After Dinner at Ornans

Courbet's After Dinner at Ornans of 1849, his breakthrough Salon success that won him a gold medal, depicts a domestic evening scene at his family home — his father and friends around the table after a meal, one man playing violin. The painting was unprecedented in applying the scale of history painting to an ordinary domestic scene in a provincial French town, asserting the dignity of everyday bourgeois life as worthy of the highest pictorial treatment. The subdued lighting and the naturalness of the figures' absorption in their respective activities create a scene of intimate social observation that transformed what history painting could legitimately address.

The dark, Caravaggesque interior is lit by a single lamp, casting deep shadows across the rustic scene. Courbet's heavy impasto and restricted palette of browns and blacks create an atmosphere of intimate, quotidian reality.