The Stonebreakers, The Burial

Courbet Gustave was born in the year 1819 into a prosperous farming family. Instead of following his fathers’ will, he decided to seek a fortune as a painter in Paris. The young Courbet had never sold a painting for ten years since he started his career at the age of 21. In the 1840s Courbet’s style began to change and he attempted to put old models into new use. For the first few months of 1848, after the Revolution started, Courbet was a spectator as the other bourgeois were. In 1849, Coubet’s career took a new turn as his painting, After Dinner at Ornans received many positive comments. As a result, Courbet went back to Ornans from Paris consciously to paint his sources, that was when the Realism trilogy of the Stonebreakers, The Burial
The scene was set in a hillside where two figures are concentrating in their work. Across the young boy’s body are the leather straps that puckered cloth of the shirt, and these straps were pulled tight by his actions. The shirt and trousers of the man also show the weight of the cloth. Clark (1982) argues that “Pressure, thickness, gravity - these are the words which come to mind, and describes the Stonebreaker the best.” Despite the fact that great attention to details are performed, we might want to know more about why Courbet decided to paint this work. In those years, the peasants in the rural areas were living a poor life. The problem in the countryside is straight forward : the rise in population and as a result - not enough land. Increase as the price of land did, the price of the bourgeois offered for their food were low. As Clark (1982) argues, in 1848 there was a prolonged economic crisis, the industry and trade were in bad times, which means no capital to invest in new machinery, no certainty about the future, food prices slumped lower every year. Would the social problem, the poverty, be the answer to why Courbet was motivated to create The Stonebreakers? According to Fried (1982), Courbet wrote a letter from Ornans to Wey, describing how he met two men breaking stones on the highway. He claimed that “it was rare to meet the most complete expression of
It was not an expected image as bourgeois should not be present in the rural areas, where the burial had taken place, according to the bourgeois myth. In fact, Paris was an immigrant city at that time and bourgeois was often a man from the countryside. Immigrants can make a profit and earn themselves a bourgeois life, and in Paris you can gain and loss your bourgeois status within years. These self-made bourgeois rejected the fact that they were of rural origin, and they refused to go back to their hometowns and greet their peasants parents. Clark (1982) argues that “there was a myth of rural society - a myth which was central to the structure of bourgeois self-consciousness.” For the myth, the line between a peasant and a self-made bourgeois was absolute, there were no gradual differentiation in between. Thus Courbet’s painting was profoundly offensive as Burial revealed the reality. It showed a society where bourgeois and peasants were one, that the countryside was a complex whole. He presented that becoming a bourgeois was a process by one’s self will and once the transition period reappeared, distinctions between bourgeois and peasants became uncertain. This was precisely why the painting disturbed the public. If we link Courbet’s political views with The Burial at Ornans, it can be included that he was trying to help with the revolution by eliminating the difference