Gustave Courbet. Georges Riat
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C… (Poetic Essays, by Max B…, with illustrations by Gust. C…) published in Besançon in 1839. The poet Max Buchon, who came from Salins, thus launched his first book, with the assistance of the person who was to become one of his best friends. Buchon was later the author of Matachin, a collection of poetry and stories from Franche-Comté written with a saucy realism, who had the good fortune to impress Buloz, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes.
Yet it was painting which called out to Courbet. Little by little, he forsook the path to the Academy for that leading to Art School. There he continued to meet, with increasing pleasure, the excellent Flajoulot who, although less modest than Father Beau, treated him with as much kindness. He was a follower of David, and called himself the king of drawing. It was not long before he nicknamed his pupil the king of colour. He gave Courbet a solid foundation in drawing; the artist’s stroke is clean, precise, delicate and expressive, and it was with great skill that his pencil, occasionally highlighted with firmly applied colours, analysed the life models at Flajoulot’s studio. Courbet’s drawings of eyes, legs, hands, feet, muscles, noses, ears, women’s torsos and breasts, soft and full, leave no doubt in this regard.
At about the same time Courbet did some small primitive paintings that do not show the same originality. These are landscapes from Ornans or the surrounding area; lively, grey, with blue skies, small in size and minute in detail, with a touching degree of good intentions, effort, and childishness. These include The Grape Harvest under the Roche du Mont, Chalimand Fields, Grandfather Oudot’s House, The Mill Road, The Entrance to Ornans, The Loue Valley in Stormy Weather and Montgesoye Islands, with poplars, willows on a hillock, and the artist, observing the scene, with his gun under his arm…
The inventory of all these works makes it obvious that the study of philosophy was gradually being abandoned. Did Courbet pass or fail the examination that he was studying for with so little interest? It would seem that he did not even sit it. He went home to Ornans for the summer holidays, and brought his father round to the idea of letting him go to Paris under the pretext of studying law.
Before he left, he delighted in exploring his beloved countryside, engraving its image forever on his memory. He gazed upon it once again with a filial affection, his sense of observation and his emotions quickened by the knowledge that he was soon to leave it. He carried these scenes of nature away with him, both the sweet and rough elements drawn and painted on his heart; as yet unaware of the immense importance they would have in his future artistic life.
I. The Beginnings
Paris and the First Salons
4. Portrait of the Artist, known as Mad with Fear, 1848 (?).
Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 60.5 × 50.5 cm.
Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst Arkitektur og Design, Oslo.
The First Exhibitions in Paris
However excited Courbet must have been on his arrival in Paris, one can easily imagine that it was not long before pangs of homesickness set in. He tried to improve his spirits by visiting compatriots from Franche-Comté, either relatives or friends, who consoled him as best they could. Relations with his cousin Oudot, the professor at the School of Law, soon became strained; he was no doubt disappointed that the young man should so quickly give up a career in the law for painting. Courbet’s life was humble and uncomplicated. He seems to have taken lodgings for quite some time in a hotel, located at number 28 in the rue de Bucy, but the place was short on creature comforts, and Courbet wrote urgently to ask that sheets, a blanket, a pad and a mattress be sent from Ornans.
Soon, in a letter of the 24th of December 1842, he announced to his parents that he had finally found a studio, at 89, rue de la Harpe; “It is a fine room with a wooden floor and a high ceiling, which will be warm in winter; the studio is upstairs, on the courtyard, and has two windows, one looking out on the courtyard, and the other in the roof.”
From then on he spent long and fruitful hours visiting the galleries of the Louvre. Francis Wey relates in his Mémoires inédits (Unpublished Memoirs) that the fine fellow of a painter, François Bonvin, whose conscientious talent has not yet been properly appreciated, acted as a guide for his young friend.
Courbet was instinctively drawn to the masters who best exemplified the as yet unfocused ideas developing within him. He had no use for the Italian school. Later, Théophile Silvestre, recording a conversation that he had just had with the master, said that Courbet called Titian and Leonardo da Vinci “frauds”. As for Raphael, he conceded that he might have done a “few portraits that were interesting,” the works nevertheless “show no thought,” and that is why, no doubt, continued Courbet, “our so-called idealists adore them.” It is quite likely that he did actually say these things. But one must not give too much importance to these witticisms, which smack of an artist out to shock the critics, who were always the painter’s bête noir, and the bourgeoisie for whom he showed a profound scorn, as did many artists of his time.
In his disapproval of the Italian school, he made an exception for the Venetians; Veronese, and among others, Domenico Feti and Canaletto. Did he study the techniques of the Bolognese artists: the Carracci, Caravaggio or Guercino? Everything points to their influence on him having been exaggerated. He particularly admired, and studied, the great realists such as Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Van Ostade, Holbein, and, first and foremost, Rembrandt, who “beguiles the intelligent, but bewilders and overwhelms the slow-witted.”
5. Portrait of the Artist, known as The Desperate Man, 1844–1845.
Oil on canvas, 45 × 54 cm.
Private collection.
From this period and these preoccupations date Head of a Young Girl, Florentine Pastiche, executed in the Florentine manner; a Fantastical Landscape with Anthropomorphic Rocks, after the Flemish; a Portrait of the Artist, in the manner of the Venetians and copies of the works of Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Van Dyck, and Velázquez.
When not at the Louvre, Courbet was hard at work in his studio, painting studies or portraits. He also went frequently to the atelier de Suisse, where he drew from life models without supervision, and where he did a great many studies which he used later in his paintings of nudes.
It has been said that Courbet was a student of the very academic Baron von Steuben and Auguste Hesse. In fact, he went only three or four times to the former’s studio, and then only to make fun of what was being done there. As for the latter, Courbet himself refused to admit such a relationship; fundamentally, he had had only himself for a teacher, and the most abiding effort in his life was devoted to preserving his independence.
His production during these first four years in Paris is varied and contradictory, revealing the conflict of ideas going on in his mind, and through which slowly and unconsciously his individual aesthetic was being developed. In the “classical” style, there is Ruins Beside a Lake (1839), Monk in a Cloister (1840), both of which are fairly mediocre compositions; Man Saved from Love by Death, an allegorical composition showing Death carrying off a woman whom Courbet himself, on the other side, is trying to hold back, an “amorous whimsy” which the author made fun of and later painted over, and a very affected Odalisque, which he painted after reading Victor Hugo. There are also landscapes, which already reveal qualities of observation and colour. These include Landscape with the Roche Founèche, with the Salins road at the bottom, and Ornans huddled on the bank of the river Loue; Views of the Forest of Fontainebleau, executed after a brief visit there in 1841; Wooded Landscape in Winter (1842) and Hunting Blind, “a studio landscape,” as he himself called this canvas, to ridicule this illogical practice (1843).
But it was his portraits that most clearly foretold the great artist to come. In particular, the portraits of his sisters. From this period on, he also used himself as a model. He has been much derided in this regard, and Théophile Silvestre, in the Catalogue de la Galerie Bruyas, went so far as to say that the soul of Narcissus lived on in Courbet. To be sure he viewed himself favourably,