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His likeness adapted from an earlier at the Exposition An immensely complex work, it the right, personified by Courbet's friends and mentors: at the At the far right are Courbet 's mother behind the pallbearers at who were shocked by commonplace and depressing an event on Universelle of 1855. is Mayor Prosper Teste de Sagey sisters; at the far left, critics, a scale usually reserved for grand, uplifting subjects. stands next to the grave; gravedigger Cassard kneels beside the open — although shown depiction of so — Courbet created a huge, friezelike burial scene, including the picture from winning the success he expected of it, was attacked by its inhabitants.

Clifflike cliff. erected by the energy within them, and press il themselves against thai untransgressible limit, the picture plane. T,hus, quite involuntarily, Courbet has come righl to the brink ol the 19th Century's major artistic revolution: the reduction of painting to its own surface, which no longer functions as a mirror or a window opened on the world. Lines and colors cease to express objects; the) are no longer transparent mean- but opaque ends. Hv the most startling paradoxes, the painter mosl eager to express the creatures is con Iron led, on realit) tonomous thickness and shapes.

For connow beyond consideration. His pictures were the Salon of 1872; about one of them, his colleague Lrnest Meissonier, an esteemed historical painter, said, it. Vendome. him: neglect, oblivion. servative society, he was refused the Place La Tour-de-Peilz, on Lake Ceneva. at For Courbet, exile was disastrous. really hurt in of one of the city's de- a broken in prison, Vendome column. of re-erecting the in down artistic affairs and, in the conservative government of Versailles ruth- court and, after several months Switzerland charge of Napoleonism, the column The following year lessly in in "We need not look at not a question of art but of dignity; Courbet cannot appear at our exhibitions.