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Temperamental!: Prints in the Collection of Bryn Mawr College

Jacques Philippe Le Bas (French, 1707-1873), after Carel van Falens (Flemish, 1683-1733); Departure for the Hunt (1742). Etching and engraving; Gift of Abbey A. K. Turner Van Pelt Grimscom, Class of 1952, Katherine Drexel Van Pelt Beaver, and Charles B.

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1. Jacques Philippe Le Bas (French, 1707-1873), after Carel van Falens (Flemish, 1683-1733); Departure for the Hunt (1742). Etching and engraving; Gift of Abbey A. K. Turner Van Pelt Grimscom, Class of 1952, Katherine Drexel Van Pelt Beaver, and Charles B.
2. Albert Alexander Paul Rouffio (French, 1855-1911), Hérodias (c. 1878), after painting of 1875. Etching; signed in plate; Gift of Abbey A. K. Turner Van Pelt Grimscom, Class of 1952, Katherine Drexel Van Pelt Beaver, and Charles B. P. Van Pelt; VP.346 While Symbolist artists of this period tend to focus on Salomé’s role in the death of John the Baptist, it was her mother Hérodias who ordered his beheading after he criticized her marriage to Herod. These artists, including Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Aubrey Beardsley, prefer to romanticize the dangerous but feminine allure of Salomé’s dance, rather than her mother’s more masculine, murderous rage as characteristic of the femme fatale. Rouffio, however, like Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) in his novella Hérodias (1877), shifts attention from the youthful daughter to Hérodias herself. His Hérodias reclines seductively, clutching her marital pillow and stroking the hair of the beheaded victim—an unnervingly calm, yet vengeful choleric. He discovers room for Hérodias to retain her femininity and depicts her as the femme fatale of this story.
3. Juanita McNeely (American, b. 1936), The Gift (1969-1970). Aquatint, signed in pencil below, Gift of Bill Scott to The William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection of Works by Women Artists, 2006.1.202. The representation of a sanguine temperament coincides with the male gaze in many lustful, even violent depictions of nude women. The Gift offers a subversion of this, but a complicated one. In it, a nude, lanky woman, perhaps a stand-in for the artist, is splayed across the center of the page; the figure looks uncomfortable, even trapped in an intolerable situation. A black subject turns away from her, even as his physical presence still seems to overpower her in ways that reinforce racialized stereotypes. If intended for a male viewer, this image becomes sanguine when it allows him to fantasize his rescue of the “damsel in distress.” But perhaps this shadowy figure is an abstraction of the terminal cancer diagnosis the artist received after graduating high school—a traumatic experience that informs her practice. Since then, she uses her art to explore “things that perhaps most people even feel uncomfortable about looking at, much less talking about.”
7. Richard Linder (German-American, 1901-1978), Der Rosencavalier (The Knight of the Rose) (1977). Color lithograph; edition 193/250; signed in pencil; Gift of Jacqueline Koldin Levine, Class of 1946, and Howard H. Levine; 2012.27.413

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Gender

Prints, such as the enlarged reproduction of a woodcut from the Swiss physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser’s book Quinta Essentia (1574) seen here, could function as teaching tools, diagraming the four temperaments as gendered attributes of bodies. The temperaments developed masculine and feminine associations that reinforced the idea that melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments were more appropriate for women, and the choleric and sanguine temperaments were better suited to men.
Read in a contemporary light, this illustration also suggests that the potential for all temperaments (and genders) resides within a single body. Prints in this section nuance the four humors as not strictly masculine or feminine. Like gender, the temperaments are fluid. These prints further suggest that issues of labor, class, race, and sexuality are inherently tied to gender performativity and thus temperamental interpretation.