The Stone Breakers

Two road laborers breaking rock, life-size and dead serious — the scale the Salon kept for gods, spent on men with holes in their shoes. The original is gone; only reproductions survive.

1. 1
   The boy with the basket

   Left, the standing figure seen from behind

   A young man — too young, really, for this work — strains under a heavy basket of broken stone, his whole body torqued by the weight. You see his back and the nape of his neck; his face is turned away from you entirely. His white shirt has split open at the shoulder blade, a leather strap crosses his back, and his trousers and shoes are coming apart. Courbet gives you his effort and his rags, and withholds the one thing that would let you feel sorry for him: his face.
2. 2
   The old man with the hammer

   Right of center, kneeling on one knee

   An old man — Courbet said about seventy — kneels on a pad of straw with a long-handled hammer raised over his shoulder, caught at the top of its arc, an instant before it falls on the stone. He is too old, really, for this work either, which is the quiet point: between the boy and the old man there is no prime-of-life in this picture, only the start of a hard life and the end of one. His face is hidden under the brim of a battered straw hat; like the boy, he is all labor and no expression.
3. 3
   The two hidden faces

   Both heads — the boy’s turned away, the old man’s under the hat

   This is the decision that runs the whole painting. Neither man looks at you; neither face is visible. A contemporary critic complained that Courbet had “suppressed the two heads.” He had — on purpose. A visible, pleading face turns a laborer into a sympathetic individual you pity. Two hidden faces leave you only the bodies and the work, which is harder to feel sentimental about and harder to look away from.
4. 4
   Patched clothes and cracked clogs

   Low — the old man’s trousers and wooden sabots

   Look at the clothing close and you find the poverty rendered as fact, not pathos: trousers patched and re-patched, a striped waistcoat, and on the old man’s feet wooden sabots (clogs) so split you can almost see the heel through them. When the picture reached Paris, the press caricatured these clogs, drawing them comically huge — a tell that the real offense was making this kind of poverty big and serious at all.
5. 5
   The pot at the edge

   Far right, at ground level by the rocks

   Off to the right, easy to miss, sits a small dark cooking pot with a little bread beside it — presumably the men’s meal, set down in the dirt where they work. It is the only soft, domestic note in the picture, and it is parked at the very margin, almost out of frame: even lunch is an afterthought to the rock.
6. 6
   The wall of hill behind them

   The whole upper canvas — the dark bank, a sliver of sky at upper right

   There is almost no sky. A steep, dark bank fills nearly the entire top of the canvas, leaving only a thin wedge of pale light in the upper right corner. The hill presses the two men forward to the very front of the picture, with no horizon to look off into and no air to breathe. A landscape would have given them a distance; Courbet gives them a wall. They are pinned between the rock they break and the rock that rises behind them.