Introducing: Realism

The term ‘realism’ is often used interchangeably with ‘naturalism’ as a description of an artist’s attempt to portray the world accurately. It can also denote artwork from any century that focuses on humble, ‘ordinary’ subject matter drawn from everyday life. Carravaggio’s 17th century paintings of street urchins and the 18th century still lifes of Chardin are two such examples. However, Realism (when capitalized) more specifically refers to a mid 19th century movement in French Art that rejected the escapist and idealized pictures of Romanticism. Led by Gustav Courbet, it was also a reaction against polished, academic Salon painting and the prevalence of grandiose mythological and historical subject matter. In contrast, Courbet painted lowly scenes from modern life in a coarse manner that critics decried as ‘ugly’. Partly a response to urbanization, it was informed by a radical political sensibility summed up by the belief that a ‘portrait of the worker in his smock is certainly worth as much as that of a prince in his golden robes’. This artistic emphasis on the socially marginalized is often defined as ‘Social Realism’. The movement’s vision of capturing objective truth had been stimulated by the invention of photography and would hugely influence later 19th century painting such as Impressionism.