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| Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans 1849-50 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
"There are plenty of pictures of ritual, or the Christian sacraments, but none of them is much like this one. It is not simply a question of sympathy or the lack of it, for there are many pictures of ritual which we are invited to contemplate with some degree of distaste: the long series of Bacchic dances, the Worship of the Golden Calf, or later, in a more polemical mood, Hogarth's Enthusiasm Delineated. But the very word 'enthusiasm' indicates what is unique about the Burial. At least the Maenads or the Children of Israel were hell-bent on their pursuits; they were clearly animated by belief, even if in false gods; for the artists who portrayed them, it seemed unthinkable to dissociate ritual from some form of religious experience. But this is what Courbet has done in the Burial at Ornans. He has given us, in an almost schematic form, the constituents of a particular ritual, but not their unison. He has painted worship without worshippers; the occasion of religious experience, but instead of its signs, vivid or secretive, a peculiar, frozen fixity of expressions. (This applies to individual faces and to the image as a whole.) It is not exactly an image of disbelief, more of collective distraction; not exactly indifference, more inattention; not exactly, except in a few of the women's faces, the marks of grief or the abstraction of mourning, more the careful, ambiguous blankness of a public face. And mixed with it, the grotesque: the bulbous, red faces of the beadles and the creaking gestures of the two old men at the graveside."
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| Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans (installation view) 1849-50 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
"Courbet has gathered the townspeople of Ornans in the new graveyard, opposite the cliffs of Roche du Château and Roche du Mont. He has painted more than forty-five figures life-size in a great frieze over eight yards long, arranging the figures in a long row which curves back slightly round the grave itself; and in places, following the conventions of popular art, he has piled the figures one on top of the other as if they stood on steeply sloping ground. And towards the right of the picture he has let the mass of mourners congeal into a solid wall of black pigment . . . "
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| Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans (right-hand detail) 1849-50 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
"Black is the basis of the Burial at Ornans, and two sequences of colour are played against it, over the picture's whole length. First the flesh colour of the hands and faces; second, the plain white of handkerchiefs and collars, lace caps, spats, the priest's trimmings, the gravedigger's sleeves, and the glossy hide of a dog. At the left of the picture [below] the same colours are put in negative; the black of the crucifix, caps, and belts against the surplices of the choristers, black crossbones and black tears on the pall itself."
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| Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans (left-hand detail) 1849-50 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
"Finally, Courbet added two notes of stronger colour, the beadles' costumes and the blue and grey of the old man's coat and gaiters. He cleared a space above the old man's head and used the grey and blue to punctuate the black surface at its halfway point; and he placed the crucifix and golden censer as a second hiatus at the left."
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| Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans (central detail) 1849-50 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
"In other words, the Burial at Ornans is carefully and subtly constructed. The repetitive forms of popular art are animated and reorganized; the monotone of black is accented just enough to keep it alive and active against the faces. Look at the sketch once again [below], which is far closer to the crude straightforwardness of the Souvenirs mortuaires, and it is clear what kind of intelligence has been at work: breaking and turning the long line of heads; drawing the black into dense clusters and making the white area a more positive interval in the picture; creating just enough space, between crucifix and censer, or between priest and gravedigger, to make the various groups distinct. Nothing is enlivened too much: the forms of popular art show through the picture like a skeleton; no device is strong enough to obscure the basic theme, the faces etched in even light against the mass of black below them."
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| Gustave Courbet Sketch for Burial at Ornans 1849-50 drawing Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon |
"This is the picture's structure. It is more complex than it seems at first sight, but it can be described step by step, with some kind of certainty. Beyond this point, when we start to ask about the picture's meaning, the real difficulties begin. What, to put it briefly, is the Burial's affective atmosphere? What are the mourners' attitudes and emotions, and what is Courbet's attitude to the event portrayed? . . . We have to answer such questions in the face of an image which deliberately avoids emotional organization: by that I mean the orchestration of forms to mimic and underline the emotional connotations of the subject. In the Burial there is no single focus of attention, no climax towards which the forms and faces turn. Least of all is the picture organized around the sacrament of burial: hardly a single face, save perhaps the gravedigger's, is turned towards the priest, and the line of heads at the right of the picture looks the other way entirely – away from the coffin and the crucifix. (Compare the sketch once again: the faces there are all turned attentively toward the grave.)"
"There is no exchange of gaze or glance, no reciprocity between these figures. Only the inquisitive, upturned face of the serving-boy seems definitely to look at something; the rest are averted, impassive, the eyes seemingly focused on the air. Men share the same expression, but we could not indicate their state of mind – grief, gravity, even indifference. They share faces, but do they share emotions? Is the Burial a sacrament or merely a social occasion? It is both, clearly, but are the two tragically or comically mixed? Should we trust to our laughter at the beadles' noses, or yield to empathy with the women's tears? Should we call it, as Champfleury did, a simple record of provincial life, or should we give it the force of allegory, as Buchon did, and call it a new Dance of Death?"
"We are not inventing this perplexity. Critic after critic, when the Burial reached Paris late in 1850, asked the same questions, though with more rancour. It was precisely this lack of open, declared significance which offended most of all; it was the way the Burial seemed to hide its attitudes, seemed to contain within itself too many contraries – religious and secular, comic and tragic, sentimental and grotesque. It was this inclusiveness, this exact and cruel deadpan, that made the Burial the focus of such different meanings. It was an image that took on the colours of its context; and perhaps it was designed to do so."
– T.J. Clark, from Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851 (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1973)