A Burial at Ornans is considered the manifest of Realism, an artistic and literary movement founded by its creator Gustave Courbet in Paris during the tumultuous 1840s.
It's a monumental work that brought the life (and death) of 19th-century peasants and low-class workers directly on canvas and into the tranquil life of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and for this reason was harshly criticized and had to be quickly removed from sight.
Today, A Burial at Ornans is one of the highlights of the Musée d'Orsay and with hindsight, we know that it made the history of art of the 1800s and that it helped give way to crucial innovative waves such as Impressionism.
Here you will find a complete description and analysis of A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet, with information about the artist, his life, and Realism, a full explanation of why the painting ignited so many controversies, and more.
In this article:
A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet: Description and Analysis
A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet: Description and Analysis
OVERVIEW
● Title: A Burial at Ornans (in French: Un enterrement à Ornans)
● Artist: Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
● Execution: 1849-1850
● Commissioner: made for exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1850-51
● Style: Realism
● Subject: Country burial procession
● Technique: oil on canvas
● Dimensions: 315x660cm / 124x260 in
● Original Location: Paris Salon, private collection
● Current Location: Musée d'Orsay in Paris
● Ticket: Yes (full price: 16€) - Buy your tickets here
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To understand the importance and content of A Burial at Ornans, it's crucial to spend a few words about the historical and social context in which the work was created!
In 1849-50, when Courbet was working on A Burial from his hometown Ornans (East France), his country had just come out of a dramatic period that included the French Revolution of February 1848 and the subsequent proclamation of the so-called Second Republic, a session of harsh repressions in June 1848, and the eventual election in December of the future Emperor Napoleon III as President of the Republic. Now, imagine all this happening in a matter of months: it means that great and profound societal changes were underway and that Courbet was experiencing them all while evolving his art. In 1848, he was right where everything unfolded, in Paris.
Long story short, in the mid-19th century, France (and much of Europe) was going through a phase that began with the 1789 Revolution and that would bring the entire continent out of the Ancien Régime and straight into the modernized, industrialized, up-to-war Twentieth Century. This included a slow but irreversible transition from absolute monarchy to more liberal and republican ideas, as well as a reconsideration of the role of the masses of peasants or low-income workers, traditionally excluded from decision-making and now brought to the fore (yes, this is when Karl Marx's ideas took over!)
Peasants and low-income workers are, indeed, the protagonists of A Burial at Ornans, and not by chance.
THE ARTIST: GUSTAVE COURBET AND REALISM
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, in Ornans, a small town in East France close to Switzerland.
Part of a family composed of his father, mother, and four sisters, Gustave grew up in a well-off environment, and his childhood is known to have been serene. Later in life, to defy the elitarian Parisian bourgeoise and build himself a persona, he would proudly define himself as an educated peasant - in reality, with several owned lands and conspicuous wealth, his family stood right at the borders between peasantry and bourgeoisie.
Anyway, Gustave soon left his nest for study reasons, as his father wanted him to become a lawyer. This would obviously never happen, but Gustave nevertheless moved to Paris in 1839, enrolling in Law Studies.
Paris soon took hold of him: he easily convinced his parents that his only purpose in life was to be an artist and they capitulated. His father ended up supporting him for years, regularly sending him money so he could afford his life in Paris. This was true luck for Courbet: he had time to focus on traineeships at various artists', to spend hours in the Louvre and other museums, to travel around Europe (especially the Netherlands) to see the Old Masters' works with his own eyes.
As an emerging artist, his first goal was to get accepted at the Paris Salon, a major art exhibition and, at the time, the main means to enter the art sector and make a name for oneself. He got rejected several times before finally succeeding in 1844. By 1849 he won a Gold Medal, meaning that he could now exhibit his work without the need of having it approved by a jury. From that moment, his career would flourish, and he soon became popular as an innovative, cutting-edge artist whose works were purposedly controversial and political.
His ideas were harshly influenced by what he saw in Paris in those years leading up to 1848 and after. Courbet was never personally involved in the riots and revolutionary movements but overall approved and supported them through his art and writings, although he despised violence and war.
By the 1860s, he was among the stars of Parisian art and his revolutionary role in shaping this latter was becoming clear. Unfortunately, in a time of societal distress, influential and controversial figures involved in politics were often targeted by the government, and while Courbet managed to stay out of danger for a while (as said, he never really took physical part in riots or protests), in 1871 he was eventually deemed guilty of damaging the Vendôme Column.
The Vendôme Column is a monument you can find in Place Vendôme in Paris, commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte and completed by 1810. It clearly recalls the Trajan Column in Rome and, like its model, is meant to symbolize military triumph. On top of it is a statue of Napoleon. In the turbulent mid-1800s, it was identified as the representation of the evil monarchy and of the power the revolutionaries wished to eradicate. In 1871, it was damaged during the Paris Commune (revolutionary government). On that occasion, Gustave Courbet, who had previously campaigned for its destruction but never really put the idea into action, was photographed on site, thus proving his direct involvement.
At this point, his life took a dramatic turn. In 1873, for his involvement during the Vendôme Column facts, he was fined a ridiculous sum he could not pay. Faced with choosing between prison for non-fulfillment or exile, he chose the latter. He fled to Switzerland, and there he died on December 31, 1877, after a few years of his decade-long addiction to alcohol causing irreversible damages.
The Realism Movement
Today, Gustave Courbet is known as the founder of Realism, an art movement that seems to indeed represent his art at its best.
Realism was born in Paris during the turbulent 1840s and later developed in the 1850s and 1860s, inspiring the artists' generations to come, including Impressionists. It saw the light at the Brasserie Andler, an iconic Parisian meeting point - today no more but once in the 6th arrondissement - that used to host Courbet and his like-minded friends such as Charles Baudelaire. There, they devised a new way of doing art and poetry, one that would describe reality as it was, that would depict the truth and the truth only.
Courbet's declination of this concept was putting real people - peasants, workers, nudes - and real landscapes into his canvases, without idealizing or elevating them. Just like in A Burial at Ornans, where we see regular people attending a regular funeral in a regular country town.
➊Where did this need for reality come from? It was a consequence of the world Courbet was living in. A disturbed, confused society that had idealized aristocrats' and absolute sovereigns' deeds through art for centuries to detach these figures from the masses - those very masses of low- and middle-class workers or peasants who were now fighting for their own place in the world and wanted to see a representation of their harsh reality on canvas.
DESCRIPTION OF A BURIAL AT ORNANS
The Burial at Ornans is a monumental oil painting on canvas by French artist Gustave Courbet, measuring 315x660 cm (124x260 in).
The sketch was made in 1849 and the painting was actually created in the first months of 1850. It depicts a funeral taking place in the city of Ornans - the artist's hometown - and specifically represents the moment when the procession to the cemetery has just ended and the coffin is reaching its final resting place. The gravedigger has just finished his job and now more than forty life-sized figures and a dog are waiting for the burial to proceed. They are all busy with their task: the pallbearers are arriving, the clergymen are getting ready for the ritual, the men are quietly mourning, and the women are weeping.
LOCATION: The funeral phase we are invited to join takes place in the extra-urban cemetery of Ornans, newly inaugurated in 1848 after years of disputes. Country people had buried their dead within the urban centers for centuries, but the Napoleonic era gradually changed customs for hygienic reasons. At the time, the cemetery must have been still quite empty but not fully empty. Here we cannot see any other graves because they are all hidden by the many figures.
LANDSCAPE: The landscape makes it clear that we are outside the town's borders. This is the typical landscape of East France, with its arid high limestone cliffs. Specifically, what we see should be the Roche du Mont (right) and the Château d'Ornans (left), two recurring sights in Ornans today as yesterday.
FIGURES: The 40 life-sized figures in the painting are divided across the scene as they would in a church (and as they likely would have put themselves in the cemetery): clergymen on one side and men and women on the other (in turn divided to separate the genders).
➜ Depicted are all citizens of Ornans, people who Courbet knew personally and even members of his family. A few of them, like the hatless man on the far left or a few men in the background of the procession at its center, may have been dead at the time of the painting's creation.
➜ Generally, they are portrayed in the funeral costume appropriate for their role: black and white robes for the clergymen (with the exception of the two beadles and choirboys), black robes for the men, and black dresses with white headdresses for the ladies.
Let's take a closer look at what these people are doing and what's their role:
Priest: the man standing on the left side of the grave reading a breviary (book with liturgical texts to be read during masses) is the priest. He is getting ready to perform the burial ritual.
Gravedigger: on his knees is a man, identified as Antoine Joseph Cassard, a peasant who seldomly worked as a gravedigger to make some extra money. He has just finished his work and his jacket is still lying on the ground. His body, the only one not standing, divides the scene in two.
Revolutionaries: on the right side of the grave are two elderly men who, if you look closely, you notice are dressed differently than all others. Their costumes come from 1793, the later stages of the French Revolution that took place 50+ years earlier. They have been identified as François Pillot-Secrétan and Jean Baptiste Cardey, Courbet's grandfather's friends. ➊Why are they dressed like that? It can be a reference to the ongoing events at the time of the work's creation and a way for Courbet to state his side or, more likely, as a way to symbolize how everything is destined to die and disappear, all ideals and revolutions alike - probably a disillusion caused by the harsh repressions that followed the 1848 events and that Courbet witnessed in person.
Beadles: only two men are dressed in red, the beadles. Their costume is kinda old-fashioned but still in use in the countryside at the time. Beadles were normally laymen called on certain occasions to help with the ceremonies.
Choirboys: behind the priest are two younglings, the choirboys. They helped carry candles and holy water and here are presented as the clumsiest and liveliest figures in the scene.
Sacristans: there are four men dressed in white standing behind the priest, one of them is carrying the cross, which spikes above the procession. They are the sacristans, clergymen employed in the parish church.
The coffin and the pallbearers: the coffin is arriving with a white drape on it, escorted by four pallbearers in black. Notice that they turn their heads away from it, likely because the corpse inside it is several days old. It was customary to expose the dead for a few days before burying them.
Hatless man: the man on the far left corner, behind the pallbearers, might be Jean Antoine Oudot, Courbet's maternal grandfather who had died in 1848 and whose funeral this could be. This latter is just a supposition though.
Group of men: telling from their fashion, the group of men is composed of relatively well-off people of Ornans. Some of them were Courbet's friends and they are mostly depicted as silently mourning the dead, without much showing off their sorrow.
Group of women: here we can recognize all the women of Courbet's family. Behind the Revolutionaries is the artist's mother, and behind her his three sisters. On the far-right corner a little girl, perhaps the artist's cousin.
DOG: the white dog on the right side of the grave is likely a symbol of loyalty, as often seen in paintings. The dog is symbolically accompanying the dead into the underworld.
SKULL AND BONES: if you look attentively, you see a skull and bones all around the right borders of the grave. They are a common recurrence in paintings that depict death: they symbolize rebirth but also vanitas, the Latin concept expressing the futility of humans' actions, all to be irreversibly annulled by death.
A BURIAL AT ORNANS' HISTORY AND CONTROVERSIES
Courbet painted his A Burial at Ornans while temporarily residing in his hometown, Ornans. It was 1849, and Courbet had left Paris - where he was living - for his annual family visit but also to escape a city tormented by months of revolts and violent repressions.
In the months he spent in Ornans, Courbet first sketched and then painted A Burial. The process was complicated due to the monumental dimensions of the work, and it took the artist several months to complete it. He often lamented the complexity of the process that required him to proceed portion after portion, partially folding the canvas to do so and never being able to have a full view of it.
Shortly after finishing it, Courbet presented A Burial at Ornans at the Paris Salon, where it was exhibited between 1850 and 1851. Controversies started almost immediately - no other Courbet painting would ever be criticized as much as this one.
After the Salon, A Burial at Ornans was purchased by Gustave's sister, Juliette Courbet, then donated in 1881, a few years after her brother's death, to the French Ministry of Fine Arts. The Ministry first showcased it in the Louvre then moved it to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The Musée d'Orsay had just opened its doors at the time and was specifically thought to exhibit 1800s works - the perfect final home for the painting.
The Main Controversies Around A Burial at Ornans
A Burial at Ornans became the most-criticized painting in Courbet's career - although not the only one.
Where did all these critics come from? After all, it's just a painting depicting a funeral!
1. The Size of the Painting
A Burial at Ornans was too big. Its monumental dimensions (315x660 cm or 124x260 in) were normally reserved for the so-called academic art (the mainstream artistic movement of the time) and specifically for historical, mythological, or religious scenes. The "Execution of Lady Jane Grey" (1833) by Paul Delaroche, the "Death of Marat" (1793), and "The Oath of the Horatii" (1784), both by Jacques-Louis David are all good examples of this style.
The depicted scenes in monumental paintings had to be idealized, reality-detached images that could inspire the people and, most of all, represent the great deeds of the aristocracy. The upper class was the expected audience of this art.
Reality was not tolerated and, therefore, a painting like A Burial at Ornans, that was to become the manifest of the Realism movement, was definitely not welcome. Moreover, the work depicted an unidealized, down-to-earth scene of a country funeral - a pointless, unuseful moment in the life of a powerless, unuseful class, the peasantry.
2. The Ugliness of the Procession
In idealized paintings, men have chiseled physiques, women are beautiful and gracious creatures, poses are unnaturally elegant, and scenes are unrealistically dreamful. In A Burial at Ornans, none of this is present.
Critics specifically addressed the ungraciousness and ugliness of the 40+ life-sized figures. Their costumes are in the ordinary fashion of ordinary people, their faces are hardly memorable, and their poses are undignified. This view was not what the aristocratic class and the jury of the Salon expected to see.
3. Brushstrokes and Composition
Academic art regularly showed off flat canvases with refined and elegant brushstrokes. When a work was finished, its surface was perfectly even and the composition was nicely arranged, usually following precise geometrical rules.
In A Burial at Ornans, brushstrokes are thick and visible. Black is the main color and borders and lines sometimes overlap. Also, Courbet never attended a prestigious art school, and his work always lacked this perfect sense of geometrical order that was taught to students.
To the Salon's visitors' eyes, this was an unacceptable show of poor technique and roughness.
4. Anticlerical and Political Messages
Lastly, in a period of political distress, political messages were immediately spotted in art and literature and, when thought to be against the current wave, disapproved of.
Courbet was known and seen as a political rebel: after all, he built himself a dissident persona. Therefore, the choice of adding two figures dressed as Revolutionaries, and of showing the ordinariness of a religious rite (the funeral) and the officiants (the clergymen) was not welcomed positively. The monumental size was even seen as a clear mock of public order and an attempt to disrupt social classes.
Later, the anticlerical accusations would decade: the central position of the crucifix and the showing off of the peasantry's piety were deemed proof of the artist's good intentions. Accusations of political implications remained.
PEASANTS AND COUNTRY BURIALS: AN INNOVATIVE SUBJECT?
A funeral in Ornans, what we get is all in the title.
As the manifest of the Realism movement, committed to depicting reality and truth, of course we cannot expect anything but the reality of what a country burial looked like in the 19th century. A civic moment, a ritual the entire community was called to take part in. A sad occasion to meet up with the small group of people that inhabited country villages, where everyone knew everyone. What we see here is likely what truly happened in rural France in the 1840s.
Unlike the official, state funerals to which sovereigns and nobles were used, no high messages and no moral examples were set to be shared. And this lack of a second purpose was exactly why hardly anyone was interested in the life of peasants: why perpetuating the memories and customs of people who did nothing but cultivate their lands and engage in manual work? What knowledge could the future generations take from them?
In Courbet's time, this mindset was changing and the importance of the masses was getting its recognition. However, this was certainly not the first time low-classes and their habits appeared on canvas. Three centuries before Courbet's years, Flemish artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Old Masters of Dutch Golden Age (Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc) did the same. Just one example among many.
➊ READ NEXT: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Peasant Wedding and Hunters in the Snow
Courbet's real innovation was to place these themes on immense, monumental canvases, to put life-sized figures of poor people in front of an aristocratic audience. Back in Bruegel's times, peasants' life was commissioned by wealthy merchants for their rural mansions, to inspire and blend in with the surroundings. In this case, there was no purpose but the celebration of the society's truth in its entirety, no one excluded.
WHERE AND HOW TO VISIT
You can see A Burial at Ornans at the Musée d'Orsay, one of the most incredible and fascinating museums in Paris. The museum hosts an impressive collection of 19th- and 20th-century artworks in a former train station, and is an unmissable experience for any art lover.
You can find the work at entrance level, in Room 7.
● To visit the Musée d'Orsay you will need a ticket: a full-price ticket costs 16€ or 14€ if purchased on-site (but I recommend purchasing it beforehand, as long lines are the norm), a reduced one costs 13€ while young people under 26 enter free of charge.
● The Museum is closed on Mondays, open Tue-Sun from 9:30 AM - 6:00 PM. Occasionally open at night.
References:
Masters of Art Series - Gustave Courbet, Delphi Classics, Hastings 2019.
Luca Casadio, Antonio Rocca, Gustave Courbet, Pelago Press, Milan 2024.
Michael Fried, The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's "Burial at Ornans", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Jun. 1983), pp. 635-683.
James McCarthy, Courbet's Ideological Contradictions and the Burial at Ornans, Art Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 12-16.