To trace the history of painting in the XIX century in France, is to trace
the main stem of its recent developments throughout the western world.
Germany has grafted something of her own national spirit upon the parent
art forms of the French; England has contributed some original impulses;
Holland and Spain have looked back to their own past as well as across to
the contemporary painting of the French. Yet it is France, with her
bewildering crowding in of new ideas and crowding out of old, which during
the past century, has led the way in painting, and in the opening of the
XX century continues to lead.
In the beginning of the XIX century, the longing of intellectual France
for a return to the poise and civic virtues of republican Rome had found
its visual expression in the classical paintings of David (1748-1825) and
Ingres (1780-1867). The beginnings of Romanticism are seen in the
paintings of Gros, who dared to paint his characters in clothes more
modern than the toga. Gericault and Delacroix (1799-1863) completed the
development in their impassioned color and movement and their searching
out of romantic and exotic subject matter.
A group of mid-century artists who combined many of the qualities of the
Classic and Romantic schools included Cabanel, Lefebvre, Bouguereau and
Gerome. The military painters, Meissonier, Detaille, and de Neuville,
might conveniently be grouped with them, they alike treating romantic
subjects in a precise and academic manner. Reflections of this group in
Germany are seen in Piloty, Menzel and Max; in Great Britain in
Alma-Tadema, Leighton and Orchardson. Such painters as these expressed
the Academic attitude with which, from 1850 to 1885, the ideas of the
Barbizon painters, the Realists, the rising Impressionists, and, in
England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (unrelated to any Continental
movement) had to compete.
The Barbizon School, including Rousseau, Corot, Millet, Daubigny, Troyon,
and others, owed much to the Dutch landscape painters of the XVII century
and to the influence of the Englishman Constable (1776-1837), who had gone
directly to nature and represented what he saw with a fidelity rare since
the time of Ruisdael and Hobbema. The spirit of this group inspired Mauve
and Jacob Maris in Holland, while Israels was influenced rather by the old
Dutch masters of figure painting.
Modern Impressionism is a mixture of two streams of influence. One arose
in the direct vision of Courbet, and the realistic painting of enveloping
atmosphere as invented by Velasquez and rediscovered by Manet. The other
stream springs from the poetic impressionistic methods of Corot and the
fiery Turner. Influenced by these two currents, Monet and Renoir produced
the high-keyed externality of Luminism, which has strongly affected
contemporary American painters; while in Europe, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley,
Sorolla, Zuloaga, Zorn and Liebermann have drawn in varying degrees from
the same two streams. Defying all classification, stands the one great
decorator of the century, Puvis de Chavannes; while initiating the most
modern art movement are Cezanne, Gauguin and Matisse, who revolt against
objectivism, and strive in visual forms to express the abiding verities.
[Landscape. Georges Michel, 1763-1843]