Lot and His Daughters

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.