These are not exactly house hold names and most of them have long since faded away. That’s what happens when you let the state dictate taste. There are a few good painters in the bunch who did decent works apart from official salons and there are those who are enamored with craft and mimesis that champion the history painters of the world. These don’t include many, if any, art historians or reputable critics. In many cases these paintings are redundant and have no admirable qualities what so ever.

Seriously, most of these guys don’t even have a wiki page.  We know there are those who champion this type of academic realism, but they are few and confused. At its very worst in the 1850s till the end of that century it competed with photography and provided color versions of reality before the invention of color photography. Any time there is and official style of art or and official place to learn that style of art, its art that suffers. There are two polarities that will never be reconciled i.e. realism and idealism, the first being subjective and emotional and the later objective and abstract.

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