Discuss the portrayal of city life in a group of works

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In this essay, we will look at how artists portray city life, how they make the most common things in our lives becoming special and how they transform reality into art. Indeed, everyday, ordinary life often becomes special under their brushes. Some of them like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec liked painting after shows instead of the show in itself, the most commune scene rather than the spectacle. Indeed, city life is what we experience every day and its portrayal could be assimilated with reality shows, nowadays: it aims at showing the most common things of our lives. Some of the pictures even disturb by showing aspects of city life, which people would have rather forget (like Degas' L'Absinthe or his Interior (The rape) ). In this essay, we are going to reflect on how painters portray city life, and what effects it has on the general public, looking at a group of works we saw in the Tate Britain's special exhibition dedicated at Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. First, we will look at how they painted the city in itself, and then its activities, and, to finish, its people.

Extraits

[...] This intimate picture also reveals some informations on the fashionable dress code of these days: black dresses were very worn. Nude women have always been a common topic in art, but at this time, they were often represented at home, in intimacy, going to bed like Degas' Bed Time[15] where we can see a nude women going to bed, or Sickert's La Hollandaise[16] showing a prostitute in bed. Other times, they were bathing like Women Washing her Hair16 (Sickert), Pierre Bonnard's The Mirror in the Green Room[17] or Philip Wilson Steer's A Girl at her Toilet[18]. [...]

[...] French painters Tissot and Renoir also painted a lot of outdoor city scenes like London Visitors[12] (Tissot) showing tourists on the step of the National Gallery or Place Clichy[13] (Renoir, 1880), which represent a crowded streetscape of Paris. In painting the cities and their habitants, they showed totally different things that have never (or rarely) been shown before. That way, they attracted a new public. However, this portraiture of cityscapes was maybe more pessimistic than the countryside ones, showing even the worst sides of human lives. [...]

[...] To conclude on this topic, we could say that the portrayal of city life was a frequent topic for the impressionists and allow them to show the most common side of everyday life, as well for celebrities than for ordinary people. With this new subject, art is becoming closer of its public and respond to a real need of seeing something you know about and what you can identify to (like when we are in the cinema and we see a place we know about, it is always more interesting Bibliography Most of the pictures quoted in this essay have been seen in the Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at Tate Britain, except from the Van Gogh one, which has been seen in the Courtauld Institute. [...]

[...] It is the same for the subject of the horse racecourses, which were a new, fashionable leisure: whereas more classic painters use to represent the race in itself, the Impressionists were keen on showing what happened before it, like n Degas' Jockeys Before the Start[25], where we can jockeys waiting for the race to begin. He uses the same method as for The rehearsal22, painting a post in the middle of the table, as if we were here. This kind of “imperfect” pictures, different from the previous ones (their predecessors tried to make perfect pictures but which seemed less real), brings the viewer nearer of the action represented. [...]

[...] Sickert 1910, Kunstmuseum, Winterthur 1884, private collection 1891, Tate, London 1914, Estate of Walter R Sickert 1874, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff About 1897, National Portrait Gallery, London 1891, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittburgh 1897, Brooklyn Museum 1894, Estate of Walter R Sickert Les Fiancés dit Ménage Sisley Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne About 1895-1900, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow 1889, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London 1880, cast about 1922, Painted bronze with muslin, Tate, London 1903-1904, Estate of Walter R. [...]