This past Monday we were back in the classroom talking about Realism. This was an art movement that I really had no prior experience with, and I had no idea that Impressionism was essentially a branch of Realism.
Spawned in France at the start of the Second Republic, realist artists were tired of classically informed arts and chose to represent the ever-changing world as they saw it. We looked at the works of Millet and Courbet, two painters who turned to their bucolic roots to magnify and elevate the lives of provincial folks. Unembellished and unidealized, early Realist paintings depict figures and settings as plainly and truthfully as possible with contrasting overtones of timelessness and change. Millet’s The Sower is at once a life-like depiction of a provincial peasant sowing seeds at dawn and at the same time a glorification of the peasantry at large that affirms their role as the backbone of French society even in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
From here we went on to look at other French paintings that captured the beauty and simplicity of the province through artists like Bonheur, and realism applied to the urban landscapes through the cartoons and paintings of Honore Daumier. We ended by crossing the pond to discuss the prominent American Realists, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Homer, like Millet, used his bucolic and nostalgic “genre scenes” to grapple with the changing political landscape and comment on America’s ‘loss of innocence’ following the Civil War. Eakins, on the other hand, was more concerned with capturing the changing landscapes of America and the activities of the growing middle class.