Courbet / Segolene Le Men

Includes bibliographical references and index

When Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) began his career in the late 1840s, French painting was dominated by two competing styles: neoclassicism, exemplified by Ingres,and romanticism, exemplified by Delacroix. Courbet, a dynamic and boundlessly self-confident man, proud of his rural origins and guided by his strong Republican beliefs,quickly established a third way. Rejecting the historical and literary subjects of the prevailing styles as too remote from actual experience, Courbet instead depicted scenes of everyday life, particularly among the peasants and the working class, with a naturalism then considered shocking. His paint handling was correspondingly direct: disdaining equally the idealized contours and cool tones of the neoclassicists and the expressive line of the romantics, he laid on his colors almost roughly, often with a palette knife instead of a brush. While Courbet's brand of realism bears a family resemblance to those of his contemporaries Daumier and Millet, its scope is much broader: his masterworks range from the Burial at Ornans (1850), a heroically scaled depiction of a villager's funeral, to the very different Origin of the World (1866), a detailed close-up of the female anatomy, and he also painted many straight landscapes, portraits, and stilllifes.

English