A Burial at Ornans
Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877) · 1849 to 1850
A funeral in a country village, painted nearly seven metres wide. More than forty life-size figures stand in a long line before an open grave in the cemetery of Ornans, Courbet's home town in the Jura hills. On the left the priest, altar boys and pall-bearers in white; in the centre the gravedigger kneeling at the edge of the pit; on the right the women of the village in black, weeping into handkerchiefs. A dog stands in the foreground looking away. Above them all the pale limestone cliffs of the valley close the scene like a lid. No one knows for certain who is being buried, and Courbet never said.
The scandal in 1850 was one of scale and manners. A painting this size was reserved for kings, battles and saints, and here it was given to provincial townspeople, painted flatly and honestly with their red noses and ill-fitting coats. The models were real citizens of Ornans, including Courbet's sisters and father, who queued at his studio to pose. There is no hero and no focal point; the eye moves along the row and finds nothing to hold it but the dark hole in the ground and a skull tossed up beside it. The thick, earthy paint, applied in places with a knife, was itself a statement against polish.
Courbet called the picture the burial of Romanticism, and it made him the leader of the Realist movement and one of the most notorious artists in Europe. Refused by the World's Fair of 1855, it hung in his own private Pavilion of Realism instead. His sister gave it to the state in 1881 and it entered the Louvre, later moving to Orsay, where it faces his other enormous manifesto, The Painter's Studio. Look for the two beadles in red robes on the left, whose flushed faces gave critics their easiest target.
Did You Know? Courbet painted the huge canvas in a cramped attic room in Ornans and could never step back far enough to see the whole picture while working on it.
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