Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [63]
Genre painting also gained respect in the first half of the nineteenth century. No longer placed on painting’s lowest rung, these scenes of the common people engaged in everyday activity were enormously popular.
BINGHAM: SON OF THE PIONEERS. The first important painter of the West was George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), known for his scenes of frontier life. Criticized in the East for uncouth subjects like riverboatmen playing cards, fishing, and chewing tobacco, he saw himself as a social historian immortalizing pioneer life.
Unlike many other artists who took the wilderness as a subject, Bingham was part of the life he portrayed. He spent his childhood on a hard-scrabble farm in Missouri and was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker before trying his hand at sign painting. He taught himself to paint with a how-to manual and homemade pigments, then took off down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers painting portraits. Bingham was soon acclaimed for celebrating the march west and the activities of the frontier. To Bingham, the commonplace was grand and bargemen at a hoedown were just as noble as ancient heroes in battle.
Bingham, “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,” 1845, MMA, NY. In this classic “genre” painting, Bingham romanticizes the settling of the Wild West.
REALISM
During the first half of the nineteenth century, as artistic wars between Neoclassicism and Romanticism raged, Realism, a force that would dominate art for the second half of the century, slowly began to emerge. With the first grindings of the Machine Age, Neoclassicism’s anachronisms and Romanticism’s escapism would prove to be no match for Realism’s hard edge.
In a sense, Realism had always been a part of Western art. During the Renaissance, artists overcame all technical limitations and represented nature with photographic accuracy. From van Eyck to Vermeer to Velázquez, artists approximated visual reality with consummate skill. But before Realism, artists in the nineteenth century modified their subjects by idealizing or sensationalizing them. The “new” Realism insisted on precise imitation of visual perceptions without alteration. Realism’s subject matter was also totally different. Artists limited themselves to facts of the modern world as they personally experienced them; only what they could see or touch was considered real. Gods, goddesses, and heroes of antiquity were out. Peasants and the urban working class were in. In everything from color to subject matter, Realism brought a sense of muted sobriety to art.
Daumier, “The Third-Class Carriage,” c.1862, MMA, NY. A spiritual heir to William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier (1808-79) drew savagely satirical caricatures that punctured the pomposity of Royalists, Bonapartists, and politicians. King Louis Philippe jailed Daumier for his cartoon of the king swallowing “bags of gold extorted from the people. ” Still Daumier continued his attacks. “The Third-Class Carriage” portrayed working-class passengers as dignified, despite being crammed together like lemmings. This was the earliest pictorial representation of the dehumanizing effect of modern transportation.
ROSA BONHEUR (1822-99) was the nineteenth century’s leading painter of animals. Her pictures of sheep, cows, tigers, and wolves reflected her passion for the animal kingdom. When someone reproached her saying, “You are not fond of society, ” the French artist replied, “That depends on what you mean by society. I am never tired of my brute friends. ” Her home in Paris was a menagerie of goats, peacocks, chickens, even a steer, wandering in and out of the studio. When she painted outdoors, dogs lay about her in a circle.
Bonheur’s lifelike images reflected her thorough research. For “The Horse Fair, ” Bonheur sketched at the Paris horse market for a year and a half disguised as a man in order to be inconspicuous. To gain an accurate knowledge of anatomy, she worked in a slaughterhouse, “wading, ” as she said, “in pools of blood. ” Bonheur was as fiercely independent as the lions she painted. She lived with a female