Perhaps the most prominent artist
of the movement was Gustave Courbet, a French painter and radical political
idealist. He took the Realist attention
toward the common man to its limits, insisting on using commoners for models in
all of his paintings and dressing in ragged clothes himself wherever he
went. His paintings showed honest scenes
of how people really behave, such as this image of the Burial at Ornans.
It is the funeral of an ordinary
villager. Unlike El Greco's Burial of
Count Orgaz, there are no saints—only commoners—and each is carrying a
different expression on his or her face.
The priest routinely reads; the gravedigger seems bored and impatient. The women mourners don't look convincing, and
no one in the painting notices the cross.
Everyone is looking elsewhere, distracted, hardly present at the scene
at all. None of the pallbearers even
look at the body. The sky itself is
cloudy and monotonous, the background scenery, uninteresting. It is quite a boring event, isn't it; and the
people in the painting appear bored.
This burial is just another routine event, a regular phenomenon in human
life; nothing sacred or majestic.
Courbet's Realism shows the nakedness of human emotions in all of their
earthly lack of grandeur. It may not be
very satisfying, but it's true to humankind.
The reality of life, the artist shows, is that the human animal is not
saintly, not always beautiful, and is easily distracted from his present
surroundings. This scene is indeed of a
burial, but not a very holy one; it's just another death in the life of
lower-class society.
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