One objection commonly made to Victorian academic art is that it’s too “photographic” — that it tried for a kind of photorealism which the camera had made redundant.

I think this objection is misguided on two counts.  The first is that
the “photorealism” of the Victorian academics far exceeded the capacities
of the 19th-Century camera.  The academic painter could achieve color
effects which film stocks wouldn’t be able to record until late in the 20th
Century.  The Victorian academics could also capture motion in ways the
still camera could not until the early 20th-Century, with the advent of
faster film stocks and shutter speeds.  The Victorian realist painter
was in fact developing his aesthetic in precisely those areas where the
cameras of the time were deficient.

More importantly, photorealism is not an aesthetic fault.  Painters
since the Renaissance have often striven for hyper-realistic effects,
and have sometimes used proto-photographic technologies, like the camera obscura, to that end.  The fact that Van Eyck and Vermeer might possibly have used the camera obscura as an aid in draftsmanship is surely not in itself a fault in their methods.  And many artists now seen as post-academic, like Degas, used the camera itself as an aid to composition, and the photorealistic aspect of their work constitutes a strong element of its appeal.

The Victorian academic painter, however, was doing something new in the
wake of the invention and widespread popularity of photography — he
was conducting a conscious dialogue with the camera.  He was
incorporating a new standard of visual authority introduced by the
camera, and doing it on purpose.  He knew that the experience of
viewing photographs had introduced a new relationship to visual reality
in the mind of modern man.  The Victorian realist painter didn’t try to
ape the photograph, and he could exceed its resources in many areas,
but he always paid homage to its authority — and he tried to construct
a new visual aesthetic based on that authority.

His effort in that regard was the basis for the magic of Victorian
academic art, for it popularity at the time and for its enduring
appeal.  Apologists for the Victorian painters often try to downplay
this aspect of the academic style, try to reconnect them to the art
that had gone before them in an unbroken tradition.  But they were
radical — the photograph made them radical.

So Bouguereau wanted to show us nymphs and satyrs, wanted to show us
figures floating in mid air, but wanted us to receive the visions as
having the authority of photographs — and not just the photographs
that an actual camera of the time could make but ideal photographs,
recording the subtlest effects of light, capturing the most fleeting
nuances of gesture.  He wanted to make us feel that we were
looking at an über-photograph.  (Bouguereau’s fantastical work is the best
place to start in a study of the über-photographic aesthetic, because,
unlike much Victorian academic art, it takes as its subjects things
which could not be observed or staged in real life and thus could not
be photographed.  It’s therefore doing something far more complex
than imitating contemporary photographic practice.  If we can
locate the über-photographic aesthetic here, we can isolate it as a
purely conceptual strategy.)

And so one has the utter strangeness of Bouguereau — decidedly
corporeal figures hovering above the ground, mythological figures with
the sex appeal of naughty photographic postcards, because they seem to
represent actual naked men and women with unimpeachable authority.
Some people find Bouguereau’s nudes pornographic, and on one level they
are.  Bouguereau has used his virtuosic technique to portray these
naked men and women as though they were real people recorded by a
camera, not visions transmitted through an artistic sensibility.  They
have that hint of indecency, of violation, that always attaches in some
measure to photographs of naked people.

This is not something to object to — it’s what makes Bouguereau cool,
exciting, new, radical.  It’s why his paintings are still alive for
people today, objects that rivet the attention, whatever judgment the
mind may be passing on them as works of art.  How much more
complicated, courageous, inventive, witty was Bouguereau’s response to
the photograph than that of the modernist rebels who simply walked away from
it, turned to abstraction in defiance of the photograph’s power.

That power has not diminished over time — indeed much of our
conception of the world we live in today is determined, overdetermined,
by the photograph.  Which is why on some level Bouguereau speaks to us
more deeply than the abstractionists do.  Bouguereau draws us
into that same dialogue with the photograph that he himself conducted,
and in transcending its power — by seeming to carry it farther than it
can ever actually go, even in the age of Photoshop — he places it in a truer
perspective than the modernists could ever have conceived.

A distinguished museum director has observed how difficult it is to
hang Bouguereau in a modern museum — discerning a disconnect not only
between Bouguereau and 20th-Century modernism but also between
Bouguereau and the great high-art tradition his work seems to
inhabit.  That is precisely because Bouguereau’s work strove for a
transcendent synthesis of painting and photography — something
no art before him could have done and no institutionally-sanctioned art
after him has chosen to do.  His work is thus profoundly modern, more genuinely modern in some ways than the work of the 20th-Century abstractionists.  It may be, in fact, that Bouguereau is so modern, so radical, that for some time to come he will need a room all to himself.

[I think the concept of the über-photograph is a useful way of distinguishing the style of the early pre-Raphaelites from the mainstream of Victorian academic art that emerged after them. Rossetti had a fundamentally painterly aesthetic with a strong bent towards the stylized and decorative, a bent developed most conspicuously in the work of William Morris.  The academic painters of the second half of the 19th-Century departed from both in adopting a photo-authoritative strategy, however fanciful their subjects.  Burne-Jones was a key transitional figure in this process.  Though he held onto many of the painterly and decorative elements of Rossetti’s style one begins to see in his work a shift towards the photo-realistic — mainly in his strict stereometric modeling of forms and figures, which gave his paintings a sculptural quality.  It was the quality of relief-sculpture, however — he rarely pursued the bold evocations of deep space that so preoccupied Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Tissot and Waterhouse, to take a few examples.  Their strategies with regard to spatial illusion were closely connected to the über-photographic aesthetic.  By the same token, the idea of the über-photograph can be used to distinguish the project of Victorian academic painters from the sterile photo-realism of some modern painters, who are consciously evoking and aping the photograph and not trying to transcend its limitations, not trying for a new visual synthesis.]

James Tissot was known for two things — his immensely popular Bible
illustrations and his paintings of contemporary Victorian society.

My friend Paul Zahl says that the Bible illustrations influenced the
iconography of the early Hollywood Biblical epics, and he may be right,
but I’m not a big fan of these works, aesthetically speaking.
They’re drawn in a looser, more impressionistic and decorative style
than his easel paintings, and to me don’t have the same power.

The easel paintings strike me as downright stunning.  In them the
use of an almost photographic draftsmanship and sometimes subtle but always highly
dramatic evocations of spatial depth result in works that utterly
enchant me.

Tissot had a number of compositional strategies for producing an
impression of spatial depth.  The most characteristic was the
depiction of semi-enclosed spaces with portals onto wider spaces
beyond, which cause the eye to come to rest momentarily in the
foreground space and then to explore the background space, which
reveals itself almost as a surprise, a release.

Tissot also had a knack for compositions involving larger groups in a
public space, like a ballroom, in which the empty areas of the scene
suggest the potential for action within it.  The strategy is very
explicit in the painting below, Too Early, in which the future of
the evening unfolds like a ghostly vision around the few early arrivals
waiting for the festivities to begin.

This is a perfect example of how visual space can be charged with
emotion — we populate the half-empty ballroom with future dancing, just as
the early arrivals do . . . we enter into the emotional anticipation of
these folks who’ve arrived a little too soon.

Tissot’s genius at suggesting depth through composition and modeling
also allowed him to produce canvases which shimmer with surface colors,
like the canvases of the Impressionists, but almost simultaneously draw
our imaginations irresistibly into the space depicted — something the
Impressionists were rarely concerned to do.  The effect is
magical, and one that movies would soon learn to achieve in more
spectacular ways than the academic Victorian painters had at their
command.  Their most potent charm was appropriated, and their
school of painting faded into history.

But when we look at Tissot’s paintings today, when our imaginations are
drawn into the spaces of his world, we can achieve a remarkable sense
of intimacy with the Victorian society he observed, we can share the
concerns and sometimes even the emotions of its long-vanished
inhabitants . . . and there’s an enchantment in that which will never
fade.

Faced with the invention of photography, academic painters of the Victorian era (like James Tissot above and Jules Lefebvre below) at first tried to compete with the new technology on its own terms — by creating super-realistic images that had the advantage
of being in color and could convey a more convincing suggestion of narrative or of the flux of ordinary life.  Posed photographs tended to look posed, largely because long exposure times required subjects to stay frozen in fixed positions for many seconds at a time.  The
academic painter could achieve effects with his figures that seemed in some ways, paradoxically, more naturalistic, more lifelike than anything the 19th-Century camera could capture.  These effects constituted the realist painter’s only areas of advantage over the
“scientific” authority of the photographic record.

The Victorian academic painters concentrated on producing an illusion of depth in the image (again competing in this with the photograph and especially the stereoscopic photograph) and located their expressiveness in the drama of space itself, drawing the eye into the painting as a prelude to seducing the mind into the emotional content of the scene depicted, as in the painting below by John William Waterhouse:

They were enormously successful in this, across a wide range of genres — from historical tableaux to contemporary social observations.  The Impressionist school which challenged the academic style tended to downplay spatial drama and bring the surface texture of the painting itself, and the sheer drama of color, into prominence.  The Impressionists generally abandoned historical subjects and concentrated on contemporary scenes.  There were some painters who almost straddled the two schools, like John Singer Sargent and Gustave Caillebotte — but to me these two painters remained primarily in the academic camp, because a precise, stereometric modeling of forms and an insistence on the drama of space tended to loom larger in their work than either the free treatment of paint on canvas or the pure celebration of color as an end in itself.

Caillebotte hung out (and hung his work) with the Impressionists but his best paintings, like the scene below, are almost categorically academic:

Sargent, though he made his living primarily by painting portraits of the sort of people who favored academic art, was enchanted by the Impressionists’ free use of paint, but even at his most unruly in this regard he remained at heart captivated by the drama of space and solid forms, which can be seen in this exquisite interior whose subtly dramatic framing draws our eye past the surface of the canvas into the room depicted:

The invention of movies almost instantly obliterated the academic approach as a popular style, just as the radical freshness of the Impressionist school had discredited it among the intellectual
elite.  Movies could render the illusion of space far more eloquently and convincingly than any painting, and were also capable of theatrical effects and a narrative complexity beyond the range of the easel painter.

A vital school of art thus virtually disappeared overnight — surviving
only in magazine and book illustration as practiced by artists like N.
C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell.  But the influence of the school
endured, because filmmakers drew on it for basic strategies of
composition in cinematography, basic notions of how to charge space
with emotion.  Indeed, Victorian academic painting had far more to
do with the development of movies as an art form than Victorian
stagecraft, which is usually the arena from which movies are presumed
to have sprung.

Victorian academic painting is now thoroughly discredited
intellectually and appreciated only as kitsch, but it’s far more than
that.  It was an exciting and entertaining form which deserves to
be taken seriously and studied far more carefully than it ever has been
in its relationship to the development of cinematic style.  Some
of it, like the painting by Sargent below, was very fine stuff indeed.