Gustave Courbet

**Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet** (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter. He was the leader of the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Courbet was prepared to try out new ideas and ways of painting. His paintings made social comment on the world around him.

Courbet's paintings were an inspiration to many other painters, particularly the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec were all inspired by Gustave Courbet's paintings of people. His landscape paintings were an inspiration to Claude Monet, Seurat, Cezanne and many other painters.

## Early life
 *(The Desperate Man),* c. 1843–1845 (Private collection)]]
Courbet was born in 1819, and was the son of Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans, Doubs. Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, were his first models for drawing and painting.

When Courbet was twenty he went to Paris in 1839, and worked at the studio of two other painters, Steuben and Hesse. He was not happy there, and wanted to work on his own. He studied the works of many great masters, including Goya, Velazquez and Titian. He painted several self-portraits at this time. He often returned home to Ornans to hunt, fish and find inspiration in the countryside and country life.

In 1846–1847 Coubet travelled to the Netherlands and Belgium where he studied the paintings of Rembrandt, Franz Hals and Jan Steen who all painted in the 1600s. The paintings by these artists often showed realistic scenes and portraits of everyday life. They showed ordinary people at the table together, dancing, writing, cooking, working at trades and in businesses and in the fields. There were many pictures of soldiers. Courbet decided that he wanted to paint scenes of ordinary life the way that these artists did. He did not want to paint scenes from literature, history or mythology like most other artists in France at that time.83

## Success
Courbet painted a large picture of everday-life at Ornans. The painting, called *After Dinner at Ornans*, shows four men who have just finished a meal at a little table, which is perhaps in an inn. One man is playing his violin, one man is lighting his pipe. Courbet sits listening, with his head leaning on his hand. A large dog is curled under a chair. Courbet showed the painting at the Salon Exhibition in Paris. It was a great success. It won a Gold Medal and was bought by the French Government.32 Because of the gold medal, Courbet could hang his pictures at the Salon Exhibitions without having them checked by a jury first. This rule was changed in 1857. He also painted many landscapes, which he began by doing outdoor sketches, then made into large paintings in his studio. By the 1870s Courbet was thought of as one of the leading artists in France. The emperor offered to make Courbet a member of the Légion d'honneur which was the highest honour in France, but Courbet refused to accept it. He believed that he belonged to the poor and ordinary people, not to the high and mighty.

At this time, there were many political problems in France. Courbet became involved in the political problems. In 1871, he was blamed because a public monument called the Vendôme Column had been demolished. He was put in prison for six months. In 1873, the new government expected him to pay to have the monument restored and put back. He did not have enough money so left France to live in Switzerland. The government decided to make terms so that Courbet could pay for the column in yearly payments of 10,000 francs for 33 years. Courbet died at La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, on 31 December 1877, one day before the first payment was due. He was 58 and died of liver disease, made worse by heavy drinking.

## Gallery

Image:Gustave Courbet - Selbstporträt mit schwarzem Hund.jpg|*Self-portrait with black dog,* 1842
Image:Gustave Courbet - Jo, la belle Irlandaise (MET-Museum).jpg|*Portrait of Jo (La belle Irlandaise)*, 1865-1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, a painting of Joanna Hiffernan
File:Gustave Courbet - La Source - Musée d'Orsay.jpg|*The Source*, 1868
File:La Falaise d'Étretat après l'orage - Gustave Courbet.jpg|*Cliffs at Etretat, After the Storm,* 1870

## Related pages
* Romanticism 
* Social realism 
* Impressionism 
* Post-Impressionists
* List of French painters

## References 
## Further reading 
* Champfleury, *Les Grandes Figures  d’hier et d’aujourd’hui* (Paris, 1861)
* Chu, Petra ten Doesschate. *Courbet in Perspective.* (Prentice Hall, 1977) ASIN B000OIFL3E
* Chu, Petra ten Doesschate and Gustave Courbet. *Letters of Gustave Courbet*. (Chicago: Univ Chicago Press, 1992) 
* Chu, Petra ten Doesschate. *The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture*.(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) 
* Clark, Timothy J., *Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution*, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); (Originally published 1973. Based on his doctoral dissertation along with *The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851*), 208pp. . (Considered the definitive treatment of Courbet's politics and painting in 1848, and a foundational text of Marxist art history).  
* Danto, Arthur (January 23, 1989). "Courbet". *The Nation*: 97–100. 
* Faunce, Sarah, Gustave Courbet, and Linda Nochlin. 
* Fischer, Matthias, Der junge Hodler. Eine Künstlerkarriere 1872-1897, Wädenswil: Nimbus, 2009. 
* Forster-Hahn, Françoise, et al., *Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings From the Nationalgalerie, Berlin* (London: National Gallery Company, 2001) 
* Hutchinson, Mark, "The history of 'The Origin of the World'" , *Times Literary Supplement*, Aug. 8, 2007.
* Lindsay, Jack. *Gustave Courbet his life and art.* Publ. Jupiter Books (London) Limited 1977.  
* Lemonnier, C, *Les Peintres de la Vie* (Paris, 1888).
* Mantz, "G. Courbet," *Gaz. des beaux-arts* (Paris, 1878)
* Masanès, Fabrice, *Gustave Courbet* (Cologne: Taschen, 2006) 
* Nochlin, Linda, *Courbet*, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007) 
* Nochlin, Linda, *Realism: Style and Civilization* (New York: Penguin, 1972).
* Noël, Bernard, *Dictionnaire de la Commune* (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1978)
* Schwabsky, Barry (March 24, 2008). "Daring Intransigence". *The Nation*: 28–34.
* Zola, Émile, *Mes Haines* (Paris, 1879)
* 

## Other websites
;General
* Gallery of paintings by Gustave Courbet 
* Berman, Avis "Larger than Life" Smithsonian magazine, April 2008 
* Courbet images and biography at CGFA 
* Humanities Web on Courbet 
* Art Renewal Center; biography and images  
* Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Gustave Courbet. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.