Realism to Impressionism summary and notes

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Realism to Impressionism summary and notes

Realism to Impressionism

1848-1900

The worker’s revolution of 1848 effectively ended France’s flirtation with imperial and royal government. Riding on a wave of anti-government sentiment, those associated with the striking workers argued that the Public should have the reigns of power, better able than any elite governing body to decide what is best for them. Writers and political activists discussed and promoted the idea of the Solution, the re-designing of French society with a new harmony between persons and classes. Impassioned discussion, both literary and artistic, emanated from the ideas of Fourier and St-Simon, taking form in Victor Considerant’s “La Solution ou le gouvernement direct du peuple” of 1851, as well as in tracts promoted by Alfred Bruyas and J. P. Proudhon, infuential friends of artists Eugene Delecriox and Gustave Courbet. The new populist experiments in government came to a climax in 1870 with the establishment of the Paris Commune, through which liberal thinkers attempted to create a socialist France; the uprising was quelled, with many leaders, artists, and writers ending up in prison. France had changed tremendously during the process, however, with reform successfully enacted in a number of areas, including the Salon. After Courbet’s creation of his own exhibition after being refused by the Salon numerous times, several professional alternatives arose to rigid adherence to Academic strictures, with artists organizing their own exhibitions, and cultivating markets, patrons, and collectors outside the old Salon networks. The change in artistic taste and purpose began in the Romantic period expanded and mutated into manifold visual forms in both France and England, two western cultures greatest effected by the social revolution taking place, though its influence would soon spread throughout Europe and into America.

The French philosopher Auguste Comte described the end of philosophy amidst the height of human achievement as the age of Positivism. This belief in the power of technological achievement to cure all ills amidst a growing skepticism about the injustices flourishing in the early Industrial movement give this early incarnation of the modern world its distinctive and contradictory flavor. A wide variety of artistic responses emerged to express and formulate the passions, fears, insecurities, hopes, and fantasies of the age. A battle between the awareness of both what was gained and what was lost by the radical social, philosophical, and spiritual change wrought by the relentless engines of progress became the essential philosophy of dialectics which fueled the ideas of Karl Marx and Hegel. Rural life came to be increasingly contrasted with urban life, and artists exposed both the triumphs and the brokenness of the social fabric as a result.

The greatest acknowledged Realist playwright, Alexandre Dumas the Younger, brought the life of the most shunned of society, the street prostitute, into the limelight with “Camille,” the dramatic tale of a fallen woman with a heart of gold, a victim of society’s injustice rather than her own moral failings. The great British tragic actress Sarah Bernhart would assume a number of personas in her career, but was most famous for her performance in Sardou’s La Tosca, a passionate tale of love and vengeance. Writers were preoccupied with the motif of the corrupted woman, including Baudelaire, Emile Zola, and Victor Hugo, who aspired in his personal life to save his mistress from the life of a kept actress. This interest in decay is paralleled in medicine, which was obsessed as well with decadence of the body (infection) and decadence of the spirit (hedonism), making for vast improvements in hygiene, and dubious assumptions in treatment of the mentally ill.

Developments in medicine came rapidly during this period, with great advancements made in the physical health and comfort of the public in general, including the affirmation and observation of cells in the body in about 1839 , the beginnings of the use of anesthesia in the forms of chloroform and nitrous oxide in around 1842, and perhaps most significantly, the salving of the increasingly horrific problems of infection and sanitation-related diseases by the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, resulting in successful regimens of sterilization and sanitation. After setting out on the HMS Beagle in 1831, Charles Darwin returned five years later to write down his observations on natural selection, which he published in 1844, and coalesced later into his revolutionary “Origin of Species.” All of life had come to be seen as functioning through a few essential principles of biology and genetics, and science as we know it was born.

Early European Photography

The photograph developed out of the Camera Obscura, a device which had been used since the early renaissance to study the effects of light. When used in conjunction with chemically treated surfaces reactive to light, the first purely “mechanical” means of creating a visual image was born. First regarded as a curiosity, it became more and more integrated into the world of art, used as both tool and product.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce, 1765-1833, View from his Window at Gras, heliograph, 1826. Seeking to simplify the lithographic process Niepce began transferring images from engravings to pewter plates with bitumen, an asphaltum material used by etchers. He created this, the first known photograph, with glass and metal plates treated with bitumen in conjunction with a camera obscura in an eight hour exposure of the view outside his studio window. He experimented with image creation in a wide range of media, touring extensively with large dioramic historical images on painted on translucent fabric, giving viewers the experience of standing in the midst of a great battle or event.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, 1789-1851, The Artist’s Studio, 1837. Using an iodine sensitized silver plate, Daguerre created a single positive image of a consciously arranged still life, much as a painter would. His process would be developed into the calotype by Fox Talbot, creating multiple images from one plate.

Oscar Rejlander, 1813-75, Two Paths of Life, albumen print, 1860. The Swedish Rejlander extended Daguerre’s idea of “artistic” photographs, evoking Raphael’s “School of Athens” in his discussion of modern morality. He painstakingly assembled the imaged of thirty negatives to create this print, which exploits the medium’s ability to record specific moments of time. Although it conformed beautifully to conventional morality, with Queen Victoria purchasing a copy, it was criticized broadly for its inadequacy compared to painting in making a melodrama come to life.

Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon), 1820-1910, Sarah Bernhardt, silver print, 1859. It could be said that Nadar took the opposite approach to Rejlander: using a minimum of props and set-ups, he sought to immortalize the great creative and cultural leaders of his day. He photographed the famed actress Bernhart a number of times, in a number of guises. As a drama critic, he was abreast of the leading figures’ latest characterizations and triumphs. He interviews and photographed an impressive pantheon of Parisian cultural notables, including Charles Baudelaire, the notorious Salon hostess George Sand, and the creator of modern color theory Chevreul. Nadar himself was famous enough to have Daumier lampoon his ambition to photograph all of Paris, and raise the humble medium to an artform.

French Naturalism

Landscape painting, both as an outgrowth of the interests of the Barbizon school and as an expression of more political and symbolic weight via the workers’ revolt of 1848, became part of new and innovative approaches to subjects, celebrating intimacy with nature and the common folk of the laboring class. The establishment of the Second Republic and the ideas of Socialism favored by its leaders gave momentum to artists and patrons interested in the connection of humanity with the earth. Many of the most influential artists in fact had strong rural ties, and preached the gospel of the countryside through their art.

Honore Daumier, 1808-79, The Third Class Carriage, oil, 1862. Though of the same generation as Millet and Courbet, Daumier expressed his empathy with the working class in primarily urban settings through rough and raw paintings of the realities of industrial-era city living. Although all the people depicted here share the same carriage rolling down the glamorous new boulevards attendant to the Paris Opera, class division is clearly in evidence. His use of strong, strident line underscores the plight of the poor family facing us, in opposition to the members of the bourgeoisie wearing top hats, seated in the front of the carriage.

Nadar Raising Photography to the Height of Art, lithograph, 1862. Daumier’s poignant wit gave voice to tragedies, conflicts, and follies; here he does a send-up of the debate over the validity of photography as art via one of the most controversial figures at the heart of the debate, the flamboyant Nadar.

Jean-Francois Millet, 1814-75. Although Millet moved to Paris to study painting in 1837, and had ties with critics and members of the Academy, he never felt at ease in the city, and returned finally to a rural life, receiving a commission to move to Barbizon in 1849. The most celebrated of the early French rural-naturalists, he moved beyond Thoureau and Corot’s depictions of the countryside as places of escape to depictions of the peasants and farmers stewardship of the land. In Paris he focused on the female nude, but concentrated exclusively on peasant life after the 1848 revolution, which caused critics to call him a “realist,” associating him not quite accurately with the political intentions of artists like Courbet. His focus was not on class politics, but on the stoic grace embodied by the workers of the field. His lack of polemic lends his works a certain transcendent, almost mythic quality of timelessness.

The Gleaners, oil, 1857. This circle of women, workers of the field taking their wages by gleaning the leftover grains of wheat from the ground at the end of the day, possesses both a monumental solidity and a ghostly insubstantiality. Chaff from the harvest hangs in the air, softening the dusk light, and threatening to dissolve the laborers into their labor.

Rosa Bonheur, 1822-99, Plowing in the Nivernais: The Dressing of the Vines, 1849. One of the best received of her generation of painters of farming subjects, Bonheur brought monumental dignity to images of farmers and their animals in frankly presented compositions such as this. Using a low point-of-view, and closely observed rendering of natural light and shade, she gave her subjects a kind of effortless grandeur. Her work was so respected that she was awarded membership in the Legion of Honor in 1865. She seemed to possess an unflinching belief in her mission as an artist, perhaps inspired by her upbringing in a born into a socialist family; they were as well members of the radical utopian sect of Comte de Saint-Simeon, who believed in a female Messiah. She was a friend of Courbet, who admired her assertive spirit.

Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877. Born in the rural village of Ornans, Gustave Courbet remained fiercely proud of his rustic beginning, keeping his peasant’s dress and speech as he stormed the bastions of Salon painting in nineteenth century France. He was the first

artist to use the term Realist to describe himself, albeit at times somewhat reluctantly. Seeing the emotionality of the Romanticists as mere escapism, he aspired to create art akin to Rembrandt and Caravaggio, art that communicated to and illustrated the life of the people. Radically Socialist, he was intimately involved in avante-garde politics, and was a good friend of the cultural theorist Pierre-Joseph Prudhon. Perhaps the first true French Realist, Courbet trained at a studio independent of the Academy, and experimented constantly with his own identity as an artist, as well as with approaches to composition and technique.

Portrait of the Artist, or The Wounded Man, oil, 1844-54. Based on an earlier charcoal sketch depicting a woman demurely resting her head on the man’s shoulder, this self-portrait eulogizes the painful ending of his fourteen year relationship with his mistress Virginie Binet, who was also mother of his son. Courbet created a series of self-portraits, in which he “made portraits of myself as gradually the conditions of my spirit changed. In a word, I have characterized my life. The third was the portrait of a man gasping and dying….”. His portraits show in a variety of personas, trying to capture the momentary identity of the self amidst a coursing stream of life and world events. The years of the Revolution were especially life-changing for Courbet; in the years immediately after the workers’ revolt, in which he had been seriously involved, Binet abandoned him, leading him to question his nature as an artist and as a man. Although the martyr-artist theme was a well-established conceit, Courbet gives it new life, both in its direct, autobiographical content, and in the straightforward chiaroscuro treatment.

Burial at Ornans , oil, 1849. Courbet wrote to his good friend Alfred Bruyas that this painting was “my beginning and my statement of principles.” Due to a heightened consciousness of concerns of sanitation, Paris had begun a practice of encouraging and legislating burials to take place outside of traditional burial grounds, and outside of urban centers. The village of Ornans consciously bucked this precedent, and resisted moving the cemetery out of the church grounds. Delicate negotiations finally helped create a new Ornans cemetery, established adjacent to Courbet’s family land, where he returned annually to paint. After his beloved grandfather Jean-Antoine Oudot died, Courbet moved his studio into Oudot’s house, where he began this painting in 1849. This funeral procession, which flaunts proper pictorial hierarchy, probably depicts the inaugural burial in the new cemetery, interring a liberal, republican, and “cultivator” in the Revolution, a friend of Oudot and a great-uncle by marriage Claude-Etienne Teste. The artist honors both a reevaluation of social hierarchy by the non-hierarchical composition, and examines the possibilities for the harmonization of traditional and contemporary cultures.

The Grain Sifters, oil, 1855. When Courbet turned his attention to depictions of peasants and their labor, the images were loaded with a greater variety of meaning than works by other artist of the same subject and style. He does not try to imbue his workers with melodramatic dignity, nor does he make them pathetic; instead we see them burdened with boredom, almost giving sway to the sensuality of sleep. The artist flirts with many of his favorite issues: the realistic and experimental rendering of natural texture with paint, the power of the female form, the abandon of sleep, and mischievous narrative detail such as the little boy impatiently checking out just what is in the oven.

The Oak of Vercingetorix, oil, 1864. Though most well known for his often controversial figural compositions, Courbet was a prolific landscape painter, and loved spending time outdoors hunting, hiking, and painting. This powerful oak, firmly rooted and embracing, suggests also the ancient tradition of the oak as representative of sacred ground and of immortality. Unwittingly part of a heated archeological debate, this oak was known by tradition as the oak of Caesar’s Camp near Alesia, the site of the defeat of the Gallic Chieftain Vercingetorix by Caesar in 52 BCE. Although another site eventually won out in the dispute, this oak represented the cultural memory of the French people, rooted deeply in the past of Antiquity.

Achille Deveria, Minna and Brenda, pendant based on a scene from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, lithograph, 1837.

The Sleepers, oil, 1866. Commissioned by the wealthy and aristocratic Turkish diploman and collector Khalil Bey, this dramatically scaled painting plays off of existing prototypes, including the lithograph by Deveria, and Orientalist paintings already in Bey’s own collection. It is tempting to discuss this work as lesbian, but the audience was exclusively male, as are the interests imbedded in the composition. The dark-and-light figures embrace each other in a kind of mandorla, an endless sacred circle. The broken necklace and accessories of decadence would seem to justify the later title of Luxury and Idleness; the painting certainly is a charmed space for the indulgence of sensual visual pleasure. The exhibition of the painting in a shop window created a police report, supporting Courbet’s reputation as a reprobate. The artist had a long-standing interest in the figure in sleep (death?), related to medical interest in unconscious states created by sleep, ecstasy, or anesthesia.

Jules Dalou, 1838-1902, Study from a Monument to Labor , plaster,1889-91. One of the most eloquent sculptural testaments to the sentiments of both the workers’ revolt and the Paris Commune of 1871 exists in the work of Dalou. Although trained in academic, commercial styles, he turned what could have been a lucrative career in producing common historical and mythological monuments aside to ally himself with the socialism of the Commune. He created a series of sculptural homages to working class people, mostly done in maquette or sketch form during his exile in England. His figures exude compact and modest energy, embracing a new anti-theatrical style of presentation, which would be salient for the next generation of sculptors.

Ilya Repin, 1844-1930, Barge-handlers on the Volga 1870-73. Repin was greatly influenced by the heady atmosphere of freedom present in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He created what would be later called “social realism,” a style which became debased when finally associated with repressive and tyrannical social rulers of the Soviet Union. In Repin’s hands, however, we see a moving, credible, and powerful tribute to the sufferings of the lower class, and the extent to which all other classes depend upon them. Leo Tolstoy tackled many of the same themes in his novels and plays, and was painted in traditional peasant garb by his brother-in-arms Repin.

Transcendent Industry

Perhaps the most eloquent and direct expression of the confidence of positivist industry can be seen in architecture. As technology for constructing buildings with first iron, then steel frames became feasible and economical, architects celebrated the possibilities for opening up both interior and exterior spaces with seemingly delicate structures. Concurrently, experiments in historicism, of freely recycling past artistic languages, became possible and popular. In grand projects such as the Opera, the social fabric of the city was rearranged in modern ways, rapidly creating new social situations; in the case of the Opera, large, lavish entertainments in a large space capable of mixing social classes came to replace some of the smaller theatres which catered to specific audiences.

Charles Garnier and Marcello (Adele d-Affry), 1825-98, 1836-79, The Paris Opera, Grand Staircase, 1861-74. Part of a disputed urban redevelopment plan initiated by the urban planner Georges-Eugene Haussman (1809-91)under Napoleon III, Garnier’s design was truly what later came to be known as “beaux-arts classicism”, using elements of many classical styles in a unique modern assemblage of visual language, a language embraced by Napoleon III as representative of his reign. The neo-Baroque architecture is meant to evoke the continuity of the Louvre and the French empire, as well as to provide a large and lavish setting for public entertainment. The female figures adorning the Grand Staircase, designed by the duchess Castiglione Colonna function as both an antidote to the powerfully masculine enterprise of the Opera, and as a typical representation of women as a part of the earth in a sort of dream-womb consciousness.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, 1827-1875, The Dance, Façade of the Paris Opera, plaster, 1867-68. This Beaux Arts sculptor introduced elements of naturalism into symbolic sculpture, taking subjects previously rendered idealistically into the real world. The Dance’s prominent placement at the façade of the spectacular new Paris Opera indicates how much interest the popular eye was taking in photographic verisimilitude.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and his Children, marble, 1865-1867. The same restless and vital movement Carpeaux used in an image of joyful play was put to use in describing remorse and torment. Like other artists of the period, he re-interpreted the medieval text of Dante’s inferno to express more modern concerns with personal moral and emotional experience. As an ultimate sacrifice, the sons of Ugolino offered themselves to slate their father’s starvation in their common imprisonment. Building on top of the artist’s Renaissance and Baroque forebears, fluid and timorous movement is united with a light, delicate obsession with details: beautiful fingers and toes seem to ooze pathos.

John Roebling and Washington Roebling, 1806-69, 1837-1926, The Brooklyn Bridge, 1867-83. One of the earliest steel bridges, fabricated by the American Bridge Company in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn employs grandly scaled piers, punctuated by stoic Gothic arches, held in stasis by massive steel cables. Nineteenth century New York had developed serious transportation problems, with the old infrastructure of the city not up to the task of its rapidly growing industrial-era prominence. The huge piers were sunk into the river via large caissons, great, hollow, upturned “cups” filled with air and workers digging the platform steadily into bedrock under the water.Many men died of asphyxiation in this nightmarish scenario, and the genius of the project, John, succumbed to the day-and-night stress of the innovative and experimental construction, dying and leaving the completion of his creation to his son.

Gustave Eiffel, 1832-1923, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1887-89. Much protested by conservative writers and artists, the great monument built truly as a glorification of modern technology and positivist spirit endured a generation of controversy until Paris embraced it as a symbol of the new age. It was built for the 1889 Universal Exposition, one of many such celebrations staged by nations to exhibit and flaunt their achievements in science and technology. Without architectural precedent, it is perhaps the first true example of modern architecture, eschewing the past for a brave new world.

Academic Realism

Although challenges to the traditional artistic order abounded, the Official Academy remained powerful and influential, with its annual Salon still an important gateway for emerging artists to gain professional credentials and contacts. Leaders of the academy enjoyed abundant honors and commissions, and attempted to keep their cabal in power. In the latter 19th century, they catered more and more to a sort of photographic realism, involving polished surfaces, an abundance of anecdotal detail, and an apparent delicate wholesomeness. This work appealed especially to the captains of industry and their families, extolling as it did the virtue of a heightened sense of reality while staying within established respectable bounds of taste.

Adolphe-William Bougereau, 1825-1905, Nymphs and a Satyr, 1873. Bougereau researched the realistic details of his paintings scrupulously, creating great crowd-pleasing works, for persons of both high and low estate. His highly accessible works make the dramatic, the lurid, and the frightening light hearted and beautiful, giving fantasy a kind of comforting reality.

Jean-Leon Gerome, 1824-1904, Reciept of the Siamese Ambassador by Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie at Fontainbleau, 1867. At the height of his career there was no busier or well paid artist in France; he is best known for saying that, “Every time I piss, I lose 100 francs,” and for his vilification by the Impressionists as embodying everything wrong with art. His theatrical, excruciatingly detailed paintings wowed the public and patrons alike, and anticipation was thick for his latest creations. Orchestrating complex compositions of figures, architecture and dramatic spaces, he gave his audiences a rarified experience of anecdotal veracity. His paintings in fact influenced later artists more with their journalistic presentation than their weight as high art.

Impressionism

In 1874 a disgusted critic dubbed Monet’s painting “Impression: sunrise” as nothing more than a fleeting impression, hardly up to the task of the concepts of immortality long associated with art. Impressionism became associated with ideas of Baudelaire and Balzac, focusing on the understanding of the moment and the individual perception of it, rather than trying to freeze the life inherent in some artistic convention of permanence. The spirit of the style is perhaps best expressed by the composer Debussy, who broke with the Sturm and Drang of German Romanticism, concentrating on compositions in whole note harmonies, and evoking oriental musical forms. When he said “Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light,” he gave us insight into the intent of the Impressionist artist---more interested in art that affects the organ of the eye rather than that of the eye.

When the chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul was hired by the Gobelins tapestry works in the 1820’s, his task was to primarily remove unwanted color effects in the dying of wool, and to create pure blacks by eliminating “subjective effects of simultaneous contrast.” In 1928 he began publishing treatises on color theory that proved to be the most useful and influential ideas for artists since Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” from 1810. After the publication in the 1840’s of his most important work, “On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors,” and his ongoing lectures at Gobelins, he was routinely consulted by artists on the use of color in painting. His most lasting influence came from his emphasis on harmonizing visual effects by the juxtaposition of strong, pure tints of flat, even colors. This interest in the purity of colors dovetailed with artists continuing the investigations of followers of both the Barbizon school and urban realists to create the phenomenon of Impressionism. While some early practitioners such as Manet expressed some overt socio-cultural agenda, most Impressionist work appears to be distinctly apolicital, or at least anti-polemic. A theme predominant in the movement, the depiction of the leisure of middle and upper-middle class professionals, tapped into an entirely new market and new sensibility. Storytelling and narrative of any kind were subverted for the pursuit of the stimulation of the eye, and the transcendent pleasure possible by attention focused on the moment of light, the action of light on surfaces. This notion of the use of art gave rise to one of the preoccupations of Modernism, the life of the picture plane.

Edouard Manet, 1832-1883. While still under academic tutelage, Manet began then-radical experiments in posing models in natural postures, and in painting in natural light, attempting to capture a moment of light. His painting fulfilled, more than any other artist, Baudelaire’s ideas about “The Heroism of Modern Life,” which encouraged the intense embracing of the NOW, with all its intensity, pain, and contradictions. His greatest break with tradition was his abandonment of the practice of painting in a series of transitions, from light to dark, from color to color, from texture to texture, in favor of “assembling” the painting like a mosaic. Courbet noted that Manet’s paintings were as “flat as playing cards,” a description that would likely not have bothered Manet in the least. His work fit the ideas of a range of writers and cultural theorists beautifully, from Baudelaire to Mellarme, and most notably, Emile Zola. Manet immortalized one of Zola’s most famous novel characters, “Nana,” painting her much as she was described by Zola: a quintessential victim, passively accepting her own degradation, enjoying the frequent beatings by her husband.

Olympia, oil, 1863. Many of Manet’s most controversial paintings were cheeky reworkings of classical standards. This nude, based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, presents us with an “Olympia,” a prostitute, angular and taught and shamelessly naked. She confronts the viewer with a powerful glance; we wince, feeling a twinge of shame at being put in the place of one of her clients. In refusing to give her body to us for delectation, she takes power over us, as unmoved by us as by the extravagant bouquet sent by a client. Her hands, in particular, exude an air of defiant defensiveness, barring the viewer from, rather than inviting him in, to her territory.

Luncheon on the Grass, oil, 1863. Based on a Raphael painting of the Judgment of Paris, this work again takes great liberties with its classical precedent. By placing contemporary people, including models which would have been known by Salon audiences, he destroys the distance and power relationship between the seer and the seen.

The Dead Christ , oil, 1880. This Christ is truly “Dead,” not hinting at the possibility of resurrection. The light is clear and stark, and the insubstantial angels seem at odds about how to mitigate the harsh, blunt, heavy reality of death.

Claude Monet, 1840-1926. This son of a grocer, who studied under the Barbizon artists, became the focal point for the new aesthetic, devoting his career to the evocation of focusing on the subject as a mosaic of light. He strove to see in a naïve way, painting colors and forms exactly as they impress the eye, not as one’s mind believes them to be. Painting directly from nature, he established the landscape as a place for childlike visual pleasure for weary urban residents.

Impression: Sunrise, oil, 1872. The critic that used the title to this painting as a weapon to deride it as a mere sketch, an unfinished record of a perception and not a fully realized work of art, unintentionally named perhaps the first truly modern movement in art. Monet’s radically innovative painting focused all its energy and compositional power on the moment of the eye’s encounter of a moment of light and atmosphere; the setting and subject became secondary to the viewer’s experience of it. This concept is what rankled and startled critics and viewers as much as the raw presence of the paint on canvas.

Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, oil, 1867. This congenial setting, using family members at his aunt’s seaside villa, typifies the unfocused forms of composition Monet favored. He, as did many European artists of the day, admired the cultivated casualness of ukiyo-e prints appearing in dealers’ shops. We are most aware of the vivid, sensual presence of light and wind skipping across the subjects at hand; edges appear only as division of light. He makes the ephemeral permanently present, without sacrificing its tenuousness.

Rouen Cathedral, Dawn, Full Sunlight, oil, 1894. As he and Renoir developed the Impressionist style, he became more and more fascinated with capturing very specific moments of light, recording their particular colors and diffusions of forms. He painted over thirty versions of the Royal Portal of Rouen Cathedral, during two different stays. He would paint the façade from the same point of view, only at the specific time of day he was trying to capture, until satisfied. This series, like other time-of-day series he accomplished, truly hints at the notion that form is nothing without light.

Water Lilies and Bridge, oil, 1899. Although initially an artistic outlaw, exhibiting only at the Impressionists’ refuses exhibits, Monet came to be very successful and lionized later in his career. With income from the increasingly brisk sales of his paintings, he retreated to a small estate he purchased in Giverny, where he immersed himself in a landscape largely of his own creation. He painted his famous series of water lilies in his back yard ponds totally en plein air, which necessitated the digging of a trench accommodate the huge canvases to his height. These final works show a painter completely immersed in the visual qualities he loved, the refraction of color and form in light.

Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903. Spring Pasture 1875. Originally a painter of the Barbizon school, Pissarro held an affinity for the ideas of the younger artists, and participated in Impressionist exhibitions. He maintained a love, however, for rural themes, and brought techniques of broken brushwork, pure color, and painting directly from the motif to his renditions of peasants and farm scenes. He later embraced the pointillist approach of Seurat, eschewing somewhat the capturing of fleeting attributes of light and atmosphere for something more permanent and immutable.

Pierre August Renoir, 1841-1919. A classmate of Monet’s at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he merged his predilection for painting softly rendered nudes with the brilliance and boldness of flickering natural light. Renoir successfully created effects of light in his experiments in plein air painting with Monet, but was fascinated more with the human figure, and the social interaction of the sexes. A devoted husband and father, he had many children, who he would later use as studio assistants, helping him to keep his brushes clean in his pursuit of purer and more delicate color harmonies.

La Grenouillere, oil, 1869. This early work, depicting a group of revelers enjoying themselves on a floating party-platform, shows Monet’s influence in its broken color and flashing patterns of light, but the artist here is focused more on the pleasure the well-dressed men and women are taking in one another.

Moulin de le Galette, oil, 1876. Renoir turns his attention to the goings-on at the popular new open air dance hall, where attractive members of the middle class are softly dappled in flattering patches of light. His art here would seem to be most concerned with joyful living, with the gossip, flirtatious and jealous glances being an integral part of the fun.

The Bathers , oil, 1884-87. In his later work he returned again to his love of the nude. After a visit to Rome, where he was smitten by Raphael, he began uniting clear outlines and volumetric form with the play of brilliant color in fine Impressionist brushtrokes.

Edgar Degas, 1834-1917. Although his work takes full advantage of the broken outline and heightened contrast of light common with the Impressionists, Degas considered himself more of a realist, documenting modern urban life. He had a particular fascination with popular forms of entertainment, such as the horsetrack, the opera, and the faddish new nightclub/music halls like the Moulin Rouge. Unlike his contemporary Impressionists, he made extensive use of photography, often drawing over his photographs and exploiting their cropped compositions. He helped to turn pastels into a respected medium through his experiments; he would often wet the paper (at times a photograph printed on heavy watercolor paper), and work the initial layers like paint. Using then a sophisticated system of layers of dry pastel and fixative solution misted on to the surface, he was able to create an unprecedented texture of light and movement.

The Dance Class, oil, 1873-74, Ballet Rehearsal, oil, 1874. With support from his family, Degas studied and traveled extensively in his youth, finally settling down to focus on large history paintings. His contact with Manet persuaded him that he should focus on scenes of contemporary life. After a formative 1870 visit to New Orleans, where he began to explore scenes from the French Quarter, he became fascinated upon his return home with women of the theatre, especially ballet dancers from the music halls. He had a problematic and tense relationship with women, perhaps from an early heartbreak, and remained a confirmed bachelor, with evidently no conjugal relationships. His paintings always greet the viewer with an unusual, often intimate and privileged point of view. In this oil from his early forays into the lives of dancers, we are lent an “offstage” view of a class being held by the magisterial master, reigning over a troupe of les rats. Degas often explores the lives of women exploited by modern society, le Monde’s servants, and these dancers are no exception. Very young women, often from very poor families, were apprenticed into the dancing choruses of the music halls, often with their families’ high hopes for a better life. Often, however, they were treated with little more respect than “rats,” managed as we see in this painting as trained animals. Les Rats were held in what came to be known as “Green Rooms,” where potential male patrons could examine the goods. For them to survive, they needed to secure a sexual relationship with a man of some means, in exchange for living expenses and a chance at moving up in the business.

Woman Receiving Bouquet of Flowers, pastel, 1876. As he continued to work with the dancers as subject, he became more and more an accepted part of their world, eventually allowed backstage as an observer, rather than a potential patron. His pastel techniques rapidly developed, allowing him to give form to the heightened, unnatural light in the music halls. The dancers in this period are physically graceful, but often have distorted, animalistic faces; since Degas’ tremendous abilities as a draftsman and as a perfectionist are well established, these distortions must be taken at face value. His empathy but also his ambivalence mingle together in haunting images such as these. The ritual of tossing bouquets to performers had superceded the giving of jewelry and clothing, but they still signified the connection between patron and mistress.

The Tub, pastel, 1886. As his reputation as a strange, but harmless fixture in the world of the working dancer grew, he acquired greater access to scenarios where the girls’ vulnerabilities were exposed. He became so fascinated with the motif of the dancer washing off in a low tub that he had such a tub installed in his apartment to more fully explore the strangely distant yet intimate perspectives of such situations. His failing eyesight perhaps made him depend upon brighter and more vivid color later in his career.

Mary Cassatt, 1845-1926, Woman in a Loge , oil, 1879. Born to a wealthy family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mary Cassatt acquired an early love of Impressionism. After studying in Philadelphia, she moved to Paris 1870 and was quickly accepted into the circle of Monet and Renoir; she was considered so French, that she is known to this day as Marie. She first exhibited with the Impressionists in 1877, bringing a unique point of view on the life of women to her well-tuned Impressionist brush. This lush painting allows us to participate in the glowing light bathing an attractive young woman in her box at the Opera, a moment of delight and anticipation.

Berthe Morisot, 1841-1895, In the Dining Room , oil, 1886. One of several women accepted into the group of Impressionists, Morisot was committed early on to a professional career, which actually flourished more after her marriage and the birth of her daughter, Julie in 1878. Her work became looser, more painterly, which , she said, reflected a woman’s unique approach to painting, which was more naturally oriented to touch. She worked for political and social equality for women. The subject in this painting seems haloed in a wreath of pure energy, in spite of the fact that she has simply been caught in the course of ordinary daily routine.

Auguste Rodin, 1840-1917. The most influential European sculptor in the latter half of the nineteenth century was thrice refused admittance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As a result, his artistic education occurred during time spent as assistants to other sculptors, and in his travels to Italy. He modeled the expressive anatomy of his later figures after Donatello and Michelangelo, whom he greatly admired. Often grouped with Impressionist painters due to the undulating surfaces of his bronzes, catching light in furtive ways, he can perhaps most accurately be allied with the symbolists because of his interest in unusual poses and ambiguous emotional content. The surfaces of all his sculptures bear the imprint of his fingers, since he only worked directly in clay, having assistants carve and cast his final pieces. Therefore, we could speculate that the arousal of the organs of touch is paramount for Rodin, as the eye was for Monet.

Burghers of Calais, bronze, 1884-86. He won his first major commission when the town of Calais sought to commemorate the heroism of their forebears in a great bronze figurative monument. During the siege of the town during the Hundred Years’ War, Edward III of England offered to spare the city if six of its most important leaders would offer themselves up as sacrifice. However, instead of self-possessed, confident, stoic heroes, Rodin gave his clients a vision of six frightened, despairing, disheveled martyrs. Unhappy with the effect, the town leaders tried various exhibition strategies to add dignity to the pathos of the Burghers.

Walking Man (study for Saint John the Baptist Preaching), bronze, 1905 (cast 1962). Movement is the key to Rodin’s method and meaning; the dynamism of the prophet finds form in the surging musculature of the male form. The emotional essence of the work presents itself in the hand of the artist searching for the representation image as much as in the image itself.

Monument to Balzac, bronze, 1897-98. Emile Zola asked Rodin to take over the commission by a writers’ group to commemorate the late writer Honore Balzac after the original artist unexpectedly died. A personally important project for Rodin, he struggled with a number of versions of the piece, until he settled on depicting Balzac in the monastic robe he donned at night to create his tortured stories of vampires, corruption, and decadence. The patrons were not happy with this depiction of the artist as possessed, exalted by the fever and passion to create, a sentiment close to Rodin’s own creative process.

Gates of Hell, The Thinker, bronze, 1879-89. For more than ten years the sculptor made models and macquettes for this ambitious, though never fully realized, project. Although it depicts literally the entrance to the inferno, it is more akin to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil than Dante’s Divine Comedy, since it presents human beings tortured by impossible desires, guilt, despairing of any attainment of happiness. Crowned with the Horatii, burdened by their sense of duty, the gates are overseen by the figure known as “The Thinker,” a riveting image of the difficulty of the human condition.

Realism and Impressionism in America

Americans actually warmed to the Impressionists quicker than Europeans, perhaps due to the lack of a powerful and wealthy academy and network of patrons. The earlier Romantic style of Cole and the Hudson River School, painting that aspired to recording atmosphere and light in concert with realistic detail, sort of split into the interest in relating incidental moments and details unique to American life and, conversely, a European Impressionist take on beauty and high society in the new world. Photography arrived in the U.S. just in time to help render scenes of the Civil War. After the war ended in 1865, photographers who had cut their professional teeth in the trenches saw opportunities to link the country together with images, to bring East the grandeur and wonder of the great West.

Naturalist and Transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman encouraged an embrace of the natural environment as something to be learned and embraced, not conquered, and visual artists sought to inspire that sense of respect and love for nature with images of ravishing and humble beauty. The poetic ideas of these writers found synchronicity with more than one generation of visual artists, seeking the unified spirit of America amidst its overwhelming variety and contrasts.

Timothy O’Sullivan, 1840-82, Canon de Chelley, Arizona, albumen print, 1873.Ttrained as a documentary photographer in the Civil War, O’Sullivan was sent out by the U.S. Government to claim the Great West as a dictate of Manifest Destiny. His images of Anasazi ruins played well with the popular fascination with the broken remains of ancient civilizations, in contrast to the continuously new environment of America.

Winslow Homer, 1836-1910. The democratization of images continued to spread after the Civil War, with many artists and audiences yearning for the immediacy of their own American reality over traditions of European symbolism and allegory. Homer began his career illustrating scenes from the War for popular periodicals such as Harper’s weekly, moving increasingly towards scenes of American and natural innocence.

The Veteran in a New Field, oil, 1865. This empathetic, reverent portrait of a reaper in a golden field is reminiscent of Millet’s work, but with a more complex subtext. Homer documents the transition of soldiers back into civilian life, with this farmer having just cast off his uniform. The antiquated single-bladed scythe also comments on the heavy death tolls carried by union, an elegy to the loss of both young men, and a president.

Snap of The Whip, oil, 1872. After spending nearly a year in France, Homer returned to American to paint a series of what were perhaps Barbizon-influenced works, celebrating rural grace and beauty.

Adirondack Woodman and Fallen Tree, watercolor, 1892. After spending a year in a rustic fishing village on England’s North Sea Coast, Homer’s inclination towards naturalism grew, and he spent great amounts of time studying nature and those who live and work closest to it. He first began exploring the wilds of his beloved Adirondack Mountains, using watercolors to record his observations on site as often as possible. He led the way for American artists to exploit the rich light and spontaneity possible with watercolors, rather than try to imitate the effects of oil paint, as realists such as Thomas Moran had done.

Sponge Divers, (Bermudas), watercolor, 1889. Homer continued to explore the land, becoming enamored of the light and wildness of the islands of the Caribbean. He watched, sketched and painted the natives that made their living diving every day for sponges in the turquoise waters around the Bahamas. These later paintings exude both a wonderful, confident and spontaneous grasp of the medium and a surety of form gained from years of drawing.

Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916. Eakins studied intensely in Europe, first under Leon Gerome, and traveled to Spain to absorb Velazquez and Ribera’s influence. When he returned to Philadelphia he began his career by specializing in candid, realistic portraits. Joining the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1876, he taught rigorous classes in anatomy and life drawing, observing and encouraging his students to observe human dissections. When he insisted on teaching drawing from the nude model, as was done in Europe, he was fired from his post (specifically for allowing female students to draw the male nude). Students followed him to his studio, and he continued to practice his form of unflinching realism.

The Agnew Clinic, oil, 1889. Eakins paid homage to other great minds seeking a clear view of reality in his paintings of famous physicians lecturing on anatomy or performing surgery with anesthesia. He both observed the details of the human body itself, and the pursuit of knowledge via observation that these kindred spirits engaged in.

Between Rounds, oil, 1899. The gritty realist could not resist witnessing the human form in all kinds of extremis, from the brutal American pastime of boxing to the more civilized but demanding discipline of crew rowing. We witness the fighter between rounds, his finely tuned muscles sagging under fatigue and pain. The tension of the moment is dense and dramatic as we wonder, with the artist, if the warrior will rise again.

American Impressionism

American artists responded to the inspiration of French Impressionism in unique and individual ways, often dovetailing the more purely aesthetic aims of the European movement with interest in regional and local subject matter.

John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925. Sargent’s expatriate parents, who ferried him through all of the great European cultural capitals in his youth, also infused in him in the process a high sense of aestheticism and restless curiosity. He was enrolled at age fourteen in the Academia de Belle Arti in Florence, and the painterly Tintoretto works he saw in Venice captivated and inspired his native sense of élan. After studying finally at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris under Carolus Duran, a Spanish-born Parisian completely under the spell of Velazquez, he began to excel in portraiture, adding a painterly sense of immediacy to the sometimes dry subject matter. He approached a fascinating woman he met in his Italian travels, Madame Gautreau; he had become somewhat obsessed with painting her portrait. Although considered initially too risqué, and not well received at the Salon of 1884, the purchase of his famous “Portrait of Madame X” in 1916 by the Metropolitan Museum in New York brought much greater art-world credibility to the lush society portraits which had made him financially successful. The power and deftness of his energetic brushstroke and his approach to the act of painting itself is however most clearly seen in his landscape and travel studies in watercolor; the breathtaking fluency and enthusiasm of his hand is unrivalled by any of his American contemporaries.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, oil, 1882. Sargent was extremely successful with society portraits, emulating Velazquez in his loose and virtuoso brushwork. He strove to capture the mood of a setting and the personality of the subject in precise but liberated marks on the canvas. In this Parisian setting, these children of close friends of the artist occupy the moment in a fleeting but very specifically individual manner.

Madame X, oil, 1884. The elegant detachment of the sitter appeared to be the height of indolence to many contemporary viewers. In daringly cut evening wear, with the porcelain skin and cosmetics of a woman of le monde, she looks away not in modesty but to allow the viewer to gaze on her uninterrupted. The almost tortured undulations of her arm and hand would seem to imply the voluptuous flesh hidden by her dress.

In a Medici Villa, watercolor, 1907, Reading, watercolor, 1911. Sargent used the medium of watercolor not a simply a convenient means to do on-site studies, but as a sensitive method to record the vivacity and spontaneity of his visceral powers of observation. Whether paintings his friends and family at leisure, or recording the sights, peoples, and companions of his travels, the artist employed the medium’s clarity of light and touch to commemorate his immediate passion for the subject and his love for the feel of a paintbrush in his hand.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1874.Whistler sought in earnest to incorporate the lessons of both the Impressionists and of Japanese prints into his realistically based works. He spent a great deal of time working in Paris, but eventually moved to London, where he developed his mature style. In this work he accentuates the brilliant effects the fireworks have on what would otherwise be an unremarkable setting. He was as influential in his outspoken advocacy of “Art for Art’s Sake” as he was in his painting.

Frederick Childe Hassam, 1859-1935, Blossoming Trees, watercolor, 1882. One of the first American artists who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts during the latter half of the nineteenth century to fully embrace Impressionist style, Hassam founded the Boston school. He consciously sought out the effects of light on urban and landscape settings, emphasizing a cultivated sense of delicate beauty in his energetic brush.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1859-1937, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Tanner came to Philadelphia in the 1880’s to study with Eakins, one of the few artists encouraging the training and careers of minority artists. He eventually settled in Paris, where his graceful Impressionist renditions of native African American subject departed from the maudlin or awkward illustration of similar subjects, making him a popular painter and sought after teacher.

The Thankful Poor, oil, 1894. Emotional depth emerges through dissolving and reappearing silhouettes, the artist’s brush strokes swirling around the subject, grasping it lovingly, then merging into the picture plane. The weight of the grandfather’s spirit is given power and dignity through the rooted triangular form of his praying worker’s hands.

Late Eighteenth Century American Photography

Americans took early advantage of the rapid development of photographic technology, exploiting the medium for a range of purposes, from quantitative observation to documentary, to aesthetic realism.

Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-1904, Female dancer with a Ball, from Animal Locomotion 1885. The English-born photographer took advantage of advancements in plate sensitivity, and the mechanical shutter, to examine human and animal movement. He began capturing a wide variety of subjects, from horses to wrestlers to nude studio models in fleeting moments of motion. Artists such as Eakins made great use of his discoveries and images.

Jacob Riis, 1849-1914, Children in a New York Alley, 1888. Photography soon turned into an ideal tool for journalistic reportage, to communicate visual realities across class and social boundaries. An émigré from Denmark, Riis used the photograph as a polemical weapon in the cause of the downtrodden, documenting the depravation being endured by the lowest of the working class, in both urban and rural settings, the human price being paid for economic progress of the elite. After being an innovative reporter for a time with the New York Tribune, actually going into the slums to understand the causes of violence and crime, he turned to photography to plead the case of the underclass. In his salient work How the Other Half Lives he reported a new point of view on the ghetto, that the horrible conditions in which the poor lived were largely responsible for the desperate acts committed, not vice versa. Although the reasons for attendance by audiences at his presentations of discoveries may have often been voyeuristic, he revealed the ugly secret of the supposedly classless society of America.

Alfred Stieglitz, 1864-1946, Spring Showers, photogravure, 1901. Although he was born in America to wealthy German immigrants, Stieglitz was sent to technical school in Berlin, where he learned the latest photographic techniques. He began photographing New York City scenes with one of the first Kodak cameras in the early 1890’s, waiting for exactly the right moment to capture aesthetic grace in even the most depressing setting. He even cropped and selected images in the darkroom for maximum artistic impact; he perhaps was the first artist to “paint” with photography, applying classical principles of composition and form to the ephemeral imagery of the plate. He was to later bring exposure to some of the most influential generation of American painters at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. This image uses the dichotomies of New York life---rich vs. poor, nature vs. city---as carefully arranged abstract forms, a sensibility he brought to the selection of art and artists for his influential gallery.

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