Realism and the Road to Modern Painting

Realism emerged in France around mid-century as a deliberate rejection of both Romantic idealization and Neoclassical elevation of subject matter. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) insisted on painting ordinary contemporary life at the same monumental scale traditionally reserved for history painting, provoking outrage with works such as The Stone Breakers (1849, destroyed in 1945) and A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850), which depicted rural laborers and an unglamorous provincial funeral with unflinching directness. Courbet's famous declaration that he had never seen an angel, and therefore could not paint one, captured Realism's core insistence on depicting only what could be directly observed.