PAINT MOVEMENTS

In this series of articles, I will give you, dear friends and readers, a simplified idea of the main styles and movements of painting.

(6) NATURALISM

Source: wikipedia.org

Jules Bastien-Lepage, » Les Foins », 1877. Oil on canvas, 180 × 195 cm. Orsay Museum, Paris

In the nineteenth century, the naturalist movement was recently distinguished from realism and various currents of painting. If realism, in painting as in literature, aims at objective reality, later on, naturalists want to « reproduce nature as it is »

Naturalistic painters choose to stage peasants, workers and the poor and also the middle class, in town and in the country, at work, at rest, in society, in their religious practices: they have more targeted choices about the facts of society that Courbet, which nonetheless serves as a reference. The formats are much more monumental than those of the realist painters of the middle of the 19th century, Courbet, Millet … They renew with the formula of Caravaggio. The details are always portrayed so as to emphasize significant parts: tired or happy faces, hands distorted by work or thin and smooth, everyday objects marked by the use … The colors are sometimes clear, often brushed, canvases keeping an unfinished look: memories of Impressionist painting.

Photo user: Wmpearl . Source: commons.wikimedia.org