310 cecily j. hilsdale
depicted in the painting and the power relations they represent. This way of thinking
about the objects represented in paintings and their power in constructing labor, ideol-
ogy, and distance resonates with another methodological move toward “thing theory”
(Candlin and Guins, 2009). Common to these different approaches is the integration
of maritime distances and local and trans-oceanic economic and artistic realities into art
historical analysis. This emphasis on mobility and diverse origins is only one way of
seeing the wider painterly Mediterranean. The depiction of distant materials and prod-
ucts serves as a means of indexing maritime vastness and abundance in the case of the
Dutch still lives, and of echoing imperial domain and New World labor in Las Meninas.
In each of these case studies the Mediterranean as a category most particularly concerns
the origins of materials as an allegory of empire.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean continued to
have significance for artists but for different interpretive agendas. No longer tied
to the diverse economies, ecologies and origins of materials and products, the
Mediterranean as its own entity and imaginary came to occupy a priority for modern
European artists. Only in this era does the Mediterranean as a singular style and ico-
nography come into its own in European art (Jirat-Wasiutynski, 2007; Silver, 2010).
At this later historical moment, the Mediterranean was marshaled as an image of
nature, of origins, and of the past civilizations of antiquity in an era of increasing
industrialization, urbanization, and world war. It was the gateway to the colonial
empires of France and Britain, initiated with Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt at the
turn of the nineteenth century, and represented for modern imaginations a border of
encounter with Africa and the Middle East. The Mediterranean is thus linked inexo-
rably with nineteenth-century Orientalist painting: it provided an imagined access to
the orientalized images of the lands and people of the “East” in works by Jean-Léon
Gérôme or Eugène Delacroix. One may also think of the timeless eroticization of
Ingres’ Turkish bath or the epic mythologizing of Alma-Tadema’s works in which the
Mediterranean becomes synonymous with Classical antiquity.
Whereas Orientalist traditions evoke the timeless Mediterranean as a lushly eroti-
cized and romanticized setting for antique drama, the Mediterranean continued to
hold formal weight for Post-Impressionist artists due to a renewed interest in classical
order and line. Responding to the loosened solidity and subject matter of
Impressionism, Post-Impressionists sought a return to structure, largely through ref-
erence to classical order and natural landscapes. The painter and theorist Maurice
Denis wrote of a new classicism he found in the formal solidity of Paul Gauguin, Paul
Cézanne, and Aristide Maillol, the last of whom embraced the Mediterranean as a
quasi-ideological concept after his 1901 sculpture of a crouching nude woman came
to be called simply “The Mediterranean.” Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh’s studio in
the south of France also produced images of the Mediterranean ideal: clear, physical
light, solid landscapes and rustic peasants. This romanticization of the southern cli-
mate and geology helped perpetuate the Mediterranean as a gateway to Other lands.
For Henri Matisse, the Mediterranean served as the liminal space for the encounter of
western desire and eastern Other. His reclining nude, Souvenir of Biskra (1906),
imagined in northern Algeria, was a controversial amalgam of anxiety and attraction,
followed in short order by Picasso’s similarly fraught Demoiselles d’Avignon of the
next year. Throughout his career, Matisse painted subjects of the Mediterranean coast
that are inflected by the modern notions of bourgeois leisure and life reform