To Night’s Overture much of these remarks may seem not to apply. Here is nothing of the naive, the whimsical, the allegorical. And yet this landscape is characteristic of Davies’ art. It is a highly spiritualized and individual treatment of landscape, wonderfully decorative in color and arrangement, and highly endowed with feeling.—The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.
To trace the history of painting in the XIX century in France, is to trace the main stem of its recent developments throughout the western world. Germany has grafted something of her own national spirit upon the parent art forms of the French; England has contributed some original impulses; Holland and Spain have looked back to their own past as well as across to the contemporary painting of the French. Yet it is France, with her bewildering crowding in of new ideas and crowding out of old, which during the past century, has led the way in painting, and in the opening of the XX century continues to lead.
In the beginning of the XIX century, the longing of intellectual France for a return to the poise and civic virtues of republican Rome had found its visual expression in the classical paintings of David (1748-1825) and Ingres (1780-1867). The beginnings of Romanticism are seen in the paintings of Gros, who dared to paint his characters in clothes more modern than the toga. Gericault and Delacroix (1799-1863) completed the development in their impassioned color and movement and their searching out of romantic and exotic subject matter.
A group of mid-century artists who combined many of the qualities of the Classic and Romantic schools included Cabanel, Lefebvre, Bouguereau and Gerome. The military painters, Meissonier, Detaille, and de Neuville, might conveniently be grouped with them, they alike treating romantic subjects in a precise and academic manner. Reflections of this group in Germany are seen in Piloty, Menzel and Max; in Great Britain in Alma-Tadema, Leighton and Orchardson. Such painters as these expressed the Academic attitude with which, from 1850 to 1885, the ideas of the Barbizon painters, the Realists, the rising Impressionists, and, in England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (unrelated to any Continental movement) had to compete.