Realism: Artists A-Z

Realism was the movement that, from about 1848 into the 1880s, painted ordinary contemporary life as the eye saw it, without the idealizing of academic art or the drama and exoticism of Romanticism. Its pictures show peasants, laborers, townspeople and city crowds at full scale and in sober, earthy colors, and they treat work, poverty and plain faces as worthy of serious art. It arose in France amid the revolutions of 1848 and the upheavals of industrial change, and Balzac, Flaubert and Zola pursued the same aims in the novel. From France it spread to Germany, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain and America.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) made Realism a program. The Stone Breakers (1849), destroyed in 1945, showed two road workers with averted faces at their endless labor. A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850, Musée d’Orsay) lines up the mourners of his home town, life-size, on a canvas almost seven meters wide, a format reserved until then for history painting, and it caused a scandal at the Salon. When the jury of the Exposition Universelle of 1855 turned down some of his works, he built his own Pavilion of Realism, showed The Painter’s Studio (1855, Musée d’Orsay) there and published a Realist manifesto. After the Paris Commune of 1871 he was blamed for the toppling of the Vendôme Column, and he died in exile in Switzerland.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), who settled in the village of Barbizon in 1849, painted peasants with a grave, monumental simplicity. In The Gleaners (1857, Musée d’Orsay) three women bend to pick up the grain left after the harvest, and in The Angelus (1857-1859, Musée d’Orsay) a couple pauses in prayer at dusk. Honoré Daumier, jailed in 1832 for a caricature of King Louis-Philippe, painted the cramped poor in The Third-Class Carriage (about 1862-1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Rosa Bonheur, who held a police permit to wear trousers when she sketched at horse fairs and slaughterhouses, won fame with Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849, Musée d’Orsay). Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Barbizon painters brought the same plain observation to landscape.

In Germany, Adolph Menzel painted the coffins of those killed in Berlin’s March Revolution in Laying Out the March Dead (1848, Hamburger Kunsthalle) and the heat and glare of a steelworks in The Iron Rolling Mill (1872-1875, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin). Courbet’s visit to Munich in 1869 inspired Wilhelm Leibl, whose Three Women in Church (Hamburger Kunsthalle) renders peasant women and their prayer books with minute care. In Russia, fourteen students left the Imperial Academy in 1863 rather than paint a set mythological subject, and in 1870 artists founded the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, who sent exhibitions around the country. Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-1873, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg) shows eleven men in harness dragging a ship upriver.

In Florence the Macchiaioli met at the Caffè Michelangiolo and painted rural and city life in bold patches of light and shade; a hostile critic gave them their name in 1862. Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega led the group. In the Netherlands the Hague School of Jozef Israëls, Anton Mauve and Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted fishermen, dunes and peasants in tones so subdued that it was nicknamed the Grey School. In Britain, Hubert von Herkomer, Luke Fildes and Frank Holl drew the London poor for the weekly The Graphic before turning such subjects into large paintings.

Americans learned the style in Paris and Munich. Winslow Homer painted soldiers of the Civil War and later the sea, and Thomas Eakins showed a surgeon operating before his students in The Gross Clinic (1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was kept out of the art section of the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Realism opened the way for the Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and for the Impressionists, who kept its modern subjects but painted them in light colors and in the open air. Vincent van Gogh, taught by Mauve, worked in a dark Realist manner, as in The Potato Eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), until he reached Paris in 1886.