The Man Made Mad by Fear by Gustave Courbet

One hand presses into the hair. The other hangs in front of a bent knee, its fingers spread and pointing down. Gustave Courbet puts his face high against a blue sky and angles his body towards us, but gives us only a narrow shelf of ground beneath his feet. The eye can follow the bent arm down to the hand and then to the edge of the rock. Beyond that edge it is harder to tell what we are looking at. Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet dates this self-portrait to about 1844. The painting measures 60.5 × 50 cm and is catalogued as oil on canvas mounted on fibreboard, inventory NG.M.02169. ^[1]

Where the figure stands

Courbet sets the horizon low enough to leave his head and shoulders clear of the hills. A pale cliff face appears far back on the left, where it is easy to pick out between the greenery and the sky. The foreground is harder to read because we are so close to the figure and see the ground at such an angle. His shoe and pale stocking catch the light near the left side of the ledge. The other leg folds in under him. The outer edge of his coat lifts away from his body to the right, its dark interior set off by a narrow strip of reddish fabric. As his weight drops, the coat seems to be moving in another direction. ^[1]

Follow the stripes on the sleeves. One set curves around the shoulder and then pitches down to the light cuff just above the centre of the painting. The other runs out towards the upper right with the raised elbow before the wrist comes back to meet the hair. The arms spread across the picture, but both bring us back to small, tightly observed details. The raised hand compresses the dark hair. The extended hand catches enough light to separate the fingers, though they close around nothing. Below that hand, the picture offers a series of browns and greys whose edges are much less definite than the cuff or the knuckles. ^[1]

The face is close to the upper edge and partly in shade. Light picks out the ridges of the forehead and the side of the nose, while the corners of the mouth and the eyes are harder to make out. The gesture and the ground help give the expression its force. From the hills behind the figure we can tell that the land extends a long way, but the drop nearest us is scarcely defined. We see the apparent danger from below the level of Courbet’s face, with little foothold of our own. His hand comes towards the space from which we look. The sense of fear comes as much from that position as it does from the face. ^[1]

The change in the paint near the edge

The striped cloth and the pale cuff have fairly clear boundaries. Further down, broad strokes of grey, green and brown overlap one another, and rough pale areas break through at the bottom. From a distance these marks suggest a descent from the shelf of rock. Up close, they are harder to arrange into a continuous surface. The light patch in the lower right might first look like a glint off rock. Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition guide identifies a painted handprint in this area. Once you look for it, the repeated suggestion of spread fingers draws attention back to the prominent hand above. ^{[1] [2]}

The Beyeler guide describes the lower part as apparently unfinished, and reports that Courbet did not call the picture a sketch when he exhibited it in 1855. The visible difference between upper and lower passages can be described more securely than the reason Courbet left them that way. A small highlight on a finger is enough to tell us where the hand is in space. A much larger mark below it could belong to a distant face of rock or a plane quite near us. The two kinds of painting meet at the point where the figure seems to need the ground to be clearest. ^{[1] [2]}

The cliff and the face in the titles

The Norwegian catalogue title, På kanten av stupet, means At the Edge of the Precipice. It directs attention to the ledge and the imbalance of the figure. Oslo’s English title, The Man Mad with Fear, brings the expression and the hands forward. For the 2024–25 exhibition Figures du fou, the Louvre listed the same inventory number as Portrait de l’artiste dit Le Fou de peur, dated about 1844–48. Its title adds a plain identification of the sitter. The broader Louvre date and Oslo’s approximate 1844 both place the painting in the period when Courbet was making a number of self-portraits. Oslo records the work as a bequest accessioned in 1947 and as a loan to the Louvre for that exhibition. ^{[1] [3] [4] [5]}

The change from one title to another affects what we expect the action to be. At a precipice someone could be slipping, scrambling back to safety or simply looking down. The English title supplies an emotion and makes a particular drama out of those possibilities. The Norwegian title leaves more room for the landscape to explain the posture. Oslo’s account offers the image as a possible allegory of the artist’s uncertainty and also places it in a Romantic tradition that associated artistic genius with extremes of feeling. Either reading begins with a situation Courbet has constructed. His face, clothes and pose let him take a role inside the landscape, with the cause and outcome left open. ^{[1] [3]}

Courbet in other roles

The Metropolitan Museum of Art brought this picture into its account of the different roles Courbet assumed in self-portraits of the 1840s and early 1850s. In The Desperate Man both hands go to the head, the face is much closer and the field around the figure gives few clues to a situation. The Oslo portrait divides that gesture in two. One hand stays at the head and the other enters the uncertain space in front of the knees. The comparison makes the hillside essential. Without it the face and hands might express distress, but the particular uncertainty of where to put one’s weight would disappear. ^{[1] [6] [7]}

In Self-Portrait with a Black Dog, Courbet also lifts his figure against a sky in rocky country. The dog and the seated figure share the foreground, giving us a way to judge its depth and a little time to look around. That portrait became Courbet’s first accepted Salon entry in 1844. It is a useful public benchmark for the Oslo picture’s approximate date. At much the same point in his career, Courbet could make a landscape into a place from which to return a spectator’s gaze, or a setting that makes the encounter physically unsettling. ^{[1] [6] [8]}

An earlier picture beneath The Bathers

A related composition survives under the surface of a different canvas. The Musée Fabre reports that Courbet tried the subject on the large support he eventually used for The Bathers, exhibited at the Salon of 1853. The museum describes a sequence. Courbet first painted a composition with a woman that it characterises as possibly allegorical. He then tried the subject related to the Oslo portrait on a monumental scale. The bathers came over both. Art historian Stephanie Marchal discusses the buried pictures from an X-radiograph and leaves room for more than one sequence of work between the small Oslo portrait and the larger attempt. ^{[9] [10]}

At 227 × 193 cm, the Montpellier canvas stands nearly four times as tall as the painting in Oslo. That difference gives an idea of how far Courbet took the experiment. On a canvas that large, the scale of the body and the ground beneath it would change the spectator’s physical relation to the scene. The finished surface in Montpellier gives us a different encounter, between two women by water, and the abandoned composition survives through examination. It is in Oslo that we can still see how much of the effect depends on that little gap between a reaching hand and a patch of paint that never quite resolves into solid ground. ^{[1] [9] [10]}

The body as a measure of the drop

In the Oslo painting the outstretched hand does work a view of a cliff alone could never do. Its fingers open towards a part of the canvas where there is no clear support. Look from the wrist to the forearm and back to the shoulder. The bend of the body makes it possible to imagine the painter losing his balance even though the ground itself is difficult to read. The other hand, nearer the head, ties that movement to the expression. The face may be the first place we look, but the arrangement of the body is what lets a viewer imagine an instant before or after the one shown. ^[3]

The contrast with The Desperate Man turns on where each picture puts the uncertainty. Orsay’s painting brings both hands up around a face that is almost parallel to the surface. The direction of the stare makes the space in front of the picture part of the encounter. In the Oslo work the upright field allows the figure to bend through a space with some apparent depth, and the reach of one hand tests that depth. The eye searches for an edge or ledge in the paint as well as searching the face for an explanation. ^{[3] [7]}

This difference also gives the alternative titles practical force. A title about madness makes it tempting to begin and end with the face. A title about a precipice directs attention below the figure and towards the extended hand. Neither tells us what first brought the painter into that position. The landscape and the gesture do enough to make the imagined danger legible while leaving the story around it open. ^{[3] [4]}