Realism

A movement that began in France around 1848, when Gustave Courbet declared he would paint only what he could see. His Burial at Ornans gave a village funeral the size of a history painting, and Millet's gleaners and sowers gave peasants the dignity once kept for saints. Realists rejected idealised myth and history in favour of ordinary people, work and the countryside, painted in earthy colours and solid forms, often with a social conscience. The idea spread across Europe and America, to Menzel in Germany, Repin and the Peredvizhniki in Russia, and Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the United States. Many later works filed as Realism simply describe the world faithfully in this tradition.

How to tell it apart: Academic art paints the same skill on idealised subjects; Impressionism keeps the modern subjects but breaks the paint into light, quick strokes.

4,331 works in the quiz. Play a round on Realism.

Artists

Vincent van Gogh · Frida Kahlo · Salvador Dalí · Claude Monet · Norman Rockwell · Henri Matisse · Edward Hopper · Camille Claudel · Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Édouard Manet · Andrew Wyeth · Ilya Repin · Gustave Courbet · James McNeill Whistler · Winslow Homer · Ivan Shishkin · Pyotr Konchalovsky · Vasily Vereshchagin · James Tissot · Jean-François Millet · Konstantin Makovsky · Frederic Remington · N. C. Wyeth · Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot · Boris Kustodiev · Thomas Eakins · George Catlin · Ivan Kramskoi · Vasily Polenov · Henry Ossawa Tanner

Best-known works

“Luncheon on the Grass” — Édouard Manet, 1863
“Christina's World” — Andrew Wyeth, 1948
“Olympia” — Édouard Manet, 1863
“The Apotheosis of War” — Vasily Vereshchagin, 1871
“The Angelus” — Jean-François Millet, 1858
“The Sleepers” — Gustave Courbet, 1866
“Four Freedoms” — Norman Rockwell, 1971
“The Unequal Marriage” — Vassili Vladimirovich Pukiryov, 1875
“A Burial at Ornans” — Gustave Courbet, 1849–1850
“In a Roman Osteria” — Carl Bloch, 1866
“Freedom of Speech” — Norman Rockwell, 1943
“Gossamer” — Józef Chełmoński, 1875
“The Painter's Studio” — Gustave Courbet, 1855
“Swimming” — Thomas Eakins, 1885
“Frederick the Great Playing the Flute at Sanssouci” — Adolph von Menzel, 1852
“The Problem We All Live With” — Norman Rockwell, 1965
“The Horse Fair” — Rosa Bonheur, 1853
“Jewess with Oranges” — Aleksander Gierymski, 1880–1881
“The Beauty” — Boris Kustodiev, 1915
“Pasteur's portrait by Edelfelt” — Albert Edelfelt, 1885
“The Stone Breakers” — Gustave Courbet, 1850
“Bazille's Studio” — Frédéric Bazille, 1870
“Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” — Frida Kahlo, 1940
“Burning the Brushwood” — Eero Järnefelt, 1893
“Major's marriage proposal” — Pavel Fedotov, 1848
“Storks” — Józef Chełmoński, 1900
“The Peacemakers” — George Peter Alexander Healy, 1868
“Woman with a Parrot” — Gustave Courbet, 1866
“Wet Meadow” — Fyodor Vasilyev, 1872
“Ploughing in the Nivernais” — Rosa Bonheur, 1849