Inspired by Émile Zola’s novels, Nordic painters including Krohg, and Werenskiold, American Charles Ulrich, Gandolfo in Sicily, and others. How Roll’s painting of a strike led to Zola’s ‘Germinal’.
Gandolfo
From dice shooters in a rough tavern, through Bastien-Lepage’s Little Chimneysweep, to poverty in Catania, and destitution in Paris.
Paintings from cities like London, Paris and Oslo, by Ford Madox Brown, Jean-Louis Forain, Félicien Rops, Christian Krohg, and others.
Cicero and the tomb of Archimedes, a theatre at Taormina, the War of the Sicilian Vespers, Antonello’s oil paintings, and urban poverty.
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.
Naturalism was a phenomenon of Northern Europe, centred in Paris with Jules Bastien-Lepage as its high priest. Except here it is in the Italian island of Sicily, in the backstreets of Catania.
The Eclectic Light Company 