During the late 1840s, France experienced a wave of Revolutions known as the February Revolutions. The revolutions were to destroy the Orleans’ monarchy, which had been established in 1830 and was finally ended in 1848 to create the second French Republic. Along with inspiring social commentary, with the revolution gaining positive reputation with Karl Marx, it also inspired fictional works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which Hugo has stated was directly inspired by the various revolutions he had lived through. The artist Gustave Courbet followed the spirit of the revolution in his portrayals of the working class, preferring to show everything realistically rather than painting anything in a flattering light. His decision cemented and created the artistic movement known as Realism.
The Stonebreakers’ reflects Courbet’s socialist leanings. His paintings portrayed people as they were rather than idealizing those with power, which was done in Neoclassical portrays of Napoleon and likening him to Caesar and the portraits of kings during the 1700s which would beautify monarchs to show how Godly they were. Courbet, however, went the opposite way. In the Stonebreakers’, Courbet depicts two men breaking rocks, hunched over. They’re both in tattered clothing, with the man on the left sporting a rip on his back and the man on the right having holes in his vest and mismatched patches to fix both his jeans and vest. Both are the realistic portrayal of the working class, or the proletariat, lacking the finances to buy new clothing and having to use spare cloth to fix the wear and tear of older clothing. Courbet’s decision to not stylize the men or depict them as lazy, but rather as two men who have decided to take on manual labor to make end meet, a way to make cash for the family to survive. In the painting, they’re just people, not a symbol, not romanticized or beings to be despised. Their depiction acts as a way for Courbet to say, “these men are just like us.” He humbles the men, with no figure standing out among the other, unifying them as men with needs rather than contrasting them with the wealthy and showing their lack of status as the focus of the painting.
A Burial at Ornans revolves around the burial of his great uncle. The painting is enormous in size, rivaling that of Neoclassical historical painting and breaking the concept that large paintings are always historical. Courbet’s painting also lacks a defined subject. There’s no one person in the exact center. The crowd has no clear structure, the clergy is pushed far to the side. There’s no one clear emotion being depicted by the patrons of the funeral, with background figures even turning away from the viewer to hide their emotions. Courbet continued to mock Neoclassical paintings by using patrons who had been at the funeral as models for this painting, shattering the notion that only historical paintings would use models that would then go on to be portrayed as historical figures. Courbet stated that he thought paintings should be based off one’s own past rather than ideals, even going as far to state that all art that did not realistically portray the subject was worthless. A Burial at Ornans thus breaks the conventional standard of neoclassical painting by using methods to create large, historical paintings for a painting of a historical event that was not exactly popular or memorialized by the public.
Gustave Courbet’s realism mirrored his beliefs of society. He preferred everything to be shown exactly as it was, not being distorted by nostalgia or ideals demanded by those in power. The painting the Stonebreakers displayed his leftist tendencies perfectly, showing working class men at work as they were, not being demonized or idealized, just as men at work. A Burial at Ornans shows his belief that all men were equal, with no singular figure being the subject of the painting and pushing the church to the side to further his idea that they were irrelevant and not the main subject. Thus, his art reflects the rising beliefs of the Paris Commune, in which all men are equal and will die equal.