Realism

Paint what you see: ordinary people, work and contemporary life.

After the revolutions of 1848, Gustave Courbet and his followers wanted to paint the world as it was, not as the Academy thought it ought to be. Peasants, stonebreakers and funerals were given the same large format as history painting.

At Barbizon outside Paris, Millet and Corot painted the countryside and its labourers. Photography, invented in 1839, challenged painting to rethink what a picture is.

Édouard Manet brought Realism into the modern city and provoked with Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. In England the Pre-Raphaelites instead sought sharpness and honesty in medieval subjects, and in Russia Repin painted the life of the people.