Nice painting. Usually when I hear art of that period discussed I hear more about the French impressionists and postimpressionists, but I guess there were still a number of realists in France as well, as that painting illustrates. BTW the style there reminds me somewhat of 17th-century Dutch style, which I like.
Speaking of which, I just got done reading a really neat book by a Dutch painter done in a sort of neo-realist style:
Rien Poortvliet, Journey to the Ice Age: Mammoths and Other Animals of the Wild
The author goes in his backyard, where he found some prehistoric hunting tools, and visualizes what it would have been like to be a hunter in the Ice Age and what the wildlife then would have looked like. A really worthwhile book if you like naturalistic art.