Modern Age
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
French Realism painter.
Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in Ornans, a small town in the Franche-Comté, and made its ordinary people and landscape the matter of a revolution in painting. Largely self-taught in the museums, he rejected both the polished ideal of the academic Salon and the exotic fantasy of the Romantics, insisting that a painter could only depict what he could see and touch — the real, present world.
At the Salon of 1850–51 he showed 'A Burial at Ornans' and 'The Stone Breakers', giving village mourners and roadside labourers the vast scale reserved for history and myth. Critics were scandalised, and the scandal was the point. In 1855, when the jury of the Exposition Universelle balked at his work, he built his own 'Pavilion of Realism' next door and issued a printed manifesto defining his aims — one of the founding gestures of the independent, artist-run exhibition.
Courbet was as political as he was pictorial. A committed republican, he took part in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was held responsible for the toppling of the Vendôme Column; convicted and ordered to pay for its re-erection, he went into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877, the year before the ruinous bill fell due. His frank facture, his palette-knife earth, and his refusal to idealise opened the road that Manet and the young Monet would take.
The words the record keeps using: defiant, earthy, unflinching, material, democratic, robust, frank.
At a glance
- Lived 1819–1877
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris, Ornans
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Realism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Impasto
Works in the archive
- The Desperate Man (Le Désespéré), 1843 (Private collection)
An early self-portrait of startling intensity: the young Courbet stares straight out, wide-eyed, his hands clutching at his own hair, crammed close to the picture edge. Part Romantic self-dramatisation, part raw… - A Burial at Ornans, 1849 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A village funeral in Ornans staged across nearly seven metres of canvas at life size: mourners, clergy, a gravedigger, and a gaping pit, the whole community of the town portrayed without hierarchy or heroism. Shown at… - The Stone Breakers, 1849 (Formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden — destroyed in February 1945 (image survives from photographs and reproductions))
An old man and a young boy break and haul stones by a roadside, their faces largely turned away, their worn clothes and hard labour rendered without a trace of sentiment or picturesque charm. The original was destroyed… - The Painter's Studio (L'Atelier du peintre), 1854 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Courbet called this vast canvas 'a real allegory' summing up seven years of his artistic and moral life. He sits at the centre painting a landscape, flanked by a nude model and a small boy; to the left crowd the poor…
What was said
In the printed preface to his independent 1855 exhibition Courbet defined Realism as knowing in order to be able to do (savoir pour pouvoir), and set as his aim to translate the customs, the ideas, and the appearance of his own epoch as he himself judged them — in short, to make living art.
Writing to his friend the critic Champfleury, Courbet described the great studio picture as 'a real allegory' determining a phase of seven years of his artistic (and moral) life, with the world of ordinary people on one side and his friends and fellow workers in art on the other.
Courbet is widely reported to have retorted, when asked to include angels in a church commission, that he had never seen an angel and so could not paint one — 'show me an angel and I will paint one'. The remark is repeatedly attributed to him in nineteenth-century accounts, but its exact wording and occasion are not securely documented.
Lineage
Passed on to Claude Monet, Édouard Manet
What would Gustave make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Gustave Courbet", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Gustave · Keep a life moment the way Gustave would · Pictures made after Gustave