Learn how this period of experimentation, discovery and industrialisation challenged the existing order of society and changed the prevailing definitions of art.
This course explores how concerns around modernity and tradition, popular and high culture, social class and gender, and race and ethnicity, influenced both the artists and collectors of this new age.
With the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824 and the opening of the Wilkins Building in Trafalgar Square in 1838 (the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation), the formation of this national institution and its collection lies at the very heart of the history of 19th-century painting.
In this first session, Amy Mechowski will set the stage, giving an overview of the module and introducing the period. After the break, we will be joined by Dr Susanna-Avery Quash, Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting), who will talk about the National Gallery’s foundation and its development under Charles Eastlake.
The critical role of academies of art in artists’ training, public taste and official patronage was well-established by the mid-century – as artists vied for recognition, validation, and visibility.
The rivalry between French artists Ingres and Delacroix has often been seen as a conflict between the period’s tradition-based Neoclassicism and a non-conformist Romanticism.
Meanwhile, Romanticism (itself a disputed category) presented a battle ground of its own for British artists Turner and Constable as they grappled with utopian and dystopian visions of an industrialised world.
As the authority of the art academies began to be challenged by what would later be regarded as avant-garde movements, artists exhibited radical works, which opened up institutional critiques.
With the Realists, represented by Courbet, Millet, and Manet in France and important contributions to social realism by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and others in England, direct observation came to the forefront of artistic practice. The relative success of efforts to convey a truthful and objective vision of the world is brought into question when viewed through the lens of gender, empire, and religion.
After the break, we are joined by biographer and curator Dr Jan Marsh, who will discuss Pre-Raphaelite responses to the US Civil War.
The imagery of contemporary life and modern subjects was embraced by artists who were heirs to a Realist legacy – not only in France, Britain, and the United States, but also in Scandinavia, Germany and Eastern Europe.
Played out in the spaces of modernity – the street, the café, the shop, the opera and theatre, the interior, the garden and the park – developments in painting were shaped by shifting social, cultural and political structures. These were manifested in challenges to the hierarchy of genres in painting as well as themes of identity, representation, and performance. We will especially focus on a crisis in the genre of the nude to explore these issues.
From their first independent exhibition of 1874, the group of artists that would come to be known as the Impressionists forever changed approaches to painting in subject and technique with a new visual language to depict modern life.
Significantly, the work of women artists, who were regarded by their contemporaries as important members of this group, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, emerged within the context of representations of femininity. And at a moment when both gendered social spheres and national schools of painting were called into question, American artists such as John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler moved freely between French and English artistic and social circles with success.
After the break, guest speaker Dr Jenny Graham will speak on Whistler’s paintings and the theme of ‘whiteness’, with reference to race, gender and the public display of art in London and Paris.
With the last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 came the debut of artists for whom the English painter and art critic Roger Fry would coin the term ‘Post-Impressionists’ 20 years later.
Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and others explored the abstract and symbolic in colour, form, subject, and technique. It was their contemporary, Paul Cézanne, however, who would be declared the founder of 20th-century Modernism within the canon of the history of art.
The module will conclude by drawing out some of the key themes and ideas explored over the past six sessions.
