The Stone-Breakers is an irony addressed to our industrial civilization, which every day invents marvelous machines to work, sow, mow, harvest, thresh … spin, weave, sew, manufacture nails, paper, pins … to execute, in short, all kinds of jobs, often very complicated and delicate, and which is incapable of freeing man from the heaviest, most difficult, most unpleasant of tasks, the eternal lot of the poor. In general, our machines, masterpieces of precision, are more skillful than ourselves … They have only one fault: they do not go into motion themselves, but need someone to watch over … control … even to serve them. Who then is the servitor of the machine? Man.
Gustave Courbet( 1819-1877) The Stone Breakers 1849 Oil on canvas 223 x314” Salon of 1850 Destroyed 1945
Courbet himself admitted no such intention. Ever devoted to portraying the region of his birth, he told of a day while on the road when,“ I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on the road. One rarely encounters the most complete expression of poverty, so right there on the spot I got an idea for a painting. I made a date to meet them in my studio the following morning.” As Linda Nochlin noted, breaking rocks is about as low as you can go on the scale of work. Courbet did his best to portray the unglamorous side of the life around him with the most realistic detail he could muster. This is one of the hallmarks of this definition of Realism, a preference for the unlovely, and in the case of the stone breakers, without comment or apparent other allusion or redemption: raw and strictly matter-of-fact. Courbet commented later,“ Alas! In this class, this is how one begins, and that is how one ends.” There is nothing to speak of heroism here, only anonymous drudgery with no glimmer of hope.
Many artists would depict peasant life in the late 19 th century. Notable among these was Jules Breton, whose familial roots drew him to the rural region of his birth in the north of France for subject matter, imparting a classical dignity to his depictions of peasant life and recording a way of life that
Jules Adolphe Breton( 1827-1906) The Song of the Lark 1884 43 1 / 2 x 33 3 / 4” Art Institute of Chicago
would vanish away in the ensuing decades. In his best known work, the Song of the Lark, he portrays a young girl on her way to the day’ s work in the field just as the sun is rising. Barefoot, sickle in hand, she pauses momentarily, hearing the lark above and behind her on the upper left of the canvas, singing as it flies. This is not the dour Realism of Courbet, but a captured real moment of a different kind, a primal music in the air that can lift the heart in the midst of a hard life.
42 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE