“Confused Thoughts and Pictures”

Like much of Heinrich Heine's writing of the 1830s, his series of short articles on the Parisian Salon first published in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in 1831 and subsequently in book form as Französische Maler (French Painters) offers reflections on the July Revolution and its aftermath. Heine uses the exhibit's juxtaposition of multiple paintings and the serial format of his journalistic reports as a double lens through which to consider the ends and beginnings of historical epochs in an age of revolution and its aftermath, a topic that will occupy us throughout this essay. In the concluding article, Heine discusses two paintings that the exhibit felicitously places side by side, and he seeks to recreate this visual juxtaposition on a textual level. The first, by Louis Robert, depicts agricultural workers outside of Rome. Heine finds in this tableau of reapers a representation of the lasting nature of the Roman people; the image presents a “Geschichte ohne Anfang und ohne Ende, die sich ewig wiederholt und so einfach ist wie das Meer, wie der Himmel, wie die Jahreszeiten” (history without beginning and without end that repeats itself eternally and is as simple as the sea, as the sky, as the seasons). This vaguely processional scene depicts festive dancing in rhythm with the seasonal harvest and evokes a classicizing shape of time based in the ceaseless repetition and constancy of Roman popular life, despite the fall of ancient Rome. The second painting, by Paul Delaroche, depicts Cromwell, the victorious representative of a new order, gazing down at the executed English king, Charles I.