Word: realist
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...Jane Austen a realist in the modern sense of the term...
Leonardo da Vinci was the first of the great Venetian painters. He has been called an idealist, a realist, a dreamer and a scientist. A scientist he certainly was, and it is to be greatly lamented, for it caused him to attempt much, and to finish little. His many and various tastes urged him different ways. He looked too deeply into the "well spring of truth," and in striving after the unobtainable, he left behind him a life of singular incompleteness, but of vast promise. He was neither religionist nor classicist, and looked at things coldly and scientifically...
Zola, said Mr. Copeland, in his accumulation of details may be called a realist, but in his massing of movements and men, he is certainly an idealist, but an idealist whose ideals were of the mud rather than of the sky. In one of his works he has taken the family of Bougon Macquart and carried them on through one book after another in all their adventures, a thing which no writer since Balsac has attempted, and by this means he gives a back-ground of the world and time which most modern French writers fail...
...tell which of these two methods of painting is the better, that is, which the more accurately expresses the effects and truths of nature. Art, we are given to understand, is the exponent of the true, the good and the beautiful, but it seems very doubtful whether either the Realist or the Impressionist gives us art in his paintings...
Take, for example, the spade and notice how each school treats it. For the Realist of the Ruskin type it is a tool of wood and iron, every fibre, every grain, every slightest characteristic of which, even the name branded in scarcely legible letters on the handle, must be painted with the most painful accuracy. For the Impressionist it is the symbol of labor, a mass of shadow against a twilight sky, suggesting peasant toil and suffering. Between these we must decide. We want neither a collection, a conglomeration of geology and botany, nor a vague, indefinite suggestion...