Introduction

The Story of Nineteenth-Century Art

This book tells the story of nineteenth-century art. like all "true" stories, it is manufactured
from the raw material of historical facts. To develop a narrative, the storyteller, of necessity,
will take a selective approach to those facts, giving more weight to some than to others and
leaving many out altogether. Of course, the choice of what to include and what to leave out
is not just the storyteller's own. TIme itself has already acted as a sieve, retaining certain ele­
ments while letting others slip into oblivion. Moreover, as the story has been told and retold,
a certain consensus has developed as to what is essential and what is secondary; who are the
stars and who are the extras; which events make up the story's turning points and which just
keep it going. Even with these points of consensus, the story will continue to evolve over
time as each generation brings new expectations to it.

TIme Frame and Context

History, whether political or cultural, cannot be packaged neatly in century-long periods.

Historical periodization follows its own rhythm, which rarely coincides with man-made cal­
endars. Thus, to tell the story of nineteenth-century art properly, we must begin nearly forty
years before 1800, during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. At that time, many
thinkers in both Europe and America believed that the world was undergoing a tremendous
ideological and cultural upheaval. In 1759 the French philosopher and mathematician Jean
d.'Alembert wrote:

A most remarkable change in our ideas is taking place, one of such rapidity that it
seems to promise a greater change still to corne. It will be for the future to decide the
aim, the nature, and the limits of this revolution, the drawbacks and disadvantages of
which posterity will be able to judge better than we can.

D'Alembert's sense of his own time was very acute: thirty years after he wrote his prophetic
words, the French Revolution broke out, ending a monarchy that had lasted for nearly nine
hundred years and setting in motion, first in France and then elsewhere in Europe, a slow but

Introduction 13
 steady process of democratization. Thirteen years earlier, in 1776, the American colonies had
declared their independence from British imperial rule in a document so far-reaching that to
this day it contains the underlying principles of the political and moral organization of the
free, democratic world.
While these political upheavals went on, the Industrial Revolution was also gaining momen­
tum. In 1769 the British inventor James Watt patented the first efficient steam engine. Together
with an unending stream of further inventions, it led to the mechanization of manufacturing,
which prompted a vast increase in the production of consumer goods. The unprecedented
supply of commodities, and the development of markets to sen these commodities to, encour­
aged the full flowering of capitalism.
From the early nineteenth century onwards, the steam engine also led to the development
of steamboats and trains, which increased the mobility both of people and of goods. Com­
munications advanced through the improvement of the mail delivery system but also through
the invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s. The latter was important not only for
sending personal messages but also for the rapid travel of news from one place to another.
Nineteenth-century newspapers thus could report more immediately and accurately on events
throughout the world.
The nineteenth century reaped both the blessings and the curses, however, of the politi­
cal, economic, and communications revolutions that had begun in the latter part of the
eighteenth century. The gradual democratization of Europe was attended by continual polit­
ical unrest. A major European-wide revolution marked the year 1848; smaller national or local
uprisings occurred in various parts of Europe, throughout the nineteenth century and well
into the twentieth.
The Industrial Revolution, while improving the standard of living of an ever-growing mid­
dle class or "bourgeoisie," created an urban proletariat that lived in squalid poverty. Charles
Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) and Victor Hugo's 1£s Miserables (1862), though fictional accounts,
are among the more memorable books to address the problem of poverty, particularly as it
manifested itself in London and Paris. But poverty was not just an urban condition. Although
agriculture was slowly modernized, the fate of most peasants barely improved over the course
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, some aspects of this modernization,
notably agricultural capitalism (whereby the land is owned by an agricultural investor who
cultivates it with the help of hired labor), actually created a rural underclass whose members
were just as miserable as their urban counterparts.
By 1750 the outlines of the five continents were largely mapped, thanks to the great sea
voyages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet many of the inland parts of the world
remained unexplored, at least by Western travelers. The American West, most of central
Africa and Australia, and considerable parts of central Asia, were blank spaces on the eigh­
teenth-century map. By the end of the nineteenth century, not only had these territories been
mapped, but many of them had also been made accessible by roads or railways.
Increased mobility and communications helped several European nations to extend their
grip over the rest of the world, leading to the colonization of substantial parts of Africa and
South Asia. Although highly profitable for Europe, colonization seriously destabilized the
world and set the stage for many of the political and economic problems that plague us even
in the twenty-first century.
People's lives changed greatly during the period under discussion. Thanks to dramatic
improvements in medical science, notably in the area of infant care, the world population
nearly doubled, from about 800 million in 1750 to 1,550 minion in 1900. In Europe during
this time the population almost tripled, increasing from 140 to 390 million, and in Britain it
increased more than five-fold, from 6 minion in 1750 to 33 million in 1900. Moreover, owing
to better nutrition, men and women grew taller, notably in Europe and America, where the
average height increased by several centimeters.
Radical changes took place in people's daily living. In the eighteenth century candles and
oil lamps were the only modes of il1umination available, both inside the house and on the
streets. By 1900 gas lighting was widely used, and electrical light, though not common, was
certainly an option for those who could afford it. In many homes, cast-iron stoves had replaced

14 Introduction
open fireplaces and the rich even had central (coal) heating. Nonetheless, as late as 1900
most homes were still sparsely heated and people wore heavy clothing, even in their parlors
and bedrooms.
In 1750 a man's suit or woman's dress was entirely handmade, from the spinning of the
yarn to the weaving of the cloth, and from the dyeing and printing of the fabric to the stitch­
ing of the seams and hems. Only the wealthy could afford a wardrobe of more than a few
garments. Ordinary people usually had one or two outfits, which they would wear for a life­
time and then, if they were not threadbare, pass on to their children. In contrast, by 1900,
men and women bought mass-produced clothes in department stores; fashions, especially for
women, changed regularly (as our study of late nineteenth-century painting will clearly demon­
strate). Clothes were worn for a few years, then discarded. Such "consumerism" was the result
of the development of the mechanized production of cloth, as well as the invention of the
sewing machine, both of which made it possible to mass-produce clothes at affordable prices.
In 1750 ordinary people had no input whatsoever into how or by whom they were gov­
erned. By 1900, in most western European countries as well as the United States, adult males
had the right to vote in national and local elections, whatever their social and economic sta­
tus. The social position of women, before 1750 in all respects inferior to that of men, slowly
improved during the nineteenth century, largely through increased access to education. By
1900, however, women still lacked most of the rights and privileges of men. Despite a long
and fierce struggle, women's suffrage remained the exception rather than the rule, and women
continued to be excluded from public office and many jobs.
In 1750 serfdom was the condition of most peasants in eastern Europe, and it remained so
until 1861, when it was officially abolished. Concurrently, in North America, slavery was an
accepted practice; workers imported from Africa formed a cheap and reliable labor force in
the Southern tobacco plantations. While objections were raised against slavery from the mid­
eighteenth century, the number of slaves actually increased over the next hundred years, as
tobacco was supplanted by cotton, which required an ever-larger supply of workers. By the
outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 some 4 million men, women, and children lived
in slavery. Although they were granted freedom by the Thirteenth Constitutional Amend­
ment of 1865, their social and economic condition, like that of the serfs in Russia, had not
greatly improved by 1900.

Labeling

In history, the period under discussion is considered a part of the so-called modern period.
Historians distinguish between early modern, beginning with the Renaissance in the sixteenth
century and ending about 1750, and modern proper, which begins in the middle of the eigh­
teenth century and ends with World War 11. Early modern is associated with the birth of
"modern" science, the beginnings of capitalism, and the ascent of the middle class. Modern
proper is known for expanding technology and the mechanization of production processes,
the triumph of capitalism and the middle class, and the rise of democracy. Yet perhaps the
modern period's most important characteristic is a powerful belief in progress, a sense that,
with the help of science and technology, humankind has the power continually to improve
the world.
In art history, although the term "modern" is widely used, its significance in terms of dates
is less precise. Modern art has been said to have begun in the early, the mid-, or even the late
nineteenth century, and some even place its birth in the early twentieth century. Its end has
been assigned with equal vagueness somewhere between the end of World War II and the
year 2000.
The problem is that the term "modern" is used quite differently in the language of the arts
from the way it is used in history. When it was first heard as an artistic term, in the seven­
teenth century, "modern" meant the opposite of "classic." While "classic" referred to an art
that was bound by the artistic rules and absolute criteria of beauty that had been established
in ancient Greece and Rome, "modern" signified a relative (though by no means complete)

Introduction 15
 freedom from these canonical precepts. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
"modern" came to be associated with the art of the Christian Middle Ages (as opposed to
"pagan" antiquity), which, in its disregard of naturalism and its lack of a single aesthetic ideal,
was felt to embody the freedom and sentiment that Classical art lacked.
A new meaning of "modern" developed by the mid-nineteenth century, however, when
the term came to mean both "at odds with tradition, free of rules" and "of its own time." A
freshly coined noun, "modernity," came to signify the desire to be different not only from
anything that had come before, but also from the norms set by middle-class taste. Moder­
nity suggested the celebration of originality and rebellion against established values. It also
came to be associated with the ever-increasing pace of change in the nineteenth century,
which made the period, to those who lived in it, seem impermanent and in flux. The French
poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who was in large measure responsible for introduCing
the term "modernity," wrote:

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. The half of art, of which the
other half is the eternal and immutable ... Woe unto him who seeks in antiquity
anything other than pure art, logiC, and general method. By plunging too deeply in
the past, he loses sight of the present; he renounces the values and privileges provided
by circumstances, for almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time
imprints upon our feelings.

To be "modern" in the Baudelairean sense was to be original by being completely in and of

one's own time.
If one defines modernity in art broadly as the desire to break with the artistic past, then
"modernism," a term coined at the end of the nineteenth century, is a trend marked by the
urge to forge ahead into uncharted artistic territory. Modernism thus is the art of the avant­
garde, the front line of artists, who consider themselves the "soldiers" of the new, forever
exploring unbeaten paths.
It has been claimed by some that modernism began in the late eighteenth century, when
the Neoclassical artists dissented from the earlier art of the Rococo period. However, Neo­
classical art recalled the art of Classical antiquity, which itself was the antithesis of the notion
of modern. Romanticism, the next major phase in nineteenth-century art, has a greater claim
to modernity, since it not only rose against the art of the previous generation but was also
inherently anti-Classical. Baudelaire called Romantic art "modern," associating it with "inti­
macy, spirituality, color, aspiration toward the infinite, expressed by all means available to
the arts." Yet in spite of these seemingly modernist and certainly anti-Classical tendencies,
many Romantic artists professedly sought inspiration in the art of the past, and their subject
matter, more often than not, was derived from history, the Bible, or historical literature.
Many contemporary art historians credit the next generation, the Realists, with having
produced the first truly modern artists. Realism's leader, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who
was a close friend of Baudelair~, wrote: 'The true artists are those who pick up their age exactly
at the point to which it has been carried by previous times. To go backward is to do noth­
ing, to waste effort, to have neither understood nor profited from the lessons of the past."
Courbet refused to paint historical, mythological, or religious subject matter, claiming that
he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. And he felt it was an artist's duty
"always to begin working afresh, always in the present."
The painter Edouard Manet (1832-1883), thirteen years younger than Courbet, took the
latter's ideas one step further. Not only did he reject traditional subject matter, but he also
flouted the notion that a work of art should present a credible illusion of reality. Acknowl­
edging the fact that a painting or a sculpture is an artificial "construct" that can at best only
approximate to reality, he claimed that artists should create paintings and sculptures accord­
ing to their own rules rather than those sanctioned by centuries-old conventions ostensibly
aimed at "imitating nature." Manet set into motion a trend away from "make-believe" in art
that, by 1910, would culminate in the total rejection by artists of any "recognizable" forms,
in paintings and sculptures that we now call "abstract" or "non-objective." Of course, the gap

16 Introduction
between Manet's art, which still presents a convincing image of reality, and the completely
non-objective works of a Vasili Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian was not closed easily. The bridge
between them was built by Manet's followers-the Impressionists and the Post-Impression­
ists. They gradually advanced the idea that a work of art is an autonomous entity that may
refer to reality but that is first and foremost an object "created" by an artist. Or, as the late
nineteenth-century artist Maurice Denis put it: "It is well to remember that a picture-before
being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote-is essentially a plane surface cov­
ered with colors in a certain order."

Plots and Subplots

The gradual shift from an art aimed at the imitation of nature to an art asserting its charac­
ter of "artifice" is an important plot of the story of nineteenth-century art, but it is by no
means the only one. As we shall see in the following chapters, there are many parallel plots
as well as subplots. These include: the changing ideas about the function of art and, relat­
edly, about the appropriate choice of subject matter; the shifting relation between the artist
and his public; the evolution of artists' attitudes toward nature; Western fascination with non­
Western art forms in the wake of expanding trade and colonization; and the impact on art of
new technologies (glass and iron in architecture, paint in tubes, gaslight in the studio, etc.).
Together these various plots and subplots make for a multi-threaded storyline, which, in turn,
is enriched by the interweaving of the stories of individual artists' lives. It is this richly tex­
tured story that is told in the following pages.

Introduction 17