I Mpressionism and Journalistic Illust Ation

E since the appearance of Meyer Schapiro's essay on ~... "Courbet and Popular Imagery" in 1941, we have been expanding our awareness of the popular arts as a formal and iconographic influence upon French painting of the second half of the 19th century.' During the past four decades, the interconnected contributions of cheaply printed colored woodcuts, fashion plates, photography, Japanese prints, lithography, and journalistic illustrations of contemporaneous events, customs, and social types have been increasingly recognized.' In the work of Anne Hanson and Beatrice Farwell, in particular, a vast repertory of images, mainly lithographic, has been brought forward as providing a pictorial storehouse from which artists repeatedly drew. Whereas Hanson has concentrated her attention upon Manet,' Farwell has ranged more broadly, exploring the extensive precedents in the lithography of the July Monarchy and early Second Empire for the iconography of Courbet, Manet, Degas, and the Impressionist generation.' In the catalogue of her illuminating exhibition The Cult of Images, Farwell has assessed the results of this research correctly and forcefully. While taking account of the artists' commitment to paint what they saw, in accordance with Realist theory, she affirms the parallel role of popular imagery: In view of the wide range of Realist subjects already treated a generation earlier in popular lithographs, this simple view of artists setting out to paint the contemporary scene from the life is no longer convincing. The pattern was already there. It is naive to suppose that Degas was unaware of Gavarni's and Beaumont's "rats" behind the scenes at the Opera, since they appeared every day in Le Charivari. By the same token, it must be assumed that any artist whose youth was spent in the 1830s, '40s or '50s grew up in the constant presence of a plethora of images that were bound to appeal to visual sensibility and the urge to draw. I t was the first generation of artists so affected. Thus we see in Impressionist painting the country outings, the boating parties at Chatou and Asnicres, the cafe-concert and the Moulin de la Galette, views of bridges and streets of Paris, music in the Tuileries, ladies in theatre loges and in bathtubs, all purged by Impressionist color and sunlight of their evil and erotic connotations to be sure, but essentially the same repertory as that of the commercial lithographer of a generation earlier.' We may take Farwell's appraisal as an epigraph to the present study. The images she has gathered together, as well as those cited by Hanson, date mostly from the period prior to 1860, when Manet and Degas were still students and the Impressionists for the most part in their youth and generally unfocused as to career. The present essay is an attempt to bring the investigation up to date, so to speak, by considering the continuing stimulative role of illustration during the succeeding twenty years. The images upon which we shall concentrate are those to be found, with an ever increasing frequency, in the weekly newspapers and satirical journals of the later Second Empire and the first decade of the Third Republic. Their appearance coincides with the active years of the Impressionists' emergence, the period when they were inaugurating their careers and establishing the first mature phase of their art. These images provided an ongoing, up-to-the-minute reference for the painters, and, in terms of style and the currency of the subjects depicted, they offered an immediate stimulus to the direction that Impressionism was taking. In the survey that follows I hall stress, for the painters, those works from the 1860s and 1 Os by Renoir, Manet, Degas, and Monet that depict the pursue of culture and leisure in the Paris of their day. The names we p t beside theirs are, for the illustrators, Daumier and Gavarni, o course-from an earlier but still i nfluential generation-and, s well, Cham, Nadar, Pelcoq, Randon, Stop, Grdvin, Bertall, a d Marcelin, among others.' In the pages of such reviews as Le Vie parisienne, Le Journal amusant, Le Charivari, L'Esprit follet, and in illustrated newsweeklies such as L'lllustration and Le Monde illustre, these artists developed their assigned survey of the life of Paris. As Farwell (in the quote above) and Roberts-Jones have indicated for the images of the Romantic generation, the subjects treated in the pages of these journals find their echo in the paintings of the I mpressionists.' The race curses, cafe scenes, masquerade balls, and outdoor concerts of Manet and Degas, the theatre and circus scenes, dancers and dance halls, the laundresses of Degas and Renoir, the backsta)e visits of Degas, the equestrians of Renoir and Manet-scenes of genre, scenes of modern activi ty, which complement the landscapes and townscapes, the portraits and still lifes of the Impressionists-were mainstays of the illustrators' and particularly the satirical cartoonists' repertory as they had been in the lithographic depictions of their predecessors.