In the winter of 1849-50 Gustave Courbet painted the funeral of his great-uncle in his native town of Ornans, in eastern France. The canvas measures 315 × 668 cm — the scale reserved by the academic class system for *peinture d'histoire*, history painting drawing on mythological or royal subjects. But what is on the canvas are ordinary villagers, Courbet's own neighbours and relatives, painted from life with their real faces, real postures, and real names.

The academic hierarchy is broken in the open. The French Academy since 1791 had fixed the order — history painting > portrait > genre > landscape > still life — and the larger the subject, the larger the canvas could be. A village funeral is a genre scene, not a history painting. By doing one at history-painting scale, Courbet rejected the academic rule openly.

The composition draws strength from that refusal. The figures are not arranged in clear hierarchy; even where attention is drawn to a group, the women in line, the clergy, the gravedigger, the dog, the boy carrying the cross stand at equal visual weight. There is no landscape proper; only a cotton-grey sky stretched flat as a band behind the figures.

At the 1850-51 Paris Salon the work was attacked as 'ugly', 'coarse', 'socialist'. The attack was on point: in those years Courbet was associated with writings supporting workers' rights after the 1848 Revolution. The painting is now at the Musée d'Orsay. The fall of the Academy was not the work of a single blow; but Realism — the position that the ordinary deserves the same monumental treatment as the heroic — was declared here.