Eighteenth chapter
20
The and Nineteenth Centuries
Fig. 651 Claude Perrault, with Louis Le Vau and Charles Lebrun, east facade of the Louvre, Paris, 166770.
Photo: Achim Bednorz, Koln.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
T
he conflict of sensibility that became evident when, in the last chapter, we compared the architecture of Bernini to that of
his contemporary Borrominithe one
enormous in scale but classical in principle, the other
extravagant in form and so inventive that it seems
intentionally anticlassicaldominates the history of
European art in the eighteenth century. In France, especially, anticlassical developments in Italian art were
rejected. As early as 1665, Jean-Baptiste Colbert had
invited Bernini to Paris to complete construction of the
Louvre, the palace of King Louis XIV. But Louis consid-
ered Berninis plans too elaborate, and the Louvres new
east facade finally was built in a highly classical style,
based on the plan of a Roman temple (Fig. 651).
The classicism of Berninis colonnade for
St. Peters in Rome has been fully developed here.
All vestiges of Baroque sensuality have been banished in favor of a strict and linear classical line. At
the center of the facade is a Roman temple from
which wings of paired columns extend outward,
each culminating in a form reminiscent of the
Roman triumphal arch.
477
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
La Salle takes possession of
Mississippi River for France
Glorious Revolution establishes
constitutional monarchy in Britain
1682
168889
1680
1687
1690
Newton publishes
his law of motion
John Locke publishes
Second Treatise of Government
Fig. 652 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos,
1640.
Oil on canvas, 40 531/2 in. Art Institute of Chicago
A. A. Munger Collection, 1930.500.
Photo 2007, The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved.
One of the architects of this new Louvre was
Charles Lebrun, a court painter who had studied in
Rome with the classical painter Nicolas Poussin.
Poussin believed that the aim of painting was to
represent the noblest human actions with absolute
clarity. To this end, distracting elementsparticularly
color, but anything that appeals primarily to the
senseshad to be suppressed. In Poussins Landscape
with St. John on Patmos (Fig. 652), the small figure
of St. John is depicted writing the Revelations. Not
only do the architecture and the architectural ruins
lend a sense of classical geometry to the scene, but
even nature has been submitted to Poussins classicizing order. Notice, for instance, how the tree on
the left bends just enough as it crosses the horizon to
form a right angle with the slope of the distant
mountain.
As head of the Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture, Lebrun installed Poussins views as an
official, royal style. By Lebruns standards, the greatest artists were the ancient Greeks and Romans,
followed closely by Raphael and Poussin; the worst
painters were the Flemish and Dutch, who not only
overemphasized color and appealed to the senses,
but also favored lesser genres, such as landscape
and still life.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Lebruns hold on the French Academy was questioned by a large number of painters who championed the work of the great Flemish Baroque painter
Peter Paul Rubens over that of Poussin. Rubens,
who had painted a cycle of 21 paintings celebrating
the life of Marie de Medici, Louis XIVs grandmother, was a painter of extravagant Baroque tastes.
Where the design of Poussins L andscape with St.
John on Patmos (see Fig. 652) is based on horizontal
and vertical elements arranged parallel to the picture plane, Rubenss forms in The Disembarkation of
Marie de Medici ( Fig. 653 ) are dispersed across a
pair of receding diagonals. In this painting, which
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
478 Part 4 The Visual Record
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Fig. 653 Rubens, Peter Paul The Disembarkation of Marie de Medici at
the Port of Marseilles on November 3, 1600.
Oil on canvas, 13 10 ft. Muse du Louvre / RMN Reunion des Muses
Nationaux, France.
Louis XV assumes
the French throne
Christianity banned
in China
1715
1742
18th century
1726
mid-18th century
Literacy becomes
widespread
Gullivers Travels
published
1750
Beginning of
Industrial Revolution
Fig. 654 Jean-Honor
Fragonard, Bathers, c.
1765. Oil on canvas,
251/4 311/2 in.
Muse du Louvre, Paris.
Scala / Art Resource, NY.
depicts Maries arrival in France as the new wife of
the French king, Henry IV, our point of view is not
frontal and secure, as it is in the Poussin, but curiously low, perhaps even in the water. Poussin, in his
design, focuses on his subject, St. John, who occupies the center of the painting, whereas Rubens
creates a multiplicity of competing areas of interest.
Most of all, Poussins style is defined by its linear
clarity. Rubenss work is painterly, dominated by a
play of color, dramatic contrasts of light and dark,
and sensuous, rising forms. Poussin is restrained,
Rubens exuberant.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
THE ROCOCO
With the death of Louis XIV in 1715, French life
itself became exuberant. This was an age whose taste
was formed by society women with real, if covert,
political power, especially Louis XVs mistress,
Madame de Pompadour. The salons, gatherings held
by particular hostesses on particular days of the
week, were the social events of the day. A famous
musician might appear at one salon, while artists
and art lovers would always gather at Mme.
Geoffrins on Mondays. A highly developed sense of
wit, irony, and gossip was necessary to succeed in
this society. So skilled was the repartee in the salons,
that the most biting insult could be made to sound
like the highest compliment. Sexual intrigue was
not merely commonplace but expected. The age was
obsessed with sensuality, and one can easily trace
the origins of Fragonards Bathers (Fig. 654) back to
the mermaids at the bottom of Rubenss painting (see
Fig. 653). Fragonard was Madame de Pompadours
favorite painter, and the B athers was designed to
appeal to the tastes of the eighteenth-century
French court.
It is the age of the Rococo, a word derived from
the French rocaille, referring to the small stones and
shells that decorate the interiors of grottos, the artificial caves popular in landscape design at the time. The
Rococo was deeply indebted to the Baroque sensibility
of Rubens, as Fragonards Bathers demonstrates. It was,
in some sense, the Baroque eroticized, conceived to
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 479
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
James Watt invents
the steam engine
American War
of Independence
United States
Constitution
1760
177583
1789
1750
1774
1776
Louis XVI assumes
French throne
Adam Smith publishes
Wealth of Nations
CHINA AND EUROPE:
CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACT
Fig. 655 Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vige-Lebrun, The Duchess of
Polignac, 1783. Oil on canvas, 383/4 28 in. The National Trust
Waddesdon Manor, England.
Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.
Ever since the first Portuguese trading vessels had
arrived in China in 1514, Chinese goodsporcelain,
wallpapers, carved ivory fans, boxes, lacquerware, and
patterned silksflooded European markets. By 1715,
every major European trading nation had an office in
Canton, and Europeans themselves developed a taste
for a style of art that became known as chinoiserie
(meaning all things Chinese). Blue-and-white
porcelain warechina, as it came to be known in
the Westwas especially desirable, and before long
ceramists at Meissen, near Dresden, Germany, had
learned to make their own porcelain. This allowed
for almost unbounded imitation and sale of Chinese
designs on European-manufactured ceramic wares.
Even a Rococo painter like Franois Boucher imitated the blue-on-white Chinese style in oil paint
(Fig. 656). The scene depicts a Chinese man bending to kiss the hand of his lady, who sits with her
parasol beneath a statue, not of Venus (as might be
appropriate in a European setting), but of Buddha.
A blue-on-white Chinese vase of the kind Boucher
is imitating rests on a small platform behind the
lady, and the whole scene is set in an elaborate
Rococo frame.
Since 1644, China had been ruled by Qing
(clear or pure) Manchus, or Manchurians, who
had invaded China from the north and captured
Beijing. By 1680, the Qing rulers had summoned
lend an erotic tone to its environment. Vige-Lebruns
portrait of The Duchess of Polignac (Fig. 655) combines in exquisite fashion all of the tools of the
Baroque sensibility, from Rembrandts dramatic lighting to Rubenss sensual curves and, given the musical
score in the Duchesss hand, even Berninis sense of
the theatrical moment.
Photo: Pernille Klemp.
480 Part 4 The Visual Record
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Fig. 656 Franois Boucher,
Le Chinois galant, 1742.
Oil on canvas, 41 57 in.
The David Collection, inv. B275.
U.S. Bill of Rights
Eli Whitney invents
the cotton gin
Napoleon becomes First Consul and
absolute ruler of France
1791
1793
1799
1789
1793
1798
Beginning of
French Revolution
Louis XVI of France
is beheaded
1800
Wordsworth and Coleridge
publish the Lyrical Ballads
NEOCLASSICISM
Despite the Rococo sensibility of the age, the seventeenthcentury French taste for the classical style that Lebrun
had championed did not disappear. When Herculaneum and Pompeii were rediscovered, in 1738 and
1748, respectively, interest in Greek and Roman
antiquity revived as well. The discovery fueled an
increasing tendency among the French to view the
Rococo style as symptomatic of a widespread cultural
decadence, epitomized by the luxurious lifestyle of the
aristocracy. The discovery also caused people to identify instead with the public-minded values of Greek
and Roman heroes, who placed moral virtue, patriotic
self-sacrifice, and right action above all else. A new
classicisma Neoclassicismsoon supplanted the
Rococo.
Virtue is, in fact, the subject of much Neoclassical
arta subject matter distinctly at odds with the early
Rococo sensibility. Women are no longer seen cavorting like mermaids, or even luxuriously dressed like
the Duchess of Polignac. In Angelica Kauffmanns
Cornelia, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures
(Fig. 658), Cornelia demonstrates her Neoclassical
virtue by declaring her absolute devotion to her
family, and, by extension, to the state. Her virtue is
reinforced by her clothing, particularly the simple
lines of her bodice.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
Fig. 657 Anonymous, View of Suzhou, Showing the Gate of
Changmen, 1734. Color print from woodblock, 421/4 22 in. Ohshajoh
Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Japan.
many Chinese artists to the Beijing court, and the
imperial collection of art grew to enormous size.
(Today the collection is divided between the National
Palace Museum in Taipei and the Palace Museum in
Beijing.) While many court artists modeled their work
on the earlier masterpieces collected by the Qing
emperors, others turned to the study of Western techniques. In the port cities of Yangzhou and Guangzhou,
Chinese artists, creating images to meet the demand
of European traders, mastered the art of perspective.
Especially popular were aerial views of cities (Fig. 657).
Perspectival space appealed to the Chinese audience
because it was both novel and exotic. The Western
audience, used to perspective, found the views of urban
China exotic in themselves.
Fig. 658 Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia, Pointing to Her Children as
Her Treasures, c. 1785. Oil on canvas, 40 50 in. Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, Richmond. The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund.
Photo: Katherine Wetzel. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 481
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Napoleon crowns
himself Emperor of France
1800
Wars of independence
in Latin America begin
1804
1808
1803
1807
Louisiana Purchase
Serfdom abolished
in Prussia
Fig. 660 Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia,
177084; 17961806.
Corbis / Bettmann. Photo: David Muench.
Fig. 659 Jacques Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793.
Oil on canvas, 65 501/2 in. Muses Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique,
Brussels.
482 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
The most accomplished of the Neoclassical
painters was Jacques Louis David, whose Death of
Socrates was discussed in Chapter 4 (see Figs. 84 and
85). David took an active role in the French
Revolution in 1789, recognizing as an expression of
true civic duty and virtue the desire to overthrow the
irresponsible monarchy that had, for two centuries at
least, squandered Frances wealth. His Death of Marat
(Fig. 659) celebrates a fallen hero of the Revolution.
Slain in his bath by a Monarchista sympathizer with
the overthrown kingMarat is posed by David as
Christ is traditionally posed in the Deposition (compare, for instance, Rogiers Deposition, see Fig. 618),
his arm draping over the edge of the tub. A dramatic
Caravaggesque light falls over the revolutionary hero,
his virtue embodied in the Neoclassical simplicity of
Davids design.
The same sensibility informs the Neoclassical
architecture of Thomas Jefferson. For Jefferson,
the Greek orders embodied democratic ideals,
possessing not only a sense of order and harmony
but also a moral perfection deriving from measure
and proportion. He utilized these themes in the
facade of his own home at Monticello ( Fig. 660 ).
The colonnade thus came to be associated with
the ideal state, and, in the United States,
Jeffersons Neoclassical architecture became an
almost official Federal style.
Neoclassicism found official favor in France with
the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon
brought the uncertain years that followed the French
Revolution to an end when he was declared First
Consul of the French Republic. As this title suggests,
Napoleons government was modeled on Roman
precedents. He established a centralized government
and instituted a uniform legal system. He invaded
Italy and brought home with him many examples
of classical sculpture, including the Laocon (see
Fig. 574) and the Apollo Belvedere (see Fig. 35). In
Paris itself, he built triumphal Roman arches, including the famous Arc de Triomphe, a column modeled
on Trajans in Rome, and a church, La Madeleine,
modeled after the temples of the first Roman emperors. In 1804, Napoleon was himself crowned emperor
Napoleon defeated at
Battle of Waterloo
1815
1830
Fig. 661 Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres,
Grande Odalisque, 1814.
Oil on canvas, 351/4 633/4
in. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
Herve Lewandowski / RMN
Reunion des Muses Nationaux,
France / Art Resource, NY.
of the largest European empire since Charlemagnes in
the ninth century.
Neoclassical art was used to legitimate this empire.
David saw Napoleon as the salvation of France (so
chaotic had Revolutionary France been that David
himself had been imprisoned, a sure sign, he thought,
of the confusion of the day), and he received important
commissions from the new emperor. But it was Davids
finest pupil, Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, who
became the champion of Neoclassical ideals in
the nineteenth century. In 1806, he was awarded
the Prix de Rome. He then departed for Italy, where
he remained for 18 years, studying Raphael in
particular and periodically sending new work back to
France.
Ingress Neoclassicism was looser than his
masters. Looking at a painting such as the Grande
Odalisque (Fig. 661), with its long, gently curving
limbs, we are more clearly in the world of Mannerist
painting than that of the Greek nude. Ingress color
is as rich as Bronzinos in T he Exposure of Luxury
(see Fig. 640), and, in fact, his theme is much the
same. His odalisquean odalisque is a harem
slaveseems more decadent than not, deeply
involved in a world of satins, peacock feathers, and,
at the right, hashish. Certainly, it is not easy to
detect much of the high moral tone of earlier
Neoclassical art.
Fig. 662 Eugne Delacroix, Odalisque, 184550.
Oil on canvas, 147 8 181/4 in. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of
/
Cambridge, England.
The Bridgeman Art Library.
Beside Eugne Delacroixs own O dalisque
( Fig. 662 ), Ingress classicism becomes more
readily apparent. To Ingres, Delacroix, who was a
generation younger, represented a dangerous and
barbaric Neo-Baroque sensibility in contrast to
his own Neoclassicism.
Ingres and Delacroix became rivals. Each had
his critical champions, each his students and folChapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 483
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
First British Reform Act
widens suffrage
1832
1830
1830s
First European
railroads
lowers. For Ingres, drawing was everything.
Therefore, his painting was, above all, linear in style. Delacroix, however, was fascinated by the texture of paint itself, and in
his painterly attack upon the canvas, we
begin to sense the artists own passionate
temperament. Viewed beside the Delacroix, the pose of the odalisque in Ingress
painting is positively conservative. In fact,
Ingres felt he was upholding traditional
values in the face of the onslaught represented by the uncontrolled individualism
of his rival.
ROMANTICISM
Fig. 663 Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One
of His Sons, 182022. Fresco, transferred to canvas,
57 7/8 325/8 in. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
All rights reserved. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
We have come to call the kind of art exemplified by Delacroix Romanticism. At the
heart of this style is the belief that reality is a
function of each individuals singular point
of view, and that the artists task is to reveal
that point of view. Individualism reigned
supreme in Romantic art. For this reason,
Romanticism sometimes seems to have as
many styles as it has artists. What unifies the
movement is more a philosophical affirmation of the power of the individual mind
than a set of formal principles.
One of the most individual of the
Romantics was the Spanish painter
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. After a serious illness in 1792, Goya turned away from
a late Rococo style and began to produce a
series of paintings depicting inmates of a
lunatic asylum and a hospital for wounded
soldiers. When Napoleon invaded Spain in
1808, Goya recorded the atrocities both in
paintings and in a series of etchings, The
Disasters of War, which remained unpublished until long after his death. His last, socalled Black Paintings were brutal interpretations of mythological scenes that
revealed a universe operating outside the
bounds of reason, a world of imagination unchecked
by a moral force of any kind. In one of these, Saturn
Devouring One of His Sons ( Fig. 663), which was
painted originally on the wall of the dining room in
1835
1833
Slavery abolished in
British Empire
Fig. 664 Thodore Gricault,
The Raft of the Medusa, 1819.
Oil on canvas, 16 ft. 11/4 in. 23 ft. 6 in.
Muse du Louvre, Paris.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
Photo: Herve Lewandowski. Inv.: RF 2229.
Reunion des Muses Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.
Goyas home, Saturn is allegorically a figure for Time,
which consumes us all. But it is the incestuous cannibalism of the scene, the terrible monstrosity of the
vision itself, that tells us of Goyas own despair. The
inevitable conclusion is that, for Goya, the world was
a place full of terror, violence, and horror.
This sense of the terrible is by no means unique to
Goya. Compare, for instance, Thodore Gricaults
Raft of the Medusa (Fig. 664). On July 2, 1816, the
French frigate Medusa was wrecked on a reef off the
African coast. The overloaded ship had been carrying
soldiers and settlers to Senegal. The captain
Take a
Closer Look on
and other senior officers escaped in lifeboats,
MyArtsLab
leaving 150 behind to fend for themselves on a
makeshift wooden raft. After 12 harrowing days on
the raft, only 15 survived. The incident infuriated
Gricault. The captains appointment had depended on
his connections with the French monarchy, which
had been restored after Napoleons defeat at Waterloo.
Here, therefore, was clear evidence of the nobilitys
decadence. To illustrate his beliefs and feelings,
Gricault planned a giant canvas, showing the raft just
at the moment that the rescue ship, the Argus, was
spotted on the horizon. He went to the Normandy
coast to study the movement of water. He visited hos-
pitals and morgues to study the effects of illness and
death on the human body. He had a model of the raft
constructed in his studio and arranged wax figures
upon it. His student, Delacroix, posed face down for
the central nude. The final painting positions the
raft on a diagonal axis, creating two contradictory
pyramidal points of tension. On the left, the mast
not only suggests the crucifix but also reveals that
the raft is sailing away from its rescuers, while
on the right, the survivors climb desperately in their
attempt to be seen. Gricaults horrifying picture,
exhibited only a few months after it was conceived,
fueled the Romantic movement with the passion of its
feelings.
In his own journal, Delacroix wrote, [The poet]
Baudelaire . . . says that I bring back to painting . . .
the feeling which delights in the terrible. He is right.
It was in the face of the sublime that this enjoyment of
the terrible was most often experienced. Theories of
the sublime had first appeared in the seventeenth century, most notably in Edmund Burkes Inquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
(1756). For Burke, the sublime was a feeling of awe
experienced before things that escaped the ability of
the human mind to comprehend themmountains,
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 485
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
publishes Nature
1835
First regular Atlantic
steamship service
1836
1840
1837
1844
Victoria assumes
British throne
First telegraphic
message
Fig. 665 Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 180910.
Oil on canvas, 421/2 67 in. Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.
Joerg P. Anders / Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.
a vast, dark, and lonely spaceso ominous that it
must surely test the monks faith. The real terror of
this painting lies in its sense that the eternal space
stretching before this man of faith may not be salvation but, instead, a meaningless void.
American landscape painters such as Albert
Bierstadt (see Fig. 30), Thomas Moran (see Fig. 258),
and Frederic Church continually sought to capture
the sublime in their paintings of the vast spaces of
the American West. Church even traveled to South
America to bring evidence of its exotic and remarkable landscapes to viewers in America and Europe.
His painting The Heart of the Andes (Fig. 666) was
first exhibited in 1859 in New York in a onepicture, paid-admission showing. The dramatic
appeal of the piece was heightened by brightly
486 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
chasms, storms, and catastrophes. The sublime exceeded
reason; it presented viewers with something vaster
than themselves, thereby making them realize their
smallness, even their insignificance, in the face of the
infinite. The sublime evokes the awe-inspiring forces
of Nature, as opposed to the Beautiful, which is associated with Nature at her most harmonious and tranquil. A pastoral landscape may be beautiful; a vast
mountain range, sublime.
No painting of the period more fully captures the
terrifying prospect of the sublime than Caspar David
Friedrichs Monk by the Sea (Fig. 665). It indicates just
how thoroughly the experience of the infinitethat
is, the experience of Godcan be found in Nature.
But the God faced by this solitary monk is by no
means benign. The infinite becomes, in this painting,
Age of the realistic
novel begins
1840s
1847
1848
Charlotte Bront,
Jane Eyre
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
lighting the picture and leaving the remainder of
the room dark, and by framing it so that it seemed
to be a window in a grand house looking out upon
this very scene. Deemed by critics a truly religious
work of art, it was a stunning success. The
insignificance of humanity can be felt in the
minuteness of the two figures, barely visible in this
reproduction, praying at the cross in the lower left,
but the scene is by no means merely sublime. It is
also beautiful and pastoral in feeling, and, in the
careful rendering of plant life, it is almost scientific
in its fidelity to nature.
The Romantic painter was, in fact, interested in
much more than the sublime. A Romantic artist
might render a beautiful scene as well as a sublime
one, or one so pastoral in feeling that it recalls, often
deliberately, Claudes soft Italian landscapes (see
Fig. 649). It was the love of Nature itself that the
artist sought to convey. In Nature, the American
poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson believed,
one could read eternity. It was a literal sign for the
divine spirit.
The painter, then, had to decide whether to
depict the world with absolute fidelity or to reconstruct imaginatively a more perfect reality out of a
series of accurate observations. As one writer put it at
the time, A distinction must be made . . . between
the elements generated by . . . direct observation,
and those which spring from the boundless depth of
feeling and from the force of idealizing mental
power. As we have seen in our discussion of painting
in Chapter 11, the idealizing force of the imagination
in painting distinguished it from mere copywork.
Nevertheless, and though Churchs The Heart of the
Andes is an idealist compilation of diverse scenes, in
many of its detailsin, for instance, the accuracy
with which the foliage has been renderedit depends
on direct observation.
Fig. 666 Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859.
Oil on canvas, 661/8 1191/4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909 (09.95).
Photo 1979 Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 487
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Revolutions across Europe, in France, Vienna,
Rome, Venice, Berlin, Milan, and Prague
1848
1848
1848
The Communist Manifesto
Fig. 667 Eugne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830.
Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 63/8 in. 10 ft. 8 in. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.
REALISM
Fig. 668 Ernest Meissonier, Memory of Civil War (The Barricades), 1849.
Oil on canvas, 111/2 83/4 in. Muse du Louvre, Paris.
Scala / Art Resource, NY.
world around him that he declared, in 1861, 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 Courbet objects. and others ascribing to
realism believed artists should confine their representation to accurate observation and notation of the phenomena of daily life. No longer was there necessarily
any greater reality beyond or behind the facts that lay
before their eyes. Courbets gigantic painting Burial at
Ornans (Fig. 669) seems, at first glance, to hold enormous potential for symbolic and allegorical Take a
Closer Look on
meaning, but just the opposite is the case. In
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the foreground is a hole in the ground, the only
eternal reward Courbets scene appears to promise.
No one, not even the dog, seems to be focused on the
event itself. Courbet offers us a panorama of distrac-
488 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
Churchs accurate rendering of foliage reflects the
importance of scientific, empirical observation to
the nineteenth century as a whole, an urge for realism
that runs counter to, and exists alongside, the
imaginative and idealist tendencies of the Romantic
sensibility. If we compare two history paintings
from the first half of the nineteenth century, we can
see how the idealizing tendency of the Romantic
sensibility gradually faded away. Faced with the
reality of war, idealism seemed absurd. Eugne
Delacroixs L iberty Leading the People ( Fig. 667 )
represents Liberty as an idealized allegoriTake a
Closer Look on
cal figure, but the battle itself, which took
MyArtsLab
place during the July Revolution of 1830, is
depicted in a highly realistic manner, with figures
lying dead on the barricades beneath Libertys feet
and Notre Dame Cathedral at the distant right
shrouded in smoke. In Ernest Meissoniers Memory
of Civil War (The Barricades ) ( Fig. 668 ), all the
nobility of war has been drained from the picture.
The blue, white, and red of the French flag have
been reduced to piles of tattered clothing and
blood, what one contemporary gruesomely
described as an omelette of men.
So thoroughly did the painter Gustave Courbet
come to believe in recording the actual facts of the
World population reaches
about 1.1 billion
Admiral Perrys visit ends
Japanese isolation
1850
1854
1851
1854
Herman Melville,
Moby Dick
Fig. 669 Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849.
Oil on canvas, 10 ft. 31/2 in. 21 ft. 9 in. Muse dOrsay, Paris.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
RMN Reunion des Muses Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.
tion, of common people performing their everyday
duties, in a landscape whose horizontality reads like an
unwavering line of monotony. If the crucifix rises into
the sky over the scene, it does so without deep spiritual
significance. In fact, its curious position, as if it were set
on the horizon line, lends it a certain comic dimension,
a comedy that the bulbous faces of the red-cloaked officers of the parish also underscore. The painting was
rejected by the jury of the Universal Exposition of
1855. To emphasize his disdain for the values of the
establishment, Courbet opened a one-person exhibition outside the Exposition grounds, calling it the
Pavilion of Realism. The cartoonist Honor Daumier
immediately responded with a cartoon depicting the
Fight between Schools, Idealism and Realism (Fig. 670).
The Courbet-like realist, with his square palette, house
painters brush, and wooden shoes, battles the aged,
classically nude idealist, who wears the helmet of a
Greek warrior.
It was, at least in part, the realist impulse that led
to the invention of photography in the 1830s (see
Figs. 319 and 320). And it was also in this spirit that
Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, declared: All
that was solid and established crumbles away, all that
was holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
look with open eyes upon his conditions of life and
true social relations. Marxs sentiments, written in
response to the wave of revolutions that swept Europe
Fig. 670 Honor Daumier, Fight between Schools, Idealism and
Realism, 1855.
Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 489
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
1854
1859
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
Fig. 671 Rosa
Bonheur, Plowing in
the Nivernais, 1849. Oil
on canvas, 5 ft. 9 in.
8 ft. 8 in. Muse
dOrsay, Paris.
Gerard Blot / Reunion des
Muses Nationaux. Art
Resource, NY.
an outcry when it was first exhibited in 1863. Two
years later, at the Salon of 1865, Manet exhibited
another picture that caused perhaps an even greater
scandal. Olympia (Fig. 672) was a depiction of a common prostitute posed in the manner of the traditional
odalisque. Though it was not widely recogTake a
Closer Look on
nized at the time, Manet had, in this painting,
MyArtsLab
by no means abandoned tradition completely
in favor of the depiction of everyday life in all its sordid detail. Olympia was directly indebted to Titians
Venus of Urbino (compare Fig. 625), just as the
Djeuner sur lherbe had been based on a composition
by Raphael (see Fig. 48). Manets sources were classical. His treatment, however, was anything but. What
most irritated both critics and public was the apparently slipshod nature of his painting technique.
Olympias body is virtually flat. Manet painted with
large strokes of thick paint. If he distorted perspective
in Le Djeunerthe bather in the background seems
about to spill forward into the picnicthen he eliminated perspective altogether in the shallow space of
the Olympia, where the bed appears to be no wider
than a foot or two.
Manets rejection of traditional painting techniques was intentional. He was drawing attention to
his very modernity, to the fact that he was breaking
with the past. His manipulation of his traditional
sources supported the same intentions. In Marxs
words, Manet is looking with open eyes upon his
490 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
in 1848, are part and parcel of the realist enterprise.
Rosa Bonheurs Plowing in the Nivernais (Fig. 671) was
commissioned in response to the French Revolution of
1848. It reveals her belief in the virtue of toil and the
common life of the French peasant. But it is her realism, her extraordinary ability to depict animals, that
made her the most famous female artist of her day.
Suddenly, it was socially and aesthetically important,
even imperative, to paint neither the sublime nor the
beautiful nor the picturesque, but the everyday, the
commonplace, the low, and the ugly. Painters, it was
felt, must represent the reality of their time and place,
whatever it might look like.
As Daumiers cartoon makes clear, the art of the
past, exemplified by the Classical model, was felt to
be worn out, incapable of expressing the realities of
contemporary life. As the poet Charles Baudelaire
put it, Il faut tre de son tempsit is necessary to be
of ones own time. He looked everywhere for a
painter of modern life. The modern world was
marked by change, by the uniqueness of every
moment, each instant, like a photograph, different
from the last. Painting had to accommodate itself to
this change. There were no longer any permanent,
eternal truths.
Baudelaires painter of modern life was Edouard
Manet. As we have already seen in Chapter 3, Manets
Luncheon on the Grass (see Fig. 47), more commonly
known by its French name Djeuner sur lherbe, caused
Emancipation of serfs
in Russia
Slavery abolished
in United States
1861
1863
186165
1864
American Civil War
Development of
pasteurization process
Fig. 672 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863.
Oil on canvas, 51 743/4 in. Muse dOrsay, Paris.
RMN Reunion des Muses Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. 2007 Edouard Manet / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
1865
conditions of life and true social relations. Olympias
eyes directly confront us. The visitor, who is implicitly
male, becomes a voyeur, as the female body is subjected to the male gaze. It is as if the visitor, who occupies our own position in front of the scene, has
brought the flowers, and the cat, barely discernible at
Olympias feet, has arched its back to hiss at his
approach. The Venus that once strode the heights of
Mt. Olympus, home of the gods, is now the common
courtesan. Love is now a commodity, something to
be bought and sold.
In his brushwork, particularly, Manet pointed
painting in a new direction. His friend, the novelist
Emile Zola, who was the first to defend Olympia ,
described it this way: He catches his figures vividly,
is not afraid of the brusqueness of nature, and renders
in all their vigor the different objects which stand
out against each other. His whole being causes him
to see things in splotches, in simple and forceful
pieces. Manet was something of a professional
observera famous flneur, a Parisian of impeccable
dress and perfect manners who strolled the city,
observing its habits and commenting on it with the
greatest subtlety, wit, and savoir-faire. The type can
be seen strolling toward the viewer in Gustave
Caillebottes Place de lEurope on a Rainy Day (see
Fig. 104). Wrote Manets friend Antonin
Proust: With Manet, the eye played such
a big role that Paris has never known a
flneur like him nor a flneur strolling
more usefully.
Edgar Degass T he Glass of Absinthe
( Fig. 673 ) was painted a decade after
Manets O lympia , but it was directly
influenced by Manets example. Degass
wandering eye has caught the underside
of Parisian caf society. Absinthe was an
alcoholic drink that attacked the nerve
centers, eventually causing severe cerebral damage. Especially popular among
the working classes, it was finally banned
in France in 1915. In the dazed, absent
look of this young woman, Degas reveals
the consequences of absinthe consumption with a
shockingly direct realism worthy of Courbet.
Fig. 673 Edgar Degas, The Glass of Absinthe, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 36 27 in. Muse dOrsay, Paris.
Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 491
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment
Suez Canal links
Mediterranean and Red Seas
1866
1869
1865
1869
Fig. 674 Claude Monet, Impression-Sunrise, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 191/2 251/2 in. Muse Marmottan, Paris.
Giraudon-Bridgeman Art Library, International Ltd.
IMPRESSIONISM
1869
The Subjugation of Women,
by John Stuart Mill
Tolstoy completes
War and Peace
accidents of atmosphere present to him . . . a singularly lively and striking sensation of the observed
scene. His canvases really do communicate impressions. The paintings, in fact, have the feel of
sketches, as if they were executed spontaneously,
even instantaneously, in the manner of photographic
snapshots.
The Impressionists subject matter sets them
apart from their predecessors at least as much as
their technique does. Unlike the Realist painters of
a generation earlier, the Impressionists were less
interested in social criticism than in depicting in
their work the pleasures of life, including the pleasures of simply seeing. If Impressionism is characterized by a way of seeingby the attempt to capture
the fleeting effects of light by applying paint in
small, quick strokes of colorit is also defined by an
intense interest in images of leisure. The Realists
would have rejected these images as unworthy of
their high moral purposes. The Impressionists
painted life in the Parisian theaters and cafs, the
grand boulevards teeming with shoppers, country
gardens bursting with flowers, the racetrack and seaside, the suburban pleasures of boating and swimming on the Seine. Auguste Renoirs La Moulin de la
69 in.
492 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
In the late 1860s, the young painter Claude Monet
began to employ the same rich, thick brushstrokes
Manet was already using, but with an even looser
hand. Combining two or more pigments on a single
wide brush, he allowed them to blend as they
were brushed onto the canvas. He would
paint wet on wetwith wet pigment over
and through an already-painted surface that
had not yet dried. Most of all, he painted
with the intense hues made possible by the
development of synthetic pigments.
Others followed his lead, and together,
in April 1874, they held a group exhibition.
They called themselves Painters, Sculptors,
Engravers, etc. Inc., but before long they
were known as the Impressionists. The
painting that gave them their name was
Monets Impression-Sunrise (Fig. 674).
Monet, the critic Thodore Duret wrote in
1878, is the Impressionist painter par
excellence. . . . [He] has succeeded in
setting down the fleeting impression
which his predecessors had neglected or
Fig. 675 Auguste Renoir, La Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Oil on canvas, 511/2
considered impossible to render with the
Muse dOrsay, Paris.
brush . . . the fleeting appearances which the
Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY.
European powers
carve up Africa
1870s and 1880s
1870s
1880
European birth and death rates
begin to decline
Fig. 676 Berthe Morisot, Reading, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 17 3/4 28 1/2 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of the
Hanna Fund, 1950.89.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
1999 The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Galette (Fig. 675) is typical. All of the figures in the
painting are Renoirs friends. One of his closest,
Georges Rivire, seated at the table at the far right,
described the painting soon after it was shown at the
third Impressionist exhibition in 1877: It is a page
of history, a precious monument to Parisian life,
done with rigorous exactitude. No one before Renoir
had thought of portraying an event in ordinary life
on a canvas of such big dimensions.
The distance of Impressionist painting from its
Realist predecessors is summed up in Berthe Morisots
Reading (Fig. 676), probably one of four paintings
Morisot exhibited at the first Independents Exhibition
in 1874. In the background, a farmers cart heads down
the road, the proper subject matter of the Realist. But
Morisots sister, depicted in the painting, has no interest in what passes behind her, and neither, really, does
the painter herself. The cart is rendered in a few loose,
rapid brushstrokes, as is the entire landscape. Leisure is
Morisots subject.
Increasingly, this urge to observe the world in its
most minute particulars led to the investigation of
optical reality in and for itself. As early as the 1870s,
in his paintings of boats on the river at Argenteuil (see
Fig. 215), or his series of studies of the Gare SaintLazare in Paris (see Fig. 7), Monet began to paint the
same subject over and over again, studying the ways in
which the changing light transformed his impressions.
This working method led to his later serial studies of
Fig. 677 Claude Monet, Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies, 1899.
Oil on canvas, 361/2 29 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
H. O. Havemeyer Collection. Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
(29.100.113).
Photo 1984 Metropolitan Museum of Art.
the grain stacks (see Fig. 152), Rouen Cathedral, and
his garden at Giverny (Fig. 677), where he moved in
1883. By the turn of the century, he had given up
painting modern life altogether, concentrating
instead on capturing the presentness of his garden,
the panoramic views that would be installed in the
Orangerie in Paris in 1927 (see Fig. 170).
For many artists, painting began to be an end in
itself, a medium whose relation to the actual world
was at best only incidental. In England, the American
expatriate James McNeill Whistler equated his paintings to musical compositions by titling them nocturnes and symphonies. He painted, he said, as the
musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until
he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.
Painting was, for Whistler, primarily an abstract
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 493
A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Systematic slaughter of the buffalo
in American West
1870s
1875
1877
1880
Invention of phonograph and first public telephone system
installed in New Haven, Connecticut
Invention of electric lights
THE IMPACT OF WESTERN CULTURE
In the last half of the nineteenth century, Western culture increasingly imposed itself upon other cultures
whose values were often diametrically opposed to its
values, particularly the sense of centeredness that had
defined indigenous cultures for hundreds, even thousands of years. Worldwide, non-Western cultures faced
fundamental challenges to their cultural identities. In
China, what had been the worlds richest economy
became increasingly dependent on manufacturing
goods for export to the West. Indias manufacturing
economy had also been overwhelmed by British
exploitation of its resources, coupled with an increased
emphasis on low-cost exports that offered little profit.
Soon, millions of people from both China and India
accepted indentured servitude in foreign lands. Japan,
which had been closed to trade with the West and to
almost all international contact since the 1630s, was
forced to open its ports in 1854 when the U.S. Navy
Fig. 678 James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, the
Falling Rocket, c. 1875. Oil on oak panel, 23 3/4 18 3/8 in. Detroit Institute
of Arts. Gift of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr., 46.309.
The Bridgeman Art Library Inc.
Fig. 679 Buffalo Kachina, Zuni culture, c. 1875.
Wood, cloth, hide, fur, shell, feathers, horsehair, pinecones. Millicent
Rogers Museum, Taos, New Mexico.
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
arrangement of shapes and colors; only incidentally
did it refer to the world. Believing that art should
possess strong moral content, the English essayist John
Ruskin was blind to Whistlers abstraction. After
viewing Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket
(Fig. 678), an image of fireworks falling over the
Thames, Ruskin wrote that Whistler was flinging a
pot of paint in the publics face. Whistler, in turn,
sued Ruskin for libel. A lengthy trial followed, and in
1878 Whistler finally won his case, but he was
awarded damages of only a farthing, approximately
half a U.S. cent. If artists were free to paint anything
they wanted, they also had to accept whatever criticism came their way.
Germany introduces the
first social security laws
1883
188485
First skyscraper
built in Chicago
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
1883
1889
International Conference in Berlin
to decide the future of Africa
threatened military action. Japan subsequently underwent a rapid process of industrialization, and, in
Europe, Japanese prints found a ready market (see
Chapter 5). In Africa, European countries vied with
one another for control of the continent, motivated by
both a sense of their own superiority to African peoples
and competition for the regions vast natural resources.
By the 1870s, in the American West, the United
States military was pursuing an unofficial but effective
policy of Native American extermination, and it
encouraged the slaughter of the buffalo as a shortcut to
this end. By the late 1880s, almost all the buffalo were
dead. A buffalo kachinaa likeness of a supernatural
character endowed with powers that can be evoked
when the figure is dancedfrom the Zuni culture in
the American Southwest (Fig. 679) is testament to
this wholesale destruction of the Native American
way of life. Derived from a Plains Indian ritual dance,
this kachina doll represents a dancer who, in dancing
the kachina, would be imbued with the power to
increase the population of fur-bearing animals in the
arid environment of the Southwest.
By 1889, the crisis had come to a head. A Paiute
holy man by the name of Wavoka declared that if the
Indian peoples lived peaceably, and if they performed
a new circle dance called the Ghost Dance, the world
would be transformed into what it once had been,
populated by great herds of buffalo and the ancestral
dead. White people would disappear, and with them
alcohol, disease, and hunger. Across the West, the
message was adopted by various tribes, and the costumes associated with the dance were particularly
beautiful. An Arapaho Ghost Dance dress (Fig. 680)
is decorated with five-pointed stars, no doubt derived,
in their design, from the American flag, but also a
long-standing symbol in Native American culture of
the cosmos. The yoke is decorated with a woman and
two eagles, one on each side of her. She holds a peace
pipe in one hand and a branch in the other. The turtle
above the hem refers to a myth of origin, in which the
turtle brings soil for the worlds creation out of the primal waters. The birds on the skirt, magpies in this
case, represent messengers to the spirit world. Many
Plains Indians also believed that the Ghost Dance costumes had the power to protect them from harm, and
thus left them immune to gunfire or other attack.
Fig. 680 Arapaho artist, Ghost Dance dress, 1890s.
Deerskin and pigments. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Ill.
(Neg. No. # A113021c).
Photo: Diane Alexander White.
That belief would come to an end at Wounded
Knee Creek, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.
The white population, paying little attention to the
fact that their presumed disappearance was predicted to be wholly nonviolent, soon reacted with fear
and hostility. More than 200 participants in the Ghost
Dance were massacred by the Seventh Cavalry of the
U.S. Army at Wounded Knee that day, despite their
dress, and, at least symbolically, Native American
culture on the Great Plains came to an end.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 495
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Kodak camera invented
1885
1888
1889
Eiffel Tower built in Paris
Fig. 681 Paul Gauguin, The Day of the Gods
(Mahana no Atua), 1894. Oil on canvas, 26 7/8
361/8 in. Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett
Memorial Collection, 1926.198.
Photo 2007 Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved.
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Seurats subject matter in The Bathers
(Fig. 682) is Impressionist, his composition is not. It is architectural, intentionally
returning to the seventeenth-century
compositional principles of Poussin (see
Fig. 652). And it subtly critiques the image
of Impressionist leisure. These are not wellto-do middle-class Parisians, but workers
(their costume gives them away) swimming
in the Seine just downriver from the factory town of Asnires. Smokestacks belch
soot in the distance. The spot, as observant
Parisians knew, was directly across from the outlet of the
great collective sewer from Paris. In the summer of 1884,
according to the local press, more than 120,000 cubic
feet of solids had accumulated at the sewers mouth; several hundred square meters of which are covered with a
bizarre vegetation, which gives off a disgusting smell.
Suddenly, the green material floating in the water is
transformed.
Of all the Post-Impressionist painters, Paul
Czanne, working alone in the south of France, most
1181/2 in.
496 Part 4 The Visual Record
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ISBN 0-558-55180-7
Although by the 1880s, many artists had come to see
Impressionisms subject matter as trivial, they were
still interested in investigating and extending its formal innovations and in reexamining the symbolic possibilities of painting. Monets work at Giverny can be
seen as an example of just such an ongoing formal
exploration. A number of other paintersamong
them Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges
Seurat, and Paul Czanneembarked on a similar brand of Post-Impressionism, each dedicated
to redirecting the Impressionist enterprise.
Paul Gauguin criticized the conditions of
modern life, but he did so by leaving Europe and
seeking out a new life in the South Seas. There,
in paintings such as The Day of the Gods (Mahana
no Atua) (Fig. 681), he tried to capture the mystery and magic of the primitive culture, a world
of unity, peace, and naked innocence far
removed from the turmoil of civilized life. The
perfect balance of the paintings composition
and the brilliant color of the scene are structural
realizations of paradise on earth.
In paintings such as La Chahut (The Can-Can)
(see Fig. 147), Georges Seurat sought to impose a
Fig. 682 Georges Seurat, The Bathers, 188384. Oil on canvas, 791/2
formal order upon the world, and in the process,
The National Gallery, London. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees.
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
he revealed its rigidity, its lack of vitality. Though
Discovery of radium
1898
1895
1900
Invention of
motion picture camera
1900
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
Fig. 683 Paul Czanne, Still Life with Cherries and Peaches,
188587. Oil on canvas. 19 3/4 24 in. Los Angeles County Museum
of Art. Gift of Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc., and Mr. and Mrs. Armand S.
Deutsch, M.61.1.
Fig. 685 Paul Czanne, The Large Bathers, 1906.
Oil on canvas, 82 99 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W 1937-1-1.
Photo 2005 Museum Associates / LACMA.
ISBN 0-558-55180-7
thoroughly emphasized the formal aspects of painting
at the expense of subject matter, and in this he looked
forward most to the direction of art in the twentieth
century. Czanne pushed toward an idea of painting
Fig. 684 Paul Czanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the
Arc River Valley, 188285. Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 321/8 in. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. H. O. Havemeyer Collection. Bequest of Mrs.
H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.64).
Photo 1984 Metropolitan Museum of Art.
that established for the picture an independent existence, to be judged in terms of the purely formal interrelationships of line, color, and plane. In his Still Life
with Cherries and Peaches (Fig. 683), he emphasizes
the act of composition itself, the process of seeing. It is
as if he has rendered two entirely different views of the
same still life simultaneously. The peaches on the right
are seen from a point several feet in front of the table,
while the cherries on the left have been painted from
directly above. As a consequence, the table itself
seems to broaden out behind the cherries.
Similarly, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the
Arc River Valley (Fig. 684) collapses the space between
foreground and background by making a series of formal
correspondences between them, by the repetition of the
shape of the lower right-hand branch of the tree, for
instance, the road below it, and the shape of the mountain itself. Finally, in The Large Bathers (Fig. 685), the
pyramidal structure of the composition draws attention
to the geometry that dominates even the individual
faceting of the wide brushstrokes, which he laid down
as horizontals, verticals, and diagonals. The simplification of the human body evident here, as well as
Czannes overall emphasis on form, had a profound
effect on painting in the twentieth century. It is in
Czanne that the art of the twentieth century dawns.
Chapter 20 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 497
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