1. Realism

2. The Realist Era
• Typically associated with the
1850’s
• Scientific method is used
rather than accept dogma
• Develops the “Age of Reason”
• Industrial Revolution takes
shape as factories produce
goods cheaper and faster
• Migration from rural areas into
cities (urbanization),
economies change from
agrarian to industrial
• Major inventions are the train
and photography

3. What is Realism?
• Enlightenment put focus on
scientific method and
observation
• Empiricism – knowledge
based on what can be
measured and directly
experienced
• What can actually be
seen/experienced in the
world
• Realists only painted
subjects they themselves
could experience (personal
experience)

4. Realism
• context: cultural
– role of artist:
• no longer to simply reveal
beautiful & sublime
• aimed to tell the truth
• not beholden to higher,
idealized reality (i.e., God)
– subjects:
• ordinary events and
objects
• working class & broad
panorama of society
• psychological motivation of
characters

5. Famous Realist Artists
• Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877
• Honore Daumier, 1808-1879
• Jean-Francois Millet
• Thomas Eakins
• Rembrandt van Rijn
• Théodore Rousseau
• Edward Hopper
• Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

6. style: self-educated; copied Spanish, Dutch & Venetian
masters @ Louvre
fight against official art (salon REJECT)
man behind the term “Realism”.
Painted subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the
rural peasantry and the working conditions of the poor
Believed that the only possible source for a living art is the
artist’s own experience (not any attempt to portray the past
or future)Depicted the harshness in life and challenged
contemporary academic ideas of art
The background was that Courbet was painting in reaction to
the dominant Romanticism and Neoclassical schools of the
time.
artist's mission was the pursuit of truth, which would help
erase social contradictions and imbalances.
subjects: “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”
Realism in France: Gustave Courbet1819-1877
The Wounded Man, 1844-
1854

7. 7
GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849.
Huge scale = monumental, but not glorified. Earth tones, everyday people. S curve
composition. Unflattering pics of provincial officials, dog and people are distracted
the painting has been referred to as, “The Burial of Romanticism”

8. Courbet: The Meeting (1854)

9. 9
GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone Breakers,
1849.
Subject = average workers painted life sized
(painting 5’3” by 8’6”)
Heavy impasto (against academic tradition)
No emphasis on Romantic feeling
Notice contrast in age of workers – too old and
too young

10. the awful side of his life on the left side of him and the good side of his life on the right
side of him. The left side represents challenge and opposition (figures like beggars and
prostitutes) while the right represents friends and admirers.
The painting exhibits a heightened reality that makes it almost dreamlike, with figures that
are both real and symbolic.
it is so original and unique in its blending of the
allegorical and the actual so that the difference is almost impossible to distinguish
The Painter’s Studio

12. • Seems to have been influenced by the
working man, or women.
• Sets his painting as in the mitts of an action,
a simple one, however it is like a photograph
taken as each person was in the middle of an
action.
• Seems to have used much oil paint.
• he can be categorized as part of the
movements of Realism and Naturalism
• Used texture as well as shading and tones to
create a more realistic look.
Jean Francois Millet (1814 – January 20, 1875)

13. 13JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, The Gleaners, 1857.

14. Potato Planters

15. Man With a Hoe

17. Honore Daumier, 1808-1879
• French caricaturist, painter, sculptor and
printmaker
• Imprisoned for his political cartoons against
royalist government; made 500 paintings, 4000
lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000
drawings and 100 sculptures
• Known during his life as political and social
satirist
• After his death, paintings more recognized

18. 18
HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834.
• Soldiers killed everyone in a workers apt. complex
• Illustrates 3 generations murdered in surprise attack
• Lithograph (print) used to mass produce image
• French government tried to suppress Rue Transomonain,

19. 19
HONORÉ DAUMIER, Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862.
• Influence of William Hogarth
• was jailed for satirizing king political cartoon
• Dignity of working class, even though crammed together in
mass transportation
• 1st piece showing dehumanizing mass transport

21. Daumier: The Uprising, 1860

22. Edouard Manet, 1832-1883
• Early paintings accepted by Academy until
1863: Salon de Refuses
• Not a radical artist; horrified by war. Protest
paintings mixed with scenes of daily life.
• By 1874, leader of avant garde
(Impressionists)
• Work has a “snapshot” quality with optical
contradictions

23. 23
ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863.

25. 25
ÉDOUARD MANET, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.

26. • The Balcony, 1868-1869
“The Bar at the Folies Bergere” (1882)

27. American Realism
• Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916
• Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

28. American Realism- Eakins the Anatomist
• Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)
– teacher: Philadelphia
Academy of Fine Arts
• taught anatomy to medical
students & figure drawing
to art students
• disapproved of academic
technique of drawing from
plaster casts
– used nude model
– allowed female
students to study
male nude
• Critics called him a
“butcher” and “degrading”

29. 29
THOMAS EAKINS, The Gross
Clinic, 1875.

30. The Bathers (1858)

32. Eakins vs. Rembrandt…

34. Thomas Eakins (British), Max Schmidt in a Single Scull

35. Winslow Homer, 1836-1910
• Began his career as freelance illustrator
1857.Largely self-taught
• Scenes of life behind the lines a sharp
contrast to grim photographs of Civil War
• Visited France; returned to paint rural
scenes
• 1881-1882 stay in fishing village
transformed his paintings
• was an American landscape painter and
printmaker, best known for his marine
subjects

36. Lifeline” 1844

37. The Gulf Stream” 1899

38. Reaction: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Not everyone was
enjoying the world
produced by
industrialization
• In England, Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood
departed from subject
matter of French Realists
• Tired of classical themes,
focused on medieval
stories and spirituality

39. 39
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, Beata
Beatrix, ca. 1863.
Dante Gabriel Rosetti was the leader of an
art movement called the Pre-Raphaelites.
This style might be considered a variant of
Romanticism, for it favors subjects of
mythological and literary subjects. They
preferred symbolic representations with a
certain poetic appeal

40. 40
JOHN EVERETT
MILLAIS, Ophelia.
John Everett Millais, a British artist, has a realistic style, but the subjects are often of a
somewhat romantic nature. For example, Ophelia (1851-52) has a literary reference to
a play by Shakespeare, since she was Hamlet's girlfriend who commits suicide. This
painting of her dead body floating down a brook, is both beautiful and haunting

42. 42
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, Horse Galloping, 1878.
Pioneers of Motion Photography One of the greatest pioneers of motion
photography was Eadweard Muybridge . Muybridge's main claim to fame was his
exhaustive study of movement of both animals and humans. The story goes that an
owner of race horses bet a friend that when a horse gallops all four feet are, at one
point, off the ground simultaneously. Using twenty four cameras, Muybridge was able
to photograph a horse galloping, each triggered off by the breaking of a trip-wire on
the course. In the 2nd and
3rd frame of the photograph,
you can see that the
horse-owner was right

43. Photography As A Document of the Times
• Child in spinning mill
1908 boy in glass factory 1908
Lewis Hine was hired to research child labor in the early 20th century, when the practice
was common. His photographs of children working in factories, on railroads, and other
dangerous working environments brought greater awareness to this problem. Soon after
his photographs were published, child labor laws went into effect. Child in Spinning Mill
1908 Boy in Glass Factory 1908

44. Symbolism
• A loosely organized
movement that flourished
in the late 1800’s and was
closely related to the
Symbolist movement in
literature. In reaction
against both Realism and
Impressionism, Symbolist
painters stressed art's
subjective, symbolic, and
decorative functions and
turned to the mystical and
occult in an attempt to
evoke subjective states of
mind by visual means.