Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877)

French artist. He was a portrait, genre, and landscape painter. Reacting against academic trends, both classicist and Romantic, he became a major exponent of realism, depicting contemporary life with an unflattering frankness. His Burial at Ornans (1850; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), showing ordinary working people gathered around a village grave, shocked the public and the critics with its ‘vulgarity’.

His powerful genius found expression in portraiture, figure composition, landscape (the gorges and forests of his native Franche-Comte, and superb paintings of the Normandy coast, The Wave being famous in several versions), sensuous paintings of the nude, animal studies, and still life. He went to Paris 1841, his training mainly consisting in the study and imitation of old masters in the Louvre, especially Velázquez and Rembrandt. In defiance of both Romanticism and classicism he evolved the idea of realism, asserting, that is, that painting should consist in ‘the representation of real and existing things’, his aim therefore being, in his own words, to ‘interpret the manners, ideas and aspect of our own time’. In this there were some social and proletarian implications, as might be gathered from his Stonebreakers (1849; Dresden, destroyed 1945), and the Burial at Ornans (Louvre), with its sombre group of peasants, which caused an uproar when exhibited at the Salon of 1850.

The Burial at Ornans and The Artist's Studio (Louvre), described as an ‘allegory of reality’ and depicting the artist at work on a landscape watched by a nude model and a group of friends including Baudelaire and Proudhon, were refused by the jury of the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Courbet opened a rival exhibition with a catalogue containing a manifesto on realism, and in the notoriety that followed stood out as a new force in art, acclaimed as such both in France and elsewhere in Europe.

He was involved in the riots of the Commune of 1871, and though he protected the Louvre from fire was held responsible for inciting the destruction of the Vendôme column and sentenced to six months' imprisonment (occupied by painting a self-portrait and some magnificent still lifes). The case was reopened 1873; his goods were confiscated and he took refuge in Switzerland, spending the last four years of his life near Vevey painting landscapes (numerous versions of the Château de Chillon) and portraits. His ideas on realism influenced Edouard Manet and the young Impressionists.