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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)102 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style102
(instead of building up form by means of thin, trans-
parent glazes) anticipated impressionism, a style he
embraced later in his career.Realism in American Painting
Although most American
artists received their train-
ing in European art schools,
their taste for Realism
seems to have sprung from a
native affection for the factual and the material
aspects of their immediate surroundings. In the late
nineteenth century, an era of gross materialism
known as the Gilded Age, America produced an
extraordinary number of first-rate Realist painters.
These individuals explored a wide variety of sub-
jects, from still life and portraiture to landscape and
genre painting. Like such literary giants as Mark
Twain, American Realist painters fused keen obser-
vation with remarkable descriptive skills.
One of the most talented of the American
Realists was William M. Harnett (1848–1892), a
still-life painter and a master of trompe l’oeil(“fools
the eye”) illusionism. Working in the tradition of
seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Harnett record-
ed mundane objects with such hair-fine precision that
some of them—letters, newspaper clippings, and
calling cards—seem to be pasted on the canvas
(Figure 30.20).
In the genre of portraiture, the Philadelphia artist
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) mastered the art of
producing uncompromising likenesses such as that ofFigure 30.20 WILLIAM MICHAEL HARNETT, The Artist’s Letter Rack, 1879.
Oil on canvas, 30 25 in.Figure 30.19 EDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 3^1 ⁄ 4 in. 6 ft. 2^3 ⁄ 4 in. A maid presents the courtesan with
a bouquet of flowers from an admirer, who, based on the startled response of the black cat, may have just entered the room.
Commenting on the unmodulated flatness of the figure, Courbet compared Olympia to the Queen of Spades in a deck of playing cards.