Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [28]
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, David’s most gifted pupil in Paris, continued in the neoclassical tradition. The historical pictures to which he devoted most of his life (eg Oedipus and the Sphinx) are now generally regarded as inferior to his portraits. The name of Ingres, who played the violin for enjoyment, lives on in the phrase violon d’Ingres, which means ‘hobby’ in French.
The gripping Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault is on the threshold of romanticism; if Géricault had not died early aged 33 he would probably have become a leader of the movement, along with his friend Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix’s most famous – if not best – work is Liberty Leading the People, which commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 Click here.
The members of the Barbizon School brought about a parallel transformation of landscape painting. The school derived its name from a village near the Forêt de Fontainebleau (Forest of Fontainebleau;), where Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, among others, gathered to paint en plein air (in the open air). Corot is best known for his landscapes (The Bridge at Nantes, Chartres Cathedral); Millet took many of his subjects from peasant life (The Gleaners) and had a great influence on Van Gogh.
Millet anticipated the realist programme of Gustave Courbet, a prominent member of the Paris Commune (he was accused of – and imprisoned for – destroying the Vendôme Column), whose paintings show the drudgery of manual labour and dignity of ordinary life (Funeral at Ornans, The Angelus).
Édouard Manet used realism to depict the life of the Parisian middle classes, yet he included in his pictures numerous references to the Old Masters. His Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia both were considered scandalous, largely because they broke with the traditional treatment of their subject matter.
Impressionism, initially a term of derision, was taken from the title of an 1874 experimental painting by Claude Monet, Impression: Soleil Levant (Impression: Sunrise). Monet was the leading figure of the school, which counted among its members Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot. The impressionists’ main aim was to capture the effects of fleeting light, painting almost universally in the open air – and light came to dominate the content of their painting.
Edgar Degas was a fellow traveller of the impressionists, but he preferred painting at the racecourse (At the Races) and in ballet studios (The Dance Class) than the great outdoors. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a great admirer of Degas, but chose subjects one or two notches below: people in the bistros, brothels and music halls of Montmartre (eg Au Moulin Rouge). He is best known for his posters and lithographs, in which the distortion of the figures is both satirical and decorative.
Paul Cézanne is celebrated for his still lifes and landscapes depicting the south of France, though he spent many years in Paris after breaking with the impressionists. The name of Paul Gauguin immediately conjures up studies of Tahitian and Breton women. Both painters are usually referred to as postimpressionists, something of a catch-all term for the diverse styles that flowed from impressionism.
In the late 19th century Gauguin worked for a time in Arles in Provence with the Dutch-born Vincent Van Gogh, who spent most of his painting life in France and died in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris in 1890. A brilliant, innovative artist, Van Gogh produced haunting self-portraits and landscapes in which bold colour assumes an expressive and emotive quality.
Van Gogh’s later technique paralleled pointillism, developed by Georges Seurat, who applied paint in small dots or uniform brush strokes of unmixed colour, producing fine mosaics of warm and cool tones in such tableaux as Une Baignade, Asnières (Bathers at Asnières). Henri Rousseau was a contemporary of the postimpressionists but his ‘naive’ art was totally unaffected by them. His dreamlike pictures of the Paris suburbs and of jungle and desert scenes (eg The Snake Charmer)