Champfleury is credited with coining the term “Realism” in art. The name was the pen name of Jules François Félix Fleury-Husson, a French art critic and novelist who became one of the movement’s principal advocates.
Champfleury promoted Gustave Courbet’s paintings and helped define the movement’s opposition to idealized academic art. He wrote about Realism in the early 1850s and published the journal Le Réalisme in 1856–1857. His 1857 book Le Réalisme further explained the movement’s ideas across literature and visual art.
The attribution is sometimes simplified: Courbet was the leading painter and publicly embraced Realism, while Champfleury was chiefly its critic, theorist, and promoter. The word itself had appeared in discussion before Champfleury, but he is widely credited with establishing it as the name of the modern artistic movement.