AHI101 Writing Assignment Composing A Formal Analysis Art History

Art History
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Art History
During my visit to the museum, I was able to view a wide array of artworks ranging from paintings to ancient potteries. The chosen object that captured my attention is a painting by a Realist painter. This paper describes the artistic period that the chosen object coincides with. The artist of the object is described concisely. In addition, the paper discusses the composition and use of colour in the painting.
The selected object is the painting titled A Burial At Ornans by the French artist Gustave Courbet (1849-1850). The painting medium is oil on canvas. It is quite a large painting as it measures 124 inches x 260 inches, or 315 centimetres x 660 centimetres. The painting is from the Realism Period. This was the period from 1848 AD to 1900 AD. Realism started as a rejection of the subjectivism and imagination of Romanticism. The focus of the artists was chiefly on accurate observation of the everyday world. Herman (2013) pointed out that Realist painters replaced the literary conceits and idealistic images of conventional art with actual real-life events. Artists during this epoch were typified by painting ordinary people in everyday situations. They were also daring and bold by painting explicit subjects such as prostitutes. Furthermore, paintings of this era were usually en plein air, meaning that they were primarily painted whilst outdoors (Parks, 2012). The choice of Realist painters of bringing the ordinary life into their canvases manifested the avant-garde desire of merging life and art.
The painting Burial at Ornans (1849-1850) is depicting the burial of one of the uncles of Gustave Courbet in the town of Ornans. It portrays the scene with unflattering air and unlike the traditional Romantic paintings of the time, it does not romanticize the depictions of mourning and grief. The painting was aimed at capturing the mundane and diverse facets of rural life at a specific occasion in a specific city: the occasion being a funeral and the city being Ornans (Malafronte, 2014). Gustave Courbet was a painter from France. He is widely recognized as the artist who led the Realist movement during the nineteenth century. This painter was born in Ornans, which is a small town located in the region of Franche-Comte in eastern France (Krebber, 2012).
The stylistic properties contained in the painting which indicate that the piece was made during the Realist Movement is that it is depicting real people who are in attendance at the funeral of a real or common person. The painting is a representation of a peasant funeral. It contains in excess of forty life-size figures who were actually present at the burial: the subjects in the painting are not actors who were utilized as models for the art. It significantly departs from the more idealized, controlled images of the Romantic and Neoclassic eras given that it is portraying the emotions and life of humble peasants, not of aristocratic personages, and it actually does so with a realistic urgency (Malafronte, 2014). Critics of this painting criticized the size and style of the piece. At 22 feet wide and 10 feet tall, the canvas’ size was characteristically used only for heroic or religious scene...