Gustave Courbet

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, in Ornans, a small town on the Loue River in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France ^[1]. His father, Régis Courbet, was a prosperous landowner who farmed at nearby Flagey, and the family's standing gave the boy both financial security and a lasting attachment to rural life. The limestone cliffs, dense woods, and river valleys around Ornans appear again and again in his mature work, and he returned to the region throughout his career to paint and to hunt ^[2].

His schooling followed a conventional provincial path. He studied at the seminary in Ornans and then at the Collège Royal in Besançon, where he took drawing lessons from Charles Antoine Flajoulot, a former pupil of Jacques Louis David ^[1]. The formal curriculum bored him. In 1839 he left for Paris, ostensibly to study law as his father wished, but he abandoned that plan almost immediately and committed himself to painting.

In Paris the young Courbet avoided the official École des Beaux-Arts. He worked instead in the informal Atelier Suisse, where artists could draw from live models without instruction, and he spent long hours copying Spanish, Dutch, and Venetian pictures in the Louvre ^[2]. Velázquez, Zurbarán, Rembrandt, and the Le Nain brothers shaped his taste far more than any living teacher. This self-directed training left him with a dark, weighty palette and a conviction that art should be learned from nature and the masters rather than from academies ^[3].

Recognition came slowly. Through the early 1840s the Salon jury rejected most of what Courbet submitted, accepting only occasional works such as a self portrait with a black dog in 1844 ^[1]. He supported himself with family money and painted a series of theatrical self portraits, among them The Desperate Man and The Wounded Man, that show a young artist experimenting with Romantic poses even as his technique grew more solid.

The political upheaval of 1848 changed his fortunes. The Revolution of that year briefly abolished the Salon jury, allowing Courbet to exhibit ten works, and in 1849 his painting After Dinner at Ornans won a gold medal, which exempted him from jury approval in subsequent years ^[2]. In these same months he fell in with a circle of writers and thinkers at the Brasserie Andler in Paris, including the critic Champfleury, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and later the anarchist philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon, whose ideas about art and society influenced him deeply ^[3].

At the Salon of 1850 to 1851 Courbet showed the canvases that made him famous and infamous at once. A Burial at Ornans, more than six meters wide, presented an ordinary provincial funeral with dozens of life-size figures, treating a village event on the scale traditionally reserved for history painting or religious scenes ^[4]. Alongside it hung The Stone Breakers, an unsentimental image of an old man and a boy at brutal roadside labor, and Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair. Critics attacked the pictures as ugly, vulgar, and politically subversive. Courbet welcomed the outrage. The controversy fixed his name in the public mind and defined the movement that came to be called Realism ^[1].

Any account of Gustave Courbet achievements has to begin with his transformation of subject matter. He argued that painting is a concrete art that can represent only real and existing things, a position he stated in the manifesto attached to his 1855 exhibition and in an open letter to prospective students in 1861 ^[3]. Angels and history's costumed heroes had no place in his work. Farmers, stonebreakers, village girls, wrestlers, hunters, and the landscape of the Jura became his repertoire, painted with thick, palpable pigment often applied with a palette knife ^[2].

His boldest institutional gesture came in 1855. When the jury of the Exposition Universelle in Paris accepted several of his works but refused The Painter's Studio, Courbet built his own exhibition space nearby, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and showed roughly forty of his paintings there for an entrance fee ^[4]. The Painter's Studio, subtitled a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic life, placed the artist at his easel between figures representing everyday society on one side and his friends and supporters, including Baudelaire and Champfleury, on the other. The one-man show was a commercial failure but a landmark: it established the independent exhibition as a weapon artists could use against official institutions, a precedent the Impressionists later followed ^[1].

The 1860s brought both notoriety and prosperity. Courbet painted frankly erotic works for private collectors, including Sleep and The Origin of the World, commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha in 1866; the latter canvas, long hidden, now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay ^[5]. He also produced celebrated hunting scenes, portraits, seascapes at Trouville and Étretat, and a long series of paintings of the Loue valley and the Puits Noir. His snow scenes and his waves, built up in dense layers of paint, were admired even by critics who disliked his figure subjects. In 1870 he refused the cross of the Legion of Honor offered by Napoleon III's government, declaring that he wanted no honor from any state, a refusal that made him a hero to republicans ^[2].

Courbet never married. In the 1840s he had a long relationship with Virginie Binet, with whom he had a son, Désiré Alfred Emile, born in 1847; mother and child left him around 1851, and the son died in 1872, predeceasing his father ^[1]. Courbet remained closely tied to his parents and his three sisters, Zoé, Zélie, and Juliette, who appear in several of his paintings, including the Young Ladies of the Village of 1852 ^[2].

He was famously gregarious and famously immodest. Large, loud, and fond of beer, he held court in Paris brasseries and cultivated his own legend as the proud peasant of Ornans, though his family was in fact comfortably landed ^[3]. Friends and adversaries alike remarked on his enormous self-confidence. His many self portraits, painted from youth to middle age, chart both his changing appearance and his lifelong interest in staging his own image.

His friendships crossed disciplines. Proudhon's death in 1865 prompted Courbet to paint a posthumous portrait of the philosopher with his family, and he maintained working relationships with younger painters, including Claude Monet and James McNeill Whistler, who painted alongside him on the Normandy coast in the mid 1860s ^[4]. Whistler's mistress and model Joanna Hiffernan sat for Courbet during that period, most famously for the portrait known as Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl ^[5].

War pulled Courbet directly into politics. After the fall of Napoleon III in September 1870, during the Prussian siege of Paris, he was elected president of a federation of artists charged with protecting the city's museums and art works ^[6]. When the revolutionary Paris Commune took power in March 1871, Courbet served as an elected member of the Commune council and as its delegate for fine arts, reorganizing the artistic administration and keeping the Louvre's collections safe ^[1].

One act of the Commune destroyed him. On May 16, 1871, the Vendôme Column, a monument to Napoleon Bonaparte's victories, was pulled down before a large crowd. Courbet had earlier proposed dismantling and relocating the column, which he considered a monument to war and conquest, and although the decree ordering its demolition was passed before he joined the council, he was held responsible after the Commune fell ^[6]. Arrested in June 1871, he was tried, sentenced to six months in prison, and fined; he served part of his term at Sainte-Pélagie prison and continued painting still lifes of fruit and flowers while in custody ^[2].

The reckoning grew worse. In 1873 the new government of Marshal MacMahon decided to rebuild the column at Courbet's personal expense, presenting him with a ruinous bill later fixed at more than 300,000 francs, payable in annual installments ^[6]. Facing the seizure of his property and possible imprisonment, Courbet crossed into Switzerland on July 23, 1873, and settled at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva. He never returned to France.

Exile was productive but corrosive. From his house at La Tour-de-Peilz, called Bon-Port, Courbet painted views of Lake Geneva, the Château de Chillon, and the surrounding Alps, and he ran what amounted to a workshop, with assistants helping to meet demand for replicas of his popular subjects ^[2]. The uneven quality of this late output, and the studio participation behind some of it, has complicated attribution questions ever since ^[4].

His health collapsed under heavy drinking and dropsy, the swelling now associated with liver disease. Weakened by edema and by an unsuccessful course of treatment, he died at La Tour-de-Peilz on December 31, 1877, at the age of 58, one day before the first installment on the Vendôme Column debt fell due ^[1]. He was buried in Switzerland; his remains were transferred to the cemetery at Ornans in 1919, the centenary of his birth ^[6].

Courbet's insistence on the material truth of paint and the dignity of common subjects opened the way for much of modern art. Édouard Manet and the Impressionists inherited his fight against the Salon system and his habit of independent exhibition, while Paul Cézanne admired his palette-knife handling of paint ^[3]. Later painters as different as the German Expressionists and twentieth century realists claimed him as an ancestor, and art historians treat his 1855 Pavilion of Realism as an early model for the artist-organized show ^[4].

His paintings anchor major collections. A Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio hang in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, The Stone Breakers was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and survives only in reproductions, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds one of the largest Courbet groups outside France ^[5]. The Musée Gustave Courbet, installed in his birthplace at Ornans, preserves works and documents from his life ^[6].

Among the most striking Gustave Courbet facts is how thoroughly his provocations became orthodoxy. The claim that everyday life deserves the grandest scale, once denounced as an insult to art, is now a founding assumption of modern painting. Any Gustave Courbet biography ends with the same paradox: a man ruined by the state for toppling one monument became, in death, a monument himself, the painter who taught the nineteenth century to look at what was actually in front of it ^[3].