Naturalist Writers and Realist Painters Confronted with Photography
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
France, from the 1840s to the late 1860s, experienced a major technological upheaval with the democratisation of the first photographic processes.
An aesthetic problem then emerged: does the perfect imitation of nature, or mimesis, constitute the ultimate achievement of artistic talent or, on the contrary, its absolute negation?
While literature was accused of transforming into a one-way mirror, naturalist painting traversed an identical conceptual crisis.
We propose here some reactions from contemporaries confronted with this new imagery.
The Chemical Metaphor: When the Writer Becomes a Photographic Operator
In the field of letters, the irruption of photography—which required moving about with a good number of chemical products—modified the vocabulary used by critics.
In the 1840s, Prosper Mérimée praised the works of Lord Byron by comparing them to literary daguerreotypes.
But during the following decade, comparing a written work to a daguerreotype became a severe criticism. The press of the time, under the pen of figures like Louis Énault, castigated the dryness of Mérimée’s observation, accusing the style of his novella Carmen of being afflicted with the same surgical coldness as a photographic print.
This suspicion regarding literary accuracy progressively touched all realist authors. As early as 1843, the critic Hippolyte Babou described the meticulous analysis of Honoré de Balzac as "moral chemistry."
Then it was Gustave Flaubert's turn to suffer the attacks of his contemporaries. In 1857, a critic reproached him for aiming a too-faithful gaze at his environment, producing a greyish and dull literature without a poetic dimension, in favour of a strict copy of the material world. Ironically, Flaubert, who was criticised for acting as a daguerreotypist, hated the idea of being photographed.
The critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze castigated Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans, accusing it of simulating the brutality of a poorly mastered chemical print and of disavowing any intellectual effort in order to brutally spit back visual reality.
In a similar vein, the Goncourt brothers attacked the painter Alexandre Antigna, suggesting that his refusal to choose his subjects likened him to a photographic machine that blindly captures the slightest refuse of nature.
Since the photographic plate was not capable of discriminating and rejecting the ugly to keep only the beautiful, realists were accused of having founded a "school of the ugly" where only "the ugly is admirable."
The Test Imagined by Champfleury
Placing photographers and painters in competition.
Champfleury imagined an experiment in 1854: simultaneously observing the plates of ten daguerreotypists, placed side by side before a natural landscape, and the sketches of ten realist landscape painters set up beside them.
The optical instruments would generate rigorously identical plates without the slightest alteration, whereas the apprentice painters, even under the aegis of a single master, would produce very different sketches.
The inevitable intervention of human sensitivity is fundamental even for a realist, which allowed Zola to write:
"A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament."
A phrase that Van Gogh often repeated to himself.
The Transparency of Realism is a Crafted Illusion
Francis Wey, a realist writer close to Champfleury and Courbet, argued against this illusion of raw reality.
He insisted on the necessity of embellishing and filtering a reality that is often unsightly. The purpose of art is not stenography—that method of ultra-rapid textual transcription used in courts—the literary equivalent of the daguerreotype.
The full capturing of an event, although factually irreproachable, will never produce a major dramatic work. Hippolyte Taine, the positivist historian par excellence, agreed with this view some decades later, asserting that photographic imitation, although exact, remains incapable of substituting for the spiritual approach of art.
Photography or stenography did not supplant the realist artist or the naturalist writer, but forced them to fully embrace their interpretive nature, abandoning the idea of perfect transparency or the absence of the author, and moving away from the strict recording of facts.
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