Is a Middle Path Possible?

Pursuing the happy medium in painting

"Juste milieu" translates as “the right mean,” or the “correct middle way.” It refers both to a philosophy of painting and to a movement of painters in 19th century France

Breakfast Time by Hanna Pauli

The juste milieu artists have been unfairly ignored in the oversimplified and polarizing narrative offered by most art history texts.

These days there aren't many books on them; they're not mentioned in many authoritative books about French painting—at least not books in English. But if you read accounts from the period, they were talked about constantly.

Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche

These artists aimed for a middle way between the Classicists and the Romantics. The term has also been used to describe the middle path between Impressionist and Academic camps.

Many of today’s new realist painters are trying for a similar kind of synthesis, introducing the best of two apparently opposite approaches, such as Abstraction and Realism.

Starting in the Third Republic in the 1870s, independent painters were beginning to make inroads into the authority of the French Academy.

By the late 1880s, the juste milieu group separated from the Academy, forming under the name “Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.” Among these defectors were Carolus-Duran (above), Duez, Besnard, Raffaelli, Roll, and Braquemond.

What were the essential qualities of the juste milieu?