Don't Quit Your Day Job

 There is an old, sage piece of advice often heard by those in the arts, whether painter, sculptor, singer, actor, comedian, or whatever, "Don't quit your day job."  And, while the line may be good advice from a financial point of view, its purpose is often that of a "put-down".  It is often spoken in a humorous context, but its real intent is to put the would-be creative genius in his or her place.  However, a number of very famous artists down through history have quite literally taken this advice.  Camille Pissarro painted window blinds.  So did Renoir at various times.  This was considered "commercial" work.  Paul Cezanne, though not technically "working", was a law student by day while in his free time he applied paint to canvas with an almost vicious intenisity, perhaps working out his frustration at having to satisfy his father's insistance that he train for some "worthwhile" vocation.   
   
In the case of  Armand Guillaumin (pronounced Ge-amin) it was not a matter of quiting a "day" job but his "night" job.  For several struggling years, he worked three nights a week to feed his wife and family in order to leave himself free to paint during the day.  Born at Moulins in 1841, he was about the same age as Renoir, Bazille, and Berthe Morisot.  He'd come to Paris at the age of 16 to work in his uncle's shop.  His family was vehemently opposed to his wanting to be an artist so he had to take a job with the Paris municipality, which, in most cases, meant building roads.  He was quite literally a ditch digger.  During the day, he often painted the urban and suburban scenes of a growing, bustling Paris, sometimes even some of the same roads and thoroughfares he himself had helped build the night before.   


La Place Valhubert, 1875,
Armand Guillaumin

Like Renoir and Pissarro, Guillaumin also painted blinds from time to time, welcoming this work, no doubt, as a step up from digging ditches.  In contrast, Berthe Morisot could be considered quite wealthy, as was Eduoard Manet, who inherited a sizable fortune.  Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley would, perhaps, best be characterized as "comfortably well-off".  Frederick Bazille, while coming from a wealthy family, appears to have been on a rather limited allowance.  They had not the need to sell their work in order to eat and have a roof over their heads.  Unlike the "chronically inpecunious" Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, and Guillaumin, they had no need for day jobs.  Curiously, of these four, Monet appears never to have even had a day job.  He seems always to have been broke.  Apparently finding it easier to "sponge" off his friends, he differed from Guillaumin in that it seems never even to have occurred to him to work at anything other than painting.

The Invention of Photography

In an era when we take technical development almost for granted, when the useful lifespan of modern appliances such as the computer can be measured in months rather than years, it is hard to fathom a more epic technical development in the area of art than that which occurred during the middle of the nineteenth century with the invention of modern photography.  Although the camera itself dates back to the Renaissance and was in fact developed largely by and for artists, it was chemistry that made photography a real force to be reckoned with in the art world.  In a competition reminiscent of the twentieth century's space race, the effort to develop a practical mechanical method of exactly depicting real life on a two-dimensional surface was a competition between France and England that often had more the hallmarks of a war than a race.

A Manet painting from 1872 having a
photographic quality.

On the French side were inventors such as Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre while in England, William Talbot manned the trenches.  By and large, the French won the race (war) and the first losers were painters, particularly miniaturists, who were often reduced to "coloring" the crude early photographic images with their oils.  Eventually however, the effects of photography upon painters became more widespread, if somewhat more subtle as well.  The French artist Eduard Manet was known to have used photographic images in place of drawings to compose some of his paintings, and Edgar Degas was often fond of cropping his paintings in a photographic manner, in effect, giving them a sort of "snapshot" quality.

At the Races, 1877, Edgar Degas

By the early years of the Twentieth Century, as picture quality improved, and Alfred Stieglitz declared photography to be on a par with painting as an art form, painters could not compete either economically or aesthetically in the open market where "realism" was the standard of excellence.  Art historians still argue this point, but the long-term result of this new "art invention" was to free painting from the harsh yoke of realism, to allow it to soar to new heights of expression and creativity it might never have achieved had Daguerre, Stieglitz, and Kodak not shown it the light.