Realism

A mid-19th-century revolt against the two reigning modes of serious painting — the grand historical and mythological canvases sanctioned by the academies, and the emotionally charged sublime of the Romantics. The Realists insisted that the only legitimate subject for art was the contemporary world, observed honestly and without flattery. Gustave Courbet, the movement's most combative spokesman, showed peasants, stone-breakers and funeral mourners at the same monumental scale that had previously been reserved for the heroes of antiquity. His 1855 one-man show, mounted in a wooden shed beside the Paris Exposition Universelle after the jury rejected his submissions, was one of the first deliberately independent exhibitions in Western art history. The movement's politics were as new as its subjects. Realism emerged from the same democratic upheavals as the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, and its practitioners rejected the idea that great art required great (meaning noble, classical, or religious) subjects. Jean-François Millet painted the physical labour of peasant women as a subject worth the full weight of a large canvas. Honoré Daumier, better known for his caricatures, painted laundresses, third-class railway carriages and street lawyers with the same unflinching attention. The conviction that ordinary life was artistically serious — and that showing it clearly was a political act — runs through all of them. Beyond France, Realism had important parallel developments: the American painters Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins brought the same empirical rigour to post-Civil War America; John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler absorbed it in Europe and reinjected it into British and American portraiture. The movement's commitment to the present-tense, observed world set the direct foundations for Impressionism, which inherited its modern subjects and added a new vocabulary of light.