Gustave Courbet

Man with the Leather Belt

c.1845

·      Appears to be a genre story, but it’s very big

·      Feels contemporary

·      Courbet is in picture

o   Another figure with violin, another with pipe

·      Perhaps takes place in Brasserie Anglaire (where his bohemian friends came to hang out)

·      Caravagesque (Caravaggio) feel—very dark

·      Won an award from this painting

o   Won access to Salon from then on 

Gustave Courbet

Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair

1849

(Third painting in 1851 Salon exhibit)

·      Emaciated cows

·      Physical location of figures and forms is awkward

o   Lots of animal legs; lots of shadows of legs; gets confusing

·      Pentimento= painted over basket in background 

Gustave Courbet

Burial at Ornans

1849-50

(Second painting in 1851 Salon exhibit)

·      Mixing of classes

·      Peasants and bourgeois all in long black coats

·      Mixture of religion

·      Takes place in countryside

·      Timelessness of tradition; rituals of Catholicism

·      Awkward moment captured in the painting

o   In conformity with the awkwardness of the social order itself in the painting; uncertainty of who is who

o   Awkwardness of form and style in that he’s concerned here with not the perspective and organization of the picture, but rather he shows the figures superposed; one on top of another. As if they’re standing on risers or bleachers

§  Drawing on the style of popular art (Epinal)

§  Making a naked appeal to a new audience

§  Called it a history picture, but it’s a heroically sized genre picture

§  “Those who were last will soon be first”

Isidore Pils

Death of a Sister of Charity

1850

·      Catholic ritual—nun’s last rites

·      Pious, simple peasants or workers who have come to pay respects to nun in last moment of her life

·      Everyone knows their place

·      French stability=Catholic church

·      Little bit of an element of frisson

·      Appeal to sympathy, but not to revolutionary change (we give to the poor through charity, not through revolution) 

Millet

The Sower

1850

·      Like a figure from Courbet’s stonebreaker painting: face unclear

·      Focus on a single peasant figure (heroicized)

·      Something dreamlike about it: figure in shadow with light from the back (level of metaphor about it, could be interpreted as a painting of the sower parable in the bible) 

Jules Breton

The Vintage at Château-Lagrange

1865

·      Ethos is more positive than Courbet paintings

·      Oxen look healthy

·      Figures are on same level of viewer.

·      Figures are full and volumetric; color rich and diverse 

Jean-Francois Millet

The Gleaners

1857 

·      Peasants during harvest. Big piles of grain, large numbers of people carrying bundles of hay to pile them up. Guy on horse is the overseer.

·      Peasants in foreground are picking up individual grains of wheat to eat for themselves (gleaning)

·      Not a very confrontational painting

Gustave Courbet

The Studio of the Painter: A Real

 Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life

1854-55

·      Effort to create a new popular art using the materials of high art

·      This is what his life adds up to: trying to change things

·      (revolutionaries, supporters who paid him, landscape in background, muse next to him, child—“innocent eye”—eye of the people who are unaffected by the decadence and degeneracy)

·      Child in foreground, lower right corner making a sketch himself

·      Skulls=reminder of shortness of life, omnipresence of death. May represent “those who live on death” (poorer people)

·      A resigned picture (it looked like things would change 7 years ago, but it didn’t work out)

Gustave Courbet

The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine

1856-57

·      Picture of modernity (prostitutes)

·      Childlike characteristics of women—like toys (in sketch parody) 

William Holman Hunt

Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice

1848

·      Similar to Oath of the Horatii

·      Painted during the year of European insurgency

·      Looks more like an everyday scene than Horatii

o   Classicism is gone in this painting

o   Contemporary people in costume of medieval warriors

o   Nothing classical about landscape, either 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation)  

1849-50

·      Not very receptive looking; body reaction is cowering

·      Red hair; looks like a contemporary young woman

·      Direct sexual, pubescent tone (realist version of subject)

John Everett Millais

Christ in the house of his Parents

1850

·      Effort to bring the subject of the life of Christ into contemporary times

·      Contemporary carpenter’s shop

·      Juxtapose the sacred into the secular time

·      Faith requires acceptance of that which is unreasonable and unbelievable, but this painting makes it appear believable

·      Young Jesus hurts hand in

·      Carpentry—wokring on building coffin, planks reference cross, ladder

·      John the Baptist is holding water in lower right (child) 

Millais

Ophelia

1852

·      Interested in English traditions, not classical ones

·      Particular face (not idealized). It’s a model of another pre-Raphaelite who was posed in a bathtub

·      Also went to banks of river repeatedly.

·      Wanted to be truthful to the time, nature, subject matter

o   Flowers that are native to England and particular location in which it’s set 

Millais

The Hireling Shepherd

1851

·      picture attacked by critics for its vulgarity

·      young male has enticed young woman into his sexual arms

·      he neglects sheep he’s supposed to be tending, and they’re eating corn from neighboring field (sheep then die from eating too much)

·      moral decadence of youth at the time 

William Holman Hunt

The Awakening Conscience

1853

·      Recognition of young woman that she’s been living in a circumstance that would make her morally compromised in this situation

Ford Madox Brown

Work

(1852–63)

Joseph Nièpce

View From the Window at Le Gras

1827

·      First photo ever taken 

·      Took 9 hours for exposure

Daguerre

Boulevard du Temple, Paris

ca. 1838

·      Looks like a photo that could have been taken today

·      Long exposure time (need enough light)

·      Guy getting his shoe shined was there long enough to be in the picture

William Henry Fox Talbot

The Open Door (Plate VI, The Pencil of Nature)

1843

·      Was it nature that did the art making, or was it the people? 

Derived perhaps from pre-Raphaelite painting 

Nadar

Sarah Bernhardt

ca.1864

-photography became a medium of perpetuating images of celebrities 

-Sarah Bernhardt=popular Jewish stage actress