Fashion in European Art by Justine De Young

Author:Justine De Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

5.2Engraving by Frank Holl after Henriette Browne’s Alsace! 1870 (N. 221, 1872 Salon). Author’s collection.

One might imagine that an artist like Puvis de Chavannes, who had created the siege’s most prominent and beloved artworks allegorizing Paris as a modern woman in black, rifle in hand, and thus seemed particularly attuned to the cultural moment and the public’s needs, would have been able to navigate the postwar landscape similarly adeptly.40 Yet his 1872 Salon offering, an allegorical figure of Hope, would prove a disappointment to critics and the public (Figure 5.3).41 Puvis’s Hope is as carefully coded, innovative, and contemporary as his earlier siege allegories, but its symbol of hope is no longer a brave modern Parisian woman in the capital as it had been during the siege, but instead a young girl in the countryside dressed in an ill-fitting white shift.42 The earlier martial, defensive Paris of Puvis’s imagination was too radical in the wake of the Commune, which had seen women actually take up arms.43 His Hope instead extends an oak twig, symbol of hope, while siting upon a collapsed wall; small wildflowers sprout at her feet, and a new dawn is breaking at the horizon, but the rough wooden crosses of a hastily erected battlefield cemetery in the background remind us of France’s recent losses. It was prominent at the Salon not only because of Puvis’s stature and the popularity of his earlier siege allegories, but also because it directly touched on contemporary anxieties about the future of France.

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