Gustave Courbet

Style and technique

Courbet's whole project was a provocation. French painting in the 1840s had a clear hierarchy: history painting was at the top, then portraiture, then landscape, then genre painting, then still life. Historical and mythological subjects were painted large; working-class subjects, if painted at all, were painted small. Courbet simply reversed this.

In 'A Burial at Ornans' (1850), he painted the funeral of an obscure provincial nobody on a canvas nearly seven metres wide — the size reserved for the heroic deaths of Roman generals and Christian martyrs. The mourners were his neighbours. The priest was the local village priest. Nobody was idealised. The painting was huge, deliberate, and deeply offensive to critics who understood immediately that it was an argument about whose lives were worth commemorating at scale.

This was the beginning of Realism as a movement. Courbet was its self-appointed spokesman and did not underestimate the importance of this role. He wrote manifestos, organised independent exhibitions outside the official Salon, and used his painting as a form of cultural combat.

Four markers: figures of enormous scale in prosaic settings, the material specificity of earth, rock, and water (he was magnificent at landscape), palette knife textures that make the surface almost sculptural, and a commitment to the unpleasant, the heavy, and the unheroic as the proper subjects of art.

His nudes are among the most uninhibited in Western painting. 'The Origin of the World' (1866) — a clinical close-up of the female genitalia — was hidden behind curtains in private collections for 127 years before entering the Musée d'Orsay in 1995.

Life and legacy

Courbet was born on 10 June 1819 in Ornans, a limestone-cliff town in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France near the Swiss border. His father was a prosperous farmer. He moved to Paris in 1839 ostensibly to study law and immediately enrolled in painting studios instead. He was largely self-taught in his mature style — he studied the Old Masters at the Louvre, particularly Velázquez, Hals, and Rembrandt, and brought their directness back to contemporary subjects.

His first major Salon success was the 'After Dinner at Ornans' (1849), which won a medal. The following year he showed 'A Burial at Ornans' and the stone-breakers — both enormous, both painted in a way that treated ordinary provincial life with the formal dignity of history painting. The critical response was divided and furious.

His self-promotion was strategic and relentless. He cultivated his image as a provincial outsider, a man of the people, a painter who had no truck with academic pretension. He wore a beret, affected peasant manners in fashionable Paris salons, and gave newspaper interviews. He was also charming, funny, and enormous — over six feet tall, with a dramatic beard and an appetite for food, drink, and women that was legendary.

In 1855, when two of his largest paintings were rejected from the official exhibition at the Universal Exposition, he did something unprecedented: he built his own pavilion outside the exposition gates, put up a sign reading 'Realism, G. Courbet' and opened his own show. He lost money but won the argument.

The Paris Commune of 1871 destroyed him. He was elected to the Artists' Federation under the Commune and agreed to chair the Arts Commission, which oversaw the demolition of the Vendôme Column — a Napoleonic victory monument — as a symbol of imperialism. When the Commune fell, Courbet was arrested, tried, and sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of 500 francs.

He crossed into Switzerland in 1873 and died in La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December 1877, aged fifty-eight, of alcoholism and liver disease. The French government seized his remaining works and possessions in lieu of the debt.

Five famous paintings

A Burial at Ornans 1850

The painting that launched French Realism as a movement. A funeral in a provincial cemetery — the burial of Courbet's great-uncle — is shown on a canvas 315 by 668 centimetres: the scale of a history painting. Fifty identifiable figures — the mayor, the priest, the gravedigger, the choir, the mourners — stand or kneel around an open grave. No one is particularly heroic; everyone is particular. The sky is grey and heavy. The painting was shown at the 1851 Salon and caused a critical scandal precisely because of its scale: it was arguing that this burial, these people, this moment were worth the same visual attention as the death of Caesar. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

The Origin of the World 1866

A small painting — 46 by 55 centimetres — of a reclining female figure from the waist down, in a state of absolute physical candour. There is no face, no mythological pretext, no allegory: just the body. It was commissioned by the Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey, who kept it behind a curtain in his Paris apartment. Its subsequent history includes ownership by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Lacan, who also kept it behind a curtain — this one painted by his brother-in-law André Masson with a snowy landscape. The French government acquired it in 1995 as payment of estate taxes and installed it in the Musée d'Orsay, where it now receives more visitors than any other painting in the museum.

The Painter's Studio 1855

A canvas nearly six metres wide — 361 by 598 centimetres — and one of the most ambitious self-declarations in the history of painting. Courbet described it as 'a real allegory of seven years of my artistic and moral life'. He shows himself in the centre, painting a landscape, while around him on the left stand figures from his native province (a hunter, a peasant, a Jew, a priest), and on the right stand his Parisian friends and supporters, including the critic Champfleury and the writer Baudelaire. The model who has removed her clothes stands behind him; the child looks at his painting. It was shown in his independent 'Realism' pavilion of 1855. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

The Wave 1870

Courbet spent the 1860s making a series of seascapes on the Normandy coast, and the wave paintings are among the most technically ambitious landscapes of the century. A single enormous wave, its crest beginning to curl, occupies most of the canvas. The sky above is a grey-green streaked with cloud; the foreground is a flat beach. Courbet painted the wave's surface with palette knives loaded with grey, white, and pale blue paint — the result is almost sculptural, the foam having a physical presence that flat brushwork cannot achieve. He made dozens of versions. This one is in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The Desperate Man (Self-Portrait) 1845

A very early self-portrait, painted when Courbet was twenty-five and not yet famous. He shows himself from very close — the face fills most of the canvas — clutching his own hair in both hands, eyes wide and startled, his expression the concentrated alarm of someone who has just been frightened. The title is theatrical and self-aware: Courbet even at twenty-five understood the value of presenting himself as a passionate, tempestuous character. The painting's tight close-up format was unusual for portraiture at the time and looks almost like a photograph. Several preparatory studies for it exist; the finished version is in a private collection.