1000+ images about Dante's Inferno on Pinterest | Comedy, Florence and Michelangelo The Gates of Hell (French: La Porte de l'Enfer) is a monumental sculptural group work by French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from "The Inferno", the first section of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. See More Auguste Rodin | artble.com Auguste Rodin Bibliography Auguste Rodin Artistic Context The Impressionist movement was largely centered on Paris, France, and many of the main artists were French natives. After the very realistic art of the Romantic and Realistic movements before it, Impressionism saw a change in style with many artists choosing to depict landscapes and people as they viewed them rather than in reality. Auguste Rodin Biography Chamagne Early Years: Auguste Rodin was born into humble beginnings in Paris, France, in 1840. After failing to excel academically he was sent to a boarding school run by an uncle in Beauvais but Rodin's shy nature and shortsightedness meant that he could still barely read and write by the time he left in 1854.

After enrolling in the École Impériale de Dessin Rodin began to experiment with drawing and modeling in clay. He applied to France's most prestigious art school, École des Beaux-Arts but was rejected three times. A job in a commercial art workshop in 1858 allowed him to develop his sculpting skills and he began to work on his privert pieces, exhibiting Man with a Broken nose in 1863 at the Paris Salon. After working in Brussels for several months the artist exhibited The Age of Bronze, the first of his pieces that truly caught the attention of Parisian society. Middle Years: Although Rodin became known under controversial circumstances, he was commissioned by the French Ministry of Fine Arts in 1880 and the resulting piece, was The Gates of Hell which spawned some of Rodin's most famous works. Although he never married, his long-term partner was Rose Beuret and the couple had one son together. Although Rodin stayed with Rose, it was during this period of his life that he embarked on an intense relationship with a young sculptor named Camille Claudel.

Both artists were heavily influenced by the other and carried on their relationship until Claudel broke it off in 1898, after realizing Rodin would never leave Rose. Some of Rodin's most famous works from this period include monuments to some of the greats of Paris society, including the writers Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac and the artist Claude Lorrain. Later Years: In 1908 Rodin moved into the Hotel Biron and although the building was due to be demolished in 1912, Rodin used his influence to save it and in return promised that his whole estate would be given to the French Government upon his death. In 1917 Rodin finally married Rose, but a year later they were both dead. Rodin was 77 when he died. Paul Dubois Nogent-sur-Seine Auguste Rodin's style continued to develop throughout his long and distinguished career. The lack of any formal training, unlike many of his contemporaries, would ultimately be the making of one of the most innovative sculptors the world has ever known.

The realism that defined Rodin's early work developed into a more expressionist style but his skill at rendering the human figure was key to his success and is something that few other artists can rival. Early Style: Rodin's early style was developed by focusing on his own education and the works of other sculptors of the time who received training at the Belle de Artes. Rodin's rebellion against academic sculpture helped him to stand out at the Salon exhibition and it allowed him to change the face of sculpturing for a new generation of artists. Rodin sought to depict the physical realism of his subjects rather than their character and this led to his first life-size work, The Age of Bronze, being falsely accused of being cast from a model, something which was not artistically acceptable until the 1960s. Later Style: Rodin drew inspiration from Donatello and other great bronze sculptors of the Renaissance for works such as The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist Preaching. Such works also resemble pieces from the contemporary Neo-Florentines such as Paul Dubois. The Neo-Florentines used supple modeling to portray a sense of life and this resulted in accurate interpretations in bronze.

This technique was obvious in Rodin's work throughout the 1880s. Later on in his career Rodin spent a great deal of time working on alternative techniques which involved assembling existing fragments. This dedication resulted in creative pieces such as The Gates of Hell which was made up of several hundred figures which Rodin went on to use on many different occasions. In the latter years of Rodin's life his works became more expressionist and some pieces such as Monument to Balzac show the artist moving away from the realism that separated him from academic sculptors. The fact that Rodin endlessly studied his models meant that he understood the human anatomy intimately and such knowledge of the human form resulted in even his most distorted pieces retaining a great sense of reality. Who or What Influenced Auguste Rodin Dante Bronze Waltz Camille Claudel Auguste Rodin was inspired by a number of artists and places during his travels around Europe. The artist's enjoyment of literary work can also be seen in a number of his works as can a sometimes obsessive interest in history which led to many of his pieces being created time and time again over a number of years. Literary Inspirations: Literature has long influenced art and the work of Rodin was no exception.

Several of the artist's most prominent works take inspiration from masterpieces that were popular during his lifetime. The Gates of Hell, for example, is filled with imagery from the 12th century epic poem The Divine Comedy by Dante. Another inspiration for this work was Baulelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) which was a controversial yet popular book in Paris around 1857. Ancient Art: Rodin's trip to Italy in 1875 would become highly influential in many of his early works. The Greek and Roman sculpture which would have undoubtedly been accessible to Rodin in Rome is often strikingly realistic but with exaggerated muscles and life-size male nudes. The influence of these works on Rodin's early pieces such as The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist Preaching are clear to see, although critically these pieces were not as successful as many of his later offerings. Rodin drew inspiration for the Age of Bronze from Michelangelo's Dying Slave , which he had studied at the Louvre. He admired Michelangelo's depiction of the human form and attempted to combine this with his own ideas on human nature. Throughout his career, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo on several occasions.

Camille Claudel: Unfortunately Camille Claudel has been best remembered as the mistress of Auguste Rodin rather than a talented artist in her own right. The relationship was extremely influential on both artists and the similarity of their work during this time demonstrates this. Claudel was apparently the inspiration for one of Rodin's most famous works, The Kiss. The Musée Rodin in Paris continues to display many of Claudel's works which demonstrates her importance in Rodin's progression as a sculptor. Auguste Rodin Works Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Works of Art (23) Essay The son of an inspector in the Paris Préfecture de Police and a former seamstress, Auguste Rodin grew up in a working-class district of Paris known as the Mouffetard.

His early instruction was provided by the “Petit École” (the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques), a school for the training of decorative artists, where he acquired a thorough grounding in the traditions of French eighteenth-century art, and by informal studies of anatomical structure under the tutelage of Antoine-Louis Barye, the French Romantic sculptor, best known for his animal subjects. Refused entrance to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, Rodin escaped the rigid Neoclassical training that still dominated its curriculum in the mid-1850s, but forfeited the early success that École graduates were ordinarily assured. Instead, Rodin served a long and difficult apprenticeship. For many years, he was employed as a modeler in the Paris studio of the highly successful and prolific sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824–1887), and later, during the economic chaos that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, he followed Carrier-Belleuse to Belgium, where he continued as an assistant in the sculptor’s temporarily transplanted studio.

There he became a partner of the Belgian Antoine (Joseph) Van Rasbourgh in the execution of monumental stone sculptures that included the allegorical groups of Africa and Asia for the Brussels Bourse. While in Brussels, Rodin also modeled a number of decorative female figures and busts of young women, some in peasant dress and others wearing flowers or fruit in their hair, to which he began to sign his own name. The bust of a young woman wreathed in grapes ( 1975.312.7 ) belongs to this period, during which his work in the medium of terracotta was still very strongly influenced by the kind of modeling he had done in the studio of Carrier-Belleuse. In 1876, Rodin traveled to Italy, stopping along the way in a number of French cities, including Rheims, where his first-hand acquaintance with the cathedral contributed to what would be a lifelong love for medieval French architecture, ultimately expressed in his 1914 publication, Les cathédrales de France. In Italy, he was deeply impressed by the work of Michelangelo, which would influence his own sculpture for years to come.

This experience provided a rich foundation for the series of nude male figures that he began to create in the late 1870s: The Bronze Age ( 07.127 ), Saint John the Baptist, and the first studies for Adam. The Bronze Age, or The Age of Bronze, as it is more often titled in English, was the first full-scale figure that Rodin exhibited publicly under his own name, initially in 1877, at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels and later that year in the Paris Salon of the Société des Artistes Français. Although the initial display in Paris of the plaster model for the figure created a storm of criticism, the first bronze cast from the plaster model was exhibited without further controversy in the Paris Salon of 1880. Official recognition came in the form of the purchase of the bronze by the French Ministry of Fine Arts for the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The Adam, also known as The Creation of Man ( 11.173.1 ), although not finished until 1881, was directly inspired by two of Michelangelo’s masterpieces.

The Gates of Hell, a monumental portal covered with sculptural relief, was Rodin’s first commission from the French government. Edmond Turquet, newly appointed Under Secretary of Fine Arts and an admirer of Rodin’s sculpture, commissioned the work on August 16, 1880, for a projected Musée des Arts Décoratifs to be built on the site of what is now the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Rodin quickly produced a number of ideas, both on paper and in clay, for a vast composition based loosely on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Adam, together with the pendant Eve that can be seen in the background of Edward J. Steichen ‘s photograph of Rodin in his studio ( 55.635.9 ), were not original to Rodin’s plans for The Gates of Hell. They vanished from The Gates quite early in its evolution but their meaning is evident: on one side, the Michelangelesque Adam, the first man, slowly and reluctantly comes to life; on the other, Eve in her shame represents the source of humankind’s fall from grace.

Rodin’s commission set a date in 1885 for the delivery of the door, but the work was still unfinished at that time, and in fact The Gates was never to be cast in bronze during the sculptor’s lifetime. Owing to the great size (21 feet high) and continuous, unbroken composition of The Gates, the clay models for individual figures and sections of the relief could not be prevented from drying out and crumbling during the decades that Rodin remained at work on the project. Rodin removed them from the framework of the portal and preserved them in the more permanent form of plaster. In the process, he began to isolate, modify, and recombine them. Many figures were finished in the round, enlarged, and cast in bronze or terracotta or carved in marble for collectors who purchased them as individual sculptures. Such sculptures as The Old Courtesan ( 11.173.3 ) and Orpheus and Eurydice ( 10.63.2 ) had their origins in the method of working that Rodin employed to deal with the vast composition of The Gates.

Thus, The Gates of Hell became a major source of the wealth of individual sculptures that Rodin created during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. Rodin’s next major commission, The Burghers of Calais ( 1989.407 ), was in no small measure prompted by a deliberate policy of raising morale after the disasters of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing Commune by creating public monuments to patriotic Frenchmen. In 1884, the Municipal Council of Calais voted to honor one of their heroes, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the leader of six prosperous citizens of Calais who offered themselves as hostages to the English king Edward III (r. 1327–77) in return for lifting his siege of the city. Rodin proposed that the monument include all six men and supplied a maquette, or sketch model, of the six that won the commission, which was signed on January 28, 1885. Rodin soon began to model hands, feet, heads, and torsos, which he assembled in various ways, modified, or discarded until the figures took their final form.

Then he set about reorienting and rearranging them, a process that lasted a decade. His abandonment of the traditional vocabulary of allegorical symbols in favor of individual poses and gestures that reveal character were innovations that brought his work into conflict with accepted formulas for public monuments. Rodin had strong support among certain influential critics and government officials, however, and public commissions followed throughout the remainder of the century. These included monuments to Jules Bastien-Lepage (1886), Claude Lorrain (1889), Victor Hugo (1891), Honoré de Balzac (1891), and President Sarmiento of Argentina (1894). The Monument to Victor Hugo was planned as part of a grand scheme for sculptural monuments commemorating various heroes and philosophers of the French Revolution to be placed inside the Panthéon in Paris along with a funerary monument to Victor Hugo (1802–1885), the most famous author and poet of nineteenth-century France. A subcommittee was formed in 1889, and after deliberating plans for the sculptural program and making a list of sculptors who would be invited to participate, they awarded the choice commission for the monument to Rodin.

Surviving models made in 1889 or 1890 establish Rodin’s conception of the work in this period. The subcommittee at first seemed pleased with the project, but doubts about its suitability for the Panthéon scheme began to surface; politics undoubtedly played a role, and in the end the committee rejected the maquette that Rodin submitted. Rodin them embarked upon a second, quite different, project now known as The Apotheosis of Victor Hugo, a triangular composition depicting Hugo standing on the rocky shore of the Channel island of his exile, with Iris, Messenger of the Gods, flying above his head and the Sirens from The Gates of Hell emerging from the waves below. The project occupied Rodin from about 1890 to 1894, but by the end of the period, government interest had cooled, and Rodin never went further than the models he made for this version of the monument. Following his earlier practice with the sculptures from The Gates of Hell, Rodin extracted a number of the figures from the various models for the Monument to Victor Hugo and presented them as independent sculptures.

These include the Iris, Messenger of the Gods in an enlarged and truncated version ( 1984.364.7 ). The French government, however, had not altogether abandoned the idea for a monument, and in 1891 Rodin was commissioned to provide a marble, based on the models for the first version of the monument, for the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The marble monument was ultimately unveiled in the gardens of the Palais Royal in 1909, and in 1933 it was moved to the Musée Rodin in Paris, where it can be seen today. In this version of the monument, Rodin relied heavily on the portrait of Hugo that he had modeled in 1883. Some of the sketches he made in preparation for the bust were reproduced in a series of prints executed in drypoint by Rodin himself. The Victor Hugo, Three-Quarter View ( 16.37.2 ) is believed to represent Rodin’s initial impression of the poet. In July 1891, the Société des Gens de Lettres commissioned a monument to the French writer Honoré de Balzac to be erected at the Palais Royal.

Rodin made numerous preparatory studies for the figure in an effort to create a vivid image of the author, who had died in 1850. One of the studies, a terracotta head ( 12.11.1 ), comes from the early stages of Rodin’s work on the monument. Many more followed for the head alone. Rodin also modeled several versions of the full figure, some with heads, some without, some wearing monk’s robes, some in contemporary dress, and some wearing nothing at all, before settling on a dressing gown of the kind that is known to have been the author’s preferred working costume. Meanwhile, Rodin was missing one deadline after another for delivery of the finished monument. The final figure created a furor, and it was rejected by the Société, as much for its entanglement in dissension within the membership as for the brutal power of the image itself, for which Société members were unprepared. By the 1890s, Rodin’s commissions enabled him to employ a number of studio assistants, some who would later become well-known sculptors in their own right.

Among them were Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), François Pompon (1855–1933), and Jules Desbois (1851–1935). Even earlier, Camille Claudel (1864–1943) had become a studio assistant, as well as Rodin’s model and mistress in a relationship that ended unhappily in 1893, in part owing to Rodin’s reluctance to abandon his lifelong companion Rose Beuret. Although Rodin was himself a skilled marble carver, the later marbles are for the most part products of Rodin’s studio, careful renditions of the plaster working models cast from his autograph models in clay. In 1900, Rodin erected his own pavilion in the Place de l’Alma to coincide with the Paris Exposition Universelle and filled it with 150 of his sculptures. Success had brought numerous private commissions and commissions for portraits. It has been said that Rodin’s portraits of men display deeper psychological insight into their character than his portraits of women, which tend toward softer, more circumspect portrayals.

Although not commissioned, the sketches of the Japanese actress Hanako ( 10.66.2 ) belie this characterization. So, too, does the unfinished portrait of Madame X ( 11.173.6 ), which apparently so deeply upset the subject that when the marble was nearly finished she refused it. The increasingly erotic character of Rodin’s sculpture in the 1880s can be explained by his preoccupation with two highly charged literary sources. These were Dante’s Inferno and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. In Dante’s epic poem, Rodin seems to have been most deeply impressed by those who were damned by the sins of the flesh, while Baudelaire’s poetry is notoriously satanic in nature. Many of Rodin’s later drawings of female figures, both alone and together, are as sexually explicit as they are remarkable for the freedom and spontaneity of their draftsmanship. Often they are the products of the sculptor’s attempt to capture the human form in motion by making quick sketches without ever taking his eyes from the human model. Some of these sketches, for example the one titled Nero ( 10.66.5 ), he reworked making corrections or adding color.

The marble group Eternal Spring ( 17.120.184 ), sometimes called Eternal Springtime, was first titled Zephyr and Earth, and it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1897 as Cupid and Psyche, both calculated to lend a certain respectability to the eroticism of the subject. By 1900, however, Rodin felt free to include both the suggestive Eternal Spring and the explicit Iris, Messenger of the Gods in his retrospective exhibition, as well as numerous sculptural fragments and partial figures. Two torsos, one cast in bronze, had been among the sculptures Rodin presented to his public in the joint exhibition with Claude Monet held in 1889 at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Although the plaster hands ( 12.12.17 ) and the terracotta torso ( 12.13.1 ) in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection were not among the avant-garde works that were displayed either in 1889 or in 1900, they were Rodin’s gift to the Museum in 1912, and they were clearly meant to be accepted as works of art in themselves.

In some instances, these sculptural fragments can be recognized as parts of completed sculptures, but more often it is not possible either to identify them or to date them with any degree of certainty. Rodin also began giving bases to some of his fragments, making small, independent sculptures of them; others he combined to create strange, sometimes bizarre, hybrid forms. The giant hand that cradles small male and female figures in a sculptural group known as The Hand of God ( 08.210 ) is the product of this working method. Success also brought exhibitions throughout northern Europe and North America. In 1912, a gallery devoted entirely to his work opened at the Metropolitan Museum. In 1916, Rodin bequeathed his collection to France. It contained his own sculptures, his working models with the casting rights, as well as drawings, paintings, photographs, and documents of various kinds. In return, he required that the French government establish a museum dedicated to his art. The Musée Rodin is now housed in Paris in the eighteenth-century Hôtel Biron that had been the sculptor’s studio in the later years of his life.

Clare Vincent Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 Citation Vincent, Clare. “Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Further Reading Rodin en 1900: L'exposition de l'Alma: Musée du Luxembourg. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001. Alhadeff, Albert "Michelangelo and the Early Rodin." Art Bulletin 45 (December 1963), pp. 363–67. Barbier, Nicole. Marbres de Rodin: Collection du Musée: Catalogue. Paris: Éditions du Musée Rodin, 1987. Butler, Ruth. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Butler, Ruth, Jeanine Parisier Plottel, and Jane Mayo Roos. Rodin's Monument to Victor Hugo.

Exhibition catalogue. London: Merrill Holberton, 1998. Cladel, Judith. Rodin, sa vie glorieuse, sa vie inconnue. Paris: B. Grasset, 1950. Crone, Rainer, and Siegfried Salzmann, eds. Rodin: Eros and Creativity. Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Prestel, 1992. De Caso, Jacques, and Patricia B. Sanders. Rodin's Sculpture: A Critical Study of the Spreckels Collection, California Palace of the Legion of Honor. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1977. Elsen, Albert E. Auguste Rodin: Readings on His Life and Work. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Elsen, Albert E. In Rodin's Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. Elsen, Albert E. Rodin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963. Elsen, Albert E.

The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985. Elsen, Albert E., and J. Kirk T. Varnedoe. The Drawings of Rodin. New York: Praeger, 1971. Elsen, Albert E., and Rosalyn Frankel Jamison. Rodin's Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200 Elsen, Albert E., ed. Rodin Rediscovered. Exhibition catalogue.. Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 1981. Gantner, Joseph. Rodin und Michelangelo. Vienna : A. Schroll, 1953. Geissbuhler, Elisabeth Chase. Rodin: Later Drawings. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Goldscheider, Cécile. "La genèse d'une oeuvre: Le Balzac de Rodin." Revue des Arts 2 (March 1952), pp. 37–44.

Goldscheider, Cécile Auguste. Rodin: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre sculpté, vol. 1, 1840–1886. Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 1989. Grappe, Georges. Catalogue du Musée Rodin: I. Hôtel Biron. Paris: Musée Rodin, 1944. Grunfeld, Frederic V. Rodin: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1987. Judrin, Claudie. Inventaire des dessins: Musée Rodin. 6 vols. Paris: Musée Rodin, 1984–92. Judrin, Claudie, Monique Laurent, and Dominique Viéville. Auguste Rodin, le monument des Bourgeois de Calais, 1884–1895, dans les collections du Musée Rodin et du Musée des Beaux–Arts de Calais. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Édition Musée Rodin, 1977. Lampert, Catherine. Rodin: Sculpture & Drawings. Exhibition catalogue.

London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986. Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette. Rodin: The Gates of Hell. Rev. ed. Paris: Musée Rodin, 2002. Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette, and Annette Haudiquet. Rodin: Les Bourgeois de Calais. Paris: Musée Rodin, 2001. Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette, et al. 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée Rodin, 1998. Levkoff, Mary L. Rodin in His Time: The Cantor Gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: LACMA, 1994. McNamara, Mary Jo, and Albert E. Elsen. Rodin's Burghers of Calais. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Cantor, Fitzgerald Group, 1977. Miller, Joan Vita, and Gary Marotta. Rodin: The B. Gerald Cantor Collection. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.

See on MetPublications Pinet, Hélène. Rodin et ses modéles: Le portrait photographié. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée Rodin, 1990. Roos, Jane Mayo. "Rodin's Monument to Victor Hugo: Art and Politics in the Third Republic." Art Bulletin 68 (December 1986), pp. 632–56. Steinberg, Leo. "Rodin." In his Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Tancock, John L. The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin: The Collection of the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976. Vassalo, Isabelle, ed. Vers l'"Âge d'airain": Rodin en Belgique. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée Rodin, 1997. Vincent, Clare. "Rodin at The Metropolitian Museum of Art: A History of the Collection." Metropolitian Museum of Art Bulletin 38 (Spring 1981), pp. 2–48.

Additional Essays by Clare Vincent France, 1800–1900 A.D. | Chronology | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Second Republic under Louis-Napoleon, later Napoleon III, 1848–52 1850 A.D. Second Republic under Louis-Napoleon, later Napoleon III, 1848–52 Second Empire under Napoleon III, 1852–70 Third Republic, 1870–1940 Third Republic, 1870–1940 Overview At the turn of the nineteenth century, France is governed by Napoleon as First Consul. As emperor, Napoleon sanctions the Neoclassical style, embodied in the art of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). Meanwhile, the seeds of Romanticism—sown here and elsewhere in Europe by contemporary writers, poets, and philosophers—give rise to an aesthetic that exalts emotion, nature, and the sublime over rationalism and classicism.

Around mid-century, in the midst of class struggles and the wake of civil uprisings against an oppressive government, Romanticism is supplanted by Realism in the visual arts and literature, which focuses on modern subjects and the lives of the lower classes. Two major artistic movements dominate the second half of the century. A group of painters known as the Impressionists also take up themes from modern life, executing primarily landscape and genre subjects with broken color and loose brushwork that reflect the transitory nature of the images they depict. In response, a group of artists known as the Post-Impressionists develop independent styles of painting that reject the objective naturalism of the Impressionists. At the century’s close, or fin-de-siècle, many artists, designers, and collectors promote an artistic reform leading to a style known as Art Nouveau. Based on asymmetrical, organic forms and influenced by Japanese art , the Art Nouveau style emerges in painting and the graphic arts as well as in architecture and the design of everyday objects. Key Events ca. 1800 A faction emerges from the studio of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825).

Known as the Primitifs, these artists push the Neoclassical style championed by their master toward a greater simplicity, emulating the linear purity of Greek vase painting and fifteenth-century Italian art. 1801 Architects Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) publish the Recueil de décorations intérieures, a compilation of drawings of contemporary design that will set the standard for the Empire style of interior decoration, which spreads throughout Europe. The two collaborate on the interior of Joséphine Bonaparte’s château outside of Paris, Malmaison (1800–1802), whose decoration reflects the Imperial Roman models and Egyptian-inspired motifs characteristic of the Empire style . 1804 Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835), a student of David, paints the monumental canvasNapoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa. This propagandizing work depicts the general’s visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa.

Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. The architectural setting and figures in exotic dress mark an early appearance of Orientalism , a fascination with the Eastern world that is stimulated in part by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, and that will persist in art throughout the nineteenth century. 1804 Napoleon I Bonaparte (1769–1821) has himself proclaimed emperor of the French. At his coronation on December 2, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Napoleon takes the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and places it on his own head. As First Painter to the emperor, Jacques-Louis David portrays the royal splendor of this event in The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Joséphine (1805–7; Musée du Louvre, Paris), and produces other iconic images of Napoleon, including a depiction of the general as he signals to lead his troops across the Alps in a campaign that will vanquish his Austrian foes (Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800; Musée National de Malmaison).

This mounted equestrian portrait recalls, in its format and pose, sculpted memorials to the heroes of antiquity (in fact, Napoleon crossed the Alps riding a mule). 1806 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), praised as the greatest sculptor of the age, executes a large-scale classical nude figure of Napoleon as a benevolent Mars. Canova produces portraits of other members of the emperor’s family, including the idealized reclining nude figure of Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, in the guise of Venus (1808; Galleria Borghese, Rome). 1814 The Allied armies ( 67.187.127 ) of Britain, Russia, and Austria enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba, and Louis XVIII (r. 1814–24) ascends the throne, establishing a constitutional monarchy. The Congress of Vienna meets between September 1814 and June 1815 with the aim of restructuring the European continent, nearly all of which has been taken as the spoils of Napoleon’s military campaigns.

In the following year, Napoleon escapes from exile and returns to power for a brief period known as the “Hundred Days.” He is finally defeated by Allied forces under the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo (1815), and exiled to Saint Helena, where he dies in 1821. 1816 The French government frigate Medusa founders off the coast of Africa; the ship’s captain abandons 150 passengers on a makeshift raft, of whom only fifteen survive after thirteen days at sea. Théodore Gericault (1791–1824) depicts this controversial subject with chilling explicitness inThe Raft of the Medusa (1818–19; Louvre), a triumph of early Romantic painting in its description of human anguish and the futile struggle of man against nature. 1824 In a pivotal year for the development of French painting, works by contemporary British painters such as landscapist John Constable (1776–1837) are exhibited at the Salon, along with Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) Massacre at Chios (Louvre).

Though met with mixed reviews, the canvas becomes an icon of the emerging Romantic aesthetic in French painting. In the same year, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) returns to France after an eighteen-year sojourn in Italy. The two artists—one the great proponent of French Romantic painting, the other a staunch exponent of Davidian classicism—are posited in a stylistic rivalry, lasting until mid-century, that recalls that of the poussinistes and rubénistes of a century earlier: Ingres’ art asserts the supremacy of academic tradition, linear contour, and design, while that of Delacroix counters with freer brushwork, often-turbulent compositions, and sensuous colorism. 1830 The July Revolution, an uprising stirred by and among the middle classes, rages for three days in reaction against attempts by King Charles X (r. 1824–30) to return to the absolutist monarchy of the ancien régime. Charles abdicates and flees; despite the citizens’ clamor for a republic, the duc d’Orléans is proclaimed limited constitutional monarch as Louis-Philippe.

In this year, Delacroix paints Liberty Leading the People (Louvre), combining realism and allegory in a depiction of the personification of Liberty bearing a tricolor and leading combatants through a corpse-littered barricade. Louis-Philippe himself acquires the work when it is shown at the Salon of 1831. ca. 1830–70 The Barbizon School of landscape painting flourishes in the region of the French village from which it takes its name. Influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch masters, the Barbizon painters turn away from idealized classical landscapes in favor of direct observation of nature and sketching out-of-doors, en plein air (a practice facilitated by the introduction, in 1841, of collapsible metal squeeze tubes of paint). Central figures of this school are Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), Jules Dupré (1811–1889), and Charles Daubigny (1817–1878).

In 1849, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) settles in Barbizon, where he paints The Gleaners (1857), The Angelus (1859; both Louvre), and other works that endow peasant life with a monumental dignity. 1831 Sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye (1796–1875) submits a plaster model to the Salon—Tiger Devouring a Gavial of the Ganges—winning public acclaim. Best known for animal groups such as this, Barye appeals to a contemporary taste for unflinching images of nature at its most ferocious. 1834 Auguste Préault (1809–1879) exhibits the plaster relief panel Tuerie (Slaughter) at the Salon. Its fragmented figures contort into gestures of anguish, their mouths opened to cry out. The emphasis on physical and emotional extremes, a radical departure from the conventions of classical relief, marks Préault’s vanguard approach. 1836 The Arc de Triomphe is unveiled at the Place d’Étoile in Paris.

Begun in 1806 by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (1739–1811), the triumphal arch is conceived as an emblem of Napoleonic rule inspired by ancient Roman models. Louis-Philippe fosters its completion by architects L. Goust, Jean-Nicolas Huyot, and Guillaume-Abel Blouet, with a revised decorative program celebrating French patriotism. Among the various participants in its decoration is François Rude (1784–1855), who executes one of four sculptural groups flanking the arch’s opening, The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, better known as La Marseillaise. The work elevates the volunteer soldiers to the status of mythic heroes as they advance—nude, or wearing classical armor—under the sweeping winged allegorical figure of Liberty. 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) exhibits a photographic image, produced on a silver-coated copper plate with iodine vapors, which he calls the daguerreotype.

His collaborator for six years (from 1827) is Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), the French chemist who in 1816 produces the first negative and, in 1826, the earliest surviving photographic image. 1842 onward Major excavations in northern Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Turkish empire, are undertaken by French and British diplomats and adventurers. Many of the monumental stone sculptures and reliefs discovered within ancient Assyrian royal palaces (dating from the ninth to seventh century B.C.) are shipped to London and Paris, prompting a vogue for all things Assyrian. Many architects and artists are influenced by the discoveries and an Assyrian Revival style flourishes in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 1848 The February Revolution overthrows Orléans rule and establishes the Second Republic. In late June of this year, class riots break out in the working districts of Paris and are brutally suppressed by the army.

The “Year of Revolutions” has a profound effect on contemporary artists such as Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), who depicts the tragic casualties of the uprising in Memory of Civil War (Louvre), shown at the Salon of 1850–51. 1849 On an official mission for the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, Maxime Du Camp (1822–1894) sets out for the Middle East, where he will make a photographic inventory of the sights and monuments of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Du Camp’s archaeological reportage inspires many others to make the journey in the 1850s. 1851 After the failure of a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the president to serve for more than one term, Louis-Napoleon mobilizes a military coup d’état that results in the fall of the Second Republic. He is named emperor of the Second Empire in the following year.

1851 The French government initiates a project of documenting the nation’s architectural heritage, assigning five photographers, including Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) and Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), to record different regions of the country. 1853 Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar, opens a photographic studio soon to become a hub of the most illustrious personalities of the day. Known to posterity for his elegant portraits of such luminaries as the actress Sarah Bernhardt and writer Charles Baudelaire, Nadar is better known to his contemporaries as a novelist and essayist. 1854 American Commodore Matthew Perry and the Tokugawa shogunate conclude the Kanagawa treaty that opens Japan, hitherto an isolationist country, to trade with the West (limited trade, particularly with Dutch merchants, had been permitted up to this point).

Shortly thereafter, Japanese wares—furniture, decorative objects, textiles, and prints—are widely available in Europe and avidly collected by an affluent bourgeoisie, including artists such as Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and writers such as Baudelaire, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. Japanese pictorial arts, especially prints, and other aspects of the Japanese aesthetic exert a profound influence on contemporary French artists, authors, and composers. In 1872, the critic and collector Philippe Burty uses the term japonisme to refer to this widespread cultural phenomenon and to promote its study. 1855 The Exposition Universelle, including a major art exhibition, is held in Paris with the aim of displaying the social, industrial, and cultural progress in France under Napoleon III. Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) submits a monumental canvas, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life, to the exposition jury, who reject it.

Outraged by the stylistic strictures imposed by the Academy of Fine Arts, Courbet organizes a private exhibition in a tent near the fairground entrance, calling it his Pavilion of Realism. Courbet’s radical departure from academic tradition had rocked the art world six years earlier, when he exhibited three pictures—Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, After Dinner at Ornans, and A Burial at Ornans—at the Salon of 1849. These works, depicting the landscape and inhabitants of his rural birthplace, elevate scenes from everyday life to the grand scale formerly reserved for history painting. Courbet’s pictures espouse the cry of contemporary critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in his review of the Salon of 1846 for an art that reflects the “heroism of modern life,” and he leads a generation of Realist painters that has as its literary counterpart the circle of Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), author of Madame Bovary (both 1857).

1858 English dress designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), often regarded as “the father of haute couture ,” opens a firm in Paris. The House of Worth dominates Parisian fashion through the second half of the nineteenth century. late 1850s The increasing popularity of photography encourages the development of faster printing processes and the circulation of inexpensive types of photographic prints, including the stereograph and the carte-de-visite. 1861 Construction begins on the Paris Opéra, designed by Charles Garnier (1825–1898). It is conceived by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), city planner under Napoleon III, as the converging point of several major boulevards. Incorporating Renaissance and Baroque architectural elements and decorative motifs, the ornate structure symbolizes Second Empire decadence, the appeal of which endures well after the empire’s fall.

Its profuse exterior adornment includes The Dance by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), a Beaux-Arts sculptor who rises to prominence with Ugolino and His Sons (1860–62; Louvre; see MMA 67.250 ) at the Salon of 1863. The Opéra is completed in 1875. ca. 1862 Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) paints The Third-Class Carriage ( 29.100.129 ), an unidealized portrayal of the living conditions of the working class and the psychological isolation symptomatic of modern urban life. The artist is already well known for the satirical drawings and political cartoons he produces for Paris weeklies, such as Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834(57.650.192), depicting the wake of a massacre of working-class opponents of the oppressive government under Louis-Philippe.

1863 The Salon des Refusés is established for the exhibition of works rejected by the Salon jury (more than half the submissions for this year are rejected), and includes pictures by Cézanne , Pissarro, Whistler, and Édouard Manet (1832–1883). Many of the works displayed generate controversy, particularly Manet’s canvas Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). While its composition of male figures reclining in a clearing with a nude female figure derives from classical and Renaissance sources (see Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael, 19.74.1 ), its contemporaneity and directness of approach shock modern audiences. Manet stirs a second scandal with Olympia (Musée d’Orsay), painted in 1863 and exhibited at the Salon of 1865. In a composition that recalls old master paintings, notably theVenus of Urbino by Titian , a nude female figure reclines on a couch.

Manet’s modern courtesan, who unabashedly engages the viewer’s glance, arouses critical disgust and claims of indecency and vulgarity. 1866 Jules Chéret (1836–1932) popularizes a technique of color lithography that marks the rise of the modern advertising poster. His designs influence the painter and graphic artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), who captures in his brief but prolific career the gaiety—and, often, the garishness—of the theaters, circuses, and cabarets of fin-de-siècle Paris. 1870 The Franco-Prussian War breaks out, ending in French defeat. At the fall of Napoleon III, the Third Republic is established. In the following year, a socialist Commune is set up in Paris (March 18–May 29); Gustave Courbet is an active participant in Commune politics, and leads a commission for the protection of artistic monuments.

After the Commune’s overthrow, Courbet is accused of ordering the demolition of the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Napoleonic rule; he is imprisoned and, declared responsible for the column’s restoration, flees to Switzerland shortly after his release in 1873, living there in exile until his death in 1877. 1874 The first of eight exhibitions of Impressionist painting is held in Nadar’s studio in Paris, featuring works by Claude Monet (1840–1926), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903).

Maligned by critics, one of whom coins the term impressionisme pejoratively after Monet’s Impression: Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), this group of artists is dedicated to the depiction of modern life, especially landscape and genre subjects, based on direct observation. They develop a style of painting with loose, broken brushstrokes that mirrors the often fleeting nature of their subjects. 1874 American painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) settles in Paris. Her cosmopolitan upbringing and early travels allow her access to studies with such masters as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Thomas Couture (1815–1879), and she exhibits at the Salon for the first time in 1868. By the mid-1870s, her style becomes less Academic, and she exhibits with the Impressionists in 1880, 1881, and 1886. Cassatt later displays her refined draftsmanship and graphic technique in paintings and prints—particularly of maternal scenes—markedly inspired by the Japanese aesthetic.

In her later years, she acts as advisor to several American friends in purchasing old master and nineteenth-century French avant-garde art; among them is Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929), who bequeaths nearly 2,000 paintings and art objects from her collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929. 1874 The young American expatriate John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) enters the studio of portraitist Carolus-Duran (1838–1917) in Paris. He will soon achieve his own success as a portraitist, depicting with liveliness and elegance the American and European elite of his age, as in his portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau, known as Madame X (1883–84; 16.53 ). Sargent is also a gifted plein-air landscapist. 1875 Georges Bizet’s (1838–1875) opera Carmen is performed for the first time in Paris; it is a critical failure.

Despite its musical vivacity and complex psychological characterizations, contemporary audiences are unsympathetic to the opera’s realism and the inspiration Bizet takes from the German Romantic composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), who himself faced great unpopularity during his three-year stay in Paris (1839–42). late 1870s Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) turns away from Impressionism, seeking to imbue objects and landscapes with a sense of solidity and permanence by reducing them to their basic geometric forms: the cube, cone, and cylinder. Though not commercially successful in his lifetime, Cézanne’s approach to painting, broadly categorized as Post-Impressionist, influences major movements in twentieth-century art, especially Cubism. 1880 Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is commissioned to execute a sculptural portal for a planned museum of decorative arts (never realized); he chooses Dante’s Inferno as the subject, and calls his doors The Gates of Hell, an allusion to Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise (ca.

1426–52) for the Baptistery of the cathedral in Florence. The lintel, pilasters, and door panels are adorned with reliefs of the turbulently swirling, tortured forms that inhabit Dante’s hell, most of which are identifiable. Several of Rodin’s major sculptures, including The Thinker (originally conceived as a portrayal of Dante) and The Kiss (a representation of the ill-fated lovers Paolo and Francesca), are enlarged versions of figures that appear on The Gates of Hell. 1881 Edgar Degas (1834–1917) exhibits The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer ( 29.100.370 ) at the sixth Impressionist exhibition. The wax sculpture, wearing a real tulle skirt and horsehair wig tied with a silk ribbon, causes a scandal because of its naturalistic depiction of the young model. Performers—ballet dancers, opera singers, and musicians—recur in Degas’ oeuvre, which spans several media, including paint, pastel, wax, and photography.

Degas is a gifted draftsman, capturing through sophisticated compositional technique the self-conscious poise of ballerinas and the casual postures of solitary bathers. 1886 Painter Georges Seurat (1859–1891) completes A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–5; Art Institute of Chicago; see MMA 51.112.6 ). The artist employs a technique known variously as Divisionism or Pointillism, in which small patches or dots of pure colors are juxtaposed to produce a visual harmony when viewed from a distance. This systematic method, rooted in contemporary color theories, places Seurat at the forefront of the Neo-Impressionist movement, along with Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944), son of Camille Pissarro. Works by these artists appear in the last Impressionist exhibition of 1886. 1886 Émile Zola (1840–1902) publishes L’Oeuvre, a novel that addresses the aesthetic issues of the later nineteenth century.

The author-critic rejects contemporary Academic painting, asserts the imprint of an artist’s personality or temperament on his work, and champions the painter Édouard Manet (1832–1883) as the leader of a “modern school of Naturalism.” At the publication ofL’Oeuvre, Paul Cézanne, a close childhood friend of Zola, claims to recognize himself in the primary character Claude Lantier, a failed artist who commits suicide; the two fall out and never speak again. 1886 Jean Moréas (1856–1910) publishes a Symbolist manifesto in the widely read periodical Le Figaro, arguing for an aesthetic that rejects naturalism in favor of the subjective world of dreams, nuances, and the imagination.

Admired by and closely associated with the work of the Symbolists are painters Gustave Moreau (1826–1898)—who engages the opposing tensions of physicality, spirituality, desire, and morality in canvases such as Oedipus and the Sphinx ( 21.134.1 ) and several works on the theme of Salome—and Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an admirer of Francisco Goya and Edgar Allan Poe who evokes a fantastic, visionary dream-world in works such as the lithograph Marsh Flower: A Sad Human Face (1885). 1888 In Brittany, painter and graphic artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Émile Bernard (1868–1941) produce paintings of simplified, flattened forms rendered in bold, unmodulated colors. This style, which they call “Synthetism,” is Symbolist in its intent to convey emotions and ideas beyond representing the visual world.

A characteristic Synthetist work is Gauguin’s 1888 canvas The Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). 1888 In February, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) departs Paris for Arles in the south of France, hoping to establish an artists’ community. Under the bright sulphur-yellow light of Provence, his work comes into its own as he realizes the expressive potential of color and line. On October 23, he is joined by Paul Gauguin; they spend 9 weeks painting side by side and living together in the Yellow House. Gauguin’s abrupt departure on December 23 is precipitated by Van Gogh’s breakdown, during which he cuts off part of his left ear with a razor. 1888 A group of young artists form the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for “prophet,” with the aim of promoting decorative painting as inspired by Gauguin’s Synthetist model.

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) is a founding member of the Nabis and writes in an article of 1890 for La Revue Blanche, “Remember that a picture, before being a war horse, a female nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” Other core members include Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867–1944), and Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). The Nabis are associated with the Symbolist movement. 1889 The Exposition Universelle is held in Paris as a centennial celebration of the French Revolution. The Eiffel Tower, a 984-foot-high iron structure designed by Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) and erected between 1887 and 1889, stands near the fairground entrance on the Champ de Mars as a symbol of the triumph of science, engineering, and industry.

1890 Claude Monet , chief exponent of Impressionism, purchases a house in Giverny, whose landscape profoundly inspires him. About this time, he begins the first of several series of paintings depicting a single subject in various conditions of light and weather. His subjects include haystacks ( 29.100.109 ), poplars, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies. He exhibits these during the 1890s in several one-man shows at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris. 1891 Paul Gauguin makes his first trip to Tahiti, where he stays until 1893. There he paints Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) ( 51.112.2 ), in which he adapts the vernacular art and customs of the South Pacific to express a Christian theme. The two central figures are based on a photograph of a low relief in the Javanese temple of Borobudur, characteristic of Gauguin’s liberal borrowing from photography and other sources. A late work, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), painted in Papeete in 1897, is Gauguin’s allegorical variation on the theme of the three ages of man—or in this case, woman, here represented by female figures in a Tahitian landscape. 1892 Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an Alsatian Jew and French general staff officer, is tried and wrongly convicted for passing French secret documents to a German military attaché. The resultant controversy, known as The Dreyfus Affair, is largely the result of anti-Semitism in France. After the court martial and nearly immediate acquittal (1898) of the actual traitor, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the pro-Dreyfus critic Émile Zola publishes “J’accuse,” an open letter to the president of the French Republic accusing the judges of acquitting Esterhazy on orders from the war office. Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to jail, but flees to England. Dreyfus is finally exonerated in 1906.

1894 Claude Debussy (1862–1918) composes the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), an orchestral work inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of 1876. Debussy is the major exponent of an impressionistic movement in music that rejects narrative and drama—ideals championed by Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner—with the aim of evoking subtleties of mood, atmosphere, and transitory impressions. Inspired by contemporary painting by Monet and Symbolist poetry, Debussy achieves impressionistic effects through the use of new chord combinations, whole-tone chords, pentatonic pitch collections, timbre, and unresolved dissonances. He is also closely associated with the Symbolist movement in music, which, like its counterparts in the visual arts and literature, rejects a strict adherence to naturalism in favor of evocation, suggestion, and imagination. 1895 German entrepreneur Siegfried Bing (1838–1905) expands and reopens his Oriental crafts shop in Paris as the Maison de l’Art Nouveau.

Bing is a specialist in Eastern arts, and promotes a Japanese aesthetic as a means of uniting art and craft in a manner that imbues even the most utilitarian object with a simple beauty. He is credited—through the foundation of a periodical, Le Japon Artistique, and various exhibitions of ancient artifacts and contemporary works—with the promotion of japonisme in France. The Art Nouveau style borrows from Japanese art its emphasis on linear ornamental motifs such as intertwining vegetal forms. Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau features designs by the painters Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Paul Ranson (1864–1909), as well as Belgian architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957). Other masters of this style are Hector Guimard (1867–1942), designer of the elegant cast-iron tendrils that adorn entrances to the Paris Métro (ca. 1900), and René Lalique (1860–1945), jewelry and glassware designer.

Citation “France, 1800–1900 A.D.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Related

Question: Who sculpted "The Gates of Hell" depicting a scene from Dante's Inferno from 1880 until his death in 1917?
Answer: Auguste Rodin