A Burial at Ornans is famous because Courbet painted a village funeral on the scale of a history painting, with his own neighbors as the mourners. The Paris Salon of 1850-51 called the faces vulgar, and the scandal made Courbet the leading name in Realism, the school that showed ordinary contemporary life as it was.
The canvas measures 315 by 668 centimeters, more than twenty feet across, a size French art kept for history painting, the top rank, meant for kings, saints and battles. Courbet, then thirty, painted it in 1849 and 1850 in a studio he set up in his grandfather's house in Ornans, a small town in eastern France, and the people of the town posed for it.
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A funeral with real neighbors sounds like a document, and Courbet dressed the picture as one. In the Salon catalogue it appeared as entry 661, a "painting of human figures, historical account of a burial at Ornans." On the canvas a priest, a gravedigger and pallbearers stand in black around an open grave, with gray cliffs behind them.
Yet the first fact a document would give is missing. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which owns the painting, calls the identity of the dead man a mystery.
I find the omission fitting. Courbet named the town in his title and left the dead man out, as if the village itself were the subject.
The dead man nobody names
Courbet painted his parents, his sisters, the philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon and his maternal grandfather, Jean Antoine Oudot, but nothing says which figure is which.
Art historians have tried to fill the silence. One candidate for the dead man is a great uncle of Courbet's. Another reading holds that Oudot, who had died shortly before Courbet started, lent his face to a pallbearer. Neither gives the coffin a name. The living around the grave are another matter, and many of them can be named.
What You'll Discover
Who stood around the grave.
Why critics called the faces vulgar.
What lies at the edge of the grave.
What Courbet built after the jury said no.