Complete the account of painting’s response to photography.
After 1839, ______ took over the work of documentation and likeness. Painting could compete on accuracy and lose, or pursue what only paint could do: sensation. The Impressionists chose the second path, making the ______ striking an object their true subject, and leaving the ______ visible on the surface rather than blending it away.
Word bank: photography · light · brushstroke · engraving · the Salon jury
Hints
- A machine took over the recording of appearances.
- Painting was then free to pursue something else.
Show the answer
After 1839, photography took over the work of documentation and likeness. Painting could compete on accuracy and lose, or pursue what only paint could do: sensation. The Impressionists chose the second path, making the light striking an object their true subject, and leaving the brushstroke visible on the surface rather than blending it away.
A machine took the job of copying appearances, and painting was freed, or forced, to ask what else it was for. Every modernist move for the next century runs through that fork.
Practise Realism and Impressionism
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Realism and Impressionism
- Why did A Burial at Ornans scandalise the Salon when its subject, a village funeral, was entirely ordinary?
- Sort each practice: academic method or Impressionist method?
- Impressionism's outdoor painting depended on two industrial products: collapsible metal paint tubes and…
- Why was the nude in Manet’s _Déjeuner sur l’herbe_ found intolerable when nude goddesses were not?
- 'Impressionism' began as a hostile reviewer's insult before the painters adopted it.
- What conditions made painting outdoors practical for the Impressionists?
- Order these moments in nineteenth-century painting.
- Rank the Académie’s genres from most prestigious to least.