The Return from the Meeting

The large picture this comes from no longer exists. In 1863 Courbet painted a wide canvas of Catholic priests weaving home drunk from a church meeting, one of them slumped across a donkey while peasants stare. The official Paris Salon rejected it, and then the Salon des Refuses, the exhibition set up precisely for rejected work, turned it away as well for mocking religion, so Courbet showed it privately for money instead. Years later a devout Catholic buyer acquired the painting and destroyed it, and the composition survives now only through photographs and smaller versions such as this one. Scholars still disagree about the Basel canvas, whether Courbet made it as a study for the lost picture or as an autograph copy afterward. It measures 73 by 92 centimetres, a fraction of the size of the original it records.