Realism

The romantic painters looked at life around -them or at the forms of nature to find patterns symbolic of emotional experience. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who called himself Realiste felt that the art of painting should consist of nothing more than the most precise definition possible of purely objective qualities of things and people. Burial at Ornans (1849) was in intention a matter-of-fact portrayal of an episode without glamor or nobility, an exercise in the act of seeing. Courbet considered the idealism of the neoclassicists and the exotic emotionalism of the romanticists as equally artificial; his often deliberately shocking subject matter and objective treatment thereof are similar in spirit to the naturalism of much literature contemporary with it, like the works of Zola. No less realistic in subject matter but warmed by obvious sympathy and understanding of humanity is the art of Honore Daumier (1808-1879). Commanding a wonderfully expressive line developed during his activity as a caricaturist for several Parisian journals and using a color scheme of a sobriety comparable in character and effect to that of Rembrandt, Daumier gives us, in paintings like Third-Class Carriage, glimpses into the inmost character of the French middle classes. His work is of such eminent sincerity and simple directness as to establish him as one of the great interpretive painters of all time.