Realist Masterworks

Masterworks of 19th Century French Realism from the National Gallery of Canada

September 10 to November 27, 2005

Organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Travelling Exhibitions Indemnification Program. Presented with the generous support of Dr. Jacqui Shumiatcher.

The MacKenzie Art Gallery once again welcomes to its walls some of the most celebrated paintings from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The sixteen Realist canvases in this masterworks exhibition represent the reforming wave which transformed nineteenth-century French art: a revolution in how artists saw themselves and the world around them.

Among the twelve artists represented are some of the most influential and revered in the history of art: Paul Cézanne, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-François Millet, and James Tissot. Their work, which emerged from an age of rebels and revolutions, left a lasting legacy of brilliant observation and dedicated social engagement—a legacy which would set the stage for their successors, the Impressionists.

The Realist movement emerged in France during the first half of the nineteenth-century as a reaction to Romanticism and the increasingly false messages of its religious and heroic subjects. Realist artists instead sought inspiration in the poetry of modern life and in their beloved French landscape. Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), for example, drew and painted scenes of his daily experiences on the streets of Paris and its environs, while Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), a founder of the Barbizon school, established the countryside of France as legitimate subject matter over the Italianate settings of classical mythology. A leading figure of the movement, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), actively sought to undermine the authority of the French Academy and make the annual Salon exhibition more democratic, free of intellectual constraints and imposed ways of understanding art. He defined Realism in 1861 as follows: “I maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects.”

Building on the legacy of the exhibition Impressionist Masterworks from the National Gallery of Canada of five years ago, the MacKenzie Art Gallery is one of only six galleries in Canada to host this prestigious exhibition. With its message of artistic and social transformation, it offers a fitting complement to celebrations of our provincial centennial and the remarkable cultural and political history of Saskatchewan.

Image credit:
Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)
The Third-Class Carriage, c.1863-65
Le wagon de troisième classe
oil on canvas
65.4 x 90.2 cm
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada
Purchased 1946 (4633)

Realist Masterworks

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