Although Naturalism in literature continued well into the early twentieth century, in painting it was fading before 1900. This article shows some examples from those later years.

The Danish artist Erik Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 returns to a theme perhaps more appropriate to ‘social realism’, as a family of four is evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

In An Injured Worker from 1895, Henningsen tackles another major social issue. The scene is a gravel or sand pit outside a town (in the distance at the right). A worker has just been injured, and is being carried away on a stretcher. By his side is his wife, who is in tears and being comforted by one of her husband’s managers. Behind and to the left are a policeman, and a doctor who wears a top hat and is wiping his hands after dressing the man’s wounds.

In France, the veteran Léon Augustin Lhermitte painted this pastel of the Vegetable Market in St-Malo in 1893. It’s a good example of his balance between detail, as seen in the distant crowd and shop fronts, and a more painterly style.

In 1889, Lhermitte was commissioned to paint Les Halles, the main and most central market in the city of Paris. He completed this, perhaps his last major work, in 1895, when it was exhibited at the Salon. The market’s origins were mediaeval, then during the nineteenth century it grew even busier, and was re-housed in iron and glass buildings erected during the 1850s. Lhermitte’s friend Émile Zola set his novel Le Ventre de Paris (1873) in this market.

Émile Friant’s Sorrow (1898) visits a municipal cemetery for a funeral, and an intimate study of the grief of a widow, who is being helped by two younger women. Their overt reactions contrast with the cluster of men, with their stern beards, at the left.

In the 1890s, Friant became a passionate aviation enthusiast. Together with a friend from Nancy, one of the oarsmen in his painting of 1887, he founded an aviation society, and flew in balloons and early aircraft.

Journey to Infinity (1899) is an extraordinary flight of fancy in a balloon, which is soaring high above a bank of grey clouds (or possibly a rugged mountain ridge) containing the forms of five nude women, one of them apparently performing a handstand. I suspect this painting may have been made for Marie Marvingt (1875-1963), an athlete, mountaineer, and pioneer aviator, who had moved to Nancy in 1889.

Jean-Eugène Buland returned to poor working families in his Parental Happiness from 1903. A young couple are nursing their first baby, and appear to be living in an agricultural outhouse. The floor is strewn with vegetables and their parings, and the husband is dressed as a labourer, with worn working shoes, his wife in wooden clogs.

Buland’s The Tinker (1908) is busy at his cottage industry, repairing damaged pots, pans, and domestic metal objects. The stone wall at the left glistens with the damp.

During this period two aspiring artists who were to achieve greatness in the early twentieth century went through a period of Naturalism, Joaquín Sorolla in Spain, and Anders Zorn in Sweden, the subject of the next article in this series.

During the nineteenth century social realism depicted poverty in the countryside, but that of the growing cities was seldom depicted until it was tackled by the Naturalists later in the century.

Some earlier attempts were based on deception.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s photo of Poor Jo from 1864 shows a young streetboy, in a pioneering collection of images of homeless children in England. Being an early photo, it cannot of course lie, but it does. This photo, as with all Rejlander’s other images of poor and vagrant children, was a fiction created in his studio, using props and models, and heavily retouched. We tend to think of such trickery as a modern phenomenon enabled by the likes of Photoshop; although the techniques were different, visual deception is far older.

It was an English writer, Charles Dickens, who was probably the greatest literary influence over Augustus Edwin Mulready, whose reputation was built on paintings of street sellers and vagrants in London, such as his Uncared For from 1871. Mulready’s approach was very different from either Dickens or Millet, in being laden with sentimentalism. Here a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes stares straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Both the girl and her brother are sparklingly clean, their hair well cared-for, and their clothes relatively smart. There is nothing to suggest that Mulready used real vagrants as his models.

More convincing, though, are the remains of posters on the brick wall behind them: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

When Doré visited London, he was shocked by its large population of vagrants and homeless. His print of A Couple and Two Children Sleeping on a London Bridge (1871) is one of several objective records he made at the time. A selection was included in his illustrated book on London published the following year.

Change continued in this challenging painting by the Naturalist Jean-Eugène Buland, Alms of a Beggar from 1880. A young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin.

In the early 1880s Fernand Pelez started to paint some of the most moving portraits of the poor, comparable to those of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Marie Bashkirtseff.

This early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress (c 1880) is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. Another showed a young woman dead from asphyxiation. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Italy it was Antonino Gandolfo who took up the theme in his depictions of urban poverty in the city of Catania on Sicily, just as Naturalism was breaking out in France, between 1880-85. Evicted, which bears the Biblical sub-title of Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, dates from 1880, and shows a woman cast out into the street, her only possessions in the bag under her left hand.

Most of Pelez’s paintings of the poor are unsettling if not frankly depressing. His Homeless from 1883 shows a worn and weary mother and her five children living on the street. She stares from sunken eyes straight at the viewer, as her children huddle in filthy blankets and sacking around her. Only the mother and her oldest daughter, who is presumably already at work, wear any shoes.

A Martyr – The Violet Vendor (1885) shows another child of the street, although here Pelez leaves doubt as to whether we are looking at the boy asleep, or dead. One of the small bunches of violets has fallen from his tray. His eyes are closed, and his mouth agape.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, most probably absinthe.

In 1888 Pelez progressed to Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats, or Les Saltimbanques, shown above in its smaller version, and below in the larger version exhibited to acclaim at the Salon. This follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, in which the figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right.

Les Saltimbanques had been a successful show in the theatre fifty years earlier, and had lived on in entertainments staged in fairs around France. Contemporary performers attested to the faithfulness and accuracy of Pelez’s painting. This was featured and illustrated in the French weekly magazine l’Illustration, which also identified many of the models, who were performers in fairs and circuses.

Pelez never repeated the success of Les Saltimbanques, and in subsequent Salons faded from public view.

In the late 1880s the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread.

Better known for his many paintings of schools and children, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy’s painting of The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen (1891) shows homeless women and children being fed in what appears to be almost a prison.

Pelez painted six different versions of The Little Lemon Vendor (c 1895-97), of which this is thought to have been the last. It was never shown in a Salon, despite its compelling imagery.

La Vachalcade (The Cow-valcade) (1896) is a reversal of a portrait of an affluent family by way of parody. Thirteen young revellers are taking part in a carnival procession, perhaps one of the Vachalcades that took place in Montmartre at the time. Some wear masks, others have the close-shorn hair characteristic of the poor, a measure against endemic parasites.

At the centre is a boy very similar to The Little Lemon Vendor, wearing an adult’s jacket and a huge hat. Behind him is a Pierrot character, and in the background a banner bearing the word Misère, misery. Dangling on that is a dead rat, a reference to a well-known café on the Place Pigalle. The ‘vache’ (cow) in the title refers to the French phrase manger de la vache enragée, meaning to live in poverty.

Although Naturalist painting had originated in the countryside among the rural poor, it soon came to record changing times in science. One of the more prominent painters of science and scientists was Léon Lhermitte, now known almost entirely for his rural paintings.

Claude Bernard (1813-1878) was a pioneering physiologist whose writings were of great influence to Naturalists, including Émile Zola. Following Bernard’s death, the Sorbonne (where he had taught) commissioned Lhermitte to paint his portrait in 1886. This is a faithful anonymous copy of Claude Bernard and His Pupils, which was exhibited at the Salon in 1889. This shows Bernard in the midst of performing an experiment on a rabbit, his students discussing its results, and one writing the experimental observations in the laboratory daybook.

Lhermitte’s painting of The Chemist Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, Lesson on Aluminium from the following year was also commissioned by the Sorbonne in Paris; I apologise for the small size of this image. Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) was responsible for many significant discoveries in chemistry, the most important being a method for the industrial manufacture of aluminium. He’s shown here surrounded by objects made from this new material, which quickly came to transform manufacturing and to invade every home.

Several Naturalist painters were commissioned to paint murals depicting scientific events for universities. Among them is Erik Henningsen’s The Nordic Natural Science Research Meeting 14 July 1847, completed in 1895 for the Aula of the University of Copenhagen. Presiding over this scientific meeting was the great Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted, who was nearly seventy at the time.

Technology was also becoming commonplace at work.

Charles Frederic Ulrich painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884). In the background is a large and relatively modern printing press.

Another Naturalist artist, Jean-Eugène Buland, in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson from 1888 shows a young boy being trained to make a cogwheel. This was part of the French industrial recovery following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

The subject of Louis Muraton’s The Photographer, painted before 1901, is rocking a glass plate in a bath of developer, in his improvised darkroom, another sign of the times.

Major innovations in medical procedures and care were introduced, and duly recorded in Naturalist paintings.

In André Brouillet’s A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière Hospital (1887), an eminent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is demonstrating how he could hypnotise Marie “Blanche” Wittman, the ‘Queen of Hysterics’, into suffering hysterical collapse. Charcot and Wittman were a renowned partnership in this ‘act’, who performed in front of Sigmund Freud when he visited the hospital.

In the USA, Thomas Eakins painted the retiring professor of surgery, Dr. David Hayes Agnew, at work in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The patient is unconscious thanks to a volatile liquid general anaesthetic administered via a mask. Bright surgical lighting puts six figures literally in the limelight, including that of Agnew, holding a scalpel at the left.

Robert C. Hinckley’s Ether Day, or The First Operation with Ether, painted between 1882-93, recreates the scene on 16 October 1846 in what is now known as the Ether Dome in the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA. Here John Collins Warren is removing a tumour from the neck of a local printer, Edward G Abbott, who was anaesthetised using ether, in its first recorded use for a general surgical procedure; I apologise for the poor quality of this image.

Finally, Anna Sahlstén’s Surgery in Hospital from about 1893 shows the dazzling whiteness of the modern hospital, with a smart professional nurse caring for a child patient in the background. On the wall is a large radiator for the hospital’s modern heating system, which replaced the old stoves seen in so many earlier images of hospital wards.

Several other Naturalist painters achieved acclaim alongside Jules Bastien-Lepage and sustained the movement after his untimely death in 1884. Jean-Eugène Buland (1852–1926) was among them, and continued painting into the twentieth century. He died one hundred years ago today, and this article gives a brief overview of his career with a small selection of his paintings.

Buland trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel, and with his teacher’s influence turned first to history painting. In 1878 and 1879 he was second in the contest for the Prix de Rome, but then switched to painting genre scenes of modern life, classical Naturalist motifs inspired by the literary Naturalism of Émile Zola in particular.

His meticulous realism was well-received at the Salon, and after winning a series of medals there, in 1889 he was awarded a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Buland settled in the village of Charly-sur-Marne, to the east of Paris, and steadfastly refused to become part of the art scene in the capital. He only seems to have ventured into Paris for the annual Salon, and to paint commissions in the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall).

From the outset, Buland took on challenging motifs with equally challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes, yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin.

Le Tripot (The Dive) (1883) is one of my favourite paintings of this period. Set in a seedy, downmarket gambling den, it’s a group portrait of five hardened gamblers at their table. Each is rich in character, and makes you wonder how they came to be there. A little old widow at the left, for example, looks completely out of place, but is resolutely staking her money. Looking over her shoulder is a man, whose face is partially obscured. Is he, perhaps, a son, or a debtor? A young spiv at the far right is down to his last couple of silver coins, and looks about to lose them too. The air is thick with smoke, the walls in need of redecoration, and a pair of young streetwalkers prowl behind them, looking for a winner who will spend some of their cash on them.

Buland also seems to have painted some unashamedly populist works, including this idyllic Innocent Wedding (1884). With the distant village, blossom, and a young couple arm in arm, it’s deeply romantic, and a far cry from the works above.

That led to a series of paintings showing events the day after the wedding, including this of the newlywed bride Offering to the Virgin the Day After the Wedding (1885). There’s a crisp formality in these figures, who appear stilted and posed as they go through the rites and processes of life.

Buland went to the factory for Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). A young boy is being trained by his foreman to make a cogwheel, when many might have preferred him still to be at school. Buland used photographs extensively in the preparatory work for this painting, to capture its wealth of detail.

This also marks an overt politicisation in his work: the apprentice was part of the nation’s efforts to advance in industry and manufacturing after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War.

Propaganda Campaign (1889) is even more political, and Buland’s stark rendering of its figures makes them pop out, almost like cut-outs. A travelling salesman is in the home of a poor family, selling books and coloured prints to the head of the household. That in his left hand shows the populist politician General Boulanger, and the salesman’s motives combine politics with business. His buttonhole rosette declares his role as a canvasser for the General.

A Stroll in the Park (1891) seems a more innocent full-length portrait of a woman, although I have been unable to discover her identity or any reason for the painting.

Municipal Council and Commission of Pierrelaye Organizing a Festival (1891) is another fascinating painting with much contemporary relevance, an example of provincial municipal art. It’s a group portrait of the council of this village to the north-west of Paris, clearly commissioned by them to record their great deeds. It has a similar stiff formality to Propaganda Campaign, rather than the more insightful approach of Rembrandt’s group portraits.

I suspect that Buland’s romantically painted ceiling of Marriage was one of his commissions for the rebuilt Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and completed in the 1890s.

He returned to poor working families in his Parental Happiness from 1903. A young couple are nursing their first baby, and appear to be living in an agricultural outhouse. The floor is strewn with vegetables and their parings, and the husband is dressed as a labourer, with worn working shoes, and his wife in wooden clogs.

Buland’s The Tinker (1908) is busy at his cottage industry, repairing damaged pots, pans, and domestic metal objects. The stone wall at the left glistens with the damp.

Jean-Eugène Buland died in his home village of Charly-sur-Marne on 18 March 1926, at the age of 73.

This century has brought something of a revival for Buland. His first solo retrospective exhibition was held at Carcassonne in 2007-08, and his prices at auction are moving steadily upwards. I hope it doesn’t prove too late to conserve and document what remains of his work.

Reference

Richard Thomson (2012) Art of the Actual, Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 17988 0.