Funeral at Ornans

 FUNERAL AT ORNANS

In this one his masterpiece, Courbet there transmits with the maximum possible realism a funeral - possibly that of his own grandfather, convinced republican, there being stated the presence of two Jacobin friends to the one that represents the whole community, from the representatives of the town hall up to the official hired mourners, happening for the noblemen and the family of the painter. Even a dog retriever does not want to get lost the event and appears in the first plane.

 

 For comments of the own painter we know that the whole population of Ornans, wanted to pose for the picture, turning out to be a set of 46 persons to natural size represented with enormous doses of veracity it is possible to say that this work is the new artistic style defended by Courbet considered as a scientific, naturalistic, anticlassic art, antirromántico, antiacademic, progressive and socially, whose only source had to be the direct observation of the native.

The figures form a compact group and stand out on the flat mountains of the locality, represented in diverse attitudes and positions, being one of the best galleries of portraits of the history of the art. The expression of the faces that do not provoke any feeling of pain. The death has not produced in these men the pain, the distress, but they live through it as a daily fact. 

Capture like models to his parents, brothers and friends, and several inhabitants of that locality, and are assembled by it in a collective portrait.