Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. The movement arose in opposition to Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama typical of the Romantic movement. In favor of depictions of 'real' life, Realist painters often depicted common laborers, and ordinary people in ordinary surroundings engaged in real activities as subjects for their works. The chief exponents of Realism were Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Rejecting the predominant academic convention and the Romanticism of his time, Courbet's independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. As an artist, he occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements in his work.
Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants, and working conditions of the poor. For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing challenged contemporary academic ideas of art.
A Burial at Ornans, Gustave Courbet, 1849-50
Exhibition of this piece at the 1850–1851 Paris Salon created an "explosive reaction" and brought Courbet instant fame.
The vast painting, measuring 10 by 22 feet (3.1 by 6.6 meters), drew both praise and fierce denunciations from critics and the public, in part because it upset convention by depicting a prosaic ritual on a scale which would previously have been reserved for a religious or royal subject. Additionally, the painting lacks the sentimental rhetoric that was expected in a genre work. Courbet's mourners make no theatrical gestures of grief, and their faces seemed more caricatured than ennobled. The critics accused Courbet of a deliberate pursuit of ugliness.
Jean-Francois Millet
Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement.
Woman Baking Bread, Jean-Francois Millet, 1854
This painting depicts a woman working in the home, and is a typical representation of the Realists' engagement with depicting the realities of life at the time.
One of the most well known of Millet's paintings is The Gleaners (1857). While Millet was walking the fields around Barbizon, one theme returned to his pencil and brush for seven years—gleaning—the centuries-old right of poor women and children to remove the bits of grain left in the fields following the harvest. He found the theme an eternal one, linked to stories from the Old Testament. In 1857, he submitted the painting The Gleaners to the Salon to an unenthusiastic, even hostile, public.
Gleaners, Jean-Francois Millet, 1857
One of his most controversial, this painting by Millet depicts gleaners collecting grain in the fields near his home. The depiction of the realities of the lower class was considered shocking to the public at the time.