French artist Gustave Courbet was perhaps the strongest exponent of the realist movement in the mid 1800s. Much like Caravaggio in the seventeenth century, he violated rules of artistic propriety by exposing the conditions of every day workers to the viewer.

 

His groundbreaking works portrayed ordinary people from the artist's native region on a 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, a French politician, the founder of Mutualist philosophy, an economist and a libertarian socialist, saw 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 rejected 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 (see in the slideshow above), exhibited at the Salon of 1852, violated conventional rules of scale and perspective and challenged traditional class distinctions by underlining the close connections between the young women (the artist's sisters), who represented the emerging rural middle class, and the poor cowherd who accepted their charity.

 

The Stonebreakers (1850) was painted only one year after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their influential pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto'  Inspired by the "complete expression of human misery" in an encounter with two road workers, Courbet asked them to pose for him in his studio. Painting the road workers life size on a large canvas, Courbet showed them absorbed in their task, faceless and anonymous, dulled by the relentless, numbingly repetitive task of breaking stone to build a road. It was considered to be scandalous.

 

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 11 accepted submissions and displayed his paintings privately in his Pavillon du Réalisme, not far from the official international exhibition.

 

Jean François Millet (1814-1875) was born into a peasant family near Cherbourg, in Normandy, France. His artistic talent was soon recognised, and after some training with local artists, the city of Cherbourg provided money for him to study in Paris. He spent some time in the studio of Paul Delaroche, and at the École des Beaux-Arts, and began his career as a portrait painter. In 1849, he moved to Barbizon, a small village in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, and began the series of rural scenes for which he became famous. The Sower, The Gleaners, and The Angelus depict local peasants, with a powerful simplicity and dignity.

 

His peasant background clearly left its mark as his paintings often reflect French rural scenes of the mid 1800’s. His art, though, does not portray an idyllic life.  Millet’s theme consistently focuses on the ordinary and the actual.

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875) was a French landscape painter and Portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting which anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

 

Between 1825 and 1843  Corot travelled to Italy, which was considered  at the time to be essential to the formation of a landscape artist.

 

His reputation was established by the 1850s, which was also the period when his style became softer and his colours more restricted. In his late studio landscapes, which often included  bathers, and allegorical figures, he used only a small range of colours, often using soft  greys and blue-greens, with spots of brighter colour confined to the clothing of the figures. He preferred to focus on mood and atmosphere rather than topographical detail, particularly in what he called his ‘souvenirs’, which were based on memories of real landscapes.

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Theodore Rousseau  (1812-1867), together with Corot, is considered a to be founding members of the Barbizon movement. Their work had many similarities in subject matter and style, especially their manner of composing a picture through values. However, his work was  considered a bold departure from the classical formulas of landscape painting and in particular, his early work was strongly criticised as being too ‘harsh’ and ‘boldly coloured.’ He was known amongst his fellow painters in Barbizon for his remarkable dedication to studying nature. A contemporary admirer said, “Rousseau was indefatigable in his analysis of nature. He observed, studied, sought for vulnerable points, and then painted. His results taught him new lessons, and he returned to nature to find out new secrets.” 

 

As an exponent of realism, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier  (1815-1891) is known primarily for his genre pictures and scenes of contemporary life. With his street views painted during the 1848 revolution and Napoleonic battle scenes, he is regarded as an accurate chronicler of his times, but Meissonier also had a fondness for the past, in particular for the 17th and 18th centuries. This tendency is also apparent in this painting of a young man busy writing (Young Man Writing, 1852) in the slideshow above. Although creating the illusion of a real, freshly observed situation, Meissonier has actually composed the scene carefully using various props. The large armchair covered in red fabric on which the man is sitting is in the style of Louis XIII (1601–1643). The sitter’s clothing, on the other hand, was in vogue during the time of Louis XVI (1754–1793). The style of painting is also inspired by the Baroque realism of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whose work Meissonier copied in the Louvre after his arrival in Paris as a young painting student.

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Painter of animals (animalier),  Rosa Bonheur was not only the first woman artist to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur, which was established by Napoleon I to honour the most accomplished citizens, she was also one of the most prominent women artists in Europe at the time. She didn't sentimentalise her subjects, but portrayed them in their natural habitat. She was both precise and painstaking in her technique - which evoked a strong sense of rural life.

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