Gustave Courbet

The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, showed ordinary laborers at monumental scale instead of idealized heroes or mythological figures. That choice made it a landmark of French Realism.

Courbet's Realism rejected academic idealization and focused on visible modern life, labor, and rural society. He wanted to paint what he could see in his own time rather than scenes from ancient myth.

A Burial at Ornans presented a provincial funeral on a huge scale normally reserved for history painting. Exhibited around 1850, it challenged Parisian expectations about what subjects deserved grand treatment.

Courbet was involved with the Paris Commune in 1871 and was later held responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme Column. He eventually went into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.