Realism emerged in France after the French Revolution of 1848 —an event that established the “right to work” in the country—Realism introduced the idea of average, working-class people, contemporary settings, and day-to-day scenes as worthy artistic subjects.

Born as a clear rejection of Romanticism, the dominant style that had come before it, Realist painters focused on scenes of contemporary people and daily life. What may seem normal now was revolutionary after centuries of painters depicting exotic scenes from mythology and the Bible, or creating portraits of the nobility and clergy.

French artists like Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Honoré Daumier, as well as international artists like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, focused on all social classes in their artwork, giving voice to poorer members of society for the first time and depicting social issues stemming from the Industrial Revolution.

Gustave Courbet is often considered the leading figure of Realism. He laid the groundwork for the movement in the 1840s when he began portraying peasants and laborers on a grand scale typically reserved for religious, historical, or allegorical subjects.

Prior to Courbet, painters did not depict scenes as they saw them; instead, they idealized them, virtually erasing any flaws or imperfections. To Courbet, this approach was detrimental to painting, as it eliminated any sense of individuality.

Although in the nineteenth-century realism had a special meaning as an art term, since the rise of abstract approaches in modern art, realism, or realist, or realistic, has come to be primarily a stylistic description referring to painting or sculpture that continues to represent things in a way that more or less pre-dates post-impressionism and the succession of modern styles that followed. Source: MET