Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1848-9, oil on canvas, 45 x 37 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France, Photo in Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Gustave Courbet
French Realist Painter
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born on June 10, 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans, France. The charismatic leader of the Realist Movement rejected the artificiality of Neoclassical art and the prevailing Romantic style, preferring to present the lives of country bourgeoisie and peasants as well as landscapes and seascapes. In his Realist Manifesto, Courbet wrote that he endeavored “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal.” His rough and loose style of brushwork matched his direct approach to subject matter.
Courbet was an anarchist and spent the last years of his life in exile in Switzerland after he was imprisoned for destroying the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Napoleonic authority, during the Paris Commune in 1871. He died on December 31, 1877.
