Gustave Courbet was a famous French artist and the founder of Realist painting. He deliberately broke artistic conventions by painting monumental canvases of peasant life and refusing to work for the government. Eccentric and arrogant, Courbet made provocation his favorite artistic method. Read on to learn more about Gustave Courbet’s most famous artworks.
1. Gustave Courbet’s Masterpiece: “A Burial at Ornans” (1849-50)
The most famous and scandalous work of Gustave Courbet was a quintessential expression of Courbet’s artistic principles and the prejudices of his contemporaries. For years, Courbet’s work was the subject of not just criticism but bitter and mean ridicule. However, the tone of such commentaries and the aspects that the critics highlighted said much more about them than about the artist.
Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in the small town of Ornans, located close to the Swiss border. His family belonged to local provincial elites since his father was a rather affluent farmer. Aged 21, Courbet, encouraged by his family, moved to Paris to study art. However, instead of enrolling in an art school, he took several lessons from independent teachers and mostly taught himself by copying works from the Louvre. Although his painting career took place mainly in Paris, Gustave Courbet was always a deeply provincial artist who felt more comfortable in Ornans than in the capital. The town’s inhabitants including his family members frequently modeled his works.
A Burial at Ornans was an enormously large canvas (more than 21 square meters), which fit more than 40 figures, all of which were later identified by researchers. The crowd included Courbet’s sisters and parents, the wife of one of the workers featured in the painting Stone Breakers, local businessmen and winemakers. The only figure who could not possibly attend the funeral was the artist’s grandfather who passed away a year before the work started. Initially, Courbet did not want to paint low-level priests, but friends told him that the clergymen were sincerely upset by their exclusion.
The painting’s reception in Paris turned into a full-blown scandal. The affluent crowd of Parisian critics and collectors barely ever contacted the provincial public and thus did not recognize them as they were. Critics described the painting as a freak show or a procession of beggars dressed in rags, not realizing these were actually respectable people. Many of them wore fashions from previous decades or even centuries, which was ridiculous for Parisians. They were scandalized by the way these people dressed and looked, and most of all, they could not believe that the artist decided to paint this ugly crowd on such a large scale.
In Courbet’s time, large canvases were reserved for honorable subjects like history paintings or battle scenes, certainly not for scenes showing provincial funerals. Peasants and provincials were normally painted on small, neat canvases, always idealized to the point of fantasy and with an indispensable hint of pity. Rich and educated art patrons and critics felt sorry for the poor crowd outside of the capital but did not express any genuine interest in their lives.
Courbet’s work was neither a romantic fantasy nor an anthropological study of the poor. It was a loud manifestation of belonging, a gesture of not asking for a place in popular culture but boldly carving it for himself and his people. It was a gesture of love and solidarity, both personal and political.
2. Stone Breakers (1849)
Gustave Courbet had a unique photographic memory that allowed him to memorize scenes in their entirety and re-enact them in painting without using models. During a carriage ride, he briefly saw two stone breakers along the road and was shocked by the pure view of crushing poverty. Stone breaking was tedious and exhausting work: men had to break large stones with hammers so that small fragments could be used to pave the roads. In his political views, Courbet was an anarchist and felt a deep connection to the poor workers. His choice to paint those figures was a political manifesto, expressing his disdain for normative painting subjects.
Unfortunately, the story of Courbet’s important work is impossible to separate from the story of its tragic demise. Since 1909, the painting has been housed in the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden. In February 1945, the Allied forces bombed the city. The Germans tried to evacuate the workers, but the trucks moving away from the city were also attacked. Stone Breakers became one of 500 works of art lost during the bombings. Courbet also painted a smaller mirrored version of the work that is still held in a private museum in Switzerland.
3. Jo, The Beautiful Irishwoman (1866)
The Irish model Joanna Hiffernan was famous as an amateur painter, manager, and partner of James McNeill Whistler. She appeared in many of his works as thin and elegant, almost ethereal. However, while Whistler was away in Chile, she traveled to Paris and, most likely, had an affair with Courbet. Courbet was the only other artist who painted Joanna, yet his depiction differed radically. In his works, Jo is a strong, muscular peasant woman, as Courbet’s beauty ideal embodies natural force and health.
According to some versions, Joe was also Courbet’s model for the infamous The Origin of the World painting. She also appeared in another scandalous painting, Sleep, that featured a lesbian couple.
4. The Painter’s Studio (1854-55)
As if the reputation of A Burial at Ornans was not enough, in 1855, Courbet created an even larger work titled The Artist’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life was a complex set of allegories and real figures that somehow impacted Courbet’s art and the way of thinking. On the left side of the canvas, he painted the people of his native Ornans. On the right, we can see his friends and colleagues, including the writer George Sand, poet Charles Baudelaire, anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and others. The central spot was occupied by the artist himself, a young boy in peasant clothing (possibly an allegory of Courbet’s pure artistic vision) and a nude model. Apart from being a reference to Courbet’s scandalous nudes, this figure might be interpreted as a metaphor for the truth in Courbet’s realist art.
The same year, Courbet submitted 14 of his paintings, including The Painter’s Studio and A Burial at Ornans, to be exhibited at the Exposition Universelle 1955. Three paintings, including those mentioned, were rejected due to their enormous size. Outraged, Courbet took the matter into his own hands (although he did not withdraw his accepted works from the show). He constructed his own exhibition pavilion, called it The Pavilion of Realism, and asked art collectors who had bought his paintings to temporarily loan them. Courbet exhibited around 40 paintings without a governmental permit, which was then necessary. He even published a catalog that featured his Realist Manifesto.
The Pavillion once again became a target for ridicule and criticism. The public was outraged by the seemingly crude art, and newspapers and critics made no attempt to clarify Coubet’s ideas. Only decades later, the art world realized how innovative Courbet’s work was. He created it at a time when traditional canons of painting and popular understanding of art were dying in agony, desperately needing a new solution.
5. Gustave Courbet’s “The Desperate Man” (1843-45)
Despite his reputation and the aggressive backlash of the press, Courbet was not underappreciated as he liked people to think. Some collectors appreciated his work and were ready to finance his provocative projects, including his own pavilion at the 1855 Exposition Universelle. Eugene Delacroix was utterly astonished by his work, and he criticized the Exposition for missing out on the most progressive artists of their time. Despite all the mockery, Courbet’s artistic skill was hard to dismiss.
Still, being appreciated was never part of Courbet’s plan. His public image and performative antagonism were parts of his art. He could have become a widely appreciated and celebrated artist in his lifetime. Before the scandalous pavilion opening, representatives of Napoleon III approached him and offered to commission a large-scale painting. They offered an unprecedented deal: Courbet would choose the subject matter of the painting and would only have to present his sketch to the French officials and artistic colleagues. Normally, the government controlled every aspect of their commissions, so the extent of creative freedom offered to Courbet was unimaginable. Outraged by the mere thought of waiting for someone’s approval, he refused and once again cemented his reputation as an arrogant enfant terrible protesting against any possible rule.
His famous self-portrait, The Desperate Man, can be read as a similar gesture. In a way, Courbet was conceptually closer to the artists of the late 20th century who made provocation central to their work. Courbet did not paint himself as he was but created an emotional and exaggerated portrait of a romantic madman, insane in his dramatic honesty and purity of heart.
