The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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98 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

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figures disposed informally around the edges of a freshly dug

grave. Paintings of this size normally depicted historical or

religious subjects. Here, however, inspired by the funeral of

his great uncle, Courbet depicts the plain-looking (and

even homely) townspeople of Ornans. He minimizes the

display of pomp and ceremony traditional to Western rep-

resentations of Christian burial, which emphasized the rit-

ual aspects of death and disposal. The kneeling gravedigger

and the attendant dog are as important to the picture as the

priest and his retinue. And the mourners, while crowded

together, play a more prominent role in the composition

than the deceased. With the objectivity of a camera eye,

Courbet banished from his view all sentimentality and arti-

fice. When the painting was rejected by the Universal

Exhibition of 1855, Courbet rented a space near the exhi-

bition grounds, put up a tent, and displayed the Burial along

with thirty-eight of his paintings. He called the space “The

Pavilion of Realism.” For this, the first one-man show in

history, Courbet charged a small admission fee.

Daumier’s Social Realism

The French artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) left the

world a detailed record of the social life of his time. He had

no formal academic education, but his earliest training was

inlithography—a printmaking process created by drawing

on a stone plate (Figure 30.13). Lithography, a product

of nineteenth-century print technology, was a cheap and

popular means of providing illustrations for newspapers,

magazines, and books.

Daumier produced over 4000 lithographs, often turning

out two to three per week for various Paris newspapers and

journals. For his subject matter, he turned directly to the

world around him: the streets of Paris, the theater, the law

courts. The advancing (and often jarring) technology of

modern life also attracted Daumier’s interest: pioneer

experiments in aerial photography (Figure 30.14), the

telegraph, the sewing machine, the repeating rifle, the rail-

road, and urban renewal projects that included widening

the streets of Paris. But Daumier did not simply depict the

facts of modern life; he frequently ridiculed them.

Skeptical as to whether new technology and social progress

could radically alter the human condition, he drew atten-

tion to characteristic human weaknesses, from the the all

too familiar complacency and greed of self-serving political

figures to the pretensions of the nouveaux riches.

One of the popular institutions mocked by Daumier was

the French Salon(Figure 30.15). The Salon de Paris origi-

nated with the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture,

Figure 30.13Lithography is a method of making prints from a flat surface; it is

also called planography. An image is first drawn or painted with an oil-based

lithographic crayon or pencil on a smooth limestone surface. The surface is

wiped with water, which will not stick to the applied areas of greasy lithographic

ink because oil and water do not mix. The greasy areas resist the water and are

thus exposed. The surface is then rolled with printing ink, which adheres only to the

parts drawn in the oil-based medium. Dampened paper is placed over the stone,

and a special flatbed press rubs the back of the paper, transferring the work from

the stone to the covering sheet.

Figure 30.14 HONORÉ DAUMIER, Nadar Raising Photography to the Heights

of Art, 1862. Lithograph. The balloonist, photographer, draftsman, and journalist

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, called Nadar, took his first photograph from a balloon.

The aerial balloon, built in 1863, inspired some of the adventure novels of the

science-fiction writer Jules Verne (see chapter 37). Nadar also pioneered the use

of artificial lighting, by which he was able to photograph the catacombs of Paris.

1798 Aloys Senefelder (Bavarian) develops lithography

1822 William Church (American) patents an automatic

typesetting machine

1844 wood-pulp production provides cheap paper for

newspapers and periodicals