1. Keeping it Real Realism
“The attempt in art and literature to depict life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it” (Adventures 950).

2. Overly dramatic and idealized art like the painting above, were a thing of the past. Likewise, dramatic, imaginative, and sentimental literature like The Birthmark, are abandoned.

3. Romanticism vs. Realism
Both are paintings of churches. One is Romantic, the other, Realist. Which is which?

4. Art and literature moves away from the fantastic and idealized and begins to depict the everyday lives of ordinary people.

5. Prior to paintings like this, by Gustave Courbet, few people painted or wrote about the working class.
Why did artists and writers suddenly gain interest in depicting the plight of people that had, for many generations, been ignored?
The Stone Breakers

6. The Sower
Artists began to paint pictures depicting the difficulties and plight of the working class, a segment of the population that had seldom been the focus of artistic or literary works.

7. Copley’s Watson and the Shark
So, instead of showing an overly dramatic, idealized scene of a shark attack…

8. Daumier’s Third Class Carriage
…artists and writers sought to depict the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
Daumier’s Third Class Carriage
If this painting were done today, how do you think the subject matter and setting would be changed?

9. Observed Fact
Writers and artists placed less emphasis on imagination (like Masque of the Red Death) and more emphasis on observed fact.
Anshutz’s Ironworkers at Lunch

10. Search for Truth
The growing importance of science, brought on largely by Darwin’s new theory of evolution, creates an increased interest in art and literature that depicts life as it is rather than how it is imagined to be.
Wee Maureen, by Robert Henri

11. From Ideas…
Dramatic, imaginative scenes like Lion Attacking a Horse were based on the ideas and creativity of the artist, Stubbs.

12. … to Facts
People wanted to see things as they are, without sentimentalizing or idealizing the subject matter. Here, we see Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net, a depiction of ordinary people doing ordinary work.

13. Millet’s The Fishermen
From work…
Millet’s The Fishermen

14. …to Play?
What is this young woman’s attitude or disposition? Why is this painting considered part of the Realist movement?
Degas’ Absinthe Drinker

15. Realism or Romanticism?

16. Thomas Eakins
The Gross Clinic (1875) is considered Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece. The painting was rejected for an exhibition in Philadelphia to commemorate the centennial of American Independence because it was considered too harshly realistic.

17. The Gross Clinic and Eakins
Thomas Eakins ( ): American realist painter, one of the foremost of the 19th century.
The Gross Clinic combined sharp realism—a depiction of an operation in progress—with psychological acuity in the portrayal of the surgeon, Doctor Gross.

18. Realism or Romanticism?

19. Hudson River School Painter Bierdstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-born American artist who specialized in grandiose paintings of spectacular mountain scenery in the western United States. The 1868 painting shown here, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

20. More on the Hudson River School
Hudson River School: the first group of landscape painters to emerge in the United States after independence from Great Britain. The Hudson River School flourished between 1820 and 1880.
Many artists associated with the group lived and painted in the Catskill Mountains region of New York State, particularly along the Hudson River. Their work is characterized by meticulous and realistic attention to detail and a poetic feeling for nature characteristic of romanticism.
Other artists who painted elsewhere, such as Bierdstadt in the West, are considered members of the school because their landscapes display the same romantic love of nature, formal composition, and precise detail typical of the Hudson River School.

21. Realism or Romanticism?

22. Snow in New York by Robert Henri
Ash Can School ( ): A group of urban realist painters in America creating work around the early part of 20th century.
Founded by the artist and teacher Robert Henri
Group began in Philadelphia around 1891
The Ash Can school artists sought to paint "real life" and urban reality. These artists believed what was real and true in life was what was beautiful and what constituted "art." They painted gritty urban scenes and the poor and disenfranchised in America.

23. Realism or Romanticism?

24. Nighthawks
"
Hopper’s paintings combined realism with isolation, vastness, melancholy.
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

25. Edward Hopper
Hopper recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night.
Corn Hill (Truro, Cape Cod)

26. More Edward Hopper
He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness—his theatres are often semideserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage.
Sunday

27. Works Cited http://www.artmovements.co.uk/ashcanschool.htm
Adventures in American Literature