Salon painting.And children. Sympathy for the poor things with an equally normal but less open response to their charms. Unlike Salon painting of women who were usually lashed to a stake, tortured or languishing in prisons condemned to sleeping on heaps of straw and suffering indifferent brutes,children seemed to fare better.Salon painting was after all, based on a precise imitation of nature, in spite of all the schmaltz ladled on, the prettying up and contrived posturings.
When children were painted directly, sympathetically, and without all the pre-conceived arrangements that turned them into little brats and whining manipulators, they could be attractive subjects for this kind of salon painting that was expert, specialized in the presentation of externals. Although it retains its mawkish and maudlin nature, remember that the style of salon painting, think Rockwell, still appeals to a large section of the public for exactly the same reasons it appealed a hundred and fifty years ago when it was fresh off the easel.
Ferdinand Waldmuller. The rustic genre. Charming because it is not forced into a pretense of more depth than it has. Does resemble Frans Hals to some extent
Children were a two-sided subject. They were innocent of history, extolled profound sentimentality and were somehow attributed to an act of purification. However, a persistent specter that the poverty of the Victorian era provided to those of comfortable status- much like in the Depression- was that of small children, gaunt, unsmiling and unresponsive, looking at food through restaurant or grocery windows. This was a flashpoint that the patrons of art were not willing to see. They wanted to remain immune to acts of revolt and wanted to remain indifferent to those willing to tough out the rough times if their children’s basic needs for food and clothing were provided for.
---Emil Munier (1840-1890), "Trois Amis" (also known as Favorite Pets), an academic artist, symbolist, pupil of Bouguereau...French culture of the XIX century...with a cat! This painting raised "furore" at the 1885 Salon and was later reproduced in many prints. Very popular indeed. Munier was the Painter of children and of kitten and dogs...French culture was synonym of high-class at that time...---Read More:http://www.non-solo-arte.com/
In art then, abstract aesthetic values were beyond the buying public. The picture should tell a story, and in the English tradition, “to put a good face on trade” . This human interest slopped over worst in pictures of children being cute or in popular storybook characters in moments of pathos. Art appealing to the vanity of the purchaser assuring them of their cultivation and depth of understanding. Their culture and values.
---Sir John Everett Millais, The Woodman's Daughter (1851) This is based on the similarly entitled tragic poem written by Coventry Patmore, a Pre-Raphaelite poet. Patmore's story concerns tragedies which often happened in those days to young women seduced by unfaithful men. However, Millais does not illustrate in his painting the original text describing the fate of a country girl who got pregnant by her upper-class lover, and who finally drowned her baby and herself, but creates for his painting a new scene from their childhood which is not actually dealt with by Patmore. Millais dared to depict a charming scene in which the woodman's daughter first sees her future lover who will bring her misery, and her little lover is about to give her fruits as a little present. Millais carefully represented the vast difference between the social status of the boy, who wears expensive velvet red clothes, and the woodman's daughter, who wears a simple cotton dress.--- Read More:http://www.rishabh.com/art.htm#child
ADDENDUM:
The splitting up of art into opposing realist and abstract camps was already 60 years old when Kandinsky got around to recognizing it. Baudelaire acknowledged the split by way of his distinction, in The Salon of 1846, between poetic and mathematical criticism. This led him, in The Salon of 1859, to distinguish between two kinds of modern artist, the positivist and imaginative or realist and romantic; both sets of terms are his. He preferred poetic criticism to mathematical criticism, just as he later preferred imaginative to positivist art. Mathematical criticism was “cold,” for it “voluntarily strips itself of every shred of temperament” — “has neither love nor hate” — “on the pretext of explaining everything.” Thus his famous assertion that “to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” There is no attempt to explain everything in a particular art, but rather to justify its existence from a certain point of view, which locates it in a meaningful horizon without exhausting its meaning. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/critical-consciousness-of-the-arts-3-29-11.asp
---New York City street urchins were a prevailing theme in John G. Brown's work, earning him the nickname of Bootblack Raphael. Although not widely known today, Brown was one of the most popular and commercially successful American painters of the late 19th century. Born in England in 1831, he trained as a glass cutter before emigrating in 1853 to Brooklyn, where he pursued a career as a realist genre painter. He opened a studio in Manhattan in 1860, and in 1869 was elected president of the National Academy of Design. ---Read More:http://archfaci.ama-assn.org/content/6/5/360.extract
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