A Burial at Ornans

A Burial at Ornans, influential oil painting created by French artist Gustave Courbet between 1849 and 1850. The monumental canvas (10.33 × 21.92 feet [3.15 × 6.68 meters]) depicting a funeral outside a rural village departed radically from the prevailing conventions of the art world and is now regarded as one of the first examples of Realism in art. Yet, when Courbet exhibited the painting at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, in 1850, it shocked audiences with its enormous and straightforward depiction of the contemporary rural bourgeoisie.

Description

Courbet began the painting originally titled Painting of Human Figures, Historical Account of a Burial at Ornans in 1849 during his annual visit to his parents’ home in Ornans, a village in eastern France. That summer Courbet’s maternal grandfather had died shortly before Courbet’s arrival, and the painting is believed to have been inspired by the funeral. The work features more than 40 life-size figures, some of whom resemble Courbet’s sisters and members of journalist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s family, who lived in the same region. On the left a group of pallbearers carry the casket, which is draped by a pall, into the frame. Next to them officers of the parish assemble, and a priest reads from what appears to be a prayer book. One altar boy looks out of the scene with an expression of boredom. In the foreground at the center the grave opens into the viewers’ space. The gravedigger pauses, half kneeling beside it, appearing to listen to the priest as he waits for the coffin. Mourners gather behind him and to the right. A few seemingly murmur to one another, while others hide their faces behind handkerchiefs, bow their heads, or gaze distractedly. A hunting dog, seemingly without its owner, stands unsure in the foreground.

Ennobling the ordinary

The painting was accepted into the Salon of 1850, but attendees of the exhibition were perplexed by its large size and ordinary subject, which were at odds with what they expected to see. Scenes from everyday life, called genre paintings, were usually done as small-scale works, such as those of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, including Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Massive canvasses were understood to be reserved for important subjects, such as historic, religious, or allegorical scenes. Here, however, is a contemporary scene, which does not even suggest a sense of heroism, such as the events depicted by Jacques-Louis David in The Death of Marat (1793) and by Eugène Delacroix in Liberty Leading the People (1830). Instead, Courbet made the incongruous choice to paint at a large scale a funeral of an unnamed person and to fill the canvas with laborers and middle-class figures. In this decision, he suggests that the grand scale of A Burial is meant to ennoble the work and goings-on of his contemporaries.

Heroicizing, not idealizing

Courbet may have been heroicizing the ordinary, but his intent was not to idealize his subjects. He wrote in 1861 that he believed that “painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things.” Courbet thus sought to portray his subjects as truthfully and objectively as possible. Here he presents the funeral goers starkly in all their commonplace variety, from the simple beauty of one young woman to the craggy faces of the veterans of the French Revolution standing in the foreground to the bulbous noses of the red-garbed beadles. Many viewers considered such subjects to be ugly, crude depictions. Moreover, the figures interact very little, and most seem indifferent to the priest’s prayers. Courbet pushed further against artistic embellishment by depicting the burial as an ordinary lackluster event. Contemporary viewers were accustomed to glorified scenes of death, such as El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–88), in which the deceased individual’s soul is accompanied by angels and saints to a majestic heaven, the reward for having lived a virtuous life. In A Burial at Ornans, however, there is no released soul, no angels, and no heaven in death, just a hole in the ground and an overcast sky. Indeed, Courbet famously said, “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one.” The seeming irreverence toward religious beliefs further angered viewers.

Rejecting illusionism

Audiences in the 19th century were also used to seeing highly finished paintings and thus were repulsed by the rough brushstrokes of A Burial at Ornans. Courbet was known to apply paint to and scrape it from the canvas by using a palette knife or a spatula to create a thick impastoed texture. As one of the hallmarks of Realism, the rough surface was a deliberate rejection of illusionism—the use of artistic techniques, such as perspective or modeling, to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a flat canvas. In their effort to create a truthful depiction, Realist practitioners called attention to the very artificiality of painting by showing brushstrokes and revealing the canvas. A painting was not a window to another world, as it had long been regarded, but simply paint on a canvas. This concept was later extended by French artist Édouard Manet and the Impressionists.

Legacy

The controversy generated by A Burial launched Courbet to the forefront of the French artistic scene, and the artist’s boldness, sometimes criticized as narcissism, not only immediately influenced other artists but also helped lay the foundations for subsequent avant-garde movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. The painting was in the collection of Juliette Courbet, one of the artist’s sisters, until 1881, when she gifted it to the French state. It was subsequently displayed in the Louvre until 1986, when it was transferred to the newly opened Musée d’Orsay, the national museum of fine and applied arts in Paris that features work mainly from France produced between 1848 and 1914.