Charles Gleyre - 1806-1874 - Review

Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 988 pp. $160

For those who believe that recent art historical writing has gone off the theoretical deep end, William Hauptman's new book on the 19th-century Swiss painter Charles Gleyre will come as a pleasant reminder of how things used to be. For others, this lavish two-volume study might well represent something of a missed opportunity, as it rarely rises above the most basic level of documentation and narrative reportage to engage the issues and ideas that have dominated discussions of 19th-century art during the past several decades.

The general character of the study is determined by its status as a catalogue raisonne of the most traditional variety. It consists of two hefty volumes. The first constitutes a minutely detailed, chronological account of Gleyre's life and works, while the second offers a complete 1,112-item catalogue of paintings and drawings. It would seem that no expense was spared in this lavish production, the latest in a long series of catalogues raisonnes of Swiss artists produced trader the auspices of the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich. Every surviving work by Gleyre is reproduced at least once, many in color.

As is perhaps fitting for such a traditionally conceived study, the great strength of Hauptman's book lies in its wealth of documentation. Seemingly every scrap of evidence remotely related to Gleyre's long life and career has been incorporated into the two-volume set. Here Hauptman, an American art historian who emigrated to Switzerland to conduct research on the project, is to be applauded for having left no stone unturned. He has systematically perused the archives of the Swiss museums in which the great majority of Gleyre's works are now housed, as well as the extensive correspondence and family archives of the artist's friends and associates.

Among the most important sources in the latter category are the papers of Charles Clement, the prominent critic and art historian who was not only Gleyre's closest friend and inheritor of the contents of his studio but also his first biographer and author of the only other catalogue of his works. This catalogue, published four years after Gleyre's death in 1874, provides the basis of Hauptman's own study.(1) Although generally deferential to Clement's firsthand knowledge of Gleyre and his oeuvre, Hauptman is able to rectify some of his predecessor's dates and identify many preparatory studies previously catalogued as miscellany. More important, Hauptman reintegrates into Gleyre's oeuvre works either unknown to Clement or considered by him to be too inconsequential to the painter's artistic legacy to be recorded. Among the most important works to have escaped Clement's attention is the spectacular suite of watercolors and drawings Gleyre made for the American industrialist and adventurer John Lowell, Jr., during their joint expedition to the Near East in the mid-1830s (Gleyre traveled as Lowell's hired companion). These works, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, seem to have been unknown to Gleyre's friends in Paris and only came to the attention of specialists in the mid-1970s. Hauptman reproduces and meticulously catalogues the entire set. The other great revelation of this study is its unveiling of seventeen notebooks containing over seven hundred drawings and watercolors spanning the entirety of Gleyre's career. While each folio of the notebooks is reproduced and commented on in the catalogue, it seems rather odd, especially in light of Hauptman's exemplary thoroughness elsewhere, that neither the provenance nor the present location of these rediscovered works is discussed in the entries.

While heartily applauding Hauptman's tenacity in collecting and collating so much information, some readers might find it difficult to escape the feeling that the purely documentary aspect of his study at times constitutes too much of a good thing. As is certainly understandable for a scholar so passionately engaged with his subject, Hauptman, whose book culminates two decades of research and writing on Gleyre, often gets caught up in minutiae. Nothing that touched on Gleyre, it would seem, was deemed too trivial or peripheral for inclusion in his book. Hauptman's narration of Gleyre's life begins with a family tree that stretches back to the early 17th century; it ends with the information that the municipality of Lausanne paid exactly 1,160 francs for the transport of Gleyre's corpse from Paris "with a supplement of 50 francs because of good service rendered" (p. 313, n. 1,118). These asides are typical of the details that fill this thousand-page study, threatening to overwhelm the reader with incidentals and making him or her wish that Hauptman had been a little more selective in the material he chose to relate. History is not, after all, merely an indiscriminate accounting of everything that ever happened.

What might be deemed Hauptman's documentary excesses would be less regrettable if one did not feel that they encroached on the analytical and interpretive aspects of his study. For Hauptman generally seems more interested in using the wealth of documentation at his disposal to establish a narrative of often incidental events in the life of his subject than in dealing with the works of art born of these circumstances. A case in point is his treatment of Gleyre's Near Eastern adventure. The main thrust of Hauptman's discussion of this seminal event consists of an exacting reconstruction of the itinerary of the trip from the diaries of Gleyre and Lowell. A considerable effort is also expended on enumerating the people encountered along the way (with bibliographical references to each one dutifully provided in the notes), and on establishing what maps and guidebooks were either used by or available to the explorers. Hauptman's discussion of the actual watercolors and drawings Gleyre produced during the journey seems rather perfunctory in comparison, consisting primarily of dating (Hauptman at times verges on fetishizing chronology) and the most basic identification of the sites and figures represented.