19th century art (Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism)
The 19th century is examined as a sequence of reactions driven by politics and the art market: the Salon, the Academy, and each movement's answer to both. You must be able to date a movement within a decade and give its formal signature.
The sequence
- Neoclassicism (c. 1760–1830): Winckelmann's 'noble simplicity', the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, correct contour, moral exempla. David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) is frieze-like and frontal, with colour subordinated to drawing; Canova's marble is cold and polished.
- Romanticism (c. 1800–1850): individual feeling, sublime nature, current events, strong colour. Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (1818–19); Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830); Turner, Friedrich. Goya (Third of May 1808) bridges the two: technique of the Enlightenment, content of Romanticism.
- Realism (c. 1840–1870): Courbet, Millet, Daumier. Contemporary, un-idealised labour, ordinary people painted at history-painting scale - which was the offence.
- Impressionism (1874–1886): out of doors, broken colour, optical mixture, serial motifs, modern leisure. Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro; Degas works indoors with off-guard angles.
- Post-Impressionism (1886–1905): Cézanne's constructive stroke, Van Gogh's impasto and colour as emotion, Gauguin's flat synthetism, Seurat's divisionism.
Worked example: Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
- Identify - oil on canvas, about 1.65 x 2.57 m, destroyed in 1945; shown at the Salon of 1850–51.
- Describe - an old man and a boy breaking stones, faces turned away or in shadow; a hillside closes the background like a wall; earth-toned palette with no accent.
- Reason - the canvas is the size of a history painting but the subject is rural wage labour. Courbet refuses allegory: no angel, no moral. He also refuses the picturesque peasant; the torn shirt is worn, not costumed.
- Interpret - Realism as a democratic claim about who may be painted and at what scale; the anonymity makes the figures stand for a class. His Pavilion of Realism (1855) makes the programme explicit.
Traps
- Mixing labels: Romantic colour without Romantic subject matter is not Romanticism.
- Calling Realism 'photographic' - it is social and polemical, not neutral.
- Crediting the Impressionists with inventing the collapsible paint tube (available from 1841) or with ignoring photography; they responded to it.
- Forgetting that 'Impressionism' came from a hostile critic, Louis Leroy, mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise in 1874.
- Treating Post-Impressionism as one style: it is four different projects.