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Toward a Modern Style: Painting and Sculpture in France, 1832-1905
"Cold exactitude is not art; ingenuous artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself."
-- Eugene Delacroix, 1822
Countering the prevalence of classical themes and styles in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Romantic artists sought a new freedom in their work. Mirroring the social and political climate, Eugene Delacroix painted idealistic and rebellious narratives through rich colors and dramatic compositions. Beginning in the 1820s, the new, highly influential style of Romanticism epitomized an aesthetic response to the growing industrialization of France.
Following the 1848 revolution, which established the short-lived French Second Republic, artists like Gustave Courbet and Honore Daumier developed new ways to reflect the lives and sensibilities of everyday people in place of the literary and historical subjects of Romanticism. Known as Realism, this new form developed alongside the fledgling art of photography and sought to depict the observable truth.
Peasant laborers and scenes of the countryside became important subjects for Courbet and his followers, like Jules-Adolphe-Aime-Louis Breton, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Theodore Rousseau. One group of painters worked regularly in the forest of Fontainebleau, near Barbizon. Barbizon school artists helped engender an inventive landscape style based on close observation in light and color. |