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

77. Robert L. Alexander, "Courbet and Assyrian Sculpture," Art Bulletin 47, no. 4 (1965): 447-52.

78. Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), vol. 1, 19.

79. Roy McMullen, Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1984), 94-96. A photograph album of the production is in the Bibliotheque de l'Opera in Paris, PH 9 (2).

80. The most extensive list of correspondences and contrasts is in Degas, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, 89-92. On the creation of the work, see Genevieve Monnier, "La genese d'une oeuvre de Degas: Semiramis construisant une ville," Revue du Louvre et des Musees de France 28, nos. 5-6 (1978): 407-26.

81. Pierre-Louis Mathieu, "La Bibliotheque de Gustave Moreau," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser, 91, no. 1311 (1978): 155-62.

82. The sketchbook, dating from 1850 to 1869, is now in the collection of the Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris. There is also in the museum a notebook recording notable articles in Le Magasin Pittoresque, including two described by the artist as "bas-relief decouvert a Ninive-Sculpture assyrienne" (1844) and "poids assyriennes" (1861). I am grateful to Mme Genevieve Lacambre for her continued assistance with this material.

83. This gesture can be found in a variety of Assyrian deity figures conserved in London, Paris, and elsewhere, such as the series from Room H of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud; Gadd, 236.

84. On the work and its context, see Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford Maddox Ford], Ford Madox Brown (London: Longmans, Green, 1986), 262, 272; Rowland Elzea, The Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Jr. & Related Pre-Raphaelite Collections (Wilmington, Del.: Delaware Art Museum, 1978), 30-31.

85. A prototype is London, British Museum, Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities (hereafter BM, WAA) 98060. All of the Assyrian artifacts referred to here were collected by and displayed at the museum by the early 1850s.

86. See, for instance BM, WAA 124533 or 124557.

87. George C. Swayne, The History of Herodotus (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1870), 36-37, paraphrasing Herodotus, 1.196. On Long's treatment of the subject, see Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 119-24.

88. The curtain design at right is derived from an Assyrian floor threshold, such as BM, WAA 118910. The battle scene at far left is closely derived from BM, WAA 124536. The central frieze is closely derived from BM, WAA 118914, 118916. The disposition of the frieze - its coloration and use of the "sacred tree" motif to take up the wall's edges - suggest the influence of not only the artifacts in the museum but also Layard's reconstruction of an Assyrian throne room. Layard's design is reproduced in Esin Atil, Charles Newton, and Sarah Searight, Voyages and Visions: Nineteenth-Century European Images of the Middle East from the Victoria and Albert Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 78-79.