Realism Paintings

Realism was a movement in fine art that appeared after the Romanticism and took place in European art between 1840-1900. Most of the time European art was Renaissance-inspired and used traditional for this style academic techniques of idealized painting. The Industrial Revolution and huge social changes made artists to seek for new art styles to depict real objects as they are, breaking rules of high art tradition.

Characteristics of Realism

The new movement has influenced all fine art genres: Realistic artworks were created in portraits, landscapes, history painting and genre-painting. In France artists went to province looking for ’real’ France and founded artistic groups in several cities.

List of most famous Realism artists includes Gustave Courbet, Ivan Shishkin, Ilya Repin, Adolph von Menzel, Thomas Eakins, Jean-Francois Millet, Vasily Perov, Ivan Kramskoy, Isaac Levitan and many others. Some artists who worked in other styles painted several Realistic pictures.

Realism artists depicted episodes from rural, urban and street life, and shocked the upper class artistic society by the way they painted nudity. Realism is a movement from the ’ideal’, popular for many centuries since Ancient art, to ordinary — common people and real life situations. This made a great shift in the world of art and made artists reconsider their points of view.

Development of Realism in 20th century

Though the classical Realism ended in 1900, most of the 20th century artists were influenced by it, and now we can see developments of Realism style in many other different styles:

• Social Realism that described life of American workers during Great Depression;
• Surrealism and Magic Realism which added a part of artist’s fantasy to the real world scenes;
• Photorealism which focused on depicting the smallest details of an object and required strong skills;
• Hyperrealism — development of Photorealism showing objects just like in the photo.

ART.biz is a place where you can find magnificent examples of modern fine art works of all styles. We work with artists from all over the world to provide you with wide diversity of art techniques and styles. You can choose the painting using several parameters including preferred colour of an artwork.

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