The Photographic Effect: Making Pictures After Photography, 1860-1895

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effects of photography and photographic concepts of picturing on painterly practice and theory in late-nineteenth century Europe. It argues that the permeation of photography into the material production and critical interpretation of pictorial art impelled painters, art photographers, and their critics to differentiate more sharply the qualities of creative labor from those of unthinking imitation. Focusing on case studies in France and England, the two countries with the longest histories of photographic practice and discourse, I consider methods of making that challenged the framework of medium, and the standards of “art” and “truth” on which distinctions between media were based. Subjects of analysis include the art criticism of British painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942); a libel trial initiated by Belgian painter Jan Van Beers (1852-1927); the plein-air painting practice of French naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884); composite photographs and theories of pictorial art by British photographer Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901); the “photographic” characteristics of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894); and the painterly realism of French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917), which was set apart from photography in the nineteenth century and came to be aligned with it in the twentieth.

I distinguish my approach from traditional narratives of cross-media exchange, which emphasize artists’ visual responses to paintings and photographs, by showing that photography’s influence was felt most palpably in the invisible realms of pictorial production and its theoretical conception. Photography provoked no single stylistic response from painters, nor was its presence in a picture substantiated by any fixed set of criteria. By the 1890s photography had destabilized “medium” as a secure category of classification, as paintings were designated “colored photographs” and photographers employed the term “picture” to classify their images as art. I examine the radical reconfiguration of the hierarchy of pictorial art that took place in the late nineteenth century, showing that photographic methods of making and paradigms of picturing undermined the visual surface as a reliable source of meaning. As a result, these hybrid pictorial practices intensified anxieties about the terms of truthful depiction, and how an authentic sense of the real might be conveyed through material means. Rather than being settled by the turn of the century, as modern theories of medium specificity would have it, I maintain that photography catalyzed tensions between the manual and intellectual aspects of art-making that trigger debates and fuel artistic experimentation to this day.