Trials of Modernity: Nineteenth-Century Precursors of Modernism

RealismGustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869)Gustave CourbetHonoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot

Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (1857)

NaturalismEmile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (1867)

DecadenceJoris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours; 1884)

SymbolismStéphane Mallarmé, “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune” (1876; later, music by Claude Debussy)

ImpressionismEdouard Manet, inspiration to the impressionistsEdgar Degas, older contemporary of the impressionistsClaude Monet

Henry James (1843-1916)

Claude Debussy, “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station (1887)

Gustave Courbet, “The Stonebreakers” (1850)

Edouard Manet, Street Pavers in the Rue Mosnier (1878)

Gustave Courbet,“Hunter on HorsebackRecovering the Trail”(1864)

Yale University Art Gallery

“The artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

Gustave Flaubert(1821-1880)

She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.

From Madame Bovary

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

Edouard Manet, Portait of Emile Zola (1868)

Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio: A Real-Life-Allegory of the Last Seven Years of My Life (1855), with Baudelaire at far right

Baudelaire and his successorsCharles Baudelaire (1821-1867)Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907)

PaintersEdouard Manet (1832-1883)Edgar Degas (1834-1917)Claude Monet (1840-1926)

ComposersRichard Wagner (1813-1883)Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Edgar Degas, Absinthe (1876)

Gustave Moreau, Salomé Dancing Before Herod (1876)

Edouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé (1876)

Edgar Degas, The Ballet Class (1874)

Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1873-4)

Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass; 1863)

Edouard Manet, “Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume” (1862-63)Yale University Art Gallery

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise (1872)

John Singer Sargent, sketchfor a portrait of Henry James

Yale Collection of American Literature,

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library