CategoriesStyles and Movements
Nineteenth Century French Realism
French painting from the late 1840s that gave peasants, labourers and provincial life the scale and seriousness once reserved for history painting.
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About
The upheavals of 1848, which toppled a king and brought working people into politics, gave painters a new claim: that villagers and labourers deserved canvases as large as those given to gods and generals. Gustave Courbet made the point with A Burial at Ornans (1849–50), a life-size funeral of his neighbours that scandalised the Salon. When the jury of the 1855 Exposition Universelle refused his vast The Painter's Studio (1855), he showed it in his own Pavilion of Realism.
Look for ordinary people at ordinary tasks, earthy colour and heavy, unidealised bodies. Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners (1857) gave three stooping women the dignity of a history painting; Rosa Bonheur, who sketched animals in Paris slaughterhouses, painted Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849); Honoré Daumier satirised lawyers and the bourgeoisie in lithographs and painted crowded third-class railway carriages. Their frankness prepared the ground for Édouard Manet and the Impressionists.
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