Realism and Impressionism Post-Impressionism and Other Late Nineteenth-Century Developments

Realism and Impressionism

In many ways, Realism was a reaction to Neoclassicism

and Romanticism. The Realist style was inspired by

the idea that painting must illustrate all the features

of its subjects, including the negative ones. It was

also obligated to show the lives of ordinary people as

subjects that were as important as the historical and

religious themes that dominated the art exhibitions of

the day. The artist who represented this movement most

forcefully was Gustave Courbet (1819–77), a flamboyant

and outgoing personality who outraged conventional

audiences by showing a painting of ordinary workmen

repairing a road at the official government-sponsored

Salon. This work, called The Stonebreakers (1849–50),

also had political implications in the context of a wave

of revolutions that spread across Europe beginning in

1848. Realism can also be seen in the works of Honoré

Daumier (1808–79) and Jean François Millet (1814–75).

Impressionism largely grew out of dissatisfaction

with the rigid rules that had come to dominate the

Salons held to recognize selected artists each year.

Édouard Manet (1832–83) is sometimes referred to as

the first Impressionist. Although he refused to consider

himself as one of the Impressionists, Manet’s work,

which showed light by juxtaposing bright, contrasting

colors, nonetheless greatly inspired and influenced the

generation of artists following him. Manet’s painting

Le Dejéuner sur L’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)

(1863)—included in the Salon des Refusés in 1863, an

exhibit of works rejected by the “official” Salon—was

singled out for ridicule. The scandal surrounding this

work resulted from its violation of the unwritten rule

that the only appropriate nudes in contemporary art

were classical figures or women in suitably exotic

settings. In Luncheon on the Grass, Manet based his

work on an engraving with a classical subject matter,

but he showed contemporary clothed men with a nude

woman as part of the group. This caused an uproar.

While Manet continued to submit his work to the

Salon, other artists who disagreed with the rigid artistic

standards espoused by the Académie des Beaux-Arts

in Paris and favored by the Salon set about establishing

Impressionism as a new style. A work by Claude Monet

(1840–1926) was the source of the movement’s name.

Monet showed a work that he called Impression, Sunrise

(1872), and the critics seized on this mere “impression”

as a means by which to ridicule the movement. It was

Monet who urged his fellow artists to work outdoors,

and these endeavors were aided by technical advances in

paint and brush production that made the medium more

portable. Impressionist artists put their colors directly

on the canvas with rapid strokes to capture the rapidly

changing light. Scientific studies of vision and color led

to the discovery that shadows were not merely gray but

that they reflected the complementary color of the object

casting them. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Alfred

Sisley (1839–99) were two other Impressionists of note.

Post-Impressionism and Other Late

Nineteenth-Century Developments

The artists who followed Impressionism, though

influenced by the earlier artists, took various features

of Impressionism in quite different directions. The

most influential of these artists was Paul Cézanne

(1839–1906). Dissatisfied with the lack of solid form in

Impressionist works, Cézanne set about redefining art

in terms of form. He suggested that a painting could be

structured as a series of planes with a clear foreground,

middle ground, and background and argued that the

objects in the painting could all be reduced to their

simplest underlying forms—a cube, a sphere, or a

cone. Here we should note the obvious influence that

these ideas, presented first by Cézanne, later had on the

development of Cubism in the early twentieth century.

The ongoing search for more and more brilliant

color was a unifying feature for many of the Post-

Impressionists. The work of Georges Seurat

(1859–91) placed an emphasis on the scientific rules

of color. Seurat applied his colors in small dots of

complementary colors that blended in the eye of the

viewer in what is called optical mixing. The results

were vibrant, though the emphasis on technique also

resulted in static compositions.

As Seurat was attracting attention and Cézanne was

formulating his rules for painting, a young Dutch

painter named Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was

studying art. Van Gogh, using theories of contrasting

color and very direct application of paint, set about

capturing the bright light of southern France. His

vigorous brushwork and twisting forms were designed

to capture an intense response, and though his career

was short, many of his works have become very well

known. Van Gogh developed the idea that the artist’s

colors should not slavishly imitate the colors of the

natural world, but should be intensified to portray

inner human emotions. The intense and jarring

yellows, greens, and reds in the poolroom of Van

Gogh’s Night Café (1888), which van Gogh considered

a place of vice, illustrate this very influential idea.

The search for intense light and clear color also marks

the work of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who is perhaps

known as much for the story of his life as he is for his

art. Though he was a successful stockbroker, Gauguin

left his wife and family while in his forties to pursue

his art career. He worked for a short time with van

Gogh in southern France but was still dissatisfied with

his art. Searching for more intense color and a more

“unschooled” style, he went to Tahiti, where he painted

works that depict the island’s lush, tropical setting and

native people, as seen through the lens of colonialism.

At this juncture, it is important to note the outside

influences that were affecting the changing art world.

The invention of the camera called into question the

very need to capture ordinary reality in art. Some of the

most important inventions may seem quite mundane.

The invention of chemically based paints and the paint

tube allowed the Impressionists to paint outdoors

easily for the first time. This was also a time of global

exploration and colonialism, and the objects brought

back from around the world had a profound effect on the

Impressionists and the artists who followed. Artists were

intrigued by masks from Africa, and many collected the

Japanese prints that were used as packing for shipments

of goods from Japan. Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was

an Impressionist whose work exemplified these new

influences. Degas often combined the snapshot style

of photography with a Japanese-like perspective from

slightly above his subject.

In England, a group of artists dissatisfied with the

effects of the Industrial Revolution banded together and

became known as the Pre-Raphaelites. These artists

created a style that attempted to return to the simpler

forms of pre-Renaissance art. The Pre-Raphaelites

created many quasi-religious works that often blended

Romantic, archaic, and moralistic elements. Their

emphasis on nature and sweeping curves paved the

way for Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau, which became

popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, was a style of decoration, architecture,

and design that was characterized by the depiction of

leaves and flowers in flowing, sinuous lines.