Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) was the founder and most powerful exponent of Realism in nineteenth-century French painting. Combative, egotistical, and politically radical, he rejected the idealized imagery of academic history painting and the romanticized landscapes of his contemporaries in favor of the unvarnished depiction of contemporary peasant life, the human body, and the natural world. His monumental Burial at Ornans presented a provincial funeral on a scale reserved for history painting, scandalizing the Salon of 1850. Courbet's technical virtuosity — particularly his handling of light on rock, water, and flesh — was beyond dispute, and his example gave the Impressionists the courage to look at the world on their own terms.