Realism in Art: Courbet, Millet and Pictures of Everyday Life

Realism is an art movement of the mid-nineteenth century that depicts ordinary people, work and everyday life without idealisation or drama. The artists wanted to paint their own time as it looked, and they broke with the academy’s demand for mythological and historical subjects.

Facts

Art about what exists

After the revolution of 1848 the demand grew for an art that depicted the lives of ordinary people. Gustave Courbet became the leader of the movement. His A Burial at Ornans of 1849–1850 is more than six metres wide and shows a provincial funeral with townspeople, priests and peasants at life size. Such a large format had previously been used only for history painting and religious subjects, and many critics thought the picture ugly and disrespectful.

When Courbet was refused space at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1855 he built his own pavilion nearby and called it Le Réalisme. That gave the movement its name. The French writer Champfleury wrote about the same ideal in literature, and novels such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary of 1857 shared the same wish to depict reality soberly.

Peasants, workers and caricatures

Jean-François Millet painted peasants at work, such as The Gleaners of 1857, in which three women bend over a harvested field to gather what is left. The picture rests on sincere respect but some contemporaries saw it as politically threatening. Honoré Daumier made thousands of lithographs for newspapers, attacking those in power, and his paintings of third-class passengers on the train show ordinary people with great seriousness.

Rosa Bonheur became one of the most famous artists of the century with her animal pictures, among them The Horse Fair, and she studied animals in slaughterhouses and at markets. She shows that Realism could also be a way of giving women a place in the art world.

Realism spreads

In Russia a group of artists formed the Society of the Wanderers, the Peredvizhniki, in 1870 and organised travelling exhibitions around the country; see the Peredvizhniki. Ilya Repin painted exhausted men hauling a barge in Barge Haulers on the Volga, finished in 1873, with a psychological sharpness that made it famous. In the United States Winslow Homer depicted country children and the struggle with the sea, and Thomas Eakins painted surgeons and rowers with scientific accuracy; see American Realism.

In Sweden a corresponding wave came in the 1880s, when a group of young artists protested against the academy as the Opponents and wanted to paint what they saw: everyday life, landscapes and people. Many had learned open-air painting and Realism in France. The Danish painter P.S. Krøyer, with his fishermen on the beach, also belongs to the Nordic tradition.

Realism and what came after

Photography, which became widely available in the mid-nineteenth century, affected Realism in several ways. It gave painters new ways of seeing, with unexpected crops and snapshots, but it also took over the role of documentation, so painters looked for something more. Édouard Manet built on Courbet’s freedom when he painted Olympia, and the Impressionists took the next step.

The word realism is used in many ways today: for whatever resembles reality, for a painter like Courbet and for later movements such as Socialist Realism and photorealism. It is therefore useful to distinguish Realism as a historical movement, roughly 1840–1880, from realistic painting in general. Read more in the guides to Romanticism and to modernism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who built his own pavilion in 1855 and called it Le Réalisme?