This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Gustave Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, completed for the Salon of 1850 to 1851, is Realism's single most consequential work, and understanding why it provoked such controversy explains the movement it launched. The painting depicts the funeral of Courbet's maternal grandfather, who died shortly before Courbet's arrival in his hometown of Ornans during his annual visit there in the summer of 1849, rendered at a scale, roughly ten feet by twenty-two feet, that French academic convention reserved exclusively for history painting, the grand depiction of significant historical, religious or mythological events populated by heroic figures. Courbet instead filled that heroic scale with an unidealized crowd of provincial mourners, family, clergy, gravediggers and local dignitaries, painted with the same unsentimental, exacting attention regardless of their social standing, against a plain, undramatic landscape rather than an elevated or symbolic setting. Critics at the time were scandalized less by the subject itself than by the presumption of treating ordinary provincial death, and ordinary provincial people, as worthy of the scale and gravity that painting had reserved for kings and saints. Alongside the smaller but equally pointed The Stone Breakers, showing two laborers, one too young and one too old for the work, breaking rock beside a road, Courbet made the case that contemporary, unglamorous life was itself sufficient subject matter for the highest ambitions of painting. Courbet's own political radicalism, which later led to his imprisonment and exile to Switzerland following his involvement with the Paris Commune, reinforced the reading of Realism as an implicitly democratic artistic program, one that rejected not only Romantic and Neoclassical style but the social hierarchy embedded in what subjects painting was permitted to dignify. Realism's insistence on contemporary, unidealized subject matter was directly inherited by the Impressionists a generation later, who kept Realism's commitment to modern life while shifting their attention from social subject matter to the transient effects of light.