A funeral nobody was supposed to paint
In September 1848, in a small town in the French countryside, an old man was lowered into the ground, and a crowd of his neighbors stood around the hole and watched. This happens somewhere on Earth every few seconds. It is the least remarkable event a human life contains. Nobody paints it. And if anyone had, they would certainly not have painted it ten feet tall — a wall of canvas the size Europe kept locked away for the death of saints and kings. That is the thing you are about to look at: the most ordinary death there is, blown up to the scale of the most important deaths there are.
The town was Ornans (pronounced “or-NAHN”), a cramped little place strung along a river in the Franche-Comté (frahnsh-kohn-TAY), the hilly region in eastern France that runs up to the Swiss border. It was the hometown of a loud, ambitious, supremely self-certain young painter named Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), whose larger story is told in the Realism overview one level up in this app (the man who would become the public face of Realism— the new school that insisted ordinary contemporary life was a fit subject for serious art, painted plain, with none of the official art establishment’s polish). Courbet had grown up here, among these exact people. And in 1848 or so, one of them died.
Whose burial this is
By the usual account, the dead man was Courbet’s own great-uncle, Claude-Étienne Teste, who died in September 1848. That identification, and the date, are the standard story rather than carved-in-stone fact — they are sometimes contested, so treat them as the received version, not a closed case. What is not in doubt is the kind of funeral it was: not a king’s, not a saint’s, not a hero’s. A provincial one. A market-town one. The death of exactly the sort of person history files under “and others.”
That is the detail to hold onto, because it is the whole engine of the painting. Courbet did not go looking for a grand subject and dress it down. He took the most local, least important death imaginable — a relative in a backwater town, mourned by the people who happened to live nearby — and decided it deserved a canvas the size Europe reserved for the death of Christ.
Paint my own people, full size
To feel how strange that decision was in 1849, you have to know the rule he was breaking. European art ran on a ranking system called the hierarchy of genres (an official ladder of subject-matter categories), and the Realism overview sketches it; this read can make it concrete. At the top sat grand scenes from myth and scripture and ancient legend — history painting (the prestige category; “history” here meant scripture, myth, and classical antiquity, not real events in the modern sense — nobody at the top was painting last week’s news). Plain modern life sat at the very bottom. Gods up here; greengrocers down there. You were allowed to paint a peasant. You were not allowed to paint a peasant at the size of a god. Size was reserved. A big canvas was a promise that the thing on it mattered enormously, and the body that decided what was permitted to matter that much was the academy (the Academy of Fine Arts, the French state institution that set the rules of painting and ran the official exhibition where careers were made — the Salon, which you will meet properly in Chapter 3).
Courbet looked at that rule and did the one thing it forbade. He went home to Ornans, and instead of painting the death of some Greek warrior he had never met, he painted the death of his great-uncle, and he painted the actual townsfolk who came to the actual grave, and he painted all of them life-size. He was not illustrating a story. He was, in effect, telling the entire ranking system that its ranks were a fiction — that a real death in a real town was as serious as anything in the Louvre. The next chapter is what that looked like.