French Art History - RW Norton Art Gallery

European Gallery
European Gallery
Landscape painting was depreciated
in the 19th century because it appealed
to the “common crowd,” middle class
buyers who were familiar with nature
but not the classics. However, a group
of artists known as the Barbizon rebelled against this notion. These new
landscape painters frequently used
unconventional painting techniques
including thick pigment (impasto),
unblended strokes, and a lack of detail
which produced a rough surface and
minimalized pictorial depth. The BarVaches et leurs Gar- bizons were interested in the transient
diennes au paturage effects of light and shadow to depict
pres d'un gros arbre and dramatize otherwise commonplace
scenes of their native landscapes. InJBC Corot
creasingly, the emphasis moved away
1860
from an intellectual approach to the
concept and sensation of a scene.
This painting whose title in English
translates to “Cows and their (female)
herders in the pasture near a big tree”
was painted by Jean-Baptiste Camille
Corot (1796-1875). Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school in
France. He studied art independent of
the Ecole system and was still a regular
contributor to the Salon and a recipient
of the Legion d’Honneur.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1926) is arguably one
Suzon
Auguste Rodin
1875
Eternal Spring
Auguste Rodin
1884
American Art History Gallery
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was born
Mother and
daughter, both
wearing large hats
Mary Cassatt
in Philadelphia, but went to France
to study art where she became a key
player in the new Impressionist movement. Their methodology was similar
to the Barbizon painters in that they
used broken brushwork and impasto,
but differed in the fact that Impressionists wanted to divorce their work
from emotion and spirituality. They
were concerned with light and color
and wanted to depict what was seen in a
particular moment without judgments.
They abandoned narrative structure of
any kind and often embraced the flat
planes and stylistic alteration of perspective they discovered in Japanese
painting.
The Thinker
Auguste Rodin
1880
of the greatest sculptors the world has ever
known. He was rejected from the Grand Ecole
three times for, ironically, failing the sculpting
exam. Though considered a titan among French
artists and so central to Western art that only
Michelangelo is better known as a sculptor,
Rodin struggled to find success and was wholly
unexhibited for the first 30 years of his life.
His first commercially successful piece was
the bust of a young woman entitled Suzon. At the
time, he was working for the premier decorative
sculptor Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse in his atelier, or studio, in Belgium. Unfortunately, Rodin
sold the rights for unlimited editions of Suzon,
which put his sculpture in every household, but
very little money in his pocket.
While Rodin had drawn and sculpted nudes
before, they lacked sensuality, which would soon
surface and become the central hallmark of his
work. The nude figures shown in Eternal Spring
were a more conservative, academic approach
and provoked little critical excitement when
first exhibited, at least partially because it was
originally associated in the public mind with
two safely distant and idealized mythological
figures, rather than a real-life adulterous couple,
unlike The Kiss, which caused tremendous
controversy.
In 1880 Rodin was commissioned to sculpt
two huge doors which became his greatest work,
The Gates of Hell, drawing its inspiration from
Dante's Inferno. The pinnacle figure is the eternal
observer, the witness and judge of mankind in its
struggle with its own misshapen desires. Poised
at the very apex of the work, it is arguably the
most famous sculpture in the world: The Thinker.
Rodin originally intended this crown piece to
be Dante himself, looking over all the sinners
in hell.
Head of a Young
Girl
Auguste Rodin
Rodin is considered a bridge between the
romantics and the modernists. He was beginning
to divorce sculpture from the need for meaning
and in doing so, he prefigured modern sculpture
by producing work that celebrated form while
remaining free of narrative. In pieces like Head
of a Young Girl, we can see the concern with
the integrity of the medium that is a hallmark of
modernism; the stone is deliberately left raw in
places, the figure just emerging from the material
in a way that juxtaposes the delicacy of the face
with the reality of the stone.
The
19th Century
French Art History
Self-Guided Tour
Boeufs et Taureaux de la Race du Cantal
Rosa Bonheur, 1888
In the early 19th century in France, art was still an elit-
ist activity patronized primarily by the aristocracy and
haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle class comprised of
merchants and entrepreneurs. Artists were to be wellversed in classical knowledge depicting subjects deriving
from mythology, religion, history, or literature, or exotic
subjects from foreign lands. Only educated people could
really appreciate historical painting because it required
specialized knowledge. A semi-annual exhibition of new
works by established and emerging artists was known
as the Salon, and was typically tightly regulated by the
Academy of Painting and Sculpting. For the first fifty
years of its existence, the only works acceptable to the
Salon were either historical or genre paintings which
were expected to demonstrate the intellectual prowess
(and class origins) of the painter as well as a polished
technique.
The R.W. Norton Art Gallery
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American History Gallery
Tapestry Gallery
Benjamin Franklin,
J.A. Houdon
1778
Gutenburg Page
Celestial Globe
George Washington
J.A. Houdon
1778
The Prisons
Marquis de Lafayette
Jules Dalou
1881
widely considered the foremost French
sculptor of the 18th century. He entered
the Ecole Royale de Sculpture at the
age of 12. After 8 years of study, he was
awarded the Prix de Rome, France’s top
prize, where the favored student is granted
the opportunity to study art in Italy at the
king’s expense. Houdon trained in Italy for
ten years, and returned to France where
he supported himself well on several
commissions. He took an active part in
teaching at the Academy, and he was a
chief contributor to every Salon. Houdon
sculpted busts of most of the leading men
of the day, and worked on commissions
for royalty. After being cleared by the
Convention during the Reign of Terror,
Houdon journeyed to America to make
busts of its most important leaders, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
Lafayette et
Washington,
16th C.Bartholdi
Tapestry
Frederic
Tiger Devouring a
Gavial
Antoine Louis Barye
1831
Lion Crushing Serpent
Louis Barye
Jules Dalou (1838-1902) was considered Antoine1832
Rodin’s rival for the title of the greatest
French sculptor. Though born to a humble
glovemaker, Dalou was admitted to the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, though he quickly
came to feel that the formalist limitations
of the academic style upon which the
school insisted stifled him artistically.
Still, he persevered, gaining a reputation
as ambitious and hard-working, if also
visibly poorer than most of his classmates.
Dalou was completely against the Ecole
after failing to win the Prix de Rome,
and when he was offered a professorship Lion Crushing Serpent,
detail
there, he turned it down. He frequently
lamented, “Whenever I do anything in my Antoine Louis Barye
statuary that is bad, I attribute it to what I
1832
learned there.”
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-
Bonheur Gallery
Les Animaliers were a group of artists,
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) is
1904) was privately tutored in art in
Paris and began exhibiting at the Salon
at the age of 20 and would do so for the
next 50 years until his death. Glorifying
the historic past with monuments was a
principal subject of the 19th century artist,
as nostalgia for heroes of the past pacified
political unrest in the present. Full scale Jaguar Devouring Hare
editions of this work are exhibited in both Antoine Louis Barye
NYC and Paris. His most famous work
1848
rests in New York Harbor: The Statue of
Liberty.
primarily sculptors in bronze, whose
works popularized images of animals
outside of a narrative or historical context. The father of this movement was
Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875), who
is considered the artistic bridge between
Neo-classicism and Romanticism, which
favored the individual and emotional and
moved away from narrative structure.
Born the son of a jeweler and conscripted into Napoleon’s last military
venture at the age of 16, Barye managed
to gain entry to the Ecole de Beaux Arts
where he competed unsuccessfully for the
Prix de Rome and the chance to study in
Italy. Though he continued to compete, he
won little, and needing to support himself
and his family, went to work for a jeweler
in 1823 where he spent the next eight years
making jewelry and small animal statues.
He became obsessed with wild animals
and began a self-study of various naturalists. Though he continued to submit work,
it wasn’t until 1831 that he had another
work accepted at the Salon, and Tiger
Devouring a Gavial was a sensation and
won a Second Place Medal.
He did well again in the Salon of 1833
with Lion Crushing a Serpent and received
his first commission for a public statue.
However, he was consistently attacked
by conservative critics who felt that his
“overly” naturalistic animals departed
from the classical models.
Even after he gained critical appreciation, he failed to succeed in business. In
1839 he borrowed money and established
his first workshop, issuing sales catalogues
and overseeing the casting of his models.
Nonetheless, his perfectionism, which
made for good art, made for bad business,
and in 1848, he was forced to declare
bankruptcy, losing all of his models and
tools to his creditors.
Fortunately, he was later given the position of Professor of Zoological Drawing
at the Museum of Natural History, and
eventually appreciation of his work led to
the award of the Legion of Honor.
Jules Pierre Mene (1810-1879) was
Huntsman with Fox
Pierre Jules Mene
1879
Dog Licking his Paw
Pierre Jules Mene
born in Paris, the son of a prosperous
metal-turner. His father trained him in
metal-working techniques and the boy
quickly put them together with his own
natural talent for drawing and began creating small sculptures. The young Mene
never attended any well-known schools
and seems to have been largely self-taught
as an artist. Always an astute businessman, in 1837 Mene established the first
of what would be a series of foundries to
cast his sculptures. The following year,
he made his debut at the Paris Salon with
a piece called Dog and Fox. From that
point on, he regularly exhibited at the
Salon, eventually winning four awards.
He was extremely popular in England as
well as France. In 1861, his reputation was
secured by his induction into the Legion
d’Honneur.
Mene was also out-going and convivial
and his home became a gathering place for
painters, musicians, and fellow sculptors.
Consequently, he was far more popular
with potential purchasers than the perhaps
more artistically gifted Barye.
Rosa Bonheur (1822- 1899) was popu-
Labourage Nivernais
Rosa Bonheur
1849
Muletiers des Pyrenees
Rosa Bonheur
1882
lar largely because she painted in the style
that became known as “juste milieu” – in
other words, a middle ground that managed to combine the innovations of the
Barbizon painters with more traditional
genre and landscape conventions. She
focused on animals, and on the rare occasion when she did depict human figures,
her working peasants were sentimentalized enough that she managed to avoid
charges of socialism in politically charged
19th century Paris.
Rosa was born to a family full of artistic
talent. She was copying masterpieces at
the Louvre by the time she was 14, her
only real artistic training, as females
were not allowed to attend the Ecole
des Beaux Arts. Nevertheless, Rosa was
showing at the Paris Salon by the age of
19. Labourage Nivernais is one of her
award-winning paintings, and at the time
was considered so realistic that people
were quoted as being able to smell the
earth being tilled.