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.

After two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome and become a history painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage had specialised in depicting the rural poor, to growing acclaim at the Salon.

Not all his paintings were typically Naturalist. He continued to paint landscapes, of which Snow Effect, Damvillers from about 1882, is one of his finest and most Impressionist.

The shadowy figures caught in the late dusk of his Evening at Damvillers (1882) are a reminder that people remained at the centre of his art.

Bastien pushed his compositional formula to the limit in this enchanting painting of Roadside Flowers or The Little Shepherdess (1882). The sky has been reduced to a thin sliver, and almost the whole canvas is devoted to its detailed foreground. Like the weeds behind her, this little girl has a wide-eyed and sad beauty. Although her clothing is visibly tatty, her face and hair are idealistically clean, in keeping with a romantic sentimentalism rather than the objectivity more characteristic of true Naturalism.

Going to School (1882) takes us back into the village, but again this girl is far too clean and perfect to be an objective account.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) is nearer the mark: a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless.

Many of his paintings from 1882 were single-figure portraits, mostly of children, but in Love in the Village he shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches. One early reading, by Mette, wife of Paul Gauguin, claimed the girl was under age, and the relationship accordingly beyond the pale. The girl not only faces away from the viewer, but her whole body is turned away, leaving that unresolved.

Bastien visited London, where he painted the river in The Thames, London (1882). This maintains fine detail right into the far distance, except where it’s affected by the smoky and hazy atmosphere, and its horizon is kept well below the middle of the canvas.

While in London he painted one of his most characteristically Naturalistic works, showing a young boy working on the street as a London Bootblack (1882). This could have been taken straight from the journalistic accounts of London’s streetlife by Henry Mayhew, or their fictional reworking in the novels of Charles Dickens. The documentary realism of the foreground gives way to a more sketchy and jumbled background.

His portrait of a flower seller in a Flower Market in London (1882) is The Little Shepherdess of the city, posed against dull brown stonework. In the background is a reminder of how the other half lived, as an affluent man in a pale top hat walks alongside a woman wearing an exuberant blue hat.

I haven’t been able to read the date on this portrait of The Blind Beggar, painted back in Damvillers, but guess that it was most probably painted between 1880 and 1883.

By 1880, Bastien’s health was starting to deteriorate as a result of what was most probably tuberculosis. He tried a brief stay in Algiers, but that didn’t help, and his output appears to have fallen dramatically in 1883-84.

Dated in 1883, The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) is unusual as its subject isn’t shown standing, face-on to the viewer, but he sits and looks down at the kitten at the lower right. This young boy is also the dirtiest of Bastien’s waifs, his left hand still being black with soot from his work. He appears to be living in a hovel, with the embers of a fire at the left edge. Although signed, and presumably complete, the prominent white cat in the foreground remains very sketchy, and contrasts with the careful detail of the boy and his large bread roll.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s declining health forced him to abandon his work in 1884, and he died on 10 December at the age of 36. His paintings continued to influence Naturalist painters well into the 1890s. Even critics like Émile Zola and Roger Fry recognised the importance of his work.

Impressionism had developed rapidly in the late 1860s, with its first buds appearing in Renoir and Monet’s paintings at La Grenouillère in 1869, and flowered in the first Impressionist Exhibition five years later. Naturalism had a slower evolution, and blossomed in the Paris Salons of 1883 and 1884 in the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Born as Jules Bastien in the village of Damvillers in the northeast of France, he showed an early aptitude for drawing, and his father taught him to paint. He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1868, where he adopted the surname of Bastien-Lepage by incorporating his mother’s maiden name. While there he was taught the Academic and Salon tradition by Cabanel.

He fought, and was wounded, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, but managed to have his first work accepted for the Salon in 1870. Unfortunately this, and another acceptance in 1872, passed unnoticed by the critics and public. It wasn’t until 1874 that his portrait of his grandfather, painted at home the previous year, was awarded a third class medal at the Salon, and he started attracting more attention. He entered the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1875, and by public reaction would have received the award. However, the jury rejected his painting on a trumped-up technicality.

Bastien’s submission for the final was The Annunciation to the Shepherds (1875), in accordance with the prescribed subject of “the annunciation of the nativity of Christ by the angel to the shepherds of Bethlehem”, as in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-15. When he was unsuccessful, the jury attempted to avert outcry by awarding him a consolation prize, but it was too late, the damage had been done. He retreated to his rural village, and the pursuit of truth in his painting. He tried a second time the following year, but was again unsuccessful, so abandoned his ambition of becoming a history painter.

His Diogenes (1877) tackles human anguish in his depiction of this ancient Greek philosopher and cynic. Traditionally shown living in a barrel, Bastien gives him cruelly mutilated feet, and one of the most expressive faces since Rembrandt.

He returned to the Salon in 1878 with Haymakers (1877). It provoked debate over what was considered to be its harsh portrayal of life and work in the country. It was also a pioneering composition for him, 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.

The following year, Bastien returned with what is now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Harvest. He employs the same compositional scheme: high horizon, fine foreground detail, deep recession here enhanced by the distant figures, and broad land. This time, though, his rural poor are smiling and happy in their labour, and it proved a huge success.

All Souls’ Day, also completed in 1878, was a more sentimental incursion into the outskirts of the city, as a grandfather is taken for a walk by two of his young grandchildren. They are strolling through land that had been, until recently, open fields. It has now been transformed as smoky factories sprawl from the edges of the cities, with a narrow no-man’s-land of allotments and smallholdings as seen here.

Then in 1879, Bastien revisited history painting with his new formula in Joan of Arc. Its horizon is so high that little sky is visible beyond the trees. The lower half of the canvas is its intricately detailed foreground, even down to the clutter of woolworking apparatus, an ingenious link to the thread of fate, and the unkempt garden.

The corner of a house sharply divides the painting into halves. On its right is the very real and tangible figure of Joan of Arc, her piercing blue eyes staring into the distance, as she receives her call to arms. On the left are the ethereal figures of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine, which gave rise to a surprisingly hostile reception by critics.

The Grape Harvest, also known as Harvest Time, (1880) varies the compositional formula, and doesn’t produce the same effects. Its horizon draws the eye more strongly, distracting from the foreground detail, and the land rises too soon to achieve the deep panorama of his earlier paintings.

Back in his native Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage painted portraits of the poor. The Beggar (1880) shows an old man who has apparently been knocking on doors in his quest for charity. A well-dressed young girl stares sadly at him as he walks away from her house, and she is closing the door on him.

Bastien’s The Wood Gatherer (Father Jacques) (1881) is one of the key Naturalist works of art, also one of the most successful examples of his compositional formula. Its high horizon and woodland break its thin slice of sky into fine fragments. The detailed foreground includes both of the figures, who are diametric opposites: an old man bent with his load of firewood, who at any moment could keel over and die, and a young child (probably a girl) who runs free among the wild flowers. The perception of depth is enhanced by the recession of tree forms, although here the space is enclosed rather than open.

His formula can be seen in progress in his Ophelia (1881), showing the character from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as her anguish is about to drive her body down into the water to drown her. At the time of his death, Bastien still had to paint all the foreground detail. This would have covered the lower half of the canvas, and given it a finely detailed appearance overall.

Back in Damvillers, he returned to the rural poor, now focussing on children as innocent victims. The formula is applied again, this time with the superimposition of a leafless sapling and the thyrsus-like flower-heads of the teasel. The tree is placed most unusually over the grazing cow, and the whole painting cropped as if a photograph.

The following year marks the high-point of Bastien’s Naturalism.

Before the Renaissance paintings were often decorated with precious metals, most commonly gold leaf in the process of gilding. Although this practice largely died out by 1500, it was revived in the nineteenth century and reached new heights in Gustav Klimt’s Golden Phase, shortly before the First World War.

Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding, although today they might appear ‘primitive’.

One of the most exquisitely worked examples of gilding was crafted by an unknown artist, most probably in France towards the end of the fourteenth century. Known as The Wilton Diptych it’s one of the greatest masterpieces in London’s National Gallery.

This painting was a luxury object intended from the outset for the personal devotions of a monarch, or someone of close rank and stature. Its interior shows on the left, King Richard II (its most probable owner) kneeling as he is presented by three saints, Saint John the Baptist (carrying the Lamb of God), Saint Edward the Confessor (holding the ring he gave to Saint John the Evangelist), and Saint Edmund (holding an arrow from his martyrdom). On the right is the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child with a throng of eleven angels, one of whom bears the standard of the Cross of Saint John.

It was painted on two small panels of oak wood using egg tempera, in a workshop clearly experienced at making such works. Each panel is made of one wider board and a narrower strip. The two parts of a panel were joined by a craftsman using simple butt joints and were glued together with such care that the joins are almost invisible. They started off about 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick, and were then carved down to form an integral frame with a recessed painting surface. The two panels are hinged together using gilded iron fittings, so that the completed diptych could be folded shut for portability.

To prepare the panels for painting, the bare wood was first covered with a thin layer of parchment, and over that a single layer of gesso was applied. This was composed, as was traditional, of natural chalk and animal-derived glue. The gesso extended over the frame mouldings to prepare them for gilding.

Much of the surface of the panels was then to be gilded. Those areas were first marked out with incisions into the gesso ground, then covered with a thin layer of red bole (clay) containing animal-derived glue. The gold leaf was then applied with dilute glue in water, and after a couple of hours the leaf was burnished into place. These gilded areas were then patterned using a range of different punches. The resulting effect is of a jewelled surface, with intricate reflected patterns from different sections of the gilding.

Some details used a different technique known as mordant gilding, in which a binding medium is applied to give low relief, and the gold leaf applied onto that without burnishing. The optical properties of unburnished and burnished gold generate additional surface effects.

Every figure in Masaccio’s early Triptych of San Giovenale from 1422 has been awarded a halo of gold leaf. Its central panel shows the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, with two angels in attendance. As is traditional, Mary is shown wearing a deep ultramarine blue cloak. The left panel shows Saints Bartholomew and Blaise, and the right panel Saints Juvenal (patron of the commissioning church) and Anthony Abbot.

Gilding had no role in the realism that came with the Renaissance, and it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that some artists revived the technique.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s early Annunciation to the Shepherds from 1875 builds on tradition, complete with its gilded angel, who could have stepped out from an early Renaissance work. That combines with the rural realism of the shepherds, with their bare and filthy feet in a timeless image.

At about the same time, Edward Burne-Jones was applying silver and gold leaf to the summary inscription for his series on the myths of Perseus. Below the Latin words, he shows Perseus with the three Graiae (or Graeae). He has just intercepted and seized their single, shared eye, which he holds in his right hand, in order to force them to take him to the sea nymphs or Hesperides, to obtain the kibisis to contain Medusa’s head.

In Austria, Gustav Klimt had trained and worked not just as an artist, but as a craftsman too, and worked with other craftsmen to present his paintings in his distinctive style.

His painting of Pallas Athena (1898) is one of his first incorporating gold. Despite her modern appearance, Klimt remains true to tradition by showing her attributes, including the aegis of Medusa’s head over her upper chest, a spear and helmet.

His empowering portraits of women increasingly used gilding to great effect. In Judith I (1901), he portrays a woman of power, whose pleasure results from her successful manipulation of the enemy general, Holofernes, and her subsequent beheading of him, a popular theme in the art of women such as Artemisia Gentileschi. Klimt leaves the ambiguity of her ecstasy, playing on the developing link between eroticism and death.

In 1902, the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession centred on Max Klinger’s Beethoven Sculpture. To raise funds to retain it in Vienna, members of the Secession contributed works to exhibit there. Klimt’s was a frieze of 24 metres in length, the Beethoven Frieze. The section shown above is that of The Hostile Powers, unusually painted using casein paints onto mortar, with added stucco, gold leaf, and other materials.

Inspired by the early Byzantine mosaic showing the Empress Theodora, in the Basilica San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, the peak of Klimt’s Golden Phase is unique in art. Much of the surface of his first Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is encrusted with gold and silver, and decorated with symbols of eyes, flowers, whorls, ellipses divided into halves, and rich textures worked into the gold leaf. To accomplish this involved a great deal of craftsmanship, using the same techniques as those for the Wilton Diptych, and took long days handling delicate leaves of precious metal.

Although seldom if ever used by others of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, the last of them, is unusual for combining it with watercolour.

Fortescue-Brickdale’s If One Could Have That Little Head of Hers from 1910 also has a curious title that appears to be a quotation. The woman shown is presumably a saint, judging by her large gold halo, but is in early Renaissance dress.

Following the early death of Thomas Girtin in 1802, there was no successor who proved as prolific in painting the cathedrals of Britain, and attention was transferred to those further south.

In 1894, Benjamin Williams Leader painted this view of Worcester Cathedral backing onto the River Severn. This was built between 1084-1504 in an unusual mixture of styles from Norman to Perpendicular Gothic, and contains the tomb of King John in its chancel. Judging by the smoke rising from the chimneys, this was painted in the early autumn.

If any artist came close to Girtin’s achievement it must have been John Constable. In about 1820, Bishop John Fisher commissioned him to paint Salisbury Cathedral from the grounds of his Palace, and Constable started to prepare sketches and studies for that medium-sized painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden, completed in 1823.

Constable was still battling with depression after the death of his wife when Archdeacon John Fisher, younger cousin of the Bishop, who had died in 1825, encouraged him to paint a larger and more ambitious view of Salisbury Cathedral, from the nearby meadows on the banks of the River Nadder. This late oil sketch was sold by auction in 2015 for more than five million dollars.

Constable completed his finished painting above for exhibition in the Royal Academy in 1831. It is perhaps a little over-egged with its storm clouds, rainbow and bolt of lightning. Despite several showings, it remained unsold when Constable died. Salisbury Cathedral was almost entirely built within the period 1220-1258, although its tower and spire, the tallest in England, were completed by 1330.

Although there is a Westminster Cathedral in London, it’s Roman Catholic, unlike the more famous Westminster Abbey, a collegiate church of the Church of England that has long been popular for coronations and interments of British monarchs and the nation’s most distinguished figures. The present building was constructed between 1245-1269 close to the Palace of Westminster on the north bank of the River Thames.

Samuel Scott’s Westminster from Lambeth, with the Ceremonial Barge of the Ironmongers’ Company (c 1745) shows a section of the River Thames on a windy day, with showers not far away. Teams of rowers pull their boats out to attend to the ceremonial barges in the foreground, reminiscent of Venetian boat ceremonies. The opposite bank shows, from the left, the imposing twin towers of Westminster Abbey, the old Palace of Westminster almost hidden behind trees, and Westminster Bridge.

The American history painter Benjamin West painted this view of Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey beyond in about 1801. Two cows and attendant milkmaids are providing a supply of fresh milk for the crowds in this royal park with Buckingham Palace on its edge. This remains 57 acres (23 hectares) of grass, trees and lakes.

The Church of England cathedral in London is of course Saint Paul’s, on Ludgate Hill a few miles to the east in the centre of the city of London. It was built between 1675-1710 to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren, following the destruction of its predecessor in the Great Fire of London of 1666.

Canaletto painted this imposing view of St. Paul’s Cathedral when he was working in England in about 1754. This Venetian artist lived and painted in London between 1746-1755 when the War of the Austrian Succession disrupted the art market in Venice.

Nicholas Chevalier painted ‘Thanksgiving Day’: The Procession to St Paul’s Cathedral, 27 February 1872 shortly after this royal event. Not to be confused with US Thanksgiving, this was a one-off state thanksgiving for the recovery from severe illness of the Prince of Wales. The widowed Queen Victoria and her son Prince Edward attended Saint Paul’s Cathedral (the obvious dome in the distance) to give public thanks to God. Approaching the arch is the carriage containing the royal party.

Canaletto wasn’t the only visitor from continental Europe to paint Wren’s prominent dome.

From 1880, Jules Bastien-Lepage visited London repeatedly. Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames, London (1881) is his fine depiction of this stretch of the River Thames, with his characteristic gradation of detail from its foreground into the distance. Standing proud on the skyline towards the right is the distinctive dome of Saint Paul’s.

Henri Le Sidaner also visited Britain on several occasions, and in 1906-07 painted this view of St. Paul’s from the River: Morning Sun in Winter, which may have been inspired by Monet’s series paintings of Rouen Cathedral, here expressed using his own distinctive marks.

In case you think Wren’s Saint Paul’s appears recent compared with Britain’s older cathedrals, in my lifetime I have seen two new Church of England cathedrals consecrated: Coventry in 1962, replacing an older building destroyed during the Second World War, and Guildford in 1961, built on a new site altogether over a period of twenty-five years.

Aprons are protective garments normally worn over the front of the body and upper legs, where they’re intended to prevent other clothes from soiling, and sometimes the wearer underneath. Although frequently seen in paintings, their absence must be interpreted with caution: most figurative paintings are made in the studio, where the only folk likely to be wearing aprons are the artist and their assistants. The wear of aprons is also markedly gendered; although in real life many men wear them at work, those most likely to be depicted with them are overwhelmingly women.

Aprons have been strongly associated with those in domestic service, and appear in folk tales such as Cinderella.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one glass slipper on her left foot. She is seen in a scullery with a dull, patched and grubby working dress and apron.

Intimate Conversation from about 1892 shows a young couple talking idly outdoors in the sun. Évariste Carpentier puts a prominent tear in the young woman’s apron to emphasise their poverty.

Probably the most famous painted apron is that worn by Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid in about 1658-59.

This woman, seen in three-quarter view, wears working dress: a stiff, white linen cap, a yellow jacket laced at the front, a brilliant ultramarine blue apron, with a dull red skirt underneath. Her work sleeves are pushed up to lay both her weathered forearms bare to the elbow. Her strong-featured face and eyes are cast down, watching the milk as it runs into the pot.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) is in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen, with her coarse white apron rolled up to enable her to lean forward and down.

Aprons were also common in women working outdoors, such as gleaners.

Those in Jules Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) are using theirs to carry their gleanings. Most are frayed and tatty, faded blue in colour.

They’re being worn by the two women in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s October: Potato Gatherers from 1878.

Some aprons could have more than one purpose, and may need more careful reading. Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest. The family group in the foreground consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground. The daughter is finely dressed under her apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in domestic service in a rich household in the nearby town.

Another painting of Brendekilde’s from this period, his Springtime; The First Anemones from 1889, shows a young woman walking with a small girl in a wood in the early Spring. The woman is unlikely to be the girl’s mother. Instead, she wears the black dress and white apron of a woman ‘in service’, in this case probably as the little girl’s maid or nanny.

Camille Pissarro’s famous depiction of Apple Picking, Éragny, from 1887-88 shows a typical country scene, with three women wearing aprons, but the man still in a waistcoat and trousers.

A Kitchen is one of Maximilien Luce’s early Divisionist paintings, dating from 1888-89. It’s an unusual motif, showing domestic servants at work in the kitchen of a large bourgeois house, both of them wearing long white aprons. Kitchens have become one place where men are also expected to wear aprons.

Jehan Georges Vibert’s meticulously realist painting of The Marvelous Sauce from about 1890 shows its rotund hero wearing an apron and tasting a sauce with his chef in a palatial kitchen.

As they were painted at work during the late nineteenth century, it became clear how many men had been wearing aprons: blacksmiths, butchers, shoemakers, coopers and many other trades.

Maximilien Luce made many paintings of people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium. Several of these metalworkers are wearing heavy leather aprons to protect their bodies from burns and injury.

One of Constantin Meunier’s later paintings, Foundry from 1902, shows a worker stripped to the waist to cope with the heat, while wearing a protective leather apron.

In The Artist’s Model (1895), Jean-Léon Gérôme shows himself at work on a marble figure, and wearing a faded blue apron.

There’s a popular and relatively recent myth that European painting in the late nineteenth century consisted almost entirely of Impressionist landscapes and their descendants in Post-Impressionism, or the dying embers of the Academic past. That oversimplification carefully omits many of the innovative artists of the day, who developed the social realism of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet into what became Naturalism. Among its other key influences were Édouard Manet and the novelist and critic Émile Zola (1840-1902), who were also associated with Impressionism.

Impressionism was primarily a revolt against established ideas as to how paintings should be made, and how they should look. Although the term has been extended to other arts, it’s only really meaningful in the context of painting.

Naturalism arose first and became most extensive in literature. Among its great influences was the pioneering French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), whose writings were read avidly by Naturalists including Zola. Bernard’s approach to science stressed not only the importance of observation, but of experiment, forming the basis for his accounts of the working of the body, and the scientific foundations of medicine. Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, published in 1865, convinced Zola to use an experimental approach to writing his novels. He thus watched people in life and filled notebooks with his observations. He then set characters up in the scenario for a novel, and they behaved according to his observations. He finally documented this imaginary experiment as his next novel.

Naturalist painting made no attempt to follow Zola’s experimental approach, but aimed to document ordinary people going about their normal daily activities in their normal surroundings, with a degree of objectivity rather than sentiment. Its style is a neutral realism showing as much fine detail as necessary for its purpose, and sometimes being almost photographic in quality.

Naturalism and Impressionism were by no means mutually exclusive, but served different purposes. Some of the finest artists of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century were exponents of both. Landscapes were predominantly approached as Impressions, while figurative paintings worked better using Naturalist techniques. Here are some examples from about 1883, when both were at their height.

At that time, it was Jules Bastien-Lepage who was having greatest impact at the Salon with his Naturalist portraits of the rural poor. Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) catches this cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless. It has other traits of Bastien’s style, such as its high horizon almost shutting the sky out, and his careful control of detail. The boy’s face is meticulous, but the cottage gardens behind have been sketched in roughly.

Bastien’s Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) from the following year is unusual as its subject isn’t shown standing, face-on to the viewer, but sits and looks down at the kitten at the lower right. This young boy is also the dirtiest of Bastien’s waifs, his left hand still black with soot from his work. He appears to be living in a hovel, with the embers of a fire at the left edge, once again sketched loosely.

Bastien’s combination of detailed realism blended with more painterly passages is seen in one of Marie Bashkirtseff best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving. This earned her an honourable mention in the Salon.

In the same year, Jean-Eugène Buland’s The Dive is set in a seedy, downmarket gambling den, as 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.

Camille Pissarro was a fine figurative artist when he wanted, and had a particular liking for markets and fairs, which may seem strange for a landscape painter. He painted this scene from The Poultry Market, Pontoise twice in 1882: once using (glue?) distemper, and here in oils, where his use of tiny marks is evolving, particularly in the fabrics.

For his portrait of his partner Aline Charigot in By the Seashore (1883), Pierre-Auguste Renoir most probably painted her in the studio, and took its background from the Normandy coast near Dieppe. This shows the growing divergence in his paintings during the 1880s, with landscapes becoming increasingly soft and high in chroma, while his figures remained realist and emphasised by his “dry” manner.

Bashkirtseff’s Autumn (1883) is a thoroughly 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.

Gustave Caillebotte also painted in both styles, with several of his best-known works being Naturalist. The Plain at Gennevilliers, A Group of Poplars (1883) is more formally Impressionist, although it retains foreground detail and has a relatively high horizon.

Alfred Sisley’s Willows on the Banks of the Orvanne (1883) is also more representative of Impressionism. An irregular row of pollarded willows, with well-developed heads, crosses the foreground, behind which there is the river Orvanne, reeds, and a tall stand of poplars. Behind this dense vegetation is a fence, field, and distant buildings, at the midpoint of the painting.

At the Impressionist end of the spectrum is Claude Monet’s Stormy Sea at Étretat (1883), painted from the beach directly in front of the the village, and a prototype for a small series.

For all his realist figures, Renoir’s Sunset at Douarnenez, from around 1883, is a classical Impressionist view looking into the setting sun.

I hope this small collection of paintings demonstrates there was a great deal more to French and European painting in 1883 than Impressionism. In this series I will explore the artists and paintings that accompanied Impressionism, but have now been largely forgotten. I hope you’ll join me.