Karl Briullov

Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens is a decorative arts museum in Washington, D.C., USA. The former residence of businesswoman, diplomat, philanthropist and collector Marjorie Merriweather Post, Hillwood is known for its large decorative arts collection that focuses heavily on the House of... Romanov. Included in the collection are Fabergé eggs and 18th and 19th century French art and one of the country's finest orchid collections. As she arranged her divorce from her third husband, Joseph E. Davies, Post initiated a search for a new house. She wanted a stately home with fifteen-foot ceilings, sited on a large, thickly wooded spot. After the divorce was final, she bought Arbremont, a Georgian Colonial estate in northwest Washington on the edge of Rock Creek Park, rechristening it Hillwood, a name she had also used for her former property in Brookville, Long Island. Arbremont, with its 36 rooms, had been built in the 1920s by Mrs. Delos A. Blodgett for her daughter, Helen Blodgett Erwin. After Post acquired it from the Erwins, she hired the architect Alexander McIlvaine to gut and rebuild its interior.
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Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of... subjects, depicting them without idealization, and not omitting their sordid aspects which continued the values placed always on the traditions of genre painting. Works may be realist in either of these senses, or both. Use of the two senses can be confusing, but depending on context the second sense is perhaps more common. Realism as a tendency in 19th century art was related to similar movements in the theatre, literature and opera. All emphasized the depiction of everyday subjects, but by no means always discarding classical, Romantic or sentimental approaches to their treatment. The movement began in the 1850s in France. One of Gustave Courbet's most important works is A Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850, a canvas recording an event which he witnessed in September 1848. Courbet's painting of the funeral of his grand uncle became the first grand statement of the Realist style.
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