WHY IS THE PAINTING BY Diego Velázquez, The Surrender of Breda (1635), given a double significance in the history of art? First, it shows Velázquez at his finest, outsized in dimensions (10x12 feet) and creative as well. It is considered his greatest work.
Second, the painting tells of a turning point in European fortunes in the seventeenth century. After a long period of Spanish occupation of the north countries, the Dutch staged a failed rebellion. What Velázquez’s Surrender portrays is a ceremony of the top generals, the victorious Spanish and defeated Dutch, passing the keys to the gates of the latter’s Breda fortress.
At first, it looks very bad for the Dutch, but over time, as Spain settled its trade rivalry with England, the Dutch rose to become a center of world commerce and craft. Think of Rembrandt’s painting, Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662), suggesting that the Dutch Golden Age had begun, with its wealth and impact on Western art.
Around Rembrandt’s time, the political intrigues and shifting fortunes between Spain and England also led to the New World outpost of New Amsterdam, a Dutch concern, being taken over by the Brits, who renamed it New York. And we all know how New York City eventually came to dominate the global art world, thanks to the Second World War.
As with Velázquez’s Surrender, another painting has woven itself into political and art history. It is The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by the French painter Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault. He had been looking for a big topic to paint, and his choice of this maritime tragedy would stir both art and politics.
As to the Medusa, it was a French frigate that in 1816 ran aground with its four hundred passengers. It was thirty miles off the West African coast. To lighten the ship, a raft was built for supplies. But in a gale, as the frigate broke up, most of the passengers filled two large life boats. The remaining 146 passengers repaired to the rickety raft. The boats pulled the raft, but when the odds became desperate, the raft was cut loose.
Over the next twelve days, the desperate rafters reduced themselves to fifteen by suicide, murder, exposure, mercy killings (and some cannibalism). Back in Paris, the tragedy generated a pitched struggle between the house of Bourbon Royalist government—head of the navy—and the recently ousted Republicans, though it was not enough to undermine the Bourbon regime (1815-1830).
Géricault had just returned from Rome amid his failed dreams of doing an epic painting. So he seized the new opportunity, taking up the Medusa story, sketching and setting up models of the raft in his studio. He used both live models and borrowed human limbs from the morgue.
One of his models was the young painter Eugène Delacroix, a novice of Géricault. As the gigantic Medusa painting progressed, Delacroix reportedly said that Géricault “allowed me to see his Raft of Medusa while he was still working on it. It made so tremendous an impression on me that when I came out of the studio I started running like a madman and did not stop till I reached my own room.”
The final painting, too, was a kind of Watergate moment in French politics—memorializing the maritime scandal—and the giant canvas traveled to England as well. Géricault had developed a new painterly style. He placed dabs of pure color next to each other. Applied with small brushes, the strokes gave life to the subdued tones of the gigantic painting, which measures 16x23 feet. The technique was the first glimmering of Impressionism. Unfortunately, a riding accident and tubercular tumor cut Géricault’s life short.
His stylistic influence, however, lasted through Delacroix. Delacroix picked up on Gericault’s way of using color. The longer-lived student became renowned for his paintings about French “liberty,” putting his mark on the age of Romanticism. During the 15-year Bourbon Restoration, Delacroix set the new standard for French painting. And significantly, he is now dubbed the first French Impressionist.
Every golden age of art—from that in Spain and Holland to that in Paris and New York—seems cheek-by-jowl with political events that, inadvertently, allow the golden age to happen.
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