Art History
Renoir, Monet Painting in his Garden, The Swing, Moulin de la Galette
1873 Monet Painting in his Garden Renoir performed his most audacious experiments in light, color, form (or lack thereof) and brushwork on uncomplaining scenes of woods, gardens, water and land. This freedom of expression and his bold innovation as a colorist out-of-doors inevitably found their ways into the figure paintings for which Renoir is so beloved. 1876 The Swing
Courbet, Burial at Ornans; Rocky Landscape Near Ornans; The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory etc.
A Burial At Ornans (French: Un enterrement à Ornans, also known as A Funeral At Ornans) is a painting of 1849-50 by Gustave Courbet, and one of the major turning points of 19th-century French art. The painting records the funeral in September 1848 of his great-uncle in the painter's birthplace, the small town of Ornans.[1] It treats an ordinary provincial funeral with unflattering realism, and on the giant scale traditionally reserved for the heroic or religious scenes of history painting. Courbet was drawn to the region around his hometown, Ornans, with its stream-filled valleys that are deeply carved into the landscape and bordered by the typical rock formations of the Jura. The overall sombre colouring, with the rich green contrasted with a vibrant pale blue, conveys the melancholy character of the rugged Jura landscape.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, Iron Forge Viewed from Without
A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (Joseph Wright of Derby, exhibited 1766). An orrery is a mechanical planetarium depicting the movements of the planets in the solar system, with a light in the center representing the sun. In Wright's time, ''philosopher" was a term indicating a scientist. The first of the paintings, exhibited in 1766, features an orrery, a model showing the movements of planets in the solar system. A lamp in the center represents the sun. In Wright's composition, the lamp is not visible, but its reflections illuminate the faces of the audience. It was not unusual to behold such a scene in Wright's time. In 18th century Britain science was becoming popularized with traveling public demonstrations. Wright very likely attended such demonstrations, according to Benedict Nicolson, author of an extensive 1968 study of Wright. http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0706/fig2.jpg
academic (pertaining to classicism, Academies, Salon exhibitions, Neoclassicism)
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart.
O'Sullivan, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, 1863
Along with Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan was one of the primary photographers of the American Civil War. Using wet-plate glass negatives, a cumbersome and labor-intensive technology that did not allow for images of active battle, O'Sullivan concentrated on the war's harrowing aftermath. This photograph depicts a scene following the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the war's bloodiest confrontations, in which thousands of men on both sides lost their lives.
Canova, Pauline Borghese as Venus
Anotonio Canova was a leading light of the Neoclassical movement. The style, influenced by the archeological discoveries in Pompeii and Herculaneum http://princessofnowhere.com/the-book/venus-victrix/
Daumier, Third Class Carriage
As a chronicler of modern urban life, Daumier captured the effects of industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Images of railway travel first appeared in his art in the 1840s. This Third-Class Carriage in oil, unfinished and squared for transfer, closely corresponds to a watercolor of 1864. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/29.100.129
Hogarth, Gin Lane, Beer Street, Marriage a la Mode
Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer. Marriage à-la-mode is a series of six pictures painted by William Hogarth between 1743 and 1745 depicting a pointed skewering of upper class 18th century society. This moralistic warning shows the disastrous results of an ill-considered marriage for money and satirises patronage and aesthetics. This is regarded by many as his finest project, certainly the best example of his serially-planned story cycles.
Benoist, Portrait of a Negress
Benoist was a French neoclassical, historical and genre painter. In 1800, she exhibited Portrait d'une négresse in the Salon. Six years previously, slavery had been abolished, and this image became a symbol for women's emancipation and black people's rights. The picture was acquired by Louis XVIII for France in 1818. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Guillemine_Benoist#mediaviewer/File:Marie-Guillemine_Benoist_-_portrait_d%27une_negresse.jpg
Morison, In a Villa at the Seaside; The Cradle
Berthe Morisot was a woman of extraordinary talents who carved for herself a career within the art world of nineteenth century Paris. She was one of only a few women who exhibited with both the Paris Salon and the highly influential and innovative Impressionists.
Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest; Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes.
Vigee-le-Brun, Self-portrait with Daughter
Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was one of the most successful and prolific portrait painters in history. By her own estimate, she executed over nine hundred works during her eightyseven-year life, which spanned from 1755-1842. (self portrait w daughter) The dryer, more linear style of this work, with its flatter application of paint, reflects the nascent Neoclassical movement in France. She would truly embrace this new stylistic trend in yet another depiction of herself with her daughter (1789,Louvre) painted two years later. " This famous work is acknowledged as a dramatic early example of changing taste.
Church, Twilight in the Wilderness
Famed landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) had a long-standing love affair with the natural beauty of Maine, which he described as "magnificent both land and seaward." Over the course of three decades, he visited often, creating intimately scaled sketches in a variety of media that served to inspire his major works, including Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), one of the Cleveland Museum of Art's most esteemed masterpieces. This exhibition showcases the painting alongside a group of nearly 25 sketches recording Maine's rugged interior, rocky coast, and windswept islands. http://www.clevelandart.org/events/exhibitions/maine-sublime-frederic-churchs-twilight-wilderness
flanerie, flaneur, flaneuse
Flânerie refers to the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street.
Cole, The Oxbow
Frederic Edwin Church—Thomas Cole exerted a powerful influence on the course of landscape painting in the United States during the nineteenth century. A wonderful illustration of this is Cole's 1836 masterwork, A View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, a painting that is generally (and mercifully) known as The Oxbow.
Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People; Death of Sardanapalus; Tiger Hunt
French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity. These various romantic strands came together in the Death of Sardanapalus (1827-8). Delacroix's painting of the death of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus shows an emotionally stirring scene alive with beautiful colours, exotic costumes and tragic events. Delacroix's most influential work came in 1830 with the painting Liberty Leading the People, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa.
Gericault, Raft of the Medusa; Study of a Dead Man
Gericault was an influential French painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement. Perhaps his most significant, and certainly most ambitious work, is The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), which depicted the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck, Meduse, in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die.[7] The incident became a national scandal, and Géricault's dramatic interpretation presented a contemporary tragedy on a monumental scale.
Goya, Saturn Devouring one of his Children; Los Caprichos; The Third of May, 1808; Disasters of War
Goya was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. The Disasters of War: In the 1810s, Goya created a set of aquatint prints titled The Disasters of War. Although he did not make known his intention when creating the plates, art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808-14 and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.
Grand Manner portraits
Grand Manner refers to an idealized aesthetic style derived from classical art, and the modern "classic art" of the High Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, British artists and connoisseurs used the term to describe paintings that incorporated visual metaphors in order to suggest noble qualities.
"Unknowns"
History painting is a genre in painting defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story, rather than a specific and static subject, such as a portrait.
Arcadia/Arcadian/pastoral
Images of beautiful nymphs frolicking in lush forests have been a frequent source of inspiration for painters and sculptors. Arcadia is a symbol of pastoral simplicity. European Renaissance writers (for instance, the Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega) often revisited the theme, and the name came to apply to any idyllic location or paradise.
Monet, Impression, Sunrise; Gare St. Lazare; Rouen Cathedral series
Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) is a painting by Claude Monet. It gave rise to the name of the Impressionist movement. Dated 1872, its subject is the harbour of Le Havre in France, using very loose brush strokes that suggest rather than delineate it. The Rouen Cathedral series was painted in the 1890s by French impressionist Claude Monet. The paintings in the series each capture the façade of the cathedral at different times of the day and year, and reflect changes in its appearance under different lighting conditions.
Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces
In Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces and in other elegant full-length portraits, Reynolds found a way to combine portraiture and history painting. He incorporated Classical mythology into his portrayal of Lady Sarah Bunbury, who is cast as a citizen of the ancient world. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Rococo/Graces
Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Belley
In about 1797, Belley's portrait was painted by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824), a former pupil of Jacques-Louis David,[2] and was exhibited in Paris in 1798.[1] In this painting, Girodet evokes the tensions of the period. Belley, standing, wears the uniform of a Convention member, with a tropical landscape behind him, and has a stylish relaxed pose, as favoured in many French political portraits of Revolutionary politicians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Belley#mediaviewer/File:Jean-Baptiste_Belley,_Girodet.jpg
Ingres, Grande Odalisque
In the 19th century the Orientalism movement added another reclining female nude to the possible subjects of European paintings, the odalisque, a slave or harem girl. One of the most famous was "The Grande Odalisque" painted by Ingres in 1814.
orientalism, orientaliste
In the 19th century the Orientalism movement added another reclining female nude to the possible subjects of European paintings, the odalisque, a slave or harem girl. One of the most famous was "The Grande Odalisque" painted by Ingres in 1814.
David, Oath of Horatti, Death of Marat
Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, oil on canvas, commissioned by Louis XVI, painted in Rome, exhibited at the salon of 1785-Neoclassicism. Oath of Horatii - best example of neo classicism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_the_Horatii#mediaviewer/File:Jacques-Louis_David,_Le_Serment_des_Horaces.jpg
Herculaneum/Pompeii
Mount Vesuvius had first erupted in A.D. 79 and had covered the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in southern Italy. Excavation of the cities buried by this eruption began in 1748 and helped launch a popular mania for the ancient world, which in turn contributed to the development of Neoclassicism.
Daugerre, Paris Boulevard; Still Life in the Artist's Studio
Paris Boulevard is a significant step in the development of photography. Taken in 1839 by Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, the photograph depicts a seemingly empty street in Paris. The elevated viewpoint emphasizes the wide avenues, tree-lined sidewalks, and charming buildings of the French capital.
picturesque, sublime
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced in 1782 by William Gilpin. Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the beautiful and the sublime. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as being non-rational.
Reclining female nude tradition (and the classical tradition)
Rarely seen during the Middle Ages, the female nude reappeared in Italy in the 15th century.
realism
Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. It portrays real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with the introduction of photography — a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look objectively real.
Constable, The Haywain
The Hay Wain is a painting by John Constable, finished in 1821, which depicts a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex. It hangs in the National Gallery in London and is regarded as "Constable's most famous image"[1] and one of the greatest and most popular English paintings.[2] Painted in oils on canvas, the work depicts as its central feature three horses pulling a hay wain or large farm cart across the river. Willy Lott's Cottage, also the subject of an eponymous painting by Constable, is visible on the far left. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hay_Wain#mediaviewer/File:John_Constable_The_Hay_Wain.jpg
Manet, Luncheon on the Grass; The Railway; The Boat; Concert in the Tuileries
The Luncheon on the Grass is a large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863. The painting depicts a female nude and a scantily dressed female bather on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. The Railway, widely known as Gare Saint-Lazare, is an 1873 painting by Édouard Manet. It is the last painting by Manet of his favourite model, the fellow painter Victorine Meurent, who was also the model for his earlier works Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass. It was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1874.
Fuseli, Nightmare
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Anglo- Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). Since its creation, it has remained Fuseli's best-known work. With its first exhibition in 1782 at the Royal Academy of London, the image became famous; an engraved version was widely distributed and the painting was parodied in political satire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare#mediaviewer/File:John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG
photography (invention of, embrace of old traditions, impact on modern painting)
The middle class created a huge demand for portraits that oil paintings could not sustain.
Chalgrin, L'Arc de Triomphe
The monument was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806 and its iconographic program pitted heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail. It set the tone for public monuments, with triumphant patriotic messages.
Couture, Romans of the Decadence
The work is a history painting, regarded as the noblest genre during the 19th century: it therefore had to represent human behaviour and convey a moral message. This painting is therefore a "realist allegory", and the art critics of 1847 were quick to see in these Romans "The French of the Decadence".
impressionism
a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France.
Enlightenment
a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. It was heavily influenced by 17th-century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and its prominent exponents include Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.
en plein air, pleinariste
a French expression which means "in the open air" and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors. It can also be used to describe other activities where a person partakes in an outdoor environment. Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism. The popularity of painting en plein air increased in the 1870s with the introduction of paints in tubes.
Caillebotte, Pont de L'Europe; Paris Street: Rainy Day
a French painter, member and patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group. Caillebotte was noted for his early interest in photography as an art form. Caillebotte is best known for his paintings of urban Paris, such as The Europe Bridge (Le Pont de l'Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l'Europe, temps de pluie) (1877). The latter is almost unique among his works for its particularly flat colors and photo-realistic effect which gives the painting its distinctive and modern look.
Charles Baudelaire (The painter of modern life)
a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Chardin, Saying Grace, Still lifes
a painting by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Chardin made several versions of the painting, one of which was given as a gift to Louis XV. The subject of the painting is one of bourgeois, everyday tranquillity - Chardin's field of expertise, with an uncharacteristic touch of sentimentality. Chardin, who had made his fame painting still life and is well known for his depictions of humble, everyday life.
modernism, modernist
a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
romanticism
an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
an oil on canvas portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough between 1785 and 1787. It was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 1937. Mrs. Sheridan (Elizabeth Ann Linley) was a talented musician who enjoyed professional success in Bath and London before marrying Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1773 and abandoning her career. She was 31 when she sat for Gainsborough, dying from tuberculosis seven years later at the age of thirty-eight. The portrait was painted between 1785 and 1787, and, was exhibited at Gainsborough's studio at Schomberg House, Pall Mall in 1786. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Richard_Brinsley_Sheridan_%28painting%29
Louis Daguerre (daguerreotype)
he first publicly announced photographic process & the first to come into widespread use during the early 1840s. By the early 1860s, later processes which were less expensive and produced more easily viewed images had almost entirely replaced it. The distinguishing visual characteristics of a daguerreotype are that the image is on a bright (ignoring any areas of tarnish) mirror-like surface of metallic silver and it will appear either positive or negative depending on the lighting conditions and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal.
avant-garde
people or works that are experimental or innovative artistically. The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.
neoclassicism
the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. The main Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th century, latterly competing with Romanticism.
industrial revolution
the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840.