Realism

Art Styles in 19th century Art Map Part I - Art Styles in 19th century (Realism, Impressionism and PostImpressionism) Part II - Art Styles in 19th century (Simbolism) Part III - Art Styles in 19th century (Simbolism) Part IV - Art Styles in 19th century (Simbolism, Art Nouveau) Realism Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map The Birth of Realism
As the Romantic movement waned, exponents of the visual arts sought to depict the world in a more literal way. Focus shifted away from idealism to a more realistic rendering of nature, social relationships, and the characteristics of the individual, society, and the nation at large. This new realism assumed various forms in the different countries where it took root. Realism was a historical movement that had a profound influence on the literature and figurative arts of Europe. The most systematic and coherent form evolved in France during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reached its peak during the Second Empire (1852-70) and began to wane in the 1870s. In many different forms, and in varying measures of intensity. Realism spread throughout Europe, from the Russia of Alexander II to the Britain of Queen Victoria, from the Germany of William I to the Italy of the Risorgimento, and from the Hapsburg empire to Scandinavia and countries beyond Europe. The year 1855 was significant in the establishment of Realism in Europe. It was the year in which Gustave Courbet (1819-77) exhibited his work in Paris in the Pavilion du Realisme, a building that he himself paid for. He exhibited about forty paintings, including A Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio, which had been refused by the jury of the Exposition Universelle, who instead hailed the work of more traditional masters such as Ingres. In the same vear as Courbet's provocative debut, the painters of the Barbizon School showed their art for the first time in a public exhibition. In 1855, the Italian Realist painters, who later became known as the Macchiaioli, met up regularly in the Caffe Michelangelo in Florence. In the field of criticism, the novelist and critic Edmond Duranty published a magazine, Le Realisme, which became the principal organ of the movement between 1856 and 1857. In Le Realisme, published by Champfleury in 1857, the same year that Flaubert's Madame Bovary appeared, no single definition of reality was proposed and no attempt was made to represent a fixed world, as in the daguerreotypes of the period. Instead, the world was seen as fluctuating and mobile and composed of complex elements and contradictions, qualities that were central to the Realist mode of expression. Gustave Courbet The Painters Studio 1854-56 Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Despite the picture representing, in the words of the artist, "a real-life allegory",

the harsh realism in the treatment of the subject and figures was judged unseemly and the work was refused by the Salon of 1855. Delacroix, on the other hand, thought it worthy of praise.

THE BARBIZON SCHOOL

Between 1830 and 1850, the village of Barbizon - lying on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris became a meeting point for a group of artists that would take its name. The major representatives of the Barbizon School were Narcisse Diaz de la Pena (1807-76), Constant Troyon (1810-65), Jules Dupre (1811-89), Theodore Rousseau (181267), and CharlesFrancois Daubigny (1817-78). They did not confine themselves to their immediate surroundings but roamed through the French provinces, from the Auvergne to the Jura and from the Vendee to Normandy. The school constituted a link between Romanticism and Realism, paving the way for the Impressionists. Abandoning the traditional 18th-century approach to landscape painting, the Barbizon artists reverted to a simpler form taken from drawings and oil studies sketched directly from nature. They took a particular interest in the changes in nature from day to day and season to season, recording them with free and subtle brushstrokes. Although they anticipated the Impressionists in painting directly from nature, they still executed their finished works in the studio. The Barbizon artists were united in their opposition to academic conventions and in their shared interest in landscape art, but each had his own personal interpretation and style. In Rousseau's early-works there lingered an element of romanticism that manifested itself in a sense of mystery, transcendence, and mystical contemplation. He immersed himself in nature and the solitude of the countryside in order to find himself. For this artist, nature became a refuge and a place of nostalgia. It compensated for the frustrations of the social and political hopes of the July Revolution of 1830 and the revolution of February I848 (Rousseau left Paris forever in 1849), as well as for his refusals by the Salons of 1835 and 1837, and the disillusion engendered by the growth of industrial society. Whereas Rousseau tended to favour a more solid and static pictorial structure, contrasting the horizontal elements of the ground with the verticals of the trees, Daubigny showed sensitivity to natural movement and variations in light. There is nothing theatrical about his work - the innumerable landscape views along the River Oise, which he often painted from his studio boat. During the 1860s, his painting became freer, embracing the vivacity of his sketches, at a time when the bold innovations of the Barbizon School were beginning to be cramped by its own formulae.

Barbizon School

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

mid-19th-century French school of painting, part of a larger European movement toward naturalism in art, that made a significant contribution to the establishment of Realism in French landscape painting. Inspired by the Romantic movement's search for solace innature, the Barbizon painters nevertheless turned away from the melodramatic picturesqueness of established Romantic landscape painters as well as from the classical academic tradition, which used landscape merely as a backdrop for allegory and historical narrative. The Barbizonartists painted landscape in realistic terms and for its own sake. They based their art on the works of 17th-century French and Dutch and contemporary English landscape painters, all of whom approached their subject with sensitiveobservation and a deep love of nature. The name of the school was taken from the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the great forest of

Fontainebleau near Paris, where the school's leaders, Thodore Rousseau and Jean-Franois Millet, driven from Paris by poverty and lack of success, settled in 1846 and 1849, respectively. They attracted a large following of landscape and animal painters, some going to live at Barbizon, others visiting only infrequently; those of the group who were to become most notable were Charles-Franois Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Pea, Jules Dupr, Charles Jacque, and Constant Troyon, all of whom had had indifferent success in Paris. Each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests. Rousseau's vision was melancholy, concentrating on vast sweeps of landscape and looming trees. Dupr's close-range, detailed scenes are suffused with foreboding. Daubigny favoured scenes of lush, verdant fields, and Diaz painted sundappled forest interiors. Troyon and Jacque painted placid scenes that featured livestock. Millet, the onlymajor painter of the group for whom pure landscape was unimportant, made monumental paintings of peasants that celebrate the nobility of human life in sympathy with nature. All of these artists, in spite of their Romantic inspiration, emphasized the simple and ordinary rather than the terrifying and monumental aspects of nature. Unlike their English contemporaries, they had little interest in the surface effects of light and colour or in atmospheric variations. Instead, they emphasized permanent features, painting solid, detailed forms in a limited range of colours. They were also concerned with mood, and they altered physical appearances to express what they saw as the objective character of the landscape. Having suffered for some time from a total lack of recognition, the Barbizon painters began to gain popularity by mid-century. Most won official recognition from the Acadmie des Beaux-Arts and started receiving large prices for their paintings; their work was particularly popular at the end of the century. Some of the Barbizon painters were masters of composition and description; others were less competent. But their historical importance is undeniable, for as a group they were instrumental in establishing pure, objective landscape painting as a legitimate genre in France.

Narcisse Diaz de la Pena

born 1808, Bordeaux, Fr. died Nov. 18, 1876, Menton French painter and lithographer of the group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon school, who is distinguished for his numerous Romantic depictions of the forest of Fontainebleau and his landscape fantasies with mythological figures. At 15 Diaz began working as a ceramic painter for the Svresporcelain factory. He studied for a time with the academic painter Alexandre Cabanel. Strongly influenced by Delacroixand the Romantics and attracted by medieval and Middle Eastern art, he often in his early career painted exotic subjects. About 1840 Diaz began to paint landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau near the village of Barbizon. These landscapes, which dominated his work for the rest of his career, characteristically have a pervasive sense of the shadowy seclusion of the forest; e.g., Forest Scene (1867; St. Louis [Mo.] Art Museum). Dense, vividly coloured foliage is broken by spots of light or patches of sky shining through the branches. During the last 15 years of his life Diaz seldom exhibited publicly. He was helpful and sympathetic to the Impressionists, especially Renoir, whom he met in 1861 painting at Barbizon.

Narcisse Diaz de la Pena Landscape with a Pine-tree 1864

Constant Troyon
(b Svres, 28 Aug 1810; d Paris, 20 March 1865).

French painter. He was brought up among the Svres ceramics workers and received his first lessons in drawing and painting from Denis-Dsir Riocreux (17911872), a porcelain painter who was one of the founders of the Muse National de Cramique. Troyon began his career as a painter at the Svres factory while also studying landscape painting in his spare time. He became a friend of Camille Roqueplan, who introduced him to a number of young landscape paintersespecially Thodore Rousseau, Paul Huet and Jules Duprwho were later to become members and associates of the BARBIZON SCHOOL. After an unremarkable dbut at the Salon of 1833, where he exhibited three landscapes depicting the area around Svres (e.g. View of the Park at Saint-Cloud; Paris U., NotreDame), he took up his career in earnest and made several study trips to the French provinces. Following the example of contemporary collectors, he began to take a great interest in 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly the work of Jacob van Ruisdael, whose influence is seen in such early paintings as The Woodcutters (1839; La Rochelle, Mus. B.-A.). At the Salon of 1841 he exhibited Tobias and the Angel (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Mus.), a biblical landscape that attracted the attention of Thophile Gautier. The subject was intended to satisfy the critics, but the painting served as a pretext for portraying a realistic and sincere representation of nature, even though its ordered and classically inspired composition perfectly fitted the requirements of a genre, the origins of which were the 17th-century paintings of Claude and Poussin and their followers.

Jules Dupre
born April 5, 1811, Nantes, Fr. died Oct. 6, 1889, L'Isle-Adam French artist who was one of the leaders of the Barbizon group of landscape painters. The son of a porcelain manufacturer, Dupr started his career in his father's works, after which he painted porcelain at his uncle's china factory at Svres. He first exhibited paintings in 1831 and in 1834 was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon. Visiting England in the same year, he learned, from the landscapes of John Constable, how to express movement in nature. The districts of Southampton and Plymouth, with their wide expanses of water, sky, and ground, provided his subjects. Late in life, he joined the artists' colony at Barbizon on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, where his style evolved, gaining in breadth, or largeness of treatment, and exhibiting greater simplicity in colour harmony.

Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau
born April 15, 1812, Paris, France died December 22, 1867, Barbizon in full Pierre-tienne-Thodore Rousseau French painter who was a leader of the Barbizon school of landscape lainters. His direct observation of nature made him an important figure in the development oflandscape painting. Rousseau, the son of a tailor, began to paint at age 14. In the 1820s he began to paint out-of-doors directly from nature, a novel procedure at that time. Although his teachers were in the Neoclassical tradition, Rousseau based his style on extensive study of the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters and the work of such English contemporaries as Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable. His

early landscapes portray nature as a wild and undisciplined force and gained the admiration of many of France's leading Romantic painters and writers. In 1831 Rousseau began to exhibit regularly at the French Salon. But in 1836 his Descent of the Cattle (c. 1834) was rejected by the jury, as were all his entries during the next seven years. Despite the Salon's censure, his reputation continued to grow. Rousseau first visited the Fontainebleau area in 1833 and, in the following decade, finally settled in the village of Barbizon, where he worked with a group of landscape painters, including Jean-Franois Millet, Jules Dupr, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Pena, and Charles-Franois Daubigny. Their artistic goals were similar, and they became known collectively as the Barbizon school. During this period Rousseau produced such tranquil pastorals as Underthe Birches, Evening (184244), reflecting the influence of Constable. After the Revolution of 1848, the Salon briefly relaxed its standards, and Rousseau finally received official recognitionas a major figure in French landscape painting. His works were well represented in the Universal Exposition of 1855, and he became president of the fine-arts jury for the Universal Exposition of 1867. Rousseau's paintings represent in part a reaction against the calmly idealized landscapes of Neoclassicism. His small, highly textured brushstrokes presaged those of the Impressionists.

Charles-Frangois Daubigny
born February 15, 1817, Paris, France died February 19, 1878, Paris French painter whose landscapes introduced into the naturalism of the mid-19th century an overriding concern for the accurate analysis and depiction of natural light through the use of colour, greatly influencing the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century. In 1836, after a year-long study of the paintings of Old Masters in Italy, Daubigny returned to Paris and began to paint historical and religious works. In 1838, the same year he enrolled in the class of Paul Delaroche at the cole des Beaux-Arts, he exhibited at the official Salon for the first time. In his youth he had illustrated books, but his true leanings were toward landscape painting as practiced by the Barbizon school, an informal association of painters who rebelled against the formulas of traditional landscape painting in favour of working out-of-doors, directly from nature. Like Camille Corot, Daubigny painted in the Morvan district, and in 1852, after the two had met, Daubigny's work began to depend on a strict observation of tonal values fortified by a concealed but indispensable minimum of compositional structure. Such works, though calm and unspectacular, soon gained success, one of them, Spring (1857), being bought by the emperor Napoleon III in 1857. Later in the 1850s, Daubigny's style, though still restrained, began to express a more personal lyricism. He increasingly employed graduated light reflections from surfaces to give effects of space; such methods also were directed at conveying a momentary impression of the landscape. Although associated with the Barbizon school, Daubigny never lived among them; he is best seen as a link between the more classically organized naturalism of Corot and the less-formal visual receptiveness of his young friends ClaudeMonet and Alfred Sisley.

Narcisse Diaz de la Pena

(b Bordeaux, 21 Aug 1807; d Menton, 18 Nov 1876). French painter. After the death of his Spanish parents he was taken in by a pastor living in Bellevue (nr Paris). In 1825 he started work as an apprentice colourist in Arsne Gillets porcelain factory, where he became friendly with Gillets nephew Jules Dupr and made the acquaintance of Auguste Raffet, Louis Cabat and Constant Troyon. At this time he executed his first oil paintings of flowers, still-lifes and landscapes. Around 1827 Diaz is thought to have taken lessons from the Lille artist Franois Souchon (17871857); perhaps more importantly, he copied works by Pierre-Paul Prudhon and Correggio in the Louvre, Paris, and used their figures and subjects in such later paintings as Venus and Adonis and the Sleeping Nymph (both Paris, Mus. dOrsay). He soon became the friend of Honor Daumier, Thodore Rousseau and Paul Huet. Diazs pictures exhibited at the Salon from 1831 to 1844 derive from numerous sources, including mythology, as in Venus Disarming Cupid (exh. Salon 1837; Paris, Mus. dOrsay), and literature, as in Subject Taken from Lewiss The Monk (exh. Salon 1834; possibly the picture in the Muse Fabre, Montpellier, entitled Claude Frollo and Esmerelda). His other themes include a fantastical Orientalism inspired by his admiration for Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugne Delacroix, as in Eastern Children(Cincinnati, OH, Taft Mus.) and such genre scenes as In a Turkish Garden (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.); these are all the more theatrical in that Diaz never travelled in the East. Nevertheless, they display his skill as a colourist and his ability to render light.

Theodore Rousseau
(b Lorient, Brittany, 23 March 1847; d St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, 23 April 1926). English painter and etcher of French birth. He was born and educated in France and settled in England in 1878, when he quickly established a reputation. Largely self-taught, his few extant early paintings show an eclectic style that combines the techniques of the Old Masters, which he studied in detail, with the subject-matter of modern urban life. In 1885 he was introduced to James McNeill Whistler, his neighbour in Chelsea, London, and in consequence a lifelong friendship was formed. As Roussel was a member of Whistlers London circle his work in watercolour and oil was influenced by the latter in style and choice of subject-matter. His oft-quoted remark that he was a pupil of Whistler is, however, belied by his frequently distinct style, as seen in such paintings as the Reading Girl (18867; London, Tate). In 1888 Whistler introduced him to the techniques of etching and drypoint, resulting in such etchings as the Sign of the White Horse, Parsons Green (c.18934). For the remainder of his life he relentlessly pursued the medium, even, like Whistler, designing his own special frames. Always fascinated by the theoretical and practical nature of colour science, he constantly experimented and was an early pioneer of the technique of colour etching in England, producing such works as Dawn. An exhibitor with the Royal Society of British Artists under Whistlers presidency, he also frequently exhibited with the New English Art Club and with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, and he was a founder-member of the Allied Artists Association in 1908.

Charles-Francois Daubigny
(b Paris, 15 Feb 1817; d Paris, 19 Feb 1878).

Painter and printmaker. He studied under his father Edmond-Franois Daubigny and in 18312 also trained with Jacques-Raymond Brascassat. At an early age he copied works by Ruisdael and Poussin in the Louvre, while also pursuing an apprenticeship as an engraver. At this time he drew and painted mainly at Saint-Cloud and Clamart, near Paris, and in the Forest of Fontainebleau (18345). In 1835 he visited several Italian cities and towns, including Rome, Frascati, Tivoli, Florence, Pisa and Genoa. He returned to Paris in 1836 and worked for Franois-Marius Granet in the painting restoration department of the Louvre. In 1840 he spent several months drawing from life in Paul Delaroches studio, although his early works were much more heavily influenced by 17th-century Dutch painters, whom he copied in the Louvre, than by Delaroches work.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

(b Paris, 17 July 1796; d Paris, 22 Feb 1875). French painter, draughtsman and printmaker. After a classical education at the Collge de Rouen, where he did not distinguish himself, and an unsuccessful apprenticeship with two drapers, Corot was allowed to devote himself to painting at the age of 26. He was given some money that had been intended for his sister, who had died in 1821, and this, together with what we must assume was his familys continued generosity, freed him from financial worries and from having to sell his paintings to earn a living. Corot chose to follow a modified academic course of training. He did not enrol in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but studied instead with Achille Etna Michallon and, after Michallons death in 1822, with Jean-Victor Bertin. Both had been pupils of Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, and, although in later years Corot denied that he had learnt anything of value from his teachers, his career as a whole shows his attachment to the principles of historic landscape painting which they professed.

Jean-Francois Millet
born Oct. 4, 1814, Gruchy, near Grville, Fr. died Jan. 20, 1875, Barbizon

French painter renowned for his peasant subjects. Millet spent his youth working on the land, but by the age of 19 he was studying art in Cherbourg. In 1837 he arrived in Paris and eventually enrolled in the studio of Paul Delaroche, where he seems to have remained until 1839. After the rejection of one of his entries for the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg, where he remained during mostof 1841, painting portraits. He achieved his first success in 1844 with The Milkmaid and a large pastel, The Riding Lesson, that has a sensual character typical of a large part of his production during the 1840s.

The peasant subjects, which from the early 1850s were to be Millet's principal concern, made their first important appearance at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower, later destroyed by fire. In 1849, after a period of great hardship, Millet left Paris to settle in Barbizon, a small hamlet in the forest of Fontainebleau. He continued to exhibit paintings of peasants, and, as a result, periodically faced the charge of being a socialist. Letters of the period defending Millet's position underline the fundamentally classical nature of his approach to painting. By the mid-1860s, Millet's work was beginning to be in demand; official recognition came in 1868, after nine major paintings had been shown at the exposition of 1867. Important collections of Millet's pictures are to be found in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in the Louvre.

Jules Breton
(b Courrires, Pas-de-Calais, 1 May 1827; d Paris, 5 July 1906). French painter and writer. After the death of his mother he was brought up in the village of Courrires by his father, grandmother and uncle. The last instilled in him respect for tradition and a commitment to the philosophical ideas of the 18th century. Bretons father, as supervisor of the lands of the Duc de Duras, encouraged him to develop a deep knowledge of and affection for his native region and its heritage, which remained central to his art.

Honore Daumier
(b Marseille, 26 Feb 1808; d Valmondois, 10 Feb 1879). French graphic artist, painter and sculptor. Son of a Marseille glazier, frame-maker and occasional picture restorer, Daumier joined his father in Paris in 1816. He became a bailiffs errand boy and was then employed by a bookseller, but his real enthusiasm was reserved for drawing and politics. He studied drawing with Alexandre Lenoir and at the Acadmie Suisse and then worked as assistant to the lithographer Bliard. Having mastered the techniques of lithography, he published his first plate in the satirical weekly La Silhouette in 1829.

Gustave Courbet
(b Ornans, Franche-Comt, 10 June 1819; d La Tour-de-Peilz, nr Vevey, Switzerland, 31 Dec 1877). French painter and writer. Courbets glory is based essentially on his works of the late 1840s and early 1850s depicting peasants and labourers, which were motivated by strong political views and formed a paradigm of Realism. From the mid-1850s into the 1860s he applied the same style and spirit to less overtly political subjects, concentrating on landscapes and hunting and still-life subjects. Social commitment, including a violent anticlericalism, re-emerged in various works of the 1860s and continued until his brief imprisonment after the Commune of 1871. From 1873 he lived in exile in Switzerland where he employed mediocre artists, but also realized a couple of outstanding pictures

with an extremely fresh and free handling. The image Courbet presented of himself in his paintings and writings has persisted, making him an artist who is assessed as much by his personality as by his work. This feature and also his hostility to the academic system, state patronage and the notion of aesthetic ideals have made him highly influential in the development of modernism.

Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz

(b Rome, 9 Feb 1815; d Madrid, 10 June 1894). Son of Jos de Madrazo y Agudo. In 1818 the family returned from Rome to Madrid, where Federico studied painting under his father and the other leading Spanish Neo-classical painters Juan Antonio de Ribera and Jos Aparicio. Federicos Continence of Scipio (1831; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando Mus.) gained him the status of academician. It shows the French Neo-classical traditions instilled in him at the Madrid Academia by his professors, all pupils of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Federico won immediate popularity in court circles with his sympathetic rendering of Ferdinand VII in the Kings Illness (1832; Madrid, Patrm. N.), and that same year (1832) he was named Pintor Supernumerario de Cmara.

Anselm Feuerbach
(b Speyer, 12 Sept 1829; d Venice, 4 Jan 1880). German painter and draughtsman. He received his first art lessons from the anatomical draughtsman at the University of Freiburg where his father, Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, lectured in Classical philology and archaeology. In 1845 he enrolled at the Dsseldorf Akademie where he studied under Wilhelm Schadow. Though adept at academic drawing, he was urged by Schadow to simplify his rather unresolved and crowded compositional sketches and concentrate on a few figures. In 1848 he moved to Munich where he made copies after Old Master paintings in the Alte Pinakothek, being especially impressed by the work of Rubens. Though eventually studying at the Munich Akademie, he saw the landscape painter Carl Rahl as his real mentor. Works such as Landscape with a Hermit Returning Home (18489; Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) combine the rich mood of the Munich landscape tradition with subject-matter more typical of the Dsseldorf school.

George Caleb Bingham

(b Augusta County, VA, 20 March 1811; d Kansas City, MO, 7 July 1879). American painter. Raised in rural Franklin County, MO, Bingham experienced from an early age the scenes on the major western rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi, that inspired his development as a major genre painter. During his apprenticeship to a cabinetmaker, he met the itinerant portrait painter Chester Harding, who turned Binghams attention to art. Teaching himself to draw and compose from art instruction books and engravings, the only resources available in the frontier territories, Bingham began painting portraits as early as 1834. The style of these works is provincial but notable for its sharpness, clear light and competent handling of paint.

Franz von Lenbach

(b Schrobenhausen, 13 Dec 1836; d Munich, 6 May 1904). German painter. The son of a master builder, he trained for his fathers profession at the Knigliche Landwirtschafts- und Gewerbeschule in Landshut, also working from 1851 in the sculpture studio of Anselm Sickinger (180773) in Munich. His elder brother, Karl August Lenbach (182847), had already become involved with painting, and it was through him that Franz Lenbach met Johann Baptist Hofner (18321913), an artist who had studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Knste in Munich. They went on sketching expeditions together, and Hofner introduced him to plein-air painting. After spending two semesters at the Polytechnische Schule in Augsburg (18523), and some months in the studio of Albert Grfle (180789), a portrait painter in Munich, Lenbach entered the Akademie in Munich in 1854. In 1857 he attended the classes of Karl Theodor Piloty (later von Piloty), who was renowned for his history paintings. Lenbach produced his first important painting, the Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert (1858; destr.), while in this class, followed by Peasants Trying to Take Shelter from a Thunderstorm in a Chapel (1858; destr.; oil sketch, Schweinfurt, Samml. Schfer). The sale of this picture, together with a scholarship, enabled him to accompany Piloty on a journey to Rome with Ferdinand von Piloty (182895), Theodor Schz (18301900) and Carl Ebert (182185). In Italy he made many oil and pencil sketches that inspired the Arch of Titus (1860; Budapest, Mus. F.A.) and the Shepherd Boy (1860; Munich, Schack-Gal.), both of which were finished after his return to Germany.

Giovanni Boldini
(b Ferrara, 31 Dec 1842; d Paris, 11 Jan 1931). Italian painter and printmaker. He received his earliest training from his father, the painter Antonio Boldini (17991872). From 1858 he may have attended courses given by Girolamo Domenichini (181391) and Giovanni Pagliarini (?180978) at the Civico Ateneo di Palazzo dei Diamanti, where he assiduously copied Old Masters. At 18 he was already known in Ferrara as an accomplished portrait painter. In 1862 he went to Florence, where he sporadically attended the Scuola del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He frequented the Caff Michelangiolo, a meeting-place of progressive artists, where he came into contact with the MACCHIAIOLI group of artists.

Thomas Eakins
(b Philadelphia, PA, 25 July 1844; d Philadelphia, 25 June 1916). American painter, sculptor and photographer. He was a portrait painter who chose most of his sitters and represented them in powerful but often unflattering physical and psychological terms. Although unsuccessful throughout much of his career, since the 1930s he has been regarded as one of the greatest American painters of his era.

Ilya Repin

(b Chuguyev, Kharkiv province, Ukraine, 5 Aug 1844; d Kuokkala, Finland, 29 Sept 1930). Russian painter and draughtsman of Ukrainian birth. He is especially celebrated for his treatment of historical themes and contemporary socio-political issues, and for his many portraits, and is known as the foremost exponent of the Russian Realist style that developed in the late 19th century.

Vasily Surikov
(b Krasnoyarsk, 24 Jan 1848; d Moscow, 19 March 1916). Russian painter. He is principally noted for his treatment of episodes from the 17th century and the medieval period of Russian history. These works are remarkable for their thoroughly researched and detailed rendering of settings and costume and the drama of their presentation. Surikov was also an accomplished portrait painter and incorporated a large number of portrait studies into his history paintings.

Winslow Homer
(b Boston, MA, 24 Feb 1836; d Prouts Neck, ME, 29 Sept 1910). American painter, illustrator and etcher. He was one of the two most admired American late 19thcentury artists (the other being Thomas Eakins) and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the USA and its greatest watercolourist. Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the same time alive to the purely physical properties of pigment and colour, of line and form, and of the patterns they create. His work is characterized by bold, fluid brushwork, strong draughtsmanship and composition, and particularly by a lack of sentimentality.