 Deer Hunt, by Alfred de Dreux (France) before 1860 The Rose and the Chariot 1. Unframed Portraits This is a story more stumbled upon than pursued. It begins in a mansion with an oddly stirring painting. From there, the story wanders into the labyrinth of the mansion’s past, wades through the melancholy pages of an old book, and ends with an oddly stirring painting. María Gainza, in her book Optic Nerve, describes her visit alone to a museum on a stormy April day. When she encounters Alfred de Dreux’s painting Chasse au Cerf, she experiences an uncanny case of Stendhal syndrome. Disturbed, she staggers into a garden and catches her breath to recover from this sudden unease. She regains her poise and braces herself to observe the picture again, finding it undeniably conventional, yet alluring, even unsettling. The painting is part of the collection of the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires. The museum is housed in what was once a private mansion built during the beginning of the 20th century, the Palacio Errázuriz Alvear. A South American patrician couple commissioned the mansion: Josefina de Alvear, an Argentine socialite, and her Chilean husband, Matías Errázuriz Ortúzar, a high-ranking official at the Chilean embassy. Chasse au Cerf belonged to the original Errázuriz Alvear art collection, together with paintings by Fragonard, Corot, and Sargent, among many other art pieces. At the beginning of the 1900s, Mr. Errázuriz commissioned the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla to paint portraits of Josefina and their son. Detailed instructions on “embellishments” and photographs of the subjects were sent from Argentina to Spain for Sorolla’s inspiration. Later, the mansion prominently displayed these vague images. In 1910, Mr. Errázuriz chose Giovanni Boldini to paint portraits of Josefina and their daughter. The daughter’s portrait displayed in the mansion features her holding, not a shaggy dog, but a spiky-furred, glaring cat reminiscent of Louis Wain’s wired felines. It is at this juncture that the forking paths of Errázuriz and Boldini become entangled. For reasons unknown, Boldini’s first portrait of Josefina de Alvear never made it to Buenos Aires. In 1912, Boldini repurposed this former work and produced a new portrait of Josefina. This revamped Josefina earned a place of honour in the mansion, above Mr. Errázuriz’s desk in his studio. One imagines him pleasantly bemused each time he encountered this beautiful woman who was and was not his wife. Later, another Boldini portrait resembling Josefina roamed Europe until it was auctioned by Christie’s in 1971. A charcoal sketch by Boldini of a woman haunted by the eerie factions of Josefina was auctioned in France. Based on this drawing, a Boldini portrait of a ghostly Josefina again wandered Europe until it was auctioned in Vienna in 2012. Boldini began this mischief with the Errázuriz family at the 1892 Paris Exposition Nationale Des Beaux-Arts. Here, he exhibited two portraits, both mysteriously titled: one as Portrait de Mme E, and the other as Portrait de Mlle E. The Madame was relentlessly identified as Josefina de Alvear, and the Mademoiselle as her daughter, also named, in mystifying García Márquez recurrence, Josefina. Later, these hasty nominations were reconsidered given that Josefina (mother) and Matías (father), not to be confused with their son Matías, were married in 1897. All these portraits, unmoored in time and space, labile in form, seem to float in an ethereal atmosphere of “an uncertain legacy of incongruous sketches.”  Doña Josefina de Alvear de Errázuriz, by Joaquín Sorolla (Spain) 1905
2. The Good Book Matías’ library in the mansion contained rows and rows of lush leather-bound books, their spines engraved with names and inscriptions in gilt lettering like so many narrow headstones. One hopes Matias pursued book collecting in his own Proustian “façon particulière,” and not in the maniacal manner of an agitated bibliophile, a disorder that leaves one wondering if bibliophiles suffer more as feverish readers or as unhealthy hoarders. Sadly, he departed with most of his books in a two-day auction held in Buenos Aires. This mournful departure recalls Walter Benjamin’s fateful dictum that a collection loses its meaning when it loses its collector. Benjamin ends his lament with a fitting epitaph for Matías: “Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.” One book in Matias’ library was a French novel titled L’Abbé Constantin, written by Ludovic Halévy and published in 1888. The novel is undeniably conventional. It tells the story of a kind Catholic Priest and the idyllic community he shepherds. Calamity strikes when two American women appear: Madame Scott and her younger sister, Bettina, who sparks an inauspicious romance. The Abbé cautiously maneuvers around the devilish Madame Scott, who brandishes a three-pronged pitchfork of being an actor, rich, and “une hérétique…protestante.” A Roman Catholic deus ex machina saves the day, uncovering the sisters’ Catholic roots. This plot twist blesses Bettina’s engagement to a gallant army officer, making her a French Lieutenant’s Woman without the postmodern twist.
3. The Red Rose of Paris, France This 1888 edition of L’Abbé Constantin features eighteen full-page colour illustrations. To create these illustrations the academic Madame Madeleine Lemaire was selected, among the many French artists of the time, from the smug avant-garde to the dull academics. As a classic genre artist, Madame Lemaire specialized in still-life watercolours, particularly roses, with Stein-like redundancy. She painted roses in gardens; she painted roses within an ample floral arrangement; she painted a solitary red rose, gently inclined, cupped in its calyx of green sepals, the softly curled petals whorling delicately, the thorns almost invisible. “Madame Lemaire painted almost as many roses as God created,” Alexandre Dumas fils declaimed in fluent French. As her rumoured secret lover, his blasphemous flattery perhaps sprouted from reckless passion. To praise Madame Lemaire as “l’impératrice des roses” seems more objective if the compliment emanates from a disinterested party like Robert Montesquiou. A poet and critic, he embodied the stylish and sophisticated Parisian dandy. He inspired the Baron de Charlus character in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Both elegant luminaries met in Madeleine Lemaire’s famed Parisian salon. Another character in Proust’s novel, Madame Verdurin, was based on certain qualities of Madeleine, without the fond memories of tea and cake. In 2010, an exhibition was held in Paris of women artists linked to the life and times of Marcel Proust. The long-forgotten Madeleine was represented by a large-format painting titled Le Char de Fées, successfully shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.  The Chariot of Fairies, by Madeleine Lemaire (France) 1892 4. Terrible, Strange, Sublime and Beauteous Shapes Three fierce, snarling griffins spread their blue wings, like a ferocious version of the Wizard of Oz’s flying monkeys, and draw The Chariot of Fairies soaring through the heavens. Three fairies ride the golden chariot in majestic poise, arrayed in full fairy regalia and windswept in gauzy elegance, the chime of Tchaikovsky’s celeste ringing in one’s mind. They are carefully coiffured as a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. One fairy sits boldly upfront, and the other two stand bravely in the back. With their pearly faces and the eggshell white skin of their bare shoulders glowing, the thinly clothed fairies clutch their wands as if anxious to be airborne. They scan the skies in different directions, eager to confront a portentous marvel to reckon with, one hopes not air turbulence. At the centre of the picture, the seated fairy’s right bare breast points a rosy nipple at you. If you follow the diagonal line from this point toward the upper left-hand corner of the canvas, a pair of dark, chaffing eyes halts your gaze. The eyes belong to a fourth fairy, with only her head popping up unexpectedly behind the upright fairies. She has a ruddy complexion, tousled black hair with feathery bangs covering her forehead, and a hint of dark Frida Kahlo eyebrows. Her bony fingers rest on her wand while her teasing expression and bizarre pose contrast with those of the other three fairies. The spell is heightened by this odd intruder. Who is this fairy staring straight at you?  Madeleine Lemaire, photographer not known 1900 5. Framed Portrait Madame Lemaire was forty-seven years old and happily divorced for twelve years when she exhibited this painting at the 1892 Paris Exposition Nationale Des Beaux-Arts. A few years later, she was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the third female artist to receive the honour after Virginie Demont-Breton and Rosa Bonheur. Lemaire must have felt accomplished and proud, her strong and ambitious character reinforced. However, some vicious backbiting creatures lurked in the darker corners of her salon. A guest derided the sessions held in her glass-roofed studio as uncomfortable and suffocating experiences with overly extended musical interludes. Another person sneered about a dark peach fuzz on Lemaire’s face. Her unkind mentor crowed to anyone within earshot that “everything she paints has a moustache.” If one compares photographs taken of Lemaire with the face that pops up behind the fairies, a certain resemblance emerges: the reddish complexion, the thick eyebrows, the aloof stare, the black hair, the Nubian-like nose. One difference stands out. In Lemaire’s photographic portraits, her hair always holds up high, unlike the fairy’s bushy mane that playfully flows down to her shoulders. This fairy proudly lets her hair down with a confident, impish glare and a self-assured grin of sardonic mocking. Amaiur Attam Amaiur Attam was born in Santiago de Chile in 1959, and spent the 1960s living in Southern California, eventually settling in Europe and finally retiring in a remote village in northwestern Spain overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Amaiur writes CNF. Main Sources: Ringelberg, Kirstin. “Reading cisheteronormativity into the Art Historical Archives.” Arts, vol. 13, no. 3, 14 May 2024, p. 89, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030089 Espejo Fernández, Alejandro. “An Argentinian in Paris: Josefina de Alvear de Errázuriz and the Belle Époque Painters.” Prieto Ustio, Ester. Coleccionismo, Mecenazgo y Mercado Artístico: Su Proyección En Europa y América, 2018, p. 41, Universidad de Sevilla. Nine, Lucas. “El misterio de los retratos de la familia Errázuriz Alvear.” Diario Página/12, 19 de Febrero de 2023, Buenos Aires, Argentina. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/524481-el-misterio-de-los-retratos-de-la-familia-errazuriz-alvear/
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
March 2026
|
