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The Stone Breakers
Gustave Courbet · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
- Date
- 1849
- Dimensions
- 165 x 257 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (destroyed in 1945)
The Stone Breakers showed two labourers, an old man and a boy, breaking stones by the roadside to make gravel for road building, one of the hardest and worst-paid jobs of the time. It was destroyed during the Second World War and survives only in photographs.
A closer look
Courbet painted the figures life-size, a scale traditionally reserved for heroes, kings and saints, which shocked the public at the Salon of 1850. The two men are seen from behind or with their faces hidden, so that they become anonymous representatives of the rural poor. Their clothes are torn and patched, their tools are worn; the boy struggles under a heavy basket of stones. Courbet said he had seen these two men on the road near his home and painted them exactly as they were. The painting became a manifesto of Realism.
More by Gustave Courbet
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- L'Origine du monde 1866
- The Sleepers 1866
- Woman with a Parrot 1866
- The Woman in the Waves 1868
- Young Ladies Beside the Seine 1857
- The Wheat Sifters 1854