Theodore Gericault's "Grande suite anglaise": Sources, iconography and significance.
Item
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Title
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Theodore Gericault's "Grande suite anglaise": Sources, iconography and significance.
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Identifier
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AAI9807971
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identifier
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9807971
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Creator
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Mishory, Alec.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Diane Kelder
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations
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Abstract
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Theodore Gericault began making lithographs in 1817, after his return from Italy. His fascination with the new medium stimulated a renewed concern with contemporary subject matter as well as a serach for a modern style. His most important contribution to this medium is the suite of twelve prints entitled Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone (The English Suite or La grande suite anglaise) which he executed in London in 1821. As opposed to Gericault's oil paintings and drawings, which have been analysed and researched in detail, scholars have been satisfied so far with formal descriptions of his print oeuvre. This dissertation presents a thorough analysis of the twelve prints comprising the English Suite. The series, as its title suggests, is indeed varied. Nine of the prints deal with horses and their tenders: working horses, horses groomed for riding, horses in military use and horses in the process of being shod. Through a realistic rendering Gericault succeeded in conveying the hardships of the English working class, referring indirectly to various aspects of contemporary social abuse. He contrasted these with the allure and elegance of high-bred horses, thus referring to the gaps which separate between the various English social classes. The three prints dedicated to the London urban scene refer to the horrible conditions of the poor and the insane. Rather than read these works as genre, anecdotal renderings, this dissertation argues that Gericault's depictions are based on a veristic approach, devoid of idylic or genre tendencies. The prints exhibit the artist's creation of symbols for human suffering, whose objectivity has no parallel in contemporary English or French art. In the English Suite Gericualt touched upon themes shunned by his contemporaries but recognized by authors and artists many years after his death. The depiction of such themes is one of the first artistic attempts at making a 'low' subject into a great modern masterpiece. Gericault's lithographs show a virtuoso mastering of the new technique of lithography; the series can be counted as one of the first cases of European art in which prints equal large scale oil paintings in their powerful, communicative and expressive formal traits. The detailed iconographic and formal analyses of the English Suite allows one to further appreciate Gericault's realist tendencies and establish him as a most significant precursor of French Realism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
