From being staffage in landscapes, shepherds and their flocks became motifs in their own right, with the social realist of Millet, even Henri Regnault.
Breton
Paintings showing women spinning from around 1000 CE to the early 20th century, by Eakins, Tanner, Courbet, van Gogh, Breton, and others,
From their genre roots in the Dutch Golden Age, through Géricault and Courbet, to the social realism of Millet, Manet, and most of all Lhermitte.
Brought up in a poor country family, he trained as a sculptor first, then switched to painting. A selection of his early social realist works, comparable with those of Jules Bastien-Lepage.
Borrowed from the Church, parasols became an accessory of the aristocracy, then for all who were fashionable. They went from black to white, then Japanese.
From Constable and Turner’s views of London’s parliament ablaze, to Edvard Munch’s painting of a local manor house in flames.
A detailed look at his paintings of the rural poor which led up to Naturalism, and how he used a compositional formula so successfully.
Little-known now, and only for his paintings of harvesters and gleaners, in his day he was at the leading edge of the Naturalist revolution, painting scientists.
After the early death of Bastien-Lepage, he led the Naturalist movement in France. After 1892, though, he concentrated on religious themes seen in a new light.
An illustrated timeline and overview of how the human visual environment, and perception of it, has changed from ancient times to virtual reality.
The Eclectic Light Company 