Paintings of urban poverty were acclaimed at the Salon during the 1880s. A small selection from Fernand Pelez, Antonino Gandolfo (Catania, Sicily), Christian Krohg (Norway) and others.
Gandolfo
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’.
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 