Chapter 2

1. Chapter 2
THE SEARCH FOR
TRUTH:
Early Photography, Realism,
and Impressionism

2. The styles of the early modernist era offered a brand of escapism to
Europeans weary of the imperialism emerging throughout the west.
Romanticized depictions of colonized territories offered a masked
depiction of realities of military occupations, and economic exploitation
to support the rise of capitalism.
NEW WAYS OF SEEING: Photography and Its Influence
Camera obscura, ancestor of the photographic camera, has been known
since ancient times. The French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is
credited with discovering the method that fixed an image he captured
with a camera.
The technique, called heliography began with a metal or glass plate
coated with naturally occurring asphalt. Areas exposed to the sun
through the camera lens hardened according to levels of exposure. After
many hours of exposure, the plate was washed with lavender oil. Only
hardened areas remained and fixed the image to the plate.

3. Niépce's associate, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre developed
the daguerreotype process, the first commercial photographic
process. The process consisted of coating copper plates with
silver which he were exposed to sunlight coming through the
camera hole.
Daguerre used mercury vapors to make the image appear on the
plate. In the beginning, it took 40 minutes to make a daguerreotype.
Tintypes or ferrotypes, developed in the late 1800s, became very
popular as they were sturdier and more affordable.
The tintype was a photograph made by creating a positive image
directly onto a thin iron plate coated with a photographic emulsion.
This technique was widely used between 1860 and 1870.

4. Anna Atkins, Cystoceira granulata, from
British Algae, 1843-44.
Detroit Institute of Arts.
Anna Atkins, who was trained as a botanist, used
photography as a means of recording botanical
specimens for a scientific reference book, British
Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
The illustration in this publication the were
created by the cyanotype method. With this
book, Atkins established photography as an
accurate medium for scientific illustration.

5. Nadar was a writer, a caricaturist, a balloonist, a photographer, and a
friend of the painters, writers, and intellectuals in Paris.
At the 1867 Paris World’s fair he floated over Paris. Edouard Manet
captured the moment in his painting, View of the World’s Fair 1867. It
was clearly influenced by photography.
Civil War photographers used glass plates to capture very sharp
images. The cameras, which looked like wooden boxes, were very
heavy. The photographers installed the cameras on wooden legs to
keep them steady.
A negative image was created when light hit the glass plate prepared
with light-sensitive chemicals. On the glass negative, the light and
dark areas of an image were reversed. Photographers then made
multiple positive paper prints from the glass negatives.

6. The glass plates had to be treated immediately after exposure. The
treatment of the glass negatives and transferring the images to paper
required dark rooms. The Civil War photographers had to bring their
dark rooms in horse-drawn wagons to battlefields.
Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, and photographers
that worked for their studios, stand out for influencing how generations
of Americans formed their understanding of the Civil War.
Mathew Brady was the first photographer to travel to the front lines.
Although Brady secured the permissions necessary to document the
Civil War early on, photographers working for his studio actually
brought him success by photographing iconic images.

7. Mathew Brady, Dead Soldier,
Civil War, c. 1863.
Gelatin-silver print.
Library of Congress, D.C.
Brady recognized the talent and
expertise of Alexander Gardner
and hired him in 1856 to work for
his studio in New York. Two years
later, Gardner was managing
Brady’s Gallery in Washington
D.C. Gardner was an expert in wet-
plate collodion photography, and
in the "Imperial Print", a 17 by 21
inch enlargement, which made
Brady famous.

8. While Brady, Gardner, and other photographers set to objectively
capture the realities of war, they could not escape the complex political
role photography played in shaping public opinion.
By 1863, Alexander Gardner and his brother opened their own studio in
Washington D.C., taking with them many of Mathew Brady's staff. The
split was caused by Brady’s lack of business acumen and failure to
regularly meet his payroll.
After the war, Alexander Gardner published his Photographic Sketch
Book of the Civil War, which included images by other photographers,
such Timothy O'Sullivan, James Gibson, George Barnard, James
Gardner, and William Pywell, who followed the armies and recorded the
American Civil War.
The technical limitations of photography to capture epic scenes of
battle in color and in real time, created a big demand for lithographs.

9. Unknown Photographer,
Frederick Douglass, 1847
Daguerreotype. Collection
William Rubel.
Frederick Douglass like
photography for its objectivity.
He preferred appearing in front of
dark, single-color backgrounds,
unlike the elaborate designs
traditionally favored by 19th-
century portraiture.

10. FRANCE
Honoré Daumier, Rue
Transnonain, Le 15 Avril 1834
[The Massacre at the Rue
Transnonain, April 15. 1834].
ONLY TRUTH: REALISM
Honoré Daumier was a prominent French printmaker during the 19th
century. Known for his prolific body of work, a critique of the social
and political life of France at the time. One of his greatest works, Rue
Transnonain, created in 1834 in response to political unrest, presents a
dramatic imagining of a massacre of innocents.

11. Gustave Courbet, A
burrial at Ornans, 1849-
50. Oil on Canvas. Musée
d'Orsay, Paris, France.
The painting depicts the funeral of Courbet’s great-uncle in September
1848, in the small town of Ornans, the painter's birthplace. Courbet treated
this ordinary provincial event with realism, and on a scale (10ft high x 22ft‘
wide) traditionally reserved for the heroic scenes of history painting.
The realistic depiction strips the artwork of the sentimental rhetoric that
was expected. Courbet said: "The Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial
of Romanticism.“Mack, Gerstle (1989). Gustave Courbet. Da Capo. p. 89.

12. Gustave Courbet, The
Source of Loue, 1864.
Oil on Canvas.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
This painting’s close
cropping of the landscape, is
clearly influenced by
photography. Courbet used
the opportunity to
emphasize the texture of the
rocks through the rough
appearance of the paint.

13. The State had commissioned the painting in 1848 for the Musée de
Lyon. After is was completed it decided to keep it in Paris, at the
Musée du Luxembourg. When the artist died, the painting was put
in the Louvre and was later transferred to the Musée d'Orsay.
Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in
the Nivernais, 1849.
Oil on canvas.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris,
France.

14. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, later known as the Pre-Raphaelites,
was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848
by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.
The meaning of this painting continues to be debated.
ENGALND
William Holman Hunt, The
Hireling Shepherd, 1851
Oil on canvas.
Manchester Art Gallery,
Manchester, England.

15. The controversies generated by Courbet’s work, conditioned the
French public to accept radical alternatives to the academic Salon.
He established the idea of the avant-garde in the popular imagination.
Each avant-garde wave was received with outrage by the conservative
public, that often became an admiration.
MANET AND WHISTLER
Édouard Manet was a realist painter who sought recognition through
the Salon.
Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of a close observation
of outward appearances, the accurate, detailed, unembellished
depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism ran through 1840,
1850, 1860.
Artists identified as realist include Gustave Courbet, Jean Francois
Millet, Jean Honoré Daumier, and Edward Manet.
SEIZING THE MOMENT : IMPRESSIONISM
AND THE AVANT-GARDE

16. Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863.
Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
The painting depicts
the juxtaposition of a
female nude and a
half dressed female
bather on a picnic
with two fully dressed
men.
In 1863, Manet
shocked the French
public by exhibiting
his Déjeuner sur
l'herbe is a statement
in favor of the artist's
individual freedom.

17. Olympia created a bigger scandal than the Déjeuner sur l’herbe,
All cultural markers identified, including the name, point to the
woman as being a prostitute. She stares back at the viewer in a
manner that shatters the illusion of idealism.
Édouard Manet,
Olympia, 1863.
Oil on canvas. Musée
d'Orsay, Paris, France

18. Mary Cassatt, Woman
Bathing, 1890–91,
Drypoint and aquatint,
printed in color from three
plates.
Metropolitan Museum, NY.
Cassatt’s work has a clear
connection to Manet’s depiction
of the mundane. She also shows
influences by Degas’ bathing
women.

19. FROM REALISM TO
IMPRESSIONISM
Corot often visited the Forest
of Fontainebleau but never
resided there.
Initially, he included a woman
and child in the center of the
image, but he removed the
child to make it more
ambiguous.
When it was shown at the
Salon of 1870, the critics
praised its quiet lyricism.
Camille Corot , Ville d’Avray, 1870. oil
on canvas. The metropolitan Museum
of Art, NY.

20. Claude Monet. Sunrise.,1872.
Oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan,
Paris, France
Impressionism is a light,
spontaneous manner of painting
which began in France as a
reaction against the formalism of
the dominant academic style.
The movement's name came
from Monet's early work,
Impression: Sunrise, which was
singled out for criticism by Louis
Leroy on its exhibition.
The hallmark of the style is the
attempt to capture the subjective
impression of light in a scene.
The style emerged in competition
with the newly invented
technology of the camera
The camera is compared with the
eye.

21. Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876.
Oil on canvas. Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The Moulin de la Galette was
one of 21 works shown by
Renoir at the third
Impressionist exhibition in
1877. The painting depicts
Moulin de la Galette, a place
near the top of Montmartre
known for entertainment, on a
Sunday afternoon when young
people from the north of Paris
would meet in the dance-hall
and in the courtyard behind it,
in fine weather. The scene in
this work is not an authentic
representation of the clientele
of the Moulin, but rather a
scrupulously organized series
of portraits.

22. Rejected by the Salon jury of 1863, Manet submitted this and two other
paintings, in the 1863 Salon des Refusés, where the painting sparked
public notoriety and controversy.
The original Salon des Refusés was an art exhibition that took place in
Paris in 1863, showing works that had been rejected by the official Paris
Salon. Emperor Napoleon III ordered a special exhibition be held at which
rejected artists could display their works. Hence the name, Salon des
Refusés.
The entire exhibition was heavily criticized. One critic said that the artists
were simply "painters of mere impressions" because of Monet’s
Impression, Sunrise. The term impressionist was coined to name these
artists with their new take on art. This work of the light on water
characterizes Monet’s work throughout his lifetime.

23. Edgar Degas was born in Paris
in 1834 and studied art from a
young age. His most popular
paintings are his ballerina
paintings.
This pastel depicts the modern
theme of the woman in her
bathtub. The asymmetrical
composition shows the
influence of the Japanese prints
in which Degas became
interested.
Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886.
Pastel on cardboard.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

24. Edgar Degas, The Jockey,
1889. Pastel on paper.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Eadweard Muybrige, Horse
in Motion, 1878. wet-plate
photograph.
Edgar Degas used Muybridge’s photographs to understand how
to image bodies in motion. Muybridge expanded the field of
photography and even began the concept of “motion picture”,
before filmmaking had been invented.

25. When he exhibited this sculpture at the
sixth Impressionist exhibition of 1881,
viewers were shocked by its realism.
It was highly unusual to incorporate
other materials in a bronze sculpture.
This one had a miniature gauze skirt,
silk bodice and fabric slippers. Dagas
prefigures the introduction of real
objects into sculpture in the 20th
century.
Edgar Degas, Little
Dancer Fourteen Years
Old. 1878-81. Bronze with
cloth accessories National
Gallery of Art, D.C.

26. Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, c.
1875. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Berthe Morisot was
associated with French
Impressionism and actively
participated in seven out of
eight group’s exhibitions.
She maintained an interest in
subjects derived from
everyday life and in
capturing the effects of light.

27. John Singleton Copley is considered to be the foremost artist of
colonial America. Copley was born on July 3, 1738, in Boston, and
was trained by his stepfather, a mezzotint engraver.
By 1760 Copley's distinctive style had crystallized, characterized by
meticulous technique, clear verisimilitude, and a vivid, balanced
palette. Copley sent his painting The Boy with a Squirrel to London,
where it was exhibited. Impressed by the painting, the English
portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds and the expatriate American painter
Benjamin West urged Copley to immigrate to Europe.
He moved to London in 1775. He was elected an associate of the
Royal Academy in the following year and a full member in 1779.
Under West's influence, Copley turned to history painting.
Copley died on September 9, 1815, in London.
NINETEEN -CENTURY ART IN THE UNITED STATES

28. LATER NINETEENTH-
CENTURY AMERICAN ART
One of the first American artists to
win a wide reputation in Europe,
Benjamin West exerted
considerable influence on the
development of art in the United
States through such young
American painters as Gilbert
Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, and
John Singleton Copley.
Benjamin West, Agrippina
Landing at Brundisium with the
Ashes of Germanicus, 1768.
Yale University Art Gallery, New
Haven

29. Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (née
Avegno, was born in New Orleans,
but grew up France, where she
became a Parisian socialite known for
her beauty and questionable morals.
When Portrait of Madame X debuted
at the Salon in Paris it created a big
scandal that eventually made Sargent
famous.
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of
Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau),
1884, oil on canvas, 234.95 x 109.86 cm,
Metropolitan Museum of Art

30. Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front,
1866. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
In 1866, one year after
the Civil War ended,
Homer completed this
painting that established
his reputation. It depicts
the scene from the war in
which Union Brigadier
General Francis
Channing Barlow (1834–
1896) captured several
Confederate officers on
June 21, 1864.

31. By
WHAT

32. Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single
Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull),
1871. Oil on canvas;
In 1870, Eakins began a
series of paintings
depicting the sport of
sculling, a subject for
which he is best known.
This is work
commemorates the
victory of Max Schmitt
(1843–1900), in an
important race on the
Schuylkill River in
October 1870.

33. Eakins, Thomas
The Gross Clinic, 1875.
Oil on canvas.
Jefferson Medical College of
Thomas Jefferson University,
Philadelphia
Gross was an innovative
surgeon and champion of
surgical intervention.

34. Henry Ossawa Tanner, The
Banjo Lesson, 1893.
Oil on canvas. Hampton
University Museum, Hampton,
VA
The painting shows an elderly
black man teaching a boy,
assumed to be his grandson,
how to play the banjo.
The portraits are skillfully
painted.