Horace Vernet

The Duc d’Orleans Proceeds to the Hôtel-de-Ville, July 31, 1830

1833

·      Working class, bourgeoisie, house wife: marching together as a people. Wanted to overthrow the Bourbon autocracy.

·      Duc d’Orleans assumes constitutional authority

·      Contrast with Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People

·      Toned down version of the recent violent history, effort to get over the violent history 

·      Cross-section of population united 

Pierre-Jean David D’Angers

Pediment of the Pantheon

 1830-37

·      Sculpture in the Pantheon in Paris

o   “Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante”

o   great people of France

o   initially the church of St. Genevieve, became secular monument

·      La Patrie= woman as the state distributing wreaths to other figures such as Napoleon (who is grabbing his own wreath)

·      Jurist Malzer, Voltaire, Rousseau

·      Gives prominence to free thinkers

·      Wasn’t evaluated until 8 years after its creation because it was politically troublesome (enshrined fundamental yet radical rights in a prestigious location)

·      Wanted to bring art to the average people—urban proletariat, peasants visiting the city

o   Overlapping of figures, jamming of figures in the corners of the pediment to fit. Doesn’t mind distortion and flattening that aren’t usually part of the classicism associated with monuments like this

o   Similar to the wood prints of Epinal in style—reaching average audiences

F. Georgin and J-B Thiébault

 The Apotheosis of Napoleon

1834

·      Napoleon being celebrated by his troops, being greeted by angels blowing bugles, heroic figures such as greek gods and Roman generals welcoming him to glory

·      Eagle of France

·      Bundle of arrows indicate military prowess and authority

·      The cult of Napoleon was still important—still seen by many as a liberating figure; Juste Milieu

·      Seen as a figure who meant to bring enlightenment and emancipation

·      Style of art different from others of the time:

o    superpositioning: placing figures one above the other. Figures in background are barely smaller than ones in the foreground

o   Rather than demonstrating clear three dimensionality and recession into space, everything is brought to the surface. This is to bring greater legibility to the print. Elements of a popular, non-elite visual language. 

-wood cut print (Epinal) 

J.P. Cortot

Triumph of Napoleon I, 1810

1833-36

·      Angel trumpeting

·      History writing story of Napoleon’s conquest

·      Dressed in simple robes—not to be taken as deity

·      Difficulty of incorporating Napoleon’s legacy following the first empire (search for an iconography appropriate to Napoleon, but also fitting to the Juste Milieu balance) 

Francois Rude

The Marseillaise (Departure of the Volunteers of 1792)

1833-36

·      Allegory of War—outstretched arms (Mars) 

o   Grotesque

o   Celebration of heroism

·      All kinds of people recruited to war (draft)

o   Not idealized in any way

o   “Curious mixture”

J.J. Grandville

Birth of the Juste Milieu

1832

  Daumier

The Past, the Present, the Future

1834

·      3 heads in one (Louis Philippe)

     a sense of sad resignation 

Daumier

Gargantua

1831

·      All of the wealth of France, the work of the peasants, is going to feed to king

·      Throwing money into baskets

·      Throne is toilet, shitting out political documents, elite people accepting it and welcoming it 

Honoré Daumier

Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834

1834

1 - Authorities hate propaganda and try to destroy it.  Between April 5-14, 1834, 19 people (with alleged Republican sympathies) were massacred by the french National guard.  That is the story this lithograph tells.  The proceeds from sales of this print helped pay for various people to push for more freedom of the press.  When it was seen in shop windows, the authorities confiscated all the prints and the lithograph stone - many copies that survive were hidden after being folded and are in very poor condition now.

2 - The main focal point isn’t the most important part of this image.  You instantly see the same there, and he looks like he might even just be sleeping.  But if you keep looking, you notice he is on top of a small child, with blood all around.  You see the head of another person at the bottom right.  Then you notice the feet of another person in the shadows in the back.  As you spend more time with the image, you see more and more death and destruction, which it was makes it such a successful piece.

3 - The most disturbing part of this image is the child.  not only is the child clearly bleeding, the wound is in the top of the head.  Think about how a kid would be shot that way - she or she must have been asleep. That is the thing that drives Daumier’s point home about how innocent these people were, and how wrong the French authorities were to allow this to happen.  They were not rioting in the streets, they were not even at work.  They were at home in bed.

(analysis from http://understandingart.tumblr.com/) 

Delaroche

Hemicycle (with Phidia, Ictinus and Apelles, and muses)

1837-41

·      Juste Milieu encyclopedia of 75 artists throughout history

·      88 ft long

·      effort to articulate the history of classicism to the present

·      anecdotalism—people are sitting around chatting

o   brings historical people down to earth, making them like normal people

Delaroche

Execution of Lady Jane Grey

1833

·      Historical genre painting

·      Takes historical paintings from the past and brings them up close by setting them in modern times

·      Lady Jane Grey was originally the wife of Henry VIII for 2 weeks in the 1500s and then executed

·      Rev. of 1830 was to renounce violence but also relish in its storytelling

Eugene Delacroix

Women of Algiers

1834

·      Harim (a place where several women were kept for one man)

·      Orientalism-set of dichotomist understandings between the East and Europe

o   Indolence, eroticism, women kept in their place, men were dominant :/ clichéd understanding of the East

·      Anthropological/ethnographic account of the culture

o   High observation of architectural and decorative details

·      Difference between “them and us”…”we are better than them” usually emphasized…after a visit to the “Orient,” one had to “restore themselves”

·      Women in this picture are at ease. No tension. Pleasure, intoxication (hookah), possibly lesbianism

·      Suggesting that perhaps this is the world we ought to embrace, not the world of Paris

 Thomas Couture

Romans of the Decadence

1847

·      Genre historique

·      Sneak peak into the lives of the Romans (after a night of debauchery)

·      Contrast of hung-over Romans with statues of famous romans in the background. Painting not about statues, it’s about the daily lives of the Romans

·      Allegory of France in these years: France had fallen low. All of the achievements of the Revolution, restructuring of the state, military, masculinity bolstered by Napoleonic victory, regime of Louis Philippe (provisioning of bread and circuses of food and entertainment), civic participation, etc. had gone to waste

·      People in the picture are all about pleasure

o   If there is blame to be cast, it is on the wealthy women

§  Woman front and center is looking out—chose this life, isn’t being victimized (in the arms of some random man, probably still intoxicated)

·      Borrowed figures directly from Algiers

o   But doesn’t think that this is something to aspire to

o   More of a blame game—women “brought down” the estate by distracting men

Corot

Fountainebleau - Aux Georges d'Apremontc.

1830-35

·      No people present

·      The story, history of France could be told without people

·      The trees and rocks are the main narrative elements

Gustave Le Gray

Tree, Forest of Fountainbleu

c. 1856

·      Photography

·      Student of Delaroche

o   In the 1840s and 50s, they began to work with large format cameras

o   Rivaled detail of artists 

Henri Le Secq

 Fountainbleau

c. 1855

·      Conflicted: should photography be artwork or merely documentation?

o   Right at the center of this conflict

·      Fountainebleau

o   Subject matter appears to be nothing

o   Just a base of a tree and a “marker”

o   Anticipatory of impressionists

§  Emphasis on light and form of leaves rather than subject

T. Rousseau

The Oak in the Rock

1861

·       Sous bois=where the spectator is immersed in the darkness of the woods (under the woods)

·      detail of light and leaves rather than a particular subject (like Le Secq)

Gustave Courbet

After Dinner at Ornans

 1849

 ·      Appears to be a genre story, but it’s very big

·      Feels contemporary

·      Courbet is in picture

o   Another figure with violin, another with pipe

·      Perhaps takes place in Brasserie Anglaire (where his bohemian friends came to hang out)

·      Caravagesque (Caravaggio) feel—very dark

·      Won an award from this painting

Won access to Salon from then on 

Gustave Courbet

The Stonebreakers

1850

Shown in Salon of 1851 with 2 other paintings

·      Wanted to make a big public impact

·      Picked subjects that engaged the politics at the time (not an artist as a politician or intellectual; rather, as an avant garde artist)

·      (Destroyed during WWII)

·      Artists sympathized more with the laborers because their patronage and support from the wealthy was diminished

·      Separated from the product they produced (sell on street rather than knowing who their patron was all along—knowing for whom they were working). Came into city; lived by own wits

Picture about labor

Don’t see the character of people; just see their work

It’s rare to see labor paintings in art history

Don’t see faces; look like machines rather than people

Tools dominate the landscape; clothes are very tattered

·      Tears in fabric—history of labor playing out in clothing itself. The tears are in places that would result from their particular work (tear on back of shirt; side of vest)

·      Bourgeois ideology: peasants and workers be seen as completely separate entities. This blurred that line—peasants as proletariat  

Gerome

Young Greeks Attending a Cock Fight

1846

·      Set in the Mediterranean

·      Sphinx like figure

·      Figures in classical costume (ancient Greeks)

·      Also known as “Young Greeks Fighting the Cocks”

·      Male and female, sex and desire

·      Ingratiating picture; meant to please an audience; playful

·      Erotic life of the classical tradition; daily lives of ancient figures (genre historique)

-Monumentality with the effect of a genre scene

-Highly constructed—differs from Realism