How do artists depict the act of looking or listening, even when the object of attention is not visible in the image? What does the experience of beauty, both seen and heard, look like? And how does the image convey the aesthetic experience of the artist’s subject to the beholder? These questions were the subject of an interdisciplinary course held at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007 that culminated in an exhibition and catalogue of prints, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and music from nineteenth-century France. The catalogue includes a preface by Anthony Hirschel, director of the Smart Museum, two leading essays by the exhibition’s curators, Anne Leonard and Martha Ward, as well as eight other well-documented contributions by students who participated in the course. The images range from a picture of Homer reciting his epic verses before a group of idealized shepherds transfixed by his song (Émile-René Ménard’s Homer (1885)) to one of a peasant girl who ceases toiling in order to hear a lark warble its dawn greeting (Jules Adolphe Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884)), and from droll caricatures by Honoré Daumier of sky-gazing Parisians anticipating the appearance of a comet to a quasi-group portrait of friends sharing aesthetic experiences in a fashionable setting (Edouard Vuillard’s The Lerolle Salon (1900–3)). The assembled works are by both prominent artists such as Daumier, Degas, Fantin-Latour, and Vuillard, and less well-known figures who sought to capture the “varieties of attention” (a phrase in the title of Leonard’s essay) that occupied the age.

During the exhibition, stations equipped with iPods and headphones were available at which listeners could hear musical selections related to some of the works on exhibit; these and other selections are presented on the CD that accompanies the volume. For example, Vuillard’s painting The Lerolle Salon is paired with two movements of Claude Debussy’s Images (oubliées), an 1894 piano piece written for the teenage daughter of Henry Lerolle whose home is named as the setting for Vuillard’s painting. Similarly, the recording presents an excerpt from Richard Wagner’s Rheingold to match Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1877 lithograph Rheingold: The Final Scene, evidently inspired by Fantin-Latour’s attendance at a performance of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth in 1876. Musical selections also include Clara Schumann’s Three Romances Op. 22 (1855), a choice prompted by Fantin-Latour’s etching entitled A Schumann Piece (1864), and César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major (1886), suggested by Gustave Leheutre’s drawing The Duet (1896). The inclusion of the CD, with remarks about each of its tracks provided in a “Listener’s Guide” at the end of the volume, makes more vivid some of the main themes of the volume: the productive conjunction of music and art—listening and looking—during this period, and the ways in which artists (and, by inference, composers) sought to depict the processes of viewing and listening and, at the same time, claim and maintain our attention.

The works discussed may be grouped into several categories: 1) images showing performers but no listeners; 2) images with listeners but no performers or other sources of sound; 3) those that include both performers and listeners; 4) those that feature only “looking.” A final category, and least interesting to my mind, is what one contributor calls “pictorial transcriptions” of musical works. Into this group fall two of the three Fantin-Latour pieces in the catalogue: his Rheingold: Final Scene and Study for the Ballet from “Les Troyens.” The artist virtually dominated this genre and produced dozens of lithographs invoking Wagner’s operas between 1862, a year after the staging of Tannhäuser at the Paris opera, and the mid-1880s. Less well known is his 1888 study in charcoal for the 1893 lithograph based on Berlioz’s monumental operatic treatment of the Trojan Wars. Unfortunately, Michael Tymkiw says very little in his essay about the relationship between artist and composer in this case. However, the selection chosen for the CD, “Dance of the Nubian Slaves” from the ballet within Les Troyens, makes clear the rhetorical overlap between the visual and pictorial, as Berlioz’s orgiastic orientalist music provides an appropriate parallel to the swirling veils and nude forms of Fantin-Latour’s drawing.

The last of the three works by Fantin-Latour in the catalogue, A Schumann Piece, belongs ostensibly in the category of performers without listeners. The performers of the Schumann duet, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Edwards, were friends and patrons of Fantin-Latour, who stayed at their home outside of London. Shown as pianist and flutist, their eyes concentrating intently on the musical scores, they are engrossed in their performance. The absent listener is, of course, the artist himself, and his implied presence casts the spectator in the same position. Thus Fantin-Latour thematizes for us the act of listening, a primary concern for many nineteenth-century artists as they came to understand listening to music as a private and interiorized experience, especially in certain Parisian Symbolist circles at the time.

Other works may be characterized as listeners without performers in the sense that the artist depicts his subjects as hearing something that is neither audible nor visible to the viewer. In the case of Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu’s sculpture Joan of Arc at Domremy (1870), whose sole subject is a gazing figure, partly kneeling and partly sitting, hands clasped together on her lap, it is only through the identification of the girl’s name and location (the village where she was born and first heard voices) that the viewer is able to supply the rest of the narrative and recognize the work as a study in hearing. The group of images that concentrates on looking includes virtually all of the fourteen caricatures by Daumier chosen for the exhibition, most of which appeared in the daily journal Le Charivari in the 1850s, when Parisians were captivated by popular astronomy. With their bulging eyes and gaping mouths, Daumier’s sky-gazing figures of gullible bourgeois society are simultaneously funny and pathetic as they search out revelations they have no hope of understanding and less chance of explaining to one another although several of the images hint at conversation (and thus listening) as well as watching. In contrast, another work in this group, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery (1879–80) by Edgar Degas, pictures Cassatt from behind in a stance suggestive of immobility and thus of fixed attention; although we cannot see her face, we imagine that her gaze meets that of the Etruscan figures staring back at her from atop their sarcophagus. As Leonard points out in her opening essay, the image connotes a strong interest in private experience as part of a broader fin-de-siècle inquiry into interior psychological states.

Most interesting to my mind are the works that represent both listening and looking and the strategies artists use to dramatize the depth of the artistic experience. Ward’s essay explores this issue via Ménard’s Homer, painted for the Paris Salon of 1885, which shows the aged bard singing his verses to the accompaniment of a lyre in the presence of three naked youths passively sprawled out in an idealized landscape. The bard’s blindness, evident in his hollowed eyes turned upward, renders him unaware of his audience, and the listeners seem to stare vacantly as if spellbound by what they hear. The performer and listeners exist in their own world, sealed off from action and oblivious of their surroundings as well as of the viewer’s presence—what Michael Fried has characterized as an anti-theatrical situation. The pastoral landscape, however, exists only for the viewer who cannot know but must imagine the verses being sung. The landscape, then, with its shimmering light and glistening waters in the distance, becomes the visual equivalent of the verbal poetry and mirrors for us the listeners’ subjective states of mind.

On the whole, the catalogue is beautifully produced. The cross reference to figure 30 (on page 29) should instead send the reader to figure 29; aside from that, the volume is free of errors, although the quality and clarity of the writing, as with all collections of this sort, is uneven. Nevertheless, the bold premise of Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France provides a fundamentally sound basis for analysis and interpretation.