Europe and America, 1800 to 1870

Realism – sometimes called naturalism, in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, or implausible, exotic, and supernatural elements.

Romanticism – An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 1700s and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure fromthe attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.

NeoClassicism – a late 18th- and early 19th-century style in architecture, decorative art, and fine art, based on the imitation of surviving classical models and types.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this group sought torecapture the innocence and beauty of Italian forms before Raphael, in protest against what they saw as the prevailing“frivolity” of art of their day.

Industrial Revolution – Thecomplex of radical socioeconomic changes, such as the ones that took place in England in the late 1700s, that arebrought about when extensive mechanization of production systems results in a shift from home-based handmanufacturing to large-scale factory production.

Beaux-Arts – the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, particularly from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century.

lithograph – the art or process of producing a picture, writing, or the like, on a flat, specially prepared stone, with some greasy or oily substance, and of taking ink impressions from this as in ordinary printing.

daguerreotype – The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.

orientalism – the representation of Asia, especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude.

odalisque – a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the sultan of Turkey.

positivism – a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism.

Hudson River School – a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism.

picturesque – visually attractive, especially in a quaint or pretty style.

transcendental – A transcendental experience, event, object, or idea is extremely special and unusual and cannot be understood in ordinary ways.

DAVID’S STUDENTS

Jacques-Louis David’s prominence as an artist in Napoleonic France attracted numerous students. He developed an active and successful teaching studio where he gave practical instruction. He influenced many important artists of the period, encouraging all his students to learn Latin and to immerse themselves in classical culture.

Initially demanded that his pupils select their subjects from Plutarch

• Ancient author of Lives of the Great Greeks and Romans
• Source of Neoclassical subject matter

David’s students produced work that was very Neoclassical

• Was open-minded in his teaching
• Encouraged his students to find their own artistic identities

Three of David’s pupils departed from Neoclassicism

• Antoine-Jean Gros
• Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson
• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

These artists laid the foundation for the Romantic movement

• Explored the realm of the exotic and the erotic
• Used fictional stories for the subjects of their paintings

GROS 

• Antoine-Jean Gros knew that surrounding himself with powerful people was good for business
• Produced several paintings about Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s

Napoleon at the Pesthouse at Jaffa

• Painted at Napoleon’s request

Recorded an incident during an outbreak of the bubonic plague

• Disease struck Muslim and French forces
• In March 1799, Napoleon himself visited the pesthouse at Jaffa
• Tried to calm the growing panic and hysteria
• Gros depicted Napoleon’s staff officers covering their noses against the stench of the place

Napoleon, standing with the dead and dying, is fearless and in control

• Comforts those still alive
• Gros implied that Napoleon possessed the power to heal

GIRODET-TRIOSON 

• Another of David’s students
• Paintings of exotic locations and cultures
• Moved further into Romanticism

Burial of Atala

• Based on the book, The Genius of Christianity
• Section of the book telling the story of Atala
• Novel was very successful
• Atala became almost a cult figure

Set in Louisiana in the US

• Focuses on two young Native Americans, Atala and Chactas
• Were fom different tribes
• Fall in love and run away together through the wilderness
• Erotic passion throughout the story
• Atala, swore herself to lifelong virginity
• Commits suicide rather than break her oath

Girodet’s painting depicts this tragedy

• Atala’s lover, Chactas, buries her in the shadow of a cross
• Helping with the burial is a cloaked priest
• Symbolizes the revival of Christianity (and the Christianization of the New World)

Like Gros’s depiction of the Muslim world

• Girodet’s depiction of American Indian lovers in Louisiana appealed to the public’s fascination

INGRES (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)

• Arrived at David’s studio in the late 1790s

Ingres’s study there was short

• Left David because of their differences in style

Ingres liked more flat and linear forms like those found in Greek vase painting

• Ingres usually placed the figure in the foreground
• Looked like a piece of low-relief sculpture

Apotheosis of Homer by Ingres

Raphael’s School of Athens served as the inspiration for Apotheosis of Homer

• Homer sits on a throne at an ionic temple
• Receives a crown from Fame or Victory
• At the poet’s feet are two statuesque women
• Personify the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Symmetrically grouped about him is a company of the “sovereign geniuses”
• Expressed humanity’s highest ideals in philosophy, poetry, music, and art

To Homer’s left

• Greek poet Anacreon with his lyre
• Phidias with his sculptor’s hammer
• Philosophers Plato and Socrates

To his far right

• Roman poets Horace and Vergil
• Two Italian greats: Dante and Raphael (the painter Ingres most admired)

Among the forward group on the painting’s left side

• Poussin (pointing) and Shakespeare (half concealed)

Forward right side

• French writers Jean Baptiste Racine, Molière, Voltaire, and François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon

Ingres had planned a much larger group

But he never completed the project

Ingres condemned “modern” styles such as Romanticism

Made works that weren’t entirely Neo-classical

GRANDE ODALISQUE by Ingres

• Borrowed the position of the head from Raphael
• Relaxed pose
• small head and elongated limbs
• cool color scheme

Made the woman an odalisque 

• woman in a Turkish harem
• place for the wives, female slaves, concubines and other women of a polygamous man

Strange mixture of artistic ideas

• combination of classical form and Romantic themes
• created confusion
• When Ingres first exhibited Grande Odalisque in 1814, the painting drew lots of criticism

Critics saw Ingres as a rebel in terms of form and content

• Did not stop their attacks until the mid-1820s
• When another enemy of the official style took his place
• Eugène Delacroix

Suddenly accepted his work

Ingres led the battle against the “barbarism” of Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, and the Romantic movement

Ingres saw himself as the conservator of good and true art

ROMANTICISM 

• Rousseau’s ideas contributed to the rise of Romanticism
• exclaimed“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains!”
• summarizes a fundamental Romantic idea

Romanticism emerged from a desire for freedom—

• Not only political freedom but also freedom of thought
• Freedom of feeling, of action, of worship, of speech, and of taste

Romantics asserted that freedom was the right and property of all

• They believed the path to freedom was through imagination
• Rather than reason
• Functioned through feeling rather than through thinking

The allure of the Romantic spirit grew dramatically during the late 18th century

• The term originated toward the end of that century with German literary critics
• Aimed to distinguish “modern” ideas from Neoclassical ones

Many scholars say that Romanticism began around 1750 and ended about 1850

• Happened between Neoclassicism and Realism

Features of Romanticism – P. I. N. E.

• Past – longing for the medieval past, pre-industrial Europe (Gothic architecture will be revived)
• Irrational/ Inner mind / Insanity – Romantic artists depict the human psyche and topics that transcend the use of reason. One Romantic artist, Gericault chose to do portraits of people in an insane asylum.
• Nature – longing for the purity of nature, which defies human rationality
• Emotion/ Exotic – Romantics favored emotion and passion over reason. Exotic themes and locales were also popular because they did not adhere to European emphasis on rationality.

Roots of Romanticism

• Emphasis on feeling over reason
• From calculation to intuition
• From objective nature to subjective emotion
• Interest in the medieval period and in the sublime

For people living in the 18th century

• The Middle Ages were the “dark ages”

Edmund Burke

• British politician and philosopher who studied the sublime
• 1757 publication
• A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
• Burke defined his idea of the sublime—feelings of awe mixed with terror

Burke said that pain or fear evoked the most intense human emotions

• These emotions could be thrilling
• Raging rivers and storms at sea could be sublime to their viewers

Artists were also interested in the fantastic, the occult, and the macabre—

• Saw the soul voyaging into the dangerous areas of consciousness

HENRY FUSELI 

• Swiss
• Settled in England
• Eventually became a member of the Royal Academy and an instructor

Largely self-taught

• Distinctive painting style that expressed the fantasies of his imagination

Specialized in night moods of horror and in dark fantasies—

• In the demonic, in the macabre (death), and in the sadistic

The Nightmare

• Young woman lies asleep
• Draped across the bed with her limp arm dangling over the side

An incubus

• A demon believed in medieval times to prey, often sexually, on sleeping women
• Sits on her stomach

In the background

• A ghostly horse with flaming eyes sticks his head through the curtain

The word “nightmare” actually derives from “night” and “Mara”

• Mara was a spirit in Northern European mythology
• People thought it tormented and suffocated sleepers (possibly from sleep paralysis)

Romantic artists often combined the drama of the Baroque with naturalistic detailsWanted to create moving imagesSome artists combined elements of Neoclassicism with Romanticism

WILLIAM BLAKE 

• Greatly admired ancient Greek art
• Thought that it illustrated the mathematical and the eternal
• Work often incorporated classical references
• Did not align himself with prominent Enlightenment figures
• Found the art of the Middle Ages appealing

Derived the inspiration for many of his paintings and poems from his dreams

• Said that dreams were important
• The rationalist search for explanations of the world killed the spiritual side of human nature

The strict rules imposed by orthodox religions killed the individual’s creative impulse

Ancient of Days 

Blake’s vision of the Almighty

Figure unites the concept of a Creator with that of wisdom

Frontispiece for his book Europe: A Prophecy

• Juxtaposed it with a quotation
• “When he set a compass upon the face of the deep” from Proverbs 8:27 in the Old Testament

The speaker in that Bible chapter is Wisdom

• Tells the reader how she was with the Lord through all the time of the Creation

Energy fills Blake’s composition

• God leans forward from a fiery ball
• Looks toward earth and unleashes power through his left arm into two rays of light
• Come from his spread fingers
• Looks like a tool an architect might use (compass)

Looks like a figure from Michelangleo

Spain and France

Romanticism gradually displaced Neoclassicism as the dominant painting style of the first half of the 19th centuryRomantic artists

• Francisco de Goya in Spain
• Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix in France
• Explored the exotic, erotic, and fantastic in their paintings

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, 1746 – April 16, 1828)

• Spanish painter and printmaker.

Has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns.

His subject matter and the way he handled paint would later influence Manet and Picasso.

His art was very diverse

• Many of his works deal with traditional religious subjects
• Others are royal portraits painted after 1786
• Goya would later become Pintor del Rey (Painter to the King)

Charles IV promoted him to First Court Painter in 1799

Worked at the same time as Jacques Louis David, but there work is very different

• Thought Neoclassicism was important, at first, but later dismissed it.
• Thought about the Neoclassical ideas of rationality and order
• Considerable thought about the Enlightenment

Many of Goya’s works are on display in the Museo del Prado in Madrid

From 1775 to 1792 Goya painted cartoons (designs) for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid.

• This was the most important period in his artistic development.
• As a tapestry designer, Goya did his first genre paintings, or scenes from everyday life.
• The experience helped him become a keen observer of human behavior.
• He was also influenced by neoclassicism, which was gaining favor over the rococo style.
• Finally, his study of the works of Velázquez in the royal collection resulted in a looser, more spontaneous painting technique.

THIRD OF MAY, 1808 (also considered Realism)

• Third of May, 1808 was a royal commission
• Painted in 1814 for Ferdinand VII, who had reclaimed the throne after the French were pushed out
• The picture was painted by order of the Spanish king together with The Second of May 1808 to celebrate the stand of the people of Madrid against the forces of Alju.
• They may have been made from sketches drawn by witnesses at the shootings.

The Spanish people

• Finally recognizing the French as invaders
• Sought a way to expel the foreign troops

On May 2, 1808

• The Spanish attacked Napoleon’s soldiers in a chaotic and violent clash
• In retaliation and as a show of force
• The French responded the next day by executing numerous Spanish citizens
• Shooting at Príncipe Pío hill.

The white of the victim’s shirt represents the innocence and purity of the some 5,000 Spanish civilians who were executed between May 2 and May 3.

The central man’s suntanned skin and work clothing indicates that he is an outdoors worker – an ordinary anonymous man at the centre of a great tragedy.

He alone looks straight at the enemy.

• An enemy who’s face we cannot see.
• On his knees, but taller than everyone else right before his death.

Goya depicted the French soldiers as anonymous

• Ruthlessly executing the unarmed and terrified Spanish peasants

The artist encouraged empathy for the Spanish

• By portraying horrified expressions on their faces

The man about to be shot throws his arms up, symbolizes Christ on the cross

Lots of emotional drama

• Use of darks and lights

Although Goya captured the specific moment when one man is about to be executed

• He also depicted the bloody bodies of others already lying dead on the ground
• Still others have been herded together to be shot in a few moments

Goya’s work was particularly emotionalLife in Spain at the time and personal painHis official paintings were very different from his personal work. We will see those next.FAMILY OF CHARLES IV 

• Goya greatly admired the achievements of his predecessor Diego Velázquez
• Velázquez’s Las Meninas was the inspiration for this image of the king and his queen
• Maria Luisa, surrounded by their children

As in Las Meninas

• The royal family appears facing the viewer in an interior space
• The artist included himself on the left, barely visible, painting on a large canvas

Goya’s portrait of the royal family has been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny

• Variety of interpretations
• Some scholars see this painting as just a depiction of Spanish royalty
• Others think its commentary on Spanish life in turmoil

It is clear that his patrons authorized the painting’s basic elements—

• The king and his family, their attire, and Goya’s inclusion

Little evidence exists as to how the royal family reacted to this painting

• Some scholars have argued that they disliked the portrait
• Others have suggested that the painting confirmed the Spanish monarchy’s continuing presence and strength

As dissatisfaction with the rule of Charles IV and Maria Luisa increased

• The political situation grew more tense

The Spanish people eventually threw their support behind Ferdinand VII

• Son of the royal couple
• Hoped that he would start to reform

To over-throw his father and mother

• Ferdinand VII enlisted the aid of Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon had his sites set on the Spanish throne and willingly sent French troops to Spain

As soon as he ousted Charles IV, Napoleon revealed his plan to rule Spain himself

• Installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne

Two of Goya’s best known paintings are The Nude Maja (La maja desnuda) and The Clothed Maja (La maja vestida).

• Depict the same woman in the same pose, naked and clothed.
• He painted The Clothed Maja after outrage in Spanish society over the previous Maja.
• No allegorical or mythological meaning, the painting was “the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art”.
• He refused to paint clothes on her, and instead created a new painting.

The identity of the Majas is uncertain.

• The most popularly cited subjects are the Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is thought to have had an affair, and the mistress of Manuel de Godoy, who later owned the paintings.
• In 1808 the paintings were seized by Ferdinand VI, and in 1813 the Inquisition confiscated both works as ‘obscene’.

A serious illness in 1792 left Goya permanently deaf.Isolated from others by his deafness, he became increasingly occupied with the fantasies and inventions of his imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind.He evolved a bold, free new style close to caricature.In 1799 he published the Caprichos, a series of etchings satirizing human folly and weakness.

His portraits became penetrating characterizations, revealing their subjects as Goya saw them.

In his religious frescoes he employed a broad, free style and an earthy realism unprecedented in religious art.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

From a series titled Los Caprichos (The Caprices) (Change in mood)

• Goya depicted himself asleep on a table or writing stand
• Creatures surround him
• Look like they are ready to attack the artist
• Owls (symbols of folly)
• Bats (symbols of ignorance)

What comes out when reason is suppressed

• Getting rid of Enlightenment ideas

Can also be interpreted as Goya’s commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—

• The unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares

The Disasters of War Series. This series is one of the most horrific depictions of war to date.  It captures the brutality of war, the slaughtering of others.

What more can one do?, from The Disasters of War, 1812-15.

In the 1810s, Goya created a set of aquatint prints titled The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra) which depict scenes from the Peninsular War.

The scenes are disturbing, sometimes macabre in their depiction of battlefield horror, and represent an outraged conscience in the face of death and destruction.

The prints were not published until 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death.

Sad Presentiments of What Must Come to Pass.

With or Without Reason.

The Same (Thing)

The Women Give Courage

And are Like Wild Beasts

What Courage! 

The woman firing the canon is standing on the bodies of dead men.

The Way is Hard

Goya became increasingly disillusioned and pessimistic

• His declining health only contributed to this state of mind

Among his later works are the series of 14 paintings called the Black Paintings

• Frescoes he painted on the walls of his farmhouse in Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid

Painted them just for himself

• Gives an insight into his mental state at the time, which is terrifying and disturbing
• deafened and driven half-mad by what was probably an brain inflammation
• decided to free himself from painterly restrictions of the time
• painted whatever nightmarish visions came to him.

After his death the wall paintings were transferred to canvas

Saturn Devouring One of His Children 

• Depicts the raw carnage and violence of Saturn (the Greek god Kronos)
• Wild-eyed
• Looks like a monster
• Eats one of his children

Because of the similarity of Kronos and khronos (Greek for “time”)

• Saturn has come to be associated with time

Has led some scholars to interpret Goya’s painting as an expression of the artist’s despair over the passage of time

Conveys a wildness, boldness, and brutality

All of the paintings below are from his home.

THÉODORE GÉRICAULT One of the artists most closely associated with the Romantic movement in FranceStudied with P. N. Guérin under DavidGéricault had an interest in the heroic and the epic

• Was well trained in classical drawing
• Did not like the rigidness of the Neoclassical style
• Produced works that rely on drama, visual complexity, and emotional force

Raft of the Medusa

Géricault’s most ambitious project

• Gigantic canvas (approximately 16 by 23 feet)

Painting of a historical event

• Abandoned the idealism of Neoclassicism
• Liked the drama of Romanticism

The painting’s subject is a shipwreck that occurred in 1816 off the African coast

• The French warhsip Medusa ran aground on a reef
• Captain was incompetent
• Was made Captain because of his political ties

150 remaining passengers built a makeshift raft from pieces of the disintegrating ship

• The raft drifted for 12 days
• Only 15 survived
• Finally, a ship spotted the raft and rescued the emaciated survivors

This horrendous event was political dynamite once it became public knowledge

Géricault sought to capture the horror, chaos, and emotion of the tragedy

Wanted to make sure the painting was accurate

• Visited hospitals and morgues to examine corpses
• Interviewed survivors
• Had a model of the raft built in his studio

A few survivors try to flag down a ship on the horizon

• Jumble of bodies
• Arranged the survivors and several corpses in a powerful X-shaped composition
• Piled one body on another in every attitude of suffering, despair, and death

One light-filled diagonal axis stretches from bodies at the lower left

• Up to the black man raised on his comrades’ shoulders and waving a piece of cloth toward the horizon

The cross axis descends from the storm clouds

• The dark, billowing sail at the upper left to the shadowed upper torso of the body trailing in the open sea

Raft is at a diagonal and comes into the viewer’s space, including the viewer in the action

Painting was also a comment on the practice of slavery

• The artist was a member of an abolitionist group that wanted to end the slave trade
• Placed Jean Charles at the top of the pyramid of bodies
• A black soldier and one of the few survivors

INSANE WOMAN Irrational states of mind went directly against Enlightenment rationalityGéricault, like many of his contemporaries

• Examined the influence of mental states on the human face
• Believed that a face revealed character
• Especially in madness and at the moment of death

He made many studies of the inmates of hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane

• Studied the severed heads of guillotine victims

Her mouth tense, her eyes red with suffering

One of several of his portraits of the insane that seems hypnotic

Romanticism was not just the visual arts

• Also in music and literature
• Rejected the structure of neoclassicism for something more emotional

In music

• Compositions of Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, and Johannes Brahms
• All emphasized the melodic or lyrical
• Music had the power to express the unspeakable
• To communicate the most subtle and most powerful human emotions

In literature

• Poets such as John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published volumes of poetry

One of the best examples of the Romantic spirit is the novel Frankenstein

• Written in 1818 by Mary Shelley
• The novel embraced the emotional
• Rejected the rational
• Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a product of science

Frankenstein served as a cautionary tale of the havoc that could result from unrestrained scientific experimentation

• And from the arrogance of scientists like Dr. Frankenstein

EUGÈNE DELACROIX Art historians present the history of painting during 1850’s as a contest between two major artists

• Ingres, the Neoclassical draftsman
• Eugène Delacroix, the Romantic colorist

Their dialogue recalls the fight between the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes

• Poussinistes were conservative defenders of academic art who regarded drawing as superior to color
• Rubénistes proclaimed the importance of color over line

Delacroix’s works were Rubeniste

DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS

• Inspired by the poem Sardanapalus by Lord Byron
• Setting of ancient Assyrian Empire
• Byron’s poem conjures images of eroticism and madness
• Delacroix used the poem for inspiration in his painting the Death of Sardanapalus

Delacroix depicted the last hour of the Assyrian king

• Had just received news of his armies’ defeat and the enemies’ entry into his city

In the painting, the king reclines on his funeral pyre (bed of combustible material for burning someone to death)

• Soon to be set on fire
• Watches the destruction of all of his most precious possessions
• His women, slaves, horses, and treasure
• Sardanapalus’s favorite concubine throws herself on the bed
• Wanted to go up in flames with her master
• Tortured and dying bodies of the harem women
• In the foreground, a muscular lave plunges his knife into the neck of one woman

Delacroix also turned to current events, usually tragic or sensational onesMade several paintings based on the Greek war for independence

• Painted the French perception of the Greeks
• Locked in a battle for freedom from the Ottoman Turks
• Generated great interest in Romantic circles

LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE 

Delacroix captured the passion and energy of the 1830 revolution in France in his painting

Based on the Paris uprising against Charles X at the end of July 1830

Allegorical personification of Liberty raising the French flag as she urges the people to fight on.

• The scarlet hat (the symbol of a freed slave in antiquity) she wears reinforces the urgency of this struggle.
• Around Liberty are Paris stereotypes
• street boy with his pistols
• worker with a sword
• intellectual man in a top hat with sawed-off musket.

As in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, dead bodies lie all around.

In the background, the towers of Notre-Dame rise through the smoke.

Romantic painters often depicted exotic places they had never seenEugène Delacroix actually went to Morocco in 1832 and discovered new insights into a culture built on proud virtues.He found there a culture more classical than anything European Neo-classicism could imagine.In a letter to his friend Fréderic Villot dated February 29, 1832, he wrote:

“This place is made for painters. . . . [B]eauty abounds here; not the over-praised beauty of fashionable paintings. The heroes of David and Co. with their rose-pink limbs would cut a sorry figure beside these children of the sun, who moreover wear the dress of classical antiquity with a nobler air, I dare assert.”

The trip to Morocco confirmed Delacroix’s conviction that beauty exists in the fierceness of nature.

He painted fights of lions and tigers, battles between horses, and clashes of Muslims with great animals.

TIGER HUNT 

Influential event in Delacroix’s life that affected his art in both subject and form was his visit to North Africa in 1832.

Things he saw there shocked his imagination with fresh impressions that lasted throughout his life and resulted in paintings such as Tiger Hunt,which he completed more than 20 years after his trip.

His trip also made him more aware of the expressive capabilities of light and color.

• Would later influence Impressionists painters.
• Pure colors lines don’t really exist in nature
• Made up of multiple colors, shadow and light

Recorded his observations in his journal, became the foundation for color theory.

• No other painter of the time explored the domain of Romantic subject and mood as thoroughly as Delacroix.
• His technique was intuitive instead of planned
• Caught the impression quickly.
• His contemporaries commented on how furiously Delacroix worked once he had an idea.
• Worked on the entire painting at once.

Landscape painting came into its own in the 19th century as a fully independent and respected genre.Rather than simply describe nature, Romantic poets and artists often used nature as allegory.In this manner, artists commented on spiritual, moral, historical, or philosophical issues.In the early 19th century, nature was thought of as a “being” that included the totality of existence.In nature artists found an ideal subject to express the Romantic theme of the soul unified with the natural world.

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH For Friedrich, landscapes were temples and his paintings were altarpieces.Abbey in the Oak Forest appears solemn/quiet.

• In the midst of winter
• through the leafless oaks
• snow-covered cemetery,
• a funeral procession brings a coffin into the ruins of a Gothic church.

The emblems of death are everywhere

• the winter season
• the leaning crosses and tombstones
• the black people are wearing
• the skeletal trees
• the church that is falling apart

Comment on human mortality.

As Friedrich himself remarked: “Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting.”

Friedrich’s work balances inner and outer experience. “The artist,” he wrote, “should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If he does not see anything within him, he should give up painting what he sees before him.”This quote is powerful.  As an artist or a writer, a poet or a musician, we shouldn’t try to just duplicate what we see in front of us.  Artists are responsible for trying to express the things that are at the core of the human experience.

J.M.W. TURNER Joseph Mallord William TurnerProduced work that also responded to encroaching industrialization

Constable’s paintings are serene and precisely painted

• Turner’s are turbulent

The Slave Ship

• 1783 incident
• Reported in a very popular read book titled The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by Thomas Clarkson
• Book had just been reprinted in 1839
• Painting was done in 1840.

The incident involved the captain of a slave ship

• Realized that his insurance company would reimburse him only for slaves lost at sea
• Not for those who died on the way
• Ordered the sick and dying slaves to be thrown overboard

Painting’s full title

• The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)

Painting is full of movement and is emotional, just like the event itself

The slave ship moves off to the left

• Slaves sink to their deaths.

People are small compared to the ocean and sky…should fill terror at the event and awe at nature

Iron shackles and around the wrists and ankles of the drowning slave

• No chance of survival

Discovered the aesthetic and emotional power of pure color

• The paint itself is almost the subject
• Important steps toward 20th-century abstract art, which will get rid of shape and form altogether

In America, landscape painting was the specialtyGroup of artists known as the Hudson River School

• Members drew their subjects primarily from the wooded areas of New York State’s Hudson River Valley
• Not everyone from the “school” painted in NY
• Name was given to American artists of that particular style
• Not only painted panoramic landscape views
• Examined our relationship to the land
• Also asked moral questions of America’s direction as a civilization

THOMAS COLE 

• Born in England
• Referred to as the leader of the Hudson River School

The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm)

Oxbow-shaped curve of the Connecticut River

Cole divided the composition in two

• The dark, stormy wilderness on the left
• The more developed civilization on the right, in light

Tiny artist in the bottom center of the painting (wearing a top hat)

• Very small compared to the landscape
• Looks at the viewer
• Asks for input in deciding the country’s future

ALBERT BIERSTADT 

• Traveled west in 1858
• Produced many paintings
• Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley among others

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

• Panoramic view
• 10 feet wide

Deer and ducks appear at the edge of a lake

• Steep and rugged mountains soar skyward on the left and in the distance
• Wild trees frames the lake on the right

Paintings of the west were very important

• Reinforced the idea of Manifest Destiny
• 19th-century idea that moving west across the continent was the logical destiny of the United States

As John L. O’Sullivan wrote in the earliest known use of the term in 1845

“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Paintings of the beautiful American West

• overlooked the realities of conquering everything – particularly pushing out Native Americans, and the destruction of the environment

REALISM

• Developed in France around midcentury
• Increasing emphasis on science
• More advances in industrial technology during the early 19th century
• Reinforced the Enlightenment’s foundation of rationalism

The connection between science and progress seemed obvious to many

• Both in intellectual circles and among the general public
• People increasingly embraced empiricism 
• (the search for knowledge based on observation and direct experience)

New ideas about science called positivism

Developed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte

• Promoted science as the mind’s highest achievement
• Advocated a purely empirical approach to nature and society
• Comte believed that scientific laws governed the environment and human activity
• Could be revealed through careful recording and analysis of observable data

Realist artists argued that only things that people could see for themselves—were “real”

• Realists focused their attention on the experiences and sights of everyday life
• Disapproved of historical and fictional subjects
• Not real, not visible, not in the present

The Parisian academic jury

• Selecting work for the 1855 Salon
• Rejected two paintings by Gustave Courbet
• On the grounds that his subjects and figures were too coarse and too large
• Courbet withdrew all of his works
• Set up his own exhibition outside the grounds, calling it the Pavilion of Realism

Courbet was the first artist ever to stage a private exhibition of his own work

• His pavilion and the statement he issued to explain the paintings shown there amounted to the new movement’s manifestos

Although Courbet maintained that he founded no school and was of no school

• He did, as the name of his pavilion suggests, accept the term Realism as descriptive of his art

The statement Courbet distributed at his pavilion reads in part:

“The title of “realist” has been imposed upon me . . . .

Titles have never given a just idea of things; were it otherwise, the work would be superfluous. . . .

I have studied the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice.

I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of “art for art’s sake.”

No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. . . .

To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearances of my time as I see them—in a word, to create a living art—this has been my aim.”

Six years later, on Christmas Day, 1861, Courbet wrote an open letter

• Published a few days later in the Courier du dimanche, addressed to prospective students

In the letter, the painter reflected on the nature of his art

“[An artist must apply] his personal faculties to the ideas and the events of the times in which he lives. . . .

[A]rt in painting should consist only of the representation of things that are visible and tangible to the artist.

Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it.

I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can consist only of the representation of both real and existing things. . . .

An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of painting.”

Courbet’s most famous statement, however, is his blunt dismissal of academic painting

He concisely summed up the core principle of Realist painting:

“I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one.”

GUSTAVE COURBET 

• Painted objects and images that beforehand weren’t worthy of painting
• working-class laborers and peasants
• Painted them on a large scale that had previously been unseen

THE STONE BREAKERS 

• Two men
• One about 70, the other a young boy
• In the act of breaking stones
• Traditionally the work of the lowest in French society

Places the young and old together

• Suggests that those born into poverty remain poor their entire lives
• Not romanticized nor idealized
• Painted them with dirty browns and grays
• Nothing fun about the painting, its pure work

This interest in the working poor as subject matter had special meaning for the mid-19th-century French audience

• In 1848 laborers rebelled against the bourgeois leaders of the newly formed Second Republic and the nation
• Demanding better working conditions and a redistribution of property.  (99%)
• The army stopped the revolution in three days
• Lots of lives lost

Courbet’s painting became popular amongst the working class

BURIAL AT ORNANS 

• Depicts a funeral outside his home town.
• Attending the funeral are ordinary people.
• Clergyman reads the Office of the Dead
• Can’t see into deep space because of all the people, creates a wall
• Some of the models were Courbet’s sisters (three of the women in the front row, toward the right) and friends.
• Behind the figures are bands of overcast sky and barren cliffs.

The open grave is right where the viewer would stand

Some bright color, but not much

Presents the viewer with the realities of life and death.

In 1857, Jules-François-Félix Husson Champfleury, wrote, “It represents a small- town funeral and yet reproduces the funerals of all small towns.”

Realism captured ordinary things.

Realists allowed brushstrokes to show.

• Wanted the viewer to know how the painting was made
• his contemporaries called him primitive.
• Often used the palette knife to help him rough in areas

Inspired the young artists who worked for him

• The public said he was careless and critics wrote that he was “brutal.”

JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET

• Subjects from everyday life.
• Moved to where his subjects lived – town of Barbizon
• Barbizon School specialized in detailed pictures of forest and countryside.

Millet started his life as a peasant

Identified with those he painted

The Gleaners

• three peasant women
• gleaning the last wheat scraps.
• These women were of the lowest level of peasant society.
• Landowning allowed them to pick up the remainders left in the field after the harvest.

Millet placed his figures in the foreground, against a broad sky.

The French public still reacted to his paintings with disgust and suspicion.

After the1848 revolution

• Millet identified with the poor
• Made their life grand
• Upperclass did not like that they were being given positions of importance.
• Middle-class landowners did not want to allow them to glean
• Millet’s depiction of gleaning did not win them over.

The middle class linked the poor with the dangerous, newly defined working class

• Were people who stood up for the working class
• Karl Marx (wrote the Communist Manifesto)
• Friedrich Engels (co-authored the Communist Manifesto and wrote The Conditions of the Working Class in England)
• Émile Zola (risked his career on an article called J’accuse…also know as the Dreyfus Affair…Jew accused of giving over secrets)
• Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations)

Socialism was a growing movement

• Both its views on property and its call for social justice, even economic equality, frightened the middle class.
• In Millet’s sympathetic portrayal of the poor, many saw a political manifesto.

1798

• German printmaker Alois Senefelder
• created the first prints using stone instead of metal plates or wooden blocks.

Lithography (Greek, “stone writing”).

• Based on the idea that oil and water don’t mix
• Uses a greasy, oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate
• Wipes water onto the stone
• Clings only to the areas the drawing does not cover.
• Rolls oil-based ink onto the stone
• Sticks to the drawing but is repelled by the water.
• Artist presses the stone against paper, only the inked areas—the drawing—transfer to the paper.

Color lithography requires multiple plates,

• one for each color,
• each impression must line up perfectly with the previous one.

HONORÉ DAUMIER 

• People knew that art could help them politically
• The violent revolutions in France and the rest of Europe in the later 18th and early 19th centuries led the French people to suspect artists of having a political agenda.
• A person could be jailed for too bold a statement in the press, in literature, in art—even in music and drama.

Realist artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

• Defender of the urban working classes
• In his art he boldly confronted authority with social criticism and political protest.
• In response, the authorities imprisoned the artist.

A painter, sculptor, and, like Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya, one of the world’s great printmakers, Daumier produced lithographs (see “Lithography,” above) that allowed him to create an unprecedented number of prints, thereby reaching a broader audience.

In addition to producing individual lithographs for sale, Daumier also contributed satirical lithographs to the widely read, liberal French Republican journal Caricature. 

In these prints, he mercilessly lampooned the foibles and misbehavior of politicians, lawyers, doctors, and the rich bourgeoisie in general.

His in-depth knowledge of the acute political and social unrest in Paris during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 endowed his work with truthfulness and, therefore, with power.

Honoré Daumier, Fight between Schools, 1855

The school of Realism is represented by the man with the square palette and wooden shoes, while idealism is represented by the nude wearing a Greek warrior.

The cartoon was created in response to Courbet’s rejection of the establishment by opening his own exhibition outside the Universal Exposition of 1885 after his painting was rejected by the jury.

RUE TRANSNONAIN 

Lithograph

The title refers to a street in Paris

• An unknown sniper killed a civil guard
• Part of a government force trying to repress a worker demonstration.
• The fatal shot had come from a workers’ housing block
• The remaining guards immediately stormed the building and massacred all of its inhabitants.

Inspired by Goya’s Third of May

• Daumier created a view of the slaughter from a realistic point of view
• Painted the aftermath of the slaughter
• Looks like we just stumbled on the scene

Artists wanted to present the facts.

THIRD-CLASS CARRIAGE

Daumier also did paintings, especially after 1848.

• Provides a glimpse into the cramped and dirty railway carriage of the 1860s.
• The riders are poor and can afford only third-class tickets.
• First- and second-class carriages had closed compartments
• Third-class passengers were crammed together on hard benches that filled the carriage.

People are not posed and not planned

• anonymous, insignificant, and patient with a life they cannot change.

Photography will later do the same thing

ROSA BONHEUR (1822–1899)Most celebrated woman artist of the 19th centuryWinner of the gold medal at the Salon of 1848

• Became in 1894 the first woman officer in the French Legion of Honor.

Received her artistic training from her father

• He was a proponent of Saint-Simonianism
• Early-19th-century utopian socialist movement that championed the education and enfranchisement (the right to vote) of women. 

Bonheur launched her career believing that as a woman and an artist she had a special role to play in creating a new and perfect society.

The Horse Fair

• Passion for accuracy in painting
• Resisted painting the social struggles that her contemporaries did.
• Painted animals
• Not the exotic wild animals that fascinated Delacroix
• Painted the animals common in France
• Horses, rabbits, cows, and sheep.

Spent long hours studying the anatomy of dead horses in the Paris slaughterhouses.

Painting of a parade at the annual Paris horse sale.

• Some horses rear up.
• Others walk around guided on foot or ridden by their keepers.

Dramatic lighting, loose brushwork, and rolling sky.

Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais, 1849, oil on canvas, 5 ft 9 in x 8 ft 8 in.

ÉDOUARD MANET (1832–1883)Pivotal artist during the 19th century.Paintings played an important role in the development of Impressionism in the 1870s.

Luncheon on the Grass

• Depicts two women, one nude, and two clothed men enjoying a picnic.
• Figures are based on living people.

The nude woman is Victorine Meurend (Manet’s favorite model at the time)

• Men are his brother Eugène (with cane) and probably the sculptor Ferdinand Leenhof.
• The two men wear fashionable Paris clothing of the 1860s
• Nude woman is not idealized
• Not ashamed of her nudity
• Looks directly at the viewer without shame.

This painting outraged the public

• seemed show ordinary men and promiscuous women in a Paris park.

One hostile critic said:

“A commonplace woman of the demimonde (loose morals), as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on a holiday, perpetrating an outrage to play the man. . . . This is a young man’s practical joke—a shameful, open sore.”

Shocking the public was not Manet’s primary goal.

Combination and criticism of the history of painting.

Negative reaction was not just to the subject matter

• The way he presented the figures was also under attack.
• Painted them in soft focus
• Broadly painted the landscape,
• including the pool in which the second woman washes.

Lighting creates strong contrasts between darks and lights.

• Men’s pants are painted with only one or two values
• Flattens their forms
• Declared that the most important element in the painting is the light.
• Used art to call attention to art.

Moving away from illusionism

• Open acknowledgment of painting’s properties
• Flatness of the painting surface.

The public thought it was a crude sketch.

Was very controversial

One interpretation of this work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution that occurred in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the western outskirts of Paris, at the time.

This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting.

Marcantonio Raimondi, The Judgment of Paris, 1488-1530 Engraving, after Raphael.

The image was based on an old image and an old story.

The Judgment of Paris refers to the choice Paris makes when forced to choose the most beautiful woman in the world.

• He chooses Venus.
• Manet’s painting directly refers to the engraving, but the image of Aphrodite is replaced by a prostitute.
• This outraged Paris society; the idea that beauty could be portrayed by someone on the fringes of society.
• The brushwork was loose and sketchy, not refined like traditional images.

This was written about the painting.

It was one long, drawn out explosion of laughter, rising in intensity to hysteria …. A group of young men on the opposite side of the room were writhing as if their ribs were being tickled.

One woman had collapsed on to a bench, her knees pressed tightly together, gasping, struggling to regain her breath…. The ones who did not laugh lost their tempers ….

It was an outrage and should be stopped, according to elderly gentlemen who brandished their walking sticks in indignation. 

One very serious individual, as he stalked away in anger, was heard announcing to his wife that he had no use for bad jokes. . . .It was beginning to look like a riot . . .and as the heat grew more intense faces grew more and more purple.

OLYMPIA Even more scandalous to the French was Manet’s 1863 painting OlympiaDepicts a young white prostitute (Olympia was a common “professional” name for prostitutes in the 19th century) reclining on a bed.Entirely nude except for a thin black ribbon tied around her neck

• Bracelet on her arm
• Orchid in her hair
• Mule slippers on her feet
• Looks directly at the viewer.

Behind her appears a black maid

• Presents her a bouquet of flowers from a client.

Horrified the public and critics.

Images of prostitutes were not unheard of during this period

• Her shamelessness and her defiant, confident look shocked viewers.

The depiction of a black woman was also not new to painting

• Including both a prostitute and a black woman was too much for the Paris elite

Also made references to racial divisions.

One critic described Olympia as “a prostitute with dirty hands and wrinkled feet . . . her body has the livid tint of a cadaver displayed in the morgue; her outlines are drawn in charcoal and her greenish, bloodshot eyes appear to be provoking the public, protected all the while by a hideous Negress.”

• Critics attacked the subject matter and the way it was painted
• Brush strokes are rougher
• Value shifts are abrubt.

The Venus of Urbino 1538 Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

While Venus is sensual and implies marital love, Olympia is frankly sexual.  Olympia gazes back at the viewer, and appears as if she is on display.  The model was a well known courtesan, and the viewer is implied as her customer.  The treatment of the Venus figure is controversial, but the treatment of space is even more so.  There is little attempt to create the illusion of depth in Manet’s image.  The space and the figure seem shallow and flat. Manet seems intent on creating a painting rather than an illusion.

WINSLOW HOMER (1836–1910) BostonRealism was well received in the United States.One of the leading American Realist.

• Experienced one of the biggest events of his life—the Civil War

In 1860

• Joined the Union campaign as an artist-reporter for Harper’s Weekly. 

At the end of the war, he painted Veteran in a New Field

• Simple and direct
• comments on the effects of the Civil War.

Man with his back to the viewer

• Harvesting wheat.
• He’s a veteran based on his uniform
• Canteen on the ground in the lower right corner
• Current job is a farmer
• Has cast aside his former job as a soldier.

Transition from war to peace.

Unemployed soldiers coming home after the war was a major concern.

New York Weekly Tribune commented: “Rome took her great man from the plow, and made him a dictator—we must now take our soldiers from the camp and make them farmers.”

Veteran in a New Field also comments about death.

• By the 1860s, farmers used cradled scythes (like a pitch fork) to harvest wheat.
• Homer rejected realism in favor of symbolism.
• Painted a single-bladed scythe
• Transforming the veteran into a symbol of Death—the Grim Reaper

THOMAS EAKINS (1844–1916)Born in Philadelphia

• Wanted to show the realities of the human experience.

Studied both painting and anatomy

Studied art under French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme

Painted things as he saw them rather than make them appeal to the public.

• Admired accurate paintings built on truth.

Gross Clinic 

• Considered brutally honest realism
• Art jury rejected it for the Philadelphia exhibition that celebrated the American independence centennial in 1876.
• Surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross
• in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia
• where the painting hung until it sold in 2006
• bloody fingers and scalpel
• lectures about his surgery on a young man’s leg.
• The patient suffered a bone infection.
• several colleagues watch
• all have been identified
• patient’s mother covers her face.

Man in the back holds an anesthetic cloth over the patients face to knock him out

• Anesthetics were introduced in 1846.

Most people couldn’t look at the painting

“It is a picture,” one critic said, “that even strong men find difficult to look at long, if they can look at it at all.”

Began to use photography to study the body in motion

• Would later collaborate with photographer Eadweard Muybridge
• to study animal and human movement.

JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856–1925)

• Born in Florence, Italy
• Younger contemporary of Eakins.

Developed a looser style in contrast to Eakins’s.

• Studied art in Paris before moving to London
• Became admired for his portraiture and his personality.

Four girls

• children of one of Sargent’s close friends
• appear in a hall and small drawing room in their Paris home.
• informal, eccentric arrangement
• suggests how much at ease they are with expensive and fragile objects
• Sargent must have known the daughters well.
• Appear relaxed and like they trust him.

Almost like a snapshot, instead of a composed portrait.

HENRY OSSAWA TANNER (1859–1937)Studied art with Eakins before moving to Paris.Wanted to paint with dignity the life of the people he grew up with

Son of an African American minister in Pennsylvania.

The Thankful Poor

• Grandfather and grandchild are painted with lots of detail
• Everything else looks like loose brushstrokes of color and light
• Man is in deep concentration

After finishing The Thankful Poor

• Started painting biblical subjects
• Inspired by the effects of light used by Rembrandt.

• Group of painters
• Called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• refused to be limited to the scenes strict Realists painted.
• Painted fictional, historical, and fantasy subjects
• Organized in 1848
• Wished to create fresh and sincere art
• Free from what the tired and artificial paintings created by those that came after Raphael.

Influenced by John Ruskin

• Critic, artist, and writer
• Did not like the materialism and ugliness of the industrialized world.

Appreciated the spirituality and idealism of past times

• especially the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS (1829–1896)One of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodPainted so realistically he was called “the poet of meticulous detail.”Ophelia

• Recieved praise when he exhibited it in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855
• This is where Courbet set up his Pavilion of Realism.

The subject is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet 

• Drowning of Ophelia
• In her madness, doesn’t realize she’s drowning

Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid like awhile they bore her up— Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress.

• Scene is a work of fiction
• Tried to present it as fact.

Painted the background on-site at a spot along the Hogsmill River in Surrey.

• Had a friend lie in a heated bathtub full of water for hours at a time.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Another founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who established an enviable reputation as both a painter and poet.Like other members of the group, Rossetti focused on literary and biblical themes in his art.

He also produced numerous portraits of women that projected an image of ethereal beauty and melded apparent opposites—a Victorian prettiness with sensual allure.

His Beata Beatrix is ostensibly a portrait of a literary figure—Beatrice, from Dante’s Vita Nuova—as she overlooks Florence in a trance after being mystically transported to Heaven.

Yet the portrait also had personal resonance for Rossetti.

It served as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth Siddal (the model for Millais’s Ophelia), who had died shortly before Rossetti began this painting in 1862.

In the image, the woman (Siddal-Beatrice) sits in a trancelike state, while a red dove (a messenger of both love and death) deposits a poppy (symbolic of sleep and death) in her hands.

Because Siddal died of an opium overdose, the presence of the poppy assumes greater significance.

CRYSTAL PALACE 

“Undraped” construction first became popular in the greenhouses of English country estates.

Joseph Paxton (1801–1865) built several such structures for the duke of Devonshire.

In the largest—300 feet long—he used an experimental system of glass-and-metal roof construction.

Designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851

• Place to showcase the “works of industry of all nations” in London.
• Built from prefabricated parts.
• Took only six months to build
• Was dismantled when the exhibition ended so that it would not obstruct the park.

Showcased huge machines, large working fountains and giant trees.

• The public liked the building so much
• Workers who dismantled it built a bigger version of the Crystal Palace at a new location on the outskirts of London
• Fire destroyed it in 1936.

The Crystal Palace was built by about 5,000 navvies who worked very hard for very little and completed their tasks quickly. Their welfare became the concern of Catherine Marsh, who noticed the poor conditions they were working in and treatment they received: she spared no effort to see that they received fair and just treatment. She made sure that meals were provided for them.

The ironwork contractors were Fox, Henderson. The 900,000 square feet (84,000 m²) of glass was provided by the Chance Brothers glassworks in Smethwick, Birmingham. They were the only glassworks capable of fulfilling such a large order, and had to bring in labour from France to meet it in time.

The life of the Great Exhibition was limited to six months, and something then had to be done with the building. Against the wishes of Parliamentary opponents, the edifice was re-erected on a property named Penge Place that had been excised from Penge Common atop Sydenham Hill. It was much modified and enlarged so much that it extended beyond the boundary of Penge Place, which was also the boundary between Surrey and Kent. Within two years Queen Victoria again performed an opening ceremony.

Several localities claim to be the area to which the building was relocated. The street address of the Crystal Palace was Sydenham SE26 but the actual building and parklands were in Penge. At the time of relocation most of the buildings were in Croydon, as were a majority of the grounds. In 1899 the county boundary was moved, transferring the entire site to Penge Urban District in Kent. The site is now within the Crystal Palace Ward of the London Borough of Bromley.

Two railway stations were opened to serve the permanent exhibition. The Low Level Station is still in use as Crystal Palace railway station, and part of the High Level Station, from which a subway gave access to the Parade area, can also still be seen, with its Italian mosaic roofing. This subway is a Grade II listed building.

The South Gate is served by Penge West Railway Station. For some time this station was on an atmospheric railway. This is often confused with a 550 metre (m) pneumatic passenger railway which was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1864.

There is an apocryphal story, popular amongst local schoolchildren, that Crystal Palace High Level Station was closed because a commuter train was trapped by a tunnel collapse and remains there to this day. In reality the closure was a scheduled part of the decline of the railway network in the 1950s.

Water features

Illustration of a Paxton water feature at Chatsworth.

Joseph Paxton was first and foremost a gardener, and his layout of gardens, fountains, terraces and cascades left no doubt as to his ability. One thing he did have a problem with was water supply. Such was his enthusiasm that thousands of gallons of water were needed in order to feed the myriad fountains and cascades which abounded in the Crystal Palace park. The two main jets were 250 feet (76 m) high.

Initially water towers were constructed, but the weight of water in the raised tanks caused them to collapse. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was consulted and came up with the plans for two mighty water towers, one at the north and the other at the south end of the building. Each supported a tremendous load of water, which was gathered from three reservoirs, at either end of and in the middle of the park.

Two years later, the grand fountains and cascades were opened, again in the presence of the Queen, who got wet when a gust of wind swept mists of spray over the Royal carriage.

Attractions

The exhibits included just about every marvel of the Victorian Age, encompassing the products of many countries throughout the world. There was pottery and porcelain; ironwork and furniture; steam hammers and hydraulic presses; perfumes and pianos; houses and diving suits; firearms and barometers; fabrics and fireworks.

Among the attractions was the first ever dinosaur exhibition, life-size (but anatomically inaccurate) models designed and made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, situated by the Lower lakes, near the Anerley entrance and still there in 2007. Hawkins held a dinner party for twenty-two guests inside the hollow body of one of the Iguanodons. The dinosaurs were renovated in a £4,000,000 project in 2002, and were officially unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh.

This is a Talktel.  The box with the head would be placed on a table while the batteries and switches would be underneath the table.  The magician could make the head’s mouth move “magically”.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is from the Greek.

• phos means light
• graphs means writing, literally writing with light.
• Like printmaking, it completely changed how we view the world and humanity
• Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1789–1851)
• Briton William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877)
• Created the first practical photographic processes in 1839

Process was relatively easy, so easy in fact it would lead several people to proclaim that painting was dead.

Middle class liked the science of the new medium and its low cost.

Artists as diverse as Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, and the Impressionist Edgar Degas welcomed photography as a tool to help them with their paintings.

Camera Obscura

Well known artists tool in the 18th century

Was a blacked out room with a small pinhole on one wall.  Whatever was outside the room was projected on the inside of the room, upside down   The artist could drape a cloth in the middle of the room and trace what was outside onto his canvas.  This is similar to tracing something by using a projector.  Later, scientists will figure out that by adding light sensitive chemicals to these “sheets” you can literally draw with light.

The earliest photographic processes were the daguerreotype, named after L.J.M. Daguerre, and the calotype. Daguerre was an architect and theatrical set painter and designer.

• Led Daguerre and a partner to open a popular entertainment called the Diorama.
• Audiences watched performances of “living paintings”
• created by changing the lighting effects on a “sandwich” made of a painted backdrop and several layers of painted translucent front curtains.

Daguerre used a camera obscura for the Diorama

• Wanted to find a more efficient and effective procedure.

Met Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826

• Niépce made a permanent picture of the cityscape outside his upper-story window by exposing, in a camera obscura, a metal plate covered with a light-sensitive coating.
• required an eight-hour exposure time.
• After Niépce died in 1833
• Daguerre continued his work, making two important discoveries.

Latent development—that is, bringing out the image through treatment in chemical solutions—considerably shortened the length of time needed for exposure.

Daguerre also discovered a better way to “fix” the image by chemically stopping the action of light on the photographic plate, which otherwise would continue to darken until the image turned solid black.

Was used until the 1850’s until a process similar to film negatives replaced it.

First photo of a person

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839, Daguerreotype

In France, at the same time, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre introduced another process, which became known as the daguerreotype, which was a light sensitive image on a metal plate.  Like the photogenic drawing, it did preserve an image, but only one.  Most importantly, it was a positive image. 

The daguerreotype was a slow process though.  It had to be exposed so long that the people on the street blur and fade away.  A lone figure remains in the bottom left corner; he has stopped to have his shoes shined. The image is captured on a metal plate, and is limited to a single exposure. Later developments will enhance the process, and the technology advances rapidly.

The introduction of the daguerreotype lead some to declare “painting is dead”.   Photographic portraits quickly became popular,  since they were more affordable than painted portraits, and the process was fascinating to many.  Because of the exposure time, a daguerreotype portrait was a laborious process, though, as evidenced in the cartoon below.

DAGUERREOTYPES 

The French government presented the new daguerreotype process at the Academy of Science in Paris on January 7, 1839, with the understanding that its details would be made available to all interested parties without charge (although the inventor received a large annuity in appreciation).

Soon, people worldwide began taking pictures with the daguerreotype “camera” (a name shortened from camera obscura) in a process almost immediately christened “photography,” from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphos (“writing”).

From the start, the possibilities of the process as a new art medium intrigued painters. Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), a leading academic painter of the day, wrote in an official report to the French government:

Daguerre’s process completely satisfies all the demands of art, carrying certain essential principles of art to such perfection that it must become a subject of observation and study even to the most accomplished painters.

The pictures obtained by this method are as remarkable for the perfection of the details as for the richness and harmony of the general effect. Nature is reproduced in them not only with truth, but also with art.

Each daguerreotype is a unique work with amazing detail and finely graduated tones from black to white. Still Life in Studio (FIG. 30-50) is one of the first successful plates Daguerre produced after perfecting his method.

The process captured every detail—the subtle forms, the varied textures, the diverse tones of light and shadow—in Daguerre’s carefully constructed tableau.

The three-dimensional forms of the sculptures, the basket, and the bits of cloth spring into high relief and are convincingly represented.

The inspiration for the composition came from 17th-century Dutch vanitas still lifes, such as those of Claesz (FIG. 25-21). Like Claesz, Daguerre arranged his objects to reveal their textures and shapes clearly.

Unlike a painter, Daguerre could not al- ter anything within his arrangement to effect a stronger image.

However, he could suggest a symbolic meaning through his choice of objects. Like the skull and timepiece in Claesz’s painting, Daguerre’s sculptural and architectural fragments and the framed print of an embrace suggest that even art is vanitas and will not endure forever.

On January 31, 1839, less than three weeks after Daguerre showed his method in ParisWilliam Henry Fox Talbot presented a paper on his “photogenic drawings”.As early as 1835, Talbot made “negative” images by placing objects on sensitized paper and exposing them to light.

In his experiments, Talbot next exposed sensitized papers inside simple cameras and, with a second sheet, created “positive” images.

He further improved the process with more light-sensitive chemicals and a chemical development of the negative image. This technique allowed multiple prints.

However, in Talbot’s process, which he named the calotype (from the Greek word kalos, “beautiful”), the photographic images incorporated the texture of the paper.

• Produced a slightly blurred, grainy effect
• Daguerreotype was more sharp.
• Calotype was not accepted
• expensive licensing and equipment fees after the process was patented in 1841.

Nadar achieved so much fame for his wet-plate photographic portraits that he became the subject of a Daumier lithographDaumier made his print in response to an 1862 court decisionSaid that photography was indeed art and entitled to protection under copyright law.

Nadar liked using balloons for travel and photography

Made the first aerial photographs of Paris in 1858 from his balloon Le Géant (The Giant).

NADAR (1828–1910)

Making portraits

• Good job for most photographers
• Greatest of the early portrait photographers was Gaspar-Félix Tournachon, known simply as Nadar
• French novelist, journalist, balloonist, caricaturist, and, photographer .

Photographic studies for his caricatures made to open a portrait studio.

So talented was he at capturing the essence of his subjects that the most important people in France, including Delacroix, Daumier, Courbet, and Manet, came to his studio to have their portraits made.

Nadar said he sought in his work “that instant of understanding that puts you in touch with the model—helps you sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas, and character and enables you to produce . . . a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait.”

Eugène Delacroix 

• Shows the painter at the height of his career.
• Even in half-length, his gesture and expression create a mood that seems to reveal much about him.
• Perhaps Delacroix responded to Nadar’s famous gift for putting his clients at ease by assuming the pose that best expressed his personality.
• The new photographic materials made possible the rich range of tones in Nadar’s images.

Improved calotype

• Developed by Nadar.
• Used glass negatives and printing paper (prepared with egg white)
• Could record finer detail and a wider range of light and shadow.

The new wet-plate technology

• named because the photographic plate was exposed, developed, and fixed while wet
• became the universal way of making negatives until 1880.

Had drawbacks.

• The plates had to be prepared and processed on the spot.
• Working outdoors meant taking along a portable darkroom of some sort—a wagon, tent, or box with light-tight sleeves for the photographer’s arms.

Portrait of Claude Monet by Nadar

HAWES AND SOUTHWORTH United States

• Photographers began to make daguerreotypes within two months of Daguerre’s presentation in Paris.

Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901), a painter

Albert Sands Southworth (1811–1894), a pharmacist and teacher.

• Ran a daguerreotype studio in Boston
• Specialized in portraiture
• Popular because of the shortened exposure time
• Still long enough to require head braces to hold people in place

Took their equipment outside the studio to record places and events.

Early Operation under Ether, Massachusetts General Hospital

Taken from the gallery of a hospital operating room

• Put the viewer in the position of medical students looking down on a lecture-demonstration

Predates Eakins’s Gross Clinic by almost 30 years

White-draped patient surrounded by a circle of darkly clothed doctors.

Room’s furniture are in sharp focus

• Slight blurring of several of the figures means they must have moved during the exposure.

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON Did not take up photography seriously until age 48.Produced images of many well-known men of the period

• Charles Darwin
• Alfred Tennyson
• Thomas Carlyle
• Photographed more women than men

Ophelia, Study No. 2

• Depicted her female subjects as characters in literary or biblical stories.
• Slightly blurred focus became something she was known for.
• dreamlike quality

TIMOTHY O’SULLIVANPhotographers were quick to realize the documentary power of their new medium.Thus began the story of photography’s influence on modern life and of the immense changes it brought to communication and information management.

Historical events could be recorded in permanent form on the spot for the first time. The photographs taken of the Crimean War (1856) by Roger Fenton (1819–1869) and of the American Civil War by Mathew B.

Brady (1823–1896), Alexander Gardner (1821–1882), and Timothy O’Sullivan (1840–1882) remain unsurpassed as incisive accounts of military life, unsparing in their truthful detail and poignant as expressions of human experience.

Of the Civil War photographs, the most moving are the inhumanly objective records of combat deaths.

A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863

Was simply a news photograph, but let people know the real price of war.

Dead men as far as the eye can see.

• Union soldiers in the foreground
• boots stolen
• pockets picked.

Did not have the technology to present these in newspapers, but did exhibit them publicly

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE (1830–1904)Realist photographer and scientist

• Came to the United States from England in the 1850s and settled in San Francisco
• Established a prominent international reputation for his photographs of the western United States.

In 1872 the governor of California needed Muybridge’s help in settling a bet about whether, at any point in a stride, all four feet of a horse running at top speed were off the ground.

Through his sequential photography, as seen in Horse Galloping,Muybridge proved they did.  Mayor lost $25,000 in today’s money

This experience was the beginning of Muybridge’s photographic studies of the successive stages in humand animal motion—details too quick for the human eye to capture.

These investigations culminated in 1885 at the University of Pennsylvania with a series of multiple-camera motion studies that recorded separate photographs of progressive moments in a single action.

Muybridge’s discoveries received extensive publicity through the book Animal Locomotion (1887), and his motion photographs earned him a place in the history of science as well as art.

These sequential motion studies, along with those of Eakins and Marey, influenced many other artists, including their contemporary, the painter and sculptor Edgar Degas , and 20th-century artists such as Marcel Duchamp.

Muybridge presented his work to scientists and general audiences with a device called the zoopraxiscope, which he invented to project his sequences of images (mounted on special glass plates) onto a screen.

The result was so lifelike that one viewer said it “threw upon the screen apparently the living, moving animals.

Nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the turf.” The illusion of motion here was the result of an aspect of human eyesight called “persistence of vision.”

Stated simply, it means that the brain retains whatever the eye sees for a fraction of a second after the eye stops seeing it.

Thus, viewers saw a rapid succession of different images merging one into the next, producing the illusion of continuous change.

This illusion lies at the heart of the motion-picture industry that debuted in the 20th century, and thus was born cinema as a new art form.

Printmaking revolutionized education.  It made what were once expensive records of history, science and religion available to the masses.  It single handedly is responsible for the growth in wealth and knowledge that surrounds us today.What printmaking did for knowledge, photography did for humanity.  While at first a simple scientific method of reproduction, its development later on led to the documentation of the human condition. We get to see what we as people are capable of doing to each other.  From slavery and war to police brutality and poverty, photography showed us an unaltered, and sometimes frightening, view of ourselves.  It made us realize the brutality of human nature.  Almost 100 years later…have we changed?