The Art Bulletin

This article reexamines a debated question concerning the influence of Chevreul’s law of simultaneous contrast on Impressionism. On the one hand, the Impressionists, when they painted the subjective effects of the contrast, did the opposite of what Chevreul advised. On the other hand, their practice corresponded exactly to the recommendations given by other scientists. I show that the Impressionists--at least Pissarro and Monet--used their knowledge of color theory in their paintings. This poses a challenge to the ``standard'' account, according to which the Impressionists had no need of a color theory, since they simply trusted their eyes.

Paintings of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran, and others recorded and interpreted that event as utopic fantasy for the fair’s immediate audience and for posterity. Selectively endorsing the organizers' and designers' assigned meanings in their views of the fair’s structures and waterways, the artists were also conscious of rendering permanent a city and an event which were as ephemeral as they were grandiose. Like the program of the fair they record, these paintings work by metonymy, exclusion, and abbreviation, and situate themselves at once as cultural commentary and aesthetic souvenir.

This article examines a double portrait by Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Study of the sitters' poses, clothing, expressions, and setting and comparison with other works by Peale suggest that the couple is depicted as Rinaldo and Armida, lovers from the sixteenth-century poem Gerusalemme Liberata by Tasso. Peale’s use of this theme appears based both on visual sources and on the poem itself. Recognition of his ties to the English tradition of poetic portraiture confirms the view that Peale cannot be regarded as a purely descriptive painter.

Charles Lang Freer has been previously portrayed as a connoisseur who collected an idosyncratic group of Asian and American objects in order to surround himself with the rarest examples of ``pure'' beauty. This article explores the ideological origins of Freer’s essentialist rhetoric in the agnostic discourse of aestheticism, and investigates how Freer’s collecting was shaped by the evolutionary beliefs promoted by the Northeastern Anglo-American elite. As an illuminating parallel to Freer’s use of art, the formation of Bernard Berenson’s philosophy of art in this milieu is also examined, as are the interchanges between Freer, Berenson, and Ernest Fenollosa.

Prints of processional carts from a Spanish festival book (1663) served as prototypes for the carts featured in a series of canvases, painted around 1674-80, depicting the Corpus Christi procession in Cuzco, Peru. The canvases in which the carts appear relate to five of colonial Cuzco’s indigenous parishes and were probably commissioned and executed by native Andeans. By incorporating forms from a Spanish source in the painted record of a local event, Andeans confounded the documentary mode of reportage. The resulting pictorial contradictions underscore the complexities of cultural confluence

The unusual discovery of an intact collection of painting and calligraphy in the tomb of Wang Zhen, a fifteenth-century Chinese merchant, enables us to explore the relevance of important changes in the social status of merchants to their activities in cultural spheres still dominated by the nonmercantile elite. Wang’s collection has much in common with the Ming paintings recorded as having been collected by Shen Zhou, a famous painter, suggesting that even such merchants as Wang Zhen, who was not well connected with important artists or government officials, were sufficiently sophisticated to obtain works by artists esteemed by contemporary cultural arbiters.

Baiae, in the Bay of Naples, was the center of the most extensive thermo-mineral resort in antiquity and a coveted location for the pleasure estates of Roman aristocracy. Excavated in 1950-51, the hillside of Baiae revealed extensive remains of a thermal city, domed and vaulted structures, gardens, pools, fountains, colonnades, and arcades. Were this complex and its extensions public baths and cure facilities, or private and royal villas? The answer is sought through an analysis of the literary and architectural evidence, and the unique visual testimony provided by De Balneis Puteolanis, a profusely illustrated early thirteenth-century manuscript.