A refreshing debunking of the "photography killed painting" myth that highlights the sophisticated synergy between technology and academic rigor. It correctly identifies that true artistic evolution stems from shifting sensibilities rather than mere technical shortcuts.
Install our extension to search inside any video instantly.
How Photography Changed Painting Forever
Added:In 1893, a critic looked at one of the most admired painters in Europe and called his life's work quote but colored photographs. Soulless, mechanical, essentially just slop. And here's the thing, I actually agreed with that criticism. I just thought that I was the one who came up with it first. You see, I've always held what seems to be a contradictory opinion. I don't really like photorealism. the lime lips and the hyperrealistic Walter White drawings with every pore on his face rendered or with honey dripping down it for some reason. You can copy a photo exactly and at the end of it all you've got is the same photo that you started with.
There's no transformation, no personality, nothing of you in it, which is a bit awkward because I paint realism for a living. But the realism that I love from painters like Jules Bastion Lage does the opposite. They're strikingly realistic from across the room. And then once you get up close, it dissolves into textures and abstraction and color choices that are so inventive that you keep coming back to look again and again. And here's the strange thing about Bastian Lage. In his own lifetime, he was one of the most celebrated painters in the world. But today, almost nobody has heard of his name. So I went digging for what critics of the 19th century actually thought of the painters that I love while those artists were still alive. The 1893 article is the camera the friend or foe of art put it like this. The school leastian labage undoubtedly has been largely influenced by the camera. Its presentations of facts are often but colored photographs to all intents and purposes. Whether the artist used the lens or not matters little. He saw the nature with the unloving eye of the camera and deliberately noted fact after fact, detail after detail, much in the same mechanical way. True, like a modern art photographer, he has thrown the hole a little out of focus, blurred the outlines, modified the harsh tones of the negative, touched up the bare facts, but all the same, he has blackened his shadows, reveled in local textures, and played the game of the camera in color.
The photograph gives them the super abundance of worthless detail, which they love. The masses now prize statistics, measurements, and textures more than abstract beauty, color harmonies, or decorative composition.
And to satisfy their desires for the former, the camera is always ready and capable. Yeah, it turns out that I've actually never had an original thought in my life. And it's not just that one critic. Even in the 1892 book, Modern Realism in Painting, Walter Siger echoes the exact same criticisms about Bastian Leage. That photo realism lacks any individual personality. One characteristic of the work of the modern photorealist in painting is that almost any of them could have painted a portion of the work of any other without making any appreciable discord of execution apparent. Something about hearing the words photo realist all the way back in 1892 hits different, especially when it's the same criticism that I have for some painters, but uno reversed onto my favorite painter. Nowadays, photography is rarely mentioned among the great painters of the 19th century. But clearly, by the 1890s, people were already calling painters who used it slap. Art at the beginning of the 19th century looked like this. And by the end of it, it looked like this. Something huge happened right at the time that photography was invented. And Bastian Laage, the painter that I started with, was right in the middle of it. His reputation got swept up in whatever that huge thing was. And I don't think the fact that we forgotten about him is a coincidence. That sent me down a rabbit hole that was much deeper than I could have ever possibly imagined. Did the camera actually kill painting? The answer to that question is a lot more complicated than what is usually presented. I want to show you that photography actually integrated into painting far more naturally than anyone admits. That the idea that great painters just traced photos falls apart the second you understand how these artists were really trained. and that realism's real killer was something else entirely. And what I found through this research completely changed how I saw this entire era. But to get there, we have to go back to the beginning, 1839.
Now, the history of photography is massive, and I want to focus on painting here. So, I'll leave the more complicated scientific developments to people who are far more qualified than me. But, we do need to start in 1839 because that's when Louie Degair invented the Darioype. You see, we'd known about photosensitive materials for some time. Surfaces that when you expose them to light could be imprinted, but the hard part was fixing those images, getting them to stop developing.
Otherwise, any more light and the image would just fade away. That's what the darioype solved. And the darioype was pure magic. Other forms of photography were invented around the same time, but darioypes were incredibly clear, focused, and detailed. They were beautifully lifelike. After inventing it, Dair gave up the patent rights to the French government in exchange for a lifelong pension. One of the greatest artists and most prominent teachers of the time, Paul Delar Ro, served on the committee to decide whether or not to grant this pension to Degrare. Delar Ro is that guy. You might know him from one of his most famous paintings, the execution of Lady Jane Gray. He inherited the studio of Grow, a classmate of Angra under their teacher, Jacqului Davidid, who drastically reformed the French art education system in the late 18th century. That's a topic that I covered in my video, The Internet is Obsessed with [music] Fake Art History. So, Delar Ro is certainly the artist to consult on the merits of the Darioype. And on that topic, he said, "From today, painting is dead." Well, actually, that quote's very famous, but when you look into the source, he probably never said it, which is unfortunate because it's it's a really fun quote. The source does go all the way back to a book published in 1874, but that was almost 20 years after his death. And it runs contrary to something that we do know. He said his official report to the government in which he stated, "Dger's process completely satisfies all the requirements of art and carries so far the perfection of certain of its essential conditions that it will become even for the most skillful painters a subject of observation and study. Staring into an image like this in the early 19th century must have completely shattered your view of [music] the world, especially as an artist. Even the basic idea that time only ever flows forward gets challenged by a still image of the past you can hold in your hands. Before photography, no one had ever seen a relative who died before they were born.
And suddenly you could. Delar Ro certainly recognized that merit, though it's unclear whether he used photography at all in the remaining 17 years of his life. He was already a fully cooked academic artist, and I imagine he wouldn't have found as much use for it as the younger generation would. The author of Paul Delar Ro history painted argues that his work shifted from prephotography paintings like Lady Jane Gay to postphotography paintings like the young [music] martyr towards a range of lights and darks that mirror a darioype much more closely. And regardless of whether he used it himself, it's impossible not to be shaped by the 17 years of photography's cultural impact between 1839 and his death in 1856. If it was your view that photography killed the need for realist painting, then the single most famous quote proving [music] that from today painting is dead is most likely not true. And the idea that the camera was an instant death sentence for painting is something that we mostly just wrote in hindsight. When you're dealing with a research or creative project that involves keeping track of lots of different artists, links, and images, you need to stay organized. That's why I use Milanote, the sponsor of this video, to organize my artistic reference boards and keep on track of all of my project planning. A lot of people ask me how to get into art history and painting. And I think that collecting art is essential to that, even if it's just digitally. I can go into the naturalist painters board I put together while researching some of the artists for this video and see all the paintings I've saved, which makes me feel really inspired to paint.
There's tons of templates to help you get started, too. On my main project board here, I have tables to keep track of all of my books. I got links so I can get back to them. And one of my favorite things about Milanote is their web clipper extension. I can rightclick and save to Milanote from anywhere on the internet. And then choose the board I want to send it to. Now, when I come back to my project, it's tagged with the source of where I found it, which is essential for me because I regularly lose hours of time trying to find the source of a painting because I accidentally closed a tab without saving the link. It's difficult for my artist ADHD brain to keep track of all the different ideas I come up with. So, making simple to-do list and then getting to check all the boxes really keeps me productive, not just in researching, but in my personal and daily life as well. And all boards are sharable, so you can collaborate in real time. Just drop your friend a link.
[music] If you want to start organizing your creative projects, you can sign up to Milanote for free with no time limit by clicking the link in the description below. Delar Rosha's accepting attitude towards the changing times must have rubbed off on his students because much of the first generation of great photographers came straight out of his studio or Ailier. Roger Fenton, Enri Luck, Gustav Lra, and Charles Negra. All of them started out as painters, but their painting was completely overshadowed by their careers behind the camera. The first photographers weren't paintings rivals. They were painters.
The camera didn't show up as an invading force from outside of the art world.
Photography was extremely difficult at the time. The people who had the artistic knowledge and the time required were artists. In the 1840s, new types of photography were introduced, letting artists capture images not on the polished metal plates of a degarotype, but directly onto paper. And this let Charles Negra develop strikingly modern mixed media workflows, compositing several photographs onto a panel and then painting directly over it. He exhibited one of them at the 1853 salon, the organ grinder. And as a side note, I wondered why it was called an organ grinder instead of an organ player.
Well, that's actually because these barrel organs were pre-programmed with music. All you had to do was just turn the crank on the side. It was a task more akin to grinding coffee. Many major cities had banned begging. So, as a legal loophole, people would buy a cheaper barrel organ. And now they had something to perform for tips or donations. And these performers even frequently had pet monkeys that would go around and collect the money from all the onlookers. So this painting or photo is an example of a genre scene, a depiction of everyday life. In Negro's work especially, that meant usually lowerass and workingclass individuals like this famous photo of child chimney sweepers walking to work. The organ grinder was made only a few years after Corb's ever so famous stone breakers painting which is a hallmark of realist art history. and Milles who also was a student of Del Ro. The gleaners would follow soon after in 1857. It seems that photography itself was fundamentally entwined with the realist art movement at the time. Though this is a bit of a chicken in the egg situation on whether photography caused any of this since this was also a period of massive social change and workers uprisings against the monarchy in France and also the subsequent quashing of that. I couldn't find any lasting critiques of Negra's painting for the salon and I think it was really largely overlooked because to me honestly it's a pretty unimpressive painting. Although one of the writers for the world's first photography journal, La Lumiere wrote about this painting. Photography and long travels do not make Monsur Negra in LC forget their brushes. We have found in the organ grinder of the former those qualities of color that have been long noted in him, united with a frankness of style and suppleness of execution. But any glowing review from La Lumiere should be taken with a grain of salt. It was created by the society helioraphic a society of photographers of which Charles Negra was a founding member.
There are even reviews from the journal likening Negrade to Mason and to comps to extremely famous and skilled military painters of the time. It's like seeing a glowing puff piece of Jeff Bezos on the front cover of the Washington Post.
There's just too much of an incestuous connection to take any of those reviews seriously. Another founding member of the society helioraphik was Julian Valor de Villanuv who had a long career as a painter and a lithographer before the invention of the camera. He was born back in 1795 and he made his debut in the salon of [music] 1814. But at the age of 47 he took up photography and it quickly grew to overshadow the rest of his artistic career. His trade was selling nude images of models for artists to use as references. Selling nude images was strictly illegal at this time, but there was an exception for images made as artist studies. These were calledmies. Julian Valul de Vilanu, I'm just going to call him Julian from now on, was one of the most famous sellers of thesemies. These photos were a serious legal gray area, and the photographers knew that. One photographer, Felix Jacques Mulin, was convicted and jailed for a month for his nudes. The police said that the images were so obscene that to even pronounce the titles would be to commit an indecency. So while painters did use images for genuine compositional work, it was also an erotic gray market at the same time. It seems Julian was introduced to Corb sometime in the 1850s. In 1855, while working on his massive canvas, the painter studio, Corb wrote to his patron, Alfred Buyus, urging him to send that photograph of a nude woman about which I've spoken to you. She will be behind the chair in the middle of my painting. We don't have that exact photo, but researchers have found this one by Julian along with many others of the exact same model who's believed to be the woman in Corb's painting. And we do have the presumed reference for the central figure of Corb's The Bathers in 1853, another Julian photo. This work was received very negatively as it was rendered with a more honest or photographic sense of realism. Rather than idealizing the woman to look like the godlike statue of Venus, the critic Goautier wrote in La Pra, "A kind of Venus getting out of the water and towards a spectator a monstrous rump with padded dimples at the bottom." The realist artists were pushing societal norms by showcasing natural body types. And it's certainly possible that Corb's view of the world was shaped or altered by photography, but he also pushed the forms of this figure far beyond anything in this photograph. He made many notable changes to deviate from it. And this, believe it or not, is really the quiet part of photography's history. As soon as photography became available, plenty of artists were quick to start using it.
And the press wasn't overly critical of the impact on painting during this time.
Some critics detested the realists for showcasing the working class on the same scale reserved for mythological figures.
But those critiques were largely about the substance of the work, not their methods. The same who critiqued Corbed Jean Leon Jerome's the death of Caesar in 1858 and claimed never has an historical scene seemed more real. If photography had been known in the days of Caesar, we might think that the painting had been done from a print made on the spot at the very moment of the catastrophe. And funny enough, Jerome, also a student of Del Ro, took a trip to Algeria in the 1850s. And [music] with him, he brought along his friend Frederick Barldi. Barldi was a painter, a sculptor, photographer, but I think it's worth stopping and saying that he just wasn't any sort of sculptor. Barli made the Statue of Liberty. And so on this trip to Algeria, he brought with him a camera. Bringing a camera along for some sort of light travel photography was no easy feat in the 1850s. Photos had to be developed on the spot, which meant hauling around a stash of dangerous chemicals and a portable dark room. It's why traveling photographers lugged around a whole wagon full of supplies. Several of the photos Baldi took would show up in Jerome's paintings years later, like the ancient ruins in the backgrounds of this one, or the setting of the horse dealer in this one. Still, while photography was certainly being used at this time, I don't believe that projecting and tracing was common among the academic painters at all. I think these were actually fully redrawn. The images are often modified, and the painters of this generation were masters of perspective and drafting. These were essential skills at the time. So, photography was commonly used as a memory aid, an occasional reference alongside the much more frequent practice of live models.
It's very important to make it clear that there's a huge difference between an artist who's trained their entire life to paint these large-scale narrative works using a photograph to help them remember foreign environments or complex details and an amateur painter just tracing a photograph with no understanding. There were some rumblings about the potential hazards of photography at this time though, like in a poet and art critic Charles Spar's review of the 1859 salon. If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted and corrupted art all together. And it's important to note there that Bilair is specifically saying photography is not art [music] and that if it's allowed to intermingle too much, it'll corrupt art and take its place. He continues, "Since the photographic industry was a refuge for all failed painters, those too poorly gifted or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal craze bore not only the mark of blindness and imbeicility, but also a tinge of revenge. He also believed photography was responsible for the growing impoverishment of French artistic genius." Now, while Baldair was extreme in his view, and I want to make it clear, I really don't agree with him at all, he was prophetic. photography really would infiltrate what we consider art. And while the 1850s and 60s were a slow simmer, by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, the question of how photography would change painting forever erupted into a full boil. And that's where I need to introduce the painter that I started with, Jules Bastion Leage. Leage was a nobody from a very small town called Dumviier in northern France. It was a very agricultural way of life with much of the population being basically a peasant class. But this was a time of great social change in France. Bastian's father taught him how to draw and somehow he got good enough to be admitted to the aldar in Paris in 1867 under the studio of Cabanel. [music] Right away the French AKL archives show him taking first place in a evening drawing class as early as 1868. And then the [music] artistic trail for Bastion goes dark for a few years. But that's when something incredible happens. In 1874, Bastian emerges in the salon with a portrait of his grandfather painted in the garden of his family's home. And it's a truly unique portrait. Not because it's shockingly realistic, which it is, but because of how that realism is pulled off. If you look at the realist of the prior generation, like Corb, they're realist in the sense that they don't try to stylize people like the idealized Greek gods like Davidid or Angra did. But there's still very little of Corb that's actually realistic. His work almost feels cartoonish at times.
And what's especially lacking is color accuracy. So there are really two different things hiding behind the word realism. Corb was a realist in his subjects. Ordinary people instead of gods and kings. But Bastion was a realist in a second way too. His paintings actually look the way that the world looks to your eye. When we compare Corb to Bastion's portrait of his grandfather, the difference in realism is striking. There's no dramatic kiosk, the theatrical split of bright light and deep shadows. Everything sits in a soft, diffuse, overcast light, which is one of the hardest things in the world to paint. And the color is extraordinary. A range of greens and yellows and blues, all held within impossibly narrow, subtle shifts of light and dark. And it was wellreceived, too. He won a third class medal for it in the salon. Bestian spent only three years training at the AKL and before that he only studied with his dad. But in that one portrait, he unveiled something that would go on to define an entire movement of art. One that would become so dominant in the art [music] world that in less than a couple decades, it would be seen as the status quo. And because of that reign, one that has been swept under the rug and forgotten about. [music] And this is where things would start to get a bit more photographic. In 1875, Bastian debuted the communicant at the salon, a portrait of his 12-year-old cousin at her [music] first communion, and it bears Bastian's usual spectacular naturalistic rendering. Now, this is a painting where you'll sometimes hear the accusation that Bastian traced a photograph. [music] That's what the museum Dorsay says on its website. A first communion was often the single occasion a poor family would ever sit for a photo. So, it's not crazy to imagine that this [music] might have been painted from that photo. And this is where I should quickly introduce a name that's going to come up a lot later. Gabriel Weissberg, the art historian who wrote the definitive book on this era of painters and what the Dorsay cites as their source for their claim of photographic intervention. Now, there's a small detailed preliminary drawing for the communicant at the Met.
And Weisberg writes that it focuses its attention on [music] Bastion's methodology, the size of a glass plate negative, 10 by 8 in. In other words, the drawing is the size of a photographic plate. So Bastion must have been working from a photo. But here's the problem. 10x8 isn't actually a standard glass plate size. So the whole inference doesn't really hold up. A full glass plate was 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 in, which is also a different aspect ratio. And notice that it's the study that's that size. [music] A small preparatory sketch, not the painting itself, which is 21 by 15 in. The charcoal and paper stump that were used to make this are the tools that almost every drawing study was made with during this time as well. To me, having a careful charcoal study actually points against tracing.
It's exactly the traditional process every artist used to make a painting. If Bastion was tracing a photograph here, I find it unlikely that he would have made a full drawing study first since that does the exact same thing that the photograph already has. A drawing is to plan out your proportions or to look at your big values. The photograph solves all of that for you. It's just redundant. And that takes us to Bestian's next salon appearance in 1878, where he exhibited one of the most important paintings of his career, haymaking. Here we have two exhausted laborers resting in a field staring off into the distance with almost a shell shocked look on their faces. It's less of a romantic idealization that you might see in a mle and more of an honest look on the hardships of being a laborer. One that could only come from Bastien, someone who had grown up surrounded by this. And it has all to the trademarks of a great Bastian painting. Brushy, sharp foreground elements like this grass and can with beautiful accents of color, deeply lielike central figures, and a background that melts into pure abstraction. And critical reception for this painting was overwhelmingly positive. Castier described it as plan air at its best and most correct, later declaring, "Nothing will be impossible for him." Another critic said, "All is right. All is true. All is admirably drawn. All is superiorly painted. When we consider that there is no string or no hoax in this painting, we are amazed by the frankness of his talent. Some critics commended Bastian for exaggerating the exhaustion of the female worker in order to emphasize the realities of peasant labor. This notion that critics commended Bastian's realism while also appreciating his ability to deviate to enhance the narrative will become a very important topic for discussion later because I haven't forgotten about photography. There's just a lot of context to get through here and almost no one ever talks about this stuff. And when all this stuff gets skipped for the sake of brevity, it essentially becomes forgotten. Haymaking was based on a poem by Theo and alongside it, Bastion exhibited a portrait of Theo himself. about that.
One critic wrote, "Here is realism in the best sense of the word, an intelligent and sagacious realism which is not content to photograph the surface of things. A sincere and true art that develops freely and boldly in the sense of the temperament and personality of the artist." And this is a very interesting comment because it's the first time we've seen someone be this dismissive of photography since Bolair's prediction of what was to come. [music] is saying that Bastienne rises above photography, even in his portraits, [music] by capturing the feeling and spirit of the subject, not just the surface, which if you'll remember is the exact same thing that I was praising Bastion for back in the intro. He's realistic, but he's not just a copious.
Those are two things that often get conflated, but they're very different.
And once Bastian started to have critical successes, he could just not stop winning. He was like the Tiger Woods of the late 19th century salon.
The year after haymaking, Bastion exhibits the potato gatherers, another massive painting on the same theme. Emil Zola, an extremely influential author and critic, deemed the artist nearly the grandson of Corb and Malay. The influence of impressionist painters is also obvious. And that's a perfect summary of what Bastian's work was.
Realist subjects painted honestly and without idealization combined with the impressionist love of immediacy, spontaneity, and color accuracy. And notably, Bestian also finds space to fit in the influence of the academics like his teacher Cabinell. This reminded me of a quote I read a long time ago from the French critic Henri Usay in 1882.
Impressionism earns every form of sarcasm when it takes the name Manet, Monet, Renoir, Kaibat, and Dega. And every honor when it's called Bastian, Laage, Duj, Jer, Bombard, Dan, Bhutin, Jean Burad, and Dany Bau. Unfortunately, some of those names have been lost [music] to time. I think we can we can see who the winners really were. And Bastian absolutely was an impressionist.
When you look at the color accuracy of his work, it's clear that he values painting and planer and painting the truth of what he sees above all else.
These are markedly impressionist traits.
But there's clearly something that also differentiates him from the likes of Monae or Manet. And that difference is the movement Bastian unintentionally pioneered. Naturalism. In plain terms, it's when you take the impressionist obsession with light and color and combine it with realism's subjects, which were ordinary people in real life, and you back it with a full technical polish of the academic training. Realist subjects with the impressionistic eye and academic skill. This is what Bastian Leage's naturalism was. It's probably one of the most overlooked and forgotten art movements in history. You won't find it in AP or even in most college art history curriculums. And this is the moment in my research that I realized that the story of photography is so entwined with academic realist and impressionist painting that it's impossible to tell the story without first understanding one of the great forgotten movements of painting naturalism. Now the communicant gave us a circumstantial hint or two maybe but the truth is we don't have any strong proof that Bastian used photography at all even though his painting was strikingly naturalistic. If anything, we have a lot more evidence that points the other way, which I'll get to later. But the naturalist painters who followed in the footsteps of Bastion in the 1880s certainly do have far more ties to photography. And it's worth exploring that first. [music] And this is where we should introduce probably the second most important but often overlooked key figure in the naturalist movement, Pascal Dunan Boué. With Bastian, it was all circumstantial. With Dunan for the first time, we have hard proof, actual surviving photographs that he worked from. That makes him a perfect test case for the whole argument. When a great painter does use photos, what does that look [music] like? Dan and Bastion were close friends. They took trips to each other's hometowns to paint. And well, actually, I don't need to give you any more proof that they were friends than to just read this letter that Bastianne wrote to Danyan after a close family member of his died. How much must you suffer? And how much would I like to console you a little? But what could one say that would bring some solace?
[music] Is it even helpful to know that your good friends are thinking about you and that they understand your sufferings? Sufferings which are similar to those that they might have gone through. If it is solace, be assured I am one of those friends. I wish for you to grow one year older in one day. Since passing time has the privilege of leaving us only with good memories, I send you all my affection and hope that you will transmit my consolences to Madame Danyan Jules Bastion Lage. Not at all related to photography, but we're taking the scenic route here. All right.
And it's just a beautiful piece of writing. Now, Dan has a full career of great paintings, one that deserve better than being lumped in and summarized like the other painters that I mentioned in this video. But here we have to make some concessions. Being a similar age to Bastian, Dunan was a fully cooked, academically trained artist during the 70s, but he was having a more difficult time than Bastian finding his artistic voice. He was interested in modernizing realist genre painting by mixing in contemporary cultural themes like poetry, music, and literature. So in 1878, he debuted at the salon with the burial of Minan Lecott. This was based on a 18th century novel, and this painting won him a thirdass medal in the salon. and it's a real showcase of Denan's incredibly refined skill and sensitivity in painting, but Dyan's heart was pulled in a few different directions. This painting is a good example of his taste for more romantic imagery. It's quite far from a typical genre scene. So the very next year, Dan showed us his desire to bring contemporary subjects into his work with his painting, The Wedding Photographer, which is genuinely one of my favorite paintings, which to be fair, I have a lot of favorite paintings, but there's a wealth of detail and care put into this painting that makes it incredibly fun to look at. It's not just a technical portrait, it's a narrative, and more importantly, a social commentary on the then overwhelming sensation that photography had become over the last few decades. Dan is a realist painter who paints narratives about everyday life.
So just by the nature of this painting existing, we're seeing that culturally photography was massively ingrained in contemporary life, maybe even more so than painting for the lower and middle class since it was much easier to commodify. The central figures of this painting are a young couple posing for their wedding day photograph. Along [music] the side sit the presumed family of the young couple, each displaying their own range of emotions. Across the spectacularly vivid red carpet, sits perhaps the grandmother of the bride.
Holding the dress, intent on the importance that the photo comes out well. Pulling backwards in the scene, we find our photographer who fittingly has his own head masked and hidden away by the curtain of the camera. And all the way to the back of the frame, I don't even know what's happening here to be honest. You can put your own story in, but all that matters is that no matter where you look in this painting, there is a broad creative range of color choices complemented by the finest details. The precise granular rendering is saved only for the focal points of the image. While in contrast, much of the painting is actually broad and brushy in its application. Just its incredible color accuracy ties it together. And this is the exact same handling of the materials as Bastian Lage's haymaking. These are the large defining traits of naturalist painters.
The painting was wellreceived in the salon, but Danielle later recalled in a chronicle that he had gone to the salon to witness the crowd's reaction to his painting. Arriving on a busy Sunday, the painter became distressed. The people congregating in front of his work were only commenting [music] on the story, not on the way in which it had been painted. He recalled that he immediately went to speak with his teacher Jerome who told him frankly that the composition was unworthy of him and cautioned him to stop in his tracks as he was made for something else. Dan resolved going forward to produce works with more profound meaning. He found this subject didn't have a deeper spiritual meaning. It was just another incident of everyday life. But looking back, he actually captured in this painting an incredibly vivid view into 19th century living that a photograph could never. showing the power that painting had and [music] still has over photography. It's not until Dan's 1884 painting, Horses at the Watering Trough, that we first have clear evidence that the role of photography played a part in these paintings. This painting, which has all the same rustic realism that the naturalists are often known for, was extremely wellreceived in the painting, winning Danyan a legion of honor, basically being kned by the government, which is a bit strange that the government would just regularly knight painters for exhibiting good work, but whatever. For Horses at the Watering Trough, we actually have a few of the source photos used to make this painting. And while the photos we've seen so far usually show clear changes from photo to final painting, here the exact poses carry straight over. We even have another photo of an alternate pose that Daniel ended up not using. I guess still the photo is squared up. And it's worth explaining what that means here because it matters. To get a small image onto a big canvas, an artist draws a grid over their smaller drawing. Then they draw the same grid scaled up on the canvas. And then they redraw the image by hand using the squares to guide the precise placement of everything. This same technique has been used to transfer drawings to canvas since the Renaissance and maybe even before. And we can see that the poses are kept pretty much perfectly accurate to the references, although the white horse in the foreground had to have been redrawn because a significant amount of motion blur is present. One critic remarked that there are artists of rare ability, of extreme sincerity, astonishing observers, conscientious beyond anything one could imagine, who spend enormous amounts of time and lavish a superior talent to give us just the emotion a photograph would produce. Danyan is one of these well-gifted artists, and his horses at the watering trough can serve our demonstration all the better. and that his other painting, the virgin, a work in certain respects entirely debatable, troubles with us an indefinable Genesis Qua impossible to define, which is a marketkedly different reaction from the one that Basten got, a painter of similar caliber working on similar subjects, who was praised for praising his work beyond photography.
And I actually think it's a bit of a fair and balanced critique. Bastian does more to dramatize and tell the story behind the painting which is only a snapshot of time whereas Danyan's appears more like a still life. There's not a lot of meaning behind these figures. Photography is being used as a point of comparison not in the way of technique but to show the difference between a picture and something which has narrative meaning and an unspeakable quality which is Janisqua. And from this point forward, photography becomes fundamentally entwined with the process of artmaking. It was slow at first, but in the 1880s, something changed and photography became interwoven into art all at once. You can see it in Dan's 1886 painting, The Pardon in Britany, for which he traveled to Britany, which is a region of France with particularly archaic religious traditions, to observe the people there. He came back with ideas for a new painting and with many of their traditional outfits which he would use to stage the compositions [music] that he wanted. He outfitted his friends in costumes and pose them which was the traditional process for any narrative painter. But this time he photographed them as well. Dan would use these photos alongside his sketches from life to composite a full composition together integrating photography seamlessly into the process of picture making. We have photos of him working on this painting from life, which besides the composition would have constituted the bulk of the work for a painting like this because cameras didn't do color.
And that's one of the most important pieces that separates the naturalists from the realists. It's their striking color accuracy. And this is the point where I have to dig into the author that I've leaned on and also pushed back on the most so far. Gabriel Weissber, a historian I introduced earlier. He's one of the foremost scholars on dunyanad and his books against the modern beyond impressionism and the naturalist impulse have been instrumental in making these videos and I want to be fair to him.
He's a big reason why anyone remembers these painters at all. He wrote the only serious books about them and the research is genuinely very good. But he's a historian, not a painter. You can read every letter and source every quote and still have no real idea what it takes to make [music] one of these paintings. So when Weisberg hits a level of skill that he can't explain, he fills the gap the [music] way that any non-art would, that they did what they must do today, trace a photo. And because his books are the most credible academic source, that assumption gets passed straight onto the museums and into pop culture. It's a huge part of why naturalism stays underlooked, I think.
And that's the training that I've spent the last four years of my life researching and also recreating. And you can see this pattern in how he writes.
He'll scrupulously source every quote when he introduces paintings like haymaking and potato gatherers and then suddenly handwave a sentence like neither preparatory drawing nor preliminary oil sketches can account for the sense of immediacy in these works.
The only plausible explanation is that best lage had been working for the process that allowed him to photograph his models in difficult poses and then transfer the image to the canvas or on the small flag bearer drawings for Dunan's 1889 painting the conscripts.
The small drawings also introduced the possibility that the painter was working from photographic sources and then enlarging and transferring poses to the canvas. But to really understand how photography integrated into painting, we have to understand how these paintings were actually made. And that's where the tracing idea falls apart in three pieces actually. One is that these artists were trained for years to make largecale narrative paintings with a variety of different working techniques, most of which were built around speed and efficiency. For them, tracing a photo would have been the slow, clumsy way to work, not a shortcut. Two is the evidence that Weissberg leans on doesn't actually even say what he thinks it says a lot of the times. [music] One of his quotes, as we'll see, isn't even about photography. And three, even when these painters clearly did use photographs, what they were doing was referencing, not just copying. So, let's start with the first piece, which is what it takes to make a narrative painting. Thinking about making a painting on the scale of the potato gatherers, which is almost 2 m x 2 m, seems like an impossible task.
But the entire purpose of an artist's training at this time was to prepare them to make largecale paintings. The vast majority of a student's time spent studying was making 18x 24 figure drawings. That's like this one up in the background. This is actually an original drawing from the 1870s at the AOL, the same place that Danyan studied. And then they would make 32x 24-in full figure paintings like this one over here.
Frequently they would make small drawn or painted sketches too that were based off various historic or mythological scenes to test their imaginative skills.
Everything was timed and students strictly only had one week to work on each figure drawing or painting before the next pose started and they had to move on. All of this was to prepare the student for a competition called the pri roam, a series of runoff elimination trials. The first one was to make a small drawn sketch on a historical or mythological subject from their imagination. And after some runoffs, eventually the top 10 would be put into special housing where they had 72 days to complete a full 5tx4 ft painting.
It's basically the American Idol for French painters. And I managed to track down a source for this, a book from the 1880s called Local De Boar, which is a detailed firsthand account of how the school actually worked, written by a former student. And it laid out the rules for the Grand Prix to [music] Rome, right down to what that final top 10 students were allowed to bring into the housing for the final 72-day trial.
And it says specifically that bringing in outside paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, or figure studies were all strictly forbidden. And photography, interestingly, even already in 1889, is named, although certainly it wouldn't have been allowed earlier either. They weren't even allowed to bring in a mannequin that was already posed. They had to put it into a neutral pose and then bring it in to make sure they weren't smuggling in some old master poses or something. I guess both Bastian and Dan competed for the Prito Rome multiple times. And both of them were unsuccessful in their attempts despite making some truly incredible paintings. We have Dunan's 1876 [music] and 1878 attempt. And we have Bastian's 1875 and 1876 attempt. Besten's 1875 enunciation of Christ to the shepherds is of legendary status. It was heavily slated to win, but the judges decided that because he had strayed too far from the prompt by setting the enunciation at twilight instead of the dead of night, they'd give the award to Leon Kumare instead. And clearly after that, his heart was no longer in it because his submission for the final painting for the next year was whack. He got that damn Yowi head on. Bastian's typical rustic naturalism is well and alive though within these figures. We know that these artists were more than capable of producing some absolutely incredible paintings strictly without the use of photography because that was the point of their entire training. It would just be way too slow for them to be setting up special projecting lanterns and shooting photos to trace onto the canvas. Especially considering that there is no painter of this caliber that would be satisfied with any single photograph. Everything required changes in order to be optimized for [music] the composition. That's why we have lots of photographs that Dan took for his pardon in a Britney painting, but none of them really line up exactly with the final painting because these were most likely just used as memory aids, something to help him remember the way that, you know, some clothing looked or the characteristic look of a specific face or body type, but not to be just lifted and traced wholesale. So, let's get back to the idea that Dan having multiple sketches of different positions of this model is somehow evidence that he transferred and took photos and projected them. Maybe for artists as highly trained, that would just be a massive waste of time. Sure, an an artist certainly would have used a model, maybe even a photograph to make some of these sketches, but these are loose gestural exploratory sketches, the kind that really only take a handful of minutes. These artists are perfectly comfortable nudging the position of a limb here and there straight from their imagination. It was a regular practice for artists to lay tracing paper over the top of their canvas to test different positions before having to commit. You can think of it like a new Photoshop layer. Then investion would have only been hampered by having to take multiple glass plate photographs on large format camera and then developing them on the spot. Or technically since this was 1889 for this painting, the Kodak was out, but still you'd have to develop the film. It's just far slower than making a 10 or 20 minute sketch, something that these artists have been training for their entire life. So, they could make masterpieces without a camera. That was the entire point of their training. The question is just how they pulled it off. Now, the reason that Weissberg says neither preparatory drawing nor preliminary oil sketches can account for the sense of immediiacy in these works is that the model and potato gathers is supposedly in a pose too difficult to hold. But this really isn't an overly dynamic position. We have lots of examples of paintings with far more dynamic posing from much earlier and these maintain a strong sense of realism like Dante and Virgil by Bugaro. This was painted almost 30 years earlier in 1850. There's a common tendency to conflate modern ways of drawing with the past. So historians tend to assume that artists are only capable of copying what's in front of them exactly. But this is actually a more modern way of drawing. These artists were very comfortable making fast gestural sketches that capture the movement and rhythm of these dynamic poses like these sketches from Bugaro again. And when a pose is difficult to hold, often ropes would be hung from the ceiling for the model to hold onto. Or an artist would do faster sketches of a difficult position and then allow the model to just pose one part of their body, just a leg or just an arm in the correct position while the artist piece it together. And we can see in this photo of Bugaro working in a studio that the model is clinging onto a rope for support. And Bugaro's painting is far more dynamic than the actual model's pose. Artists of this time were masters of not only painting what they see, but understanding the basic forms of the figure, which allowed them to manipulate, exaggerate, and even draw from imagination. In these sketches by Emil Friant, a naturalist painter alive at the same time as Bestian and Dany, he shows a box form figure, a rounded form figure, and a characterized figure, all drawn probably from imagination. I don't think that these people are real. And this is him playing with these different concepts of drawing the figure that they were all comfortable with. We can look at Frederick Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda painting from 1891 to get a full look at the typical academic process for making a grand narrative painting. First, small sketches, usually from imagination, would be rapidly composed in order to get your ideas onto the paper as immediately as possible.
Then, sometimes models would be used to make medium-sized exploratory sketches of different positions. These would be used to draft a more serious full compositional sketch later on. And at the same time, artists would make small sculptures to help them understand the form and perspective of difficult passages in the painting. And then, painted studies would be made from all the individual elements. And these will be made from the model so they can get accurate color and posing. And finally, you use all of this reference material that you generate to composite it together by repainting and redrawing, of course, the whole thing on the final canvas. And this was never a smooth process. Artists are constantly reworking the posing of individual figures and scrapping [music] entire paintings. Dan reworked the old man in this painting several times. We have multiple steps of this process. So that's my first piece, how [music] these paintings were actually made. My second is that Weissberg actually doesn't really know what his evidence is saying a lot of the times because of that lack of knowledge. He's more intent on fitting history into his idea of how painting worked rather than understanding the greater context of the art world at this time. Take this quote that Weissberg cites referring to Bastion for example. He seems to have cut and pasted the two figures on the canvas. This effect is most notable in the potato gatherers where the forms flat and dry where the draftsmanship is too self-conscious and the execution too detailed constitute a detriment to the landscape which in this case is admirable for simplicity and poetic rusticity. And this is a very peculiar quote especially considering where the source appears which is octave membos writing in a 1885 retrospective exhibition that was put together to memorialize the death of Bastian Leage.
He died only one year prior at the age of 36. Too early, very unfortunately.
The full paragraph this quote comes from feels especially strange. So, let me read the whole thing. And as you listen, I want you to keep one thing in mind. Is Mirabbo actually talking about photography at all here. There is not in his pictures, above all in his compositions, that kind of bond between man and the earth that one feels so deeply in MLE. It is rare that his figures truly belong to the landscapes in which he places them. They seem to have been cut out and then pasted onto the canvas. This impression is very strong in the potato harvest where the figures flat and dry and of a draftsmanship too labored and execution too detailed do harm to the landscape which is nonetheless there of an admirable simplicity and a true rustic poetry. This writing feels especially harsh for what is essentially a eulogy, but reading a bit further changes that context entirely. I infinitely prefer his small studies in which the subject narrowing to a single emotion hampers the artist less. Some are truly remarkable, an exquisite feeling and a moving tremor. It is there that one fully senses the artist Bastian Leage was. His aspirations, his investigations, his sincere preoccupations with the nature. The excellent painter rendered impressions of fleeting hours and mystical lights that prove there was a poet, a dreamer, an often [music] inspired interpreter within the naturalists who claim to prefer truth to poetry. His seascapes have an accent that astonishes in this lover of the rain fields. And his starless nights, which bathe sleeping villages in their thick shadow, have a mysterious depth into which the mind [music] sinks towards infinite dreams. I believe nonetheless that comparing him to Holine, as many have done, is an exaggeration of no real weight. Holine in Finnish and imperfection of detail have a rugged draftsmanship, a pitilous logic, an almost savage resolve of line that Bastian Leage often lacked.
Superior to Messier, who always stiffens a human figure and reduces it to the deadness of the skeleton, to the immobility of the armature, he sought in an oftentimes excessive virtuosity to penetrate the soul of the model and to set radiance upon the face. And this justice must be granted a Bastianne and the artist admired where he is admirable. In some he was a very sincere artist who never had any but artistic concerns and never let himself be guided by thoughts of money or the compromises of the trade. Manet had impressed him keenly, but he did not dare push the logic to its conclusion, and often he stopped halfway in his boldness. Truth dwells just as well in the high regions of the ideal. There it shows itself in more beautiful and more dazzling lights, and the artists who go to seek it there risk nothing but the making of imperishable works. Bestian Leage lacked flame. That flame of ardent and sacred creation which lifts a man above the virtuosity of the craft to bring him into the splendid heaven of immortal art. Where painters are not merely painters but receive initiation into all the beauties that human thought produces. A painter who has been only a painter will never be more than half an artist. And there's so much to analyze about this writing, but it's not such an ardent attack on the artist's methods as what comes off in Weisberg's limited quotation. I don't believe that there is any accusation of photography here at all. And that is made especially clear when he compares Bastianne against both Holine and Mesonier. Holine, an artist who lived around 1500, is known as one of the greatest portraitists and draftsmen to ever live. And it's fair to say that while Bastianne is truly a visionary painter who should get the credit where he deserves it, almost no artist of the 19th century comes close to the raw draftsmanship ability of the great Renaissance masters. Although comparing Besten to a contemporary, albeit a bit older than him, Messier, Bestian's naturalist ability truly shines. Mirbo is saying that Messier is technically accurate, but stiffens his figure so much that you can feel the rigid armature underneath them. An armature being the wire that you build under a sculpture to give it stability.
Bastian, by contrast, for all his technical skill, paints not only what he sees, but the very soul of the model, a virtue higher than that of pure copying.
And with that analysis, it wouldn't make any sense for a critic to be accusing Bastian of projecting photographs onto the canvas and tracing them. He merely thinks that Bestian overcooks his meals.
so caught up in his love of the technical craft of painting that he is blind to the great poetic sensitivities that conjure meaning deeper than the surface which makes sense because Mirbo was a great supporter of the impressionists. This article is an encapsulation of the growing impressionist and auburn guard movement one that actually understood and admired the great skill of basten but was ideologically opposed to his refinement.
They were uninterested in the idea that beauty could be had not only in these grand philosophical reflections of society, but also the tender appreciation of nature itself.
Dismissing all of this just to pull a quote about figures being cut and pasted just to further your idea that maybe these painters use tracing is missing the forest for the trees. So, those are the first two pieces. And the final one is what happened when these painters genuinely did lean on the camera. What I've been saying is specifically aimed at artists trained during the 1870s and much of the 1880s. I don't want to say that there are no artists at this time that were using tracing of photography because there certainly were. But the barrier to entry to photography was still quite high. And to produce good painted results, especially of a naturalist subject matter, you needed some serious training. The hallmark of naturalism is highly accurate color, which no black and white photograph is going to be able to solve for you. But as the 80s progressed and certainly throughout the 90s, the technology became much more accessible and artists became more open to using it as well.
Jules Alexis Mun was a young colleague of the naturalists and he trained under Jean Leon Jerome at the AOL just like Danyan. Perhaps because he was a few years younger, Mun used photography much more aggressively. In 1887, he won a third class medal in the salon for the painting the conversation, which we do have a few photographs for. And Met's photography is not just individual references that are meant to be later composited together by the artists like Dan, but they were almost fully composed instead. That said, there are still many changes from the photos to the final painting. We could just be missing photos, but like I said earlier, it's impossible to account for every little design decision in one photograph.
you're always going to want to make a tweak to a pose or change the color of a shirt later on. Weisberg again handwavingly states that his 1892 painting of a peasant woman was enlarged from a photograph by using a projection lantern. And again, unless there is another photograph that I don't know about, which would be strange because why not just use the one that he actually used in your book, then this photo has significant differences from the final painting in a way that a different angle just wouldn't make up for. The features of the woman's face have been exaggerated to make her look aged and more characteristic.
Specifically, her chin is much longer and pointier. Her hands and the rotation of her head are entirely different positions, ones that can't be accounted for by just rotating the photo. You cannot get this painting by projecting and tracing this photo. What you can get this painting from is using the typical academic method of using this photo to help your posing and costumeuming and guidance of the character type you want, but then enhancing it informed by your many years of highlevel drawing training. We have many more photographs from Mun, each that he turned into his own painting, most of which have significant design changes from the photos. But it's clear that for some photographs were becoming a fully integrated part of the composition and design process. Interestingly, Weisberg states at this point, "While no photograph yet proves his utilization of a magic lantern, discussions with the descendants have confirmed that such an apparatus was in his studio. In this way, he could enlarge his imagery, transfer it to a carefully calibrated drawing, and then use that as a pattern to transfer the design to a canvas, which I'm very skeptical of. If using these magic lantern devices to project photographs onto canvases was so common, then why is it that every single time I find someone mentioning one, it's the one place without a footnote? But I do want to acknowledge my own bias here.
I'm probably just as quick to jump to skepticism as Weisberg is to jump to the use of tracing. The truth is somewhere probably in the middle, and I do fully believe that there were artists at this time who were just straight up tracing photographs and slavishly copying them.
My largest contention is just that the naturalist painters used photography in a way that elevated their source material instead of hampering themselves by the technical processes that they just had no need for. And this reminded me of a 1922 memoir by Edward Simmons, an American impressionist who studied in Paris. He recalled his time talking to Besten about his working methods. Besten was born in Damore, which was probably the reason he made such an admiral painting of Jeanovar, now in the Metropolitan Museum. He told us the details of the work. There was no model except for the body. And he used several to carry out his ideal of the head. You feel that she is a working girl and not just a pretty peasant by bugaro. And I think this is very true. The most skilled artists of the time would never just slavishly copy a photo. They would enhance it infusing it with their own design knowledge and taste. It's exactly why Mirbo complimented Besten for capturing the soul of the model in this very painting. The use of photography of these artists fit very well into the traditional academic way of making a painting. Some of these preliminary sketches that would have been done to capture the details of the drapery or specific costumeuming could be replaced or supplemented by a few photographs.
Despite many of the old school traditionalists disliking the naturalist for their subject matter, the naturalists were actually a natural continuation and evolution of academic painting. They integrated modern technology and subjects into processes that they learned in school. The popularization of photography affected everyone, even those who didn't really use it. But here's where it gets genuinely complicated, because this wasn't a simple case of the camera being just good or bad for art. By the 1880s, audiences increasingly wanted scientific [music] accuracy in their paintings, that kind that a camera could only verify, which left painters in a real bind. ignore the science and risk looking flat or wrong or chase it and risk losing the art. The next three stories are all painters that were caught in that bind. And what separates them in the end isn't whether they use the camera, it's how much training they had before they started using the camera. We heard about Mason earlier, an enormously successful and highly skilled military painter who went to incredible lengths to draw horses accurately. He even built a miniature railway track on his estate so that he could travel alongside a horse in motion to observe it closely. For hundreds of years, the traditional way in painting to draw a horse galloping at full speed was in a position called the flying gallop, where all the legs were stretched outward. In a full sprint, a horse's legs move too fast for the human eye to even follow.
In 1878, the photographer Edward Mobridge, working with a wealthy horse breeder, Leland Stanford, developed a way to drop a camera shutter speed to just 1/ 1,000th of a second. He lined up 12 cameras with trip wires across the horse's path and took a series of photos that captured the full gallop cycle. And yes, horses did have a brief moment in which all their legs left the ground, but it was nothing like the long spled out flying gallop in many historical paintings. One set of legs would be moving in and the other pushing outwards. It might even seem like a really obvious fact to us now, but this was a massive breakthrough at the time.
And when Stanford showed this to Masonier in 1879, it caused a crisis for the artist. All these years my eyes have deceived me, said Masonier. Stanford reportedly replied, "The machine cannot lie." and gave him a tutorial on horses gates which ended with the painter exclaiming in despair. After 30 years of absorbing and concentrated study, "I find I have been wrong. Never again shall I touch a brush." Though he did touch a brush again, obviously, and reportedly went back to correcting some of his old paintings, even. And in his 1881 portrait of Stanford that Messier made, he added masses of books in the background. On top of which we can see in the corner one of Moy Bridg's photo, Messier was a painter in pursuit of truth. And to him, the camera was just another tool that allowed him to get closer, just like the railroad he built to observe horses. Only this time, the camera was such a breakthrough that it caused a miniature crisis for him. The integration of science into painting was absolutely tied in many parts to the development of photography. An 1862 book showcases this photographic pursuit of truth. It's called mechanisme analis electrophysiologic expressions arts plastics. Thank god they kept it brief. And uh oh, of course this translates to the mechanism of human physami or electrphysiological analysis of the expressions of passions applicable to the practice of the visual arts. This book is something out of a horror movie.
These scientists ran electrical currents through people's facial muscles to force their face into the correct expressions and then compared them against historical artworks to judge whether the expressions were right, I guess. And these photos are truly strange to look at. And I'm not really sure that they look better than the classical sculpture that they're held up against, which goes to show that scientifically correct or photographically accurate isn't always the best artistic choice. And oftent times it's plainly not. And this is exactly what Thomas Ekits, an American artist who studied with Jean Leon Jerome in Paris, was critiqued for. Inspired by the recent Moyidge plates, he exhibited a May morning in the park in 1880, which was widely criticized for putting motion blurred speed lines on the carriage wheels while leaving the horse's legs frozen in time, which is the typical way we paint. Critics argued that if you're going to use motion blur, it should probably apply to everything that's moving. Applying it to just one element, like the wheels, makes the painting feel discontinuous. Eekans was an average photographer and just a year later he made a new painting Mending the net which peculiarly analysis shows has no underdrawing at all. And it wasn't until the painting was reanalyzed more recently that the revelation came that there were microscopic cuts made into the canvas with a needle-like point.
These are only viewable with a 15 to 30 times magnification and occur at logical points like the tops and bottoms and width of different forms and the separation between light and shadow.
Eakans would have needed a serious magnifying glass just to make these tiny incisions. And since they weren't visible to the naked eye, the most likely explanation is that he was reproing photographs onto the canvas at various points in the process, [music] scratching in these marks to guide himself. These marks were so small that they would be invisible to the five or 10x magnification loops that people would carry around to inspect [music] paintings. And I still haven't shown you the painting that I'm talking about. I wanted to give you all that context first. So, here it is. Mending the net 32x 45 in. It's a medium size. Smaller than a prior canvas for sure.
Yeah, it's incredibly unimpressive. I mean, it's technically okay. The figures are accurate, but I think there's nothing in it that evokes even an ounce of emotion or detail of a Bastian painting. It reminds me of the Venetian secret scandal I went over in my video, The Internet is Obsessed with Fake Art History, where Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy, became obsessed with these last papers that detail the technique of old masters like Tishim.
This, of course, was a hoax. And when he debuted this painting, it looked terrible and was met with horrendous critical reception. It's easy to fall into the trap of looking for a secret way that the masters worked rather than accepting the boring truth that they just had better training. So, this insanely painstaking process of taking dozens of photographs and then projecting them onto your canvas, using a microscope [music] to insize tiny marks to notate the placement secretly seems to be a very awkward attempt at using science to explain artistic skill. No matter how painstakingly scientific your process is, if you just don't have the chops that best deny did, you're not making a naturalist painting. Eekans was chasing the same thing Mason was, scientific accuracy. He just went further, secretly projecting and tracing. But he didn't get Messier's results. He certainly didn't get Basten's not because leaning on a photograph is automatically bad.
Messier leaned on science, too, but because the camera can only ever amplify the painter that is holding it. and Eekans simply really wasn't good enough for it to save. Honestly, this is the closest we'll ever get to the accusation against the naturalist actually being true. A painter who really did project and trace from photographs. [music] And the result wasn't haymaking. It was mending the net, which is the whole point. The camera couldn't make Eekans great, and it didn't need to make Besten great. He already was. The naturalists [music] deserve more credit for what they did, not less. And just so we can get a comparison of the type of art being produced this year, I looked up the 1881 Paris Salon to show you a few of the paintings. This is Hercuanium by Hector Laru. Distribution of the flags to the French army by Edward Deal. On the way to the sacrifice by Vandera, amateur rehearsals by Jean George Vber.
On the road to the temple of Series Spring by Florence Almata and The Virgin with Angels by William Bugaro. And that is just a couple from a list of only the notable paintings from the salon. There were hundreds more. I remember watching a show called Bully Beatdown or something on MTV when I was a kid. And they would take a bully who was picking on someone innocent and challenge them to fight a real MMA fighter to win some money. And normally since the bully had a large hubris, they'd accept. I know it was all fake. It's [music] fine. And then only they would get clobbered on camera. Bugaro's 55-year-old outofshape French body would turn Eekans into paste in the arena of the salon. And Bugaro didn't really need the projector to do it. American artists just didn't have the type of training and systems [music] that French artist did. And even when they did go to study in Paris, they often didn't stay for more than a few years. In the case of Eekans, he was notoriously resistant and stubborn to Jerome's teachings. And often the people who take the shortcuts are exactly the ones who reach for technology to fill in the gaps. And this is where I'd like to return to the 1893 article we started with is the camera the friend or foe of art. We read that the school of bastion leage which roughly speaking is responsible for the largest number of brand new figure subjects painted in England today is to say those wherein modernity is sought and prized undoubtedly has been influenced by the camera. Its presentation of facts are often but colored photographs to all intents and purposes. Whether the artist used the lens or not matters little. He saw nature with the unloving eye of the camera and deliberately noted fact after fact, detail after detail, much in the same mechanical way. True, like a modern art photographer, he has thrown the hole a little out of focus, blurred the lines, modified the harsh tones of the negative, touched up the bare facts, but all the same, he has blackened his shadows, reveled in local textures, and played the game of the camera and color.
The photograph gives them the super abundance of worthless detail, which they love. The masses now prize statistics, measurements, and textures more than abstract beauty, color harmonies, or decorative composition.
And to satisfy their desires for the former, the camera is always ready and capable. We come back to this with a lot more context. Now, and the question is, the camera the friend or foe of art isn't only rhetorical. After the article, the author opens it up to a wealth of English artists that he pulled. Many of the top English artists of the time replied, "I will confine myself on this occasion to saying that photography may be of great use or the reverse to an artist, according as it is used with or without judgment and intelligence. afraid you will consider this very vague. Reality it sums up the whole question. Yours faithfully, Frederick Leighton. Sir, I am convinced that the camera has had a most healthy and useful influence upon art. It is of the greatest use to painters. Yours faithfully, Lawrence Alma Tata. Sir, no doubt photography has been beneficial and is often of value to the artist.
Faithfully yours, Jean Everett Mle. It's funny that the most famous and accomplished artists all gave short and sweet answers. If I only had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
There are many different takes in this article, though. Some admonishing the destruction of certain industries of photography caused, some ambivalent to photography, and many downright against it. One of those is by the artist Walter Sickert. In proportion, as a painter or a draftsman works from photographs, so is he sapping his powers of observation and expression. It is much as if a swimmer practiced in a cork jacket or a pianist by turning a barrel organ for drawing which should express the three dimensions is substituted a kind of mapping and color is simply non-existent. Siger didn't start writing criticism until the latter half of the 1880s. His name shows up again as the author of modern realism in painting, an 1892 essay published along several others as an homage to Bastian Leage.
It's the same piece we pulled this quote from at the beginning of the video. One characteristic of the work of the modern photorealist in painting is that almost any of them could have painted a portion of work that any other would without making any appreciable discord of execution apparent. This article is wedged between a memoir by a close friend of Bastion Leage, the poet Andre Theorough, and another essay by George Clawson, the man who is often credited with popularizing the Bastian Leage style of painting in England. Basically, he was a bastion fanboy. And this is extremely strange because Secret's writing is beyond brutal. It's it's it's a full-on hit piece on Bastion in in his eulogy. The article reads, "It was impossible." And seeing Bastion Leage's Jean of Arc at the Paris exhibition of 1890 after a lapse of some years since its first appearance to resist the conclusion that it falls inevitably under the heading of machine. And by machine here, he's apparently calling it like a commodity or just another worthless man-made produced thing. In the composition, there is neither grace nor strangeness. The drawing is without profoundity or novelty of observation.
The color is uninteresting, and the execution is the usual mechanically obtrusive square brush work of the Parisian schools of art. Dramatically, the leading figure is not impressive or even lucid. And the helpless introduction of the visionary figures behind the back of the wrapped maid completes the conviction that it was an error of judgment for a painter with the limitations of leage to burden to a touching and sanctified legend with commonplace illustration. And then later in the article, to judge fairly of an artist, however, we must follow him on his own ground. In his portrait of his grandfather at the same exhibition, it was quite possible to see Leage at his best as a workman in photographic copiest of a figure in repose. It was at the same time possible to turn from this figure straight to Manise Fifer into his Bonbach and thus measure the gulf that separates a meritorious workman from an inspired executant of the first rank. No useful end can be gained from obscuring this fact. And if in league with the modern gigantic conspiracy of toleration, we are to speak of Bastian Leage as a master, what terms are left for us for Keen and MLE or Whistler and Dega? And this critique is a culmination of a few things. Mainly the shifting tides away from realism. Cigert was a combative partisan fighting for the impressionists like Whistler and Dega, interested only in the more romantic sensitivities in art. The traits Bastion was praised for at the salon. Its ability to exaggerate where needed to break from what a camera could do while still maintaining innovative abstract brush work in areas like the background.
Ziker ignores this. Instead, he sees Bastian as only what he cares to see, a photocopist and technical craftsman, not an artist. Now, you're watching YouTube, so let me say something that no one would write in their doctorate thesis.
Sicker was a loser. At his absolute greatest, he could be outpainted by a blindfolded bastion. But I suppose that's his point. But I won't give sucker any credit because [music] his writing doesn't really come from a place of honesty. Remember, we read a harsh but poetic and genuinely thoughtful analysis by Mirbo written after Bastian's retrospective [music] 7 years before Curt writes this essay. Mirbo makes many of the same points, actually pretty much all of them, but with far greater tact and much more credit and genuine understanding, even though he was in the very same impressionist camp as Cickert. Here, Sicker is attacking Bastian not in the substance of his painting, but in what Bastion represents to him. And the irony is that Siger would go on to paint from photographs regularly. This Gwen Francois Deiz as the Isabelle of France was taken directly from a photo in the actress's press clippings. He even wrote the photographers's name Bertram Park to credit his source at the bottom of the painting. And Secret would respond to this by saying that probably would have used the same creativity when painting from a photo as he would from life. But Bastion and any of the naturalists could easily make the same argument as I've already shown. The big difference was just the changing sensibilities as to what art should be. And I think this points to something bigger about how we do [music] history. We tend to retell the past through the people who were loud enough and published enough to leave a paper trail. Sigert wrote a vicious quotable essay. So, Sigert survives. He becomes what people thought. But thousands of ordinary people stood in front of haymaking in 1878 and were genuinely moved by it. And there was a generation of students inspired to become naturalist painters.
They didn't write essays. Their admiration left no footnote. So, when a historian reaches for a source, they reach for the loudest critic in the room. and mistake him for being the verdict of his age. It's the same reason why it can be so difficult to learn about the way that students were trained in this time in Paris because the training was so unanimous and codified through these systems of independent and state sponsored studios that the actual technical bits of what happened daytoday were seldom written down. It was just taken for granted. And that's really what the 1890s were. Not the moment that photography won, but the moment that the tide started going out on realism itself. Cert wasn't the consensus, but he is a good view into the mind of a new developing sensibility. One that prized the romance and spontaneity of the impressionist over the patient truth of the naturalist. Those were the very traits that made Bastian a star in 1878.
His control and his finish and his fidelity to what he actually saw. Those were becoming things a new generation held against him. Nothing about his paintings had changed. Just the eyes looking [music] at them had. Photography didn't storm the art world from the outside. It grew up inside of it. Made by painters and used by painters from almost the very first day. The accusation that it ruined painting and that artists began to just trace photos falls apart the moment you understand how artists of this time were trained.
They were brought up in a system of education that understood that painting had strengths that the photograph just never could. The one competition that flat out banned photography produced some of their finest works. And when someone genuinely did lean on the camera as a crutch by projecting and tracing and scratching [music] marks in secret, you didn't get a bastionage. You got mending the net. Because the camera was never a shortcut to being good. It only ever amplified the painter who was already using it. So if the camera didn't kill realism, then what did taste? But there's a deeper version of that answer that almost nobody connects.
Academic painting had absorbed photography so smoothly. And the naturalists were the direct descendants of the academics trained in the same itilier under the same masters. So by the 1880s, naturalism and realism weren't the rebels anymore. They were the establishment. They had become the new academicism. And the avang guard always needed an establishment to push back against. So when the tide turned on Bastion, it wasn't because he was bad and it wasn't really about the camera.
It was because he had become the very thing a new generation needed to overthrow. Naturalism didn't fail. It actually won. And then it became the wall that everyone else wanted to knock down. And I want to be clear on this because it would be easy to hear this as just some modern art ruined everything rant. And it isn't. Tastes change. It's just how art stays alive. And there's no generation of artists immune to time and progress. My point was never that they were wrong. It's just that something new always needs something old to push off of, just like how the naturalists pushed against the subject matter of the academics and the execution of the realists. But the time for naturalism came too. I just think it deserves to be remembered [music] as what it actually was. It wasn't a dead end, but one of the last and most overlooked great flowerings of the realist tradition. Now guys, this is just a tiny fraction of everything involved in this story. It's not possible to include it all in one video, and I wanted to start with something that's truly meaningful to me.
I'm really not capable of controlling the scope of my research. Everything is so fascinatingly interconnected that I can't stop reading more and more. But because of that, I have so much that I had to cut out. A scandalous lawsuit that swept up the media over whether or not an artist painted directly over a print. the scores more of naturalist painters from all over the world that didn't make it into this video and the photographers who made it their life's goal to prove that the photo was just as much of a piece of art as [music] the painting. So, I'd like to return to this topic again. If you like this video, drop me a comment down below to tell me that you want to see more. Also, if you're interested in learning how to paint and draw just like these masters did, that's what me and Raone Herado, someone who is far more skilled at all of this stuff and the research who helps me out a lot, based our course off of.
Just go to htonestudio.art art for free guides, references, and our full drawing
Related Videos
7:01
Art History
Solo Exhibition "Light in the City" | Virtual Art Tour
christinakentart
12K views•2025-03-09
27:36
Art History
Learn to Draw Anatomy - Skeleton Structure
pomeroyartacademy
22K views•2025-04-15
3:31
Art History
Episode 4: Erin Manning
ABERnetwork
285 views•2024-11-01
0:45
Art History
JAMES VAN DER ZEE: The Photographer Who Captured Harlem’s Soul
UncommonSense59
941 views•2026-01-31
0:55
Art History
Signature X Mithila Art
SignatureNepal
1417K views•2026-02-04
2:23
Art History
Chancel Wall Paintings at St Mary's Church, Chalgrove
ATSHeritageTV
532 views•2020-05-18
2:21
Art History
Henry Siddons Mowbray Painting, ca. 1895 | Vintage Austin | Preview
RoadshowPBS
176K views•2017-06-30
12:02
Art History
The Moonhouse - Sweden's Red Cottage on the Moon
ThreeStarVagabond
2K views•2025-06-01
Trending
13:25
Business
Playstation NO DISC/NO BUY Fight Is Over...
DavidJaffeGames
4K views•2026-07-23
22:40
Business
Steam and Xbox Just Dropped The Hammer On PlayStation
OhNoItsAlexx
9K views•2026-07-23
16:52
Anthropology
Americans Confused in Australia for 17 Minutes Straight
IWrocker
17K views•2026-07-23
20:36
Business
SuperBike Factory Has Gone... What's Next for the Motorcycle Industry?
thatbikersimon
11K views•2026-07-22