Quarry men

In late November 1849 Courbet wrote to his friend the writer Francis Wey about two men he had passed on the road near Maisières, close to his home town of Ornans. One was too old for the work and one too young, and both were breaking stones for a road surface. He asked them to come and pose in his studio. The canvas he made from them was life-size, and when it went on show at the Paris Salon in the winter of 1850 that scale still belonged to battles and saints. The big version was kept in Dresden through the war and has not been seen since 1945. This smaller one repeats the same two figures with the composition turned around, darker in tone, the older man kneeling at the left with his hammer up. Oskar Reinhart bought it in 1923 from the Danish collector Wilhelm Hansen, who was selling off half of his French paintings after Copenhagen's largest bank collapsed.