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Glossary

Lithography – a printing process in which the image to be printed is rendered on a flat surface, as on sheet zinc or aluminum, and treated to retain ink while the nonimage areas are treated to repel ink.

Naturalism – factual or realistic representation, especially: The practice of describing precisely the actual circumstances of human life in literature or the practice of reproducing subjects as precisely as possible in the visual arts.

Gilded Age of painting – 1870s-1920s; a time of great prosperity in America which brought a new level of European sophistication to the American art scene.

Genesis – origin; creation; coming into being.

Impressionism – a theory or style of painting originating and developed in France during the 1870s, characterized by concentration on the immediate visual impression produced by a scene and by the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

Barbizon – informal school of French landscape painting, 1830-70; the style developed near the village of Barbizon and the Fontainebleau Forest outside Paris. The Barbizon painters preferred rural subjects and strove to capture nature as it was revealed to them through haze, fog, mist and filtered sunlight.

Stretcher – the wooden framework to which a painter’s canvas is attached.

Fauvism – An early-20th-century movement in painting begun by a group of French artists and marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors. The word derives from the French word fauve meaning “wild beast”, the nickname a French art critic used in referring to Henri Matisse and his fellow artists.

Genre – A realistic style of painting that depicts scenes from everyday life.