Hello, my name is Christopher Riopelle, I'm the curator of Post 1800 Paintings
at the National Gallery. I want today to introduce you to the
newest acquisition among the post-1800 paintings and to do so, I want to look at
a theme in painting that has been popular for
many centuries now. That is the depiction of people drinking,
specifically the depiction of people drinking
alcohol. It was popular in 16th-century Italian painting,
17th-century Dutch painting 18th-century British painting, and we
will look at four 19th and 20th-century works
in which the theme is explored further. The first painting I want to look at is
this work by Ernest Meissonier, a painting of 1854.
Meissonier was a kind of phenomenon of 19th-century painting,
hugely popular, hugely successful, with his depictions usually set in
the 17th, or 18th century, in imitation of
Dutch pictures, very often showing sociability of the time, so showing
people enjoying themselves. He also did a line in paintings of the
victories of Napoleon, but here we see him
depicting a young man in a tavern, looks like he's wearing 18th century
costume, a very vigorous young man. He's looking
at us very directly. He's about to say
something. He's enjoying, as well as his glass
of ale, he is enjoying a pipe. So two senses are being evoked here, not
only taste of the liquor, but the smell of the
smoke, of the pipe. Notice the way he presses
his thumb to the table top. It's as if he's about to say something
very direct and immediate, and maybe amusing. To us, he is enjoying the
conviviality of the tavern and he's about to go out
and take on the world. The next picture
I want to look at comes from 21 years or so later
It is by the American John Singer-Sargent. Sargent arrives in Paris
in 1874 to begin to study painting there, with
Emile Carolus-Duran, a very respected teacher,
and at some point around then he paints this picture
of a gazebo in the countryside. It seems that he's in Brittany. He
doesn't bother with the people. Perhaps they're off enjoying a pre-prandial
stroll in the garden before they come back
and enjoy the two glasses of wine that are sitting there
in the sunshine on the table top. He doesn't need the people to express
the idea of conviviality. The wine says it all, the wine and
the sunlight, and the sense of conviviality that it
expresses. It's painted in a fully Impressionist style,
clearly he has learned the lessons of the French Impressionists,
of Monet, of Renoir, of Pissarro. Now the painting is signed and dated
1874, but that's the year he arrives.
Evidence suggests that in fact, when he gave this picture to Carolus-Duran,
he changed the date, put 1874 on it, but
in fact, he painted it a year later after he's had the opportunity
to learn the lessons of the Impressionists.
So he's playing with us a little bit, letting us or Carolus-Duran
think that he was even cleverer than he was, and he was a very clever
man. Arguably the cleverest of all the painters in Paris
at that time was Edouard Manet, and the third picture we have
shows Manet in about 1878, 1880, we're not entirely sure,
painting a picture of a café-concert, a place, a tavern,
that also provided entertainment. We see the waitress
with her steins of beer, serving tables that are
already filled with steins of beer.
Workmen, we see one worker in his blue smock,
and in the rear of the picture, we see that a woman has taken
the stage, and is singing. So it's a very noisy picture, because we imagine both
the noise of the crowd, and the noise, this beautiful noise,
coming from the stage. In fact, Manet first painted this on a much larger
scale, and then for reasons we don't know, cut it in half. The other half, the left
side, is now in the Reinhart collection in
Winterthur, Switzerland, but you can put them
together, and see what he originally intended. As I say,
we're not at all clear why he cut them in half,
except that the picture in Winterthur shows
much more bourgeois middle-class people, the working-class people on this side,
and maybe he thought they didn't go together
so well. The final picture is our new acquisition, this
extraordinary painting by the Spaniard, the great
Spanish painter of the turn of the 20th-century
Joaquín Sorolla. Sorolla had incredible technique. He knew exactly
how to wield his paintbrush
rapidly to evoke the play of light in the sunlight, or in dark spaces. He was
the great master of painting in black. Now in 1910,
he was spending the summer in Basque Country in the town of Zarauz,
when he received an important commission to paint
a big cycle of paintings on the peasants of Spain, and their customs.
That cycle is now in the Hispanic Society of America,
in New York, but he had to get his hand ready to paint peasants. So in that
summer of 1910, he starts going to the taverns of Zarauz,
painting a series of pictures there,
showing showing drinkers in the tavern.
They're often very sad pictures because of this man whom we
see in the centre of the painting here, who is clearly obliterated
by the drink he has had, and whose friends, if that's what they are, are
egging him on by pushing yet another glass of
what we think is cider toward him, so that he uh will get even more
drunk, even more watery-eyed, even more
oblivious. A couple of them turn very distrustful
eyes toward Sorolla himself. Who is this man
trying to break in on our, our party, as it were? Maybe that's why
Sorolla paints so quickly here.
It is an extraordinarily important depiction
in Sorolla's career, and with the other pictures we've been
looking at. It shows the arc of ways in which
artists have depicted this very sociable
act of drinking in taverns, in public, from
conviviality right here, to serious inebriation. And as you explore the
National Gallery, you certainly can see
that in many other parts of the Gallery.
Now if you're interested in learning more about art history,
click here, or here. Thank you very much for watching, and we'll see you the next time.