Start with genre paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, add GĂ©ricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’, Courbet and Millet’s social realism, Manet and Lhermitte and you’ve made Naturalism.
Breton
As a sign of those in domestic service, and the poor when working on the land, worn by those in the kitchen, even the men, and protecting their bodies when at work.
Paintings of police from lictors in ancient Rome, through ‘Peelers’ in London, to those regulating prostitution and trying to control striking workers.
An umbrella Madonna, parasols of the nobility, in soirées on the beach, the rise of the white parasol and arrival of Japonisme, with Sargent and Sorolla, and in California.
Constable and Turner both paint the burning of London’s Parliament, a scene of a prairie fire in the US, a burning castle in Denmark, San Francisco on fire in 1906, and more.
A dance to the music of time, the hours, Muses, sirens, winged putti, faeries, maidens fearing death, mid-summer feasts and folk dancing.
Fireplaces and hearths, from a small town in the country, a dozing fisherman’s wife copied by Vincent van Gogh, a fire in a studio, and those in suburban homes.
Painted by Jules Breton, Jean-François Millet, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Léon Augustin Lhermitte and others during the late 19th century.
Knitting shepherdesses, peasant girls, smallholders, a goose girl, fisher girls, by Millet, Breton, LA Ring, Winslow Homer and others.
Ploughing, sowing, weeding, calving and lambing, the hay harvest, sheep shearing, the grain harvest, fruit harvests, then back again to the start.
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