COURBET, Gustave (Omans, 1819 – La Tour-de-Peilz, 1877)
Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans (Franche-Comté) on 10 June, 1819. He had four sisters of whom the three surviving (Zoë, Zélie, and Juliette) played an important role in his artistic and personal life. Zoë and her later husband, Reverdy, denounced Courbet’s political activities, while Juliette took care of his oeuvre and made donations of important pictures to the Louvre. His father was a well-established land-owner. After school at Ornans where he was taught by the painter, Antoine Beau, he spent two years at the college of Besançon and was instructed there by Charles-Antoine Flageoulot. In 1839, he went to Paris, to study with Charles de Steuben, Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, Charles-Alexandre Suisse, and Charles-Louis-Émilien Desprez. He also copied Flemish, Dutch, Venetian and Spanish paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. From 1844 on, he exhibited at the Salon and soon established connections with the Bohemian scenery and the Barbizon school; he also visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 1846–47. He drew a revolutionary vignette in 1848 and created pictures which were considered to be inspired by socialist ideas. Apart from many self-portraits, the group portrait, After Dinner at Ornans of 1849, and the so-called trilogy of Realism, The Stonebreakers (1849), A Burial at Ornans (1849–50), and The Peasants of Flagey, Returning from the Fair (1st version, 1850), drew public attention to him. Courbet then would meet the anarchist philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and became familiar with poets such as Max Buchon, Champfleury [Jules A.-F. Husson], Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Vallès. Ingres and Delacroix were impressed by him. In 1853, Courbet painted two pictures, The Bathers and The Wrestlers, which earned him the nick-name of “the painter of the ugly”; similarly, The Cornsifters was scorned in 1854–55. Yet in 1854 Courbet also painted The Meeting which combines a new feeling for bright colours and day light with a new kind of self-seeking authority. His masterwork, The Studio of the Painter, of 1854–85, was planned to be shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was finally displayed in a separate pavilion, while eleven of his canvases remained at the World Fair rooms. A similar division occurred at the World Fair of 1867. Courbet often exhibited abroad, in Frankfurt, Antwerp, Brussels, Munich and Vienna. After his Manifesto of Realism (1855), he issued another statement about Realism (as anti-Idealism) at an Antwerp conference in 1861. Yet in the same year, he declined to found a Realist school arguing that the independence of his pupils was his basic principle. In 1862 he painted together with Monet in the Saintonge, a South West province of France, and between 1859 and 1869–70, he sometimes met Boudin and Whistler at the coasts of Normandy, but he especially liked to study either women and female nudes around Paris or landscapes, rocks, and forests of his native Franche-Comté. He did a lot of sketches and some fine drawings during his numerous travels, perhaps to England, certainly to Baden-Baden, and even to Madrid. In Paris, he became awarded a governmental gold medal in 1866, and in 1870 was even offered the Cross of the Legion of Honour which he refused. This can be explained by his adherence to the First International Workers’ Union in 1864. He also remained in contact with Proudhon with whom he provided so much information that the philosopher finally wrote an essay on his art. During the Paris Commune of 1871, Courbet was nominated President of the Federation of Artists. In this function, he saved the Louvre, but he also supported the demolition of Colonne Vendôme, a monument in honour of Napoleon’s wars. The demolition, carried out in May 1871, resulted in his imprisonment. He was also made to pay for its reconstruction. Once released, he fled into Switzerland in 1873 and, becoming dropsical, he died at the end of 1877 at La Tour-de-Peilz near Vevey. Despite his illness, he produced some excellent landscape paintings of the Alps and the Lake of Geneva during his last years.
K H
<< back