Nach dem Essen in Ornans

Courbet painted this over the winter of 1848 and 1849, and the scene could hardly be plainer. In his home town of Ornans, after a meal, his father and three friends sit around a table while one of them plays the violin. What shocked people was the scale. He gave this ordinary provincial evening the enormous canvas usually reserved for grand history painting, kings and battles, and he painted it with a blunt, heavy brush. When he sent it to the Paris Salon of 1849 it won him a gold medal and was bought by the French state. The medal came with a privilege that mattered. It meant his work could now skip the Salon jury, an exemption he kept for years, and it hangs today in the museum at Lille.