A lot changed in painting in the 1890s. Within just a few years, Naturalism went from being all the rage to old hat. These paintings show how.
Lhermitte
From physicists to photographers developing their plates, Naturalist painters recorded the science and technology of their time.
Paintings showing women spinning from around 1000 CE to the early 20th century, by Eakins, Tanner, Courbet, van Gogh, Breton, and others,
Less often painted than the rural poor, Naturalism did show the growing pains of the 19th century cities. Paintings from Lhermitte, Luce, Bellows, and more.
Review of paintings and related articles published here in the first half of 2018, starring Fuseli, Klimt, Liljefors, Sassoferrato, and Hodler.
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.
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.
His paintings of markets, including Paris’s famous Les Halles, are superb, as are his pastels.
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.
He worked his way from rural naturalism, through Impressionism, to a distinctive Post-Impressionism.
