Inventing Assyria: exoticism and reception in nineteenth-century England and France

While even the traditional conception of Assyria was thus transformed, the juxtaposition of France and England is key to a much more radical and varied range of reception between the two countries. The varying fortunes of Assyria in France and England disrupted the prediscovery situation, in which both countries shared the same mode of conceiving the subject. The works of Courbet, Degas, and Moreau (and even Delacroix's lack of interest in the discoveries) suggest a distinctly different atmosphere in France from that of England, one that forecloses on, governs, and ultimately subordinates the aesthetic challenge of ancient Assyrian art.

Tracking the archaeological history and aesthetic debate over Assyria, as we have done, illuminates the fundamental differences between the milieus of reception in France and England. Not only their pragmatic archaeological histories, but also their methods of disseminating information differed sharply. The subsequent French submersion of Assyrian imagery we have noted is remarkably concordant with the troubled history of French Mesopotamian archaeology as well as the constrained circulation of the discoveries to the public. By contrast, in England, with its vigorous public debate on Assyria and its art, the lionizing of Layard as discoverer, as well as numerous publications on the works, an audience was fostered that was prepared to respond to the specific, detailed Assyrian images of artists such as Brown and Long.

For all the amassing of textual and visual evidence of Assyria, for all the energy expended in the antiquarian project of fixing the Assyrian past, the image of Assyria that arose was thus localized and hybridized as it circulated among Western audiences. Courbet's "Assyrian" beard is no less the fruit of this process of circulation than Brown's painstaking Assyrian decor. Ultimately, then, like many another exoticist subject, Assyria served not only as an object in its own right but also as a distant and distorted mirror in which France and England asserted their respective identities. On these grounds, a most telling observation of the early reception of ancient Assyrian objects is this line from a review of an English production of Byron's Sardanapalus, which used elaborate sets and costumes almost directly copied from Layard's reliefs. "That one performance gave us a better insight into the manners and habits of the Assyrians, than a whole lifetime has enabled us to acquire of the French."(94)

Notes

I am grateful to Deborah Lyons, Keith Moxey, John Malcolm Russell, and Alan Wallach for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper. Some of this material is derived from my doctoral dissertation, "A New Antiquity: The English Reception of Assyria," University of Chicago, 1989. My dissertation research was partly sponsored by a Kress Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

1. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Sidney Smirke to Joseph Scoles, June 28, 1847.