One intellectual consequence of the social and political upheavals of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe was the speculative search for meaningful patterns of historical development. Inspired by lofty notions of the artist as a poet-philosopher, a few exceptional painters joined the effort, producing grandiose schemes of “universal history.” Daniel Guernsey explores this material using four case studies: James Barry’s The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture (1777–1784), the mural cycle that he painted for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London; Eugène Delacroix’s hemicycle and cupola decorations charting the rise and fall of ancient Greco-Roman civilization in the Deputies’ library in the Palais Bourbon in Paris (1838–47), one of the most prominent official commissions of the July Monarchy; Paul Chenavard’s unrealized commission under the short-lived Second Republic for the Pantheon in Paris, in which an elaborate, cyclical scheme of world history was to be summarized in a circular floor-mosaic entitled Social Palingenesis (1848–1851); and finally, as a realist recasting of universal histories like Chenavard’s, Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio. A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855), the centerpiece of the artist’s counter-exhibition to the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The book ends with a brief epilogue concerning the twentieth-century legacy of universal history in the work of the Mexican muralists.

The years covered by Guernsey’s four examples, 1777–1855, span “the first proliferation of universal histories in art” (2) during the modern period, with Barry’s being the earliest major example and the 1855 Exhibition both marking the apogee of so-called art philosophique and ushering in the modernist critique of its intellectual (i.e., non-pictorial) ambitions. The chapter on Barry, however, is somewhat disconnected from the subsequent three chapters, which follow in quick chronological succession through the convulsions of mid-nineteenth-century France. The imbalance between British and French examples can be explained in part by the absence of a legacy of monumental painting in Britain, as well as by the book’s apparent genesis in the author’s PhD dissertation about Delacroix’s murals (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995). It seems Delacroix led Guernsey to consider Barry, for the French artist had read of Barry’s cycle and was indebted to it for part of his final iconographic program. By adding the later examples of Chenavard and Courbet, Guernsey situates Delacroix in a historical sequence, outlining the rise and fall in Europe, and then episode of rebirth in the Americas, of a tradition of painting universal histories.

Guernsey’s arguments in each chapter, like the paintings themselves, resist easy summary. Barry’s cycle, which charts the providential development of the arts, manufactures, and commerce from ancient Greece to modern-day England to post-revolutionary America, finds its immediate context in the Society’s promotion of the fine and mechanical arts. Guernsey argues that Barry affirms the civilizing role the Society accorded commerce and industry globally, in keeping with the progressive, humanistic views of the Protestant Dissenters affiliated with the Society. Like the Dissenters, Barry was also attuned to the negative social and cultural effects of contemporary English commercialism and mercantilism, and he identified the newly independent United States with regenerated artistic and social ideals. The coherence of Barry’s vision is complicated, however, by the notable iconographic changes he made in his prints after the cycle, replacing key figures in the culminating Elysium composition. The introduction of Catholic figures like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Guernsey contends, reflected the artist’s move after the French Revolution to an anti-Protestant position, identified with the Catholic critique of the liberal economic and religious values that had apparently helped loose the forces of atheism and anarchism upon the world.

Delacroix’s work is likewise understood to be imbued with enlightened liberal values, this time in the context of Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy. Developing an iconographic scheme in accord with the legislative function of the Deputies’ library, Delacroix is also presented as playing an admonitory role, guiding the Deputies in statecraft by providing classical exemplars of civic virtue, with a special emphasis on eloquence and political oratory. Identifying the artist with a self-critical strand within modern French liberalism, Guernsey argues that he sought to maintain the classical republican, Renaissance, and Enlightenment traditions of civic humanism in the face of encroaching political apathy associated with modern commercial-industrial society, the interests of which were represented by the Deputies themselves. Thus Delacroix’s paintings represented an effort to “save liberalism from self-destruction” (120).

Chenavard’s Social Palingenesis finds its motivation in the secular, civic function of the Pantheon under the Second Republic. Chenavard’s heterodox scheme, which looks forward to a post-Christian “religion of humanity,” entailed a celebration of the religious, philosophical, and political freedoms inaugurated by the Reformation and Enlightenment. Chenavard’s faith in social evolution, however, was mitigated by a deep strain of pessimism. The excised bottom portion of the work, Guernsey emphasizes, was to have contained a prophetic vision of human regression, social disintegration, and cultural decline under the materialist reign of commerce and industry. He identifies Chenavard’s position here with the Catholic left of the 1840s, which held capitalism to represent the modern devolution of Protestantism and liberalism.

Guernsey’s chapter on Courbet, which derives from a previously published essay (Daniel R. Guernsey, “Childhood and Aesthetic Education: The Role of Emile in the Formation of Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio,” in Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn R. Brown, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002, 71–88), does not attempt a comprehensive reading of The Artist’s Studio. Instead it focuses on the central group of the artist painting a landscape, with the nude model and small boy watching attentively. Echoing the theses of Klaus Herding and James Rubin (see Klaus Herding’s chapter on the painting in Courbet: To Venture Independence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991; and James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Guernsey posits Courbet as a guide in virtuous statecraft to Napoleon III and a promoter of social justice and harmony. As he further elaborates, Courbet’s was a redemptive vision of art grounded in nature that had close affinities to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his ideas of educative reform, and stood against the ills of industrial capitalism, consecrated in the name of progress by international exhibitions like that of 1855. While acknowledging that Courbet’s painting does not present a plan of historical development, Guernsey argues that it shares with universal histories like Chenavard’s a humanitarian ethos and a preoccupation with social renewal.

Guernsey is concerned in each chapter with the immanent politics of universal history as it served in specific institutional contexts, and, as he shows, there are remarkable ideological connections between the four cases. They shared as their informing political context liberal or republican institutions committed to the idea of progress, whether economic, political, social, or cultural. Guernsey stresses the artists’ ambivalent or overtly critical relationships to the legitimizing discourses of these institutions, and one of the book’s virtues is its emphasis on just how ideologically mixed and unstable cycles like Barry’s and Chenavard’s could be. The ambivalence arose on the one hand from the painters’ belief in progressive liberal values rooted in the Reformation and Enlightenment, and, on the other, a strong antipathy to the materialist forces of the modern economic order, which (among other things) threatened the revival of the humanist tradition of monumental public art in which they were invested. They shared, Guernsey argues, a commitment to the social function of art and a romantic vision of the artist as prophetic legislator or redeemer of humanity. The quintessential poet-lawgiver Orpheus (particularly as he was enlisted by Rousseau in Emile) thus emerges as a recurrent figure throughout the book.

As a piece of intellectual history, Guernsey’s work makes a genuine contribution, deepening our understanding of the ideological nuances of well-known but still perplexing works. His source material is wide-ranging, his grasp of it impressive, and his choice of textual sources is generally convincing and historically justified. The lengthy citations that drive his argument, however, often eclipse the paintings themselves, which then function reductively as tacit supports for the iconographic reading. The tremendous interpretive pressure he puts on certain details shows, for instance, in his presentation of Delacroix’s scene of the tribute money in the theology cupola of the library as exemplifying the “moralization of money as it served to remind the deputies that it is their civic duty to practice good stewardship in guiding France’s political economy, cautioning them against abusing the nation’s commonwealth to promote their own purposes regardless of real social needs” (107). This is to extrapolate a great deal, especially given the rather unsystematic way in which Delacroix arrived at the subjects for his program, as Anita Hopmans has documented (Anita Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations in the Palais Bourbon Library: A Classic Example of an Unacademic Approach,” Simiolus 17, no. 4 (1987): 240–69).

The historical thrust of Guernsey’s argument occasionally leads him to somewhat contorted positions. Intent, for instance, upon situating Courbet in relation to his predecessors by arguing for the basis of his “real allegory” in classical iconography, Guernsey makes a visually tenuous comparison between the triad of Napoleon III/Courbet/female model and that of Alcibiades/Socrates/muse in François-André Vincent’s 1776 painting Socrates Instructing Alcibiades, and then asserts that Courbet had actively demythologized, naturalized, and concealed his source. At least to this reader, such arguments of “disguised displacement” (203) threaten to become circular.

More fundamentally, the author’s approach, which posits a coherent didactic message to be deciphered, overlooks pictorial or structural ambiguities in the works themselves that might resist or complicate his discursive line. Guernsey generously acknowledges scholarly debt to Lee Johnson and Jonathan Ribner in the case of Delacroix, and Herding and Rubin in the case of Courbet, but it is telling that he does not take into account the provocative deconstructions of Delacroix’s cycle by Norman Bryson or of Courbet’s painting by Linda Nochlin, both of whom dwell on problems of “reading” and allegorical interpretation (see Norman Bryson’s chapter on the Palais Bourbon cycle in Tradition and Desire, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984; and Linda Nochlin, “Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading ‘The Painter’s Studio’,” in Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, eds., Courbet Reconsidered, Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1988, 17–41).

In his pursuit of an authoritative reading, Guernsey also minimizes the fact that the works flummoxed many contemporary viewers. Some discussion of the problematic status of didactic mural painting in the nineteenth century and of the dramatic shifts in image-text relations during this period would have been useful here. As it is, Guernsey ignores the radical differences between Barry, who wrote a book-length explanatory text to accompany his cycle when it first went on display in 1783; Delacroix, whose brief notice in Le Constitutionnel in January 1848 cursorily identified and described each scene; and Courbet, whose famous 1854 letter to Champfleury suggestively enumerated some of the figures in The Painter’s Studio, but also eagerly anticipated how it would confound critics who tried to unlock its meaning. Guernsey simply considers this letter as a challenge to the interpreter. He does not pursue the possibility that Courbet may have conceived his work partly as an ironic riposte to ponderously didactic works like Chenavard’s, which in the 1850s were being dismissed as “logogriphs” or “rebuses” by many critics. In this context, Courbet’s position seems to be his familiar one of agent provocateur: his “real allegory” would flaunt its obscurity as a parody of art philosophique. Such a position, of course, does not neatly square with the vision of the artist as social redeemer and moral educator. While that vision was certainly an earnest one for the philosophizing artists of an earlier generation, it was much more difficult to sustain without irony in the 1850s, given the pervasive sense of disillusionment in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic coup.

In this regard, more consideration might have been afforded the end, or rather the aftermath, of art philosophique in France. Guernsey’s epilogue on the Mexican muralists is certainly justified given his interests in the intellectual history of the Left, but an equally valuable coda, extending the book’s primary focus, might have looked at French art of the later nineteenth century. Public mural painting underwent a revival with figures like Puvis de Chavannes, and universal history went underground in elaborate private schemes like Gustave Moreau’s Life of Humanity, on which Guernsey wrote his MA thesis (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986). Even with this caveat, however, Guernsey’s four case studies, particularly that on Delacroix, make significant and original contributions to the literature devoted to each artist, and, taken together, elaborate a sophisticated and thought-provoking thesis.