Nobody Noticed This Painting Was About The Painter's Own Death

[00:00:00]The painting you are looking at right now was completed around 1850, and the title tells you almost everything you need to know except the part that makes it unbearable. A woman sits slumped against a pile of sticks in the snow.

[00:00:13]Her eyes are closed. Her body has the specific limpness of something that is no longer holding itself upright by choice. Against her body, a small child rests with an expression of complete peace. The kind of peace that in the context of this painting and this cold and this woman who is no longer holding the child deliberately carries a meaning that most viewers take a moment to fully register. The pile of sticks beside her is not simply scenery. It was how she was surviving. The urban poor of 19th century Paris gathered small pieces of wood from wherever they could find them and sold them for burning. It was the most basic available form of work for a woman with no other resources.

[00:00:57]A way of converting physical effort directly into the small amount of money needed to keep a child alive for another day. She was gathering sticks when whatever happened to her happened. The full title of this painting, as recorded by the Cleveland Museum of Art where it now hangs, is Destitute Dead Mother Holding Her Sleeping Child in Winter.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> The museum uses the word dead. Whether the child is also dead or dying or genuinely asleep against a mother who is already gone, the painting does not resolve this. It holds both possibilities simultaneously and the specific quality of the child's peaceful expression against the specific quality of the mother's collapsed body. Look at the child's expression one more time and then look at the mother's and understand that Tassaert made a very specific choice about each of them. The mother's face shows what death looks like when it arrives from cold and exhaustion, not dramatic, not agonized, simply the the of effort. The face of someone who ran out of whatever was keeping them going and stopped. There is no expression of suffering in the conventional sense.

[00:02:04]There is the absence of expression, which in this context is far more devastating than any depiction of pain could have been. The child's face is different. The child looks peaceful in the specific way that sleeping children look peaceful, the unconsciousness of someone who has not yet understood that they need to be afraid, or who fell asleep before the cold reached the point that would have woken them.

[00:02:26]And this is where Tassaert's most precise and most quietly devastating decision lives.

[00:02:32]He did not paint the child clearly dead.

[00:02:34]He painted the child in a state that the viewer cannot determine from looking asleep, or dying, or already gone, and he left the resolution entirely to whoever was standing in front of it.

[00:02:45]This was not an evasion.

[00:02:47]It was a specific argument about what this kind of death actually looked like in Paris in 1850. Not dramatic, not certain, not resolved into a clear moral or narrative conclusion. Simply a woman and a child in the snow at a point in the progression that the viewer arrived at too late to know whether intervention was still possible, and too early to know whether it was already too late.

[00:03:12]Nicolas François Octave Tassaert was born in Paris in 1800 into a family of Flemish origin that had been producing artists for three generations.

[00:03:24]His grandfather was a sculptor, his father an engraver, his brother a print artist and art dealer.

[00:03:31]He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1817 through 1825, illustrated books for Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père, and built a career in the middle decades of the 19th century that brought him popular success, institutional recognition, and a specific kind of critical dismissal that would follow him for the rest of his life.

[00:03:52]He was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1853.

[00:03:55]He was collected by Alfred Bruyas and by Alexandre Dumas fils, whose collection eventually included at least 50 of his works. He was given the nickname the Prud'hon of the poor man and the Correggio of the attic, comparisons to two celebrated earlier masters applied to a painter working in the same tradition, but with subjects that the tradition had previously considered beneath it. His paintings of dying mothers, destitute families, suicides, and abandoned children were praised by the public who saw them and found them moving and criticized by the academic establishment who found them melodramatic and unfit for elevated art.

[00:04:35]Van Gogh recognized him as a teacher.

[00:04:38]Gauguin did too.

[00:04:39]Both of them understood what Tassaert was doing, not sentimentalizing poverty, but documenting it with the specific attention that the academic tradition reserved for mythological and historical subjects.

[00:04:52]Insisting through the act of painting that a dead woman in the snow with a child against her body was as worthy of that attention as any Venus or Caesar.

[00:05:02]He stopped exhibiting after the 1857 Salon, withdrawing more and more from the formal art world. In 1863, he sold his entire stock of paintings to an art dealer named Père Martin and stopped painting altogether, attempting to become a poet. Almost none of his literary work survived, suggesting he may have destroyed it himself.

[00:05:24]His eyesight deteriorated and he became an alcoholic. And on April 24, 1874, in his house at number 13, Rue du Jourama in Paris, he died by inhaling charcoal gas. He died in the same way as the woman in his painting Suicide, a work he had exhibited at the Salon of 1850, the same year he painted the destitute mother in the Snow, depicting a mother and daughter who had ended their lives together by burning charcoal in their attic. The method he used to kill himself was the method he had depicted in his own painting, 24 years before he needed it. If you want more art deep dives like this one, please like and subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. To understand what Tassaert was painting and why it landed the way it did, you need to understand what Paris looked like for the people at the bottom of it in the middle of the 19th century. The revolution of 1848 had promised transformation and delivered disruption.

[00:06:27]The brief Second Republic that followed the overthrow of Louis Philippe had raised expectations and then failed to meet them, producing the economic instability and political disappointment that would eventually deliver Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to power as Emperor Napoleon III.

[00:06:45]The urban poor of Paris, the workers, the unemployed, the women with no husband and no income, the children born into families that could not feed them, lived in conditions that the bourgeois Paris of the grands boulevards and the salon exhibitions was structurally designed not to see.

[00:07:04]Tassaert [music] saw it.

[00:07:05]He lived in the same city in conditions that were not enormously different from those of the people he painted, [music] and he turned the attention of the academic painting tradition, the scale, the technical seriousness, the careful composition, the salon exhibition, onto subjects that tradition had developed specifically to exclude. Dying mothers were acceptable in religious painting as allegories of sacrifice and martyrdom.

[00:07:30]Dying mothers in the snow beside piles of firewood sticks because they had been gathering wood to sell and the cold had beaten them before they could get home were a different proposition entirely.

[00:07:40]They required the viewer to understand that what they were looking at was not a metaphor, but a condition, [music] something happening in the streets of the city they were living in, to people whose existence the institutions of that city had organized itself around not noticing. The critics who called his work melodramatic were not wrong that it was emotionally direct. They were using the word melodramatic to mean something else, that he was directing emotion at subjects that did not deserve it. That the pathos he was generating was being wasted on people who did not merit the serious attention of serious painting.

[00:08:18]Tassaert disagreed. He disagreed with every canvas he produced for three decades, and then he stopped. The connection between Tassaert's subjects and his own biography is not metaphorical. It is literal and documented. He painted suicides by charcoal asphyxiation in 1850 and died by charcoal asphyxiation in 1874.

[00:08:41]He painted destitute women in winter and died in poverty. He painted isolation and withdrawal and spent his final decade in almost complete withdrawal from the world that had given him his career and then watched him leave it.

[00:08:55]The arc of his life mirrors the arc of the lives he depicted with a precision that suggests he was not simply observing the suffering of the poor from a position of relative comfort.

[00:09:05]He was describing something he understood from proximity [music] and that proximity eventually closed the distance entirely when he sold his paintings to Père Martin in 1863.

[00:09:16]He had already made the decision that painting was finished for him. He was 63 years old and had spent four decades making work that the public valued and the critics tolerated and the institutions honored with a Legion of Honor while finding ways to communicate that the subjects themselves were not quite appropriate for serious consideration. He tried poetry.

[00:09:37]The poetry did not survive, which may have been his own decision. He lost his eyesight to alcohol.

[00:09:43]He became impoverished in the literal sense, not [music] the comfortable bohemian poverty of a young artist in a garret, but the genuine destitution of an old man with no income and deteriorating health in a city that had moved on to impressionism and had no particular use for the painter who had spent 30 years insisting mothers in the snow deserved to be looked at.

[00:10:09]He was buried in Paris. The destitute dead mother holding her sleeping child in winter is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, where it arrived as a gift in memory of a collector named Helen Borowitz in 2013.

[00:10:24]It measures 33 by 25 cm, smaller than a piece of printer paper. It hangs in a collection that includes work by Rembrandt and El Greco and Caravaggio and the other painters who make up the canon of Western art that Tassaert spent his career attempting to expand. Whether the expansion has happened is a question the painting raises by existing in that company. Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you want more videos like this one, please subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. See you in the next video.