How did the Barbizon School help prepare the way for Gustave Courbet’s Realism?

The Barbizon School helped prepare the way for Gustave Courbet’s Realism by breaking ground in the faithful, objective representation of the natural world and ordinary life.1

Their contributions included:

• Focus on the Ordinary: Moving away from the melodramatic and idealized subjects favored by the Romantic and academic traditions, Barbizon painters emphasized simple, everyday aspects of nature and rural life.21
• Close Observation: By painting solid, detailed forms based on sensitive, direct observation, they established pure landscape painting as a legitimate and objective genre.21
• Humanizing Labor: Artists like Jean-François Millet began to portray peasant laborers with a sense of monumentality and dignity, a theme that Courbet would later expand upon with his own stark, unadorned depictions of working-class life.21

Ultimately, the Barbizon painters provided a foundation of "factuality" that allowed Courbet to further develop his philosophy of reproducing reality accurately, free from the contrived idealism of previous schools.31