Gustave Courbet and The Stone Breakers Art
Gustave Courbet painted the Stone Breakers art in 1849 during the period of social realism. The painting is a depiction of young and old peasant men breaking rocks. The picture was destroyed in 1945 along with other 154 paintings that were in transit to Dresden (Zorn 6).
Analysis
The Stone Breakers was painted during the realist period which was in the 19th century. The realism period was considered a counter-reaction to the art of Romanticism which was popular at the time. The artists during the realism period were not interested in historical paintings that had mythological subjects; they were more concerned about painting the world around them. Gustave Courbet was a realist painter who chose to paint about his environment. Gustave Courbet’s painting “The Stonebreakers” is a representation of the reality of the lives of peasant workers. Both subjects in Courbet’s painting do not show their faces; this is a specific characteristic that demonstrates that Courbet’s work was different from the academic style at that period. The Stone Breakers painting is also characterized by a rough application of paint which makes it hard to differentiate between the foreground and the background; this flattens the setting of the art. Courbet’s artwork elevates the poor working class through the depiction of peasants in the front of his painting. The rough brushstrokes, large canvas size and the turned faces of the subjects in The Stone Breakers painting deviates from the academic style of the mid-nineteenth century (Al-Abbas 1738).
Interpretation
The Stone Breakers painting is a depiction of the lives that the majority of the population at the time hard to endure. The young man and the old one are wearing tattered clothes in an isolated field trying to earn a living through breaking stones. Realism is an artistic movement that started in France is the 1850’s that is characterized by the accurate, detailed depiction of surrounding environment. In other words, realism art represents daily life situations such as Courbet’s portrayal of the peasant men breaking stone to earn a living. Courbet draws the attention of his audience to the poverty and the hardship endured by the subjects in his painting; Courbet does this through the realistic depiction of the working class. The bourgeoisie would have found the subject matter of The Stone Breakers painting offensive at the time; this is because the poor working class could have been regarded as political risks during the time of the uprisings and social revolutions (Al-Abbas 1738).
Judgment
Gustave Courbet successfully portrays the lives of two hardworking peasant men in the Stone Breakers painting. Courbet painted the figures of two stone breakers, and he ensured that both subjects fill the foreground of the picture. The fact that the two working men in the Stone Breakers painting occupy a significant portion of the art makes the two figures prominent and hard to ignore. There is no way a viewer can look at the Stone Breakers painting without realizing that the piece of art is about the lives of the two peasants. Courbet portrays his subjects on a large scale painting that was usually reserved for historical pictures; this implies that the two hardworking men in Courbet’s portrait should be elevated to a status similar to historical art. Through the depiction of the working class in the painting, Courbet draws the attention of his audience to the events of the time that needed change. Gustave Courbet embraced realism at a time when Romanticism was popular (Al-Abbas 1738). Gustave Courbet was an artist who used his skills to portray the life of commoners who worked as stone breakers. Courbet’s work was not defined by the artwork style that was popular at the time; he instead chose to paint his surrounding with no imagination or exaggeration.
Works Cited
Al-Abbas, Mohammed B. "The Emergence of Death Representations in Visual Arts: Stereotypes and Social Realities." People: International Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1733-1743. http://grdspublishing.org/index.php/people/article/download/175/162
Zorn, Nicolette. "The Politics of Gustave Courbet’s Landscape Paintings." (2013). https://publications.lakeforest.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002"context=seniortheses
