Realism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Realism took shape in France in the middle of the nineteenth century as a direct challenge to the two dominant modes that had preceded it, the idealized classical seriousness of Neoclassicism and the heightened emotion and exoticism of Romanticism. Where those movements elevated their subjects, whether ancient heroes or dramatic, often distant events, Realist painters insisted that art's proper subject was the visible, material world around them, rendered without embellishment. The term itself was coined by the French novelist and critic Champfleury in the 1840s, and it became permanently associated with his friend Gustave Courbet, the painter who gave Realism its defining works and its public notoriety. Realist subjects deliberately broke with the conventions of what critics called High art: peasant and working class labor, the life of city streets, cafes and popular entertainments, and the ordinary, often unglamorous texture of provincial and urban life. This came with a frankness in the treatment of the human body and of subjects previously considered beneath serious art, producing a certain deliberate grittiness that unsettled the largely upper and middle class Salon audience. Courbet's breakthrough came at the Paris Salon of 1850 to 1851, immediately following the upheaval of the 1848 Revolution, when he exhibited The Stone Breakers, showing two anonymous laborers breaking roadside rock, and A Burial at Ornans, an enormous canvas depicting the funeral of his own grand-uncle in his hometown. Both paintings applied the scale and formal seriousness that French academic tradition reserved for history painting, kings, saints and classical narrative, to subjects the establishment considered beneath such treatment, a choice widely read as a democratic, even political statement about whose lives deserved to be recorded. The resulting scandal established Realism as a movement and Courbet as its central, combative figure.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Gustave Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, completed for the Salon of 1850 to 1851, is Realism's single most consequential work, and understanding why it provoked such controversy explains the movement it launched. The painting depicts the funeral of Courbet's maternal grandfather, who died shortly before Courbet's arrival in his hometown of Ornans during his annual visit there in the summer of 1849, rendered at a scale, roughly ten feet by twenty-two feet, that French academic convention reserved exclusively for history painting, the grand depiction of significant historical, religious or mythological events populated by heroic figures. Courbet instead filled that heroic scale with an unidealized crowd of provincial mourners, family, clergy, gravediggers and local dignitaries, painted with the same unsentimental, exacting attention regardless of their social standing, against a plain, undramatic landscape rather than an elevated or symbolic setting. Critics at the time were scandalized less by the subject itself than by the presumption of treating ordinary provincial death, and ordinary provincial people, as worthy of the scale and gravity that painting had reserved for kings and saints. Alongside the smaller but equally pointed The Stone Breakers, showing two laborers, one too young and one too old for the work, breaking rock beside a road, Courbet made the case that contemporary, unglamorous life was itself sufficient subject matter for the highest ambitions of painting. Courbet's own political radicalism, which later led to his imprisonment and exile to Switzerland following his involvement with the Paris Commune, reinforced the reading of Realism as an implicitly democratic artistic program, one that rejected not only Romantic and Neoclassical style but the social hierarchy embedded in what subjects painting was permitted to dignify. Realism's insistence on contemporary, unidealized subject matter was directly inherited by the Impressionists a generation later, who kept Realism's commitment to modern life while shifting their attention from social subject matter to the transient effects of light.