Editorial Foreword

The series to which this book belongs is devoted to both the history and the problems of style in European art. It is expository rather than critical. The aim is to discuss each important style in relation to contemporary shifts in emphasis and direction both in the other, non-visual arts and in thought and civilization as a whole. By examining artistic styles in this wider context it is hoped that closer definitions and a deeper understanding of their fundamental character and motivation will be reached.

The series is intended for the general reader but it is written at a level which should interest the specialist as well. Beyond this there has been no attempt at uniformity. Each author has had complete liberty in his mode of treatment and has been free to be as selective as he wished – for selection and compression are inevitable in a series such as this, whose scope extends beyond the history of art. Not all great artists or great works of art can be mentioned, far less discussed. Nor, more specifically, is it intended to provide anything in the nature of a historical survey, period by period, but rather a discussion of the artistic concepts dominant in each successive period. And, for this purpose, the detailed analysis of a few carefully chosen issues is more revealing than the bird’s-eye view.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank my friends and colleagues in the field of nineteenth-century studies for their generous gifts of information and ideas. Among those with whom I have discussed problems or from whom I have received information are: Professors Albert Elsen, Ann Coffin Hanson, Robert L. Herbert, Fred Licht, Theodore Reff, Robert Rosenblum and Allen Staley. I should like to extend special thanks to Robert Rosenblum for opening my eyes to some of the hidden splendours of Victorian painting in the course of visits to several exhibitions undertaken in his company. Many of the ideas, and the basic insights, developed in the course of these pages go back to my days as a graduate student at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, where I was privileged to study under the late Walter Friedlaender and to write a doctoral dissertation on Courbet and Realism under the direction of Professors H. W. Janson and Robert Goldwater. In addition, I am indebted to the various people who helped me to obtain photographs or information about the current whereabouts of works of art, particularly the staff of the Witt library in London, and M. Pierre Rosenberg in Paris. My gratitude to my loyal and industrious assistants, Sherry Chayat Nordstrom and Alison Hilton, knows no bounds. Edith Tonelli helped with the task of proof-reading. Special thanks must go to my husband, Richard Pommer, who provided moral support and sound advice at every stage of the way, especially on architectural matters. My mother, Mrs Elka Heller, and my mother-in-law, Mrs Reba Pommer, my daughter Jessica and my housekeeper, Mrs Eleanor Lezon, offered invaluable domestic assistance. I can only add that my warmest thanks must be reserved for my two editors, John Fleming and Hugh Honour, who were models of patience, attentiveness and encouragement at all times during the preparation of this manuscript.

L.N.
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
November 1970

1
The Nature of Realism

Realism, as an historical movement in the figurative arts and in literature, attained its most coherent and consistent formulation in France, with echoes, parallels and variants elsewhere on the Continent, in England and in the United States. Preceded by Romanticism and followed by what is now generally termed Symbolism, it was the dominant movement from about 1840 until 1870-80. Its aim was to give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life. This definition will determine the direction of the present study, but it inevitably raises a number of questions. For whereas such terms as Mannerism, Baroque or Neo-classicism – whatever difficulties they may present – are generally used to define stylistic categories, proper to the visual arts, the word Realism is also closely connected with central philosophical issues. In order to isolate the peculiar implications of Realism, considered as an historical, stylistic movement or direction in the arts, we must first consider some of the problems arising out of the different and sometimes diametrically opposed senses in which the term can be used.

REALISM AND REALITY

A basic cause of the confusion bedevilling the notion of Realism is its ambiguous relationship to the highly problematical concept of reality. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Tate Gallery in London, for example, was entitled ‘The Art of the Real’ and consisted not – as the uninitiated might have expected – of recognizable views of people, things or places, but of large striped or stained canvases and mammoth constructions of plywood, plastic or metal. The title chosen by the organizer was neither wilfully mystifying nor capricious. It was a contemporary manifestation of a long philosophical tradition, part of the main-stream of Western thought since the time of Plato, which opposes ‘true reality’ to ‘mere appearance’. ‘All things have two faces’, declared the sixteenth-century theologian, Sebastian Franck, ‘because God decided to oppose himself to the world, to leave appearances to the latter and to take the truth and the essence of things for himself.’ This is an extreme statement of a notion which echoes down through the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘True reality lies beyond immediate sensation and the objects we see every day’, said Hegel. ‘Only what exists in itself is real.… Art digs an abyss between the appearance and illusion of this bad and perishable world, on the one hand, and the true content of events on the other, to re-clothe these events and phenomena with a higher reality, born of the mind.… Far from being simple appearances and illustrations of ordinary reality, the manifestations of art possess a higher reality and a truer existence.’ Later in the century Baudelaire maintained, in his sketch for a critique of Realism, that, in contradistinction to Realist doctrine, poetry itself was most real and was ‘only completely true in another world’ since the things of this world were merely a ‘hieroglyphic dictionary’. Many of the most vociferous opponents of Realism based their attacks on these grounds: that it sacrificed a higher and more permanent for a lower, more mundane reality.^∗

The commonplace notion that Realism is a ‘styleless’ or transparent style, a mere simulacrum or mirror image of visual reality, is another barrier to its understanding as an historical and stylistic phenomenon. This is a gross simplification, for Realism was no more a mere mirror of reality than any other style and its relation qua style to phenomenal data – the donnée – is as complex and difficult as that of Romanticism, the Baroque or Mannerism. So far as Realism is concerned, however, the issue is greatly confused by the assertions of both its supporters and opponents, that Realists were doing no more than mirroring everyday reality. These statements derived from the belief that perception could be ‘pure’ and unconditioned by time or place. But is pure perception – perception in a vacuum, as it were – ever possible?

In painting, no matter how honest or unhackneyed the artist’s vision may be, the visible world must be transformed to accommodate it to the flat surface of the canvas. The artist’s perception is therefore inevitably conditioned by the physical properties of paint and linseed oil no less than by his knowledge and technique – even by his choice of brush-strokes – in conveying three-dimensional space and form on to a two-dimensional picture plane. Even in photography, which comes closer to fulfilling the demand for ‘transparency’, the photographer’s choice of viewpoint, length of exposure, size of focal opening and so on, intervene between the object and the image printed on the paper. Similarly in literature, the most vividly convincing nineteenth-century Realist novels interpose the barriers of ‘he said’ and ‘she whispered meaningfully’, between reader and experience. Or they alternate lengthy, if objective, descriptions of clothing and furniture with set passages of conversation, in a manner opposed to our actual more free-flowing consciousness of experience which was only later developed by such writers as Proust, Virginia Woolf, Joyce or Robbe-Grillet. The cinema has been described by André Bazin as ‘a re-creation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time’. Yet, even the cinema fails to realize the time-honoured dream of capturing reality and capturing it whole which has been one of the aspirations of art since at least as early as the time of Pliny.

Although it is hard to believe that Parrhasios’ grapes could have deceived even the most gullible of birds, the old story reveals, like the bravado of trompe l’œil painting and ingenious experiments with the camera obscura, that perennially obsessive desire of artists to bring reality back alive, to escape from the bonds of convention into a magic world of pure verisimilitude. If mid twentieth-century artists and writers are sceptical about the possibility of attaining this aim, is it not partly because of their and our – equally obsessive – preoccupation with and self-consciousness about the means of art: the formal demands of paint and canvas, the self-generating power of the structure of language whether literary or visual? The very aspirations of realism, in its old naïve sense, are denied by the contemporary outlook which asserts and demands the absolute independence of the world of art from the world of reality and, indeed, disputes the existence of any single, unequivocal reality at all. We no longer accept any fixed correspondence between the syntax of language, or the notational system of art, and an ideally structured universe.

In the mid nineteenth century, however, scientists and historians seemed to be revealing at breakneck speed more and more about reality past and present. There were no apparent limits to the discovery of what could be known about man and nature. Realist writers and artists were likewise explorers in the realm of fact and experience, venturing into areas hitherto untouched or only partly investigated by their predecessors. For although the notion of a ‘styleless style’ may be itself part of the self-created myth of the nineteenth century, the role played by actual objective investigation of the external world in the creation of Realism cannot be ignored. The history of art is more than a succession of stylistic and iconographic conventions modified by occasional ‘comparisons’ with perceived reality – ‘stylistic rectifications’ as André Malraux has called them. Courbet’s Meeting[1], for example, was clearly based on a prototype in popular imagery [2]: yet Courbet observed the countryside around Montpellier with scrupulous attention to its peculiarities and he recorded the local flora, the bright clear atmosphere of the Midi, as well as the appearance of himself, Bruyas and his servant, with striking and convincing accuracy. What is more, he succeeded in achieving his aim: creating an image that looks like and was for long held to be an objective, almost photographic, record of an actual event.

1. The Meeting, 1854. Gustave Courbet

2. The Wandering Jew, n.d. Popular print

If one takes the opposition between convention and empirical observation in art as a relative rather than an absolute criterion, one can see that in Realism the role played by observation is greater, that by convention smaller. John Constable’s cloud studies of 1821-2 are a case in point [3]. As Ernst Gombrich has shown, they were partly based on engravings by the eighteenth-century water colourist Alexander Cozens. But they were still more intimately connected with Constable’s own observations of the sky, both as a miller and a painter, and were also influenced by the meteorologist Luke Howard who investigated and classified cloud forms. However much he may have depended on the pre-existing schemata provided by Cozens – as Gombrich claims – Constable used Cozens’s prototypes not as ready-made formulae, which with a few judicious alterations would serve to fill the top of a landscape, but as aides mémoires – or, rather, aides recherches – for his own far more precisely observed representations. His cloud studies are, in fact, classified as cirrus or strato-cumulus formations and the time and place of their execution are indicated in many cases.

3. Cloud Study, c. 1822. John Constable

Constable may not have been aiming for scientific accuracy alone; but by accepting natural phenomena as the appropriate object for representation in his cloud studies, by restricting his experience to the phenomenon itself and neither interpreting it symbolically nor using it as a medium to express an état d’âme, he was very much an artist of the nineteenth century and one who points the way to later developments within the Realist movement. It is no accident that advanced French landscape painters like Corot and Huet admired him in the thirties and forties.

Degas, according to Gombrich, ‘dismissed the excited talk of his impressionist friends with the remark that painting was a conventional art and that they would better occupy their time by copying drawings by Holbein’. But this is only part of the story. In his notebooks, Degas reiterated in both words and sketches his passion for concrete, direct observation and notation of ordinary, everyday experience: ‘Do every kind of worn object… corsets which have just been taken off… series on instruments and instrumentalists… for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoons, oboes, etc.… On the bakery, the bread: series on journeyman bakers, seen in the cellar itself or through the air vents from the street.… No one has ever done monuments or houses from below, from beneath, up close, as one sees them going by in the streets.’ [4] For Degas there was no necessary contradiction between copying Holbein and recording the novel themes of his own time in his own way. Nor need there ever be any conflict between an interest in draughtsmanship or the great masters of the past and a preoccupation with the present and the development of a system of notation appropriate to it. As George Moore pointed out, Degas chose unusual themes such as the ballet girl, the washerwoman, the housewife bathing herself [5], precisely because ‘the drawing of the ballet girl and the housewife is less known than that of the Nymph and the Spartan youth’. And he added: ‘Painters will understand what I mean by the drawing being “less known” – that knowledge of form which sustains the artist like a crutch in his examination of the model, and which as it were dictates to the eye what it must see.’ Moore, and other critics sympathetic to the Realists, regarded convention and schemata merely as crutches, not as necessary components of art and, furthermore, crutches which could be, and sometimes were, dispensed with. This may be part of Realist myth – yet it is also part of Realist reality.

4. Building Seen from Below, c. 1874-85. Edgar Degas

The history of late eighteenth – and nineteenth-century art is indeed, as Gombrich declares, the story of the struggle against schemata; and the major weapon in this struggle was the empirical investigation of reality. When Constable said that he tried to forget that he had ever seen a picture as he sat down to paint from nature, or Monet that he wished he had been born blind and then suddenly received his sight, they were not merely placing a high premium on originality. They were stressing the importance of confronting reality afresh, of consciously stripping their minds, and their brushes, of secondhand knowledge and ready-made formulae. So radical and extreme an approach was new. And its success is attested by their works – whether or not we consider fidelity to reality (however understood) to be an aesthetic criterion.

Yet one may well ask to what extent this was, in fact, a new approach. Was it not merely another manifestation of a recurrent trend in European art? What of the scrupulous exactitude of Jan van Eyck, the visual veracity of Velasquez, the relentless recording of varicose veins and dirty feet by Caravaggio, the meticulously observed still-lifes and interiors by the Dutch ‘little masters’ of the seventeenth century? Disregarding, for the present, the complex relationship of Realism to the art of the past, it would be difficult to demonstrate that Manet’s portraits are in any sense more faithful than those of Velasquez or that Renoir’s Le Pont des Arts [6] is a closer record of a specific place at a specific time than Vermeer’s View of Delft [7]. But important though it might be, fidelity to visual reality was only one aspect of the Realist enterprise; and it would be erroneous to base our conception of so complex a movement on only one of its features: verisimilitude. To understand Realism as a stylistic attitude within its period, we must therefore turn to some of the Realists’ other aspirations and achievements.

5. Le Tub, c. 1886. Edgar Degas

6. Le Pont des Arts, Paris, c. 1868. Auguste Renoir

7. View of Delft, c. 1660. J. Vermeer

REALISM, HISTORY AND TIME

A new and broadened notion of history, accompanying a radical alteration of the sense of time, was central to the Realist outlook. Furthermore, new democratic ideas stimulated a wider historical approach. Ordinary people – merchants, workers and peasants – in their everyday functions, began to appear on a stage formerly reserved exclusively for kings, nobles, diplomats and heroes. ‘Give up the theory of constitutions and their mechanism, of religions and their system’, demanded Hippolyte Taine, apostle of the new historical approach, ‘and try to see men in their workshops, in their offices, in their fields, with their sky, their earth, their houses, their dress, tillage, meals, as you do when, landing in England or Italy, you remark faces and gestures, roads and inns, a citizen taking his walk, a workman drinking.’ This insistence on the connection between history and experienced fact is characteristic of the Realist outlook. As Flaubert pointed out in a letter of 1854: ‘The leading characteristic of our century is its historical sense. This is why we have to confine ourselves to relating the facts.’ A true understanding and representation of both past and present was now seen to depend on a scrupulous examination of the evidence, free from any conventional, accepted moral or metaphysical evaluation. Indeed, in the radical if rather coarsely materialistic view of Comte or Taine, the morals and ideas of past and present were simply one kind of evidence, in no way different from physical evidence, to which indeed they might be reduced. ‘Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar’, wrote Taine. ‘Let us then seek the simple phenomena for moral qualities as we seek them for physical qualities.’ Applying this attitude to art, Courbet declared in 1861 that ‘painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the presentation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects; an object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.’

It is hardly paradoxical that the era in which history was canonized as a scientific (or pseudo-scientific?) discipline also saw the end of History Painting – that time-honoured pictorial assertion of permanent values and eternal ideals centred around the nexus of heroic antiquity. Painters did not cease to paint subjects from Greek and Roman history: far from it. And certain critics urged a return to the appropriate ‘grand manner’. But what they now produced were, for the most part, historical genre paintings: scenes from the everyday life of Greece and Rome, scrupulously accurate in costume and setting, and as devoid of elevated sentiment as of noble form. In other words, History painters had become anecdotal painters of history, and most of them found the décor and picturesque costumes of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance more sympathetic than those of the ancient world. Delacroix, who had extended his own range of historical and literary sources, criticized modern painters who ‘call themselves history painters. That claim must be totally refuted’, he wrote, ‘The history-painter is he who represents heroic deeds, and these lofty deeds are to be found exclusively in Greek and Roman history… subjects drawn from other eras produce nothing but genre paintings.’

Whether the painting of historical subjects had been degraded or enriched by this new concept of history is a matter of opinion; but there can be no dispute that it had been irrevocably altered by the mid nineteenth century. And indeed some academic painters were affected by it no less than their opponents, the Realists. Gérôme’s Death of Caesar [8] and Poussin’s Death of Germanicus are both set in the ancient world; but Gérôme’s photographic veracity and insistence on the concreteness of a specific historical event could hardly be further removed from Poussin’s elevated generalization and moral distancing. No matter what his choice of subject or his professed attitude to the nature of art, Gérôme would seem, on the evidence of his work, to have shared Courbet’s view that painting was essentially an art concret and demanded a similarly concret visual language. From this point of view it is simply Courbet’s insistence on contemporaneity as a necessary condition of the concrete that separates the academic artist from the innovator.

8. Death of Caesar, 1865(?). J.-L. Gérôme

As the treatment of historical subjects became more factual and mundane towards the mid century, so the chronological range available to artists was expanded. The limits of time itself were being gradually pushed back from Archibald Ussher’s judicious starting-point in 4004 B.C. The fluid relativism of a perpetually revised scientific hypothesis replaced the story of Creation and the metaphysical absolute it implied. History and value, history and faith, which had been inseparable since the earliest creation myths and integrated in the doctrine of the Christian Church, were irremediably torn asunder by the Higher Criticism and the New Geology. What was left was history as the facts, in a vast landscape extending from the mists of prehistoric times to the Comtean precincts of present-day experience. Fernand Cormon’s The Stone Age, Alma-Tadema’s Apodyterium, Gérôme’s Louis XIV and Molière at Dinner, and Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette [9, 10, 11, 12] – unlikely companions though they may be from a purely aesthetic standpoint – are vivid examples of this newly expanded historical sense. All four paintings share a common attempt to place the daily life of a given chronological period in a convincing and objectively accurate milieu. The Realist, of course, insisted that only the contemporary world was a suitable subject for the artist since, as Courbet put it, ‘the art of painting can only consist of the representation of objects which are visible and tangible for the artist’, and the artists of one century were therefore ‘basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century’. But artists who kept to subjects from the past were by no means unaffected by considerations of factual accuracy and freedom of choice of subject quite similar to Courbet’s. As Gerald Ackerman has pointed out, many mid nineteenth-century painters of historical scenes attempted to satisfy Taine’s demand for actuality as the sine qua non of history, through a sense of probability, painting them as if they had been present. It is the demand for contemporaneity and nothing but contemporaneity, which here separates the Realists from their fellow artists. If Alma-Tadema’s painting might be called a ‘genre painting of antiquity’, Courbet’s might equally well be termed a ‘history painting of contemporary life’. By the mid nineteenth century the distinction had become a very slender one; but, as we shall see, for the Realist it was the crucial distinction.

9. Return from a Bear Hunt During the Stone Age, 1882. Fernand Cormon

10. An Apodyterium, 1886. L. Alma-Tadcma

11. Louis NTV and Molïere at Dinner, 1863, J.-L. Gérôme (engraving after)

12. Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Auguste Renoir

The Realists held that the only valid subject for the contemporary artist was the contemporary world. ‘Il faut être de son temps’ became their battle-cry. ‘I hold the artists of one century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century’, wrote Courbet. ‘It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. Historical art is by nature contemporary. Each epoch must have its artists who express it and reproduce it for the future… The history of an era is finished with that era itself and with those of its representatives who have expressed it’. And his major supporter in the ‘bataille réaliste’, Champfleury, maintained that the ‘serious representation of present-day personalities, the derbies, the black dress-coats, the polished shoes or the peasants’ sabots’, had a far greater interest than the frivolous knick-knacks of the past.

The moral implications of ‘contemporaneity’ were suggested by the critic Castagnary who, in his Salon of 1863, praised the ‘naturalists’ for ‘putting the artist back into the midst of his era, with the mission of reflecting it’, and French society for producing painting ‘that describes its own appearances and customs and no longer those of vanished civilizations’. But artists with this belief sometimes had to make sacrifices for it. On the eve of the 1866 Salon the young Bazille told his parents: ‘I have chosen the modern era because it is the one I understand best, that I find most alive for living people’, adding the rueful postscript ‘– and that is what will get me rejected’. In his Salon of 1868 Zola called the young Monet, Bazille and Renoir Les Actualistes – ‘the painters who love their times from the bottom of their artistic minds and hearts.… They do not content themselves with ridiculous trompe l’œil; they interpret their era as men who feel it live within them, who are possessed by it, and who are happy to be possessed by it.… Their works are alive because they have taken them from life and they have painted them with all the love they feel for modern subjects.’

As Realism evolved, the demand for – and conception of – contemporaneity became more rigorous. The ‘instantaneity’ of the Impressionists is ‘contemporaneity’ taken to its ultimate limits. ‘Now’, ‘today’, ‘the present’, had become ‘this very moment’, ‘this instant’. No doubt photography helped to create this identification of the contemporary with the instantaneous. But, in a deeper sense, the image of the random, the changing, the impermanent and unstable seemed closer to the experienced qualities of present-day reality than the imagery of the stable, the balanced, the harmonious. As Baudelaire said: ‘modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent’.

This insistence on catching the present moment in art – whether the encounter of Courbet and his patron on the road to Sète in The Meeting [1], the corps de ballet making a révérence in a Degas or a chance effect of light or atmosphere in a Monet landscape – is an essential aspect of the Realist conception of the nature of time. Realist motion is always motion captured as it is ‘now’, as it is perceived in a flash of vision. Earlier painters had, of course, often represented physical movement. But even so dynamic a picture as La Ronde by Rubens shows how little they were concerned with capturing a specifically observed instant of action. Instead, Rubens constructed a kind of generalized, eternal paradigm of violent physical action, with a beginning, middle and end within the context of the pictorial space, each pose carefully calculated to link with the next in an unbroken chain. He depicted the general idea of movement – movement as a permanent ideal entity rather than a perceived moment of specific activity. In pre-nineteenth-century art, time was never a completely isolated instant but always implied what preceded and what would follow. In classical art and all schemata based upon it, the passage of time is condensed and stabilized by means of a significant kinetic summary.

13. Dancer on the Stage, 1878. Edgar Degas

A Realist, like Degas, destroyed this paradigm of temporal continuity in favour of the disjointed temporal fragment. In such a work as the Dancer on the Stage [13], Degas showed no interest in conveying any ideal image of movement but concentrated on creating the equivalent of a concrete instant of perceived temporal fact – an isolated moment. The poses of the figures, far from leading step by step to a climax, are deliberately disconnected from one another; the directions of movement diverge from rather than converge on a point of motion and significance. The appearance of a single moment is painted from a viewpoint which makes its discreteness, its lack of significant compositional or psychological focus most apparent. Time is seen as the arrester of significance not – as in traditional art – the medium in which it unfolds.

14. The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1867. Eadouard Manet

This emphasis on the temporal fragment as the basic unit of perceived experience, like the equation of concrete fact with reality itself, accompanied the elimination or reduction of traditional moral, metaphysical and psychological values in Realist works. Adversaries were quick to accuse the Realists of producing works emotionally and morally, as well as formally, lacking in continuity and coherence. The acceptance of what is immediately experienced, and of nothing beyond it, as the entire meaning of the event depicted – characteristic, for example, of Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian [14] – led critics to accuse the artist of lack of feeling, of inability to comprehend, or at least to create, a pictorial equivalent for the moral and psychological implications of a chillingly brutal subject, as had Goya in his Third of May [15]. Yet the sense of detachment, the lack of metaphysical overtones in Manet’s painting came from no moral unconcern at the event, still less from political indifference or artistic ineptitude. Manet must have reacted to the outrage as much as any other staunch republican. His sense of its importance is revealed simply by his careful attention to the actual details of the execution, his painstaking compilation of eye-witness reports and photographs, and his repeated large-scale recreations of the scene from life in his studio. Manet, unlike Goya, carefully contrived to rivet the ‘meaning’ of his painting to firm, concrete facts – the momentary appearance of the execution of the Emperor, a particular, documented historical event – rather than transforming it into a more generalized commentary about the eternal inhumanity of man to man like Goya’s Third of May.

15. The Third of May, 1808, 1814, Francisco de Goya

This difference is due, at least in part, to the difference in the temporal attitudes controlling each work. For Goya, meaning unfolds, within the pictorial world, in time and space, progressing from the grey undifferentiated background of ‘before’ to the stark, light-revealed climax of the men being executed – ‘now’ – to the lumpish, blood-encrusted fallen figures at the very boundary of the pictorial world – ‘afterwards’. This progression in time – emphasized by light, by intensification of colour saturation, and by the degree of materiality of the paint surface itself – is bound to an underlying moral conviction of the senselessness and bestiality of such events. The intimation that we are confronted by the same group of victims in three stages of their agony intensifies its pathos and our sense of its inevitability and hopelessness. There is more than a little reminiscence of the Stations of the Cross in these anonymous figures, as is hinted at by the open-armed gesture of the man in the centre. The rebels of Madrid, struck down by their grey, faceless executioners, are assimilated to a humanized up-dating of Christ’s Passion. The contrast between light and shade, between human disorder and mechanized regularity, from left to right, intensify the moral and metaphysical impact of Goya’s masterpiece.

In Manet’s painting there is none of this temporal-emotional unfolding, no sense of the confrontation of a climactic moment of truth, prepared for by almost inchoate intimations and followed by a harrowing aftermath within the painting itself, none of the pictorial analogies or contrasts that make Goya’s painting a paradigm of an eternal, and recurrent, human situation. Maximilian’s death takes place in historical rather than metaphysical time. The time is the present, the place is Queretaro, Mexico, the victims are neither more nor less human than their executioners, the spectators are anonymous observers, as are we who observe the painting itself. The event is a terrible one, but Manet, the painter, refrains from any overt pictorial judgement: it is what it is, when it is, where it is, nothing more. The horror is contained within the fact, as in an instantaneous war-news photograph. For the Realist, horror – like beauty or reality itself cannot be universalized: it is bound to a concrete situation at a given moment of time.

THE NEW RANGE OF SUBJECT-MATTER

If the Realists contracted their field of vision in temporal and emotional terms, they expanded it to take in a vastly wider range of experience. A new demand for democracy in art, accompanying the demand for political and social democracy, opened up a whole new realm of subjects hitherto unnoticed or considered unworthy of pictorial or literary representation. While the poor might always have been with us, they had hardly been granted a fair share of serious artistic attention before the advent of Realism – nor had the middle classes, who were now the dominant force in society. For the Realists, ordinary situations and objects of daily life were no less worthy of depiction than antique heroes or Christian Saints: indeed for the ‘peintre de la vie moderne’ the noble and beautiful were less appropriate than the commonplace and undistinguished. The very boundary-line between the beautiful and ugly had to be erased by the advanced artist. Could any subject in and of itself be considered ugly and therefore be rejected?

‘If a painter is possessed of an original feeling for nature and a personal manner of execution,’ declared the brilliant left-wing critic Théophile Thoré, ‘even if he applies them to the most inferior objects, he is master of his art and in his art. Murillo in his Young Beggar is as much a master as in his Assumption of the Virgin. Brouwer and Chardin painting pots are as much masters as Raphael painting Madonnas.’ And, in a review of the Salon des Refusés of 1863 the same critic maintained: ‘It is good to descend, or, if you will, rise once more to the classes that scarcely ever had the privilege of being studied and put into the light by painting.… The portrait of the worker in his smock is certainly worth as much as the portrait of a prince in his golden robes.’ For the Realists there were no ready-made literary or artistic subjects. One of their chief proselytizers, Duranty, declared: ‘In reality nothing is shocking; in the sun, rags are as good as imperial vestments.’ Claude Lantier, Zola’s Realist artist-hero preferred a pile of cabbages to all the picturesque medievalism of the Romantics and proclaimed that a bunch of carrots, directly observed and naively painted on the spot was worth all the eternal confections of the école – ‘the day is coming when a single original carrot will be pregnant with revolution’ – and he found a ‘tableau tout fait’ in a group of workers gulping down their midday soup beneath the iron and glass roof of Les Halles.

The Realists placed a positive value on the depiction of the low, the humble and the commonplace, the socially dispossessed or marginal as well as the more prosperous sectors of contemporary life. They turned for inspiration to the worker, the peasant, the laundress, the prostitute, to the middle-class or working-class café or bal, to the prosaic realm of the cotton broker or the modiste, to their own or their friends’ foyers and gardens, viewing them frankly and candidly in all their misery, familiarity or banality. Courbet said that the goal of the Realist was to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of his own epoch in his art, and thus, the social dimension automatically acquired importance, whether the artist was a self-conscious political radical, like Courbet himself, or an equally self-conscious, cynical anti-democrat like Jules or Edmond Goncourt. Indeed, it is the Goncourts who state the issue most strongly, in their famous preface to Germinie Lacerteux of 1864:

In England, Walter Bagehot said that ‘the character of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art’ and attacked Dickens because his poor people were ‘poor talkers and poor livers, and in all ways poor people to read about’. Similarly the critic Enault condemned the characters in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans [39] as ‘common, trivial and grotesque’. But, despite all opposition, Realists in England and on the Continent continued to affirm the right of the lower classes to literary and artistic status. Stone-breakers, rag-pickers, beggars, street-walkers, laundresses, railway workers and miners now began to appear in paintings and novels, not as picturesque background figures but in the centre of the stage.

But of course an artist did not become a Realist merely by depicting a peasant with a hoe or a shepherdess with a lamb: his commitment went deeper – to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This demand became a moral as well as an epistemological or aesthetic imperative. In the words of G. H. Lewes, writing on Realism in Art in 1858:

The passage reminds one how close George Eliot was to the Realists, though she is seldom numbered among them.

Courbet fulfilled such a demand for truth in art. His peasants, with their craggy features and reprehensible linen and gauche postures, his apparently artless, clumsy and naively additive compositions, could be equated by his admirers with an honest attempt to express the truth of his subject matter, and by his enemies with a deplorable lack of delicacy and decorum. Indeed, it was not to Courbet’s subjects that some of his most violent opponents objected, but to his coarse, unvarnished and unselective manner of presenting them. When Champfleury complained that Courbet was treated as ‘seditious because in all good faith, he has represented bourgeois, peasants and village women in natural size’, the conservative critic Perrier replied: ‘it is not because he has painted bourgeois or peasants that M. Courbet is treated as seditious, but because he has presented them in a way that is contrary to human nature. Nobody,’ Perrier insisted, ‘could deny that a stone-breaker is as worthy a subject in art as a prince or any other individual.… But, at least, let your stone-breaker not be an object as insignificant as the stone he is breaking.’ The same point was made by Louis de Geoffroy in discussing the Burial at Ornans: ‘the funeral of a peasant is not less touching to us than the convoy of Phocion. The important thing is to avoid localizing the subject, and in addition, to emphasize the interesting portions of such a scene.’ Though it is difficult sometimes to take these critics’ protestations of admiration for lower-class themes at face value there can be little doubt that, both in their own eyes and in those of their critics, the Realists were aiming for far more than a mere expansion of subject-matter. The premium placed on that most controversial of all entities – truth – rose dramatically towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and the word ‘sincerity’ became a Realist battle-cry.

For although the Realist refrained from moral comment in his work, his whole attitude towards art implied a moral commitment, to the values of truth, honesty and sincerity. In his very refusal to idealize, elevate or in any way embellish his subject, in his stalwart dedication to objective, impartial description and analysis, the Realist took a moral stand. Never before had the qualities of sincerity and truthfulness been asserted so forcefully as the basis of artistic achievement. ‘The beautiful, the true and the good is a fine slogan and yet it is specious. If I had a slogan it would be the true, the true alone,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve. ‘Seek in works what is contrary to or in conformity with this law of sincerity’, demanded the critic Duranty in the pages of his short-lived periodical Le Réalisme, ‘and emphasize the superiority of the one over the other.’ For Champfleury, the essential Realist formula was ‘sincerity in art’ – the artist’s duty to represent only what he had seen or experienced, without any alteration and without any conventional response or aesthetic affectation. To accusations of literalism, or mere photographic accuracy, he replied that ‘the reproduction of nature by man will never be a reproduction and imitation, but always an interpretation… since man is not a machine and is incapable of rendering objects mechanically’. And Manet characterized his own art as, above all, sincere. ‘The artist does not say today “Come and see faultless work”, but “Come and see sincere work”,’ he asserted in 1867.

The artist striving for truth or sincerity had to guard his spontaneous vision against distortion or alteration by aesthetic conventions or preconceptions. Naïveté of vision – what Castagnary called a mind ‘free from the prejudice of education’ – came in this way to be considered a necessary concomitant of sincerity and truthfulness. ‘He knows neither how to sing, nor how to philosophize’, wrote Zola in praise of Manet. ‘He knows how to paint, and that is all.’ Some critics and artists went so far as to assert that sheer ignorance or lack of formal training were positive assets for the artist. Laforgue proposed that the academies should be shut; Courbet refused to set himself up as a professor, declaring that art could not be taught; Pissarro, in an unguarded moment, even suggested that they burn down the Louvre. Yet what the Realists generally meant by ‘naïveté’ – a term used with greater frequency than precision – was not merely, or not always, a childlike innocence of perception, which might also be valued, of course, but the intuitive grasp of truth of Rousseau’s uncorrupted man combined with the ruthless and disciplined quest for objective reality characteristic of the new man of science. Sincerity (which for the Realist, was more like the modern existentialist concept of ‘authenticity’ than its looser, present-day meaning) and truth required of the artist a ceaseless effort to divest himself of the impedimenta of traditional training and poncif, a lifetime’s self-purgation of received ideas.

Mockery proved a formidable weapon for tearing away the protective covering of conventional sentiment or artifice from reality. Daumier’s incisive deflation of the petty pretences of the bourgeoisie, or his parodies of the classical ideal in his Histoire ancienne lithographs [16], Courbet’s ludicrous carousing priests in The Return from the Meeting or his grossly fleshy Bathers [17], naked rather than nude, are samples of the genre. A subtler but no less telling vein of irony marks Flaubert’s devastating stichomythia of bureaucratic platitude and amorous dalliance in the ‘commices agricoles’ sequence in Madame Bovary or Manet’s straight-faced juxtaposition of classical elevation and contemporary banality in he Déjeuner sur l’herbe [19].

16. Menelaus Victorious, 1841. Honoré Daumier

17. The Bathers (detail), 1853. Gustave Courbet

18. Nude Study, photograph c. 1853. J. V. de Villeneuve

But the artist had a hard struggle to rid himself of preconceptions and time-honoured formulae, to liberate both his vision and notation from outward idealism and established poncifContes domestiquesBovary