HAMILTON, ON, CANADA – The Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Fall 2011 exhibition season offers a closing salute to its French Connection year with a stunning display of nineteenth-century French Realist paintings alongside three intriguing exhibitions drawn from private collections. On view through January 15, 2012, Masters of French Realism showcases works by various French painters associated with the central nineteenth-century artistic movement Realism, which achieved its most coherent expression in French painting. At the centre of French Realism was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), represented in the exhibition by two landscape paintings. While Courbet’s Realist representations of peasants and labourers were motivated by strong political views, other French Realists, such as Philippe Rousseau (1816-1887), found both popular and critical success with their naturalistically painted humble subjects.