Fotoreproductie van een gravure naar het schilderij Maternal embraces door Auguste Toulmouche before 1871

Curator: This photogravure presents an image entitled "Maternal embraces" made before 1871. The print reproduces an etching after a painting by the French artist Auguste Toulmouche. It appears in a volume once owned by Godfrey Wordsworth Turner. Editor: First glance? That tender gaze feels less like doting affection and more like... possession. I feel caged by her embrace and maybe that says more about me than about this reproduction after Toulmouche's canvas, huh? Curator: I think you are onto something there. Toulmouche often depicted women in domestic settings. He gained significant success and popularity catering to bourgeois tastes. His artworks show not just domesticity but the expectations, the performance of it all, of prescribed ideals that were sold as reality. The engraving is, in essence, a symptom. Editor: Yes, symptom of the pressure cooker these woman experienced during that time. Look at the elaborate fabrics of their clothing, these ornate details. Like layers of invisible chains that imprison both woman and child. This reminds me of how certain objects can carry repressed emotions... How an entire epoch can get entangled in a single garment. Curator: Exactly! Printmaking played a crucial role in disseminating images of bourgeois life during this time. So engravings like this had the power to enforce a certain behavior. They gave material form to socio-political ideas that were being exchanged and demanded at the time. They normalized conventions of domesticity. It speaks volumes. Editor: Looking again, you're right; it has none of the free brushstrokes or daring light effects one finds in other contemporary work from France like that by the Impressionists, so there is some kind of message to be gathered by this restraint and precision. Everything's buttoned-up. Even emotion. Curator: Precisely, and that calculated execution made it palatable, easily reproduced, and massively consumed. This work speaks not just to an image but its reproduction and broader influence at the time. Editor: I never thought that just one image and all the things associated to it at the time, could be, in the end, so provocative and loud, despite of its own intentions. Curator: Right? It shows the potency and reach images have when supported by existing ideologies of power and the mechanics for their endless reproduction.