The Canon’s Dinner by Jean Georges Vibert

We return today to master artist Jean Georges Vibert (1840-1902), who created a series of paintings illustrating the hypocrisy and greed of the church.  Vibert specialized in genre scenes that underscored human weakness within the clergy – and while these views were often acidic, they were seldom vitriolic.  These pictures became extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but he won special acclaim in the (then) free-thinking United States.  He was actively collected by both the Astor and Vanderbilt families and today’s picture, The Canon’s Dinner (1875), was sold at auction as recently as November by Sotherby’s.  Obviously Vibert continues to speak to us today.

As Vibert wrote about himself …you can’t deny that the priests who began my education recognized in me elocutionary talents, because they planned to make a preacher of me. Yes; I advise you to speak of the priests! You have profited handsomely by their teachings!  They, at any rate, cannot be ignorant of your lively satire; you have made them feel the point of it enough.  Haven’t you always said that a painter should paint only what he sees?  It is not my fault if I have seen them at such close quarters.

By any critical yardstick, this is a remarkable picture.  Vibert tells the story through meticulous detail mixed with his signature snarky wit.  First off, the canon in the picture is a corpulent man, obviously well-used to his comforts.  Notice how his slippered feet are spread apart, resting on the rail of his table.  His ruddy face is lined but incandescent at the prospect of is good meal.  His plate is not only filled with lobster, but also on the table are two bottles of wine.  The tableware is silver and opulent – this is no simple meal.

Next to the canon is a tray resting on an elaborate table complete with what looks like duck, greens, gravy and perhaps a tureen of soup.  The couch upon which he sits is beautifully upholstered, complete with an ornate overhang.

The room is appointed in luxurious detail.  Note the tapestries that line the wall (delicately rendered by Vibert), along with the frescoes surrounding the door and the lush, Oriental carpet beneath his feet.

Vibert, of course, makes the joke complete with the canon’s companion.  That worthy is dressed in simple robes of black, his slim (and probably underfed) figure upright on a kneeling bench, holy book before him.  He is probably praying on behalf of the canon before he starts his meal, or, also likely, detailing some important part of church doctrine to his superior. 

The differences between the two men could not be more startling: thick and thin, sensual and ascetic, gluttonous and abstemious, worldly and spiritual.  However, the canon, who is clearly more ‘human’ in his enjoyment of the pleasures of the world, is undoubtedly higher in the church hierarchy, a hierarchy that values chastity, poverty, simplicity and self-denial.  Like the canon’s dinner, Vibert’s joke is just too delicious.

One other point – the qualities of such a picture, and its degree of wit, would be lost without the artist’s extraordinary technical ability.  Painted by, say, a Manet or Renior, the picture would merely become a study in colors, or perhaps a look at contrasts.  But appreciating the extreme sensual pleasure and richness of the surroundings is essential to the joke, and that kind of delineation is only possible with an artist gifted at realistic detail.

More Vibert tomorrow!

Happy Halloween: The Vision of Faust by Luis Falero

For Halloween I’m sharing a dainty dish called The Vision of Faust, by Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-1896).

Falero is a little-remembered painter with a marked taste for the outrageous and the bizarre.  He often painted witches, wizards and occult sequences from literary classics, and though his oeuvre was recherché, he was quite a gifted painter in his own right. 

Falero was born in Toldeo and entered the Spanish navy at an early age.  However, his artistic inclinations were stronger than his military ties, and he left the navy for a career in art.  He studied in Paris and London, where he later settled.  Falero had a deep and abiding love for astronomy, and the heavens around us were often integrated into his paintings.

Falero died early, only 45, though somewhat worn out by strife and ruin.  At the time of his death he lost a paternity suite brought against him by 17 year-old Maud Harvey, who was seduced by Falero while serving as both his housemaid and model.  He dismissed Harvey from service when she became pregnant with his child, and broke his promise to support her and the baby.  She won a judgment against him of five shillings a week.

Ironically, Johann Goethe’s Faust concerns a middle-aged scholar (the somewhat flabby man in the painting) who sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles, in return for regained youth and sensual pleasures. He seduces a young girl, Gretchen, who bears his illegitimate child, kills the baby and is sentenced to death, but her soul is spared from Mephisto's clutches.

Goethe's Faust is an extraordinarily influential work, influencing operas, plays, films and … this picture.  Aside from grand, cosmological themes, Falero was obsessed with the female nude, of which he was a master.  His command of feminine anatomy was immense, and his skills at coloration and tone formidable.  He rendered the female form with great charm and occasional wit. 

In fact, the erotic urges of some artists are, if you’ll pardon the expression, naked on the canvas.  It takes only a glance at Michelangelo’s body of work, for instance, to see his intense passion for muscular youths (the same can be said for American artist Paul Cadmus), and the overt passion by which Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet painted their female subjects made their passion for women visible.  Falero’s erotic impulse is blatantly visible in his finished work.  Note the rounded sensuality of the women in The Vision of Faust, and the creamy pinkish-white coloration.  The women fly though the air visibly contorted by passion or erotic release – it is an extremely sexual representation.  Indeed, even the hag/witch in the lower portion of the picture seems fired by a raw, sexual energy: one of her hands rests wantonly on the hip of a sensual woman, while the other fondles a ram’s horn. 

Faust, too, though pudgy and obviously middle-aged, is sexually objectified by his warm coloration, and, more importantly, by the echoes of his figure to the ram behind him.  A trick of the light playing on Faust’s hair gives the impression of horns, and his beard all too obviously mimics the ram’s profile.

Perhaps one of the key reasons this picture is so effective is its brazen, shameless sense of … blasphemy.  The thick, cottony clouds highlighted and lit from behind are strongly reminiscent of hundreds of religious paintings, and the huge, menacing bat in the upper left seems to be an inverse image of the dove. Where religious pictures often have the transcendent resurrection of the dead, Faust features a reanimated corpse, its skull face leering hideously.

The Vision of Faust is a remarkable painting … I just wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.

Happy Halloween!