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Term used to describe scenes of typical American life painted in a naturalistic vein from c. 1920 until the early 1940s. It applies to both Regionalism and Social Realism in American painting, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous. The phrase probably derived from Henry James’s collection of essays and impressions, The American Scene (London, 1907), published upon James’s own rediscovery of his native land after 21 years as an expatriate. The term entered the vocabulary of fine arts by the 1920s and was applied to the paintings of Charles Burchfield during 1924.

In the two decades following World War I, American writers and artists began to look for native sources for the aesthetic and spiritual renewal of their modern technological civilization. This search engaged and activated many thoughtful and creative people in the 1920s and 1930s and resulted in that flurry of activity that Waldo Frank (1889–1967) discussed as ...

(b Orléans, March 7, 1817; d Paris, Feb 26, 1878).

French painter. He was taught at the school of drawing in Orléans by a local painter, François Salmon (1781–1855). On 9 October 1837 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, first in the atelier of Sebastien Norblin de la Gourdaine (1796–1884). A year later he became a pupil of Paul Delaroche, from whom he acquired his understanding of dramatic composition.

Antigna exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1841 with a religious canvas, the Birth of Christ (untraced), and showed there every year for the rest of his life. Until 1845 his exhibits were primarily religious scenes and portraits. Influenced by the effects of industrialization and the sufferings of the urban working class, which he witnessed at first hand while living in the poor quarter of the Ile St Louis in Paris, he turned towards contemporary social subjects dominated by poverty and hardship. The ...

French family of painters. Jean-Antoine Bail (b Chasseley, Rhône, 8 April 1830; d Nesle-la-Vallée, 20 Oct 1919) was largely self-taught, but he received some training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon before showing the intimate, monochromatic Artist’s Studio (Saint-Etienne, Mus. A. & Indust.) at the Salon there in 1854. He subsequently showed works at the Paris Salon, beginning in 1861 with The Cherries (untraced), and he exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, Paris, until 1898. He was recognized by contemporary critics as the artist who best exemplified the realist tradition in provincial themes. He used models who posed in his studio on the Ile St Louis for his paintings of cooks and maids, and many of his interior scenes, with their intimate figural groupings and close attention to detail, display an awareness of Chardin and Dutch 17th-century painting. Sensitive portraits such as the ...

(b Montpellier, Dec 6, 1841; d Beaune-la-Rolande, Nov 28, 1870).

French painter. The son of a senator, he was born into the wealthy Protestant middle class in Montpellier. He soon came into contact with the contemporary and still controversial painting of Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet through the Montpellier collector, Alfred Bruyas. In response to his family’s wishes he began to study medicine in 1860. He moved to Paris in 1862 and devoted his time increasingly to painting. In November 1862 he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre where he produced academic life drawings (examples in Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) and made friends with the future Impressionists, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. When the studio closed in 1863, he did not look for another teacher but followed his friends to Chailly, near the forest of Fontainebleau, where he made studies from nature (e.g. Study of Trees; priv. col.). From 1863 he took an active part in Parisian musical life, attending the Pasdeloup and Conservatoire concerts. He developed a passion for opera (Berlioz and Wagner in particular) and German music (Beethoven and Schumann). He attended the salon of his cousins, the Lejosne family, where Henri Fantin-Latour, Charles Baudelaire, Edmond Maître, Renoir and Edouard Manet were frequent guests, and at the end of ...

(b Richmond, VA, June 25, 1931; d Oneonta, NY, Aug 29, 2013).

American painter. Beal studied at the College of William and Mary, Norfolk, VA, before going on to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. In 1965, he began having solo exhibitions at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, later Frumkin/Adams Gallery and then George Adams Gallery, which had venues in New York City and Chicago, continuing to exhibit with them into the 21st century. Like many artists working in the 1960s, he repudiated the abstract, then so current in the art world, and favored instead the kind of “New Realism” being espoused by artists such as Philip Pearlstein, among others. His art focuses on the figure indoors, usually rendered up-close in a compact interior environment. The colors are usually vivid and the lines often dominant.

Beal is known primarily as a painter, but in addition to painting and prints, Beal produced two major public art monuments. The first was a series of four murals titled ...

(b San Francisco, CA, May 14, 1932).

American painter. Native of the San Francisco Bay Area, known for careful observation and explicit use of snapshot-like photographic source material for paintings of family, cars, and residential neighborhoods. The artist rose to national and international prominence in early 1970s as part of the Photorealist movement (see Photorealism).

From the 1960s, Bechtle pursued a quiet realism based on the things he knew best, translating what seem to be ordinary scenes of middle-class American life into paintings. Following an early childhood in the Bay Area and Sacramento, his family settled in 1942 in Alameda, an island suburb adjacent to Oakland where his mother would occupy the same house for almost 60 years. The neighborhood appears in many of Bechtle’s paintings.

Bechtle earned both his BFA (1954) and his MFA (1958) at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied graphic design and then painting. During his student years and into the 1960s, Bechtle was influenced by Pop art’s precedent for the use of commercial subject matter and techniques. He was likewise interested in Bay Area figuration, especially the subjects and structure of paintings by ...

(b Philadelphia, PA, March 1, 1890; d New York, NY, Feb 12, 2002).

American painter. Raised in Philadelphia she studied at the Philadelphia College of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design) under Elliott Daingerfield (1859–1932), Daniel Garber (1880–1958), Samuel Murray (1869–1941), Harriet Sartain (1873–1957), and Henry B. Snell and graduated in 1911. With her mother, she toured Europe in 1905 and 1912. After returning from her second trip to Europe she settled in New York where her father had recently relocated the family. She lived at home and studied briefly at Art Students League taking life and portrait classes with William Merritt Chase. She eventually established her own studio in Manhattan and married William Meyerowitz (1898–1981), a painter and etcher. She was associated with the members of The Eight and part of the Ashcan school. She was an original member of the Philadelphia Ten—a group of female painters and sculptors schooled in Philadelphia who exhibited together annually, sometimes more often, from ...

(b La Rochelle, Nov 30, 1825; d La Rochelle, Aug 19, 1905).

French painter. From 1838 to 1841 he took drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a pupil of Ingres, while attending the collège at Pons. In 1841 the family moved to Bordeaux where in 1842 his father allowed him to attend the Ecole Municipale de Dessin et de Peinture part-time, under Jean-Paul Alaux. In 1844 he won the first prize for figure painting, which confirmed his desire to become a painter. As there were insufficient family funds to send him straight to Paris he painted portraits of the local gentry from 1845 to 1846 to earn money. In 1846 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in the studio of François-Edouard Picot. This was the beginning of the standard academic training of which he became so ardent a defender later in life. Such early works as Equality (1848; priv. col., see 1984–5 exh. cat., p. 141) reveal the technical proficiency he had attained even while still training. In ...

(b Paris, April 25, 1824; d Paris, Oct 1888).

French painter. Born of creole parents, Boulanger became an orphan at 14. His uncle and guardian sent him to the studio of Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then in 1840 to Paul Delaroche, whose prosaic Realism and dry, careful technique influenced Boulanger’s style of painting. A first visit to Algeria in 1845 gave him an interest in North African subjects, which was taken up later by his friend Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1849 he won the Prix de Rome with Ulysses Recognized by his Nurse (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.), in which he combined academic figure drawing with Pompeian touches inspired by Ingres’s Antiochus and Stratonice (1840; Chantilly, Mus. Condé). Boulanger’s knowledge of the ruins at Pompeii, which he visited while studying at the Ecole de Rome, gave him ideas for many future pictures, including the Rehearsal in the House of the Tragic Poet (1855; St Petersburg, Hermitage), in which the influence of ...

(b Naples, Feb 23, 1835; d Naples, Sept 21, 1920).

Italian painter. He came from a family of artists of Catalan origin and was taught by his grandfather Giuseppe (1766–1850) and his great-uncle Antonio before enrolling at the Naples Accademia di Belle Arti in 1853. He studied under Gabriele Smargiassi (1798–1882), an exponent of traditional, composed, Romantic landscape, but was soon impressed by the plein-air landscape painting of Giacinto Gigante and by the work of the landscape painters of the Scuola di Posilippo, Alessandro La Volpe (?1820–87) and Vincenzo Franceschini (1812–85). Between 1854 and 1855 Cammarano entered the studio of Nicola Palizzi and devoted more time to studies from the live model and of landscape en plein air, with stays on Capri and at Cava Campobasso. This led to a break with Smargiassi, but Cammarano continued to attend evening life classes at the Accademia and to take part in competitions. Early works, such as ...

[Buoneri, Francesco]

(fl c. Rome, 1610–20).

Painter active in Italy. His nationality is not known. He was a follower of Caravaggio, and his rare works reveal a highly original and idiosyncratic response to that artist’s naturalism. Agostino Tassi mentioned him as involved, with several French artists, in the decoration of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia between 1613 and 1615, and Giulio Mancini noted a ‘Francesco detto Cecco del Caravaggio’ who was close to Caravaggio.

Richard Symonds, who visited Rome in 1650, mentioned that the model for Caravaggio’s Amore vincitore (Berlin, Alte N.G.) was one ‘Checco da Caravaggio’, ‘his owne boy or servant that laid with him’ (quoted Papi, 1992). The central work in Cecco’s oeuvre is Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple (Berlin, Alte N.G.), which Longhi (1943) identified as the work, formerly in the collection of Vicenzo Giustiniani, that had been referred to in G. M. Sylos’s Pinacotheca sive Romana pictura et scultura...

[Durand, Charles-Emile-Auguste]

(b Lille, July 4, 1837; d Paris, 1917).

French painter. He came from a humble background and by the age of 11 was taking lessons at the Académie in Lille from the sculptor Augustin-Phidias Cadet de Beaupré (b 1800) who taught him to sketch. At 15 he began a two-year apprenticeship in the studio of one of David’s former pupils, François Souchon (1787–1857), whose name he still referred to several years later when he exhibited at the Salon. In 1853 he moved to Paris. He copied in the Louvre where he must have met Henri Fantin-Latour, then taking life classes at the Académie Suisse (1859–60). He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1859. His first period in Paris, from 1853 to 1862 (interspersed with visits to Lille, where he received portrait commissions and an annuity in 1861), shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, whose After Dinner at Ornans...

(b c. 1770; d Edinburgh, Feb 1843).

Scottish painter. He originally worked as a wigmaker. In the 1790s he produced topographical illustrations in Edinburgh and reputedly trained under David Allan and at the Trustees’ Academy. Turning to figure subjects c. 1800, he contributed to the development of Realism in Scottish genre. He evolved a frank but subtle style with a sensitive response to character and the nuances of light, seen in Arrival of the Country Cousins (c. 1812; Duke of Buccleuch priv. col.). His art was admired by the young David Wilkie, who based his Pitlessie Fair on Carse’s Oldhamstock Fair (1796; both in Edinburgh, N.G.). Wilkie also took up many of the subjects that Carse had already derived from Allan, such as Penny Wedding, which Carse had painted in 1819 (G. N. Statham priv. col., on dep. Edinburgh, N.G.)

Carse contributed to the exhibitions of the Society of Incorporated Artists in Edinburgh from their inception in ...

(b Venice, 1637; d Venice, ?1712).

Italian painter. He trained first with Matteo Ponzoni, then with Sebastiano Mazzoni; Mazzoni encouraged the development of a Baroque style, but Celesti was also attracted by the naturalism of the tenebrists. The first known works by Celesti are mature in style, and he had already achieved considerable fame in Venice when the Doge Alvise Contarini honoured him with the title of Cavaliere in 1681. The complexity of his sources is evident in two canvases, Moses Destroying the Golden Calf and Moses Chastising the Hebrew People for their Idolatry, both painted c. 1681 for the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, and signed Cavaliere; they are influenced by Luca Giordano and by the narrative techniques of Jacopo Tintoretto. The most distinguished works of Celesti’s early period are two large lunettes that show three scenes: Benedict III Visiting St Zacharias, A Doge Presented with the Body of a Saint, and the Virtues Surrounding a Doge Holding the Model of St Zacharias...

(b Bruges, Nov 20, 1817; d Schaerbeek, Brussels, Feb 9, 1900).

Belgian painter. He was attracted from earliest childhood by the sea, to which he devoted his entire life and art. In his youth he made sketching trips along the Belgian coast. He studied under Horace Vernet in Paris and received advice from the marine artist Théodore Gudin, after which he was engaged as an official naval artist. Clays was interested by every aspect of intellectual life; when his training was complete he joined the circle of the mathematician Adolphe Quételet, Director of the Brussels Observatory, which included many of the leading artists and scientists of the time. In 1852 he married Quételet’s daughter Marie-Isaure (d 1860). Like Louis-Charles Verboeckhoven, Clays worked in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch marine painting and was initially influenced by Romanticism. He gradually moved towards Realism and became one of the chief Belgian marine painters working in this style with such works as Becalmed on the Scheldt...

(b Paris, July 17, 1796; d Paris, Feb 22, 1875).

French painter, draughtsman and printmaker.

After a classical education at the Collège de Rouen, where he did not distinguish himself, and an unsuccessful apprenticeship with two drapers, Corot was allowed to devote himself to painting at the age of 26. He was given some money that had been intended for his sister, who had died in 1821, and this, together with what we must assume was his family’s continued generosity, freed him from financial worries and from having to sell his paintings to earn a living. Corot chose to follow a modified academic course of training. He did not enrol in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but studied instead with Achille Etna Michallon and, after Michallon’s death in 1822, with Jean-Victor Bertin. Both had been pupils of Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, and, although in later years Corot denied that he had learnt anything of value from his teachers, his career as a whole shows his attachment to the principles of historic landscape painting which they professed....

(b Boston, MA, Nov 21, 1843; d Waverley, MA, Jan 15, 1909).

American painter. Currier first studied art in the late 1860s after working briefly as a stone-cutter (his father’s profession) and as a banking apprentice. In 1869, after a short stay in England, he arrived in Antwerp, where he studied at the Koninklijke Academie and benefited especially from the example of Antoine Wiertz. Currier visited Paris in the spring of 1870, perhaps intending to undertake a lengthy period of study. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in August 1870, however, he moved to Munich, where he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste until 1872. He became part of the American contingency of Munich painters, which included Frank Duveneck, Walter Shirlaw and William Merritt Chase. Like them, he became a notable practitioner of Munich realism as taught by Wilhelm Leibl and others. To this style, based on the chiaroscuro and dramatic brushwork of Frans Hals, Currier brought an expressionistic, individual manner, bolder in technique and more emotional and visionary in character. The ...

(b Budapest, June 1, 1883; d Budapest, Dec 31, 1937).

Hungarian painter. He studied in Munich and Nagybánya (now Baia Mare, Romania) under Simon Hollósy, and for 18 months in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens. Brown tones and a strong realism characterize his early pictures. On returning to Hungary, he developed close links with many leading radical intellectuals. He became a member of the radical, Fauvist-influenced group the Eight (see Eight, the), exhibiting with them from 1909 until they disbanded in 1912. His own ideal was Cézanne.

After 1910 Czigány’s style remained unchanged. He painted restrained compositions with harsh, rigid forms; his still-lifes highlight the plasticity of objects (e.g. Still-life with Apples and Utensils, 1910s) and his landscapes are vivid (e.g. Lonely Tree, 1910; Budapest, N.G.). He had an introvert personality with an inclination towards depression. From the 1910s to the end of his life he painted a series of portraits overwhelmingly frontal and sculptural in form (e.g. Self-portrait...

[Enrico, Antonio d’; il Tanzio]

(b Riale d’Alagna, 1575–80; d 1632–3).

Italian painter. He is best known for his dramatic oil paintings executed in a unique style of Caravaggesque realism modified by the elegance of Lombard Late Mannerism. He also adopted elements of a robust and unsophisticated realism from Piedmontese art, as is evident in his frescoes for the sacromonte at Varallo (see Varallo, Sacro Monte, §2). His drawings are in the highly refined and meticulously finished technique associated with Renaissance draughtsmanship.

Tanzio’s family had lived at Varallo since 1586, and he had two brothers who were also artists: the fresco painter Melchiorre d’Enrico, with whom he may have trained, and the sculptor and architect Giovanni d’Enrico (c. 1560–1644). On 12 February 1600 a safe conduct was issued to Melchiorre and Tanzio to leave Valsesia to visit Rome for the Holy Year. Tanzio’s first biographer, Cotta, wrote that the artist studied ‘in the Academies of Rome’ and that in ...