Courbet's The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, shows an old man and a younger one breaking rocks for a road, and it presents hard, anonymous work as a life with no way out, the same task from youth to old age. Courbet gave two nameless laborers a canvas of the size French painters kept for kings and battles, and offered them no hero's pose and no rescue. The canvas was lost in 1945.
Shown at the end of 1850 at the Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the city, 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. 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 written in November 1849 at Ornans, his hometown in eastern France. The letter says nothing about respect. It describes what he came across on a carriage ride, and what he expected to become of the people in it.
I read the painting as a verdict on that life, and the letter is the evidence.
The two men on a country road
Courbet came upon the two men near the village of Maisières, in the hills of the Franche-Comté, his home region. He was driving a carriage to a château, where he meant to paint a landscape. On November 26, 1849, he told the story to his friend Francis Wey, a writer. They were breaking stones for a road: an old man of seventy and a younger one.
He stopped the carriage and saw, as he put it, "the most complete expression of poverty." In the translation of the art historian Albert Boime, he sketched them in words: on one side an old man "bent over his work, his sledgehammer raised, his skin parched by the sun, his head shaded by a straw hat," on the other a young man "with swarthy skin, his head covered with dust."
Then he arranged for them to come to his studio the next morning. The scene that looks like a glimpse from a carriage window was painted indoors, with the two men posing.
He added a line that tells what he thought he had found. "Alas! In this class, this is how one begins, and that is how one ends." On the canvas the young man stands at one end and the old man at the other, doing the same job. Courbet was describing a life that does not change from its first day to its last.
He gave that life a canvas the size of a battle painting, and Paris split between ridicule and praise.
What You'll Discover
Why it was painted so large.
What is missing behind the two men.
Who mocked it, who defended it.
Whether it really burned.