A Burial at Ornans

A whole village funeral, painted ten feet tall — the scale the Salon kept for the death of kings.

1. 1
   The hole everyone is here for

   Center foreground, low — the bare turned earth

   The whole crowd is gathered around this — not a coffin, not a cross, but an open grave painted as a flat black wedge with almost no depth, a void dropped into the dead center where a hero ought to be. The gravedigger kneels patiently beside it in his shirtsleeves, and on the turned earth lie a skull and a scatter of bones, dug up to make room: the bluntest reminder of death there is, with no allegory and no scythe.
2. 2
   The one thing pointing up

   Upper left, held against the gray sky

   A bearer holds a crucifix aloft against the flat gray sky — the single strong vertical in a painting that is otherwise all horizontal line. In a Salon history painting the heavens would open behind it; here the sky just stays gray and gives nothing back.
3. 3
   The loudest color in the room

   Left of center, with the clergy — the two figures in red

   The figures in vivid red are beadles — minor parish officers who keep order at services. Courbet gave the grandest color in the whole painting (the red a history painter would save for a cardinal or a king) to two small-town church ushers with frankly ordinary faces.
4. 4
   Two men wearing the wrong decade

   Center, in white stockings and knee breeches

   Among the men in 1840s mourning black stand two old fellows in the suits and knee breeches of 1793 — the dress of the First Republic, half a century out of fashion. They are real sitters (friends of Courbet’s grandfather): veterans of the Revolution planted in the crowd. In 1850, two years after the barricades, that detail did not feel safe.
5. 5
   Grief on the right, a dog who doesn’t care

   The right half (the women); the white dog, center-right foreground

   The women are massed on the right, some pressing handkerchiefs to their faces — the only open grief in the picture (the artist’s own sisters Juliette, Zoé and Zélie are among them). And down in front, back turned to the whole solemn business, a small dog sniffs off toward the edge, completely indifferent. No history painter would have let that animal stay; Courbet gave it the front row.
6. 6
   The real rock behind the real people

   The pale band across the top, behind the crowd

   That pale, chalky wall of limestone is not invented scenery — it is the actual escarpment of the Ornans valley, Courbet’s hometown geology placed behind his hometown neighbors. Almost the same value as the sky, it refuses to recede; it stands up as a near-featureless wall that presses the figures flat against the viewer.