Realism for beginners: painting life as it is

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Around 1848, the year revolutions swept Europe, a new generation of painters rejected both the noble Greeks of Neoclassicism and the moonlit dreams of Romanticism. They wanted to paint the world as it is: farm workers, stone breakers, train passengers, a village funeral. This was Realism. In the same decades, a new invention, photography, changed what pictures could be for, and gave Spiritualism its most famous fakes.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition What later admirers made of Realism. Modern How the ideas live on.

Courbet’s protest

Historical Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877) painted the burial of an ordinary villager at the huge scale once reserved for history painting, and men breaking stones by the road. When some of his works were refused for the Paris World’s Fair in 1855, he built his own Pavilion of Realism next door and published a manifesto. It was one of the first exhibitions an artist organized for himself, and it set an example the Impressionists would follow twenty years later. A line often attributed to Courbet, that he would paint an angel when someone showed him one, sums up the whole movement, even if the exact words are uncertain.

Millet and the dignity of work

Historical Jean-François Millet (1814 to 1875) painted French peasants sowing, gleaning and resting. To some critics his patient laborers looked dangerously political, as if they were asking for something. The Gleaners (1857), in the Musée d’Orsay, shows three women bent double, picking up the last stalks after the harvest, while a rich farm glows in the distance.

Daumier on the train

Honoré Daumier, The Third-Class Carriage, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (29.100.129). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Honoré Daumier (1808 to 1879) drew thousands of satirical lithographs for Paris newspapers and was once jailed for a caricature of the king. In The Third-Class Carriage (1864) he paints a poor family on a hard bench: an old woman with a basket, a mother holding her baby, a sleeping boy, and behind them a crowd of strangers. Nobody talks. The modern city has arrived, and with it a new kind of loneliness.

Rosa Bonheur

Historical Rosa Bonheur (1822 to 1899) was one of the most famous painters of her time. To study animals in horse markets and slaughterhouses, she got official police permission to wear trousers. Her enormous Horse Fair (1852 to 1855), in the Met, shows powerful horses paraded at a Paris market, full of muscle and dust.

Photography arrives

Historical Photography was announced to the world in 1839. Daguerreotypes, unique mirror-like images on silvered plates, filled studios in every city; the Boston studio of Southworth and Hawes made portraits of striking directness. The English botanist Anna Atkins used blue cyanotype prints to record algae, published from 1843 in Photographs of British Algae, often called the first book illustrated with photographs. Photography took over the job of recording likenesses, and painters began to explore what a camera could not do: color, brushwork, a personal way of seeing.

The esoteric angle

Historical Spiritualism, the belief that the dead can speak through mediums, spread from the United States after 1848. In the 1860s the Boston photographer William Mumler sold “spirit photographs” with ghostly figures beside living sitters. He was tried for fraud in New York in 1869 and acquitted for lack of proof, but the images were double exposures.

Later tradition Spirit photography grew into a whole industry, with fairy and ghost photos into the twentieth century. It is real history and not evidence of spirits.

Modern I find these photos moving, because they show how badly grieving people wanted a sign. In lesson 7 of the course I follow Spiritualism into the art of Hilma af Klint.

Try it yourself

Compare a daguerreotype portrait by Southworth and Hawes in the Met’s online collection with a painted portrait from the same decade. What can the photo show that the painting cannot? Sitters had to hold still for many seconds; how does that show in their faces?

Before and after

Before this: Pre-Raphaelites.

After this: Impressionism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.