Around 1850 a group of French painters rejected both the ideal heroes of Neoclassicism and the passionate imagination of Romanticism. They wanted to paint the world as it was, especially the lives of ordinary working people. Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877) said he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. The movement is called Realism (about 1840 to 1880).
Looking closely: The Gleaners
Describe. Three peasant women bend in a stubble field, picking up stray stalks of wheat left after the harvest. Far behind them, in golden light, are huge haystacks, a loaded cart and many harvesters, with a foreman on horseback. Analyze. The three women fill the foreground, big and heavy, their backs bent in a slow rhythm, their faces hidden. The bright, rich harvest is pushed far away. Interpret. Gleaning, gathering what the harvest leaves behind, was allowed for the poorest families. Millet (1814 to 1875) gave these women the size and dignity usually kept for heroes. Some critics in 1857 found that alarming; others saw it as simple truth about rural life.
Key idea
Courbet's The Stone Breakers showed two road workers, an old man and a boy, life-size, breaking stones in torn clothes. Paintings that large were supposed to show history or myth; Courbet used that scale for anonymous laborers. The canvas was destroyed near the end of World War II in 1945, and we know it from photographs.
Why it works
Common mistake
Rosa Bonheur (1822 to 1899), the most famous animal painter of her day, studied the Paris horse market twice a week for a year and a half to paint The Horse Fair. To work freely in that crowded, all-male setting she obtained official police permission to wear trousers. The huge canvas, more than 16 feet wide, swirls with rearing horses and grooms.
Worked example: Realist or not?
- It is lifelike in technique.
- But the subject is ideal and imaginary, not everyday life.
- The Realist movement is defined by everyday subjects shown without idealizing.
Answer: No: lifelike, but not Realist in subject.