Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007
Chapter 9
REALISM AND THE URBAN POOR
The conviction that art could promote social and political change inspired increasing numbers of artists. Paintings, prints, and sculptures depicted the unnecessarily destitute living and working conditions of the urban lower classes for a more fortunate, affluent audience. The emotional tone of these images could be sentimental, straightforward, condescending, or ennobling depending on the artist's own attitudes and the reaction (s)he sought to evoke in her/his audience. Likewise, viewer reactions varied and were not always predictable: some responded with a feeling of superiority, others with pity, and some were roused to social activism. These portrayls attest to the intensifying interest of artists in showing the appearance of their time, which was changing at a rapid pace.
Artists and Artworks:
9.2 - Ernest Messonier, Memory of Civil War (The Barricades), 1848
9.3 - Alfred Rethel, Death as Victor, 1849
9.4 - Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834, 1834
9.6 - George Cruikshank, Gin-Crazed Girl Commits Suicide, 1848
9.7 - Vasily Perov, Drowned, 1867
9.8 - Richard Redgrave, The Governess, 1844
9.9 - Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless, 1857
9.10 - Anna Blunden, The Song of the Shirt, 1854
9.11 - Honoré Daumier, Laundress on the Quai d’Anjou, c. 1860-61
9.12 - Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, 1856-57
9.13 - Christian Krohg, Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room, 1885-87
9.14 - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Inspection, Rue des Moulins, 1894
9.15 - Thomas Eakins, Gross Clinic, 1875
9.16 - Ford Maddox Brown, Work, 1852-65
9.17 - Adolf von Menzel, Iron Rolling Mill, 1875
9.18 - Constantin Meunier, Hammerer, c. 1885
9.19 - Ilya Repin, Bargehaulers on the Volga, 1873
9.20 - Gustave Doré, Scripture Reader in a Night Refuge, 1872
Readings:
Cherry, Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. London: Routledge, 1993
Clark, T.J. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982
Harris, Beth, ed. Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. London: Ashgate, 2005
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. New York: Vintage Books, 1996
Jackson, David. The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Painting. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011
Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996
McWilliam, Neil. Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993
Nochlin, Linda, ed. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900: Sources and Documents. Englewood: Prentice Hall, 1966
Nunn, Pamela Gerrish. Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995
Thomas, Julia. Victoria Narrative Painting. London: Tate, 2000
Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl. “The Peredvizhniki and the Spirit of the 1860s,” Russian Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (July 1975): 247-65
Varnedoe, Kirk. Northern Light: Nordic Art at the Turn of the Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988
Weisberg, Gabriel P. Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse. New York: Abrams, 1992
Wood, Christopher. Victorian Painting. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999
Subtitle:
REALISM AND THE URBAN POOR
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