Art Throb # 19: The Blood Drinkers (1898) by Joseph Ferdinand Gueldry (1858-1945)

Joseph Ferdinand Gueldry (1858-1945), The Blood Drinkers (1898)

Media unknown, dimensions unknown

Whereabouts unknown

At the beginning of Jean Rollin's 1979 film Fascination two women visit an abattoir to drink fresh ox blood as a cure for anaemia, which is supposedly brought on by menstrual bloodshed. As the butchered bodies of slaughtered animals hang around them and blood covers the floor, the women are handed glasses of the blood, which looks like red wine. One of the women dips her finger in her glass and rubs her lips suggestively, applying blood lipstick.

The scene must have been inspired by – or the director must have at least been aware of – The Blood Drinkers, Joseph Gueldry's 1898 painting of a French slaughterhouse, in which a group of delicate-looking women (one of whom has brought a small child) gather for the same purpose. As in the film, animal carcasses hang from the ceiling and blood soaks the floor. However, whereas the characters in the film appear nonplussed by the experience, the women in Gueldry's painting are visibly distressed. One puts her hand up to her face in disgust at the smell of newly-slaughtered flesh, while another turns away as if about to vomit. As one of the slaughterers lifts a glass of the newly-drained blood to one of the women of the group, the other slaughterer stands over the ox to restrain it with a rope. Their aprons, arms and hands are streaked with blood and an axe – presumably the weapon used to slaughter the animal – lies on the floor nearby. It is unclear as to whether the animal is dead – the fact that one of the men has to restrain its legs suggests it is not. Its throat appears to have just been cut and the warm blood is captured as it pours out.

It is a graphic and disturbing painting. Its impact must be even greater when viewed in the flesh (no pun intended) and in full colour (I have been unable to find a colour reproduction). As Bram Dijkstra says in Idols of Perversity (1986), when the painting was first exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Francais in Paris in 1898, it caused a sensation (Dijkstra, p.337). The same year, the editor of The Magazine of Art wrote:

One of the most popular paintings of the year is undoubtedly Monsieur Gueldry's gorge-raising representation of "The Blood Drinkers", in which a group of consumptive invalids, congregated in a shambles, are drinking the blood fresh from the newly-slain ox lying in the foreground – blood that oozes out over the floor – while the slaughterers, themselves steeped in gore, hand out the glasses like the women at the wells. What gives point to the loathsomeness of the subject is the figure of the one young girl, pale and trembling, who turns from the scene in sickening disgust, and so accentuates our own. (Dijkstra, p. 338)

As a piece of art, Gueldry's painting is unremarkable. Lacking in subtlety, it manipulates the viewer, choreographing a desired response. Gueldry clearly wants to inspire revulsion in us, and so does everything he can to elicit it. Our emotions are dictated by the woman who turns away; the viewer is not trusted to respond on his own terms.

The painting also plays upon contemporary appetites for sensation and scandal. As Bram Dijkstra says, "In many ways [late nineteenth-century salon painters] were the forerunners of the twentieth century's newspaper photographers" (page 337). Wherein lies the painting's relevance to modern eyes. As straightforward documentary, its purpose is doubtful. The idea of fragile, anaemic women visiting slaughterhouses in order to ingest ox blood was a whiff of the urban myth about it, feeding both contemporary (and modern) popular appetites for vampire folklore. The equivalent of shock- horror slasher films, the painting's purpose is to sensationalise, scandalise and titillate. The fact that women are presented as weak and feeble creatures forced to undergo such an ordeal, and are infantilised by men, too seems patronising to modern audiences. On the other hand, the painting's offensiveness may be celebrated. Jean Rollin's film lifts it into a new context in which its ironic kitsch value can be appreciated.

The Blood Drinkers forms an intriguing addition to Gueldry's oeuvre as a whole. Painting mainly in oils, he depicted factory workers and many landscapes and pictures of riverbanks, lakes, boating scenes and nautical scenes. A student of J.L. Gerome, in 1878 Gueldry made his debut at the Paris Salon. In 1885 he won a third place medal and in 1889 a silver medal. At the Universal Exposition in 1900 he won a scholarship to travel abroad, and in 1908 was made a knight of the Legion d'Honeur.