| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gustave Courbet |
For more information on Gustave Courbet, visit Britannica.com.
| 5min Related Video: Gustave Courbet |
| Biography: Jean Desiré Gustave Courbet |
Jean Desiré Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a French painter whose powerful pictures of peasants and scenes of everyday life established him as the leading figure of the realist movement of the mid-19th century.
Gustave Courbet was born at Ornans on June 10, 1819. He appears to have inherited his vigorous temperament from his father, a landowner and prominent personality in the Franche-Comté region. At the age of 18 Gustave went to the Collège Royal at Besançon. There he openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the traditional classical subjects he was obliged to study, going so far as to lead a revolt among the students. In 1838 he was enrolled as an externe and could simultaneously attend the classes of Charles Flajoulot, director of the école des Beaux-Arts. At the college in Besançon, Courbet became fast friends with Max Buchon, whose Essais Poétiques (1839) he illustrated with four lithographs.
In 1840 Courbet went to Paris to study law, but he decided to become a painter and spent much time copying in the Louvre. In 1844 his Self-Portrait with Black Dog was exhibited at the Salon. The following year he submitted five pictures; only one, Le Guitarrero, was accepted. After a complete rejection in 1847, the Liberal Jury of 1848 accepted all 10 of his entries, and the critic Champfleury, who was to become Courbet's first staunch apologist, highly praised the Walpurgis Night.
Courbet achieved artistic maturity with After Dinner at Ornans, which was shown at the Salon of 1849. By 1850 the last traces of sentimentality disappeared from his work as he strove to achieve an honest imagery of the lives of simple people, but the monumentality of the concept in conjunction with the rustic subject matter proved to be widely unacceptable. At this time the notion of Courbet's "vulgarity" became current as the press began to lampoon his pictures and criticize his penchant for the ugly. His nine entries in the Salon of 1850 included the Portrait of Berlioz, the Man with the Pipe, the Return from the Fair, the Stone Breakers, and, largest of all, the Burial at Ornans, which contains over 40 life-size figures whose rugged features and static poses are reinforced by the somber landscape. A decade later Courbet wrote: "The basis of realism is the negation of the ideal. … Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of romanticism. …."
In 1851 the Second Empire was officially proclaimed, and during the next 20 years Courbet remained an uncompromising opponent of Emperor Napoleon III. At the Salon of 1853, where the painter exhibited three works, the Emperor pronounced one of them, The Bathers, obscene; nevertheless, it was purchased by a Montpellier innkeeper, Alfred Bruyas, who became the artist's patron and host. While visiting Bruyas in 1854 Courbet painted his first seascapes. Among them is the Seashore at Palavas, in which the artist is seen waving his hat at the great expanse of water. In a letter to Jules Vallès written in this period Courbet remarked: "Oh sea! Your voice is tremendous, but it will never succeed in drowning out the voice of Fame shouting my name to the entire world."
Courbet was handsome and flamboyant, naively boastful, and aware of his own worth. His extraordinary selfconfidence is also evident in another painting of 1854, The Meeting, in which Courbet, stick in hand, approaches Bruyas and his servant, who welcome him with reverential attitudes. It has recently been shown that the picture bears a relationship to the theme of the Wandering Jew as it was commonly represented in the naive imagery of the popular Épinal prints.
Of the 14 paintings Courbet submitted to the Paris World Exhibition of 1855, 3 major ones were rejected. In retaliation, he showed 40 of his pictures at a private pavilion he erected opposite the official one. In the preface to his catalog Courbet expressed his intention "to be able to represent the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my own era according to my own valuation; to be not only a painter but a man as well; in short, to create living art."
One of the rejected works was the enormous painting The Studio, the full title of which was Real Allegory, Representing a Phase of Seven Years of My Life as a Painter. The work is charged with a symbolism which, in spite of obvious elements, remains obscure. At the center, between the two worlds expressed by the inhabitants of the left and right sides of the picture, is Courbet painting a landscape while a nude looks over his shoulder and a child admires his work. Champfleury found the notion of a "real allegory" ridiculous and concluded that Courbet had lost the conviction and simplicity of the earlier works. Young Ladies by the Seine (1856) only served to further convince the critic of Courbet's diminished powers.
But if Courbet had begun to disappoint the members of the old realist circle, his popular reputation, particularly outside France, was growing. He visited Frankfurt in 1858-1859, where he took part in elaborate hunting parties and painted a number of scenes based on direct observation. His Stag Drinking was exhibited in Besançon, where Courbet won a medal, and in 1861 his work, as well as a lecture on his artistic principles, met with great success in Antwerp. With the support of the critic Jules Castagnary, Courbet opened a school where students dissatisfied with the training at the école des Beaux-Arts could hear him extol the virtues of independence from authority and dedication to nature.
Courbet's art of the mid-1860s no longer conveyed the democratic principles so clearly embodied in the earlier works. He turned his attention increasingly to landscapes, portraits, and erotic nudes based, in part, on mythological themes. These include the Venus and Psyche (1864; and a variant entitled The Awakening), Sleeping Women, and Woman with a Parrot (1866).
In 1870 Courbet was offered the Légion d'Honneur, which, characteristically, he rejected. Now, at the height of his career, he was drawn directly into political activity. During the Franco-Prussian War he was named president of a commission charged with protecting works of art in Paris, and he also served as a member of another commission engaged in a study of the Louvre archives with the intent of discovering frauds traceable to the deposed government of Napoleon III. On March 19, 1871, the Commune was officially established, and a month later Courbet was elected a delegate. On May 8 the column in the Place Vendôme, long associated with Bonapartism, was pulled down, and on June 7, after the abolition of the Commune, Courbet was sentenced to a 6-month prison term for his part in the destruction of the column. He returned to Ornans in 1872, but the following year, when his case was reopened, he fled to Switzerland and settled near Vevey at La Tour de Peilz. In 1874 the government demanded the payment of 320,000 francs toward the reconstruction of the column and the public sale of his possessions. Already seriously ill with dropsy, Courbet was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of his situation. He died at La Tour de Peilz on Dec. 31, 1877.
Further Reading
The only full biographical study of Courbet in English is Gerstle Mack, Gustave Courbet (1951), which is, however, poorly illustrated. Many good illustrations and a concise text are in Robert Fernier, Gustave Courbet, translated by Marcus Bullock (1969). Gustave Courbet, the catalog to the exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1959-1960, is noteworthy for its rich documentation of many works, good illustrations, and clear chronology. There is an important discussion of Courbet in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1946; rev. ed. 1961), and a study of the reception which his works received in "Courbet and His Critics" by George Boas, contained in the anthology edited by Boas, Courbet and the Naturalistic Movement (1938).
Additional Sources
Courbet, Gustave, G. Courbet, 1819-1877, Milano: Fabbri, 1988.
Schumann, Henry, Gustave Courbet, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1975.
| French Literature Companion: Gustave Courbet |
Courbet, Gustave (1819-77). The leading representative of the Realist movement in French painting, Courbet succeeded in fusing a powerful naturalist style with a socialist vision of society and art derived from Proudhon. In Parisian artistic and literary circles in the late 1840s, his friends included Baudelaire (whose portrait he painted c.1847) and Champfleury. Following the Revolution of 1848 his representation of contemporary social reality, his land- and seascapes, and his female nudes freed from conventional idealism embodied his rejection of the academic tradition. During the Universal Exhibition held in Paris in 1855 he staged a rival exhibition of his own work, which marked an important stage in the collapse of state control of painting, a process accelerated by the Impressionists.
[James Kearns]
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Gustave Courbet |
In 1855, Courbet exhibited the vast Painter's Studio (Louvre). Attacked by academic painters, he set up his own pavilion where he exhibited 40 of his paintings and issued a manifesto on realism. While he continued to provoke the establishment by submitting works to the Salon that were twice rejected in the mid-1860s, within that decade he triumphed as the leader of the realist school. His influence became enormous, reaching its height with his rejection of the cross of the Legion of Honor offered him by Napoleon III in 1870. Under the Commune of Paris (1871), Courbet was president of the artists' federation and initially active in the Commune; he was later unfairly held responsible, fined, and imprisoned for the destruction of the Vendôme column. In 1873 he fled to Switzerland, where he spent his few remaining years in poverty. Although his aesthetic theories were not destined to prevail, his painting is greatly admired for its frankness, vigor, and solid construction.
Bibliography
See his letters, ed. by ten-Doesschate Chu (1992); J. Lindsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (1973) and P. ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (2007); studies by T. J. Clark (1973), S. Faunce and L. Nochlin (1988), M. Fried (1990), and J. H. Rubin (1997).
| Wikipedia: Gustave Courbet |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009) |
| Gustave Courbet | |
 Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar). |
|
| Birth name | Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet |
| Born | 10 June 1819 Ornans, Doubs, France |
| Died | 31 December 1877 (aged 58) La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | Painting, Sculpting |
| Training | Antoine-Jean Gros |
| Movement | Realism |
| Works | A Burial At Ornans (1849-1850) L'Origine du monde (1866) |
| Patrons | Alfred Bruyas |
| Influenced | Whistler, Cézanne, Hopper |
| Awards | Gold-Medal winner - 1848 Salon; Nominated to receive the French Legion of Honor in 1870, - Refused. |
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix), with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social commentary in his work.
| “ | I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.[1] | ” |
Contents |
Courbet was a painter of figurative compositions, landscapes, seascapes, and still-lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar: the rural bourgeoisie and peasantry, and the working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant Romantic nor Neoclassical schools. History painting, which the Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century ..."[2] Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own experience.[2]
His work, along with the work of Honoré Daumier and Jean-François Millet, became known as Realism. For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing, challenged contemporary academic ideas of art.
Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans (Doubs). Though a prosperous farming family, anti-monarchical feelings prevailed in the household. (His maternal grandfather fought in the French Revolution.) Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, were his first models for drawing and painting. After moving to Paris he returned home to Ornans often to hunt, fish and find inspiration.[3]
He went to Paris in 1839, and worked at the studio of Steuben and Hesse. An independent spirit, he soon left, preferring to develop his own style by studying Spanish, Flemish and French painters and painting copies of their work.
His first works were an Odalisque, suggested by the writing of Victor Hugo, and a Lélia, illustrating George Sand, but he soon abandoned literary influences for the study of real life. Among his paintings of the early 1840s are several self-portraits, Romantic in conception, in which the artist portrayed himself in various roles. These include the Self-Portrait with Black Dog (c. 1842–1844, accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1844), the theatrical Self-Portrait, also known as Desperate Man (c. 1843–45), Lovers in the Countryside (1844, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), The Sculptor (1845), The Wounded Man (1844–1854, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), The Cellist, Self-Portrait (1847, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, shown at the Salon of 1848), and The Man with a Pipe (c. 1848–1849, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Trips to the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846–1847 strengthened Courbet's belief that painters should portray the life around them, as Rembrandt, Hals, and the other Dutch masters had done. By 1848, he had gained supporters among the younger critics, the Neo-romantics and Realists, notably Champfleury.[4] Courbet achieved greater recognition after the success of his painting After Dinner at Ornans at the Salon of 1849. This work, reminiscent of Chardin and Le Nain, earned Courbet a gold medal and was purchased by the state.[5] The gold medal meant that his works would no longer require jury approval for exhibition at the Salon[6] (an exemption Courbet enjoyed until 1857, when this rule was changed).[7]
In 1849 Courbet painted Stone-Breakers (destroyed in the British bombing of Dresden in 1945), which was admired by Proudhon as an icon of peasant life, and has been called "the first of his great works".[8] Courbet was inspired by a scene witnessed on the roadside, as he explained to Champfleury and the writer Francis Wey: "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."[8]
The Salon of 1850–1851[10] found him triumphant with Stone-Breakers, the Peasants of Flagey, and A Burial at Ornans. The Burial, one of Courbet's most important works, records an event—the funeral of his grand uncle—which he witnessed in September 1848. People who had attended the funeral were used as models for the painting. Previously, models had been used as actors in historical narratives; here Courbet said that he "painted the very people who had been present at the interment, all the townspeople". The result is a realistic presentation of them, and of life, in Ornans.
The painting, which drew both praise and fierce denunciations from critics and the public, is an enormous work, measuring 10 by 22 feet (3.1 by 6.6 meters), depicting a prosaic ritual on a scale which previously would have been reserved for a religious or royal subject. According to art historian Sarah Faunce, "In Paris the Burial was judged as a work that had thrust itself into the grand tradition of history painting, like an upstart in dirty boots crashing a genteel party, and in terms of that tradition it was of course found wanting."[11] Then too, the painting lacks the sentimental rhetoric that was expected in a genre work: Courbet's mourners make no theatrical gestures of grief, and their faces seemed more caricatured than ennobled. The critics accused Courbet of a deliberate pursuit of ugliness.[11] Eventually the public grew more interested in the new Realist approach, and the lavish, decadent fantasy of Romanticism lost popularity. The artist well understood the importance of this painting; as Courbet said: "The Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of Romanticism."
Courbet became a celebrity, and was spoken of as a genius, a "terrible socialist", and a "savage".[11] He actively encouraged the public perception of him as an unschooled peasant, while his ambition, his bold pronouncements to journalists, and his insistence on depicting his own life in his art gave him a reputation for unbridled vanity.[11] Courbet associated his ideas of realism in art with anarchism, and, having gained an audience, he promoted democratic and socialist ideas by writing politically motivated essays and dissertations. His familiar visage was the object of frequent caricature in the popular French press.
To a friend in 1850 he wrote,
| “ | ...in our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly.[12] | ” |
During the 1850s Courbet painted numerous other figurative works using common folk and friends as his subjects, such as Village Damsels (1852), the Wrestlers (1853), Bathers (1853), The Sleeping Spinner (1853), and The Wheat Sifters (1854).
In 1855, Courbet submitted fourteen paintings for exhibition at the Exposition Universelle. Three were rejected for lack of space, including A Burial at Ornans and his other monumental canvas The Artist's Studio.[13] Refusing to be denied, Courbet took matters into his own hands: he displayed forty of his paintings, including The Artist's Studio, in his own adjacent gallery called The Pavillion of Realism, which was a temporary structure he erected next door to the official Salon like Exposition Universelle.[13] Although artists like Eugène Delacroix were ardent champions of his effort, the public came mostly out of curiosity and to deride him. Attendance and sales were disappointing,[14] but Courbet's status as a hero to the French avant-garde became assured. He was admired by the American James McNeill Whistler, and he became an inspiration to the younger generation of French artists including Édouard Manet and the Impressionist painters many of whom were still in art school at the time. The painting itself was recognized as a masterpiece by Delacroix, Baudelaire, and Champfleury. It is an allegory of his life as a painter, seen as an heroic venture, in which he is flanked by friends and admirers on the right, and challenges and opposition to the left. Friends on the right include the art critics Champfleury, and Charles Baudelaire, and art collector Alfred Bruyas. On the left are figures (a priest, a prostitute, a grave digger, a merchant, and others) who represent what Courbet described in a letter to Champfleury as "the other world of trivial life, the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, the people who live off death."[15]
.JPG)
In the Salon of 1857 Courbet showed six paintings. These included the scandalous Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer), depicting two prostitutes under a tree, as well as the first of many hunting scenes Courbet was to paint during the remainder of his life: Hind at Bay in the Snow and The Quarry.[7] By exhibiting sensational works alongside hunting scenes of the sort that had brought popular success to the English painter Edwin Landseer, Courbet guaranteed himself "both notoriety and sales".[16] During the 1860s, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works such as Femme nue couchée. This culminated in The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde) (1866), which depicts female genitalia and was not publicly exhibited until 1988,[17] and Sleep (1866), featuring two women in bed. The latter painting became the subject of a police report when it was exhibited by a picture dealer in 1872.[18]
By the 1870s Courbet had become well established as one of the leading artists in France. On 14 April 1870, Courbet established a "Federation of Artists" (Fédération des artistes) for the free and uncensored expansion of art. The group's members included André Gill, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Eugène Pottier, Jules Dalou, and Édouard Manet.
Until about 1861, Napoléon's regime exhibited authoritarian characteristics, using press censorship to prevent the spread of opposition, manipulating elections, and depriving the Parliament of the right to free debate or any real power. In the decade of the 1860s, however, Napoléon III made more concessions to placate his liberal opponents. This change began by allowing free debates in Parliament and public reports of parliamentary debates, continued with the relaxation of press censorship, and culminated in the appointment of the Liberal Émile Ollivier, previously a leader of the opposition to Napoléon's regime, as (effectively) Prime Minister in 1870. As a sign of appeasement to the Liberals who admired Courbet, Napoleon III nominated him to the Legion of Honour in 1870. His refusal of the cross of the Legion of Honour offered to him by Napoleon III angered those in power but made him immensely popular with those who opposed the current regime, and in 1871 under the revolutionary Paris Commune he was placed in charge of all the Paris art museums and saved them from looting mobs. However when the power shifted back to the old guard Courbet found himself in an untenable political position.
For his insistence in executing the Communal decree for the destruction of the Vendôme Column, he was designated as responsible for the act and accordingly sentenced on 2 September 1871 by a Versailles court martial to six months in prison and a fine of 500 francs. During his incarceration, Courbet painted several still-life compositions. In 1872 he depicted his imprisonment in the Self-Portrait at Ste.-Pélagie.
In 1873, the newly elected president Mac-Mahon wanted to resurrect the Column, and Courbet was singled out to pay the expenses. He then took refuge in Switzerland to avoid bankruptcy. From this period date several paintings of trout, "hooked and bleeding from the gills",[19] that have been interpreted as allegorical self-portraits of the exiled artist.[19]
On 4 May 1877, the estimate of the costs was finally established: 323,091 fr 68 cent. Courbet was allowed to pay the fine in yearly installments of 10,000 francs for the next 33 years, until his 91st birthday. On 31 December 1877, a day before the payment of the first installment was due,[20] Courbet died, age 58, in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.
An exhibition of his works was held in 1882 at the École des Beaux-Arts.
A major exhibition of Courbet's work, "The Born Rebel Artist", opened in 2007 at the Grand Palais, and traveled to the Musée Fabre (Montpellier, France) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) during 2008.[21][22]
'Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!': The Bruyas Collection from the Musée Fabre,' 2004 exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute of Courbet's works from the collection of Alfred Bruyas, now at the Musée Fabre.
Courbet was admired by many younger artists. Claude Monet included a portrait of Courbet in his own version of Le dejeuner sur lherbe from 1865-1866. Courbet's particular kind of realism influenced many artists to follow, notably among them the German painters of the Leibl circle,[23] James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Cézanne. Courbet's influence can also be seen in the work of Edward Hopper, whose "Bridge in Paris" (1906) and "Approaching a City" (1946) have been described as Freudian echoes of Courbet's "The Source of the Loue" and "The Origin of the World." [24]
 Self-portrait with black dog, 1842 |
 The man with a pipe Self-portrait, 1848-49 |
 The Hammock, 1844 |
 Zélie Courbet, 1847 |
 Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1848-1849 |
 Stone-Breakers, 1849 |
 After Dinner at Ornans, 1849 |
 Farmers of Flagey on the Return From the Market, 1850 |
 Portrait of Alfred Bruyas, 1854 |
 Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, 1854 |
 Louis Guéymard(1822–1880) as Robert le Diable, 1857, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
 Les Bas Blancs, (Woman with White Stockings), ca 1861 (Barnes Foundation) |
 Femme nue couchée, 1862 |
 Portrait of Countess Karoly 1865 |
 Proudhon and his children, 1865 |
 The Bather, 1868, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 The Source, 1868 |
 The Wave, 1870 |
 Cliffs at Etretat, After the Storm, 1870 |
,_oil_on_canves,_1872-3.jpg) Stream in the Jura Mountains (The Torrent), 1872-3, Honolulu Academy of Arts |
Monographs on the art and life of Courbet have been written by Estignard (Paris, 1874), D'Ideville, (Paris, 1878), Silvestre in Les artistes français, (Paris, 1878), Isham in Van Dyke's Modern French Masters (New York, 1896), Meier-Graefe, Corot and Courbet, (Leipzig, 1905), Cazier (Paris, 1906), Riat, (Paris, 1906), Muther, (Berlin, 1906), Robin, (Paris, 1909), Benedite, (Paris, 1911) and Lazár Béla (Paris, 1911). Consult also Muther History of Modern Painting, volume ii (London, 1896, 1907); Patoux, "Courbet" in Les artistes célèbres and La vérité sur Courbet (Paris, 1879); Le Men, Courbet (New York, 2008).
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gustave Courbet |
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: |
|
|||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
 | realism (in art) |
| Louis (Jean-Baptiste) Dubois (art) |
| Francis Wey (photography) |
 | Where is Gustave? Read answer... |
| What is gustav? Read answer... |
| Why was hurricane gustav called gustav? Read answer... |
Copyrights:
 |
 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gustave Courbet". Read more |
Mentioned in
