He painted stone breakers at history-painting scale
Jean Desire Gustave Courbet, 10 June 1819 to 31 December 1877, led French Realism by insisting he would paint only what he could see. Late-1840s canvases of unidealized peasants and laborers used the huge formats academies reserved for saints and kings, and Paris noticed.
Courbet grew up in Ornans, in the Doubs, in 1819, in a household hostile to the monarchy; a grandfather on his mother's side had fought in the Revolution. His sisters Zoe, Zelie and Juliette sat for his first drawings. He reached Paris in 1839 and briefly joined the studio of Steuben and Hesse, but soon preferred teaching himself by copying Spanish, Flemish and French masters in the Louvre. A tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846 and 1847 convinced him, as Rembrandt and Hals had, that a painter should record the life around him.
His breakthrough came at the Salon of 1849, where After Dinner at Ornans won a gold medal and was bought by the state. The medal let him exhibit without jury approval until the rules changed in 1857. That winter he painted The Stone Breakers, based on an old man and a youth he had seen doing punishing roadside labour during an eight-month stay at home from October 1848. Proudhon hailed it as an emblem of peasant life. The canvas no longer exists: it was among 154 paintings lost when an Allied raid hit a lorry carrying Dresden's art to the Konigstein Fortress in February 1945.
A Burial at Ornans, shown at the Salon of 1850 to 1851, depicted his great-uncle's funeral of September 1848 using the townspeople who had actually attended. At about 3 by 6.7 metres, it gave a humdrum village rite the dimensions normally kept for saints and monarchs. Critics accused him of chasing ugliness; the historian Sarah Faunce likened the picture to an upstart in dirty boots gatecrashing a refined party. Courbet himself called it the burial of Romanticism.
He rejected history painting outright, arguing that artists cannot convincingly depict any century but their own, and worked alongside Millet and Daumier in what became known as Realism. Fame brought labels ranging from genius to savage socialist, which he cultivated. Six months in prison followed his role in the 1871 Paris Commune, and from 1873 he lived in Swiss exile until he died four years later.
Source: Gustave Courbet
