A Burial at Ornans

A Burial at Ornans is a large painting completed in 1849 and 1850 by the French artist Gustave Courbet, depicting an ordinary funeral in Ornans, the small town in eastern France where Courbet was born. Courbet treated this everyday, provincial scene with the frank realism and the grand scale that painting had traditionally reserved for heroic or religious history subjects, a deliberate break with academic convention. Its exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1850 produced an explosive reaction among critics and the public and brought Courbet immediate fame, and it is now widely regarded as a major turning point in nineteenth-century French art. The painting is held at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.