In the mythology of modern art history the realist painters of the Victorian era fought a losing battle with the photograph and eventually capitulated to the dominant aesthetic of 20th-Century art, with its irresistible (and progressive) trend towards a greater and greater abstraction, abandoning both pictorial realism and almost all narrative ambitions.
In fact, however, realist painters of the Victoria era conducted an exciting and productive dialogue with the photograph, incorporating its apparent authority but also, at the same time, extending its range of representation beyond the technical limits of the 19th-Century camera.
Academic art surrendered not to the abstractions of the 20th-Century painter but to the great artists of the early cinema, who assumed the narrative and representational ambitions of academic art in a medium which had, at least as far a popular taste went, better resources for realizing those ambitions. You could almost say that the academic art of the 19th-Century was born again, gloriously, in a new medium, which it deeply influenced.
Academic art taught movies how to orchestrate photo-realistic elements into theatrical forms, using lighting, framing and the placement of figures in space to create a hyper-realistic illusion that had the coherence of actual visual experience even when departing from it in fabulous ways. Because film could capture motion, and thus emphasize the plasticity of space far more expressively than the easel-painter, it rendered the academic easel-painter's art passé. It was motion and the greater illusion of spatial depth it allowed which lost academic art its popular following.
But much more than that was lost, especially in the realm of color. Up until very recent times, color film stocks couldn't begin to reproduce the range of lighting conditions which the Victorian realist painters gloried in. By marrying, through draftsmanship, an almost photographic realism with an über-photographic sensitivity to color and light, the Victorian painters anticipated cinematic effects which remain difficult to achieve even today.
The attempt to devalue the work of Victorian painters, seeing them as obstinate blocks to the steady progress of art, was a strategic ploy on the part of 20th-Century modernist painters and their apologists in the academy and the marketplace. Engaged in a project which would divorce art from popular taste and arrive at an aesthetic dead end before the end of the 20th century, they posited a straw man in the person of the reactionary academic practitioner which lent their own schools an undeserved glamor and prestige -- even as the academic practitioner was informing and inspiring the great new popular art form of the movies.
But the intellectual disgrace of the Victorian painters also helped impoverish cinema, because, after the first glorious blossoming of the art in the silent era, filmmakers forgot academic painting. To get back in touch with its lessons, they had to get back in touch with the masters of the silent era, like Griffith, Vidor, Murnau and Ford, for whom Victorian academic painting was a living form and a direct inspiration of their techniques. The filmmakers who followed them had to engage Victorian academic art at one remove, and thus lost touch with the very forms which had inspired and instructed the original pioneers of cinema.
The propaganda of the modernist painters, understandable from their point of view, resulted in a great loss to the visual culture of the 20th-Century. It couldn't obliterate the glories of Victorian academic painting, which survived, transformed, in movies and in popular illustration (through the work of artists like N. C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell.) But it distorted the intellectual appreciation of a visual tradition which might have been of great use to artists, film artists especially, if they hadn't been shamed into despising it on principle.
I would argue that a new appreciation of Victorian realist painting has the power to recharge the art of cinema in our time -- quite apart from the pleasures to be gained by directly encountering a vital and ravishing visual tradition.
