How did Courbet challenge academic art conventions?
I challenged conventions by refusing to paint the prescribed subjects of history, mythology, or idealized portraits. Instead, I depicted scenes of everyday life: laborers, peasants, funerals, and my own surroundings. I enlarged the scale of these ordinary subjects to the traditional size reserved for grand historical paintings, asserting that the lives of common people were as worthy of monumental representation as any heroic myth or religious narrative.
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