5 Famous Painters of American Realism

As the new century approached, the growth of machine manufacturing, the rise of the automobile, and the proliferation of the telephone sped up the pace of the world. Workers scraped and clawed to retain a foothold in new economies. Handheld cameras made it easy to record images with unfailing accuracy, and photos started to appear regularly in daily newspapers.

Artists responded. In Europe, Fauvism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Picasso’s Cubism shook up traditional painting. American realists dug in and created images more telling than anything shot through a camera lens.

1. Winslow Homer

First trained in lithography, at the age of 25, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) traveled to Virginia as a Civil War correspondent for Harper’s Weekly. His wartime sketches and drawings led to the hallmark oil paintings Home, Sweet Home (c. 1863) and Prisoners from the Front (1866). Homer’s subjects included hunting and camping scenes, sailing, and workers. Later in his career, he moved increasingly toward watercolor. His work frequently portrayed a sense of his subjects’ solitude, often by placing them against the wide expanse of nature.

2. Thomas Eakins

Born in Philadelphia in 1844, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and supplemented his art education with anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College. His mastery of human physiology shows in his paintings of naked bathers, boxers, wrestlers, and rowers on the Schuylkill River. Unfortunately, his attention to the human form spilled over into a tumultuous personal life and controversial teaching methods. Scandal followed him, yet his talent was undeniable. Toward the end of his life, he turned to portraiture, showing his subjects in unflinching likeness.

3. Robert Henri

Robert Henri (1865–1929) came from the kind of hardscrabble life he sought to paint. Born Robert Henry Cozad in Ohio, his father changed the family name to Henri after shooting a rival in the face during a land dispute and fleeing east. Robert Henri enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and greatly admired Thomas Eakins’ work. Like Eakins, he strove to show beauty in common people and everyday urban life. He preached a philosophy of “Art for life’s sake,” believing the pursuit of art, regardless of the result, to be noble and fulfilling.

A great teacher, Henri is considered the father of the Ashcan School, a group of realists including George Luks, John Sloan, George Bellows, and William Glackens. This group of artists influenced another Henri student, Edward Hopper.

4. Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper’s (1882–1967) haunting watercolors are easily recognizable, and his painting Nighthawks has become almost cliché, an image reproduced in cartoons and greeting cards. He’s inseparable from the story of 20th-century America. Like many realist painters of his era, Hopper also worked as a freelance illustrator, and his ability to imply narrative is one of the strongest aspects of his work. Often, he uses the geometry and perspective of manmade structures to accentuate the isolation of his figures as they peer out of windows or are viewed through them or are boxed into corners of confining rooms.

5. Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)

Wyeth fits on this list of American Realism painters because of the qualities in his work, even if the chronology makes him an outlier. While decades removed from Winslow Homer and Robert Henri’s Ashcan school, Wyeth’s realistic depictions of American life carry a haunting tenderness and isolation similar to Hopper’s. Also, like Hopper, his most famous painting, Christina’s World, is inextricable from American pop culture. Much of his work is set against the backdrop of the rugged New England countryside. Wyeth’s decades of realist work endured through several art movements, including the post-war shift toward Abstract Expressionism.

While the artists on this list are rather homogeneous, this is reflective of American art schools that were not admitting students of color and, at best, grudgingly admitting women who, even once admitted, were often excluded from life-drawing classes. Even when educated and talented, women were not given serious attention. That included Edward Hopper’s wife Josephine Nivison Hopper, also a student of Henri. Mary Cassatt, a distant cousin of Henri, is sometimes included among American realists, however, she spent much of her life in Europe and aligned more with the Impressionists. Cecilia Beaux, the first female teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, is another candidate for this list, but her portraits are more idyllic than realist.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue with the brilliance of the five painters of American Realism listed. They helped define not only American art but also 20th-century American identity.