After 175 years, Gustave Courbet’s slow procession of mourners still stirs even the hardened modern heart.

Most obviously, this is because it unflinchingly confronts mankind’s eternal subject and does so on an immense, human-sized scale. But poignancy rests in the details: the freshly dug grave that extends into the viewer’s plane, the dog that has wandered innocently into the scene, the young boy beneath the processional cross who gazes up at an elder, asking for reassurance. There cannot be any, and this was precisely the point of realism, the movement that A Burial at Ornans heralded upon its scandalous appearance at the Paris Salon of 1850 to 1851.

It’s been a masterpiece at the center of the Musée d’Orsay’s collection since the museum opened in the late 1980s, encouraging a generation of visitors to ask the same confounding questions. Among them: Who are all these people? Why is there a skull and bones at the grave’s edge? And who, exactly, has been buried?

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50), before restoration. Photo: © C2RMF Laurence Clivet and Alexis Komenda, courtesy of Musée d’Orsay.

Over the coming year, visitors to the museum will enjoy a different relationship to A Burial at Ornans, with Courbet’s 20-foot painting set behind a wall of plexiglass as it undergoes a complete restoration in full view of the public.

“The aim of the restoration work is to restore the original color harmony of this masterpiece as far as can be achieved,” the museum said in a statement, “while consolidating the framing to ensure its preservation for future generations.”

Restoratioin of Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) at Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images.

There is, by the museum’s own admission, much to address. The painting has remained largely untouched for half a century and its current condition is “compromising the interpretation of the work,” the Musée d’Orsay said. The restoration will begin by carefully removing grime from the surface of the painting before gradually thinning layers of varnish (many of which, it claimed, were poorly applied) that are obscuring the original colors of Courbet’s composition.

Restoratioin of Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) at Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images.

There are tiny cracks and rips in the painting and part of the problem rests with the canvas itself. Courbet created the work in his grandfather’s house in Ornans and relied on the materials of his hometown. It’s a coarse, loosely woven fabric unsuitable to hold so much paint. The composition’s subject matter might be heavy, but so too was Courbet’s thick impasto style. This weight, in addition to the instability of certain binders in areas of highly layered paint, were already causing problems in Courbet’s time with the painter calling the work “damaged” in 1864.

Naturally, transporting a canvas of this size and weight quickens the deformation. And in the painting’s early years, it moved a lot. In the three decades following its donation to the Louvre in 1881, records show it was mounted or dismantled around 20 times. Specialists at the Musée d’Orsay will do so again, thereby revealing border portions of the canvas that were folded in the late 1800s. This poses the intriguing prospect of adding depth, and potentially details, to Courbet’s grave. A new frame seems likely.

Restoratioin of Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) at Musée d’Orsay. Photo: Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images.

The restoration follows a study from France’s National Centre for Research and Restoration that ran the full-gamut of modern imaging methods on A Burial at Ornans. It identified the hidden edges as well as the numerous alterations Courbet made to the painting in a sketched underdrawing. These included relocating the central priest and drastically reducing the size of the grave.

The project arrives a decade on from the restoration of another Courbet vast painting in the same ground floor gallery space, The Painter’s Studio (1855), a work that’s all the richer for its renewed brightness.