This paper proposes to analyse the writings of Jules Champfleury with the purpose of making known Champfleury's thoughts about visual arts, particularly that of Gustave Courbet and the brothers Le Nain. This, we maintain, can be found scattered in his novels and short stories and not as art critic itself, showing that, against the author's own statements, he had a clear idea about the meaning of this movement although very different from its contemporaries. Realism to him was the reconquest of nature and the method to carry it out was the pure materiality and naturalness of painting, far from those social realisms of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, which took him closer to Gustave Courbet's aesthetic ideas and meant he is considered as the true spokesman of the movement.