A mid-19th-century reaction against Romantic idealization and academic history painting. The Realists — Courbet, Millet, Daumier in France, and an international wing including Manet, Whistler, Homer and Sargent — insisted on painting the contemporary world as it actually looked: working peasants, urban bars, train stations, the modest rooms of ordinary people. The movement's politics were as new as its subjects; it grew out of the same democratic upheavals as the revolutions of 1848 and rejected the idea that great art needed great subjects. Realism's commitment to the everyday set the stage for Impressionism, which would inherit its modern subject matter and add a new attention to light.
