Famous Realism Paintings: 12 Icons of Everyday Life
In the middle of the eighteen hundreds a group of painters got sick of gods, kings and pretty lies, and started painting the world as it actually was: peasants, laborers, the poor and the plain.
Realism threw out grand history and myth for the dignity of ordinary life, often on a scale once saved for saints. Here are twelve of the most famous Realism paintings, all now in the public domain.
I have gathered the works that put real, unglamorous people at the center of art for the first time.
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1. Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1850)
Courbet shocked Paris by painting a village funeral on a canvas the size of a battle scene, twenty feet wide, filled with ordinary country people instead of heroes.
There is no God visible in the sky, no drama, only mourners, a dog, an open grave and the plain business of death. Critics were outraged that a nobody's burial should be treated as grandly as a coronation, which was exactly the point, and I break down the whole movement in understand Realism in one minute It made Courbet the leader of Realism overnight.
When the 1855 world's fair rejected his work, he simply built his own tent next door and called it the Pavilion of Realism.
2. Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Three peasant women bend low over a harvested field, gathering the last stray grains of wheat left for the poor, their backs curved with endless work.
Millet gave these bent, faceless figures the solemn weight of statues, and the wealthy hated it. To them the picture looked like a threat, a reminder of the vast, hungry poor just after a revolution had scared all of Europe.
Behind the women a rich harvest is piled high, guarded by a man on a horse. The three gleaners were painted with such dignity that the picture became one of the most reproduced images in France.
3. Honore Daumier, The Third Class Carriage (about 1864)
In a crowded railway carriage, a tired old woman, a nursing mother and a sleeping boy sit jammed among strangers on a hard wooden bench.
Daumier spent his life as a newspaper cartoonist, jailed once for mocking the king, and he brought that sharp eye to the new crush of the modern city.
He painted the poor packed into third class not as a cause but as people, weary, patient, lit by a soft pale light from behind. This kind of everyday genre scene had never been given such tenderness.
The painting was unfinished at his death, and Daumier died nearly blind and poor, his greatness recognized only afterward.
4. Ilya Repin, Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873)
Eleven ragged men harnessed like animals haul a barge up the Volga river under a burning sky, their bodies bent almost to the ground.
Repin, still a student, spent whole summers living beside the real haulers to paint them true, each man a distinct, exhausted individual.
One young hauler near the middle lifts his head, staring out with a spark of defiance that made him a symbol of a nation ready to revolt. The picture shook Russia and made Repin famous at twenty nine.
A grand duke bought it, and it became a rallying image for every Russian who dreamed of change.
5. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)
A famous surgeon stands mid operation, a bloody scalpel in his bare hand, lecturing to students while a patient lies open on the table and a woman recoils in horror.
Eakins painted American medicine with brutal, clinical honesty, down to the fresh blood on the doctor's fingers. The 1876 jury for the great Philadelphia exhibition found it too gruesome for the art halls and hid it away in the medical section.
For decades it hung in the college where the scene was set. In 2006 the city of Philadelphia raised sixty eight million dollars to stop it being sold away.
6. Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers (1875)
Three shirtless workmen kneel on a bare parquet floor, scraping it smooth, sweat on their backs in the light from a tall window. Caillebotte, a wealthy young man who painted purely for pleasure, chose a subject no one thought worthy of a large canvas, manual labor in a modern Paris apartment.
The official Salon rejected it as vulgar, offended by the sight of half naked workers. His Impressionist friends, though, admired the cool, sharp realism and the stark empty floor.
Caillebotte quietly became their great patron, buying dozens of their pictures that now anchor the Musee d'Orsay.
7. Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)
A black sailor lies on the deck of a broken, mastless boat, ringed by circling sharks and a distant waterspout, adrift and alone on a heaving sea.
Homer painted this dark, unsettling scene late in his life, and it was so bleak that buyers stayed away for years.
When one collector complained about the grim ending, Homer wrote back that the man would of course be rescued and live happily ever after.
A tiny ship on the far horizon may or may not save him, a detail Homer added only in 1906, when the Metropolitan Museum finally bought the picture.
8. Adolph Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill (1875)
Inside a roaring German factory, half naked workers wrestle a glowing bar of white hot iron under showers of sparks, the whole scene lit red by the furnace.
Menzel spent months sketching in real ironworks to get every gear, tool and grimy face exactly right. It was one of the first great paintings of heavy industry, made just as Germany was becoming a modern power.
In a corner, a few workers pause to eat a meager lunch, unnoticed in the din. Menzel showed the machine age for what it was on the factory floor, brutal, exhausting human labor.
9. Jules Bastien Lepage, Haymaking (1877)
A young peasant woman sits in a mown field at midday, worn out, staring blankly past us while her husband sleeps on his back in the cut hay behind her.
Bastien Lepage painted rural work with photographic sharpness in the foreground and a soft, hazy distance, a blend of Realism and the new outdoor light Her dazed, empty look is the real subject, the numb tiredness of a body worked to its limit.
He painted his own villagers in the fields where he grew up. He died young at thirty six, just as he was becoming one of the most admired painters in Europe.
10. Wilhelm Leibl, Three Women in Church (1882)
In a plain Bavarian church, three women in traditional dress sit praying, painted with such minute care that you can count the threads in their shawls and prayer books.
Leibl worked on this small panel for years, painting slowly and directly from life in a Bavarian village church. He wanted no story and no message, only the absolute truth of how these women looked, absorbed in quiet faith.
The old woman's worn hands and the young one's fresh face tell a whole life between them. It is German Realism at its most patient, finished stroke by stroke over four winters.
11. Jean Francois Millet, The Angelus (1859)
Two peasants stand in a darkening potato field with their heads bowed, pausing their work as a distant church bell rings the evening prayer.
For decades it was one of the most reproduced images in the world, printed on everything from plates to postcards.
Millet said he painted it remembering how his grandmother made them stop to pray at the sound of the bell. Salvador Dali became obsessed with the picture, convinced the basket at the couple's feet hid a small coffin.
An X ray taken years later did find a painted over shape underneath, and the mystery has never been fully settled.
12. Edouard Manet, The Old Musician (1862)
A ragged old fiddler sits by a roadside surrounded by street children, a young woman with a baby and a wandering drinker, all the outcasts of modern Paris gathered in one strange group.
Manet painted this early, before his great scandals, borrowing poses from old master paintings but filling them with the real poor of the city. The figures do not interact, each locked in private solitude, staring out or away.
It is a puzzle of a picture, half homage and half street scene. The very slums Manet drew these outcasts from were being flattened as he worked, cleared to build the grand new boulevards of modern Paris.
Realism in art, questions readers ask
What is Realism in art? A movement that began around 1850 to paint everyday life and ordinary people honestly, rejecting myth, romance and idealized beauty.
Who started Realism? The French painter Gustave Courbet is usually called its founder and loudest champion.
How is Realism different from Romanticism? Romanticism painted heroes, passion and dreams; Realism painted laborers, the poor and plain daily life as it truly looked.
Why was Realism controversial? Treating peasants and workers on the huge scale once saved for kings and saints felt shocking, even threatening, to the wealthy.
Is Realism the same as realistic painting? Not quite. Realism is a specific nineteenth century movement about ordinary subjects, while realistic simply means lifelike, which art had been for centuries.
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The dignity of the ordinary
Realism sounds simple, paint what you see, but it was a quiet act of rebellion. By putting a peasant, a laborer or a beggar where a saint or a king used to be, these painters said that every life was worth looking at closely.
The idea seems obvious now, which is exactly how far they moved us. Every honest photograph of a working life owes something to a Frenchman who chose to paint a village funeral the size of a battle.