Collection: Realism

Realism was a French art movement that emerged in the late 1840s as a deliberate rejection of Romantic emotionalism and academic idealisation. Its founder, Gustave Courbet, argued that contemporary life, including peasants, labourers, and the working class, deserved the scale and seriousness that academic painting had reserved for history and mythology. The movement emerged alongside the political upheaval of the 1848 revolutions and the social transformations of the Industrial Revolution.

Realist painters abandoned history painting, the highest of the academic genres, and turned to ordinary subject matter rendered with documentary directness. They depicted contemporary people of all social classes, often in unflattering or unidealised circumstances, and rejected the smooth academic finish in favour of a more visible handling of paint. The movement was closely linked to the emerging discipline of social documentary photography and to the literary Naturalism of Émile Zola.

Beyond Courbet, the principal French Realists were Jean-François Millet, whose paintings of peasant labour anticipated the social engagement of later movements, Honoré Daumier, who used lithography to extend Realist subject matter into political caricature, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who associated with the Barbizon School. The movement spread internationally. The Russian Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, applied Realist principles to peasant and rural subjects with explicit social and political ambition. In Germany, Adolph Menzel and Wilhelm Leibl took up Realist methods after encountering Courbet's work. American painters including Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins studied Realism in Paris and Munich during the 1860s.

Realism's commitment to direct observation and contemporary subject matter prepared the technical and intellectual ground for Impressionism, Naturalism, and the Russian Itinerant tradition. Its principal sub-movements include the Barbizon School, Naturalism, Tonalism, academic art, and Orientalism.