Realism

Realism, in art and literature, the faithful imitation of real life; more specifically, the artistic movement which started in France c.1850 in reaction to the idealized representations of romanticism and neoclassicism, with a social dimension derived from scientific progress and the revolutions of 1848. In France the leading painters were Jean-Baptiste Corot, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean François Millet, and its main literary expression was in the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola. In the United States, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and members of the Ashcan School were realistic painters, and Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank Norris led the literary movement.