Gustave Courbet – Burial at Ornans

This is one of the most often expounded upon of Courbet’s paintings, notorious at the time of its creation for its realism and its scale and remarkable, looking back from today’s perspective, as a milestone in the development of artistic expression. At 6.6m wide, it was of a size that would normally be dedicated to a classical subject or to some momentous historical event, but here it shows ordinary people attending a burial in a small country town. Ornan, in the Jura mountain country of eastern France, was Courbet’s birthplace and many of the people depicted in the work were known to the artist who, by 1849, and after a decade living and working in Paris, had returned home, setting up a studio in his grandparent’s house.

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849-50, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

The painting is frequently cited as representing one of the great turning points in art history, when Romanticism, with its notions of the sublime and heightened emotion, perhaps best typified in France by Delacroix (think of Liberty Leading the People from 1830 and before that Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa from1819) gave way to Courbet’s determinedly grittier authenticity. Although he was not a participant in it, the revolution of 1848 which ushered in the Second Republic after deposing King-Louis Philippe’s monarchy, was a watershed moment in the social and political life of the country and the artist did respond to some of the radical proto-socialist ideas that underpinned it, beliefs which shaped both his subject matter and the ways he could give them a more meaningful voice. By this reading, death itself is the ultimate leveller depicted here, cutting across all social strata to bring everyone face-to-face with the fate that awaits them all.

The painting would look like a tableau, or a frieze were it not for the fact that it conjures a real sense of movement, particularly in the second rank of women on the right who mostly follow one another as if in procession. The pall bearers on the left also appear to have just come to a halt. This inferred motion feels perilous with too many figures crowding too near the edge of the open grave, the positioning of which, dead centre (pun intended) at the foot of the painting, makes the viewer feel as if they too are grievously closer to death than they think, and that there is no escaping its yawning maw. The grave’s opening reminds me of those anamorphic trompe l’oeil street art works made on pavements that you sometimes see today, which from the right angle appear to be bottomless pits or undulating terrain for instance. Here, the grave is cropped by the picture’s lower frame but our proximity as viewers to its unseen depth, its liminality and the unknowability of what lies beyond, is distinctly unnerving. As if we need any further reminder of death’s certainty, a human skull missing its jaw (like Yorick it will no longer laugh and joke) is perched at the lip of the opening.

Most of the figures are dressed in the black expected at a funeral but which makes the two scarlet-robed and tall-hatted sacristans catch the eye.

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, (detail)

The foremost of them casts a sceptical or envious look towards the balding priest holding a missal, ready to intone the familiar committal liturgy. The other has an unfeasibly large nose and with his mouth agape he appears to be speaking, perhaps inappropriately, when everyone else is silent. These two figures are like the real-life ‘grotesques’ that often appear in Fellini films, adding an earthy verisimilitude in contrast to the polished beauty of leading players. The bulbously roseate features of their two faces suggests that they belong to ordinary, venal men, fond of a glass or two. Their dressing-up for the occasion is Courbet’s sly observation on the hypocrisy and grubby status-seeking of those who would position themselves as servants of the church while in reality are just enjoying the funeral’s masquerade, the opportunity for one-upmanship and a far cry from any genuine spirituality. By contrast, we see three respectable bourgeois types to the right of them, each hatless. The first is consumed by what looks like genuine grief, holding a handkerchief to his eyes. The next, balding, gaunt and sombre, manifests probity but the soles of his shoes are muddied by the freshly dug earth. The third, the tallest of them, portly and bearded, is like a study in seemly decorum.

The wide brims of the pall bearer’s hats shield their eyes from view and gives them a sinister aspect. They each hold onto the white cloths they will use to lower the coffin into the ground, one of them already wound around a hand in readiness to bear its weight. With heads cast down in reverence, Courbet also manages to suggest a kind of shame in their action as if they sense guilt at their function, the interment a kind of necessary baseness. One of the altar boys gazes up into the face of one of the leading coffin carriers, as if it’s his father, and as if seeing something in his expression that he hasn’t before seen during the course of his young life.

The old-fashioned tailcoats and breeches of the two figures to the right of the grave, the nearest holding up his left hand beseechingly, stand on the opposite side to the priest. Scholars identify them as veterans of the first French Revolution, upholders of its secular values; they represent the political realm presented in contradistinction to the church’s jurisdiction. The jacketless kneeling figure is probably the gravedigger. He too looks towards the priest for his next cue. Maybe for him, Courbet suggests, this is just ‘another day at the office.’

The strangest expression appears on the face of figure whose white gloved hands hold the crucifix standard aloft, his surplice identifying him as another of the church’s several sidesmen visible in the painting.  

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans (detail)

His look suggests that he is both unengaged in the action going on around him and is also a little challenging to the viewer as he stares out directly towards us. The cross is like a proclamation, the apotheosis of Christian belief – asserting the idea that sin-redemptive death will be followed by everlasting life. And yet that face also suggests dubiety. The crucified figure of Jesus is held against the sky, above the mountains and over the village that sits atop one of them, so that Christ, the son of God, is shown to have dominion. On the other hand, I think that Courbet’s anti-clericalism is revealed in that expression – it suggests that the church’s role in what can often be the lowest moments in the lives or rich and poor, young and old-alike, has a performative quality to it, its ceremonial and ritual observances providing a comfort in their public utterance, but which are empty of real meaning.

What counts for the artist I think is the way that people of all classes and belief come together in a demonstration of collective support for the bereaved in such provincial communities. Even the dog in the right foreground, perhaps looking towards the young girl on the extreme right, plays its role. Did it once belong to the person just buried and does it now seek the solace of someone new to take care of it?

Courbet’s non-Romantic, realistic depictions of people beside an open grave is, at an ideological level, a declaration that the social hierarchies of the past should also become entombed. His new mode of painterly expression is at the same time an aesthetic pronouncement that the art of the past is now similarly and necessarily rendered extinct.