Un entierro en Ornans

When this went up at the Paris Salon of 1850, the scandal was partly about size. A canvas over six metres wide, big enough for a coronation or a battle, and Courbet had filled it with an ordinary funeral in Ornans, the small country town where he grew up. More than 40 life-sized villagers stand around an open grave, in their plain everyday clothes, faces you would pass in the street. Critics were offended that common townsfolk were given the scale the age reserved for saints and kings. Look for the freshly dug hole in the foreground and the flat grey sky above it. No opening heaven, no angels, no soul rising, just the ground and the weather. Courbet later said that in painting this burial he had really buried the whole Romantic school of French art.