Gustave Courbet

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans (department of Doubs). Anti-monarchical feelings prevailed in the household (his maternal grandfather fought in the French Revolution). Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette were his first models for drawing and painting. After moving to Paris, he often returned home to Ornans to hunt, fish, and find inspiration.

Courbet 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 the paintings of Spanish, Flemish and French masters in the Louvre, and painting copies of their work.

Courbet's first works were an Odalisque inspired by the writing of Victor Hugo and a Lélia illustrating George Sand, but he soon abandoned literary influences, choosing instead to base his paintings on observed reality. Among his paintings of the early 1840s are several self-portraits, Romantic in conception, in which the artist portrayed himself in various roles. These include Self-Portrait with Black Dog (c.1842-44), the theatrical Self-Portrait which is also known as Desperate Man (c.1843-45), Lovers in the Countryside (1844), The Sculptor (1845), The Wounded Man (1844–54), The Cellist, Self-Portrait (1847) and Man with a Pipe (1848-49).

Trips to the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846-47 strengthened Courbet's belief that painters should portray the life around them, as Rembrandt, Hals and other Dutch masters had. By 1848, he had gained supporters among the younger critics, the Neo-romantics and Realists, notably Champfleury.

Courbet achieved his first Salon success in 1849 with his painting After Dinner at Ornans. In 1849-50, Courbet painted The Stone Breakers (destroyed in the Allied Bombing of Dresden in 1945), which Proudhon admired as an icon of peasant life; it has been called "the first of his great works". The painting was inspired by a scene Courbet witnessed on the roadside. He later explained to Champfleury and the writer Francis Wey: "It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning."

While other artists had depicted the plight of the rural poor, Courbet's peasants are not idealised like those in works such as Breton's 1854 painting, The Gleaners.

During World War II, from 13 to 15 February 1945, the Allies continuously bombed the city of Dresden, Germany. German troops hastily loaded artworks from Dresden's galleries and museums onto trucks. The Stone Breakers was destroyed, along with 153 other paintings, when a transport vehicle moving the pictures to the Königstein Fortress, near Dresden, was bombed by Allied forces.

Courbet associated his ideas of realism in art with political anarchism, and, having gained an audience, he promoted political ideas by writing politically motivated essays and dissertations. His familiar visage was the object of frequent caricature in the popular French press.

In 1855, Courbet submitted fourteen paintings for exhibition at the Exposition Universelle. Three were rejected for lack of space, including A Burial at Ornans and his other monumental canvas The Artist's Studio. Refusing to be denied, Courbet took matters into his own hands. He displayed forty of his paintings, including The Artist's Studio, in his gallery called The Pavilion of Realism (Pavillon du Réalisme) which was a temporary structure that he erected next door to the official Salon-like Exposition Universelle.

Although artists like Eugène Delacroix were ardent champions of his effort, the public went to the show mostly out of curiosity and to deride him. Attendance and sales were disappointing, but Courbet's status as a hero to the French avant-garde became assured. The American James Abbott McNeill Whistler admired him, and he became an inspiration to the younger generation of French artists, including Édouard Manet and the Impressionist painters. The Artist's Studio was recognised as a masterpiece by Delacroix, Baudelaire, and Champfleury, if not by the public.

During the 1860s, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works such as Femme nue couchée, culminating in The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde) (1866), which depicts female genitalia and was not publicly exhibited until 1988, and Sleep (1866), featuring two women in bed. The latter painting became the subject of a police report when it was exhibited by a picture dealer in 1872.

On 4 September 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Gustave Courbet proposed to the Government of National Defense the dismantling of the Place Vendôme column, erected by Napoleon I to honor French military victories. He suggested relocating it to the Hôtel des Invalides and advocated for melting down German and French cannons to create a new monument symbolising the unity of the German and French peoples.

Though the government did not act on this proposal, it was not forgotten. After France's defeat, the Paris Commune took control on 18 March 1871, and Courbet actively participated by organising a Federation of Artists, which held its first meeting on 5 April. He chaired this meeting, asserting that the Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg should reopen and proposing that the Salon exhibition be free from government influence. Courbet criticised key state institutions of French art, including the École des Beaux-Arts.

On 12 April, the Commune assigned Courbet to oversee the museums and organise the Salon and issued a decree to demolish the Vendôme column. Courbet was elected as a delegate for the 6th arrondissement and became involved in the Commission on Education. He advocated for replacing the column with an allegorical figure representing the Commune's rise to power.

However, Courbet soon clashed with other Commune members, opposing the formation of a Committee on Public Safety and the arrest of his friend Gustave Chaudey, who was later executed by a Commune firing squad. On 13 May, at Courbet’s suggestion, the Paris home of Adolphe Thiers was demolished, and his art collection was confiscated. The column was destroyed on 16 May amid a public ceremony. After the Commune was suppressed on 28 May, Courbet went into hiding and was arrested on 7 July.

At his trial before a military tribunal on 14 August, Courbet argued that he had only joined the Commune to pacify it and that he had wanted to move the Vendôme Column, not destroy it. He said he had only belonged to the Commune for a short period, and rarely attended its meetings. He was convicted, but given a lighter sentence than other Commune leaders: six months in prison and a fine of five hundred francs.

In May 1877, the state set the final cost of reconstructing the Vendôme Column at 323,000 francs for Courbet to repay in annual installments of 10,000 francs for the next 33 years. On 31 December 1877, a day before the first installment was due, Courbet died, aged 58, in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.