Painting Antiquity concludes an important phase in Stephanie Moser's long-term work on the reception of the history of antiquity, specifically material and visual culture, in the modern era (Moser, Reference Moser2006; Reference Moser2012; Reference Moser2015). Moser's approach is characterised by its complexity, nuance, and consistent contextualization. The complexity draws on social and cultural history next to art history, the nuance adds personal perspectives of the artists and their audience, and the contextualization includes the political background as well as the aesthetic fascination of encountering the ancient world—the ‘exotic’ other, a treasured ancestor, and the object of admiring and discerning gazes. The Victorian period saw historicist painting meeting Orientalism. Paintings of this era inspired by ancient artefacts demonstrate a fascination with past artisanship alongside creative reinterpretations of ancient arts and crafts. This is no coincidence: the appeal of ‘ancient objects manufactured by hand and decorated with great skill’ (p. 309) is typical of the industrial era, with its conventional art and mechanised production, that had inspired its opponents, the pre-Raphaelites or the Arts and Crafts movements. Indeed, the former also directly engaged with ancient Egyptian artefacts.
This book offers a cultural biography of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), Edwin Long (1829–1891), and Edward Poynter (1836–1919). They may be seen as ‘academic’ painters (after all, a vastly different Egyptian inspiration was applied by their younger contemporary, Paul Gauguin, (1848–1903)); but they were also a specific group of historicist and romantic painters, going beyond depicting heroic backstories for a modern identity. Illustrators and artists have not only reproduced images of artefacts, but they also produced an interpretative vision of past cultures. Ancient Egypt was defined and redefined textually and visually throughout the nineteenth century, and the intense, colourful reinterpretations provided by the romantic painters exerted an influence over the visualization of the ancient past well into the twentieth century, which directly influenced the film industry.
Moser follows the artists, their work, and—no less prominently—the response to the ‘archaeological painting.’ Their popularity was never a given or a universal view shared by their critics. As shown by Moser in insights interspersed throughout the book and summarized towards its end, this genre was an acquired taste for some, whilst lauded by others; its acceptance has waxed and waned from the outset.
The book consists of an introduction, eleven chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction gives an insight into the social context of the artistic projects of Alma-Tadema, Long, and Poynter, noting their coeval and later evaluation as creative artists, but also as mediators of the past. All three have used ancient Egypt as an essential element in their paintings: displaying their interpretations of an ancient life, narratives with a relevant cultural capital for the Victorian world and set in the Egyptian antiquity (including but not limited to the Bible), and on occasion allowing their inanimate actors, the artefacts, to dominate the images.
Chapter 1 is concerned with background and training of the artists and Chapter 2 with the earlier 1860s work of Alma-Tadema and Poynter. Chapter 3 takes the analysis into the 1870s, whilst Chapters 4 and 6 look at the later production of Alma-Tadema. Edwin Long is the subject of Chapter 5. Alma-Tadema experienced two major episodes of Egyptian interest. The first one centred on the archaeological genre in full; and the second recognized as more dramatic, focussed on scenes such as Finding of Moses. Yet, the sense for rendering artefacts in striking detail remained strong. Moser highlights the skill of Alma-Tadema, manifested in the detailed study of ancient material culture. It is symptomatic that Georg Ebers greatly appreciated Alma-Tadema. Ebers was an Egyptologist and novelist who tried to bring the Egyptians to life on the pages of books of fiction, and then commissioned Alma-Tadema (himself, probably inspired by Ebers’ approach) to supply a set of illustrations for Egypt in Word and Picture, a major project presenting a trip through Egypt in a lavishly illustrated two-volume book, which became exceedingly popular in Europe. Some of Ebers’ novels also sold extensively. The late Dominic Montserrat opined that ‘his series of Egyptian-themed romances (Varda, An Egyptian Princess, Cleopatra, and others) helped stimulate interest in Egyptian artefacts and keep it alive’ (Montserrat, Reference Montserrat2000: 97). Much the same can be said of Alma-Tadema, Poynter, and Long, but particularly of Alma-Tadema.
Chapter 7 targets the contexts—from artistic to historical—of the archaeological phase of British art. The cultural biography approach is reflected in its title, ‘The Currency of Objects’, supplying extensive context, from the absorption of books by Gardner Wilkinson into the historical consciousness of Victorian Britain, to the individual artists using their knowledge of antiquity as part of their brand.
Poynter and Long's works are reviewed in Chapter 8, whilst Chapter 9 targets the preparatory works of all three artists. One of the significant strengths of this volume is its consistent and well-articulated attention to the complete process of making, reflecting on, and consuming Victorian art, with many pages dedicated to encounters with artefacts in museums and in books that preceded the creative decisions of the artist. The journey of individual artefacts or groups of artefacts through different paintings, followed by their consumption via printed reproductions, is another chapter in their long biography.
The analysis of individual images identifies ancient artefacts that all three painters, and particularly Alma-Tadema, incorporated into their paintings, on occasion without regard for strict chronological boundaries. The next category of objects is defined as ‘informed Egyptian inventions’ (p. 276), an elegant way to describe modern Egyptianizing production of imagined or real objects. This is an art trend that was highlighted over thirty years ago by Jean-Marcel Humbert (Reference Humbert1989) and has also been discussed more recently (see Versluys, Reference Versluys2020, emphasizing the agency of artefacts). Long in particular tended towards ‘augmenting’ (p. 278) ancient details and creating fantasy objects of great beauty, loosely based on elements directly copied from ancient artefacts and the reworked.
The chapters span an arc of artistic development of the three painters, and a trajectory of their engagement with archaeological genre painting, particularly with Egyptian themes. The specific genre of painting that relied so prominently on the accuracy of visual representation of even minuscule ancient artefacts is set in context of nineteenth century historical painting, which often represented grand narratives of heroic proportions. Archaeological genre painters often chose to follow a different method. The interest in domesticity and everyday life, in detail of interior, dress, furniture, or pottery, shown in other genres of Victorian era paintings (e.g. James Tissot [1836–1902]; see Buron et al., Reference Buron and Matyjaszkiewicz2019), translated into an intense involvement with objects taken to stand for the everyday existence of ancient people, in this case, ancient Egyptians. Whatever the choice of topic or narrative frame for the scene, beautiful artefacts took centre stage, highlighting ‘the aesthetic power of everyday things’ (p. 18)—or in any event of things perceived as objects of everyday use.
This approach to antiquity was not primarily concerned with some expected orientalist narrative clichés or even necessarily with biblical themes (although all three painters who engaged in the archaeological genre also covered biblical topics). It opened perspectives that did not Other but domesticated Egypt. It is a key point to make, as a shorthand understanding of ‘orientalism’ may jump to a conclusion of othering Egypt and then diminishing of the ‘Other’. Yet, this was not always the case: the ‘oriental’ was in focus of admiration and interest and at least attempts at understanding, certainly where visual arts were concerned (compare MacKenzie, Reference MacKenzie1995: 213–214, 215). The argument is however given a useful framing by Moser: ‘in seeking to make the ancient world relatable […] artists selected aspects of the past that were familiar to them and their audiences’ (p. 29). This trait has also been interpreted as providing visions of an idealized Victorian domesticity, a sentiment draped in ancient regalia.
Chapters 10 and 11 are specifically concerned with a contemporary response to and appraisal of the works. The symphony of voices responding to archaeological genre painting provides a reception history for reception history. Reflections on and the commodification of Victorian art are extensively addressed by Painting Antiquity, which weaves together the narratives of individual artists’ biographies and artefact biographies (both for the paintings and for some of the ancient objects that inspired them), involved in a network of historical consciousness and social memory. The concepts of ‘veracity’ or ‘authenticity’, debated in the coeval press, are problematized as the paintings did not manifest only in an exact depiction of artefacts that archaeology and collecting mediated to the western world. They were tempered by the Victorian actualization of biblical and historical scenes that were serving their purpose within a distinctly Western identity, and within its entwined regimes of historical consciousness and social memory. Moser's aim has ‘not simply been to produce an account of archaeological sources’ that the painters chose to use, ‘but rather to consider what the archaeological elements signified as a whole.’ (p. 3)
The concluding chapter is aptly subtitled ‘The Splendid Appearance of Things Mundane.’ It summarizes the visual intensity that produced a diversified impact of the archaeological painting genre, not forgetting one important aspect: the interconnection of public interest in archaeology and of perceptions of ancient art. Without the presence of antiquity in nineteenth century social memory and visual culture, there would hardly be such interest in archaeology. The layers of historical awareness are always intricately linked. Yet the pathways that link them are far from simple: it was the power of the ‘domestic’ beauty of historical artefacts from a faraway world that fitted the period's interest in cataloguing the world, searching for ancestry, and reviewing societal norms. Moser has mapped and explained this complexity with flair.
Moser supplies a careful portrayal of the period, acknowledging existing scholarship and the controversies surrounding the evaluation of historicist painting, but giving the voice primarily to Victorians. She offers detailed insight into the integration of ancient culture and the formation of aesthetic ideals during the second half of the nineteenth century as well as into reflections on ancient art as an autonomous phenomenon characterizing historical cultures. Hers is an approach focused on the relevant intellectual space of the period. In studies of the Victorian era, and particularly Victorian art, this is a productive approach (e.g., Bown, Reference Bown2011), and one that may well continue to inspire a non-judgemental and comprehensive engagement with late nineteenth century history and art. Once we discard assumptions, such as that the ‘orientalist’ painters must have shared the dominant prejudices of their period, we note that they, notably Alma-Tadema, were not ‘whitewashing’ Egypt: see Pastimes in Ancient Egypt, where both entertainers and guests display a range of skin colours. This has of course provided the artist with an opportunity to show his skill in colour composition and provide a suitably digestible image of an exotic world, but it was also a tacit recognition of the diversity of the ancient civilization.
The illustrations are an indispensable and valuable part of this publication and have been meticulously researched and selected. The images are not only needed to illustrate the points made in the text, and to mediate a specific aesthetic experience, but also to ensure that the twenty-first century audience would understand the attraction of the nineteenth century visual culture. With photographic techniques, mass media, and the creation of new spaces of display (from the publicly accessible museum to reproduced art in domestic as well as public spaces), this was an intensely visual century in the Western world (Edwards, Reference Edwards2012: 3). Visual communication connected illustrated volumes, photography production, and inventive painting.
The context of reception studies supplied here is detailed and international. One could ask where were contemporary Egyptian artists, but that would be an anachronistic question, because the reception of ancient Egypt in visual arts of modern Egypt comes mostly later, with the twentieth century ‘pharaonism’ reflected both in literature and in visual arts.
Some information is recontextualised repeatedly throughout the volume: the intense ‘display’ culture of the late nineteenth century that focussed interest on visual presentation, the national(ist) agendas, the circulation of and access to the artefacts. However, that is to an advantage. The book can be read cover to cover, but thanks to its structure, it also allows for a reader's choice of ‘dipping’, for example into the work of a particular author or a specific period of art production.
Painting Antiquity is setting a new standard in the level of detail and insight; both in description of the sources and in their analysis. Most of all, it achieves its aim to marry historical analysis with the experience of art. The art that was and is to be enjoyed and understood with sensitivity to its historical context.
