Chapter 18
What You See Is What You Get: Realism
In This Chapter
Facing life without rose-colored glasses
Grasping the revolutionary nature of realism
Finding majesty in the mundane
Interpreting Pre-Raphaelite symbolism
“Keep it real” is a modern expression, but not a modern idea. People have felt the need to deflate exaggeration and filter out bias since, well, probably the cave days when some braggart returned from a hunt claiming he’d bagged 50 bison by himself.
In the mid-19th century, artists in France began to feel that Romanticism and Neoclassicism had stretched the truth or overlooked it. The French artists felt that the Romantics distorted reality by projecting their sublime emotions onto landscapes and people, or that they painted exotic locales instead of their own backyards (for example, Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus is set in ancient Babylon).
The leader of the Realist movement, Gustave Courbet, said, “I cannot paint an angel because I have never seen one.” He’d never seen Babylon either and wasn’t about to paint it. The Realists grounded themselves in the ordinary, capturing day-to-day life on their canvases: laborers breaking up rocks, peasants hoeing a field, a baker lounging on a sack of flour.
Realists also rebelled against Neoclassicism and its idealized forms and subjects. They weren’t about to dress farmers in togas or soften emotion, for fear of distorting the harmony of the human form! They painted straining muscles and weathered, impoverished faces — as well as pretty ones. In other words, they kept it real.
On the other hand, like the Romantics, many French Realists were driven by the desire to reform society, to make life fairer for the little guy, especially the peasant and factory worker. In 1848, another revolution erupted in Paris, overthrowing France’s last king, Louis-Phillipe, the so-called “Citizen King.” This was a revolt of the working class. They won the revolution, got the vote, and elected a president, but working conditions stayed the same.
In France, the revolution of 1848 fired up Realist painters like Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Jean-François Millet. They continued the fight with their paintbrushes, democratizing art by painting the poor and mixing social classes on their canvases. That was a provocative thing to do considering that, in 1832, Daumier was thrown in prison for six months for a caricature of the king. The cartoon shows a gargantuan version of King Louis-Phillipe with a 40-foot plank extending from his open mouth like an elongated tongue. Emaciated workers load carts of materials which are wheeled up the plank, suggesting that the king stuffs himself with the produce of the working class while they starve.
In this chapter, I explore works by the leading Realist painters, including the Barbizon school and Hudson River school, as well as the British Pre-Raphaelites, and see how prevailing social conditions affected their work.
Revolutions of 1848
The year 1848 was a year of revolutions. They detonated all across Europe in Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and Prague. Many of the revolts occurred just a few days apart.
Who lit the match that ignited all these uprisings? Europe suffered from economic depression and crop failures in the 1840s. Sparse harvests made food prices skyrocket, and people starved. Dreadful working conditions prevailed in factories, and Socialism offered a hopeful solution with its slogan “Workers Unite.” The combination of these forces lit the first explosion and the rest went off in a chain reaction.
Most of the revolutions flopped. But they set the tone for change, which progressed at a snail’s pace over the next few decades. The French Revolution of 1848 was somewhat successful. All men over 21 could finally vote, and they replaced their king with an elected president, Louis-Napoleon. France was a republic again. But four years later, Louis-Napoleon overthrew his own government and became Emperor Napoleon III.
Courbet and Daumier: Painting Peasants and Urban Blight
Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier were the most political of the Realists. Courbet told a newspaper after the Revolution of 1848, “I’m not only a Socialist, but a Democrat and a Republican . . . a supporter of the whole Revolution!”
Gustave Courbet
In 1847, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) visited Holland. The paintings of everyday people by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Jan Steen inspired him. Courbet wanted to do the same kinds of paintings in France.
One day, Courbet noticed two men hacking up rocks on a dirt road. He sketched them on-site and invited them to his studio to pose so he could turn his sketch into a painting. Apparently, they brought along their lunches to pose, too: a soup pot, a loaf of bread, and a spoon. Instead of Romantic vistas of nature like in J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship or Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Mists (see Chapter 17), Courbet relegates nature — a shady hill, a patch of wheat, and a couple bushes — to the background. The focus is on hard work. Even the laborers’ personalities don’t matter. The young man’s face turns away from the viewer; a hat hides the older man’s shadowed features. They are simply generic workers.
When he showed The Stone Breakers (see Figure 18-1), Parisian society found it crude, as some people today might be turned off by a painting of a road crew drilling pavement with jackhammers. In those days, upper- and middle-class people preferred to avert their eyes from the gritty side of daily life, not see paintings of it in galleries. The Stone Breakers reminded them of the recent working-class revolution. Harmless as it looks to us, the painting was perceived as a threat — and Courbet probably meant it to be. In a letter to a friend, written in 1850, he said, “In our very civilized society, it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies. I must address myself to them directly.”
In addition to painting ordinary people and nature scenes, Courbet gave his works a rough finish so they’d look grittier, like real life. No glazed veneer, no makeup — just the naked truth.
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Figure 18-1: Courbet’s The Stone Breakers captures on canvas the gritty side of everyday life. |
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Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY
Official art
The governments of most European countries sponsored official academy exhibitions throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. These exhibitions were usually the only venues in which artists could show their work. The exhibitions typically showcased art that followed the rules, not art that broke new ground. In France, the official exhibition was called the Salon of Paris and was held in the Louvre. If you couldn’t get into the Salon, most likely no one would see your work.
At first, the exhibitions were held annually, then biannually. In 1863, the Salon rejected the work of so many artists, including famous ones, that Napoleon III established the Salon des Refusé (Gallery of the Refused) for artists whom the Salon rejected. The Salon des Refusé was held periodically over the next 20 years.
Honoré Daumier: Guts and grit
Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) shared Courbet’s views, but instead of painting country scenes, he focused on city life. His brand of Realism tends to be expressionistic. Capturing mood and character was more important to him than detailed realism. Blurry backgrounds and heavy shadows are typical features of Daumier’s work. His painting The Third-Class Carriage almost seems like a sketch. Daumier shows us the care-worn faces of the poor, including that of a small boy. Years of hardship are etched on the old woman’s face. The basket on her lap and her central position suggest that she is the breadwinner of this small family. Perhaps the breast-feeding mother isn’t married. The background characters don’t need to be sharply focused in order for the viewer to understand how they feel in this crowded, claustrophobic carriage. The brown tones, dirty yellow light, and sketchy look of the painting allow you to feel the texture of poverty and travel back in time to a typical urban scene in mid-19th-century France.
In his lifetime, Daumier was known for his caricatures much more than his paintings. Lithography was invented just in the nick of time — ten years before Daumier’s birth. He mastered the medium and became one of France’s greatest lithographers and caricaturists. Most of his caricatures mocked government officials, autocratic laws, and middle-class mores. As mentioned in the first section of this chapter, one of them got him thrown in jail for six months. A few years later, Daumier created a lithograph depicting the government’s violent suppression of a strike. In response, the king ordered all copies of the image to be destroyed.
Experimental Communism: The Paris Commune
In 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, and the Franco-Prussian War erupted. Within a year, France lost and Napoleon’s government fell. For 72 days after the signing of the peace treaty, a Socialist government called the Paris Commune ruled the capital. Gustave Courbet was one of the Commune’s 92 leaders. Courbet’s most remembered action as a Commune member was to recommend that the Communards knock down the Vendôme column, because it had been built to memorialize Napoleon I’s military victories in Italy. Courbet said:
In as much as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation’s sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorize him to disassemble this column.
Eventually the French army besieged Paris and retook it. Thousands of Communards were lined up against walls and massacred. The new government imprisoned Courbet for six months and fined him 500 francs — about $100 (or over $1,300 in today’s dollars). While he was incarcerated, Courbet did a chalk drawing depicting prison conditions. The drawing, called Young Communards in Prison, shows some of the young children who were imprisoned for helping the Commune.
In 1873, the new Republican government of France decided to rebuild the Vendôme column destroyed by Courbet’s order. They demanded that Courbet pay for part of it — 10,000 francs a year for 33 years. He fled to Switzerland and died the day before the first payment was due!
The Barbizon School and the Great Outdoors
A year after the Revolution of 1848, the artist Jean-François Millet left Paris nearly broke. Millet joined another starving artist, Théodore Rousseau, in Barbizon, a tiny village about 30 miles southeast of Paris, on an edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Together with two other painters, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, they headed the Barbizon school of artists. They had all gone to Barbizon to paint natural scenes en pleine air (in the open air, or outside).
Jean-François Millet: The noble peasants
Whereas Rousseau communed with nature, mesmerized by the “voice of the trees,” Millet (1814–1875) painted peasants working the land. This wasn’t new stuff for Millet; he’d grown up tilling the earth in rural Normandy. His love for the rustic life shows. He projected it in his landscapes like a Romantic painter. A soft poetry suffuses most of his paintings. The pastoral scenes of workers sowing, harvesting, and tilling fields are so beautiful that you want to pick up a hoe and join in.
But not everyone felt that way when Millet exhibited his work at the Salon of 1850. Critics attacked Millet’s The Sower and The Binders and accused him of being a Socialist. That sounds absurd today, but in 1850, middle- and upper-class Europeans were hypersensitive about anything that had the scent of Socialism. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published two years earlier, in 1848, called for the overthrow of capitalism and a classless society. A painting showing peasants as equals and manual labor as ennobling and beautiful scared a lot of people. The shadowy, energetic peasant (in The Sower) might be sowing the seeds of revolution. The Gleaners (see Figure 18-2), shown in the 1857 Salon, riled up Millet’s critics again, for similar reasons — it seemed like he was advocating workers’ rights. The painting depicts three impoverished women gleaning what’s left of a wheat crop that’s already been harvested. In spite of the poverty, Millet’s painting dignifies the laborers’ work by bathing the scene with a nostalgic light.
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Figure 18-2: Millet’s The Gleaners documents a rural way of life that was beginning to be displaced by the Industrial Revolution. |
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Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
Despite the criticism (or maybe because of it), Millet’s paintings sold and the Barbizon school’s influence spread far beyond France’s borders (for example, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted numerous copies of Millet’s works in the 1880s).
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: From naked truth to dressed-up reality
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) is probably the greatest artist from the Barbizon school. The Impressionist Claude Monet said of him, “There is only one master here — Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.”
Corot’s early paintings like Chartres Cathedral (1830) and the View of Volterre (1838) were as naturalistic as Gustave Courbet’s; every object sharply defined; the background, middle and foreground distinct from one another. But around 1850, Corot changed: His paintings became poetic. He suffused them with a soft radiance, like sunlight muted by mist. These paintings appealed to and inspired Impressionists like Monet a generation later.
Morning: Dance of the Nymphs (1850) is veiled with silvery summer light. The background begins in the middleground, the two zones blending mystically together. The leaves on some of the mid-ground trees blur and blend into the background like puffy green clouds. Even the bare-breasted nymphs frolicking in the foreground seem on the verge of dissolving into the haze. Corot has made near and far seem equally distant from the viewer, which gives the painting its poetic, almost magical power.
Keeping It Real in America
Some Americans followed traditions developed in Europe. Others preferred homegrown styles. Realism was a natural for pragmatic Americans, especially when it celebrated majestic natural scenery or rural pleasures like boating and fishing or paintings of the sea.
Westward ho! with Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was born in Solingen, Germany; grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts; returned to Germany for four years to study painting; and came back to the United States to paint. Bierstadt’s specialty was spectacular mountain scenery. He made sketches and took photos of the scene, often in treacherous and dangerous locations; from these photos, he painted his awe-inspiring landscapes. For example, he headed west with an expeditionary party in 1859 and, in the summer of 1861, sketched in Eastern Shoshone country in the Wind River region of Wyoming.
In The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak he works the natural sunlight to highlight pieces of the landscape as if he were shining spotlights on them. Although Native Americans and animals populate the foreground and middle ground of the painting, they don’t project any personality — they’re simply local color and ambience. It’s the light in the painting that has personality. (See the nearby sidebar “Let there be light: The Hudson River school” for more.)
Bierstadt always went for the long, wide shot, so to speak, and never the intimate close-up.
Navigating sun, storm, and sea with Winslow Homer
The earliest paintings of Winslow Homer (1836–1910) are of the Civil War, which he covered as a pictorial reporter (sketcher) for Harper’s Weekly in 1862. After the war, he studied in Paris for a year (in 1867), but it doesn’t appear that he absorbed much from the French Impressionist movement, which was coming into its own at that time. In fact, after he returned to the United States, Homer painted mostly realistic scenes of happy rural life, many of them of pastoral figures in sun-drenched landscapes. He began experimenting with watercolors and soon mastered the medium to become one of the greatest watercolor artists in history.
Homer’s best paintings are watercolor seascapes done primarily in the 1880s in Maine. Man against nature is the “Maine” theme that runs through most of his sea paintings. In Homer’s Summer Night, silhouetted figures ensconced on black rocks gaze at a glassy sea. Two women in evening gowns — one with a wistful expression — dance solemnly on the shore as if to the music of the crashing waves, but the other figures take no notice of them. The glorious scene entrances them.
Boating through America with Thomas Eakins
Like Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) studied in Paris in the 1860s. But he stayed much longer than Homer and appears to have absorbed more art styles.
His most famous paintings are of boat racers. In The Biglin Brothers Racing, he captures a sense of cinematic action. You feel the effort of the rowers, yet the scene is peaceful. The tension between rowing and the surrounding serenity of nature gives the painting its power and interest.
But Eakins was more than a boat painter. He was a very versatile master of many genres. His Agnew Clinic, a painting of a surgical operation performed on a woman before an auditorium of medical students (reminiscent of Rembrandt’s famed Anatomy Lesson), is a probing study of character. He examines the personalities of the medical students as carefully as the surgeons examine the body on the operating table.
Let there be light: The Hudson River school
Luminous light was the hallmark of the Hudson River school artists (sometimes called Luminists), a loosely linked group that included Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and others. Focusing on the Hudson River Valley and the mountain ranges in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, their goal was to glorify American scenery and life. Their romanticized landscapes imply that man and nature live in perfect harmony. The Hudson River school didn’t usually paint en pleine air, but in studios where they could “dress up” their paintings to reflect an idealized vision of the United States.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Medieval Visions and Painting Literature
Three British art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — launched the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. In school, they avoided the splashy techniques and stylized subjects of Royal Academy of Arts instructors. The Pre-Raphaelites chose their name out of respect for the perfect naturalism of Raphael, and as a reminder of how all of Raphael’s followers got art wrong by making it too stylized and artificial. Like the French Realists, they chose to paint nature as she is, with an almost photographic realism. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites weren’t Realists. They didn’t paint peasants working in the fields (as Courbet and Millet had) or England’s urban poor. They looked to medieval art and literature for models.
They painted fictional rather than true stories drawn from medieval romances, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, and Romantic poets. The Pre-Raphaelites were particularly fond of Arthurian romances (the stories of King Arthur and his court). They also painted pictures with stained glass.
Like the French Realists, the Pre-Raphaelites hoped to reform society. They rejected middle-class materialism and were opposed to mass production because it turned workers into robots and churned out functional products without aesthetic value. They also objected to middle-class art buyers. In England, the middle class bought art that reflected their values and glorified the Industrial Revolution that had leveraged their social rise. They had a tendency to buy art that looked like the Industrial Revolution, preferring murky colors and brown tints that made the paintings look as though they’d been colored by the breath of London’s textile factories. (A Titian painting reportedly fetched a higher value in 19th-century England after a brown wash made of bitumen was painted over it.)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Leader of the Pre-Raphaelites
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), the leader of the Pre-Raphaelites, was both a poet and a painter. He sometimes wrote poems to accompany his paintings, which he called “double works.” The often brilliant poems elaborate on the paintings’ meanings.
Rossetti was the most mystical member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His Beata Beatrix follows the poet Dante’s muse Beatrice to heaven. Rossetti’s own wife, Elizabeth Siddal, had died, possibly by committing suicide, the same year (1862). Rossetti links her to Beatrice in the painting. With closed eyes, Beatrice/Elizabeth peers across the gulf of death and sees a faded Dante/Rossetti trying to reach her from the other world (the other figure is Love). A gilded sundial next to Beatrice/Elizabeth’s shoulder marks both terrestrial time and the hours of eternity. A haloed bird sets a poppy on Beatrice/Elizabeth’s lap, a symbol of remembrance. In this case, it’s more than a symbol: Elizabeth Siddal overdosed on laudanum, a poppy derivative.
The Pre-Raphaelites tried to embed symbols naturalistically into their paintings instead of superimposing them. In this way, Beata Beatrix could be both naturalistic and symbolic. For a mystic like Rossetti, this was hard to do. The more-grounded Millais was better at achieving a natural-looking symbolism in his paintings.
John Everett Millais and soft-spoken symbolism
In his painting Christ in the House of His Parents, John Everett Millais (1829–1896) depicts Jesus at the age of 8 or 9 in his father’s carpenter shop. Millais embeds naturalistic symbols of Christ’s crucifixion in the scene. The nails on the table are something you’d find on a carpenter’s bench, but they also suggest the crucifixion. Joseph holds a spike right next to Jesus’s open hand, suggesting that Jesus accepts his fate, even as a child. The young John the Baptist, on the right, carries a bowl of liquid (representing blood), while eyeing Jesus. A dove perches on a ladder, symbolizing the Holy Spirit descending from heaven; and a flock of sheep peek in the room as if looking for their shepherd.
All the symbols fit naturalistically into the scene. The painting offers both the realism of a snapshot and the symbolism of poetry.
Millais’s most famous painting is Ophelia (see the color section). In this work Millais depicts the suicide of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, described by Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (4.7):
There is a willow grows aslant the brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaidlike awhile they bore her up, Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, * * * But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.
Millais captures the scene with great poetic power, combining botanical realism with a brutally beautiful depiction of a suicide provoked by what Ophelia wrongly believed was unrequited love. Ophelia accepts death with upturned hands as she sinks into an environment with which she perfectly harmonizes. Her open mouth, half-shut eyes, and already deathly pale skin enhance the poignancy of Millais’s painting.
To paint Ophelia, Millais had his model (Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s wife) lie in a bathtub for hours during the winter. He heated the tub by placing lamps under it. But one day the lamps burned out. He was too absorbed in his work too notice. But Siddal never complained. She nearly died afterward and never recovered completely.
The Arts and Crafts movement: Adding form to function
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which expanded to seven members, broke up after a couple years. After the dissolution of the group, one of the members, William Morris, launched the highly influential Arts and Crafts movement (1880–1910).
Morris’s goal was to replace generic, mass- produced items like furniture with beautiful, handcrafted objects. Why did a chair have to be merely functional? Couldn’t it be beautiful, too? Morris hoped his handcrafted products industry would grow large enough to provide creative alternative employment opportunities for factory workers. He also hoped the products would be as affordable as mass-produced commodities.
However, Morris proved a better craftsman than an economist: His Arts and Crafts movement never panned out financially, remaining a luxury for the rich while the masses embraced machined furniture made cheaply in large factories. However, his totalizing approach to interior design, taking a hand in crafting everything from the curtains to the light fixtures to the tea set, inspired many artists and architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.