Los picapedreros

You cannot stand in front of this painting anymore. Courbet made it in 1849, showing two roadmenders breaking stones by hand, an old man and a boy doing the dullest, hardest work there was. When he hung it at the Paris Salon of 1850, critics were offended that anyone would paint labourers this large and this plainly, with no lesson and no beauty added. That was the point. Courbet said he would only paint what he could actually see, and this was one of the pictures that gave the movement called Realism its name. The canvas lived in Dresden for decades and then vanished in 1945, near the end of the Second World War, when the city was bombed. So everything we know about it now comes from old photographs and the people who saw it while it still existed.