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JA
ID
c. 1840–1880
Realism rejected Romantic idealism in favour of honest, unsentimental depictions of everyday life. Courbet’s peasants, Corot’s landscapes, and Homer’s working figures brought new dignity to ordinary subjects.
Artists & Works
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was the defining portraitist of the Gilded Age. His bravura brushwork and psychological acuity captured the confidence and anxiety of a ruling class at its peak.
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James Tissot
James Tissot made his name painting fashionable London society with almost forensic attention to the textures of silk, lace, and modern life, before a personal crisis turned him toward religious subjects for the rest of his career. His crowded, glittering social scenes remain a uniquely detailed record of Victorian manners.
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Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer is one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century. His Civil War illustrations and late Maine seascapes combined clear-eyed realism with formal power that anticipated American modernism.
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Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet scandalised Paris with Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, painting contemporary subjects with the flat brushwork and blunt honesty of Realism while refusing the polished finish the Salon demanded. Though he never exhibited with the Impressionists, his younger admirers Monet, Renoir, and Degas regarded him as their essential forerunner.
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Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet founded Realism by refusing to paint anything he had not seen with his own eyes, scandalising the Paris Salon with monumental depictions of ordinary stonebreakers and provincial funerals once reserved for kings and saints. His defiant motto, to paint real and existing things, became the rallying cry for every movement that followed.
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Henri Fantin-Latour
Henri Fantin-Latour is best remembered for exquisitely observed flower still lifes and group portraits of the Paris avant-garde, gathering poets and painters like Manet and Whistler into single canvases as a quiet record of a revolutionary generation. His flowers, painted purely for their own sake, remain among the most sought-after still lifes of the nineteenth century.
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