History of Art graduate students give a 20-minute presentation followed by Q & A.

In 1891, English artist and art critic Walter Sickert coined the term “photo-realist” to describe French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. Unlike the more familiar, mid-twentieth century definition of photorealism, Sickert made no claims that Bastien-Lepage painted directly from photographs. Instead, he employed this photographic analogy to characterize Bastien-Lepage’s conceptual and material approach to painting, an essentially documentary process that, in Sickert’s estimation, paralleled the function of a camera. Complaints about the “photographic” qualities of contemporary painting had become commonplace by the early 1890s, following a period of abrupt transformation in the critical assessment of realism and the standards by which “truthful” pictures could be made. This paper analyzes the shifting responses to Bastien-Lepage’s work over the course of the 1870s and 80s to show how photography came to characterize the production and interpretation of realist painting. I suggest that Sickert and his contemporaries wielded photography as a rhetorical tool to communicate the perceived moral failings of artistic practice at the end of the nineteenth century.