| |
| |
 Several Nineteenth-Century
European Artists and art critics achieved a self-aware
homosexual identity that is expressed in both their lives and their
works, but lesbianism is only rarely depicted in terms of identity
during this period. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
 Louise Abbéma (1858-1927) was a painter in the Impressionist style, as well as an engraver, sculptress, and writer. She is best known for her portraits and genre scenes and for her close relationship with actress Sarah Bernhardt. |
|
|
|
| |
| |
 Aestheticism was a
theory of art and an approach to living that stressed the independence
of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments. It
influenced many gay and lesbian writers and artists at the turn of the
twentieth century. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 The Arts and Crafts movement created medieval-type artists' guilds, which have been seen as homosocial. The movement emphasized handcrafted decorative works of art and architecture as a reaction to the overtly industrial society that was flourishing by the 1850s. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Jean-Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), an early French Impressionist, is remembered as a great
talent whose full potential was never realized because of his early
death. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) was an English decadent and Symbolist artist who used his gifts for caricature and grotesquerie to attack Victorian sexual values. His work has been immensely influential, and can be especially discerned in the stylized lines of Art Nouveau. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Rosa Bonheur (1822-1877) was the
most popular artist of nineteenth-century France and was the first
woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor.
|
|
| |
| |
| |
 Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864)
created studies of male youth that are richly homoerotic, though the devoutly religious artist apparently did not conceive of them as such. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) may be the best known nineteenth-century visual artist
associated with Romanticism. His art glorifies the irrational, the
subjective, the morbid, the overly emotional, the unpredictable, and
the bizarre. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Anna Elizabeth Klumpke
(1856-1912) is best known today as the last lover of acclaimed French
painter Rosa Bonheur, but she was an accomplished artist in her own
right. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Eugène Jansson (1862-1915), sometimes described as Sweden's first gay artist, has only recently begun to receive the international attention that his accomplishments merit. Though his nocturnal cityscapes were much in demand by collectors, he stopped painting them in 1904 in favor of works featuring young workers, sailors, and athletes--usually shown nude. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Hans von Marées (1837-1887) was a nineteenth-century German painter who created homoerotic drawings and paintings, especially male nudes in bucolic settings or in scenes from classical mythology. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Walter Pater (1839-1894) was an influential Victorian critic and scholar. His stylistic elegance and dangerous ideas about art, combined with rumors that he was homosexual, made his name virtually synonymous with gay sensibility during the late nineteenth century. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) is best known as the model for a number of paintings by Édouard Manet, but she was also an artist in her own right. The loss of her identity has recently been seen as symbolic of the fate of women artists. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) and Charles Shannon (1863-1937) were partners in life as well as in art. Though they pursued independent careers, they also collaborated on a number of creative projects, including book design. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 British artist Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) chose
to live openly as a homosexual at a time when it was not socially
acceptable to do so. His career was destroyed when he was convicted of buggery in 1873. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 The Symbolist movement in painting and literature flourished from 1886 to 1905. It was the first self-consciously queer movement in Western art history. The Cult of the Diva, with its attendant homoerotic impulse, was central to the ethos of the Symbolists, who were also called Decadents--a term more or less interchangeable with homosexuality in the public mind at the time. |
|
| |
| |
| |
 Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929) created works that celebrate the beauty of male youth, as well as the
artist's lifelong love of the sea, swimming, and sailing. |
|
| |
| |
