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

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Late Nineteenth-Century

Architecture

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CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 105

Answering the critics, Eakins wryly replied: “The criticisms
of The Gulf Stream by old women and others are noted. You
may inform these people that the Negro did not starve to
death, he was not eaten by the sharks, the water spout did
not hit him, and he was rescued by a passing ship.. .”
American audiences loved their Realist painters, but,
occasionally, critics voiced mixed feelings. The American
novelist Henry James (1843–1916), whose novels probed
the differences between European and American charac-
ter, assessed what he called Homer’s “perfect realism” with
these words:

He is almost barbarously simple, and, to our eye, he is

horribly ugly; but there is nevertheless something one

likes about him. What is it? For ourselves, it is not his

subjects. We frankly confess that we detest his

subjects—his barren plank fences, his glaring, bald,

blue skies, his big, dreary, vacant lots of meadows,

his freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his

flat-breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish of rural

doughnuts and pie, his calico sun-bonnets, his

flannel shirts, his cowhide boots. He has chosen the

least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of

scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated

them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every

inch as good as Capri or Tangiers; and, to reward his

audacity, he has incontestably succeeded. It...isa

proof that if you will only be doggedly literal, though

you may often be unpleasing, you will at least have a

stamp of your own.

Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century

history of architecture was revolu-

tionized by the use of an exciting

new structural medium: cast iron.

Providing strength without bulk,

cast iron allowed architects to span broader widths and

raise structures to greater heights than achieved by tradi-

tional stone masonry. Although cast iron would change the

history of architecture more dramatically than any advance

in technology since the Roman invention of concrete,

European architects were slow to realize its potential. In

England, where John Nash had used cast iron in 1815 as

the structural frame for the Brighton Pavilion (see Figure

29.14), engineers did not begin construction on the first

cast-iron suspension bridge until 1836; and not until mid-

century was iron used as skeletal support for mills, ware-

houses, and railroad stations.

The innovator in the use of iron for public buildings

was, in fact, not an architect but a distinguished horticul-

turalist and greenhouse designer, Joseph Paxton

(1801–1865). Paxton’s Crystal Palace (Figure 30.26),

erected for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, was

the world’s first prefabricated building and the forerunner

of the “functional” steel and glass architecture of the twen-

tieth century. Consisting entirely of cast- and wrought-iron

girders and 18,000 panes of glass, and erected in only nine

months, the 1851-foot-long structure—its length a

Figure 30.25 WINSLOW HOMER, The Gulf Stream, 1899. Oil on canvas, 28^1 ⁄ 8 in. 4 ft. 1^1 ⁄ 8 in. Homer
added the fully rigged sailing ship at the horizon on the left some time after the painting was exhibited.