Gustave Courbet
Champion of Realism.
Courbet refused to paint angels because he had never seen one. He painted peasants, workers and landscapes on a monumental scale and challenged the Academy.
Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in Ornans in Franche-Comté in eastern France. His family were prosperous farmers. He came to Paris in 1839 to study law but devoted himself to painting instead. He was largely self-taught and studied the old masters in the Louvre, especially the Spanish and Dutch. In his early years he painted many self-portraits, in which he staged himself as lover, desperate man or wounded man.
His breakthrough came at the Salon of 1849, when he won a medal for After Dinner at Ornans. At the Salon of 1850–51 he caused a scandal with two large paintings: The Stonebreakers, destroyed in the Second World War, and A Burial at Ornans, now in the Musée d'Orsay. The Burial shows an ordinary provincial funeral on a scale otherwise reserved for historical events and religious scenes. The critics found the people ugly and the subject trivial.
When his large work The Painter's Studio (1855) was not accepted for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he opened his own exhibition in a shed he called the Pavilion of Realism. The Painter's Studio is in the Musée d'Orsay. Courbet is said to have declared that he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. He painted what he saw: peasants, workers, landscapes of the Jura, the sea, hunting scenes and women. The Origin of the World (1866), a close-up of a woman's genitals, is today one of the most talked-about works in the Musée d'Orsay.
Courbet painted with thick layers of paint, often with a palette knife, and in dark, earthy tones. He was self-assured, provocative and politically radical, and a friend of the anarchist Proudhon. He took part in the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Communards pulled down the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Napoleon. Courbet was blamed, sentenced to prison and later ordered to pay for a new column. In 1873 he fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1877.
Courbet is the leading figure of Realism. He showed that ordinary people and subjects could become great art, and he paved the way for Manet and the Impressionists. His idea of organising his own exhibitions outside the official Salons became a model for the later avant-garde.