Émile Friant painted portraits and scenes of the French countryside.  He
had, to me, a decidedly cinematic eye — his genre paintings are not
sentimentalized and they have a bold, dynamic quality based on spatial
compositions of great though subtle power.  They remind me of Bertolucci’s
images in 1900.

The painting above uses a technique Tissot was fond of — creating a
space in the foreground that instantly occupies one’s attention but
which also opens up into a deep space beyond.  Spaces opening up
into deeper spaces instantly summon up the idea of movement, of the
potential for movement — they almost produce a sensation of movement.  This
and their photorealistic quality are what to me give them a cinematic
quality.

Friant was a late Victorian — he lived until 1932, well into the era
of the Impressionist triumph.  Like John Singer Sargent he
borrowed a freer approach to brushwork from the Impressionists while
remaining true to the basic aesthetic ideals of the Victorian academy.

Bouguereau’s figures are so solid that when he sets them floating in the air the effect is unsettling, uncanny, but in a pleasant way, as flying in dreams is pleasant.

Lord Leighton was generally considered the dean of Victorian academic painters.
He combined the decorative stylization of the early Pre-Raphaelites with a more photo-realistic draftsmanship, an approach which made his work popular with a wide public and influential among his fellow painters.

The painting above, exhibited in 1855, caused a sensation and
established his reputation.  An enormous, 17-foot-long work
depicting a procession in Renaissance Italy, it was admired by Queen
Victoria, who bought it.

Leighton also did works in a style that might be called magical
photorealism, like the one below, which reminds one of similar images
by Bouguereau:

He could also, like Bouguereau, be frankly sensual in a more naturalistic mode:

Like Alma-Tadema he did vexing evocations of the ancient world:

His historical paintings could have strong narrative and theatrical qualities, like this one, Dante In Exile:

On top of all that he produced some fine portraits, like this famous image of the explorer Sir Richard Burton:

All around, Leighton was really cool.

You could get lost in the spatial complications of this painting, Destiny
by John William Waterhouse, which take a while to sort out.  The
sorting out is part of the artist’s strategy for drawing you into the
image — as the female figure’s dream of the adventures those ships
could take her on becomes your own.  For her the ships are reflections
in a glass, for you they’re paint on canvas — dreaming makes them both
real.

Actually, if there’s a Victorian artist you do know, it’s probably John William Waterhouse.  Prints of his paintings are quite popular, and it’s not hard to see why.  He
combines the dreamy Romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelites with a bold
modeling of forms and an optical integrity that suggests a nearly
photographic realism, however free his treatment of the paint surface.

His process seems to have involved a strict linear draftsmanship to
which he applied sketchy strokes of paint as he worked out the color
scheme of the final image.

He then blended the colors into more modeled forms for the finished
work, but retained something of the freshness of his sketches.

Impressionism was a stage in his process, never an end in itself.
His primary goal was narrative suggestiveness and the creation of a
world, theatrical as it might be, which convinced the eye with the
illusion of space and stereometric forms.  Note the sharp relief
of the figures in the painting at the head of this post and the
sketchier view of the coast behind them.  The contrast of
treatment itself creates a sense of deeper space.

Andrew Lloyd Webber owns the painting below.  I’d have bought it, too, if I had his resources — it’s just miraculous:

The title of this painting is Unconscious Rivals,
implying a narrative content that isn’t really apparent in the work
itself but suggesting how Alma-Tadema’s imagination worked.  He
wanted to present the ancient world as brand new, almost
photographically convincing in visual terms, and to people it with
humans exactly like ourselves, as opposed to classical emblems of
virtue or vice.  In this he was following the classical style more
closely than some of his neo-classical peers in 19th-Century art.
Even when Greek sculptors in antiquity were depicting mythological
beings, they always endowed them with an essential humanity just as
vital as their symbolic personae.

The play of light in this painting is magical yet perfectly naturalistic, and I
love the way Alma-Tadema has obscured our view of the distant sea,
which only makes us look deeper into the space of the painting to
register it.  It also makes us imagine walking up to the railing
for a better view — drawing us into the foreground space as we imagine
navigating it.

The porch and table with figures creates its own space, echoed in the space
of the pier with figures behind it, drawing our eye deeper into the
image, to the spars of the docked ship, the buildings and the course of
the Thames winding into the distance.

The girl, the captain’s daughter of the painting’s title, looks in the
other direction, counterpointing our attention.  We feel that if
we just turned our heads we would see what she’s seeing.

We’re not simply looking at something — we’re inside the painting . . . we’re somewhere.

Recently, thanks to Amy Crehore’s blog Little Hokum Rag, I discovered the work of the amazing Swedish painter Anders Zorn.  Zorn started his career in the Victorian era and his paintings share some of the attributes of the Victorian academic schools — an almost photo-realistic style combined with an emphasis on the dramatic use of spatial depth in the image (see above.)

But Zorn worked into the first two decades of the 20th-Century and like Sargent, another quasi-academic, he was attracted to the free brushstrokes and painterly surfaces of the Impressionists.  Indeed, some of Zorn’s wonderful  portraits of women can stand favorable comparison with Sargent’s work:

Like Gérôme, Zorn’s interest in stereometric forms led him to work also in the medium of sculpture:

Zorn was justly celebrated for his images of water, in which the sensual brushstokes render with convincing precision the surfaces of sea or river or lake:

Zorn is perhaps most famous for his plein air nudes.  In them he abandons any hint of the allegorical or classical, which tended to inform the Victorian academic approach to the nude, for a frank celebration of the female body in a natural setting.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these nudes influenced Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of naked women out of doors — which have the same sort of directness, as though we, the viewers, had simply stumbled upon a woman walking around naked through the woods:

There’s a hint of the voyeuristic in the approach — you get a sense that Zorn’s models might be startled (though perhaps not embarrassed) to find someone looking at them.  The image below seems to reflect something of Zorn’s attitude — seen from behind, one of his models appears to be disrobing for him out of doors, or getting dressed again after posing, but Zorn appears to be spying on her without her knowledge.  There’s no sense of violation — just of a secret delight.

I think it’s one of the sexiest images in all of art:

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema might be the most ravishing of all the Victorian academic painters.  His luminous photo-authoritative images of the ancient world are sensually and historically seductive — they seem to lay antiquity before us as it might have appeared in real life were we to be magically transported back into it.

In truth his visions are romantic, concentrating as they do on sunny Mediterranean light, color, luxury and spectacle — but they convince the eye.  His preoccupation with the illusion of spatial depth draws us imaginatively into the scenes he conjures up, gives us a visceral sense of participation in them.

The tradition of the Biblical epic in cinema pursued Alma-Tadema’s aims by other means but rarely achieved them with such magnificent authority.  The chariot race in Wyler’s Ben-Hur perhaps comes closest to involving us in a vision of the ancient world that possesses a comparable enchantment and illusion of truth.

Wyler, and second-unit director Yakima Canutt, who actually supervised most of the filming of the chariot race, used the tracking shot in spectacular ways to draw us into the cinematic universe of the sequence.  A camera moving through real spaces, photographing real people driving real chariots was a powerful tool, but in a way its very power highlights the effects Alma-Tadema was able to achieve with just paint and canvas.

He was fine painter, as well as a fine storyteller — the study below gives a good idea of his purely painterly gifts, scarcely inferior to Degas’, for example:

The 20th-Century art establishment became suspicious of the meticulous “finish” the academic painters gave their works, but the über-photographic illusion they were after, and the narrative ambitions it served, remain potent and charming.

One of the artist’s popular desert scenes.  It’s hard to imagine that David Lean, or his cinematographer Freddie Young, didn’t study these when preparing to shoot Lawrence Of Arabia, which is like a series of Gérômes come to life.

Ces Dames de Chars.

Notice how the lead horse gallops into an imaginary space in front of
the canvas, while the eye is simultaneously drawn in the opposite
direction, through a series of distinct interior spaces within the image — the bright covered arena, the darkened audience galleries — that open up
behind the lady charioteers.

To read more about Tissot go here.