The Period Eye

When you think about it, a deck of playing cards has a tactility and design like nothing else: the small, stiff paper panels with glossy sides, the faces inscribed with a number or letter and the equivalent in hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs and the backs intricately colored and patterned. To grip a deck with backs upward is to suggest numerological and symbolic randomness; to spread a hand is to engage in ordering and valuation; to draw and discard, to throw down money or chips at intervals is to conjecture a hand’s value in relation to others’. There are consequences to manipulating cards.

Shortly before passing away a few years ago, my grandmother gave me a fancy double deck of playing cards manufactured by the Piatnik Company of Vienna. I can still see her sitting in a heavy padded armchair before a large walnut card table overhung with an enormous swag lantern and instructing her grandchildren in the games most conducive to filling a holiday afternoon. Although she was very patient in teaching us variations of go fish, poker, and rummy, she never tried to introduce us to her personal favorite, contract bridge, perhaps because it necessitated great concentration, dependable partners, and a heavy purse. Like her scotch and sodas and slightly risqué jokes, bridge seemed to us an adult ritual that belonged to those who made it through the Great Depression.

The letter cards of this deck—the king, queen, and jack—seem peculiarly suited to my aesthetic sensibilities: each bears an aristocratic likeness adapted from a famous early modern French portrait. The “court of diamonds,” for example, is represented by busts of Henri IV and his second wife, Marie de’ Medici, after full-lengths by Frans Pourbus the Younger, and Cardinal Richelieu after Philippe de Champaigne. All the figures are swathed in generous draperies that make the fusion between their upright and inverted aspects appear seamless and are colored with brilliant primaries against a pale yellow ground. However, the designer’s determination to adhere to baroque pictorial illusionism instead of conventional flat patterning lends the personages a strange palpability that seems almost monstrous—like Siamese twins bending backwards.

The decision to model the figure of the jack of diamonds on Champaigne’s portrait of Cardinal Richelieu was probably motivated by the circumstance that so many copies are held in public collections (e.g. National Gallery, London; Louvre, Paris; National Museum, Warsaw). All of these copies are based on a slightly smaller lost original painted in 1635 for the Galerie des Hommes Illustres (or Gallery of Famous Men) at the Palais Cardinal (now the Palais Royal), Paris. Never reluctant to parade his power and achievements, the cardinal had commissioned the painter to fill his gallery with twenty-six full-length, over life-size portraits of great men of France spanning Abbé Suger to Louis XIII. Because this series was engraved shortly after completion, we know something about the appearance of the cardinal’s first portrait, which the London copy most closely resembles.

A native of Brussels, Champaigne was familiar with the grand format portraits of the Flemish masters. His Richelieu mimics the pose of Van Dyck’s Genoese clientele of the 1620s: a solitary figure draped in an elaborate vestment consisting of an ermine stole, a voluminous red cappa magna (or mantle), a white rochet (narrow-sleeved, lace-edged over-garment), and a red cassock extends one hand to motion the way with his biretta (four-crested cap) and employs the other to gather up the folds of his ponderous garment. The head is a study of the effects of long working hours upon a fifty year-old administrator: gray hair, flaccid flesh, and lined eyes are meticulously rendered to suggest probity and vigilance. The white linen collar, the pale blue ribbon of the Ordre de Saint-Esprit, and lace-edged surplice, lend the form textural variety and signify that the individual is currently engaged on secular matters. The habit is drawn and modeled in a way that seems hard, even brittle at the edges yet fluid on the surfaces, not unlike late Mannerist sculptures. Rendered from a low viewpoint, the figure appears to be composed of solid geometries: the lines of recession intersect with the folds of the garment to demarcate at least four triangular units secured by the right hand. Richelieu’s satisfaction with the portrait can be assumed from the large number of copies in circulation, some of which show the left hand repositioned to assume a florid rhetorical gesture—of the kind that appears on our playing card.

The designation of Richelieu as the third member of the royal suite is especially interesting in light of his political ties to Marie de’ Medici and Louis XIII. Armand Jean du Plessis was educated in Paris, became Bishop of Luçon in 1606, served as Secretary of State to Marie de’ Medici and her protégé Concino Concini until the latter’s assassination in 1617, was recalled by Louis XIII to negotiate peace with her after a disastrous civil war, and was made Chief Minister to the king in 1624, a position he retained (along with the new title of duc de Richelieu) until his death nearly twenty years later. His principle contribution to the state consisted of centralizing the French monarchy at home by limiting the resources of rebellious nobility and increasing its strength abroad by pursuing diplomatic alliances meant to frustrate Austro-Spanish hegemony. Yet the Bourbons never completely trusted him and the nobles and commons downright despised him. Marie de’ Medici regarded Richelieu’s service to her son as a threat to her own influence while Louis XIII repeatedly questioned his minister’s draconian and brutal methods.

It is significant that by the early seventeenth century the knave of diamonds had acquired a bad reputation in France and England as a worthless fellow or an evil omen. The French expression “Il est un valet de carreau” (“He is a knave of [floor] tiles”) suggested a “man of the pavement” or loiterer who sought to take advantage of passers-by; the English epithet “scurvy knave” suggested a sea-faring rascal (in the diamond import business?) who brought his illness back to port to infect inhabitants. Both epithets seem readily applicable to a vigilant minister navigating the “ship of state.” Political personages and state functionaries were first ridiculed on playing cards during the French Revolution, when satires and caricatures flooded the Paris and London markets. Our contemporary card follows this tradition in raising an unfavorable comparison between Richelieu and the n’er-do-well: both had an ominous gaze, were bearded, and sported a deceptively elegant “hook,” the cardinal’s curled finger being similar to the knave’s halberd with its serpentine flourish. In a strange twist, the graphic designer gave the queen and her allies a belated, symbolic form of revenge they could never have afforded in life, the cardinal’s double hook at once persuading the great and ensnaring the weak.

But then my grandmother, who was affectionately known as “queen of the card table,” would have said that whatever “hand” I was dealt in life, it was in my interest to make work enjoyable and to take leisure seriously.

The expansion of the Internet into news, entertainment, and leisure does not seem to have staunched the flow of printed magazines—available at airports, gas stations, grocery and drug stores. My neighbors were cleaning out a garage piled with old newspapers and periodicals when I came upon an August 1991 issue of Family Circle, whose spine offered the assurance that it was the “world’s largest-selling women’s magazine.” The back flap contained a full-page advertisement remarkable for its reliance on a well-known early nineteenth-century portrait.

A woman, undoubtedly a model in her early twenties, stands confidently in the foreground, turned forty-five degrees to the picture plane and clothed in French military garb, one hand thrust into a white waistcoat, the other resting on the arm of a gilded fauteuil and grasping a cigarette. Pale, even facial features are cosmetically enhanced with high arched eyebrows, deeply shaded cheeks, and broad red lips, the whole framed by a luxuriant chestnut mane floating two enormous gold spiral earrings. The narrow torso is augmented by a dark blue cutaway coat trimmed with red collar and cuffs, gold braid epaulettes, metallic buttons and medals; the slim legs are accentuated by white breeches and hose, terminating in black patent leather flats affixed with a gold buckle. The hands are the operative signs: while the position of the right is a popular synecdoche for the Emperor Napoleon I, and as such works with the empire uniform, setting, and frame to signify Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812), the gesture of the left is meant to showcase a foreign object, namely Virginia Slims Cigarettes. The impact of the advertisement is thus derived from the viewer’s perception of the woman’s/product’s daring disruption of a visual sign system created by and for men to promote their authority. Two inscriptions clarify the nature of this disruption of visual coda: white script at the top queries, “Ever wonder where we’d be if history had been herstory?,” and yellow capitals at the bottom left declare, “YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY.” The message is forceful and unequivocal: after centuries of being excluded from the chief cultural and political events of history’s narrative, women are at last emancipated and ready to play and to record a part equal to that of a man.

And not just any man. Between 1800 and 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte presided over a series of military and diplomatic victories on the European Continent that allowed him to claim a French empire stretching from the Papal States to the Netherlands along with dependents and allies extending from Spain to Russia. First as Consul and then as Emperor, he also presided over the creation of a strong executive branch capable of reorganizing national and regional governments and instituting a new legal system (the Napoleonic Code) and civil service that oversaw public education, religious worship, tax collection, and law enforcement. To explore in greater depth how the interests of the commodity marketer compare with those of the art historian, it is necessary to consider the origins and content of David’s original portrait of Napoleon.

In 1810, an eccentric Scottish nobleman named Alexander Douglas, Marquis of Hamilton, commissioned David to paint a full-length image of Napoleon that would preside over a collection brimming with busts and miniatures of the Bonaparte family and an impressive array of Egyptian artifacts. Unlike his later female impersonator, the emperor shows sure signs of middle age: thinning hair and cautious gaze rest atop a slack and portly physique disposed in comfortable counterpoise. The uniform, augmented with white winged lapels held with gold buttons, can be identified as that of the Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. The rendering of the right hand lightly slung into an opening in the vest accentuates his corpulence, and that of the left firmly clutching a gold snuffbox admits the importance of tobacco as a nighttime stimulant. Although a few planes have been flattened and furnishings inserted compared to the original sketch, the arrangement guarantees the balance of horizontals and verticals typical of neoclassical painting. The eye is admitted to this private space only by degrees: the red velvet settee angled like the figure, the mahogany trestle bureau affixed with a lion and piled with writing implements, the wall articulated at the left edge by a monumental pilaster filigreed with grotesques and at the right by a tall case clock registering 4:13 a.m., the recess filled with books—all attributes of the emperor’s private suite at the Château de Tuileries. The low-burning lamp and the early hour of the clock suggest that the emperor has been up all night reading and drafting documents. David himself remarked that he intended it to seem like Napoleon had been hard at work writing the Code Napoléon, signified by a partial inscription on the scroll at right, yet this was hardly to be believed since the Code was a collaborative effort and had been in effect for years. But David was successful in promoting the legend of the emperor tirelessly working for the welfare of his subjects. As sunrise approaches, he rises from his desk, adjusts his uniform, and fastens his sword in preparation to review of the foot soldiers. In this way, he encompasses both civil and military aspects in his person and identity; battles in foreign fields may well have brought him to the elevated position he now holds, but administrative responsibilities at home are consuming an increasingly large share of his time.

Even before Napoleon’s reign had ended, viewers compared the portrait to slightly earlier fare. Alexandre Lenoir, archeologist and head of the Musée des monuments français, proclaimed it the best likeness ever made of the emperor, the image of a lawgiver among his papers being the perfect companion to that of a conqueror traversing the Alps. Closer to today, Albert Boime embraced this comparison between Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and the Napoleon in His Study (1812) for the purpose of exploring the relative proportions of mythology (his word is “ideology”) and reality in each. As portraits, both are idealized depictions, but whereas the former invested the active body of the hero with ideal qualities, the latter accorded to the inanimate objects surrounding the body with them. In other words, the master of the surprise attack has now become a prisoner of paperwork.

Scholars take as axiomatic the idea that Imperial state portraits evidence a clean break with the ancien régime‘s religio-political values, if not always its sign systems: the ancient emblems and medieval regalia that they bear can signify antiquarianism or historical anecdote but never transcendent powers. This may well have been true for many post-Revolutionary viewers, intent as citizens were to break with past political institutions, but it was likewise true that painters built on past visual traditions, among which the eighteenth century’s small- to mid-sized cabinet portraits featuring clerics, aristocrats, and financiers, male and female, engaged in reading or writing within the confines of their libraries and boudoirs, figured prominently. It only remained for a head of state to express the desire to be so represented on a grand scale before a large audience for this domestic occupation to be understood as a political virtue. Napoleon appears to have been the first to embrace this strategy. Thus, David’s portrait of Bonaparte represents a measure of continuity with the Bourbon past, suggesting that the emperor not only bears the martial and legal obligations of modern statecraft but also continues the creative and thoughtful pursuits of the republic of letters.

Mention of women’s contributions to Enlightenment texts and images brings us back to Virginia Slims’ use of a model to travesty Napoleon’s portrait. In 1968 the Phillip Morris Company targeted young professional women with a longer, slimmer, and smoke-reducing cigarette. Its marketing consultants, aware of the potential of modeling shots to be seamlessly integrated into realist paintings, conceived the strategy of substituting a young mannequin for a middle-aged monarch. Women’s liberation, it was suggested, consists of being able to appear and to act like a man, as signified by the assumption of military dress and the possession of tobacco. Of course, this only gives rise to more questions. If women’s empowerment over inequities past and present is predicated on her ability to be like a man, does that not constitute a reinforcement of patriarchal values, in this case militant and autocratic ones? Further, if women’s empowerment is facilitated by the consumption of tobacco, does this not contribute to capitalist abuses, the exploitation of labor and the onset of lung cancer? Consumers might have been served better with a portrait of Madame de Pompadour or Catherine the Great standing before a desk piled with papers, holding a cup of Gevalia Kaffe, and pondering, “How might herstory be written?” or “What will herstory say?” Establishing this narrative continues to be a complicated and contested business.

When a friend offered me a slightly worn copy of Cecil Beaton’s Photography (1951), a series of autobiographical anecdotes compiled by one of the twentieth-century’s foremost society photographers, I did not have to think twice about accepting it, for I had always been intrigued by his elaborately staged portraits. In the late 1930s and early ‘40s Beaton seemed to delight in “historical artifice,” posing members of the royal family against old master paintings or within period interiors. In early March 1945, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace to take an official photograph of George VI’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, intended to mark her attaining the age of majority. In a half dozen varieties reproduced in books and magazines, she appears at three-quarter length, firmly seated and facing left, ensconced in lush foliage. She is clothed in a low-necked, short-sleeved gown of pink crinoline speckled with sequined floral sprays and butterflies, her mother’s Hartnell hand-me-down during a time of economic austerity. Brown hair strangely cresting to the side and ruddy hands heavily clasped in the lap, the shy teenager looks directly at the camera and smiles broadly in salutation or lowers her visage in romantic introspection. She is flanked by two thin sprays of carnations and backed by a partial reproduction of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Hazards of the Swing (1767). Yet the illusion of a fairy princess dwelling amid magical trees and birds seems a bit contrived even for this era.

By juxtaposing a very alive princess with a painterly forest, Beaton may have imagined that he was elevating his technique by allusion to an eighteenth-century French masterwork and securing for his sitter the illusion of youthful innocence and beauty. However, there are hazards to quoting old masters, the most obvious being that the content of the backdrop may be incongruous with the values of the sitter.

From the moment Fragonard showed historical narratives at the Salon (or art exhibition of the French Académie Royale in Paris) in 1765, he was hailed as an official talent capable of reinvigorating grand format history painting for the edification of the public. Soon after, however, Fragonard abandoned an academic career and the historical genre for a private existence making rococo decorative panels for the haute bourgeoisie. A wealthy Intendant des finances (tax collector) for the clergy, the baron de Saint-Julien had conceived The Swing as a titillating fantasy wherein his mistress would be represented on the ropes being pushed from behind by her placid husband and regarded from below by her enthralled lover. The artist was accustomed to making precise studies of landscape, but whenever he came to adapt these to decorative vignettes like this one, his imagination took over. For example, a massive, gnarled, yet still eminently virile oak frames the right and upper sides of the canvas, its billowing branches melding with the blue-green bushes and trees beyond. The attitudes of the human inhabitants are no less exaggerated. The young mistress wears a luxurious robe à la française of pale pink silk trimmed at the bodice and sleeves with frothy waves of bows and lace, the amplitude of which is tested by the husband pulling her ever higher into the air. As the demimondaine floats upward and over a rose bramble, she raises a leg in order to discharge a miniature shoe, a signal to her lover that incidentally provides him with a tantalizing view up her skirt. Reclining against a cylindrical plinth carved with a nude chase scene and topped with Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s 1757 marble sculpture of Cupid invoking silence, the rascal is clothed in a simple pale gray suit and gazes upward adoringly. He raises his tricorn hat in an effort to brush her dangling leg. When legal and moral strictures have fallen away, burgeoning nature steps in to abet the sexual impulse.

To be sure, Beaton did his best to neutralize any chance that the sensational content of Fragonard’s The Swing would be associated with the physical person of Princess Elizabeth. As Roy Strong has observed, Beaton charged a photographic firm in Ealing to provide him with a single enlarged portion of the French canvas printed in reverse. Nevertheless, wartime technology had its limitations, and the supporting ropes and billowing dress of the air-born lady remained partly visible in the upper left, requiring a (painted?) overlay of parallel hatchings. Joint recognition of a famous work from the art historical canon and an official representative of the British government results in an attempt to relate the two. Did Princess Elizabeth own Fragonard’s painting or admire the rococo style and, if not, why did she find this imagery appropriate? And joint recollection of the painting’s mistress on a swing and the photograph’s princess on a stool results in an attempt to reconcile their divergent identities and interests. Yet the two women are hardly in sympathy: the princess’s decorous and genial presence transforms the space from one of amorous dalliance to one of youthful purpose and imagination. Personal desires are upstaged by official obligations, the thick ropes re-cast as supports for a tottering but still admired tree: the House of Windsor.

Beaton’s approach was typical for press photographs and studio films of the period, offering aristocratic and bourgeois clients the illusion of graciousness and congeniality and consumers relief from poverty and warfare. Equipped with large and medium format cameras capable of registering optimal figural detail and tonal subtlety, he posed the royals before large painted and photographic backdrops that incorporated quotations from paintings and engravings spanning Watteau to Winterhalter. He was quick to distinguish his creative approach from that of Victorian and Edwardian portrait photographers, who delighted in arranging elites in absurd costume portraits and narrative tableaus. Rather, he wished to convey the “easy charm” and “melting sympathy” of female members of the royal family at a time of massive political and social convulsion. It is unclear whether the aristocracy knew what he was about; as he recollected, the older generation questioned his use of elaborate settings: “all these backgrounds and flowers—what does it mean?” “So long as the pictures are flattering, who cares?” they chirped. They could not have known that he was creating a goddess for the modern era.

Sixty-five years later, when “high” and “low” art forms regularly circulate and intermingle in digital mass media, there is finally a reason to care. Manipulating images from art history to meet a new creative objective is always a tricky business, but especially so when it is done in the service of an ideology, politician, or figurehead. Those inclined to see Beaton’s society photographs as a significant step on the way to chic costume and set design of the late 1950s and early ‘60s are missing their larger purpose as a vehicle for encouraging popular acceptance of the institution of monarchy in the post-war democracies. All the while the fascists in Italy and Germany were using official ceremonial and newsreel footage to court the old dynasts and new industrialists, the constitutionalists in Britain and the United States were doing their best to adapt monarchs and millionaires to the language of popular media, converting archaic signs of authority, prestige, and wealth into a kindly, luxurious, and infinitely consumable product.

The strength of this enterprise will be tested once again next February when Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. In the meantime, her government has announced a few measures aimed at increasing popular support for the monarchy: the throne will now pass to the eldest child, whether male or female, and members of the royal family may now, in addition to marrying divorcé(e)s, practice Roman Catholicism. Some of Beaton’s more notorious clients, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, would have smiled.