Painted World (Outdoors, Indoors) - France (19th century)

Frédéric Bazille
Landscape at Chailly
1865
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Frédéric Bazille
Self Portrait
1865-66
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Boudin
Approaching Storm
1864
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Wounded Eurydice
ca. 1868-70
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Arleux-Palluel, The Bridge of Trysts
ca. 1871-72
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Obsession

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathédrales;
Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos cœurs maudits,
Chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles,
Répondent les échos de vos De profundis.

Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer
De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes,
Je l'entends dans le rire énorme de la mer.

Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;
Dont la lumière parle un langage connu!
Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!

Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles
Où vivent, jaillissant de mon œil par milliers,
Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers.

– Charles Baudelaire (1857)


Forest, I fear you! in my ruined heart
your roaring wakens the same agony
as in cathedrals when the organ moans
and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

Ocean, I hate you! for I recognize
the sobs and insults of  my own despair,
the bitter laughter of a beaten man
repeated in the sea's huge gaiety.

Night! you'd please me more without these stars
which speak a language I know all too well –
I long for darkness, silence, nothing there . . .

Yet even shadows have their shapes which live
where I imagine them to be, the hordes
of vanished souls whose eyes acknowledge mine.

– translation by Richard Howard (1982)

Paul Cézanne
Madame Cézanne in Yellow Chair
ca. 1888-90
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Cézanne
Bathers
ca. 1890-94
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Edgar Degas
Four Studies of a Jockey
1866
oil and gouache on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Courbet
Rêverie (Portrait of Gabrielle Borreau)
1862
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Courbet
The Rock of Hautepierre
ca. 1869
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Portrait of a Woman
1851
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
The Corner of the Table
1872
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Camille Pissarro
Haymaking at Éragny
1892
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Camille Pissarro
Woman and Child at the Well
1882
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Ernest Meissonier
L'Endymien
before 1891
watercolor
Art Institute of Chicago

Surviving Art of the Difficult 1870s

Anonymous Maker
Mantel Ornaments
ca. 1870
glass
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Interrupted Reading
ca. 1870
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Berthe Morisot
Woman at her Toilette
ca. 1875
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Antonin Mercié
Gloria Victis
ca. 1873
bronze statuette
Art Institute of Chicago

Ernest Meissonier
The Defense of Paris
1870-71
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still Life - Corner of a Table
1873
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

"These monetary crises in the fall of 1873 were followed by a world-wide depression which lasted almost until the end of the decade.  . . .  There was, at the time, the usual disagreement as to the causes of the depression and the remedies which should be applied.  . . .  The Dutch found that the fall in the price of German vinegar was an important contributing cause, while excessive speculation, the falling off in the production of wine, and the disappearance of fish from the coast of Brittany were among the causes advanced by the French.  In 1885, a British Royal Commission succeeded in reducing the major causes to six, one of which was overproduction.  And it is interesting to note that the Oxford Prize Essayist for 1879 already had found the "real and deep-seated cause" in the fact that "the whole world is consuming more than it has produced."

"In retrospect, it appears that the crises were largely traceable to the financial excesses which had characterized the five or six years preceding 1873.  Governments and individuals borrowed to finance undertakings of almost every sort, especially railroad construction.  The United States, Turkey, Egypt, and South American were supplied with funds from England, which loaned over 1.5 billion dollars in the brief period 1870-74; while Russia, Austria, and Italy were supplied chiefly by Germany, to whom France paid a war indemnity of five billion gold francs between 1871 and 1873.  With the first scare, both stock and commodity prices fell, bonds went into default, over-extended bankers failed, and credit began to contract." 

– from The Depression of 1873-79 by O.V. Wells (Journal of Farm Economics, May 1937)

Auguste Renoir
Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers' Lunch)
1875
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Perseus and Andromeda
(study for The Doom Fulfilled)
1875
gouache on board
Art Institute of Chicago

Auguste Rodin
The Age of Bronze
1875-76
bronze (life size)
Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio)

Charles Gifford Dyer
Seventeenth-Century Interior 
1877
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Cézanne
Plate of Apples
ca. 1877
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Camille Pissarro
At the Window, rue des Trois Frères
1878-79
pastel
Art Institute of Chicago

John Warrington Wood
Rebecca
1878
marble (half life-size)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edgar Degas
Portrait after a Costume Ball (Portrait of Madame Dietz-Monnin)
1879
pastel and distemper on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago