Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace, is near the beautiful valley of the
Doubs River, and it was here as a boy, and later as a man, that he
absorbed the love of landscape.
He was by nature a revolutionary, a
man born to oppose existing order and to assert his independence; he had
that quality of bluster and brutality which makes the revolutionary
count in art as well as in politics. In both directions his spirit of
revolt manifested itself. He went to Paris to study art, yet he did not
attach himself to the studio of any of the prominent masters. Already in
his country home he had had a little instruction in painting, and
preferred to study the masterpieces of the Louvre. At first his pictures
were not sufficiently distinctive to arouse any opposition, and were
admitted to the Salon. Then followed the Funeral at Ornans, which the
critics violently assailed: “A masquerade funeral, six metres long, in
which there is more to laugh at than to weep over.” Indeed, the real
offence of Courbet’s pictures was that they represented live flesh and
blood. They depicted men and women as they really are and realistically
doing the business in which they are engaged. His figures were not men
and women deprived of personality and idealised into a type, posed in
positions that will decorate the canvas. He advocated painting things as
they are, and proclaimed that la vérité vraie must be the aim of the
artist. So at the Universal Exposition of 1855 he withdrew his pictures
from the exhibition grounds and set them in a wooden booth, just outside
the entrance. Over the booth he posted a sign with large lettering. It
read, simply: “Courbet – Realist.” Like every revolutionary, he was an
extremist. He ignored the fact that to every artist the truth of nature
appears under a different guise according to his way of seeing and
experiencing. Instead, he adhered to the notion that art is only a
copying of nature and not a matter also of selection and arrangement. In
his contempt for prettiness Courbet often chose subjects which may
fairly be called ugly. But that he also had a sense of beauty may be
seen in his landscapes. That sense, mingled with his capacity for deep
emotion, appears in his marines – these last being his most impressive
work. Moreover, in all his works, whether attractive or not to the
observer, he proved himself a powerful painter, painting in a broad,
free manner, with a fine feeling for colour, and with a firmness of
pigment that made all his representations very real and stirring.
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