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REALISM · WORK

A Burial at Ornans

Gustave Courbet · 1850

A whole village funeral, painted ten feet tall, the scale the Salon kept for the death of kings.

The canvas
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Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1850. Oil on canvas. 10 ft 4 in × 21 ft 11 in.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Given by Juliette Courbet, 1881
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
  1. The hole everyone is here for
    Center foreground, low, the bare turned earth
    The whole crowd is gathered around this, not a coffin, not a cross, but an open grave painted as a flat black wedge with almost no depth, a void dropped into the dead center where a hero ought to be. The gravedigger kneels patiently beside it in his shirtsleeves, and on the turned earth lie a skull and a scatter of bones, dug up to make room: the bluntest reminder of death there is, with no allegory and no scythe.
  2. The one thing pointing up
    Upper left, held against the gray sky
    A bearer holds a crucifix aloft against the flat gray sky, the single strong vertical in a painting that is otherwise all horizontal line. In a Salon history painting the heavens would open behind it; here the sky just stays gray and gives nothing back.
  3. The loudest color in the room
    Left of center, with the clergy, the two figures in red
    The figures in vivid red are beadles, minor parish officers who keep order at services. Courbet gave the grandest color in the whole painting (the red a history painter would save for a cardinal or a king) to two small-town church ushers with frankly ordinary faces.
  4. Two men wearing the wrong decade
    Center, in white stockings and knee breeches
    Among the men in 1840s mourning black stand two old fellows in the suits and knee breeches of 1793, the dress of the First Republic, half a century out of fashion. They are real sitters (friends of Courbet’s grandfather): veterans of the Revolution planted in the crowd. In 1850, two years after the barricades, that detail did not feel safe.
  5. Grief on the right, a dog who doesn’t care
    The right half (the women); the white dog, center-right foreground
    The women are massed on the right, some pressing handkerchiefs to their faces, the only open grief in the picture (the artist’s own sisters Juliette, Zoé and Zélie are among them). And down in front, back turned to the whole solemn business, a small dog sniffs off toward the edge, completely indifferent. No history painter would have let that animal stay; Courbet gave it the front row.
  6. The real rock behind the real people
    The pale band across the top, behind the crowd
    That pale, chalky wall of limestone is not invented scenery, it is the actual escarpment of the Ornans valley, Courbet’s hometown geology placed behind his hometown neighbors. Almost the same value as the sky, it refuses to recede; it stands up as a near-featureless wall that presses the figures flat against the viewer.
The story · 5 chapters
~18 min total
1
Ornans · 1848
The town and the grave
The most ordinary death there is, a relative’s funeral in a backwater town, and Courbet decides to paint it at the size Europe kept for kings.
2
The canvas
Forty neighbors at the scale of kings
Ten feet tall, twenty-two wide: a long frieze of real townsfolk around an open grave, the gravedigger, the skull, the red beadles, the indifferent dog, the Ornans cliff.
3
Paris · 1850–51
The bomb in the Salon
Hung beside The Stone Breakers in the official Salon, the country funeral detonates, ugliness, monstrous scale, and the shadow of 1848.
4
Courbet’s verdict
The burial of Romanticism
What Courbet meant by his famous line, and why this canvas is Realism’s public birth five years before the 1855 manifesto.
5
After
Afterlife
Juliette Courbet gives it to the nation in 1881; the Louvre to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986; the canvas where modern art’s subject cracked open.
1849–50
Painted
10′4″ × 21′11″
Dimensions
Orsay
Now at
Provenance
Every hand it passed through
1849–1877
Gustave Courbet (the artist)
Ornans / Paris
Painted 1849–50 in Ornans; shown at the Salon of 1850–51; it stayed with the artist until his death in Swiss exile in 1877.
1877–1881
The Courbet family
Ornans
After Courbet died in exile in Switzerland in 1877, the enormous canvas remained with his family.
1881
gift to the nation
Juliette Courbet (his sister)Museum
Paris
Donates the painting to the French State, the very canvas the State’s official Salon had recoiled from thirty years earlier.
1881–1986
Musée du LouvreMuseum
Paris
Enters the national collections; for decades hangs in the Louvre, among the history paintings it had once mocked.
1986–today
never sold
Musée d’OrsayMuseum
Paris
When the Orsay opens in a converted railway station, the Louvre’s 19th-century collection crosses the river to fill it. On permanent view.