Gustave Courbet did not ask permission. He grew up in Ornans, a small farming town in eastern France, the son of a landowner who wanted him to study law. Courbet studied painting instead. He largely taught himself, spending years copying Old Masters in the Louvre. Then he pointed his brush at ordinary life.

The Official Paris Salon was the gatekeeper of French art. The jury decided who got shown, who got sold, who got remembered. These were the Kingmakers. Courbet painted stone breakers, peasants at a funeral, a woman giving alms in the snow. He painted the working class with the same gravity the Salon reserved for mythology and aristocracy. The critics called it vulgar. The jury rejected his most ambitious work.

In 1855, during the Universal Exposition, the jury blocked two of his paintings. Courbet's response was not a petition. Not a revision. He built his own pavilion outside the official grounds, hung his work himself, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and charged admission. The crowds came anyway.

The Kingmakers never forgave him. In 1871, Courbet participated in the Paris Commune and oversaw the demolition of the Vendôme Column — a bronze monument Napoleon had cast from the cannon of conquered enemies. Propaganda made permanent. Courbet helped pull it down. The restored government convicted him, fined him the full cost of reconstruction, and drove him into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.

The column was rebuilt. But so was his reputation. The peasants he painted have been hanging in museums the Salon never intended them to ever since.