Gustave Courbet, the Realist

Gustave Courbet, the Realist

Let’s first begins with who Jean Desire Gustave Courbet was. Gustave Courbet was a famous French painter. Courbet was born in Ornans, France on June 10th of 1819. Ornans, France is a filled with forests and pasture’s perfect for realist paintings. At the age of 14 Courbet was already in art training receiving lessons from Pere Baud a former student of a neo-classical painter named Baron Gros. Courbet’s parents hoped he would go off and study law when he moved out in 1837. To there misfortune he had enrolled in at the art academy. At the art academy Courbet received lessons from Flajoulot another famous neo-classicist. At twenty years old Gustave Courbet went to Paris, the European center for art, political, and radical activists. It was about this time Courbet had started to study in the studio of the obscure painter M. Steuben.

Courbet’s art was considered realism. Realism in art is basically taking every day acts and people and putting it on the canvas (ie: paint, drawing). This was Courbet’s specialty. Gustave Courbet has painted many painting. A few of his most famous was “Wounded Man” which he painted in 1847, and was heavily rejected by the salon. A few of his other famous paintings was “After Dinner at Ornans”, “Funeral at Ornans”, and “Stonebreakers”. This is only a few of his many famous paintings. Between 1841 and 1847 only three of the twenty-five pieces he submitted were approved and passed by the selection committee of the salon. The first ten years he was out on his own he sold almost no painting and made almost no money, thus he relied on his family to send him money to help support him with his artwork. Somewhere in this time period Gustave Courbet met a young lady named Virginia Binet whom little is known about except that she was his mistress and bore him a son in 1847.

When 1848 rolled around a Dutch art dealer viewed one of Gustave’s pieces and invited him to Holland to make a deal. It was about this time Courbet was getting excited and felt his big breakthrough was coming very soon. A new art school was being formed with Jean Desire Gustave Courbet as the head of it. The school was named Brasserie Andler and quickly nicknamed “The Temple of Realism”. The Brasserie was the first place to coin the term “realism” to describe a style of art and literature and philosophy. At this time Gustave Courbet was beco...

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...and, Belgium, and England. Courbet then became a member of the Commune. Courbet proceeded to help destroy the column in the Place Vendome which was a monument to Napoleon’s Victories. When the Commune failed Gustave Courbet was arrested and sentenced to six months of prison and a fine of 500 francs. His sentence began in September of 1871 but due to illness he was released earlier only to be handed over to a clinic at Neuilly. In 1872 his luck didn’t get any better and his son died. To add to all the frustration and misfortune in May of 1873 the new government ordered Courbet to pay for reconstruction of the Vendome Column. The cost tallied over 300,000 francs. He then fleas from France to Switzerland. Jean Desire Gustave Courbet died on the last day of 1877. In 1919 his remains were transported to a cemetery in Ornans.

Gustave Courbet was considered the realist of his day because he basically founded the form of art “Realism”. He went out on a limb to create these masterpieces that in the beginning no one liked. He stuck true to what he believed and kept on painting his “realistic” paintings. He then made it big and was a celebrity, only later to be arrested and thrown in prison.