Dali House

“Pietà” by William Bouguereau, 1876 (detail)
You must see the whole painting – click the image.

The denizens of Dali House have taunted William Bouguereau from the second-storey windows before upon seeing him saunter by in the street with his top hat and walking stick, but you know we’re just jealous. Bouguereau (1825-1905) was no second-storey man but a talent of the first order. (Some of his paintings take on a life of their own, literally – read on further down about the sultry nymphs of New York bardom.)

Painter, frescoist, draughtsman and teacher, the Frenchman was born and died in La Rochelle, France, so it’s tempting to say he didn’t get to see much of the world, but man, he did have his admirers. From Van Gogh to Dali, many of the Major Names that came later thought he was the bee’s knees.

The always excitable Fred Ross, a leading collector of Bouguereau works and, seemingly as a result, the founder of the Art Renewal Centre, has a pointed essay about the Frenchman on ARC’s website called “Bouguereau & the Real 19th Century”. It’s actually a speech he delivered with vigour to the New York Society of Portrait Artists in 2002. I’ve edited out much of Ross’ ranting about the curse of modernism because all that’s been duly noted previously at Dali House, thanks very much. He still gets his digs in.

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In 1900 at the Universal Exposition in Paris, it is reported that Degas and Monet were approached by a newspaper reporter who asked who, in their opinion, would most likely be considered the greatest 19th-century French artist in the year 2000. After a brief debate, both agreed on one man – William Bouguereau.
What did these two geniuses of French Impressionism see that their chief followers and supporters over the next hundred years did not? For Bouguereau, a true genius of the art of painting, was soon to fall so far from grace that art history students in the 1940s through to the 1980s could study 19th-century art and never hear his name, or see one of his paintings …

Just imagine for a moment that you are a a music major … Then imagine that in spite of that, you had never heard of Chopin or Beethoven, nor ever heard any of their music … At the most, you’d heard that they were from a small but powerful group of composers who had run the music world, and who didn’t appreciate the greatness of Shostakovitch or Bartok, who had ultimately led to the genius of John Cage. You were taught that Chopin and Beethoven were petty academics who wrote romantic, sentimental, inane, vapid, maudlin and silly works, and you were never exposed to, nor was it arranged for you, to listen to any of their music.

Then imagine that a few years after graduating, you went to a concert and heard some of the most intensely beautiful works of your life … You look at the program and see the names Frederic Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven … Next you run to a music store and find their work on some rare CDs and start listening to everything you can find by them, and despite everything written in the music history books, and everything you’d been taught about them, you were certain in the deepest recesses of your heart, you were certain beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that you had discovered two of the greatest musical geniuses in all of history …

Perhaps you had only just happened to have heard the only good works they had ever written, [but] then, as you uncovered work after work after work, you discovered that nearly everything they’d ever written during their mature years were as great, or greater, than the first pieces you had heard at that one concert. Wouldn’t the world seem like it was upside down? …

In October 1977 I walked into the Clark [Art Institute in Massachusetts] to see their 30 Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape …
Finally, after about 15 or 20 minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness …
I approached the painting more closely, and saw the name Bouguereau at the bottom and the date 1873 – 1873? How was that possible? I’d learned that the greatest artists at that time were, Manet, Corot, Courbet, and Renoir … that the techniques and greatness of the old masters had died out, and that nobody knew how to do anything remotely this great by the 1870s …

I stopped in at Sotheby’s that Tuesday and as fate would have it, there were three Bouguereau paintings being offered for sale that coming Friday. I purchased one called “Les Enfants Endormis”, of two babies asleep in each other’s arms … And I still didn’t know who he was. During the next few weeks I started researching Bouguereau and the entire period as much as I could …
Almost immediately, I discovered that he had won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1851 at the age of 26, and after winning nearly every accolade and award imaginable for an artist of his time, ultimately become the President of the Academy, Head of the Salon, President of the Legion of Honour. He was in fact, considered the greatest French artist of his time, and Paris was the centre of art world. All this made me feel very good about my instincts, and that I had intuitively identified as being one of the worlds’ greatest artists somebody who had generally been considered as such by most of the world during the final decades of the 19th century.

As an aside, consider this interesting article in the New York Times, published April 7, 2000:
“Lenn D Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, has a vivid memory of the first time he was profoundly moved by a work of art. At age seven, during a visit to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was separated from his parents. While wandering in search of them, he came upon a huge painting, ‘Nymphs and Satyr’ by William Bouguereau. His parents found him a half-hour later, still staring at the painting.
“The experience helped Mr Lowry believe in the transformative power of art and what he calls the ‘unique encounters that occur when one is fortunate to confront directly an extraordinary object’.”

It didn’t take long before I discovered a lot of other major names that I’d never heard of before: Jules Joseph Tissot, Alexander Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre, Ernst Louis Meissonnier, Jean George Vibert, Jean Leon Gérôme, Leon Bonnat and Leon l’Hermitte from France – and John William Waterhouse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Edward Coley Burne Jones, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Lord Leighton and Frank Dicksee from England, and scores of other artists all across Europe and American about whom I had never learned, never been taught, and never seen any of their works.

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End of passion play.

A Google search for Ross’ beloved nymphs quickly turns up a pair of surprises: (a) that, contrary to his moaning, Bouguereau continues to be very well known, and much admired, and (b) that this painting in particular has an amazing history.

That, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg, as David S Brooke explains elsewhere on the web in a well-researched article:

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Bouguereau’s “Nymphs and Satyr”, one of the more celebrated paintings at the Clark Art Institute, has always enjoyed considerable popular appeal.
This is probably due less to the rather decorous naughtiness of the subject matter and the glossy finish of the painting than to the sense of gaiety and arcadian delight which the nymphs have evoked in many of their admirers.

The painting was shown at the 1873 Salon with a quotation from the first-century Latin poet Publius Statius: “Conscious of his shaggy hide and from childhood untaught to swim, he dares not trust himself to deep waters.” Statius is describing the predicament of Pan, who is cheated of his quarry, the nymph Phoebe, when she takes refuge in a lake.
At no point in the poem is the god dragged into the water, and it seems possible that Bouguereau invented this humorous revenge; he shows us a light-hearted ambush in which the unfortunate non-swimmer is literally danced into the stream. There is no escape for him, since reinforcements – more nymphs – have been summoned from the woods behind.

When the painting was first exhibited, reactions were mixed. While one critic claimed that the artist “had depicted a rather risky subject with charm and delicacy”, another found the picture highly skilled but somewhat superficial: “A glossy, creamy, waxy painting where one guesses at all kinds of ingenuities, where one finds the art of composition, well-ordered groups, motion, wit, and great suppleness of drawing, but which is cold in essence, empty and leaving but a faint impression on the mind.”

But Bouguereau had a considerable following at this time in America, and the painting was promptly bought by John Wolfe. It spent most of the first 10 years of its life hanging with three equally large pictures by Bouguereau’s academic contemporaries: Pierre Cot’s “Springtime” (which showed a couple “in the most dangerous and in flammable of the teens” on a swing), Léon Bonnat’s “Fellab Women and Child” and Hans Makart’s “Fellab Woman at Well”.

The Nymphs spent the next 20 years hanging opposite the bar in the Hoffman House at Broadway and 25th Street. The painting had been acquired at the sale of Wolfe’s pictures in 1882 by Edward S Stokes, one of the owners of the hotel. Stokes had earlier served four rather comfortable years in Sing-Sing for shooting the notorious speculator Jim Fisk, his rival in love, and as a result of this fortuitous connection the Bouguereau acquired an aura of scandal, which has never been wholly dispelled.

Several prints of the elegantly appointed bar survive and it is clear that the Nymphs had become a major landmark by the 1890s. The painting was hung with some splendour beneath a red velvet canopy, lit by a crystal chandelier, and reflected in the large mirror over the bar. In one colour lithograph, a box of Hoffman House cigars lies open on a near by table and Bouguereau’s nymphs appear on the inside label.

From such surroundings they migrated to silver matchbox covers, plates, urns and even bathroom tiles. A caricature by EA Filleau shows the painting hanging not in the bar but in an art gallery, surveyed by a gentleman of the road. “I’ve travelled the world over and tramped every spot on the map,” says Weary Walker, “but I’m damned if I can locate that brook.”
The shady brook, the beautiful nymphs, the satyr’s amusing predicament must have provided a potent visual image of the 1880s and ’90s to many visitors to the Hoffman House. It was in this ambience that Robert Sterling Clark, living in New York and recently graduated from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, first saw the picture.

After Stokes’ death in 1901 his paintings were sold; neither Clark nor any other admirers of the picture were to see the Nymphs again for more than a quarter century. Reputedly bought by a gentleman whose family found them an embarrassment, the Nymphs were quickly consigned to storage – as the artist’s reputation was shortly to be.

The picture’s brief re-emergence into the limelight in the early 1940s is amusingly documented in Clark’s diaries. He remembered the painting well when he encountered it again in 1934 in Manhattan Storage while inspecting the Hoffman wine cellars. It was not until 1942, however, when the owner died, that Clark had a chance to purchase the picture. Already quite familiar with Bouguereau’s work, Clark had bought one of his drawings in 1922 and a painting, “Seated Nude”, in 1939. Initially he was discouraged by the sheer size of the Nymphs. “It really is a fine picture … marvellous nudes … I only wish I had the study for it, because it is about 10x8 feet. It ought to be in a good museum or some other public building.” At one time, Clark had the notion of buying it and giving it to Bouguereau’s hometown of La Rochelle.

Herbert Elfers, Clark’s contact and friend at the Durand-Ruel Galleries, persuaded the heirs of the late owner to let him sell the Nymphs without revealing its source. Elfers first had the idea of selling the painting to Billy Rose, the owner of the Gay Nineties cabaret where, in Clark’s words, “it would reconstitute more or less the old Hoffman House atmosphere”. By this time Clark was much enamored of the picture and instructed Elfers to make an offer, reassuring the family that “it would go to a private collector … and it would probably be left to a French museum”.

On June 5, 1942, the Bouguereau was bought by Clark, and he was already contemplating the “highly amusing prospect” of exhibiting it. His first choice was Parke Bernet (for a Red Cross benefit), but Elfers was anxious to show it at Durand-Ruel’s. The critic Frank Crowninshield (who also remembered the picture in the Hoffman House) was to write an article for Vogue launching the Nymphs once again as a symbol both of the Gay Nineties and of “the happy and joyous spirit of the Second Empire”. Turned down by the Red Cross – who Clark suggested had reservations about so much unclothed beauty – the painting was gladly accepted by the Free French Relief Committee for a benefit exhibition.

On January 11, 1943, the Nymphs appeared once again before the public at the Durand-Ruel Galleries on 57th Street. As one reporter put it, “Nymphs, satyr rally to fighting French”. They were shown in solitary splendour, in front of reddish-brown curtains borrowed from Wildenstein’s, and they attracted a good deal of attention in the press. It was scarcely surprising that they received a special welcome from the habitués – now 40 years older – of the Hoffman House. A Mr Willet remarked to Herbert Elfers that the picture made him “feel like 20″, and another admirer wrote a poem for the nymphs which admirably encapsulated their history and their continuing attraction:

I drank a toast to you wben I was young,
And now I’m old, I’ll drink to you again;
Once you were Gotham’s pride, admired of men,
When o’er the bar, your glorious canvas hung.
You merry nymphs, of beauty unsurpassed,
Banished for years by, strange decree unjust,
0ut of the darkness and the gathering dust,
Lovely as ever, you’ve returned at last!
And you, oh faun, the Naiads drag you still
Down to their pool with gleeful merriment,
They drag you down, against your struggling will,
The half-man in you fearing their intent;
I Pity you, as over you they gloat,
Yet in your place, who wouldn’t be a goat?

Clark relished the whole affair, the more so perhaps because he chose to remain anonymous throughout it and never even attended the opening. Speculations as to the picture’s new owner, offers from other collectors to Durand-Ruel – even some interest from museums – entertained him highly. When the show was over, the painting disappeared once again into storage, though it was later fitted (with some difficulty) into Clark’s New York apartment, where he enjoyed its effect on startled visitors.

The final – and lasting – appearance of the nymphs took place in the summer of 1959, when they were unveiled in Williamstown, an appropriately arcadian spot for their retirement. Clark had died three years before, but once again they were celebrated in the press, having by this time acquired quite a mythology of their own.
In 1984 they travelled to Montreal and Hartford to receive a measure of art-historical respectability through their inclusion in a major Bouguereau exhibition.

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More on this Fisk-Stokes affair from the Internet …

James Fisk Jr (1834–1872, pictured here) was one of those colourful “Big Jims” and “Diamond Jims” of American lore, a Vermont boy who ran away to join the circus before having a go at his dad’s trade, peddling. He proved a clever salesman and was soon part owner of a Boston dry goods firm, which made him his first fortune, thanks to Civil War army contracts and possibly a bit of cotton smuggling.

At the end of the war he was a New York stockbroker, helping Daniel Drew outbid Cornelius Vanderbilt for the Erie Railroad, then with Jay Gould grabbing control of the business. He was soon the country’s best-known speculator, a colleague summing him up thus: “Boldness! boldness! Twice, thrice and four times. Impudence! Cheek! Brass! Unparalleled, unapproachable, sublime!”
Fisk bought theatres and put on lavish productions. His Grand Opera House on West 23rd Street doubled as headquarters for the Erie Railway. Fisk rode around town in a carriage with four matched horses while postilions spread a carpet between carriage and doorstep wherever he paid a call.

He bought the colonelcy of the New York’s Ninth Regiment and swank uniforms for its recruits and one for himself, costing $5,000. In 1871 the regiment did a lousy job of protecting the city’s Irish Protestant Orange Day parade when Irish Catholics descended on it and a major riot broke out that resulted in 47 deaths. Fisk fled ignominiously over backyard fences and through cellars to safety.
He and Gould were lifelong buccaneering partners, allying with Boss Tweed in the wholesale bribery of legislatures and judges and, in attempting to corner the gold market, triggering Black Friday on September 24, 1869.

A serial philanderer, Fisk got into a row over one of his girlfriends in 1872 – the Broadway showgirl Josie Mansfield – with business associate Edward Stokes, a handsome encroacher on his territory. When Fisk found that he was being cheated by Stokes in the oil business as well as edged out of the brownstone mansion he’d bought Mansfield, he unleashed a blizzard of lawsuits. Stokes was unstable to begin with, and the legal costs drove him nuts.
On the afternoon of January 6, 1872, Stokes learned that Fisk had succeeded in having him indicted for blackmail and that a warrant was out for his arrest. He was told that Fisk was at the Grand Central Hotel at Third Street and Broadway, but got there first and waited at the top of a staircase. Fisk arrived, began climbing the stairs and was shot twice at point-blank range, in the abdomen and arm.
As Fisk was helped into one of the parlours, Stokes reportedly went to the front desk and calmly announced that a man had been shot. “Yes,” a hotel staffer supposedly replied, “and you’re the man who did it!” Stokes sat down and waited to be arrested. Within an hour newsboys were in the streets shouting, “Extra! Shooting of Jim Fisk!”
A crowd of thousands converged on the Grand Central Hotel, blocking Broadway, and platoons of policemen were dispatched there and to the Tombs Prison, where Stokes was taken. Meanwhile, brokers descended on the uptown Fifth Avenue Hotel to swap shares in the Erie Railroad.
The mob at the hotel – admirers of Fisk’s unfailing kindness to people in need – kept a vigil until he died the next morning.
He lay in state at the Grand Opera House on the 8th as 20,000 came by to pay their respects. Another 100,000 watched the Ninth Regiment’s military funeral, unequalled until General Grant’s 13 years later. Fisk was later buried in his native Brattleboro, Vermont.
Stokes’ lawyers got him off with four years for manslaughter. He died in 1901, “a pathetic curiosity in New York society” by one account. Josie Mansfield died in Europe, impoverished and forgotten, in 1931.

The Grand Opera House, too far from Broadway to be a successful theatre, hosted vaudeville and then cheap movies and in 1960 was slated for demolition when a mysterious fire levelled it.
The Grand Central remained one of New York’s premier hotels until the main shopping district moved uptown. In 1892 it became the Broadway Central, to avoid confusion with the railroad terminal far uptown, but a slew of fires and its criminal clientele quickened its decline. Welfare families were the chief tenants when, on August 3, 1973, it suddenly collapsed, killing several occupants and blocking Broadway for days.

Edward Arnold portrayed Fisk in the 1937 movie “The Toast of New York”, a fictionalised version of the killing that also starred Cary Grant and Frances Farmer.
It’s been called the “Heaven’s Gate” of its day. RKO sank well over $1 million into it, as is clear from the production values, had casting problems (Spencer Tracy and Ginger Rogers were initially lined up) and firing and rehiring writer Dudley Nichols. Neither critics nor movie-goers particularly liked it.