On Monday, April 15th, we focused Realism. We began our discussion on Realism, by looking at Francisco de Goya’s, The Third of May. The Third of May depicts Spanish civilians during the Napoleonic wars and the struggle they faced by the oppression French soldiers showed. The painting displays a group of Spanish people kneeling or bracing themselves from the emotional intensity and brutality of the war. The focal point of the painting displays a man in a white shirt and bright yellow pants. The man shows a worried facial expression with his hands up in the air bracing for savior. Next, we looked at Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s View of Rome. This work displays a calm scenic view of Rome, contrasting to the many harsh, emotionally intense works displaying war and violence. View of Rome utilizes sweeping brushstrokes with pink and orange colors, as if the sun is setting on the water and a pale blue sky. The reflection in the water creates a soft ambiance for the viewers and illuminates the glow of the sun on the water. I specifically liked this painting, given it is quite different from that of the many violently-emotional works we have looked in during the Baroque and Realism class discussions.
As we continued class, we moved on to look at Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans. A Burial at Ornans is significant in many ways, but one way in particular is that each person in the painting has a specific role and different roles than the other. Rather than depicting a funeral procession of an upper class party, Courbet displays ordinary people part of either the lower or middle classes. This painting encompasses the meaning and the overall themes of the realism movement. For example, the realism movement accepts the flaws of society and the lower class and ordinary people of the movement, while other eras often portrayed scenes with the upper class and neglected lower and middle class people. We see similar notions with Honoré Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage, depicting commoners cramped in a third-class train cart.
To finish the class, we focused on photography, including Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s Still Life, William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Open Door, and lastly photos from the Crimean war. All of these works center on Realism and the power behind showing the hardships and reality for ordinary and lower class people at the time.