Realism as an art movement arose in France in the 1840s–60s, led by Gustave Courbet, who insisted that the painter's proper subject was the actual world — not mythology, not history, not religious narrative. His Burial at Ornans (1849–50) depicted a provincial French funeral at full monumental scale — the scale of history painting given to ordinary people. The critical establishment was scandalized. Courbet was unrepentant: 'Show me an angel and I'll paint one.' Honoré Daumier's cartoons attacked social injustice; Jean-François Millet's peasants dignified agricultural labour. In literature, Flaubert, Zola and George Eliot translated the same principles into prose. Realism was not simply a style but a moral position: that the lives of ordinary people were worthy of serious artistic attention.