figures, seen at eye level in person, blocks any view into deep space.
The faces are portraits. Some of the models were Courbet’s sisters
(three of the women in the front row, toward the right) and friends.
Behind and above the figures are bands of overcast sky and barren
cliffs. The dark pit of the grave opens into the viewer’s space in the
center foreground. Despite the unposed look of the figures, Courbet
controlled the composition in a masterful way by his sparing use of
bright color. In place of the heroic, the sublime, and the dramatic,
Courbet aggressively presents the viewer with the mundane realities of
daily life and death. In 1857, Jules-François-Félix Husson Champfleury
(1821–1889), one of the first critics to recognize and appreciate
Courbet’s work, wrote ofBurial at Ornans,“[I]t represents a small-
town funeral and yet reproduces the funerals ofall small towns.”^7
Unlike the theatricality of Romanticism, Realism captured the ordi-
nary rhythms of daily existence.
Of great importance for the later history of art, Realism also in-
volved a reconsideration of the painter’s primary goals and departed
from the established priority on illusionism. Accordingly, Realists
called attention to painting as a pictorial construction by the ways
they applied pigment or manipulated composition. Courbet’s inten-
tionally simple and direct methods of expression in composition
and technique seemed unbearably crude to many of his more tradi-
tional contemporaries, who called him a primitive. Although his
bold, somber palette was essentially traditional, Courbet often used
the palette knifefor quickly placing and unifying large daubs of
paint, producing a roughly wrought surface. His example inspired
the young artists who worked for him (and later Impressionists such
as Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir; see Chapter 31), but the pub-
lic accused him of carelessness and critics wrote of his “brutalities.”
800 Chapter 30 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1800 TO 187030-29Jean-
François Millet,
The Gleaners,1857.
Oil on canvas, 2 9
3 8 . Musée d’Orsay,
Paris.
Millet and the Barbizon
School painters special-
ized in depictions of
French country life.
Here, Millet portrayed
three impoverished
women gathering the
remainders left in the
field after a harvest.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Like Courbet,Jean-François
Millet(1814–1878) found his subjects in the people and occupa-
tions of the everyday world. Millet was one of a group of French
painters of country life who, to be close to their rural subjects, set-
tled near the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau. This
Barbizon School specialized in detailed pictures of forest and coun-
tryside. Millet, perhaps their most prominent member, was of peas-
ant stock and identified with the hard lot of the country poor. In The
Gleaners (FIG. 30-29), he depicted three peasant women perform-
ing the backbreaking task of gleaning the last wheat scraps. These
impoverished women were members of the lowest level of peasant
society. Landowning nobles traditionally permitted them to glean—
to pick up the remainders left in the field after the harvest. Millet
characteristically placed his monumental figures in the foreground,
against a broad sky. Although the field stretches back to a rim of
haystacks, cottages, trees, and distant workers and a flat horizon, the
gleaners quietly doing their tedious and time-consuming work
dominate the canvas.
Although Millet’s works have a sentimentality absent from
those of Courbet, the French public still reacted to his paintings with
disdain and suspicion. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, for
Millet to invest the poor with solemn grandeur did not meet with
the approval of the prosperous classes. In particular, middle-class
landowners resisted granting gleaning rights, and thus Millet’s rela-
tively dignified depiction of gleaning did not gain their favor. The
middle class also linked the poor with the dangerous, newly defined
working class, which was finding outspoken champions in men such
as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and the
novelists Émile Zola (1840–1902) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870).1 ft.