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70 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
Architect?
Name of Structure? Location? Date Built? Significance? |
Gustave Eiffel
Eiffel Tower Paris, France 1887-89 -main attraction of the 1889 Universal Exposition, one of several large fairs staged in Europe & the US during the late 19th c. to showcase the latest international advances in science and industry, while also displaying both fine and applied arts. Because Eiffel's marvel lacked architectural antecedents and did not conceal its construction, detractors saw it as an ugly, overblown work of engineering. Perhaps more than any other monument, the Eiffel Tower embodies the 19th c. belief in the progress and ultimate perfection of civilization through science and technology. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Jacques-Louis David
Napoleon Crossing The Saint-Bernard 1800-1801 -Neoclassical, with Baroque influences -With the rise of Napoleon, David reestablished his dominant position of chief arbiter of French painting. David saw in the general his best hope for realization of his Enlightenment-oriented political goals, and Napoleon saw in the artist a tested propagandist for revolutionary values. As Napoleon gained power and took his crusade across Europe, reforming law codes and abolishing aristocratic privilege, he commissioned David and his students to document his deeds. David's new artistic task, the glorification of Napoleon, appeared in an early, idealized portrait of Napoleon leading his troops across the Alps into Italy in 1800. Napoleon - who actually made the crossing on a donkey - is shown calmly astride a rearing horse, exhorting us to follow him. His windblown cloak, an extension of his arm, suggests that Napoleon directs the winds as well. While Neoclassical in the firmness of its drawing, the work also takes stylistic inspiration from the Baroque - for example, in the dramatic diagonal composition used instead of the classical pyramid of the Oath of the Horatii. When Napoleon fell from power in 1814, David went into exile in Brussels, where he died in 1825. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Antoine-Jean Gros
Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa 1804 Neoclassical AND Romantic -Gros began working in David's studio as a teenager, and eventually vied with his master for commissions from Napoleon. Gros traveled with Napoleon in Italy in 1797 and later became an official chronicler of Napoleon's military campaigns. This painting is an idealized account of an actual incident: During Napoleon's campaign against the Ottoman Turks in 1799, bubonic plague broke out among his troops. Napoleon decided to quiet the fears of the healthy by visiting the sick and dying who were housed in a converted mosque in the Palestinian town of Jaffa (Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire). The format of the painting - a shallow stage and a series of arcades behind the main actors - is inspired by David's Oath of the Horatii. The overall effect is Romantic, however, not simply because of the dramatic lighting and the wealth of emotionally stimulating elements, both exotic and horrific, but also because the main action is meant to incite veneration rather than republican virtue. At the center of a small group of soldiers and a doctor, Napoleon calmly reaches toward the sores of one of the victims - the image of a Christ-like figure healing the sick with his touch is consciously intended to promote him as semidivine. Not surprisingly, Gros gives no hint of the event's cruel historical aftermath: Two months later, Napoleon ordered the remaining sick to be poisoned. -At the Salon of 1804, Gros debuted his painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa. The painting launched his career as a successful painter. It depicts Napoleon as he visits his own men in Jaffa (part of present-day Israel and Syria). He had just massacred the countries after losing an attempt to conquer Egypt and his men caught the plague. Opinions differ as to why he visited: whether it was to determine if he should leave his troops to die in Jaffa, or to boost morale. The painting is important for Gros because he shows Napoleon in a mostly positive light. He also showed an exotic setting and a recent event, which set him apart from his contemporaries. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Large Odalisque Romantic Although Ingres, like David, fervently desired acceptance as a history painter, his paintings of literary subjects and contemporary history were less successful than his erotically charged portraits of women and female nudes, especially his numerous representations of the odalisque, a female slave or concubine in a sultan's harem. In this painting, the cool gaze this odalisque levels at her master, while turning her naked body away from what we assume is HIS gaze, makes her simultaneously erotic and aloof. The cool blues of the couch and the curtain at the right heighten the effect of the woman's warm skin, while the tight angularity of the crumpled sheets accentuates the languid, sensual contours of her form. Although Ingres's commitment to fluid line and elegant postures was grounded in his Neoclassical training, he treated some Romantic themes, such as the odalisque, in an anticlassical fashion. Here the elongation of the woman's back (she seems to have several extra vertebrae), the widening of her hip, and her tiny, boneless feet are anatomically incorrect but aesthetically compelling. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Jean-August Dominique Ingres
Portrait of Madame Desire Raoul-Rochette 1830 Although Ingres complained that making portraits was a "considerable waste of time," he was unparalleled in rendering a physical likeness and the material qualities of clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry. In addition to polished life-size oil portraits, Ingres produced - usually in just a day - small portrait drawings that are extraordinarily fresh and lively. This exquisite portrait is a flattering yet credible interpretation of the relaxed and elegant sitter. With her gloved right hand Madame Raoul-Rochette has removed her left-hand glove, simultaneously drawing attention to her social status (gloves traditionally were worn by members of the European upper class, who did not work with their hands) and her marital status (on her left hand is a wedding band). Her shiny taffeta dress, with its fashionably high waist and puffed sleeves, is rendered with deft yet light strokes that suggest more than they describe. Greater emphasis is given to her refined face and elaborate coiffure, which Ingres has drawn precisely and modeled subtly through light and shade. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Théodore Géricault (French)
Raft of the Medusa 1818-19 Romantic -In its insistence on portraying an unpleasant truth, this history painting marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in French painting, laying the foundation against the prevailing Neoclassical style. -full of diagonal lines culminating in a black survivor who waves down the ship; it is a metaphor: by giving him the power to save his comrades, G. suggests that freedom for all humanity will only occur when the most oppressed member of society is emancipated. -Although The Raft of the Medusa retains elements of the traditions of history painting, in both its choice of subject matter and its dramatic presentation, it represents a break from the calm and order of the then-prevailing Neoclassical school. -In choosing the tragedy as subject matter for his first major work—an uncommissioned depiction of an event from recent history—Géricault consciously selected a well-known incident that would generate great public interest at the 1819 Paris Salon and help launch his career, and he went to great lengths to prepare for it, including drawing cadavers. -Nevertheless, Géricault did not depict the actual physical condition of the survivors on the raft: exhausted, emaciated, sunburned, and close to death. Instead, following the dictates of the Grand Manner, he gave his men athletic bodies and vigorous poses, evoking the work of Michelangelo and Rubens. He did this to generalize and ennoble his subject, elevating it above the particulars of a specific shipwreck so that it could speak to us of more fundamental conflicts: humanity against nature, hope against despair, life against death. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? |
Théodore Géricault
Study of Hands and Feet 1818-19 Romantic |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Théodore Géricault
Pity The Sorrows of a Poor Old Man 1821 Romantic -Gericault was one of the first artists to use the recently invented medium of lithography to create fine art prints. -This is one of 13 published lithographs of Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone in London in 1821. -The title of this work comes from a popular English nursery rhyme of the period. -Lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, "stone" + γράφω - graphο, "to write") is a method for printing using a stone (Lithographic Limestone) or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface. Lithography uses oil or fat and gum arabic to divide the smooth surface into hydrophobic regions which accept the ink, and hydrophilic regions which reject it and thus become the background. -During the first years of the nineteenth century, lithography made only a limited impact on printmaking, mainly because technical difficulties remained to be overcome. Germany was the main centre of production during this period. Godefroy Engelmann, who moved his press from Mulhouse to Paris in 1816, largely succeeded in resolving the technical problems, and in the 1820s lithography was taken up by artists such as Delacroix and Géricault. London also became a centre, and some of Géricault's prints were in fact produced there. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Eugène Delacroix
Scenes From the Massacre at Chios 1822-24 Romantic One of Delacroix's first paintings at a Salon, it depicts an event even more terrible than the shipwreck of the Medusa. In 1822, during the Greek's struggle for independence engaged the minds of many during that period, and it led the Romantic poet Lord Byron to enlist on the Greek side and give his life. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Eugène Delacroix
Liberty Leading the People: July 28, 1830 1830 Romantic -commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Charles X. A woman personifying Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the tricolor flag of the French Revolution in one hand and brandishing a bayoneted musket with the other. This is perhaps Delacroix's best-known painting, having carved its own niche in popular culture. -The work reports and departs from facts in ways that are typically ROMANTIC. The Revolutionaries were indeed a motley crew of students, craft workers, day laborers, and even children and top-hatted lawyers. They stumble forward through the smoke of battle, crossing a baricade of refuse and dead bodies. This muc of the work is plausibly accurate. Their leader, however, is the energetic flag-bearing allegorical figure of Liberty, personified by the muscular woman who carries the Revolutionary flag in one hand and a bayoneted rifle in the other. Delacroix took a classical allegorical figure and placed her, weapon and all, in the thick of battle. Like most Romantic paintings, the work is obviously not a mere transcription of an actual event. Rather, the artist applied his imagination to the story and created a work that, while not exactly faithful to fact, is indeed faithful to the EMOTIONAL climate of the moment as the artist felt it. This was the essence of Romanticism. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: François Rude
Title: Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (The Marseillaise) Date: 1833-36 Artistic Style: Neoclassical with Romantic elements Significance: Romanticism gained general acceptance in France after the July Monarchy was established, bringing with it a new era of middle-class taste. This shift is most evident in sculpture, where a number of practitioners turned away from Neoclassical principles to more dramatic themes and approaches. Early in the July Monarchy, the minister of the interior decided, as an act of national reconciliation, to complete the triumphal arch on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, which Napoleon had begun in 1806. Rude received the commission to decorate the main arcade to commemorate the volunteer army that had halted a Prussian invasion in 1792-93. Beneath the urgent exhortations of the winged figure of Liberty, the volunteers surge forward, some nude, some in classical armor. Despite such Neoclassical elements, the effect is Romantic. The crowded, excited grouping so stirred the patriotism of French spectators that it quickly became known as The Marseillaise, the name of the French national anthem written in the same year, 1792. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Edmonia Lewis
Title: Forever Free Date: 1867 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: -Marble sculpture remained closer to Neoclassical norms until after 1850, when Romanticism began to infect it. The American sculptor Edmonia Lewis was a leader in this tendency. Born in NY State to a Chippewa mother and an African American father and originally named Wildfire, Lewis was orphaned at the age of 4 and raised by her mother's family. As a teenager, with the help of abolitionists, she attended Oberlin College, the first college in the U.S. to grant degrees to women, then moved to Boston. Her highly successful busts and medallions of abolitionist leaders and Civil War heroes financed her move to Rome in 1867. -Galvanized by the struggle of newly freed slaves for equality, Lewis created Forever Free as a memorial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The kneeling figure prays thankfully, while the standing man seems to dance on the ball that one bound his ankle as he raises the broken cain to the sky. In true Romantic fashion, Lewis's enthusiasm for the cause outran her financial abilities, so that she had to borrow money to pay for the marble. Lewis sent this work back to Boston hoping that a subscription drive among abolitionists would redeem her loan. The effort was only partially successful, but her steady income from the sale of medallions eventually paid it off. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Francisco Goya
Title: Family of Charles IV Date: 1800 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: -This large portrait expresses some of the alienation Goya felt. The work openly acknowledges the influence of Velasquez's earlier royal portrait Las Meninas by placing the painter behind the easel on the left, just as Velasquez had. The artist somehow managed to make his patrons appear faintly ridiculous: The bloated and dazed king, chest full of medals, standing before another relative who appears to have seen a ghost; the double-chinned queen, who stares obliquely out (she was then having an open affair with the prime minister); her eldest daughter, to the left, stares into space next to another older relative who seems quizzically surprised by the attention. -One French art critic described this frightened bunch as "The corner baker and his family after they h ave won the lottery." Yet the royal family seem to have been perfectly satisfied with Goya's realistic rather than flattering depiction of them. Indeed, if everyone was in fact posed in those positions, with the artist to one side, they must have all been admiring themselves in a huge mirror. -As the authority of the Spanish aristocracy was crumbling, this complex rendition may have been the only possible type of royal portrait. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Francisco Goya
Title: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters Date: 1799 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: In the career of Goya, we see the birth of Romanticism in a single lifetime. In the 1770s and 80s, he was a court painter, making tapestry designs in a style based on the Rococo. The dawn of the French Revolution filled him with hope, as he belonged to an intellectual circle that was nourished by ENLIGHTENMENT ideas. After the early years of the French Revolution, however, Spanish king Charles IV reinstituted the Inquisition, stopped most of the French-inspired reforms, and even halted the entry of French books into Spain. Goya responded to this new situation with LOS CAPRICHOS (THE CAPRICES), a folio of 80 etchings produced between 1796 and 1798 whose overall them is suggested by The Sleep of Reason. -The print shows a slumbering personification of Reason, behind whom lurk the dark creatures of the night - owls, bats, and a cat - that are let loose when Reason sleeps. The rest of the Caprichos enumerate the specific follies of Spanish life that Goya and his circle considered monstrous. -Goya hoped the series would show Spanish people the errors of their ways and reawaken reason. He even tried to sell the etchings, as Hogarth had done in England, but they only aroused controversy with his royal patrons. In order to deflect blame from himself, he made the metal plates an elaborate gift to the king. The disturbing quality of Goya's portrait of human folly suggest he was already beginning to feel the despair that would dominate his later work. -After printing about 300 sets of this series, Goya offered them for sale in 1799. He withdrew them from sale 2 days later without explanation. Historians believe that he was probably warned by the Church that if he did not he might have to appear before the Inquisition because of the unflattering portrayal of the Church in some of the etchings. In 1803 Goya donated the plates to the Royal Printing Office. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Francisco Goya
Title: Third of May, 1808 Date: 1814-15 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: In 1808 Napoleon conquered Spain and placed on its throne his brother Joseph Bonaparte. Many Spanish citizens, including Goya, welcomed the French at first because of the reforms they inaugurated, including a new, more liberal constitution. On May 2, 1808, however, a rumor spread in Madrid that the French planned to kill the royal family. The populace rose up, and a day of bloody street fighting ensued, followed by mass arrests. Hundreds of Spanish people were herded into a convent, and a French firing squad executed these helpless prisoners in the predawn hours of May 3. -Goya commemorated the event in a painting that, like Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, focuses on victims and anti-heroes, the most prominent of which is a Christ-like figure in white. -Everything about this work is Romantic: the sensational current event, the loose brushwork, the poses based on reality, the off-balance composition, the dramatic lighting. But Goya's work is less an indictment of the French than of the faceless and mechanical forces of war itself, blindly destroying defenseless humanity. When asked why he pained such a brutal scene, Goya responded: "To warn men never to do it again." -Soon after the Spanish monarchy was restored, Ferdinand VII abolished the new constitution and reinstated the Inquisition, which the French had banned. In 1815 Goya was himself called before the Inquisition for the alleged obscenity of an earlier painting of a female nude. Though found innocent, Goya gave up hope in human progress and retired to his home outside Madrid, where he vented his disillusionment in the series of nightmarish "black paintings" he did on its walls. He spent the last four years of his life in exile in France. Instructor's Comments: Uprising, government put it down, but brutally. Another political painting. When this rebellion was suppressed so brutally (lined them up and shot them) Goya was upset enough about it to portray it in a painting. Again, the Romantic technique is employed here. He’s not a neoclassical painting. The figures are sketchy, a contemporary event is shown, subject intended to create drama, outrage. Dead lying on the ground, bleeding out. Some are cowering, people lined up waiting to be executed, and a firing squad. Where are we standing in relationship to the subject? We’re looking at the backs of the shooters. We’re not looking from the perspective of the victims. There’s a little bit of Goya saying that we were complicit in such a horrible miscarriage of justice. This particular figure with his arms raised, the light is unnatural, almost supernatural, Christlike, hearkens back to the crucifixion. The white shirt helps. Another different, hard-hitting painting that Goya is capable of. This is the same Goya who also does those prints, remember. So Goya is lumped in with Romantic painters, but his technique is a little different. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Caspar David Friedrich
Title: Nebel (Fog) Date: 1807 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: The German Romantic painter Friedrich saw in nature a vehicle of intense personal feeling. He received early encouragement from poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to make landscape the principal subject of his art. In his early life, Friedrich was also influenced by the writings and teachings of Kosegarten, a Lutheran pastor and poet from his district who taught that we can see the divine in a personal experience of nature. If God's holy book was the Bible, just as important was God's "Book of Nature." Friedrich studied at the academies of Copenhagen and Dresden and settled in the latter city. Throughout his career, he not only sketched in nature, but also took long walks. Later, in the studio, he synthesized his sketches with his memories and feelings in order to create paintings such as Nebel. Here we see a mysteriously quiet seacoast, where some passengers in a small boat row out to a larger one. Fog has drwn a veil over most of the details of this landscape, but such facts matter much less to Friedrich than the overall mood, which is hushed and solemn. This place resembles none that we can visit, because the artist invented it based on his sketches and memories. He wrote, "Close your physical eyes in order that you may first see your painting with your spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness so that it can affect others." We are left wondering about the possible reasons for this journey: Escape is one possibility; so is a more symbolic reading, such as death, or, in common parlance, passage to the other side. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Caspar David Friedrich (German)
Title: Cloister Graveyard In the Snow Date: 1819 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: Some of the best Romantic Landscape painters are German. Lots of good landscape painters throughout history have been produced in Germany. Subject wise, Romantic landscapes have something in common – make us thing about life in general. Remember Claude Lorain’s ancient ruins and pastoral scenes? What things would look like in a perfect world. Romantic landscape painters are going to make you think a little deeper than that. They try to be more poetic in a different, more serious way. Cloister, for example, look like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral. Not necessarily realistic, but creates a great sense of decay, the passing of time. A line of monks entering the doorway, dwarfed by the cathedral, a sense of the smallness of man and the largeness of nature. This becomes pretty key in all of Friedrich’s paintings and typical of the movement as a whole. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Eugène Delacroix
Title: Death of Sardanapalus Date: 1827 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: Delacroix's painting of the death of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus shows an emotionally stirring scene alive with beautiful colours, exotic costumes and tragic events. The Death of Sardanapalus depicts the besieged king watching impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines and animals. The literary source is a play by Byron, although the play does not specifically mention any massacre of concubines. Sardanapalus' attitude of calm detachment is a familiar pose in Romantic imagery in this period in Europe. The painting, which was not exhibited again for many years afterward, has been regarded by some critics as a gruesome fantasy involving death and lust. Especially shocking is the struggle of a nude woman whose throat is about to be cut, a scene placed prominently in the foreground for maximum impact. However, the sensuous beauty and exotic colours of the composition make the picture appear pleasing and shocking at the same time. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner
Title: The Burning of the House of the Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834 Date: 1834 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: Everything is blurred due to smoke, but a Neoclassical painter might have been more photorealistic in their detail. The people would have been clearly delineated. Turner mixes them all together so you get sketchy, loose, romantic brushstrokes. Again, the people are small and nature is huge. More faithful to feeling than to fact, the work accurately depicts the crowds and the bridge but greatly exaggerates the size of the fire. Turner's main interest was in capturing the feelings attending the loss of one of England's most historic structures, and in order to do this he resorted to some of the loosest and most painterly brushwork ever seen in Western art up to that time. In those years, the Parliament was in the midst of reforming its electoral districts in order to broaden its political base and equalize representation. The Reform Bill of 1832 was a landmark in this democratic quest, but Turner's painting points out that Mother Nature often has the last word, thwarting or hindering even our most noble aspirations. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: John Constable
Title: The White Horse Date: 1819 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: A typical work of Constable's maturity, depicts a fresh early summer day in the Stour River valley after the passing of a storm. Sunlight glistens off the water and foliage, an effect Constable achieved through tiny dabs of white paint. In the lower left, a farmer and his helpers ferry a workhorse across the river. Such elements were never invented by Constable, who among the Romantics stays closest to fact. His goal was rather to capture the time of day, the humidity in the air, and the smell of wet earth. he once said that he wanted to paint the landscape as if no one had ever painted it before. In order to capture faithfully his initial sensation, he frequently used unmixed dabs of pure color on his canvases, a technique which later influenced artists on both sides of the English Channel. Instructor's comments: Another romantic painter although it’s harder to tell. Constable shows us the English countryside as he would like to see it. It’s idealized, and Romanticized. Ivy-covered cottages, trees. All very sweet, but it’s In the 19th century in the countryside of a country that’s increasingly becoming industrial. What he’s painting is disappearing, and he’s nostalgic. A lot of Romantic painters are Nostalgic: about the ancient roman past, the medieval past, events from even 10 years ago. It seems to permeate the subjects of their paintings. Constable is a great Romantic landscape painter though he may not be so obvious about it. There’s something about the skies: there’s always a touch of the dark, looming ominous clouds, almost always, in Romantic painting. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: John Constable
Title: The Hay Wain Date: 1821 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: The Hay Wain is revered today as one of the greatest British paintings, but, when it was originally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821 (under the title Landscape: Noon), it failed to find a buyer. It was considerably better received in France where it was praised by Théodore Géricault. The painting caused a sensation when it was exhibited with other works by Constable at the 1824 Paris Salon (it has been suggested that the inclusion of Constable's paintings in the exhibition were a tribute to Géricault, who died early that year). In that exhibition, The Hay Wain was singled out for a gold medal awarded by Charles X of France, a cast of which is incorporated into the picture's frame. The works by Constable in the exhibition inspired a new generation of French painters, including Eugène Delacroix. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: George Catlin
Title: Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe Date: 1832 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: George Catlin is an American painter of the 1830s, before the Civil War, after the Revolution. Catlin is not a distinguished academic painter. He taught himself to paint, so his quality of work is not as high as what we see in Europe. He’s almost more of an anthropologist than a painter: He’s capturing the rapidly-disappearing native American way of life. He was fascinated with recording them. He went on his own Grand Tour, but in The United States. He recorded rituals, ceremonies, in painting. Much of what we know of their way of life is due to Constable. His technique is not that good but he’s portraying in a Romantic way: nostalgic for the past, trying to re capture something before it goes away forever. To him and others in that time, Native Americans were exotic, foreign, “primitive”, so Europeans and Americans were fascinated with them. 19th Century idea of the “Noble Savage” idea that a primitive people have a nobility that we have lost, but they’re also capable of an “animal savagery” that we have lost. It’s a stereotype. It’s a Romantic stereotype based on fantasy. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Thomas Cole
Title: The Oxbow Date: 1839 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: In the mid-1830s, Cole went on a sketching trip that resulted in this painting, which he painted for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York. He believed that a too-close focus on factual accuracy was murderous to art, so he made paintings months after his sketches were complete, the better, he said, for memory to "draw a veil" over the scene. Cole considered The Oxbow one of his "VIEW" paintings, which were usually small, although this one is monumental. The scale suits the dramatic view from the top of Mount Holyoke in Western Massachusetts across a spectacular oxbow-shaped bend in the Connecticut River. To Cole, such ancient geological formations constituted America's "antiquities." The work's title tells us that it depicts an actual spot, but the artist orchestrated the scene in order to convey his interpretation of its grandeur. He exaggerated the steepness of the mountain, and set the scene below a dramatic sky. Along a great sweeping arc produced by the departing dark clouds and the edge of the mountain, Cole contrasts the two sides of the American landscape: its dense, stormy wilderness and its congenial, pastoral valleys. The fading storm suggests that the wild will eventually give way to the civilized. Instructors Comments: A Hudson River artist. We have a group of artists doing a lot of landscapes, celebrating American landscapes. One of the things American artists do well in the 19th century. They seem to have a different take on landscapes than the Europeans do, perhaps because there’s less history here, academically speaking. Also we have broad vistas, sweeping canyons (Niagara falls, Grand Canyon, etc.) so when I look at American landscape painters in the 19th century, I see more optimism than the Friedrichs of the 19th century. Oxbow, a funky loop in the river. We see some signs of habitation but not a lot sort of an untamed landscape the trees have a nice warped twistedness framing the canvas, and a stormy sky. The sky usually indicates whether it’s a romantic painting or not. If it’s bright and cheerful, probably not Romantic. The subject matter, landscapes themselves very American in feel. Perhaps manipulating the landscape a bit to make it more dramatic for the viewer. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Frederic E. Church
Title: Twilight in the Wilderness Date: 1860 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: Among his best works, not only for its incisive glimpse of the American wilderness, but for its implicit religiosity. Never before and probably never since has the American wilderness been so successfully depicted in all of its various levels of meaning - topographical, nationalistic, religious. Yet, this work was for its time already a wishful demonstration of faith in America rather than an accurate symbol of the American present. It comes as a shock to realize that Twilight was painted during an increasingly turbulent age. The divisions between Northern and Southern interests over slavery, the possibility of disunion through secession, the Northern reaction to the fugitive slave laws (about which Emerson raged in his journals), the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which helped bring about the conditions that created "bleeding Kansas," raised desperately serious questions about the purposes, aims, and ideals of the nation. Politicians and clergymen in speech after speech and sermon after sermon reaffirmed their belief in America's goals and aspirations at this time. Church added his voice of reassurance by painting this and other comforting images - the radiance of the New England landscape; the energy and force of Niagara Falls, symbol of the nation's strength and hopefully still pristine character; and the South American scenes bursting with natural and religious life-sustaining imagery. Church is another artist who is painting not just in America but all over the world. Wilderness has a very romantic sky. It’s realistic but it’s been idealized enough to be very dramatic and appealing to the sensibilities of a 19th century person. He’s also done some great ones of Niagara falls, the awesomeness, the grandeur. Makes him uniquely American. Even his painting of Jerusalem is an American outlook, has that feel about it. This sense of the largeness of nature is really understood by Americans. |
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Architect?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Architect: Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin
Title: Houses of Parliament, London, England Date: 1836-60 Artistic Style: Gothic Revival Significance: Across the street is Westminster Abbey. So you get these huge, gothic cathedrals right across the street from 19th century pointed windows, with crenellations done in a Gothic style. Gothic revival structure. It’s Romanticism being inserted into architecture. Interest in reviving older forms. We’ve seen this in classicism but also was applied to other things. Renaissance revival, gothic revival, greek revival. Resurgence of these forms with a romantic spirit. So Houses of Parliament does not look like a gothic cathedral, it just has some of the vocabulary. A lot of gothic structures are castles, churches, abbeys, but in the 19th century the style will be applied to government buildings, personal houses, etc. They do this with fashion too. Nostalgic for the past. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre
Title: The Artist’s Studio Date: 1837 Artistic Style: Allegorical Still-Life Photograph Significance: Photography is invented in the 19th century, many different techniques came about around the same time. Photograms, daguerrotypes, cyanotypes, etc. Daguerrotypes required a really long exposure time but very quickly had artistic applications. Not only scientific stuff was recorded, but also captured portraits, still lifes, landscapes. They’re also keeping in mind its aesthetic value. Artfully arranged materials, carefully worked out viewpoints, much as painters do. This all has its effect on the art of the 19th century. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Medium? Significance? |
Artist: Louis Daguerre
Title: Boulevard du Temple Date: 1839 Medium: Daguerrotype Significance: This was the first photograph of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show. The photographer is still keeping in mind the lines of the compositions, he’s choosing his angles. This quickly becomes apparent to artists that this is something they can work with as they’re painting. It makes a huge difference. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Medium? Significance? |
Artist: Julia Margaret Cameron
Title: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle Date: 1867 Medium: Silver Print. Significance: The most creative early portrait photographer was Julie Margaret Cameron, who received her first camera as a gift from her daughters when she was 49. Cameron's principal subjects were the great men and women of British arts, letters, and sciences, many of whom had long been family friends. Cameron's work was more personal and less dependent on existing forms than Rejlander's. Like many of Cameron's portraits, that of the famous British historian Thomas Carlyle is deliberately slightly out of focus. Cameron was consciously rejecting the sharp stylistic precision of popular portrait photography, which she felt accentuated the merely physical attributes and neglected a subject's inner character. By blurring the details she sought to call attention to the light that suffused her subjects - a metaphor for creative genius - and to their thoughtful, often inspired expressions. In her autobiography, Cameron said: "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfuly the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man." Instructor's Comments: Her husband bought her a camera to keep her occupied and got really good at it. They ran in artistic elite circles. She would dress up one of her friends as a player in one of Shakespeare’s plays, so she would photograph people playing characters as well as photographing them as themselves. Her technique very piercing, haunting right from the beginning. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Timothy O'Sullivan
Title: Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle (a/k/a White House Ruins) Date: 1873 Medium: Colloidion Print Significance: From 1867 to 1869, O'Sullivan was official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel under Clarence King. The expedition began at Virginia City, Nevada, where he photographed the mines, and worked eastward. His job was to photograph the West to attract settlers. O'Sullivan's pictures were among the first to record the prehistoric ruins, Navajo weavers, and pueblo villages of the Southwest. In contrast to the Asian and Eastern landscape fronts, the subject matter he focused on was a new concept. It involved taking pictures of nature as an untamed, un-industrialized land without the use of landscape painting conventions. O'Sullivan combined science and art, making exact records of extraordinary beauty. Above the architectural forms, the monumental striated rock formation hovers illogically where the sky should be. O'Sullivan, photographing from a great distance, conveyed the sense of overwhelming scale. Along with the two tiny figures standing at the left center, the photograph's original caption, which identifies the location as: "In a Niche 50 feet above Present Cañon Bed," provides a measure of scale. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: John Augustus Roebling
Title: Brooklyn Bridge (New York) Date: 1869-83 Artistic Style: Gothic Revival Significance: The Brooklyn Bridge, one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, stretches 5,989 feet (1825 m) over the East River, connecting the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn (on Long Island). Upon completion, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, the first steel-wire suspension bridge, and the first bridge to connect to Long Island. Originally referred to as the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, it was dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge in an 1867 letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and formally so named by the city government in 1915. Since its opening, it has become an iconic part of the New York skyline. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. New Materials, new form, but also 19th century gothic revival elements. Another example of new materials creating new things…. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Joseph Paxton
Title: Crystal Palace Date: 1850-51 Artistic Style: Significance: The positivist faith in technological progress as the key to human progress spawned world's fairs that celebrated advances in industry and technology. The first of these fairs, the London Great Exhibition of 1851, introduced new building techniques that would eventually lead to the development of Modern architecture. The revolutionary construction of the Crystal Palace featured a structural skeleton of cast iron that held iron-framed glass panes measuring 49"X30", the largest size that could then be mass-produced. Prefabricated wooden ribs and bars supported the panes. The triple-tiered edifice was the LARGEST SPACE EVER ENCLOSED UP TO THAT TIME - 1,851 feet long, covering more than 18 ACRES, and providing up to ONE MILLION SQUARE FEET OF EXHIBITION SPACE. The central-vaulted transept - based on the new cast-iron railway stations - rose 108 feet to accommodate a row of elms dear to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. Although everyone agreed that the Crystal Palace was a technological marvel, most architects and critics, still wedded to Neoclassicism and Romanticism, considered it a work of engineering rather than legitimate architecture because it made no clear allusion to any past style. Some observers, however, were more forward-looking. One visitor called it a revolution in architecture from which a new style would emerge. Instructor's comments: Built as an Exhibition Hall (think of Bartle Hall, although it wasn’t intended to be permanent, stood for a long time before it was destroyed). They constructed it over a landscape with rocks, hills, trees. Gives you a sense of the space, a result of the industrial revolution. Starts slow but picks up fast changed people by the end of the 19th century. They displayed all th great products of their day in here. One of the wonderful products of the Industrial Revolution, was Louix XVIII furniture copied and mass-produced, more people could afford to buy this stuff. This exhibition celebrates that. A lot of this is called Victorian furniture because Queen Victoria reigned in England at this time. It was very gaudy, lots of fluff. Whole rooms in the exhibition looked asian, often done in a tacky way. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Henri Labrouste
Title: Reading Room, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Paris) Date: 1843-50 Artistic Style: Significance: This is the first attempt to incorporate structural iron into architecture proper. It is a library in Paris. Labrouste was something of a radical in his desire to reconcile the Ecole's conservative design principles with the technological innovations of industrial engineers. Slender iron columns - cast to resemble the most ornamental Roman order, the Corinthian - support two parallel barrel vaults. The columns stand on tall concrete pedestals, a reminder that modern construction technology rests on the accomplishments of the Romans, who perfected the use of concrete. The design of the delicate floral cast-iron ribs in the vaults is borrowed from the Renaissance architectural vocabulary. Instructor's Comments: We can now have skinny columns that still support the same weight as classical stone columns but these are made out of metal. The effect is a very open space. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Charles Garnier
Title: The Opera Date: 1861-74 Artistic Style: Neo-Baroque Significance: The Palais Garnier, also known as the Opéra de Paris or Opéra Garnier, but more commonly as the Paris Opéra, is a 2,200-seat opera house on the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, France. A grand landmark designed by Charles Garnier in the Neo-Baroque style, it is regarded as one of the architectural masterpieces of its time. Instructor's comments: Done using an historical style. We do have the more traditional vocabulary of the classical pediments and columns put together in a grandiose way. Pretty impressive space, even though it uses all of these older traditional vocabulary in architecture, it is still creating a pretty modern space for its time. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Charles Garnier
Title: The Opera (Paris) Date: 1861-74 Artistic Style: Neo-Baroque Significance: Inside of what some critics called the "temple of pleasure", was even more opulent than the outside, with Neo-Baroque sculptural groupings, heavy, gilded decoration, and a lavish mix of expensive, polychromed materials. The highlight of the interior was not the spectacle onstage so much as the one on the great, sweeping Baroque staircase, where various members of the Paris elite - from old nobility to newly wealthy industrialists - could display themselves, the men in tailcoats accompanying women in bustles and long trains. As Garnier himself said, the purpose of the Opera was to fulfill the most basic human desires: To hear, to see, and to be seen. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Title: The Dance Date: 1867-68 Artistic Style: Romantic Significance: Carpeaux was commissioned to carve one of the large sculptural groupings for the facade of Garnier's Opera, a winged personification of Dance, a slender male carrying a tambourine, leaps up joyfully in the midst of a compact, entwined group of mostly nude female dancers, embodying the theme of uninhibited Dionysian revelry. The erotic implication of this wild dance is revealed by the presence in the background of a satyr, a mythological creature known for its lascivious appetites. Carpeaux's group upset many Parisians because he had not smoothed and generalized the bodies as Neoclassical sculptors such as Canova had done. Although the figures are IDEALIZED, their detailed musculature and bone structure (observe the knees and elbows, for example) make them appear to belong more to the real world than to the ideal one. Carpeaux's handling of the body and its parts has therefore been labeled REALISTIC. Carpeaux's UNWILLINGNESS TO IDEALIZE PHYSICAL DETAILS was symptomatic of an important shift in French academic art in the second half of the 19th century. Although the influence of photography on the taste of the period has sometimes been cited as the probably cause of this change, both photography and the new exactitude in academic art were simply manifestations of the increasingly positivist values fo the era. These values were particularly evident among the bankers and businesspeople who came to dominate French society and politics in the years after 1830. As patrons, these practical leaders of commerce were generally less interested in art that idealized than in art that brought the ideal down to earth. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Gustave Courbet
Title: The Stone Breakers Date: 1849 Artistic Style: Realism One of a three paintings Courbet submitted to the salon of 1850-51, The Stone Breakers is a large painting showing two haggard men laboring to produce gravel used for roadbeds. Courbet's representation of The Stone Breakers on an 81/2 foot wide canvas testified in a provocative way to the painter's respect for ordinary people. In French art before 1848, such people usually had been shown only in modestly scaled paintings, while monumental canvases had been reserved for heroic subjects and pictures of the powerful. Immediately after completing this, Courbet began work on an even larger canvas, A Burial at Ornans. Realism. Two men at least a generation apart if not two. (Father/son or father/grandson). These are the guys who break rock up into gravel….all day long. There’s no idealism here, not romantic. We can read a little into it. It’s fairly dirty work, we don’t see their faces, we see a cycle from one generation to the next, the younger generation takes over the older, a cycle of life. It’s quite a bit different from what we’ve seen of the neoclassical and romantic painters. Courbet would not have painted these guys on the side of the road. He probably asked them to pose in his studio. His technique doesn’t differ from previous generations. A more socially conscious artistic style of the mid century. Significance: |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Gustave Courbet
Title: Burial at Ornans Date: 1849 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: The critics at the 1850 Paris Salon objected to its presentation of a mundane provincial funeral on a scale normally reserved for the depiction of a major historical event. They also faulted its disrespect for conventional compositional standards: Instead of arranging figures in a pyramid that would indicate a hierarchy of importance, Courbet lined them up in rows across the picture plane - an arrangement he considered more democratic. Critics also noted that the work contains no suggestion of an afterlife; rather it presents death and burial as mere physical facts, as a positivist might regard them. The painter's political convictions are especially evident in the individual attention and sympathetic treatment he accords the ordinary citizens of Ornans, many of them the artist's friends and family members. Courbet seems to have enjoyed the controversy: When some of his works were refused by the jury for a special Salon at the International Exposition of 1855, he rented a building near the fair's Pavilion of Art and installed a show of his own works which he called the Pavilion of Realism. Instructor's comments: This does not depict a major even in history. This is everyday people being depicted at a burial. This is a pretty large canvas. There’s no real focus. The focal point is difficult to pin down. Unusual. Note the people aren’t idealized, either, they’re presented as they are. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Gustave Courbet
Title: The Painter's Studio (Atelier) Date: 1854-55 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: n 1855 Courbet's monumental canvas The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life (1855; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle. Courbet retaliated by mounting his own exhibition at his Pavilion of Realism, audaciously built within sight of the official one, where he showed The Painter's Studio along with about forty paintings and four drawings. The Painter's Studio is so vast that it could not safely travel to New York for this exhibition. Comprising thirty lifesize figures, the composition, which remains unfinished, is divided into three parts, as described by Courbet: on the left is "the world of commonplace life," signified by various types, including a priest, a hunter, a worker, and "a Republican of 1793"; on the right are "the people who serve me, support me in my ideas, and take part in my actions," based on portraits that Courbet had painted; in the center, Courbet represents himself, painting a landscape and flanked by a nude model and a little boy. Courbet's use of the word "allegory" in his title has given rise to various interpretations. The painting has been read as a coded reference to Freemasonry, a lesson in governance intended for Napoleon III, and a political cartoon criticizing the imperial regime. Its meaning remains enigmatic. Delacroix, his own retrospective on view at the Exposition Universelle, visited Courbet's Pavilion of Realism, where he discovered The Painter's Studio; he marveled in his Journal: "His rejected painting is a masterpiece; I cannot tear myself away from it." Instructor's comments: Here we have Courbet himself working on a canvas with the nude model. A number of people and props that he uses. Think of them as character actors, waiting to be painted by the great Courbet. On the right are the patrons who fund his work. They’re crowding in to the room to gawk. Some of these are actual portraits of real people. Some of his patrons would have recognized themselves in the painting. It’s done AS IF It’s a great mythological reason. He’s elevating his studio to a place of great import, lack of idealization makes this realism. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Gustave Courbet
Title: The Source of the Loue Date: 1864 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: Looks quite modern for its time; you focus on the brush strokes and the canvas itself more than the subject, thus making it look more 2D than 3D. Landscape plays a central role in Courbet's imagery. From the outset, he identified himself with the topography of his native Ornans, its limestone cliffs looming over his image in his 1844 Self-Portrait with Black Dog. During the next twenty years, Courbet developed a repertoire of landscape motifs rooted in his native Franche-Comté. As he famously proclaimed, "To paint a landscape, you have to know it. I know my country, I paint it." At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, Courbet garnered his first public success as a landscape painter with his Stream of the Puits-Noir, Valley of the Loue. Over the next decade he painted repetitions and variations of this site. Similarly, the source of the Loue River, a geological curiosity not far from his birthplace, inspired a group of canvases in 1864. In these works Courbet's unique vision of landscape emerges, evidenced by his predilection for tightly framed compositions, some of which verge on abstraction, and his handling of paint. His use of a palette knife to build up the surface of his canvases, the materiality of which evokes the varied textures of the landscape itself, elicited the admiration of Cézanne, who called him "a builder. ... He built like a Roman mason." |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Jean-François Millet
Title: The Gleaners Date: 1857 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: This is one of the most well known of Millet's paintings, The Gleaners(1857), Walking the fields around Barbizon one theme returned to Millet's pencil and brush for seven years—gleaning—the centuries old right of poor women and children to remove the bits grain left in the fields following the harvest. He found the theme an eternal one, linked to stories from the Old Testament. In 1857, he submitted the painting The Gleaners to the Salon to an unenthusiastic even hostile public. (Earlier versions include a vertical composition painted in 1854, an etching of 1855-56 which directly presaged the horizontal format of the painting now in the Musée d'Orsay.[8]) A warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this daily scene where the struggle to survive takes place. During his years of preparatory studies Millet contemplated how to best convey the sense of repetition and fatigue in the peasant's daily lives. Lines traced over each woman’s back lead to the ground and then back up in a repetitive motion identical to their unending, backbreaking labor. Along the horizon, the setting sun silhouettes the farm with its abundant stacks of grain, in contrast to the large shadowy figures in the foreground. The dark homespun dresses of the gleaners cut robust forms against the golden field, giving each woman a noble, monumental strength. Instructor's comments: This is a depiction of what the peasant women did. These aren’t poor farmers, they’re the ones who come and get the LEFTOVERS from the poor farmers. He shows them with dignity, but realism. They’re not overly idealized, but not groveling in the ditches either. A respectable way to create this scene. The landscapes are beautiful as well. Again socially conscious art using academic techniques. Choosing subjects that are more socially conscious. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Rosa Bonheur
Title: Plowing the Nivernais: The Dressing of the Vines Date: 1849 Artistic Style:Realism Significance: Bonheur devoted herself to painting her beloved farm animals with complete accuracy, increasing her knowledge by reading zoology books and making detailed studies in stockyards and slaughterhouses. (To gain access to these all-male preserves, Bonheur got police permission to dress in men's clothing.) Her professional breakthrough came at the Salon of 1848, where she showed eight paintings and won a first-class medal. Shortly after, she received a government commission to paint Plowing in the Nivernais, a monumental composition featuring one of her favorite animals, the ox. The powerful beasts, anonymous workers, and fertile soil offer a reassuring image of the continuity of agrarian life. The stately movement of the people and animals reflects the kind of carefully balanced compositional schemes taught in the academy and echoes scenes of processions found in classical art. The painting's compositional harmony - the shape of the hill is answered by and continued in the general profile of the oxen and their handler on the right - as well as its smooth illusionism and conservative theme were very appealing to the taste of the times. Her workers are far less pathetic than those of Courbet or Millet. Bonheur became so famous that in 1865 she received France's highest award, membership in the Legion of Honor, becoming the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Rosa Bonheur
Title: The Horse Fair Date: 1853 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: After her 1853 masterpiece The Horse Fair (Le Marché aux Chevaux) became world famous, two interesting things happened. Rosa began (1) receiving honors, including the Légion d’honneur (from the Empress Eugénie, in 1865), previously only held by men and (2) retreating from the limelight. She bought an estate near the Forest of Fontainebleau and settled there with her life-long companion, Nathalie Micas (and, after Micas' death, American painter Anna Klumpke), and her menagerie of animals. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Honoré Daumier
Title: The Third-Class Carriage Date: c. 1862 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: The painting depicts the interior of one of the large, horse-drawn buses that transported Parisians along one of the new boulevards Haussman had introduced as part of the city's redevelopment. Daumier places the viewer in the poor section of the bus, opposite a serene grandmother, her daughter, and her two grandchildren. Although there is a great sense of intimacy and unity among these people, they are physically and mentally separated from the upper-and lower-middle-class passengers, whose heads appear behind them. By portraying the lower classes as hardworking and earnest, the work humanizes them in a way similar to that of the novels of Charles Dickens. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Honoré Daumier
Title: Rue Transnonain Date: 1834 Artistic Style: Realism Significance:Rue Transnonain was created in response to the massacre of 19 people - including women and children - by the French National Guard in response to the strike of silk weavers in Lyon, on April 14, 1834. Daumier created this large scale lithograph for inclusion in the L'Association Mensuelle, a subscriber publication intended to collect funds to further freedom of the press, and pay for lawsuits brought against Charivari. Association lithographs were larger scale than the usual Charivari publications, and their distribution was to a very small group - the subscribers of this special publication. When the printseller Aubert showed the lithograph in his shop window the authorities were so incensed that all impressions were ordered found and confiscated (as well as the lithographic stone). |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Ilya Repin
Title: Bargehaulers on the Volga Date: 1870-73 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: Born in the Ukraine, Repin became an important Russian Realist painter and sculptor with artworks usually making a statement on tensions in the social order. After his death a Repin cult was established which praised the artist for being a progressive. His works were painted in shocking detail which seem to put you in the scene much like a good descriptive book. His were the kinds of paintings which make you feel the heat or shade your eyes from the sun. He was considered not just a Realist because he could portray a landscape as if you were seeing the actual situation with your own eyes, but because he depicted a real situation in terms of social reality- i.e. the differences in class amongst the subjects. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Thomas Eakins
Title: Max Schmidt in a Single Scull Date: 1871 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: In his determination to fuse art and science for the sake of an uncompromising Realism in painting, Eakins all but revived the Renaissance tenets of da Vinci. Not only did Eakins dissect cadavers right along with medical medical students (a traditional method of artistic training) and join Muybridge in his studies of motion with stop-action photography, especially those devoted to human movement, but he even had an assistant pose on a cross in full sunlight as the model for a Crucifixion scene and provided a nude male model for his female drawing students, a step that forced his resignation from the august Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eakins's extraordinary early painting Max Schmitt was his first treatment of an outdoor subject. In the foreground the artist's friend, a celebrated oarsman, pauses momentarily while rowing on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River and looks toward the viewer; in the middle distance, Eakins has depicted himself midstroke, also looking at us. A crystalline light and carefully ordered composition lead us into this rational pictorial space, in which each detail is keenly observed and convincingly rendered. Eakins has here produced a Realism that transcends mere illusionism by way of a magical clarity, as if time were suspended in a single instant. Shortly after his return from studies in Europe in July 1870, Eakins began to paint rowing pictures. This work is among the most celebrated of those painted between 1870 and 1874. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Thomas Eakins
Title: The Gross Clinic Date: 1875 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: This painting attracted negative attention, was severely criticized and was refused exhibition space at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial because the jury apparently did not regard surgery as a fit subject for art. The painting shows Dr. Samuel David Gross performing an operation with young medical students looking on. The representatives of science - a young medical student, the doctor, and his assistants - are all highlighted. This dramatic use of light, inspired by Rembrandt and the Spanish Baroque masters Eakins admired, is not meant to stir emotions but to make a point: Amid the darkness of ignorance and fear, modern science shines the light of knowledge. The light in the center falls not on the doctor's face but on his forehead - on his MIND. The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire had called as far back as 1846 for artists to depict "The Heroism of Modern Life," and turn away from the historical or the imaginary. He wrote, "There ARE such things as modern beauty and modern heroism." Though Eakins most likely had not read Baudelaire's call, he did see Dr. Gross as a hero and depicted him memorably. For many years the painting hung not in an art gallery but at the Jefferson Medical College. A few years later, Eakins's commitment to the unvarnished truth proved costly to his career. When he removed the loincloth from a male nude model in a mixed life-drawing class, the scandalized Academy board gave him the choice of changing his teaching methods or resigning. He resigned. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Winslow Homer
Title: The Life Line Date: 1884 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: Homer believed that unadorned realism was the most appropriate style for American-type democratic values. The Boston-born Homer began his career in 1857 as a freelance illustrator for popular periodicals such as Harper's Weekly, which sent him to cover the Civil War in 1862. In 1866-67 Homer spent ten months in France, where the Realist art he saw may have inspired the rural subjects he painted when he returned. His commitment to depicting common people deepened after he spent 1881-82 in a tiny English fishing village on the rugged North Sea Cost. The strength of character of the people there so inspired him that he turned from idyllic subjects to more dramatic themes involving the heroic human struggle against natural adversity. In England, he was particularly impressed with the breeches buoy, a mechanical apparatus used to rescue those about foundering ships. During the summer of 1883 Homer made sketches of a breeches buoy imported by the lifesaving crew in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The following year Homer painted The Life Line which depicts a coast guardsman using the breeches buoy to rescue an unconscious woman and is a testament not simply to human bravery but also to ingenuity. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Winslow Homer
Title: The Fox Hunt Date: 1893 Artistic Style: Realism/proto-modernism Significance: The struggle between the forces of nature plays itself out in a haunting drama featuring a fox, weakened by the deprivations of winter, descended upon by hungry crows. The spareness of this striking composition, with its graceful silhouettes, cropped forms, and slanted perspectives, attests to Homer's sophisticated knowledge of japonisme as well as his ability to extract great emotional intensity from the simplest of scenes. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Winslow Homer
Title: Prisoners from the Front Date: 1866 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: As an ilustrator for Harper's Weekly magazine in New York, Homer, a virtually self-taught artist, was assigned to the front during the Civil War. In his illustrations and in the oil paintings he began to make during the war, Homer tended to focus on the quiet moments of camp life rather than the high drama of battle. A landscape laid waste by those battles is the setting for the artist's greatest early work, Prisoners From the Front. At the left of the painting, 3 Confederate soldiers - a disheveled youngster, an old man, and a defiant young officer - surrender to a Union officer at the right. Although Homer's painting represents a fairly unremarkable occurrence in the war, it achieves the impact of HISTORY PAINTING in the significance of its theme. His subtle characterization of the varying classes and types of the participants in the tragic conflict alludes to the tremendous difficulties to be faced during Reconstruction between these warring cultures. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: John Singer Sargent
Title: Madame X (Mme Gautreau) Date: 1884 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: Sargent spent most of his career in Paris and London, though he received many portrait commissions from leading American families. His flashing, liquid stroke and flattering touch in portraiture made him one of the most famous and wealthy artists of his time. Moreover, in a major work like Madame X Sargent revealed himself almost mesmerized, like a latter-day Ingres, by the abstract qualities of pure line and flat silhouette. At the same time, he so caught the explicit qualities of surface and inner character that the painting created a scandal when publicly shown at the Salon, for in addition to the figure's already decollete dress, Sargent had placed the left-hand strap off her shoulder. To placate an offended public, he adjusted the strap as seen here after the salon closed. The experience prompted the artist to leave Paris eventually and establish his practice in London. In his most painterly works, meanwhile, Sargent carried gestural virtuosity, inspired by Frans Hals and Diego Velasquez, to levels of pictorial autonomy not exceeded before the advent of the Abstract Expressionists after World War II. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: William Holman Hunt
Title: The Hireling Shepherd Date: 1851 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: The combination of didacticism and naturalism that characterized the first phase of the movement is best represented in the work of Hunt, for whom moral truth and visual accuracy were synonymous. Hunt painted the landscape portions of the composition outdoors, an innovative approach at the time, leaving space for the figures, which he painted in his London studio. The work depicts a farmhand neglecting his duties to flirt with a woman while pretending to discuss a death's-head moth that he holds in his hand. Meanwhile, some of his employer's sheep are wandering into an adjacent field, where they may become sick or die from eating green corn. Hunt later explained that he meant to satirize pastors who instead of tending their flock waste time discussing what he considered irrelevant theological questions. The work is certainly an allegory fashioned after one of the parables of Jesus about good and bad shepherds. The painting can also be seen as a moral lesson on the perils of temptation. The woan is cast as a latter-day Eve, as she feeds an apple - a reference to humankind's fall from grace - to the lamb on her lap and distracts the shepherd from his duty. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Ford Maddox Brown
Title: Work Date: 1852 Artistic Style: Realism Significance: Although he never became an official member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Brown was introduced to the group by the precocious young poet and painter Rossetti. The large canvas Work, which preoccupied him for several years, is Brown's monumental testament to the edifying and redemptive power of hard toil. Like Hunt, he relies on a microscopic accuracy of detail to deliver his moralizing message. At the center of the sun-drenched composition are the muscular laborers who dig trenches for new waterworks in the London suburb of Hampstead. A proliferation of genre vignettes circle around this central action of the painting; these reinforce Brown's theme with emblems of the various social strata that made up contemporary Victorian society. At the far left, for example, is a ragged flower seller followed by two women distributing temperance tracts. In the shade of a tree at the right, an indigent couple tends to their infant while in the background an elegantly dressed couple rides horseback. The two men at the far right are portraits: The philosopher Thomas Carlyle and a leading Christian Socialist, Frederick Denison Maurice, "brainworkers" whose relatively conservative ideas about social reform dovetailed with brown's own genuine attempts to correct social injustice. His painting is the most complete illustration of the familiar Victorian ethic that promoted work as the foundation of material advancement, national progress, and spiritual salvation. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: James Abbot McNeill Whistler
Title: Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket Date: 1875 Artistic Style: Aestheticism (art for art's sake) Significance: By the middle of the 1860s Whistler was was titling his works "Symphony" and "Arrangement," hinting that just as a symphony can be a pleasing composition of sound, so a painting can be a pleasing arrangement of form, regardless of its subject. He made several landscapes with the musical title "Nocturne," and when he exhibited some of these in 1877, he drew a negative review from England's leading art critic John Ruskin, a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites who defended the moral intentions of those artists. Whistler's work seemed to have no such purpose, so Ruskin wondered in print how an artist could "demand 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the pulic's face." The most controversial painting in Whistler's show was the painting shown on the reverse, and it precipitated one of the most important court cases in Western art history. The work is a night scene painted in restricted tonalities that looks at first like a completely ABSTRACT painting, meaning that it does not represent observable aspects of nature. In fact, Whistler depicted a fireworks show over a lake at nearby Cremone Gardens, with viewers dimly recognizable in the foreground. Calling the work a "Nocturne" recalled the piano pieces of Romantic composer Frederic Chopin, though Whistler was less interested in Romantic feeling than in pursuing the parallel between art and music. After reading Ruskin's review, Whistler sued the critic for liel and the case went to trial. On the witness stand, the artist defended his view that art has no higher purpose than creating visual delight; he further claimed that art need not have a subject matter at all in order to be successful. While Whistler never made a completely abstract painting, his theories became an important part of the justification for abstract art in the next century. Whistler was inspired by and incorporated many sources in his art, including the work of Rembrandt, Velásquez, Japanese art, and ancient Greek sculpture to develop his own highly influential and individual style. He was adept in many media, with over 500 paintings, as well as etchings, pastels, watercolors, drawings, and lithographs. Whistler was a leader in the Aesthetic Movement, promoting, writing, and lecturing on the “art for art’s sake” philosophy. With his pupils, he advocated simple design, economy of means, the avoidance of overly-labored technique, and the tonal harmony of the final result. Whistler has been the subject of many major museum exhibitions, studies, and publications. As a realist painter, he was unafraid to change course and experiment with impressionist and semi-abstract techniques, particularly with his controversial but innovative “nocturnes”. Like the Impressionists, he employed nature as an artistic resource. Whistler insisted that it was the artist’s obligation to interpret what he saw, not be a slave to reality, and to “bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Title: Symphony in White No. II: The Little White Girl Date: 1864 Artistic Style: Aestheticism Significance: Although he believed in "Art for art's sake", Whistler, in an authentic Realist manner, consistently painted what he had observed. Whistler's approach was evident in the early 1860s, when he made pictures like Symphony in White No. II: The Little White Girl, where japonisme makes its presence not only in the obvious decor of an Asian blue-and-white porcelain vase, painted fan, and azalea blossoms, but also in the more subtle, and more important, flattening effects of the nuanced, white-on-white rendering of the model's dress and the rectilinear, screenlike divisions of the architectural framework. Further reinforcing the sense of an overriding formalism is the off-center composition, with its resulting crop of the figure along two edges of the canvas. To emphasize his commitment to the principle of art for art's sake, an art committed to purely formal values, Whistler gave his pictures musical titles - arrangements, symphonies, and nocturnes - thereby drawing analogies with a more immaterial, evocative, and nondescriptive medium. Such analogies were very much in the spirit of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism, summed up in 1873 in the English critic Walter Pater's dictum, "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." This approach emphasized the formal qualities of art as being more important than subject matter, and indeed Whistler's aim was to create not a duplicate of nature, but rather what he called "an arrangement of line, form, and color first." |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Title: Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room Date: 1876-1877 Artistic Style: Anglo-Japanese style Significance: Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room is Whistler's masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He painted the paneled room in a rich and unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted in 1876-1877, it is now considered a high example of the Anglo-Japanese style. Unhappy with the first decorative result by another artist, Leyland left the room in Whistler’s care to make minor changes, “to harmonize” the room whose primary purpose was to display Leyland’s china collection. However, Whistler let his imagination run wild, “Well, you know, I just painted on. I went on—without design or sketch—putting in every touch with such freedom…And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy of it.” Upon returning, Leyland was shocked by the “improvements”. Artist and patron quarreled so violently over the room and the proper compensation for the work that the important relationship for Whistler was terminated. At one point, Whistler gained access to Leyland's home and painted two fighting peacocks meant to represent the artist and his patron; one holds a paint brush and the other holds a bag of money. Whistler is reported to have said to Leyland, “Ah, I have made you famous. My work will live when you are forgotten. Still, per chance, in the dim ages to come you will be remembered as the proprietor of the Peacock Room.” Adding to the emotional drama was Whistler’s fondness for Leyland’s wife, Frances, who separated from her husband in 1879. Having acquired the centerpiece of the room, Whistler's painting of The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, American industrialist and aesthete Charles Lang Freer purchased the entire room in 1904 and had it installed in a room in his Detroit mansion. After Freer’s death in 1919, the Peacock Room was permanently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.. The gallery opened to the public in 1923. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Title: Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room Date: 1876-1877 Artistic Style: Anglo-Japanese style Significance: Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room is Whistler's masterpiece of interior decorative mural art. He painted the paneled room in a rich and unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted in 1876-1877, it is now considered a high example of the Anglo-Japanese style. Unhappy with the first decorative result by another artist, Leyland left the room in Whistler’s care to make minor changes, “to harmonize” the room whose primary purpose was to display Leyland’s china collection. However, Whistler let his imagination run wild, “Well, you know, I just painted on. I went on—without design or sketch—putting in every touch with such freedom…And the harmony in blue and gold developing, you know, I forgot everything in my joy of it.” Upon returning, Leyland was shocked by the “improvements”. Artist and patron quarreled so violently over the room and the proper compensation for the work that the important relationship for Whistler was terminated. At one point, Whistler gained access to Leyland's home and painted two fighting peacocks meant to represent the artist and his patron; one holds a paint brush and the other holds a bag of money. Whistler is reported to have said to Leyland, “Ah, I have made you famous. My work will live when you are forgotten. Still, per chance, in the dim ages to come you will be remembered as the proprietor of the Peacock Room.” Adding to the emotional drama was Whistler’s fondness for Leyland’s wife, Frances, who separated from her husband in 1879. Having acquired the centerpiece of the room, Whistler's painting of The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, American industrialist and aesthete Charles Lang Freer purchased the entire room in 1904 and had it installed in a room in his Detroit mansion. After Freer’s death in 1919, the Peacock Room was permanently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.. The gallery opened to the public in 1923. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Édouard Manet
Title: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) Date: 1862-63 Artistic Style: Realism/ Pre-Impressionism Significance: In 1863, Manet shocked the French public by exhibiting his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe ("Luncheon on the Grass"). It is not a realist painting in the social or political sense of Daumier, but it is a statement in favor of the artist's individual freedom. The shock value of a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men, which was an affront to the propriety of the time, was accentuated by the familiarity of the figures. Manet's wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, both posed for the nude woman, which has Meurent's face, but Leenhoff's plumper body. Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men are Manet's brother Eugene Manet and his future brother in law, Ferdinand Leenhoff. They are dressed like dandies. The men seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman's clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth — giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio. This impression is reinforced by the use of broad "photographic" light, which casts almost no shadows: in fact, the lighting of the scene is inconsistent and unnatural. The man on the right wears a flat hat with a tassel, of a kind normally worn indoors. Despite the mundane subject, Manet deliberately chose a large canvas size, normally reserved for grander subjects. The style of the painting breaks with the academic traditions of the time. He did not try to hide the brush strokes: indeed, the painting looks unfinished in some parts of the scene. The nude is a far cry from the smooth, flawless figures of Cabanel or Ingres. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Édouard Manet
Title: Olympia Date: 1863 Artistic Style: Pre-Impressionism Significance: As he had in Luncheon on the Grass, Manet again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist in the painting Olympia (1863), a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting, The Nude Maja (1800). Manet embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. The painting was controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed.[1] That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece. The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture[citation needed] - also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. The alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino. Manet's uniquely frank (and largely unpopular) depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865. At the same time, his notoriety translated to popularity in the French avant-garde community. "Olympia" immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance. As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Claude Monet
Title: On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt Date: 1868 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: Monet was probably the purest exponent of Impressionism. Born in Paris but raised in the port city of Le Havre, Monet trained briefly with an academic teacher but soon forsook the studio to paint outdoors. He befriended the BARBAZON SCHOOL artist Daubigny, who urged him to "be faithful to his impression," and guided the younger artist to create his own floating studio on a boat. Many of Monet's earthly works include expanses of water. Monet's effort to capture the intense brightness of the sunlight led to the creation of this work, which one critic complained made his eyes hurt. Monet applied the flat expanses of pure color to the canvas unmixed, directly out of the tube, and he avoided underpainting his canvases in brown, as the academics taught. This is a solitary figure in a landscape, but it is not a Romantic vision. Monet visited England in 1870 and saw the extremely painterly works by Turner. While Turner's brushwork may have influenced some of Monet's later landscapes, Monet did not share the older artist's commitment to feeling or to narrative. He said simply, "The Romantics have had their day." Instead he painted the simple moments, capturing the play of light quickly before it changed. Instructor's comments: Proponent of this new group of admirers of Manet. Monet shows us in Seine, a lovely landscape, but again, unfinished looking like Manet’s. An “impression” of the scene. Monet doesn’t desire to finish his paintings in that way. The impressionists as a whole went out to capture modern life. They took their canvases out “en plein air”. They don’t make sketches and take them back to their studio to complete the painting. It’s called painting in plain air, outside. They started around the mid 19th century but impressionists embrace it as an artistic style. They wanted to capture the transience of modern life. They didn’t want to paint posed scenes. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Claude Monet
Title: Impression, Sunrise Date: 1872 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: Louis Leroy, the satirical critic for Le Charivari, was the first to speak of a school of "Impressionists," a term he derisively based on the title of this painting by Monet. It was include in the first Impressionist exhibition at the studio of the photographer Nadar in 1874. The show marked a significant historical occasion, for it was organized by a group of artists outside the official apparatus of the Salon and its juries, the first of many independent, secessionist group exhibitions that punctuate the history of avant-garde art in the modern period. Monet's painting offers a harmony of sky and water, an example of the type of atmospheric dissolution later explored by Whistler in his Nocturnes. It is a thin veil of light gray-blue shot through with the rose-pink of the rising sun. Reflections on the water are suggested by short, broken brushstrokes, and the ghostly forms of boats and smokestacks are described with loose patches of color, rather than gradations of light and dark tones. Impression: Sunrise, for Monet, was an attempt to capture the ephemeral aspects of a changing moment, more so, perhaps, than any of his paintings until the late Venetian scenes or Waterlilies of 1905. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Claude Monet
Title: Boulevard des Capucines, Paris (Les Grands Boulevards) Date: 1873-74 Artistic Style: Impressionism Location: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO Significance: Monet's intuitive grasp of the reality of visual experience becomes particularly evident in this painting. It was painted from an upstairs window in Nadar's former studio, and can be compared with contemporary photographs of a similar scene. Whereas both camera-made images show "cities of the dead", the one because its slow emulsion could record virtually no sign of life and the other because its speed froze every horse, wheel, and human in midmovement, Monet used his rapidly executed color spotting to express the dynamism of the bustling crowd and the flickering, light-and mist-suffused atmosphere of a wintry day, the whole perceived within an instant of time. Still, far from allowing his broken brushwork to dissolve all form, he so deliberated his strokes that simultaneously every patch of relatively pure hue represents a ray of light, a moment of perception, a molecule of atmosphere or form in space, and a tile within the mosaic structure of a surface design. With its decorative clustering of color touches, its firm orthogonals, and its oblique Japanese-style or photographic view, the picture is a statement of the artist's soverign strength as a pictorial architect. Monet's is a view of modern Paris, for throughout the Second Empire Louis-Napoleon thorugh is Prefect of he Seine, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman, undertook a major program of urban renewal that called for the construction of wide boulevards and new sewers, parks, and bridges. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Claude Monet
Title: Rouen Cathedral, The Portal (In Sun) Date: 1894 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: Monet painted more than 30 views of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, studying the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Title: Moulin de la Galette Date: 1876 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived. Renoir has glamorized its working-class clientele by replacing them with his young artist friends and their models. Frequently seen in Renoir's work of the period, these attractive people are shown in attitudes of relaxed congeniality, smiling, dancing, and chatting. The innocence of their flirtations is underscored by the children in the lower left, while the ease of their relations is emphasized by the relaxed informality of the composition itself. The painting is knit together not by figural arrangement but by the overall mood, the sunlight falling through the trees, and the way Renoir's soft brushwork weaves his blues and purples through the crowd and across the canvas.This idyllic image of a carefree age of innocence, a kind of paradise, nicely encapsulates Renoir's essential notion of art: "For me a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty-yes, pretty! There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need for us to manufacture more." |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Edgar Degas
Title: The Rehearsal on Stage Date: c. 1874 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. His work shows two important influences: 1)The angular viewpoint in this and many other works shows his knowledge of Japanese prints, which he collected, and 2) the seemingly arbitrary cropping of figures (seen at the left) shows the influence of photography, which he also practiced. His work diverges from that of other Impressionists in these compositional techniques and also in his subjects, which are mostly indoors under artificial light. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Edgar Degas
Title: Little Dancer Fourteen Years Old Date: 1878-81 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: Wax, hair, linen, bodice, satin ribbon and shoes, muslin and tutu, wood base, 39” h. Known for his ballerina images, but not for his sculpture. Most of them were not discovered until after his death, in his studio. Many were never finished. This mixed media of materials may have been academic exercises, working out spatial relationships while painting. Interesting in part because they’re multi-media which no one did at this time. Most worked in bronze. Thinking outside the box. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Gustave Caillebotte
Title: Paris Street, Rainy Day Date: 1877 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: This guy’s major contribution to Impressionism is that he collected so many of their paintings, when they were struggling, he bought a bunch of them to keep them going. His paintings seem a little more calculated, serene, not so fuzzy. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Mary Cassatt
Title: Little Girl in a Blue Armchair Date: 1878 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: This is definitely a “snapshot” not formal or neoclassical. Mary Cassatt, an American painter, who lived and studied and spent much of her adult life in Europe. She spent a great deal of time in Paris (and studied there), so much so that her style is really French. She was a friend of Degas, and responsible for introducing American collectors to the French Impressionists. Because she’s a woman, she gives us a little more feminine subject matter. So, no nudes, focused on a lot of mother/daughter scenes. Her everyday modern life. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Mary Cassatt
Title: Woman in a Loge Date: 1879 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: She’s sitting in front of a mirror that’s reflecting the room. Sketchy, Impressionist technique. Feminine subject matter; she views them differently from Degas, Monet, Renoir. Eventually she alters her style a little bit. Japanese style was becoming popular. She absorbs the popular Japanese woodblocks. |
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Artist?
Title? Date? Artistic Style? Significance? |
Artist: Mary Cassatt
Title: Maternal Caress Date: 1891 Artistic Style: Impressionism Significance: This one is much more flat, linear, with patterns. Influenced by Japanese woodcuts. |
