ABSTRACT
The theoretical questions about the new naturalism can be addressed by focusing upon George Clausen’s The Girl at the Gate, 1889, a less complex composition, but one which nevertheless engaged with the challenges. Naturalism deployed artifice to efface the footprints of artifice. The painter’s methods, his or her personality, opinions, skills and competencies, were not at issue. The onslaught on naturalism came from painters like Walter Sickert who coined the pejorative term ‘photo-realism’ to describe the recording of tiresome facts. It was increasingly expected in the 1890s that painters would transcend the literal and that they might take the viewer beyond quotidian naturalism in terms of either handling or subject matter. It goes without saying that ‘completeness’, the concentration of time, of summary treatment implying instantaneity, is fundamentally different from the snapshot completeness of naturalism. ‘Realism’ and ‘naturalism’ are much misunderstood and misdescribed phenomena in the discussion of the visual arts in the late nineteenth century.
