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)