It's a great honour to be giving the Slade lectures this year.
And for me, a great pleasure also to come back to Oxford for both personal and professional reasons,
for personal reasons, because my father was at the beginning of his career.
Chaplain of Harvard and in retirement at the end of his career, chaplains of All Souls.
And I was a boy at the Dragon School for professional reasons, because the first day I came to study modern history here at St Cats,
I opened up the examination decree's and saw that one could do a course in months, finally called Baudelaire and the artists of his time.
And I decided there and then to do it, which I did studying under Francis Haskell and T.J. Clark.
And in that way, I was launched on my career as an artist store in which a third of a century later sees me on this podium.
So let me give you a lecture. But I can't because I don't know how to dim the lights because this is dark.
Defining the dominant naturalism, naturalism was the dominant aesthetic of late 19th century France in painting as in literature.
It sets the cultural tone shaped and suited the mentality of the mainstream work hand-in-hand with the political ideology of the Third Republic.
And no wonder naturalist painting, descriptive, frank, direct was a dynamic kind of art.
Look at the canvases that won gold medals at the great exposition in that cell in 1889 and
nineteen hundred Emil Feels All Saints Day represents a snatched moment of something seen.
The little girl in Mid Step is just about to give the blind beggar a coin as her family
follows behind on their way to the annual visit to the municipal cemetery in Charlotte Cortez.
The farewells all is still and meditative in the central panel of the final meal before the Breton fisherman's
set out to sea and in the side panels of the men on their vessel and the women waiting on the cliffs.
Both canvases in bed on their day were held up a standing for the best in modern French painting.
How different they are.
The feel encapsulating in its Life-Size figures, a moment of experience conjuring up the cold, making evident its class contrasts,
and the dutiful act of charity of the côté using its equally large scale to quasi ritual effect.
Its groups of figures silent in the gloomy light.
Yet both are fundamentally naturalistic, describing the material world with attention to the physical actuality of bodies and textures.
They are also both conscious of their different painterly artifices.
All Saints Day, with its cut off figures and central void, the farewells with its almost symmetrical play with the triptych format.
And there are other similarities. The idea of the family is pivotal, together with its inescapable dimensions of continuity and loss.
Both have a religious resonance for yours in the depiction of an annual act of observance Cottee's in its echo of a scene of the Last Supper.
How surprising throughout the 18, 80s and 80s, 90s,
the Third Republic set up to wrest influence from the Catholic Church in a hard fought struggle for determining influence over the national mind.
And yet the two French paintings, which won gold medals at successive Exposition Universelle,
were purchased by the state for the national collections. Had religious associations dealing with such paintings.
Then we have to cope with more than mere description contrived in their making and moving in their impact,
modern in their forms of representation and rich in contradictions.
These are complex works of art.
Between 1880 and nineteen hundred, the span of these lectures, naturalist painting created a panorama, an encyclopaedia of contemporary French life.
Let's have a tall Duthie Zoar and look at some polarities. We might begin in 1880 with horses, static cars, collector of flotsam,
lifesize and emphatically filling the space immediately in front of us with her load of wreckage.
Sturdy presence and surly unwillingness to make eye contact and end in nineteen hundred and one with Everlast.
George Banjoes is visit to the factory after a sway with the director, an equally arresting painting.
This time setting prosperity and proprietorship within the grim realities of industrial production.
With its startling conjunction of fan and furnace, satin and sweat, and its strange compositional combination of the statuesque and the precarious.
Top and bottom of society then. And also industry and agriculture.
Joseph Felt. To Day Labourers Steelworks of Sachem More 1889 dwarfs.
The workers by the huge factory as they cast a gun for a battleship.
While Lail now meets market at Chateau TIAR, he painted a decade earlier, embraces the mainly female shoppers in the placid town square.
Descriptive in their representation, both paintings tackle aspects of the economy,
alluding to the larger issues of France's still troubled status as a great power and anxieties
about the deep population of the countryside as people left for industrial work in the cities.
The pictures, too, are explicit about place Lahore's factory at the Department of the Noir Lab Mix Market there in the EIN.
Collectively by accretion, such paintings built up that Encyclopaedia of France.
And how different is leisure meat market to Camil Pizarro's market scenes such as the Schuckert year of 1883,
Pissarro used some brighter colour and are more evident brushstroke and here employed a close up design.
But both artists built their compositions around strongly drawn figures describing
different activities and detailing the nuances of class in rural communities.
Impressionist painters like Pissarro were, one can argue, engaged in a form of naturalism, a need to be written in to its historical analysis.
Let's look at one other polarity, this time in the work of a single artist at the Salon of 1887.
All these years, Becs exhibited before the operation a portrait of the celebrated surgeon you repeal and his team,
a carefully staged account of medical practise and instruction, not failing to draw attention to surgical instruments of payroll's own devising.
Before the operation typifies naturalism alliance with modern science.
Four years later, at the Societe Nasional, LeBeau's up.
Joe X showed his ceiling for the grand Saldate effect at the Paris Hotel de Ville.
For the theme music, JAV X opted to counterpoint the here and now of a modern,
naturalistic image of a singer onstage seen across the heads of spectators,
an orchestra with a vertiginous composition of musicians in 18th century costume set amongst allegorical figures.
The whole creating a rather bizarre combination of Duga and Tupelo.
But with these two paintings for different purposes, Joe Vex demonstrated naturalism is elasticity,
how it could be adapted to depict the most contemporary in scientific medicine and elide with traditional forms of representation.
You can already see, I hope, that there were many natural isms at its best.
Naturalist painting could be daring and varied, instructive, confrontational, grand, even meditative.
And one of the things I want to do in these lectures is to show that at best its qualities and complexities deserve better than art.
History often allows. Naturalist painting had two characteristics which I want to insist upon at the outset.
First, as I've already hinted, it was flexible, adaptable to different subjects and purposes,
accommodating to individual manners of painting within its broad compass of the descriptive.
Second, it was modern. It depicted the here and now, of course, what could be seen.
What was part of contemporary experience. But it's modern character resided not merely in its descriptive bliss,
but also in the way in which the representation of the actual elided with
broader ideological and philosophical understandings of how the world worked.
Naturalism, what might say was more than an aesthetic.
It was also a state of mind. Much of this lecture series will be concerned with enquiring how this kind of art functioned and flourished.
But it will also consider the opposition for the two decades between 1880 and nineteen hundred saw the burgeoning of modernism in France.
These years saw at Goodooga and Claude Monet working at impressively consistent levels of achievement,
as well as the emergence of such talents as Odey or her door, one of whom was chuckles is on the left.
Your Qahar Paul Goga. Not to mention that Dutch visitor Vincent van Hoff.
What do I bring? These artists work into play.
I will do so by considering it, considering it in terms of the dominant naturalism rather than simply on its own terms.
The history of modernism tends to be exclusive and linear,
privileging an elite to the exclusion of contemporaries and following a progressive sequence preordained by hindsight.
My objective is to return all these kinds of painting to history, to their context.
Under the Third Republic. In so doing, I shall try to treat the works I discuss equally.
I have no intention of diminishing great innovative canvases by CFR and his peers.
The CEO has been yard up there. Nor do I seek to promote certain kinds of painting above their functional functional station.
And I will be showing some fairly numbing canvases. A Joie de Thai's funeral of Pasteur Springs to mind.
There is no question of revisionism here then, but rather a respect for history and the contemporary Montanti de.
There are two central hypotheses.
The first is the claims have already made that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in France between 1880 and nineteen hundred.
Why and how this was. I shall explore in the early lectures.
But one answer will be that it suited the ideology of the Third Republic.
Naturalism in the visual arts, as in literature, was comprehensible.
It dealt with matters at the moment with common experience.
Naturalist paintings with their everyday subjects were immediately legible.
They required only vernacular culture to be brought to them to be understood from these points of view.
They were egalitarian.
The republic put great emphasis on being a progressive regime supportive of modern thinking in sciences such as medicine and engineering,
naturalism was suckered by shared and sustained.
That mentality of exactitude, which characterised France's NICE's technocracy and naturalism, is central concern.
The description of actuality could be made to serve the public's need to articulate and broadcast its ideological values,
hence the value of a painting like de daytime's funeral of Pasteur.
If naturalist art to a considerable extent went hand in hand with Republicanism,
how might an artist who had no wish to either paint naturalistically or to ally
with the republic and consensus negotiate ways around that dominant aesthetic?
The second hypothesis is in response to these questions,
naturalism might have the virtues that I've outlined, but it also had its flaws in its worthiness.
It might lack irony, and it's in its loyalty to Macy's.
However flexible, it might lack style to moderate and modify or even entirely circumvent its broad and encompassing reach.
Art seeking a pictorial and ideological independence would do well to seek style.
Individual visual idioms of colour,
touch and design that went beyond the reach of the hegemony of the actual and legible style will be a constant theme in these lectures.
Exploring these two hypotheses will, I hope, lead us away from certain quite commonly held assumptions and present art history.
One of these is the view, ironically held by modernists and revisionists alike.
That naturalist painting of this period was content with surface description derived such modernity as it mustered from a reliance on
photography and was in essence as conservative in the social values of its subjects as it was in the pictorial representation of them.
Quite the contrary, I will argue.
Naturalism allowed very diverse kinds of execution and representation and was conscious in the range and diversity of its artifices,
of which photography was only one. In addition, it was a deeply ideological aesthetic, often hand in glove with Republican rhetoric.
The cumulative impact year on year of hundreds of descriptive canvases of contemporary French life, rural and urban, agricultural and industrial set,
totally or natural and methods are now created a collective notion of national identity substantially shaped to the priorities of the republic.
Therein lay naturalism is power to sustain its position as the dominant aesthetic.
The second assumption is that the avant garde ism of a soha are a ghoga was a reaction against entrenched academic art, stalled impressionism or both.
It could be argued that naturalist painting itself was a reaction to the academic system.
After all, artists such as Zilberstein bastion apart and they all complained about their academic
tuition while Alfred Hall boasted of succeeding with negligible training for such artists.
Naturalism was a means of introducing modernity into the established conventions of picture making, of making art useful for a wider society.
As for the old guard, by the 1880,
the sclerotic traditions of academic painting or the rather fragmented impressionism were less at issue than the dominant naturalism.
This had either to be adapted to serve individualistic, even subversive ends or better still, circumvented by innovative style.
A third assumption concerns the importance of symbolism.
It would be a fool who denied the importance of the symbolist aesthetic that emerged in the late 1980s as a critical counter to naturalism,
an aesthetic that engendered and sustained the work of creative figures as significant as Odeo.
Woodall is another of his jungle's on the left, and Mochis, Dinny, Paul Verlaine and Stefan Mallat made there on the right must be respected.
But symbolism was an aesthetic which perhaps because of its very suggests, Stephen,
even hermetic idioms necessarily spoke for an end to an elite public, whereas naturalism had a national ubiquity and audience.
Some of these aspects I will not have time to discuss fully in these lectures and will do so in the book to come.
But I must raise them now to indicate that I am not ignoring them. Testing these hypotheses has wider methodological perspectives.
One might say that these lectures are about building bridges. One of these is between history and the history of art.
Over the next eight weeks, I will place the emphasis first on works of art with historical material in a more supportive role in a sense.
These lectures then are very different from my last book, The Troubled Republic, which began with historical problems in 1890 France,
social degeneration, the crowd, church state relations and Franco German rivalry and brought the images to the problems.
While I won't be bringing in a great deal of historical evidence and data into these lectures,
they will be consistent, historical underpinning to my arguments.
The other bridge, one might say, is between Anglo Saxon and French approaches to art history.
British and Americans often tend to focus on modernism, considering work that doesn't fit,
that's aesthetics, established patterns at best as mere context.
The danger of such approach is that its values about what a good or interesting works,
what is useful evidence, are preordained and not necessarily the values of the period.
In recent years, the French have almost surrendered the modernist torain to the Anglo Saxons.
However, French scholars are busily reviving the mainstream art of the Third Republic.
Coincidentally, and to my advantage, there has been a. Lot of recent exhibitions feel top left and molholm 2006 Bastia in the past.
All and Buelow in 2007, Schappell Chieh Poovey had been up in 2008.
We might ask, why is it because France is currently at an impasse and looks back to images which show old certainties of rural France.
A French France. But we shouldn't forget that the art we admire perhaps tells us as much about who we are as the art we make.
French scholars, however, tend to accumulate useful material about artists rather than interpret their work.
Ideologically, my approach involves looking at a very wide range of pictures from grand public
declarations through easel paintings for exhibition and private ownership to posters,
magazine illustrations and albums of lithographs for reasons of time.
I will deal chiefly with painting, occasionally touching on sculpture, but not the decorative arts.
There will be some dinosaur bones you might think redundant in this museum, but I promise you not.
I will be looking at well-known works and artists. Great names like Monet, CFR and Tunisia attract.
But from unexpected perspectives and in unusual contexts, trying to escape conventional categorisations.
And I will assume a certain knowledge on my audience is part so won't be stopping to define neo impressionism.
Explain the Nabby or outline Third Republic political history.
This is not a survey course, but a series of arguments and propositions.
I will also be analysing paintings by many artists celebrated in their own day
figures such as Loudly Beina Kathy Air and Feore and taking them seriously.
I'll be introducing some striking and weird works to.
If you want to see a painting of a woman having a blood transfusion from a goat.
Come next week. I intend to avoid dealing with these pictures with hindsight.
My interest is in how it was for people then by doing using a wide range of their pictures and their own words.
One can better explore the mortality of the artists, critics, politicians and administrators of the period in particular.
I'm going to read naturalist pictures ideologically rather than as description or anecdote.
And this brings historical processes into art history.
Let me give you an example. It feels Oarsman of the Myrt was exhibited at the salon of 1887.
At one level, it is a carefully contrived image of actuality,
with its Life-Size figures caught in actions like pouring wine, removing a jacket or passing of roast fowl.
But there are more allusive readings. The title gives us a specific regional clue for the Almost from North Sea on the Myrt.
This is a picture about pride in one's pee. It's also about vitality, about appetites.
Worked up after a hard outing on the river. A positive image of young Frenchman's physical prowess at a time of anxiety about national degeneration,
the spread of alcoholism and venereal diseases, and the conviviality of the moment can also be taken as fact.
Every day deepened from genial anecdote into Republican ideology.
Should that reading's suit discover that the straw hatted man on the left is Eugene Coolabah,
leading figure of the Rowing Club and Stein of a North Sea Department store.
Owning family and oarsman of the MLT with its young packed hall and more ordinary style,
becomes a painting about cross-class harmony under the Republic.
Such a picture should not be discarded as just a conventionally painted narrative.
By the standards of 1887, it was modern in its actuality and in its inherent values and shown first in a private gallery
at North Sea and then seen by half a million at the Paris Paracel and many more across France.
When given a full page in the mass circulation Le Monde illustrate,
a painting like this disseminated its message of well-being and collectivity very broadly.
I need to explain some of my terms of reference. What do I mean by naturalism?
Not too far. Leestma was a word widely used in France during the second half of the 19th century.
So was Zionism. But I've preferred naturalism for several reasons.
It was in more consistent usage in the 20 years that I'm exploring.
Whereas realism was declining as a term for discussion of the arts,
whether it was the conservative critic or the you say in 1882 worrying about the increasing prevalence of NATO,
Islay and Ampicillin East works at the salon or the progressive administrator and critic Loggi Marks,
noting in 1889 that le naturalism it or father to such an extent that even academic artists had
begun pand academic more Delahanty naturalism was the key term in common aesthetic parlance.
Naturalism was touted as a cultural movement by important figures such as the widely read novelist Emil Zoner.
It played across disciplines and media and might be discussed in terms of theatre and sculpture, let alone painting of a novel.
In addition, naturalism had echoes of the natural sciences, a link Zola, for one, was keen to promote.
And this enhanced its impact and modernity.
For as a concept, naturalism meant more than merely the mimetic process of representing nature, description was linked with exactitude.
Take an example of an art historian writing in 1880 or so about a famous old master of the AVAR praised Rembrandt's Night Watch.
Above all, for that exactitude, that truth in the physiognomy is and in the action which one identifies as naturalism exactitude,
it was understood as a virtue. Overlapping with scientific accuracy.
Precise evidence. Pure knowledge and moral truth.
Honesty. Clear thinking. But a source of such values could easily become ideological,
as we will see in a republic and mortality which strove to assert its values of modernity and rationality.
Naturalism may have been the dominant aesthetic term.
But that's not to say that it was undisputed. The influential but reactionary theatre critic Forese Sarsae.
Right that while we accept that some people have warts on their faces,
we should not accept novelists and painters who get pleasure from contemplating walks.
And in a 1891, the journalist Zuel Kyohei ran an important series of interviews in liquid heat,
asking leading writers if naturalism was finished and whether symbolism had replaced it.
But looking back from 1914, it was naturalism that had taken to.
Was taken to have dominated the previous generations, painting, as one critic drily put it.
The trend in the studios around 1885 was naturalism.
People talked of the masterpieces to make with subjects like the Vault Malakoff railway station and the Bettino Kishi Odille bus.
But the decoration of a new town hall was an occasion for a wedding banquet
under the pergola or promenade of the bridal couple in the park more smoothly.
The intellectual background to this aesthetic predominance was summed up by the
academic gappy and Monod in 1894 in a book on three major modern historians,
Ernest Duno, A Bullet 10 and you Michali model, identified scientific realism.
My naturalism as the organic principle of French intellectual life in recent decades.
This analysis of objective and demonstrable truth, studied in concrete reality was a monads view.
A tendency so general. So deep. So truly organic.
That one finds the same passionate search for truth, for scientific realism in every aspect of intellectual life.
Whether that authors know it or not.
And he cited the paintings of Bastiaan, the Pasion, Ernest, Miss Sonja, the novels of Zola and Gajda, Microsoft and the writings of 10.
Above all, the Monod.
This does this current US cross disciplinary not only linking literature and the visual arts, but also the arts and sciences for poor Borgia.
Use psychology in his novels and Zola physiology and pathology in his.
A key figure in this contemporary intellectual framework which made naturalism the basis of modern thought was epaulette 10.
Seen here in a portrait by level Bonnar, professor of the history of art at the Acle, they Bouzar in Paris.
Since 1864, Ten had put forward his ideas in books such as Philosophy de la 1865.
Above all, he believed in the deterministic principle that artistic production was shaped by by historical and cultural circumstances,
that perhaps Moomaw Emilia made a work of art.
Look, as it did, this concept was so prevalent as a means of judging and justifying Naturaliste paintings that
it was consistently alluded to by contemporary writers with no necessary citation of 10.
Thus, when the museum curator, Leyla's Benedek, summed up Alfred Hall's work, it was as exclusively of his time, of his country and of his media.
Equally, arguing that an artist did not live up to Ten's formula was a way of distancing his work from naturalism,
as the symbolist writer George Lautenbach did when he saw Eugen County as workers
voluntarily neglecting disdaining what is to do with race period or class.
Another prominent figure in the shaping of this naturalist mentality named in Monod schema was the novelist Emile Zola.
Between 1870 and 1893, Zola produced the 20 novels of the Rural Machol series.
Their ideas on heredity and determinism, influenced by 10 zero,
also made theoretical contributions, helping to define naturalism as intellectual scope.
His Lahoma experiments are published in 1880, was a manifesto for literary naturalism,
vaunting writing that would describe and analyse absolutely any aspect of modern experience.
Significantly, there was a section entitled Liow Hyperbolic in Literature in which Zola proclaimed
his own Republicanism and then insisted like public scarnati of at least in part,
the republic would be naturaliste or it won't exist.
This was a play on the statement by Adults Teer, the first president of the Third Republic, that the Republic will be conservative or it won't exist.
Zebra's argument was that naturalism is a Republican literature,
given that the Republic was based on a Democratic decision itself made after five factual analysis of the nation's needs.
He saw the republic emerging from the same process of scrupulous observation of material reality as
manifested by his novels or the medicine of the late Clode banner with whose experimental pathology.
He also sought to draw parallels. Zola defined naturalism as the analytical and experimental method modern enquiry based on facts and human documents.
Failure to capitalise on the modernity of Naturaliste method was to fail to be truly model.
Yet Zoner recognised that the description and analysis of the material world as a creative rather than scientific act needed to allow flexibility.
Not everyone responds and sees in the same way.
So his next theoretical text, little more and that's a list of 1881, acknowledged that Zoners,
a middle group of naturalist's writers, including moop us on Christmas, had personal.
Literary styles within their collective naturalist aesthetic.
And he said the same painters. These texts by Zola are significant.
They help define naturalism, moderating its core belief in close descriptive analysis with generosity towards personal means of expression,
stressing the aesthetics, interdisciplinarity, its reach encompassing literature and the visual arts.
Its mortality shared with the sciences. These were all terms with which monotones academic survey would agree.
A decade and a half later, finally,
it is no coincidence that Lahoma experimental title was published in 1880 as Republican politics really got into gear because for Zoner,
with his play on tears admonition about the Republic's future, naturalism was inescapably ideological, notably dark.
Zoners intellectual impact within the work world of the visual arts.
The novelist may have written very little art criticism during the eighteen eighties and nineties,
but his earlier naturalist definition of a work of art learnt that you are the art there.
Top of hour, Moore was constantly quoted, invoked and impugned to give just two examples.
When Octave Millo praised Rafael is act at the founders there on the left in 1886, as nature seemed by a masculine temperament.
He was using a naturalist dictum for a naturalist picture, whereas when in 1892,
Mochis Dinny found Louis all Cotard's recent work re-engaging with the theory of nature seen through temperament,
the committed symbolist Dinni was somewhat disappointed by what he saw as this recidivist Lapps.
The common currency of that definition was one instance of the hegemony of that cultural and intellectual agenda.
Whether you call it zoners, naturalism tends positivist determinism, Monod scientific realism, naturalist painting emerged from it,
belonged within it and contributed to it, giving visual and broadcast to all form to the Republic's dominant Montanti de.
What of the Third Republic itself? I got no time to go into detail about the policies,
manoeuvrings and personalities of 20 years of complex pictorial activity, but let's build an armature.
At least the Third Republic was founded on the 4th of September 1870 in the wake of military defeat
at the hands of the invading German armies and the subsequent collapse of the second empire.
However, the eighteen seventies was a decade of false starts and conservative reaction.
It wasn't until the elections of January 1879 that a politically authentic republic was in
place with a majority in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies and a genuine Republican,
usually gravy scene there painted by Bonner in 1880 as president.
This is where I begin.
The eighteen seventies had at least shown Republicans clearly who their enemies were and the extent of the work necessary to defeat them.
In broad terms, the Republican Project was to create a civic religion using the Republic to give moral unity to France.
Republicans beacon principles, liberty, equality, fraternity were values drawn from enlightenment,
thought and tempered in the fire of the French Revolution. A century on.
It was time to put them in place. The republic drew value from this inheritance and the visual arts were only one medium used to validate it.
For example, at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a team of painters led by Joe VACs and Alfred Stovall's painted the giant Panorama de Sickler.
Those are only some fragments of it. A pictorial survey of the great and good of the past century.
Its central section of the top player was comprised of an arch surmounting a monument to the glory of France.
And behind it for knishes with statues, books, statues of enlightenment.
Philos of this insistence on historical continuity was echoed in Kamei Lefevre as 1895 Sculpture of the Republic for the Mathie of E.C Lee Moutinho.
Here the figures of liberty, equality and fraternity as they reach down towards Marianne, the symbol of the Republic,
are each given a date which you might be able to see on the carving that the photograph was taken by me.
So not very good. And the dates of their 1789, 1830,
1848 registering revolutions in French society and the chronological progression towards the realisation of present Republicanism.
Liberté, Égalité and Stephanie Té are political values standing for and against.
Under the early Third Republic, they stood against the past.
Liberty from the autocratic rule of monarchal emperor. From religious belief or superstition.
From control by the Catholic Church and the KYOHEI equality rather than the class hierarchy of aristocrats notables.
They also stood for the present and future, for liberty of thought and expression of political association.
Equality between the Couche socio fraternity as a means of building a unified nation forth, as Graham Robb has recently reminded us.
France was a very diverse country language, social customs, food, building materials,
agricultural practises all differed from region to region across the EXI God.
France was in an analogous position to two neighbouring countries which had recently unified politically Germany and Italy,
in that it's still in the Republican scheme needed to cohere into a single nation.
Republicanism was therefore a political ideology with a job to do.
Nation building that hasn't been recently somewhat debased, this necessitated the promotion of the collective.
In March 1882. Ernest Hummel.
Seen here again in a portrait by Bonner. I will be showing you other pictures than portraits by Bonner.
I can assure you. In March 1882, Ernest Keweenaw gave a famous lecture at the Sorbonne.
What is a Nation?
His conclusion a great aggregation of men, healthy of spirit and a room of art creates a moral consciousness that is called a nation.
The republic sought to shape that consciousness to its own principles to unite that aggregation under the banner of fraternity.
That process was identified with modernity for the progressive and scientific principles inherited from the Enlightenment led ever forward.
The pictures that I'm going to explore in these lectures, pictures that went on show in Paris and other cities that were photographed and
reproduced in magazines contributed by the process of accretion to this consciousness,
whether a landscape of Old TEEB by Claude Monet or of the Vogue by Louis for, say, a peasant scene by Leone.
Let me talk Cammi Pissarro, a Parisian suburb by luging large or foreswear half valy.
The cumulative impact of descriptive canvases in such a climate was a contribution to the
constant definition of the moral consciousness of nationhood that Al-Noor had identified.
Broadly speaking, Republicans wanted a conservative regime, although there was universal manhood, suffrage,
a radical constitutional situation in contemporary Europe,
the actively political classes sought stability and consensus to protect the elites and their property.
Social reform tended to be a limited objective. There were, of course, shifting political patterns during the two decades with which I'll be dealing.
During the 18th 80s, Republican's chief opponent was the church politicians determined to wrest influence on the nation's young from the church.
The better to mould the Republican future. And they pursued anticlerical policies, particularly in education.
The steady process of laicisation enfold vote that involved the gradual removal of Catholic influence in schools,
beginning with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1880, as well as other social reforms such as the liberalisation of the divorce law in 1884.
But by the 1990s, relations between church and state had become less confrontational.
In the 90s, it was increasingly the political left, especially the growing threat of socialism,
as well as the resurgent right which troubled the majority Republican centre.
Of course, the broad front of Republicanism itself was very diverse.
There were many strains, opportunist, radical solitaries and social jostling and regrouping in often short lived administrations.
Again, there were different commitments to the republic in different regions, and the Catholic right was strong.
In Britain and the North, for example,
different interests and constituencies could be truculent and might need to be addressed in different ways to suit their different demands.
What you will be asking was the place of the visual arts and this.
Well, that's one of the main questions that I'll be addressing in this series when I will, I can assure you, be talking more about pictures.
But I want to close this introductory lecture by returning to painting if Republicanism.
Liberty, equality, fraternity was to become a civic religion.
It needed to be taught.
So education, the instilling of Republican values across France to create that broad ideological consensus was a crucial political mechanism.
The introduction to the official publication of the Great Exposition Universelle,
held in 1889 right at the middle of my period, made this crystal clear.
We will show to our sons what their fathers have done in a century through the progress of education, the love of work and respect for liberty.
Education meant more than schooling. It meant the subtle and constant indoctrination of all citizens with Republican values.
This was addressed particularly at men who had the vote in France's new democracy.
It was no coincidence that the official official rhetoric I've just quoted talked to fathers and sons and I will return to virility in later lectures.
This discreet process of propagandising the electorate involved a wide variety of
methods amongst them that this year will art's almost throughout this period.
There was a Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, an indication of how the Republic understood art as an ideological tool.
As you know, fairly, a leading politician in the eighteen eighties was quite frank about this in a speech of April 1881.
For a society like ours, a lively democracy. Art Mazia is, above all and before all, a major means of popular education.
What politicians required civil servants delivered in an 1895 speech.
The senior functionary, Gustaf Lahoma, insisted that modern democracy gives art a public role,
a bubble through its museums, which are a form of instruction.
To address its many constituencies and satisfy diverse interests,
the state had to acknowledge different forms of art and embrace an eclectic range of styles.
I do not want to be doctrinaire in my lectures and assume that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in competition with no stylistic alternatives.
Undoubtedly, forms of classicism, notably that of Poovey to Chavan,
seem there on the left or the neo baroque of artists such as labelled Bonnar on the right had a substantial impact in grand public painting,
for example. This eclecticism became a problem with big public commissions such as the Hotel de Ville and Paris and the Capitol in Toulouse,
where many different interests had to be admitted, leading to a chaos of styles.
But I think that it is too easy to conclude with pure lace that the republic's liberal embrace of eclectic styles is the main story.
Undoubtedly, both expediency and Republican egalitarianism encouraged leading administrators such as
Lavall May and June Castagnetti to recognise diverse kinds of work and in so doing,
accept a degree of laissez faire eclecticism. But within that surface, liberalism was a naturalist drive.
Until now, plussed, seen here in a bust by loadout, minister of Culture and Gambetta,
short lived government, a pivotal figure at the 1889 Exposition Universelle,
explained that while he could find merit in allegories and historical subjects,
I confess that I have a marked predilection for the representation of something seen.
Those on the left were also clear on the committee charged with commissioning decorations for the reconstructed Paris Hotel de Viel counsellor's,
such as the Socialist, while Vidal and former Communist label or Dunner demanded real and true images of the political,
economic and social life of the everyday people of Paris.
One suspects that such a position is common across much of the Republican spectrum.
A primary means by which the state could promote its values and manipulate mortality via the fine arts were inevitably committees.
The Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts set up the committee de Tabo DA in February 1882.
Its remit to vet public commissions and by works for the state collections effectively.
This meant that the state bought art that suited it take its purchases from the sale of 1889.
One was lab meets portrait of the great pathologist Clode Bhavna Zoners Inspiration.
A picture intended for the Academy Dimmit scene at the new Sorbonne.
An exemplary image of the scientific progress vaulted by the Republic.
Another was your four losses. Men of the Holy Office.
A typical naturalistic historical reconstruction of a scene of the Inquisition.
Destined for the eles, a palace.
It would have served as a reminder to the president of the autocratic illiberalism of the church if he needed such a reminder.
In addition, there were over a dozen landscapes. Amongst them pull signs near Avignon.
These landscapes represented sites all over France, from Flanders to also the noires to the short BINYA on exhibition at the Selo.
They would have given visitors a descriptive reminder of the nation's geographical diversity distributed to provincial museums and town halls.
They would have satisfied this all that regional pay, deputy or mayor consolidating the republic status through the visual arts.
What kind of art suited the Republican project? This is another question which I'll explore in much greater detail in the next two lectures.
But let me give you some quick, far answers, because they support my case that the Naturaliste aesthetic had a strong ideological foundation.
First, Republicanism favoured art, which was democratic and egalitarian.
Some examples of the Dhall submitted an informal sequence of paintings to the as of the 18th,
80s and 1990s of various social types, usually of the lower classes.
Amongst these were Luby cement worker at the 1884 salon, Amanda Lamay to the farmer's wife purchased from the state from the 1888 Sello.
LifeSize and giving names and media. These were portraits of Égalité, ordinary citizens, given the pictorials status of a Grandy's.
The city of Paris bought Zoo Duluth's large high relief every day from the 1883 salon,
intending it for a grand room in the reconstructed Otar de Ville.
Dalou, like Roll., a committed Republican, protested that he would rather it were mounted in a public garden visible to the many, not just the few.
This egalitarianism had other visual manifestations. Thus, when his great tower was completed in spring 1889,
Gustaaf Eifel had the names of the 100 99 workers who had been employed on its construction from start to finish painted prominently on a girder.
A second Republican requirement was legibility.
So when in 1888, Alford born to submitted his preliminary sketch there for universal suffrage, subject central to Republican ideology for the soldier,
say, at the mathie of Leelah in the Parisian suburbs, he was required to make changes for the final decoration.
He had to reverse the composition, placing registration on the left and voting on the right.
So the public picture read in a logical sequence.
But Bolto had already established in his sketch that much of what was was expected was easily legible.
Voters from across the Couche. So Seattle, the quasi religious act of casting the vote.
A third does a desideratum. Was that art should be exact and scientific.
In other words, that the fine art should comply with the cultural mentality of zoners naturalism or Monarchos scientific realism.
There's time, for one example. That fascination with exactitude was not restricted to the contemporary of the summer of 1880.
Georgia is a villes exhibited Mafa assassinated 13th of July 1793, eight o'clock in the evening,
which as a defining moment of the revolution was purchased by the state.
The painting is highly dramatised and the gestures of its Life-Size figures, with the scene set back from The Spectator as if on stage.
But that theatricality is tempered by the specificity of texture,
costume and accessory right down to the exact number six, seven, eight of the news sheet.
Let me do purple tipping into Marfa's bath.
On its frame was a cartouche with a detailed 18th century account of the murder, identifying figures such as Marfa's common law wife, Chalmette.
Thus, Vinces canvas is as accurate in documentary terms as it is immediate and dramatic.
On the 8th of July 1886, the music Guyver purchased the actual tub in which Maher was seated when Charlotte Corday knifed him.
The waxwork museum used it in a reconstruction of the event, which opened in autumn 1886 and was loosely derived from Vinces composition.
The music Gilliver was as determined to advocate its authenticity as befits its catalogue, devoted five pages to describing Maher's death,
explaining how the music had traced his actual bathtub and even reprinting the deed of sale in both grand experts,
exhibition painting and the popular culture of the waxwork exactitude.
And the document were understood to be central to validating visual representation.
In presenting the wide public with reliable information, in promoting knowledge appropriate to the Republican Project, in the next two lectures,
I'll explore how naturalist painting functioned, how it might be imbued with Republican rhetoric, and how it might be read.
The aim is to do more than prove that naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in France during the 1980s and 90s.
It's to demonstrate that naturalist paintings dominance was due to the way the image of the world
it offered was consistent with and indeed contributed massively to the formation of a consensus.
That consensus gravitated around several overlapping mortality.
The broad spectrum of Republican ideology, a shared grasp of social, national and civic values, and a sense of what was modern.
All this is encapsulated overtly in a painting such as your bellows, Lamar says.
With its carefully staged commutable Republicanism and rather more suggestively in Fleer was political discussion of
1890 scrupulously representing the penetration of literacy and liberty of debate amongst the provincial parties.
These mortality were those of the dominant classes and imagery in a public mural
decoration and exhibition painting or magazine illustration served to disseminate them.
But what I want to do more in these lectures than explore this with you.
I'm sorry. I want to do more of these lectures than explore this with you. After all, what comes down from above can attract ridicule.
So how did caricature play on that dominant naturalism and what comes up from below?
Can be hard to trace. So what evidence can we find of art tempered not by the bourgeois but by the Populaire?
But these propositions and speculations lead towards a much larger issue.
This concerns the status of avant garde painting. We understand the eighteen eighties and nineties in France as the crucible of modernist art.
And I, for one, am not going to deny the value or importance of Douga or Monet, Soha or Ghoga, all of whom will feature later lectures.
But if we really value naturalism, acknowledges its aesthetics and tragedy,
register its embodiment of what most contemporary is considered as modern in both subject and style.
Do we not need to recalibrate our understanding of the avant garde?
Might we not need to consider avant garde ism less as heroic,
pioneering of new forms of expression and more as a modification of a deliberately negotiated
repudiation of perhaps even of an eventual submission to that dominant naturalism?
Let's see.