The Stone Breakers — Gustave Courbet
The Stone Breaks is an oil painting on canvas by the French artist Gustave Courbet painted in 1849. The painting was damaged during WWII in 1945 at the Dresden bombing. However, its story lasted longer than its survival.
The artist Gustave was not from the elitist class, he was born into a middle-class farmer family and found interest in art from his three sisters. He moved to Paris to get art training at Steuben and Hesse Studios. He did not stay long at the studios because he soon found his very own artistic style and wanted to perfect it alone. Gustave once said that “painting is a concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things” (Finocchio, n.d.). So with this belief, he created paintings in a realistic form.
The Stone Breakers is known to be one the greatest examples of the Realism style of painting. Realism is a type of revolutionary style that shows life in its organic form, with all its imperfections and troubles. It was the opposite of Romantics which glorified and polished everything. Courbet’s painting is made of two men breaking and removing stones from a road that’s being built. This heavy labor was usually done by chain gangs which were prisoners chained together and worked on building roads as a sort of punishment. However, in this situation the two workers are not prisoners nevertheless; one is too young and the other too old to be doing such work. Originally as he drove his family carriage in his hometown the artist saw the two men working and immediately got an idea for a painting. So he asked them to visit him in his studio the following morning to pose. His precision on the details of their clothes shows the influence of Realism on the painting. In his letter to his friend when describing the painting he says “ I have made nothing up my dear friend.” (Phaidon, n.d.). This indicates that he painted them in the exact way they appeared to be in front of him; their clothes dirty and soaked in sweat with holes and patches.
Not showing people’s faces in the classical paintings was abnormal, but Courbet wanted to represent the entire lower class and not just these individuals. His art was not meant to be only a pretty painting but something that the lower class could relate to as well. It was in a way representing them in their true form.His work was a protest piece against capitalism and the work and struggle that the middle and lower classes went through daily, he showed sympathy for them and disgust for the upper class (Courbet, n.d.). He also used brushwork that is rough because he rejected the polished and smooth style of the neoclassic art that dominated his time (ER Services, n.d.).The artist also places a mountain behind the workers that covers the entire background of the painting except for a tiny corner at the top right corner that shows the sky. The reason for this is to give the feeling that they’re trapped physically and socio-economically by their work.
During the artist’s time, the art of photography had emerged and was gaining fame. Many artists accepted it and thought it to be useful and a new form of art since it captured a scene in the most perfect form. However, Courbet was amongst the men who did not agree with it. He believed that art was done by skill and took time to create. But just because he did not believe that it was not art does not mean it can’t aid in the creation of art. Gustave Courbet utilized photography to capture the image he may want to paint. He used this method mostly on nude painting, in which he observed women’s bodies from nude photography and then painted them into landscape scenery. This of course was not the case for The Stone Breakers, as mentioned earlier that he invited the two men to pose for the painting which indicates that a camera was not used. Yet the painting is created to such perfection that it looks as though it was captured by a camera and that is exactly the essence of realism. Painting a scene as it would be captured by the camera.
In conclusion, The Stone-breakers painting is best known for its role in the realism revolution and for being one of Gustave Courbet’s best works. It is truly a cultural institution for its long-lasting memory even after it’s tragic destruction.
Bibliography
Courbet, G. (n.d.). The Stone Breakers, 1849 by Gustave Courbet. Gustave Courbet. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://www.gustave-courbet.com/the-stonebreakers.jsp
Courbet, G. (2021, May 16). A focused look into Courbet’s The Stonebreakers | by Yuening Li | Medium. Yuening Li. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://yueningli.medium.com/a-focused-look-into-courbets-the-stonebreakers-2756f1403e70
Courbet, G., & Picasso, P. (2022, May 12). “The Stone Breakers” Gustave Courbet — A History and Analysis. Art in Context. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://artincontext.org/the-stone-breakers-gustave-courbet/
ER Services. (n.d.). Courbet, The Stone Breakers | Art History II. Lumen Learning. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-arthistory2/chapter/courbet-the-stone-breakers/
Finocchio, R. (n.d.). Nineteenth-Century French Realism | Essay. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved April 1, 2023, from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm
Harris, B., & Zucker, S. (n.d.). Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers — Smarthistory. Smarthistory. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from http://smarthistory.org/courbet-the-stonebreakers/
Phaidon. (n.d.). Home. YouTube. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/june/10/a-movement-in-a-moment-realism
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Chain gang. Wikipedia. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain-gang
