Romanticism and Realism
The Romanticism of feeling and the Realism of everyday life challenged the Academy, and Paris became the art capital of the world.
After Napoleon's fall a new generation of artists sought greater freedom. Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, a depiction of shipwrecked men in distress, and Eugène Delacroix made colour and movement the heart of painting. The Romantics chose subjects from contemporary life, from the Orient, from literature and from the forces of nature. They were set against Ingres, who defended the classical line. The struggle between colour and drawing, feeling and order, dominated the Salon for decades.
Around 1850 a new movement went further still. Gustave Courbet wanted to paint what he saw with his own eyes, without idealization. His large canvases of peasants, stone breakers and a funeral in the countryside caused a scandal. Jean-François Millet painted farm labourers at Barbizon, and Honoré Daumier depicted the everyday life of the city and the hypocrisy of politics in lithographs. Realism made ordinary people worthy subjects for great art, something many considered both ugly and politically dangerous.
Under the Second Empire Paris was rebuilt as a modern metropolis with boulevards, parks and a new opera house. Photography, invented in 1839, changed the way people looked at pictures. The Salon was still the main road to success, but it became ever harder to get into. When in 1863 the jury rejected thousands of works, the emperor had a special exhibition organized, the Salon des Refusés. There Édouard Manet showed Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and opened the way to modern painting.