Famous Funeral Paintings: 12 Farewells in Art
Famous funeral paintings include a burial so ordinary it started a scandal, an island of the dead that hung in Hitler’s office, and a Spanish count buried by two saints in person. Twelve funerals on canvas, and the one that changed painting forever.
The procession, in five lines
One funeral painting is seven meters wide and shows nobody important at all. That was the point.
One island of the dead exists in five versions, and Freud, Lenin and Hitler each owned or wanted one.
One burial is attended by two saints who had been dead for centuries.
One painter buried his own child and then painted the grave.
And one funeral procession is entirely made of skeletons.
1 | A Burial at Ornans, Gustave Courbet (1850)
Seven meters of canvas for the funeral of an unremarkable man in a small French town, painted at the scale reserved for kings and battles.
Critics were outraged that peasants and a dog got history painting treatment. The man who did it on purpose is in my guide to Gustave Courbet.
2 | The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, El Greco (1586)
Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen descend in person to lower a Toledo nobleman into his grave, while the local gentry watch in black ruffs.
El Greco painted his own son as the page and put his signature on the boy’s handkerchief. It still hangs in the church it was made for: El Greco.
3 | Isle of the Dead, Arnold Bocklin (1880 to 1886)
A white shrouded figure ferried toward a rock island of cypresses and tombs. Bocklin painted five versions and called it a picture for dreaming over.
Freud, Lenin and Hitler all owned or displayed copies, and Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem about it. The Swiss Symbolist is in my guide to Arnold Bocklin.
4 | The Funeral of Saint Bonaventure, Francisco de Zurbaran (1629)
Monks in white surround the body of a saint while cardinals and a pope stand by, everything lit like a stage in a dark room.
Zurbaran made white wool his signature. The painter of Spanish monasteries is in my guide to Francisco de Zurbaran.
5 | The Funeral of Shelley, Louis Edouard Fournier (1889)
The poet Shelley drowned in 1822 and was burned on a beach near Viareggio. Byron and Trelawny stand watching the pyre in this Victorian reconstruction.
The painting is fiction dressed as reportage: Byron actually left before the cremation ended, and Mary Shelley was not present at all.
6 | The Dead Toreador, Edouard Manet (1864)
A bullfighter laid out flat on an empty grey ground, seen from his feet. Manet cut this figure out of a larger painting he had destroyed.
Death with no mourners, no priest, no story: modern painting arriving through a funeral without a funeral. He is in my guide to Edouard Manet.
7 | The Entombment of Christ, Caravaggio (1603)
The body slides toward us on a stone slab that juts out of the picture, as if being lowered into our own space. Nicodemus looks straight at the viewer.
It was so admired that Rubens, Fragonard and Cezanne all copied it. The rule breaker is in my guide to Caravaggio.
8 | The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1562)
An army of skeletons herds the living into a giant coffin trap, while a skeleton cart hauls skulls across a burning plain. No funeral, just the industry of death.
Bruegel painted it after decades of plague and war in the Low Countries. The Prado restored it in 2018. He is in my guide to Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
9 | Burial of the Sardine, Francisco Goya (about 1815)
A carnival funeral: masked crowds dance behind a banner grinning with a black face, burying a sardine to mark the start of Lent.
Goya turned a folk ritual into something closer to a nightmare. The man who painted Spain’s underside is in my guide to Francisco Goya.
10 | The Funeral, Edvard Munch (1890s)
Munch returned to graves and mourners repeatedly after losing his mother at five and his sister at fourteen, painting figures dissolving around an open plot.
Grief was his lifelong subject before anxiety was. He is in my guide to Edvard Munch.
11 | The Funeral of Atala, Anne Louis Girodet (1808)
A young woman is carried to her grave in an American wilderness by a lover and a priest, from a novel by Chateaubriand that all of France had read.
Girodet lit the tomb like a theater and turned a bestseller into the most reproduced Romantic funeral in Europe. It is in the Louvre.
12 | The Funeral of the First Born, Vasily Perov (1865)
A widow drags a child’s coffin through the Russian snow on a sled, her back to us, two surviving children huddled on top.
Perov had buried his own children. Nothing in the painting is symbolic: it is a sled, a coffin, and a road that goes on past the frame.
For more mourning, the Met and the National Gallery both catalogue their burial scenes with the commissions behind them.
Funerals on canvas, quick answers
What is the most famous funeral painting? A Burial at Ornans by Courbet, with El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz as the sacred equivalent.
Why was Courbet’s burial scandalous? Its size. Painting ordinary villagers at the scale of history painting insulted the hierarchy of subjects.
Who owned copies of Isle of the Dead? Freud and Lenin had prints, and Hitler bought a version. It became the most reproduced image in Germany.
Are the saints in El Greco’s burial real attendees? No. Local legend said Augustine and Stephen appeared to bury the count in 1323. El Greco painted the miracle as fact.
Where can I see these paintings? Orsay for Courbet, Toledo for El Greco, the Prado for Bruegel and Goya, the Louvre for Girodet.
One closing fact: the villagers of Ornans posed for Courbet one by one in his studio, which is why every mourner looks like a portrait. Fifty real people attended a funeral that never happened.