"A subject with very little appeal"

Those were the words of the acclaimed French publication 'L'Illustration' written in a review of the 1850 Salon showing of Gustave Courbet's painting 'The Stone Breakers'.

The review would go on to describe the work as being of poor composition, failing to add importance to its subject, and with lighting that was not "appropriate". Other critics would lambast the thickly applied palette knife paint as "careless", they'd describe the subjects as "Brutish, worn, and dirty".

Overall the prevailing sentiment of many critics was hostile, that the subject was not only unfit for high art, but unfit to be painted at all.

However this painting would go on to become one of the cornerstones of the 'Realism' movement, regarded as a masterpiece by many.

So why was it met with such hostility by the majority of its contemporary critics? It was not the shock of the new that took them as it would with later more abstract movements, the technique and style no where near as alien to them as cubism would be. Truth be told it made them uneasy for it showed the reality of poverty and how hard work had shaped this class of men. It did not adorn them in heroic light, it did not make their struggle or sacrifice seem noble.

The workers are not drawn rippled with the muscle of Grecian marble, nor is the younger of the two mens cheeks kissed with the cherubic colour of exertion. It simply reflected an unflinching bitter reality. The reality of clothes patched over and over again, the reality of bent backs and skin subdued by dirt. The expressionless anonymity of the impoverished.

The poet Max Buchon hit on this most saliently at the time, describing the two men painted as representative of "the dawn and twilight of modern galley-slave existence"

This existence is not something those at the Paris Salon wished to think on, to them the the poor who toiled in fields and quarries did so in unified groups, supporting each others labour as a village come together beneath a golden sun, their lives humble but warm, as seen in the idealised work of Jules Bretons 'The Gleaners'.

They did not want this reality with all the discomfort and hardship it contained. They did not wish to think on the suffering the systems they partook in propagated. What is more they certainly did not see it fit to have such struggles elevated, to have them laid bare before the populous for what they were, indictments of a system which was leaving people behind to suffer.

As the social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote it was "a visual condemnation of capitalism and potential for greed".

To me it is a reminder, to always put forth truth to power, and to hold a healthy distrust of those with power when those few say something is not for the many. As Louis de Geofroy said "art that is made for everyone should be what everyone sees."