A Burial at Ornans
Gustave Courbet · 1849–1850
Realism
Painting what the eye actually meets: a mid nineteenth-century movement that took peasants, streets and cafés as its subjects and treated them with a frankness that shocked the audiences of its day.
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Play CollectionThe ordinary, at full scale
Realism, in the narrow art-historical use, names a French movement of the mid nineteenth century: ordinary things, set down the way the eye meets them. The novelist Champfleury minted the label in the 1840s, and its painting found its hero in his friend Courbet.
What that meant on the wall was farm workers and city crowds, café tables and cheap entertainments, and a new plainness about the body. Painted at that scale and with that honesty, the subjects scandalised an art public made up almost entirely of the comfortable classes.
Courbet's scandal
Courbet, who led the Realism movement in nineteenth-century French painting, made the movement's name with a funeral. A Burial at Ornans records a funeral in his birthplace, giving a village event the canvas size that history painting had kept for heroes and saints; the picture brought him instant fame.
His later years were as stormy as his pictures: six months in prison in 1871 for his part in the Paris Commune, then exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.
Wider than France
The movement reached beyond Courbet's circle and beyond painting's usual ground. Manet, a native Parisian, made his scandal at the Salon des Refusés with subjects taken from the life around him. Eakins, an American realist painter and photographer, was honoured mostly after his death. Carpeaux, sculptor of the Second Empire, took his subjects from the street and walked away from the classical tradition.
Artists
The French painter around whom Realism formed; his grand pictures of ordinary life at Ornans scandalised the Salon and made his name.
A native Parisian whose unconventional subject matter drawn from modern life made him famous at the Salon des Refusés, and an important precursor of Impressionism.
An American realist painter, photographer, sculptor and fine arts educator, controversial in his own day and far more honoured later.
A French sculptor and painter of the Second Empire under Napoleon III; he found his subjects in the street and left the classical tradition behind.
Artworks
Femme nue couchée
Gustave Courbet · 1862
A dark-haired young woman lies back on a couch wearing nothing but shoes and stockings, red curtains open on a grey sky behind her; Goya's naked maja surely stands somewhere behind the picture.
After Dinner at Ornans
Gustave Courbet · 1848
The first of the big Ornans canvases, painted over the winter of 1848 to 1849; it took a medal at the Salon of 1849 and the state bought it.
The Hunt Breakfast
Gustave Courbet · 1858
An al fresco meal of a deer hunting party, painted in Germany in 1858 and now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne: Realism demanded that genuine events, rather than imaginary mythological compositions, be faithfully recorded, and Courbet was its pioneer.
Femme nue au chien
Gustave Courbet · 1861
A young woman seated naked before a landscape, bending to kiss a small white dog; the model is thought to have been Courbet's mistress at the time. Shown to the public in 1868, the canvas hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
Boating
Édouard Manet · 1874
A man and a woman in a sailboat on a sunny summer day, the boat cut off hard at the edges, a framing Manet took from Japanese prints. First shown at the Salon of 1879, it reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the Havemeyer gift.
Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand
Thomas Eakins · 1874
A doctor at his desk between scientific objects and household ones, reading a book and petting his cat; he taught Eakins anatomy at Jefferson Medical College. The portrait hangs at Crystal Bridges, in Arkansas.
La Danse
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux · 1865
A garlanded winged youth holds a tambourine aloft while women dance around him, carved for the façade of the Paris Opera and attacked with ink the year it went up; the original has been at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986, with a copy left in its place outside.
Sources
- Tate, “Realism”
- Wikipedia, “Gustave Courbet”
- National Gallery, London, “Edouard Manet”
- Wikipedia, “Thomas Eakins”
- Wikipedia, “Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux”
- Wikipedia, “A Burial at Ornans”
- Wikipedia, “Femme nue couchée”
- Wikipedia, “After Dinner at Ornans”
- Wikipedia, “The Hunt Breakfast (Courbet)”
- Wikipédia, “Femme nue au chien”
- Wikipedia, “Boating (Manet)”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand”
- Wikipedia, “La Danse (Carpeaux)”
Invite Realism into your living room
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