Anti-Musical Monday (4): Art History Edition

This book is why there is no music today:

I need to read it really, really quickly for my Later British Literature class, which is a seminar focusing on Victorian literature and social protest. I adore the class, but I'm having mixed feelings about Adam Bede. I'm over halfway through, and not much has happened yet. People are just going about their lives, getting crushes on the wrong people, going to church, going to work...and I think that's part of the point. George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) turned ordinary lives into art, which was a pretty bold action.

(I think. I am not expert on anything I'm typing in this post.)

I know more about the conventions in visual art at the time. (But I'm still not an expert. You'll keep remembering that, right?) There were formal academies in countries like England and France, and in France there was an annual organized exhibition called the Salon. Realist paintings like The Stonebreakers by Gustave Courbet caused a big stir:

It's a large painting with ordinary people in it. The horror! Large paintings usually signified (or, as the working people in Adam Bede would say, "sinnified") important (rich, powerful, etc.) subjects. And the style? I'm not going to get into that because of Adam Bede, but I can certainly talk about scandy paintings and the--gasp!--rebellion against the Salon later.

Happy Monday,