Scenes from Art and Illustration

Nineteenth-century art was diverse in its schools and techniques, but the art of love and seduction was unrelentingly moralistic. In France, the great painters of the Impressionist school were painting luminous canvases filled with tourists, family scenes, and nature—gardens, fields, and water. In England, however, the Pre-Raphaelite painters were painting women with an emphasis on their beauty of their flesh. Pre-Raphaelites sought to unify the flesh and the spirit, and their paintings often contained highly moralistic "narratives" expressed through sensual bodies and gorgeous color and detail. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt were perhaps the most successful artists of the school, and their portraits of women within moral melodramas created stereotypes of women that are still popular. Viewers of Pre-Raphaelite paintings need to be aware that the artists frequently used symbolic details to provide moral explanations of the scene's narrative content.. Hunt's painting, The Awakening Conscience , is a good example. The painting pictures a young woman arising from the lap of a young man who is seated at the piano. The details of the decor, such as the cat on the floor with the bird and the print on the wall of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, tell us that she is a kept woman, who has just undergone an epiphany about her moral transgressions.

In contrast, Edgar Degas's painting The Rape may puzzle us with its subdued colors and neat bedroom. The space and postures of the people in this interior setting may challenge us to define what kind of rape scene we are seeing. Augustus Egg's triptych, however, poses few problems of interpretation in this drama of a married woman's infidelities. Since divorce was virtually unavailable to a woman who had been unfaithful, the ways to resolve adultery were largely limited to forgiveness or abandonment. Egg's paintings stress the hurt to children, both the daughters the woman must leave behind and the unwanted child of her lover, who has, apparently, abandoned her, too.

Illustration in journals and newspapers burgeoned in the nineteenth century due to innovations in print technology. Much of popular illustration was rather crude in execution with lots of black ink and little subtlety in light and dark tones. Still, illustrations could be quite effective in achieving their purposes, to portray some melodramatic scene from a popular novel or accompany an account of an actual crime or court case. The contemporary popularity of films and television dramas of crime, complete with the most lurid scenes of violence, should make it easy for us to understand the fascination many people in the earlier century saw in these pictures.

Illustrations from papers and journals were usually designed to sell papers and journals. They are often sentimental pictures of lovers, or exaggerated scenes of conflict between men and women, occasionally with children present. When serialized novels are illustrated, a common choice of subject is lovers in a private moment, shown with greater detail than with the delicacy and indirection the reader would find in the text. Graphic artists seemed to have more leeway to portray the intimacies of the boudoir or lovers embracing than writers had to describe such scenes. Topics for illustration were often the moment of betrayal, the dangerous flirtation, or the first meeting. Other popular illustrations were satiric in nature, focusing on the absurdities of the marriage market.

Some popular novels and volumes of poetry were lavishly illustrated, and the artistic quality of the illustrations increased with the seriousness of the literary work. The drawings for Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" are more explicit than the text, but not indelicate.The illustrations from Little Women are more wholesome, as befits the young women who were a substantial part of the audience for this popular book.

Art and illustration provide representations of the nineteenth century's understanding of love and seduction, but we also need to interrogate these representations. The commercial function of illustration and the mechanics of its production play an important role in determining content. Are these illustrations meant to depict real-life scenes, or appeal to the audience? In trying to understand love and seduction in the nineteenth century, art and illustration can be important, but we must look at these scenes with multiple perspectives from history and literature.

Art and Illustration