Realist Painting Style: Courbet, Millet, and Daumier

The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Realism

"Realism is democracy in art," Courbet believed (Nochlin, xiii). Taking that as the credo upon which artists constructed their work, the Realist style could be nothing if not anti-academic, anti-historical, and anti-conservative. Indeed, whether brushstrokes, pen markings, or etchings into stone or metal form the image, the underlying attitude is one of freedom, attention to the gross characteristics of form, dismissal of mere decoration for its own sake, and an unashamed celebration of the ordinary. The self-consciousness of the finely chosen brushstroke is gone, replaced by a mark that favors expression of the interplay between what is seen and the seer. Gone is any demand from outside the artist to make things appear lovelier, grander, or more stately than they perhaps really are. It is, in short, art with the warts painted in — the "attempt to render in paint that which exists in three dimensions." It is, moreover, a less light-filled art than what had gone before in the Romantic style, and what would come after in Impressionism. It used the colors of the palette that corresponded to the nature of the subject matter, and that subject matter had changed from nobility in shining satins to the peasantry in rough and dirty woolens and linens. It might be fair to say that Realism was a portrait of reality gone down market one full step, for the painters themselves were, by and large, firmly bourgeois. Realism might therefore also be described as a style depicting "what is" from a viewpoint that could easily look down were it not rooted in an egalitarian philosophy and a compassionate attitude.

Because the peasantry has no history, and the bourgeoisie has little — certainly not the illustrious family trees of the nobility nominally deposed in the revolutions across Europe in 1848 — the concept of time as a locus for Realist paintings was far different from how time had been used in all the movements that had come before. Classicism was timeless in that it was a self-involved ethos imagining that events which had occurred two thousand years earlier still had lasting value for the viewer and were fit subjects for art. Romanticism was timeless in that it celebrated the enduring noble qualities of mankind in an imaginary, color-washed palette that could, to a Realist, only be the stuff of dreams. But Realism took on the nature of the eternal now. How Courbet himself expressed it was this: "Il faut être de son temps" (Nochlin, 19). Translated, the slogan — "It is necessary to be of your own time" — was the rallying cry of all Realists.

But exactly what did it mean? It was a call to what the artists saw as authenticity: to express and inform about the actual events and people of the day, month, year, and decade — always changing, never mired in a particularly admired era, as they accused the classical academicians of being. It is entirely possible that the introduction of photography — an "instant painting" — may have informed this viewpoint as much as did the 1848 Revolution and its destruction of much of the remaining Bonapartist elitism and the previous noble stratification of French society. By anchoring the subject matter of art in its own time, the eternal present, the way was opened for the invention of the avant-garde, meaning that something is in advance of one's own time (Nochlin, 7). In attempting to bring about social change — which would happen sometime in the future — art was necessarily and perennially in advance of its own time, although it often lagged behind technically.

Charles Baudelaire, author and eloquent spokesman of Realism, had fought on the barricades in the 1848 Revolution and later wrote extensively on art. In one work he condemned the "puerile utopia of the art-for-art's sake school" (Nochlin, 3). As an egalitarian, Baudelaire wanted art, as much as anything else in life, to both reflect and engage the greatest number of people — the working class. He decried that even when workers did walk through a great treasure house of art such as the Louvre, they would come away having seen objects but not having been moved at any elemental level. His call for "painters of modern life" was, viewed through twenty-first-century glasses, as self-defining and limiting as any other demand for a particular attitude in art had ever been. It was simply different because it celebrated not the nobility, but the serf.

Realism did focus on the serf — or, as they were called by that time, the worker. But even a brief look at the depictions of workers in Courbet's paintings makes it clear that these people have nothing: their clothes are minimal and untidy, their surroundings unlovely, their expressions unhappy. Celebrating the worker becomes literally a paean to the heroism of the millions who toil — a refreshing change from celebrating the solipsism of the classes who had always caused them to toil. It is worth remembering that the concept of time had changed, no longer mired in the past but rather avant-garde, looking toward the future. It would have to be: the "now" that Courbet and his contemporaries painted was certainly nothing to aspire to. It was, however, a reflection of a certain segment of what actually was.

Three Painters, Three Approaches

A discussion of three paintings — one each by Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and Honoré Daumier — illuminates how these three important Realists combined the political with the painterly, the ethos with the aesthetics.

The Sleeping Spinner, oil on canvas, 35⅞ × 45¼ in. (91 × 115 cm), Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

Courbet, for all his derision of classicism, is perhaps the most classical among the three, at least in terms of technique. He chooses a single female subject — not an unusual choice — and shows her in her familiar surroundings, again quite ordinary for centuries of figure painting. He picks out the shape of her face and her hands — those things which make a human being an individual from a pictorial standpoint — with intense light, and fades into the background the everyday objects surrounding her. That is the source of the difference: portraits of nobles from times past would have included objects displaying the individual's station. In this case, the only objects displayed clearly are the spinning wheel and the spool. As in classical portraits, these objects give information about the subject — and therein lies the radical departure. The subject is not only a worker, but also a female worker, and not merely a female worker but one who is exhausted, fallen asleep on the job. That was "painting for modern times," as Baudelaire would have it. But Courbet's technique, from the ordering of his composition to the fineness of his brushstrokes, is not nearly as avant-garde as that of some of his contemporaries. In this, he might have been perfectly suited to bridge the gap between classicism and the future, bringing at least an acknowledgement of skill to attempts to be shown at reputable venues.

The Walk to Work (Le Départ pour le Travail), oil on canvas, 55.5 × 46 cm (21⅞ × 18⅛ in.).

Millet has chosen an even more radical approach than Courbet. His composition of two figures walking across fields to work is far more peasant-oriented — Courbet's approach possesses a more bourgeois feeling and subject. His figures are not well dressed, whereas Courbet's sleeper is quite adequately robed for her place and time. Their clothing is tattered, dirty, and of poor quality. Their relative positions, however, make it clear that this is art of a far different sort than had come before. The man is not standing behind, presenting the lady. He is walking in front, and his face is in shadow. The woman, although on a plane behind the man, faces front, confronting the viewer — almost expressionless, with a posture neither hopeless nor grand. She simply is. In its simple activity, composition, and studiously emotionless rendering, this painting is more avant-garde by far than Courbet's. Its rougher brushstrokes seem perfectly suited to the subject matter. This painting would have been harder to hang in the well-heeled households of the day, and more demanding of salon judges willing to be open to new ideas. Because of this, the painting makes a more forceful — or at least more aggressive — statement about the changes in art and in the world of its time.

The Third-Class Carriage, 1863–65, oil on canvas, 25¾ × 35½ in. (65.4 × 90.2 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Daumier's painting depicts a woman nursing a baby on a train — a scene that might still cause discomfort in parts of the United States today. And yet in its own time, it was probably far more common for a working-class woman to nurse in public than it is now. But depicting it in art was another matter entirely. In the depiction, the nature of French society in the 1860s is explained in detail. The mother looks down lovingly at the baby. The woman beside her is lost in her own thoughts; the boy beside her sleeps. In the background, people go about their own business — talking, arguing, gazing at the passing scenery. One figure at the far left looks as though he might be casting a sidelong, disapproving glance at what the woman is doing. He is, in fact, one of the few well-dressed figures in the painting, conspicuous in his top hat and stiff posture. While it is an oil painting, it borrows much from the line work of lithography — a departure in technique, a blending of painting with drawing.

It is yet another step beyond Courbet in terms of removal from classical technique. While Millet's work is far broader in concept, construction, and execution than Courbet's, Daumier's is still broader in concept, still more expansive in construction and composition, and still more modern in execution.

The attitudes of the Realists toward workers differ markedly from contemporary attitudes. While Americans nominally seem to value the "common man," most effort goes toward becoming anything but — or at least toward watching reality shows that are nothing more than vicarious dreams of a better condition. In contemporary art, it is rare — at least since the end of the Ashcan School — to see anything resembling the extolling of workers. And even for the Ashcan School, it was industry itself that was paramount.