What is Naturalism in art?

Naturalism was a late nineteenth-century painting movement, strongest between about 1880 and 1905, that extended the Realist interest in unidealised observation into a more systematic recording of peasant and rural labour. Naturalist paintings were typically large in scale, finished in a tonal grey-green palette, and depicted their working-class subjects with a sober documentary seriousness drawn from Émile Zola's contemporary novels.

When did Naturalism start?

The movement took public shape through the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the late 1870s, particularly with Haymaking (1877) and Joan of Arc (1879). The Glasgow Boys in Scotland worked in a closely related idiom through the 1880s. The Newlyn School in Cornwall, led by Stanhope Forbes, adapted Naturalism to English fishing-village subjects from 1884. The movement ran to around 1905, when it was eclipsed by modernist developments.

Who are the most famous Naturalist artists?

Jules Bastien-Lepage was the French leader and international reference point. In Britain, the Glasgow Boys (James Guthrie, John Lavery, E.A. Hornel, Arthur Melville) and the Newlyn School (Stanhope Forbes, Henry Scott Tuke, Walter Langley) were the main groupings. Scandinavia produced Peder Severin Krøyer and Anders Zorn. Italy had the Macchiaioli predecessors and the later Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. Russia's Ilya Repin worked in a Naturalist-influenced Realist mode.

What defines the Naturalist style?

Naturalist paintings use a dominant grey-green palette, plein air observation often worked up in the studio, large canvas formats borrowed from Salon history painting, and subject matter drawn from peasant and fishing communities. Figures are shown at life size in their working clothes, at rest or absorbed in labour, rather than in dramatic action. The paint surface is smooth and tightly finished, closer to academic Salon painting than to Impressionism.

What is the difference between Naturalism and Realism?

Realism (c. 1848 to 1880) was Courbet's French movement, politically engaged, often anti-clerical, focused on dignity in ordinary life. Naturalism (c. 1880 to 1905) came a generation later and was less politically militant, more descriptively observational, and absorbed influence from photography and the Barbizon landscape school. Naturalist painters also travelled internationally, producing parallel movements in Scotland, Cornwall, Scandinavia and Russia.

Why was Naturalism important?

Naturalism carried Realist principles into the academic Salon system, giving working-class subjects the monumental scale previously reserved for history painting. The movement also internationalised the rural peasant subject, producing recognisable parallel schools across five countries. Its tonal palette and careful plein air observation fed directly into the regional schools that persisted beyond the modernist watershed, particularly in Scandinavian and Russian painting.

Where can I see the best Naturalist paintings?

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds Bastien-Lepage's Haymaking and Joan of Arc. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow preserves the densest Glasgow Boys collection. Penlee House in Penzance holds the Newlyn School archive. The Skagens Museum in Denmark houses the Krøyer paintings of the Skagen artists' colony. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow owns Repin's major Naturalist canvases.

Returning to the Reconquered Land by George Clausen

Villerville Beach. Normandy by Carlos de Haes

Moose shifting across a swamp in Sweden by Bruno Liljefors

Design for a Chair Back by Charles Antoine Lemaire

Fox in Winter Landscape by Bruno Liljefors

RPS Medical Exhibit in Photokina, Cologne (1952) by James Sowerby

The Water's Edge by Charles-François Daubigny

Naturalism

16 artists · 1870–1900

Naturalism^[4] in painting prioritised the faithful recording of nature and everyday life over classical idealisation. The movement took hold in the 1870s and reached its peak in the following two decades, shaped by Emile Zola's call for artists to observe the world with scientific detachment. French painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage brought plein-air technique to rural subject matter, depicting farm labourers in fields with a directness that avoided both sentiment and social commentary. In Britain, George Clausen adapted this approach to the English countryside, painting agricultural workers under open skies with careful attention to natural light. The movement also encompassed a parallel tradition of natural-history illustration: John James Audubon [9]'s life-size bird portraits, Elizabeth Gould's ornithological lithographs and Bruno Liljefors's wildlife paintings in Swedish forests all pursued exact observation of animal subjects within their habitats. Naturalism's insistence on looking closely, recording honestly and painting outdoors fed directly into twentieth-century realist traditions.

Key Ideas

Plein-Air Observation

Naturalist painters worked outdoors, setting up easels in fields, forests and farmyards. They painted what they saw under real light conditions rather than composing idealised scenes in the studio. This insistence on direct observation separated them from the academic painters who worked from classical models and from the Impressionists who prioritised the fleeting moment over precise description. Bastien-Lepage described his aim as keeping simply to the true aspect of a bit of nature.
Rural Labour Without Romance

Naturalist painting returned again and again to agricultural workers: haymakers, gleaners, potato gatherers and shepherds. The treatment avoided both heroic elevation and pitying condescension. Figures occupy the landscape as part of it, not posed against a backdrop. George Clausen's field workers are absorbed in their tasks, painted with the same attention to light and form as the crops around them. The paintings present labour as fact, leaving moral judgement to the viewer.
Natural-History Precision

A strand of Naturalism focused on the animal world. Audubon painted birds at life size with scientific accuracy and compositional flair. Elizabeth Gould produced ornithological lithographs that balanced anatomical detail with a sense of the living creature in its environment. Bruno Liljefors set predators and prey in Swedish landscapes rendered with the same empirical care. These artists treated wildlife painting not as decoration but as a form of knowledge.

Key Artists

John James Audubon

1785–1851 · American

George Clausen

1852–1944 · British

Elizabeth Gould

1804–1841 · British

Theo van Hoytema

1863–1917 · Dutch

Francois Levaillant

1753–1824 · French

Bruno Liljefors

1860–1939 · Swedish

Carlos de Haes

1826–1898 · Spanish

Explore adjacent traditions and influences.

Realism

1840–1880

Impressionism

1860–1890

Progression of Art

Landmark works that shaped the movement.

October

Jules Bastien-Lepage · 1878 · Oil on canvas

A young woman sits in a potato field at harvest time, her expression blank with exhaustion. Behind her the landscape stretches into a hazy distance under pale autumn light. Bastien-Lepage painted the figure with tight, precise brushwork and let the background dissolve into softer handling, a technique that created the illusion of depth through differential focus. The painting was shown at the Salon of 1878, where Emile Zola praised it. Its combination of rural subject matter, outdoor light and unflinching observation of physical fatigue established the template that British and Scandinavian painters would adopt.

The Girl at the Gate

George Clausen · 1889 · Oil on canvas

A young woman leans against a wooden gate in an English field, caught in a moment of rest between tasks. Sunlight filters through her straw hat. Clausen painted the figure from life, working outdoors in the manner of Bastien-Lepage. The handling is precise where it matters (face, hands, the grain of the wood) and looser in the surrounding foliage. Clausen described his ambition as showing the union of man with nature and the dependence of man on nature. This painting marked his mature style and was widely exhibited, establishing him as the leading British Naturalist.

Carolina Parakeet

John James Audubon · 1833 · Watercolour, graphite and pastel on paper

Audubon painted seven Carolina Parakeets perched on a branch of cocklebur, their green and yellow plumage rendered with fine, layered washes. The species is now extinct, making the plate both an artistic achievement and a scientific record. Audubon worked from freshly killed specimens wired into lifelike poses and painted at full scale. His composition crowds the birds into a tight cluster that conveys their gregarious behaviour while filling the double-elephant folio page. The plate appeared in The Birds of America (1827 to 1838), one of the most ambitious publishing projects of the nineteenth century.

A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains

Elizabeth Gould · 1832 · Hand-coloured lithograph

Elizabeth Gould produced the lithographic plates for this volume, working from her husband John Gould's preliminary sketches and from study skins. She introduced foliage and landscape backgrounds that placed each bird in a plausible habitat, a departure from the plain white grounds common in earlier ornithological illustration. Her colouring was precise and delicate, distinguishing individual feather tracts by tone and texture. She completed over six hundred plates across multiple publications before her death in 1841. Her work elevated ornithological illustration from dry taxonomy toward a form of natural-history art.

Fox in Winter Landscape

Bruno Liljefors · 1893 · Oil on canvas

A red fox moves across a snow-covered field, its fur catching low winter light. Liljefors painted the scene with exact attention to the fox's anatomy and gait, embedding the animal in a landscape rendered with equal care. Brushwork in the snow captures the texture of wind-blown drifts. Liljefors studied animal movement directly, spending long periods in the Swedish countryside sketching from hides. His work rejected the sentimental animal painting of the Victorian era in favour of a rigorous, observational approach. Fellow artists considered him the greatest Naturalist wildlife painter of his generation.

Winter Morning

George Clausen · 1901 · Oil on canvas

A ploughed field stretches toward a low horizon under a sky whitened by frost. A farmworker walks away from the viewer, small against the expanse of turned earth. Clausen painted this in his later manner, combining Naturalist precision in the foreground furrows with Impressionist softness in the distant sky. The palette is restricted to browns, greys and cool whites. The painting captures the quietness and scale of the English countryside in winter. Clausen was knighted in 1927, an acknowledgement of a career spent recording rural life with patient, undramatic honesty.

Origins

Zola and the Naturalist Programme

The novelist Emile Zola coined the term Naturalism in 1868 and applied it first to literature, then to painting. He called for artists to observe nature with an exacting eye and to present their findings without embellishment. Zola championed the Impressionists for their plein-air practice but criticised what he saw as their lack of rigour. When Jules Bastien-Lepage exhibited paintings that combined outdoor light with tight, precise drawing, Zola saw the synthesis he had been waiting for. He called Bastien-Lepage the grandson of Millet and Courbet, placing him in a lineage of painters committed to unvarnished reality.

Bastien-Lepage and the French Countryside

Bastien-Lepage grew up in Damvillers in rural Lorraine and returned there to paint after his training in Paris. His canvases show peasant farmers and village girls in the fields, painted at life size with sharp focus on the central figure and a softer, more atmospheric treatment of the landscape behind. This differential focus was new and widely imitated. British, Scandinavian and American painters travelled to see his work at the Salon and adapted his method to their own landscapes. His early death in 1884 cut short a career that had reshaped European figure painting.

Clausen and British Naturalism

George Clausen saw Bastien-Lepage's paintings in Paris in the early 1880s and committed himself to the same programme of outdoor work and rural subjects. He settled near the Essex village of Childwick Green and painted farmhands, haymakers and field workers under the changeable English sky. Clausen helped found the New English Art Club in 1886, which became a platform for painters working outside the Royal Academy's conventions. His lectures at the Royal Academy, published as Six Lectures on Painting in 1904, set out the case for direct observation as the foundation of all good painting.

In Their Words

“I have had hard work to set up my first ideas, being determined to keep simply to the true aspect of a bit of nature.”

Jules Bastien-Lepage, Letter, c. 1878

“The love of nature and resolute determination not to depart from the strict literal truth as he saw it.”

George Clausen, on Bastien-Lepage, Six Lectures on Painting (1904)

“A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”

Emile Zola, Mon Salon (1866)

All Naturalism Artists

14 artists.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Naturalism in art?
Naturalism^[4] was a late nineteenth-century painting movement, strongest between about 1880 and 1905, that extended the Realist interest in unidealised observation into a more systematic recording of peasant and rural labour. Naturalist paintings were typically large in scale, finished in a tonal grey-green palette, and depicted their working-class subjects with a sober documentary seriousness drawn from Émile Zola's contemporary novels.
When did Naturalism start?
The movement took public shape through the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the late 1870s, particularly with Haymaking (1877) and Joan of Arc (1879). The Glasgow Boys in Scotland worked in a closely related idiom through the 1880s. The Newlyn School in Cornwall, led by Stanhope Forbes, adapted Naturalism^[4] to English fishing-village subjects from 1884. The movement ran to around 1905, when it was eclipsed by modernist developments.
Who are the most famous Naturalist artists?
Jules Bastien-Lepage was the French leader and international reference point. In Britain, the Glasgow Boys (James Guthrie, John Lavery, E.A. Hornel, Arthur Melville) and the Newlyn School (Stanhope Forbes, Henry Scott Tuke, Walter Langley) were the main groupings. Scandinavia produced Peder Severin Krøyer and Anders Zorn. Italy had the Macchiaioli predecessors and the later Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. Russia's Ilya Repin worked in a Naturalist-influenced Realist mode.
What defines the Naturalist style?
Naturalist paintings use a dominant grey-green palette, plein air observation often worked up in the studio, large canvas formats borrowed from Salon history painting, and subject matter drawn from peasant and fishing communities. Figures are shown at life size in their working clothes, at rest or absorbed in labour, rather than in dramatic action. The paint surface is smooth and tightly finished, closer to academic Salon painting than to Impressionism^[4].
What is the difference between Naturalism and Realism?
Realism (c. 1848 to 1880) was Courbet's French movement, politically engaged, often anti-clerical, focused on dignity in ordinary life. Naturalism^[4] (c. 1880 to 1905) came a generation later and was less politically militant, more descriptively observational, and absorbed influence from photography and the Barbizon landscape school. Naturalist painters also travelled internationally, producing parallel movements in Scotland, Cornwall, Scandinavia and Russia.
Why was Naturalism important?
Naturalism^[4] carried Realist principles into the academic Salon system, giving working-class subjects the monumental scale previously reserved for history painting. The movement also internationalised the rural peasant subject, producing recognisable parallel schools across five countries. Its tonal palette and careful plein air observation fed directly into the regional schools that persisted beyond the modernist watershed, particularly in Scandinavian and Russian painting.
Where can I see the best Naturalist paintings?
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds Bastien-Lepage's Haymaking and Joan of Arc. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow preserves the densest Glasgow Boys collection. Penlee House in Penzance holds the Newlyn School archive. The Skagens Museum in Denmark houses the Krøyer paintings of the Skagen artists' colony. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow owns Repin's major Naturalist canvases.

Sources

Naturalism editorial draws on the following published scholarship.

[1] book Gabriel P. Weisberg, Naturalism, 1992 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[2] book Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, 2012 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[3] book Roger Tory Peterson and Virginia Marie Peterson, Audubon's Birds of America, 1981 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[4] wikipedia Wikipedia: Naturalism Used for: biography.
[5] book Hauser, Arnold; Harris, Jonathan ; Harris, Jonathan , Social History of Art, Volume 4 Used for: biography.
[6] book Hodge, Susie, 1960- author, The short story of women artists : a pocket guide to movements, works, breakthroughs, & themes Used for: biography.
[7] wikipedia Wikipedia: Christian Wilhelm Allers Used for: biography.
[8] wikipedia Wikipedia: Charles Sprague Pearce Used for: biography.
[9] wikipedia Wikipedia: John James Audubon Used for: biography.
[10] wikipedia Wikipedia: Arthur Verona Used for: biography.

Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-06-04. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.

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Naturalism

Key Ideas

Plein-Air Observation

Rural Labour Without Romance

Natural-History Precision