# The Stonebreakers [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [COURBET, Gustave]() - Date: 1851-1900 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 165 x 257 cm ## Commentary Like Romanticism, Realism was a broad cultural movement in the 19th century that had its origin in literature and philosophy. In painting, its most prominent representative was Gustave Courbet. His Stonebreakers represented workers, as he had seen them, in monumental form. The Stonebreakers, destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, was the first of Courbet's great works. The Socialist philosopher Proudhon described it as an icon of the peasant world. But for Courbet it was simply a memory of something he had seen: two men breaking stones beside the road. He told his friends the art critic Francis Wey and Champfleury: "It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning." ## Related artworks - [A Burial at Ornans]() - [After Dinner at Ornans]() - [Artist at His Easel]() - [Beach near Trouville]() - [Burial at Ornans \(detail\)]() - [Cliffs at Étretat]() - [Courbet in his Cell at Sainte-Pélagie]() - [Farmers of Flagey on the Return from the Market]() - [Firemen Running to a Fire]() - [Flower Still-Life]() - [Landscape]() - [Landscape with a Dead Horse]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()