NGV Salon hangs its 19th-century collection

The National Gallery of Victoria has found a way to display more of its collection: the centuries-old Salon style.

Art handler James Young prepares works for hanging at the NGV. Picture: Eugene Hyland

From the second half of the 17th century, and especially from the 18th century onwards, the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture would hold a large annual exhibition that became the main official occasion for serious work, other than major commissions for churches or palaces, to be displayed to the public. There were art shops too, where pictures could be bought, but the Salon, as it came to be known, was the occasion for official recognition.

After the French Revolution, when the academy was abolished and then re-established in a different form, with its teaching functions transferred to the new Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Salon continued to grow throughout the 19th century. The sheer number of works in different styles could be overwhelming to the public, and led directly to the modern genre of newspaper art criticism.

Denis Diderot was a precursor in the 18th century, writing for a private newsletter, Friedrich Melchior Grimm’s Correspondance litteraire, that allowed him to express his views with wonderful frankness, and by the middle of the 19th century competing reviews appeared in the many newspapers. The best of the new art critics was Charles Baudelaire, also the greatest poet of his time, who reviewed the Salons of 1845, 1846 and 1859 as well as the art component of the Exposition Universelle of 1855.

The Salon style of hanging thus refers to a collection of pictures set quite tightly in several rows and largely covering the wall space, not unlike the way paintings are displayed in private collections and quite unlike the sparse hanging generally preferred in modern museology. In great museums, the most familiar example of this type of hanging is probably in the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence.

This kind of hanging may not always be ideal for the display of the greatest masterpieces and is impractical in museums where crowds gather around the most famous works. But it is quite congenial for works of a more modest nature, and the new Salon hang at the National Gallery of Victoria, including paintings and some fine bronze sculptures, is an inspired solution that allows many more works to be shown while also conveying something of a collective impression of the taste and sensibility of the 19th century.

As in the old Salon, the effect is impressive both in quality and in diversity. Labels, with more than 140 works, would be impractical, so they are dispensed with, which also has the advantage of inviting us to look first at the works on their own terms, as pictures, instead of resorting immediately to the crutch of words and the reassurance of names.

The information is available, of course, on digital screens discreetly positioned in the centre of the room and with chairs to sit on. Here visitors can scan a 360-degree panorama of the room and simply touch any image they want to learn more about. The label that appears includes far more information than could have been included on the wall, as well as expandable high-resolution digital images that allow us to explore details that cannot be seen from ground level or often indeed with the naked eye. In this way, the room combines some of the best features of traditional display and contemporary technology. As on the best gallery websites today, we are able to inspect works in unprecedented close-up views that reveal the movement of the brush and the sequence and superposition of pigments.

But the online experience, though mesmeric, can be disembodied: here the physical presence of the pictures also allows us to appreciate and even to feel their real scale and the material qualities of the paint surface.

The works on display, which in reality span a period from the late 18th century to the first years of the 20th, represent a huge variety of styles and genres from artists who range from the very famous to the almost completely obscure, reminding us that the history of art is more complex and ultimately more interesting than relatively limited narratives that confine themselves either to the greatest individuals or to movements considered innovative and therefore significant.

There are dozens of the kind of narrative pictures that flourished in the 19th century, only to be despised by modernists and then eventually rediscovered with shifts in taste in the last generation or so. These pictures can be divided roughly into history and genre paintings, the former dealing with significant events and the latter with non-specific and humbler episodes of daily life.

A century or two earlier, history paintings were mostly either scriptural or mythological or, less often, historical in the narrow sense, and sometimes, though more rarely still, dealing with contemporary events. Genre scenes, on the other hand, were usually picturesque images of peasants, workers or even gypsies or brigands.

By the 19th century, growing nationalism expanded the repertoire of recent and local history subjects, while the moralising and sentimentality of the Victorians transformed genre pictures into sermons and tear-jerkers.

Thus history subjects here include Vaclav Brozik’s picture of the so-called defenestration of Prague in 1618, which was considered the beginning of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), the bloodiest episode of religious conflict in Europe’s history.

On the other hand, EM Ward’s Josephine signing the act of her divorce (1853) is, like a sort of historical novel, an opportunity to reimagine a whole cast of famous characters of a couple of generations earlier, including not only Napoleon but Murat and Talleyrand.

The 19th century’s concern with history leads to an increasing emphasis on accuracy in reconstructing not only events but settings and details of costume, much as in period dramas and historical films today. For ancient subjects, authenticity had been important since the renaissance and especially the 17th century, but in the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, historical reconstruction reaches a new level of minute detail. Despite this passion for accuracy, 19th-century artists did not have the same profound affinity for the traditional subjects of history painting as those of the Renaissance and ­baroque periods, and the result is that the ­expression of these stories is sometimes off-key, whether overly emphatic, ambiguous or ­saccharine.

On the one hand, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s picture of the Roman hero Marcus Curtius sacrificing himself for the good of the state is characteristically and rather clumsily melodramatic. On the other, Ary Scheffer’s Christ and the Maries and his The temptation of Christ (both 1854) illustrate the facile religiosity, reminiscent of holy cards, that appalled Baudelaire.

A number of pictures are interesting in the way that they echo the styles of earlier masters. Thus Charles Cope’s painting of a Puritan family embarking for the American colonies in the 17th century (1856) clearly draws inspiration from the great Raphael Cartoons then on display at Hampton Court Palace in London before being moved to the new Victoria and Albert Museum in 1865.

The rare subject of Adam and Eve finding the body of Abel (1869), painted by the little-known Natale Carta, shows the ­influence of Poussin, and Jean-Jacques Henner’s Idyll (1874) emulates the tenderness of Correggio.

Sometimes the stylistic affinities are much closer, and the work of contemporary imitators or possibly pupils was mistaken for that of the master himself. There is, for example, a small work in the manner of Gericault, and another acquired as a Goya but now no longer a plausible attribution. Closer to the mark is a fine little study of a nude in the style of Corot.

The range of approaches to the figure is striking in a period that we used to criticise for its sexual hypocrisy, at once prudish and prurient, although similar attitudes have recently made a dramatic and surprising reappearance in our own time, especially in the US and English-speaking societies under American influence, such Australia.

Works are prepared for hanging at the NGV by art handler Tony Mahony. Eugene Hyland

At one end of the spectrum are paintings such as St George Hare’s physically discreet but narratively suggestive The victory of Faith (1890-91) or Jules Lefebvre’s The Grasshopper (La Cigale, 1872). The title refers to La Fontaine’s retelling of the fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, in which the heartless Ant, who has been gathering stores throughout the summer, refuses to help the likeable but feckless Grasshopper, who has spent the time singing and now faces the onset of winter with no supplies. In the painting, autumn is suggested by the fallen leaves, while the misspent summer is hinted at in the rather peculiar treatment of the girl’s anatomy, with its fetishistic displacement of her sex to the fold where pubic mound meets thigh.

In contrast, the small nude study by William Etty is appealing in its freshness and in the honesty with which it represents a body that has most probably given birth (1843). Etty considered the female body the most beautiful subject of painting, but was regularly reproached for being too sensual. Another fine realistic study, half a century later, is by the brilliant young — and sadly short-lived — Australian artist Hugh Ramsay.

There are several good portraits too, including a new acquisition that readers should now be able to admire, but which was just about to be hung when I visited the room. It is a fine neoclassical portrait by Louise Bouteiller of Cesarine d’Houdetot, Baroness of Barante, sitting in the botanical garden of Pamplemousses district in Mauritius.

What is a young French aristocrat doing in Mauritius? It was a convenient place to move to during the revolutionary years, to avoid the guillotine, and many families that settled on the island more than two centuries ago still have connections there. But there is something even more interesting about this young woman, and her name should ring a bell for any reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, one of the most remarkable, surprising and radically self-exposing autobiographies ever written.

Among the memorable stories Rousseau tells — it was illustrated by a plate in the 1837 edition — was when he was working in a cottage that an aristocratic family had made available to him on its estate. One day the beautiful young lady of the house, Sophie, who had been out hunting, called in to see how he was getting on with his work. Rousseau recalls that she ­entered, unusually, dressed in a man’s costume, with knee-length boots and carrying a riding crop.

Not entirely surprisingly, the philosopher was smitten by this ambiguous vision of beauty with hints of the dominatrix persona that evidently appealed to his erotic sensibility. And the connection with our picture? Well, it turns out that Cesarine d’Houdetot was the daughter of Cesar Louis d’Houdetot, who was, as the reader will by now have guessed, the son of Sophie d’Houdetot. So the new member of the NGV’s community of portraits, while herself barely remembered as the author of a couple of pious books, is the granddaughter of the woman who bewitched Rousseau.

Salon re-hang of 19th-century collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne