Descending Night~Adolf Alexander Weinman ;1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition
(Source: mventus)
Burial at Ornans - Gustave Courbet, 1849
From the Musée d’Orsay’s website:
Courbet’s approach was radically innovative at the time: he used a canvas of dimensions usually reserved for history painting, a “noble” genre, to present an ordinary subject, with no trace of idealisation, which cannot pretend to be a genre scene either.
At the Salon in 1850-1851, many people decried “the ugliness” of the people, and the ordinariness of the whole scene. Among the few admirers of the painting, one critic prophesied that it would remain “the Herculean pillars of realism in modern history”. The very subject of the painting has been reinterpreted. At first regarded as anticlerical, it was finally believed that, in a composition dominated by Christ on the cross, bringing together the clergy, a mayor and a Masonic judge, surrounded by men and women from all walks of life, it was the idea of “universal understanding” which prevailed, a constant preoccupation in the 19th century and for the 1848 generation in particular.
The fire of the House of Lords and the Commons of October 16th, 1834 - 1835, J.M.W Turner
