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