Wednesday, September ?, 1889

Wednesday Sept. ——-

Went to the exposition. Visited the art galleries of England, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Hungary and the United States. Englands display is poor, much more so than United States. The chief thing of interest to me was a life size picture of Gladstone by Millais, magnificent. He is standing as though addressing the House of Parliament and the flash of his intellect seems almost to speak from the canvass. A beautiful life size portrait of Lady Coldridge, daughter of the – –

poet, in a white lace robe, by Leighton , is to me one of the sweetest things in the gallery. The”Last Rose of Summer” is also superb

The United States display occupies four rooms. Two statues by Story stands at the entrance as you ascend the star case. Some things are fine, especially Bridgman’s picture “Pirate of Lore” attracting crowds. It is in three parts in one immense frame. A/ beautiful girl has fallen asleep in a garden, a peacock fan in her hand. The flowers about her,the shade and vines are climing over the garden wall ; her sweet innocent heavenly face unconscious of all but peace, while over the wall peers a villian. In the next picture the villian has  attacked her, while she is struggling to defend herself, and in the last she lays dead pierced to the heart. The coloring and awful story make it interesting, and the artistic s kill of Bridgman have here found full expression.

[This is the first of a few entries in this subsection that have no exact date but are interspersed with entries that have exact dates whose order doesn’t match up with those that don’t, all leading me to believe that these small number of entries may have been typed out of order.]

[Millais painted multiple portraits of British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone, and so far I have been unable to definitively determine which one was exhibited at the Exposition, though it seems likely it was one painted in the 1880’s. The art critiques I have read suggest that today these portraits are generally not looked very favorably upon as accurately portraying Gladstone’s character, as portrait painting was overall still supposed to do in the Victorian era.]

[By “Coldridge” Addie appears to mean the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but she was confused about his family in this entry. His only known daughter was Sara Coleridge; Sara had died in 1852. The portrait of a woman in the Coleridge family by the painter Frederic Leighton is of Amy Augusta Jackson Coleridge (nee Lawford), second wife of Lord John Coleridge, who was a grand-nephew of the poet. Here is a reproduction of the painting that seems to best match Addie’s description, “Amy Augusta, Lady Coleridge.” Sources vary on its exact date, with some only giving a range; a few sites date it as being finished in 1890, but if it is the correct painting, it would have to have been finished by 1889. It is also possible that this painting really was finished in 1890 and there is a second painting of Lady Amy Augusta Coleridge by Leighton that I haven’t located online. For those interested, here is a contemporary article about Lord and Lady Coleridge’s sensational 1885 marriage.]

[“The Last Rose of Summer” appears to have been a popular painting title, both then and more recently. Without an artist’s name to narrow down results, so far I have been unable to determine which painting titled “The Last Rose of Summer” was shown at the Exposition Universelle de 1889. I did discover that it was a popular song in the late 1800’s and that the song is believed to have inspired at least some of the paintings.]

[It is very likely that the artist Bridgman to which Addie referred was American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman, one of the top “Orientalist” painters of the mid-19th century to early 20th century and one of the best-known American painters of the time. Bridgman had studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and frequently participated in the Paris Salon. An “Orientalist” painter being featured at the Exposition Universelle de 1889 fits well with what seems to have been a major theme that year. Today Bridgman appears to not be very well known in the States outside of art history and art dealer circles. Here is a blog post on him. Here is a website devoted to him, featuring copies of many of his paintings. If you are browsing at work, be aware that number of his paintings are of nudes. With regards to the specific reference in this journal entry, I have yet to find a painting or set of paintings that he did called “Pirate of Lore”; perhaps it was a colloquial name commonly known at the time.]

Sunday, September 22, 1889

Sunday Sept. 22nd.

This morning came the first rain we have had in Paris, so we studied and read aloud all the morning, concerning the old Masters and directly after breakfast (12 o’clock) we went to the Louvre to find what we had been studying about. We found the Rubens room and a series of magnificent pictures representing the marriage of Henry 1V with Mary DeMedici. They are about 30 feet high by 20 feet in width and 15 in number. The first one represents Angels suspended in mid air weaving the thread of Mary’s life; the second her birth and the third her education; fourth Henry’s first view of Mary’s picture, and the rapture and surprise in his face and attitude; fifth, marriage, sixth birth of Louis XV; seventh, Louis giving the crown to his mother; eighth her coronation; ninth, the tyranny of her reign, luxury of the nobles and misery of the people She stands colossal and imperious holding a rake; tenth, quarrel with her son and so on to the end when she and her son become reconciled. We hunted up all the Titians,Leonardo-de-Vinci’s, Raphael’s and Murillo’s. We admired especially two fine ones of the latter; the”Birth of the Virgin”and the”Conception of the Virgin.”

We spent all the afternoon until four o’clock when the uniformed men with cocked hats came through the rooms crying “Alle; Alle”, which means go out, and the thousands began pouring forth. The earth and sky were fresh from the rain, the sun shining, so we walk ed all the way through the garden of the Tuilleries. We sat down, and watched the fountains playing, and the trees and flowers, it seemed like heaven. What must it have been when the sovereigns of France wandered up and down where we were sitting. The lower part of the garden is noww given up for a public play ground, a mass of shade [Ed. Note: “shade” is added below “of”] with no grass, clear white gravelled earth, every now and then statues and fountains and filled with chairs in fron of a grand stand where a band was playing. Girls and boys were playing ball, nurses by the score with their babies and a kind of general resort for rich and poor alike. We walked through to the Place,del-Concord. An immense square in the center of which is “Cleopatra’s needle”, brought from Egypt and entirely covered with hyrogliphics. Twelve immense pieces of marble statuary on huge bases surround this place and the marble fountains. The Champs Elysee goes directly out from this to the Bois-de-Bologne. This evening we sang hymns from Moody and Sanky, the only American thing I have heard in Paris

[Here is a blog post analyzing the Medici Cycle, focusing on “The Presentation of Her Portrait to Henry IV,” which Addie discussed as well. Here is the Louvre‘s own English-language page on one of the paintings in the Medici Cycle, “The Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Médicis.” The other sites note that the cycle actually consisted of 24 paintings, not 15 as Addie noted in her diary. The discrepancy may be because Addie seems to have been writing about the paintings in one specific room at the Louvre.]

[Three Egyptian obelisks all known colloquially as “Cleopatra’s needle” were re-erected in major ‘Western’ cities over the course of the the 19th century, one each in in Paris, London, and New York City. All three still stand today. The one in Paris, originally from Luxor in Egypt, was erected at Place de la Concorde in 1833 after being presented by viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, to King Louis-Philippe of France in 1829. The delay between gifting and placement of the obelisk now at Paris shows how expensive and difficult it was to move a huge granite obelisk at the time, though the London obelisk’s gap time was more marked, taking nearly 60 years to go from gifting to its new placement. An old engraving of the London Cleopatra’s needle can be seen at this blog post by the Bodleian Library, along with a 19th century song that may have been inspired by the London obelisk’s arrival. After several minutes of searching I was unable to successfully locate a definitively-19th-century photograph or postcard of the Paris obelisk, so I stopped looking for now.]

[Moody and Sankey (not “Sanky” as spelled by Addie) were an American duo who wrote and performed gospel hymns, touring around the United States and United Kingdom performing them. Sankey also wrote many hymns alone and with other collaborators and is estimated to have written approximately 1,200 songs total, many of them hymns. He had served in the U. S. Civil War, as had Addie’s husband. Moody and Sankey were at a revival meeting in Chicago when the Chicago Great Fire occurred in 1871, killing many of the people who were attending it, and Sankey is said to have watched the city burn down from a rowboat on the lake; this experience seems to have profoundly changed Sankey’s life. A biography of Sankey and links to some of his hymns (many including auto-playing music) can be found here. A video featuring Dave Willets’s portrayal of Sankey and a medley of some Moody and Sankey hymns is on YouTube.]

Tuesday, September 17, 1889

Tuesday Sept. 17th.

This morning we took a cab and started out for Madame Tatemans a boarding school just outside the city limits. The coachman did not know the way, so we had a long ride and a good look at Paris. Every time I go out I am astonished more and more at the size ,extent and beauty of this metropolis. We rode out on the “Bois-de-Bologne” the most delightful Boulevard in Paris, with four rows of trees down the whole extent to the park. When we arrived at Madame Tateman’s we were ushered into a beautiful parlor. The Madame came in,a polished French woman speaking English fluently. She took us all over the beautiful school, and I never saw anything so fine for a school. The dining room has a dome and stained glass ceiling. I went there to get the little girls in school, but found everything bfilled. I heard about it on the Gascogne.

This P. M Jennie’s Greek admirer came for us and took us in a carriage to the Louvre, the grandest picture gallery in the world. How can I begin to give any idea of it. It was once the Palace of the sovereigns of France. Begun in 1541 by Francis 1, and finished in 1857 by Napoleon 3. The Government spares no expense in keeping up these galleries of pictures and it costs nothing to enter. Of course there are miles of pictures, but we divided most of the time to among the old Masters, Rubens, Raphael and Murillo. One whole row is devoted to Rubens and the pictures are immense. How one man could accomplish so much in one short life time is a mystery to me The coloring is rich, and the spiritual inspiration is sublime. We saw the famous Last Supper by Leonardo-de-Vinci, and a great number of Raphael’s seraphic pictures, always containing the one face he adored. I do not wonder these men are immortal. The number and grandeur of their works makes one feel their enormous powers and capacity for labor and their transcendant genius. My blood fairly ran cold as I looked at the original works of these great mast ers.

the Louvre is situated in the palaces bordering on the Tulleries garden. We left the Louvre an d went to the Morgue where three dead bodies lay waiting identification. They were a horrible sight. In a glass case one child that had been murdered, its face pounded fearfully. On our way we saw the tower in which Marie Antoinette was imprisoned and from which she was taken for execution. We also saw the native habitation of Heloise and Ableard, and their sorrowful love story had adeeper meaning for me than ever before. We came back and walked through the Palais Royal, filled with rare jewels and everything else under the sun.

This evening was Madame’s Soiree. The parlor filled with guests. Mademoiselle Lita the opera singer sang for us.

[Without a specified location, I have thus far been unsuccessful in identifying the school run by Madame Tateman. I am not completely sure what Addie means by a Boulevard named Bois-de-Bologne, though I can say that she appears to have misspelled “Boulogne” as “Bologne.” The 1889 map on this blog shows a Boulevart de Boulogne running next to the park known as Bois de Boulogne, but I’m not sure why she would have taken that street to get to the park as per the entry since the street ran parallel to the park. The park’s name remains the same but in the intervening century-plus the road has been renamed Boulevard Anatole France. Comparing a modern map (link opens PDF) of Bois de Boulogne to the 1889 map on this blog shows the structure of the park itself appears to have changed little since Addie visited it. The park was one of many changes introduced to Paris by Baron Haussmann (photo of him here), the same person after whom the street where Addie was staying was named; he modeled it on large London parks like Hyde Park.]

[I imagine the Louvre is familiar to all readers. The English-language version of their website is here.]

[When I first read this entry, I was shocked both that a morgue had been open to the public and at the fairly nonchalant tone with which Addie seemed to me to report the visit in the diary, as if morgue visits were an everyday occurrence to Victorians. In subsequent research I discovered that the Paris Morgue was notorious for being open to the public, was frequently mentioned in Victorian tourist guide books as a potential destination, and was visited by many Victorian British writers who wrote about it in the English language. In the article “Returning the Look: Victorian Writers and the Paris Morgue” by Paul Vita (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 25:3 [2003], pp. 241-256), Vita writes:

“The archives of the Musée de Police in Paris hold no records of how many people visited the nineteenth-century morgue, but a tourist attraction it was. . . . A large plate-glass window separated these two rooms—a sanitary measure, which also ensured that the experience was essentially visual. In 1867, this morgue was demolished, as part of the ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris (Schwartz 55), and replaced by a structure roughly four times the size of the original. Located at the end of the Ile de la Cité, the new morgue was a modernized version of the former: as Vanessa Schwartz points out, the modest Greek temple was replaced by ‘a generic administrative building—symmetrical, made of stone and supported by heavy pillars, with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité written across the front’ (55). This new morgue heightened the spectacle of the first—adding curtains to conceal the changing of the scene, for example (Schwartz 57)—while it accommodated Paris’ growing population of unclaimed corpses and the thousands (often spurred on by a sensational or scandalous story in the press) who came to see them.”

On the blog Victorian Paris, blogger Iva quotes a lengthy passage about Paris Morgue visits from Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867), including: “The morgue is a sight within reach of everybody, and one to which passers-by, rich and poor alike, treat themselves. The door stands open, and all are free to enter. There are admirers of the scene who go out of their way so as not to miss one of these performances of death. If the slabs have nothing on them, visitors leave the building disappointed, feeling as if they had been cheated, and murmuring between their teeth; but when they are fairly well occupied, people crowd in front of them and treat themselves to cheap emotions; they express horror, they joke, they applaud or whistle, as at the theatre, and withdraw satisfied, declaring the Morgue a success on that particular day.”

According to descriptions of exactly where the post-1867 morgue was located, it appears that on the 1889 map on this blog, the large sketch of Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris curiously literally covers up the morgue’s precise location.]

[I have thus far been unable to determine the identity of the opera singer Addie calls “Lita.”]