Artistic scandals were two a penny in 19th-century Paris, but perhaps the biggest scandal of all—in terms of sheer size—involved the strange, sombre, immense painting A Burial at Ornans, by Realism’s founder and most celebrated practitioner, the French artist Gustave Courbet.
Largely self-taught and extravagantly self-confident, Courbet was barely 30 when he caused an uproar at the Salon of 1850-51 with his 6.6m-long, defiantly dreary portrayal of an ordinary funeral in his hometown of Ornans—then little more than a village, near the Franco-Swiss border—on a scale suggestive of a grand historical event.
A Burial at Ornans was a major turning point in the history of art, signalling a shift away from formal, academic and grandiose depictions of the past to inspired, innovative and often confounding versions of the present
A signature work in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay since the museum opened in 1986, A Burial at Ornans was a major turning point in the history of art, signalling a shift away from formal, academic and grandiose depictions of the past to inspired, innovative and often confounding versions of the present—the opening gong, arguably, of the avant-garde. And though it may no longer be scandalous, it is still mysterious. Who are those mourners on the right, and why are there dim faces lurking behind them? Why is the freshly dug grave hovering at the very bottom of the composition, like an afterthought? And—in what still gives the work a bit of notoriety—whose burial is it, anyway?
Conservators will start to unlock some of these secrets early next year, when the work undergoes an ambitious treatment that will aim to do everything from modulating the effects of yellowing varnish to investigating folds of painted canvas now obscured behind the immense gilded frame. When it is over, new colours will likely emerge, and the oversize artwork may end up just a bit bigger, and even a bit more daring.
Right now, A Burial at Ornans and its similarly large companion, Courbet’s 1855’s The Painter’s Studio, hang on adjacent walls in an open main-floor gallery that serves as a point of entry for the Musée d’Orsay’s special exhibitions. The plan is to switch them around, says Isolde Pludermacher, the museum’s general curator of painting, and then construct a barrier with a viewing window around A Burial at Ornans. This will prevent the need to move the painting—one of the very largest in the permanent collection—more than a few feet, while allowing for an on-site process accessible to ordinary museum goers.
The massive undertaking follows a 2020 full X-ray examination, when conservators discovered that the format had been changed. It turns out that several centimetres of the original work had been folded back—most likely in 1881, four years after the artist’s death and around the time the painting entered the collection of the Louvre. Pludermacher says the folds particularly affect the bottom edge of the painting. She says the museum now knows that the ominous if somewhat diminutive grave “is deeper” in the original, adding that the treatment promises to reveal “details that we cannot see now”.
Even more audacious?
Kathryn Calley Galitz, an art historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, co-curated the New York museum’s mammoth Courbet survey in 2008. She is very familiar with A Burial at Ornans, which was exceptionally moved to the nearby Grand Palais for the Paris version of the show. She says she is still thrilled by the work’s original transgression of presenting mundane figures on a monumental scale. When asked to comment on the prospect of a revised bottom section, she says: “If that hole in the centre gets larger, it will make the painting even more audacious.”
Pludermacher says that the planned cleaning and the potential altering of decades of distorting varnish promise to restore Courbet’s original palette, a process that has occurred with other recent treatments.
In 2014-15, the museum restored The Painter’s Studio—again, in a gallery space accessible to the public—which heightened the colours of disparate figures’ clothing. And just this autumn the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille, a major municipal museum in northern France, saw the completion of an 18-month-long analysis and restoration of Courbet’s 1848-49 prelude to the burial work, After Dinner at Ornans, an outsize interior scene that just went back on view this September.
Completed in Paris at the National Centre for Research and Restoration in French Museums, the treatment dramatically revealed Courbet’s original colours, says Antonella Trovisi, a Paris-based conservator who worked on the project. The violinist figure on the right now has dark-blue trousers, which looked decidedly black in the pre-treated version. The blue emerged gradually, Trovisi says, in response to repeated cleanings using nanogel technology. In addition, the once-dingy tablecloth now seems much whiter, following the removal of thick layers of varnish. This new still-life effect, Trovisi says, has compositional impact, instilling the painting with a revived sense of intimacy.
As the Musée d’Orsay gears up for its treatment, Pludermacher is hopeful but measured about how A Burial at Ornans might look in one to two years’ time, once the process is complete.
Conservators have some hard choices ahead of them—for instance, what to do about the murky faces on the right that the curator likes to call “the ghosts”. It is likely that these faces were included and then painted over by Courbet himself, but they are now visible as their overpaint became more transparent over time. In spite of the artist’s intentions, these vague—and very effective—apparitions are now part of the work. Pludermacher says that decoding and addressing Courbet’s original approach during the treatment will be “something we have to deal with”. Similarly, she is not sure yet if the unfolded areas of canvas are intact enough to be included in a newly displayed version of the painting. “We don’t know what solution the conservators will propose,” she says.
And then there is the matter of the unseen corpse. Does Pludermacher have any theories on who it might be? “We still don’t know,” she says, but she thinks the treatment might offer new clues. “It’s such a huge painting, set in such a small village, and nobody knows who it’s about—but maybe we will by the end.”
