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Moose
This painting is a reminder that Bierstadt did not limit his production to landscapes. On his travels he did numerous studies of wild animals, and beginning in the late 1870s, he sometimes made them the chief subject of his paintings. Such works link him to Rosa Bonheur, Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), and other important nineteenth-century animal painters.
Moose was probably painted after 1880, since the foremost animal seems to be based on the bull shot by the artist on the Maine border that year. Proud of having stalked and killed the bull moose with the eighth-largest antlers in sporting history, Bierstadt had the head stuffed and mounted on the wall of his studio.
In this painting the artist seems keen to emphasize the nobility of the forest beasts. The bull poses regally, imitating the stag in Landseer’s exceedingly famous Monarch of the Glen (1851), as he moves from shadow into sunlight. The soft glow forms a halo behind the spectacular antlers and, for greater realism, shines through the ears. The three-quarter viewpoint subordinates the most ungainly features of the moose-its heavy muzzle, hanging dewlap, and hump at its shoulders. The legs and body are made more slender, but the head is characteristically long.
Although the artist has ennobled the bull moose, this painting also demonstrates his considerable anatomical knowledge of this large ungulate. He distinguishes between the adult male’s typical palmate antlers and the spikes of the yearling depicted behind him. The cow exhibits an awkward profile with fleshy nose and hump, although Bierstadt neglected to include its dewlap, or “bell.” He places the animals appropriately in a forest setting, a natural habitat of the moose, and features in the foreground a white birch, whose twigs and bark are a staple of the animal’s diet. He created a soft lighting, for this shy creature is usually most active at dawn and dusk. The sprinkling of red leaves indicates an autumnal season consistent with the fully developed antlers of the bull, which sprout in April and are shed in December or January.
At the time this work was painted, the moose was nearing extinction in the United States from over-hunting. By the mid-1890s, there was finally a public outcry to save these rapidly declining game animals. It is ironic that Bierstadt as a hunter contributed to their drastic decline, while as a painter he celebrated them as natural inhabitants of the American wilderness.
NOTE: Bierstadt gave the antlers of the bull that he shot to the New York Zoological Society, which sent them on to the Boston Museum of Science.
Yosemite Valley
This painting shows nearly the same view as Looking up the Yosemite Valley, although El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks appear somewhat closer. Bierstadt also shows a broader expanse of the Merced River and mist at the base of Bridalveil Fall. The depths of the valley are less hazy, so it is easier to make out Sentinel Rock and beyond it the tip of Half Dome and Clouds Rest. Details are sharper and the artist has varied the shapes of rocks and trees. The landscape is animated only by the three deer in the foreground, evoking the valley in its primitive state.
Yosemite Valley demonstrates the approach to landscape Bierstadt developed while in Germany. It is a compromise between the objectivity of Realism and the idealism of more traditional landscapes. He began by making on-site sketches in pencil and oil, collecting examples of wildlife and Indian artifacts, and taking photographs. He used these documents for reference in the studio, where he created compositions calculated to give unity and emotional impact. This combination of documentation and studio planning is not unique to Bierstadt, who would have been aware of contemporary German and American landscape painters who worked the same way.
In Yosemite Valley, the general topography is correct, but secondary motifs, like dead stumps in the river and the trees along its banks, are positioned to draw the eye back to the granite landmarks and to contrast with the light mistiness beyond. Such sudden light effects have emotional value, here suggesting the valley as a dreamy apparition, and are quite different from the more gradual lighting preferred by most Hudson River School artists. The juxtaposition of more thickly painted, richly nuanced foregrounds in the Dutch manner with luminous distances reminiscent of Claude Lorrain or Turner (1775-1851) is a convincing method of increasing the illusion of depth; the technique was common in nineteenth-century German painting and found as well in certain works by Bierstadt’s Dusseldorf companions of the 1850s, Gifford, Whittredge, and William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900).
On the Boulevard
This is one of Béraud’s many scenes of Paris’s fashionable Right Bank. The presence of the eighteenth century Pavillion de Hanovre on the left (then the showplace of the prestigious metalwork firm of Christofle) identifies this view of the broad sidewalks that lined the boulevard de Italiens. The artist indicated the precise location and depicts women in fashions of the mid-1880s- hats, hairstyles, and the short, bustled walking skirt of the woman in the foreground. The newspaper kiosk with its advertising column in the background is also typical of Parisian sidewalks in the late nineteenth century. To give an additional sense of immediacy, Béraud has borrowed the Impressionist device of abruptly cropping figures.
The artist does not limit himself to recording such specific details. He also shows the kind of human comedies played out daily on the streets of the French capital. Here a young woman on the right saucily lifts her skirt, exposing shapely ankles and a patch of petticoat, to the delight of a sharp-eyed policeman. Béraud makes a contrast with this flirtatious interlude by juxtaposing two proper gentleman politely greeting one another. Farther back, one notices quite different kinds of individuals representing the varied life of modern Paris: a bearded tourist with guidebook, a running messenger boy, a woman examining Christofle’s shiny display, and a morose worker.
NOTE: The Pavillion de Hanovre was torn down and reconstructed in the park at Sceaux in 1930.
Les Halles
This is one of Béraud’s early street scenes, for which he was famous in the 1880s. So precise is his rendition that this spot can be located on a map. It shows the central market of Paris, Les Halles, on the left and the church of Sainte-Eustache (built 1532-1637) on the right, viewed from the rue Baltard where it meets the pointe Sainte-Eustache. Les Halles, one of the splendid Second Empire projects, was designed by Victor Baltard and employed the most advanced construction technology of the time, iron and glass. “The belly of Paris, ” as the market was called by Emile Zola, was one of the symbols of the city’s modernity.
The produce market next to the enclosed sheds is alive with activity and brightly colored vegetables. As is usual in Béraud’s painting, a pretty woman in a fashionable dress is an important focal point. The artist’s attention to the individuality and movements of the other customers and workers reveals differences in character and behavior, while class distinctions are clearly indicated by clothing. The confrontation of the hefty peasant woman and top-hatted gentleman, to the left, and the maid of a few steps behind her mistress, in the center, are cases in point.
Beyond the market itself, Béraud offers glimpses of the bustling streets, where pedestrians mingle with horse-drawn vehicles. In the center is an omnibus, a mode of public transportation introduced to Paris some forty years earlier.
Like the Impressionists, Béraud was interested in showing specific time and place. Thus, upper-class people wear the latest fashions, trees are sparsely leafed, suggesting early spring, and umbrellas are held, some open, some closed, implying that a light rain has just ended or is just beginning.
Worms, Jules
Worms studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1849. Early in his career, he worked as a printmaker and illustrator before turning to painting. He debuted at the Salon in 1859, winning medals in 1867, 1868, and 1869.
Worms shared a Paris studio with Vibert and Spanish painter Eduardo Zamacoïs in the 1860s. Worms traveled with his Spanish friends, and drew from Spain the subject of his most well-known genre paintings. Worms studied the works of Diego Velásquez and Francisco Goya. Worms learned from Velásquez the use of color and, from Goya, the uses of satire. Worms was known for his lively scenes of intrigue set against a colorful set.
American collectors sought out Worms’ work. By 1880, his paintings were in the collections of John Wolfe and his daughter Catherine Lorillard Wolfe. She later bequeathed the family’s collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to James H. Stebbins.
Watrous, Harry Willson
Harry Willson Watrous was born in San Francisco and educated in New York. He studied at the National Academy of Design as an adolescent before going to Europe in about 1881.
Watrous’ early work was similar to Vibert’s in style and subject. In 1883, Sacramento Daily Union correspondent Lucy Harper reported from Paris that she had seen a painting for sale that looked like Vibert’s and “the technique of this little work,” Harper wrote, “…[bespeaks] a master hand.”
In 1884 and 1885, Watrous had paintings accepted at the Paris Salon.
Watrous went home to New York in 1886 where his long career at the center of the New York art world began. He began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in 1894 and showed there annually until his death.
Many of his canvases showed modern, well-dressed women in profile against dreamy backgrounds, smoking, drinking cocktails, and reading paperback novels—the kinds of activities that must have been common at the turn of the 20th century.
Vibert, Jehan-Georges
Jehan-Georges Vibert was famous as a painter, a writer, and a man who loved life. The painter entertained everyone who was anyone in Paris with “fantastic entertainments” in his home and studio. Vibert afforded this gracious living through the success of his art, which was popular in both France and with American collectors.
Vibert was born into the Paris art world. Vibert studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1856-1862. He showed his first paintings at the Paris Salon in 1863.
Vibert began his career painting mythological and historical scenes but soon switched to scenes of everyday life, or genre paintings, which brought him critical and popular success. His specialty was satirical paintings of clerics, especially of cardinals.
Scenes of cardinals with pretty young women, and of clerics enjoying a fine meal and a roaring fire, made gentle fun of the Catholic Church at a time when anti-clericalism in France was the order of the day.
Verboeckhoven, Eugène
Eugène Verboeckhoven was known as “the Raphael of sheep”—an appellation that is surprising in a time when paintings of animals were common. Popular in Belgium from the 1820s onwards, he developed an international following.
Verboeckhoven’s father was a sculptor, and the young Eugène first trained at home in Ghent. As a young man, he learned to make lithographs. He entered the Antwerp studio of the animal painter Balthasar-Paul Ommeganck in 1818. Two years later, he made his debut at the Salon in Ghent.
King William I of the Netherlands commissioned an equestrian portrait from Verboeckhoven in 1822. This painting catapulted the young painter to popularity. Verboeckhoven moved to Brussels in 1828 and, two years later, when revolution erupted.
Like Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) and Constant Troyon (1810-1865), Verboeckhoven gave his animals, and particularly his sheep, a sense of individuality. His creatures are not universal sheep; they are particular creatures.
Troyon, Constant
Troyon was born in Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. He first learned to draw and paint from the porcelain painter Denis-Désiré Riocreux. Troyon’s first job was as a porcelain painter in the Sèvres factory. He experimented with landscape painting on the side and, in 1833, debuted at the Salon. Troyon studied 17th-century Dutch painting and developed a style that relied on representing nature simply and realistically.
In 1849, Troyon received the Legion of Honor. About this time, he also began painting animals almost exclusively. Troyon was prolific and left behind many large-scale paintings showing farm animals in the foreground against a low horizon with dramatic skies. The novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote of his work:
It is more than painting… the effect of the painting is striking, full of truth, energy, and life. [It is as though] you are opening your window [to look over] the countryside… (1865)
Troyon painted in Normandy in the late 1850s and died in Paris in 1865.