Genres

Movement in mid- to late 19th-century art, in which an attempt was made to create objective representations of the external world based on the impartial observation of contemporary life. Realism was consciously democratic, including in its subject-matter and audience activities and social classes previously considered unworthy of representation in high art. The most coherent development …

Group of French painters associated with the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris and especially with the village of Barbizon. The main members of this informal group were , , , and ; they formed a recognizable school from the early 1830s to the 1870s. Mainly concerned with landscape, they had little interest in the classical …