Modern life and the way that ordinary people spent their free time were popular subjects with many Impressionist painters. Monet, Renoir and Degas show us the theatres, cafés, and popular countryside resorts of late 19th-century Paris. Traditionally in France the middle classes (bourgeoisie) had not been considered fit subjects for serious painting; and the working classes were usually portrayed as comical yokels, or timeless figures of rural life.

The focus of art on the lives of ordinary people was not only a feature of painting. The 19th century saw the development of the novel as a literary form, and novelists such as Zola and Flaubert wrote about the lives of the middle and lower classes. These people became the tragic, and occasionally heroic, focus of serious literary works. These authors took as much pleasure in describing the café's, bars and theatres of Paris as artists did in painting them.

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