Lecture 11 Realism

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1848

Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857

Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1857

Winslow Homer, Veteran in the Field, 1865

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Henry Osawa Tanner, The Grateful Poor, 1894

Lecture 11 Realism

Positivismpalette knife

image d’epinalReconstruction

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1848

Gustave Courbet, an anarchist who advocated a classless society, used the term Realism to describe his own work

Two males – one mature, one young – in the act of breaking stones – the work of those of the lowest classes. Menial work reveals the toil – not romanticism.

Color: dirty browns and grays to convey dreary and dismal nature of work.

Use of palette knife making dabs of color visible instead of concealing them. Open facture lays way for impressionist.

Courbet, Stone Breakers, 1848

Goya, Third of May 1814, 1817

Courbet shows us an objective view as opposed to the highly dramatic style favored by the Romantics.

Deadpan v drama

Courbet: “Dear Meiseirs, I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on a highway. It is rare to encounter the most complete expression of poverty, so an idea for a picture came to me… I made an appointment with them for the next day at my studio. On the one side is an old man, seventy.. on the other side a young fellow… in his filthy tattered shirt…. Alas, in labor such as this, one’s life begins that way, and ends that same way”.

Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849

Bleak provincial landscape with common trivial people done in monumental in scale, like a large history painting. Portraits of Courbet's friends from his home town.

The line of mourners conforms to the horizon line of the hills behind, these people are one with the land. Figures are arranged in rows rather than in traditional hieratic pyramid.

Courbet’s work was rejected from the International Exhibition of 1855. In response, he set up the Pavilion of Realism – a one man exhibition.

Gustave Courbet, Good day Monsieur Courbet, The Meeting 1854

Wandering Jew, image d’epinal

Courbet borrowed imagery from popular culture. In this case, he looks to the image epinal, a widely circulated woodcut illustration of the Wandering Jew. He bases himself on this prototype and depicts a chance meeting of the painter and his wealthy patron, Alfred Bruyas and Bruyas’s servant Calas, on a road outside Montpellier.

Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857

Millet paints a large picture of a group of gleaners, the lowest, most impoverished peasants who picked up the leftovers after the fields had been harvested.

Peasants are ennobled. Received with suspicion in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution – poor having solemn grandeur was threatening. Socialism is a growing moment and is threatening to the middle class.

Millet, The Gleaners, 18

Jules Breton, Blessing of the Wheat in the Artois, 1857

Jules Breton was a favorite artist to the king. His image of peasants censored out the harsher aspects of poverty such as gnarled hands and darkened faces. Unlike Millet, Bretons peasants literally are bowing before higher authorities.

Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais: The Dressing of Vines, 1849

Internationally renowned woman painter. Bonheur applied for legal permits to wear men’s clothing in public.

Concerned with agricultural activities - dressing of vines & tilled soil, meticulous detail of landscape. She studied the breed of cattle in situ

Idealized aspect – not confronted with poverty like Courbet

Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853-5

At the Horse Fair – these horses are not quite broken – slightly wild. Wrangled by grooms. Bonheur studied equine anatomy in Parisian slaughter houses. Panoramic composition - like Courbet's Burial at Ornans.

Dynamic but ordered composition. Hugely popular – sensation at the Salon of 1853.

In 1865 Bonheur was awarded the Legion d’Honor (highest award in France) by the Empress who declared “genius has no sex”.

Winslow Homer, Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864

In the USA, Realism linked to the American democratic ideal.

Homer was a native of Boston and trained as lithographer. He covered the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly Magazine as an artist-reporter.

Battle of the Wilderness occurred May 5-6, Ulysses S. Grant served as a lieutenant general in command of the union armies. First of his Richmond campaigns which would result in Robert E Lee’s surrender within the year. Battle in wooded area – different than conventional war. 2,246 soldiers died. Painted from quickly rendered sketches “made on the spot at the time of battle”.

Homer, Veteran in a New Field, 1865

Made shortly after end of the civil war; the soldier returns to the peace and his field. Addresses the Veteran Problem and the ANXIETY of the transition to peacetime. Farmer using an anachronistic scythe. At the time, farmers were using the cradles scythes and here we have a single blade scythe – the tool of the Grim Reaper. Alludes to the soldier’s role as the harvester of death, now a harvester of wheat. At the same time, depicts a smooth transition to farming – bolstering the perception of the countries greatness – it can quickly make the transition.

Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866

Completes this work after Homer goes to Paris where he sees Courbet’s Burial at Ornans. Image of Union officer, General Francis Channing Barlow, confronting confederate prisoners. Not a tragedy or a battle. Barlow’s great accomplishment was the capture of these soldiers and two generals at the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864

Homer, Snap the Whip, 1872

Homer began visiting the Adirondack Mountains in the 1870’s NY State. Depicts post-war optimism

Children play “snap the whip” outside of a one room school house in the Adirondacks. The Little Red School House was an American icon. There is a sense of nostalgia as these schools were disappearing. Significant reforms in American education on the raise: the new role of the teacher – women were taking over, and changes in the curriculum emerging in the decades after the Civil War – more creativity.

Homer, Cotton Pickers, 1876

Reconstruction Act of 1867 lead to black suffrage. Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed discrimination of blacks in public facilities, made education available, and allowed men to vote and run for political office. Southern whites were resistant and the Ku Klux Klan was founded. Civil Rights Act was nullified in 1883 by the Supreme Court

As a war correspondent, Homer had traveled to the South and had made many studies of the rural African Americans who live there. On his returned he now imbued southern blacks with dignity and nobility. Low horizon line. A Sensitive depicturing without caricature.

Homer, A visit from the Old Mistress, 1876Addressing the social aftermath of the Civil War Mistress in black confronts three adult figures. Range of emotional response to her visit. Woman remains seated which is a change since abolition yet their home and conditions have not improved. Closed claustrophobic space. Homer caught the awkward tension of these women whose years of forced bondage never fostered in them a sense of loyalty or affection for their former overseer.

Thomas Eakins, Self Portrait, 1902

Eakins is another American Realist, a native of Philadelphia who studied at the Penn Academy in 1862.

Eakins, Hooded female model

Eakins nude

Eakins return to Pennsylvania Academy in 1876 and worked as a teacher where he advocated the study of the live model rather than the plaster casts as was the custom. He urged students to photograph nudes and use them in their works. He allowed female students to study from male nude models which caused outrage and the call for his resignation.

Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Dr Samuel Gross operated at Jefferson Medical College on a patient with bone infection or osteomyelitis. Considered too realistic for the day and was rejected from the Philadelphia exhibition for lack of appropriate subject matter. Dr Gross, a famous surgeon, intervened and arranged for the medical school to buy the picture for $200. All figures are portraits. Anesthetists holds chloroform cloth over patients face which was a new technology. Mother cringes in background.

Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tuylp, 1632

Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Hawes and Southworth Early Operation Under Ether 1847

Eakins, Motion Study

Edward Muybridge, Horse Galloping, 1878Interest in anatomy leads him to collaborations with British photographer Edward Muybridge who shared his empirical need to figure out movement. Muybridge used a zoopraxiscope (an early form of motion picture projector) – to show photos on a screen which created a life-like moving image which critics exclaimed, “nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the turf.”

Eakins, The Swimming Hole, 1885 Eakins, Photo of students swimming, c 1885

Eakins secretly relied on projected images and traced them to make his paintings during this period. Some images drawn from one photograph, some compositions based on several photos. Nude plays a central role. Naturalistic style. Classical underpinnings based on the Greek ideals of beauty: male nudity, strength, camaraderie.

Henry Osawa Tanner, Henry Osawa Tanner 1859-1937 Tanner was from a lower middle class family, son of a Methodist preacher and racial rights activist. Student of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy 1880-1884 and then moved to Paris. A private patron provided for Tanner’s overseas education and accommodations. Found that Europe did practice the type of racism that plagued African Americans in post civil war USA

Henry Osawa Tanner, Thankful Poor, 1894Mood of quiet devotion. Tanner wanted to counter the caricature like renderings of African Americans prevalent at the time and choose a more serious subject which he imbued with quiet dignity. Tanner’s mature style merged realism with the effects of Impressionism: Grandfather and grandchild are detailed while the room dissolves into loose strokes of color a delight. Expressive lighting reinforces reverent spirit

Tanner, Thankful Poor, 1895

Tanner, Banjo Lesson, 1893

Response to the mocking stereotypes of blacks so popular at the time,

Tanner transforms the minstrel tradition into an instrument of racial pride.