Flash cards for Final Exam
Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons 1789.
This work was shown right after the storming of bastille kicking off the French revolution. It was commissioned by the government. The subject is inspired by Roman history. Lucius Brutus was the founder of the Roman republic and first console of the republic. (republic set up in 509 BCE) Brutuses sons has conspired with the former monarch of the roman kingdom to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy. The plot was found out and Brutus himself orders the execution of his sons. Brutus in the corner becomes the defender of the republic at the cost of his own family . The sons were connected throught he monarch through the mom - monachry is then feminized. He sits by a sclupure that is the personified power and nature of Rome. ALso below is the capitoline wolf - a symbol of ancient Rome. The women more react to the tragedy of the sons deaths. The women seem to be in a more makeshif interior space, while brutus is in an in between space fo public and not public. The center of the canvas has a void and is unfilled by figures and this is done on purpose for emotional effect. Still life in the cetner of a basket and sw=ewing items - abondened by the women. Makes the viewer wonder did Brutus make the right choice? Draws in the viewer of waht they think? Brutus even looks conflicted. Brutus was seen as a hero in the French revolution. (busts of him pla ed around city). The horitai brothers fight til death - one survives but not one where one of the sisters is the finance of one and Brutus kills the fiance as well. Brutus almost seems to look out and speak to the leaders of France that this may be the amount of sacrifice that will be made . The artists Jacques David was in the thick of the revolution once it was spurred, with this came his distaste for the academy and for its way of having hierchy and state run power. He felt slighted differnt times when he didnt get director roles and didnt win certain things. David opened up the salon in 1790 for more artists to show – even women. In 1993 he was a leading voice in calling the academy to disband all togther becuase they squelshed creativity and students had to fit into a mold. David through tiem headed up the propeganda machien fo the revolution.
Jacques-Louis David, Marat at his Last Breath/Death of Marat, 1793.
Before the revolution broke out Marat was a scientist and journalist, and an anti-royal. He was very to the left. The most striking event of his political life was his assasination. He had called for the executation of a number of royalists - Charlotte dardet - related to some of the royalists executted traveled to Pris to exact her revenge on Marat. She gainedaccess to his house and he had a skin condtion that made in soak in baths which we can see his in, in the painting. he would sit in the tub and do a lot of revolutionary work in it. She wanted to come in to meet with him to gather money for widows of the revolution. After she gained access to see him she stabs him. He we can see the cut and knife. After his dath and jacobites were amiguius on what to do with Marat, he wasnt as easy to hold up as others. David orchestrates his body to be displayed. It was taken to a church and displayed on a pillar. He was assasinated in the summer so it was hot and not good to have the body out for long. In the painting blood is on the paper and has charlottes name on it. Theres another letter that shows his support for the widows and orphans and a banknote, in his last mooment was doing work to support these people. Thus painted Charlotte in a worse light and him in a more heroic light. The painted balances bewteen the real and ideal showing him as muscular and there is a focus ont he male nude under duress. The background is emlimnated creating a note of transendance. Hinting at this was the death of a politican butperhaps something grater. David wants him to be beautiufl an serene. Light shines down and reflects a supernatural sort of look. Its done to create a supernatural look thats not christian that is almost like a golden divine. David is though making a connection with traditional religious images like Carvaggios entombment adn we him in the same position as christ after the crucidfication. Marat his the seculaar revolutionary hero rather than a christian religious savior. David gave these paintings to the revloutionary government. Before the paintings were hung they were parades through the street ina. festival. this festival was held on the same dya that marie annioinette was Guiottened. And set up in lourve for public admiration before hung int he national chambers.
Anne-Louis Girodet, Sleep of Endymion, 1791; 1793 Salon
One of Davids puils and the biggest star to come out of davids studio. Went to rome right as the revolution was breaking out. Shown at the heigh at the reign of terrror. Thi counted as a body of work of a male nude from his practice and time in Rome but he added this and anotehr figure to make it a history painting. Tells the story of a moon godess falling in love with a mortal. She has him imprisioned in an eternal sleep so every night she can ravage the sleeping mortal. She is assisted by the winged god in the top corner. It is almost Roccoco in its subject matter, dealing with love making and the goddess. But also out of step with classical painting as well. If compared to the Oath of the Horatia - its very differnt the space is thrown off. Instead of lineear the scene is in a mystical lush sceneery. The space isn’t readable and is closed off. He is in the forgorund and fills the scene with his nude body. There is one light source in the Oath and he sculpts the bodies in a logical way - where in the other sleepig painting the light is ulimates th figure in a scattered way. Steam pours off his body. In the oath and other paintings the male bodies are hyper masquilne where in this one the body has minimal muscle and its more soft and sexualized. In th western tradition a body like these was more seen as depcited for women. There is no visible reveger or godess i the work and rather the erotic person whimming it into place is the zepher whom seems to gaze on Endymion. in the salon the reaxtions to the work were positve but no one really talked about the sexualization of the male nude in the critical feedback in the salon. A german scholar championed the nudity of Greek youthes who were strong from athletics and healthy lifestyles. He belived that the success of greek art was due to Greek democracy and lifestyle and climate. He liked the graceful approach to the male body. These men may have had same sex attraction.
Jaques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800-1801
David became a court painter under Napoleon, tsked with creating propoganda sort of art. The commsiion came from a spansih diplomet - as there as much support for him. It was so successful that he created 3 more replicas of it. this was painted of a campaign Napoleon had led in 1799. The horse has wild unhinged eyes and rears up. Napoleon sits calmly dispite the craziness of the stead leading the troops forward. Looks out toward viewer - metaphors of not only leading soldiers but also France forward. It is a mix of Neoclassicsm and a proto romantic image. We can see the neoclassism start to fade out. and we begin to see in the early 1800s into the 1820s and 1830s romantiscm begin to grow. the painting is very linear, all forms are solid and the paint is dematerialised there arent indivual brushstrokes. But there is aslo this romantic emotionally charged scene. The wind and horse rearing make his cape billlow in a dramatic way and contasts with his composure. The irony in it is that when napoleon crossed into the path of Itlay he didnt do it ont he vangard of troops on a stalion but rather was on the back of a pass on a mule at the rear of the army. on the rocks below in the pianitng David flatters Napoleon showing names of other great rulers who led troops across the alps like Hannibal and more.
Antonio Canova, Theseus slaying the centaur, 1804-1819
Premier Neoclassical sclupter of the age. When Napoleon meeets him he compells him to move his studio from Italy to France. His fame had spread all over europe he was reknown for prints that were made after his works. Some his clients inlcuded the pope and different monarchy. Neopolaton understood the power of art and its way to sway r move people. When he was in Itlay he started to loot a lot of Italian art. In the early 19th century under his reign it was one of the most popular times for art looting in the 19th century only to be rivaled in the 20th century by Hitler. Neo stole them and hung thm in the lourve whch he renamed the Muse Neoploean. When Neo was defeated the allied forces were anxious to get their hands back on the art and bring it back to home countries. Antonio was bitter and not really on board in becoming a sclpture for Napoleon bcs he had seen the looting. Canova learned to disguise metaphores of Napoleon in his work instead of paitning him outright as politics changed rapidly in order to be markable outside of French imperial system.
Jean-Antoine Gros, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, 1804
On March 21, 1799, in a make-shift hospital in Jaffa, Napoleon visited his troops who were stricken with the Bubonic Plague. Gros depicts Napoleon attempting to calm the growing panic about contagion by fearlessly touching the sores of one of the plague victims. Like earlier neoclassical paintings such as David’s Death of Marat, Gros combines Christian iconography, in this case Christ healing the sick, with a contemporary subject. He also draws on the art of classical antiquity, by depicting Napoleon in the same position as the ancient Greek sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere. In this way, he imbues Napoleon with divine qualities while simultaneously showing him as a military hero. But in contrast to David, Gros uses warm, sensual colors and focuses on the dead and dying who occupy the foreground of the painting. We see the same approach later in Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People (1830).
Napoleon was a master at using art to manipulate his public image. In reality he had ordered the death of the prisoners whom he could not afford to house or feed, and poisoned his troops who were dying from the plague as he retreated from Jaffa.
Anne-Louis Girodet, Revolt in Cairo on 21 October 1798, 1810
More than ten years after the revolt in Cairo, Girodet was commissioned by Vivant Denon to paint this bloody episode from the Egyptian Campaign – it was exhibited at the Salon of 1810. The work is by no means a historical account, but rather a free impression based on the contemporary fashion for all things Oriental. French troops are shown driving back Arab soldiers, but there is no partisanship as regards the violence. The agression of the Muslim rebellion is more than matched by the savagery of French repression.
Whilst the scene has the restrained profundity typical of Neo-Classicism, it nevertheless completely breaks the rules with respect the rules of composition as taught to Girodet by his master David. As a great admirer of Gros, Girodet here attempts to ‘out-Orient’ him, by making his subject a battle scene. From the tumultuous superimposition of combattants emerge three principal figures: a hussard sabre bared, bearing down upon a terrifying, naked, Mamluk warrior, who holds in his arms his dying master. The two groups, drawn in a strong underlying upward movement from left to right, seem to be locked in a dance of death. There is a wealth of detail, some of which almost too horrific to bear, painted with enormous skill: for example the neck of the beheaded man, whose head is brandished in the foreground is hidden by the helmet. Arms, uniforms, luxurious fabrics, naked skin – all is painted with the same finesse.
In addition to this sense of movement, Girodet uses colour and strong light contrasts to express the violence of the conflict. According to contemporary reports, the work was painted at night by lamplight. Perhaps the chiaroscuro used to reinforce the dramatic intensity comes from this. Nevertheless, the painting is deeply romantic and very much the precursor of Delacroix, a painter who expressed in strong terms his admiration for the brutal energy found here.
Theodore Gericault, The Charging Chasseur, 1812
it shows a cavalry member of Napoleon’s forces on horseback preparing for attack. Yet, the horse seems to be rearing away from an unseen attacker.
This work was very different from other Napoleonic battle scenes due to its unique composition.
This painting is symbolic of French Romanticism and has a motif similar to Jacques Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (see Related Paintings below). However, in this piece, there are various non-classical characteristics such as its dramatic diagonal arrangement and vigorous paint handling.
The Charging Chasseur was the first work that Theodore Géricault exhibited. Afterwards, the artist continued moving away from classicism and this was evident in works such as his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa of 1819.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781 RA exhibition.
He is swiss but had major contributions to english patrons or galleries.
Fuselis works are much more pyschological in natural rather than the brhgt or flirty rococco works. Becaue of this they have attracted more attention to modern scholars. Bottles near her bed suggfest a mediince perhaps for sleep but instead her sleep is inteupted by these creatures. Which go back to mesapatamia. We think the scenemay be about ealry science into sleep and how it may feel when one is sleeping but can’t control your limbs to move. and its symbolizes her potentillly being raped but unable to move. Certain elements like ther curtain adn horse head could be seen as sexual.
The plot thickens when he now that Fuseli fell in love with the daughter of a scienctist of sleep who was Swiss. but he would not allow Fuseli to marry his daughter. and of course was emotional and distraught and wrote a letter. also on the back of this painting is also a portrait of her whihc is interesting.
Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom, 1789
The premise comes from the play Shakespeare play mid-summer nights dream. Which was his favorite pobably bcs some of the darker aspects of it. Shakespear was the source of inspiration for artists outside of Italian and greco art inspiration in the Romantic period. Shakespear thouhg was not as favorted by contenental artist as he was seen as wild unruly and uncuth indivual and playwrite copared to other writers. But for British Romantic artists he was a major source of inspiration.
This scene sshows Titania who is the Queen of the fairies of the forest in the center is given a love potion and falls in love with the figure Bottom seen on the left who has been transformated to have ahead of a Donkey. It shows an add type of fulled filled with creates and people as she falls in love with the half-donkey.
Scholars sometimes have trouble relating him to history and either writing him off a genius for his art or a crazy person. We ofte this of the romantic introspection as arising form after the French revolution and napoleonic wars, but this romantic idea got rolling earlier than the french revolution. It seems that some inspireation for the british in Romanticm as by the loss of the American colonies. The English defeat in the war was a blow to the English national conciousness. Fusilis art seems to fit into the idea of escapism and turning inwards espcially ones own pysche and/or an allegory of politial circumstances. They could have been a way to escape mentally from the wars, first the American war and than the French Napoloeonic wars. -
William Blake, Elohim Creating Adam, ca. 1795-1805
Elohim is a Hebrew name for God. This picture illustrates the Book of Genesis:
‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground’. Adam is shown growing out of the earth, a piece of which Elohim holds in his left hand.
For Blake the God of the Old Testament was a false god. He believed the Fall of Man took place not in the Garden of Eden, but at the time of creation shown here, when man was dragged from the spiritual realm and made material.
Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper
William Blake, Newton, c. 1795-1805
Here, Blake satirises the 17th-century mathematician Isaac Newton. Portrayed as a muscular youth, Newton seems to be underwater, sitting on a rock covered with colourful coral and lichen. He crouches over a diagram, measuring it with a compass. Blake believed that Newton’s scientific approach to the world was too reductive. Here he implies Newton is so fixated on his calculations that he is blind to the world around him. This is one of only 12 large colour prints Blake made. He seems to have used an experimental hybrid of printing, drawing, and painting.
John Constable, The Haywain, 1821
John didnt seem himself as a romantic artist. But today we do see him as one as many of his works are of where he grew up and the countryside thus showing his home and are full of emoiton and feeling and almost nostalgia.
This view is of the millpond at Flatford and th flatford mill was used for grinding corn. and was operated by the Constable family for more than 500 years. The house is one the Constables owned and rented out to tenant farmers. THese sort of scenes are labeled as being the picterisque. It ist necessarily idelaized bcs it is true to the details one would see here. But all the same it has a sense of nostalgia. And it shos peace and calm that was beginning to disappear because of industrlization. THis paitning was not a plein air paiting but completed in Studio in London and he produced it from a series of drawings of the farm house and mill. S many of his works he recycled certian aspects like the woman in the midground and an empty boat on the right. But dispite resue of aspects everything goes togther and nothing feels out of place. He had an impressive way of captuing atmosphere in his paintings. The painting was seen favorably by the public but it did not sell at that time. He sold this and two other paintings to an anglo French Dealer named Aerosmith and had them shwon in the 1824 Paris Salon where they were popular bcs of their quality. Constable was awarded a medal byt he French King king Charles the 10th for their quality. He was unswaed the the accolades given. His work shows the one-ness with nature in Romanticism. They are charged with emotion and nostalgia that is different from classical academic landscapes.
JMW Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited 1812
Turner was loved by the academy and had much success in and with it. This is probably because he had a deep appreciation and understanding of art history and his work was different. He loved the old masters but he didnt let it infringe upon his art.
This painting is a landscape historical painting of sorts. We can connect it to the paitning of Napoloeon crossing the Alps. This is a total inversion of what David did, in the Napoloeon piece is a large prominent heroic figure shown in glory where as with Turners work man is completely overwhelmed by nature. He shows mans vulnerability in the face of the overhwelming force of the poweer of nature. Being the figures int eh foreground the other figures are hard to see and they crawl almost of like ants over the landscape. Showing warfare that Hannibels forces are pillaging. When looking in the background somewhat int he center there is a small representation of an elephant and Hannibel is on top of the elephant.
What is interesting in Turners work is not as much the nartive or battle int he work but more so the meterioogial phenomenon a play. The storm is ferocious and black clouds are swirling and a bizarre orange sun that shows through the clouds of the storm.
JMW Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, 1844
During this time there was was growth in the railways and a want to connect each of them more to each other. This work is wonderful because of the atmospheric conditions that he captured. the rian is falling in sheets with white streaks, it is hard to tell whether thsi is a celebration or denigration of train travel, but train travel is the quintensental modern development within this period. Turner himself didnt enjoy travelong by train, but whne he did he would put his head out the window as they were traveling along taking in the landscape and feel and experience the rushing wind.
The train in the painting is fairly abstract and the front in some portions is oddly transparent. You can alsmot see inside to its firey bowls and along it you can almsot see the passenger cars. in the forehround which is easier to see in person there is a rabbit that is racing for its life trying to get across. Some have interpreted the painting as mans overcomign of nature or some see it as mans equalization or even greater power than nature. Also int he left portion fo the canvas there is a rowboat that is small in comparision with the greatness of the train.
Aslo in the work the train seems to lead right into our space and it seems to ahve this industral man-made sublime. It has power tht is unmatched. The tie to the romantic period is to the power and velocity that is shown in thr train and current happenings in growth of industrialization. it is full of movement and energy.
Francisco de Goya, Family of Carlos IV, 1800-01
He was appointed painter to the King. Which would be a prominent position a painter could strive for. It was the position Valeasquez had occupied in the 17th century. This is a lifesie portrait of the royal family. Carlos the 4th is on the right side, theres Queen Maria Louisa, left is the crown Prince fernando, and int he corner you see Goya himself tunred towards a large Easel and looks directly out at the viewer - if he is painting this family why is he also in the painting, or if it were an active painting maybe it is set up int he foreground.
The message of the painting is a robust happy royal family in Spain. But the reality is tht it is ridded with intrigue and drama and attempted coups to throw each other from power. The portrait is shown in a merciless realism, showing them with a level of awkwardness and ugliness. Some sholars have wondered if he was satrizing the royal family. But they royals did pay for it and like it, thus it had their approval. the portrait recalls Diego de Valazquez, Las Menians in 1656. In this Valesquez was also celebrating himself and the status he had attained as the roal court painter. Goya paroding the style and strucatural devices in Valazquezes. Some of the details of Goyas are the details in his brushwork, unlike France Spain is about colro rather than line and drawing. the details of the monachers clothing and finery is incredible.
Francisco de Goya, Yard with Lunatics, c. 1794
Goya suffered from an undiagnosed illness that left him deaf for the rest of his life. This work was draawn after he went completely deaf. It conveyes distaina and disillusionment or resentment Goya experince and became a part of his persona. Our modern conception of him is that he was this mad genuis alone on the fringes of society, but the sterotype applied to goya is undercut by the court honors he had attained. He was the most decorated Spanish artist of his day and was attached to the court for most of his career. Goyas career shares more simialrities to David rather than say David. This was a part of several tempates.
Theres serverla specualtions on what caused his illness and deafness but it is clear that Goya lived in fear of insanity after this and he projected these fears into his work. These series of images were done without comission independently. This work is the only confirmed existing work from the series.
It shows a prision where the mentally ill are thrown in with criminals without any attempt to classify or treat the nature of theri mental illnesses. Int he middle there are tow prisioners naked and clashing with genitlaia darkened out. Theres a men in balck who is a prison guard who is ready to strike them. People in the front pear out in an unsettlign way. He said that it inspired by scenes he had seen as a youth but we are not sure if this is true but seems fair. There is much light but it cant penetrate down into the prison. Perhaps symbolizing that the light of reason has departed from the inmates in the asylum.
In this we see common threads of Goyas work. The first deals with the insuccficancancy of fullflling enlightenment ideals. One enlightenment ideal was t reform prisons and asylums to make them more humane to the people there. And this subject became common. The other theme here and in other works by him is there is a wrestling with a dark side of human nature and inner psychology and there is a ceratin amount of maddness that is autobiographical with Goya.
Francisco de Goya Capricho 43, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
This is the best known image from Goya’s series of 80 aquatint etchings published in 1799 known as ‘Los Caprichos’ that are generally understood as the artist’s criticism of the society in which he lived. Goya worked on the series from around 1796-98 and many drawings for the prints survive. The inscription on the preparatory drawing for this print, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, indicates that it was originally intended as the title page to the series. In the published edition, this print became plate 43, the number we can see in the top right corner. Nevertheless, it has come to symbolise the overall meaning of the series, what happens when reason is absent. Various animals including bats and owls fly above the sleeping artist, and at the lower right a lynx watches vigilantly alerting us to the rise of monstrous forces that we are able to control when sleep descends. Bats represent folly, the cats represent superstition, an owl pokes him with a crayon s he can wake up and record the visions. The idea is that if reason goes to sleep monsters will be produced in these forms. But he also wrote a caption saying that art is a combination of reason and imagination. Also in this time enlightenment had promised many things like reason and equality but in reality not hall of that had been fullfilled. The reaction in Romanticism is the reaction against enlightenment. This sort of art is a reaction of him seeig the atrocities of the remnants of enlgihtenment which was the French army invading into Spain.
Done is aqua print - an etching in wax and the plate in the wax is given a chemical bath and the cheicals eat into the paintwhere the wax has been scraped away and then its cleaned off and ready to be inked and printed.
Francisco de Goya, Third of May, 1808, 1814
On May 2, 1808, hundreds of Spaniards rebelled. On May 3, these Spanish freedom fighters were rounded up and massacred by the French. Their blood literally ran through the streets of Madrid. Even though Goya had shown French sympathies in the past, the slaughter of his countrymen and the horrors of war made a profound impression on the artist. He commemorated both days of this gruesome uprising in paintings. Although Goya’s Second of May is a tour de force of twisting bodies and charging horses reminiscent of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, his The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid is acclaimed as one of the great paintings of all time, and has even been called the world’s first modern painting.
We see row of French soldiers aiming their guns at a Spanish man, who stretches out his arms in submission both to the men and to his fate. A country hill behind him takes the place of an executioner’s wall. A pile of dead bodies lies at his feet, streaming blood. To his other side, a line of Spanish rebels stretches endlessly into the landscape. They cover their eyes to avoid watching the death that they know awaits them. The city and civilization are far behind them. Even a monk, bowed in prayer, will soon be among the dead.
Goya’s painting has been lauded for its brilliant transformation of Christian iconography and its poignant portrayal of man’s inhumanity to man. The central figure of the painting, who is clearly a poor laborer, takes the place of the crucified Christ; he is sacrificing himself for the good of his nation. The lantern that sits between him and the firing squad is the only source of light in the painting and dazzlingly illuminates his body, bathing him in what can be perceived as spiritual light. His expressive face, which shows an emotion of anguish that is more sad than terrified, echoes Christ’s prayer on the cross. The man’s pose not only equates him with Christ, but also acts as an assertion of his humanity. And therre is stigma or holes in his hands. he is showing Spain as still a god-fearing nation and what the revolution has produced.
Goya’s The Third of May 1808 in Madrid remains one of the most chilling images ever created of the atrocities of war, and it is difficult to imagine how much more powerful it must have been in the pre-photographic era, before people were bombarded with images of warfare in the media. A powerful anti-war statement, Goya is not only criticizing the nations that wage war on one another, but is also admonishing us, the viewers, for being complicit in acts of violence, which occur not between abstract entities like “countries,” but between human beings standing a few feet away from one another.
It can be compared to Davids oath of the Horatiach in the gunmnes stance and this painting tauts self-sacrifice fo the good of the nation adn to honor nation over onesself, but the violence of war disapears in it. In Goyas there is violence in its more true fashion. They are even shown in their techniques David being clear and clean and Goyas is a subjective view of the world and you can see the lines of the paint. The flip of neoclassism works and the people who are oppressed in these works.
Francisco de Goya, Witch’s Sabbath, c. 1820-1823
The mural paintings that decorated the house known as “la Quinta del Sordo,” where Goya lived have come to be known as the Black Paintings, because he used so many dark pigments and blacks in them, and also because of their somber subject matter. The private and intimate character of that house allowed the artist to express himself with great liberty. He painted directly on the walls in what must have been mixed technique, as chemical analysis reveals the use of oils in these works. The Baron Émile d´Erlanger acquired “la Quinta” in 1873 and had the paintings transferred to canvas. The works suffered enormously in the process, losing a large amount of paint. Finally, the Baron donated these paintings to the State, and they were sent to the Prado Museum, where they have been on view since 1889. Brugada called this work The Big Billy Goat, alluding to the devil as a Ram served by the witches in their Sabbaths. The goat appears on the left. Seated in front of him is a crowd of men and women with animal-like features, witches and warlocks that have met to practice their Sabbath. On the right, a young woman sits. Perhaps she is waiting to be initiated into their rites. Goya used the world of witches to denounce the degradation of humankind. When it was removed from the wall, more than 1.4 meters of this composition were cut off, so that the young woman mentioned above was no longer in the center of the composition, as she is in Yriarte´s description. Despite the multiple explanations offered by art historians, these works continue to be mysterious and enigmatic, yet they present many of the esthetic problems and moral considerations appearing in Goya´s works. The mural paintings from “la Quinta del Sordo” (the Black Paintings), have been determinant in the modern-day consideration of this painter from Aragon. The German Expressionists and the Surrealist movement, as well as representative of other contemporary artistic movements, including literature and even cinema, have seen the origins of modern art in this series of compositions by an aged Goya, isolated in his own world and creating with absolute liberty.
It could be seen as royalists regaining power in Spain after Napoloeon and instead of going into better ideals it goes back to strict Catholiscm. The paint is built up very thickly.
Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Children, c. 1820-1823
A jarring image - one of the msot jarring in art history.
The canvas features the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus or Saturn (the father a Zues) in Roman mythology, depicted by Goya in a state of complete frenzy. The horrifying scene of a pre-Olympian god eating his children, fearing that he would be overthrown by one of them, but from the trickery fromt he wife of Saturn she replaces them with a stone so Saturn its it instead of hte chidlren adn Zues coems and rescuces his greek God siblings from saturn adn overthrows Titans. It has a Greek classical theme but the style is as far from classism or neoclassism as you can get. This is not a history paitning but more of a nightmare. The structure and contour of his body dont make sense and face looks crazy. Theres no heroism or glorification, but more nightmare and painterly and perhaps Goya escaping into his own mentally ill world towards the end of his life. It shows his view of power adn that whomever is in power does whatever they can to maintain that power even if it evokes violence and destruction. It was painted on the walls of the artist’s house alongside other Black paintings, then transferred to canvas after the artist died and now is part of the Museo del Prado collection.
Franz Pforr, The Entry of King Rudolf of Habsburg into Basel in 1273, 1808-1810
Intentionally clad in a plain grey garment and a black beret, Rudolf von Habsburg rides into the city of Basel with his opulent entourage. He had been elected emperor in Frankfurt a short while previously. In a rigorous, flat composition and with brilliant local colours, this is the Nazarene Pforr’s idealised version of the Middle Ages, “where the dignity of man can still be seen in all its strength”. Inspired by Old German and Italian Gothic and Early Renaissance art, Pforr dreamed of a patriotic form of painting which would help to revive the spirit of the German nation.
The perspective is purposefully dysfunctional. This is harkening back purposefully to the style before the high renaissance before perspective is completely mastered. And there are hard edge contours for the people. It creates an idealized version of a scene from the middle ages. It is similar to gothic era medieval manuscript painting. They wanted to celebrate Germany heritage that was not french and not classical. The Nazarres were making radical moves away from academic art.
Fredrich Overbeck, Italy and Germany, 1811-28
In 1828, Friedrich Overbeck painted a friendship allegory—a project he had set aside after his friend and fellow artist Franz Pforr’s death at the age of twenty-four in 1812. Overbeck’s print symbolizes the artistic ideals of the two friends, specifically the espousal of early-Renaissance Italian and German art in the form of a pair of dark- and fair-haired maidens holding hands, with a view of the Roman countryside to represent Raphael behind Italia and the skyline of Dürer’s Nuremberg behind Germania.
Philip Otto Runge, Morning, ca. 1808 (small version)
To the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme, Runge owed the concept that flowers can symbolize different human states. With their cycle from first bud to death, their response to light, and as manifestations of God’s purpose on earth, flowers were for Runge the most revealing of all natural forms. Together with small children and musical instruments they formed the allegorical base of his most ambitious work, a series on the theme of Times of Day. This was intended to take the form of four huge oil paintings, and to be experienced in a Gothic chapel to the music of choirs and poetry by his friend the writer Ludwig Tieck. This grand plan never materialized; the designs were published in some rather unsatisfactory engravings in 1806 and 1807, while only one of the four subjects, Morning, was developed in oil, in two versions (the larger was later cut into fragments, having failed to satisfy the painter himself).
The painting represents a supreme statement of the nature mysticism associated with the Romantic movement, and is undoubtedly the masterpiece of Runge’s short life. He began work on it in Dresden, where he had been greatly moved by Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in the picture gallery, and his tightly structured, vertical compositions have some of the qualities of altarpieces. As in the earlier Nightingale’s Lesson, they are surrounded by hieroglyphic borders, combining Christian and mythological symbolism. Individual plants, minutely scrutinized like botanical specimens, are integrated into visionary patterns. In Morning, Runge was able to incorporate his researches into colour theory, based on association and the revelatory power of light. The small version contains a passage of sublimely lovely pure landscape painting — the summer meadow on whose carpet of flowers a baby wakes at dawn.
Philipp Otto Runge, The Hülsenbeck Children, 1805-06
In an age that witnessed both dwindling institutional patronage and a rising bourgeois art market, many artists viewed portraiture as their bread and butter. For the Romantic artist, however, a portrait was more than just a lucrative commission – it was also an opportunity to capture the underlying essence of the sitter’s soul, and to make visible through pictorial and symbolic means man’s spiritual connection to the natural world. In this respect, Philipp Otto Runge’s The Hülsenbeck Children (1805-06), a portrait of the children of his brother’s business partner, could be regarded as one of the finest works of the era. In this painting, Runge renders the world around his three young sitters in great naturalistic detail and yet also manages to present it subjectively from their point of view. The children, at once small and monumental, and the lovingly detailed townscape behind them are given equal aesthetic weight in a manner reminiscent of Raphael’s Madonnas (which Runge greatly admired). Also remarkable is the extent to which Runge employs gesture and expression to portray each sibling as a unique individual. While this sensitivity to children’s personalities must be ascribed mainly to Runge’s own talents of observation, the painting also speaks to larger cultural and historical shifts in the perception of early childhood. With the rise of the Enlightenment notion of Bildung (education in the broadest sense of individual character formation), philosophers and writers associated with both the Sturm und Drang movement and Romanticism – most notably, Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793), whose students included Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig Tieck, and Wilhelm Wackenroder – focused increasing attention on children in an attempt to understand the complex relationship between rationality and feeling. In the Romantic privileging of the “primitive” and the “naïve,” the child occupied a particularly special place.
It is interesting to see that in the painting the world arouh dhtem is made to be at their scale as we can see with the fence.
Caspar David Friedrich, Tetschen Altarpiece/Cross in the Mountains, 1807-08
If nothing more were known of the painter, this painting, the so-called ‘Tetschen Altar’ would command attention for its boldness in creating a devotional image from the materials of landscape. It is both the first masterpiece of one of the greatest Romantic landscape painters and a manifesto for the art of landscape itself. It exemplifies two important achievements of early Romanticism: the elevation of nature to a kind of religion, and of landscape to equal or surpass history painting.
The 34-year-old painter was inordinately proud of the work. It was the largest he had painted so far, in a medium in which he was still far from proficient, and he had designed the frame himself - a Gothic arch with the eye of God and the wheat and vine of the Eucharist. He had intended the picture as a gift to the Swedish king Adolphus IV, in recognition of his resistance to Napoleon, but was persuaded instead to sell it to Count von Thun-Hohenstein for his castle in Tetschen, Bohemia. With its splendid frame it was transformed from political gesture to religious image, but still it remained a landscape. Nature itself was imbued with religious feeling.
The painting’s carved frame is based on a concept by Friedrich, but was executed by one of his friends, the sculptor Gottlieb Christian Kühn.
The sense of the modern is modern as it relys on feeling and ones personal relationship or feeling with god nd Jesus and the scene is one where it is not historically acurate with the pine trees, but one where it meetds the viewer where theyare in Germany and connects Jesus and God with the feeling they would have.
David Caspar Friedrich, Abbey Among Oak Trees, 1809-10
The Cross in the Mountains (The Tetschen Altar) brought Friedrich to the attention of a wider public. Probably at no other point in his life did Friedrich enjoy more profound appreciation and greater admiration than in the years around 1810. Two landscapes in particular were responsible for thrusting Friedrich into the limelight. In 1810 they were exhibited as pendants at the Academy exhibition in Berlin, where they were purchased by the Prussian king Frederick William III. These two paintings were The Monk by the Sea and the Abbey in the Oakwood.
The Abbey in the Oakwood is an expression of grief at the loss of a great past. The artist has chosen to depict an architectural ruin; it may testify to the sublimity of the past, but it is a monument in a graveyard.
The Napoleonic invasion of Germany and the consequent War of Liberation had added a patriotic dimension to Friedrich’s subjects of north German ecclesiastical buildings in ruins or, in imagination, raised again. While the essential message of the Abbey in the Oak-wood of 1810 is the passing of the earthly life, its fog-bound ruin and blasted, leafless trees inevitably evoked the contemporary state of Germany.
The painting was exhibited with its companion picture, the Monk by the Sea. This suggests the hope of resurrection in its bright sky, in contrast to the dark clouds that loom above the figure on his Baltic shore.
Caspar David Friedrich painted Abbey in the Oakwood as a medium to explore the human condition. The landscape takes on otherworldly meanings and showcases how we are just one moment in the natural and eternal timescales. Renewal and rebirth are alluded to, and even stages of religion could be implied: from the Polytheism of tree worship, through the monotheism of Christian beliefs, to the Atheism of modern apathy. Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oakwood is a macabre masterpiece that captures the un-pretty themes of Romanticism.
David Caspar Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10
Friedrich worked for two years on this, ultimately his most famous work. The composition is divided horizontally into land, sea, and sky with a clear simplicity that shocked his contemporaries. A monk stands, bareheaded, on the shore. Seagulls circle around him. The lonely figure faces the leaden blackness of the immeasurably vast sea. The grey band of cloud over the water surprisingly gives way to blue sky along the top edge of the picture. No artistic composition had ever been as uncompromising as this: the main space of the picture seems like an abyss of some kind; there are no boundaries, there is nothing to hold on to, just a sense of floating between night and day, between despair and hope. In 1810 Heinrich von Kleist put into words, as no other could, the magical fascination of this painting: “Nothing could be more sombre nor more disquieting than to be placed thus in the world: the one sign of life in the immensity of the kingdom of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle. With its two or three mysterious objects the picture seems somehow apocalyptic, like Young’s Night Thoughts, and since its monotony and boundlessness are only contained by the frame itself, contemplation of this picture gives one the sense that one’s eyelids have been cut away.”
The broad expanses of sea and sky emphasize the meager figure of the monk, standing before the vastness of nature and the presence of God.
Constance-Marie Charpentier, La Mélancolie, 1801
Constance Marie Charpentier exhibited at least thirty works at the Paris Salons from 1795 to 1819, yet she is remembered almost exclusively as the painter of Melancholy (1801), included in the present exhibition.¹
Charpentier met with considerable success at the Salons, where she exhibited primarily portraits and domestic genre scenes. In 1798 her pendant paintings Widow of a Day and Widow of a Year earned a prix d’encouragement, a commission for a painting to be purchased by the state for 1,500 francs. Melancholy, Charpentier’s only known history painting, fulfilled this commission, and its appearance at the 1801 Salon prompted an admiring poet to declare: “this painting lets us discover / Charm in melancholy.”⁴ Charpentier went on to win a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1814, and a silver medal at the 1821 Salon exhibition atDouai, in northern France. Although she ceased exhibiting after 1821, she was still teaching ten years later when a dictionary of artists announced that she “receives, three times a week, young women who wish to follow her advice on drawing and painting” at her residence on the rue du Pot de fer Saint-Sulpice (part of the modern-day rue Bonaparte, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris).
She seemed to take ideas that were common in the Romantic period that women, especially women of the north felt emotions deeply and more sincerely and the Northerns had a deeper imagination. She also adapted her dress from the woman figure in the Oath of Horatia by David. And we can even see the differences in the shift from Neoclassism in these paings as the women int he Oath of the Haritia is confined to the small corner of the image and serves as a suplimentary charcacter, in Charpentier’s painting she is relocated to the center of the painting and dominates the scene and her sadness is our sole focus. And she is an independant woman and her emotions are a part of her. And she is cast as the perfect model of femininity in the Romantic movement.
Anne-Louis Girodet, Burial of Atala, 1808
Christian sentiment and interest in the Americas were at a high point in France in 1808 when Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson painted his version of Burial of Atala and captured both of these popular ideas. The Catholic Church and the French government had recently signed an agreement restoring power to the Church after the French Revolution of the previous two decades had taken it away. At the same time, Christian missionaries, colonial settlers, and explorers were sending their travel accounts back to France and most French people, who would never actually see the Americas, were fascinated by stories from this faraway place. This painting, full of Christian motifs, of the burial of a young girl mourned by her Native American beloved is based on a novella written by Franc¸ois Rene´ Chateaubriand, who had journeyed to North America in 1791.
In Chateaubriand’s fictional story set in in the 1700s in the American South (specifically the French-owned Louisiana Territory), the Christian girl Atala made a vow to her mother to remain celibate, and rather than break it for her beloved, a Native American Natchez man named Chactas, she killed herself. In Girodet’s composition, we see Atala’s corpse, sensually draped between the grieving Chactas and the priest who helped them escape a storm, Father Aubry. She is dressed in white, a color symbolizing innocence and purity in European cultures, with a crucifix clutched in her hands. Her pose and the setting in a cave reference common Christian iconography, like scenes of the Entombment and the Deposition that depict Christ after his death. Atala is depicted as saint-like, martyred for her virtue and faith. Chactas’s identity as a Native American is suggested by his comparatively dark complexion, lack of clothing, and long flowing hair, representing an imagined exotic savage in a missionary narrative about “saving” indigenous people with Christianity.
Eugène Delacroix, the Barque of Dante, 1822
Depicted on the canvas are the events of canto eight of Dante’s Inferno. Dante along with his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, are crossing the river Styx. As their boat crosses the water the tormented souls that inhabit it are attacking them. Dante loses his balance, but Virgil steadies him. The third figure in the boat is Phlegyas, who serves as the boatman. Even though the figures are in open water, the scene is claustrophobic. There seems to be no way out, only the continuance of their journey, the way ahead. Virgil seems somewhat calm but is focused on Dante. It is his duty to ensure that Dante goes through the circles of Hell to finally reach Heaven and Beatrice. On the other hand, Dante appears frightened and shocked.
The focus of the painting is the figures on the bottom part of the canvas, the tormented souls. Delacroix presents them with great variety in their positioning and great care in their coloring. The bodies are contorted with great pathos and are full of emotion. After all, this is the fifth circle of Hell which is devoted to the sin of anger. The main inspiration for them is the first true masterpiece of the Romantic movement in France, The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault.
Stylistically, the Barque of Dante stands between two artistic movements, Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Following Neoclassicism, the painting is organized with a vertical and horizontal axis. The main horizontal axis is the boat itself and the main vertical is Virgil and Dante standing upon it. Meanwhile, we find romantic elements in the abundance of emotion throughout the canvas: the socked Dante, and the desperate tormented souls. Mind you, Romanticism is all about emotion, but that emotion does have to be positive. Another thing along the lines of Romanticism is the coloring. There is also looser brushstrokes. In a romantic stye he does not hold back in the straining and ugliness in the bodies of those trying to get up onto the boat.
Delacroix was inspired by Rubens The arrival of Marie de Madici at Marseille 1622-1625.
Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827
“The Death of Sardanapalus” by Eugène Delacroix depicts the tale of Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria, who, according to an ancient story, exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and decadence.
He spent his whole life in self-indulgence, and when he wrote his epitaph, he stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life.
His debauchery caused dissatisfaction within the Assyrian empire, allowing conspiracies against him to develop. Sardanapalus failed to defeat the rebels, and then enemies of the empire join the battle against him.
After Sardanapalus’ last defenses collapsed and to avoid falling into the hands of his enemies, Sardanapalus ordered an enormous funeral pyre.
On the funeral pyre were piled all his gold and valuables. He also ordered that his eunuchs and concubines be added to the fire, to burn them and himself to death.
The King’s last act of destroying his valued possessions, including people and goods, in a funerary pyre, demonstrated his final depravity.
The story of the death of Sardanapalus is based on the tale from an ancient Greek historian, which inspired Lord Byron to write the play Sardanapalus in 1821.
Byron’s play, in turn, inspired a cantata by Hector Berlioz, called Sardanapale in 1830, and then Franz Liszt’s opera, Sardanapale, in 1845.
Delacroix’s painting was part of the era of Romanticism, and this painting added to the growing awareness of the story of Sardanapalus.
Delacroix’s original painting is dated 1827 and hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, a smaller replica, painted by Delacroix in 1844, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830
Liberty Leading the People, oil painting (1830) by French artist Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution in Paris that removed Charles X, the restored Bourbon king, from the throne. The heroic scene of rebellion was initially received with mixed reviews, but it became one of Delacroix’s most popular paintings, an emblem of the July Revolution and of justified revolt.
Delacroix started painting after witnessing the violent escalation of protests against a set of restrictive ordinances that Charles X issued on July 26, 1830. For three days, later known as les Trois Glorieuses (July 27–29), working- and middle-class citizens set up barricades in the Paris streets and fought the royal army. Unable to contain the insurrection, Charles X soon abdicated. Louis-Philippe, the so-called Citizen King, took the throne and created a constitutional monarchy. Historians speculate that Delacroix’s dependence on royal commissions prevented him from taking part in the rebellion outright, but he was nonetheless moved when he saw insurgents raise the Tricolor, the French national flag, on Notre Dame, a turning point in the rebellion.
Delacroix finished the painting in three months, and it was shown with 23 other revolution-inspired works at the 1831 Salon, an annual exhibition of French art held at the Louvre. Yet Delacroix, by combining realism and idealism and by applying his characteristically expressive brushwork, created a more modern scene that contrasted with those of his competitors. Contemporary critics and viewers were nonetheless divided on whether the painting was heroic or distasteful.
A half-nude female figure dominates the monumental painting (8.5 × 10.66 feet [2.6 × 3.25 metres]) as she charges forward, a crowd of determined revolutionists in her wake. She is a personification of liberty, a classical symbol used throughout the history of art. Indeed, her yellow dress swirls around her body, loosely tied with red rope and falling from her shoulders in a manner that is reminiscent of heroic Greek sculptures, such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 190 BCE). Yet she is also of the moment, wearing a red Phrygian cap that resembles the stocking cap worn by the working class and made popular during the French Revolution (1787–99) as a “liberty cap” but which originates from antiquity. Her modernity is heightened by the Tricolor she hoists above her head and the musket with the bayonet she grasps in her other hand. Some critics, however, found her grimy skin and alleged underarm hair to be too human for a personified ideal.
The fighters are also idealized realist figures, representing the different types of people who took part in the revolution. To the left is a member of the bourgeoisie, identified by his top hat, cravat, and tailored black coat. He is armed with a hunting shotgun. Farther back is a craftsman or factory worker, wearing a work shirt, apron, and sailor pants and wielding a sabre. A younger figure to the right, marked as a student by his faluche, a black velvet beret, shouts a rallying call as he brandishes a pistol in each hand. Liberty surmounts a barricade of cobblestones and fallen figures, as one wearied fighter looks up hopefully at her. Another figure, a male in a nightshirt and nude from the waist down, lies at the bottom left corner. He may have been beaten by the opposition in his home and dragged into the street as an example. A member of the royal army, recognizable by his blue coat and epaulets, lies next to a fallen comrade in the other corner.
In the background Notre Dame rises through a clearing of smoke, its south tower nearly obscuring its twin and heralding a barely discernible Tricolor on its roof. The cathedral is the only structure Delacroix included in an arrangement of churning human bodies, but he subdued the chaos of the scene by using a pyramidal composition and fairly muted colours.
Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans, 1849 Salon
This is the first painting in which Courbet announced his project of presenting particular observations of provincial life on a scale and with a sense of importance commensurate with that of academic history painting. The life-sized figures grouped around the small country dining table are engaged in no activity that could be translated into narrative or dramatic terms; each is focused on his own inner consciousness of that which they have in common, the experience of music. Yet the solidity and scale of the figures and the seriousness of their joint nonaction, their mutual inwardness, can carry the conviction that this is a painting that commands the highest attention. It has moved beyond the familiar realm of the Dutch interiors, which certainly contributed their share to its conception. The more perceptive of its early viewers testified to its originality. Francis Wey, a fellow Franche-Comtois and man of letters who became Courbet’s friend, saw the painting at his first meeting with the artist, when he was taken to his studio by Champfleury in the winter of 1848. He wrote in his memoir of Courbet that he could not remember having ever been so unexpectedly astonished; everything about this work of an unknown artist seemed fresh and at the same time accomplished, its qualities unlike those of any known school. Also in his memoir Courbet writes of Eugene Delacroix meeting him in front of the painting on exhibition at the Salon of 1849 and expressing a similar amazement at this revolutionary who had burst upon the scene so suddenly, without precedent. Even not knowing the identities of the figures (which we do from Courbet’s specific Salon notes) to be the painter’s father and three close friends, we would know that they are not types, not the boors or innkeepers or soldiers or gentlemen of Dutch genre, but individual men living in a particular time and place.
Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1851 Salon
Gustave Courbet is relatively unknown in 1851 when the government-sponsored art exhibition, the Paris Salon, presents his 20-foot-long masterwork, A Burial at Ornans. The frieze-like portrayal of somber middle-class citizens at a graveside in Courbet’s home province generates an explosive reaction among the painter’s audience and critics. With few exceptions, viewers react to the work as an assault on the very idea of what a painting should be. To sophisticated Parisians, rural folk are considered proper fodder for small genre pieces; it’s unprecedented to accord them the magisterial scope of the historical masterpieces of French tradition. With the worker uprisings of 1848 a recent memory, Courbet’s use of the common people as a grand subject is deemed a radical act – “the engine of revolution,” as one critic says. Furthermore, in his push towards a realistic style, Courbet has intentionally painted his black-clad folk in a manner that does not idealize their suffering. The Salon audience is accustomed to paintings that poeticize and uplift, and they read Courbet’s grieving figures as vulgar and ugly. One critic writes, “He paints pictures as you black your boots.”
The exhibition makes Courbet famous, and he describes A Burial at Ornans as the “debut of my principles.” Within a few years, he embraces Realism, a term originally used derisively by his critics. He writes that his purpose is to use art as a way toward self-knowledge, to “translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation; in a word, to create living art, that is my goal.” Many art historians view Courbet’s stubborn independence and determination toward artistic freedom as an important rupture with the Salon-controlled painting of the past, an inspiration to the next generation of innovators, the Impressionists.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
Like Romanticism, Realism was a broad cultural movement in the 19th century that had its origin in literature and philosophy. In painting, its most prominent representative was Gustave Courbet. His Stonebreakers represented workers, as he had seen them, in monumental form.The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, depicts two ordinary peasant workers. Courbet painted without any apparent sentiment; instead, he let the image of the two men, one too young for hard labor and the other too old, express the feelings of hardship and exhaustion that he was trying to portray. Courbet shows sympathy for the workers and disgust for the upper class by painting these men with a dignity all their own.
The Stonebreakers, destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, was the first of Courbet’s great works. The Socialist philosopher Proudhon described it as an icon of the peasant world. But for Courbet it was simply a memory of something he had seen: two men breaking stones beside the road. He told his friends the art critic Francis Wey and Champfleury: “It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.”
Many of Courbet’s paintings focus on everyday people and places in daily French life. Courbet painted these ordinary people in an attempt to portray the French people as a political entity. In this way Courbet’s republicanism showed through in his work. Courbet truthfully portrayed ordinary people and places, leaving out the glamour that most French painters at that time added to their works. Because of this, Courbet became known as the leader of the Realist movement.
Jean-Francois Millet, The Sower, 1851 Salon
The painting depicts a peasant in the act of sowing land, apparently in winter. The Sun shines at the top of the painting, which indicates that it is dawn. The sower is dressed in a typical peasant’s attire, with his legs draped in straw to provide more warmth, walking in long strides, and carrying a bag of seeds over his shoulder, while he is in the act of sowing his crops with the right hand. At the left of the painting several crows appear scavenging the crops. At the right side, in the distance a man is seen plowing the ground with his oxen for the sowers work. The painting is an unidealized depiction of the peasant’s strength and hardworking lifestyle.
The Sower is Millet’s most famous theme and one he repeated several times between 1850 and 1870. For Millet, the subject expressed profound personal and religious beliefs. However, his first version (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) aroused a storm of controversy when it appeared in the 1850 Paris Salon. Viewers were shocked by Millet’s heroic treatment of a lowly peasant at a time when the situation of the French rural poor was degrading, and socialism threatened bourgeois society.
Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 Salon
By far the most recognizable of Millet’s works, The Gleaners depicts a trio of women gleaning the last bits of wheat from a field. Millet found the theme of women gleaning the last bits of wheat an eternal one, linked to stories of the Old Testament. The painting was received by the public with open scorn. It was also relevant and contraversal bcs at this point in the 2nd Empire, land owners were trying to get laws passed that prohibited gleaning bcs that it promoted laziness and theavery - so they wanted to ban the practice of letting the poor open to this acts. In 1854 a law was passed that allowed gleaning on certain days and would be enforced. During this time It presented what at the time were the lowest ranks of society, taking advantage of the age-old right to remove the last bits of grain left over from wheat harvest, in a sympathetic light. During his lifetime, this painting garnered naught but notoriety from a French upper-class that feared glorifying the lower ranks of society, and it was not until after the artist’s death that it became more popular.
Another symbolizm is that they are seen as similar to Ruth from the bible or from the old testament. A thinly veiled allegory to a biblical figure.
Their austerity contrasts with the abundant harvest in the distance: haystacks, sheaves of wheat, a cart and a busy crowd of harvesters. The festive, brightly lit bustle is further distanced by the abrupt change of scale.
The slanting light of the setting sun accentuates the volumes in the foreground and gives the gleaners a sculptural look. It picks out their hands, necks, shoulders and backs and brightens the colours of their clothing.
Then Millet slowly smudges the distance into a powdery golden haze, accentuating the bucolic impression of the scene in the background.
The man on horseback, isolated on the right, is probably a steward. In charge of supervising the work on the estate, he also makes sure that the gleaners respect the rules governing their task.
His presence adds social distance by bringing a reminder of the landlords he represents.
Without using picturesque anecdotes, merely through simple, sober pictorial procedures, Millet gives these certainly poor but no less dignified gleaners an emblematic value free of any hint of miserabilism.
Rosa Bonheur, Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849
This scene, dated 1849, shows the first ploughing or dressing, which was done in early autumn to break the surface of the soil and aerate it during the winter. The pretty rolling countryside with wooded hills in the distance provides the background for two teams of oxen pulling heavy ploughs. The freshly turned soil scores the foreground.
Attention is focused on the first team of Charolais-Nivernais cattle, whose light russet and white coats gleam in the cold, pale light. It is primarily an animal painting, and the heroes are the oxen themselves, leaving little room for the men: the cowherd is a diminutive figure. It is a hymn to agricultural labour, whose grandeur was magnified because, in these post-revolutionary days, it was easy to contrast with the corruption of the city. It is also tribute to provincial regions – here the Nivernais, with its agricultural traditions and rural landscapes.
For all these reasons, this realist work drew almost unanimous critical acclaim. The State, which had commissioned it from Rosa Bonheur in 1848 for the Musée de Lyon, decided to keep it in Paris, at the Musée du Luxembourg. When the artist died, rich and famous in France, England, but particularly in the United States, it was put in the Louvre and was later allocated to the Musée d’Orsay.
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853 Salon
Unveiled at the Paris Salon of 1853, Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair was an instant sensation. The great canvas, more than sixteen feet long, toured internationally for two years; soon, the image circulated in smaller painted versions and printed reproductions. Featuring some twenty horses and nearly forty grooms, dealers, and prospective buyers, the composition teems with an unruly vitality barely contained by the overall disciplined structure. Various breeds make up the parade, including the massive, dappled-white Percherons with knotted tails at center right. Bonheur knew her subject well: though women were barred from the horse market on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital in Paris, she went regularly in male disguise to study the scene firsthand.
Undefeated by obstacles impeding women with professional ambitions, Bonheur became the most renowned animalier of her time, bringing increased gravitas to her chosen genre. She hailed from a family of artists; her father trained her not only in painting and sculpture but also in a freethinking philosophy that bolstered her independence. Like Bonheur herself, The Horse Fair is categorically unconventional. It departs from the fashionable English pictorial treatment of horses as prized property of the landed gentry; Bonheur’s powerful animals are instead destined for punishing labor in the city. Energetically heroic rather than serenely bucolic, the picture avoids as well the orientalizing exoticism of Delacroix in favor of quotidian reality.
Nor is there a trace of sentimentality, a minor marvel given Bonheur’s affinity for equine subjects. (Her empathic identification with horses was such that when she had to dress in women’s clothes, she described herself as “in harness.”) Art historian James Saslow marshalled evidence in 1991 to argue convincingly that the blue-smocked figure riding a sorrel mount near the center of the composition, looking directly at the viewer, is a self-portrait. Thus we find Bonheur abjuring the royal and military associations of equestrian portraiture, proudly appropriating the genre for herself. Where was her Baudelaire, one wonders, a poet to celebrate this highly original painter of the spectacle of modern life?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848-49
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is a revered oil painting created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848-49, which was regarded as the first significant painting produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The painting portrays Mary as a young girl, working on embroidery with Saint Anne, her mother, while Saint Joachim, her father, prunes a vine. Alongside symbolizing the Holy Spirit via dove representation in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin painting that marks its peculiarity.
Rossetti received guidance from his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood peers William Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown in creating the remarkable artwork. During its exhibition time in London, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin held initials “PRB” to indicate it was an original work produced by Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members.
GR’s own description of the work, given in a 14 Nov. 1848 letter to Charles Lyell, is primary: “It belongs to the religious class which has always appeared to me the most adapted and the most worthy to interest the members of a Christian community. The subject is the education of the Blessed Virgin, one which has been treated at various times by Murillo and other painters,—but, as I cannot but think, in a very inadequate manner, since they have invariably represented her as reading from a book under the superintendence of her Mother, St. Anne, an occupation obviously incompatible with these times, and which could only pass muster if treated in a purely symbolical manner. In order, therefore, to attempt something more probable and at the same time less commonplace, I have represented the future Mother of Our Lord as occupied in embroidering a lily,—always under the direction of St. Anne; the flower she is copying being held by two little angels. At a large window (or rather aperture) in the background, her father, St. Joachim, is seen pruning a vine. There are various symbolic accessories which it is needless to describe” (Fredeman, Correspondence, 48.12)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found, begun 1854 (unfinished)
‘Found’ depicts the poignant moment when a young farmer, arriving in London to sell his calf at market, discovers his sweetheart, now a prostitute left destitute on the streets of the metropolis. This painting is the only large-scale example of Rossetti’s work to grapple with the principles most relevant to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its early years. First and foremost, it depicts a scene from contemporary life instead of the cozy pastoral subjects which were then too popular at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions. Secondly, it boldly tackles the devastating social issues resulting from the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying growth of cities in 19th century Britain. Thirdly, it is executed with painstaking attention to detail. The close observation of nature was an important element of the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy and one which was singled out and promoted by the art critic John Ruskin.
Although Rossetti began preliminary studies for Found as early as 1853, and worked at it on and off throughout his life, it was left incomplete at his death. This is particularly apparent in the upper right and distant landscape. As time went on, Rossetti’s style and interests changed. Undoubtedly his inability to complete Found was related to the passage of time and his loss of interest in the concept and style, which were so much a part of his youth.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (Behold the Servant of the Lord; The Annunciation), 1850
Inspired by the work of early Renaissance artists such as Botticelli (1445-1510) and Fra Angelico (1387-1455), Rossetti sought in this work a radical reinterpretation of the Annunciation. Traditionally the Virgin was depicted in studious contemplation, reading a missal at a prie-dieu; but here Rossetti shows her rising awkwardly from a low bed, as if disturbed from sleep, while the Angel Gabriel presents her with a white lily. Both figures are dressed in white, a symbol of the virgin’s purity, and the angel’s role as the messenger of god is emphasised by the small white dove hovering beside him, signifying the presence of the holy spirit. Rossetti used several sitters for his figures, including his brother, William Michael, for the Angel and his sister, Christina, for the Virgin.
A companion piece showing the Virgin’s death was planned, but never begun. This partly explains the tall narrow shape of the picture, which was intended as part of a diptych. Rossetti intentionally restricted his palette almost entirely to white and the three primaries. The colour blue, symbolic of heaven, is traditionally associated with the Virgin and red symbolises the blood of Christ. Rossetti even sought a red-haired model for the Virgin’s head. The composition is carefully thought out: the vertical division of space, made by the blue hanging and the edge of the bed, falls almost on the Golden Section. The dove and the lily, with one bud still to break, move across this division and are the instruments of conception. Rossetti has written the date, ‘March’, at the bottom of the canvas, perhaps to signify the month in which the Feast of the Annunciation is held. The original frame was also inscribed with Latin mottoes, copied from a brass rubbing owned by a fellow member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, F.G. Stephens (1828-1907).
The picture was exhibited at the National Institution in 1850 and heavily criticised, partly for its didacticism. The critic for the Athenaeum wrote that it was ‘a work evidently thrust by the artist into the eye of the spectator more with the presumption of a teacher than in the modesty of a hopeful and true aspiration after excellence.’ (20 April 1850, p.424) Rossetti vowed never to exhibit in public again, but he continued to work on his picture until 1853, when it was sold to Francis McCracken of Belfast, an early patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, for £50.
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1849
‘Isabella’ was one of the first paintings made in the new Pre-Raphaelite style. It was begun shortly after the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, when Millais was only 19.
The subject is taken from a poem by John Keats (1795-1821), based on a story by the Italian writer Boccaccio (died 1375). It tells of the love between Isabella, the sister of wealthy Florentine merchants, and their poor apprentice Lorenzo. The jealous brothers later murder Lorenzo, but his body is found by Isabella, who cuts off his head and buries it in a pot of basil, which she waters with her tears.
The ending is hinted at in this painting by the pot of herbs in the background. There are other signs of the coming tragedy too. One of the brothers is shown aiming a kick at Isabella’s dog, while the lovers share a blood orange, signifying the later spilling of Lorenzo’s blood.
John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of his Parents, 1850
This is Millais’s first important religious subject, showing a scene from the boyhood of Christ. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850 it was given no title, but accompanied by a biblical quotation: ‘And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’ (Zech. 13:6)
Christian symbolism figures prominently in the picture. The carpenter’s triangle on the wall, above Christ’s head, symbolises the Holy Trinity. The wood and nails prefigure the crucifixion, as does the blood on the young Christ’s hand, which he has cut on a nail, and which drips onto his foot. The young St John is shown fetching a bowl of water with which to bathe the wound. This clearly identifies him as the Baptist, and the image is extended by the white dove perched on the ladder, symbol of the Holy Spirit, which descended from Heaven at the baptism of Christ.
Following the Pre-Raphaelite credo of truth to nature, Millais painted the scene in meticulous detail and based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street. The sheep in the background, intended to represent the Christian flock, were drawn from two sheep’s heads obtained from a local butcher. He avoided using professional models, and relied instead on friends and family. Joseph’s head was a portrait of Millais’s own father, but the body was based on a real carpenter, with his rough hands, sinewy arms and prominent veins. The Virgin Mary was his sister-in-law Mary Hodgkinson, who also appears in Millais’s Isabella (1848-9, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool); John the Baptist was posed by a young adopted cousin, Edwin Everett; and Nöel Humphreys, the son of an artist friend, sat for the young Christ.
The public reaction to the picture was one of horror and Millais was viciously attacked by the press. The Times described the painting as ‘revolting’ and objected to the way in which the artist had dared to depict the Holy Family as ordinary, lowly people in a humble carpenter’s shop ‘with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness’. Charles Dickens was one of the most vehement critics, describing the young Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed gown’ (Household Words, 15 June 1850).
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1854
The Awakening Conscience was conceived as the material counterpart to Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851-3, Warden and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford). Its inspiration was a verse from Proverbs: ‘As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart’. With his typical thoroughness, Hunt hired a room at Woodbine Villa, 7 Alpha Place, St John’s Wood, a ‘maison de convenance’, to use as the setting. A gentleman has installed his mistress (known to be such because of her absence of a wedding ring) in a house for their meetings. As they play and sing to Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night, she has a sudden spiritual revelation. Rising from her lover’s lap, she gazes into the sunlit garden beyond, which is reflected in the mirror behind her. The mirror image represents the woman’s lost innocence, but redemption, indicated by the ray of light in the foreground, is still possible. Intended to be ‘read’, the painting is full of such symbolic elements. The cat toying with the broken-winged bird under the table symbolises the woman’s plight. A man’s discarded glove warns that the likely fate of a cast-off mistress was prostitution. A tangled skein of yarn on the floor symbolises the web in which the girl is entrapped. Indeed, as Ruskin wrote to the Times on 25 May 1854, ‘the very hem of the poor girl’s dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street’. The frame, designed by Hunt, also contains various symbolic emblems; the bells and marigolds stand for warning and sorrow, the star is a sign of spiritual revelation.
The underlying spiritual message was generally ignored by most critics, who concentrated instead on the more sensational aspects of the composition. The model is Hunt’s girlfriend Annie Miller, an uneducated barmaid whom he met in 1850 when she was fifteen.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851
The scene depicted is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, falls into a stream and drowns:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Shakespeare was a favourite source for Victorian painters, and the tragic-romantic figure of Ophelia from Hamlet was an especially popular subject, featuring regularly in Royal Academy exhibitions. Arthur Hughes exhibited his version of her death scene in the same year as this picture was shown (Manchester City Art Gallery).
Millais began the background in July 1851, at Ewell, Surrey. In accordance with the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he painted with close observation of nature. Millais quickly found, however, that such intense study was not without problems, and was moved to remark in a letter to Mrs Thomas Combe,
My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced. The flies of Surrey are more muscular, and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh … I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay … am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water, and becoming intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that Lady sank to muddy death, together with the (less likely) total disappearance, through the voracity of the flies … Certainly the painting of a picture under such circumstances would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.
(J.G. Millais I, pp.119–20)
The figure of Ophelia was added afterwards. The model, Elizabeth Siddal, a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites who later married Rossetti, was required to pose over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. The lamps went out on one occasion, causing her to catch a severe cold. Her father threatened the artist with legal action until he agreed to pay the doctor’s bills.
The plants, most of which have symbolic significance, were depicted with painstaking botanical detail. The roses near Ophelia’s cheek and dress, and the field rose on the bank, may allude to her brother Laertes calling her ‘rose of May’. The willow, nettle and daisy are associated with forsaken love, pain, and innocence. Pansies refer to love in vain. Violets, which Ophelia wears in a chain around her neck, stand for faithfulness, chastity or death of the young, any of which meanings could apply here. The poppy signifies death. Forget-me-nots float in the water. Millais wrote to Thomas Combe in March 1852: ‘Today I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress - all flowered over in silver embroidery - and I am going to paint it for “Ophelia”. You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds’ (J.G. Millais I, p.162).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna, 1866
This is one of a series of decorative pictures of beautiful and sensual women, which Rossetti produced in the mid 1860s. The model is Alexa Wilding, who sat for some of Rossetti’s best-known works, including La Ghirlandata (1873, Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London) and The Blessed Damozel (1875-8, Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts). The spiral pearl clasp in her flowing auburn hair and the red coral necklace appear frequently in Rossetti’s pictures of women. Along with the sweeping movement of her arms, the green rosettes on her shoulder and the floral earrings, they serve to accentuate the picture’s circular composition. The heavily embroidered white and gold drapery is used in other pictures of this date, including Monna Rosa (untraced). The enormous sleeve recalls Raphael’s portrait of Giovanna of Aragon in the Louvre.
Rossetti originally called the picture Venus Veneta, and intended it to represent ‘a Venetian lady in a rich dress of white and gold, - in short the Venetian ideal of female beauty’ (quoted in a letter dated 27 September 1866, Doughty & Wahl, II, p.606). After the picture was finished he changed the title to Monna Vanna, denoting a ‘vain woman’, a name taken from Dante’s Vita Nuova, which Rossetti had translated in October 1848. Rossetti considered the painting to be one of his best works and declared it ‘probably the most effective as a room decoration that I have ever painted’.
In 1873 Rossetti retouched the picture, lightening the hair and altering the rings, which had been criticised for their clashing colours. He also changed the title to Belcolore, believing that the subject looked too modern for its previous title. Despite this, the painting continued to be known as Monna Vanna. It was first owned by the Cheshire collector W. Blackmore, who also owned Fazio’s Mistress (Tate N03055), and later passed into the hands of George Rae of Birkenhead, one of Rossetti’s most important patrons.
James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1863
James McNeill Whistler worked furiously on The White Girl during the winter of 1861–1862, rising at 8:00 each morning to paint. His model was his mistress and frequent companion, Joanna Hiffernan, a well-known beauty who also modeled for other artists of the day. Whistler lived in Paris at the time, but painted the canvas specifically for submission to the 1862 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London, an annual event juried by a group of artist-academicians whose choices could make or doom an artist’s career. For the 27-year-old Whistler, who was still establishing his reputation, The White Girl was meant to demonstrate his talents to the world. He was cruelly disappointed when he visited the Academy galleries a week before the salon opened to the public, searching room after room of paintings for his work, until at last he found it leaning against a wall amid the rejects. He consoled himself with the thought that “she was still beautiful.”
The picture was shown about a month later at Morgan’s, a commercial gallery in London, with the “rejected” designation. There it attained some notoriety, savaged in the press as “bizarre” and “incomplete.” The painting continued on this path: rejected by the 1863 Paris Salon, it ended up in the Salon des Refusés, a protest exhibition organized by Gustave Courbet of paintings spurned by the French Salon jurists. Shown alongside the similarly scandalous with Déjeuner sur L’Herbe by Édouard Manet, The White Girl became known as one of the exhibition’s most infamous pictures.
Flouting the conventions and standards of portraiture, The White Girl made 19th-century viewers distinctly uncomfortable. The woman pictured wears an informal cambric (lightweight cotton or linen summer fabric) housedress of a type worn in private. Her red hair is loose, contrasting vividly with the tonal white interior setting and dress. Gazing impassively, her expression is vacant and unfocused—she does not charm us, yet rivets our attention. She stands on a wolf or bearskin rug whose fierce appearance contrasts with her own blank look, and flowers drop languidly from her hands to the floor. To viewers of the period, these attributes made Hiffernan’s worldliness and lack of innocence explicit and shocking.
Whistler later appended the title with “Symphony in White: No. 1” (there were eventually three paintings in the series) to focus attention on what he viewed as the painting’s true subject: his handling of the thick white paint, its textures, and subtle tonal contrasts. The painting’s radical break with traditions of portraiture make it a bellwether of modern art.
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, 1877
This work, which is a depiction of a fireworks display in London’s Cremorne Gardens, is probably Whistler’s most infamous painting. It was the central issue of a libel suit that involved the art critic John Ruskin and the artist. Ruskin had publicly slandered the work by making the statement, “I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler won the libel suit; however, he was awarded only the token damages of one farthing. This is one of Whistler’s many “Nocturnes,” which are characterized by a moody atmosphere, a subtle palette, and overall tonalist qualities.
Karl Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii, 1834 Salon
The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov produced in 1830–1833 on the subject of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is notable for its positioning between Neoclassicism, the predominant style in Russia at the time, and Romanticism as increasingly practised in France. The painting was received to near universal acclaim and made Bryullov the first Russian painter to have an international reputation. In Russia it was seen as proving that Russian art was as good as art practised in the rest of Europe. Critics in France and Russia both noted, however, that the perfection of the classically modelled bodies seemed to be out of keeping with their desperate plight and the overall theme of the painting, which was a Romantic one of the sublime power of nature to destroy man’s creations.
The Roman city of Pompeii, south of Naples, was under active excavation in the early 19th century, work having begun on the city and its neighbour Herculaneum in the middle of the previous century. Artists were well aware of its potential as a subject. John Martin had painted The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1822 and others had sketched and produced engravings of the site.
In 1823, Bryullov arrived in Rome with his brother Aleksandr via Venice and Florence. Aleksandr was a participant in a scientific study and restoration of the Pompeii baths in 1825–26, which led to the publication of his book Thermes de Pompéi in Paris in 1829, and Karl may have visited Pompeii in 1824. He saw Alessandro Sanquirico’s set designs for Giovanni Pacini’s opera L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825), which was performed at Naples and at La Scala, Milan, and visited the Naples museum to study artefacts recovered from Pompeii. He certainly visited Pompeii in 1827 and according to Rosalind Blakesley, was so affected by the remains of the Via dei Sepolcri (Street of the Tombs) that he decided to set his painting in that street. Contemporary letters indicate that he studied Pliny the Younger’s eye-witness description of the disaster, in which Pliny’s uncle died, and Pliny’s observations in his letters to Tacitus were referenced in the picture. Also in literature, Bryullov read Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) (1827) with its historically based account of a disastrous plague and the reactions to it of individuals.
These sources coalesced into the work known as The Last Day of Pompeii for which Bryullov painted a compositional sketch in 1828 at the request of Countess Maria Razumovskaya. The main canvas was commissioned by Count Anatoly Demidov, whom Bryullov had met in Naples, and for whom he painted an equestrian portrait the same year. It was to be completed by 1830 for the sum of 40,000 francs, but by the end of that year Bryullov had only got as far as outlining the figures on the canvas in two colours and had given little attention to colour choices. A trip to Bologna and Venice to see work by Tintoretto and Titian gave him the answers he needed.
Ivan Kramskoi, Christ in the Wilderness, 1838 WE
His portrait, “Jesus in the Desert,” became the most famous work his hard and short life, took him five years to complete. Kramskoi was deeply invested both spiritually and emotionally in his artwork. His goal was to “place a mirror in front of people’s faces, by which their heart would be awakened by the sound of an alarm.”
Kramskoi took the inspiration for “Jesus in the Desert” from the Bible. In the book of Luke chapter four, we read: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” Kramskoi portrays Jesus during his exhausting 40 days fast in the desert. There the devil begins to tempt Him through hunger by telling Him to turn stones into bread, pride and presumption by telling Him to call upcast himself off the Temple heights and command angels to carry Him in their hands, and through power by promising Him unlimited authority over the kingdoms of this world if Jesus would bow down in worship of Satan. The facial expression presented in this painting is Jesus’ tightly clenched hands, and the reflective pose of Jesus all display his internal battle. The representation is static, without movement. Yet, it draws our attention to the emotional state of Jesus and His internal struggle.
The focus of this painting is the bowed and bent figure of Jesus. However, the viewer’s eye is drawn to His interlocking hands, which are the center of the composition. The artist didn’t accent the hands of Christ by accident; they represent His entire 40-day fight with the forces of darkness along with all the mental and physical struggles those forty days held.
From there, the viewer’s eyes focus on Christ’s face and after on the space around Him. In His face, we see humility and the acceptance of His fate. The cup of temptation will not pass Jesus by as he chooses to drink it to the bottom. His legs are wounded from the desert stones, leaving us feeling that we are touching something hurting. Christ’s bloody feet bring their own feelings of suffering to the image. By looking at them, we understand that there was a long and sleepless night of darkness before His morning time of reflection.
Now the dawn is near, and the journey is coming to an end. Jesus is sitting on a rock waiting for the sun to rise. The horizon line divides the canvas into two worlds: cold, lifeless desert and the coming sun. That dawn of a new day is like proclaiming the victory of light. Behind Christ, the pink of a rising sun breaks through the horizon, like light born in the cold darkness of a person’s soul. Christ’s willful determination will defeat the gloom and chaos of the outside world.
Nothing interrupts the dialogue of Christ and the viewer. The landscape is empty as the cold rocks, and the light colors create a particular atmosphere of sorrow and hope. Jesus is faced with a moral choice. And while we know how the story ends, the canvas brings out this battle-what will Jesus do? Will the devil succeed in tempting Him? What will Christ choose? He is not only the Son of God; He is also an ordinary man who must choose between good and evil every day, especially this day.
Kramskois pondered over the person of Jesus Christ for almost ten years and worked on this painting for five years. Originally the piece was meant to be vertical. Kramskoi remade this drawing a multitude of times. The result was a piece that reflected his own spiritual ponderings with realistic exactness. This process of creation brought joy to Kramskois. This is a deep believer, a sensitive and compassionate artist who wanted to capture God in human flesh, whom anyone could understand and embrace. Kramskoi wanted to show a moment of moral choice in Jesus’ life. Ivan Nikolaevich was looking for a way to present Jesus in the most accurate and holy way, not as a judgmental being of great power but like a man – filled with His own pain, troubles, and heartaches.
Remarkably, after publishing his artwork, Kramskoi did not wish to hear others’ opinions about his creation. Even though the piece was nominated for the Academy of Arts award, the artist declined to accept it. The academy even wanted to award Kromskoi the title of Scholar. However, being faithful to his commitment not to use the art for drawing attention to himself, the artist declined this title as well.
Kramskoi’s “Jesus in the desert” remains a work filled with deep thoughts and reflections about Christ’s life. That is possibly why the painting has not lost its beauty and charm. It touches our souls with its humility and invites us to seek change.
The Russian art collector, Pavel Tretyakov, purchased the painting from the artist for six thousand Russian rubles. Tretyakov confessed that this was one of his favorite pieces ever purchased. Ivan Nikolaevich planned to continue painting portraits such as this one. Sadly his life was cut short by an aneurysm at the age of 49 while working on a portrait.
Vasily Surikov, Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, 1881 WE
depicts a dramatic historical moment during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great in 1698. The Streltsy were a group of Russian guardsmen who rebelled against Peter’s reforms. In the painting, Surikov captures the tense atmosphere of the morning of their execution, with the Streltsy awaiting their fate in a crowded square. The scene is characterized by somber lighting and expressions of resignation, fear, and defiance among the condemned soldiers. Surikov’s meticulous attention to detail and emotional depth convey the gravity of the historical event, reflecting the artist’s skill in capturing both the human drama and the historical significance of the moment.
Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 15, 1581, 1885
Ilya Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 15, 1581” depicts a dramatic and tragic scene from Russian history. In the painting, Ivan the Terrible, the notorious Tsar of Russia, is shown cradling his dying son, Ivan Ivanovich, whom he had struck in a fit of rage. The scene captures the emotional turmoil and remorse of Ivan the Terrible as he realizes the consequences of his actions. The use of dark, somber tones and the intense expression on Ivan’s face convey the weight of the moment.
The painting is often interpreted as a commentary on the consequences of absolute power and the destructive nature of unchecked authority. It reflects themes of familial conflict, tyranny, and the complexities of human nature. Repin’s portrayal of Ivan the Terrible as a remorseful figure humanizes him, inviting viewers to empathize with his inner turmoil despite his cruel deeds. Overall, the painting serves as a poignant reminder of the tragedies that can result from the abuse of power and the importance of compassion and restraint in governance. It also related to current events of when the painting was done as Alexander the 2nds assasination in 1881, and though the painting was done in 1885, there for years of bloody government reprisal. Feelings were overloaded in people of the many emotions of the time.
Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863 Salon des Refuses
Luncheon on the Grass (“Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” 1863) was one of a number of impressionist works that broke away from the classical view that art should obey established conventions and seek to achieve timelessness. The painting was rejected by the salon that displayed painting approved by the official French academy. The rejection was occasioned not so much by the female nudes in Manet’s painting, a classical subject, as by their presence in a modern setting, accompanied by clothed, bourgeois men. The incongruity suggested that the women were not goddesses but models, or possibly prostitutes.
Yet in Le dejeuner sur l’herbe, Manet was paying tribute to Europe’s artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from The Pastoral Concert - a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) - and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael’s Judgement of Paris.But the classical references were counterbalanced by Manet’s boldness. The presence of a nude woman among clothed men is justified neither by mythological nor allegorical precedents. This, and the contemporary dress, rendered the strange and almost unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the public of the day. Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his painting “la partie carree”.
Manet displayed the painting instead at the Salon des Refuses, an alternative salon established by those who had been refused entry to the official one. Like his friend Courbet, Manet influenced modern painting not only by his use of realistic subject matter but also by his challenge to the three-dimensional perspectivalism established in Renaissance painting. Manet painted figures with a flatness derived partly from Japanese art and resembling (as Gustave Courbet commented) the flatness of the king or queen on a playing card.
Luncheon on the Grass - testimony to Manet’s refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation - can perhaps be considered as the departure point for Modern Art. The modernist reinvention of pictorial space had begun.
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1865 Salon
When Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, it is met with jeers, laughter, criticism, and disdain. It is attacked by the public, the critics, the newspapers. Guards have to be stationed next to it to protect it, until it is moved to a spot high above a doorway, out of reach.
With Olympia, Manet rebels against the art establishment of the time. Taking Titian’s Venus of Urbino as his model, Manet creates a work he thinks will grant him a place in the pantheon of great artists. But instead of following the accepted practice in French art, which dictates that paintings of the figure are to be modeled on historical, mythical, or biblical themes, Manet chooses to paint a woman of his time – not a feminine ideal, but a real woman, and a courtesan at that. And he paints her in his own manner: in place of the smooth shading of the great masters, his forms are painted quickly, in rough brushstrokes clearly visible on the surface of the canvas. Instead of the carefully constructed perspective that leads the eye deep into the space of the painting, Manet offers a picture frame flattened into two planes. The foreground is the glowing white body of Olympia on the bed; the background is darkness.
In painting reality as he sees it, Manet challenges the accepted function of art in France, which is to glorify history and the French state, and creates what some consider the first modern painting. His model, Victorine Meurent, is depicted as a courtesan, a woman whose body is a commodity. While middle-and- upper class gentlemen of the time may frequent courtesans and prostitutes, they do not want to be confronted with one in a painting gallery. A real woman, flaws and all, with an independent spirit, stares out from the canvas, confronting the viewer, something French society in 1865 is perhaps not ready to face.
After Manet’s death, the painter Claude Monet organizes a fund to purchase Olympia and offers it to the French state. It now hangs in the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, where it is considered a priceless masterpiece of 19th French painting.
To learn more about the painting, watch The Shock of the Nude: Manet’s Olympia, the second film in the 4-part Culture Shock series.
Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies Berge, 1882 Salon
This celebrated work is Édouard Manet’s last major painting, completed a year before he died, and exhibited in 1882 at the Salon (the official annual exhibition of the French Academy of Fine Arts). This would have been a startling painting for Salon visitors in many ways, not least because it seems to follow the traditional format of portraiture but does not name its subject. Indeed, the barmaid appears as just another item in the enticing array on offer in the foreground: wine, champagne, peppermint liqueur and British Bass beer, with its iconic red triangle logo.
The background shows a fashionable crowd mingling on the balcony, entertained by musical and circus acts below. In the top left, a trapeze artist in green boots adds to the excitement. This animated scene is in fact a reflection in the large gold-framed mirror, which projects it into the viewer’s own space.
Opened a decade or so earlier, the Folies-Bergère had rapidly become one of most popular music halls and places of entertainment in Paris. Manet frequented it with friends and made sketches on site. However, the final work was painted entirely in his studio, where a barmaid named Suzon came to pose. She is the painting’s still centre. Her enigmatic expression is unsettling, especially as she appears to be interacting with a male customer who is shown in the mirror. Ignoring normal perspective, Manet has shifted their reflection to the right. The bottles on the left are similarly misaligned in the mirror. This play of reflections emphasizes the disorientating atmosphere of the bustling Folies-Bergère. In A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet created a complex, absorbing composition and one of the iconic paintings of modern life.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1874 He was One of the leading painters emphasizing the unfinished look in art. He also advocated that landscape paintings should be done outside int he elements En Plein Air. And the weather light and atmosphere should be captured as they were in the moment. Impressionist works were also more bright as they began to used synthetic pigments, but also the collapsable metal tube was invented in the 19th century, making it easier to store and transport paint outside.
This famous painting, Impression, Sunrise, was created from a scene in the port of Le Havre. Monet depicts a mist, which provides a hazy background to the piece set in the French harbor. The orange and yellow hues contrast brilliantly with the dark vessels, where little, if any detail is immediately visible to the audience. It is a striking and candid work that shows the smaller boats in the foreground almost being propelled along by the movement of the water. This has, once again, been achieved by separate brushstrokes that also show various colors “sparkling” on the sea.
From the 15th April to 15th May 1874 Monet exhibited his work together with Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and some other thirty artists. They organized their exhibition on their own as they were usually rejected at the Paris Salon. Most visitors were disgusted and even outraged over such a graffiti. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise enjoyed the most attention and some visitors even claimed that they were absolutely unable to recognize what was shown at all.
A critic who attended the exhibition, M. Louis Leroy, wrote a now-famous article in Le Charivari in which he used the term “Impressionist” based on the title of this painting. Despite the fact that Leroy had used the word derisively, the group decided to adopt it and painters such as Renoir and Degas were happy to be called Impressionists.
Despite its notoriety, the painting is in some ways untypical of Monet’s own work of this period and of Impressionism more generally. It shows little of the Impressionist treatment of light and colour. The colours are very restrained and the paint is applied not in discrete brushstrokes of contrasting colours but in very thin washes. In some places, the canvas is even visible and the only use of impasto is in the depiction of the reflected sunlight on the water. The painting is strongly atmospheric rather than analytical and has a spirit somewhat akin to Turner’s works. Nevertheless, it does illustrate particularly well one of the features of an Impressionist painting that was thought so revolutionary. The technique is very ‘sketchy’ and would have been seen as a preliminary study for a painting rather than a finished work suitable for exhibition. (Monet himself saw the work as unfinished, and it was for that reason that he adopted the title ‘Impression’ to distinguish it from such works as his other view of Le Havre in the same exhibition, though this too lacks the finish than expected.) In this work, Monet stripped away the details to a bare minimum: the dockyards in tile background are merely suggested by a few brushstrokes as are the boats in the foreground. The whole represents the artist’s swift attempt to capture a fleeting moment. The highly visible, near-abstract technique, compels almost more attention than the subject-matter itself, a notion then wholly alien to viewers.
Claude Monet, Gare St Lazare, 1877 IE
Trains helped the spread of urbanization and transport. Bringing people in and out of the city more often. All of the forms across the scene are weighed with equal importance.
When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes. At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their own times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to be considered, like Manet, Degas and Caillebotte, a painter of modern life.
In 1877, settling in the Nouvelle Athènes area, Claude Monet asked for permission to work in the Gare Saint-Lazare that marked its boundary on one side. Indeed, this was an ideal setting for someone who sought the changing effects of light, movement, clouds of steam and a radically modern motif. From there followed a series of paintings with different viewpoints including views of the vast hall. In spite of the apparent geometry of the metallic frame, what prevails here is really the effects of colour and light rather than a concern for describing machines or travellers in detail. Certain zones, true pieces of pure painting, achieve an almost abstract vision. This painting was praised by another painter of modern life, Gustave Caillebotte, whose painting was often the opposite of Monet’s.
The thick application of paint increases the feeling of bustle and smoke int he area. Monet would often juxtaxtopose certain pure colors near each other and let our eyes do the blending. he does does on urban spaces and makes them more atheistically pleasing.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876, 1877 IE
The Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, named after one of the three windmills in the neighborhood, held open-air dances every Sunday, and these would start in the early afternoon and carry on until midnight. It provided Renoir with the subject for this, his most ambitious work of the period.
From the lengthy account of the picture given by Renoir’s friend Georges Riviere, many of the models for the figures can be identified (though not always their positions). The three men seated at the right are Riviere himself and the painters Pierre Franc-Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte. Next to them are one of Renoir’s models and her sister, while to the left the two most prominent dancers are another of Renoir’s models, Margot, and the Cuban painter Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cardenas. Several of the other dancers were also friends of Renoir.
Riviere noted that the women in this work, whom the artist had patiently coaxed into posing for him, were of working class origin, i.e. of the type that would normally frequent such dances (Montmartre was a poor, fairly rundown area). Caillebotte bought the painting, probably on the occasion of its exhibition, from where it entered the State collection with his bequest.
L ater Renoir described how his friends had helped him to carry the canvas to and from the dances and, though it was partially painted on the spot (as emphasized by Riviere), Renoir also made various preliminary studies. The framing of the scene, in which the figures at the sides are cut off, gives the impression that it continues beyond its bounds and that this is thus a slice of reality. The light brushwork is an extension of that used by Renoir in his smaller works, and, in particular, he has captured the mottled effects caused by the light filtering through the trees. For example, the back of the man in the foreground and of the dress of the woman seated next to him are marked by spots of coloured light, while the ground by Margot and Solares y Cardenas is fragmented into areas of pink and blue.
These unusual features were criticized by some in the reviews of the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877 at which it was displayed. Both Riviere and Renoir admired the way in which the young workers who attended these dances managed to put aside their cares for its duration, and Riviere was keen to present the painting as a genuine scene of Parisian life. However, the very description he gave of the figures shows this to be somewhat untrue: the work is in many ways contrived and largely populated by Renoir’s middle-class friends, who are enjoying the company of the lower-class girls - the image of carefree enjoyment is essentially an ideal.
Edgar Degas, Monsieur Perrot’s Dance Class, ca. 1875
Though Degas had been treating the subject since 1870, this is his first fully accomplished ballet work. It was painted in two stages: from late 1873 to mid-1874 and then in 1875-6, when it was substantially reworked. There is a variant in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. X-ray photographs and associated drawings reveal that the painting originally showed the foreground dancer with a fan posed looking out at the viewer and leaning against the piano, while the unidentified dance master was seen from the back. Some features of this original dancer can be seen beneath the present one: the dark brown patch on the fan was originally part of the hair of the first figure. The anonymous figure of the dance master was replaced with that of Jules Perrot, whom the artist had probably first met in 1874. Perrot had been a famous dancer at the Opera and had also worked in Russia, before later becoming a teacher. Degas thus transformed the original work into a kind of homage to Perrot, turning the foreground dancer away from the viewer so as not to distract from his figure. Her present position, watching Perrot, serves to direct the eye towards the centre.
This reworking of the image is typical of Degas’ laborious method, and signs of alteration are also evident in many other works. The setting was probably a room in the old opera house in the rue Le Peletier, which had burnt down in 1873. Though supposedly a class, hardly any of the dancers are actually paying attention to Perrot. The dancer in the foreground, seated on the piano, is scratching her back, while the one at the far end of the room above the rest is adjusting her choker. Most of the others are similarly distracted. In the background, to the right, can be seen some of the dancers’ mothers, while the small dog in the foreground adds a further incidental detail.
Edgar Degas, The Absinthe Drinker, 1876
Degas’s painting In a café (The absinthe drinker) shows a couple seated side by side in a café, looking worse for wear after a long night. The woman stares into space with heavy eyes, her shoulders drooped and a pale drink (absinthe) on the table in front of her. Her surly companion stares off to the side, a pipe sticking from his mouth, his misshapen hat pulled down over his unruly hair. His glass is filled with a brown drink (possibly mazagran – a cold coffee beverage and hangover cure). The palette of muted greys and soft earth tones suggests stale air and melancholy.
This scene was both typical and topical in Degas’s time. Absinthe (also known as La Fée Verte or ‘the green fairy’) was a green coloured, highly alcoholic spirit. Poured over ice and served with water and a cube of sugar to soften the bitter taste, it was highly addictive and known to cause hallucinations. Its growing popularity and its negative social effects led to absinthe being banned in much of Europe and America.
The café pictured –La Nouvelle Athènes, in Place Pigalle – was one frequented by modern artists and intellectual bohemians. The painting is composed like a photograph, with its subject matter cropped at the edges and carefully balanced light and shade. Although it has the appearance of being made on the spot, the image was actually completed in Degas’s studio. Degas convinced his friends to models for the figures: Ellen André was an actress and an artist’s model; Marcellin Desboutin was an engraver and artist. Their reputations suffered as a result of the painting and Degas had to publicly declare that they were not really alcoholics.
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, 1874 IE
Undeniably Berthe Morisot’s most famous painting, The Cradle was painted in Paris in 1872. It shows one of the artist’s sisters, Edma, watching over her sleeping daughter, Blanche. It is the first image of motherhood—later one of her favourite subjects—to appear in Morisot’s work.
The mother’s gaze, her bent left arm, a mirror image of the child’s arm, and the baby’s closed eyes form a diagonal line which is further accentuated by the movement of the curtain in the background. This diagonal links the mother to her child. Edma’s gesture, drawing the net
curtain of the cradle between the spectator and the baby, further reinforces the feeling of intimacy and protective love expressed in the painting.
Berthe Morisot showed The Cradle at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874—the first woman to exhibit with the group. The painting was scarcely noticed although important critics commented on its grace and elegance. After unsuccessful attempts to sell it, Berthe Morisot withdrew it from display and The Cradle stayed in the model’s family until it was bought by the Louvre in 1930.
Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1878
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, raised near Pittsburgh and first trained as a painter in Philadelphia, became nineteenth-century America’s most modern painter. Like many of her contemporaries, Cassatt felt that her artistic education in the United States was inadequate, and she traveled to Europe soon after the Civil War. She studied in both Italy and France, and by 1873 she had made Paris her home. While most of her compatriots were proud of the education they received in the art schools of the French capital, Cassatt soon tired of the conservative approach taught in those academies and perpetuated by the exhibitions they organized. She felt strongly that painting needed to break free of old methods and adapt to the modern world.
Cassatt found the answer to her demand for a new kind of painting in the work of the Impressionists, a small circle of independent French artists. She approved of their disdain for juried exhibitions and soon adopted their experimental techniques and their preference for images of contemporary life. In 1877 Edgar Degas invited her to show her work with the group. Cassatt thus became one of only three women, and the only American, ever to join the French Impressionists.
In the Loge was the first of Cassatt’s Impressionist paintings to be displayed in the United States. When it was shown in Boston in 1878, critics described the picture as “striking,” adding that Cassatt’s painting “surpassed the strength of most men.” [1]The canvas, then entitled At the Français—A Sketch, depicts a fashionable lady dressed for an afternoon performance at the Comedie Français, a theater in Paris. Entertainments like the theater, the opera, and the racetrack were extremely popular among Parisians, who enjoyed such diversions not only for the show, but also for the opportunity to see—and to be seen by—their peers. The Impressionists took delight in painting these spectacles of modern life, and the theater, with its dazzling variety of lights and reflections, was an especially appealing subject. Many male artists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Degas, had painted beautiful women in theater boxes, where they appeared as if they were on display in a gilded frame. Cassatt gave her female figure a noticeably more dynamic role, for she peers avidly through her opera glasses at the row of seats across from her. In the background at upper left, a man trains his gaze upon her. The viewer, who sees them both, completes the circle. Cassatt’s painting explores the very act of looking, breaking down the traditional boundaries between the observer and the observed, the audience and the performer.
Mary Cassatt, The Bath, 1892
In this work, Mary Cassatt addressed the theme for which she is best known—women and children—while also experimenting with compositional elements of Japanese art. Cassatt saw a large exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1890, and produced a series of prints influenced by their aesthetics. The Child’s Bath is the culmination of her investigation of a flattened picture plane and decorative patterning. The intimate scene of everyday life also echoes the subject of many Japanese prints. In Cassatt’s painting, the encircling arms and gentle touch of the mother or nurse convey an overall feeling of protection and tenderness.
Gustave Caillebotte, Floor Scrapers, 1876 IE
This painting is one of the first representations of the urban proletariat. Whereas peasants (The Gleaners (1857) by Millet) or country workers (The Stone Breakers (1849) by Courbet) had often been shown, city workers had seldom been painted. Unlike Courbet or Millet, Caillebotte does not incorporate any social, moralizing, or political message in his work. His thorough documentary study (gestures, tools, accessories) justifies his position among the most accomplished realists.
Caillebotte had undergone a completely academic training, studying with Bonnat. The perspective, accentuated by the high angle shot and the alignment of floorboards complies with tradition. The artist drew one by one all the parts of his painting, according to the academic method, before reporting them using the square method on the canvas. The nude torsos of the planers are those of heroes of Antiquity, it would be unimaginable for Parisian workers of those times. But far from closeting himself in academic exercises, Caillebotte exploited their rigor in order to explore the contemporary universe in a completely new way.
Caillebotte presented his painting at the 1875 Salon. The Jury, no doubt shocked by its crude realism, rejected it (some critics talked of “vulgar subject matter”). The young painter then decided to join the Impressionists and presented his painting at the second exhibition of the group in 1876, where Degas exhibited his Woman Ironing (1873). Critics were struck by this great modern tableau, Zola, in particular, although he condemned this “painting that is so accurate that it makes it bourgeois”.
Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877 IE
This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets. As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions. The painting’s highly crafted surface, rigorous perspective, and grand scale pleased Parisian audiences accustomed to the academic aesthetic of the official Salon. On the other hand, its asymmetrical composition, unusually cropped forms, rain-washed mood, and candidly contemporary subject stimulated a more radical sensibility. For these reasons, the painting dominated the celebrated Impressionist exhibition of 1877, largely organized by the artist himself. Caillebotte thus provides a unique view of Paris as it was transforming from an ancient city into a modern metropolis.
