The Royal Academy supported the age-old belief that art should be instructive, morally uplifting, refined, inspired by the classical tradition, a good reflection of the national culture, and, above all, about beauty. But trying to keep young 19th-century artists’ eyes on the past became an issue! The world was changing rapidly, and some artists wanted their work to be about their contemporary environment—about themselves and their own perceptions of life. In short, they believed that the modern era deserved to have modern art.

The Modern Era begins with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. Clothing, food, heat, light, and sanitation are a few of the basic areas that modernized the 19th century. Transportation was faster, getting things done got easier, shopping in the new department stores became an adventure, and people developed a sense of leisure time—thus the entertainment businesses grew.

In Paris, the city was transformed from a medieval warren of streets to a grand urban center with wide boulevards, parks, shopping districts, and multi-class dwellings (so that the division of class might be from floor to floor—the rich on the lower floors and the poor on the upper floors in one building—instead of by neighborhood). Therefore, modern life was about social mixing, social mobility, frequent journeys from the city to the country and back, and a generally faster pace, which has accelerated ever since.

How could paintings and sculptures about classical gods and biblical stories relate to a population enchanted with this progress?

In the middle of the 19th century, the young artists decided that it couldn’t and shouldn’t. In 1863, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire published an essay entitled “The Painter of Modern Life,” which declared that the artists must be of their own time.

Gustave Courbet, a young fellow from the Franche-Comté, a province outside of Paris, came to the big city with a large ego and a sense of mission. He met Baudelaire and other progressive thinkers within the first years of making Paris his home. Then, he set himself up as the leader of a new art: Realism—“history painting” about real life. He believed that if he could not see something, he should not paint it. He also decided that his art should have a social consciousness that would awaken the self-involved Parisian to contemporary concerns: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Unlike Millet, who, in paintings like The Gleaners, was known for depicting hard-working but idealized peasants, Courbet depicts figures who wear ripped and tattered clothing. And unlike the aerial perspective Millet used in The Gleaners to bring our eye deep into the French countryside during the harvest, the two stone breakers in Courbet’s painting are set against a low hill of the sort common in the rural French town of Ornans, where the artist had been raised and continued to spend a much of his time. The hill reaches to the top of the canvas everywhere but the upper right corner, where a tiny patch of bright blue sky appears. The effect is to isolate these laborers, and to suggest that they are physically and economically trapped. In Millet’s painting, the gleaners’ rounded backs echo one another, creating a composition that feels unified, whereas Courbet’s figures seem disjointed. Millet’s painting, for all its sympathy for these poor figures, could still be read as “art” by viewers at an exhibition in Paris.

Courbet wants to show what is real, and so he has depicted a man who seems too old and a boy who seems still too young for such back-breaking labor. This is not meant to be heroic: it is meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life. As with so many great works of art, there is a close affiliation between the narrative and the formal choices made by the painter, meaning elements such as brushwork, composition, line, and color.

Like the stones themselves, Courbet’s brushwork is rough—more so than might be expected during the mid-19th century. This suggests that the way the artist painted his canvas was in part a conscious rejection of the highly polished, refined Neoclassicist style that still dominated French art in 1848.

Perhaps the most characteristic of Courbet’s style is his refusal to focus on the parts of the image that would usually receive the most attention. Traditionally, an artist would spend the most time on the hands, faces, and foregrounds. Not Courbet. If you look carefully, you will notice that he attempts to be even-handed, attending to faces and rocks equally. In these ways, The Stonebreakers seems to lack the basics of art (things like a composition that selects and organizes aerial perspective and finish) and as a result, it feels more “real.”