A Burial at Ornans

Movement: Realism The shock here is the size. Courbet painted a plain village funeral in his hometown of Ornans, with real local people as the mourners, on a canvas more than 20 feet wide, a scale traditionally reserved for heroic history paintings. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1850 to 1851, it caused a scandal because it treated ordinary rural people as worthy of a monument. That claim, that everyday life deserves serious art, is Realism. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. What came next: a group of younger painters took ordinary life outdoors and chased the fleeting effects of light.