Realism in Art and Literature

1. Realism in Art and Literature Primarily second half of 19th century

2. Characteristics of Realism in literature and the visual arts

3. 1. Focus on common, everyday people and events • Photography invented (1830s) • Slice of life approach • Example from George Eliot’s Adam Bede

4. from Adam Bede “Perhaps you will say, ‘Do improve the facts a little. . . . The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not such a mixed entangled affair. . . . Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right.’ “But, my dear friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? . . . Nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions.”

5. 2. Truthful treatment of material • William Dean Howells (the “dean” of American realism) • Howells: “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” • Howells: “Is it true? True to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?”

6. 3. Focus on the here and now • Clear break from the Romantic urge of the supernatural • Courbet: “Show me an angel and I’ll paint one.” • Development of the diorama and panorama

7. Panorama of Chicago, Christian Inger, lithograph (1857)

8. Some reasons for this emphasis on realistic life • New print media (like lithography) • Steam printing press, cheap newsprint (Penny Magazine 1832) • Railroads for distribution 1. New technologies

9. 2. Rising Middle Class • Large reading audience, especially women • Characters tended to be drawn from everyday middle class life • Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

10. Gustave Courbet (1819-77)

11. Courbet Hollyhocks in a Copper Bowl (1872)

12. Courbet Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856)

13. Courbet: Burial at Ornans (1849)