Artwork of the day

The Peasants of Flagey, Gustave Courbet, 1850-55, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie, Besançon

The final Courbet painting in this context  is the Peasants of Flagey returning from the fair. The picture is less crowded than the burial at Ornans and certainly more crowded than the Stonebreakers. Here, a group of peasants returns from a fair, as the title of the painting suggests. The fair was a business event of rural life, so the people involved return to their home after having sold their products and perhaps bought other things themselves. The thin oxen in front of the peasants might symbolize poverty, or may be the result of an economic deal .However the most important thing about this painting is that this is a representation of the third class in rural France. After the exhausted workers and the indifferent bourgeoisie, Courbet depicts the peasants, those people who have been lucky enough to own some estates and be able to make a living out of them. This painting therefore completes a trilogy that aims at representing the whole of rural life from a social, critical and even political point of view.

Artwork of the day

The Burial at Ornans, Gustave Courbet, 1849-1850, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The second of the three works by Courbet to examine the French rural life, the Burial at Ornans deals not with the deprived poor but with the rural bourgeoisie. The occasion is a burial, perhaps, a real event from the social life at Ornans. The people represented, are “the public face” of the town, mixed with members of Courbet’s own family. However if one’s looks closer, understands that very few among the crowd actually mourn for the dead. Many look out of the picture, others talk with each other. This is clearly then a social event, where the bourgeoisie of Ornans gathered to show off. It is how the sarcastic eye of the artist saw all these people, and the burial at Ornans is the way he chose to criticize them. This painting is a visual contrast to the miserable situation of the Stonebreakers. These people are quite wealthy even if their status is much lower than this of the urban bourgeoisie that claimed power in Paris and the other big urban centers of France. 

References

Clark, T.J. 1969. “A Bourgeois dance of death: Max Buchon on Courbet-I” The Burlington magazine. pp 208-213

Rubin, Henry James. 1997. Courbet. France: Phaidon

Artwork of the day

The Stonebreakers, Gustave Courbet,1849, oil on canvas

One of the paintings representing people from the artist's hometown, Ornans, the Stonebreakers is one of Courbet's most celebrated works, although it does not survive today as it was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The artist chose to depict his two protagonists in a three-quarter view, hiding thus their faces. What the viewer needs to know though is clear at one glance. The picture shows two people: an old man and a boy, in the process of breaking stones at the end of a provincial road. Courbet described these two figures in a letter to his  friend Champfleury as “pitiable”. The old man is for Courbet “an old machine”, “sunburned” and dressed with rags. The boy is fifteen years old according to Courbet and he is already “suffering from scurvy”. These two persons belong to the lowest part of the French rural society of the 19^th century, who have most probably lost their farms from poverty. They are in this state and have no hope of ever getting out of it. The old man represents the end of the existence of the French proletariat, the boy, the beginning. 

This painting along with the Burial at Ornans and The Peasants of Flagey are thought to form a coherent whole of French rural life and as large scale paintings their theme (neither historical nor heroic) scandalized the French Salon of 1850.

References

Rubin, Henry James. 1997. Courbet. France: Phaidon