Over the last months I have shown examples of the Naturalist painting that became popular in Europe during the late nineteenth century, although it is now neglected or glossed over in modern accounts of that period. This concluding article provides a table of contents, and an illustrated list of some of the better-known painters who were Naturalists for substantial periods in their careers.

Contents

Naturalism and Impressionism
Origins
Jules Bastien-Lepage 1875-81
Jules Bastien-Lepage 1882-84
Marie Bashkirtseff
Spread
Science and medicine
The modern meal
Urban poverty
Education
Photography
Into the 20th century
Sorolla and Zorn

Major artists

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884)

Most prominent of the Naturalist painters until his early death in 1884, his Haymakers (1877) is a pioneering composition, with its high horizon and fine detail in the foreground. Together these give the impression that the whole canvas is meticulously realist, although in fact much of its surface consists of visible brushstrokes and other painterly marks. At the same time its deep recession and broad inclusion of land gives it the illusion of a wide-angle panorama, enhancing the exhaustion and desolation of its figures.

Articles:
Jules Bastien-Lepage 1875-81
Jules Bastien-Lepage 1882-84

Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884)

Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé, A Meeting (1884) led the depiction of the urban poor.

Article:
Marie Bashkirtseff

Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925)

Previously an established social realist, his Naturalist masterwork is The Harvesters’ Pay from 1882.

Articles:
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Léon Augustin Lhermitte 1
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Léon Augustin Lhermitte 2

Fernand Pelez (1848-1913)

Specialised in urban deprivation and poverty.

Article:
Street Urchins: Paintings of Fernand Pelez

Jean-Eugène Buland (1852–1926)

Article:
A Civic Starkness: Paintings of Eugène Buland

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929)

Articles:
Painting and Photography: the work of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret 1
Painting and Photography: the work of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret 2

Henri Gervex (1852–1929)

Article:
Surgery, sinners, and soirées: the paintings of Henri Gervex

Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924)

Specialised in children and schools.

Article:
Commemorating the centenary of the death of Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy, painter of childhood

Émile Friant (1863–1932)

Articles:
The Last Naturalist: Émile Friant, 1
The Last Naturalist: Émile Friant, 2

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)

Although now known as an Impressionist, he also painted in Naturalist style.

Articles:
The Naturalism of Gustave Caillebotte 1
The Naturalism of Gustave Caillebotte 2

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

A Norwegian social realist and Naturalist.

Articles:
Christian Krohg painting social reality 1: to 1883
Christian Krohg painting social reality 2: 1883-88
Christian Krohg painting social reality 3: 1888-95
Christian Krohg painting social reality 4: 1898-1924
Commemorating the centenary of Christian Krohg’s death

Erik Henningsen (1855–1930)

Danish.

Article:
Erik Henningsen: the thirsty man

Charles Frederic Ulrich (1858–1908)

Born in New York City, trained in the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany.

Antonino Gandolfo (1841–1910)

Italian, from Sicily.

Article:
Down and Out in Catania: paintings of Antonino Gandolfo

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923)

Spanish.

Articles:
Sorolla’s Naturalist paintings 1: Fishermen and white slaves
Sorolla’s Naturalist paintings 2: Science and the sea

Anders Zorn (1860–1920)

Swedish.

Articles:
1: Portraits of success
2: Far places and near death
3: Switching to oils
4: High life and low life
5: Portraits and prints
6: Presidents and Saunas
7: The White House and legacies

Many Naturalist artists continued to paint in the style until late in their career, but two younger aspiring painters passed through a phase of Naturalism on their way to greatness in the early twentieth century, Joaquín Sorolla in Spain, and Anders Zorn in Sweden. Neither is now generally recognised as having been Naturalist at that time, though.

Sorolla had his first great success with a gold medal at the 1892 National Exhibition in Madrid, for Another Marguerite! which went on to win first prize at a Chicago International exhibition.

A young woman sits, hunched up and dejected, with chains around her wrists and her possessions tied up in a small bundle next to her. Sat behind her in the cattle-class compartment of the railway train are two armed National Guards, near-identical figures who are escorting her in custody to face trial. She appears already to be sitting in the cell which awaits at her destination.

Sorolla’s title explains, with its reference to Gounod’s opera Faust (1859), itself based on Goethe’s Faust. There, Marguerite was seduced by Faust, made pregnant, and then killed her baby. The artist was apparently inspired to paint this in the summer of 1892 in Valencia, by a real-life episode in which he had seen a woman being transported in custody to face a tribunal for an identical charge.

And They Still Say Fish is Expensive! (1894) is set in the hold of one of the larger Valencian fishing vessels, amid spare tackle, a large barrel, and some of its catch. Two older men are attending to a youth, who appears to have been wounded, presumably as the result of an accident at sea. Around the boy’s neck is a pendant good-luck charm; he is stripped to the waist and pale, and one of the men is pressing a dressing against his abdomen. Lit from an open hatch at the top left, the painting has the immediacy of a photographic ‘snap’ and looks documentary.

Sorolla’s title is incisive social comment about the values of a society which is happy to see young boys go to sea to fish, putting their lives at risk so that those ashore can enjoy cheap seafood. This was painted during the summer of 1894, again in Valencia, and went on to great acclaim in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was bought for the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Another painting that Sorolla exhibited successfully at the Salon in 1895 was White Slave Trade (1895), an epitome of the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain.

Set in a similarly bleak railway compartment to Another Marguerite, four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of a much older woman. In contrast to their guardian, who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which Sorolla’s title refers is, of course, the movement of prostitutes between brothels. This could have been from Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria, as suggested by Powell for example.

The theme of prostitution had been brought to the fore in Naturalism by the Norwegian painter and writer Christian Krohg, whose first novel published in 1886 had documented its problems in Oslo, and which he had depicted in Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87), a work Sorolla is unlikely to have seen, but may well have heard about.

Sorolla’s Portrait of Dr. Simarro at the Microscope from 1897 shows Doctor Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), who was an eminent psychiatrist in Madrid. He also undertook pioneering research looking at the fine structure of the brain. Among his many achievements was a modification of an established technique for staining microscopic sections of brain, which proved a major advance and an inspiration to the great Spanish neurohistologist Ramon y Cajal. This portrait was exhibited at the National Exhibition in Madrid in the same year.

Research, or under its original Spanish title of Una investigación o El Dr. Simarro en el Laboratorio, from the same year, goes on to look at Dr. Simarro at work in the laboratory among colleagues and students. He is here preparing specimens for microscopy, presumably using his staining technique. The table is covered with bottles of chemicals used in that process, and the chunky metal object in the centre foreground is a microtome, used for cutting very thin sections of tissue embedded in paraffin wax, prior to their staining, for study under the microscope.

Anders Zorn’s Naturalism flourished when he was painting the realities of country life in the rural town of Mora, Sweden, where he had been born and brought up.

In Baking Bread, painted in Mora in 1889, Zorn captures each step in the process in documentary fashion, from kneading the dough, through rolling and preparing it, to its baking. There’s even an infant in the foreground who looks ready to consume it. This is painted in his characteristic limited palette derived from his transition to oils when he was in Saint Ives, Cornwall.

My favourite painting from this period in his career is another showing country events near his family home, at Mora Fair, from 1892. Against a background of crowds and carts going to and leaving the fair, a young woman sits looking completely fed up. Not far from her feet, her partner is slumped face down amid the weeds, presumably from an excess of alcohol.

A couple of years later, he stole some time from painting the rich and famous when he was staying in Venice, for some more serious work, here showing The Lace Makers (1894).

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.

Few accounts of painting in the last decades of the nineteenth century consider the importance of photography at the time. Yet photography was enjoying remarkable technical advances: in 1884, George Eastman started replacing glass plates with light-sensitive film, and four years later he launched the first Kodak camera, the predecessor of the Kodak Brownie that was to follow in 1901. As Naturalist painting was taking the Salon by storm, its rival was becoming more widely available, and no longer required a private chemistry lab.

First responses to photography by painters were often hostile.

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.

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, most obviously in the use of views through the lens of a camera.

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.

During his development of Naturalism, Jules Bastien-Lepage arrived at a compositional formula that achieved similar effects, as seen in his Haymakers or Hay making in the same year, with its high horizon and fine detail in the foreground. Together these also give the visual impression that the whole canvas is meticulously realist, although in fact much of its surface consists of visible brushstrokes and other more painterly forms.

Eugène Burnand’s magnificent painting of Bull in the Alps from 1884 is fascinating for his use of both optical effects and extreme aerial perspective. Not only are there marked contrasts between the foreground and background in terms of chroma, hue and lightness, but Burnand has used defocussing in a photographic manner. The crisp edges of the bull stand proud of the softer edges and forms in the mountains behind. It’s worth noting that Burnand had been a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ painted his wonderful In the Classroom two years later, in 1886. 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.

By the 1890s, more painters were experimenting with photography.

Among them was Edgar Degas. 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.

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.

The Naturalist painter Jules-Alexis Muenier became a photographer by the time he travelled to North Africa with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret in 1888, armed with cameras.

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 work 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.

One of the main priorities of the Third Republic in France was to secularise the nation, and one of its pillars was the introduction of free and mandatory education. This was accomplished in the Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882, whose changes swept across every part of France, and became an important theme in French Naturalist painting.

Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer’s wonderful watercolour of A Breton Infants School from 1882 predates any celebration of the Republican policy: the crucifix high on the wall at the right confirms this is one of the older Catholic schools. It shows a teacher helping one of her students with writing, in a class wearing only traditional Breton costume. There’s clearly room for improvement, though, as one girl is sleeping on her book, doubtless exhausted from her early morning work on the family farm.

By 1882, Jean Geoffroy had entered the schools where he was to be most successful and prolific; he apparently lodged above a school, with a couple of teachers. Snack Time shows the pupils outside their primary school during a break, armed with their lunchboxes and baskets. He tells their stories using subtle hints including their clothes. A well-dressed girl in white is being harassed by a smaller boy into surrendering some of her food. He wears rougher clothes but seems in control of the situation, as others watch on and laugh.

Within two years of the early death of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ In the Classroom (1886) looks as if it may have been painted from photographs. 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.

Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 doesn’t give us the same depth of field effect, but shows one of the Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. They’re still a bit of a shower, with the younger ones at the back working on traditional slates, but this is the public face of the modern Republican School.

In 1895 Geoffroy shows a Drawing Lesson in a class of older boys, who are following the classical tradition of drawing casts and appear remarkably diligent and well-behaved.

In his In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.

The Third Republic believed in catching its future citizens young. In 1899, Geoffroy painted The Nursery, one of very few images to show the state’s approaches to the early rearing of children. Hospitals developed a rigorous almost military approach to nurseries and feeding that endured well into the twentieth century, and separated mothers from their infants for much of the time.

It was only right that those citizens of the future should celebrate the national day of France, Bastille Day, on 14 July, as painted by Geoffroy in about 1900. For young boys in the years before the First World War, this was becoming increasingly militaristic rather than just patriotic.

I have been unable to locate an image of Geoffroy’s painting from which Charles Baude made this print of Prize-Giving at an Infants School in 1904, but it’s a fine example of the artist’s depictions of the social interactions within groups of young children.

Geoffroy’s undated painting of It’s Hard to Share shows another of the tribulations of childhood. These young boys have just emerged from a sweet shop, and the child in the centre is reluctant to share the paper cone of sweets he has just bought. His face says it all, as he looks with great suspicion at his less fortunate friend, and a dog also looks up expectantly.

The Third Republic also opened up higher education to French women.

In Jean Béraud’s undated The Thesis of Madeleine Brès (or The Doctoral Jury) he shows us one of the early woman doctoral students defending her thesis before the academic jury. At the time, this was a major landmark in the improvements in women’s rights, and their archaic academic dress emphasises this change.

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.

Eating together with family and friends is one of the great social events, and became a popular theme in nineteenth century painting. It was enthusiastically adopted by several of the leading Naturalist painters, as shown below.

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe from 1863 is one of the best-known if not infamous paintings of a social meal. Two couples are apparently disinterested in the token picnic of fruit and bread that has spilled out from its basket in the left foreground. As the two men talk, fully dressed, a conspicuously naked woman stares unnervingly at the viewer, and the other woman is washing herself in the river behind. This was rejected by the Salon of that year, ensuring its lasting fame and influence.

A far cry from Manet’s meal, Eugène Lepoittevin’s Picnic from 1866 captures a picnic’s distinctive combination of the planned and impromptu. This group has lugged crockery, soup and a folding stool for their simple meal sitting on the grass under some trees.

Renoir’s masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81) is set on the Île de Chatou under the awning of the Restaurant Fournaise. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This meal seems all but over, the wineglasses near-empty as the party turns from eating to conversation.

In summer, breakfast became a favourite meal in your own garden. Just a year before his untimely death in 1884, the Italian peri-Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this startling Breakfast in the Garden, with its contrast between the detail of the glass soda syphon, covered bowl, glasses, and other reflective materials on the table, and its wonderfully sketchy garden background.

Laurits Andersen Ring was more pointed in his social message in A Boy and a Girl Eating Lunch, from 1884. Paupers’ children, they have a single bowl of broth between them, and there’s not even a hint of wine and fruit. The girl looks up in tears, hoping for a miracle to change their lives, and take them away from this bare wooden table and blackened walls.

Léon Frédéric’s Funeral Meal from 1886 shows a large group of mourners sitting outside in the summer sunshine to remember the deceased following their funeral. Their meal is simple if not frugal, and there are neither glasses of wine nor mugs of beer. This is the moment that grace, or perhaps a eulogy for the deceased, is being read.

Now almost forgotten is Émile Friant’s masterpiece The Meurthe Boating Party, also known as Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party or The Oarsmen of the Meurthe, from 1887. This shows the artist’s watersporting friends eating lunch together on the river Meurthe in Nancy. This can be read as a broad message of well-being and conviviality: healthy, fit young men engaged in team sports; fraternity; and harmony across different classes within society. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1888, and as a result of its success was featured as a full page in the popular magazine Le Monde Illustré, bringing Friant instant fame.

That same year the 23-year-old Swedish painter Hanna Pauli made the meal table the centrepiece of her virtuoso painting of Breakfast-Time (1887). She uses it as a demonstration of her skills in depicting the reflective surfaces of silverware, porcelain and abundant glassware, but its table is now deserted.

The Belgian artist Émile Claus also painted The Picnic in 1887. It’s set in the French/Belgian countryside around the River Lys, in the area of Ypres, which was devastated during the First World War. The plain clothing worn indicates these are poor farmworkers rather than landowners.

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.

Critics and the public got their first taste of Naturalist painting in the Salons in the early 1880s, led by the success of Jules Bastien-Lepage. As Paris was the focal point of western painting at that time, this rapidly spread internationally, and ranged wider in its themes.

Literary Naturalism had spread with the translation of the writings of Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) the critic and historian, Claude Bernard (1813-1878) the physiologist, and the Rougon-Macquart novels of Émile Zola (1840-1902), published between 1871-93. Those became accessible in all the major European languages by 1880, and attracted an intellectual following throughout Europe and North America.

At the time there was a strong Nordic school of painting in France, including Christian Skredsvig (friend of Edvard Munch), Nicolai Ulfsten, Carl Larsson, Karl Nordstrôm, Hans Heyerdahl, Erik Werenskiold, and Christian Krohg.

Krohg’s Port Side! (1879) is his only painting to be exhibited at the Salon. He started this when he was in Berlin, and completed it when at Skagen in Denmark in the summer of 1879. It didn’t set the Salon of 1882 alight, but was favourably received by some critics.

Hans Heyerdahl’s The Dying Child (1881) was so lauded it was bought from the Salon for the French nation, but has since returned to Norway. Although executed in an older, darker style this motif became popular with Nordic painters including Edvard Munch, and is typical of Naturalism.

A little later, Erik Werenskiold painted his rural Norwegian response to Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, in his Peasant Burial of 1885.

Charles Frederic Ulrich was born in New York City in 1858, and had travelled to Europe to attend the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, as did so many other American painters, including William Merritt Chase. Many of his surviving works show different workplaces across Europe: in The Glass Blowers (1883) the work is delicate, in blowing and preparing glass domes, perhaps for use as covers of watches and clocks.

Joan Planella was a Catalan painter who studied in Italy rather than France. The Little Weaver (1882-89) shown here is a replica of the original completed in 1882. It shows a young girl working at a large and complex loom in Catalonia, as a man lurks in the background, keeping a watch over her.

Following the formative social realism of Jean-François Millet, Léon Lhermitte’s masterpiece The Harvesters’ Pay (1882) takes a more objective look at the realities of rural farmworkers. This evolved rapidly through Bastien-Lepage’s paintings of poor waifs and strays, to the grim battle for survival shown below in Fernand Pelez’s Homeless (1883).

These were by no means confined to France. The Sicilian Antonino Gandolfo’s Evicted from 1880 raised similar concerns under a very different political regime.

Even more uncomfortable for the French Third Republic and other states was the depiction of industrial unrest as it swept across Europe in the late nineteenth century.

A good example is Alfred Roll’s painting of a Miners’ Strike in 1880. This was probably made from life when he visited the strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield that year. His large original painting seems to have been exhibited at the Salon in Paris, from where it was purchased by the State. However, the artist had to sell at ‘cost price’ on the understanding that it would be hung in the capital, in the Ministry of Commerce, where it would have substantial impact.

Once the State got its hands on Roll’s painting, it was despatched to a local museum in Valenciennes, where it seems to have been largely forgotten. The original is now badly damaged, and the image shown above is reproduced from Le Petit Journal, where it didn’t appear until 1 October 1892.

By early 1884, Émile Zola had decided to write a novel in his Rougon-Macquart series about a miners’ strike, and in February 1884 the author visited a strike near Valenciennes, where Roll’s painting was on display, for his research. He started writing Germinal on 2 April 1884, and the book was published in serial form from November of that year. Its story centres on a miners’ strike in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield very similar to that painted by Roll, and it remains Zola’s most successful work.

The State may have successfully suppressed the immediate impact of Roll’s painting by hiding it away in the provinces, but in this case it had not anticipated its influence on Zola.

Industrial unrest in Belgium came to a head in 1886, with a succession of strikes across the country. These started in Liège as a commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune, but spread through industrialised zones to the region around Charleroi and Hainault.

Robert Koehler painted his masterpiece of The Strike in the Region of Charleroi that year, with a group of workers standing outside the smart entrance to offices. The top-hatted owner stands on the top step, one of his managers looking anxious beside him. The leader of the workers is at the foot of the steps telling the industrialist of the workers’ demands. The situation is looking increasingly nasty, although there are no signs yet of police or troops, or of violent confrontation.

Politics and art were mixing freely in the Nordic countries too. The Norwegian Christian Krohg explored the theme of fatigue and sleep, particularly among mothers. In Tired from 1885, the young woman seen here is no mother, but a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance.

Home work as a seamstress was seen as the beginning of the descent into prostitution, a major theme in Krohg’s painting and writing. The paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives, which all too often led to them taking to the street.

Just before Christmas 1886, Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted several other scenes from the book. Curiously, Krohg’s campaigning writing and painting didn’t want prostitution made legal: quite the opposite, he and others wanted it banned.

Naturalist painting also helped promote advances being made by the state in healthcare and education.

The depiction of modern hospitals, medical teaching and research is a feature of Naturalism. Henri Gervex, who rose to fame with a ‘shocking’ painting of a nude courtesan on the morning after, found a little flesh at the Hôpital Saint-Louis, where an eminent doctor is teaching Before the Operation in 1887.

Jean Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 shows one of the Third Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. This was deemed sufficiently positive to the State as to be purchased by the French National Ministry of Education, where it still hangs.

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.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé was a young woman who started training in Paris in 1877, and who died from tuberculosis seven years later, just three months before him, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884).

She was born and brought up in Havrontsi (Gavrontsi), to the north of Poltava in central Ukraine, between Kyiv and Kharkiv, where she first started to learn to draw and paint. Her affluent parents split up when she was twelve, following which she travelled around Europe with her mother, eventually settling in Paris. She originally hoped to be a singer, but after an illness ruined her voice, she decided to be an artist. She then studied with Robert-Fleury from 1877, and at the Académie Julian.

A self-assured painter from the beginning, she set her sights high and had the ability and drive to paint excellently. Her early Self-portrait with Palette (1880) was painted in the same year that she first had a work accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon, and she was successful again in every subsequent Salon until her death.

While still studying at the Académie Julien in 1881, she painted In the Studio, which gives good insight into what her training was like. Her class was of course entirely female, and the Académie Julien was one of the few reputable schools that accepted women pupils at that time. The artist is seated in the centre foreground, holding her palette and knife as she looks up at one of her fellow pupils.

Her early portraits are skilful if conventional, as is The Artist’s Sister from 1881. She started establishing herself in the art scene; it has been claimed that she wrote a column for the mysandrist newspaper La Citoyenne under the name of Pauline Orrel, but that appears to be unsupported by the original edited versions of her diaries.

She became a close friend of Jules Bastien-Lepage when visiting Nice in 1882, and he acted as her mentor if not teacher, as she described herself as his pupil. She also formed a close friendship with the writer Guy de Maupassant.

As she developed a more distinctive style in her portraits, so her brushwork loosened. She was an astute observer of women’s life, as shown in At a Book (c 1882), with its emphasis on her model’s unusual hair.

Young Russian Girl (c 1882) is another delicate portrait, although I suspect the original isn’t as soft-focus as this image.

Although Bashkirtseff accepted that her mentor Bastien-Lepage reigned supreme in the countryside, she felt that she was his match when it came to depicting the urban environment of Paris. In the Mist from 1882 is a good demonstration of how well she captures the almost deserted city streets on a foggy day, with a bright plume of flame from a fire in the centre of her canvas.

Autumn, from 1883, is an impressive and Impressionist depiction of a row of trees on the bank of the River Seine in the centre of Paris, but is unusual in being devoid of people. The leaf litter, occasional rubbish, and fallen bench strengthen its feeling of desolation in the midst of the bustling city.

Bastien’s composite of detailed realism blended with more painterly passages shows in one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer is quite unnerving. That year she was awarded an honourable mention from the Salon.

A Meeting (1884) finally justified her claim to paint the urban poor, and to match Bastien-Lepage. This painting was a great success when shown at the Salon that year, and is probably her finest work.

Her pastel Portrait of Madame X (1884), now in the Musée d’Orsay together with A Meeting, was also shown in the Salon that year.

By that summer, Bashkirtseff’s fragile health was deteriorating rapidly because of tuberculosis. She died on 31 October, less than a month before she would have turned twenty-six, and less than three months before her mentor died.

Her ambition was better fulfilled after her death than in life. Her huge mausoleum in Cimitière de Passy, Paris, designed by Bastien’s younger brother Émile, contains her artist’s studio complete with an unfinished painting of Holy Women by the Grave. Three years later, her copious and revelatory diaries were published, and propelled her to international fame.

References

Wikipedia.
An English translation of her journal, on archive.org.