Realism is the art movement that, from the 1840s, painted the men and women of its own time exactly as they looked, without making them prettier. It was born in France, and its leader was the painter Gustave Courbet.
The picture to see first is his A Burial at Ornans, a village funeral on a canvas as big as a battle scene. Even the name of the movement began as an insult.
Courbet painted the Burial in 1849 and 1850 in Ornans, the small town in eastern France where he grew up. He used its inhabitants as models and painted them life size.
In 1850 the picture went on show in Paris at the Salon, the state exhibition where artists faced the public and the press. It made Courbet famous, but most critics hated it, and the word they threw at it was realism.
That word was older than the painting. As early as 1826, the Paris magazine Mercure français had predicted that le réalisme, French for realism, might become the leading literature of the century.
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By the 1850s, the prediction had turned sour. Critics used the word for any picture they found ugly or vulgar, and even the novelist Champfleury, one of Courbet's defenders, admitted in 1857 that it served mostly as an insult.
Courbet ended up flying the insult as a flag. In 1855, when he opened an exhibition of his own in Paris, he hung a sign over the door that read Du Réalisme, "On Realism."
A funeral the size of a battle
To see why a funeral could shock anyone, start with how Paris ranked paintings…
What You'll Discover
What the lost painting of two road workers showed.
The exhibition hall Courbet built at his own cost.
What Courbet said about painting angels.
Why a photographic painting is not always Realism.
How the movement reached Russia and America.