Gustave Courbet

Self-proclaimed founder of Realism and the most combative, physically present personality in 19th-century French art. Courbet came from a prosperous farming family in Ornans, a village in the Franche-Comté near the Swiss border, and his roots in that particular landscape and community — its stone quarries, its forests, its funerals and village weddings — gave his work a materiality and specificity that was entirely new. He came to Paris at eighteen and largely taught himself by copying in the Louvre; his subjects, scale and attitude were his own invention. The Burial at Ornans (1849–50) is his founding statement: a canvas three meters high and six meters wide showing an actual funeral in his home village, its mourners and clerics observed with democratic equality, at a monumental scale previously reserved for history painting. The effect at the 1851 Salon was one of simultaneous outrage and fascination — the very subject seemed to degrade the category of ambitious painting. A Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856), his reclining female nudes in contemporary dress; the Stonebreakers (1849, destroyed in World War II, known only from photographs); the forest interiors and deer hunts — all declared the same program: that the present world, seen honestly, was the proper subject of painting. Courbet's politics were as blunt as his brushwork. He refused the Legion of Honour. He mounted his own Pavilion of Realism outside the 1855 Exposition Universelle when the jury rejected his submissions. In 1871 he participated in the Paris Commune and was held responsible for the toppling of the Vendôme Column — and was subsequently fined the entire cost of its reconstruction, a bill so enormous it bankrupted him. He fled to Switzerland, where he spent his last years painting lake views and died in La Tour-de-Peilz in 1877.