Afterlife

The painting outlived its painter, and the way it entered the public collections is its own quiet ending. Courbet’s later life went badly: the Realism overview tells how his politics caught up with him after the Paris Commune of 1871 (the brief revolutionary workers’ government in Paris, which Courbet publicly backed) and he died in exile in Switzerland in 1877. The Burial — this enormous, hard-to-house, once-scandalous thing — was still in the family.

It was Courbet’s sister, Juliette Courbet — one of the women you can find in the canvas itself — who handed the painting to France. By the standard account she gave it to the State in 1881, four years after her brother’s death, donating to the nation the very canvas the nation’s official Salon had once recoiled from. Sit with that for a second. The picture the academy had treated as an assault on its values — the thing the critics called ugly and dangerous — was given, for free, by the dead painter’s sister, into the permanent keeping of the country whose taste it had outraged. The outrage became the heirloom.

For a long time the Burial hung in the Louvre, the great Paris museum, taking its place at last among the very history paintings it had once mocked. Then, in 1986, the Musée d’Orsay(the Paris museum dedicated to nineteenth-century art, installed in a converted former railway station on the Left Bank) opened, and the Louvre’s nineteenth-century collection moved across the river to fill it. The Burial went with it.

It is there now, in the Musée d’Orsay, and you can stand at the back of that country funeral any day the museum is open. The canvas that once needed defending hangs as a fixed point of the national collection, a thing schoolchildren are walked past as obviously important — which is the strangest fate of all for a painting whose entire scandal was that it refused to be obviously important.

So what is the Burial today, beyond a famous big picture of a sad day in a small town? It is the canvas where the subject matter of modern art split open. Every later painter who pointed a serious brush at an ordinary contemporary thing — a railway carriage of the tired poor, a bottle of absinthe, a haystack at noon, a soup can — is working in the space Courbet pried open with a country funeral.

The throughline is worth saying flat, one more time: he took the single most ordinary event there is, the burial of an unimportant man in a backwater town, and he painted it at the size and with the seriousness Europe reserved for the death of kings and saints. No hierarchy, no idealization, no hero — more than forty real villagers, life-size, standing around a hole in the ground, with a bored dog in front and the bones of the last occupant scattered in the dirt. That mismatch of humble subject and monumental scale was the scandal, and it was also the door. Realism walked through it first. Everything restless in modern painting walked through after.