**In Europe, the artistic period after Romanticism was one of much change. In this period, Realism, artists and authors started to move away from the idea of nature and instead focused on life itself. Realism as a genre of art was one of the first types of paintings to show Europe as it really was. By studying the paintings done in this time period, one can easily see the lives of the working and middle class. However, Realism did not necessarily show how the middle class had changed. Rather, the art of the Realist period showed the middle class as it always was, along with documenting the truth of how industrialized Europe had become.
**In past artistic movements, the main focus of art had often been religious figures or important political figures. Even though they might have shown common people, one could tell that the scenes themselves were of great importance without having to read too much into them. In Eugene Delacroix's painting of French revolutionaries lead by a women carrying the revolutionary flag, this was clearly a pivotal point in French history. This scene depicted in this painting was of great significance to France as a whole. On the other hand, Fig. 1 shows simple people riding on a train. The train itself is not very important, nor are any of the people in it. These are the true common people. There was a small majority of middle-class men or women who actually participated in the fight for rights in the French Revolution. Fig. 1, being a Realistic painting, showed these people as they really were: folk with simple lives and simple tasks to do, tasks that do not involve fighting in glorious wars. Fig. 2 is another simple painting. The people in this are merely taking a merry stroll down the street as the rain is clearing up. There is nothing truly extraordinary going on. In one painting of the previous Romantic era, The Raft of the Medusa, every person on the shipwrecked raft is doing something, the picture is busy and full of action. This is hardly ever the case in reality. Real life is often slow paced and leisurely, not as hectic as that painting portrays. Fig. 2 instead shows how real life is often as easy as a stroll down the street, nothing too exciting.
**One specific way the paintings of the Realistic era convey the truth is that they convey the truth as the artist sees it him- or herself. The painter of Fig. 1 saw the common people more sad and downtrodden. Weary people on a crowded train, thinking about all the things that need to be done. There are people talking and there are people sleeping -- both adults and a baby. Maybe the artist took a ride on a train one day and was inspired to paint exactly what he saw. What he saw turned out to be a troubled middle class, but only troubled by their own troubles, petty day-to-day troubles, little troubles that everyone is worried about, making this painting seem even more realistic. The painter of Fig. 2 seemed to see the world in a different way. He shows the people in his art as possibly more esteemed, judging by their fancy garb and top hats. He saw a finer side to the common people, and this is the message he tried to convey in his piece. In artistic periods prior to this, common people were common people, all pretty much the same and represented how artistic law told painters to represent them. The Realistic period is when the truth comes out, that even within a social class people can be different -- and so can the way that different people interpret them -- and this fact was represented in both Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.
**Another bit of truth that paintings of the Realistic era convey is indeed one of change: change in technology and industry. In Fig. 1, the people are riding on a train, possible a steam engine or maybe an electric one, to get to their destination. Trains were invented much before the Realistic era, but this was the time that technology like this started to appear in paintings. In Fig. 2, one can see signs of industry mostly from the buildings in the background. These large structures are well on their way to becoming skyscrapers. Often in times before this, paintings had not had clear, detailed images of buildings of this time. Both Delacroix's painting and The Raft of the Medusa do not have any clear buildings in them. But even through all these changes in industry shown through these Realistic paintings, the middle class is the middle class in the middle class. The world changed around them, maybe their jobs changed, maybe their pay changed for better or for worse, the both Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 convey the truth that the middle class stays the same throughout all of these new developments.
**The time of Realism was indeed a time in which artists could show real life as it was in actuality. This was an even farther step forward than Romanticism in stepping away from the once-customary Church commissioned paintings. Realism, as the name suggests, was real. Realism was one of the first types of art to show the middle class as it really was; a middle class that, even through the industrializing world, had not really changed. Of course, there were people in the middle class that rose up, for example the Third Estate becoming the bourgeois factory owners, but there was just another middle class -- the proletariat, in this case -- to take their place. Through both Fig. 1 and Fig 2., the respective artists show the middle class as it was, is, and shall be: a working, sometimes struggling class, with ordinary problems living their ordinary lives, even through all of the change.
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