The Realist who insisted that ordinary people were worth painting at the scale reserved for history, and made that a political position.
Gustave Courbet was a French painter who insisted that art should show ordinary life at the size and seriousness previously reserved for gods, kings and battles. He was born at Ornans, in the Doubs near the Swiss border, on 10 June 1819 and died in exile at La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland on 31 December 1877.
He called what he did Realism and made the word into a movement. A Burial at Ornans, finished in 1850, is over six metres wide and shows fifty villagers standing at a country grave. Nothing in it is noble, and it is painted on the scale of a coronation.
When the organisers of the 1855 Paris world's fair rejected his largest picture, Courbet built a shed beside the exhibition, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and charged admission to see his own work. It was the first one-man show of its kind.
He was a republican and a socialist all his life. In 1871 he joined the Paris Commune, was held responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme Column, and was jailed, ruined by the bill for rebuilding it, and driven out of France. He died in Switzerland at fifty-eight.
Gustave Courbet was born on 10 June 1819 at Ornans, a small town in the Franche-Comté, twenty-five kilometres from Besançon. His father, Régis Courbet, was a prosperous landowner and farmer. The family was comfortable, provincial and republican.[1]
He kept the place all his life. The valley of the Loue, the limestone cliffs above it, the hunters, the stone, the local funerals and fairs are the subject of a large part of his work, and he went back to paint there every year.
He was sent to Besançon to study, and in 1839 to Paris to read law. He gave the law up almost at once and taught himself to paint by copying Spanish, Dutch and Venetian pictures in the Louvre. He never took a formal studio training, and he said so often.[2]
The best-known picture of his early twenties is The Desperate Man, a self-portrait in which he stares out of the canvas gripping his own hair. He kept it for the rest of his life. It is still in a private collection and is seen only when it travels on loan.
Courbet's argument was simple and he repeated it for thirty years: a painter should paint what he can see, in his own time, and history painting and mythology are lies about the present.
Asked to put angels into a commission for a church, he gave the reply that became the motto of Realism. Show me an angel, he said, and I will paint one.[3]
The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, shows two road labourers, an old man and a boy, at work by the side of a road. Courbet gave them no expression, no message and no dignity beyond what the work itself has. The picture was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and survives only in photographs.
A Burial at Ornans, shown at the Salon of 1850 and 1851, was the scandal. It is 3.1 metres high and 6.6 metres wide, the format of a state occasion, and it shows the people of his own town standing round an open grave: the mayor, the priest, the gravedigger, the dogs, his sisters. Critics complained that the figures were ugly and that the picture said nothing. That was the point of it, and Courbet did not deny the charge.[1]
In 1855 Paris held a world's fair with a large art exhibition attached. The jury took eleven of Courbet's paintings and refused the one he cared about, The Painter's Studio, a canvas nearly six metres wide that he subtitled a real allegory summing up seven years of his artistic and moral life.
Courbet's response was to put up a wooden building on the avenue Montaigne, next to the official exhibition, hang forty of his own paintings in it, call it the Pavilion of Realism, and sell tickets. Admission was one franc, with a catalogue and a short printed manifesto at the door.[3]
Few people came and he lost money. The gesture mattered anyway. It is the first time an artist mounted a full one-man exhibition in opposition to an official Salon, and every independent show of the following century descends from it.[2]
One of the people who took the lesson was Camille Pissarro, who reached Paris in 1855, the year of the pavilion. What he took was both halves of it: the subjects Courbet thought were worth painting, and the refusal to wait for the Salon's permission to show them.
Courbet worked in Paris for most of the year and became one of the most visible men in its artistic life. He drank at the Brasserie Andler in the rue Hautefeuille, which became known as the headquarters of Realism.
His circle was as much literary and political as artistic. The critic Champfleury argued the case for Realism in print. The poet Charles Baudelaire sat for a portrait in 1848. The anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a close friend and wrote a book about Courbet's painting as a social principle.
He was a large, loud, confident man who enjoyed being talked about, and his enemies said that the self-promotion was the whole of him. The paintings outlasted the argument.
Courbet painted the naked body with a bluntness that the Salon jury found hard to place. The Bathers, in 1853, shows a heavy woman climbing out of a stream, seen from behind, with no mythological excuse for her being there. The Emperor Napoleon III is said to have struck the canvas with his riding crop.
In 1866 the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey commissioned L'Origine du monde, a close view of a woman's torso and genitals, painted with complete seriousness and no narrative at all. It stayed in private hands for over a century, at one point owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who kept it behind a sliding panel. It entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1995 and is now one of the most visited pictures in Paris.
Courbet was a republican, and in 1870 he refused the Legion of Honour from the collapsing empire of Napoleon III in an open letter. The refusal was printed and made him a hero to the republican left. When the Paris Commune took the city in the spring of 1871 he was elected to it and made president of its arts commission, where his work was mostly practical: keeping the museums open and protecting their collections.[4]
The Vendôme Column was a bronze column cast from captured cannon and topped by a statue of Napoleon. In September 1870, before the Commune, Courbet had petitioned for it to be taken down as a monument to war, and had suggested moving it elsewhere. On 16 May 1871 the Commune pulled it down.[5]
After the Commune fell, Courbet was tried for the destruction. He was fined and sentenced to six months in prison, which he served at Sainte-Pélagie. In 1873 the new government decided to re-erect the column and sent him the bill: 323,000 francs, payable at 10,000 francs a year for the rest of his life.[6][7]
Courbet crossed into Switzerland in July 1873 and never came back. He settled at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva, where he painted views of the lake, the mountains behind it and, repeatedly, trout. He worked partly through assistants as his health failed.
He drank heavily, and dropsy — fluid retention from liver disease — swelled his body badly in his last two years. He died at La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December 1877, aged fifty-eight, the day before the first instalment on the column was due.
He was buried in Switzerland. In 1919 his remains were brought back to Ornans and reburied in the town he had painted all his life.
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds the essential pictures: A Burial at Ornans, The Painter's Studio and L'Origine du monde. The Petit Palais holds more, and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier holds the Bruyas collection, including The Meeting.
The Musée Courbet at Ornans occupies the house he was born in, and shows work alongside the landscape of the Loue valley that produced it.
Courbet changed what a painting was allowed to be about. Before him, size signalled importance: large canvases were for history, religion and power. He put stone breakers, village funerals and his own friends on that scale and refused to make them heroic, and after him the subject of serious painting was open.
The Impressionists took the permission and left the politics. Claude Monet and the painters who organised the independent exhibitions of the 1870s worked from what Courbet had established, and those exhibitions follow directly from his shed on the avenue Montaigne in 1855. Édouard Manet, who never showed with the group, made the same move on his own account, putting up a private pavilion at the world's fair of 1867.
He also paid for his politics more heavily than any other major French painter. The Vendôme Column bankrupted him, exiled him and probably shortened his life, and the paintings he made on Lake Geneva were done under a debt he could not have lived long enough to clear.
Born on 10 June at Ornans in the Franche-Comté, son of a prosperous landowner.
Is educated at Ornans and then at the seminary and college in Besançon.
Is sent to Paris to read law and abandons it for painting.
Teaches himself by copying Spanish, Dutch and Venetian pictures in the Louvre, taking no formal studio training.
Has his first painting accepted by the Salon, a self-portrait with a black dog.
Paints a portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire and becomes a fixture of the Brasserie Andler.
Paints The Stone Breakers, showing two road labourers at work with no message attached.
Shows A Burial at Ornans at the Salon, six and a half metres of ordinary villagers at a country grave.
The Salon showing of A Burial at Ornans continues into the new year and the attacks on it intensify.
Shows The Bathers, a heavy naked woman leaving a stream with no mythological pretext.
The world's fair jury refuses The Painter's Studio, his six-metre allegory of his own working life.
Builds the Pavilion of Realism beside the official exhibition, hangs forty of his own paintings and charges admission.
Prints a short manifesto of Realism in the pavilion catalogue.
Shows Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, attacked for painting modern women as they actually looked.
Opens a teaching studio in Paris, then closes it, refusing to correct his students' work.
Paints at Trouville on the Normandy coast alongside Claude Monet and James Whistler.
Paints L'Origine du monde on commission from the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey.
Mounts a second one-man pavilion during the Paris world's fair of that year.
Refuses the Legion of Honour offered by the government of Napoleon III.
Petitions in September for the Vendôme Column to be taken down as a monument to war and moved elsewhere.
Is elected to the Paris Commune and made president of its arts commission, working to keep the museums open.
The Commune pulls down the Vendôme Column on 16 May.
Is arrested after the Commune falls and sentenced to six months in prison and a fine.
Serves his sentence at Sainte-Pélagie and in a clinic at Neuilly, and paints still lifes in custody.
The government decides to re-erect the Vendôme Column and bills him 323,000 francs, payable at 10,000 francs a year for life.
Crosses into Switzerland in July and never returns to France.
Settles at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva and paints the lake and the mountains.
Works increasingly through assistants as his health declines.
Dies at La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December, aged fifty-eight, of liver disease, the day before the first instalment on the column falls due.
A memorial sale of his studio is held in Paris.
His remains are brought back from Switzerland and reburied at Ornans.
The Grand Palais in Paris holds a large centenary retrospective of his work.
L'Origine du monde enters the Musée d'Orsay, having spent decades in private hands including those of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Painting
Forty-odd villagers stand around an open grave at Ornans, Courbet's home town in eastern France, painted life size on a canvas more than twenty-two feet wide. The scale was the provocation. Life-size figures on a canvas this big were reserved for religious and historical subjects, and Courbet gave that treatment to a funeral for someone whose name the painting never supplies.
Painting
Three men meet on a dusty road outside Montpellier. Gustave Courbet is on the right with a pack on his back and his beard up; his patron Alfred Bruyas and a servant have stopped and taken off their hats. Every hat in the picture is off, Courbet's included, but his hangs at his side while Bruyas holds his out and the servant bows his head. The arrangement caused trouble immediately, because the painter is the one being received.
Painting
A close view of a woman's torso and genitals, cropped at the thighs and below the shoulders, lying on a white sheet. Gustave Courbet painted it in 1866 for a private client and it stayed in private hands for well over a century. It reached the Musée d'Orsay in 1995, from the estate of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and is a small canvas: 46.3 by 55.4 centimetres.
Painting
Courbet sits at his easel in the middle of a crowded studio, painting a landscape, with a naked woman standing behind him and a small boy watching. The jury of the 1855 Universal Exhibition refused it, so he built a shed nearby at his own expense, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and showed it himself. He gave the picture a subtitle: a real allegory summing up seven years of his artistic life.
Painting
Two men break stones at the side of a road: an old man kneeling with a hammer and a young one carrying a basket of rock. Gustave Courbet showed it at the Salon of 1850 alongside A Burial at Ornans, and it became the picture people pointed to when they argued about Realism. It no longer exists. The painting was destroyed in February 1945, during the war, and only photographs survive.
Met · 1859–1865
The painter Henri Fantin-Latour brought Whistler into the circle of Courbet, the leader of the Realists — the movement that insisted painting show ordinary contemporary life at the scale once reserved for history. In 1865 the two worked side by side at Trouville on the Normandy coast.
Courbet supplied two things Pissarro kept: ordinary working people as a subject worth the largest canvas, and the example of showing outside the Salon when the Salon would not have you.
Courbet knew the young Monet in the 1860s and encouraged him, and the scale and frankness of the Realist canvases are behind Monet's early figure paintings.
A French painter, born at Ornans in 1819 and died in exile in Switzerland in 1877. He led the Realist movement, which held that painters should show ordinary contemporary life rather than history, myth or religion, and he painted village funerals and road labourers at the enormous scale previously reserved for battles and coronations.
A Burial at Ornans, finished in 1850. It is 3.1 metres high and 6.6 metres wide and shows about fifty people from his home town standing around an open grave. Critics complained that the figures were ugly and that the picture had no subject, which was close to what Courbet intended.
A wooden shed Courbet built on the avenue Montaigne in 1855, next to the official art exhibition of the Paris world's fair, after the jury refused his painting The Painter's Studio. He hung forty of his own works in it and sold tickets. It was the first full one-man exhibition mounted in opposition to an official Salon, and every independent show since follows from it.
Because of the Vendôme Column. He had petitioned in 1870 for the bronze column in the Place Vendôme to be taken down as a monument to war, and when the Paris Commune pulled it down in May 1871 he was held responsible. He served six months in prison, and in 1873 the government billed him 323,000 francs for rebuilding it, payable at 10,000 francs a year for life. He fled to Switzerland that July.
A painting of 1866, a close view of a woman's torso and genitals, commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey. It stayed in private hands for more than a century, at one point owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who kept it behind a sliding panel. It entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1995.
Of liver disease at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva on 31 December 1877, aged fifty-eight. He had been drinking heavily and suffering from dropsy, the fluid retention that comes with liver failure. He died the day before the first payment on the Vendôme Column was due.
Influenced
Courbet supplied two things Pissarro kept: ordinary working people as a subject worth the largest canvas, and the example of showing outside the Salon when the Salon would not have you.
Influenced
Courbet knew the young Monet in the 1860s and encouraged him, and the scale and frankness of the Realist canvases are behind Monet's early figure paintings.
Met · 1859–1865
The painter Henri Fantin-Latour brought Whistler into the circle of Courbet, the leader of the Realists — the movement that insisted painting show ordinary contemporary life at the scale once reserved for history. In 1865 the two worked side by side at Trouville on the Normandy coast.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Gustave Courbet and their work.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gustave Courbet page.
Account of the column's destruction and of Courbet's part in it.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gustave Courbet page.
Swiss heritage site on his years at La Tour-de-Peilz and his death there.
Reference article cross-checked for the dates, the paintings, the Commune trial and the exile.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gustave Courbet page.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Gustave Courbet. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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