Then, about the middle of the Century appeared Gustave Courbet who loudly proclaimed himself a _realist_. He meant by this that he was not moved by sentiment, as the Barbizon _naturalists_ were; that he believed that the only thing which concerned a painter was to paint what he could see, as it appeared to his eye alone. He wished to limit his art to what is visible to sight. So he thought it was foolish for an artist to attempt to represent a scene from the Bible or any historical subject or subject invented by the imagination. As the artist had never seen these things, he had no business, as a painter, to try and represent them. He was going outside his own art and meddling with some one else’s: the art of the writer or actor, for example.