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Nineteenth-century Painters

Nineteenth-century painters were sometimes travelers who ventured beyond frontiers and returned with visual reports of their encounters with other cultures. In an age when engraved drawings were an accepted part of newspaper reportage artists' reports were not likely to be challenged. But painters' accounts were not accompanied by texts and they often took care to insist on the fact of their presence at the scene and among their subjects. This served as a warrant of their reliability and facilitated acceptance of ideas or attitudes implicit in their representations of other cultures. Artists thus presented themselves as surrogates for their audiences--confirming, modifying, reinforcing, and re-shaping perceptions of other cultures. These painters employed different visual strategies as the means of emphasizing their roles as witnesses, and distinctive strategies were often employed depending on the kind of statement the artists were making about the culture they were observing. Three examples of distinctive uses of such visual strategies to insist on the artists' presence can be found in works by George Catlin, Eugène Delacroix, and Winslow Homer. In each instance how the artist made his presence felt was related to what the artist had to say about the culture he encountered.

The paintings are: George Catlin's Catlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-To-Toh-Pa--Mandan (1857-69), an example of Catlin's career-long effort to record the appearance of certain Native American societies, Eugène Delacroix's Women of Algiers (1834), a scene observed during the painter's recent visit to North Africa, and Winslow Homer's A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876), one of a number of paintings of African Americans that resulted from a trip to Virginia. In each case the artist left the society of which he was a part, sought out people with distinctive cultures, and returned to present his encounters to his public. But there were considerable d...

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Nineteenth-century Painters. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:15, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681541.html