In today’s lecture, we discussed Realism, which as the title of the movement suggests was about capturing real life. It focused not on idealized grand figures, but on everyday, often working-class or rural people, and aimed to elevate them to the height of the grand portraits and history paintings of the past. This art movement was heavily influenced by the ongoing revolutions and social tensions in Europe as well as the rapidly growing industrialization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hallmark work of this period is Millet’s The Sower<\/em>, which is a large portrait of a peasant sowing seeds in a field at dawn. The man’s face is covered by his hat and the showdown from the rising sun behind him. His face being obscured is meant to make him a representative of peasants as a collective, not just a specific man from a specific town, but all peasants everywhere. Millet himself came from a peasant family and in his art career expressed great sympathy for peasants, and often aimed to elevate them in his works. He wanted to highlight the labor of the working class, especially in the day of rapid industrialization in France which prioritized machines over humans. Millet wants to remind urban viewers that peasants are the backbone of French society, not machines or industry, and without their labor French society would collapse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In today’s lecture, we discussed Realism, which as the title of the movement suggests was about capturing real life. It focused not on idealized grand figures, but on everyday, often working-class or rural people, and aimed to elevate them to the height of the grand portraits and history paintings of the past. This art movement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18547,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18547"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2437,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions\/2437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}