Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Thesis Statement

In The Stonebreakers-1849, the most important element is not mere truthfulness in representing nature, but the distinctive ways in which he transformed what he saw.

Introduction

Courbet's breakthrough as an artist had much to do with the Revolution of 1848, which spelled the end, if only temporarily, to the rigid jury system of the Salon. To the unjuried Salon of that year, he sent no fewer than ten works. More important for his future, however, was the 1849 Salon, juried by a committee democratically elected by all artists, where he exhibited six paintings and received a medal. This meant that henceforth he was hors concours: his works no longer had to pass by the jury to be admitted (Chu, 2005). This new status allowed him to make an important statement at the combined Salon of 1850/51, where he exhibited nine paintings, including the Stonebreakers and the Burial at Ornans, two paintings that received much critical attention. Both works were related to the ideology and the events of the Revolution and the short-lived Second Republic that followed it (1848-1851).

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

The first, showing two men engaged in the meanest form of contemporary labor—the manual breaking of fieldstones to create gravel for roads—dealt with poverty, a hotbutton issue during the Second Republic (Chu, 2005). The second, a monumental group portrait of rural bourgeois and well-to-do peasants, alluded to the new sense of civic equality that had been created by the introduction, in 1848, of universal suffrage. On an artistic level, it also called into question the traditional hierarchy of genres. Courbet had painted an ordinary scene of contemporary life on a canvas the size of a monumental history painting. Maintaining that the Burial, in fact, was a history painting, he claimed that, contrary to traditional history paintings, which reimagined the past for the public of the present, his work offered an accurate record of the present for the viewers of the future. This new concept of history painting was an important aspect of Courbet's artistic program, which he referred to as realism (Chu, 2005).

This was an epoch-making picture when first exhibited, and it sums up, more clearly than his larger pictures in the Louvre, the distinctive features of Courbet's art. Classified under the vague word " naturalism," it stood for a conscious reaction away from both Ingres and Delacroix; away from two different ...