Beaux-Arts, fromage, guillotines, and other French concepts

I started learning French about ten months ago. It was an idea that I toyed with for the ridiculously large span of one to thirteen years prior (when it was offered in middle school and my dearest mother thought Spanish would prove more useful in my future and made me study it instead – I will neither agree or disagree with that point all of these years later). Initially this venture, ten months ago, started out of spite – I was surrounded by French speakers and could never get a word in edgewise because I never knew what the hell they were talking about. I planned to learn it the best I could, without telling them of course, and then shock everyone when I was well-versed enough to call them out on their merde.


I relate to this look all too well.
Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski), Thérèse, 1938.
Oil on cardboard mounted on wood, 100.3 x 81.3 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Needless to say that never happened as one cannot learn a language in ten months without actually eating, sleeping, and breathing it (I have a life, after all). I do listen harder and repeat phrases in my head. I bother French speakers with inane grammatical and pronunciation questions. Sometimes immature young men will teach me a phrase or two and send me off to repeat it to another immature guy and they’ll all have a giggle at my expense, leaving me supremely embarrassed, but equally proud of my ability to mimic.


My namesake was French!
Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain), Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, 1645-1649.
Oil on canvas, 99.5 x 127 сm.
Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, The State Heritage Museum, St Petersburg.

For the longest time I never had a single nice thing to say about anything French – except maybe Amélie, but that doesn’t really count considering its international notoriety. I don’t care for frog’s legs, snail, or duck confit; I don’t really enjoy Impressionism, mostly because endlessly repeated titles make fact-checking a nightmare; call me Guy de Maupassant when it comes to the Eiffel Tower (fun fact: Maupassant ate at the Tower’s base daily because he hated it so and that was the only place in the city that he was unable to see it); do not get me started on roquefort, maroilles, or epoisses (ugh, ick, bleh).

 


Hippolyte Flandrin, Young Man Sitting by the Sea, figure study, 1836.
Oil on canvas, 98 x 124 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Thankfully now, I could probably rustle up a few nice things to say – the politeness of gentlemen, Realist and Romantic paintings, the frankness of women, the invention of the guillotine, etc. I am most especially in awe of the vast collection of art housed in France and could probably spend one week in the Musée du Louvre and neither see enough or tire of it.

Since most of us don’t have the time, money, language skills, or (if you’re like me) patience to endure France, visit the National Gallery of Art, Washington to see Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac from 27 January to 26 May. It promises a beautiful array of French art. Don’t want to travel too far from home? Check out French Painting by Victoria Charles for all of the artistic glamour without the offensive cheeses.

-Le Lorrain Andrews

So Peculiarly English: topographical watercolours

So peculiarly English.... a label I just can’t seem to shake off. But what is it that makes me and fifty million others so English, and so peculiar? I love the great stereotypes of England and its mad inhabitants, with our tea-drinking, cheese-rolling, queue-respecting and morris dancing. So how disappointed must I have been when I saw that the V&A, in order to celebrate Englishness, has put on an exhibition dedicated to English watercolour painting?

English watercolours are not peculiar in any way, shape or form. In fact, they are the opposite, the very essence of banality. The only peculiar thing about them is that the English were the only ones to bother with them, and that they insisted on doing it for so long.

Not only that, but topographical landscapes, so you can see the English countryside in all its... dreariness. Early topographical watercolours, writes Bruce MacEvoy, were “primarily used as an objective record of an actual place in an era before photography”; as land surveillance maps, for military strategy (to help us out with our colonising), for the mega-rich to show off their wealthy estates (built in all probability with money from the slave trade), and for archaeological digs, for when we wanted to have a record of whose lands we had already pillaged. Doesn’t it feel great to be English?


John Constable, Stonehenge, 1835. Watercolour on paper, 38.7 x 59.7 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

When we weren’t painting watercolours to celebrate our upper classes’ moral ineptitude, we were depicting scenes of England’s lush greenery, her rolling hills, picturesque villages and rocky coastline. Or rather, Turner, Constable and Gainsborough were. People can’t get enough of their tedious seascapes and landscapes, as if they’ve never seen a tree or a rock before in their lives. The only redeeming feature of Turner is that apparently he once had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea, which a great example of English eccentricity right there.


J.M.W. Turner, Warkworth Castle, Northumberland – thunder storm approaching at sunset, 1799.
Watercolour on white paper, 52.1 x 74.9 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.

Forget the 427 identical paintings of abbeys and vales, heaths and lakes; I’d rather see something truly peculiar, like a painting of Turner tied to a mast of a sinking ship. Then, and only then, would I come to your watercolour exhibition.

If, unlike me, you have a great love for the topographical landscapists of yore, get down to the V&A for their exhibition ‘So Peculiarly English: topographical watercolours’ (from the 7th June 2012 - 1st March 2013). Read up on a classic English painter before (or after) your visit with this Turner ebook, or find more art you'll love on the Ebook-Gallery.