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Gustave Courbet Biography
COURBET, GUSTAVE (1819-1877), French painter, was born at Ornans (Doubs)
on the 10th of June 1819. He went to Paris in 1839, and worked at the
studio of Steuben and Hesse; but his independent spirit did not allow
him to remain there long, as he preferred to work out his own way by the
study of Spanish, Flemish and French painters. His first works, an
Odalisque, suggested by Victor Hugo, and a Llia, illustrating George
Sand, were literary subjects; but these he soon abandoned for the study
of real life. Among other works he painted his own portrait with his
dog, and The Man with a Pipe, both of which were rejected by the jury of
the Salon; but the younger school of critics, the neo-romantics and
realists, loudly sang the praises of Courbet, who by 1849 began to be
famous, producing such pictures as After Dinner at Ornans and The Valley
of the Loire. The Salon of 1850 found him triumphant with the Burial at
Ornans, the Stone-Breakers and the Peasants of Flazey. His style still
gained in individuality, as in Village Damsels (1852), the Wrestlers,
Bathers, and A Girl Spinning (1852). Though Courbet's realistic work is
not devoid of importance, it is as a landscape and sea painter that he
will be most honoured by posterity. Sometimes, it must be owned, his
realism is rather coarse and brutal, but when he paints the forests of
Franche-Comt, the Stag-Fight, The Wave, or the Haunt of the Does. [...]
When Courbet had made a name as an artist he grew ambitious of other
glory; he tried to promote democratic and social science, and under the
Empire he wrote essays and dissertations. His refusal of the cross of
the Legion of Honour, offered to him by Napoleon III, made him immensely
popular, and in 1871 he was elected, under the Commune, to the chamber.
Thus it happened that he was responsible for the destruction of the
Vendme column. A council of war, before which he was tried, condemned
him to pay the cost of restoring the column, 300,000 francs (?12,000).
To escape the necessity of working to the end of his days at the orders
of the State in order to pay this sum, Courbet went to Switzerland in
1873, and died at La Tour du Peilz, on the 31st of December 1877, of a
disease of the liver aggravated by intemperance. An exhibition of his
works was held in 1882 at the cole des Beaux-Arts. |
