By the 1880s, some established painters had begun to use photographs in the development of their paintings, although they appear to have kept quiet about those techniques. During the next decade this became more widespread, and raised the question of whether photography should be accepted as a new art.

In the 1890s Edgar Degas experimented with photography. This is an albumen print of patron and amateur painter Henry Lerolle with two of his daughters, Yvonne and Christine, taken by Degas in 1895-96.

Degas also took this self-portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle in the same period.

In Degas’ oil painting of After the Bath from about 1895, the woman has adopted a strange and unnatural position, as if she has almost fallen from the edge of the deep bath. Her left foot is still cocked over its edge, as the rest of her lies on her right side on a towel. A maid stands behind her, attending to her long hair.

Degas didn’t just draw and paint women bathing, but made photos as well, such as this print of After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back from 1896.

The realist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme not only experimented with photography for many years, but was an enthusiastic advocate for its recognition as an art in its own right.

Gérôme’s Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) is based on a quotation attributed to Democritus, “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well” (or, more literally, ‘in an abyss’). Gérôme used the same allusion in his preface to Émile Bayard’s posthumous collection of collotype plates of photographs of nudes, Le Nu esthétique. L’Homme, la Femme, L’Enfant. Album de documents artistiques inédits d’après Nature, published in 1902, where he wrote:
Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.

It’s almost certain that Jules-Alexis Muenier became a photographer between 1880, when he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and when he travelled to North Africa with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret in 1888, armed with cameras. Although he may have found it difficult to set up the necessary darkroom and processing laboratory when he was still living in Paris, in 1885 he moved to a large house on his parents-in-law’s estate in Coulevon, which should have been ideal.

Although I have been unable to find a suitable image of the painting, this photograph shows Muenier with his painting of The Harpsichord Lesson in about 1911, which became his most famous painting during his lifetime. Muenier, Gérôme and Dagnan-Bouveret weren’t just happy snapper photographers, but believed in photography as fine art. All three were early members of local photographic clubs, and Muenier and Dagnan-Bouveret exhibited their photographs as seriously as their paintings.

Franz von Stuck’s remarkable Dancers (1896) is one of his earlier paintings exploring images of dancing women. This seems to have been inspired by some of the more flamboyant dresses of the day, and as an experiment in the portrayal of motion, in turn influenced by contemporary photography.

Joaquín Sorolla’s portrait of The Photographer Christian Franzen from 1903 brings this full circle. Franzen (1864-1923) was Danish by birth, trained in Copenhagen, then worked throughout Europe until he established his studio in Madrid in 1896. He was appointed court photographer to King Alfonso XIII.

By the twentieth century, some of the most prolific and painterly painters were also dedicated photographers.

Marthe in the Bathtub (1907) is one of the thousands of photos of Marthe taken by Pierre Bonnard.

Kneeling Woman or Nude with Tub from 1913 is a painting that surely reflects Bonnard’s photographs.

I Werners Eka (In Werner’s Rowing Boat) from 1917 is one of Anders Zorn’s last great paintings of a nude outdoors.

Zorn had also been an enthusiastic photographer who used photos for his paintings. This undated print was taken At Lake Siljan, close to his home town of Mora.

To finish, I leap forward a century to the painstakingly real paintings of Ellen Altfest. To ensure her painted representations are exact, she measures angles with metal skewers, and places marks to maintain her orientation in forests of hair. She eschews grids and projections so she can retain a sense of herself, and not lapse into mechanical reproduction. She only paints in natural light, and often outdoors.

The end result is nothing like a photograph. Her oil paintings result from the most prolonged and intense looking, and slow, meticulous painting. I feel sure that Gérôme would have loved them.

Painters were among the pioneers of photography, as many of them used the camera obscura or camera lucida as an optical aid to drawing. But until the early nineteenth century there was no practical way to fix that image to make it permanent. As various chemical processes were developed and improved to the point where photographs became readily available, painters saw the threat to their effective monopoly, particularly in the lucrative business of portraits.

Photography quickly became all the rage. A few famous painters had their portraits taken: in 1847, John Jabez Edwin Mayall made a daguerreotype of JMW Turner, just four years before his death, and went on to take the first carte-de-visite photos of Queen Victoria in 1860.

The camera in Frederick Daniel Hardy’s The Young Photographers (1862) is almost hidden beneath the bright red cloth covering it and the photographer. The message that photography was just child’s play may not have been what he intended, and wasn’t true at that time.

Paintings of photography seem to have peaked around 1870, when photographs were still relatively novel and unusual, and not perceived as much of a threat to the painter.

Philipp Sporrer’s The Photo (1870) is probably the most pointed painted propaganda. The young photographer is not the sort of man you would leave your wife or daughter with. He’s down at heel, unkempt, and his straw hat is abominably tatty. His studio is poorly-lit, probably an old shed, its floor littered with rubbish, and its window broken. His subject is manifestly poor and uncouth, sitting in ill-fitting clothes and picking his nose as he waits for the photographer to fiddle with his equipment.

Lajos Bruck’s The Photographer (1870) is perhaps fairer to the new medium, with a whole village and their innumerable children being cajoled into smiles ready for the camera. The itinerant photographer’s partner, though, seems disinterested, as she sits resting her head against her hand and looking away.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s A Wedding at the Photographer’s (1879) seems more calculated. Hugely successful at the Salon, this artist saw no threat from wedding photography, a market in which there was no competition between painting and photography. But he still takes the opportunity to show the photographer and his studio as being tatty and tawdry.

Gradually, painting started to become influenced by the nascent art of photography.

Gustave Caillebotte’s major painting of 1875 shows three workmen preparing a wooden floor in the artist’s studio at 77 rue de Miromesnil. It’s thoroughly detailed, Realist, and despite its innovative view and unusual subject, it conformed to the highest standards of the Salon at the time.

Caillebotte was hurt and angry when he was informed that this painting had been rejected by the Salon jury. The grounds given seem extraordinary now: apparently the jury was shocked at this depiction of the working class at work, and not even fully-clothed. It was deemed to have a ‘vulgar subject matter’ unsuitable for the public to view. Or was it really because of his wide-angle photographic effect?

Caillebotte was one of the first established painters to experiment with photography, as demonstrated in another wide-angle view of Paris Street, Rainy Day from 1877.

Soon, Thomas Eakins was using photographs to aid his painting.

His preparatory studies for Swimming (1885) grew from a series of photographs taken by the artist and his friends. But photos never replaced his own sketches: for this work, Eakins made several figure studies, details such as the dog, and different landscape backgrounds, and then brought them together in oil sketches.

Once he was happy, he embarked on his final version. In at least some cases, including his paintings of shad fishing from 1881-82, the figures in his Arcadia (c 1883), and Swimming (1885), he put final photographic images into a ‘magic lantern’ projector, which he then projected at the canvas.

He developed a sophisticated system not only for using the projected image to make a graphite underdrawing, but as the painting progressed, to incise key points and lines of reference in the paint surface. This enabled him to create paintings that were accurately calibrated to his reference images: a great advance on the traditional system of enlargement using grids, and one factor in his detailed realism. This technique was discovered by Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman.

Together with other photos and various studies, Eakins then painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole) in 1885.

Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ wonderful In the Classroom was painted the following year. It bears unmistakeable evidence that it was either painted from photographs or strongly influenced by them. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.

In Amsterdam, George Hendrik Breitner painted from photographs of his model Marie Jordan (1866-1948), whom he later married.

This photographic print of Marie Jordan Nude, Lying on the Bed from about 1888 is one of a series he made at about the same time that he was working on a painting of her.

Although conventionally dated to about 1887, there can be little doubt that Breitner’s Reclining Nude was based on that print.

Folding screens were first recorded in ancient China, where they were used as portable room dividers and as decorative furniture. They’re thought to have made their way to Europe in the late Middle Ages, and started to spread more widely during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Early screens were made of wood, but were soon covered with painted paper or silk. Kanō Hideyori’s magnificent Maple Viewers (紙本著色観楓図) (Muromachi, early 1500s) is painted on paper in the classical style of the Kanō school, then applied to a six-section folding screen.

In Europe, screens served several purposes in addition to dividing a larger space into two. They could be used to keep drafts away, provide privacy, hide a feature like a servant’s entrance to a kitchen, or purely for decoration.

In the fourth painting in William Hogarth’s moralising narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode, The Toilette (c 1743), Countess Squander is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. In the background at the right is a painted screen showing a masquerade ball.

It was the popularity of East Asian artefacts in the latter half of the nineteenth century that put folding screens in many homes and quite a few paintings. They featured in at least two of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s works from the mid-1860s.

Behind Whistler’s Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is a painted screen from Japan.

A more elaborately painted screen forms the backdrop to Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen from 1864.

Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti’s The Duet (1870) attracted favourable reviews when exhibited at the Royal Academy. This features a decorated folding screen from East Asia in the left background. The artist was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister-in-law.

In 1872 William Quiller-Orchardson completed Dolce Far Niente, incorporating in its painted screen a contemporary flavour of Japonisme. His woman, dressed in sober black, reclines on a thoroughly European chaise longue, her open book and fan beside her as she stares idly out of an unseen window.

Like other artists of the day, Elihu Vedder developed a fascination for objets d’art from the Far East, which he assembled in this Japanese Still Life in 1879. This unusual collection may have been assisted by the fact that his brother was a US Navy doctor who was stationed in Japan as it was being re-opened to the West.

Bouderie, which means sulking, is a splendid and intimate portrait of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s friend and colleague Gustave Courtois, painted in 1880. Courtois is seen at one end of a large sofa, smiling wryly and staring into the distance. He holds his palette and brushes in his left hand, and what may be a long mahlstick in the right. At the opposite end of the sofa, turned with her back towards Courtois, is a young woman dressed in fashionable clothing, in black throughout, apart from white lace trim at the foot of her skirts. Also shown is a screen decorated with Japanese imagery, and on the floor the skin of a big cat, perhaps a lioness.

Pierre Bonnard developed his earlier Man and Woman in an Interior into his Man and Woman in about 1900. Marthe isn’t getting dressed here, but sits up in the sunshine. A folded wooden screen divides the painting into two. Bonnard stands at the right edge of the painting, his legs looking skeletal in the sunlight.

William McGregor Paxton’s Tea Leaves (1909) show two well-dressed young women taking tea together. The woman in the blue-trimmed hat seems to be staring into the leaves at the bottom of her cup, a traditional means of fortune-telling, and behind them is a large folding screen, whose details are intentionally blurred and vague.

The New Necklace from the following year is one of Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow bureau writing. She has turned her chair to reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace from a slightly older woman in a dark blue-green dress. Their backdrop is another folding screen, this time with its East Asian painting clearly visible.

My final screen is the painting itself.

Pierre Bonnard’s exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs was painted at the outset of his career, in about 1889. Its story is contrastingly European, and based on one of Aesop’s fables retold by Jean de La Fontaine’s The Frogs who Demand a King.

The version retold by La Fontaine centres on a colony of frogs, who ask Jupiter for a king. The god’s first response to their request is a laid-back and gentle leader, whom the frogs reject as being too weak to rule them. Jupiter’s second attempt is a crane, who kills and eats the frogs for his pleasure. When the frogs complain to Jupiter, he then responds that they had better be happy with what they have got this time, or they could be given something even worse. Bonnard’s magnificent panel is traditionally interpreted not as showing the evil crane of the second attempt, but the first and gentle ruler.