A Burial at Ornans

A whole village gathers in a long, frieze-like row around an open grave - priest, pallbearers, weeping women, bored officials, a dog - the mourners life-size and unidealized, the freshly dug pit gaping at the viewer's feet. Courbet gave this ordinary provincial funeral the colossal scale once reserved for kings and saints, and critics were outraged. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, A Burial at Ornans is the manifesto of Realism - common people granted the grandeur of grand history, death rendered without heaven or heroics, only the plain, collective fact of a community burying its own.