Contributed by John Goodrich / Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Looking back at the early decades of modernism, we may sense something inevitable about the ascent of Picasso and Matisse.

Amateur” is what they called artist Gustave Caillebotte, a bourgeois bachelor who lived in a well-appointed apartment in the ...

It was aimed at rejecting the values of Romanticism and history painting. Artists like Gustave Courbet turned to a more realistic approach to art that involved depicting day-to-day lives.