Realism is an art movement that in mid-nineteenth-century France set out to paint the world as it is: peasants, labourers, a village funeral, a street or a café. No idealisation, no classical gods and no obligatory beauty. The term was introduced in the 1840s by the novelist Champfleury, a friend of the painter Gustave Courbet. In a broader sense, realism means any faithful depiction of reality. The movement differs, however, from twentieth-century hyperrealism, which imitates photography to the point of being indistinguishable from it, in its aim: it was after the truth about society, not technical illusion.
It was born around 1850 and Courbet became its face. His huge A Burial at Ornans (1849 to 1850), more than six and a half metres wide and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, scandalised the Salon by giving a village funeral the scale of history painting. When the jury of the 1855 World’s Fair rejected some of his paintings, he built his own Pavilion of Realism right next door. A paradox? The movement peaked just as photography was arriving, and it was photography that soon allowed artists to free themselves from realism. In doing so it opened the way for the Impressionists.
Alongside Courbet, realism includes Jean-François Millet with his peasants and Honoré Daumier, who drew Parisian society with irony. The Czech chapter is written by Karel Purkyně (1834 to 1868), son of the physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkyně, who was struck in Paris by Courbet’s painting in particular. His Portrait of the Blacksmith Jech of 1860, in the collection of the National Gallery Prague, is one of the high points of Czech realism. Beware of confusing it with socialist realism, which here after 1948 was a doctrine imposed by the state, not a freely emerging movement.
On the market, nineteenth-century realists are a quieter segment than the Impressionists who followed them. Courbet’s auction record is held by Femme nue couchée (Reclining Nude) of 1862, which sold at Christie’s in 2015 for 15.3 million dollars. By comparison, Monet’s Meules (Haystacks) sold in 2019 for 110.7 million dollars. The realist gaze lives on, meanwhile, in contemporary figurative painting. Collectors often declare a fondness for abstraction, yet when buying they not infrequently reach for the figure. Perhaps because they recognise themselves in it.
— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club
Related terms: Hyperrealism · Impressionism · Photography · Modern art · Old Masters
