The case that I made in the first lecture was that during the 1980s and 1990s, naturalism was the dominant aesthetic in French culture.
Today, I want to explore specifically how it functioned in visual culture.
How can we explain the startling volume and variety of documentary paintings produced at this period?
What was their value to the society which produced them?
Today I will be concentrating on paintings, many of which were intended for public display and others which were for a more private purpose.
But reading these pictures can be a complex business, as I hope I will demonstrate.
To do so, we need to begin with two premises. First,
that naturaliste forms of representation in late 19th century France were both more intricate and
potentially contested in the ways which they were crafted and read than we conventionally recognised today.
Second, that we need to push aside our modernist prejudices about good art in order to penetrate the mentality
that gave naturalism its cultural hegemony but linked it so closely to Republican ideology.
I'm going to try and persuade you that there's interest in apparently uninteresting paintings, naturalism, sintered,
the Third Republic, Republicanism, privileged the Naturaliste aesthetic and naturalism co-opted the Republican ideology.
This collusion of interests was very evident at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.
Midway through our period,
the official publication made the exposition US objectives clear in explicitly Republican rhetoric to give pleasure to the eyes,
unsatisfaction to the spirit presented in the sentiment of social dignity and the need for liberty,
which relies on the fraternity of peoples and individuals. In his semi-official account, a French painting of the expositional George La Finest,
who doubled as a curator at the Louvre and an art critic explicitly linked to the
Third Republic and naturalism when he wrote that in a resonantly democratic society,
the predominance of studies of contemporary life demonstrates the absolute liberty of imagination and observation,
a serious and sympathetic respect for all the physical and moral manifestations of humankind at all levels of understanding and culture.
The inclusive egalitarianism of such language was matched by paintings of the expositional.
In 1890, Louis Bethel exhibited a large canvas which represents the central dome of the Gallery Day machine.
It is not only programmatic in what it depicts Parisians, provincials and Colonial's,
the uniforms of the Army Republican Guard and École Polytechnique the iron construction and grandiose decor of the architecture,
but also in what it implies about the Republic.
In such details as the impressed gazes of the colonial visitors or the glimpse of
the Eiffel Tower through the far windows which you cannot see in this reproduction,
the painting articulates imperial outreach, technological mastery, economic prosperity and social stability.
This is pictorially couched in naturalist's terms.
By this, I don't just mean descriptive detail, but its manipulation.
The cut off figure of the North African. Just a couple of pieces from us.
The views towards and through and upwards.
The Momoh Carina's of figures in mid stride.
Bell's contrivance of the immediacy and diversity of looking works hand in glove with the values that the Republic used the exposition to promote.
Little wonder, then, that this painting entered the personal collection of the President of the Republic.
Sadly, Covino the values that the Third Republic sought to instil.
Well articulated, far a wide variety of visual media from grand public mural decorations and monumental sculpture through easel
paintings to cheap prints and photographic reproductions which gave the widest possible currency to imagery.
I will concentrate on various kinds of painting, but what I want to convey throughout this lecture is how closely the ideology Republicanism strove.
To promote and perpetuate and lie did with the pictorial languages and forms that painting could offer,
those might be to do with visual idiom, narrative and actions, say, or human scale and detailed exactitude.
Or they might involve different types of picture.
Perhaps the mural addressing the gaze of the masses or the easel picture intended for private contemplation.
The republic was not slow to use the time honoured medium of public decoration.
The programme to decorate the mayor.
He, the Town Hall of the Capitals are holding smores and the surrounding suburbs typified Republican use of art for pedagogical purposes.
But as it unrolled through the later eighteen seventies and eighties eighties, this programme adapted to changing currents.
These included the shift from the conservative moral order regime of the 70s to the opportunist republic of the 80s,
the generally more progressive politics compared to central government of the commissioning body.
The Paris City Council.
All the varying makeup of the juries of senior artists who recommended successful decorative painters early decorations often relied
on allegories which both thematically and visually were outdated and incomprehensible to the broad citizenship that were used.
The public rooms of the Mathey gradually ponderous subjects such as Leks and Justy are replaced by more vernacular ones like family and TVI.
This change in language and legibility not only echoed the transition from the
paternalistic presidency of McMahon to the ostensibly more egalitarian one of gravy.
It also required a change individual idiom, for example,
when he was commissioned to decorate the mathie of the CCMA on these small with images of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Here is the central panel of liberty, or the Navy still relied on a neo baroque design and the historical allusion to the fall of the Basti.
Even in 1887, a conservative solution surely difficult to decipher for the ordinary citizen who stood beneath his allegories.
The following year, a more liberal jury commission commissioned Paul Boudoir to decorate the Saudi mariage of the town hall of Arko Cashel.
His subjects being Mateer shooting practise. They feel Sci., the engaged couple and labeller, she says.
The Washerwomen depicted in a naturalist idiom.
These everyday subjects went beyond what they actually represented discreetly but quite evidently articulating civic values,
duty, family and labour loftier. For example, shows the workers of the suburbs practising their rifle shooting.
But apparently descriptive simplicity is underpinned with ideological allusion to Égalité or men practise flatout.
Any day they watch and advise each other and leap out, Day defended like their families by their skill at arms.
Those tripartite national values are pictorially prompted by the tricolour of their clothing and shoes to democracy,
and public decorations were not confined to contemporary subjects.
Pall Mall says decoration for the pull tail.
The death of sad Jenova ever completed in 1882 may reconstruct a fifth century scene, but it is as emphatic in its actuality.
Aged skin, dirty feet. Naked children as it is in its depiction of all the couche socio.
All of the dark ages.
The nobles, clergy, Bergers and peasants from the elderly to babies suggest not only community but continuity through the generations.
A linkage from fifth to 19th centuries implied also by the titular above the dying Saints head.
And I'm afraid the colour has made the embroidery above rather more purple in this.
But believe me, if you go to the pool table, it is blue. This choice of colour in the central section was deliberate.
The preliminary oil study didn't use it, and the introduction of the Tricolour was an allusion to Republican politics,
as was the inclusion amongst the Franck's of two leading radical politicians,
Honey Gumbley and Ed More Jocky Starfish, chromatics and ideology worked in close collusion.
But even the Curtis scan of loss is decoration would have tipped the wink to most visitors to the port deal.
But this was a picture about a Gallito. That equality Revit resided not just in what Loha said represented, but how he had done so.
Such public works, whether they use contemporary subjects as boudoir did, or historical scenes like novels,
were deliberately imbued with legible values and associations which promoted Republican ideology.
Mural decorations were commissioned to promote civic ideology in public places.
But Republican values were also explicit or implicit in easel paintings shown at the annual salons.
Many exhibition pictures were large canvases, which the artists hoped would be purchased the museums.
Thus to enter the public sphere paid by the public purse.
It helped to endorse the appropriate values.
Rafael is George Clemenceau, addressing an electoral meeting executed in 1883 and shown at the salon of 1885,
may promote a particular politician and suggest the artist's adherence to his politics.
But in broad terms, it advocates the democratic values of the Post 1879 Republic, Freedom of Speech and of political association.
In a word, liberty.
As Clemenceau explains his policies to a crowd of identifiable political colleagues such as Kamei of Palatal and Alexander are below.
The picture ended up in the national collections. But the Republican rhetoric could also be filed.
I suggest in more modest pictures for the private collector, for instance,
George Bellows representation of Victor Hugo's coffin lying in state under the OP to tee
off in 1885 was a small panel painted on the spot and kept in the artist's possession.
Nonetheless, its ostensible record of something seen is orchestrated in suitably democratic terms to the
left of female servant or shopkeeper has the same view from a stepladder as to board was.
While a couple of male vendors provide a proletarian presence in the foreground
and again add a discreet couleur accent amongst the black coated bourgeois,
the collective in its various forms national, civic, regional, professional, communal.
And so was what the regime sought to identify and bind to the republic.
This notion of a central identity found its resistance not only in the political sphere or in regional pride,
but also in the sheer ingrained parochialism of much of rural France.
In 1892, for instance, the mayor of timidness in the ESER had to instruct that year conscripts for military
service that there was more to laparoscope than the village in which they had been born.
The army was a particularly potent image of Republican collectivity writing about the military painter Edward Dipti in 1897, Gustave Lullay,
a former director of Fine Arts, took an emphatically Republican position today due to constant and logical and necessary progress.
The principle of obligatory individual service sees all France's male population enter the ranks
that wrote Justice in military law should be matched by truth in the representation of the soldier,
which details paintings provided. The proliferation of paintings of army life gave pictorial form to the collective experience of young Frenchmen,
demonstrated their performance of duty to women and children, and shored up public belief in an army reformed along Republican lines.
Pictures were part of the rhetoric. George Janosch is the reservists from the cellar of 1882 is a culture sleep.
Modern composition,
with its wedge of open space on the right stopped by the rider designed to set up a sense of the informal and the momentary as other gestures,
such as the man with the suitcase removing his hat in the centre.
Janosch juxtaposed cap bola and top hat, signifying the different classes united by the égalité and fraternité of conscription,
attitudes to the collective or the meat and drink of politics.
And under the Third Republic, they formed an active role in shaping ideas about relations between the individual situation and the state.
The function of a malfunction of the collective fascinated contemporary intellectuals in his pioneering framework for sociology.
Lay Haigler delimited sociologic of 1894.
Emil Durkheim argued that the new discipline would study LAAM Collective, the collective soul, taking, as one example, rural depopulation.
If the population pushes into our towns instead of spreading over the countryside, it's because there's a kind of opinion,
a collective pressure, which imposes that concentration on individuals, Dotcom wrote.
Another intellectual, Molly's Buffer's, was sharply critical of the republic centralising collectivism in his 1897 novel A Day,
Hussie Lay the Gambetta schoolmaster Bhutto yay, a Democrat designated by those who set themselves up to organise democracy.
Teachers love Kilic TV day Nazionale to his N-E schoolboy's.
But when these youths migrate to Paris, impelled to the National Centre, tragic consequences follow from their uprootedness painting.
Its great goal, the grouping of the human figure into memorable images, also addressed these ideological and social issues.
Label level leaks emerged as a leading painter in the eighteen eighties.
His work, published for the national collections and winning medals and prestigious commissions.
Lemonade's typical subject matter was agricultural life around his native village, Morseu Baths on the Marne to the east of Paris.
A painting such as the Harvest showed at the Salon 1883, gave its over lifesize peasants and heroic scale.
The torsion and the fatigue of the figures, as well as the sweeping expanse of the Marne cornfields, add to the sense of the epic.
But for all the scenes, simple obviousness, its seasonal ubiquity.
It incorporated fundamentals. Hard work.
Tedham tasks the fertility of the soil breads to come, which spoke directly about collective duty,
social coherence and the timeless continuity's of country life limits.
Evening Work of 1888 shows a local veiga here represented as a female gathering.
The girl being taught to knit by an elderly woman and staff or suggesting continuity's crofter knowledge flowing through the community.
Unusually for a chiefly rural department, the Monde's population increased slightly between the censuses of 1886 and 91.
But the increase was in industrial centres such as a house, rather than in the agricultural areas where Republicanism was slow to take root.
Land meets naturalism was equivalent then observation of harvest,
or they was crafted into a scene either epic or intimate, ostensibly accurate, painted by the local man.
But such paintings transformed the data of Lao Meat P into pictures to be seen in the capital.
They dealt with larger issues,
whether the broad embrace of Republican collectivism or the more specific problems of rural D population for evening work
was illustrated in alternate Tokyo's 1888 book Lover You who STK recording Country Customs before they disappeared,
lemmings images were made within.
And as part of debates about the nature of the national collective, as much so as the ideas of a deal chyme or a bass.
The republic played up its modern scientific identity as it sought to distance itself from its political rivals, the monarchy and the Catholic Church,
to pitch their hierarchy and superstition into the past while projecting its own commitment to change and progress into the future.
It traced its intellectual roots to the rationality of the Enlightenment and laid stress on its modernity.
Founded on the application of reason, logic and science,
looking back to the natural aesthetic of naturalist aesthetic of the 18th 80s from the vantage of nineteen hundred and eight labels, Benedict,
curator of the state collection of modern art,
the music Deducible wrote that one analysed and discussed individuals and social media like a doctor discourses on pathological cases,
one class types of humanity. One studied the defects resulting from their condition, their hereditary past,
and one applied the same laboratory method to the examination of the mentality of collectives.
This methodical scientific ideal. He went on, applied as much to authors such as flowback and Mopar soul as it did to painters such as Alfred Hall.
And he added, the impressionist artists who had rigorously scientific ambitions.
And this is all wrong. Type artists were understood to be specifically engaged with scientific ideas of observation and accuracy.
This went beyond the time honoured practise of studying anatomy from corpses on the 11th of July 1891.
Emil Fleer attended the execution of a triple murderer and immediately afterwards drew
the guillotined head in the anatomy laboratory of the North Sea Medical Factory.
And you'll be pleased to know I've spared you that one of the strangest alliances between art and medicine, which I trailed.
Last week came in 1890 when Dr Seymour Bernheim commissioned Zu Adler to paint a woman receiving a blood transfusion from a goat in his laboratory.
Bad idea. The picture was both a record and a public promotion of bad times.
Misguided hypotheses about mixing blood from different species.
Adelies feet would be twelve hundred traps rising to fifteen hundred.
If the painting was exhibited as it was at the 1892 Saladin's artist falsey as required,
the painting colludes with the medical practise detailing battlelines, attentive supervision.
The stopwatch precision the up to the minute equipment, modern art going hand in hand with modern medicine.
Education was another means by which the Republic strove to diminish the authority of its political rivals, particularly the church.
The eighteen eighties saw a legislative programme and a series of educational reforms promoting the Republic's league policies.
The strategy was to entrench Republican values in the minds of the younger generation.
So developing and perpetuating Republicanism as the Central National Montanti
Day mural decorations commissioned from the public purse and propagandising
public policy were inevitably rolled it more dodgeballs 1893 commission for the Saudi Kosei of the Town Hall of Masel or for typifies this.
And I show you the sketch depicting the mayor at a price giving on the cattle.
We're the Third Republic coincided the end of the school year with the National Fed.
The painting enshrined a secular ritual in the seat of local authority.
It's lauding of civic values such as scholarly achievement and communal recognition.
Given a specifically Republican gloss by the tricolour of the three leading schoolgirls in the centre, Aimé Parfaits,
the distribution of the prises exhibited at the 1890 Salon de la Nasional represented a village, seen its inclusion of Mayr,
Kyohei and local notables on the dais as the critic Louis Enno noticed a tactful harmonisation of local men of influence and whose hint that these
girls would eventually marry while alluding to family values actually cut across the significance that the republic gave to the education of women.
The move of the 21st of December 1880, formulated by Kamins,
say enhanced secular secondary education for girls and established teacher training colleges for young women.
By the mid 80s 90s, there was an impressive phalanx of over 45000 Republican ised as the two Twiss in primaries.
Schools, given that education and the arts belong within the same ministerial portfolio,
when on the 19th of April, 1893, June, we saw director of primary education proposed to his boss,
the minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, that contemporary education should be recorded in a series of five paintings.
The decision was swiftly reached. Unsure just what Who Specialised and Painted Children was commissioned on the 17th of June,
from proposal to ministerial decision in two months demonstrates the complicity between ideology and visual culture.
A painting from Jeff was series was exhibited annually from 1895.
Of the whole group together in the section on education at the nineteen hundred exposes CLB New Ourselves.
What an example of the interface between Republican policy, executive action and visual culture.
These pictures of education served to educate the public about the Republic's educational practises.
The descriptive naturalist aesthetic covered not only seems from contemporary life, but also from history,
as we've seen with Lohaus, his death of San Genevieve historical subjects encouraged ideological glosses.
The proliferation during the 1980s of scenes from the fratricidal vaun day wars of 1790,
three to six fought in western France between the troops of the First Republic and the two islands Catholic and Aristocrat LED is a case in point.
Throughout the decade, each salon had three or four paintings on the theme.
And nine were on view at the 1889 Exposition Universelle.
Often large, these canvases made much of their actuality with their specific settings, detailed costumes and physical combat paintings such as.
Joseph Giorgio's F. Vitz is death of Basra on the left and Alexander Bloss death of General Buckwheat from the sales of 1883 in 1888, respectively,
used Naturaliste pictorial devices to maximise the illusion of actuality figures frozen in rapid
movement or encroaching from the canvas edges to give a powerful sense of impulsive aggression.
And in these two paintings, the moment of or just before violent death.
Vinces Barber is in fact an excellent example of how the same work could fulfil its
ideological and pedagogical functions in different contexts and via different media.
It represents the death in 1793 of a teenaged drummer who,
as he was killed by counter-revolutionary better Breton Quran's yelled out Vive la Republique,
commissioned by the state in 1880 and the success of the sale of 1883.
The painting was first hung in the Ailey's, a palace where its theme of Republican devotion would have been evident to all the presidents visitors.
In addition, five hundred thousand photographs were printed for distribution to schools throughout France
so that Burroughs dutiful martyrdom could stand via the arresting naturalism of Vitz,
his picture as an example to millions of schoolchildren, many of whom would have died in the trenches of 1914 to 18.
But the ideology promoted by such images was not watertight, susceptible to a single reading.
While a schoolboy might have been thrilled by Barack's heroic example,
the adult might well remember that the one day campaigns had been a civil war, as had been the commune of 1871.
The commune was not deemed an appropriate Celo subject.
But images of the Vaun Day wars reminded Republicans of the dangers of extremism within the nation and that
on occasion sacrifices were needed to defeat irrational opponents for monarchists or Catholic evil to.
It might be added. Such paintings recalled that a new republic led to civil war.
Be it in 1793 or 1871. Painting might be an ideological tool, but it could not be reliably red.
By 1880, there was a wide understanding that the depiction of contemporary France necessarily
following the naturalist aesthetic was one of the functions of modern art.
This was supported across the Republican spectrum from senior deputies such as until now,
pushed to radical Paris counsellors like Lay or Donna at the beginning of his distinguished career as a critic and aspect of their Bouzar Hodgy,
Marx wrote in La Pockley de Lest It 1884 that we are grateful to the realist for
retracing our own image for us and for preparing for the centuries to come.
Documents on the age in which we live. Naturaliste representation went hand-in-hand with Republican ISM's demand for the scientific docu law.
For example, limites contribution to the Utter the Vehle Declaration was a painting of lay out the Paris Central Market.
Laffan Nest, who I've mentioned was a Republican functionary,
praised the painting at the 1895 Selander Lenarcic now for being an invaluable document and found it quite appropriate.
That limit had included himself on the right of the canvas.
He's up there somewhere as place validated the authenticity of his observation.
It should come as no surprise that the work of art, executed and admired as a document, should be to the fore.
At the very time that Deok Hymes, a Haigler Delimiters sociologic, was centred on the idea of social facts.
This canvas I show you in black and white because it's so large, it's now rolled up.
And the next image I'm going to show you is the sketch of the painting, because that too is rolled up.
These pictures can be quite difficult to see.
Pressure from the political centre to classify and record contemporary life leads to many major public commissions to record significant events.
Alfred Hall's celebration of the centenary of the estate's general, exhibited in 1893,
represented a fact held by President Kozlow VLSI in 1889 at six by nine metres.
It had required 78 portraits and took three years work rolls.
Insistence on this in an interview suggests how significant the scrupulousness of his record was to him.
Louis Pasteur died in September 1895, and Dati was commissioned by the state to paint the funeral of the great scientist.
This is the boring painting that I threatened you with last week, just as Pasteur was entombed in the pool table.
So De Thai's painting went to the museum Nazionale at VLSI.
So the state doubly claimed the great man exhibited at the 1897 Saladin's artist for sale.
The painting was praised by fellow artist Albert Mesnil for its detail,
which he found morally scrupulous and of course, as a document but only in your writing.
Writing in the liberal Lappe room dismissed the ties,
painting as merely official art whose only interest for the future would be its record of protocol.
L may well be right. It's difficult for us today to take such a painting seriously as a work of art, but we should return to its function.
Dati fulfilled his brief to provide a record for a society that found moral worth in honesty and exactitude.
Pasteur's funeral had been attended by a crowd of 200000.
Placing its representation in a national museum helped perpetuate the nation's tribute to the great chemist on the scene.
Dati chose not only paid homage to Pasteur, but also reiterated progressive Republican rhetoric.
As all the public authorities, politics, diplomacy, academia,
the law of the army pay tribute to science, an appetite for the record was hardly new to art.
It had been shared by countless generations, from Egyptian pharaohs to Dutch burgers and Corsican generals.
But it proliferated in France at the end of the 19th century, as in other European countries.
So many private organisations, like the editorial teams of newspapers, had themselves perpetuated in group portraits.
In 1889, Jorge Bello celebrated the centenary of John Alday Deba.
By then, an organ of conservative Republicanism before was accumulation of some 40 portrait's lacks spontaneity.
Despite episodes such as the brimming wastepaper bin or the man glancing up from his paper but within his bland disruptiveness can be found.
Figures like 10, Eleanor and Jules Seymours tried to point out.
Who's there? I think these were all intellectual avatars of positivism and Republicanism, aptly encapsulated in this naturalistic record.
The following year, Joseph Heida commissioned author Gelwix to paint his editorial team at Lafe Puplick for says a bust of the paper's founder,
Gambetta asserts itself on the mantelpiece. Rovics is smaller.
Staff age allowed a greater sense of spontaneity than Bevell, as if we had just entered an editorial conference with Urgence Spillar looking
out from the rival LA tour and then a vow that whoso smoking a cigarette.
Although the painting strives for its contrived vitality,
it was evidently agreed that progressive politics required to be represented according to the best efforts of modern naturalism.
Individuals also commissioned portraits as records.
I'm not thinking here of the portrait for posterity common to all ages, but of portraits with greater specificity.
The celebrated act of Kokila in a commission to a series of paintings from Emil Theel representing him in different roles.
Some, for instance, as Figaro in Burma shares play there on the left,
a quite straightforward, although always in character and precise in details of costume,
while others such as popular as Schapper on the Right, deploy the artful devices of naturalism here.
The surprising placement, the instant of expression, the.
To record, however, was hardly free from contrivance.
Group portrait of the great physiologist Claude Bhavna at work at a vivisection laboratory and surrounded by his research team,
was commissioned for the Academy Dimmit scene in 1886. But while the painting proffers, all naturalism is descriptive plausibility.
It is quite bogus. Bella had died in 1878.
Yet commissioning a posthumous portrait, however, lacking in direct observation of the main, Sittar was nonetheless consistent with other objectives.
The celebration of scientific progress, commemoration of a great man making a document of the period,
even though in Bella's case it was strictly too late.
We can go some way towards explaining the proliferation of paintings done for the record,
by acknowledging the common anxiety about the rapidity of change.
If one aspect of naturalism was its ability to register the rapid momentum of modernity.
Another was its function in the conservation of the state of things before the processes of change swept them away.
Today, Turkey's text accompanying Leibnitz illustrations to love the Who STK of 1888 I show you the frontispiece on the left makes clear
that their collaboration is to describe French country life already in transition for a quarter of a century before France becomes,
as Towfiq put it, furrowed by brick, rectangular roads, tramways and railway tracks a vast Groff's board of systematic cultivation.
In his introduction to his great project to illustrate the New Testament finally published in 1896, I show you a watercolour over there on the right.
James Tiso made the same points. Modernity would soon transform the Holy Land.
A naturalist method should be used to document it before Christ's countryside became unrecognisable.
Nationalism's relations with modernity were complex and multifaceted as aesthetic had a conservationist dimension.
The Republic presented itself as a reformist regime.
Its progressive policies introducing liberal changes such as the freedom of
the press in 1881 and the legalisation of divorce and trade unions in 1884.
These reforms inevitably attracted political opposition, in particular during the late 1980s and 1990s,
with the increasing socialist vote discontented with the slow pace of social change and pressing for more vigorous solutions to last.
Your social policy and legislation were a matter for parliamentarians, of course.
But ministries and other social organisations used visual culture to disseminate their reformist positions and rhetoric.
Nationalisms, inclusive city may have theoretically equipped to deal with any subject.
However raw or distressing. But how efficacious was it?
A drawing attention to social problems? In 1882, Odille Woodall dismissed Bastia largest canvases of peasant types as decent bourgeois presentable,
arguing that middle class spectators simply had no knowledge of such people's gret grim existence
isn't so satisfied themselves with admiring the exact description of rags and wrinkles.
A decade later, the ironic writer Julia Hanaa made the same point about theatre.
Having seen Gaffar hoped Almond's harrowing play, The Weavers,
he wrote in his journal that while we want to be moved by others misery, people leave the theatre saying, Why should we go to dinner?
Certainly, painters and writers from their different political positions addressed the
largely middle class urban audiences at the art exhibition theatre or novel,
aware that their work would likely do better if it were informative rather than critical.
Just as those audiences with their own diverse political perspectives sought entertainment rather than instruction diversion, not reformist policy.
Nevertheless, at certain points, naturalism engaged with and served Republican reformism.
Let me take as an example the issue of baby care and the unwanted child.
These are pressing issues at a time when France's birthrate was very low between 1870 and 1914.
France's population increased by 10 percent, while Britons grew by 43 percent and Germany's by fifty eight percent.
Deaths in France actually exceeded births by 300 in the half decade, between 1890 in 95.
Many steps were taken to ameliorate this national weakness at government level,
legislation was introduced to reduce women's working hours to 11 hours in 1892 and ten in nineteen hundred in Paris.
Reformers like the city councillor Paul Strauss introduced practical steps through the system of assistance public to aid mothers and protect babies.
Breastfeeding mothers received a supplementary 10 francs per month from 1885.
A woman could deposit her unwanted infant at any hour and with total anonymity at the OSPI stays or for a C stay where it would be adopted.
A means to prevent abortion and infanticide from 1893 Paris maternity hospitals like Le Matel any day and its new wing,
Buddah Lock were required to lodge women in the last weeks of pregnancy.
The bars and marble of an abandoned baby awakening was purchased from the salad days artist say by the Patmore Dallas Sen.
On the course, a general of which Paul Strauss said it was placed in the Opie Taylor Sal Vassall to pull the naturalism of the sculpture.
Life sized highly detail with the baby's movements and expressive face,
insisted that this was a marble not of a funerary monument of a living child who implicitly had the right to municipal protection and
would one day be a citizen with responsibilities to the nation installing such a work in a maternity hospital literally set in stone.
This institutional commitment about DeMar Fest's in front of the maternity hospital exhibited at the 1892 Saladin's artist,
also is at one level an emotionally charged image of desolate motherhood, replete with sombre Pallot and pathetic fallacy at another.
It is a pictorial enactment of modern welfare practise.
The woman leaves the Opt-Out Buddha Lock the obstetric clinic at 125 Boulevard Appointer.
Paul Hoil, which it opened in 1890 and crosses the road to Lusby, stays or for assisted opposite where she will hand her baby over.
The picture was bought by DeMar Heist's friend. It was Seemore, a bachelor from philanthropist who gave it in 1894 to the city of Paris,
allowing it to become a public painting demonstrating the city's enlightened policies.
Paris also ran municipal clash called Prepon Year,
where working women could leave their babies for several weeks to be breastfed by an unmarried mother in the institution.
At the 1895 Salon de la Nasional, N.S., Doer's exhibited the delighted de great title.
This remarkable painting, Now Lost, sadly represents the regimentation of a natural function.
All the babies are fed at once. They are all weighed. The world is modern and hygienic.
The painting typifies a Republican vision of progress, science and reform and a horrifying contradiction.
Industrialised breastfeeding, a feminist, historians have pointed out.
For Republican reformers like Strauss, the single mother was controlled by doctors and bureaucrats.
The state took over the paternal role of the child, effectively became the state's doers, may have represented a moondust merely arem.
But Patro patriarchal control, if invisible, is the ordering force.
Love delighted day is also leak secular.
Unmarried mothers become socially useful as multiple municipal Madonnas and the paintings prevalent whiteness,
to which critics drew attention, alludes not to virginal purity, but to the modern virtue of public Haiji.
But once again, even private pictures for private consumption engaged with national issues don't talls 1892 painting
of his wife changing their son's nappy is at one level a picture of domestic intimacy at another.
An engagement with the national duty to breed and nurture.
I'll leave you with that for a bit and have a sip of water.
Another of the ways in which naturalism was so effective, an ally to Republicanism, was its flexibility.
Crucially, this involved in elasticity of style. The painters that we've already seen were strong individuals.
Nobody would confuse a loss for the tie and left me with a battle.
But naturalism also allowed what one might call flexibility of a reach.
It catered for a range of taste those who liked paintings of vigorous rural life.
But in my land meet historical reconstructions, lost scrupulous military precision.
Dati and so once again, there was an overlap between representation and politics.
The variety of power offered by the dominant naturalist aesthetic allowed its audiences.
Different artists to admire.
And yet, within that wide range of artistic personalities, the artists largely adhered to the central consensus of naturalism.
Because painters means of representation were legible and their subjects typically public
in their resonance that audiences could choose preferences from within a wide portfolio.
The Army officer might have Mark to tie the landowner and meet the naturalist aesthetic,
thus mapped neatly onto the patterns and requirements of Republican politics.
As the Republic struggles to establish itself fighting its position against old opponents
such as monarchism and the church and new threats like Bulos schism and socialism,
its politicians needed to satisfy the diverse demands of very different constituencies.
The adaptability of the naturalist aesthetic was enormously helpful here.
The state's mechanisms were deliberately used to forward art, which promoted Republican values.
This applied not only to the funding and commissioning of public art, such as the decoration of institutional buildings,
but also the purchase of paintings from the salons and their dispersal in provincial museums,
which might have equally implicit pedagogical intentions.
Thus, when the museum in Toulouse was sent Longhouses Horses, St.
John Crisostomo and the Empress Doxy in 1894. It was not merely receiving a picture by a locally born artist.
A traditionally anticlerical city was being sent a painting about the undesirability of religious interference in the affairs of state.
Although I'd be making a case that naturalism served as the primary aesthetic of the republic in the eighteen, eighties and nineties,
I should also acknowledge that nationalism's polyvalent also allowed it to be used by the Republic's ideological opponents.
Look for great Tal's lack. They showed up shown in the salon.
1886 is a very large and discoloured, closely descriptive canvas of the French Alps.
But the painting is perhaps less a celebration of sublime regional scenery by
Youssef artist or a geological or meteorological document than a painting adma.
Yoram Day Glory for great title was an eBay.
DeMar Fest's The Vow represents the solo catalogue of 1894, explains Brett on fishermen safely returned from a long voyage off the Newfoundland banks,
making a barefoot pilgrimage to a specific chapel purchased by the state and deposited at the Museum of Note.
It had official approbation, but it was also illustrated in a Catholic grammar.
Published in 1915 by the Abbey Pozole with exercises with which utilise the pictures disruptiveness to ask educational questions.
And writers on the left might take naturalism to task for being too unsympathetically generic or tame.
Writing for the far left lapel in 1884,
Judith Gosha condemned paintings like Hall's Mathiesen off the herb vendor on the left for choosing proletarian models who were too dull and class.
Given the character of the Parisian worker five years later, Octave Mirabeau, playing his quasi anarchist views for the conservative Likud Party,
praised Raphaela there on the right for introducing into contemporary art proletarian
subjects hitherto considered hideous and which would shock middle of the road Republicans.
This leaves us with the question of how contemporaries read naturalist painting plausibility and exactitude were at a premium.
Reviewing an exhibition of Mason Yates pictures in 1884.
Okay, Michelle explained his success in terms of their empathetic legibility with my new observation.
He makes his figures express intelligible feelings. Interesting.
Easy to comprehend. Which leaves The Spectator the pleasure of discovery without introductory effort.
Citing as an example this reader who is charmed by his book.
He smiles as at a people thought exactitude was held up as a quality.
The critic Oliver Massol praised Joe says, session of the or jury for its accuracy.
In 1887, the more recognisable Mesnil and level seated at the front Volo standing on the right in his usual brown coat.
Writing in 1890, Mochis, Amelle made common expectations about pictures.
Absolutely clear. The natural disposition of the public is to go to those pictures which speak their language.
It has neither the time nor the desire to decode complicated handling, which would demand a moment's reflection to be understood.
The further work is from photographic reality, the less chance it has of halting the public's passage.
This appetite for exactitude riled the youngest symbolist generation in rough is painting faint,
extendible, complained a man's never a touch in a landscape. He's a former solicitor who's taking a stroll.
After nine years, five months and three days of penal cobbly.
But for the majority, exactitude was the gold standard by which pictures were judged.
That fascination with material actuality permeated the culture of the early Third Republic.
It can be found in the theatre in the staging of Fennel ECAs.
The butchers at the touts were legal in 1888 with real bloody sides of beef hanging as a backdrop.
It can be found in popular spectacles such as Teofilo Plumpers, 1889 Latu,
then the first moving panorama named after a new transatlantic vessel with its wax crew and a ship that sailed past.
This taste factuality could even be found in children's toys for.
In 1879, the first doll, dressed not in clothes but only in nappies, was marketed.
Not a lot of people know that art was integrally implicated in this mesh of cultural understanding.
By this period, several senior artists who was equal de Bouzar professors were forming the next generation.
Men like Lawson Lael Bonner were committed to Naturaliste practises commissioned to paint a crucifixion for the Paladin's.
Eustace Bonner had hired Boosie,
an artist's model and former murderer who had somehow escaped the guillotine to nail a corpse to a cross so he could paint from nature.
When, in 1888, the touts were Liebl stage, Lail and Eeks play the death of the Duke of Onger.
It gave its production cross disciplinary credence by using the same costume as loss had used for his painting of the subject 15 years before.
Indeed,
the music Guyver even had a waxwork of locals and other artists visiting Dati work on one of his military Panorama's surrounded by his real props.
One final observation might be made about how Naturaliste painting was read, and that is its consistent link in critical discourse.
And it seems in the minds of the artists themselves with virility.
An artist's general temperament might be judged in these terms, as Paul Nappier did when he discussed Mohle says, robust and virile creations.
So might individual works. Turkey found a Bastia apologies love in the village found in Bastia LaBarge is Love in the Village,
a sincere and male poetry which is reassuring and savoury as the smell of ripe summer cool.
At the salon of 1886, Rafaelle is at a foundry suggested to Millo the powerful odour of work and humanity.
These workers are real workers with tanned skin, hardened muscles, limbs stiffened by continual effort.
Not only did Meebo share with Turkiye that allusion to smell, but its evocation of crude physical fact.
He also found masculinity in the style as well as the subject for this was nature seen by a male temperament.
This was also the way an artist might judge art past art.
On his visit to Venice in 1887, Phil appreciated the realistic details in Tintoretto, his work, which he found very masculine.
What are we to make of this litany of self-justification, Katri?
Maleness. The reality seems to have been associated with values of physicality and directness,
both in terms of an unflinchingly descriptive aesthetic and of a moral truthfulness.
Once again, I suggest that one finds in this equation the illusion of the naturalist means
of understanding the world and Republican assumptions about ordering it.
I return to where I began this lecture with democracy.
The third republic's vaunted democracy offered universal manhood of suffrage.
French women did not have the vote.
It was this widespread political and social assumption that men took responsibility in public life and was thus the voting situation.
While women tended the home, even Leslie Shay, a leading supporter of women's rights,
argued in 1877 that of the nine million adult women in France, only a few thousand would vote rationally.
The rest would do the kill. Bidding Russia took the standard line.
The women's primary role was as an educator, voiced amongst countless others.
But Professor Montage of the Bordo Faculty of Medicine,
when the team when he wrote that she should be wife and companion to man, guardian of his home material,
an intellectual educator of the young generations who will be the future naturalist painting predominantly made by men,
assumed the schema of contemporary society.
Yet again, it was not simply implicit in the subject of their paintings, but also embedded in pictorial decisions.
Take Jeff for us. Plus, P Mer, one of the canvases commissioned by the Ministry of Public Instruction 1895.
In that tidy example of collusion between political will and picture making, it depicts one of the state trained, astute police with a class of boys.
She is shown teaching the future electorate, though she could not vote herself like the battalion of breastfeeds.
She is a servant of the republic. Jeff Webb represents her doing her job.
But the painting concentrates on the ranks of busy boys.
The teacher, discreetly silhouetted, is shoved into the upper background space here naturalism to does its job.
A servant of the republic making a document recording a reform, showing social progress being exact.