intimist

A painter or writer whose art is in the intimism genre

Pertaining to or characteristic of the intimism genre; focussed on everyday domestic matters.

By its subject, the work is inscribed at the intersection of the romantic and realist traditions: on the one hand, Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siecle and Vigny's Chatterton, but also the so-called intimist novel that, as Jean Bruneau notes, 'recounts events of daily life and asks the essential questions about them' and which, 'down-to-earth and often moralizing', prefigures the realist novel and the thesis novel; and on the other hand, the second bohemia, whose intimate journal in the romantic manner (as with Courbet's intimist painting of the world familiar to the painter) is converted into the realist novel when, with Les Scènes de la vie de bohème by Murger and especially Les Aventures de Mariette and Chien-Caillou by Champfleury, it registers in a faithful manner the often sordid reality of rawboned daubers' lives, their garrets, watering-holes and love affairs ('It is in reality the saddest live,' writes Champfleury in a letter of 1847, 'consisting of not dining, not having boots, and making about all that a quantity of paradoxes.')

For this reason, in the numerous intimist portraits he painted in the sixties, particularly those of his wife Estrella, in which he worked from life, he attached so much importance to optical reality and mimetic perfection, to that “humanist certainty” that lies at the heart of all classicist stances.

Introspective; concerned with inner life and psychological experiences.

However, he had not yet at that time fully displayed the principle of expression through intonation, the amazing ability to construct a line of verse in accordance with the most ready-to-hand, most colloquial speech - a characteristic which makes some critics group him with the intimist poets who write of the most complicated inner experiences, ostensibly inaccessible to the ordinary reader of today, and which makes others see him, no less mistakenly, as far too closely continuing the Futurists' methods of fashioning language.

Now its form is a psychological/intimist film which is less perceivable as a genre because it slips over so many (i.e., thrillers, adventure, historical reconstruction, etc.).