1013
Skidmore, Colleen, “’All That Is Interesting in the Canadas’:
William Notman’s Maple Box Portfolio of Stereographic
Views, 1860.” Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (1997–1998):
69–90.
——, “Concordia Salus: Triumphal Arches at Montreal, 1860.”
Journal of Canadian Art History XIX (1998): 86–112.
——, “Women Workers at Notman’s Studio: Young Ladies
of the Printing Room.” History of Photography 20 (1996):
122–28.
Triggs, Stanley, The Composite Photographs of William Not-
man, Montreal: McCord Museum of Canadian History, 1993
(exhibition catalogue).
——, William Notman’s Studio: The Canadian Picture, Montreal:
McCord Museum/McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992
(exhibition catalogue).
——, William Notman: The Stamp of a Studio, Toronto: Art
Gallery of Ontario/Coach House Press, 1985 (exhibition
catalogue).
——, Brian Young, Conrad Graham, and Gilles Lauzon, Victoria
Bridge: The Vital Link, Montreal: McCord Museum of Cana-
dian History, 1992 (exhibition catalogue).
NUDES
In E. M. Forster’s novel, A Room with a View (1908),
Lucy Honeychurch expressed her rebelliousness by buy-
ing a photograph of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—this in
defi ance of her chaperone’s warning that “Venus, being a
pity, spoiled the picture, otherwise so charming.” Almost
contemporaneously, in 1910, seven-year-old Kenneth
Clark was “expounding” his favourite pictures to his
Victorian grandmother. “Unfortunately,” he recalled in
his autobiography, “I began with Giorgione’s Concert
Champêtre. We were sitting on a sofa near the window
and I turned to the page in triumph. ‘Oh dear, it’s very
nude’ said my grandmother, and rose from the sofa in
confusion.”
These episodes show that the nude was an un-
comfortable subject in the Victorian and Edwardian
periods. In addition, they draw attention to the tension
that existed between the aesthetic and erotic aspects of
such subjects. In the case of photography, this tension
was exacerbated by the realism of the medium, a real-
ism that made it diffi cult for the viewer to be “diverted
(‘sublimated’) in the direction of art”—as Freud put it
in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1901).
Susan Waller (2003) highlighted the problematic na-
ture of photography when she observed that during the
Third Republic of France photographic reproductions
of paintings of nudes that had been publicly displayed
in the Louvre or in the Salon could not be displayed in
shop windows, even when the government censorship
authority had approved their sale.
Freud’s assertion that sexual curiosity might be “sub-
limated” to become, at least in part, an aesthetic appre-
ciation of the body has proved contentious. “If the nude
is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires
appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad
morals,” wrote philosopher Samuel Alexander in Beauty
and Other Forms of Value (1933). Kenneth Clark, on the
other hand, maintained in The Nude (1956): “No nude,
however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator
some vestige of erotic feeling ... and if it does not do
so, it is bad art and false morals. The desire to grasp and
be united with another human body is so fundamental a
part of our nature, that our judgment of what is known as
‘pure form’ is inevitably infl uenced by it; and one of the
diffi culties of the nude as a subject for art is that these
instincts cannot lie hidden.” More recently, Camille
Paglia in her highly infl uential book Sexual Personae
(1990) insisted on the fundamentally sexual nature of the
nude in art; at the other end of the spectrum is Maxim
Du Camp’s 1863 observation that “art should have no
more sex than mathematics.” In fact, photographs of the
nude may be situated at all points in a spectrum ranging
from the chaste to the obscene. Moreover, the character
of the photograph may change, depending on the nature
of the consumer and whether he was an artist, medical
student, scopophiliac or voyeur.
Drawing from the nude model was central to the
training and practice of artists in the early modern period
and remained so in academic art curricula in Europe and
North America throughout the nineteenth century. This
being the case, it is not surprising that photographers
worked from the nude and produced studies from theNUDES
Unknown. Nude with Mirror.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Rubel Collection,
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997 (1997.382.45)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.