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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)94 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style94
instance, record with gritty Realism the notorious slums of
nineteenth-century Glasgow, Scotland. Such photographs
could easily illustrate the novels of Charles Dickens. In a
similar vein, the eyewitness photographs of the American
Civil War (1861–1865) produced by Mathew B. Brady
(1823–1896) and his staff testify to the importance of the
professional photographer as a chronicler of human life.
Brady’s 3500 Civil War photographs include mundane
scenes of barracks and munitions as well as unflinching
views of human carnage (Figure 30.9). By the end of the
century, the Kodak “point and shoot” handheld camera
gave vast numbers of ordinary people the freedom to take
their own photographic images.Courbet and French Realist Painting
In painting no less than in literature and photography,
Realism came to challenge the Romantic style. The Realist
preference for concrete, matter-of-fact depictions of every-
day life provided a sober alternative to both the remote,
exotic, and heroic imagery of the Romantics and the noble
and elevated themes of the Neoclassicists. Obedient to the
credo that artists must confront the experiences and
appearances of their own time, Realist painters abandoned
the nostalgic landscapes and heroic themes of Romantic
art in favor of compositions depicting the consequences of
industrialization (see Figure 30.3) and the lives of ordinary
men and women.
The leading Realist of nineteenth-century French
painting was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). A farmer’s
son, he was a self-taught artist, an outspoken socialist, and
a staunch defender of the Realist cause. “A painter,” heprotested, “should paint only what he can see.” Indeed,
most of Courbet’s works—portraits, landscapes, and con-
temporary scenes—remain true to the tangible facts of his
immediate vision. With the challenge “Show me an angel
and I’ll paint one,” he taunted both the Romantics and the
Neoclassicists. Not angels but ordinary individuals in their
actual settings and circumstances interested Courbet.
In The Stone-Breakers, Courbet depicted two rural labor-
ers performing the most menial of physical tasks (Figure
30.10). The painting, which Courbet’s friend Proudhon
called “the first socialist picture,” outraged the critics
because its subject matter is mundane and its figures are
crude, ragged, and totally unidealized. Moreover, the figures
were positioned with their backs turned toward the viewer,
thus violating, by nineteenth-century standards, the rules
of propriety and decorum enshrined in French academic art
(see chapter 21). But despite such “violations” Courbet’s
painting appealed to the masses. In a country whose popu-
lation was still two-thirds rural and largely poor, the stolid
dignity of hard labor was a popular subject.
Courbet’s contemporary Jean-François Millet (1814–
1875) did not share his reformist zeal; he nevertheless
devoted his career to painting the everyday lives of the
rural proletariat. His depictions of hard-working farm
laborers earned him the title “the peasant painter.” In
Gleaners(Figure 30.11), three ordinary peasant women
pursue the menial task of gathering the bits of grain left
over after the harvest. Delineated with ennobling simplic-
ity, these stoop-laborers are as ordinary and anonymous as
Courbet’s stone-breakers, but, set against a broad and
ennobling landscape, they appear dignified and graceful.Figure 30.9 MATHEW B. BRADYor
staff, Dead Confederate Soldier with Gun,
Petersburg, Virginia, 1865. Photograph.
The four-year-long American Civil War
produced the largest number of casualties
of any war in American history. Brady
hired staff photographers to assist him in
photographing the military campaigns and
battles, a project that produced some
3500 photographs but left him bankrupt.