detailism

Updated: May 20, 2025

The first master expresses the refinement of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell.

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail. Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and the expression of only its salient features.

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914