Les portraits à travers les idées
The Contextuals
The ragpicker was an essential figure in a French capital overwhelmed by its own waste. The ragpicking trade was complex, with its own set of regulations and specific vocabulary for the various roles, such as 'scraper', 'muddler', 'picker' and 'placer'.. With their wicker baskets slung over their backs, lanterns and hooks at the ready, these men and women were omnipresent before the introduction of sorting bins by Prefect Poubelle and advances in the paper industry marginalised their profession. In this urban landscape, Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire were to art and literature what ragpickers were to the gutter: recyclers of rubbish.
A social context for Courbet's A Burial at Ornans. Contrary to Proudhon's predictions, worshipping the dead remained a vibrant practice in France during the second half of the nineteenth century. While funeral traditions evolved and varied according to social status and financial means, celebrations of the dead and visits to cemeteries retained their importance as both places of contemplation and settings for a stroll.. Even the dress codes and etiquette reflected the political and religious tensions that divided the country.
When the French state attempts to legally regulate the world's oldest profession. Grasping the intricacies of the organisation of the French prostitution system between 1850 and 1900 enriches our understanding of genre paintings by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Béraud and Nittis. At that time, the profession was entirely devoted to controlling the deadly disease known as syphilis, - from which most French artists and authors suffered -with its specialised establishments, hospitals, registration system, prisons and police.
At that time, Paris was the European capital of both sex and cultural tourism. The commodification of the female body was a well-established practice. The popularity of women's brasseries and so-called pretext shops, along with the popularity of guides that catalogue sexual services, codes, and various tricks of prostitution, all point to a thriving industry. Even tourist guides, translated into several languages, were available to help provincials and foreigners navigate this maze of the "galanterie" trade or in other words, sex trade.
The arts and literature thrive on blurring the boundaries between genres. The venal prostitute was the counterpart to the virtuous wife. However, the established barrier between the two was crumbling, and the maze of rules that governed them was on the verge of collapsing. Traditional guardians of bourgeois morality, such as wives and young girls of marriageable age, were gradually adopting makeup, red hair dye, mirrors, and the art of bathing; how dreadful! Meanwhile, prostitutes were beginning to behave like the bourgeoisie. Mastering the etiquette of this era helps us to better understand the ambiguities in literature and art with which Flaubert, Zola, Manet and the Impressionist painters experimented.
