Review of paintings and related articles published here in the first half of 2018, starring Fuseli, Klimt, Liljefors, Sassoferrato, and Hodler.
Lhermitte
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.
