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HISTORY OF THE WORLD |
The pictures in this gallery originated in existing collections and photogravure services around 1919. Many works were commissioned from painters and illustrators whose names today are virtually unknown. Among these are R.B. Ogle, A. Stewart, J.H. Valda, M. Dovaston, W.S. Bagdatopoulos, and others, who worked to pointers by historians.
Although artistically these works have little or no market value, they manifest influences of such as estheticism and impressionism, but particularly academicism. Historical and pseudo-historical painting, as opposed to themes from mythology, probably gained respectability first with Poussin (1594-1655), who is represented here with the Rape of the Sabine Women. Historical painting reached its apogee in mainstream art with Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). The Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) also practiced the historical genre on a grand scale, as in the Execution of Marino Faliero. Academicism can be defined as the tendency in art to carry on with undiluted pictorial realism applied to grand historical subjects.
But if academicism had its moment and lost its ground, historiography has never lost its fascination since it was launched by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What this gallery pretends to do is to heighten the fascination of history. There are difficulties here. One is that, above the individuals, history is process and pictures cannot depict processes except metaphorically, in the sense, say, in which an incident can be considered significantly part of a process. This produces basically staginess and most of the paintings in this gallery, however finished, could double as production sketches for operas. Staginess is often unintentionally comical and so it is with many of these pictures, which tend to exaggeration, contrived contrasts, melodramatic gesturing, and so on. But on the whole, this gallery does make history come alive through the depiction of how events might have occurred, through the representation of customs and dress, through sincere if flawed attempts at portraiture, and in other ways. In summation, this gallery and these works are a form as much of entertainment as of information.
One of the flaws implicit in this gallery is that most of the works were produced in the early 20th century and therefore they reflect, one, the state of historiographical knowledge at the time, and, two, the cultural attitudes prevalent in western civilization. Three glaring absences here are references to the Indus River Valley Civilization, which was only discovered in the 1920s, and to the Minoan and the Mycenaean civilizations, which had been been excavated earlier but about which only the vaguest conjectures were possible. Homer, for instance, could have been used as an inexhaustible source of anecdotal material not entirely unhistorical, but the case for the connection between Mycenae and Ancient Greece had not then been made strongly enough. Considering that many of the pictures are about conjectures on pre-history, perhaps an excessive caution was exercized. Caution however is frequently thrown to the winds in the representation of details concerning remote and even recent events. In this respect, it must be taken into account that the general attitude towards history manifest here is imbued by Victorian values and by unabashed Eurocentrism. But this, in our view, is probably as much an advantage as a disadvantage and the curious viewer of this gallery will find as much interest in the representations in themselves as in discovering what the representations distorted, misrepresented, or simply got wrong. On the whole, though, for the vast majority of subjects here, today a similar monumental attempt to capture the instants of history would probably not yield significantly dissimilar results.
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