This comprehensive survey the history of realist painting and argues that realism has had a continuous yet restlessly changing place in American and European painting throughout the 20th century. Artists discussed include Eakins, Bellows and Homer, Vuillard, Bonnard, Schiele, Morandi, Hopper and Giacometti, through to Balthus, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney. The author provides the historical, artistic and critical contexts in which painting has taken a realist turn, from the Ashcan School to Soviet Social realism, from painting of the Existentialist era to the time of Photorealism, to recent developments. He argues that the western tradition of pictorial realism has in fact been renewed and modified through the diverse influences of modernism, political conflict and new visual technologies.