Wedding Feast at Yport (1866)

Albert Auguste Fourié: Wedding Feast at Yport

This charming illustration of life in Normandy in the second half of the 19th century is as fresh today as when it was painted. Despite its commonplace subject – although some have discerned complex sociological thinking in this wedding scene – the painting has acquired immense celebrity over the years.

And it is true, this slice of life is full of lively appeal. At the time, the painter, Albert Fourié, was accused of having worked in his studio from a photograph. But as it happens, there is a photograph of the artist, outdoors, standing by his unfinished painting. The story is a good example of how far photography had become a rival to painting at the time. Another indication of this was the suggestion that Fourié had placed his canvas beneath the trees – as in the above-mentioned photograph – in order to more effectively render the effect of light falling through the leaves in patches on the table where the guests are eating. In any event, the painter certainly came close to photography in his desire to capture the faces and attitudes in an instant, directly reflecting this technique.

Faced with this competition, many painters turned to Impressionism. But Albert Fourié was not one of them. A pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian, he remained faithful to tradition, taking inspiration from photography, while giving his work undeniable charm through a soft, mellow style quiet different from the direct and forceful rendering of a mechanical image. [Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen]

The Letter (1865)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Letter

Three English Girls (1865)

Gustave Courbet: Three English Girls at a Window

Les Oranges (1865)

William Bouguereau: Les Oranges

The image of a mother and child is a symbol of universal relevance. It exists and is celebrated within every culture, throughout its respective history. Through iconic works like Les Oranges, Bouguereau has made an enduring contribution to this fundamental canon of imagery and he continues to have a profound impact on how such images are produced and received to this day.

The present painting is among Bouguereau's greatest achievements. His virtuosity is apparent in every element of the painting, which was executed at the height of his genius. His debt to the Renaissance masters is evident here and the religious overtones of this painting are subtly underlined by the inclusion of the oranges, recognized in symbolic terms as a substitute for the apple in the hand of the infant Christ.

In his biography on the artist, Marius Vachon discusses the artist's mother and child paintings, which are greatly instructed by the fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Madonna and Child. He writes: "From the outset, the paintings of the Italian masters revealed to the artist the beauty inherent in youth, the seduction in a smile, the grace in simplicity. Above all he paints young mothers, with their children. This theme, which had been interpreted in an inexhaustible variety of ways, and always with new eloquence, inspired him to paint works of an infinite charm, in the figure types were generally borrowed from the Italians" (as translated from Marius Vachon, W. Bouguereau, 1900, p. 90). [Sotheby’s]

Bacchante by the Sea (1865)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Bacchante by the Sea

Sheep by the Sea (1865)

Rosa Bonheur: Sheep by the Sea

Rosa Bonheur created Sheep by the Sea following a trip through the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1855. In painting this complacent flock of sheep settled in a meadow near a body of water, Bonheur captured a placid moment. Sheep by the Sea demonstrates the artist’s commitment to direct observation from nature. The thickly applied paint provides texture that conveys the lushness of a verdant landscape at water’s edge. The informality of this rustic scene belies the detailed physiognomic studies of animals that Bonheur frequently sketched before executing a work in oil paint.

Although the Empress Eugénie of France commissioned Sheep by the Sea, Bonheur exhibited the painting at the Salon of 1867 before it entered her collection. The empress (like her contemporary, Queen Victoria) also patronized the renowned British artist Sir Edwin Landseer, whose sentimental paintings of domestic animals became popular among the upper classes in England and France. Yet, unlike Landseer’s animals, which play out human dramas, Bonheur’s animals appear within their natural habitats, not subjected to human laws and emotions. [National Museum of Women in the Arts]

Woman in a Podoscaphe (1865)

Gustave Courbet: Woman in a Podoscaphe

By 1865, the first summer that Courbet spent at Trouville, the harbor town and its close neighbor Deauville had become fashionable resorts for a Parisian and international clientele. Strolling and picnicking on the sands and even bathing in the sea had become stylish pastimes during the Second Empire; this was the life documented in the beach scenes by Courbet's older colleague Eugene Boudin. Sea bathing was still rather a decorous activity, however, and therefore the artist (and others) were much struck by the spectacle of a young woman who went out into the waves by herself, clothed only in a simple sleeveless shift and with her long hair blowing in the wind, propelling a kind of catamaran structure she called a "podoscafe." Courbet referred to her as the Amphitrite moderne, and set about making a large painting of her. Though it was never shown at the Salon, the ambitious scale of the work leads one to believe that it was originally conceived as a Salon painting. It was characteristic of Courbet to seize upon such a subject, unmistakably modern yet with classical overtones: a modern Venus not rising from the sea but dominating it. It is even possible that he might have initially conceived the painting as a kind of challenge or reproof to the trite pandering of Cabanel's Birth of Venus, shown at the Salon of 1863.

This female figure is certainly not presented in terms of sexual passivity, but of independence and prowess. She fills the pictorial field, brought as close to the viewer as she can be without having her interesting vessel and her long, double-ended oar cut off by the edge of the painting. Her position on the structure is easy and confident. (Doubtless, it was quite impossible in actual fact without a harness of some kind, but she posed for him on land and Courbet was not concerned with literalism.) The loose, flowing hair, always so attractive to Courbet, was at the time a conventional signal of sexual availability, but seems here rather to rhyme with the waves through which this sea nymph plies her craft. The surface of the painting was not completely finished, and this fact together with restorations undergone sometime in this century, contributes to the unusual flatness of the figure. Nonetheless her conception and her placement in the vast space of the sea make this an unforgettable image, one that only Courbet would have had the bold naivete to create. [GustaveCourbet.com]