Which French painter created the 1849 work 'The Stone Breakers'?

Which French painter created the 1849 work The Stone Breakers? Gustave Courbet created it.

The Stone Breakers is an oil painting showing two road laborers, a young man and an older man, breaking rocks. Courbet began it in 1849 after seeing workers performing this exhausting task near Maisières. Their worn clothing, repetitive labor, and obscured faces turn them into powerful representatives of the rural working class.

Courbet’s decision to make humble labor the subject of a large, serious painting challenged academic ideas about what belonged in high art. The work was shown at the Paris Salon of 1850–1851, where critics objected to its bleak subject and thick, forceful paint handling. Other observers praised its social seriousness.

Courbet made two versions. The larger version associated with Dresden was lost or destroyed during the Second World War, while a smaller reversed version survives in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur. The painting remains a landmark of Realism.