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Art Through Time · 1848 to 1900

Realism

Realism was the movement that, from about 1848, turned painting toward ordinary life as it really was: peasants, laborers, village funerals and city crowds, painted at full size and without flattery. It began in France with Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier, and every country soon had its own realists.

Courbet put it plainly. He would not paint angels, he said, because he had never seen one.

When
1848 to 1900
Where
France
Began
Courbet's Stonebreakers, 1849; his Pavilion of Realism, 1855
Grew out of
Romanticism

When was Realism?

Realism begins around 1848, the year revolutions swept Europe. At the Salon of 1850 to 1851, Courbet showed The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans, a country funeral painted as large as a battle. When the jury of the 1855 World's Fair turned down two of his paintings, he built his own pavilion beside it and called it the Pavilion of Realism.

It lasted until about 1900. In Russia, the Wanderers left the Academy in 1870 to show real life across the empire; in the United States, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins painted the sea, rowers and surgeons into the 1890s.

How to recognize Realism

  • Ordinary people as the subject, given the size and seriousness once kept for kings and saints.
  • Work and the working poor, as in Millet's The Gleaners, three women bent double, picking up what the harvest left behind.
  • No idealizing. Plain faces, rough hands and muddy boots.
  • Earthy color: browns, ochres and greys, laid on thickly, sometimes with a palette knife.
  • The present, not the past. No myths, no history, no allegory: what the painter could see.
  • Social conscience. Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage shows the poor packed onto a train bench, tired and patient.

Realism around the world

In France, Rosa Bonheur studied horses at the Paris horse market for her The Horse Fair, with police permission to wear trousers while she worked. Millet painted the peasants of Barbizon at prayer in The Angelus.

In Russia, Ilya Repin painted Barge Haulers on the Volga, men harnessed like animals to drag a ship upriver. In the United States, Thomas Eakins painted his friends rowing on the Schuylkill River, as in The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, and an operation in progress in The Gross Clinic, so frank that the 1876 Centennial Exhibition hung it in its medical section, not with the art.

Famous Realist paintings

What came after Realism?

Its younger admirers kept the modern subjects and lightened the palette. Painting outdoors in quick strokes, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro made Impressionism; in the Salon, Jules Bastien-Lepage and others carried Realism toward the near-photographic Naturalism of the 1880s.

Inside Realism

  • Barbizon School, 1830 to 1875. Painters who walked into the forest to paint nature directly.
  • Macchiaioli, 1855 to 1880. Patches of light and shade, painted outdoors before the Impressionists.
  • Hague School, 1860 to 1900. Grey Dutch skies, dunes and fishing boats.
  • Peredvizhniki, 1870 to 1923. Painters who left the Academy to show real life across the Russian Empire.
  • American Realism, 1865 to 1910. Homer's sea and Eakins's rowers, unsentimental and strong.
  • Naturalism, 1875 to 1900. Open-air realism with photographic detail.
  • Newlyn School, 1884 to 1914. Fishing families painted in the open air of a Cornish village.
  • Ashcan School, 1900 to 1920. Fast, frank pictures of city life.

Realism painters

More Realism paintings

See Realism on the timelineEvery art movement in order