Page 48 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Franz Xavier Winterhalter: Queen Victoria and Duchess de Nemours 1843. (Engraving: The Cousins).
Winterhalter was probably the leading royal portraitist of this time, commissioned by several of the numerous royal courts of Europe - including Louis-philippe of France and Queen Victoria (he painted at least 120 works for Victoria and Albert). He worked directly on the canvas, with no preliminary drawings or sketches. His technical and aesthetic talents rival that of Jean August Dominique Ingres, and in his portraits of women, he captured the changing spirit of the times amongst the refined and often reclusive courtly circles. In Britain he was criticised for making his paintings too fleshly and sensual. His paintings were exclusive and not commonly exhibited to the general public, but accurate monochrome prints could be made as lithographs or as engravings in steel, hand-cut by master craftsmen and used to illustrate early magazines, books and or offered for sale. Samuel Cousins was one such engraver - a favourite of Queen Victoria. Winterhalter was also a professional lithographer.mAs often in the Art world, Winterhalter was in his lifetime considered ‘merely’ a glossy portraitist, but his work was retrospectively celebrated recently at the National Portrait Gallery (1987).
While many historians and critics have commented on the impact of photography on the art of portraiture - not least the threat perceived by jobbing portrait artists whose painterly skills could not match the verisimilitude of the daguerreotype or wet-collodion print - portraitists of the calibre of Winterhalter (and later, John Singer Sergeant, Jacques-Émile Blanche, James Tissot etc) not only survived photography, but excelled in their subtle stylisations and embellishments on nature. Although not a portraitist, in his paintings that incorporate Jane Burden/Morris |(eg The Blue Silk Dress 1868), the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rosetti illustrates the difference between the mundane photographic recording and the painting infiltrated and informed by a loving eye. Later, in the Belle Epoque (c1890-1910) portrait artists like the society favourite Giovanni Boldini became exaggeratedly expressionist or rather mannerist in style, just as the pictorialist photographers of the Photo Secession group and other contemporaries were discovering the number of ways that photographs could be manipulated after exposure (in ‘post-production’ as it were) - see Robert Demachy, Frank Eugene (Nude 1908), Gertrude Kasebier (manipulated self-portrait 1902) et al. As McLuhan observed, new media alter the extant media environment - changing the overall media ecology as it were - cross-fertilising techniques and ideas...