Gustave Courbet's A Burial At Ornans

The intention of this paper is to discuss the historical significance of Gustave Courbet’s painting, A Burial at Ornans. I plan to show through the following research that the painting and the artist both play a major role in the movement of the arts from favor of Romanticism to Realism at the end of the French Revolution.

A Burial at Ornans was showcased only several years following the French Revolution of 1848, which overthrew the monarchy of King Louis Philippe. In the aftermath of the Revolution came a short-lived stage of a progressive Second Republic that was terminated at the hands of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in a coup d’état in 1951 and then followed by the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852 (Brooks, 2005).

Romanticism was

The oil on canvas painting, originally titled Painting of Human Figures, the History of a Burial at Ornans, is quite massive in size. Measuring at approximately ten by twenty two feet, this grand scale defies the tradition that such was typically reserved for high status paintings of historic significance. Such vast size historic paintings were traditionally thought of in the highest regard by academies and competitions (Brooks, 2005). And yet the Burial presents itself in subject matter, not in grandeur, but in the ordinary humility of common villagers at the gravesite in Courbet’s home province. (Anon, 1999). The melancholy scene is given a frieze-like treatment and is completely painted with dark and muted tones of green, deep brown, and carbon gray- giving both the environment and the citizens in the painting a sense of concrete heaviness (Anon, 2006). There is nothing about the portrayal of the subjects at hand that reads as noble or heroic. The villagers themselves are clad in drab common attire rather than a more formal and traditional regional costume and their expressionless faces seem to reflect the downhearted hues that surround them (Brooks, 2005). At the bottom center of the painting lies an open burial pit with scattered bones around it’s perimeter clearly making the viewer aware that this funeral is being presented as an unceremoniously commonplace affair and perhaps even as a memento