Intermediality and Modernity

Référence électronique SMYLITOPOULOS, Christina. Intermediality and Modernity : Cruikshank’s Murder of the Duke d’Enghien (1814) and Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814) In : L’Image railleuse : La satire visuelle du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours [en ligne]. Paris : Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2019 (généré le 18 décembre 2020). Disponible sur Internet : <http://books.openedition.org/inha/8473>. ISBN : 9782917902707. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.inha.8473.

The objects of analysis considered here were executed by artists in significant political or professional transition and reveal that formal discourses can be found between the commissions of court painters and commercially motivated agents who aimed unapologetically to expand the market. In the discussion that follows, I will trace these two works of art through a number of contexts, beginning with Tegg's publishing practice to suggest that the nature of the market for satirical prints may have enabled Goya to count Cruikshank's Murder of the Duke d'Enghien among his many sources. My analysis is informed by the remarkable similarities shared by the compositions and Goya's appreciation of British graphic satire, which I will examine in light of the unclear circumstances surrounding the production of Third of May 1808. The influence Goya's painting has exerted over time demonstrates the aesthetic legacies of these violent confrontations. This essay seeks to learn what role graphic satire may have played in these artistic interventions.
Tegg's Intervention in the Market 6 Primarily regarded as a "reprint publisher," Thomas Tegg entered the market for graphic satire in 1806 when Piercy Roberts (fl. 1795-1824) of Middle Row, Holborn sold Tegg his stock of prints and plates. 15 Tegg had established his diversified publishing practice by selling remainders of books, at first at auctions and then at his London shop in Cheapside. Over time, his gambles on inexpensive reprints of works of science, religion, history, literature, manuals on etiquette and comportment, as well as art and social commentary resulted in profits, and he became quite successful. 16 Using a similar mode of testing the market before embarking on new works, Tegg's initial strategies for selling graphic satire could be characterized as economical. For example, he repackaged printed satires in his Caricature Magazine; or Hudibrastic Mirror, a multivolume series of hand-numbered issues comprised of two or three satires bound with string in blue paper wrappers and sold for 2 shillings, coloured. 17 Presumably finding initial success, Tegg expanded this branch of his publishing firm and began to commission original works from established graphic satirists like George M. Woodward (1760-1809), Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811), Charles Williams (fl. 1796-1830) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), and also sold posthumous engravings, including prints after the designs of Richard Newton (1777-1798), a virtuoso satirist who died young just as his work was becoming more recognised. 18 But Tegg also provided opportunities for emerging talents, including J. Lewis Marks (c. 1796-1855), William Heath (1794-1840), and George Cruikshank. Tegg's intervention in this diverse and expansive market may have been more influential than previously appreciated, but a study on Tegg's graphic satire faces its own difficulties, not least of which is his standing in the discourse as an opportunist with little to offer an industry increasingly tied to notions of national excellence. The concern that products of cultural industry could be addressed as "mere commodities" has influenced the study of British publishing, including graphic satire. 19 Tegg's repute, fuelled by confrontations between adversarial competitors played out in the advertising pages of the periodical press, has not helped his long-term position as a producer of important works. Making sense of Tegg's involvement in the genre has nevertheless stimulated an interesting question. From an artist's perspective, could the efficiencies Tegg developed in book publishing, which he seemed to apply to the production of graphic satire, generate swifter turnaround from design to publication, steady and frequent payment, a venue for experimental work, and most significant to the goals of this essay, a longer reach in the domestic and foreign markets Tegg aimed to encourage?
Intermediality and Modernity L'Image railleuse 8 Unfortunately, most of Tegg's business documents have not survived, and those that do paint a picture of a cunning trader whose interests were located squarely on the bottom line. A close look at the work that he published, however, suggests that the consequences of Tegg's keen understanding of the market and the industrial methods he employed were important in disseminating the ideas advanced by graphic satirists. Vital to the analysis that follows is that graphic satire did not merely reflect contemporary concerns, despite being characterized by Tegg as a satirical "Mirror;" rather, graphic satire had the ability to project and to do so at great distances.
Graphic satire's realm of influence 9 The art historian Ernst H. Gombrich understood graphic satire's potential impact when he wrote of "the direct influence … [of] works of indifferent quality … on the creations of genius." 20 As his prime example, he cited the influence of the peripatetic Scottish painter, writer, and graphic satirist Sir Robert (Bob) Ker Porter (1777-1842) on Goya, called by Gombrich the "giant of the period." 21 Porter travelled to Spain in 1807 with Sir John Moore (1761-1809), who had the command of the British Army in Portugal, but who soon received orders to march into Spain to ally with forces against the French. 22 Gombrich speculates that while there, Porter may have disseminated his own satire on the atrocities committed by Bonaparte against his enemies and toward his own troops at Jaffa. 23 Buonaparte massacring three thousand eight hundred men at Jaffa, for example, was inspired by the defamatory accusations against Bonaparte written by the Lieutenant Colonel of the Cavalry Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777-1849) in History of the British Expedition to Egypt, which was first published in 1802 and was quickly reissued in many editions ( fig. 3). 24 The print, "From a design by M. R. K. Porter," was published collaboratively on August 12, 1803 by three firms -the dealer and auctioneer John Hatchard (fl. 1803-1843), the owner and publisher of the European Magazine James Asperne (1757-1820), and John Ginger (fl. 1798-1803), "stationer to the Prince of Wales" before he went bankrupt -and refers to events from Bonaparte's Syrian campaign, pursued in the spring of 1799. We see the central figure, a Turkish prisoner, from the back, so as to bear witness to his bound wrists and the gruesome emergence from his body of the blood-stained point of a French soldier's bayonet. Porter heightens the horror of the scene by bringing the beholder dangerously close to the action and rendering the teetering Turk's body in a precarious diagonal, suspended at the tipping point between standing and falling, life and death. The pile of fallen comrades, which the Turk will quickly join, reveals the only possible outcome of this violent encounter, but also demonstrates graphic satire's early influence on the culture of witnessing. 25 10 Gombrich's theory, that Porter distributed his work while in Spain, is one way of understanding how British graphic satire might have travelled in this period, but there are others. Earlier in the century, Thomas Jeffreys and Robert Sayer sold satires out of their suitcases in France. 26 The Scottish-born engraver William Charles (1776-1820) quit the London scene and brought satirical prints to America, and later, Tegg's own sons took a range of material to Australia and had plans to expand Tegg's business in North America. 27 Furthermore, we know from advertisements that Tegg enthusiastically pursued new markets for his books and prints and encouraged ship captains with wholesale prices to stimulate an export market. 28 Goya likely had access to British graphic satire through his friends: the treasurer of Cadiz, Sebastián Martínez y Pérez (1747-1800), who had a significant print collection, and the dramatist Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828), who travelled to London and wrote in letters home about "English caricatures," which he may have brought back to Spain. 29 Prints may have also travelled to Spain via British sailors and soldiers who were engaged in the blockading during what is now collectively known as the Anglo-Spanish War, a series of conflicts fought between 1796 and 1802, and then again from 1804 to 1807, followed by the Peninsular War, which was fought against the French between the newly allied Britain and Spain from 1807 to 1814, when British soldiers were stationed on the ground. 30 11 Reva Wolf has convincingly argued that British graphic satire held a seminal role in Goya's work, his eighty-print series Los Caprichos (1799), in particular. 31 Gombrich thought that Porter's satirical works may have inspired the Third of May 1808, one of a series of four paintings (two of which were not painted, are lost, or have not survived) the subjects for which Goya described in a letter dated February 24, 1814 as "the most Intermediality and Modernity L'Image railleuse notable and heroic actions and scenes of our most glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe." 32 Proposed by the artist and accepted by the Regency government in 1814 -to curry favour with Fernando VII's regime, to evade allegations of earlier collaboration with the French, and for the financial incentives that sometimes went along with royal commissions -this painting has long occupied a position as a "protomodern" work, located at a pivot point marked by the critical Romantic reflections on the costly political experiments of the Enlightenment. 33 The painting depicts the execution of Spanish rebels on a hillside in the outskirts of Madrid following an uprising: a series of violent encounters between French and French-allied troops and mercenaries, and the common people of Spain, who were disappointed when promises of political reform were left unfulfilled.
Goya's Third of May 1808 and Cruikshank's Murder of the Duke d'Enghien 12 Christian iconography is commonly discussed in relation to Goya's painting. 34 In suggesting stigmata with a dimpled palm, Goya was not merely making a martyr of the Spanish rebel, but he was also referencing centuries of sanctioned violence in art. For constructing a fusillading scene, however, Goya looked to more contemporary sources.   Picturesque. 37 What is forgotten is that The Life of Napoleon was evidently quite successful; it went into four editions and was reissued in 1817. 38 Tegg had originally released this extended satire serially, before collating it and selling it as a book with additional images a few months later. In November and December of 1814, then, Cruikshank's engravings had begun circulating in the market as single-sheet satires in coloured and uncoloured formats, without the accompanying Hudibrastic poetry. That the images were distributed as stand-alone satires, before Tegg repackaged the series, suggests that visual satire was the chief attraction of the volume. But it also implies the potential for a wider scope of dissemination. Satirical prints of Bonaparte's exploits could have circulated as humorous reflections on the folly of French ambition even after the British withdrew from the Peninsula in April 1814. 39  . 1), when the Duke was put to death by a firing squad in the moat of the Château de Vincennes moments after a military commission found him guilty of intelligence with the enemy, high treason, and complicity in a plot. 40  German territory of Baden. He was taken first over the river to Strasbourg and then on to Paris, where he was executed at around two o'clock in the morning. 42 According to Philip Dwyer, Bonaparte was making the point with this execution that "there was nothing sacred about the Bourbons." 43 In the months that followed, reports from foreign envoys emphasizing the lawless seizure, which occurred on neutral ground, were published in the British periodical press. 44 The "execution," which was spun in France as a lawful outcome of a military trial for treason, was recast in the British press as criminal: "that gallant Prince so basely and barbarously murdered by the most execrable tyrant that ever disgraced humanity." 45 15 A comparison between Cruikshank's Murder of the Duke d'Enghien and Goya's Third of May 1808, reveals a number of intriguing formal elements. As both pictures are night scenes, the artists portrayed the victims lit by lanterns, dramatically emerging from a tenebrific background. The lantern that hangs from the Duke's neck was, according to The Memoirs of Queen Hortense, one of the "loathsome details" disseminated by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838) to avert blame from him to the Consul once news spread of the event, but may also reinforce the lawless and arbitrary nature of the Duke's death. 46 If a similar, legitimate event had taken place in (enlightened) Britain, the execution would have been carried out by hanging. Goya's lantern, which the artist places on the ground in front of the soldiers, has also been interpreted as a symbol of the Enlightenment, deployed ironically. 47 Instead of showing the path from the darkness of oppression toward freedom, French Enlightenment blinds the common people, to their peril. 16 The requirement for comedy in Cruikshank's print, which would square with the light and relieved tone of most of the satires in this collection -released as a retrospective in the months following Bonaparte's exile to Elba in April of 1814 but before his escapeis satisfied by the diminutive figure of "Little Boney," who needs to stand on an elevation in what appears to be the ocular cavity of an enormous skull, simply to be visible to the firing squad. In The Life of Napoleon, Cruikshank perpetuated the trend invented by Gillray in 1803 of depicting Bonaparte as short-statured, despite the fact that he was relatively tall for the period. 48 The representation of a memento mori, however, complicates the tone of the satire, reinforcing the anxiety the print inspires. The nobleman has been stripped of the sartorial trappings of his position, which lie in a clump at his feet, as we wait, suspended forever, for Boney to give the order to fire. In Goya's painting, the victim appears to cast light himself and, despite what we anticipate once the French soldiers fire their weapons, we are compelled to anxiously fix our gaze on the impending victim. This nameless quarry will soon join his comrades in the pile of dead rebels. There are also similarities between the print and the painting in the angle at which the soldiers are positioned, the way the shadow is drawn at a diagonal across the foreground, and even the way the formal elements of the top registers of the pictures form analogously a double-curve. Given Goya's awareness of and attentiveness to visual satire, the influence between these compositions may have flowed from the satirical to the serious.
Context of an (eventual) masterpiece 17 We know that Goya's painting was accepted as a commission in March 1814 by the Regency government (1810-1814), which was in place before the accession of Intermediality and Modernity L'Image railleuse Fernando VII (1784-1833; second reign 1813-1833), but we do not know when it was completed. It has been speculated that the painting and its counterparts, including the surviving Second of May 1808, were used to embellish the triumphal arch for Fernando's return to Madrid, which was planned for spring 1814. 49 Another possibility advanced is that the painting was displayed during the first commemoration in May 1814 of the Dos de Mayo uprising, the rebellion of common Spaniards who fought in the streets and surrounding areas of Madrid, that was swiftly and violently crushed by French troops. The immediate aftermath was that hundreds of prisoners were executed the following day, but over a longer term, the event played a part in initiating the Peninsular War. Nonetheless, Janis Tomlinson's extensive archival research demonstrates that there is no evidence that these paintings were ever seen outside the palace. 50 18 At the time, Goya was "reduced to absolute penury," according to a letter written by the politician Juan Álvarez Guerra (1770-1845), and in the months to come the artist began to petition the crown for unpaid accounts for pictures he had completed before the French occupation began in 1808. 51 During the period Goya was meant to be working on Third of May 1808, he was involved in completing other works, including a half-length portrait of the king (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid) and a full-length equestrian portrait of José Rebolledo de Palafox y Melzi, Duke of Saragossa (1780-1847), known by the title General Palafox (Prado Museum, Madrid). For the duke's portrait, Goya complained that he completed the work "with some difficulty on account of the scarcity of some materials." 52 For the Regency commission, Goya was supposed to receive supplies and also a monthly stipend, which may not have materialized. He may also have used any available materials to paint the Third of May 1808; however, despite the fact that it was technically a government commission, payment for this work was not yet guaranteed. In order to receive any outstanding money due to him, Goya would have to complete a process of political "purification." 53 When Fernando VII was restored to the throne, he struck a committee to investigate the wartime behaviour of royal personnel, including court painters. Goya's purification took several months, finally concluding in April 1815. 54 19 Once the paintings had been completed, they may have in fact gone directly into storage at the Prado (Royal Museum) -so directly, the pictures might have been wet, as analysis has exposed residual paint from the Third of May 1808 on the surface of the Second of May 1808. 55 According to Manuela Mena, there are documents dated to November of 1814 that refer to the construction, hardware, and finishing of frames for paintings referring to the 2 of May 1808, which suggest that the paintings were at the least anticipated at the Prado. 56 It is curious that no contemporary accounts mentioning the paintings have survived, which suggests either a lukewarm response from a monarch who much preferred the neoclassical style used by Goya's competitors, or that the paintings had not yet been completed. 57 Also striking is that a monument, which had been commissioned in 1814 by the provisional government and dedicated to those who were killed in the uprising, was cancelled by Fernando VII. As a king who intended to rule as an absolute monarch, Fernando would have been concerned about drawing attention to fallen men who died fighting for political reform. Furthermore, despite Goya's interest in print and his activities as an engraver, evidence that a contemporary engraving after Third of May 1808 existed to circulate in Spain or beyond remains elusive. 58 The first printed version of Third of May 1808, it seems, appeared as a wood engraving in Charles Yriarte's Goya, sa vie, son oeuvre (1867). 59 Furthermore, the first written account we have of someone viewing the paintings was in 1845, twelve years after the king had died, when the French writer, painter, and critic Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) claimed to see "Massacre du 2 mai, scène d'invasion." 60 20 It is also unlikely that Cruikshank had access to Goya's sources or to Goya's work directly. Despite Goya's claim in a letter offering all eighty Caprichos plates to the king that "Foreigners most of all want them," they were not popular in Britain. 61 The series could be ordered in 1814 from the London bookseller, Thomas Boosey, who seemed to have a single copy in his catalogue of foreign works, but, as it kept appearing in advertisements over the year, it is unlikely that it sold. Significantly, even if it had sold, the series did not include a fusillading scene. According to Nigel Glendinning, there is also little evidence that Goya "was much in the public eye in England at the time" and his death seemed to have passed in 1828 without much regard. 62 21 With respect to Goya's other firing squad scenes, like those in the Disasters of War, this collection of works did not circulate in Britain when Cruikshank worked up the scene of the Duke's execution. Remarkably, though dated from 1810 to 1820, the first edition of the series was not printed until 1868, forty years after Goya's death. 63 That Goya appreciated British graphic satire has been generally accepted. He signed a letter sent to his long-time friend and correspondent, Martín Zapater, which included a caricature of himself "from London," which has been interpreted as Goya's understanding of caricature being an English genre. 64 But what precisely Goya found in this material is still up for debate. 65 22 Linda Hutcheon's attempts to account for the phenomenon of parody in modern and post-modern art has been helpful. In her work, she has addressed the widely held notion that parody was a deviant, even parasitic, critical response, the roots of which she finds in the aesthetic values of Romanticism, which advances genius, originality, and individuality over imitation and quotation. 66 Goya's genius has been discussed in precisely these terms: in 1868, Gauthier described Goya as a "fiery Spanish painter" of "inexhaustible invention." 67 Goya's invention can also be supported by contemporary documents. In the invoices Goya writes to his patrons, he frequently points out when a work was "of [his] own invention." 68 But this was not Goya's way to assert his unique artistic vision. Tomlinson tells us that "invention" needs to be understood within the context of salary payment strategies in Spain in this period. When Goya asserts that a work was of his "own invention," he was indicating that he had executed the preparatory drawings for the finished work he was invoicing and should, therefore, be paid more. 69 Conclusion 23 Due to the central role prints played in Goya's artistic practice, Tomlinson wisely counsels that attempting to find precisely which works of print informed Goya's painting is an exercise in futility; she writes, "their quantity suggests that the answer may well be 'all of the above'." 70 Still, unearthing a dialogue between compositions and genres can lead to interesting questions. In a discussion of Werner Hoffman's thoughts on caricature, Michele Hannoosh wrote that the genre "follows the pattern of all revolutionary forms and activity; it binds itself to the model it is dethroning, and is sustained by the system it attacks." 71 This, of course, assumes that the object of analysis would be a caricature in the traditional sense. But, if the generative nature of graphic Intermediality and Modernity L'Image railleuse satire is taken for granted, can we think of Goya's Third of May 1808 in part as a caricature, sustained by, but also attacking, the system of British graphic satire? After all, irony was, Debarati Sanyal tells us, "one of modernity's dominant modes of selfunderstanding." 72 Was Goya critical of Cruikshank for presenting a French aristocratic victim? In appropriating aspects of Cruikshank's composition, could Goya be seen as reorienting the political importance of the print, from a French insider to the common man, who was swept up in the horrors of war? Did he replace the Duke's finery, which lay in a pile at his feet, with the bodies of the common people of Spain, the real victims of revolution and counterrevolution? 24 One of the reasons Goya's work has become so compelling to artists and critics over time is that it forcefully portrays a reality of war that the prevailing aesthetic of neoclassicism under-expressed or even censored. 73 This legacy of honesty and violence in the face of academism is still being explored today, exemplified by the acclaim of Goya by the English artists known as the Chapman Brothers, Jake (1966-) and Dinos (1962-), who called Goya "the first Modernist artist; the first who had psychological and political depth." 74 However, it has taken time for people to recognize Goya's innovation, including his appreciation of graphic satire as an expression of modernity.