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In 1849 Gustave Courbet painted the funeral of his own great-uncle in his hometown of Ornans, a small town in eastern France, filling the canvas with more than 40 life-size townspeople rendered with the weight and seriousness academic painting reserved for kings and saints. When A Burial at Ornans was shown at the 1850 Paris Salon, critics were outraged that ordinary gravediggers and mourners had been painted at the scale of history painting, and the label they used to insult it, Realism, became the name of the movement Courbet led for the next two decades.

In March 1871, in the chaos after France's defeat by Prussia, Courbet was elected to the Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government that briefly ran Paris, and headed its arts commission. During the Commune's two months in power, the bronze column in the Place Vendôme, cast from captured enemy cannon to celebrate Napoleon's victories, was pulled down as a monument to war.

When the Commune fell that May, Courbet was arrested, jailed for six months, and later held personally liable for the cost of re-erecting the column, a fine so large it would have taken decades of his income to pay. In 1873, rather than face seizure of his paintings, he crossed into Switzerland and never returned to France, dying in exile at La Tour-de-Peilz in 1877.