Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877)
Un enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans)
1849–1850
Oil on canvas, 315 x 668 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
At the end of the summer of 1849, Courbet began his first monumental painting. He wanted to make it his “statement of principle” and expressed his ambition by entitling the work Tableau de figures humaines, historique d’un enterrement à Ornans. He was inspired by the collective portraits of the Dutch civic guards of the 17th century, while the sumptuousness of the blacks recalls Spanish art.
The variations of values, in dark greens and muted grays, serve a certain austerity of tones, the thick and robust style gives density and weight to beings and natural elements. The rigor of the frieze composition, the gaping hole at the edge of which are bones, invites a meditation on the human condition.
Courbet‘s approach was then radically innovative: he used dimensions ordinarily reserved for history painting, a “noble” genre, to represent a banal subject, without idealization, which is not a genre scene either.
At the Salon of 1850–1851, many denounced “the ugliness” of the figures, the triviality of the whole. Among the rare admirers of the painting, a critic nevertheless prophesied that it would remain “in modern history the Pillars of Hercules of Realism”. The very subject of the painting has been reinterpreted. Initially considered anticlerical, it is ultimately retained that, in a composition dominated by Christ on the cross, where the clergy, a mayor and a Freemason judge rub shoulders, surrounded by men and women from all social conditions, it is the idea of a “universal understanding” which dominates, a constant preoccupation of the 19th century and of the generation of 1848 in particular. (Orsay)