19th Century French Harvest Landscape Deauville GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877)

Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet’s rural origins in the Franche-Comté region had a profound influence on his work. His parents were wealthy farmers who made their living by renting their land and were able to provide their son with a full education. He studied at the Ornans seminary and then at the Collège Royal in Besançon. He was a mediocre student and throughout his life showed little interest in academic pursuits. At Besançon he was introduced to painting by Charles-Antoine Flajoulot, a follower of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He left for Paris at the age of twenty on the pretext of studying law, but after his arrival there he informed his parents that he had decided, irrevocably, to become a painter. His parents agreed to send him a small allowance to cover basic living costs. He spent a brief period studying, first in Charles de Steuben’s workshop, and then in Nicolas-Auguste Hesse’s, but he claimed to be an autodidact, painting from life, and copying the works of the grand masters of the past in the Louvre, with the deliberate exception of the Italian school, which he considered over-sentimental. At this time, in the 1840s, Courbet was a very handsome man, tall and statuesque, with well-defined features, long hair, and a black beard.

His maternal grandfather, a lawyer named Oudot, had instilled republican beliefs in him from a young age and, following the events of 1848, Courbet was openly hostile to the Second Empire. His friendship with the writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who also came from the Doubs département, introduced him to revolutionary ideas. A Realist by temperament, Courbet gradually became convinced that a painter of rural and simple subjects should also have socialist ideals. His evangelical nature occasionally led him to choose social themes for his paintings. The Stone-breakers, dated 1850, was certainly not intended as an attack on the regime’s social policy, but in 1863, however, he made a clear statement of anti-clericalism in the large canvas Priests Returning from the Conference, which caused a scandal. The painting was subsequently bought by a religious gentleman who had it destroyed. At the Salon of 1868 his canvas Charity of a Beggar at Ornans was seen as an anarchistic painting, although in fact it portrays socialism in a very romantic light.

It was inevitable that Courbet would become active in politics following the fall of the Empire and the political unrest of the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. He was elected president of the Federation of Artists and made a concerted effort to protect the works housed in the national museums. He also, however, sent a letter to the provisional government requesting the dismantlement of the Vendôme Column, which he saw as a symbol of imperial aggression, and soon after the column was torn down by the Communards. When the Commune was crushed by government troops, Courbet was arrested, along with the Commune’s leaders, and charged with the column’s destruction. He was sentenced to six months in prison. It was towards the end of his incarceration that he discovered a renewed enthusiasm for work that had been lacking during the months of upheaval. In 1873 a court ruling ordered him to pay the cost of repairing the Vendôme Column, and his assets were seized. He fled to Switzerland to escape arrest, taking refuge in the village of La Tour-de-Peilz beside Lake Geneva. His death, on 31 December 1877, went almost unnoticed in France.

Courbet’s Self-portrait with a Dog (1844) was his first work to be accepted by the jury of the Salon. From then on, however, the jury rejected some or all of his submissions every year. Shortly before the revolution of February 1848 the new director of fine arts of the Republic, Charles Blanc, decided to abolish the Salon jury and allow each painter to exhibit what he liked. Courbet was therefore able to exhibit his new work, After Dinner at Ornans. The Salon jury, now elected by the painters themselves, awarded him a medal giving him the right to exhibit every year. In 1855, he submitted Painter’s Studio for the Salon in the Palais de l’Exposition Universelle, but it was rejected. In order to show his work to the public, Courbet staged his own exhibition, funding it from his own pocket. Such an initiative was then unheard of, but it was soon imitated by other artists. Despite the many problems he encountered, Courbet eventually managed to put on a small exhibition but was disappointed by its reception. Many visitors came in its opening days, attracted by the novelty and the whiff of scandal surrounding the exhibition, but after that attendance was poor.

Towards the end of the Second Empire, Courbet was no longer seen as a controversial revolutionary. Although he was not universally admired by critics, they were unanimous in praising his outstanding technical abilities. In 1867, on the occasion of another Exposition Universelle, he thought the time was right to display a vast amount of new work in order to correct the public’s earlier lukewarm reception for his painting. At enormous cost, he had a large exhibition hall built near the Place de l’Alma in Paris, where he put on show about 100 of his works. Despite the novelty of this exhibition, it was again poorly frequented. These repeated failures made Courbet a bitter man and increased his hatred of the bourgeois, imperial regime, which he blamed for his misfortunes. In 1870, in keeping with the rebellious attitude he had chosen to adopt, he rejected an award of the Cross of the Légion d’Honneur. After his release from prison he sent several paintings to the Salon, but in 1872, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier persuaded the jury to exclude his work owing to his political activities during the Commune.

Courbet’s early paintings were inspired by literary romanticism, drawing upon the writings of Victor Hugo ( Odalisque), George Sand ( Lélia), and Goethe’s Faust ( Walpurgis Night). His work ran the gamut of the sentimentality fashionable at that time, from his Maiden’s Dream to Lovers in the Countryside. Courbet painted his first masterpiece, Self-portrait with a Dog, at the age of 25. His best qualities are already evident in this striking work: frank observation, a sure command of detail, an astonishing skill in his approach to volume, and an outstanding power of expression. The years following this first success were full of disappointments for a man who had expected a rapid rise to fame. It was, however, the period in which he painted an impressive series of self-portraits, including Guitar Player (1845), The Cellist, and Man Wearing a Belt. As a young man Courbet was aware of his good looks and used their full potential to enrich his work. At this time, his originality had only expressed itself through a few technical innovations.

After Dinner at Ornans (1849) served as his introduction to the public and marked his coming of age as an artist. This picture can be described as a snapshot painted onto a vast canvas. Courbet depicted himself at a dining table with four companions, each of whom is doing something different: one is playing an instrument, another is smoking a pipe, while another is asleep. Courbet showed his ultimate indifference to the academic rules by painting one of the figures with his back turned. It had been two centuries since such a homely subject had been treated in such depth in France. Realism was born. The painting was bought by the state for the town of Lille. Most critics and the majority of the public, however, made no attempt to hide their surprise and disapproval. This had little effect on Courbet, who had the support of young writers and journalists, such as Champfleury and Charles Baudelaire, and felt sure of his chosen path. In a period of fertile creativity, he subsequently painted several important canvases based on these new principles, including Peasants from Flagey, The Stone-breakers, and Burial at Ornans, all dated 1850. The latter is made up of a series of portraits, all presented with a far greater candour than those in Jacques-Louis David’s Le Sacre (Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame). Courbet portrays most of the humble inhabitants of Ornans, each of whom is depicted with as much individual emphasis as David gave to the nobility of the foremost court in Europe. The peasants are gathered around the grave with no respect for hierarchy, their natural expressions reflecting emotions common to any burial ceremony. The family members of the deceased are shown as upset, and several old women are weeping, but most of the onlookers are talking among themselves or appear to be indifferent. The priest, the altar boys, the men of the choir, and the vergers look upon the scene with professional detachment and boredom. The painting caused a scandal. The painter was accused of demeaning his art by treating a subject of this nature on such a large scale and of debasing a religious ceremony. His only supporters were his friends, joined by the critic Paul Mantz, who defended Courbet in the press by highlighting the extreme novelty of the subject and its execution. The artist himself feigned indifference in the face of these attacks, but in fact he was deeply hurt by them and, to confound his critics, attempted to prove that he was capable of painting more graceful subjects. Unfortunately, he was unable to go against his own nature, and not even his friends could praise Young Village Girls, which was reminiscent of his immature work and served only as ammunition for his critics. Courbet realised his mistake and returned to powerful subjects with The Bathers, painted in a very realistic style that potentially laid him open to charges of being vulgar and ugly, and a group of Wrestlers, dated 1853, which was an extraordinary study of anatomy.

In the following year, Courbet visited the Midi region in southern France, and this new landscape transformed his palette. Light tones replaced the sombre, dense colours and the opaque tones he had been using to paint the forests of Doubs or the Île de France. From the outset, he identified with the natural beauty of the south of France. In The Meeting (also known as Bonjour Monsieur Courbet), painted in 1854, Courbet is shown, hatless, walking towards his friend Bruyas, the collector, who is accompanied by a servant. The three figures stand out in contrast against a shimmeringly translucent sky. He also painted landscapes in more austere colours, such as the Stream of the Black Well, dated 1855, which draws on the lessons he learned in the Midi.

Courbet attracted an ever-growing entourage of admirers, which perhaps had a counterproductive effect on his devotion to Realism. He began nurturing an ambitious plan to produce an immense canvas that would symbolically represent all of his theories on painting. The result was the Painter’s Studio, dated 1855, a very large painting that is both a portrait gallery of Courbet’s closest friends and a lexicon of his ideas (the full title is, in fact, Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years of My Artistic Life). In a rather risky innovation, each figure in the canvas is both a portrait and a symbol. Baudelaire, for example, who appears on the right of the canvas where the artist’s positive ideas are represented, symbolises Realist poetry, which Courbet held dear. On the left of the canvas, a crucified dummy represents the death of Academic Art, which Courbet despised. Courbet saw this as a major work and showed it with several others in the exhibition at the so-called Pavillon du Réalisme after its refusal by the Exposition Universelle jury. His hopes for this exhibition were not fulfilled, however, which made him realise that his large-scale paintings did not appeal to the public. This failure was perhaps a factor in drawing him back to the easel. It was his more accessible smaller paintings that were to make his name with the general public, but his rejection of ambitious compositions was to rob his work of the very ingredient that had made it so exceptional in the history of painting. Courbet had always been a fine landscape artist, producing canvases until the war of 1870, and painting some of his best examples during long stays in Ornans and Saintes, and during brief visits to Germany and Belgium. At the same time, he discovered a passion for paintings of animals set in meticulously executed landscapes, such as The Quarry, Stag Fight, and Surrender of the Deer. These animals are not intended as a decoration or a distraction, but they serve instead to heighten the emotion of the composition, and their narrative always has a poignantly realistic quality.

Courbet fell under the spell of the sea while staying beside the Mediterranean in 1854. It was the English Channel, however, that he painted most frequently. In Trouville and Étretat, he met Eugène Boudin, Édouard Manet, and James McNeill Whistler, but their sense of colour and movement was different to his own in every sense. His seascapes can in no way be called Impressionistic. He chose, above all, leaden shades and portrayed rain-soaked horizons and stormy seas. In his Cliff at Étretat, dated 1870, he chose to emphasise the immensity and the menacing power of the ocean, rather than the pleasantly distracting movement of waves. In Stormy Sea, also 1870, he painted a wave on the point of breaking, seemingly frozen in time before crashing onto the shore.

Courbet continued to produce many nudes during this period, such as Venus and Psyche, dated 1864, and Woman with a Parrot, dated 1866, which are more than simple anatomical studies. Without a trace of sentimental grace, these women, like those of The Bathers of 1853, still breathe a pungent sensuality. Towards the end of his life, he produced a few still-lifes, nudes, and landscapes, but to increase his production he was often helped by his students and created many canvases in this way. He occasionally tried his hand at sculpture and lithography, and also produced many book illustrations.

Courbet occupies a unique place in the history of painting. His work embodies a vital stage in the evolution of 19th-century painting towards a more penetrating Realism. After Jacques-Louis David, whose realism consisted of substituting Greek and Roman heroes for François Boucher’s dreamlike scenes of mythology, and Eugène after Delacroix, who replaced David’s figures of antiquity with more familiar historical and literary figures, Courbet took Realism a stage further by portraying contemporary and, above all, ordinary events in settings painted from life. In this way he indirectly influenced the future evolution of painting, having, by his deliberate revolt against official art, opened the way for the Impressionists, who, informed by the idealistic approach in fashion at the time, were also seeking to portray reality through pictorial techniques and attempted to capture a scientific reality hidden under the surface of appearances. Courbet, in contrast, chose to belong to the 19th-century positivist materialist school of thought and, in the first period of his work until 1870, devoted his painting to a Social Realism that was close to the naturalism espoused by Émile Zola.