Thomas Couture and the Evolution of Painting in Nineteenth-Century France

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Few artists of the nineteenth century worked so torturously and so much against their personal instincts as did Thomas Couture.1 Indeed, for many artists of the period whom we classify as belonging to the juste milieu group—painters striving to conciliate avant-garde and conservative tendencies—compromise was a source of painful confusion.2 Compromise here implied a conflict between the priorities of the past and the demands of the present. Sensitive artists among this group found their own time valid for pictorial themes and experienced a deep sense of personal independence, but their commitment to the classical ethos hampered the full expression of this outlook. Less confident than, for example, Delacroix or Courbet, they nervously sought a style capable of reconciling their longing for traditional forms with their anxiety to be modern. The tension between an inner need for direct participation in a changing contemporary world and the desire to achieve the high status accorded the traditional painter is perhaps most marked in Couture's life and work.