Gustave Courbet, born in Ornans in 1819, painted stone breakers and village mourners on canvases as large as history paintings, and with them he founded Realism. He also painted The Origin of the World.
He died in exile in Switzerland in 1877, the day before he was due to make the first payment on a monument he was blamed for toppling.
The monument was the Vendôme Column, a bronze pillar in Paris crowned with a statue of Napoleon, pulled down during the Paris Commune of 1871. France held Courbet responsible for its fall. His real part was smaller and came earlier: he had asked for it.
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Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, in Ornans, a small town of the Franche-Comté, a region of eastern France along the Swiss border. His father was a landowner, and the family lived in comfort.
The boy who would later call himself the proudest and most arrogant man in France began by drawing at home, with his sisters Zoé, Zélie and Juliette as models. In 1837 he went to Besançon, the nearest big city, for his first painting lessons.
Around 1840 his father sent him to Paris to study law, and the son soon gave it up for painting.
In Paris he tried the teaching studios of Steuben and Hesse, two established painters, and lost patience with their lessons. So he taught himself in the galleries of the Louvre, copying Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Velázquez.
From those masters he took deep shadows and thick, heavy paint, and he kept both for the rest of his life. He soon turned them on his own face.
Around 1843, in The Desperate Man, a small canvas of 45 by 54 centimeters, he shows himself grimacing wildly, his signature in bright red. The picture is still in a private collection.
A funeral in Ornans
In 1849 and 1850 Courbet painted a funeral in Ornans, his home town, on a canvas 315 by 668 centimeters, about 10 by 22 feet. What he chose to put on a surface that size is what Paris could not forgive him…
What You'll Discover
Where a landowner's son learned to paint.
Why a village funeral shocked Paris.
Where The Stone Breakers went.
Why he built his own exhibition.
Who ordered the painting behind a curtain.
Why he refused France's highest honor.