ordinary people, deemed inappropriate for art. Courbet said the painting was ‘in reality the burial of Romanticism’.

9. Cézanne, Girl at the Piano (oil on canvas, 1868). The piano had a transformative effect on the position of women in the home.

10. Gérôme’s The Duel after a Masked Ball (oil on canvas, 1857) was one of the most widely copied and engraved pictures in the nineteenth century.

11. Clair de lune à Valmondois by Daubigny (1877). An example of the clichéverre method, pioneered by the Barbizon painters and photographers, in which the artist etches on a glass plate coated with collodion and exposes it to light against a sheet of sensitized paper. Its subtle effects had an impact on painting.

12. Daguerreotype of Pauline Viardot, St Petersburg, 1853. Turgenev had it mounted in a wooden case.

13. Louis Viardot (photograph, 1868). One of a series of postcards of European writers sold individually and published in eight volumes between 1855 and 1890.

14. Pauline Viardot’s musical salon in Paris (engraving, 1858). Pauline is seated at her Cavaillé-Coll organ.

15. Pauline standing with her daughters Claudie (left) and Marianne (right) (photograph, Baden-Baden, 1870).

16. The Konversationshaus at Baden-Baden (hand-coloured steel engraving, 1858).

17. Degas, La Chanson du chien (gouache, pastel and monotype on paper, 1875–77), a marvellous evocation of the singing style of Thérésa (Emma Valladon), the most famous of the café concert singers in the 1860s and 1870s.

18. Tissot, London Visitors (oil on canvas, 1874). Armed with a guidebook, the well-dressed tourists are standing at the entrance of the National Gallery contemplating which site they should visit next. The two youths are ‘bluecoat boys’, students of Christ’s Hospital School who served as tour guides.

19. Repin’s portrait of Turgenev (oil on canvas, 1874), commissioned by Tretiakov for his museum of Russian art in Moscow. The Viardots did not like the portrait, and Repin was obliged to make changes, souring his relations with Turgenev.

20–21. Khalarmov’s portrait (oil on canvas, 1875) was favoured by Turgenev and the Viardots, who displayed it with the artist’s portraits of Pauline and Louis Viardot (plate 21, oil on canvas, 1875) in their picture gallery at the rue de Douai.

22. Corot, Peasant Woman Collecting Wood (oil on canvas, Italy, c. 1870). Turgenev was the owner of several Corot landscapes. He loved the sensory ‘impression’ they created of actually being in nature.

23. Rousseau’s Le Givre (‘Hoar frost’, oil on canvas, 1845), one of Europe’s most expensive paintings when it was sold for 60,000 francs in 1873.

24. Renoir, La Grenouillère (oil on canvas, 1869). Painted by Monet as well as Renoir, the Grenouillère riverside restaurant near Bougival was ‘the birthplace of Impressionism’, according to Kenneth Clark.

25. Manet’s portrait of Zola (oil on canvas, 1868). On the wall above the desk is a reproduction of Manet’s Olympia (1863), and on it Zola’s pamphlet on Manet, which helped to promote the artist’s work.

26. Degas, The Orchestra at the Opéra (oil on canvas, 1870). The composer Chabrier, a friend and early patron of the Impressionists, is depicted in the box, the sole member of the audience to be seen.

27. Renoir, Madame Georges Charpentier et ses enfants (oil on canvas, 1878). The publisher and his wife, Marguérite, were key supporters of the Impressionists, helping them to get established through their salon.

28. Monet, Gare St.-Lazare (oil on canvas, 1877), one of several paintings of the station included by Monet in the Third Exhibition of the Impressionists, where it was praised by Zola: ‘You can hear the rumbling of the trains, their smoke billowing under the vast glass interior. Our artists must find the poetry in these stations, as their fathers found it in the forests and rivers.’

29. ‘The Pirate Publisher – An International Burlesque That Has Had the Longest Run on Record’, cartoon, Puck, 24 February 1886. Authors from Europe and America (among them Wilkie Collins, Tennyson, Browning, Verne, Daudet, Zola, Björnsen, Freitag and Mark Twain) accuse the publisher of reprinting their works abroad without paying them, while the publisher insists that he is supported by the law. The Berne Convention, adopted by ten states in September 1886, was the first effective law of international copyright.

30. Villa Viardot at Bougival (photograph c. 1900).

31. Turgenev’s dacha (‘Les Frênes’) at Bougival (photograph, 2018).

32. Detail of the stained-glass panels in the front door at ‘Les Frênes’. The scenes depict Turgenev hunting in the Russian countryside (photograph, 2018).

33. Portrait medallion of Pauline Viardot worn by Turgenev, with his initials on the back. Musée Tourguéniev, Bougival (photograph, 2018).

34. Turgenev’s bedroom at ‘Les Frênes’ (photograph, 2018).

35. Claudie Viardot’s pencil drawing of Turgenev moments after he had died, 3 September 1883.

36. Pauline Viardot in old age (photograph, c. 1900).