Gustave Courbet

In A Burial at Ornans, a funeral stretches across nearly seven metres of canvas. The mourners stand in an uneven row beneath a low sky, their attention scattered among the people and proceedings around them. In The Desperate Man, the young Gustave Courbet fills a canvas barely half a metre wide with his staring face and the hands he thrusts into his hair. And in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Source of the Loue, the deepest dark belongs to a cave mouth. Pale water spills out below it, picking up the light that the rock seems to absorb. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Courbet (1819–1877) became a leading figure in French Realism by bringing subjects from his own time and surroundings into public painting. What makes those three works worth putting side by side is how differently he asks us to look. The funeral takes time to cross. The self-portrait gives the eye almost nowhere to escape. The river picture makes you linger where two surfaces meet. Across his career, a local ceremony, a face in a mirror and a familiar stretch of water could each carry a picture on its own terms. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

A young painter in two guises

Courbet grew up in Ornans, in the Doubs in eastern France, and moved to Paris in 1839. At the Louvre he copied older paintings, among them a work by Guercino. His own early self-portraits offer a way into what he was learning to do with a figure. In The Desperate Man, the eyes confront us straight on while the spread fingers and angled forearms gather the composition around the face. The cropping makes the gesture feel as if it is still happening. The Musée d’Orsay dates the picture to about 1844–45 and places it in a tradition of studies in which painters demonstrated their ability to render strong emotion. The title describes the expression he staged. ^{[2] [5]}

He presented another version of himself in Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, his first painting accepted at the Paris Salon, in 1844. He sits outdoors with his dog and a walking stick, looking down towards us from his seat among the rocks. The hat throws shade over his face, and the landscape opens out behind him. His gaze holds the viewer in both portraits, but the space around him changes the encounter. In one picture you are almost in his way. In the other he seems to have time to look you over. ^{[2] [8]}

Ornans at the Salon

The Paris Salon, a major public exhibition for living artists, was where Courbet made a gathering among friends into an event for strangers. At the 1849 Salon, After Dinner at Ornans earned him a medal. In the painting, a violinist plays at the end of a meal. A white tablecloth catches the light and marks out the space between the seated men. One leans on a hand, another smokes, and a dog lies under a chair. The scattered postures give the impression that the men have been there a while. The award meant he could show work at the subsequent Salon without submitting it to the jury. ^{[1] [12]}

At the Salon of 1850–51, Courbet brought scenes of provincial life onto canvases of the size conventionally given to history painting. In A Burial at Ornans, a cross rises above the heads near the left, the coffin enters from that side, and the open grave cuts into the ground at the bottom. The row of people continues past it, all the way to the mourners on the right. Stand imaginatively at the edge of that grave and the dimensions make sense. You are looking across a group of people roughly your own size. Their faces and small differences of posture keep drawing you away from the centre, even though the ceremony has brought them all to the same spot. ^{[1] [4]}

The funeral shows what was at stake in calling Courbet a Realist. A painting on this scale could command a public room and invite the sustained attention given to a battle or a biblical episode. The occasion here is a burial in the artist’s home town, and the identity of the person being buried remains unknown. Courbet gave that occasion the scale of a public event while leaving the mourners room to be distracted, intent or absorbed in their own grief. ^[1]

A place to show his own work

Ornans remained a point of return, but Courbet’s career also depended on relationships elsewhere. In 1854 he visited the collector Alfred Bruyas in Montpellier. In The Meeting, the painter approaches on foot with a walking staff and a pack. He holds his hat in one hand. His host faces him with an attendant and a dog. The space between the two men gives their greeting much of its force. Courbet lets us see what each brings to the encounter, from the travelling painter’s equipment to the collector’s companion and fine clothes. The Musée Fabre reads the picture as an encounter between two men who had something to offer each other. ^[6]

The following year, the jury for the Paris Exposition Universelle refused The Painter’s Studio, although it accepted other submissions by Courbet. He mounted a separate exhibition nearby in his Pavilion of Realism. The exhibition catalogue introduced his case for painting the world of his own day as he saw it. Putting on a show gave him a place to make that case with his pictures and in his own words. ^{[4] [9] [13]}

The Painter’s Studio makes that independence visible as a scene of work. Near the middle of a dim room, Courbet sits at his easel painting a landscape. A child looks up beside him, and a standing nude holds a white cloth. Farther out, figures gather on either side. The bright patch at the centre draws the eye into an outdoor space even as the easel and the people around it insist that we are indoors. Courbet called the painting a real allegory in its long title. That pairing of words suits a picture in which particular people and tangible objects share a room that can also be read as a statement about the painter’s place in society. ^[9]

From the Loue to the sea

The Loue runs through Ornans. Upstream, where it emerges from a grotto, Courbet found a subject he could paint repeatedly. In the Met’s 1864 Source of the Loue, the built structures to the left give a sense of the cliff’s height. Their straight lines hold against the jagged face above them. It may be one of four views of the spring that Courbet reported painting in a letter to his dealer. Look from the abrupt marks of the rock to the broken streaks of pale water. The Met points to the palette knife in both passages. The same tool could lay down a rough surface or pull the paint into thin marks that follow the fall of the water. ^[3]

On the Normandy coast Courbet used the relation between water and land to a different end. The Musée d’Orsay’s Stormy Sea, also called The Wave, went to the Salon of 1870. Its heavy wave rises in a long dark band behind the boats on the beach. Light catches the breaking crest, and the narrow strip of shore gives the approaching water much of its size. The Cliffs at Étretat after the Storm shared that Salon with it. There the chalk cliff gives the coast a firm profile and the sea sits farther back in the picture. In one, the eye follows the unstable edge of a breaking wave. In the other it can settle on the outline of the headland against the sky. ^{[11] [14]}

Painting for different audiences

In 1866 the Salon accepted Woman with a Parrot, a reclining nude with loose hair spilling onto the bedding and a raised hand supporting the bird. The same year Courbet painted The Origin of the World, a much smaller nude framed at such close quarters that it leaves the face outside the picture. The Musée d’Orsay names Khalil-Bey as the latter painting’s first owner and probable commissioner. The difference in scale and framing gives a sense of what Courbet could ask of a viewer in a public exhibition and what he could paint for a private collection. ^{[10] [15]}

The Commune and the last years

Courbet’s involvement in Parisian public life took a different turn in 1871. During the Paris Commune he served on its council and presided over the Federation of Artists. He had earlier advocated taking down the Vendôme Column, a Napoleonic monument. After the Commune fell, a military court convicted him of complicity in its destruction and sentenced him to six months in prison. The earlier proposal, the Commune’s decision and the later legal proceedings were separate events. Courbet left for Switzerland in 1873, settled in La Tour-de-Peilz and continued painting views of Lake Geneva. He died there in 1877. ^{[16] [7]}

In the 1874 Château de Chillon at the Musée Courbet, the castle sits low against the mountains and its reflection extends into the lake. The museum points to a photograph used for the composition. Look at the firm masses of the castle and the looser handling of the bank. A familiar tool from the Loue pictures, the painting knife, here helps give the architecture its shape. ^[17]

Where to start with Courbet’s work

Start with The Desperate Man and The Painter’s Studio to see how Courbet places himself in two very different roles. To see how he handles a group, pair After Dinner at Ornans with A Burial at Ornans. In the interior, the table keeps bringing the eye back to the men. In the outdoor scene, the line of figures carries the eye along the whole canvas. ^{[1] [2] [12] [9]}

The themes offer different ways through the work. Follow the places that recur in Courbet’s pictures, from the valleys around Ornans to the Normandy coast and Lake Geneva, or compare the roles he tries out in his early self-portraits. To understand how his Realism became a public argument, follow the relationship between what he showed at the Salon, what he put on display himself and what he made for collectors. The biography follows the sequence of his life, including the years in Switzerland. ^{[3] [4] [5] [11] [7]}

Use the paintings catalogue to find an individual work or browse by subject, from portraits and figure paintings to landscapes, hunting scenes and still lifes. Similar titles can point to different canvases. That matters especially with recurring subjects such as the Loue and the waves. Check the collection and date alongside the title when comparing pictures. Robert Fernier’s catalogue raisonné is a systematic record of Courbet’s work and a further point of reference for those comparisons. ^{[3] [4] [11] [18]}

A way into Courbet’s work

Begin with two small or moderately sized pictures and a very large one. In The Desperate Man, the arms almost fill a canvas little more than half a metre wide. In A Burial at Ornans, a whole community stretches across nearly seven metres. In The Source of the Loue, a dark opening makes a stretch of water rushing towards the viewer look especially bright. The three pictures reward the same first question. What has Courbet placed close to the picture’s edge, and what does that make the viewer feel close to? ^{[19] [20] [21]}

The scale of the funeral also raises a question about who would see a picture. The young man in The Desperate Man now appears to confront anybody who looks at him, yet his first known public exhibition came late in the artist’s life. The people at the funeral had a broad audience when the painting appeared at the Salon of 1850–51. An encounter can feel immediate on the canvas regardless of when it became possible in a gallery. Following those separate histories helps make sense of Courbet’s use of both public exhibitions and more restricted settings for his work. ^{[19] [20]}

The works also look different when we ask where they were made. The Musée Courbet traces his work in Ornans from an adapted attic to a former foundry with a tall ceiling and north-facing window. The later studio contained objects he could study and kept him close to the river, the valley and his family’s country. His biography follows how work done in those surroundings entered exhibitions in Paris and abroad. The paintings guide traces the choices from canvas to canvas, including where a title refers to more than one work. ^[22]