Saw the Daumier show at the RA today and enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. The cartoons are in the Hogarthian vein, what pictorial satirist hasn't used Gargantua to portray greed?!, and the paintings were a combination of more or less precise salon paintings and the curly-whirly blurred atmospheric creations which are harder to appreciate but quite moving in their choice of subject. The point was made that they prefigured impressionism, mm, maybe. Van Gogh, whose early dark paintings are not totally dissimilar, was a fan apparently.
The cartoons were on the usual topics, mocking politicians etc. but one, without any explanatory text, showed "Paris (man) abducting Helen ( woman, face wouldn't have launched a coracle)" with what may well be Pyramids and Temples in the background. This could represent Napoleon and his lot ferrying large quantities of ancient Egyptian booty back to Paris and then the Louvre. Not that we can criticise as we have a large number of major Spanish paintings in Aspley House, booty from the Spanish looted by Joseph Bonaparte, the brother, and liberated from him by the Duke of Wellington. At least we paid somebody for the Elgin Marbles.
The other thing was the historical context which included Prussia's invasion of Austria in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the latter leading to the Siege of Paris ending when the city fell on the 28th of January 1871. This was fairly recent history in 1914 and relevant to decisions made at the time, especially in view of the Schlieffen Plan ( I've just looked it up!) which " was the German General Staff's early-20th-century overall strategic plan for victory in a possible future war in which the German Empire might find itself fighting on two fronts: France to the west and Russia to the east. (wiki)".
The cartoons were on the usual topics, mocking politicians etc. but one, without any explanatory text, showed "Paris (man) abducting Helen ( woman, face wouldn't have launched a coracle)" with what may well be Pyramids and Temples in the background. This could represent Napoleon and his lot ferrying large quantities of ancient Egyptian booty back to Paris and then the Louvre. Not that we can criticise as we have a large number of major Spanish paintings in Aspley House, booty from the Spanish looted by Joseph Bonaparte, the brother, and liberated from him by the Duke of Wellington. At least we paid somebody for the Elgin Marbles.
The other thing was the historical context which included Prussia's invasion of Austria in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the latter leading to the Siege of Paris ending when the city fell on the 28th of January 1871. This was fairly recent history in 1914 and relevant to decisions made at the time, especially in view of the Schlieffen Plan ( I've just looked it up!) which " was the German General Staff's early-20th-century overall strategic plan for victory in a possible future war in which the German Empire might find itself fighting on two fronts: France to the west and Russia to the east. (wiki)".
Comment