A Burial at Ornans: Was it a Life-Sized Farce?
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
At the Salon of 1850, or rather 1851, which opened on December 30th, Gustave Courbet exhibited his monumental Burial at Ornans, depicting mundane provincial obsequies; the well-known scandal erupted.
The observers' lack of understanding of the composition did not necessarily stem from its subject—the style being little questioned—but rather from its size and register.
Art historian T. J. Clark offers an explanation for this scandal.
Shakespeare and the Tragicomical at the Paris Salon
The monumental dimension of the work confers an unprecedented grandeur upon anonymous villagers, since such a size is normally reserved for mythological, religious, royal, or imperial narratives... Unless this size confers upon the characters, rather than political weight, the scenic presence of actors.
Two critics, Prosper Haussard and Jean-Jacques Arnoux, emphasise the tragicomic side of the scene, with its grimaces and carnival-like deformities. According to Adolphe Desbarolles, the painting borrowed this tragicomic tone from the theatre of Shakespeare. The skull appearing near the open pit is compared to that of the jester Yorick, exhumed by a gravedigger in Hamlet. And Théophile Gautier hesitates to qualify the painter's intention: is he serious or a prankster? Salon art should not provoke laughter, especially when dealing with an immense canvas.
The modern spectator might not notice:
these pallbearers turning their heads away from a pestilential corpse,
the cacophonous procession of women coming and going—etiquette dictated that women should appear neither in processions nor at the cemetery, being too expressive and too emotional,
not to mention the mugs of two beadles with the complexions of drunkards.
From Popular Song to the Salon
Courbet relies on a dual process of hybridisation. He grafts onto the solemn language of high art (the canvas is immense) a popular scene—the funeral of an anonymous countryman. His painting also has something of the popular ditty, Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre, remarks one commentator.
The ballad opens with the husband's departure for war with great fanfare, followed by death on the battlefield and the return of the body, the painful lamentations of a widow, only to give way abruptly to ribald verses about the promising night ahead for the onlookers.
Courbet's canvas operates through similar ruptures in tone: dignified and restrained men positioned between beadles, porters, and women behaving inappropriately.
Of the Grotesque and the Carnivalesque
Perhaps the scene is indeed real.
Burials of the indigent frequently offered themselves up to ridicule. When poor wretches, picked up in an advanced state of decomposition by mere labourers—enlisted occasionally, often without experience, and prone to drunkenness—were buried, their funerals caused frequent incidents, ranging from clearly audible oaths to the clumsy dropping of coffins.
Could the scene be inspired by Courbet's own carnival experiences?
Courbet loved the carnival, recounting his festivities to Champfleury. He played the role of the Pierrot of Death. Dressed in a black suit enhanced by a white collar—a colour inversion like the exceptional one seen on the mortuary cloth in A Burial. Everyone paraded and followed a puppet perched on a high pole, a burlesque procession not unlike the gathering around the crucifix in the painting.
The superposition of grotesque, comic, and tragic styles constituted a common reality of popular life, festivals, songs, and Épinal imagery. By introducing it into a monumental work, Gustave Courbet played the role of an impostor at the Salon, or at the very least an intruder whom a jury might have rejected had he not benefited from the status of an exempt artist.
This blog relies on the primary source anthology sheets provided by Art d’Histoire Académie:
Plus all those inserted as links in the blog above
You can also view our traditional, free-access videos:
The Art d’Histoire Académie platform specialises in primary sources and digitised archives covering the artistic period from 1850 to 1910.
It offers clear, structured interactive videos accompanied by a library of over a thousand anthology sheets, comprising 10,000 explained and contextualised primary sources that can be viewed in their original format.
Whether you are preparing for an exam, a lecture, a guided tour, a conference, an exhibition, or a publication, Art d’Histoire Académie is here to support you. The labyrinth of archives simply becomes what it ought to be for any passionate researcher: a source of inspiration and a space for fulfilment.
