A focused look into Courbet’s The Stonebreakers
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) was an outlier of the 19th-century art community. Grew up in the small town of Ornans, Courbet moved to Paris to develop his career. He was known for painting large-scale scenes of everyday life in 19th France.
This story sets Courbet’s 1849 painting The Stonebreakers within its own time. Here, we are off to examine the choice of subject, the social condition, and the artist’s personal experience with the assistance of some scholarly journals and my thoughts inspired by a course I took at college. Hopefully, you will have your own evaluation at the end of the story.
Staring at the patches of pigments on the surface of The Stonebreakers, we uncontrollably imagine the scene of Courbet wielding a knife to apply pigments and imprinting with his thumb.
In the painting are two male figures engaging in the hard labor of smashing stones. Although the painting is conducted in a sketchy style, details are not omitted: we can see grease and dirt on the ragged cloth. The hard labor is so vividly depicted that as if the man will drop his chisel in a second. The audiences are invited to situate themselves at the site watching the stonebreakers soaked in sweat.
We cannot tell the facial features of the stonebreakers because they are orientated to show the rear and the profile. This peculiar orientation, which is unusual to the frontal orientation in classical paintings, could be interpreted as Courbet intended to encompass the entire lower class into this painting rather than to depict two arduous individuals.
Nigel Blake, in Modern Practices of Art and Modernity, proposes a more political interpretation of the orientation. Frontality is a privileged viewpoint that everything important is perfectly visible to the audiences of the Salon. When the bourgeoise audiences see working-class figures in paintings, they are likely to remind themselves about their social and moral superiority. Courbet’s use of the unideal viewpoint, which impedes the audience from seeing the faces, therefore purposefully subdued the superiority felt by the beholders.
Let’s changing gear to the entire picture.
Overall, the painting doesn’t exhibit a deep depth. The figures are slightly shaded and the thick contour line makes the figures appear even flatter. On the contrary, the landscape has a heavy shading. It is peculiar that how the figures and the background, which are side by side, are not lighted to the same extend. The sense of separation between them in the pictorial space brings the figures into the real space.
This renders a similar threatening effect to that of the striding sower in Millet’s The Sower. Therefore, I would speculate that the intended audience, the bourgeoisie, is pushed by the artist to look at the stonebreakers in close proximity. If we relate to the intensified relation between the two classes in the Second Republic, it is reasonable to conclude that Courbet intended to challenge the class hierarchy by creating this artificial encounter.
A breach of the hierarchy of genres was challenged by Courbet. Meyer Schapiro in Modern Art 19th&20th Centuries brings up that the unusually large scale of The Stonebreakers is ‘politically suggestive’.
The width of the painting is over eight feet, way larger than normal genre paintings. Genre painting is ranked the third place on the hierarchy of painting but The Stonebreakers takes the size of a usual historical painting (i.e. this genre is on the top of the hierarchy)
Additionally, to compare horizontally, there were a diversity of artists doing genre painting but no one did in the size of Courbet’s. Hence, the scale alone is significant to the understanding of the painting. One could suggest that Courbet transformed scale into a statement to voice for the lower-class in the political struggle. The displacement of the scale The Stonebreakers is in essence symbolizes a break free of the lower-class as they were granted universal male suffrage.
Due to the absence of composition, lack of finish-ness, and oblivion to the hierarchy of painting, Courbet was perceived as defying the Académie, the orthodoxy of French arts.
Scholars also consider Courbet to be the spokesman of the poor. In Modern Art 19th&20th Centuries, Schapiro records that Courbet stopped painting romantic subjects in 1848, and concentrated on depicting the public. He describes that Courbet served the people’s taste. The painter’s style was criticized as naïvéte and primitive. Besides, Courbet’s participation in the Paris Commune and his broke up with Champfleury substantiate the argument that Courbet’s works were sided with the lower class.
However, I find Courbet’s family background and the social environment in Paris during the Second Republic make Courbet’s motivation arguable.
Courbet was borne to a countryside bourgeoise family in Ornans. Despite the place he grew up was desolate, his family was well-off enough that he had never tried agricultural works, and thus was rarely exposed to the scene of peasants working. He was unlikely to develop a deep connection with the poor.
Considering the social background, there emerged ‘a more insurgent taste for the people’ (the non-bourgeoise class) in the 1840s as Schapiro described in Courbet and Popular Imagery. The universal male suffrage effectuated in 1848 made the rural poor a player in politics. Under that revolutionary ambiance, Parisians bourgeoise was drawn to the provincial subjects in order to understand more about the empowered fraction of the population. As a newcomer to the art market in Paris, Courbet was influenced by the trend naturally.
Besides, The Stonebreakers is a studio painting. The fact that it was modulated in collaboration with non-peasant models rather than having the real laborers in the painting casts another shadow on the artist's motivation.
The French reads: A gentleman obliged to dress as a peasant..
Another Cham’s caricature of Courbet hiring a gentleman to pose like a peasant in his studio visualizes the sarcasm. In this light, the artist’s choice of stonebreakers as the subject could be understood as a conscious decision to appeal to the bourgeoise’s curiosity. In other words, the artist marketed his remote relevance to the real rural peasants in order to gain a place at the Salon.
Although the formal evidence and Courbet’s artistic style approves the democratic nature of The Stonebreakers, Courbet’s personal experience and the painting as a studio painting could point to the opposite conclusion. And the social condition is a factor that could be argued in either way.
Therefore, we need the painting to be situated within a particular context in order to assert its meaning.
Bibliography
Nigel Blake, Modern Practices of Art and Modernity, chapter 1
Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art 19th&20th Centuries
Meyer Schapiro, Courbet and Popular Imagery An Essay on Realism and Naïveté
