Realism is the art movement that, from the 1840s, set out to paint ordinary people and the life of its own time as they really looked, without flattering or idealizing them. It began in France, and its leader was Gustave Courbet. The picture to see first is his A Burial at Ornans, a village funeral painted on the scale of a great history painting. The name of the movement began as an insult.
Courbet painted the Burial in 1849 and 1850, in his home town of Ornans, in eastern France, and used the people of the town as his models. When it was shown at the Paris Salon, the great official exhibition of the day, it made his name in Paris, and much of what critics wrote about it was hostile.
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The insult was the word realism itself. It had been floating around French writing since 1826, when a magazine, the Mercure français, guessed that le réalisme might become the leading literature of the century. By the 1850s critics used it for any painting they found ugly or vulgar. Even Champfleury, a novelist and critic who defended Courbet, admitted in 1857 that the word served mostly as an insult.
Courbet never claimed to have chosen the label, and he said so in print. Yet when he opened his own exhibition in Paris in 1855, he hung a sign over the door that read Du Réalisme, "On Realism."
What You'll Discover
Why a village funeral offended Paris.
The lost painting of two road workers.
The exhibition Courbet built for himself.
What Realism is often confused with.
How the movement reached Russia and America.