detailist

Updated: May 27, 2025

On this basis the way seems opened to settle the changeful formulas of taste; why the rejection of what for the moment has held the pinnacle of popular favor; why, for instance, the waning of interest in the detailists of the brilliant French-Spanish School, the school of Fortuny, Madrazzo, Villegas, Rico, or of the work of Meissonier, who as a detailist eclipsed them all.

Henry Rankin Poore - Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures

The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the blade became apparent.

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

These items are what interested the great detailist and they are perfect; but with all the intense effort of six close years of labor the picture has less real finish than any work ever signed by Mauve.

Henry Rankin Poore - Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures