Naturalism

In art, realism is generally the attempt to represent subject-matter truthfully, without artificiality, exaggeration, or speculative or supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not necessarily synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the commoner and the rise of leftist politics.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Naturalism (art)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Naturalism is art movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 23 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶