COURBET, Gustave

Courbet had no sooner finished The Stonebreakers than he began the epic Burial at Ornans and had to invite half the village into his studio to complete it. Courbet could not reconstitute the entire scene in his studio for lack of space; there were simply too many “walk-on parts” to allow this. “Fifty life-size figures, with a background of landscape and sky, on a canvas twenty feet wide and ten feet high,” he proudly announced to Champfleury; this was the format customarily used for battle scenes. Courbet noted in the Salon entry registers that it was “A picture of human figures, a historical record of a burial at Ornans.” He had some hesitations about how to place the cortege relative to the tomb, but the definitive composition showed a country burial at the moment of leave-taking. For the most part, the men take this fairly calmly, but the grief in the women is more melodramatic, while the cure and the pallbearers wear an expression of routine detachment.

Thanks to his friends, Courbet was finally able to realize his dream of painting a large-scale composition that would cement his reputation. Exhibited at the 1849 Salon, After Dinner at Ornans is set around a table in Caravaggesque fashion. It shows Courbet’s father, R�gis, to the left, along with three regular visitors to the household: Urbain Cuenot in the background, propped on his elbow, Adolphe Marlet with his back turned and lighting a pipe, and Alphonse Promayet playing his instrument. The painting is life size and combines a strongly rural atmosphere with a touch of willful sentimentality. Widely praised, it was purchased by the French State in the person of Charles Blanc, the Director of the Beaux-Arts.

This genre scene of imposing dimensions testifies to the debt Courbet owed to an entire tradition of realistic French painting, from the Le Nain brothers to Chardin. Presenting an image of country life at once serene, reassuring and musical, it gave him his first success at the Salon. It earned Courbet a gold medal, which meant that he no longer needed to submit his paintings to the Salon jury.

This picture, painted by Courbet in the bathing resort of Trouville, provocatively has no identifiable subject and its effect lies entirely in the finely differentiated grey, ochre and blue colour tones which build up the image of beach, sea and sky in horizontal parallel bands.

Courbet’s marine scenes were often painted at �tretat, a Norman fishing village popular among artists of his generation and, later, the Impressionists. Its great cliffs, rising so precipitously from the beach and from the waters provided a striking contrast to sand-bound or storm-tossed boats below, and with the ever-changing sea and sky. Courbet painted many views of this site in the late 1860s and early 1870s. This painting stress a rock formation known as Aval or Aiouille, where a natural flying buttress appears to support an equally natural, crenellated tower. This sense of implicit architecture suggests a great city lost in primeval times.

Courbet represents a daily and banal reality without embellishing it: his father and some fellow citizens dressed as farmers return from a fair as though they were in a slow procession.

Because this painting is unfinished, we cannot be certain of the painter’s intentions, but it has undeniable merit in the organisation of the figures. There is no sense of their having been recomposed in the studio; indeed, they might almost have been sketched on the spot. Courbet had set up his easel in the firemen’s barracks in rue Saint-Victor while the commander had sounded the alert so that the painter could watch the firemen go about their standard procedures.

The penetrating whiteness of the horse’s corpse lying in the central foreground, contrasted with the sullen green of the forest behind, gives this provocative subject an elevated, almost religious inflection.

Although, with its unique rock formation, the landscape appears fantastical, Courbet did in fact depict the scene from life, with recent research pinpointing the exact location as the Grotte des G�ants, or ‘Cave of Giants’ in Saillon, Valais, south-west Switzerland. The fantastical rock formation was not a result of Courbet’s imagination, but a genuine natural feature.

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Courbet made a very important acquaintance, that of the genre-painter Fran�ois Bonvin. From him he learnt the sacrosanct ritual of copying old masters in the Mus�e du Luxembourg and the Louvre. Following in the footsteps of G�ricault, Chass�riau and Delacroix, Courbet discovered the Venetian and Bolognese schools of Italian Renaissance painting, the northern Baroque of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the works of Vel�zquez, Zurbar�n and Murillo. The principal surviving records of this period are his copies of Guercino’s Vision of St Jerome (1840) and Lot and his Daughters . Courbet destroyed most of his other early works, sparing only some portraits and his first big history paintings, in which he was clearly struggling with the heritage of Romanticism.

This painting belongs to the series of self-portraits in which the artist depicted himself in various moods. These self-portraits show the influence of Titian, Vel�zquez and Rembrandt whose works Courbet studied in the Louvre. In this romantic self-portrait Courbet is represented with Virginie Binet, the mother of his son born in 1847.

The first version is in the Mus�e des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.

Beside the painter Virginie Binet is depicted. Courbet had an illegitimate child with her.

Although the canvas bears the date of 1868, the year of its first public exhibition, it was undoubtedly painted around 1861-62. The model was L�ontine Renaude, mistress of the painter at the time.

The erotic character is evoked by the direct link between the woman and her dog. The affection shown for the animal serves as a metaphor for the sensual love for the lover, an accomplice spectator of the scene.

Courbet is sensitive to various influences here. The pose of the model, the drapery and the landscape of the background, as well as the presence of a small dog, a symbol of fidelity, allude to Titian. But the young woman does not have the classic beauty of a Danaë, her features are common. However, the almost perfect roundness of the body, like its velvety texture, attenuates the realistic assumption.

The amusement in which the young woman indulges, ignorant of the viewer, also evokes the gallant paintings of the 18th century rediscovered by the society of the Second Empire.

These sources underline the approach adopted by the artist in his desire to renew his nudes. The canvas indeed marks a notable evolution of Courbet’s female nudes towards a more gallant approach. Compared to the Bathers of 1840 (Montpellier, Mus�e Fabre), the silhouette of the young woman is refined, the touch lighter, the texture of the skin smoother.

This was perhaps Courbet’s last painting. At the end of his life, he again and again painted the Château de Chillon on Lake Geneva and views of the Dents du Midi in the Alps. These works were long neglected but demonstrate a complete and unparalleled mastery of the art of landscape.

In addition to the many nudes, Courbet also painted simple figures of young women, such as the ones in The Poor Woman of the Village.

Adolphe Marlet was a regular visitor to the Courbet household at Ornans. He was depicted in Courbet’s painting After Dinner at Ornans.

Alfred Bruyas was a rich Montpellier collector. In Bruyas Courbet had netted the patron and cultivated collector that he needed, a man to back him financially and the owner of a collection in which Courbet could be proud to figure.

The Portrait of Baudelaire does not show the poet at his most brilliant. He is seen as scholar and critic: the author of the Salons. He is smoking a pipe and reading, while the pen lying on top of a book on his desk is too obvious an emblem of his profession.

Paul Chenavard (1807-1895) was a French painter, a pupil of Ingres and Delacroix. He was Courbet’s companion during this last trip to Italy. In his portrait by Courbet gazing anxiously from the picture is a man who incarnated the nineteenth-century figure of the intellectual and philosophical painter, a man whose company was much appreciated by poets, writers, artists, and musicians such as Rossini and Berlioz.

Courbet’s first dealer was one H. J. van Wisselingh, who visited him in his studio to buy a self-portrait, The Sculptor, and commission a portrait of himself.

Courbet made a point of representing the major figures in French cultural life of the first half of the nineteenth century. The celebrated Romantic composer Hector Berlioz did not, however, much like Courbet’s portrait, which he thought lacking in either feeling or identifying attributes. Courbet painted the composer on the by now conventional dark background in an attitude of retreat, as though hounded by destiny.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini, overture

Courbet frequently painted his family and his sisters and father are present in all his major works. Juliette played a particular role in his life. She was an important figure in his entourage and was, after his death, unreservedly devoted to his memory, even attempting to censure traits of Courbet’s character and aspects of his career.

Courbet painted some fifty nudes in all. Clothed feminine figures form another series. Some are supposed lovers or women close to his heart. They include the portrait of Laure Borreau, her amorous gaze focused on the spectator

In this painting Courbet depicts a fellow-student and boyhood friend. This portrait shows the influence of Ingres on the young Courbet.

R�gis Courbet was the father of the artist.

Urbain Cuenot was a regular visitor to the Courbet household at Ornans. He was depicted in Courbet’s painting After Dinner at Ornans.

When Courbet was transferred to Sainte-P�lagie prison, he obtained permission from the prison director to paint still-lifes with fruit, a genre he had previously neglected.

Courbet was drawn to the region around his hometown, Ornans, with its stream-filled valleys that are deeply carved into the landscape and bordered by the typical rock formations of the Jura. The overall sombre colouring, with the rich green contrasted with a vibrant pale blue, conveys the melancholy character of the rugged Jura landscape.

Courbet’s favourite subject in the 1840s seems to have been the self-portrait. This relatively unusual genre requires the artist to observe his own reflection, demanding remarkable stillness and concentration. Traveling to Belgium and the Netherlands for the first time in the summer of 1846, Courbet went to The Hague to admire the Rembrandt self-portraits. But unlike Rembrandt, Courbet liked to dress up and stage his own appearance. The series of self-portraits that Courbet painted between 1842 and 1849 is clearly Romantic in inspiration and the source of a very personal and modern interpretation of the myth of the artist in the nineteenth century.

This self-portrait, exhibited in the 1846 Salon, still has overtones of the Italian Renaissance.

Among the paintings Courbet exhibited in the 1851 Salon was a self-portrait in which he seems to be judiciously eyeing the spectator. Man with Pipe represented the first important stage in his awareness of the direction that his artistic maturity would take. We note that this was the first self-portrait that Courbet parted with; he had kept all the others and even of this one made a copy that never left his studio.

Man with Pipe was the last in a long series of self-portrait undertaken in the 1840s. Courbet wrote: “It is the portrait of a fanatic, an ascetic. It is the portrait of a man who, disillusioned by the nonsense that made up his education, seeks to live by his own principles.”

Courbet’s contribution to the Salon of 1848, which was held in the Louvre, consisted of seven paintings and three drawings. Among them was the self-portrait called The Cellist which illustrated his passionate interest in music. Both at Ornans, where members of the family and his friend Promayet played various instruments, and in Paris Courbet lived in a milieu which encouraged his inclination toward music. He could turn his hand to the violin, composed songs and took an interest in the research into folksong.

Courbet’s commitment to politics led to a period of imprisonment. He immortalized this part of his life in Self-Portrait at Sainte-P�lagie. Immediately after his arrest in June 1871, he was accused of having taken part in the Paris Commune, the last of the nineteenth-century revolutions in France. During his trial, Courbet was accused of having taken part in the destruction of the colonne Vend�me, which had been erected by Napoleon I to commemorate the victories of the Grande Arm�e. Found guilty in 1871, Courbet found himself worse off again after his appeal in 1874.

In Self-Portrait at Sainte-P�lagie, Courbet presents himself in the cell of his Paris prison, seated on a table, near a half-open window somewhat obstructed by the solid prison bars. He is simply dressed, wearing a chestnut suit and a beret, his red neck-scarf the only note of colour in this dark-toned painting. His pipe is, as always, in his mouth and his mainly impassive stare is directed, with perhaps a touch of nostalgia, toward the prison yard.

One of Courbet’s earliest self-portraits, it surprises the spectator with the determination of the young man, his youth and the emphasis placed on the hand in the foreground. The Mannerist aesthetic is reminiscent of the self-portrait in a convex mirror by the Renaissance painter Parmigianino.

Though Courbet was inspired and correspondingly successful in his treatment of groups, he did not stop painting more intimate pictures such as the last self- portrait, Self-Portrait with Striped Collar. It was painted at Montpellier and suggests a certain weariness with the genre; it was indeed, the last self-portrait that he painted for some twenty years.

This painting is also known as Laziness and Lust.

This picture was painted by Courbet while in exile in Switzerland.

The picture illustrates a theme of nude bathing much taken up by the classical painters. But its opulent, baroque vision offered an alternative to academic paintings well before Manet showed his model Victorine Meurent in D�jeuner sur l’herbe (1863).

This picture depicting the château tn the Lake Geneva was painted by Courbet while in exile in Switzerland.

The subject of this painting is the famous landmark of Etretat, the so-called Porte d’Aval, which also inspired Claude Monet, who was a frequent visitor to the Normandy coast in the 1860s.

In 1858 Courbet stayed in Frankfurt where a studio was placed at his disposal in which young painters could watch him at work. Three major pictures date from his stay in Frankfurt: The German Huntsman, The Hunters’ Meal and the Woman of Frankfurt.

Courbet liked to go hunting while staying in the Franche-Comt� or Germany, but painting sporting scenes of this kind in large format was a very different matter and presented a considerable challenge, one which he solved by opting for an ornamental approach.

The women here are Courbet’s sisters, Zo� and Juliette, along with Courbet’s son, D�sir� Binet. A masterpiece of rural simplicity, it is a brilliant example of the genre scene and reminiscent of Millet. The painting was exhibited at the 1855 Salon.

In 1855 Gustave Courbet organized an exhibition in Paris entirely of his own painting which he called “Le R�alisme”. This title defined not only Courbet’s artistic conviction but gave a name to a new style. For Courbet, only what was empirically there could be represented, and then only in the form and the colour of the original subject. This approach was in conflict with the then current doctrine of art, the Academy, and also the views of the majority of artists. His large painting The Hunt Breakfast of 1858 is an impressive example of his approach., an everyday scene rendered exactly in ordinary, subdued colours.

The Meeting (instantly dubbed Bonjour Monsieur Courbet) was commissioned by Alfred Bruyas, a wealthy Monpellier collector who had begun purchasing Courbet’s works in 1853, and it was exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle. The painting is associated with Courbet’s stay at Monpellier during the summer of 1854. The composition is simultaneously narrative and symbolic. It echoes the popular image (well known to Courbet) showing “the burghers of the town speaking to the wandering Jew,” and it is capable of a reading as the meeting of money and genius. The location is precisely identified as being near a friend’s house on the outskirts of Montpellier, and we see Courbet arriving on foot (leaving for others the coach visible in the background), a free artist returning from the sea, his painting gear on his back.

This painting, made for Khalil Bey who already owned Ingres’s Turkish Bath (1862), is certainly Courbet’s most mysterious and fascinating picture. Before it entered the Mus�e d’Orsay in 1995, the painting had rarely if at all been exhibited. Its technique and subject set it quite apart from the vast numbers of more conventional nudes painted in the nineteenth century.

This painting was the first in a long series of animal paintings with hunters, stags, red and roe deer, horses, dogs, foxes and snow-scenes. During his frequent stays in Franche-Comt�, Courbet liked to go hunting and made of this activity a subject from which he drew wholly unprecedented results.

In 1854 Courbet stayed with Bruyas In Montpellier. His great painting Bonjour Monsieur Courbet seals their friendship and collaboration. It was at this point that he had the idea of a huge composition showing his rue Hautefeuille studio and decided that he should return to Ornans. Before leaving he paid homage to his environment by painting himself as a little dot set against the immensity of the Mediterranean.

This painting was exhibited at the 1853 Salon and was bought by a rich Montpellier collector called Afred Bruyas, who liked Courbet as he liked Cabanel, Couture, or Delacroix.

Like Romanticism, Realism was a broad cultural movement in the 19th century that had its origin in literature and philosophy. In painting, its most prominent representative was Gustave Courbet. His Stonebreakers represented workers, as he had seen them, in monumental form.

The Stonebreakers, destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, was the first of Courbet’s great works. The Socialist philosopher Proudhon described it as an icon of the peasant world. But for Courbet it was simply a memory of something he had seen: two men breaking stones beside the road. He told his friends the art critic Francis Wey and Champfleury: “It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.”

Landscape painting is an important area of Courbet’s oeuvre. He painted the landscapes where he lived or which he visited. The Stream at Br�me shows a spot near Ornans where Courbet was born and spent his youth, and to which he returned many times. In this canvas the vigorous palette and broken brushstrokes are particularly striking.

The subtitle of the huge painting is Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life. Courbet did not like to talk about his art, but made an exception for this work: “It is the moral and physical story of my studio. … it is the world that comes to be painted. …The painting is divided into two parts. I am in the middle, painting. On the right are… friends… On the left, the other world of trivial life…”

In 1854, Courbet began work on The Studio which he would like to submit for the Exposition Universelle. Courbet described the painting in a letter: “I see a society with its concerns and passions; it is the world that comes to be painted… The scene takes place in my atelier in Paris. The painting is divided into two parts. I am in the middle, painting. On the right are the shareholders, that is, friends, workers, devotees of the art world. On the left, the other world of trivial life, the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who live off death.”

The Studio presents a completely original synthesis and a thoroughly unexpected confrontation. There is no parallel in Courbet’s later career for this generous, indeed baroque, vision, in which models and minds come together. Courbet sought to present the studio as an overall image of the role of art. He declared the autonomy and subjectivity of his perception in the face of history and the real world, both of which he had in his own way summoned into the studio. The master of ceremonies is seen painting a landscape, a practice that was to become increasingly central during the rest of his life. Meanwhile, the notion of a group portrait as homage or allegory in the spirit of Frans Hals, Rembrandt or Philippe de Champaigne, is perfectly achieved.

The painting was a success at the Exposition, however, it did not find a buyer, remaining rolled up in a corner of the rue Hautefeuille studio till 1881, when Courbet’s sister Juliette, his sole heir, decided to sell it. By then it had become something of a burden. It raised 21,000 francs (some 3,200 euros). Only in 1920 was it acquired by the Louvre, finding its way to the Mus�e d’Orsay some sixty years later.

When Courbet was transferred to Sainte-P�lagie prison, he obtained permission from the prison director to paint still-lifes with fruit, a genre he had previously neglected. Once free and back in Ornans, he continued this experiment with trout. On one of these paintings, we see the fish on the banks of the river, the hook still in its mouth, while on the bottom of the painting is inscribed in vinculis faciebat (“made while in chains”).

Between 1864 and 1868 Courbet undertook a series of paintings of the female nude. He could not have failed to witness the triumph of Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris) at the Salon of 1863, along with the popularity of similar representations by Cabanel’s fellow academicians. Here, Courbet evokes the myth of Venus, the goddess born of the sea, but slyly subverts convention by depicting the model’s underarm hair - an element of realism amplified by the almost palpable quality of her flesh.

This painting was exhibited at the 1853 Salon.

In addition to the many nudes, Courbet also painted simple figures of young women, such as the ones in Three English Girls at a Window.

Courbet made profitable stays at the chateau de Rochement in Saintonge, in Frankfurt in 1858.

In 1858 Courbet stayed in Frankfurt where a studio was placed at his disposal in which young painters could watch him at work. Three major pictures date from his stay in Frankfurt: The German Huntsman, The Hunters’ Meal and the Woman of Frankfurt. The last of these constituted a new kind of painting for Courbet, a society portrait, staged with all the trappings this kind of commission required. It shows the wife of a Frankfurt notability in a sort of timeless state of incompletion relieved only by the features of the young woman savouring the late afternoon light from her terrace.

Courbet was a painter who excelled in depicting professional models and nude peasant girls: at the spring, lying down, asleep, half-covered by a sheet, sometimes in a landscape and more rarely indoors.

This picture is reminiscent of the painting by Delacroix of the same title.

A scene of leisure and relaxation on the banks of the Seine, the picture shows two young Second Empire ladies, weary, inactive, provocative — and liable to all kinds of sexual interpretation. Courbet paid particular attention to the details of their clothes.

Until the Revolution of 1848 only three of Courbet’s pictures had to date been accepted by the Salon, the three self-portraits Self-Portrait with Black Dog, The Guitarrero, and Man with Leather Belt. These had the merit of making the artist as visible as the work.

This painting, depicting Courbet’s sisters, Zo�, Z�lie and Juliette giving alms to a girl cowherd, belongs to Courbet’s realist works which earned him the soubriquet of the “Watteau of the ugly” from Th�ophile Gautier. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1852 and was bought by the duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III.