Die Bauern von Flagey bei der Rückkehr vom Jahrmarkt

In 1850 Courbet sent Paris three enormous canvases of ordinary country life, and this was one of them. The others were A Burial at Ornans and The Stonebreakers. Painted the size normally reserved for kings and saints, they showed instead the farmers of Flagey, his home village in eastern France, plodding home from a livestock fair with their cattle. Critics were offended that such plain people had been given so much wall. The well-dressed man riding at the front is thought to be the painter's own father, Régis, a landowning farmer. Courbet kept returning to the picture, still reworking it in 1855, five years after the scandal it first caused.