The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair

A pig noses the ground in the foreground of Gustave Courbet’s The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair. Its lead runs back to a man with a pipe, a bundle and a folded umbrella, walking apart from the riders. Behind him a woman balances a basket on her head. Cattle crowd the road at the left, already close to the edge of the picture. Courbet catches the group on its way home, after the bargaining is over and there are still animals to bring back. ^[1]

The Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon records the painting as an oil on canvas of 1850, measuring 208.5 × 275 cm, under inventory number D.959.1.1. It is a state-owned work assigned to the Musée d’Orsay and deposited in Besançon. Orsay lists the same canvas as RF 1959 9 and gives its height as 206 cm. The Joconde national collections database agrees with Besançon’s measurements and dates the work 1850–55, taking account of Courbet’s later changes. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

On the road home

The two horsemen are easy to spot against the sky. One wears a tall dark hat and sits almost square to the viewer. His horse’s white blaze catches the light just below him. The rider beside him turns his head, loosening the symmetry of the pair. Below them the pale flank of an ox fills a broad stretch of the road. Its body overlaps the darker animal ahead, whose head is already nearing the left edge. The cattle give the group a direction even as faces, shoulders and horses’ heads turn at different angles. ^[1]

The walkers are distributed unevenly. Behind the horses, one woman’s white head covering and the outline of the basket carried by another separate them from the dark ground. At the right, the man with the umbrella takes a long step down the darker verge. The slack curve of the lead links him to the pig well below the line of the horsemen. Between the bright road and the shade at the edge, the figures find their own footing and leave space for the animals. The uneven intervals give a sense of how this procession moves, bunching where the cattle occupy the road and opening out where the man with the pig can walk clear of them. ^[1]

Flagey lies on the Amancey plateau in the Doubs. Courbet’s paternal grandfather acquired the family farm there, and his father Régis expanded and diversified the holding. Courbet knew a countryside where the people tending and trading animals lived alongside artisans and shopkeepers, and where fairs were a regular part of the local economy. The historian Ivan Jablonka identifies the fair in the painting as that of Salins and reads the difference between riding and walking as a sign of relative means. The exact route is harder to fix. What the picture makes plain is how differently the travellers are equipped for the journey. Two ride, others carry baskets or bundles, and the man on the verge keeps his pig at the length of a cord. ^{[4] [5]}

A village procession at the Paris Salon

The painting appeared as no. 662 at the Salon of 1850–51 at the Palais Royal, in the same group of Courbet entries as A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers. The official catalogue names 30 December 1850 as the opening date, which accounts for the single year in some references to a show reviewed in 1851. In the burial painting the people gather around a grave. In the Flagey canvas the road keeps them moving past each other and past us. Each subject came from the region Courbet knew, and each put local people on a scale associated with history painting. Here the width lets us follow small gestures across a group large enough to take in slowly, from the horns and hooves at the left to the man out on his own at the right. ^{[2] [3] [6] [7]}

The critic Louis de Geofroy, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1851, wondered why a viewer should care whether the peasants came from Flagey or Pontoise. He took their clothes and the tether around the pig’s hind leg as evidence of a devotion to local detail that, in his view, left people and animals looking equally awkward. The caricaturist Bertall also picked up the umbrella and basket in Le retour du marché, published in Le Journal pour rire on 7 March 1851. He made the riders and their mounts look like stiff, wide-eyed toys. Both responses depend on how easy it is to recognise the particular things Courbet chose to paint. ^{[8] [9]}

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made nearly the opposite case in his 1865 book on art and its social purpose. He took the absence of flattering poses as evidence of careful observation. He asked what future generations might learn about a society from pictures of its ordinary occupations, and used the return from the fair to make that case. His own reading went so far as to imagine roles and motives for the travellers. Those are Proudhon’s interpretations. The detail that irritated Geofroy was precisely what Proudhon wanted a painter to preserve. ^[10]

What Courbet changed

The picture in Besançon has a different right side from the composition shown at the Salon. The Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF) reports that a partial X-ray made in 1959 was initially taken as evidence of a later repetition. The centre now identifies the surviving canvas as the original composition, cut down on the right and enlarged again by Courbet after the Salon. Joconde dates the modifications on that side to 1855. The centre’s short account gives 1849 for the Salon, but the exhibition records and contemporary review place it in 1850–51. ^{[3] [6] [8] [11]} The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2008 retrospective catalogue describes the same Besançon canvas as a later replica. ^[14]

Bertall’s caricature also places the woman with the basket differently. A Musée Courbet teaching dossier reproduces the print and attributes the difference to an earlier interpretation, associated with the art historian Hélène Toussaint, that the Besançon picture was a second canvas. The C2RMF’s account instead explains how the original could survive with an altered composition. A satirical print can preserve a recognisable detail from the Salon picture, but its liberties make it a poor guide to the precise extent of the changes. De Geofroy’s account at least establishes that visitors to the Salon already saw a man leading a pig. Orsay records a second Paris showing as no. 3 at Courbet’s independent Pavillon du Réalisme in 1855, and another as no. 4 at his pavilion in 1867. ^{[2] [8] [9] [11]}

From private collections to Besançon

The canvas passed through the Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune galleries and the collections of Auguste Dreyfus and Clement A. Griscom. Robert Fernier’s catalogue raisonné records the painting at the Griscom sale in New York in 1914. Orsay then traces it to the collection of the Japanese industrialist Kōjirō Matsukata, where it was recorded from 1929 until the French authorities placed his collection under sequestration in 1944. Matsukata had hoped to establish a museum in Japan, but he died before the fate of his Paris holdings was settled. France returned the majority of that group in 1959, forming the core of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, while this Courbet remained in France. ^{[2] [12] [13]}

Orsay records acceptance for the Louvre in 1952 under Matsukata’s name as a gift, then a transfer to the French national museums in 1959 under the peace treaty with Japan. Joconde identifies the work as state property and leaves the acquisition date and method unspecified. Besançon gives 1959 as the date of deposit. Orsay also records an extended loan to the Musée Courbet in Ornans from 2012 to 2018 during the renovation of the Besançon museum, followed by the canvas’s return to Besançon. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

The painting made one much shorter journey in 2000, when it went to Flagey for an afternoon. The Musée Courbet traces the project to restore the Courbet family farm to that visit. A picture that once asked a Parisian audience to pay attention to a particular village became, for a few hours, a public event in the village itself. ^[4]