A village as history painting
At the Paris Salon of 1850–51 hung a picture almost seven metres wide. Formats like this were reserved for battles, saints and the heroes of antiquity. Gustave Courbet, however, showed a funeral in his home town of Ornans in the Jura: peasants, local dignitaries, mourners and a priest stand in a long, disorderly line around an open grave, under a grey sky, without glorification and without angels.
The critics were outraged. They accused Courbet of celebrating ugliness and offending the dignity of art. That was exactly his intention. A Burial at Ornans turned the academy’s hierarchy of genres upside down: ordinary people were painted as large and as seriously as only kings had been before.
The Pavilion of Realism
For the Exposition Universelle of 1855, Courbet submitted numerous works. The jury accepted many of them but rejected the Burial and his new major work, The Painter’s Studio. Courbet responded in his own way. At his own expense he had a pavilion built near the exhibition, which he called “Le Réalisme”, and showed around 40 pictures there. In the catalogue he declared that he wanted to render the customs, ideas and appearance of his time as he saw them, and to make “living art”.
It was one of the first solo exhibitions that an artist organised himself in opposition to the official system. The writer Champfleury had already popularised the term “Realism” in his defences of Courbet. Courbet himself is credited with saying that he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one.
Work becomes a worthy subject
In 1849 Courbet painted The Stonebreakers, two men at the hardest and worst-paid work by the roadside. The picture later went to Dresden, where it was destroyed in 1945. For many contemporaries it carried a political message, all the more so because Courbet openly declared himself a republican and a socialist.
Jean-François Millet, who settled in 1849 in the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, painted peasants at work, calmly and almost solemnly. His Gleaners of 1857 shows three women gathering the ears of grain left behind after the harvest, a right granted to the poorest. In the background the landowner’s sheaves pile up. Conservative critics saw in it a dangerous accusation.
Daumier and Bonheur
Honoré Daumier was famous above all as a caricaturist. For a lithograph showing King Louis-Philippe as the gluttonous giant Gargantua, he was sent to prison in 1832. Later, in paintings such as The Third-Class Carriage, he depicted the weariness of ordinary travellers with deep sympathy.
Rosa Bonheur was one of the most successful women artists of the 19th century. Her animal pictures, such as Ploughing in the Nivernais of 1849, were based on close studies at cattle markets and slaughterhouses. To be able to work there, she applied to the Paris police for permission to wear trousers. Her Horse Fair now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Germany: Menzel and Leibl
In Berlin, Adolph Menzel painted The Iron Rolling Mill between 1872 and 1875, one of the first large industrial pictures in German art. For his studies he travelled to a rolling mill in Königshütte in Upper Silesia. The picture shows heat, noise and a change of shift, workers forging as well as eating hastily.
In 1869 Courbet exhibited at the International Art Exhibition in Munich’s Glass Palace and made a strong impression on young painters, above all Wilhelm Leibl. Leibl later moved to the countryside and painted peasant women and men with a precision reminiscent of the old German masters. He worked on Three Women in Church for around four years.
Russia and America
In Russia, painters founded the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions in 1870; its members are known as the “Peredvizhniki” (the Wanderers). They showed their work in many cities across the empire and wanted to make art for a broad public. Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga shows eleven men straining in harness against a ship, each with a face of his own.
In the United States, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins applied the realist gaze to fishermen, rowers, Civil War soldiers and an operating theatre in Philadelphia.
Photography and painting
The daguerreotype had existed since 1839. Photography raised the question of what painting could still achieve when a machine could record reality. Many Realists used photographs as aids. At the same time their work shows that Realism is never mere copying: selection, format and composition turn reality into a statement.
Commune and exile
Courbet remained political. During the Paris Commune of 1871 he sat on the Commune’s council when the Vendôme Column, a monument to Napoleon, was pulled down. After the Commune was crushed he was held responsible, imprisoned, and later ordered to pay for the column’s reconstruction. In 1873 he fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1877 in La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva.
Why it still matters
Realism redefined what is worth depicting. Since Courbet, any person and any subject can be the stuff of great art. The Impressionists adopted his focus on the here and now, and from socially critical photography to the painting of today, his question still resonates: whose lives are actually being shown?
Further reading
- Linda Nochlin: Realism (1971).
- T. J. Clark: Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973).