Bare feet as a sign of rural poverty, among irregular peasant volunteer soldiers, and striking miners. But what about the kissing of feet?
Roll
Response to Courbet’s ‘Burial at Ornans’, a curious work by Edvard Munch, and very disturbing thoughts about burial alive.
How to buy fresh milk in central London, what the Scythians lived on, and more. Paintings by Millet, Delacroix, Winslow Homer, and others.
From Naturalist paintings of Bastille Day in 1880 to rush hour in New York City, and crowds outside the Gare de l’Est in 1917.
Hosting Lord Byron’s Alpine Witch, as the birth canal for Thomas Cole’s ‘Voyage of Life’, and an attempt by Courbet to return to the womb? The versatility of caves.
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.
Some superb and very different paintings of industrial unrest, an important subject for the Naturalist painters of the late 19th century.
Miners on strike in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield in 1880, a painting which may well have inspired Émile Zola to write his most popular novel, ‘Germinal’.
The Eclectic Light Company 