#realism

It got turned down by the big official Salon the year he made it, and Émile Zola wrote a defence of him in a newspaper that apparently annoyed enough readers to cost Zola the job. Wikipedia puts the flatness down to Japanese prints and Spanish painting, both of which he'd been looking hard at.

The original doesn't exist anymore — it was destroyed when Dresden was bombed near the end of the Second World War, so from what I can find, reproductions like this are all that's left of it. Apparently it caused a stir at the time too: painting road workers at the kind of size usually saved for kings and battles wasn't the done thing.

Apparently the man in the suit is Eakins's own brother-in-law, painted late in his career as one of a handful of life-size standing portraits he made around then.

He painted this back in his hometown, and the two women are said to be his sisters. Farm work, done at a size usually saved for kings and battles — apparently that's exactly what annoyed people about him at the time.

Two summers of travelling up and down the Volga went into this, from what I can find — following the hauling crews around and sketching them. When it turned up in an exhibition some critics called it a slander on the country, and a grand duke bought it anyway and hung it in his billiard room.

The official Salon rejected this, so it went into the side exhibition of rejects the emperor allowed that year, where crowds supposedly turned up mainly to laugh at it. It started out with a much duller title, something like 'The Bath', and the arrangement of the three of them is said to be lifted from a centuries-old engraving — which may have been part of the cheek.

The man in the middle bankrolled him for years, and the meeting on the road is meant to be the two of them running into each other outside Montpellier, or so the story goes. Critics at the time thought it was outrageously vain and took to calling it 'Fortune bowing to Genius'. The pose itself is said to be lifted from a cheap popular print.

Gleaning was, apparently, a legal right for the poorest people in a village — once the harvest was carted off you could go over the field and keep whatever was left. Well-off critics at the time took badly to seeing that painted this big, and read three women picking up scraps as a political argument rather than a scene.

The row, from what I've read, was about the size. A canvas this wide was for battles and saints, and he used one on a burial in the small town he came from, with half the place turning out for it. When it went on show in Paris it caused an uproar and made his name in one go.