Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around ... more Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around 1900, was a place that modernity had overlooked and that stubbornly retained popular beliefs that centuries of Catholic missions had failed to extinguish. Le Braz, in La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Death Legends in Lower Brittany) (1893) presents a collection of death omens, folktales and superstitions that he compiled in his travels in the far western region of Finistère. These death legends describe the coming of Ankou (the Grim Reaper) deadly sirens, hags or old crones who curse or steal children, midsummer night visitations of the dead, night demons and harpies and the power of widows’ curses. Le Braz’s text encouraged a genre of ethnographic travel writing about Northern European Celtic traditions, and fired up the desire to record (if not reinvent) cultures on the edge of extinction in the face of modernity. This paper examines the writing of Celtic Brittany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historiography of the visual culture of death in the region, and the importance of Le Braz’s island narratives for later texts such as J.M Synge’s Aran Islands.
Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person's skul... more Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person's skull were made in Brittany from the eighteenth century to about 1900. In Breton churchyards, prior to the First World War, the ossuary, or charnel house (located in the churchyard or attached to the church), was the receptacle of bones of the dead taken from graves in the crowded churchyard. Because of very limited consecrated ground, this might happen as soon as five years after the initial burial. After a grave was exhumed, the skull was separated from the other bones and put in a wooden box shaped like a peaked-roof house; this was painted (by travelling artisans or cemetery workers) with the name of the dead and dates of life and age at death. The contained skull remained partially visible through a heart-shaped opening. The box was then placed in the church or in an ossuary niche where it functioned as a miniature tomb that both memorialized the departed individual and displayed the ma...
Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage... more Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage with the ecology of the edge of the sea, including its human and non human biological communities. Coming from a visual studies perspective, I am interested in articulating an ecological realism of the French Atlantic coast: looking at the intersections of landscape painting, ecological visual culture and the rise of intertidal natural history. Because my research extends far beyond the usual range of art history, I am looking to marine science for vocabulary and metaphors in my descriptions of seaside communities and ecologies.
Paul or Charles Geniaux’s photograph, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-Hamon (c. 1900),... more Paul or Charles Geniaux’s photograph, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-Hamon (c. 1900), is this chapter’s starting point for thinking about the cultural roles played by religious and commemorative maritime imagery of the French North Atlantic in greater global ocean ecologies. Comparisons are made to paintings and material culture from Brittany that either remember the lost at sea or serve as votive offerings to chapels. Votive boats such as the one held by the boy are posited as part of a “gift economy” that maintains social bonds, rather than the global fishing economy into which the boy is entering. The influence of Pierre Loti’s Iceland Fishermen on popular opinion, as well as Vincent van Gogh, is considered.
Despite their long histories as a culturally valuable commons and sites of biodiversity, the Bret... more Despite their long histories as a culturally valuable commons and sites of biodiversity, the Breton landes were frequently depicted by nineteenth-century authors, travellers and administrators as wild, unproductive wastelands. While the architects of France's ‘interior colonization’ identified such areas as an ugly, infertile expanse to be cleared and put to use, many visual artists were producing a compelling counter-narrative, representing the landes and zones humides as places of beauty and reverie. This article examines the work of artists such as François Blin, Camille Bernier, Alexandre Ségé and Henri Rivière from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that their work contributed to a discourse of preservation by encouraging new ways of seeing the land, not for its extractive utility but as a space of unexpected splendour and enchantment. Far from a regressive form of nostalgia, these images encourage a unique ‘dwelling perspective’ which uses aesthetic beauty to reveal the a...
"Van Gogh and Nature." published in NCS (Nineteenth-Century Studies), vol. 26, ... more "Van Gogh and Nature." published in NCS (Nineteenth-Century Studies), vol. 26, 2016-17. Review of the exhibition "Van Gogh and Nature" at the Clark Art Institute and the accompanying catalog.
At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton... more At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton women in mourning, a project he collectively titled In the Country of the Sea. Although almost forgotten today, in the period prior to World War One, Cottet’s works were prominent in public exhibitions; they received enthusiastic critical attention and were avidly collected.1 Many critics noted that his focus on rural life, rooted in the specifics of Breton coastal culture, was a Naturalist offspring of the politically radical realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet.2 Nonetheless, when shown alongside international Symbolist works, his imagery also shared many of these artists’ formal strategies and thematic iterations of eternal, associative, and allegorical symbols. Leonce Benedite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, acquired works by Cottet for the French state at about the same time that he critically praised its “subjective realism” in reviews.3 Benedite’s seemingly paradoxical phrase best demonstrates the way that his style and subject matter adhered to an appealing middle ground, or else struck a compromise between Naturalism and Symbolism.
Helen M. Shannon is Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum. Her Ph.D. dissertation in ... more Helen M. Shannon is Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum. Her Ph.D. dissertation in art history at Columbia University analyzed the reception of African art in American modernism. I. Peter T Nesbett with an essay by Patricia Hills, Jacob Lawrence: Thirty ...
Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly &quo... more Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly "disenchanted": belief in the magical and sacred had receded to its uncolonized margins. In France, these margins on the Brittany coast drew a seasonal crowd of cultural tourists throughout the 19th century. Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This article departs from previous studies of art in Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities (such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or internation...
Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around ... more Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around 1900, was a place that modernity had overlooked and that stubbornly retained popular beliefs that centuries of Catholic missions had failed to extinguish. Le Braz, in La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Death Legends in Lower Brittany) (1893) presents a collection of death omens, folktales and superstitions that he compiled in his travels in the far western region of Finistère. These death legends describe the coming of Ankou (the Grim Reaper) deadly sirens, hags or old crones who curse or steal children, midsummer night visitations of the dead, night demons and harpies and the power of widows’ curses. Le Braz’s text encouraged a genre of ethnographic travel writing about Northern European Celtic traditions, and fired up the desire to record (if not reinvent) cultures on the edge of extinction in the face of modernity. This paper examines the writing of Celtic Brittany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historiography of the visual culture of death in the region, and the importance of Le Braz’s island narratives for later texts such as J.M Synge’s Aran Islands.
Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person's skul... more Skull boxes that both memorialized a dead individual and displayed the deceased person's skull were made in Brittany from the eighteenth century to about 1900. In Breton churchyards, prior to the First World War, the ossuary, or charnel house (located in the churchyard or attached to the church), was the receptacle of bones of the dead taken from graves in the crowded churchyard. Because of very limited consecrated ground, this might happen as soon as five years after the initial burial. After a grave was exhumed, the skull was separated from the other bones and put in a wooden box shaped like a peaked-roof house; this was painted (by travelling artisans or cemetery workers) with the name of the dead and dates of life and age at death. The contained skull remained partially visible through a heart-shaped opening. The box was then placed in the church or in an ossuary niche where it functioned as a miniature tomb that both memorialized the departed individual and displayed the ma...
Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage... more Several images of the French Atlantic shoreline that I discuss in this essay imaginatively engage with the ecology of the edge of the sea, including its human and non human biological communities. Coming from a visual studies perspective, I am interested in articulating an ecological realism of the French Atlantic coast: looking at the intersections of landscape painting, ecological visual culture and the rise of intertidal natural history. Because my research extends far beyond the usual range of art history, I am looking to marine science for vocabulary and metaphors in my descriptions of seaside communities and ecologies.
Paul or Charles Geniaux’s photograph, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-Hamon (c. 1900),... more Paul or Charles Geniaux’s photograph, Young Boy in Front of the Chapel of Perros-Hamon (c. 1900), is this chapter’s starting point for thinking about the cultural roles played by religious and commemorative maritime imagery of the French North Atlantic in greater global ocean ecologies. Comparisons are made to paintings and material culture from Brittany that either remember the lost at sea or serve as votive offerings to chapels. Votive boats such as the one held by the boy are posited as part of a “gift economy” that maintains social bonds, rather than the global fishing economy into which the boy is entering. The influence of Pierre Loti’s Iceland Fishermen on popular opinion, as well as Vincent van Gogh, is considered.
Despite their long histories as a culturally valuable commons and sites of biodiversity, the Bret... more Despite their long histories as a culturally valuable commons and sites of biodiversity, the Breton landes were frequently depicted by nineteenth-century authors, travellers and administrators as wild, unproductive wastelands. While the architects of France's ‘interior colonization’ identified such areas as an ugly, infertile expanse to be cleared and put to use, many visual artists were producing a compelling counter-narrative, representing the landes and zones humides as places of beauty and reverie. This article examines the work of artists such as François Blin, Camille Bernier, Alexandre Ségé and Henri Rivière from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that their work contributed to a discourse of preservation by encouraging new ways of seeing the land, not for its extractive utility but as a space of unexpected splendour and enchantment. Far from a regressive form of nostalgia, these images encourage a unique ‘dwelling perspective’ which uses aesthetic beauty to reveal the a...
"Van Gogh and Nature." published in NCS (Nineteenth-Century Studies), vol. 26, ... more "Van Gogh and Nature." published in NCS (Nineteenth-Century Studies), vol. 26, 2016-17. Review of the exhibition "Van Gogh and Nature" at the Clark Art Institute and the accompanying catalog.
At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton... more At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton women in mourning, a project he collectively titled In the Country of the Sea. Although almost forgotten today, in the period prior to World War One, Cottet’s works were prominent in public exhibitions; they received enthusiastic critical attention and were avidly collected.1 Many critics noted that his focus on rural life, rooted in the specifics of Breton coastal culture, was a Naturalist offspring of the politically radical realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet.2 Nonetheless, when shown alongside international Symbolist works, his imagery also shared many of these artists’ formal strategies and thematic iterations of eternal, associative, and allegorical symbols. Leonce Benedite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, acquired works by Cottet for the French state at about the same time that he critically praised its “subjective realism” in reviews.3 Benedite’s seemingly paradoxical phrase best demonstrates the way that his style and subject matter adhered to an appealing middle ground, or else struck a compromise between Naturalism and Symbolism.
Helen M. Shannon is Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum. Her Ph.D. dissertation in ... more Helen M. Shannon is Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum. Her Ph.D. dissertation in art history at Columbia University analyzed the reception of African art in American modernism. I. Peter T Nesbett with an essay by Patricia Hills, Jacob Lawrence: Thirty ...
Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly &quo... more Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly "disenchanted": belief in the magical and sacred had receded to its uncolonized margins. In France, these margins on the Brittany coast drew a seasonal crowd of cultural tourists throughout the 19th century. Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This article departs from previous studies of art in Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities (such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or internation...
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