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Thomas Couture - Daydreams - Walters 3744
Summary
Since the 16th century, a figure blowing bubbles has served as an allegory for the vice of vanity. A schoolboy slouches on a chair beside his unopened books as bubbles drift overhead. The note tucked in the broken glass reads: "Le Parasseux indigne de vivre" (the lazy one unworthy of living). The soap bubbles and the crumbling wall suggest the fleeting nature of time, and the laurel wreath symbolizes glory ignored. Rejecting prevailing academic traditions, Couture developed a highly personal technique involving bright colors and expressive paint textures, which was based on his studies of Venetian works in the Louvre Museum. He frequently depicted contemporary subjects but filled them with moral overtones. An influential teacher, Couture trained such artists as Edouard Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Mary Cassatt, and Eastman Johnson.
Eastman Johnson (1824–1906) was a famous American artist of the 19th century, an outstanding master of everyday and portrait genres. Eastman Johnson was a prominent adherent of realism in art, the formation of his style was greatly influenced by the work of the Dutch and Flemish masters of a painting of the 17th century.
Thomas Couture (1815–1879) was an academic painter best known for his portraits and historical genre pictures such as “The Romans of the Decadence” (1847), which created a sensation at the Salon of 1847. Couture developed his excellent portrait skills under Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. An academician of stature, he combined soft, 18th-century coloring and a strict 19th-century classicism in his most important work. His sharp use of tonal contrasts is thought to have influenced one of his most famed students, Édouard Manet. Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Fantin-Latour also studied under this popular teacher.
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