In today’s class, we visited the Landay room in the art museum to choose a Baroque work to write on for our second take-home exam. I found it very helpful to see these works upclose and notice the actual textures within the works. I ended up using Bourguignon’s Battle Scene (With Riderless Horse), which I found very interesting.

Class today finished with looking at photography and Realism. In the beginning stages of photography, it took multiple hours (8) to take an image. Parisians loved photos as the real-life version of still life paintings. The photo Harvest of Death showed the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg in America, illustrating for many people the documentary power of photos. It showed real people and real death, evoking emotions nationwide as the photo was exhibited.

Transitioning to Impressionism, Édouard Manet was known as the hinge between Realism and Impressionism. He painted images of intelligent businessmen strolling to take in contemporary life, the beginning of impression values. His painting Luncheon on the Grass was a statement supporting modern art as it depicted irregular brushwork and had no sense of depth and real proportions. A modern version of former paintings by Titian and Giorgione, the focus was on the foreground and the modern life of prostitutes, painted again in Olympia.

Claude Monet is one of the most famous artists of the Impressionist era. Embodying the ideals the light is fundamental and visible brushwork to capture the transiency of modern life, the name impression comes from his work. Impression, Sunrise was originally mocked by the public for its lack of form. But utilizing divided brushwork where each stroke corresponds to a different color, the eye blends the colors together to create the impression of a scene. His series of Haystacks was a study of a subject under different variables (time of day, season) to see how color changes as a function of light. The impression of scenes gives a mysterious but also calm and peaceful sentiment to each painting.

In class on Monday we covered Realism. The key idea of Realism was for an artist to put onto the canvas what they see in straightforward reality, thus producing a realistic rendering of the world around them. We spent a chunk of time considering Jean-François Millet’s The Sower. In his work, Millet paints things that are visible to everyone in life, producing many images of field workers and peasants. His paintings highlight the labor of the working peasant class and show the importance of their work. The colors in the painting are dark and earthy, almost carrying a grainy feel. This is something we saw in many examples of Realism.

Today was the recorded lecture, which wrapped up the previous class on Neoclassicism and then transitioned to Romanticism. In the Romantic period, we saw a new dominance of “exotic” subject matter. The exotic nature of these new subjects was not intended to make the viewer think, as had been the goal in the previous periods, but instead to make you dream. There was a push to appeal to the senses, instead of intellect, and provoke the viewer to feel the emotions of the scene. Every element of romantic works helped contribute to the conveying of emotions from the work to the viewer, from composition to color. The first example of Romanticism which was given was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s, Grande Odalisque. An odalisque is a woman from a Turkish harem, which taps into the exotic interests of the time. The goal of the artist is not to depict a female body that is true to life, as the body proportions and features of the odalisque figure appear to be slightly distorted. She is said to have too many vertebrae, her feet are small, and her body is unnaturally curved. Overall these features do not convey accuracy to the human body, but instead a feeling of dreaminess.

In this class, we discussed Neoclassicism, the artistic movement that aligned closely with the values of the Enlightenment movement. These values included reason, logic, and morality. These three values greatly influenced the work of neoclassical artists. During this movement, which is a reference to “new” classics, we see a revival of Greek and Roman classical art. We can see this, especially in the use of classical forms. Classical forms convey a feeling of transporting back to a previous time when humanistic values were important, as well as the political ideas of a republic and democracy.

One of the most exemplary neoclassical works is Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of Horatii. The composition of the painting especially follows the movement’s values of reason and logic. There are geometric arrangements throughout the painting, especially in the positioning of the three brothers and their father. I also found it very interesting how much the solid and upright positioning of the men contrasted with the women who were depicted draped over each other in the corner. While the men maintained stoic faces, the women were depicted as emoting.

Today’s lecture was recorded and on Impressionism. I found it interesting that impressionism (the interest in capturing the essence, or “impression” of something), essentially stemmed from the ability of technology to perfectly capture images (via photography).

The cat in Manet’s Olympia remains to be my favorite animal depicted in art. Ever. I really enjoyed the interesting perspective of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, and how he utilized the composition of having a large mirror in the background to showcase to the viewer what lies beyond the frame of the canvas.

Degas and Cassatt are two of my favorites, and I never knew they were friends! I absolutely adore Cassatt’s use of perspective, growing up a lot around East Asian art, I could definitely see the inspiration she took from artprints in her works.

Today’s lecture focused on art from the Impressionist movement. One artist in particular who stood out to me was Manet whose works often combined themes of Realism with the techniques of Impressionism. He also often included harsh critiques of French society in a number of his works to reaffirm his belief that art should be able to the modern world. He studied old masters and would often include references to their works in his art as a way to highlight his message about what art should be. He embodied the French concept of a flâneu which was a witty, intellectual man who would stroll around Paris and observe everyday life.

Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass is meant to be a critique of the use of nudity in academic art being acceptable because it is about figures from a distant past. These paintings with naked women and clothed men, often showing figures from antiquity, were highly popular in the salons simply for their erotic appeal. Luncheon on the Grass critiques this concept by showing a contemporary scene of a naked woman in a Parisian park accompanied by two fully clothed men in modern garb. Manet copies the poses of the figures from nude portraits from the Renaissance. The figures are lit by a very white, frontal light which flattens the canvas. Manet uses very obvious and harsh brush strokes which further distorts the scene. He also does not use perfect proportions or perspective. All these features in addition to his critical statement of the salons in this work are a complete rejection of the academic style.

Today’s recorded lecture began by discussing early photography and the first photographs. The invention of photography was a significant advancement for artists, and it allowed them to record reality easily. After wrapping up Realism, the lecture moved on to impressionism.

I really enjoy looking at the impressionist art. I find it to be very visually appealing and complex enough to maintain a viewer’s attention for a significant amount of time. I really enjoyed Claude Monet and his plein-air paintings. His ability to capture specific moments in an accurate manner is very impressive especially when compared to realist art. He has a unique style of divided brushstrokes, but this does not sacrifice other elements, such as lighting.

Monet’s series of Wheat Stacks and other haystack paintings show how he used different colors to create different feels and change the lighting. The lecture brought attention to how much color is used in the version set in the snow. This was particularly impressive as painting snow is incredibly challenging, especially when using so much color without making the snow look dirty.

Moving to Realism we looked at the work The Sower, which exudes many of the qualities synonymous with Realism. It depicts a simple nameless person whose face is covered by shadows. He is in the action of sowing seeds which was a job of the working class. Many of the colors are earth tones. One which is not is the sun at dawn signifying the beginning of a new form of government. Another similar work is The Stonebreakers. A man and a boy are in the process of breaking stones, another working-class job. It leans into more political themes of the working class being exploited including child labor. It also is made up of earth tones.

Another type of art that was prevalent was works of political cartoons. These were featured in newspaper. It’s Safe to Release this one depicts a handcuffed man with two people talking above him deciding he is safe to be released because he is determined to be dead. Another cartoon is Les Poires. It depicts a man’s face turning into a pear making negative remarks about his character.

In today’s lecture, we discussed Realism, which as the title of the movement suggests was about capturing real life. It focused not on idealized grand figures, but on everyday, often working-class or rural people, and aimed to elevate them to the height of the grand portraits and history paintings of the past. This art movement was heavily influenced by the ongoing revolutions and social tensions in Europe as well as the rapidly growing industrialization.

I hallmark work of this period is Millet’s The Sower, which is a large portrait of a peasant sowing seeds in a field at dawn. The man’s face is covered by his hat and the showdown from the rising sun behind him. His face being obscured is meant to make him a representative of peasants as a collective, not just a specific man from a specific town, but all peasants everywhere. Millet himself came from a peasant family and in his art career expressed great sympathy for peasants, and often aimed to elevate them in his works. He wanted to highlight the labor of the working class, especially in the day of rapid industrialization in France which prioritized machines over humans. Millet wants to remind urban viewers that peasants are the backbone of French society, not machines or industry, and without their labor French society would collapse.