Naturalist painting both supported the State, and attacked it – sometimes so much that works had to be suppressed. The real history of art at the end of the 19th century.
Buland
The very large Paris Salon of 1883 introduced the public and critics to a new and growing movement in painting. It wasn’t Impressionism or Post-Impressionism, though.
Eight of Cabanel’s most precocious and brilliant pupils. Only one won the Prix de Rome, and the others went on to develop Naturalist art. Was Cabanel the father of this new movement?
The late 19th century took gambling upmarket into glitzy casinos. Seen in paintings by Courbet, Rossetti, Félix Vallotton, and others.
Stark and rigidly formal, his paintings of contemporary life look like formal photos. Another major (and forgotten) Naturalist.
From 1880, artists concentrated on social aspects of work. They questioned whether young children should be at work, and the role of the worker in society.
The Eclectic Light Company 