The Stone Breakers

Courbet's The Stone Breakers of 1849, destroyed in World War II, depicted two road laborers — an old man and a boy — breaking rocks by the roadside, a subject that elevated the most degraded manual labor to the scale and dignity of history painting. The painting caused scandal at the 1850 Salon not because of technical failure but because of its ideological content: giving monumental treatment to social invisibles was perceived as political provocation. Proudhon praised it as socialist art; critics attacked it as demagogic vulgarity. Its destruction in the Dresden bombing deprived subsequent generations of one of nineteenth-century painting's most consequential statements.

Courbet used a thick, earthy palette applied with palette knife and brush to convey the gritty materiality of the scene. The life-size figures shown from behind deny the viewer any heroic or sentimental reading of their labor.