The long nineteenth century
Realism
c. 1840–1880
Ordinary people and everyday work, painted without idealization.
Overview
Around the revolutions of 1848, French painters rejected historical and mythological subjects in favor of what they could see for themselves. Gustave Courbet painted laborers and a village funeral on the grand scale previously reserved for heroes, and argued that painting should deal only with real and existing things.
Jean-François Millet gave dignity to peasant labor, and Honoré Daumier satirized politics and city life. Édouard Manet’s frank, flatly lit scenes of modern Paris scandalized the official Salon and pointed the way to Impressionism.
What defines it
- Contemporary, everyday subjects
- Working people shown at large scale and without flattery
- Sober color and direct observation
Works to know
- A Burial at Ornans
- The Gleaners
- The Third-Class Carriage
- Olympia