Courbet (1819–1877) established himself as
the leading proponent of Realism by challenging the primacy of history
painting, long favored at the official Salons and the École des Beaux-Arts, the
state-sponsored art academy. The groundbreaking works that Courbet exhibited at
the
Paris Salons of 1849 and 1850–51—notably
A
Burial at Ornans (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and
The Stonebreakers (destroyed)—portrayed
ordinary people from the artist's native region on the monumental scale
formerly reserved for the elevating themes of history painting. At the time,
Courbet's choice of contemporary subject matter and his flouting of artistic
convention was interpreted by some as an anti-authoritarian political threat.
Proudhon, in fact, read
The Stonebreakers as an "irony
directed against our industrialized civilization ... which is incapable of
freeing man from the heaviest, most difficult, most unpleasant tasks, the
eternal lot of the poor." To achieve an honest and straightforward
depiction of rural life, Courbet eschewed the idealized academic technique and
employed a deliberately simple style, rooted in popular imagery, which seemed
crude to many critics of the day. His
Young Women from the Village (
40.175), exhibited at the Salon of 1852, violates conventional rules of scale and
perspective and challenges traditional class distinctions by underlining the
close connections between the young women (the artist's sisters), who represent
the emerging rural middle class, and the poor cowherd who accepts their
charity.
When two of Courbet's major works (
A Burial at Ornans and
The
Painter's Studio) were rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition
Universelle in Paris, he withdrew his eleven accepted submissions and displayed
his paintings privately in his Pavillon du Réalisme, not far from the official
international exhibition. For the introduction to the catalogue of this
independent, one-man show, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto, echoing the tone
of the period's political manifestos, in which he asserts his goal as an artist
"to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according
to my own estimation." In his autobiographical
The Painter's
Studio (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Courbet is surrounded by groups of his
friends, patrons, and even his models, documenting his artistic and political
experiences since the Revolution of 1848.
During the same period, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) executed scenes of
rural life that monumentalize peasants at work, such as
Sheep Shearing
Beneath a Tree (
40.12.3). While a large portion of the French
population was migrating from rural areas to the industrialized cities, Millet
left Paris in 1849 and settled in Barbizon, where he lived the rest of his
life, close to the rustic subjects he painted throughout his career.
The
Gleaners (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon of 1857,
created scandal because of its honest depiction of rural poverty. The bent
postures of Millet's gleaners, as well as his heavy application of paint,
emphasize the physical hardship of their task. Like Courbet's portrayal of
stonebreakers, Millet's choice of subject was considered politically
subversive, even though his style was more conservative than that of Courbet,
reflecting his academic training. Millet endows his subjects with a sculptural
presence that recalls the art of Michelangelo and
Nicolas Poussin, as seen in his
Woman
with a Rake(
38.75). His tendency
to generalize his figures gives many of his works a sentimental quality that
distinguishes them from Courbet's unidealized paintings.
Vincent van Gogh greatly admired Millet
and made copies of his compositions, including
First Steps, after
Millet (
64.165.2).
The socially conscious art of Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) offers an urban
counterpart to that of Millet. Daumier highlighted socioeconomic distinctions
in the newly modernized urban environment in a group of paintings executed
around 1864 that illustrate the experience of modern rail travel in first-,
second-, and third-class train compartments. In
The First-Class Carriage (Walters
Art Museum, Baltimore), there is almost no physical or psychological contact
among the four well-dressed figures, whereas
The Third-Class Carriage (
29.100.129) is tightly packed with an anonymous
crowd of working-class men and women. In the foreground, Daumier isolates three
generations of an apparently fatherless family, conveying the hardship of their
daily existence through the weary poses of the young mother and sleeping boy.
Though clearly of humble means, their postures, clothing, and facial features
are rendered in as much detail as those of the first-class travelers.
Best known as a
lithographer, Daumier produced thousands of
graphic works for journals such as
La Caricature and
Le
Charivari, satirizing government officials and the manners of the
bourgeoisie. As early as 1832, Daumier was imprisoned for an image of
Louis-Philippe as Rabelais' Gargantua, seated on a commode and expelling public
honors to his supporters. Daumier parodied the king again in 1834 with his
caricature
Past, Present, Future (
41.16.1), in which the increasingly sour expressions
on the three faces of Louis-Philippe suggest the failures of his regime. In the
same year, Daumier published
Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834, in
the journal
Association Mensuelle (
20.23). Though
Daumier did not witness the event portrayed—the violent suppression of a
workers' demonstration—the work is unsparing in its grim depiction of death and
government brutality; Louis-Philippe ordered the destruction of all circulating
prints immediately after its publication.
As a result of Courbet's political activism during the Paris Commune of 1871,
he too was jailed. Incarcerated at Versailles before serving a six-month prison
sentence for participation in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, Courbet
documented his observations of the conditions under which children were held in
his drawing
Young Communards in Prison (1999.251), published
in the magazine
L'Autograph, one of a small number of works
inspired by his experiences following the fall of the Commune.
Like Millet, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) favored rural imagery and developed an
idealizing style derived from the art of the past. Similar in scale to
Courbet's works of the same period, Bonheur's imposing
Horse Fair (
87.25), shown at the
Salon of 1853, is the product of extensive preparatory drawings and the
artist's scientific study of animal anatomy; her style also reflects the
influence of such Romantic painters as Delacroix and Gericault and the
classical equine sculpture from the Parthenon.
Édouard Manet and the
Impressionists were the immediate heirs
to the Realist legacy, as they too embraced the imagery of modern life. By the
1870s and 1880s, however, their art no longer carried the political charge of
Realism.
