A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
A village funeral in his birthplace, painted on the scale of a history painting – a landmark of Realism
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Art
Gustave Courbet
1819–1877 · French
Realism
Gustave Courbet was the leader of the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Rejecting academic idealism and Romantic drama, he painted ordinary provincial people and labourers on the vast scale reserved for history painting. A political radical, he was jailed after the Paris Commune and died in exile in Switzerland.
How to spot them
- ▸Huge canvases of ordinary rural life in his home region of Franche-Comté, painted without idealisation
- ▸Dark earthy palette, heavy palette-knife textures, rocky landscapes and crashing waves
- ▸Bold self-portraits of the artist as a romantic, defiant young man
- ▸Quiz clue: Ornans, the Pavilion of Realism of 1855, the Vendôme Column and the Paris Commune
Key works
The Painter's Studio (1855)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Subtitled 'A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life'
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Stone Breakers (1849)
Destroyed in 1945 (formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden)
Two labourers breaking stones by the roadside; lost during the Second World War
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
L'Origine du monde (1866)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Explicit close-up nude, once owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (The Meeting) (1854)
Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Courbet, with pack on his back, greeted by his patron Alfred Bruyas
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Desperate Man (Le Désespéré) (1843–1845)
Private collection
Wide-eyed self-portrait of the young artist tearing at his hair
Image: Gustave Courbet · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Ornans, in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, in 1819.
- •When works were rejected from the 1855 Exposition Universelle, he staged his own show in a 'Pavilion of Realism'.
- •He reputedly declared that he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one.
- •He refused the Légion d'honneur in 1870.
- •During the 1871 Paris Commune he was blamed for the toppling of the Vendôme Column.
- •He was imprisoned and later ordered to pay for the column's re-erection, and fled to Switzerland in 1873.
- •He died in exile at La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, in 1877.
- •L'Origine du monde entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1995.
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Sources
- National Gallery, London — Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Gustave Courbet