Gustave Courbet

born Ornans, Franche-Comté 1819, died La Tour de Peilz, Switzerland 1877

Courbet went to Paris in 1839, ostensibly to study law. He spent time at the Académie Suisse but should be considered self-taught, having spent much time in the Louvre learning from the old masters, particularly the Dutch, Venetian and Spanish schools.

His submissions to the Salon in the early 1850s, such as Burial at Ornans (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), gave rise to controversy because of their use of everyday subject matter on a heroic scale. In 1855 he erected his Pavilion of Realism within the grounds of the Universal Exposition, a move that impressed younger artists for its independence from official sanction. In it he showed 40 paintings and two drawings and accompanied them with a Realist manifesto; these actions made him the chief proponent of Realist painting.

After this time his art became less polemic, and he painted more nudes, portraits and landscapes. Critic Edmond About explained that Courbet 'affects not to choose, but to paint all that he meets, without preferring one thing before another [...] His theory may be thus given: all objects are equal before painting' (Nos Artistes au Salon de 1857).

Courbet, like many other artists, painted on the Normandy coast, first going to Le Havre in 1859, where he met Eugène Boudin. Courbet's involvement with the Paris Commune and his alleged role in the destruction of the Vendôme Column led him to move to Switzerland in 1873.

Source: Monet and the Impressionists exhibition catalogue:
Shackelford, George T M. Monet and the Impressionists.
Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008

Works by Gustave Courbet in the exhibition

Landscape with stag  1873, Gustave Courbet.
Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of New South Wales; purchased 1997