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 During the middle decades of the 19th century, official French art, which received the approbation of the late imperial or republican forms of government, remained under the domination of a tradition characterized by the classicist Ingres or the venerable realist David. Courbet, the realist, caught the public fancy by giving the matterof-fact man in the street that enjoyment in recognizing objects which he mistook for the more subtle forms of aesthetic pleasure. The nature Romantics of the Barbizon school, Rousseau and Corot, carried this realism into the realm of landscape painting, busying themselves with the study of atmospheric perspective.
Daguerre and Meissonier, striving for more exact realistic vision, busied themselves with the invention of photography and the motion picture. Among the individualist groups at the time of Napoleon III, in 1863, some were to distinguish themselves by discovering new aesthetic pleasures in a type of painting arranged in flat, almost Oriental patterns. These young insurgents, led by Edouard Manet, came to be known as the "impressionists" -- because one of Manet's little landscapes was entitled "Impression."
At first the impressionists announced as their intention simply the achievement of a more realistic rendition of color than that of the classicists, who used brown pigment for their shadows, or of the realists and Romantics, who used blacks. There seems to us nothing very revolutionary in this. However, the impressionist insisted that when a man painted a picture out-of-doors he could often see purple, blue, and green reflex tones of color in shadowy parts, or if he painted in his studio with gray walls, his shadows would appear black. This one observation alone did not condemn the impressionists in the eyes of contemporary critics.
However, in one painting by Manet -- The Picnic -- there appeared two nude female figures which had no possible allegorical meaning. Here was realism, naked and unashamed, art stripped of all pretense other than that gained by the purely simple enjoyment of light playing over the surface of a female body. Having no definite social purpose, painted in a technique which broke the tradition of the classical Academy, the picture and the associated works of Manet's friends outraged both the sensitive Victorian public and the critics, who decried the work as too revolutionary.
As the doctrine of "art for art's sake" had not yet emerged in 19th-century criticism and the critics had not been trained to observe objectively new formal values, they missed the chief point -- that Manet had placed one bright area of color next another without transitional tones, thus getting a more exciting type of painting. Manet broke up the unity of sense impressions by doing this, and his canvas appeared more lively -- that is, a little nearer what one actually experiences in real life. The use of the colored shadows also made the canvas more dynamic than the nicely modulated works of the academicians. The critics, had they been brilliant enough, might have noticed that Delacroix, the Romantic leader, had here and there discovered the first effect and Leonardo da Vinci, the reflected colors in the shadows. An official decree by the Emperor Napoleon III set aside a new show place, the Salon des refuséWhere Manet and his friends might exhibit.
Almost everyone laughed at the paintings in the Salon des refusés. Manet continued painting splendid animated versions of bourgeois French types, all of which suggest, not so much that the Frenchman is by nature a revolutionary as they do that he is simply a very interesting person. A favorite among Manet's paintings is the young fifer in the uniform of Napoleon's Zouaves. One of the strongest of Manet's works in America is the figure of the philosopher in the Chicago Art Institute , which is almost devoid of color interest.
Similar figures by the Belgian sculptor Meunier and Daumier's strong paintings of proletarian types furnish fit companion pieces for this champion of the rights of the people. Manet, the first impressionist, who was also a great expressive realist, examined with a creative vision the life of the common man, until, becoming rather famous as he aged, he accumulated wealth, which gave him more and more time for picnicking. Then turning from his revolutionary realism, he led the group of impressionists into a simple study of the play of colored lights over pleasant landscape vistas along the Seine. The critics still condemned these harmless impressionist studies as "revolutionary."
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