The difference between Romanticism and Realism in art

The difference between Romanticism and Realism in art lies in the way of looking. Romanticism (c. 1800–1850) paints feelings, dreams, history and the grandeur of nature. Realism (c. 1850–1870) turns away from the exalted and shows the present as it is: ordinary people, work and everyday life, on a large scale and without idealisation.

Facts

Two answers to a new age

Romanticism and Realism are both children of the revolutions. Romanticism emerged around 1800 as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the cool ideals of Neoclassicism. Artists sought what could not be measured: feeling, imagination, the national spirit and nature as something greater than humankind. The sublime, the mixture of terror and wonder felt before a stormy sea or an abyss, became a key word.

Realism came a generation later, after the revolutions of 1848. Industry was growing, the cities were filling with workers and photography had just been invented. Now a group of painters no longer wanted to escape into history or dreams. They wanted to show their own time, with the people that history painting had forgotten. Where Romanticism asks how the world feels, Realism asks what it actually looks like.

Romanticism: feeling, nature and drama

Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, from around 1818, is the best-known image of Romanticism. A man stands with his back to us on a rock, looking out over a sea of mist. We cannot see his face, so we put ourselves in his place. Nature is not a backdrop but a mirror for the soul.

In France, Romanticism became more dramatic. Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People after the July Revolution of 1830, with a female figure leading the people over the fallen. The colour is hot, the composition a rising pyramid of bodies and smoke. Théodore Géricault turned a contemporary shipwreck into a vast tragedy, and in England J. M. W. Turner made light and mist dissolve form in The Fighting Temeraire. Goya's The Third of May 1808 shows war as horror, not heroism.

What they share is intensity: movement, strong colour or a charged stillness, and subjects larger than everyday life.

Realism: everyday life on a large scale

Gustave Courbet is the name most associated with Realism. A Burial at Ornans, painted in 1849–1850, shows a funeral in his home village with more than forty of its inhabitants, life-size. There is no hero, no miracle, no clear story, only an ordinary event painted on a scale previously reserved for history and religion. That is exactly what outraged the Paris public. When Courbet's works were not received as he wished at the 1855 World's Fair, he showed them in a pavilion of his own under the sign Le Réalisme.

Jean-François Millet painted peasants in the fields with a heavy dignity, and Honoré Daumier drew and painted the workers, lawyers and railway passengers of Paris. The colours are muted and earthy, the light even, the compositions often flat and without theatrical effects. The Realists did not want the picture to be beautiful, but true.

Édouard Manet took the consequences a step further. His Olympia of 1863 is a naked woman who is not a goddess but a courtesan in contemporary Paris. From there the road leads to Impressionism; see the guide to Impressionism.

Between them: landscape and Barbizon

The boundary between the movements is clearest in landscape painting. John Constable was a contemporary of Turner but painted his Suffolk with an almost scientific eye: clouds, weather and work in the fields, studied out of doors in oil sketches. The subject is the Romantic love of nature, but the way of seeing points towards Realism.

In France, from the 1830s, a group of landscape painters gathered in the village of Barbizon beside the Forest of Fontainebleau. They wanted to paint French nature as it was, without classical ruins and idealised trees. Millet moved there in 1849, and Camille Corot worked in the same area. The Barbizon painters are a bridge between the Romantic feeling for nature and the Realist demand for truth, and they paved the way for the Impressionists' painting out of doors.

Criticism followed the same lines. The poet Charles Baudelaire defended Delacroix as the master of modern Romanticism, while the writer Champfleury became the spokesman of Realism and in 1857 published a book entitled Le Réalisme.

Sweden: Realist technique, Romantic subjects

In Sweden the boundary is more fluid than in France. From the 1850s many Swedish artists studied in Düsseldorf, where the academy taught an exact, detailed style of painting. The technique was realistic, but the subjects were often Romantic: peasant life, fairy tales and historic moments.

August Malmström's Dancing Fairies of 1866 is a Nordic fairy tale of spirits over a meadow in the moonlight, painted with painstaking technique. Gustaf Cederström's The Funeral Procession of Charles XII shows a national moment, the king's dead body carried across the mountains, in a severe, almost documentary style; the version in the Nationalmuseum dates from 1884. Read more about the period under the Düsseldorf period.

How to tell them apart

First ask what the picture shows. A stormy sea, a battlefield, a ruin in the moonlight or a lone figure before nature points to Romanticism. A peasant, a worker, a funeral or a café points to Realism. Then ask how it is painted. Romanticism often has strong contrasts, swirling movement or dramatic light. Realism is calmer and more matter-of-fact, with earth colours and even light.

A third test is time. The Romantics liked to choose the past or the faraway: the Middle Ages, the Orient, the fairy tale. The Realists painted their own present. Place Liberty Leading the People beside A Burial at Ornans in Compare and see the difference: the same Paris, twenty years apart, two completely different ways of seeing. The guides to Romanticism and Realism go deeper into each movement, and the aesthetics chapter on Romanticism describes the ideas behind it.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

A painting shows two men breaking stones beside a country road, in muted browns and life-size. Which movement does it probably belong to?