Realism And Impressionism In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The Art of Courbet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, and Rodin

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The French Impressionists were the offspring of the Realists, and to trace their artistic pedigree we must return to painting in France in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was shown how the Romantics had rebelled against a false Classicism, but only the barest hint was given of how the struggle for liberty and truth in art reached a further stage in the forties by the development of a new group of artists known as the Realists. The leader of this movement and the man who perhaps did more than any other to change the whole modern outlook on art was Gustave Courbet (1819-77).

Courbet was the son of a wealthy farmer of Ornans in the Doubs. His father intended him for the law, and with this object sent him to Paris. Arrived there, Courbet threw law to the winds and set about learning the one thing that interested him, painting. A rigid republican, both by education and inclination, Courbet was penetrated by a passionate sympathy for the working classes, and he found the subjects for his pictures in the ordinary life of the people. Further, holding tenaciously that painting, ‘an art of sight,’ ought to concern itself with things seen, he was opposed to Romanticism as the Romantics had been, in their day, to Classicism. Intensely earnest and serious by nature, Courbet regarded it as mere frivolity to make pictures out of imaginary incidents in poems and romances when all the pageant and pathos of real life waited to be painted. His point of view is made clear by a reply he once made to a patron who desired that he should execute a painting with angels in it for a church. ‘Angels!’ said Courbet, ‘but I have never seen angels. What I have not seen I cannot paint.’

After the Revolution of 1848 Courbet’s new style of democratic painting had a temporary success. In 1849, before the political reaction had begun, he was awarded a medal at the Salon for his picture, ‘After Dinner at Ornans.’ This medal placed him hors concours, that is to say, it gave him the right of showing pictures in future Salons without his works have to obtain the approval of the Selecting Jury. Courbet took full advantage of this privilege in the following year, and to the Salon of 1850, in addition two landscapes and four portraits, he sent two large pictures entitled ‘The Stone-breakers’ and ‘A Funeral at Ornans’. The political reaction was in full tide, and the two last pictures raised a storm of fury, because their subjects were supposed to be ‘dangerously Socialistic.’ It will be remembered that it was in the Salon of the same year that J F Millet showed his first great democratic painting, ‘The Sower’.

‘A Funeral at Ornans’ became one of the milestones in the progress of modern painting, for, notwithstanding the abuse showered on Courbet, the sincerity of his work appealed to a younger generation of artists. Here was a man who saw life steadily as a whole, and painted life just as he saw it. Each figure in it from the clergy to the mourners, from the gravedigger to the dog, is painted simply but with a truth and power that make it a living thing. Courbet was the first of modern painters to rbeak the open-air realism of Velazquez and Frans Hals. He not only had much direct influence on Whistler and on Manet, but pointed out to them the road along which they should travel.

Realism And Impressionism In France (continued)