Gustave Courbet: The Complete Story
Gustave Courbet was the swaggering father of Realism, the painter who threw out gods and goddesses and put ordinary stone breakers, peasants and his own huge ego onto canvases the size of history paintings. Proud, political and built to provoke, he was jailed for his part in a revolution and died in exile, still paying the bill.
Courbet believed painting should show the real world, not myths and angels, and he said so loudly enough to change the course of art.
Realism as a weapon
Asked to paint angels, Courbet snapped that he would paint one the day someone showed him one. Instead he painted Realism: laborers crushing rock in The Stone Breakers, a whole village at a graveside in A Burial at Ornans, plain people made monumental. Critics were appalled that ordinary life filled a frame meant for kings and saints.
The painting that stayed hidden for a century
In 1866 he painted one of the most explicit nudes in the history of art, a close cropped female body he called The Origin of the World. For more than a hundred years it passed quietly between private owners, too frank to hang in public. Today it is one of the most visited works in the Musee d'Orsay.
His own one man show
When the 1855 World's Fair in Paris rejected his giant canvas The Painter's Studio, Courbet built his own Pavilion of Realism next door and charged admission. It was one of the first times an artist staged a solo show in open defiance of the official system, a move every independent artist since has echoed.
The column that ruined him
Courbet was a committed radical. During the Paris Commune of 1871 he was held responsible for the toppling of the Vendome Column, a monument to Napoleon's wars. He was jailed, then ordered to pay for rebuilding it, a crushing sum. He fled to Switzerland and died there in 1877, reportedly the day before the first payment fell due.
Why he still matters
Courbet kicked open the door for modern art. By insisting that the real, the rough and the everyday deserved the grandest treatment, he made the work of Manet, the Impressionists and almost everyone after them possible. He was his own best advertisement, and he knew it.
Quick answers about Gustave Courbet
Who was Gustave Courbet? The French painter who founded Realism.
When was he born? In Ornans, France, in 1819.
How did he die? In exile in Switzerland, in 1877, ruined by a fine.
What is he famous for? The Stone Breakers, A Burial at Ornans, and The Origin of the World.
What movement did he start? Realism.
Where can I see his work? The Musee d'Orsay in Paris holds the key pieces.
He died in Switzerland in 1877, exiled and broke, on the eve of the first instalment owed for a column he was blamed for pulling down. The man who painted reality without flinching met an ending as blunt as one of his own canvases.