Realism

Gustave Courbet exhibited *The Stone Breakers* and *A Burial at Ornans* at the 1850 Paris Salon and was roundly attacked for it: peasants labouring by a roadside and a village funeral rendered at the scale previously reserved for history painting were considered not just aesthetically questionable but politically dangerous. He agreed, and called his approach Realism. The movement that emerged across the following three decades — Courbet in France, Honoré Daumier with his caricature-edged social satire, Jean-François Millet romanticising rural labour, and the English Pre-Raphaelites (who were something else again, but shared the impulse toward observable truth) — was rooted in a simple but radical proposition: contemporary life, including working-class life, was a valid subject for serious art. By the 1870s the impulse had spread to American painters like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, and the appetite for the unembellished visible world would feed directly into Impressionism.

How to recognise it

Earthy, muted palettes are the first indicator: ochres, raw umbers, dull greens, grey skies — colour is observed rather than elevated. Compositions are often deliberately unmonumental: figures cropped by the frame, groups arranged informally as if caught mid-movement. Subjects drawn from working life — labourers, washerwomen, peasants at meals, urban crowds — painted with the same seriousness as biblical scenes. Faces are particular rather than generic, hands are roughened by work. Textures (fabric, soil, stone, wood) are rendered with physical attention. If the painting seems to argue that the scene in front of you is important simply because it happened, with no allegory and no idealisation, you are in Realist territory.