Working-Class Visibility

Before Courbet, peasants and laborers showed up in paintings only as background figures or comic relief. Realism's boldest move was treating ordinary working people as subjects worthy of a serious canvas.

His huge Burial at Ornans showed a rural funeral attended by everyday villagers — farmers, tradesmen, and mourners with real faces and weathered hands. Parisian critics were outraged that a painter would spend a canvas the size of a history painting on nameless provincials. Courbet had provoked them on purpose.