In The Absolute Bourgeois, T. J. Clark notes that much of Millet’s work from the early 1850s reduces the lives of the proletariat to menial existences: “They [Millet’s pieces] do no more than illustrate their tasks, they are created to grasp the hay or wield the pitchfork…they are not so much anonymous as perfunctory.” Indeed, Millet and the other artists of his time created works that blended technical mastery with profound subtextual content. Their cleverly composed pieces often stirred public discourse over the issues presented in the painting; art intellectuals and laymen alike adopted antithetical opinions on the conflict between skill and subject matter within paintings such as Millet’s The Gleaners, Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers and On the Bridge of Europe, and Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette. In fact, this paper will incorporate these paintings in an attempt to explore how the representation of the working class has evolved over the early decades of modern art. It is important to understand that this period, the Impressionist period, coincided with a period of significant social development in
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This particular painting utilizes perspective and space to make an argument about the nature of the social hierarchy. The couple who occupies the left field of the composition serve as a legible representation of the upper middle class: The man wears a top hat, and both individuals wear expensive, fashionable black clothing. They obviously have deep pockets, so to speak. On the other hand, the man they have just passed on the sidewalk strolls by in denim and a humbler hat, without any semblance of the dignified posture with which the middle class man carries himself. Also noteworthy is the reappearing conflation of man and animal; the dog in the foreground walks in the same direction as the man, attributing an animal quality to his situation once
This particular painting utilizes perspective and space to make an argument about the nature of the social hierarchy. The couple who occupies the left field of the composition serve as a legible representation of the upper middle class: The man wears a top hat, and both individuals wear expensive, fashionable black clothing. They obviously have deep pockets, so to speak. On the other hand, the man they have just passed on the sidewalk strolls by in denim and a humbler hat, without any semblance of the dignified posture with which the middle class man carries himself. Also noteworthy is the reappearing conflation of man and animal; the dog in the foreground walks in the same direction as the man, attributing an animal quality to his situation once