800 Cn. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
Jean-Fran^ois Millet’s The Gleaners (1857).
est in portraying artistic subjects with a vivid sense of actuality. Jean
Fran^ois Millet (1814—1875), a Barbizon painter, painted peasants at work
in such pieces as The Gleaners (1857) and The Angelas (1859), giving
peasants a dignity that repelled many middle-class viewers who thought
them unworthy of being painted.
Artistic style evolved far more rapidly than did official views of what con
stituted good art. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) abandoned the idealiza
tion that still characterized painting. “Show me an angel,” he scoffed at his
critics, ‘‘and I will paint one.” Taking as a compliment the assessment that
he was “a democratic painter,” he startled viewers by choosing ordinary
workers as his subjects. Like Millet, Courbet shocked with his realism.
Burial at Ornans (1849) portrays a family of some means looking rather
unattractive, bored, or even indifferent as the body of a relative is being
lowered into a grave in Courbet’s hometown. The Bather (1853) shows a
stout naked woman rising from a forest pool. Nudity did not bother many
viewers—it was, after all, a staple of classical painting. Rather, viewers
were upset by the fact that Courbet portrayed an ordinary-looking woman
holding herself up very awkwardly. The artist seemed to be mocking the
kind of classical scene painters had been expected to treat w'ith reverence.
When Napoleon III saw the exhibited painting, he struck the canvas with a
riding-crop. Courbet, a political radical, believed that art should have a
social purpose. He exacted some revenge in a later painting by depicting
the emperor as a shabby poacher.