I’m not talking about photorealistic paintings here; I was thinking more along the lines of selective focus (shallow depth of field) and motion blur. Are there any painters from the pre-photographic age that used the technique of blurring the background of a picture to make the subject stand out more? Were there other techniques that did the same job, or did the idea of a picture with shallow depth of field simply not exists in peoples visual vocabulary?
(I don’t know anything about art history, etc. - these a just some questions that occurred to me as I walked to work this morning.)
It’s not pre-photography, but Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is a pretty good example of what you’re looking for, I think:
Also, it’s certainly not what you asked for, but paintings of ghosts pre-photography do sometimes show them as transparent objects, just the way double exposure images appear to be.
I wonder if that imagery was influenced by the “two way mirror” phantasmagoria effect.
Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, painted in 1844, is not strictly pre-photograph, but photography had barely been developed (yuk yuk), and Turner may not have known it existed. Everything is a blur; the landscape because of the rain, and the train because of the rain, steam and speed.
It might be said (since I’m saying it) that Turner anticipated X-Ray photography. He shows the fire in the locomotive, though it’s encased in iron. Art experts would say its impressionism, though.
There is currently a controversy raging about whether or not some pre-photographic paintyers used the camera obscura to help them with their paintings. Here’s one such link:
In this case the optical effects would be real optical effects, but produced by the painter’s conscious efforts, rather than being the automatic result of a photograph. I don’t know if this method was used, but I’ll bet that it would take something like this for an artist to introduce the effects of focus and blur that you mention.
There’s no question that the camera lucida was used, at least by amateur artists, but that was about the time photography was invented. John Herschel (better known as an astronomer) was an enthusiastic camera lucida sketcher, but he was no artist. Think of him more as a 19th century shutterbug. And he also invented hypo (sodium thiosulfate) as a photographic “fixer”.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but chiaroscuro was popular with painters long before it was with photographers. It’s the use of light and dark to give the illusion of depth. Caravaggio used it a lot.
Thanks for your replies and some very interesting links.
Just from a brief look, it seems that other techniques - colour, light + shade, etc - were used to achieve the same effect that selective focus is used to achieve in photography.