Gustave Courbet

French painter

• Born: June 10, 1819
• Birthplace: Ornans, France
• Died: December 31, 1877
• Place of death: La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

Courbet contributed to the formation of modern art by liberating subject matter and style from academic dogma. The most profound aspects of his contributions are the influences his works have had upon the subsequent analysis of realism.

Early Life

Gustave Courbet (kewr-bay) was born in a town in the scenic Loue River valley of Franche-Comté in eastern France. There, his father, Eléonor Régis Stanislaus Courbet, was a prosperous landowner, whose ancestral home was in the neighboring village of Flagey. Gustave’s mother, Suzanne Sylvie Oudot, came from a similar economic background of landed proprietors in Ornans. It was in the Ornans home of his grandfather, Jean-Antoine Oudot, a veteran of the French Revolution, that Gustave was born.

Courbet’s early life and studies prior to his 1839 arrival in Paris at the age of twenty had provided him with valuable skills. The young artist’s tutelage under Père Beau at Ornans followed his first years of school in 1831 at the petit seminaire. It was there that Courbet began to paint from nature. Subsequently, while attending the Collège Royal at Besançon (after autumn, 1837), Maître Flajoulot’s emphasis on painting from the live model added another aspect of current artistic training to Courbet’s abilities.

During this period, Courbet acquired a deep and lasting appreciation for the cultural heritage and rugged beauty of his native Franche-Comté. This region did not formally become a part of France until 1678 because of a long and complex history of geographical and political factors. The tradition of independence emanating from his native province played an important role in the formation of Courbet’s character and notably influenced his attitudes toward formal training and academies.

In Paris, Courbet studied briefly with a minor painter. A greater source of inspiration was discovered at the Louvre, where Courbet diligently copied Dutch, Flemish, Venetian, and Spanish masters. Also significant were the friends he established in Paris: Alexandre Schanne, who became a character in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847-1849), the painter François Bonvin, and later, the writers Charles Baudelaire and Champfleury.

The decade of the 1840’s proved to be a very important one for Courbet, in which his prodigious talent and originality became recognized. His first salon successes were Self-Portrait with a Black Dog (1844) and The Guitarist (1845). The artist’s handsome features and vigorous physicality are evident in other numerous self-portraits of this period. With After Dinner at Ornans (1849), for which he received a gold medal at the Salon of 1849, Courbet had developed an artistic formula for elevating and monumentalizing common subjects that led to his first truly revolutionary works: The Stonebreakers (1849) and The Burial at Ornans (1849).

Life’s Work

The revolutions of 1848 had occurred during the first crucial decade of Courbet’s mature formation. Growing discontent with the failure of Louis-Philippe’s government to incorporate democratic reform or acknowledge socialist ideas had led to this uprising that had a direct impact on Courbet’s art. Courbet emerged as a pictorial advocate of a new, more democratic aesthetic.

The Stonebreakers, which appeared at the Salon of 1850-1851, depicted a young boy and an old man laboring side by side to repair a road. Courbet was, in fact, depicting a form of public service (corvée) that was customary in rural France; yet the Parisian audience found his large-scale, unidealized figures to be offensive, and even threatening, as they harbored connotations of peasant uprising or violence. Courbet’s realist manifesto, The Burial at Ornans, also exhibited at the Salon of 1850-1851, recorded a funeral in his native town. Again, Parisians were provoked by a scene that did not depict a known historical event or idealize its characters. Courbet had glorified the idea that the peasantry and rural bourgeoisie were worthy of the serious artistic treatment usually reserved for aristocratic subject matter and concerns. Courbet’s works thus threatened established Parisian social and aesthetic values.

Courbet had entered the decade of the 1850’s as an artist with strong political associations, which were subsequently incorporated into his total philosophy, as is evident in a statement from the period: “I am not only a socialist, but a democrat and a republican; in short, I am in favor of the whole revolution, and above all I am a realist.”

The ability of an artwork to shock its viewers was used by Courbet in major salon submissions from this time onward to draw attention to his name and artistic message. Courbet was thus a subject of great controversy; yet, whether in praise or criticism, there was widespread acknowledgment of the impact of his style. Two works, Young Ladies of the Village (1851) and The Bathers (1853), demonstrate how Courbet’s art had begun to interact with salon criticism. The first painting portrayed his three sisters in a rural setting bestowing a charitable gift upon a young shepherdess. Even Courbet was surprised when the honest depiction was mocked for its ugliness, as he had thought it dignified, even gracious. Courbet decidedly responded in the Salon of 1853 by creating a depiction of woman that was more truly a mockery of the sort his critics espoused. The Bathers depicted two very corpulent and egotistical women decadently bathing in the pool of a wooded glade. The very decadence of the women became his prime focus. Thus, a new aspect of Courbet’s works developed, which may be termed the painted caricature.

By the mid-1850’s, Courbet had entered into politics of a different kind that formalized his new conception of the artist’s role as activist and showman. Partly in reaction to the amount of negative criticism that he inevitably generated, and partly out of his own entrepreneurial desire to make his painting more profitable, he established his own exhibition independent of the combined Salon and World Exhibition of 1855. For this occasion, he conceived of a large canvas, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic Life (1854-1855), in which Courbet depicts himself in the act of painting. He paints amid two groups, one made up of supportive patrons and the other a puzzling assemblage of diverse characters and types that Courbet claimed to have seen in his travels. This huge work has had numerous interpretations and remains problematic, yet quite clearly it is an essential revelation of Courbet, as he sees himself in the process of creating, which is quite necessarily an act and role that he revolutionized.

Also beginning around 1855, Courbet envisioned a serial approach for his art, thus incorporating past works with future endeavors to create entire cycles of related paintings that would compare and contrast different aspects of society. The idea is said to have come from the novels of Honoré de Balzac; its relevance is exemplified in Courbet’s works between the years 1855 and 1866.

In 1861, Courbet began to experience a strange mixture of acclaim and adversity. His Fighting Stags (1861) was widely admired, and there was even rumor of an official state purchase and Courbet’s decoration with the highest honors. However, in the end, he received only a second-class medal—a great affront to an artist who had painted what many considered to be the best work in the salon.

This blow caused Courbet to break forever with the praised and accepted aesthetics of his time, as dictated by the salon. His reaction was deliberately to insult taste and sensibility in his salon submissions of 1863, 1864, and 1868. However, in the intervening year 1866, he reversed this trend and awed the critics with a new and fantasy-inspired image, Woman with a Parrot . Again, there was rumor of governmental purchase and Courbet’s decoration. It did not come and was clearly meant to reprimand Courbet’s past condemnation of accepted taste. A final reconciliation with the salon came in 1870, when he submitted two beautiful seascapes painted at Étretat in 1869, The Stormy Sea and Cliffs at Étretat After the Storm . Finally, the critics were filled with enthusiasm. Courbet had become a popular and briefly unproblematic artist.

Courbet’s subsequent nomination for the Legion of Honor in June, 1870, caused a sensation; however, the painter held firm to his socialist principles and declined the award. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July, Courbet was elected chairman of the arts commission, responsible for the protection of artworks in and around Paris. The duties of this position ultimately cast political overtones upon Courbet as the leader of a large and active group.

Courbet was transformed into a political scapegoat and held responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme Column. The subsequent trials, imprisonment, and exorbitant fines threatened to ruin Courbet and ultimately forced his exile to Switzerland, where he died four years later, a celebrated, but saddened, artist.

Significance

Throughout his life, Gustave Courbet maintained a spirit of Fourierist political optimism. Though his paintings were often conceived to provoke confrontation, he nevertheless believed that through a liberated artistic manifesto human beings could ultimately derive a philosophy of social harmony. These ideas had become formalized in Courbet’s early maturity and were perpetuated by the artist’s relations with his greatest patron, Alfred Bruyas, and with the social philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Through their encouragement and support, Courbet was able to assess his role and the nature of his art: “To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art—this is my goal.” Courbet had set these ideas down in paint as early as 1849 with The Burial at Ornans. That the message of Courbet’s art was clear to his contemporaries is demonstrated by the 1851 commentary of Paul Sabatier:

Since the shipwreck of the Medusa,… nothing as original has been made among us. The clothes, the heads, have a solidity, a variety of tone and a firmness of drawing that is half Venetian, half Spanish; it is close to Zurbarán and to Titian.… It was not an easy thing to give dignity… to all these modern clothes.…

Courbet’s late seascapes and somber still lifes are unique pictorial expressions. They represent his most poetic statements, in which the sheer physicality of paint invigorates the expressive power of the work. Courbet’s influence on modern art is documented by subsequent generations of avant-garde artists who studied and even collected his works, notably Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Matisse, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Pablo Picasso.

Bibliography

Chu, Petra ten Doesschate, ed. Courbet in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Part of the Artists in Perspective series, containing essays about art history from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A very useful gathering and translation of important contemporary accounts of Courbet’s life and art, including contextual and stylistic essays.

Clark, Timothy J. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. The most detailed analysis of Courbet’s life and art between 1848 and 1851. Clark’s approach, which is both Marxist and structuralist, illuminates the social and political situations of the Second Republic and the simultaneous developments in Courbet’s art—which contained strikingly appropriate pictorial representations of these underlying social tensions.

Courbet, Gustave. Letters of Gustave Courbet. Edited and translated by Petra ten Doesschate Chu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Reprints six hundred of Courbet’s letters to Baudelaire, Monet, Hugo, and others. The letters portray a man whose intelligence and sophistication belied his carefully constructed image of the naive provincial artist.

Faunce, Sarah, and Linda Nochlin. Courbet Reconsidered. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. A comprehensive, well-illustrated exhibition catalog comprising six essays and 101 entries. Topics addressed are a critical and historical summary of Courbet’s oeuvre, reinterpretation of The Painter’s Studio, gender studies in Courbet, contextual art history, and the American response to Courbet.

Lindsay, Jack. Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. A comprehensive biography that incorporates most of the literature available at the time of publication. Includes eighty-nine black-and-white illustrations and an extensive bibliography.

Mack, Gerstle. Gustave Courbet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. The first monograph in English, which is primarily based on the first substantial French biography and its nineteenth century sources by Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet peintre (1906).

Nochlin, Linda. Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society. New York: Garland, 1976. A sophisticated analysis of the origins of Courbet’s style by one of the foremost authorities on the artist. Select bibliography and 121 black-and-white illustrations.

Rubin, James Henry. Courbet. London: Phaidon Press, 1997. Part of the Arts & Ideas series, this is a collection of essays about Courbet’s life and artwork.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. Rubin considers Courbet’s art, particularly The Painter’s Studio, in relation to the theories of Proudhon, a contemporary and acquaintance of Courbet, to compare and contrast the doctrines of both enigmatic figures.

Toussaint, Hélène, et al. Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877: [Exhibition] at the Royal Academy of Arts, 19 January - 19 March, 1978. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978. The largest retrospective of Courbet’s work in the twentieth century was originally displayed at the Musées Nationaux in Paris in 1977 and 1978, and later exhibited in London. This is a translation of the catalog from the Paris exhibition. The catalog is a well-illustrated and scholarly monograph, with new interpretive breakthroughs made possible by sophisticated laboratory analysis at the Louvre. Essays include an introduction by Alan Bowness, an authoritative biography by Marie-Thérèse de Forges, and catalog entries and reinterpretive analysis of The Painter’s Studio by Hélène Toussaint.