A Burial at Ornans
An ordinary funeral in Courbet’s home town, on a scale previously reserved for history painting. The critics were outraged: why make ordinary peasants so large?
No one looks towards the grave and no miracle occurs – just people in black against a grey sky.
Gustave Courbet came from Ornans, a small town in Franche-Comté in eastern France. He painted A Burial at Ornans in 1849–1850 in an attic studio in his parents’ house. The canvas is about seven metres wide and more than three metres high, so large that he could hardly see the whole picture at once while he was working. He showed it at the Salon in Paris in the winter of 1850–1851.
The picture shows a funeral in the town’s new cemetery. About fifty people stand in a long row in front of a landscape of limestone cliffs. On the left, men carry the coffin, and one holds up a crucifix. In the centre the priest stands reading, surrounded by beadles in red robes. A gravedigger kneels by the open grave, and a skull lies at its edge. In the foreground stands a dog. On the right are the women, dressed in black, with handkerchiefs to their faces.
Courbet used the inhabitants of Ornans as models, among them the mayor, the priest, friends and his own father and sisters. Who is being buried is not stated. It has been suggested that the picture refers to the funeral of Courbet’s great-uncle, but this is uncertain. Courbet did not want to tell a story but to show an ordinary event in an ordinary town.
The composition is almost entirely horizontal, like a frieze. No figure dominates, and the gazes are directed in different directions. No heaven opens and no holy figure appears. The colours are dark – black, grey and brown – with only a few patches of red and white. The grey sky weighs heavily over the people. The figures are painted life-size, and the viewer stands almost like one of the mourners at the graveside.
At the time, such a large format was reserved for history painting: biblical, mythological and historical scenes. Giving a provincial funeral of ordinary peasants and townspeople the same scale was perceived as a provocation. Critics called the picture ugly and vulgar, and some saw in it a political, socialist message. Others defended it as a new, honest art.
A Burial at Ornans became one of the manifestos of Realism. When the picture was not accepted for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, Courbet showed it, along with other works, in a pavilion of his own that he called the Pavilion of Realism. It was one of the first instances of an artist organising his own exhibition in protest against the official institutions.
After Courbet’s death his sister Juliette donated the painting to the French state. It hung in the Louvre and was moved in 1986 to the new Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Today it is seen as a turning point in the history of art, a picture that opened painting up to everyday people and events and paved the way for later generations of Realists and Impressionists.