Gustave Courbet

From Academic Kids

Jean D�sir� Gustave Courbet (June 10, 1819 – December 31, 1877) was a French painter.

Contents

1 Realism 2 Notoriety 3 See also 4 External links

Realism

Best known as an innovator in realism (and credited with coining the term), and a landscape and seascape painter, his scenes are not romantic or idealized as was customary style at the time. Rather, he portrayed dynamic scenery, subject to continuous and progressive change. Courbet believed the realist artist's mission was the pursuit of truth which would help erase social contradictions and imbalances.

For Courbet realism was not the perfection of line and form, but spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist and portraying the irregularities in nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing, challenged contemporary academic ideas of art, which brought him criticism that he deliberately adopted a cult of ugliness.

His work, along with the works of Honor� Daumier and Jean-Fran�ois Millet, became known as realism.

Born in Ornans (Doubs), into a prosperous farming family which wanted him to study law, 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, and painters and painting copies of their work.

His first works, an Odalisque, suggested by Victor Hugo, and a L�lia, illustrating George Sand, were literary subjects; but these he soon abandoned for the study of real life.

A trip to the Netherlands 1847 strengthened Courbet's feeling that painters should portray the life around them, as Rembrandt, Hals, and the other Dutch masters had done.

Among other works, he painted his own portrait with his dog, and The Man with a Pipe, both of which the Paris Salon jury rejected. However, the younger critics, the neo-romantics and realists, loudly sang praises of Courbet, who by 1849 was becoming well known, producing such pictures as After Dinner at Ornans (for which the Salon awarded medal) and The Valley of the Loire.

The Salon of 1850 found him triumphant with the Burial at Ornans, the Stone-Breakers (destroyed in 1945) and the Peasants of Flazey. His style continued to develop uniqueness, as in Village Damsels (1852), the Wrestlers, Bathers, and A Girl Spinning (1852).

Because he associated his ideas of realism in art with socialism, when he had gained an audience he promoted democratic and socialistic ideas by writing politically motivated essays and dissertations.

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.

Notoriety

Towards the end of the 1860s, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works, culminating in The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde) (1866), depicting female genitalia, and The Sleepers (1866), featuring two women in bed. While banned from public display, the works only served to increase his notoriety.

His refusal of the cross of the Legion of Honour offered to him by Napoleon III made him immensely popular with those who opposed 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. After the fall of the Commune, the subsequent government charged him with destruction of the Vend�me column. A council of war tried him and condemned him to six months imprisonment and ordered him pay 300,000 francs to restore the column. He served his six-month sentence, but fled to Switzerland in 1873 to avoid working at the orders of the state to pay the fine.

Courbet died at La Tour du Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.

An exhibition of his works was held in 1882 at �cole des Beaux-Arts.

See also

• Champfleury, Les Grandes Figures d�hier et d�aujourd�hui (Paris, 1861)
• Mantz, "G. Courbet," Gaz. des beaux-arts (Paris, 1878)
• Zola, Mes Haines (Paris, 1879)
• C Lemonnier, Les Peintres de la Vie (Paris, 1888).

External links

• Courbet images and biography at CGFA (http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/courbet/index.html)
• Artchive on Courbet (http://artchive.com/ftp_site.htm)
• Humanities Web on Courbet (http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=b&ID=12)
• Art Renewal Center; biography and images (http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/art.asp?aid=746)
• Courbet’s 'Low Tide at Trouville' (c.1865) (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=150) in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/index.asp)

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