Courbet saw two men breaking stones on a road near Maisières and asked them to pose in his studio. An old man and a boy, faces hidden or shaded, labour in ragged clothes at nearly life size. Attacked at the Salon of 1850 as unfit for high art but praised by Proudhon, the canvas was lost, probably destroyed, in 1945.
Look closer
Notice the boy's torn shirt and the old man's patched clothes. Courbet wrote that he had rarely met so complete an expression of poverty.
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