Sunday, November 5, 2017

19th-century European Views of Interiors (Watercolor)

 Jean-François Thomas de Thomon
Architectural composition - Interior of Egyptian Temple
1803
watercolor, gouache
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"The manufacture of time by a press agency is by no means simple, the current events industries' information not being satisfied with recording 'what happens', since then everything that 'happens' would have to be recorded, but 'what happens' only happens in not being 'everything', in being differentiated from everything.  Information only has value as the result of a hierarchization of 'what happens': in selecting what merits the name of 'event', these industries co-produce, at the very least, access to 'what happens' through giving it the status of event.  Nothing 'takes place' or 'happens' except what is 'covered'.  Thousands of (potential) events, at a minimum, happen without happening, take place without taking place, or take place without happening  and thus will not have taken place, will not have happened  but rather will go to their anonymous and improbable destinations."

 Bernard Stiegler, from The Industrialization of Memory, translated by Stephen Barker in Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Stanford University Press, 2009)

Hilaire Thierry
Salon in Empire taste
ca. 1820
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Eugène Delacroix
Fireplace
ca. 1824
watercolor
Philadelphia Museum of Art

John Sell Cotman
Errand-boy asleep in a church
ca. 1825
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Anonymous artist
Painter's Studio
1820s
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Joseph-Eugène Lacroix
A Studio in the Villa Medici, Rome
1835
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jakob Alt
View from the Artist's Studio in Alservorstadt toward Dornbach
1836
watercolor
Albertina, Vienna

"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.  Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused.  In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge, they were formed at that time.  And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves." 

 Sigmund Freud, from Screen Memories (1899) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, translated by James and Alix Strachey and published by the Hogarth Press (1948)

Anonymous artist
Interior of a Library
ca. 1830-50
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Eduard Gaertner
Concert-room of Sans Souci Palace, Potsdam
1852
watercolor, gouache
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Romolo Liverani
Stage-set design for Il Trovatore
ca. 1853
watercolor
Morgan Library, New York

Félix Duban
Architectural fantasy in the style of Pompeii
1856
watercolor
Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

Karl Wilhelm Streckfuss
Artist's Studio in Berlin
1860s
watercolor
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Adolph Menzel
Choirstalls in Mainz Cathedral
1869
watercolor, gouache
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

John Singer Sargent
Tiepolo ceiling, Milan
ca. 1898-1900
watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York