Courbet's The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, shows an old man and a younger one breaking rocks for a road, and it argues that hard, anonymous work deserved a monumental painting. Courbet gave two nameless laborers a canvas of the size French painters kept for kings and battles, and offered them no hero's pose, no rescue, no way out. The canvas was lost in 1945.
Shown at the Paris Salon at the end of 1850, the picture made Courbet the face of Realism, the movement that painted ordinary modern life without improving it.
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The usual answer stops at dignity. Labor deserves respect, the poor deserve a place on the walls of the Salon, the official art exhibition of Paris. It is a generous reading, and the size of the canvas seems to back it up.
Courbet, though, explained how the picture began, in a letter to friends written at Ornans, his hometown in eastern France, in November 1849. He did not write about respect. He wrote about what he came across on a carriage ride, and about what he expected to become of the people in it.
I read the painting as a verdict, not a salute. And the canvas itself, the best way to test that reading, is gone: nobody has stood in front of it since 1945.
What You'll Discover
What Courbet saw on that road.
Why it was painted so large.
What is missing behind the two men.
Who mocked it, who defended it.
Whether it really burned.