Art Gallery

Courbet, Gustave (1819 - 1877), born in Besançon, after attending the grammar school at Besançon, Courbet began to study law in Paris in 1840. in painting he was largely self-taught, learning his art by copying the old masters (Velázquez, Hals, Rembrandt and the Venetians) in the Louvre, and in Holland where he stayed in 1846. In 1844 he exhibited forthe first time at the Salon. In 1848 he met Corot, Daumier and Baudelaire. The themes of this early works, taken from Goethe's Faust and the books of Victor Hugo and George Sand, still bear the strong mark of Romanticism which he was soon to reject. These early works include landscapes, painted at Fontainebleau, and Portraits of members of his family ("Juliette Courbet", Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, 1844) as well as self-portraits. He was first accepted at the Salon in 1843 with his picture "Courbet with Black Dog" (Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, 1842)

In 1849/50 his first "realistic" pictures are produced at his home town of Ornans: "Peasants from Flagey returning from Market" , "The Stone Masons" (destroyed in 1945, kept at Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), and "Burial at Ornans" which were considered revolutionary. Revolutionary they certainly were in their choice of subject, depicting the life of simple people (Courbet refected all traditional suject matter) with an unsentimental, down-to-earth manner of representation.

Courbet aimed at a realistic art with a social function. "I maintain that painting is clearly a concrete art whose existence lies only in the representation of real and existing objects..." Courbet's work is characteristic in it's strong brush strokes, sometimes applying paint directly with the spatula, mostly in dark tones. Maupassant observed the painter at work at Etretat in 1869, giving a pointed account of his method: "In a large, empty room a gigantic, grimy and untidy man applied blobs of white paint to a large, empty canvas with a kitchen knife. From time to time he went to the window, pressed his face against the pane and looked out at the storm. The sea came so close as if to smach the house, covering it with spume and noise.... The work became "The Wave" and brought disquiet to the world."

When, in 1855, Courbet was rejected by the jury of the World Exhibition, he set up his own "Pavillon du Réalisme" next door to the exhibition building in protest and as an example of his perception of art, demonstrating it by displaying forty of his pictures. One of them was the "Painter's Studio", which included a picture of his friend, the Socialist philosopher Proudhon, whose political convictions had a great influence on Courbet. Courbet was very successful with his work in Germany where he stayed in Frankfurt am Main in 1858/59 and in Munich in 1869. He joined the Paris Commune in 1871 and was given the task of protecting the museums from war damage. When the Commune was defeated, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment.

He took refuge in Switzerland in 1873. Courbet, who influenced and advised the budding Impressionists, has become a major representative world-wide of a naturalistic realism which shows up inconsistencies in reality by means of artistic device