Gustave Courbet: 11 works

'Courbet's emulation of Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch masters put him at odds with his most powerful contemporaries in the French Academy, for whom the idealizing art of the Italian Renaissance was paradigmatic. Courbet's relentless and outspoken disregard for academic principles, and the example of paintings like this Rembrandtesque portrait of a Dutch tradesman, quickly set the stage for a sweeping revolution in mid-nineteenth-century art.'

'He saw the basis of Realism as "the denial of the ideal," the rejection of established classical subjects and a refined style. He chose instead, to paint only what he could see.'

'Consider the passage below, in which Courbet conveys the character of the sea in a letter to Victor Hugo dated November 28, 1864: "The Sea! The sea with its charms saddens me.'

'Late in life he wrote to a friend: "I still have Jo ́s portrait that I will never sell and that everyone admires" and he remembered the pleasant times they had together at Trouville when Jo would entertain them with Irish songs. Courbet also painted Jo as one of two erotic nudes in The Sleepers (Petit Palais, Paris).'

'He was the first to be accused of "dirty painting," an accusation that was later to be levelled at his successors like Max Liebermann. Courbet painted numerous landscapes, most frequently depicting the chalk cliffs of the Jura mountains and the river valley of the Loue near where he was born in Ornans.'

'Galvanized by the success of Cabanel's "Birth of Venus" (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) at the Salon of 1863, Courbet sought to challenge the French Academy on its own terms with a painting of a nude that would be accepted by the increasingly rigid--and arbitrary--Salon jury. His first attempt, in 1864, was rejected on the grounds of indecency; however two years later, his "Woman with a Parrot" was accepted for the Salon of 1866.'

'The Gust of Wind--Gustave Courbet's largest canvas devoted solely to landscape--was commissioned to decorate a room in the grand Parisian house of the Duke de Bojano.'

'His tricks of the trade notwithstanding, Courbet's originality is evident in his economical and confident brushwork, which, in tandem with his use of a palette knife, suggests delicate textures like grass or leaves and rough ones like stone strata. With Courbet's "art for art's sake" emphasis on the physical qualities of paint, works like Roe Deer at a Stream inspired several generations of modern landscape artists, from Cézanne to Picasso and Matisse.'

'Fascinated by the raging ocean, he sought to capture the power of the rapid, elusive and continuous rolling motion of its swells. Tirelessly painting the same motifs, he created the concept of "series" before Monet and the Impressionists.Courbet spent the summer of 1869 in Étretat, a small fishing village nestled in a valley flanked by striking chalk cliffs.'

'We suddenly understand the admiration that the future Impressionists felt for Courbet's light and freedom. Courbet sent The Etretat Cliffs after the Storm and The Stormy Sea to the Salon of 1870.'

'Just as Kleist once described the Monk by the Sea, so too Cézanne described Courbet's Wave with an equal degree of understanding: "... the one in Berlin is wonderful, one of the wonders of this century, with much greater movement, much more tension, a more poisonous green and a dirtier orange than the one here (Musée du Louvre, Paris), with the foamy surf of the tide, which comes up from out of the depths of eternity, its ragged sky and its pallid precision.'