Contemplating Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres on his birthday

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,
Josephine-Eleonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Bearn, Princesse de Broglie, 
1851-53
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." 

                                                                         - Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy (Pride and Prejudice)

There are some artists whose works bring to my mind the famous words exchanged between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett at the time of his surprising and "uncivil" declaration. I find myself baffled as I contemplate these masterpieces and find that "I like them against my will, against my reason, and even against my character." Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres is one such artist. Strange that even though my preferences run towards Romanticism rather than  Classicism, I am transfixed by Ingres' portraits. It could be the calm, cold gaze of Monsieur Ingres' subjects, engaging the viewer in such a manner that one  just can't look away, or the perfection of his line and forms plus the impeccable rendering of the different surfaces throughout his superbly finished canvases.  Although Ingres idealizes and distorts his figures, one is left with the impression that they are standing before a very real presence.  

Nudity a la Grecque and the Female Gaze

Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799
(Musee du Louvre)

Museums are full of works of art trying to tell us something vital about a particular period of time if we only stop to listen. Unfortunately a lot can be lost in translation since most discourse depends on the perspective of a particular scholar or a school of thought.  Also, changing sentiments can turn the iconography of a significant masterpiece into disconnected arguments.   I feel Jacques-Louis David's The Intervention of the Sabine Women hanging at the Louvre museum, is one of those paintings that merits further investigation.

Nicolas Poussin,  The Abduction of the Sabine Women,1633-34
(Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

David painted this monumental work while he was imprisoned after the death of Robespierre and the end of the reign of terror.  It  is always described as a reconciliation painting where love prevails over conflict,  David's call to find a way to rebuild after the destruction of the revolution and its aftermath.  Influenced by Nicolas Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, David depicts the end of the legendary  story from Roman history. Romans who have no women abduct the females from Sabine and make them their wives; years later the Sabine men come back to claim their female kin but in the midst of battle they are stopped by the intervention of the Sabine women who have become the wives and mothers of Romans, refusing to let their fathers and husbands kill each other.

David exhibited this painting in his studio where a mirror was placed on the opposite wall, giving the viewer the full effect of being in the midst of the battle. David provided a brochure for his audience that explained and defended his motivations and reasoning for the controversial tableau.  He also did something that was unprecedented til this time in France, he charged an admission fee.  It was deemed a box office success and became one of the most talked about paintings of his career.  The reason for the drama was caused mostly because of the state of dress or undress of the protagonists.  Some critics opposed the depiction of Roman soldiers fighting in the nude on the grounds of historical inaccuracy, others were outraged at the idea of the male nude displayed for all the world to see.   David proclaimed his choice as artistic license.


I recently discovered a fascinating article in the Art Bulletin by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Nudity a la Grecque in 1799, that sheds an intriguing light on this controversial painting.1 Grisby explains: 


"Scholarship  has for the most  part treated  the novel conjunction of  naked  male  bodies  and  newly central  female  protagonists as separate issues.

While  the  nudes  have been  described in  terms of  David's stylistic  development toward  a greater classical Greek  purism, the  Sabine  women's  prominence  has been 

interpreted as affording a familial  basis for the reconciliation  of  a  divided  and  warring  post-Revolutionary  France.  Aesthetic  priorities  (male  nudity) and  narrative saliency (female  intervention)  have often  been  held  asunder."

As it turns out, the critics redefined David's protagonists in specifically contemporary French terms. For David's severe critics the male nudes were contemplated in terms of the modern man stripped bare humiliated before their valets or his body deformed, bent, branded from his vulgar cultural practices, particularly fashion.   Herosilia, on the other hand, in her Grecian white gown was likened to the real women of post-Revolutionary France parading around in diaphanous gowns.  According to Grisby, David  himself  was responsible for  such  a collapse of high art and ephemeral fashion. The fashionable French woman had been modeling herself on the female protagonists of David's  major  pre-Revolutionary paintings; by 1790's the classical white gown had become everyday attire. 

Louis-Leopold Boilly, No Agreement, 1797

On September 7, 1789, women had donned simple white gowns and donated their ornaments to the state in an attempt to distance themselves from compromising associations of femininity with aristocratic ostentation. 2 However, it is stated that the renunciation of excessive ornamentation turned into excess of exposed flesh.  Wise men of 18th century France tried to dissuade women from this immodest way of displaying themselves by trying to convince them of the hazards to their health as well as severely reprimanding them for not being a model for the impure female.  Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby explains: 



"Ultimately, however, the greatest threat posed by women's new exhibitionism was not their impact on other women but the power they inappropriately wielded over men. Roederer, for one, understood fashion to be the means by which women exercised their"empire."This was not merely a matter of women's seduction of men  but of their substitution of tyranny for republicanism. Ephemeral fashion is by definition antithetical to timeless law. The stakes were self-evident:  as long as women-immoral, fashionable, fickle, and tyrannical-are prominent, there  could  be  no (fraternal)  Republic."

The Intervention of the Sabine Women, brought forth a concept which was completely antithetical to anything that had been seen in art so far -  the female gaze.  We read and write about the male gaze on the female body quite extensively in regards to feminist theory but this is the first time I experienced the exact opposite.  I should mention here that Tatius, Herosilia's father, standing to her left, was posed full frontal, without the modesty of the scabbard he wears in the painting today ( David modified the painting in1808).  The two male protagonists Tatius and Romulus were standing fully nude to an audience of females as well as males.  Girgsby mentions fashionable women standing before the painting in David's studio imagining themselves in place of Herosilia and her cohorts, another annoyance the critics could lay at David's door.  Along with the female viewer observing Tatius in puris naturalibus there are also Herosilia and the old woman in the middle who is about to rip open her gown, both getting a full view of Romulus that is not afforded to anyone else. 

"Here  are  women  in  states  of  undress regarding a displayed  male  nude; indeed, they are the only figures gazing at Romulus's exposed body.  It is difficult, however, to assess precisely where they look and what they see there. They alone enjoy access to Romulus's other  side, that presence or absence lurking behind (or  eclipsed  by?) shield and sheath, buttocks. As viewers by proxy, they heighten the sense of suspense attending Romulus's withheld body. Their oddly uninformative but directed gazes, coupled with Tatius's frontality, compel the question:  Should the viewer project Tatius's anatomy onto the halfgod's front, assembling his body part by part (shoulder, arm, chest, hardened stomach, genitals) in an attempt to reconstruct the man as seen by the women?"



Finally, the painter was blamed for sacrificing the health of women,  promoting 'nudity' for the sake of garnering a greater purity of forms in his painting. Darcy Grigsby states, women were ultimately the malleable materials of the dictatorial artist.  I guess anything was preferable to women having a mind of their own and acting independently.  


These are the elements that places David's painting on a plane which is more than just another neoclassical work to be memorized and recognized for me.  An intriguing peek into the lives, and thoughts of people from 200 years ago, observed through a careful study of a canvas hanging on a museum wall, ours to be had for the price of an admission ticket... this is why I love Art History.

1  Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, Nudity a la Grecque in 1799, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 2(Jun., 1998), pp 311-335

2  Ibid., 321

Jacques- Louis David - Bonaparte Crossing the St. Bernard Pass

Jacques Louis David, Bonaparte Crossing the St. Bernard Pass, 1800
(Musee National de Malmaison, France)

Jacques- Louis David - A Cult of Great Men, 1793

Anatole Desvoge after David's Painting, Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau on his Death Bed, 1793

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793
(Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium)

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Bara, 1793

Jacques- Louis David - the Oath of the Tennis Court

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court, 1791
(Versailles Palace)

Jacques- Louis David - The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons

Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, 1789
(Musee du Louvre)

David, Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789 from Smarthistory Videos on Vimeo.

Jacques- Louis David - The Death of Socrates

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

From the Metropolitan Museum Catalog Entry: 

The great history painter and portraitist Jacques Louis David was the pupil of Joseph Marie Vien (1716–1809) and then in 1766 entered the school of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Having won the Prix de Rome in 1774, he traveled to Italy with Vien, an early exponent of neoclassicism and the newly appointed director of the French Academy there. In the Italian capital, David followed a traditional course, drawing from the antique, from models, and from nature, and studying contemporary and earlier painting. He made innumerable studies that attest to his passionate interest in antiquity and in the sculptural style of painting espoused in the seventeenth century by the Romanist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), whose successor he became.

David returned to Paris in 1780 and the next year was received as a candidate member of the Académie, presenting Belisarius Begging Alms (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille), a history painting praised for its nobility of spirit. His reception piece, submitted in 1783, was the starkly heroic Grieving Andromache (École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Moralizing themes were immensely popular in the tumultuous years preceding the French revolution and many painters essayed The Death of Socrates, but none with the success of David. From its first exhibition at the Salon of 1787, the canvas has been admired for the clarity and force of its composition and the purity of its sentiment.

In 399 B.C., having been accused by the Athenian government of impiety and of corrupting young people with his teachings, the philosopher Socrates was tried, found guilty, and offered the choice of renouncing his beliefs or drinking the cup of hemlock. He died willingly for the principles he held dear. Here he gestures toward the cup, points toward the heavens, and discourses on the immortality of the soul. The picture, with its stoic theme, has been described as David’s most perfect neoclassical statement.

The artist consulted Plato’s "Phaedo" and a variety of sources including Diderot’s treatise on dramatic poetry and works by the poet André Chenier. The pose of Plato, the figure seated in profile at the foot of the bed (who was not actually present at the scene), was reportedly inspired by the English novelist Richardson. The printmaker and publisher John Boydell, writing to Sir Joshua Reynolds, called The Death of Socrates "the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the stanze of Raphael," further observing that the painting "would have done honour to Athens at the time of Pericles." 

Jacques- Louis David - The Oath of the Horatii

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784
(Musee du Louvre)

Information from the Louvre Website

The Oath of the Horatii

In the 7th century BC, the three Horatii brothers, chosen by the Romans to defy the Curiatii, the champions of the town of Alba, are swearing to defeat their enemies or die. As they receive their weapons from their father, the women of the family are prostrate with suffering. This painting, a royal commission, was the manifesto for a new style, neoclassicism. Both the architecture of the room and the poses of the warriors are rigorously geometrical.

The Horatii and the Curiatii

In the 7th century BC, to put an end to the bloody war between Rome and Alba, both cities designated champions: the former chose the Horatii, the latter the Curiatii. The two families were linked by marriage. Jacques-Louis David depicts the Horatii swearing to defeat their enemies or die for their country. On the right, the grief-stricken women of the family already fear the worst: Sabina, the sister of the Curiatii and wife of the eldest of the Horatii, and Camilla, the sister of the Horatii and betrothed to one of the Curiatii, hang their heads in sorrow, while behind them, the mother of the Horatii hugs her grandchildren. 

A new moral painting

David chose this episode in Roman history for his first royal commission in 1784. A Prix de Rome laureate in 1776 and a member of the Académie, he wanted to launch his public career by creating a stir with a radically innovative picture. He forsook the amorous and mythological subject matter of his first teacher, Boucher, for the Roman historians and Corneille's classical play Horace (1640). David presents this episode as an example of patriotism and stoicism. In this respect, he is close to philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Diderot, who advocated the painting of moral subjects. David also wanted to give his painting an orginal form. He sought to emulate the grand style of his 17th-century forebears Poussin and Le Brun. David returned to Rome, where he could draw inspiration from ancient art for this painting. He presented the finished canvas in his studio in Rome in 1785, then at the Paris Salon later that year, on both occasions to acclaim. 

The manifesto of neoclassicism

The Oath of the Horatii is the first masterpiece of a new style breaking with the rococo style. The composition is broad and simple, with the life-size figures arranged in a frieze in the foreground, as on Roman sarcophagi and Greek vases. The figures are separated by large empty spaces in a stage-like area shown head-on. David emphasizes the room's geometry. The harsh, slanting light gives the figures their relief, and their contrasting characters are conveyed using different forms. He gives the men energetic bodies constructed out of straight lines and dresses them in vivid colors, while the women are all sinous curves and muted colors. The painting became the model throughout Europe for the new style of painting later known as neoclassicism.

 

Adelaide Labille-Guilard - Self-Portrait with Two Pupils

Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Self Portrait with Two Pupils, 1785
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Adelaide Labille-Guilard first trained as a miniaturist and then learned the art of pastel painting from the preeminent Maurice Quentin de la Tour.   Not only was Labille-Guiard an exceptional artist but she was also an astute promoter. Before she was admitted as an academician she exhibited a series of pastel portraits of the most prominent academicians including the director at the Salon de la Correspondence (a commercial exhibition) which must have drawn enough attention for them to be familiar with her name.  She was accepted into the Academie in 1783 along with Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun.  She did not have a royal patron like Vigee-LeBrun nor did she have the privileges accorded a full academician of a salary.  She was training female artists at her studio but she also needed to attract wealthy patrons. 

 Labille-Guiard composed her portraits like large scale history paintings.  In this huge canvas we see an artist working at her easel as her two pupil look-on with admiration.  She engages the viewer by placing them in the position of the subject that she is painting.  Labille-Guiard has positioned herself in the middle of the canvas dressed as an aristocratic lady in a very fashionable, low-cut, satin dress, powdered hair and hat with bows and feathers.  According to Laura Auricchio, her pose and costume would have been instantly recognizable as the images from the published fashion plates that were so popular among the elite audience of fashionable women who were also very desirable patrons.1 She seems to be giving an all-encompassing impression of herself in this self-portrait. On the one hand she is dressed provocatively - her ample bosom is placed at the center of the painting and her little foot peeks under her dress - and on the other, she has two statues behind her one of her father and the other the Vestal Virgin - the former lending a sense of propriety and the latter a sense of  virtue.  She is claiming this is her studio and she is being watched over by her father and the Virgin.

She has shown an incredible mastery with her paints while depicting all the different light effects and textures. The intricacies of her dress are portrayed so realistically that the seams and even the wrinkles are very obvious.  The students in the back are standing in a contrapposto pose which is a concept developed in Classical sculpture and cannot be seen in Jacques-Louis David's figures until after the revolution. The  painting was a huge success.  She was considered to be one step away from a history painter.

Compared to her contemporary Vigee-LeBrun's soft rococo paintings Labille-Guiard's work was always considered more masculine.  Her work was so exceptional that some believed it was actually painted by her lover.  They could not conceive of such mastery in a female.  There were even pamphlets circulating at this time besmirching her name, containing lewd comments that she had to make a complaint about. But being the ever-resourceful woman that she was, she wrote to the wife of the director asking her to intervene on her behalf.  She went on to describe what a stain on her honor would do to her old lonely father.  With a little female intervention, action was taken to arrest and interrogate the printer and seize the pamphlets.2 Labille-Guiard had turned a negative situation into a positive with very influential allies on her side.

Madame Adailade of France, one of the daughters of Louis XIV, wanted to purchase the Self-Portrait with two Pupils but Labille-Guiard would not sell it and instead painted a portrait of the Princess of France in a very similar style as her own.  Mademe Adailade and her sisters became Labille-Guiard's major patrons and since she associated herself with the generation that was previous to the present ruler, she was not targeted by the Revolutionaries. She even painted a portrait of Maximilien Robespierre.

Jacques-Louis David,
The Oath of the Horatii, 1785
(Musee du Louvre)

Unfortunately, over the years, Labille-Guiard was not as widely recognized as her contemporary Vigee-LeBrun who made the cover of a current Survey of Art book while her name doesn't even come up in the index section.  I think this talented artist as well as shrewd businesswoman deserves to be recognized as a painter of the top caliber not just a female portraitist, afterall she risked the wrath of a society who firmly believed the female's place was in the home, behind closed doors, taking care of her children.   Just for the level of success she achieved in 18th century society she deserves to be mentioned with the canons of her generation.; this painting could have been hanging right next to David's monumental Oath of the Horatii. 


1  Auricchio, Lauren. "Self-promotion in Adelaide Labille-Guiard's 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Students." Art Bulletin (2007). 51 
2  Ibid., 48

Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun - Portrait of Marie-Antoinette

Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun, Portrait of Marie-Antoinette, 1778-1779
(Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) 

Vigee-LeBrun was Marie-Antoinette's favorite portraitist and such a close confidant that the queen aided her entrance to the Academie by having her husband Louis XVI interfere on her behalf .  This event caused whispers that she was intimately involved with the sovereign and in contemporary terms that she basically slept her way to the top. Looking at this portrait of the queen that pronouncement is a little difficult to acknowledge as truth.  Vigee-LeBrun was a true royalist and had to flee France the night of the Revolution are true however.

In this rococo painting of the notorious queen who was blamed to almost single-handedly, bring down the ancien regime Vigee-LeBrun depicts Marie-Antoinette in all her royal glory.  The queen is shown standing in a very elaborate dress of satin and lace with huge paniers holding out the skirts attesting to her noble status.  The red velvet covered table that holds the crown and the bust of her husband Louis XVI seen on top of the column to her right are also some of the elements befitting a queen that are incorporated into the painting.

This is the first portrait Vigee-LeBrun painted of the queen from real life.  Similar to a history painting, it is a huge work involving many components and would have taken several sittings.  Vigee-LeBrun wrote her memoirs explaining how she proceeded with making portraits of royalty, starting with trying to make the sitter very comfortable.    In order to avoid the sitter appearing too tall, she made sure that the head was not placed too high on the canvas.  Another important factor to take into consideration was for the model to be presented in a space where she did not overtake it.

Vigee-LeBrun, The artist's maid, 1778
(Musee Carnivalet, Paris)

Jacques-Louis David,
Queen Marie-Antoinette on the
Way to the Guillotine, 1793
(Musee du Louvre)

Although this is a painting in the rococo style, with an abundance of drapery and flowers and soft brush strokes, critics still identified the brush strokes as a sign of Vigee-LeBrun's identity as a female.   The cross-hatching  technique that was taught at the academy was also considered feminine as opposed to Jacques Louis David's strong contours.  Maybe  identifying all that was of the ancien regime and corrupt as a feminine style and adapting a more stern style in art and calling it more masculine was more consoling to their sensibilities.  It is also interesting to compare Vigee-LeBrun's painting of Marie-Antoinette in 1778 to the drawing of David in 1793. It may even be recognized as a lesson in humility.

Jacques- Louis David - The Master of Neoclassicim

Jacques-Louis David, Self Portrait, 1794
(Musee du Louvre)

Jacques-Louis David was born into an upper class family with connections in the Academie  royale d'architecture (Royal Academy of Architecture) and was supposed to study to be either a lawyer or an architect.  But he was adamant about becoming an artist.  His father had died when he was nine years old leaving his education in the care of his uncles who themselves were architects.

He started his studies at the Academie de peinture et de sculpture but was soon disillusioned with the constraints of the strict academy education which he believed was designed to suppress artistic genius and originality, particularly his own.  This is thought to be the reason for his rebellion against the despotic institutions of the ancien regime during the Revolution, including the Royal Academy which he helped to abolish in 1793.1  After three consecutive tries, David finally won the prestigious Prix de Rome and could go and study there.  At first he said he was only interested in the works of the Renaissance masters but after he got to Rome, Classical sculpture became his main obsession and he captured the purity and power of contour from Winckelmann's teachings.

Jaques-Louis David, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1781
(Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille)

Before David started painting Belisarius Begging for Alms in late 1780 as a preliminary entry submission for acceptance into the Academie, he asked the academy what subject he should paint, showing his compliancy. But some scholars argue that this painting actually signifies David's "prerevolutionary radicalism"  and his involvement in the Revolution was the logical conclusion of being a radical,  intellectual, enlightened artist.2


Belisarius was a very successful and loyal general in Byzantine Emperor Justinain's army but he fell from grace, his property was seized and he was blinded. Belisarius was reduced to begging in the streets.  This story was popular during the Enlightenment in mid 18th century France both in art and literature.  In the painting David depicts the moment when a blind old man accompanied by a child, holding out his helmet for a woman to put coins in it is recognized as Belisarius by one of the soldier's who served under him.  The soldier is horrified at seeing his old commander begging in the streets.  The underlying message  being 'this could happen to anyone who is a traitor to the crown" would be understood by the young artists who were in awe of David.

David has depicted the scene taking place in front of very rigid, solid, doric columns and a distant Roman city in the background.  The composition is perpendicular to the viewer's line of vision.  David's strong outlines delineates all the figures from one another and the background.  Although this painting is cited as the first manifesto to Neoclassical painting, there are some lapses in David's work.  The position of the soldier, behind and higher than the woman would necessitate him to be taller. While he has used proper perspective in depicting the tiles on the right side of the painting, the tiles on the left side do not have the illusion of going back in space.  David does not seem to be too concerned with such details and in the future would have his students work on the little details.

It is still a little obscure how David would produce such a subject that could very well be construed as a criticism of the monarchy but the concepts of Enlightenment and the sovereigns perspective on the arts seems to be intersecting during the reigns of Louis XV and XVI.  On the one hand the Enlightened artists, philosophers, and literary figures finding patronage and an intellectually fertile ground in the Salons of aristocratic ladies, the most interesting example being Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour being the protector of the Encyclopedia, and  on the  other some of those figures being arrested for the works discussed at those Salons. The more I learn, the more confounding I find 'the Age of Reason.'

1  Kohle, Hubertus. "The Road from Rome to Paris:  The Birth of a Modern Neoclassicim." Jacques-Louis David:  New Perspectives. Newark [Del.: University of Delaware, 2006. 71. Print
2 Ibid., 74

The Salon - Different Artistic Styles from 18th and 19th Centuries

The official art exhibition of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1748- 1890 was the Salon.  Artwork selected for exhibition at the Salon typically fit the characteristics of Academic Art. 

If you wanted to make it as an artist, you had to be exhibited in the official Salon which was controlling the art world.  The latest and the greatest of the time were determined there.

In order to be seen in one of these exhibitions, your work had to be huge or hope you won't be skied (placed high above)  All the walls were packed from  the floor to the ceiling with paintings.

The catalog of the exhibit would have little snippets of  literature or poetry listed with the paintings.  

There was a hierarchy of genres that was acceptable when selecting paintings for the official Salon:

     1.  History Painting

     2.  Portraiture

     3.  Genre (everyday life scenes)

     4.  Landscape

     5.  Still Life

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii,1784, approx 10 1/2 x 14'
(NEOCLASSICAL STYLE HISTORY PAINTING)

Neoclassicism (1750-1820), the art of the ideal, drew upon Western classical art and culture.  

Jacques-Louis David is painting not his own time but an image of the Romans from ancient history, in order to make a comment on his own society. He believed that 'Art should be morally instructive.' At this time society was degenerating, so he was painting an ideal for his time to reinforce the morals of  family, patriotism and society.

Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, 16 X 23 1/2'
(ROMANTICISM)

Romanticism (1800-1850) was an artistic movement that grew out of the Enlightenment based on ideas of reason, democracy and order. It emphasized very passionate emotions, very exotic settings that appeal to the imagination, extremes of human experience - events that wouldn't happen to the average person in everyday life, and the notion of the sublime. All of the ideals of Neoclassicism was under fire at this period and there was a strong reaction to the French Revolution.

Theodore Gericault didn't actually experience this scene but he talked to the survivors of this atrocity.  There is drama and an immensity to this canvas, later-on scale becomes important for the Impressionists.  

There is still a triangle in the composition but it's skewed so there is much more emphasis on the dynamism of this particular event.  

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850, approx. 10 1/2 x 22'

(REALISM)

Realism is an artistic style, it does not necessarily mean a replica of a real experience, it is interpretive and naturalistic not realistic.  This monumental painting has no association with the past. Courbet could have experienced this scene of the burial from the French countryside.