"I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one."

It’s not a coincidence that Courbet’s The Stone Bereakers was painted in 1848 and completed in 1849. It was directly after laborers in Courbet’s native France had rebelled against the bourgeois leaders of the newly formed Second Republic, demanding better working conditions and a redistribution of property. Even though the army quelled the revolution in three days, the uprising raised the issue of labor as a national concern and placed workers center stage. Thus, Courbet’s depiction of stone breakers in 1849 was very timely and populist.

The painting itself depicts, quite literally, two stone breakers, one young and the other old, in the act of breaking stones. This menial labor was traditionally the lot of the lowest in French society. Here, Courbet juxtaposes youth and old age, suggesting a vicious cycle: those born to poverty will remain poor their entire lives. The artist neither romanticizes nor idealizes the men’s work, instead depicting their thankless toil with accuracy and directness. His color palette is made up mostly of dirty browns and grays, conveying the dreary, dismal nature of the task, while the angular positioning of the older stone breakers limbs suggest a mechanical monotony of the work. At the same time, while the younger stone breaker is more upright, the older man is physically cowed by years of a demeaning job and lifestyle, almost bent out of shape, allowing us to see the unfortunate and painful trajectory that the young man will take as he goes about his life as a stone breaker.