Research - Realism: Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819-77)

Courbet was the main exponent of Realism in 19th-century French painting. His work contrasts with the Classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix. He relied on the use of the palette knife to create heavily impastoed surfaces, as if to stress his disdain for the fine finish of academic practice. Courbet was born at Ornans in eastern France and received his early training in Besançon. In Paris from 1840, he studied especially the Dutch and Venetian paintings in the Louvre. He exhibited at the Salon in 1844, but public and official favour later deserted him. His mature works often treat genre subjects on the grand scale of history painting, as in his ambitious painting of his studio. After this was turned down by the Exposition Universelle in 1855, he held a one-man exhibition establishing his position as a Realist. (National Gallery Website)

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1851 Oil on canvas, 3.15 m x 6.6 m

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 
Analysis of the painting

Content

A Burial at Ornans is a huge, frieze-like portrayal of sombre middle-class citizens at a graveside in Courbet's home town. It generated an explosive reaction among the painter's audience and critics. With few exceptions, viewers react to the work as an assault on the very idea of what a painting should be. With the recent worker uprisings of 1848 , Courbet's use of the “common” people as a grand subject was deemed a radical act -- "the engine of revolution," as one critic said.

Form and process

In his push towards a realistic style, Courbet has intentionally painted his black-clad folk in a manner that does not idealise their suffering. They are real people. The Salon audience is accustomed to paintings that uplift, and they read Courbet's grieving figures as vulgar and ugly. One critic writes, "He paints pictures as you black your boots."

Energy

Courbet wrote that his aims were to "translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation; in a word, to create living art, that is my goal." Many art historians view Courbet's determination toward artistic freedom as an important rupture with the Salon-controlled painting of the past (grand historical mythological, religious paintings), and an inspiration to the next generation of innovators, the Impressionists. His work does not have the high finish of the usual type of salon paintings of the time, and reflects the subject matter of his genre scenes.

Culture

Courbet was a rebel and bohemian. He was the first painter to sponsor his own, self-financed exhibitions. His support for the poor and oppressed ran contrary to French politics. Near the end of his life, in the 1870s, he was jailed briefly for his association with the Paris Commune.

Relevance to my work.

Realism forms the basis for many movements and styles which are relevant to my approach. It is at the heart of Industrial and Social Realism, for instance, L.S.Lowry, whose work I shall be looking at in future research and posts.