Which 19th-Century Painter

What are Millais, Beardsley, Cezanne, and Monet known for?

Jun 23, 2007 Suzanne Hill

Which British or French painter was dismissed as sentimental, was known for satanic subject matter, was the father of modern art, or was honored symbolically as an eye?

Which artist was named:

1. Fundamentally philistine – commonplace, conceited, and sentimental? (by R. H. Wilenski)

John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was a great Pre-Raphaelite 19th-century British artist who was famous and well-compensated in his own time. His early works show his preference for historical themes, for the traditions of the masters, and for showing the beauty of the natural world. He painted with great attention to detail. In his later works, he became bolder, using broad blocks of harmoniously-chosen colors to show emotion.

Critics such as R. H. Wilenski and John Ruskin, however, dismissed his work as petty and sentimental. It’s interesting to note that on an extended holiday, Millais met and fell in love with Ruskin’s wife in a scandal that ultimately led to the Ruskins’ divorce. Perhaps this helps to explain Ruskin’s dislike of Millais and his work.

According to Art Renewal Center, Millais is another 19th-century realistic painter who, despite contemporeanous success and popularity, has “fallen into disfavor, seemingly because of material success...This is sad, unfair, spiteful, and unnecessary.”

2. The Fra Angelico of Satanism? (by Roger Fry)

Aubrey Beardsley

Beardsley (1872–1898), the most remarkable 19th-century British illustrator of the industrial age, was declared an artistic prodigy with a genius for drawing. This talent seems to have been innate for he received very little training - night classes at the Westminster School of Art were the only formal training he ever received. Beardsley’s greatest influences were Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Mainly Beardsley’s subject matter for his drawings is drawn from Classical ideals and literature, the Bible, and the social world of his own time. He drew demons, faeries, macabre creatures, ladies at their toilette, dead dolls. His witty yet decadent designs for Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” (1894), one of his best-known achievements, show a pronounced Japanese influence, although Wilde declared the drawings “too Japanese.” Beardsley’s black-and-white drawings are both elegant and erotic. His work had a strong influence on the highly-stylized Art Nouveau movement.

Beardsley’s pictures express eternal human truths, like that in classical literature, yet he gave them personal interpretation with a unique grotesque feeling derived from his own fevered psyche. Likewise, in the frescoes painted by Early Renaissance master Fra Angelico, the viewer can see that painterly skill matched with an artist’s personal interpretation of his subject creates a truly great work of art. Indeed, Beardsley’s drawings earned him the term “the Fra Angelico of Satanism” by art critic Roger Fry.

3. The first wild man of modern art? (by Roger Fry)

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is the French 19th-century precursor of modern painting. In his paintings, viewers don’t so much see realistic detail as they feel the warmth and presence of fruit and the sensuous texture of fabrics in his still lifes or feel the heat and richness of the scenes in his landscapes. His new and original style was seen as a welcome escape from the confines of traditional or even Impressionistic painting. Some thought of him as a primitive or a naïve painter; others thought of him as a mysterious yet sophisticated master of painting. He came to be known as the father of modern art.

Critic and art historian Roger Fry described these new influential ideas of "vision and design" in an attempt to understand and explain modern art as it broke away from traditional art.

Fry started out as a specialist in Renaissance work. From 1905 to 1910, he was the curator of paintings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His contact with Cézanne during this time was a turning point in his career, changing his interests to the venue of modern art. It is said that Fry succeeds in giving the viewer a sense of the excitement he himself felt while looking at Cezanne's works and coined the term “Post-Impressionism” to describe it.

4. Only an eye but my God what an eye? (by Paul Cezanne)

Claude Monet

The French leader of Impressionism, Monet (1840-1926) sought to paint scenes captured in the mind’s eye and as they would appear to a "relaxed" viewer. For example, he painted a series of about thirty canvases showing the Gothic Rouen Cathedral in its variety of nuances of color as the light upon its façade changed throughout the day. The comment of his friend, Cezanne, refers to what we used to believe about his commitment to working directly from nature. In this way supposedly he produced what Duchamp later condemned as dumb or uninformed "retinal painting" and as such to have been consciously opposed to commentary, metaphor, narrative, or analysis of any sort.

However, in 1959, George Heard Hamilton, a vocal proponent of and self-appointed interpreter of early modern art, published a study of Monet's paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, writing, “…we can describe these paintings as the climax of Impressionism…Upon the basis of a technique painstakingly developed through thirty years of experimentation and directed toward the depiction of separate, isolated, unrelated instants in the outer world of positivist, physical causality, Monet erected a new king of painting which reveals the nature of perception rather than the nature of the thing perceived." With this study, he attempted to show that Monet's Impressionist works were indeed conscious, philosophical, and poetic.

Today we have a view of Monet as one of a non-conformist – for instance, fathering his first child out of wedlock, avoiding wartime military responsibilities, setting up a household (after the death of his first wife) with a married woman with many children, and disavowing religion.

Sources:

Bailey, Colin J. The Art Quiz Book: 2000+ Questions on Painters and Paintings. Station Press: Scotland, 1995.

Grove Dictionary of Art. Oxford University Press, 2007.

The copyright of the article Which 19th-Century Painter in Modern Art History is owned by Suzanne Hill. Permission to republish Which 19th-Century Painter in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Vanessa by John Millais

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