Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819-77) was born in Ornans, in eastern France. After a sound education, that included studies at the college of fine arts at Besanton, Courbet moved to Paris in 1841 to study. When he decided instead to become a painter his parents, who were well-to-do farmers, promised to support him. Courbet was then free to undertake his own education in painting by copying the masterpieces at the Louvre. At 25 he had a painting accepted by the Paris Salon of 1844. But in the following years his unacademic style was repeatedly rejected by official taste. In 1848, when the Revolution established the Second Empire, Courbet was strongly affected by the new liberal political atmosphere. While visiting Ornans in 1849 he produced two paintings, The Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans, that made him famous and initiated a new realist style in painting.

The exhibition of these two paintings at the Salon of 1850 caused a scandal that made Courbet's reputation as the leader of a new realism. In The Stonebreakers Courbet depicted an older man and a boy working at preparing rock for the paving of a highway. He showed the two figures, their faces hidden, working against the background of a dark hillside amidst the piles of rough rock. They are "absorbed in their task, faceless and anonymous, dulled by the relentless, numbingly repetitive task" (Cole and Gealt 238). The presentation of such a scene of unrelieved misery was a deliberate break with "artistic propriety" in whi

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Category: Arts - G