Realism, Early Photography, and Impressionism in France, Britain, and the United States, c. 1850-1880
Realism in France
Realism: an artistic tendency emerging in mid-nineteenth‑century France, later spreading to other European countries and the United States.
Emphasized empirical observation and truthful representation of everyday subjects.
Reacted against Neoclassicism and Romanticism, which Realists saw as escapist retreat into past, exotic, or imaginative worlds.
Key influences on Realism’s rise:
Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte: insisted that positive knowledge comes from observing the natural world and applying scientific methods to society amid urbanization and industrialization.
Photography as a truthful image; seen as an empirical instrument to capture reality.
Marx and Engels: scientific socialism; their Communist Manifesto (1848) identified class struggle as history’s motor and predicted the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie to create a classless society.
Realism arose after the Revolutions of 1848; depicted peasant and lower‑class subjects; linked to political liberalism and, in Courbet’s case, socialism (though Realist images could also be conservative).
Realism in practice and aims:
Pioneering French Realists: Gustave Courbet and Jean‑François Millet portrayed working‑class and rural life.
Édouard Manet shifted focus to modern urban and suburban life; his circle included Impressionists who pursued modern leisure scenes.
Techniques emphasized material reality: Courbet used thick paint; Manet employed a loose, sketchy manner; many Impressionists painted en plein air with rapid strokes and pure color.
Emphasis on line, shape, form, space, color, and texture; opened pathways to modernist abstraction explored by Post‑Impressionists (see Chapter 2).
Tensions with academic art:
Academic art promoted antiquity and Renaissance ideals, study of nature, and the live model; dominant in France at the Académie des Beaux‑Arts and École des Beaux‑Arts, with the Salon as main Paris exhibition.
Realists and Impressionists faced rejection by Salon juries; their works often deemed poorly executed or offensive by conservative critics.
Realist and Impressionist pioneers are now viewed as avant‑garde and foundational for modern art.
Realism in France: leading figures and works
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
Emerged from Ornans; rejected École des Beaux‑Arts training; connected with radical thinkers (Proudhon, Champfleury).
1848 Revolutions shaped his political commitments; publicly aligned with peasant and working‑class subjects.
Major works:
The Stonebreakers (1849):
depicts an adolescent boy and an older man breaking stones; material reality emphasized with thick paint and palette knife; monumental yet unheroic, akin to a modern democratic history painting.
Interpretation: socialist critique of proletariat exploitation, as seen by Proudhon.
A Burial at Ornans (1849–50):
nearly 7 meters wide; more than forty figures and a dog; depicts Ornans residents at a funeral; not allegorical or moralizing; democratic representation of provincial life; women featured equally with men despite legal/social inequality.
Style: spatial compression, stark color contrasts, crowding, and lack of overt emotion; recalls popular woodcuts and lithographs Courbet admired; anti‑hierarchical stance.
Reception: conservative critics attacked the scale and vulgarity; Champfleury defended Courbet as truthful Realism.
1855 Paris Universal Exposition: Courbet submitted fourteen paintings; three rejected; he then organized a rival show titled Du Réalisme; declared his aim to translate the mores and era’s look into living art, inspiring Manet and the Impressionists to exhibit independently.
Jean‑François Millet (1814–1875)
Not politically outspoken or avant‑garde, but aligned with Realism through peasant subject matter.
Associated with Barbizon School (Theodore Rousseau) after leaving Paris in 1849.
Notable work:
The Gleaners (1857):
three women gleaning after harvest; monumental in scale and composed with restrained color to convey dignity of poverty.
Reception: controversial at the 1857 Salon; some critics found imagery ugly or menacing; others see it as conservative in elevating poverty to classical status; composition emphasizes democratic portrayal of rural labor.
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899)
Conservative Realist focusing on animals; best‑known for Plowing in the Nivernais (1849) and The Horse Fair (1853).
Plowing in the Nivernais (1849):
large, smooth, academy‑aligned rendering of rural labor; positive portrayal of rural toil; admired by Second Empire authorities; earned Bonheur the Légion d’Honneur in 1865 (first woman to receive it).
Bonheur’s life: cross‑dressing permit to dress as a man in public; long‑term partnership with Nathalie Micas; lived with many animals at her estate; her unconventional life contrasted with her conservative art; her animal subjects reflect an ideal of freedom from social constraint.
Realism in Britain
Realism in Britain focused on meticulous observation and a highly colored linear style, notably by the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB): Hunt, Millais, Rossetti (founded 1848 in London).
Goals and stance:
Rejected academic conventions traced to Raphael; sought to renew British art by rejecting artificial chiaroscuro, idealized figures, and harmonious compositions.
Looked to fourteenth‑ and fifteenth‑century painters preceding Raphael (e.g., van Eyck, Fra Angelico) for inspiration, but did not imitate their styles; aimed to observe nature freshly.
John Ruskin urged fidelity to nature as a path to moral and spiritual truth: “Go to Nature … having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”
The Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
Members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Focus: moralized, biblically or literarily themed, sacred or literary subject matter; sharp focus, sermonizing quality, and direct nature study contrasted with French Realists.
John Everett Millais (1829–1896)
Prodigy; RA member at 11;
Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop) (1849–50, fig. 1.4):
ambitious, highly detailed naturalism; scene set in an Oxford Street carpenter’s shop; used real people and even sheep’s heads for background flock.
Reception: harsh reviews from contemporaries (e.g., Dickens) due to perceived ordinariness of the biblical subject; later recognized as a premier technical realist of the PRB.
Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893)
Associated with PRB though not a formal member; explored Realism via modern life subjects.
Work (1852–65, fig. 1.5):
monumental, crowded tableau celebrating labor; navvies excavating a water main; contrasts with images of poverty (barefoot, ragged children) and wealth (bvanced class figures) in the same composition; includes four quotes about labor on the frame (e.g., Proverbs 22:29).
Emphasizes modern life, social reform, and the moral value of labor; Carlyle and Maurice depicted as “brainworkers” in the painting’s right side, signaling reformist ideals.
The Later Pre‑Raphaelite Movement (c. 1860s–1880s)
Rossetti and Edward Burne‑Jones led a movement away from contemporary reality toward romantic, historical, or imagined subjects; Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) and Burne‑Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) exemplify this shift toward ideal beauty.
The Aesthetic Movement (late 1860s–1900) in Britain
Core idea: art for art’s sake; pure beauty over moral or social messaging.
Leading figures: James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American expatriate, active in London);
Whistler’s Realist to Aesthetic transition: French schooling, focus on London life, and then a Japanese‑influenced simplified design and color palette.
Nocturnes of the Thames:
Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75, fig. 1.6); Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) (1875).
Whistler’s aim: to separate art’s form from descriptive narrative; he described nocturnes as “an arrangement of line, form, and color” with musical associations (e.g., “nocturne” as a musical term).
Controversy: critics (e.g., Ruskin) attacked his abstraction; Whistler sued for libel and won minimal damages but asserted the value of formal qualities over illustrative content.
Japonisme (box and box text)
Japanese art’s influence on Western artists surged after the 1853 opening of Japan to foreign trade; ukiyo‑e prints by Hiroshige and others circulated in the West.
Key features artists borrowed:
Elevated/slanted perspectives, asymmetrical compositions, flat shapes, cropped forms.
Impact across artists: Whistler, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Toulouse‑Lautrec, Gauguin, van Gogh, etc.
The Early Technical Development of Photography
Photography’s invention date and methods: announced in 1839; daguerreotype and calotype.
Daguerreotype (Daguerre, 1787–1851; France): images are unique and highly detailed; on mirror‑like copper plates with silver iodide; developed with mercury vapor; fixed with salt solution; short exposure times emerged by 1841.
Calotype (Talbot, 1800–1877; England): negative on paper; allows unlimited prints via contact printing; less sharp than daguerreotypes.
Public perception: seen as natural representations; photographs were used in portrait studios, in industry, or as scientific/ documentary records.
Positional shifts: initially seen as rival to painting; some feared painting’s decline; some artists used photography to aid painting (e.g., Courbet, Degas, Eakins).
The Wet Collodion process ( Archer, 1833–1869) (early 1850s): glass plates coated with collodion and silver nitrate; sharp detail; required immediate development while wet; outdoor use required a portable darkroom.
Albumen prints (Blanquart‑Évrard, 1850): albumen‑coated paper; produced rich detail and tonal range; standard until the 1890s when gelatin/collodion papers supplanted it.
Photography as Art vs Documentary:
Some photographers pursued artistic aims (The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Rejlander, 1857; Le Gray’s painterly landscapes and seascapes).
Others pursued documentary aims (Nadar, Cameron) or scientific/documentary recording (Bradley, Brady, O’Sullivan).
Masters of Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century Portrait Photography
Nadar (Gaspard‑Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910)
Paris portrait studio (1855–1873); originated from caricature drawing; shifted from Panthéon project (Panthéon of literary greats) to portrait photography.
1856 perspective on photography: photography can teach technique but the artistry lies in “moral grasp of the subject” and “an intimate portrait.”
Approach to sitters: engaged them in conversation; no props; plain backgrounds; focus on their features and attire.
Notable sitter: George Sand (c. 1864), renowned writer who wore men’s clothing and had many affairs; Sand portrait shows her imposing presence.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
British photographer; began at age 48; produced enduring portraits and imaginative composite images inspired by Bible, classical myth, and literature.
Aimed to ennoble photography by uniting the real with the ideal; sought to capture truth through poetry and beauty.
Notable portrait: Sir John Herschel (1867), shot with slight blur to give a spiritual/poetic quality.
Documentary Photography and Civil War Photography
The mid‑nineteenth century also produced documentary photography; many photographs served practical roles (science, territory surveys, historical records).
Civil War photography in the United States flourished through Mathew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan; Brady used many photographers to document the war.
The Gettysburg image A Harvest of Death (July 1863) by Timothy O’Sullivan; published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866).
O’Sullivan’s photograph is stark and unmanipulated, confronting death; Alexander Gardner contextualized the image as a moral warning to prevent future calamities.
The Painting of Modern Life: Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
Manet: pivotal Realist painter focused on modern life in and around Paris; studied with Thomas Couture; influenced by Velázquez; absorbed old Master techniques into a modern idiom.
Relationship with Baudelaire’s theory of modern life (The Painter of Modern Life, 1859): modernity as ephemera to distill the eternal; the flâneur as ideal observer who watches but remains detached.
Philosophical stance towards gender and spectatorship: Manet’s works on prostitution reveal social realities while challenging traditional depictions of female sexuality.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
Rejected by the 1863 Salon; displayed at the Salon des Refusés; controversial for its depiction of male students with a nude woman, triggering public scandal.
Possible referential gestures: references to Titian’s Pastoral Concert and a Marcantonio Raimondi‑after‑Raphael composition; self‑conscious engagement with Old Masters that signals a critique of academic tradition.
Formal qualities: flattened lighting and color blocks; foreground figure larger than perspective would dictate; sketch‑like handling; breaks with the illusionistic tradition; reveals painting as an arrangement rather than a mirror of nature.
Manet’s intent: to reveal the gap between museum painting conventions and modern urban life; a sly critique of academic nudity and social conventions; invites viewer complicity and irony.
Olympia, 1863
A scandal at the 1865 Salon; depicts a reclining nude courtesan with a Black maid presenting flowers; Olympia’s stare and posture challenge the viewer and gatekeepers of morality.
Based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino but reimagined as a living, modern Parisian sex worker; marks a stark departure from idealized classical nudes.
Formal reception: criticized for harsh lighting contrasts and lack of modeling; some praised for raw honesty; Zola celebrated its modern handling of light and surface.
Manet’s last major painting: A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère (1882)
Set in a popular Paris nightclub; features a barmaid behind a marble counter with a still life of liquor and flowers; a top‑hatted customer appears in the mirror behind her, creating ambiguity about the relationship between the two.
The composition complicates spatial perspective; the mirror’s angle shifts the viewer’s position and adds interpretive puzzle about the scene.
The Impressionists (1870s–1880s)
Emerged from Manet’s circle, organized a separate exhibition system to bypass the Salon; formed Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.; first exhibition in 1874 in Paris.
Core members (with others joining across eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886): Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre‑Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley; most except Caillebotte and Cassatt joined.
Goals and methods:
Rejected the Salon’s juried authority; sought independent exhibitions to attract press and buyers.
Emphasized direct, fresh observation of modern life and outdoor landscapes; used rapid, unblended color and sketchy brushwork; often painted en plein air.
Monet (1840–1926)
Leader of the movement; known for bright, light‑filled landscapes painted en plein air; technique involved rapid, broken brushstrokes of pure color that blend at a viewing distance.
Early method and pedagogy: advised painting directly by assembling color patches rather than detailed mixing; aim to capture impression rather than exact detail.
Early career: Le Havre origins; studied with Gleyre; formed associations with Renoir, Sisley, Bazille.
Notable works and development:
Women in the Garden (1866–67): rejection by the 1867 Salon; example of the shift toward modern life depicted in bright color and social scenes.
The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874, fig. 1.16): demonstrates Monet’s study of water, sky, and reflections; composition shows figures as small elements within a broader environment; demonstrates varied brushwork: choppy blues/greens for water; thicker strokes for trees; a restrained, atmospheric sky.
Later systematic series (1890s): Rouen Cathedral series (e.g., The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light, 1894) exploring light over architecture; Giverny wheat stacks and other subjects; painting achieved through multiple layers and memory rather than direct observation alone.
Monet’s philosophy: painting as feeling and sensation as much as appearance; painstaking discipline yields spontaneous‑looking results.
Pierre‑Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Focused on figure painting; sought to translate impressions of nature into loose, bright brushwork; from Limoges; earlier trained as a porcelain painter; joined Gleyre’s studio; social circle included Manet.
Early career: some Salon acceptance (1864–1869), but frequent rejections in 1872–73.
Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876): depiction of Montmartre’s outdoor dance hall; vibrant, idealized social life; features a lively crowd and a central couple dancing; painterly style blends dark blues, purples, violets with warm tones; sense of restless movement.
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
Central female figure in Impressionism; exhibited in all but one of the eight exhibitions.
Background: upper‑middle class; primarily painted intimate domestic interiors and gardens; studied with Corot in 1860; influenced by him’s poetic, airy brushwork; Manet became brother‑in‑law in 1874.
Notable works: The Butterfly Hunt (1874, fig. 1.18) painted en plein air in Edma’s garden; depicts Morisot with daughter Jeanne and Blanche; swift, light brushwork evokes fleeting impressions of nature and movement.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Core Impressionist; preferred to call himself a Realist or an Independent; studied at the École des Beaux‑Arts; traveled to Italy for drawing from the Old Masters.
Focused on modern life, especially Parisian entertainment; preferred studio composition from memory, drawings, and photographs rather than plein air painting; careful draftsmanship coexists with bold color use.
Notable subjects: ballet dancers; over 600 works depicting dancers in performance and rehearsal; early works often from lower‑class female dancers.
The Rehearsal (c. 1874, fig. 1.19): interior with back‑lighted windows; unconventional, fragmented composition; multiple figures arranged in a dynamic, non‑central manner; inspired by Japanese woodblock prints (Japonisme) which influenced Degas’ cropped perspectives.
Later works (1880s) include unidealized nude bathers in domestic interiors (e.g., Le Tub, 1886); Degas described his subjects as the “human animal busy with herself, a cat licking itself,” reflecting a blend of realism and voyeuristic perspective; debates over whether these images are misogynistic or sincere depictions of daily life.
Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)
American expatriate who participated in the 1879 Impressionist exhibition and contributed to the group’s shows in the 1880s.
Subjects: women of her race and class in domestic interiors, gardens, or at the theater; training in Philadelphia and Paris; influenced by Degas to adopt a lighter palette and looser brushwork while maintaining strong drawing.
Works on spectatorship and gendered gaze:
In the Loge (1878, fig. 1.20): a woman in a box uses opera glasses; foreground subject actively watches others while the viewer is the object of surveillance; interpreted as a feminist assertion of woman’s agency within a male‑centered culture.
Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879): another loge scene conveying social display and gaze.
Realism in Later Nineteenth‑Century American Painting
American Realism followed Civil War; sought to depict native subjects—people, daily life, and landscapes—while forging a national identity distinct from Europe.
American Realists of the 1870s–1880s: Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner; shared interest in observational accuracy and modern life, with distinctly American subjects and social themes.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Began as a Boston lithographer; moved to New York as a freelancer in 1859; Civil War artist‑correspondent for Harpers Weekly; 1866–67: a year in Paris likely influenced by Millet and Barbizon.
Theme: outdoor leisure and American life; notable series: the country school motif (early 1870s), including Snap the Whip (1872). The scene emphasizes teamwork, athleticism, and national optimism; bright light, bold figures; a one‑room schoolhouse as backdrop signals modern changes and nostalgia for rural life.
Homer’s style: bold, blunt, brightly lit figures with simple forms; praised as distinctly American and less influenced by European schools.
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Highly trained academically (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; École des Beaux‑Arts with Jean‑Léon Gérôme); influenced by Velázquez (via Rembrandt/Rubens approach).
Major works and methods:
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871: outdoors, with precise perspectival studies; a study in optical realism and scientific precision.
The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross), 1875: life‑size depiction of a surgeon performing an amputation in an amphitheater; emphasizes science, rationality, and medical pedagogy; intense light highlights the surgeon and instruments; the painting’s realism caused controversy and was rejected from the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
Eakins’s realism approach involved underpainting and glazing (indirect painting), achieving translucency and depth unlike Homer’s more opaque technique; effort to capture anatomy and precision.
Eakins later faced professional consequences for controversy around anatomy instruction (1876 Centennial; 1886 resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy for removing a male model’s loin cloth in a class with female students).
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937)
American painter, African American origin; lived in Paris; achieved success at the Salon; studied under Eakins (1880–82) in Philadelphia; moved to Paris (1891) and specialized in Christian subjects.
The Banjo Lesson (1893, fig. 1.23): intimate interior scene of an elder man teaching a boy to play banjo; warm lighting from fire and left light creates reverent, contemplative mood.
Tanner’s work counters racial stereotypes of Black musicians; emphasizes education and transmission of culture; a dignified portrayal of African American life within a modern realist framework.
Key terms and ideas to remember
Realism: empirical observation, truthful representation of everyday life; opposition to escapist historical/mythological painting.
Positivism: knowledge from observation, use of scientific methods in social reform.
“Nocturne” (Whistler): a painting title linking painting to music; emphasis on line, form, color, and mood over narrative content.
Flâneur (Baudelaire): a leisurely, observant urban observer; Manet’s modern life subjects respond to this idea; the modern spectator’s role is central to understanding modern life.
Japonisme: influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Western modern art; introduced new compositional strategies (cropping, flat shapes, unusual perspectives).
Salon and public reception: the Salon tradition defined success; Realists/Impressionists often faced rejection but later gained recognition as pioneers of new expression.
Photography and painting: the daguerreotype, calotype, wet collodion processes; debates on whether photography could be art; some painters used photography as a tool for capturing models and lighting.
The shift from historical/mythological to daily life: a hallmark of Realism and early Impressionism; modern life as subject matter becomes central to 1860s–1880s art.
Realism in Britain
Summary:
Realism in Britain centered on empirical observation, strong color, and meticulous line; PRB artists rejected academic conventions and pursued moral and spiritual meanings through direct nature study.
PRB core members and aims:
William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848) seeking to renew British art by rejecting Raphael‑inspired academic conventions.
Ruskin’s maxim: “Go to Nature …” as a guiding principle for fidelity to nature and moral truth.
PRB’s emphasis on literary or biblical subject matter, with sharp focus and moralizing content, marked a contrast with French Realists who emphasized everyday life and democratic subject matter.
John Everett Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop), 1849–50
Realistic depiction of a biblical scene; set in an Oxford Street carpenter’s workshop; used real people and animals as models; faced harsh criticism for its literalness; later recognized as a pinnacle of technical realist painting in Britain.
Ford Madox Brown: Work (1852–65)
Grand, multi‑figural scene celebrating labor; set in Hampstead; features navvies digging a water main; contrasts between labor and poverty; includes depictions of wealth (leafleting temperance); euphemisms of class and social reform; Carlyle and Maurice depicted as “brainworkers” (two moral reformers) in the painting; frame quotes from Proverbs emphasize diligence.
The Later Pre‑Raphaelite Movement
Rossetti and Edward Burne‑Jones shifted toward romanticized depictions, historical or mythological settings; stylistic differences compared to Brown’s modern realist social commentary.
The Aesthetic Movement: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Aestheticism (l’art pour l’art) becomes a major English influence (1870–1900); Whistler abandons detailed realism of earlier career for a refined, contemplative beauty in his Nocturnes.
Nocturnes: nocturnal cityscapes and river scenes with subdued palettes; Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75) and Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) (1875) illustrate the reduction of subject matter to form and color; his titles emphasize music and composition rather than narrative.
Controversy: Whistler’s abstraction drew objections from critics like Ruskin; the courtroom confrontation highlighted the new modernist emphasis on art’s autonomy.
Japonisme
A broad Western fascination with Japanese art that influenced many Impressionists and other modern artists.
Hiroshige and ukiyo‑e prints:
Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge, No. 76 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857) (Figure 1.7): a woodblock print widely disseminated in the West.
Key stylistic features borrowed by Western artists: unusual angles and cropping, flat shapes, dynamic compositions, and decorative surface patterns.
Impact:
Search for new visual vocabularies broke with Renaissance illusionism and contributed to the development of modernist strategies across painting and printmaking.
The Early Photography (overview and significance for Realism and modern art)
Photography’s birth (1839): Daguerre (Daguerreotype, France) and Talbot (Calotype, England) announced publicly in 1839.
Daguerreotype: crisp, detailed images on silver‑plated copper; unique prints; short exposure times after improvements; fragile; not easily replicated.
Calotype: negative on paper; branding a positive print via contact printing; allowed unlimited prints; less sharp than daguerreotype.
Talbot described photography as the “pencil of nature.”
Public perception and early debates:
Photography was seen as a natural means of image production, but subjectivity remained in composition, lighting, focus, and framing.
The rise of photography threatened portrait painting’s market; painters such as Millais and Holman Hunt used detailed realism as a response to the photographic standard.
Some painters used photography as a tool (e.g., Courbet, Degas, Eakins) to capture models or lighting; Degas and Eakins were prolific photographers.
The Wet Collodion process (Archer, 1851) and Albumen prints (Blanquart‑Évrard, 1850)
Wet collodion: glass plate negative; rapid exposure times; could produce prints in multiple copies but required immediate development; outdoor work required portable darkrooms.
Albumen prints: prints on glossy albumen-coated paper; rich detail and tonal range; standard until the 1890s when gelatin/collodion papers dominated.
Photography as art vs documentary:
Some photographers pursued artful, staged compositions that mimicked painting (e.g., Rejlander’s The Two Ways of Life, 1857) with allegorical content.
Gustave Le Gray advocated for photography as a legitimate art form, achieving painterly effects in landscapes and seascapes; Brig upon the Water (1856) printed from a single negative, among his major achievements.
Masters of mid‑nineteenth‑century portrait photography
Oscar Rejlander (1813–1875): used combination printing; The Two Ways of Life (1857) assembled from 30 negatives; a stage‑like, allegorical, moralizing composition.
Le Gray (1820–1884): painterly seascapes and landscapes; his best known Brig upon the Water (1856) demonstrates a technical synthesis of sky and water in a single, well‑exposed negative; his work often misread as nocturnes due to mono‑chrome tonality.
Documentary photography and war photography
Civil War photography in the United States saw photographers capture camp scenes and battle aftermath; Brady’s studio network produced portraits and campaign imagery; O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death is a stark, unsentimental view of the dead, presented without heroic narrative.
Masters of Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century Portrait Photography: Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron
Nadar (Gaspard‑Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910)
Paris portrait studio (1855–1873); shifted from caricature to intimate portraiture.
Methods: engaged sitters in conversation, removed studio props, photographed against simple backdrops; created an approachable, psychologically insightful portrait style.
Notable sitter: George Sand (c. 1864): Sand’s portrait shows a dignified, imposing figure, consistent with her reputation as a leading cultural persona.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
British photographer who produced enduring portraits and imaginative, literary‑themed images; strongly influenced by the Pre‑Raphaelites.
Philosophical aim: combine the real and the ideal; use photography to express poetry and beauty while preserving truth.
Notable work: Sir John Herschel (1867), a portrait treated with a soft focus to convey intellectual energy and spiritual presence.
The purpose and range of portrait photography
Portrait photography served: scientific documentary use, surveying colonial territories, or recording important events and people; it also elevated photography to an art form with its own formal conventions.
The Painting of Modern Life: Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
Manet as a pivotal Realist figure focusing on modern life; influenced by Baudelaire’s ideas of modernity and flâneur observational stance.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Rejected by the Salon; presented at the Salon des Refusés in 1863; scandal due to the depiction of a nude woman in the presence of two fully dressed men.
Formal references to Renaissance masters (Titian’s Pastoral Concert; Raimondi after Raphael) suggest a dialogue with Western painting history rather than straightforward imitation; a parody of academic conventions.
Formal innovations: rejection of tonal modeling; foreground figure placed on a larger scale than perspective would normally permit; background landscape painted with sketchy, flat handling; emphasizes surface and materiality over illusionistic depth.
Interpretation: Manet critiques the gap between museum painting conventions and contemporary life; questions traditional representation of sexuality and class; foreshadows modernism’s self‑conscious treatment of painting as a constructed image.
Olympia (1863)
Sequel to Déjeuner; depicts a prostitute (courtesan) with a Black maid and flowers; her direct gaze challenges the viewer and unsettles social hierarchy.
Based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino but recast as a contemporary Parisian figure; emphasizes social and racial hierarchies in 19th‑century France; leverages stark lighting contrasts and anti‑idealized body form (Courbet’s critique of “modeling” vs. “flat” painting).
Public reception: controversial for its explicit subject matter and confrontational style; some celebrated its modernity, others found it indecent.
Manet’s Last Major Painting: A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère (1882)
Set in a Paris nightclub; the central figure, a barmaid, is mirrored by a top‑hatted client; the reflection in the mirror is displaced and angled, creating interpretive ambiguity about the scene and relationships.
The painting embodies modernist concerns: ambiguous perspective, the role of the spectator, and the commodification of social interactions in urban life.
The Impressionists’ emergence and Manet’s influence
The Impressionists took cues from Manet (modern life, loose brushwork) but pursued broader experimentation: rapid plein air painting and more systematic layout and composition.
The movement arose from a collective rejection of the Salon’s authority and sought to present works without jury oversight, relying on independent exhibitions and networks (e.g., Durand‑Ruel as a key dealer).
The Impressionists
Core ideas and aims:
Translate direct visual experience of nature into painting with rapidly applied strokes of pure color to capture fleeting effects of light.
Combine two tendencies: (1) painterly translation of the momentary experience of nature; (2) composed scenes that mimic spontaneous slices of modern life.
Central theme: modern leisure in Paris and the French countryside; emergence of a new middle class with time for outings; leisure, promenades, picnics, boating, music halls.
The Impressionists’ method involved experimentation with color, light, and composition; they often painted en plein air to capture fleeting atmospheric conditions.
The movement’s infrastructure and commercialization
The group organized eight significant exhibitions (1874–1886), each with different rosters; the only consistent participant across all eight was Camille Pissarro.
The group sought to bypass the Salon and create direct sales channels; Durand‑Ruel emerged as a crucial dealer who nurtured a lasting market for their works.
Monet: continued to explore light, atmosphere, and color throughout his career
While Monet remained engaged with landscape and seascape subjects, his approach to color and optics matured into systematic series.
Renoir: focused on figure painting and social life, rather than pure landscape; sought to capture human vitality and social interaction; his Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) is a celebrated example of Impressionist social life.
Berthe Morisot: important female Impressionist; depicted intimate scenes of family life and gardens; her work pushed painting toward a more intimate, domestic sphere.
Edgar Degas: a realist in the Impressionist circle; emphasized studio composition and human bodies in motion; crafted innovative, cropped perspectives inspired by Japonisme; deeply studied dancers, laundresses, and other working women.
Mary Cassatt: American participant in the Impressionist movement; integrated into Degas’s circle; focused on scenes of women in private or public life, particularly interior settings and theater-related scenes; uses a refined brushwork and light palette.
Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Degas, Cassatt: Portraits, Landscapes, and Genre Scenes (focused synthesis)
Monet (landscapes and en plein air): The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874) showcases impressionist handling of water, sky, and light; its composition reveals disciplined use of color and brushwork to render atmosphere rather than precise detail.
Renoir (figures and social life): Ball at the Moulin de la Galette demonstrates a lively, sunlit outdoor social scene with a unification of color and movement through loose brushwork.
Morisot (domestic and intimate scenes): The Butterfly Hunt (1874) emphasizes tender, intimate portrayals of mother and child in outdoor spaces; uses light, airy brushwork.
Degas (composition and figure studies): The Rehearsal (c. 1874) uses unusual vantage points (angled perspective, cropped figures) to convey a fleeting moment in rehearsal; his ballet subjects reveal an analytic approach to movement and form; his work often critiques the social gaze (voyeurism) and gender roles.
Cassatt (women’s perspective in modern life): In the Loge (1878); Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879); Cassatt’s works analyze women’s experiences and social visibility within theater life and public spaces; her paintings reflect shifting gender norms and assert female spectatorship.
Realism in Later Nineteenth‑Century American Painting
After the Civil War, American Realism blended a commitment to truthful depiction with modernist sensibilities; artists sought to define a distinctly American identity.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Early career in Boston; became a prominent Civil War illustrator and painter; influenced by Millet and Barbizon through a Paris stint (1866–67).
Known for outdoor leisure scenes and American rural life; notable work: Snap the Whip (1872): depicts boys playing a popular fall game near a one‑room schoolhouse in a nostalgic pastoral setting; the composition embodies American energy, teamwork, and national optimism; the style is bold, simple, and direct.
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Highly trained academically; studied Velázquez and the Old Masters; pursued intense realism and a scientific approach to painting.
Major works:
The Gross Clinic (1875): a life‑sized, dramatic anatomy lesson; light highlights the surgeon’s hands and the patient’s leg; the surrounding crowd is rendered with a clinical precision; the piece embodies medical science and rationality; its reception was controversial when shown at the Centennial Exhibition (1876) and across Philadelphia.
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871: a demonstration of precision perspective and realistic depiction of sport; a celebration of American vitality.
Eakins’s realism sometimes offended contemporary audiences, leading to professional friction (e.g., his resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886 over propriety concerns).
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937)
Black American painter who found success in Paris; studied in Philadelphia under Eakins; well known for Christian subjects.
The Banjo Lesson (1893): tenderness and reverence in a Southern interior; warm light from the fire and sunlit room create an intimate, respectful scene emphasizing cultural transmission and education rather than stereotype.
American Realism’s broader significance
The post‑Civil War period produced a uniquely American realism that paralleled European developments in its fidelity to everyday life and social issues, while centering American people and landscapes.
Key figures, dates, and terms to remember (quick reference)
Revolutions: 1848 Revolutions in Europe; Second Republic; Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1851–1870).
Important dates for major works:
Courbet, The Stonebreakers (1849)
Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50)
Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais (1849)
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair (1853)
Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Manet, Olympia (1863)
Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75)
Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life (1857)
Monet, The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874)
Renoir, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876)
Morisot, The Butterfly Hunt (1874)
Degas, The Rehearsal (c. 1874)
Cassatt, In the Loge (1878)
Homer, Snap the Whip (1872)
Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)
Tanner, The Banjo Lesson (1893)
Key terms:
Realism, Positivism, Communist Manifesto (1848), Salons, Barbizon School, Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood, Ruskin, flâneur, Japonisme, daguerreotype, calotype, wet collodion, albumen prints, combination printing, Nocturne, l’art pour l’art, syndicate/Salon des Refusés, déjà vu of modern life in art, and the shift toward modernist abstraction.
Major themes:
The democratic, anti‑hierarchical impulse in Realism; the moral and social questions raised by depicting labor, poverty, and the working class.
The tension between modern life and classical tradition; the appropriation of Renaissance and classical models as critique or homage.
The emergence of modern life as legitimate subject matter; the rise of leisure, urban life, and the social spaces of contemporary culture.
Connections to earlier lectures and to real‑world relevance:
Realism as a bridge between traditional academic painting and modernist experimentation; the movement’s insistence on truth in representation foreshadowed later modernist explorations of form and perception.
The period’s innovations in photography deeply influenced painting’s approach to representation, perspective, and the valuation of painterly materiality.
The works of Manet and the Impressionists anticipated later debates about art’s autonomy, viewer active role, and the financial and institutional mechanisms (galleries, dealers) sustaining new art.
Ethical, philosophical, and practical implications:
Realism’s political associations (Courbet’s socialist stance; Millet’s rural dignity; Bonheur’s balanced naturalism) raised questions about the role of art in society and its relationship to power.
The emergence of the flâneur and modern urban gaze confronted issues of gender, class, race, and spectatorship in representation (e.g., Manet’s Olympia; Cassatt’s In the Loge).
The debate about photography as art vs. documentation highlighted the evolving status of different media in representing reality and shaping perception.
Formulas, numbers, and references (LaTeX):
Dimensions: A Burial at Ornans: 315 imes 668 ext{ cm}
The Gleaners: 83.5 imes 110 ext{ cm}
Olympia: (size not specified in transcript)
The Band across major works and dates: 1849-1850,\, 1849,\, 1853,\, 1857,\, 1863,\, 1872-75,\, 1874-1886,\
Realism in France
Realism: an artistic tendency emerging in mid-nineteenth‑century France, later spreading to other European countries and the United States.
Emphasized empirical observation and truthful representation of everyday subjects. This meant depicting subjects from contemporary life, often working-class or rural, observed directly rather than idealized or drawn from historical or mythological narratives.
Reacted against Neoclassicism and Romanticism, which Realists saw as escapist retreat into past, exotic, or imaginative worlds.
Key influences on Realism’s rise:
Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte: insisted that positive knowledge comes from observing the natural world and applying scientific methods to society amid urbanization and industrialization. This fostered an intellectual climate that valued observable facts and a scientific approach to societal understanding, directly influencing artists to depict their contemporary world with objective truthfulness.
Photography as a truthful image; seen as an empirical instrument to capture reality. Photography's ability to mechanically record details without artistic interpretation challenged painting to redefine its purpose, pushing Realists to focus on the unembellished truth of experience rather than idealized beauty.
Marx and Engels: scientific socialism; their Communist Manifesto (1848) identified class struggle as history’s motor and predicted the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie to create a classless society. The document’s publication resonated with the social upheavals of 1848, encouraging artists to portray the dignity and struggles of the working class, thereby embedding a socio-political dimension into their art.
Realism arose after the Revolutions of 1848; depicted peasant and lower‑class subjects; linked to political liberalism and, in Courbet’s case, socialism (though Realist images could also be conservative). The revolutions highlighted class divisions and the demand for social change, prompting artists to engage with the lives of ordinary people who were largely absent from traditional academic art.
Realism in practice and aims:
Pioneering French Realists: Gustave Courbet and Jean‑François Millet portrayed working‑class and rural life.
Édouard Manet shifted focus to modern urban and suburban life; his circle included Impressionists who pursued modern leisure scenes.
Techniques emphasized material reality: Courbet used thick paint; Manet employed a loose, sketchy manner; many Impressionists painted en plein air with rapid strokes and pure color. Courbet’s use of impasto, often applied with a palette knife, made the paint itself a tangible, physical presence, mirroring the raw, unrefined nature of his subjects. Manet's technique, with its visible brushstrokes and simplified forms, emphasized the two-dimensionality of the canvas and the act of painting, rather than creating an illusionistic window into another world.
Emphasis on line, shape, form, space, color, and texture; opened pathways to modernist abstraction explored by Post‑Impressionists (see Chapter 2).
Tensions with academic art:
Academic art promoted antiquity and Renaissance ideals, study of nature, and the live model; dominant in France at the Académie des Beaux‑Arts and École des Beaux‑Arts, with the Salon as main Paris exhibition.
Realists and Impressionists faced rejection by Salon juries; their works often deemed poorly executed or offensive by conservative critics.
Realist and Impressionist pioneers are now viewed as avant‑garde and foundational for modern art.
Realism in France: leading figures and works
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
Emerged from Ornans; rejected École des Beaux‑Arts training; connected with radical thinkers (Proudhon, Champfleury).
1848 Revolutions shaped his political commitments; publicly aligned with peasant and working‑class subjects.
Major works:
The Stonebreakers (1849): depicts an adolescent boy and an older man breaking stones; material reality emphasized with thick paint and palette knife; monumental yet unheroic, akin to a modern democratic history painting. This monumental scale, typically reserved for historical or religious grandeur, applied to common laborers, elevated their mundane, grueling work to a powerful statement about social class and the anonymous nature of manual labor, implicitly critiquing the hierarchy of traditional art subjects.
Interpretation: socialist critique of proletariat exploitation, as seen by Proudhon.
A Burial at Ornans (1849–50): nearly 7 meters wide; more than forty figures and a dog; depicts Ornans residents at a funeral; not allegorical or moralizing; democratic representation of provincial life; women featured equally with men despite legal/social inequality. The painting's vast canvas and horizontal format, traditionally used for heroic battle scenes or grand narratives, here democratically presented a local funeral, giving equal visual weight to each common villager. This challenged the academic hierarchy of subjects, where such an everyday event, especially one without allegorical meaning or idealized figures, was considered unworthy of grand painting.
Style: spatial compression, stark color contrasts, crowding, and lack of overt emotion; recalls popular woodcuts and lithographs Courbet admired; anti‑hierarchical stance.
Reception: conservative critics attacked the scale and vulgarity; Champfleury defended Courbet as truthful Realism.
1855 Paris Universal Exposition: Courbet submitted fourteen paintings; three rejected; he then organized a rival show titled Du Réalisme; declared his aim to translate the mores and era’s look into living art, inspiring Manet and the Impressionists to exhibit independently. Courbet's refusal to adapt his style for the official Salon and his establishment of a private pavilion were a radical act of artistic independence, setting a precedent for avant-garde artists to control their own exhibitions and artistic narratives, directly influencing how Manet and the Impressionists later broke away from the Salon system.
Jean‑François Millet (1814–1875)
Not politically outspoken or avant‑garde, but aligned with Realism through peasant subject matter.
Associated with Barbizon School (Theodore Rousseau) after leaving Paris in 1849.
Notable work: The Gleaners (1857): three women gleaning after harvest; monumental in scale and composed with restrained color to convey dignity of poverty. The immense scale and low vantage point emphasized the physical arduousness of the women's task and their marginalized position at the bottom of the agricultural hierarchy. Critics found the depiction of 'ugly' peasant women without idealization or narrative to be threatening, particularly in the socio-political climate following the 1848 revolutions, where images of the working class could be interpreted as calls for social reform or even revolution. Others defended it as a dignified, almost classical, portrayal of rural poverty.
Reception: controversial at the 1857 Salon; some critics found imagery ugly or menacing; others see it as conservative in elevating poverty to classical status; composition emphasizes democratic portrayal of rural labor.
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899)
Conservative Realist focusing on animals; best‑known for Plowing in the Nivernais (1849) and The Horse Fair (1853).
Plowing in the Nivernais (1849): large, smooth, academy‑aligned rendering of rural labor; positive portrayal of rural toil; admired by Second Empire authorities; earned Bonheur the Légion d’Honneur in 1865 (first woman to receive it).
Bonheur’s life: cross‑dressing permit to dress as a man in public; long‑term partnership with Nathalie Micas; lived with many animals at her estate; her unconventional life contrasted with her conservative art; her animal subjects reflect an ideal of freedom from social constraint.
Realism in Britain
Realism in Britain focused on meticulous observation and a highly colored linear style, notably by the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB): Hunt, Millais, Rossetti (founded 1848 in London).
Goals and stance:
Rejected academic conventions traced to Raphael; sought to renew British art by rejecting artificial chiaroscuro, idealized figures, and harmonious compositions. They believed that academic art after Raphael had become formulaic and superficial, employing artificial lighting (chiaroscuro) and idealized forms that obscured truth rather than revealing it. They instead championed a return to the perceived sincerity, sharp detail, and vibrant colors of early Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck and Fra Angelico, seeking a 'truth to nature' in every detail.
Looked to fourteenth‑ and fifteenth‑century painters preceding Raphael (e.g., van Eyck, Fra Angelico) for inspiration, but did not imitate their styles; aimed to observe nature freshly.
John Ruskin urged fidelity to nature as a path to moral and spiritual truth: “Go to Nature … having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”
The Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
Members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Focus: moralized, biblically or literarily themed, sacred or literary subject matter; sharp focus, sermonizing quality, and direct nature study contrasted with French Realists.
John Everett Millais (1829–1896)
Prodigy; RA member at 11; Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop) (1849–50, fig. 1.4): ambitious, highly detailed naturalism; scene set in an Oxford Street carpenter’s shop; used real people and even sheep’s heads for background flock. The meticulous realism, depicting ordinary individuals and a cluttered, authentic carpenter's shop, stripped the sacred narrative of its traditional reverence and grandeur. Charles Dickens famously condemned it as "mean, odious, and revolting," finding the depiction of the Holy Family as unidealized, common laborers to be blasphemous and vulgar. This reaction underscored the PRB's radical challenge to established notions of beauty and sacred art.
Reception: harsh reviews from contemporaries (e.g., Dickens) due to perceived ordinariness of the biblical subject; later recognized as a premier technical realist of the PRB.
Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893)
Associated with PRB though not a formal member; explored Realism via modern life subjects.
Work (1852–65, fig. 1.5): monumental, crowded tableau celebrating labor; navvies excavating a water main; contrasts with images of poverty (barefoot, ragged children) and wealth (bvanced class figures) in the same composition; includes four quotes about labor on the frame (e.g., Proverbs 22:29). This ambitious painting served as a social commentary on Victorian England's class structure and the moral virtue of all forms of labor. By placing the "brainworkers" (Carlyle and Maurice) alongside the manual laborers, and depicting various social strata from the wealthy to the impoverished, Brown created a complex visual allegory about the interconnectedness and divisions within modern society. The numerous details invite a prolonged, didactic reading, characteristic of Pre-Raphaaelite moral aims.
Emphasizes modern life, social reform, and the moral value of labor; Carlyle and Maurice depicted as “brainworkers” in the painting’s right side, signaling reformist ideals.
The Later Pre‑Raphaelite Movement (c. 1860s–1880s)
Rossetti and Edward Burne‑Jones led a movement away from contemporary reality toward romantic, historical, or imagined subjects; Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) and Burne‑Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) exemplify this shift toward ideal beauty.
The Aesthetic Movement (late 1860s–1900) in Britain
Core idea: art for art’s sake; pure beauty over moral or social messaging.
Leading figures: James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American expatriate, active in London);-
Whistler’s Realist to Aesthetic transition: French schooling, focus on London life, and then a Japanese‑influenced simplified design and color palette.
Nocturnes of the Thames: Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75, fig. 1.6); Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) (1875).
Whistler’s aim: to separate art’s form from descriptive narrative; he described nocturnes as “an arrangement of line, form, and color” with musical associations (e.g., “nocturne” as a musical term). Whistler championed "art for art's sake" (l'art pour l'art), advocating that art should not serve moral, didactic, or narrative purposes but should exist solely for its own beauty and formal qualities, much like music. His Nocturnes, with their abstract titles, aimed to evoke a mood or sensation through color and composition, rather than illustrate a specific scene.
Controversy: critics (e.g., Ruskin) attacked his abstraction; Whistler sued for libel and won minimal damages but asserted the value of formal qualities over illustrative content. Ruskin, a prominent art critic, vehemently condemned Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) as a "pot of paint flung in the public's face," arguing that it lacked artistic skill and moral purpose crucial to art. Whistler's libel suit, though resulting in a symbolic penny in damages, was a seminal moment in art history, asserting the artist's right to pursue aesthetic innovations independent of public understanding or moral judgment.
Japonisme
Japanese art’s influence on Western artists surged after the 1853 opening of Japan to foreign trade; ukiyo‑e prints by Hiroshige and others circulated in the West.
Key features artists borrowed:
Elevated/slanted perspectives, asymmetrical compositions, flat shapes, cropped forms.
Impact across artists: Whistler, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Toulouse‑Lautrec, Gauguin, van Gogh, etc.
The Early Technical Development of Photography
Photography’s invention date and methods: announced in 1839; daguerreotype and calotype.
Daguerreotype (Daguerre, 1787–1851; France): images are unique and highly detailed; on mirror‑like copper plates with silver iodide; developed with mercury vapor; fixed with salt solution; short exposure times emerged by 1841. The exquisite detail of daguerreotypes created a sensation, offering a fidelity to reality hitherto unimaginable, but their uniqueness meant no copies could be made, limiting their widespread distribution.
Calotype (Talbot, 1800–1877; England): negative on paper; allows unlimited prints via contact printing; less sharp than daguerreotypes. The replicability of the calotype was revolutionary, laying the groundwork for photography's eventual role in mass communication and documentation, despite its comparatively softer focus.
Public perception: seen as natural representations; photographs were used in portrait studios, in industry, or as scientific/ documentary records.
Positional shifts: initially seen as rival to painting; some feared painting’s decline; some artists used photography to aid painting (e.g., Courbet, Degas, Eakins). Photography's emergence forced painters to reconsider their role. While some viewed it as a mechanical competitor, others, particularly Realists and Impressionists, utilized it as a tool for study—capturing fleeting moments, compositional ideas, or anatomical details that would be impractical to achieve with live models. It freed painting from the sole burden of objective representation, allowing artists to explore subjective vision.
The Wet Collodion process ( Archer, 1833–1869) (early 1850s): glass plates coated with collodion and silver nitrate; sharp detail; required immediate development while wet; outdoor use required a portable darkroom.
Albumen prints (Blanquart‑Évrard, 1850): albumen‑coated paper; produced rich detail and tonal range; standard until the 1890s when gelatin/collodion papers supplanted it.
Photography as Art vs Documentary:
Some photographers pursued artistic aims (The Two Ways of Life by Oscar Rejlander, 1857; Le Gray’s painterly landscapes and seascapes).
Others pursued documentary aims (Nadar, Cameron) or scientific/documentary recording (Bradley, Brady, O’Sullivan).
Masters of Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century Portrait Photography
Nadar (Gaspard‑Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910)
Paris portrait studio (1855–1873); originated from caricature drawing; shifted from Panthéon project (Panthéon of literary greats) to portrait photography.
1856 perspective on photography: photography can teach technique but the artistry lies in “moral grasp of the subject” and “an intimate portrait.”
Approach to sitters: engaged them in conversation; no props; plain backgrounds; focus on their features and attire.
Notable sitter: George Sand (c. 1864), renowned writer who wore men’s clothing and had many affairs; Sand portrait shows her imposing presence.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
British photographer; began at age 48; produced enduring portraits and imaginative composite images inspired by Bible, classical myth, and literature.
Aimed to ennoble photography by uniting the real with the ideal; sought to capture truth through poetry and beauty.
Notable portrait: Sir John Herschel (1867), shot with slight blur to give a spiritual/poetic quality.
Documentary Photography and Civil War Photography
The mid‑nineteenth century also produced documentary photography; many photographs served practical roles (science, territory surveys, historical records).
Civil War photography in the United States flourished through Mathew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan; Brady used many photographers to document the war.
The Gettysburg image A Harvest of Death (July 1863) by Timothy O’Sullivan; published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866).
O’Sullivan’s photograph is stark and unmanipulated, confronting death; Alexander Gardner contextualized the image as a moral warning to prevent future calamities.
The Painting of Modern Life: Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
Manet: pivotal Realist painter focused on modern life in and around Paris; studied with Thomas Couture; influenced by Velázquez; absorbed old Master techniques into a modern idiom.
Relationship with Baudelaire’s theory of modern life (The Painter of Modern Life, 1859): modernity as ephemera to distill the eternal; the flâneur as ideal observer who watches but remains detached.
Philosophical stance towards gender and spectatorship: Manet’s works on prostitution reveal social realities while challenging traditional depictions of female sexuality.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
Rejected by the 1863 Salon; displayed at the Salon des Refusés; controversial for its depiction of male students with a nude woman, triggering public scandal. The scandal arose not merely from the nudity, but from the unidealized, confrontational gaze of the nude woman, who stares directly at the viewer, challenging conventional propriety. Furthermore, her presence among fully dressed, contemporary men in a recognizable Parisian park setting made the scene seem explicitly modern and thus morally transgressive, unlike allegorical or mythological nudes that were acceptable in academic art.
Possible referential gestures: references to Titian’s Pastoral Concert and a Marcantonio Raimondi‑after‑Raphael composition; self‑conscious engagement with Old Masters that signals a critique of academic tradition.
Formal qualities: flattened lighting and color blocks; foreground figure larger than perspective would dictate; sketch‑like handling; breaks with the illusionistic tradition; reveals painting as an arrangement rather than a mirror of nature. Manet's deliberate flatness and stark contrasts, rejecting traditional chiaroscuro and academic modeling, consciously drew attention to the painted surface itself. This formal audacity, along with the unsettling perspective and "sketchy" finish, was seen as both radical and poorly executed by critics, but it foregrounded the artist's subjective vision and the artificiality of painting, paving the way for modernist abstraction.
Manet’s intent: to reveal the gap between museum painting conventions and modern urban life; a sly critique of academic nudity and social conventions; invites viewer complicity and irony.
Olympia, 1863
A scandal at the 1865 Salon; depicts a reclining nude courtesan with a Black maid presenting flowers; Olympia’s stare and posture challenge the viewer and gatekeepers of morality. The blunt, unidealized depiction of a contemporary sex worker, identified by the name "Olympia" and her accessories, directly confronted the Victorian hypocrisy surrounding female sexuality. Her direct, unapologetic gaze, contrasting sharply with the passive historical nudes like Titian's Venus of Urbino, was perceived as vulgar and threatening, as it implicated the male viewer in her profession and challenged societal norms of female modesty. The inclusion of the Black maid also highlighted racial and colonial undertones in Parisian society.
Based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino but reimagined as a living, modern Parisian sex worker; marks a stark departure from idealized classical nudes.
Formal reception: criticized for harsh lighting contrasts and lack of modeling; some praised for raw honesty; Zola celebrated its modern handling of light and surface.
Manet’s last major painting: A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère (1882)
Set in a popular Paris nightclub; features a barmaid behind a marble counter with a still life of liquor and flowers; a top‑hatted customer appears in the mirror behind her, creating ambiguity about the relationship between the two.
The composition complicates spatial perspective; the mirror’s angle shifts the viewer’s position and adds interpretive puzzle about the scene. The deliberate spatial ambiguity, particularly the dislocated reflection of the barmaid and customer, creates a disorienting, modern experience of urban anomie and detachment. It forces the viewer to actively engage with the painting's construction, questioning reality and representation, and subtly commenting on the transactional nature of social interactions in leisure spaces.
The Impressionists (1870s–1880s)
Emerged from Manet’s circle, organized a separate exhibition system to bypass the Salon; formed Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.; first exhibition in 1874 in Paris.
Core members (with others joining across eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886): Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre‑Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley; most except Caillebotte and Cassatt joined.
Goals and methods:
Rejected the Salon’s juried authority; sought independent exhibitions to attract press and buyers.
Emphasized direct, fresh observation of modern life and outdoor landscapes; used rapid, unblended color and sketchy brushwork; often painted en plein air. These techniques were crucial for capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere—the "impression"—of a specific moment. The use of pure, juxtaposed colors, rather than blended pigments, aimed to simulate how the eye perceived light in nature, and the swift, visible brushstrokes conveyed spontaneity and the artist's immediate experience.
Monet (1840–1926)
Leader of the movement; known for bright, light‑filled landscapes painted en plein air; technique involved rapid, broken brushstrokes of pure color that blend at a viewing distance.
Early method and pedagogy: advised painting directly by assembling color patches rather than detailed mixing; aim to capture impression rather than exact detail.
Early career: Le Havre origins; studied with Gleyre; formed associations with Renoir, Sisley, Bazille.
Notable works and development:
Women in the Garden (1866–67): rejection by the 1867 Salon; example of the shift toward modern life depicted in bright color and social scenes.
The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874, fig. 1.16): demonstrates Monet’s study of water, sky, and reflections; composition shows figures as small elements within a broader environment; demonstrates varied brushwork: choppy blues/greens for water; thicker strokes for trees; a restrained, atmospheric sky.
Later systematic series (1890s): Rouen Cathedral series (e.g., The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light, 1894) exploring light over architecture; Giverny wheat stacks and other subjects; painting achieved through multiple layers and memory rather than direct observation alone. These series demonstrated Monet's rigorous, almost scientific, study of how light transformed subjects at different times of day and in varying atmospheric conditions. By painting the same motif repeatedly, he sought to capture the ephemeral and subjective nature of perception, revealing how light itself becomes the primary subject, dissolving solid forms into vibrations of color.
Monet’s philosophy: painting as feeling and sensation as much as appearance; painstaking discipline yields spontaneous‑looking results.
Pierre‑Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Focused on figure painting; sought to translate impressions of nature into loose, bright brushwork; from Limoges; earlier trained as a porcelain painter; joined Gleyre’s studio; social circle included Manet.
Early career: some Salon acceptance (1864–1869), but frequent rejections in 1872–73.
Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876): depiction of Montmartre’s outdoor dance hall; vibrant, idealized social life; features a lively crowd and a central couple dancing; painterly style blends dark blues, purples, violets with warm tones; sense of restless movement.
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
Central female figure in Impressionism; exhibited in all but one of the eight exhibitions.
Background: upper‑middle class; primarily painted intimate domestic interiors and gardens; studied with Corot in 1860; influenced by him’s poetic, airy brushwork; Manet became brother‑in‑law in 1874.
Notable works: The Butterfly Hunt (1874, fig. 1.18) painted en plein air in Edma’s garden; depicts Morisot with daughter Jeanne and Blanche; swift, light brushwork evokes fleeting impressions of nature and movement.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Core Impressionist; preferred to call himself a Realist or an Independent; studied at the École des Beaux‑Arts; traveled to Italy for drawing from the Old Masters.
Focused on modern life, especially Parisian entertainment; preferred studio composition from memory, drawings, and photographs rather than plein air painting; careful draftsmanship coexists with bold color use.
Notable subjects: ballet dancers; over 600 works depicting dancers in performance and rehearsal; early works often from lower‑class female dancers.
The Rehearsal (c. 1874, fig. 1.19): interior with back‑lighted windows; unconventional, fragmented composition; multiple figures arranged in a dynamic, non‑central manner; inspired by Japanese woodblock prints (Japonisme) which influenced Degas’ cropped perspectives.
Later works (1880s) include unidealized nude bathers in domestic interiors (e.g., Le Tub, 1886); Degas described his subjects as the “human animal busy with herself, a cat licking itself,” reflecting a blend of realism and voyeuristic perspective; debates over whether these images are misogynistic or sincere depictions of daily life.
Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)
American expatriate who participated in the 1879 Impressionist exhibition and contributed to the group’s shows in the 1880s.
Subjects: women of her race and class in domestic interiors, gardens, or at the theater; training in Philadelphia and Paris; influenced by Degas to adopt a lighter palette and looser brushwork while maintaining strong drawing.
Works on spectatorship and gendered gaze:
In the Loge (1878, fig. 1.20): a woman in a box uses opera glasses; foreground subject actively watches others while the viewer is the object of surveillance; interpreted as a feminist assertion of woman’s agency within a male‑centered culture.
Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879): another loge scene conveying social display and gaze.
Realism in Later Nineteenth‑Century American Painting
American Realism followed Civil War; sought to depict native subjects—people, daily life, and landscapes—while forging a national identity distinct from Europe.
American Realists of the 1870s–1880s: Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner; shared interest in observational accuracy and modern life, with distinctly American subjects and social themes.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Began as a Boston lithographer; moved to New York as a freelancer in 1859; Civil War artist‑correspondent for Harpers Weekly; 1866–67: a year in Paris likely influenced by Millet and Barbizon.
Theme: outdoor leisure and American life; notable series: the country school motif (early 1870s), including Snap the Whip (1872). The scene emphasizes teamwork, athleticism, and national optimism; bright light, bold figures; a one‑room schoolhouse as backdrop signals modern changes and nostalgia for rural life.
Homer’s style: bold, blunt, brightly lit figures with simple forms; praised as distinctly American and less influenced by European schools.
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Highly trained academically (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; École des Beaux‑Arts with Jean‑Léon Gérôme); influenced by Velázquez (via Rembrandt/Rubens approach).
Major works and methods:
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871: outdoors, with precise perspectival studies; a study in optical realism and scientific precision.
The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross), 1875: life‑size depiction of a surgeon performing an amputation in an amphitheater; emphasizes science, rationality, and medical pedagogy; intense light highlights the surgeon and instruments; the painting’s realism caused controversy and was rejected from the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
Eakins’s realism approach involved underpainting and glazing (indirect painting), achieving translucency and depth unlike Homer’s more opaque technique; effort to capture anatomy and precision.
Eakins later faced professional consequences for controversy around anatomy instruction (1876 Centennial; 1886 resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy for removing a male model’s loin cloth in a class with female students).
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937)
American painter, African American origin; lived in Paris; achieved success at the Salon; studied under Eakins (1880–82) in Philadelphia; moved to Paris (1891) and specialized in Christian subjects.
The Banjo Lesson (1893, fig. 1.23): intimate interior scene of an elder man teaching a boy to play banjo; warm lighting from fire and left light creates reverent, contemplative mood.
Tanner’s work counters racial stereotypes of Black musicians; emphasizes education and transmission of culture; a dignified portrayal of African American life within a modern realist framework.
Key terms and ideas to remember
Realism: empirical observation, truthful representation of everyday life; opposition to escapist historical/mythological painting.
Positivism: knowledge from observation, use of scientific methods in social reform.
“Nocturne” (Whistler): a painting title linking painting to music; emphasis on line, form, color, and mood over narrative content.
Flâneur (Baudelaire): a leisurely, observant urban observer; Manet’s modern life subjects respond to this idea; the modern spectator’s role is central to understanding modern life.
Japonisme: influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Western modern art; introduced new compositional strategies (cropping, flat shapes, unusual perspectives).
Salon and public reception: the Salon tradition defined success; Realists/Impressionists often faced rejection but later gained recognition as pioneers of new expression.
Photography and painting: the daguerreotype, calotype, wet collodion processes; debates on whether photography could be art; some painters used photography as a tool for capturing models and lighting.
The shift from historical/mythological to daily life: a hallmark of Realism and early Impressionism; modern life as subject matter becomes central to 1860s–1880s art.
Realism in Britain - Summary:
Realism in Britain centered on empirical observation, strong color, and meticulous line; PRB artists rejected academic conventions and pursued moral and spiritual meanings through direct nature study.
PRB core members and aims:
William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848) seeking to renew British art by rejecting Raphael‑inspired academic conventions.
Ruskin’s maxim: “Go to Nature …” as a guiding principle for fidelity to nature and moral truth.
PRB’s emphasis on literary or biblical subject matter, with sharp focus and moralizing content, marked a contrast with French Realists who emphasized everyday life and democratic subject matter.
John Everett Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop), 1849–50
Realistic depiction of a biblical scene; set in an Oxford Street carpenter’s workshop; used real people and animals as models; faced harsh criticism for its literalness; later recognized as a pinnacle of technical realist painting in Britain.
Ford Madox Brown: Work (1852–65)
Grand, multi‑figural scene celebrating labor; set in Hampstead; features navvies digging a water main; contrasts between labor and poverty; includes depictions of wealth (leafleting temperance); euphemisms of class and social reform; Carlyle and Maurice depicted as “brainworkers” (two moral reformers) in the painting; frame quotes from Proverbs emphasize diligence.
The Later Pre‑Raphaelite Movement
Rossetti and Edward Burne‑Jones shifted toward romanticized depictions, historical or mythological settings; stylistic differences compared to Brown’s modern realist social commentary.
The Aesthetic Movement: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Aestheticism (l’art pour l’art) becomes a major English influence (1870–1900); Whistler abandons detailed realism of earlier career for a refined, contemplative beauty in his Nocturnes.
Nocturnes: nocturnal cityscapes and river scenes with subdued palettes; Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75) and Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) (1875) illustrate the reduction of subject matter to form and color; his titles emphasize music and composition rather than narrative.
Controversy: Whistler’s abstraction drew objections from critics like Ruskin; the courtroom confrontation highlighted the new modernist emphasis on art’s autonomy.
Japonisme
A broad Western fascination with Japanese art that influenced many Impressionists and other modern artists.
Hiroshige and ukiyo‑e prints:
Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge, No. 76 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857) (Figure 1.7): a woodblock print widely disseminated in the West.
Key stylistic features borrowed by Western artists: unusual angles and cropping, flat shapes, dynamic compositions, and decorative surface patterns.
Impact:
Search for new visual vocabularies broke with Renaissance illusionism and contributed to the development of modernist strategies across painting and printmaking.
The Early Photography (overview and significance for Realism and modern art)
Photography’s birth (1839): Daguerre (Daguerreotype, France) and Talbot (Calotype, England) announced publicly in 1839.
Daguerreotype: crisp, detailed images on silver‑plated copper; unique prints; short exposure times after improvements; fragile; not easily replicated.
Calotype: negative on paper; branding a positive print via contact printing; allowed unlimited prints; less sharp than daguerreotype.
Talbot described photography as the “pencil of nature.”
Public perception and early debates:
Photography was seen as a natural means of image production, but subjectivity remained in composition, lighting, focus, and framing.
The rise of photography threatened portrait painting’s market; painters such as Millais and Holman Hunt used detailed realism as a response to the photographic standard.
Some painters used photography as a tool (e.g., Courbet, Degas, Eakins) to capture models or lighting; Degas and Eakins were prolific photographers.
The Wet Collodion process (Archer, 1851) and Albumen prints (Blanquart‑Évrard, 1850)
Wet collodion: glass plate negative; rapid exposure times; could produce prints in multiple copies but required immediate development; outdoor work required portable darkrooms.
Albumen prints: prints on glossy albumen-coated paper; rich detail and tonal range; standard until the 1890s when gelatin/collodion papers dominated.
Photography as art vs documentary:
Some photographers pursued artful, staged compositions that mimicked painting (e.g., Rejlander’s The Two Ways of Life, 1857) with allegorical content.
Gustave Le Gray advocated for photography as a legitimate art form, achieving painterly effects in landscapes and seascapes; Brig upon the Water (1856) printed from a single negative, among his major achievements.
Masters of mid‑nineteenth‑century portrait photography
Oscar Rejlander (1813–1875): used combination printing; The Two Ways of Life (1857) assembled from 30 negatives; a stage‑like, allegorical, moralizing composition.
Le Gray (1820–1884): painterly seascapes and landscapes; his best known Brig upon the Water (1856) demonstrates a technical synthesis of sky and water in a single, well‑exposed negative; his work often misread as nocturnes due to mono‑chrome tonality.
Documentary photography and war photography
Civil War photography in the United States saw photographers capture camp scenes and battle aftermath; Brady’s studio network produced portraits and campaign imagery; O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death is a stark, unsentimental view of the dead, presented without heroic narrative.
Masters of Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century Portrait Photography: Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron
Nadar (Gaspard‑Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910)
Paris portrait studio (1855–1873); shifted from caricature to intimate portraiture.
Methods: engaged sitters in conversation, removed studio props, photographed against simple backdrops; created an approachable, psychologically insightful portrait style.
Notable sitter: George Sand (c. 1864): Sand’s portrait shows a dignified, imposing figure, consistent with her reputation as a leading cultural persona.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
British photographer who produced enduring portraits and imaginative, literary‑themed images; strongly influenced by the Pre‑Raphaelites.
Philosophical aim: combine the real and the ideal; use photography to express poetry and beauty while preserving truth.
Notable work: Sir John Herschel (1867), a portrait treated with a soft focus to convey intellectual energy and spiritual presence.
The purpose and range of portrait photography
Portrait photography served: scientific documentary use, surveying colonial territories, or recording important events and people; it also elevated photography to an art form with its own formal conventions.
The Painting of Modern Life: Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
Manet as a pivotal Realist figure focusing on modern life; influenced by Baudelaire’s ideas of modernity and flâneur observational stance.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Rejected by the Salon; presented at the Salon des Refusés in 1863; scandal due to the depiction of a nude woman in the presence of two fully dressed men.
Formal references to Renaissance masters (Titian’s Pastoral Concert; Raimondi after Raphael) suggest a dialogue with Western painting history rather than straightforward imitation; a parody of academic conventions.
Formal innovations: rejection of tonal modeling; foreground figure placed on a larger scale than perspective would normally permit; background landscape painted with sketchy, flat handling; emphasizes surface and materiality over illusionistic depth.
Interpretation: Manet critiques the gap between museum painting conventions and contemporary life; questions traditional representation of sexuality and class; foreshadows modernism’s self‑conscious treatment of painting as a constructed image.
Olympia (1863)
Sequel to Déjeuner; depicts a prostitute (courtesan) with a Black maid and flowers; her direct gaze challenges the viewer and unsettles social hierarchy.
Based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino but recast as a contemporary Parisian figure; emphasizes social and racial hierarchies in 19th‑century France; leverages stark lighting contrasts and anti‑idealized body form (Courbet’s critique of “modeling” vs. “flat” painting).
Public reception: controversial for its explicit subject matter and confrontational style; some celebrated its modernity, others found it indecent.
Manet’s Last Major Painting: A Bar at the Folies‑Bergère (1882)
Set in a Paris nightclub; the central figure, a barmaid, is mirrored by a top‑hatted client; the reflection in the mirror is displaced and angled, creating interpretive ambiguity about the scene and relationships.
The painting embodies modernist concerns: ambiguous perspective, the role of the spectator, and the commodification of social interactions in urban life.
The Impressionists’ emergence and Manet’s influence
The Impressionists took cues from Manet (modern life, loose brushwork) but pursued broader experimentation: rapid plein air painting and more systematic layout and composition.
The movement arose from a collective rejection of the Salon’s authority and sought to present works without jury oversight, relying on independent exhibitions and networks (e.g., Durand‑Ruel as a key dealer).
The Impressionists
Core ideas and aims:
Translate direct visual experience of nature into painting with rapidly applied strokes of pure color to capture fleeting effects of light.
Combine two tendencies: (1) painterly translation of the momentary experience of nature; (2) composed scenes that mimic spontaneous slices of modern life.
Central theme: modern leisure in Paris and the French countryside; emergence of a new middle class with time for outings; leisure, promenades, picnics, boating, music halls.
The Impressionists’ method involved experimentation with color, light, and composition; they often painted en plein air to capture fleeting atmospheric conditions.
The movement’s infrastructure and commercialization
The group organized eight significant exhibitions (1874–1886), each with different rosters; the only consistent participant across all eight was Camille Pissarro.
The group sought to bypass the Salon and create direct sales channels; Durand‑Ruel emerged as a crucial dealer who nurtured a lasting market for their works.
Monet: continued to explore light, atmosphere, and color throughout his career
While Monet remained engaged with landscape and seascape subjects, his approach to color and optics matured into systematic series.
Renoir: focused on figure painting and social life, rather than pure landscape; sought to capture human vitality and social interaction; his Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) is a celebrated example of Impressionist social life.
Berthe Morisot: important female Impressionist; depicted intimate scenes of family life and gardens; her work pushed painting toward a more intimate, domestic sphere.
Edgar Degas: a realist in the Impressionist circle; emphasized studio composition and human bodies in motion; crafted innovative, cropped perspectives inspired by Japonisme; deeply studied dancers, laundresses, and other working women.
Mary Cassatt: American participant in the Impressionist movement; integrated into Degas’s circle; focused on scenes of women in private or public life, particularly interior settings and theater-related scenes; uses a refined brushwork and light palette.
Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Degas, Cassatt: Portraits, Landscapes, and Genre Scenes (focused synthesis)
Monet (landscapes and en plein air): The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874) showcases impressionist handling of water, sky, and light; its composition reveals disciplined use of color and brushwork to render atmosphere rather than precise detail.
Renoir (figures and social life): Ball at the Moulin de la Galette demonstrates a lively, sunlit outdoor social scene with a unification of color and movement through loose brushwork.
Morisot (domestic and intimate scenes): The Butterfly Hunt (1874) emphasizes tender, intimate portrayals of mother and child in outdoor spaces; uses light, airy brushwork.
Degas (composition and figure studies): The Rehearsal (c. 1874) uses unusual vantage points (angled perspective, cropped figures) to convey a fleeting moment in rehearsal; his ballet subjects reveal an analytic approach to movement and form; his work often critiques the social gaze (voyeurism) and gender roles.
Cassatt (women’s perspective in modern life): In the Loge (1878); Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879); Cassatt’s works analyze women’s experiences and social visibility within theater life and public spaces; her paintings reflect shifting gender norms and assert female spectatorship.
Realism in Later Nineteenth‑Century American Painting
After the Civil War, American Realism blended a commitment to truthful depiction with modernist sensibilities; artists sought to define a distinctly American identity.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Early career in Boston; became a prominent Civil War illustrator and painter; influenced by Millet and Barbizon through a Paris stint (1866–67).
Known for outdoor leisure scenes and American rural life; notable work: Snap the Whip (1872): depicts boys playing a popular fall game near a one‑room schoolhouse in a nostalgic pastoral setting; the composition embodies American energy, teamwork, and national optimism; the style is bold, simple, and direct.
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Highly trained academically; studied Velázquez and the Old Masters; pursued intense realism and a scientific approach to painting.
Major works:
The Gross Clinic (1875): a life‑sized, dramatic anatomy lesson; light highlights the surgeon’s hands and the patient’s leg; the surrounding crowd is rendered with a clinical precision; the piece embodies medical science and rationality; its reception was controversial when shown at the Centennial Exhibition (1876) and across Philadelphia.
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871: a demonstration of precision perspective and realistic depiction of sport; a celebration of American vitality.
Eakins’s realism sometimes offended contemporary audiences, leading to professional friction (e.g., his resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886 over propriety concerns).
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937)
Black American painter who found success in Paris; studied in Philadelphia under Eakins; well known for Christian subjects.
The Banjo Lesson (1893): tenderness and reverence in a Southern interior; warm light from the fire and sunlit room create an intimate, respectful scene emphasizing cultural transmission and education rather than stereotype.
American Realism’s broader significance
The post‑Civil War period produced a uniquely American realism that paralleled European developments in its fidelity to everyday life and social issues, while centering American people and landscapes.
Key figures, dates, and terms to remember (quick reference)
Revolutions: 1848 Revolutions in Europe; Second Republic; Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1851–1870).
Important dates for major works:
Courbet, The Stonebreakers (1849)
Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50)
Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais (1849)
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair (1853)
Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Manet, Olympia (1863)
Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75)
Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life (1857)
Monet, The Bridge at Argenteuil (1874)
Renoir, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876)
Morisot, The Butterfly Hunt (1874)
Degas, The Rehearsal (c. 1874)
Cassatt, In the Loge (1878)
Homer, Snap the Whip (1872)
Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)
Tanner, The Banjo Lesson (1893)
Key terms:
Realism, Positivism, Communist Manifesto (1848), Salons, Barbizon School, Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood, Ruskin, flâneur, Japonisme, daguerreotype, calotype, wet collodion, albumen prints, combination printing, Nocturne, l’art pour l’art, syndicate/Salon des Refusés, déjà vu of modern life in art, and the shift toward modernist abstraction.
Major themes:
The democratic, anti‑hierarchical impulse in Realism; the moral and social questions raised by depicting labor, poverty, and the working class.
The tension between modern life and classical tradition; the appropriation of Renaissance and classical models as critique or homage.
The emergence of modern life as legitimate subject matter; the rise of leisure, urban life, and the social spaces of contemporary culture.
Connections to earlier lectures and to real‑world relevance:
Realism as a bridge between traditional academic painting and modernist experimentation; the movement’s insistence on truth in representation foreshadowed later modernist explorations of form and perception.
The period’s innovations in photography deeply influenced painting’s approach to representation, perspective, and the valuation of painterly materiality.
The works of Manet and the Impressionists anticipated later debates about art’s autonomy, viewer active role, and the financial and institutional mechanisms (galleries, dealers) sustaining new art.
Ethical, philosophical, and practical implications:
Realism’s political associations (Courbet’s socialist stance; Millet’s rural dignity; Bonheur’s balanced naturalism) raised questions about the role of art in society and its relationship to power.
The emergence of the flâneur and modern urban gaze confronted issues of gender, class, race, and spectatorship in representation (e.g., Manet’s Olympia; Cassatt’s In the Loge).
The debate about photography as art vs. documentation highlighted the evolving status of different media in representing reality and shaping perception.
Formulas, numbers, and references (LaTeX):
Dimensions: A Burial at Ornans: 315 \times 668\text{ cm}$