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

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100 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

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century lower-class railway travel (see Figure 30.1). The

part of the European train in which tickets were the least

expensive was also, of course, the least comfortable: it

lacked glass windows (hence was subject to more than aver-

age amounts of smoke, cinders, and clatter) and was

equipped with hard wooden benches rather than cushioned

seats. Three generations of poor folk—an elderly woman, a

younger woman, and her children—occupy the foreground

of Daumier’s painting. Their lumpish bodies suggest weari-

ness and futility, yet they convey a humble dignity reminis-

cent of Rembrandt’s figures (see chapter 22). Dark and

loosely sketched oil glazes underscore the mood of cheerless

resignation. Daumier produced a forthright image of com-

mon humanity in a contemporary urban setting.

The Scandalous Realism of Manet

The French painter Edouard Manet (1832–1883) presented

an unsettling challenge to the world of art. A native

Parisian who chose painting over a career in law, Manet was

an admirer of the art of the old masters. He was equally

enthralled by the life of his own time—by Parisians and

their middle-class pleasures. In a large, brilliantly painted

canvas entitled Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass),

he shocked public taste by taking a Classical theme and

putting it in modern dress (Figure 30.16). Déjeunershows a

nude woman enjoying a picnic lunch with two fully clothed

male companions; a second, partially clothed woman

bathes in a nearby stream. The representation of the female

nude was considered the ultimate subject in academic art.

Her identity in ancient sculpture, as in Western art history

since the Early Renaissance, was invariably that of a mytho-

logical or allegorical figure, such as Venus or Charity.

Manet’s nude, however, was nothing more than an ordinary,

naked woman. By picturing the female nude—and one who

brazenly stares out at the viewer—in a contemporary set-

ting occupied by clothed men, Manet offended public

morality and academic tradition. He also destroyed the

barrier between fantasy and everyday reality.

Figure 30.16 EDOUARD MANET, Déjeuner sur l’herbe,

1863. Oil on canvas, 7 ft.  8 ft. 10 in. The still life in the

lower left testifies to Manet’s technical skills as a painter.