Realism (art movement)

Realist works depicted people of all social classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions.

[citation needed] The popularity of such "realistic" works grew with the introduction of photography—a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look objectively real.

After the arrival of Impressionism and later movements which downgraded the importance of precise illusionistic brushwork, it often came to refer simply to the use of a more traditional and tighter painting style.

It has been used for a number of later movements and trends in art, some involving careful illusionistic representation, such as Photorealism, and others the depiction of "realist" subject matter in a social sense, or attempts at both.

[4][5][6] Jules Bastien-Lepage is closely associated with the beginning of Naturalism, an artistic style that emerged from the later phase of the Realist movement and heralded the arrival of Impressionism.

[7] Realists used unprettified detail depicting the existence of ordinary contemporary life, coinciding in the contemporaneous naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert.

Leibl and several other young German painters met Courbet in 1869 when he visited Munich to exhibit his works and demonstrate his manner of painting from nature.

In the United States, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins were important Realists and forerunners of the Ashcan School, an early-20th-century art movement largely based in New York City.

The Ashcan School included such artists as George Bellows and Robert Henri, and helped to define American realism in its tendency to depict the daily life of poorer members of society.