The town of Tours is in central France, about an hour’s train ride south of Paris. It is has two rivers (the Loire and the Cher), a beautiful old medieval quarter, and an excellent cathedral. Though oddly lacking in the cafe/bar department, there are plenty of nice restaurants in the center.
Before The Ball, the distateful business of feeding the baby.
The other week we went for a visit and found, like many provincial cities, a small but excellent museum.
The collection is spread over several floors, the higher up you go the younger the paintings.There are some of the well-known famous artists, like Degas or Monet, but like many rural museums they show a lot of excellent, kind of second string artists. You may not have heard of them but they were a big noise in their day. They just didn’t make the posterity cut, so to speak.
The top floor had some very interesting 19th century images of women.
Coffee? Tea? Bloody decapitated head?
The 19th century was a peculiar time for women. Civilized society tried to repress even the idea of sexuality, There was a lot of head shaking and finger wagging around judging proper behaviour.
Before the Ball by Edourd Debat-Ponsan.shows a woman breast feeding — a natural thing for a woman to do — literally surrounded by judging people. Her husband has a twisted expression of stern disapproval and arousal. The maid looks very censorious.
Then there is Judith Victorius by Eugène Thirion. This tells the story of Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia. He gets drunk, passes out, and Judith sneaks into his tent and cuts his head off.
Carvaggio’s version is a little more subtle.
This is a well-known scene in the history of art. I went to a whole exhibition of paintings of Judith & Holofernes last summer, and they were all a lot more like this Caravaggio (which wasn’t in the Tours museum). This is more typically horrific and violent.
But the 19th century one presents Judith as a quite placid, well-dressed upperclass matron who happens to have a decapitated head to hand. Always be a lady, even when committing bloody murder.
What do you think is going on here?
Then we have the multi-titled, Dynamis, or The Machine, or The Red Coal by Jean Veber.
What on earth is going on? You have a naked woman straddling some kind of machine that is driving flywheel that is grinding up tiny men. Does she just hate men? Does she represent Industry that is destroying mens’ lives? A rampant naked woman is used to symbolize the destructiveness of the modern age, even though it was 99.9% run by men. In the 19th century everything was a woman’s fault.
It been has always complicated to be a woman. When everything is your responsibility – morals, finances, child care, men’s sexual appetites – it’s gets hard to live. And if you accidentally got pregnant your were thrown out of your life and had to move away, sometimes without your baby. Also, you had to go through city all day without anywhere to pee. It was deemed inpolite to acknowlege the bodily functions of females. Tough times.
A very interesting collection of paintings. Things were challenging for women back then. They are challenging now too, but at least we have public toilets.
i highly recommend Tours and this museum. There are lots of other artists represented from over the past thousand years 987out there who are not mentioned in the art history books but are well worth a look. And if you are visiting Tours I also recommend you find a hotel near to the center for a better choice of restaurants.
