Daniel Ridgway Knight was an odd American artist who loved to paint relaxed French peasants in luscious landscapes. Ironically, he lived during a stressful time when the Industrial Revolution displaced numerous farmers and polluted the environment. He seemed to ignore the harsh truth and shut himself in his imaginary serene world. For instance, In the Premier Chagrin, translated as The First Grief, Knight paints two healthy girls conversing on a stone wall in front of gorgeous fields. At first, it appears as merely a pretty painting that is nicely contrasted to show depth and realism. Yet, with a closer look, this contrast in the colors and lines of the landscape and the figures creates tension to suggest the painter’s conflict between longing for serene freedom and feeling trapped within the stiff society.
-In the 1700’s a new middle class emerged. Mass print became a thing as well. Every day people started to purchase art works to display in their homes. It was a way for them to express their status and national patriotism. The diversity in patrons had a great impact on the arts of the 15th – 18th centuries. With new patrons and the demand for art work, artists were able to capture more than just religious scenes. They were able to create landscapes and everyday life in their work. Artists were commissioned by the new middle class to create art work that they were able to hang in their houses. For instance, artist Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting “A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrey (1765).”
In this selection of the book, Gitlin discusses a seventeenth-century Dutch painter by the name of Vermeer. Vermeer was known for being able to”fr[ee]ze instants, but instants that spoke of the relative constancy of the world in which his subjects lived” (Gitlin 558). People collected Vermeer’s paintings for display throughout their homes. Gitlin sees Vermeer as the seventeenth-century version of the media. In that time, the images painted were relative to the people’s era and private world. In today’s world Vermeer would be the equivalent to a celebrity photographer or movie director. If Vermeer, or any other artist of his time, were to see today’s households, they would find that the once private space inside the home is now much more dominated by images of the outside world than what would have been possible in the 1600’s.
One of the most significant similarities between O’Keeffe and van Gogh is in the use of their art to advocate for the enfranchisement of the forgotten and the excluded. Nowhere is this more apparent than in van Gogh’s frequent portrayal of peasants
In Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fire Place, there is a great amount of value. For example, there is darkness around her nose and cheeks. This darkness symbolizes a dark cloud hanging over her, like she has shame and wretchedness sticking with her. Another example is the darkness around the edges of the painting. This darkness is like an arch around the peasant woman. By creating this distribution of value, Van Gogh creates a murky feeling. Van Gogh’s main purpose for this distribution of value was to create an overall feeling for the audience, a feeling that would have the audience sense the challenging and depressing moments of peasants and lower class. The richness of the darkness helps the audience deeply feel the emotions of the peasant. There is also a hint of lightness in this artwork. The fire she is cooking on acts as the main light in the peasants living area. The fire lights up her face and hands, as well as behind the sitting
Throughout Cultural Perspectives, many influential texts have been read, analyzed, and discussed. One text, Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, integrates the thoughts of quite a few authors that have been discussed this semester. Through employing a Marxist view of history—there are always the “haves” and the “have-nots”—one can see that Life in the Iron Mills exemplifies the struggles that face many “have-not” citizens throughout history. One can then see the clear connections to various authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and Adam Smith.
Have you ever looked at a piece of art and wondered how it could be based on real life, because it was just so beautiful? Well Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was able to paint in such new and exciting ways; people were left wondering just this. Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was a woman of many talents. In her life time she came up with new ways of painting, revolutionized fashion in France, and overcame any prejudice thinking because she was a woman. Before dying at the age of eighty-seven, she had gained the respect of women and men all across the world. Being a female artist in the eighteenth century was not easy, especially when you had to keep a career and your life together during the
As the monarchy attempted to squeeze the city and its people into obedience, they effectively squeezed the “life” out of the middle and lower classes. The world is dark and lifeless. Everything is gray scale to symbolize the strict adherence to the new censorship laws and the removal of liberty and freedom. The artists are the only people who inhabit any locations of color. Even though the law of the lands has changed, them seem to be unaffected by them, despite a lack of work. The color symbolizes the freedom, imagination, and artistic spirit that is still very much alive in them. While they navigate the very rich web of drama around them, the world is in a sort of rigid time warp where every must get in line with the monarchy or face the
In a society where judgement and rank define us as humans, I was intrigued by Victor Hugo’s opposing proposal on his definition of class. In researching this idea, I ran across numerous causes for the placement of class in a nineteenth century society. In trying to intertwine them all, I stumbled, thus causing me to lose my original purpose of my research. However, after countless circles in place, I finally came across the primary purpose, the commencing factor for all the underlying causes. During this time of despair and anguish there was a luminosity or rather said: industrialization. This idea of industrialization brought about revision and adversity during this time period. Leading me to suspect that perhaps the definition of class deviates from the industrialization in nineteenth century France.
Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was becoming the world’s hub for art innovators; a place that is widely regarded as the birthplace of modern art. Artists of all disciplines, from sculptors to musicians, made their way to this city to pursue their passions in a community of like-minded and passionate individuals. These artists came from all over the world, in a time before the world was made flat with commercial aviation. Once they arrived, they often found themselves in suboptimal living conditions, sometimes even lacking running water. Despite these obstacles, Montmartre, a hillside neighborhood on the north bank of Paris, managed to draw an impressive artistic crowd, and would eventually foster the birth of
The mid 1800’s in France was truly a period for challenging arising issues in the midst a great change. Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and-Jean Francois Millet’s The Gleaners, are two paintings that use the style of realism to convey a unique perspective of the reality around them. (subjects, brush stroke, background)
Pastoral and country settings are featured in countless paintings that hang in museums across the world, however, not many of them were as rule-breaking, revolutionary, and inspiring at their initial exhibitions as Édouard Manet’s (ca. 1832 - 1883) Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (1862 – 1863) and Henri Matisse’s (ca. 1869 - 1954) Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905– 1906) had been. In Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (see fig 1), Manet painted a nude woman in a sensual country setting to challenge the idea of what the female nude is to be in art. Le Déjeuner is a Realism work and in concert with its subject, was a cause scandal which left
In this short written assignment, I will analyze two paintings - View form my window, Eragny-sur- Epte by R, Camille Pissarro and Harvest at la Crau by L. Vincent van Gogh- that have a similar theme- rural life, as I explore the color, the composition and the main painting objects of the two pantings. and state how the two paintings speak differently to my sense.
As art practices evolved during the 19th and 20th centuries, the elite of society became an object of criticism and obscurity as subject matter, whereas the working class began to appear in artworks in a more open and positive light. This shift in artworks depicting the working class in favor of aristocracy is clear in the analysis of three different periods, with the works of three different artists: Jean-François Millet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vera Mukhina. Millet depicts the working class forthright in his works, such as The Gleaners (1857); he focuses on the futility of labor and the conditions of the emerging middle class in reaction to the extravagance and leisure of the aristocracy around him. Renoir utilizes an Impressionistic style to depict the working class neighborhood and surroundings he lives in; in paintings such as Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), he exposes the leisurely lifestyle of the working class and their integration into the rest of society. The working class could now intermix with the aristocracy in a way that had never before been plausible. Mukhina, however, like other Socialist Realist artists, represents the working class in her sculpture Worker and Collective Farm Girl (1937) as a powerful and driving force; in the piece, noticeably absent is any reference to the elite in society. Marking a great departure from earlier representations of the working class, Mukhina places the worker front and center in a positive light. Together, these
Queen Victoria oversaw the most prosperous era in British history. However while this greatly benefited the upper and upper-middle classes, it did not do so much to improve the lives of the working class. One glance at the clothes of the people in Fildes’s painting is all it takes to see that: people in ragged, tattered