Explore realistic paintings for sale online today. If you’re looking for hyper-realistic oil painters, we have work by the talented Andrew McNeile Jones. Lemons From Sorrento (III) is one of his many realistic still-life paintings. Andrew’s style is largely influenced by his time working in film and television, hence the almost cinematographic play on light and dark in his realistic paintings.

Chris Temple’s piece Vitkovice #3 is the third of a trio of realistic cityscape paintings for sale. Often focusing on industrial settings, Chris creates colourful, monumental cityscape pieces where he captures the immense scope and life of cities in transformation.

Vadim Kovalev’s ,,Dali,, captures Salvadore Dali’s vibrant and eccentric soul with oil on canvas. The highly realistic definitions in this detailed portrait are mixed with subtle odes to surrealism; a minute ladybird teeters off of Dali’s moustache, reflected in his right eye.

History of realistic paintings

Realistic art began as a 19th-century movement famously led by Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet. The art movement aimed to only represent what artists could see in front of them. The original definition of realistic painting in art was, therefore, to represent subjects in a truthful, naturalistic way. This meant staying as true as possible to the object being painted and not adding in artificial details or transforming the piece due to any artistic conventions.

Modern realism points to work created since, and potentially influenced by, the development of abstract expressionism. Today, while some realistic paintings have a photo-realistic quality (photorealism - realistic paintings which are so accurately detailed, they could be confused with photographs - emerged as a concept in the 1960s), some paintings appear much more abstract and experimental to openly question the reality of any given work of art. Realistic painting is no longer restricted to paintings which look ‘real’.

Famous realistic painters who have paved the way for realism in modern art include but are not restricted to Edward Hopper, an American realist painter and printmaker, Sir Stanley Spencer, a British realist figurative painter, and Andrew Newell Wyeth, a visual realist painter. Modern hyper-realistic painters with high fidelity to realism also include the likes of Leng Jun. Jun’s painstaking attention to detail is so astounding that his realistic portraits have a scarily uncanny resemblance to his subjects.