Paintings from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of^elg
lum
and American Collection
[This blank page deliberately inserted by Boston College Digital Libraries staff to preserve the openings of the
analog book.]
COURBET
MAPPING
REALISM
Paintings from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
and American Collections
Edited by Jeffery Howe
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press
This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Courbet: Mapping Realism; Paintings from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and American Collections at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, September 1-December 8, 2013.
Organized by the McMullen Museum and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Courbet: Mapping Realism has been curated by Jeffery Ffowe and Dominique Marechal. The exhibition has been underwritten by Boston College, the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, the Newton College Class of 1968, and the Newton College Class of 1973.
MCMULLEN MUSEUM
mm BOSTON COLLEGE
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935930 ISBN: 978-1-892850-21-8
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Printed in the United States of America
© 2013 by McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Flill, MA 02467
Book designer: John McCoy Copyeditor: Kate Shugert
Cover: Gustave Courbet {l2>l9-77) , Jura Landscape, 1869. Oil on canvas, 59.7 x 73.3 cm. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum Appropriation Fund, by exchange and Walter FI. Kimbell Fund (43.571). Photo: Erik Gould.
CONTENTS
Preface 5
Nancy Netzer
Realist Manifesto 7
Gustave Courbet
Courbet: Mapping Realism 9
Jeffery Howe
Realism: From Z/KfiVGT/?r TO 21
Jean-Philippe Huys and Dominique Marechal
Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet 29
Dominique Marechal
The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet 39
Claude Cernuschi
Courbet’s Quarry: Paintings of the Hunt 67
Katherine Nahum
Inside Out: Courbet and the Challenge of Realist Landscape 77
Jeffery Howe
Plates 85
Contributors 135
Index 137
Preface
Courbet: Mapping Realism brings together important works of the leading French realist painter Gustave Courbet and his contemporaries in Belgium and America. This project builds on a relationship of long standing between a distinguished professor of art history at Boston Col- lege, Jeffery Howe, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, which first bore fruit in a collaboration between that institution and the McMullen Museum in the exhibition Fernand Khnopff: Inner Visions and Landscapes in 2004. Dominique Marechal, curator of nineteenth-century art at the Royal Museums, and Jean-Philippe Huys, a researcher at the Centre international pour I’Etude du XIX*^ siecle in Brussels, consulted with Howe in 2010 and invited him to contribute to the catalogue for the exhibition Gustave Courbet and Belgium, which they were organiz- ing for 2013 at the Royal Museums. Because Courbet’s paintings were coveted by Boston collectors and influenced many local painters, dis- cussions quickly turned to the exhibition’s traveling to the McMullen, where Howe proposed to expand its scope with loans from this side of the Atlantic to “map” Courbet’s influence in America. Howe then led a second curatorial initiative that aimed to expand knowledge of Courbet as leader of the realist movement in America. Two art historians at Boston College, professors Claude Cernuschi and Katherine Nahum, joined the team, agreeing to contribute essays in addition to those by Marechal and Huys for the present volume, which examines the relationship between the artist’s reception and influence in Belgium and America.
To Jeffery Howe we owe our greatest debt of gratitude for master- minding the McMullen exhibition and its catalogue. We also extend special thanks to Dominique Marechal for serving as the exhibition’s co-curator. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Director Michel Draguet, Head of Exhibitions Sophie van Vliet, and Registrar Valerie Haerden supported the idea, and contributed valuable expertise as the project progressed. Boston College alumnus William Vareika and his wife Alison, of William Vareika Eine Arts in Newport, Rhode Island, shared their knowledge and helped with securing paintings by Courbet and American artists in private collections.
At the McMullen Museum, Assistant Director Diana Earsen designed the galleries to tell the parallel stories of Courbet’s influence in Belgium and America. Assistant Director John McCoy designed this book and the exhibition’s graphics to reflect nineteenth-century Erench bookmak- ing. Publications and Exhibitions Administrator Kate Shugert organized loans and photography. She copyedited with extraordinary discernment the essays in this publication and, with John McCoy and Annie McEwen, compiled the index. Kerry Burke provided numerous photographs for the catalogue and the exhibition. Interns Erancesca Ealzone, Nathan Jones, Keith Eebel, and Emilie Sintobin helped with proofreading and loan pro- cessing. Anastos Chiavaras and Rose Breen from Boston College’s Office of Risk Management provided guidance regarding insurance. We are grateful to the University’s Advancement Office — especially James Hus- son, Thomas Eockerby, Catherine Concannon, Mary Eou Crane, and Kathy Kuy for help with funding.
Much of this exhibition has been drawn from the riches of private collections and institutions in the US. Eor assistance in identifying and obtaining these loans we thank friends and colleagues: Darcy E. Beyer
and John Treacy Beyer; Michael Conforti, Jennifer Harr, Mattie Kel- ley, Monique Ee Blanc, Teresa O’Toole, and Richard Rand (Sterling and Erancine Clark Art Institute); Thomas Colville (Thomas Colville Eine Art); Heather Haskell, Joanna Hanna, and Diane Waterhouse Barbarisi (Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Eine Arts); Anne Hawley, Elizabeth Reluga, Oliver Tostmann, and Amanda Venezia (Isabella Stew- art Gardner Museum); Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Mechnig; Thomas P. Camp- bell, Eisa Cain, Emily Eoss, and Susan Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art); John W. Smith, Tara Emsley, Sionan Guenther, and Maureen O’Brien (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design); Malcolm Rogers, Ronni Baer, Sue Bell, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Marietta Cambareri, Chris Hightower, and Kim Pashko (Museum of Pine Arts, Boston); Ali- son Oscar; Jock Reynolds, E. Eynne Addison, Elizabeth Aldred, Eawrence Kan ter, and David Whaples (Yale University Art Gallery) .
The McMullen could not have envisioned such a collaboration of international scope were it not for the continued generosity of the administration of Boston College and the McMullen family. We espe- cially thank Jacqueline McMullen; President William P. Eeahy, SJ; Eor- mer Provost Cutberto Garza; Interim Provost Joseph Quinn; Chancellor J. Donald Monan, SJ; Vice-Provost Patricia DeEeeuw; Dean of Arts and Sciences David Quigley, and Director of the Institute for Eiberal Arts Mary Crane. Major support for the exhibition was provided by the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, chaired by C. Michael Daley, the Newton College Class of 1968, and the Newton College Class of 1973. Publication of this volume is underwritten in part by the fund named in memory of our late, and much beloved, docent, Peggy Simons. To all mentioned above, our sincerest thanks.
Nancy Netzer
Director and Professor of Art History
5
Realist Manifesto
Gustave Courbet
The title of realist was imposed upon me as that of romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. In no time have titles provided an accu- rate view of things: if it were otherwise, works of art would be superflu- ous.
Without expounding on the greater or lesser accuracy of a designa- tion that none are bound, let us hope, to comprehend, I will restrict myself to a few words of elaboration to nip any misunderstandings in the bud.
I have studied, independent of any system or partisan spirit, the art of the ancients and moderns. I sought no more to imitate the one than to copy the other: neither was it my intention, for that matter, to reach the facile goal of “art for art’s sake.” No! I simply sought to mine from a thorough knowledge of tradition a rational and independent feeling of my own individuality.
What I had in mind was to understand my craft in order to practice it. To be in a position to translate the mores, ideas, the look of my era, according to my own estimation; not to be a painter only, but a man; in a word, to make a living art, that is my goal.
Gustave Courbet, “Manifeste du realisme,” preface to Exhibition et vente de 40 tableaux et 4 dessins de I’oeuvre de M. Gustave Courbet (Paris: Simon Ra9on, 1855), n.p. New translation by Claude Cernuschi and Jeffery Howe.
7
Courbet: Mapping Realism
Jeffery Howe
Mapmaking is a way of making order out of experience. We draw on paper to make maps of terrain, and create mental maps of our environ- ment. A map is an image based on measurements, memory, and imagi- nation. The overview provided by a map can reveal links between sites of importance and the distance that must be traveled between them. This exhibition expands our knowledge of Gustave Courbet’s career by revealing the importance of his frequent travels to Belgium, and the reception of his works in America reflects an expanded sphere of influence. The artworks shown in Courbet: Mapping Realism help us chart the legacy of realism in these two countries, and to further understand the nature of that moment in history. The best maps transcend individual viewpoints, which are often limited, by synthesizing the knowl- edge of many. The collaboration of the con- tributors to this catalogue constructs a map that is more than the sum of its parts.
lized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must break free from its very governments. The people have my sympathy. I must turn to them directly, I must get my knowledge from them, and they must provide me with a living. Therefore I have just embarked on the great wandering and independent life of a bohemian.”"^
The traveler was a free spirit, neither peasant nor bourgeois, and
a kind of evangelist for Courbet’s ideas of freedom and a new social order. His 1850 portrayal of Jean Journet in The Apostle Jean Journet Setting Out for the Conquest of Univer- sal Harmony, was intended to show the spread of Journet’s utopian Fourierist philosophy (flg. 2), and provided the model for Courbet’s self- portrait in The Meeting.
Pilgrims and Wanderers — Courbet as Mis- sionary
The image of the artist as a pilgrim or wanderer intent on discovering and observing the wonders of nature was a key trope in the romantic era, as seen in Caspar David Friedrich’s self-portrait as a Traveler Overlooking the Sea of Fog (1818, Hamburger Kun- sthalle). Although Gustave Courbet (1819-77) later claimed to have buried romanticism with his great and disturbing painting A Burial at Ornans (1849- 50, Musee d’Orsay, Paris), many of his early works were quite theatrical and overtly romantic, including dramatic self-portraits and a Faustian scene. Classical Walpurgis Night (1847, lost).' Even in 1854, he por- trayed himself as a pilgrim in search of patrons and natural wonders in the self-portrait The Meeting (flg.
1). This is a carefully staged and provocative work.
From the beginning, many have noted the inver- sion of social hierarchies displayed in The Meeting as the wealthy patron bows to the master painter.^
Underscoring the image of the artist as outsider,
Courbet based this work in part on popular prints of the mythic Wandering Jew.^ Claude Cernuschi’s essay, “The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet,” in this volume explores the issues raised by this and other works. Wandering and witnessing were not just metaphors for Courbet; his life and career were marked by explorations throughout France and beyond. In 1850, he wrote to his friend Francis Wey: “Yes, dear friend, even in our so civi-
1. Gustave Courbet, The Meeting; or, Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, 1854. Oil on canvas, 132 x 150.5 cm, Musee Fabre, Montpellier.
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2. Gustave Courbet, The Apostle Jean Journet, 1850. Lithograph, 37.5 x 27.3 cm (sheet). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum.
The Gospel of Realism
Courbet is known as the chief represen- tative of realism in the nineteenth century, although that term needs qualiflcation.^ Even his self-portraits are frequently performances reflecting a flctitious narrative, as Claude Cernuschi demonstrates. Courbet feigned reluctance to adopt the title in his “Real- ist Manifesto,” published on the occasion of his solo exhibition in competition with the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1855. He wrote: “The title of realist was imposed upon me as that of romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830.” He explained that his goal was simply to create a living, vital art true to his time:
I have studied, independent of any system or partisan spirit, the art of the ancients and mod- erns. I sought no more to imitate the one than to copy the other: neither was it my intention, for that matter, to reach the facile goal of “art for art’s sake.” No! I simply sought to mine from a thorough knowledge of tradition a rational and independent feeling of my own individuality.
What I had in mind was to understand my craft in order to practice it. To be in a position to translate the mores, ideas, the look of my era, according to my own estimation; not to be a painter only, but a man; in a word, to make a living art, that is my goal.'’
He insisted on authenticity in art and life, but his rejection of classical values led even sensitive critics such as Theophile Gautier to dub him “the Watteau of the Ugly.”^
Courbet’s audacity and uncompromising commitment to material truth were amply shown in The Bathers of 1853 (flg. 3). This image of a
9
Courbet: Mapping Realism
large woman seen from the rear as she leaves the water after bathing has attracted controversy ever since it was shown at the Salon of 1853, when the Emperor Napoleon III reportedly struck her on the rear with his riding crop, and the Princess Eugenie compared her bulk to one of Rosa Bonheur’s painted Percheron horses.^ The controversy over Courbet’s exhibit added to his notoriety as a rebel. This event also brought him a new patron, Alfred Bruyas of Montpel- lier, who purchased three works, including The Bathers — the first of many acquisitions.
Courbet’s image has little to do with the tradition of idealized nymphs bathing in forest scenes, although he may be mocking the fan- tasies of earlier romantic or rococo art. He is almost certainly not being disrespectful of the female figures; his taste for generously fleshed nudes was well known. The model for the nude bather has been identified as Henriette Bon- nion, who may have been one of Courbet’s mistresses, and who also posed for simi- lar photographs by Julien Valou de Ville- neuve.^ Courbet was naturally intrigued by the photographic image and its emerging claims for visual truth. Whether he worked from the photographs, or whether they were made after his work, is not known.
He often revised and combined earlier concepts as he constructed his paintings.
The landscape of The Bathers was based on an earlier study that Eugene Delacroix reported seeing in Courbet’s studio. Cour- bet added the figures, thus covering over an alternate unfinished version of The Man Mad with Fear (c. 1844-45, Nasjonalgal- leriet, Oslo).'^
Class divisions and a rage at perceived violations of decorum fueled much of the criticism of Courbet. His earthy bathers with their enigmatic gestures puzzled Dela- croix, who wrote in his Journal m 1853:
I was amazed at the strength and relief of his principal picture — but what a picture! What a subject to choose! [...] What are the two figures supposed to mean? A fat woman, backview, and completely naked except for a carelessly painted rag over the lower part of the buttocks, is stepping out of a little puddle scarcely deep enough for a foot-bath. She is making some meaningless gesture, and another woman, presumably her maid, is sit- ting on the ground taking off her shoes and stockings. You see her stockings; one of them, I think, is only half-removed. There seems to be some exchange of thought between the two figures, but it is quite unintelligible.'^
The gesture of the woman coming out of the water puzzled Delacroix, and it seems to be a kind of inversion of the noli mi tangere (do not touch me) gesture of Christ to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, perhaps adding a certain anti-clerical undertone to the image.
The charge of ugliness was frequently hurled at Courbet’s paintings of peasants and working class women; contemporary carica- tures repeatedly castigate his figures with dis- paraging terms about their class, hygiene, and even smell (figs. 4, 5).
In a letter addressed to the young artists of Paris in 1861, Courbet elaborated his aesthetic principles, stressing the need to be true to one’s own era, and to reject the invention of historic detail:
Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it. I hold that the artists of one cenmry are totally incapable of representing the things of a preceding or subsequent century, in other words, of painting the past or the future. It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. His- torical art is by nature contemporary.
Every ^e must have its artists, who give expression to it and reproduce it for the future.'^
The imagined worlds of academic classi- cism and romanticism were a sham, accord- ing to Courbet. He further insisted that the representation of abstractions and fantasies was beyond the scope of painting:
I also maintain that painting is an essen- tially concrete art form and can consist only of the representation of real and existing things. It is an entirely physical language that is composed, by way of words, of all visible objects. An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of paint- ing. Imagination in art consists of knowing how to find the most complete expression of an exist- ing thing, but never of inventing or creating the thing itself
In the name of truth, Courbet rejected the tradi- tional academic hierarchies of art, which elevated historical and religious art above the categories of “mere imitation” such as genre painting and still life. Beauty was to be found in nature, and presented directly and simply as it was found; his letter concludes:
Beauty is in nature and occurs in reality under the most varied aspects. As soon as one finds it.
3. Gustave Courbet, The Bathers, 1853. Oil on can- vas, 227 £ x 193 cm, Musee Fab re, Montpellier.
4. Honore Daumier, The Faces that Courbet Fellow Paints Are far too Vulgar. No One’s Really that Ugly!, Le Charivari, June 8, 1855.
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5. Cham, caricature of Courbet’s The Spinner, Le Charivari, May 29, 1853.
10
Jeffery Howe
it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who can see it. As soon as beauty is real and visible, it carries its artistic expression within itself. But the artist has no right to amplify that expression.
Courbet was widely seen, and often mocked, as the apostle of realism, garlanded with a halo of his own brushes (fig. 6) . In the popular press and in the eyes of his contemporaries, Courbet’s messianic pretensions were recognized. Charles Baudelaire used the phrase “Courbet saving the world” as a heading for some proposed notes on realism.
Courbet also worked through parables and extravagant gestures. When pressed to teach he finally agreed, but instead of professional mod- els brought a cow into his studio in Paris so his students would have direct contact with nature (fig. 7). This was yet another example of his chal- lenge to academic art and its teachings.
Real Allegories — The Path from Realism to Symbolism
Courbet’s most complex work is undoubt- edly the great canvas that he prepared for his Pavilion of Realism, which he set up as a one- person counter-exhibition opposite the official exhibition at the French Exposition Universelle of 1855. Titled The Painter’s Studio: A Real Alle- gory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artis- tic Life (fig. 8), this was as much a manifesto as his “Realist Manifesto,” which was issued on the occasion of this show. In this work, Cour- bet tried to demonstrate that his realist doc- trine did not preclude the presentation of ideas, even allegory, as long as the terms were based on his own observed experi- ence. Significantly, he is at the center of the picture, at work painting a landscape while surrounded by figures who either frequented his studio, or whom he had seen at different times. It is not a realis- tic depiction of a moment in his studio, but a collage of symbolic figures, such as the model who undoubtedly signifies the “naked truth.” This work has been much studied and discussed; it is one of the key works of the century.'^ Courbet’s letters shed important light on it, including this one written to Champfleury in late 1854 while he was working on the painting:
Ui HAITRE.
Rieti nT'»( iiili' In vrui, Ir rni ml Ml •irrutik.
6. Gilbert Randon, The Master — Only Truth is Beau- tiful, Truth Alone is Desirable, Le Journal Amusant, June 15, 1867.
anticipated important aspects of the later symbolist movement.
Although he was given a room of his own with eleven of his paint- ings shown in the great exhibition of French art at that time, an honor he shared along with Delacroix and Ingres, Courbet felt slighted. As he boasted to Count de Nieuwerkerke, the organizer of the Exposition Universelle, “Monsieur, I am the proudest and most arrogant man in France.”'^ He borrowed money and sold paintings to build his Pavilion of Realism and exhibited another forty paintings there, including his Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Studio U The exhibition was a financial fail- ure, but he was not deterred, and in 1867 once again opened his own exhibition at the Rond-Point du Pont de I’Alma at the time of the inter- national exposition. His example of challenging the authority of the official art establishment was a major impetus to the impressionists when they mounted their own independent art exhi- bition in 1874. Before Courbet, independent exhibitions by artists had been rare in France.
Courbet and Belgium
Always ambitious, Courbet was eager to promote his art in other countries. His success and notoriety were carefully orchestrated. Bel- gium was particularly important for Courbet, who found a warm reception among Belgian artists and patrons. The Stonebreakers (1849, formerly Gem^degalerie, Dresden, presumed destroyed in 1945) galvanized Belgian artists when it was shown in Brussels in 1851. Courbet declared to the Belgian merchant Arthur Stevens (brother of the painters Alfred and Joseph) in 1866: “I consider Belgium my coun- try. I have been going there for twenty-six years and have received all kinds of ova- tions and tokens of friendship.”^^ This let- ter suggests that he visited Belgium as early as 1840, though his first documented trip was in 1844. Dominique Marechal has thoroughly investigated Courbet’s voyages to Belgium in his essay “Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet” in this volume. In 1 847 Courbet affirmed that Belgium was “a very agreeable coun-
7. A. Prevost, Courbet’s studio, Le Monde lllustre, Mar. 15, 1862.
try.”^^ He wrote to his family that he was being spoiled by his hosts:
It is the moral and physical tale of my atelier. First part: these are the people who serve me, support me in my ideas, and take part in my actions. These are the people who live off of life and off of death; it is society at its highest, its lowest, and its average; in a word, it is how I see society with its concerns and its passions; it is the world that comes to me to be painted.'*’
Those on the right side of the canvas are the ones who thrive on life, while those on the left thrive on death. Courbet finds freedom in the image of the pure landscape, and is flanked by persons who connote truth and innocence. While seeking to bring realism to a new level, Courbet also
You should have received by Fapoir a letter in which I told you that I was going to Belgium, a very agreeable country, where I have been for a week or ten days.
Just imagine it as a veritable Cockaigne. I am received like a prince, which is not surprising for I move among counts, bar- ons, princes, etc. Now we eat, now we go out in an open car- riage, or we go horseback riding along the avenues of Ghent.
As for the dinners, I hardly dare talk about them, I don’t know whether one is away from the table more than four hours a day. I think that if I stayed much longer, I would return as big as a house.
His submissions to the 1851 Salon in Brussels were well received; he
11
Courbet: Mapping Realism
wrote to his family that “at the Brussels exhibition my Stonebreakers and my Cellist are far greater successes than I expected in Belgium. There is even talk of giving me the gold medal.”^"^
He did not win a medal, but had considerable official success in later exhibitions. In 1860, his Woman with Mirror (plate 20) was a major suc- cess. When the Paris Salon rejected his Venus and Psyche (destroyed 1945) in 1 864, it was shown at the exhibition of the Cercle artistique et litteraire de Bruxelles. In 1868 Courbet exhibited twelve works at the Ghent Salon and was made an honorary member of the Societe libre des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. Belgium provided an alternative venue for Courbet’s art, where he found success even when rejected in France. He wrote to his father from Antwerp in 1861:
“Belgium and its artists have bril- liantly avenged the stupidities of the French government in my regard.”^*’ In 1 869 he was awarded a medal at the Brussels Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts, where he showed three paintings.
Courbet and America
Besides Belgium, Courbet also frequently traveled and exhibited in Germany as well as Switzerland, which was close to his home in Ornans.^^ He also reportedly trav- eled to London and documenta- tion has recently been found of a trip to Spain.
Although he never visited America, it was to become an important new market for Courbet. The first painting by Courbet shown in America was The Grain Sifiers (1855, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes).
It was shown at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1859, but did not attract attention.
This would change after the Civil War. Americans were building major collections of art and European dealers were eager to capitalize on this new market.
So many Erench works of art came to America so fast that the literary and art critic Emile Durand-Greville (1838-1914) was commissioned by the Erench gov- ernment to investigate the situation in 1885-86.^° In America, the Erench invasion was compared to the takeover of Mexico by the Erench emperor Maximil- ian in a New York newspaper.^^ American artists such as William Morris Hunt (1824-79) studied in Paris and came back to Boston to share their enthusiasm for the new European styles of painting. Hunt col- lected Barbizon paintings, and encouraged others in Boston to do the same.^^ Boston took an early lead in collecting Barbizon and impression- ist art. William Howe Downes noted in 1888 that “it is a significant fact in the history of art that there was a time when New York dealers who had a good Corot or Courbet were obliged to send it to Boston in order to sell it.”
Eiscal caution also played a role. American collectors bought so many fake old masters in the first half of the century that modern art seemed a safer investment. American critics who were uncomfortable with his social themes and nudes hailed Courbet’s landscapes as the best
examples of his genius. Landscape and nature images had great appeal in the American context that had long identified the source of inspira- tion and creativity with nature. Courbet’s paintings offered a new path to American artists, who were struggling to find a balance between the tra- ditional approach of emulating the old masters of Europe and the direct observation of nature.^'’
The Quarry of 1856-57 (fig. 9) depicts the aftermath of a success- ful hunt, with a dead deer hanging from a tree and a hunter leaning against another tree, while a young man blows a horn and two hunting dogs sniff at the pooled blood on the ground. The shadowy figure of
the man is presumed to be a self- portrait, and the painting evokes a mysterious melancholic mood.^^ The canvas was pieced together out of at least five sections, as the artist revised and expanded his concep- tion of the scene. The image of the artist as hunter, whether for landscape motifs or animals, was an outgrowth of the romantic image of the artist as pilgrim or explorer. The Quarry, with its dogs and horn blower, shows the hunter poised between nature and civilization. Courbet explained that “the hunter is a man of independent character who has a free spirit or at least the feeling for liberty. He’s a wounded soul, a heart that goes to stir up its languor in the wasteland and the melancholy of woods.”^^ He clearly identified with the hunter who sought to find freedom in nature; his outlaw and anti-authoritarian tendencies were acted out in real life when he was fined for hunting out of season. The hunter was also a potent icon in the American ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. Katherine Nahum’s essay in this volume explores the significance of this melancholic and enigmatic paint- ing. Although the hunt was a success, the hunter seems oddly distant and withdrawn.
This was the first major work by Courbet to be acquired for a public collection in America, and it came by a circuitous route. The Parisian publishers Cadart and Luquet were Courbet’s main dealers in the 1860s.'^^ To publicize their Erench Etching Club they organized an exhibition of the works of Cour- bet and other modern Erench artists in March 1866 at the Line Arts Gallery in New York. The exhibit included three works by Courbet, The Return from the Conference (1862, destroyed; this work was exhibited in Ghent in 1867), The Wrestlers (1852-53, Szepmiiveseti Muzeum, Budapest), and The Quarry. This exhibition was also shown in April at Leonard’s auction house on Bromfield Street in Boston. The American exhibitions were gratifying to Courbet; he wrote to his friend Urbain Cuenot that “the American exhibition is making a lot of noise. In short, everything is fine so far.”'*'^
Courbet sold The Quarry to the art dealer Van Isacker in Antwerp for 8,000 francs in 1858. In 1862 Van Isacker traded it to the Galerie Cadart et Luquet in Paris. The painting was enlarged sometime after 1862 with
8. Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven- Year Phase of My Artistic Life, 1855. Oil on canvas, 361 x 598 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
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9. Gustave Courbet, The Quarry {La Cu- rie), 1856-57. Oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
12
Jeffery Howe
a nineteen-inch strip at the top at the suggestion of Jules Luquet."^^ Cad- art and Luquet sold The Quarry to the Allston Club for 25,000 francs ($5,000). The Allston Club was a short-lived independent artists’ asso- ciation, with noted painter William Morris Hunt as its president."''’ The Club existed only from 1866 to 1873, and held just two exhibitions, in 1 866 and 1 867. In late May and June of 1 866 an eight-by-six-foot banner hung from rented rooms in the Stu- dio Building announcing the exhibition of The QuarryT^
ALLSTON CLUB.
ON EXHIBITION Courbet’s Great Painting,
LA CUREE
The Studio Building housed artists’ studios, theater companies, and related businesses.
Tenants included William Morris Hunt and the gallery of Seth Morton Vose (fig. 10).
The Allston Club made a commitment that the work would remain forever in Boston, and the painting was reportedly displayed as if in a chapel in red velvet, amid the cheers of the purchasers. According to his friend Amand Gautier, Courbet declared “what care I for the Salon, what care I for honors, when art stu- dents of a new and great country know and appreciate and buy my works?”'*^
The Quarry and an unidentified Ornans landscape were shown at the second Allston Club exhibition in April 1867. Between 1868 and 1872 The Quarry was also shown at the annual exhibits of the Boston Athenaeum. Boston’s most significant new public institution was the Museum of Eine Arts, which was founded in 1870 and opened in 1 877 in a bold High Victorian Gothic building on Copley Square. It was a conspicuous emblem of art and refinement as the genteel tradi- tion began to take hold in America. The Quarry was shown there in 1877, the year of the museum’s opening and the year of Courbet’s death.
When the Allston Club disbanded in 1873, the work passed to Henry Sayles (1834-1918).
Sayles loaned The Quarry to the Museum of Eine Arts from 1877 until 1889. In 1918 it was pur- chased from his nephew George Tappan Erancis for $75,000. Almost sixty years later, Henry Sayles Erancis described his great-uncle as “a very austere old Victorian gentleman” whose house in Boston’s Back Bay “was paved with pictures from top to bottom. It was rather gloomy and dark. . .the most important picture, was the big Courbet. . .over the sideboard in the dining room... he had other Courbets and he had Barbizon pictures.”^'
Other works by Courbet were exhibited in Boston in following years, many of them with connections to Belgium. The Young Ladies of the Village (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was then owned by the Boston collector Thomas Wigglesworth (1814-1907), was shown at the Boston Athenaeum in 1879. It had been shown in Ghent in 1865.
10. The Horticultural and Studio Buildings, Boston. Corner of Tremont and Bromfleld Streets, near the Park Street Church. Built in 1861, the Studio Building burned down in 1906. From stereoscopic photograph by John P. Soule, c. 1880.
The noted Belgian collector Charles-Leon Cardon (1850-1920) owned a study for this work.^^ In 1881 an unidentified landscape, also owned by Wigglesworth, was exhibited by the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association at Mechanics Hall. In September 1883 three works. Wreck in a Snowstorm (now known as Diligence in the Snow, 1860, National Gallery, London), Runaway Horse (1861, Neue Pinakothek, Munich),
and a landscape, Tn the Forest of Fontainebleau (location unknown), were shown at the Eor- eign Exhibition in Boston, also in Mechanics Hall.^^ In 1876, Courbet exhibited four works at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.
The most distinguished private collection in Boston belonged to Isabella Stewart Gard- ner. Housed in her Venetian-style palace built in 1902, it includes a landscape by Courbet, A View across a River (c. 1855, plate 34). This work entered her collection very early; she loaned it to the new Museum of Eine Arts from April 26, 1880 to June 3, 1881.^^ This landscape near his home in Ornans was cen- tral to Courbet’s identity, and this painting is similar to the Landscape at Ornans of c. 1855 (plate 1).
The Erench artist’s commitment to nature found many admirers in the United States. The noted American critic James Jackson Jarves compared Courbet to Walt Whitman in 1869:
SOIAT-MRSde I, a tOMMUXE,
Uht-mitiB qm Htail Tir. jour appdi a. demalir 1» Colonr® clevait (Xijiuncnccr par fataeBr dt |ji«r«i9.
11. Leonce Scherer, caricature of Courbet as The Stonebreaker, with the destruction of the Vendome Column behind him, Souvenirs de la Commune, Aug. 4, 1871.
He is the strongest the truest and most satisfying of the realists, a Robert Brown- ing of the easel. There are no such local greens, grays, lights and shadows as his; no firmer sense of material forms and uses of things; none more vigorous or more harmo- nious in his own interpretation of nature. He puts the spectator in absolute, organic rela- tionship to it. Courbet’s qualities are great, like those of Walt Whitman, who is an Amer- ican Courbet in verse; but the best qualities of both are obscured or affrontively obtruded by a sort of Titanesque realism, which affects the gross and material, as it were, to empha- size their introspective view into the primary elements of nature and man. Each sings the Earth earthy, and with such heartiness and comprehension, as to move our imaginations to a muscular grasp of her stores of enjoy- ment. Courbet at times may be coarse, but his style, compared with the popular pretty, is as the uncut diamond beside the tinsel gem.^'’
Despite being denounced by conservative Ameri- can critics such as Titus Munson Coan in the Century Magazine as a communist for his partici- pation in the Paris Commune of 1871, which briefly ruled Paris after the Eran co-Prussian War (fig. 11), Courbet’s works continued to sell to sophisticated collectors. Although disastrous for his career in Prance, and leading to his exile in LaTour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Courbet’s role in the Commune and the destruction of the Vendome Column only added
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Courbet: Mapping Realism
to his notoriety. It was not until after his death that his reputation was fully rehabilitated in France.
Major works by Courbet entered New England collections throughout the twentieth century, including the enigmatic Toilette of the Dead Girl (c. 1850, formerly known as Toilette of the Bride) acquired by the Smith College Museum of Art in 1929.
Courbet was prominently featured in the growth of major collections in New York. Louisine Flavemeyer (nee Elder, 1855-1929) built one of the fin- est collections, and eventually owned forty-four paintings by Courbet. Fler friend, the American artist Mary Cas- satt, took her to the preview of Cour- bet’s estate sale in Paris in 1881 and told her “someday you must have a Courbet.” Many of the works she acquired were donated to the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art in 1929.'"’’ The melancholy Hunter on Horseback, Recovering the Trail (1863-64) was donated to the Yale University Art Gal- lery in 1942 by Electra Flavemeyer (1888-1960, daughter of Eouisine), and her husband, Watson Webb.”’
Mary Cassatt also collected for herself She owned five of Courbet’s works, including the Woman with a Cat (1864, Worcester Art Museum), which was later in the Havemeyer collection. Cassatt’s first acquisition was Laun- dresses at Low Tide, Etretat (1866-69, Sterling and Erancine Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA). By 1911, she also owned portraits of The Mayor of Ornans (Ur bain Cuenot) (1846) and Madame Frond which were donated to the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Pine Arts in Philadelphia in 1912.”^
Contemporary collectors still seek out major paintings by Courbet; one astute individual has built a stunning collection of thirteen Courbets, includ- ing Woman with Mirror and Winter Landscape in the present exhibition (plates 20 and 36) .
Expatriate Americans such as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt knew Courbet’s works intimately. Whistler, who was born in Eowell, Massachusetts, admired Courbet in the early 1860s. Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Silver: Beach at Trouville (1865, fig. 13) reprises Courbet’s Seaside at Palavas of 1854 (fig. \2)H Courbet’s
12. Gustave Courbet, The Seaside at Palavas, 1854. Oil on canvas, 27 x 46 cm, Musee Fabre, Montpellier.
13. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Beach at Trou- ville, 1865. Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 75.6 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
14. Gustave Courbet, The Woman with a Mirror; or, Jo, the Beautiful Irishwoman, 1865-66. Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 66 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
seascape depicted himself on the shore, standing on a rock at the bottom left of the composition, and brashly salut- ing the ocean. Sky and sea are evenly divided, with the horizon at mid-point. Whistler’s composition is very similar, with Courbet placed in almost exactly the same position. Fdis horizon line is higher, however, and his long broad horizontal brushstrokes flatten the space. The overall feeling is lighter than Courbet’s painting. The figure of Courbet in Whistler’s painting is more subdued, even humble, than the ebul- lient self-portrait by the Prench artist. Whistler had already begun to trans- form the material solidity of Courbet’s realism into something more abstract, anticipating his later development of the aesthetic movement.
Courbet described Whistler inac- curately as an Englishman and his student.”"’ Their initially cordial rela- tionship was not to last. The Irish beauty Jo Fliffernan (or Fleffernan) was a crucial figure in their split. Jo was Whistler’s model for The White Girl (Symphony in White, No. 1) (1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and many other paintings in the early 1860s. She was Whistler’s mistress, but could not live with him in Eondon due to the objections of his mother. If Jo did not meet Courbet in 1 863 when Whistler exhibited The White Girl at the Salon des refuses in Paris, she cer- tainly did when they joined Courbet at Trouville during the fall of 1865.
Courbet admired her beauty and her Irish songs, and he made four versions of the painting /o, the Beautiful Lrishwoman (1865-66, fig. 14).”” Jo posed again for the Prench artist in 1866 when Whis- tler was away on a seven-month voyage to Valparaiso, Chile. Perhaps inevitably, Jo became Courbet’s mistress, which led to an irrevocable split between the two artists. There was little contact between them until Courbet wrote to Whistler on Pebruary 14, 1877, just months before his death.”” Jo posed for Cour- bet for such sensual paintings as The Sleepers (1866, Musee d’Orsay, Paris), a picture with a lesbian theme painted for the Turkish ambassador and collec- tor Khalil Bey.”^ The flagrant sensual- ity of this work is also displayed in the Woman with Parrot {12>GG, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was
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Jeffery Howe
exhibited in the Salon in Brussels in 1866 and the Reclining Nude (1866, Mesdag Museum, The Hague), which was shown at the Brussels Salon in 1869. The recent discovery of what may be the head of Courbet’s Origin of the World Musee d’Orsay, Paris) in an antique shop in Paris may
settle once and for all whether or not Courbet used Jo as the model for his most sexually explicit painting.*’^ In any event, this was too much for the somewhat puritanical Whistler.'’^
The Major Themes
Courbet’s primary themes — nudes, landscapes and seascapes, portraits, and scenes of labor — reveal different facets of his art. He could not limit him- self to any one genre, even though some of his early supporters such as Champfleury felt that he should have continued to focus on images of social themes as portrayed in The Stonebreakers and After Dinner at Ornans (1848-49, Palais des Beaux- Arts, Lille).
These large-scale representations of modern life represented what Charles Baudelaire discerned as the “Heroism of Modern Life,” poetic even when tragic.^' Some modern commentators have also criticized Courbet for compromising his principles in search of profit in the marketplace with his later nudes and landscapes. Courbet always considered his career to be a business, and he frequently mea- sured his success by his earnings in letters to his father. Albert Boime notes that in 1855-56 Cour- bet speculated heavily (and lost) in the stock market. Courbet was both a busi- nessman and socialist.
Nudes were a major part of Courbet’s work; his Reclining Nude in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (c. 1840-41, plate 21) is an important early example. This work, executed at the beginning of his career, still shows characteristics of aca- demic classicism in the pose but also shows the painterly qualities for which he would be known.
The intimacy of Courbet’s portraits of Jo with a mirror was anticipated in a work exhibited in Brussels in 1860 to great acclaim, the lovely Woman with Mirror (plate 20). The subject of a woman gaz- ing into a mirror is a venerable one in the history of art, with depictions of Venus by Titian and others serving as allegories of sight and beauty. Courbet’s self- absorbed figure embodies thoughtful reflection, and its quiet sensuality and psychological depth foreshadow later symbolist images of women and mirrors.^^ Courbet’s technique is beautifully demonstrated in the modeling of the figure and the rendering of the diaphanous gown.
Landscape was one of Courbet’s most important themes, and will be treated in greater length in a separate essay in this volume. Recent exhibi- tions have shed new light on Courbet’s landscapes, which unite his study of nature and experimental painting techniques.
Portraiture forms a large part of Courbet’s oeuvre. As with landscape, it is an art form based on direct observation, and thus corresponds to his realist principles. His best portraits capture both the physiognomy of the
sitter and a sense of character. Examples include his portrait of fellow artist Alfred Stevens (c. 1861, plate 6) and Monsieur Nodler, the Younger (1865, plate 26). Louis Dubois in Belgium rivaled Courbet’s skill in both still life and portraiture in his Woman with Bouquet (1854-55, plate 9). Dubois (1830-80) was an energetic supporter of Courbet’s art. In 1861 he was probably the “Dubois” registered in Courbet’s studio in Paris. He was one of the founders of the independent artist group the Societe libre
des Beaux-Arts, and a collaborator on their journal, LArt LibreN In America, John La Farge followed Courbet’s example with the wonderful portrait of A Boy and His Dog (Dickey Hunt) (plate 27).
Melancholia, or artistic depression, was a sub- ject explored by Courbet several times in the 1840s, and surfaces also in his later work. Although his public image was that of a bluff and hearty bon vivant, he privately admitted to depression. He wrote to his patron Alfred Bruyas in 1854, when his career was taking off: “Under the laughing mask which you know me by, I conceal my grief, bitter- ness and a sadness which clings to the heart like a vampire.”^^ This was a central theme for the poet Charles Baudelaire, who defined mourning as a hallmark of modernity, noting that the distinctive black costume of men’s fashion signified a culture in mourning.^® Self-portraits such as The Desper- ate Man (c. 1844-45, private collection). The Man Mad with Fear (c. 1844-45, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), or The Wounded Man (c. 1844-54, Musee d’Orsay, Paris) represent a different image of Courbet than the usually confident artist who once called himself the “most arrogant man in France.”^^
Even his self-portrait The Cellist (1847, fig. 15) shows a certain vulner- ability. The Belgian artist Alfred Stevens echoed this work, which was exhibited in Brussels in 1851, in his painting The Sick Musician, 1852 (plate 8). The musician is unable to perform or even show interest in his instrument, and is under the care of a nun as nurse. As an image of artis- tic despair, this work foreshadows Emile Wauters’s portrayal of The Madness of Hugo van der Goes (1872, fig. 16), which later haunted Vincent van Gogh as a har- binger of his own breakdown. Vincent wrote to his brother Theo in 1888: “As a matter of fact, I am again pretty nearly reduced to the madness of Hugo van der Goes in Emile Wauters’s picture. And if it were not that I have almost a double nature, that of a monk and that of a painter, as it were,
I should have been reduced, and that long ago, completely and utterly, to the aforesaid condition.”*® Melancholia continued to be an important theme to such isolated artists as James Ensor and Edvard Munch later in the century.*^
The melancholy often found at the casino is reflected in the faces of the gamblers in Louis Dubois’s painting Roulette (1860, plate 14). The nine figures crammed into a small frame show various states of anxiety, concern, and despondency. There seem to be no winners here. The casino as setting is an updated version of the gambling theme depicted by artists
15. Gustave Courbet, The Cellist, 1847. Oil on canvas, 117 x 90 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
16. Emile Wauters, The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, 1872. Oil on canvas, 186 x 275 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
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Courbet: Mapping Realism
such as Caravaggio in The Cardsharps (c. 1595, Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth) . The nervous tension and image of figures who are isolated even in the midst of a crowd speak of modernity.
The social conscience of Courbet led him to depict the lives of the working class, especially after 1848. Flis Stonebreakers (1849) is one of the key works of the century in this vein. Poverty and the plight of the lower classes were the focus of many Belgian realists. Joseph Stevens painted a scene of stray dogs fighting over a bone while poor homeless people huddle against a wall and rummage in a trash can for food on a street in Brussels in his large picture Brussels, Morning (1848, plate 10). The struggle for existence in the modern city has seldom been more poi- gnantly portrayed. Courbet rejected the established church as another institution of vain authority, and mocked it on several occasions, nota- bly with his large painting of drunken priests in The Return from the Confer- ence (1862, destroyed). Belgian artists such as Charles de Groux continued to depict and honor the faith of the lower classes, and Gustave Leonard de Jonghe painted a poignant picture of sick, blind, and crippled pilgrims praying beside a roadside shrine in his Pilgrims Praying to Our Lady of the Afflicted; or, Our Lady of Mercy m 1854 (plate 11).
Courbet’s Legacy
Courbet cannot be said to have introduced realism to Belgium — the home of Jan van Eyck and Peter- Paul Rubens had a long and vital history in art, frequently marked by innovations in depicting visual reality. There were currents of realism in Belgium in the 1 830s and 1 840s, as Jean- Philippe Ffuys and Dominique Marechal make clear in their essay “Realism: From Living Art to Free Arf in this volume.
However, his art had a great impact. The landscapes and hunting scenes of Louis Dubois are unthinkable without Courbet’s precedent, and his impact on painters such as Alfred Stevens and Charles de Groux is undeniable.
Courbet’s art was also a catalyst for art in the United States. Although fidelity to visual appearances and observed detail had long been valued in American art, after the Civil War and the rise of pho- tography there was an increased demand for authenticity in art and a new confidence about aesthetic judgment. Many American artists studied in Europe, or were exposed to Courbet’s art through American exhibitions. Those whose work has affinities with Courbet’s art include William Mor- ris Hunt (1824-79), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), and John La Large (1835- 1910). Homer was typically uncommunicative about his contacts with Erench artists, but he was in Paris in 1 867 for the exhibition of his work Prisoners from the Front (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) at the Exposition Universelle and he could have seen the Courbet exhibition at
the Rond-Point du Pont de I’Alma in April.
Homer’s rugged realism and implicit call for social justice, similar to Courbet’s stance, is evident in Veteran in a New Field of 1865, which depicts a soldier returning to peaceful pursuits after the Civil War (fig. 17).
Agricultural labor is also the subject of Winnowing Grain by East- man Johnson (c. 1873-79, plate 32). This work recalls Courbet’s Grain Sifters of 1855 that was exhibited in Brussels in 1857. Rural labor is also the subject of Elihu Vedder’s Peasant Girl Spinning (c. 1 867, plate 31).
Hunting scenes, as depicted in Courbet’s The Quarry, are paralleled in Winslow Homer’s After the Hunt, a watercolor of 1892 (Los Ange- les County Museum of Art) and Thomas Eakins’s Will Schuster and
Blackman Going Shooting for Rail of 1876 (Yale University Art Gallery). It would be revealing to further compare the culture of hunting in Europe and America at this time. Hunting was a mythic part of American identity, and in Europe it was increasingly the sport of the wealthy and was marked by rit- ual, as in Courbet’s The Quarry. With growing urbanization and industrial- ization, hunting became increasingly a matter of recreation. Some of Cour- bet’s hunting scenes focus on the social aspect of the sport, while others depict only the hunted animal, with whom he could also identify. The Belgian Louis Dubois focused solely on the dead deer alone on the high ground in The Dead Deer — Solitude (1863, plate 16). It is as still and elegiac as Courbet’s painting A Dead Doe (1857, Musee d’Orsay, Paris).
Winslow Homer is well known for his many paintings of the wild Maine coast near Prouts Neck, where he moved in 1883. These can be compared to Courbet’s marine paintings, as can John La Barge’s Sea and Rocks near Spouting Horn of 1859, painted in Newport, Rhode Island (plate 46).
Thomas Eakins explored many aspects of modern realism, including the use of photography and chronophotog- raphy. His painting William Rush Carv- ing His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, with its image of the sculptor and his model, focuses on the artist’s studio as the laboratory for testing theories of representation (1876-77, fig. 18). Eakins’s painting, which was exhibited at the Boston Art Club in 1878, clearly builds on Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life (1855, fig. 8) in the attempt to reconcile traditional allegory, which was still central to Beaux-Arts paint- ing and sculpture in America, and the new realism that was central to the emerging modernist culture. Courbet was a pivotal figure between the past and future in art; building on his success in Belgium, he became an important bridge between America and the new directions in European painting.
Through his personal example and through his art, Courbet helped
17. Winslow Homer, Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas, 61.3 x 96.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
18. Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1876-77. Oil on canvas, 51.1 x 66.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Jeffery Howe
create the image of the avant-garde artist, who was defined both by his advanced style and by his opposition to prevailing institutions and authorities. His intransigence was equaled by his shrewdness in building his legacy. His dedication to realism and his conviction that one must paint what one can see challenged the academic standards of subject and decorum. His inventive technique stressed the materiality of paint, applied in a spontaneous manner that allowed for accident, but which also skillfully suggested a truthful visual perception.
The textured surface of Courbet’s paintings — rough in places, and sleek in others — provides a visible record of his hand movements and artistic decisions. This is itself a kind of map, tracing his interactions with the material dimensions of the work of art. The narratives we construct also provide a temporal map of history linking events along a pathway The exhibition Courbet: Mapping Realism is one of many possible roads toward understanding Courbet and the art of his era.
1 Courbet declared that he had buried romanticism in 1861, cited in the Pre- curseur d’Anvers, Aug. 22, 1861; see Pierre Courthion, Courbet, raconte par lui-meme et par ses amis, 2 vols. (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1948-50), 1:160. See also: Paul B. Crapo, “Disjuncture on the Left: Proudhon, Courbet and the Antwerp Congress of \%G\ I" Art History 14, no. 1 (Mar. 1991): 67-91. T. J. Clark was exactly right to describe this painting as “strange and dis- turbing” in Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1 848 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 11. Classical Walpurgis Night was lost when he painted over the canvas with The Wrestlers (1853, Szep- miiveseti Miizeum, Budapest). See Sylvain Amic and Florence Hudowicz, “Courbet’s ClassicalWalpurgis Night. A Vanished Work Resurfaces,” in Cour- bet: A Dream of Modern Art, ed. Klaus Herding and Max Hollein, exh. cat. (Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 430-51.
2 Ting Chang, “Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet’s The Meeting^’ Art Bulletin 86, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 719-30.
3 Linda Nochlin, “Gustave Courbet’s Meeting. A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew,” Art Bulletin 49, no. 3 (Sept. 1967): 209-22. See also Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naivete,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4, nos. 3-4 (Apr. 1941 -July 1942): 164-91.
4 Letter to M. and Mme. Francis Wey, July 31, 1 850, in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ed. and trans.. Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1992), 50-4/98-99.
5 See Clark, Image of the People. Also Linda Nochlin, Realism (Baltimore: Pen- guin, 1972), and Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See also Herding and Hollein, Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art, and Frederique Desbuissons, “Courbet’s Materialism,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 251-60. James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) is also useful to understand his social philosophy.
6 Gustave Courbet, “Realist Manifesto,” 7 (in this volume).
7 In La Presse (July 21, 1853); quoted in Maura Reilly, “Le Vice a la Mode: Gustave Courbet and the Vogue for Lesbianism in Second Empire France” (PhD diss.. New York University, 2000), 103.
8 Sylvain Amic, “ The Bathers^ in Gustave Courbet, ed. Dominique de Font- Reaulx et al., exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 342-44.
9 Jack Eindsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 104 cites Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre (Paris: H. Floury, 1906) for information that the model, whom he identifies as “Josephine,” may have been a mistress of Courbet. For Villeneuve’s photographs, see Font-Reaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, 342fF.
1 0 Courbet’s use of photography was noted by Aaron Scharf, Art and Photogra- phy (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974).
1 1 Font-Reaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, 342 and 105-6.
12 Delacroix, quoted in Beatrice Farwell, “Courbet’s Baigneuses and the Rhe- torical Female Image,” in Woman as Sex Object, ed. Thomas Hess and Einda Nochlin (New York: Newsweek, 1972), 65. See Eugene Delacrok, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, trans. Eucy Norton (Eondon: Phaidon, 1995), 181-82.
13 Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 61-16/203-5 (Dec. 25, 1861). This letter was published in the Courier du Dimanche oiOzc. 29, 1861. Chu notes that this letter is widely believed to have been written by Castagnary.
1 4 Clark, Lmage of the People, 2 1 .
1 5 The literature on The Painter’s Studio is vast, but one may note several impor- tant studies, such as Benedict Nicholson, Courbet: “The Studio of the Painter” (New York: Viking, 1973). Helene Toussaint made the most complete iden- tification of the figures in this painting in “The Dossier on The Studio by Courbet,” in Gustave Courbet, 1819—1877, ed. Alan Bowness et al., exh.
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Courbet: Mapping Realism
cat. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 260-68. Klaus Herding qualified some of these identifications, while endorsing her general thesis on the political significance of the work in his '‘The Painter’s Studio: Focus of World Events, Site of Reconciliation,” chap. 3 in Courbet: To Venture Inde- pendence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 45-61.
16 Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 54-8/131-33 (Ornans, Nov. -Dec. 1854, addressed to Champlleury).
17 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Cour- bet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 2007), 106.
18 Patricia Mainardi, “Courhet’s Exhibitionism,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 118 (Dec. 1991): 253-66. See also Jean-Jacques Eernier, “Ee peintre et 1 archi- tecte,” Ligeia 41-44 (Oct. 2002-Nov. 2003): 132-47.
19 Jacques-Eouis David exhibited his Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799, Musee du Eouvre, Paris) privately, but felt he had to issue an explanation; see Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documen- tary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), 1-11. Theodore Gericault exhibited The Raft of the Medusa (1819) in Eondon and Dublin, but these were unusual events. See Eee Johnson, “ The Raft of the Medusa in Great Britain,” Burlington Magazine 96, no. 617 (Aug. 1954): 249-54.
20 See Mainardi, “Courbet’s Exhibitionism.” See also Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France.
21 Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 66-6/276 (Mar. 22, 1866). Courbet implies here that he first visited Belgium in 1840, but this date is not confirmed by any other source.
22 Ibid., 47-4/73 (Sept. 6, 1847, to his family).
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 51-2/102 (Sept. 9, 1851).
25 In 1858 he had written to his father: “I am in Belgium to try to develop a new line of action. I am working here and carving out a new niche for myself for the future when I may want or need it. The way things are going in Erance, this is useful, especially for me.” Ibid., 58-1/158 (June-July?, 1858).
26 Ibid., 61-14/201.
27 See Werner Hofmann and Klaus Herding, eds., Courbet und Deutschland, exh. cat. (Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle; Erankfurt: Stadel Museum, 1978). William Hauptman, “Ea Tour-de-Peilz: Gustave Courbet and Swit- zerland,” Burlington Magazine 124, no. 954 (Sept. 1982): 577-85. Ea Tour- de-Peilz, Switzerland, where Courbet lived in exile, was only seventy miles from Ornans.
28 Alisa Euxenberg, “Buenos dfas, Senor Courbet: The Artist’s Trip to Spain,” Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1184 (Nov. 2001): 690-93.
29 Eaura E. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Soci- ety, iS65— /TOO (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143.
30 Alexandra R. Murphy, “Prench Paintings in Boston,” in Corot to Braque: French Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ed. Anne E. Poulet and Alexandra R. Murphy, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Pine Arts, 1979), xvii.
31 yWixnzi, French Realist Painting, 146.
32 Martha A. S. Shannon, Boston Days of William Morris Hunt (Boston: Mar- shall Jones, 1923); see also Eois Pink, “American Artists in Prance, 1850- \%7 OS American Art Journal 5, no. 2 (Nov. 1973): 32-49.
33 Erica Hirschler, Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting (Eondon: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 21 .
34 William Howe Downes, “Boston Painters and Paintings,” Atlantic Monthly 62, no. 370 (Oct. 1888): 778.
35 Clara Erskine Clement and Eaurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Cen- tury and Their Works: A Handbook Containing Two Thousand and Fifty Bio- graphical Sketches, xo\. 1 (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), 164.
36 Joshua C. Taylor, The Fine Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 52-88.
37 Sten Ake Nilsson, “Gustave Courbet and the Mirror of Death,” Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm 6 (1999): 62-65. Shao-Chien Tseng, “Con- tested Terrain: Gustave Courbet’s Hunting Scenes,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 2 Qune 2008): 218-34.
38 William M. Kane, “Courbet’s Chasseur of 1 866-1867,” Yale Art Gallery Bul- letin 25, no. 3 (Mar. I960): 30-38.
39 Eindsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art, 194. Eindsay is quoting from Courthion, Courbet, raconte par lui-meme et par ses amis, 2:39.
40 In 1854 Courbet was fined for hunting in the snow, which was illegal in Prance. See Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 54-1/120. Purther information is given in Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence, 87.
41 “Hunting the Roebuck in the High Jura: The Quarry, Gustave Courbet,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 16, no. 98 (Dec. 1918): 83-85. See also Downes, “Boston Painters and Paintings,” 503-6. Douglas E. Edelson, “Courbet’s Reception in America before 1900,” in Courbet Reconsidered, ed. Sarah Paunce and Einda Nochlin, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1988), 69, notes that “it was the club’s treasurer, Albion H. Bicknell, who saw The Quarry at Cadart’s exhibition and, excited by the opportunity to purchase a major work by Courbet, enlisted the aid of Robinson and Hunt to raise the necessary funds.”
42 Anne Wagner, “Courbet’s Eandscapes and Their Market,” Art History 4, no. 4 (Dec. 1981): 414.
43 Edelson, “Courbet’s Reception in America,” 67. The Pine Arts Gallery at 625 Broadway in New York was also known as the Derby Gallery. See also First Fxhibition in Boston of Pictures: The Contributions of Artists of the French Etching Club, exh. cat. (New York: Ee Messager Pranco-Americain Printing Office, 1866).
44 Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 66-7/278 (Apr. 6, 1866).
45 Bruce K. MacDonald, “The Quarry by Gustave Courbet,” Bulletin: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 67, no. 348 (1969): 52.
46 Shannon, Boston Days of William Morris Hunt, 86-87. Members of the Allston Club included Martin Brimmer (1830-96), collector and one of the founders of Boston’s Museum of Pine Arts.
47 Downes, “Boston Painters and Paintings,” 504.
48 Rene Brunesoeur, Museum contemporain: Biographies, Gustave Courbet, 2"^ ed. (Paris: Robe, 1867), 22: “Avec I’engagement de la {la Curee^ conserver toujours a Boston. Ee tableau a ete installe triomphalement dans une espece de chapelle en velours rouge, au milieu des hourrahs des acquereurs.”
49 Courbet’s words were recorded by Amand Gautier, and quoted by Downes, “Boston Painters and Paintings,” 504. Downes (1854-1941) was the art critic for the Boston Evening Transcript for over thirty years. Edwina Spencer gives a more detailed account of Courbet’s words: ‘“What care I for the Salon, what care I for honors, when art students of a new country, and a great country, know and appreciate and buy my works?’ Climbing upon the omnibus to go home (with the money pinned in his vest) he declared that day to be the proudest of his whole life.” Edwina Spencer, “The Story of American Painting: 5. The Development of Eandscape and Marine Paint- ing,” Chautauquan 49 (Peb. 1908): 384. I have not been able to locate the original form of this quote in Gautier’s writings.
50 The term “genteel tradition” is originally from George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Winds of Doctrine (Eondon: Dent, 1913), 186-215. Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture and the Rein- terpretation of the Past in the American Renaissance,” Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 69-87, notes that the term “refer[s] to the complex of ideas that placed great emphasis on craftsmanship, a search for the ideal, and a belief in beauty and the ideal of striving to create a high culture that would keep the forces of barbarism at bay,” 74.
18
Jeffery Howe
5 1 Oral history interview with Henry Sayles Francis, Mar. 28, 1974— July 1 1, 1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu / collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-henry-sayles-francis- 13137. Sayles’s collection included Autumn Landscape (1866, whereabouts unknown) and The Glen at Ornans (1866, plate 40).
52 Riat, Gustave Gourbet, peintre, 96.
53 Mechanics Hall was a large exhibition building designed by W. G. Preston that opened in 1881 and was demolished in 1959.
54 None of these works can be securely identified, unfortunately; see Chu, Let- ters of Gustave Gourbet, 76-16/577n4.
55 Alan Chong, ed.. Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Lsabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Beacon Press, 2003), 62.
56 James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts: The Experiences and Observations of an American Amateur in Europe (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869), 274. The parallels with Whitman have often been noted, including Albert Boime, “Courbet and Whitman,” Mickle Street Review 12 (1990): 49-73, and in his Art in an Age ofGivil Struggle, 1848—1871 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 220-23.
57 See Titus Munson Coan’s “Gustave Courbet, Artist and Communist,” Gen- tury Magazine 77 , no. 4 (Feb. 1884): 483-95. This brought a spirited rebut- tal: Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, “Gustave Courbet, the Artist,” Gentury Magazine 29, no. 5 (Mar. 1885): 792-94.
58 Ting Chang, “Rewriting Courbet: Silvestre, Courbet, and the Bruyas Col- lection after the Paris Commune,” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 1 (1998): 107-20. See also Alda Cannon and Frank Anderson Trapp, “Castagnary’s A Plea for a Dead Friend (1882): Gustave Courbet and the Destruction of the Vendome Column,” Massachusetts Review 12, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 498-512, and Linda Nochlin, “The De-Politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic,” October 22 (Autumn 1982): 64-78.
59 Louisine W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Gollector (New York: Ursus, 1993), 190, 203. See Judith Barter, ed., Mary Gassatt: Modern Woman, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), 180.
60 Alicia Faxon, “Painter and Patron: Collaboration of Mary Cassatt and Louisine Havemeyer,” Womans Art Journal 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1982-Win- ter 1983): 15-20. See also Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty. Works in her col- lection that were exhibited in Belgium include: Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare (1857), shown at the Cercle artistique et litteraire in Brussels in 1878; Madame de Brayer (1858), shown at the Salon in Antwerp in 1858, the Cercle artistique et litteraire in Brussels in 1878, and an exhibition. Portraits du siecle (1789—1889), in Brussels in 1889; The Young Bather (1866), also shown at the Cercle artistique et litt&aire in Brussels in 1878; The Sleepers of 1866, which was shown at the Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts in Brus- sels in 1866 and the Antwerp Salon in 1870; Jo, the Beautiful Irishwoman (1866), shown at the Brussels Salon in 1866; the Woman in the Waves (1868) exhibited at the Salon de Gand, September 13-November 15, 1868, and the Brussels Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts, August 15-October 15, 1872.
61 Kane, “Courbet’s Ghasseur o( 1866-1867,” 30-38.
62 Barter, Mary Gassatt: Modern Woman, 179-80.
63 Eaurence des Cars, “A Eegacy of Truth: The Reference to Courbet from Manet to Cezanne,” in Gustave Gourbet, ed. Font-Reaulx et al., 67, and Michel Hilaire, in the same catalogue, 272-73. See also catalogue entry in Faunce and Nochlin, Gourbet Reconsidered. Courbet visited Alfred Bruyas in Montpellier in the summer of 1854 and during his stay went to the seaside town of Palavas. Bruyas donated the painting to the museum in 1868.
64 Chu, Letters of Gustave Gourbet, 65-16/269 (Nov. 17, 1865).
65 The version now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm was exhibited in Brus- sels in 1866.
66 Chu, Letters of Gustave Gourbet, 77-9/601-2.
67 Dorothy M. Kosinski, “Gustave Courbet’s The Sleepers: The Eesbian Image in Nineteenth-Century French Art and Eiterature,” Artibus et Historiae 9, no. 18 (1988): 187-99.
68 News media reported on February 7, 2013 that a collector had found a painting that may be the head that was removed from the torso sometime before it was sold to Khalil Bey. Although accepted as genuine by Robert Fernier, author of the catalogue raisonne of Courbet’s works, curators at the Musee d’Orsay are skeptical. Further research is needed to clarify the issue. Charlotte Pudlowski, “Ee visage de L’Origine du monde, le doute s’installe,” Slate, http:/ /www.slate.fr/ culture/ 68065/origine-du-monde-polemique.
69 Some have speculated that she may also have been the model for Courbet’s even more explicit The Origin of the World (1866), which was also commis- sioned by Khalil Bey, though the evidence for this is only circumstantial. Segolene Ee Men, Gourbet (New York: Abbeville Press, 2008), 327. The novel by Christine Orban, J’etais I’origine du monde (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000) presumes Jo was the model for this picture. Also, Francine Prose, “Behind the Green Veil: A Paean to Courbet’s Origin of the WorldJ Modern Painters 20, no. 4 (May 2008): 64-67.
70 Boime, Art in an Age ofGivil Struggle, 218 notes Champfleury’s disappoint- ment with Courbet’s concessions to his clients.
71 Charles Baudelaire, ‘“On the Heroism of Modern Fife,’ from the Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, ed. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 104-7.
72 Even such perspicacious critics as T. J. Clark felt that Courbet’s later land- scapes were a failure, and “the weakest part of his art,” “imprisoned within a formula” {Image of the People, 132). Wagner, “Courbet’s Eandscapes and Their Market,” stresses the commercial goals of Courbet’s landscape produc- tion.
73 Boime, Art in an Age ofGivil Struggle, 217.
74 Jeffery Howe, “Mirror Symbolism in the Works of Fernand Khnopff,” Arts Magazine 33, no. 1 (Sept. 1978): 112-18.
75 Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman, eds., Gourbet and the Modern Land- scape, exh. cat. (Eos Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006).
76 Robert Hoozee, “Ee Realisme: Courbet en Belgique,” in Paris— Bruxelles, Bruxelles— Paris: Les relations entre la France et la Belgique, 1848—1914, ed. Anne Pingeot and Robert Hoozee, exh. cat. (Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux; Anvers: Fonds Mercator, 1997), 153.
77 Eetter to Alfred Bruyas, Nov. 1854, in Pierre Borel, ed., Lettres de Gustave Gourbet a Alfred Bruyas (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1951), 47. Translation mine; original text: “Avec ce masque riant que vous me connaissez, je cache a I’in- terieur, le chagrin, I’amertume, et une tristesse qui s’ attache au coeur comme un vampire.”
78 Baudelaire, “Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol of a perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders? [. . .] We are each of us celebrating some funeral” (“On the Heroism of Modern Fife,” 105).
79 In a letter to Count Nieuwerkerke in 1855; see Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France, 106.
80 Vincent van Gogh, “To Theo van Gogh. Arles, Sunday, 21 October, 1888,” Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters /let709/letter.html.
81 For Edvard Munch and melancholy, see Jeffery Howe, “Nocturnes: The Music of Melancholy, and the Mysteries of Eove and Death,” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, Expression, exh. cat. (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2001), 48-74.
82 Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Ste- phen Grane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
19
Realism: From Living Art to Free Art
Jean-Philippe Huys and Dominique Marechal
Realism
The term “realism” raised various interpre- tations and questions in the nineteenth century; it covers a controversial and nebulous normative concept^
It naturally means the faithful reproduction of the things of the world, the convincing rep- resentation of the appearance of material real- ity. This illusionist ability has been appreciated in Europe since classical antiquity and, since the Renaissance, the degree of correspondence of an image with reality was considered proportional to the merit of the artist. Realism is not an end in itself but a means to represent the beautiful, the good, and the true, emphasizing the imita- tion of nature.
Some will go from the reproduction of events to the height of the “real” in painting: genre scenes and landscapes where the interest of accuracy is pushed to the extreme. For nature represented with the fidelity of a daguerreo- type, while still subject to choices and arrange- ments, Adolphe Leleux (1812-91) became the bard. He was regarded as the first artist of the realist school referred to by Theo- phile Gautier (1810-72) in the 1840s.^ His peasants depicted in their daily lives and the small scenes from his travels drew the enthusiasm of the Parisian bourgeoisie. But this quest for authenticity remained merely external and superficial because it was often accompanied by an ongoing desire to beautify the models and to ennoble them, however trivial they may be. Tfie resulting images are obviously the result of a com- promise between realism and idealism; and they still retain a note of the picturesque and sentimentality inherited from the eigh- teenth century, most of the time completely “fabricated” and showing attributes of the workshop.
The tension between the ideal and the “trivial” was already apparent at the Paris Salon of 1831 in history paintings depicting contemporary events where the people are the protagonists. And, paradoxically, even the icon of romanticism. The Twenty-Eighth of July: Liberty Leading the People (1830, Musee du Louvre, Paris) of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), car- ries within it the seeds of a certain realism. But one must wait until 1 846 for the call to artists — by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) in his review of
the Paris Salon under the title “On the Heroism of Modern Life” — to paint the ordinary aspects of contemporary life and find qualities of epic “grandeur.” The poet asked them to renounce allegory and the classi- cal nude as well as the historical costume, abandoning the past to focus
on the present.^ This exhortation would be fol- lowed, above all due to the social, economic, and political context.
Following the deep economic and agri- cultural crises that struck several countries of Europe, including France and Belgium, as early as 1 846, and the effects of the 1 848 revolution that toppled Louis-Philippe and established the Second Republic, one sees a growing interest in social issues. Paintings emerged that elevated fig- ures of the sick, the unfortunate, the poor, or the victim, to the level that was traditionally reserved for historical, mythological, or religious heroes. For the first time, the sad life of the peasant and the man in the street were represented seriously, both in the countryside and in the modern city. Particularly poignant images of distress and deplorable living conditions appeared, notably of laborers and peasants who fled to the cities to find work, but found, alas, no choice other than begging.^ The entire European economy was affected by mass unemployment and fam- ine, aggravated by an outbreak of cholera in the spring of 1849.^
Poverty also infiltrated the artists’ workshops when the social “safety net,” which had a system of incentives and relief for artists introduced by the July monarchy (1830-48), disappeared. Tfie revolution of February 1 848 dealt a fatal blow to artists, causing pervasive unemployment. Tfie art- ists tfiemselves were condemned to poverty.'’ Tfie desperate example of Octave Tassaert (1800-74) in 1849 is revealing: tfie artist was almost fifty years old and fiad received notfiing from tfie State since 1842.^ His paintings witfi social subjects are even more poignant because they bear the imprint of his personal experiences (figs. 1, 10).
Painters such as Tassaert, Isidore Pils (1813-75), or Alexandre Antigna (1817- 78) composed dramas of the life of the poor with exemplary and moral intentions, closer to melodrama than reality. They joined nobility to the truth and gave poverty a dignified modesty that invited compassion and consolation. Early examples of social representations of the same kind exist also in Belgium, such as The Beggar of Philip de Witte (1847, Museum Groeningeabdij, Gourtrai) or the Poverty in Flanders, Emigra- tion of the Flemish Beggars (presumed lost) of Leonard van den Kerkhove exhibited at the 1848 Salon in Brussels.^ “We feel under their rags the
1. Nicolas-Fran^ois Octave Tassaert, 1852.
Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm, Musee Fab re, Montpellier.
•S4
2. Gustave Courbet, Afier Dinner at Ornans, 1848-49. Oil on canvas, 195 x 257 cm. Palais des Beaux- Arts, Lille.
21
Realism: From Living Art to Free Art
heart and faith that ennoble,” “a moral beauty opposed to materialism.” ^
That is why this “official” realism that is not objective and remains sen- timental in a persistent romantic spirit is often described by the term misera- bilisme}^ To cite two examples among others that perfectly illustrate this real- ist vein of pathetic appeal: Abandoned by Octave Tassaert (fig. 1), which can be compared to The Paupers Bench (1854, plate 12) by the young Charles de Groux (1825-70). Their authors’ depictions are similar in presenting a distraught subject who causes a stir inside a church on the sidelines of a
3. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849. Oil on canvas, 165 x 257 cm, Gem^degalerie, Dresden (destroyed).
not to be a painter only, but a man; in a word, to make a living art, that is my goal.''^
“To make a living art” is an idea that drives Courbet for years and that is car- ried like a torch intended to burn down the enemy academic art, frozen in its shackles. “Living art” is the rejection of “art for art’s sake,” which promoted the imagination or the search for the beautiful ideal at the expense of objec- tive observation. And in this quest for objective reality, realism according to Courbet is imperatively linked to per- sonal truth, that is, the sincerity of the
celebration, behind a column or pillar.
The pictorial productions of these “official real- ists” cited above proved false and conventional in the eyes of an artist as positivistic and materialistic as Gustave Courbet. Indeed, the latter understood realism as a creation that is intended to truthfully render the empirical world by using perception, imagination, and memory all at once — like the invention of a fictive nature emerging outside of any ideal. This is realism according to Courbet: an anti-idealism that eliminates all imaginary worlds, but that does not exclude imagination because it serves him to reach the truth in purifying the sen- sation. The rejected ideal included mythological, religious, historical, or literary subjects in painting, all opposed to “real” subjects. The word “realism” in this sense comes into use in 1846, following a reflection shared by Courbet, Champfleury," and Max Buchon^^ — and in imitation of Baudelaire. It is doubly a question of freedom for the artist: to
artist and an attitude of independence from convention. Courbet explains the other point which emerges from this purported mani- festo:
Neither was it my intention, for that mat- ter, to reach the facile goal of “art for art’s sake.” No! I simply sought to mine from a thorough knowledge of tradition a rational and independent feeling of my own indi- viduality.'^
In other words, for Courbet, the realist artist is the one who freely represents reality “as it is” and chooses what he wants to show. Thus the master of Ornans offers snippets of Franc-Comtois life to the Parisian scene, defying taboos by breaking with mythological, historical, and literary genres. After Dinner at Ornans (fig. 2) exemplifies his intentions. This large painting exhibited at the
find in himself his own resources and rules and to create an art of his time. Nevertheless, so-called traditional critics considered Courbet’s truth to be too realistic, since he painted ugly, vulgar.
4. Jean-Fran9ois Millet, The Winnower, c. 1848. Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 71 cm. National Gallery, London.
Paris Salon in 1849 is an intimate, life-size rep- resentation of ordinary people in their daily lives. It is a slice of life in the manner of the masters of the seventeenth-century Dutch school.
and insignificant people and presented a sordid spectacle in his paintings.'^
Living Art
Courbet focuses his attention on the reality that passes before his eyes, the liv- ing present. Fie uses the expression “a liv- ing art” in the prologue to the catalogue of his solo exhibition held in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. This text is commonly referred to as the “Realist Manifesto” because the artist defines here his conception of real- ism in painting:
To be in a position to translate the
shown by the choice of a wide composi- tion involving multiple characters, the treatment of a still life on the table, the rendering of the dog’s coat, and the subtle play of light. Courbet shows his father and his three close friends from Ornans in a peaceful setting that is closed in itself and independent of both the art- ist and the viewer.''’ A fresh atmosphere comes from this first masterpiece that the State purchased in the first year of the Second Republic and earned Courbet a gold medal. With this canvas, “which is the first history painting of Courbet,” he comes into his own.'^
Encouraged, Courbet quickly went further by painting The Stonebreakers (fig.
mores, ideas, the look of my era, 5. Jean-Franco is Millet, The Haymakers, 1850. Oil on canvas, 56 x 3) and A Burial at Ornans (1849 50, according to my own estimation; 65 cm, Musee du Louvre, Paris. Musee d’Orsay, Paris), which he exhibited
22
Jean-Philippe Huys and Dominique Marechal
at the Paris Salon in 1850-51. But the general climate was changing in France: the return of the Empire was already looming on the hori- zon. The reception of his Stonebreakers suffered especially. Indeed, the initial pictorial bravado was overtaken by politics. The word “realism” became synonymous with insult. At first officials feared the democratic trend of an art that they regarded as resulting from the revolution of February 1848. Then many critics were concerned about the evolution of this painterly transgression that despised invention. Finally the public, who moved from hope to uncertainty, was baffled by this new art. Courbet exploited this idea of controversy.
Despite the politicization of his work,
Courbet remained “above all a real- ist,” even if he accepted the “social- ist” designation to which he added, not without provocation, the epithets “democrat” and “republican.”^^ By doing so, the artist seems neverthe- less to bring a political connotation to his artistic engagement, which can disrupt it because his approach is similarly revolutionary. But it is only retrospectively that Courbet affirms:
“Denying the conventional and false ideal, in 1848 I raised the flag of realism, which alone puts art in the service of man.”^^ Courbet therefore represents a real break with theatri- cal and narrative sentimentality, stuffed with the moralizing intentions of the official realists.
The impact of The Stonebreakers was extraordinary both in France and Belgium in 1851. The Belgian critic Camille Femonnier reminisced, com- paring these workers specifically to rioters: “One seemed to see a vile and callused plebian mob rushing to claim its revolutionary right to art after claim- ing its right to life on the barricades.”^”
Considerations of this nature placed the artist at the head of those who painted the working class. Gustave Courbet and Jean-Fran^ois Millet influenced one another. The silhouette of Millet’s The Winnower (fig. 4), a figure of a peas- ant painted in the manner of a hero, is obviously repeated in the pose of the young man of The Stonebreakers. And these workers by Courbet show obvious affinities in their attitudes with The Haymakers by Millet (fig. 5), a can- vas also presented at the Paris Salon in 1850-51. These pictures present iconic images of men working in the countryside who were born during the short revolutionary period: a realistic vision of the conditions of the worker or peasant that did not fail to frighten the ruling class, which believed it saw a call to uprising in them.
Courbet and Millet were aware of the social impact of their work and their contribution to the evolution of ideas on art. But the painter of Ornans differs from his colleague in that he elevates labor, making his
realism monumental by the large format of his canvases, ignoring the hierarchy of genres. Millet, meanwhile, was more in line with many con- temporary genre scenes that certainly focused on the effort of the work- ers, but where a picturesque aspect gave them an allegorical, and even political meaning. Courbet refused such local color marked by romanti- cism, which permeates such compositions such as The Harvest of Potatoes during the Flood of the Rhine (fig. 6) by Gustave Brion (1824-77). The disaster is a pretext to show the tragedy of humble people who find them- selves in great poverty; in this case that of a peasant family scrambling to save the crop that will keep them from starving to death. Such a scene was bound to generate emotion. This sentimentality was annihilated by The Stonebreakers and its peers. A differ- ence in spirit that perhaps voluntarily escaped the authors of the Cosaques, in their satirical criticism of The Har- vest of Potatoes at the Brussels exhibi- tion of 1854: “An ill wind, blown by Mr. Courbet, is cause of all the evil.”^^
Painting Manifestos of the First Generation of Belgian Realists
The presence of The Stonebreak- ers at the Brussels Salon in 1851 cre- ated a stir but does not constitute the starting point of realism in Belgium. Courbet is not its initiator — realism was practiced in Belgium before that date. It is an indigenous current that reap- pears in Belgian’s art history from the fifteenth-century Flemish primitives, the sixteenth-century dynasty of the Brueghels, and the seventeenth-century Flemish masters. And in the nineteenth century, this fundamental current resur- faces as early as 1848. Only this time the protagonists were of the canine spe- cies, though no less real than men of the working class.
Exhibited at the 1848 Salon, The Beggars; or, Brussels, Morning (1848, plate 10) of Joseph Stevens (1816-92) shows a sincere realism.^^ It is neither an allegory, nor a fable, nor a parody. The Brussels artist composed a drama played at dawn by mangy vagrants driven by hunger, a drama found in the street staged by proletarian dogs who carry the weight of human dis- tress. This distress is literally represented in the half-light of the back- ground: a bent woman delves into a garbage bin, looking for any scraps, while another poor woman sits with her back to the wall, resigned. The face of the first is not visible, which makes her action impersonal and uni- versal. On the other hand, the dogs carry the imprint of the deepest mis- ery on their faces. One idea traverses the work: the suffering of beings in distress is similar, whether they are dogs or human; as much as the human race, the canine race knows the struggle for lifeH Joseph Stevens does not
6. Gustave Brion, The Harvest of Potatoes during the Flood of the Rhine in 1852, 1852. Oil on canvas, 98 x 132 cm, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.
7. Joseph Stevens, An Episode at the Dog Market of Paris, 1854. Oil on canvas, 240 x 290 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan.
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Realism: From Living Art to Free Art
seek to captivate through sentimentality or melodrama but strikes and touches the truest reality, a frank and naked reality resulting from a strict adherence to objectivity, allowing him to transcend the story depicted here. The painter also brings his characters to life on a large-format can- vas, which are almost in relief from the full impasto of his brush, demon- strating perfect mastery in its technical execution. “Brussels, Morning is the only true Flemish canvas and the only one, therefore, which is related to this great and beautiful old Flemish school,” his brother Alfred, also a painter, will say. And the art critic Paul Fierens pointed out the novelty of this artwork, writing that “never has Stevens told of a more poignant dis- tress not only of these poor dogs but of the poor world, of a street without joy, without sun. Brussels, smiling city.
[...] You see here behind the scenes and it is not a romantic fantasy.”^*’
This very personal manner of showing the life of his time and the rich materiality presented in the paint- ings of Joseph Stevens seem to have spoken to Gustave Courbet. An Epi- sode at the Dog Market of Paris (fig. 7)
“brought joy to Courbet,” according to Camille Lemonnier.^^ Joy undoubt- edly from seeing a living art through a work of a solid practitioner with firmness of brush, a powerful touch, and impasto. Specially executed for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, this large canvas was the subject of good reviews. “This moves, lives and stirs. Mr. Joseph Stevens is, this year, the strongest of the realists. Fie is a master,” wrote Claude Vignon.^* Edmond About admired “the accurate, learned, honest and unhesitating” drawing and rendering of dogs that “have no other physiognomy than that of their race,”^^ while the daily LEcho de Bruxelles rightly notes that the life-size figures of the old woman sitting with the boy are as perfectly painted as the animals. Joseph Stevens was greeted with acclaim both in Brussels and Paris, because he remained foremost an animal painter, even if a realist: his canine pro- tagonists could not disrupt the academic or political agenda in the way that the characters of Courbet could. The latter only represented dogs as the principle actors on a canvas on two occasions: The Dog of Ornans (1856, private collection), which is a replica of the quadruped appearing in the bottom right of A Burial at Ornans, and The Dogs of the Comte de Choiseul (fig. 8). Interestingly, one can see a link between Stevens and Courbet when com- paring the canine silhouette cut by the left edge of The Episode of the Dog Market with the white greyhound that flaunts its sleek looks against its brown haired counterpart in The Dogs of the Comte de Choiseul where the dogs are represented without their master on a simple blue background.
In addition to the illustrations of the modern city, life in the Bel-
gian countryside is revealed by Charles de Groux. In this regard it is The Drunkard (fig. 9) that marks the advent of social realism in Belgium. The small canvas represents a drama of plebeian misery; its author docu- ments an aspect of the human condition. The work seeks to evoke emo- tion, to touch the viewer with “the expression of feeling and truth of mimicry,” which were the concerns of de Groux according to his first biographer. Surprisingly, two decades later critics evoked affinities with Courbet, but both artists seem to share nothing more than an awareness
of the sufferings of the peasant class, having quite different manners of rep- resenting observed reality. Indeed de Groux will make a habit of sad sub- jects, which are confined in a kind of melodramatic painting, far removed from that of Courbet, but close to the masters who merely represent anec- dotal scenes of contemporary life. Thus The Drunkard seems to echo Tassaert’s An Unfortunate Eamily (fig. 10) with the dying mother lying on the bed resembling the battered mother sit- ting on the chair. Both are placed in the context of a dismal environment, a cottage and a garret, where in one the children appeal for compassion here on earth, and where the pious image hung on the wall calls for consolation from beyond in the other.
Another lesser known milestone of the Belgian realist movement is the paint- ing by Gustave de Jonghe (1829-93) entitled Pilgrims Praying to Our Lady of the Afflicted; or, Our Lady of Mercy (1854, plate 11). This large canvas was presented at the Brussels Salon of 1854.^^ Acquired by the P.-E. Everard Gallery of Eondon, it then entered the collection of Dr. Jules Eequime in 1874.^^ This enlightened connoisseur built a collection of paint- ings almost exclusively by Belgian realist artists. Einally, forced to leave Belgium for health reasons, Eequime offered it as a gift to the Royal Museums of Eine Arts of Belgium in 1892 on the occasion of the sale of his collection.^'’
In an article in La EMerationArtistique dedicated to this remarkable collection at the time of the sale, the accomplishment of the young de Jonghe is presented as an “interesting documentary point of view, not to mention its pictorial qualities that impressed strongly Charles de Groux and Eouis Dubois, it so to speak was the flag of the revolt of free art, against the old classics, romantics and academics in Belgium.”^^ The journal LArt Mo derne writes further that Pilgrims Praying to Our Lady of the Afflicted “is considered by the artists as the starting point for realistic developments in Belgium.”^^ This painting is thus presented at the begin- ning of the 1 890s as a manifesto of free art, in other words, of realism in Belgium. And some noted its resemblance to a de Groux.^^ Right from its appearance in 1854 the criticism was rather flattering toward the paint-
8. Gustave Courbet, The Dogs of the Comte de Choiseul, 1866. Oil on canvas, 89 x 117 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum.
9. Charles de Groux, The Drunkard, 1853. Oil on canvas, 68 x 80 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan.
24
Jean-Philippe Huys and Dominique Marechal
ing, praising the artist’s ability of having breathed into it a quality con- and above all in landscape.
sidered to be valuable: “of feeling, without which art is only a pompously By “free art” one means the renewal of art, the “free and individual
adorned corpse.”'^'* It is also appreciated for its composition,"^^ expressive interpretation of nature.”"^® An art that liberated itself from the hierarchy
design, vigorous color, and free touch."^^ And the motif that surprises even today — the sky lit only at the horizon line — was interpreted as a refer- ence to landscapes of the old masters, and more- over as the young artist’s desire for distinction in his manner of reproducing nature.
If de Jonghe’s painting shows affinity in spirit with Charles de Groux’s “miserabilistic” work, it is also related to Misfortune by the romantic Louis Gallait (1810-87), exhibited in Paris in 1844, which shares its evocative truthfulness as well as the motif of the mother and child kneel- ing before a font, requesting the Madonna’s help (fig. 11). Pilgrims Praying to Our Lady of the Afflicted also recalls the post-romantic drama that characterized The Death of a Sister of Charity by the French painter Isidore Pils (1850, Musee des Augustins, Toulouse, held at the Musee d’Orsay). That said, this “realistic” episode was not repeated in the career of Gustave de Jonghe, who quickly changed to become the author of graceful genre scenes in order to win public favor.
of genres and from the judgment of official Salon juries. This freedom occurs in the conception, the expression, and the exhibition of any artis- tic manifestation."*^ It is an art free of academic conventions and the rules of the workshop. It is a “return to the true sense of painting, admired not for the subject but for its rich materiality, like a precious substance and a living organism.” In this declaration of Gamille Lemonnier, one can easily see the spirit that animated Gustave Gourbet.^®
Translated by Jeffery Howe
Free Art
In view of the essentially negative, deroga- tory use of the word “realism,” Belgian admirers and defenders of Gustave Gourbet preferred to use the terms “sincerity” and “modernity.”"*"* These are also guidelines found in LArt Libre (1871- 72), the artistic and literary magazine published by the Societe libre des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (1868-75). The foundation of this society is important in the evolution of nineteenth-century Belgian painting, “a declaration of rights made at a timely moment.”"*^ It is in fact the culmina- tion of several attempts to combat the apathy of the Academy, such as the nearly unionized action against the system of admission and placement in exhibitions."*'* Thus young artists gathered on behalf of artistic freedom. The founding members included Louis Artan, Theodore Baron, Gharles de Groux, Gonstantin Meunier, Fdicien Rops, Alfred Verwee, its secretary Gamille van Gamp, and Louis Dubois who became the true leader and theoretician of the group by writing under the pseudonym Hout {wood in Dutch) in the periodi- cal that affirmed the principles of the free circle. The artists of the society were mostly related to the French realists; after being contacted, Gour- bet sent his encouragement and accepted the title of honorary member.*^ Some members had
10. Nicolas-Fran9ois Octave Tassaert, An Unfor- tunate Family, 1849. Oil on canvas, 114 x 78.5 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
11. Louis Gallait, sketch for Misfortune, 1844. Oil on canvas, 25.5 x 17 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: J. Geleyns/ Ro scan.
assimilated the lessons of the master of Ornans, whose works were shown
in Belgium for almost two decades in the triennial exhibitions. They were able to “digest” his innovative art and internalize it, enabling them to formulate an autochthonous realist art that was evident in portraiture
25
Realism: From Living Art to Free Art
1 Herwig Todts, “Le naturalisme: Introduction a rhistoriographie et a I’interpretation d’une mode,” in Tranches de vie: Le naturalisme en Europe, 1875—1915, exh. cat. (Ghent: Ludion; Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 9-31. Roger Bruyeron, forward to Courbet: Ecrits, propos, lettres et temoignages (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 5-9.
2 Patrick Le Nouene, Albert Boime, and Sylvie Douce de la Salle, Exigences de realisme dans la peinture frangaise entre 1830 et 1870, exh. cat. (Chartres: Musee des Beaux-Arts, 1983), 9, 14, 35. Around the figure of Leleux crit- ics had grouped a small number of painters such as Hedoin, Fortin, and Luminais. At the same time, comparable works were produced in the school of Diisseldorf, for example by Carl Wilhelm Hiibner (1814-79). See Lil- ian Landes, ‘“Ein neues Fach des Genres’: Das sozialkritische Genrebild der Diisseldorfer Malerschule im internationalen Vergleich,” in Die Diisseldor- fer Malerschule und ihre inter nationale Ausstrah lung, 1819—1918, ed. Bet- tina Baumgartel, exh. cat. (Diisseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast; Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2011), 21 Off.
3 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century European Art, ed. (Bos- ton: Prentice Hall, 2012), 265.
4 Jan De Maeyer and Peter Heyrman, eds., Geuren en kleuren: Een sociale en economische geschiedenis van Vlaams-Brabant, 19de en 20ste eeuw (Louvain: Peeters, 2001), 59.
5 Chantal Georgel, 1848, La Republique et I’art vivant, exh. cat. (Paris: Fayard/ Editions de la reunion des musees nationaux, 1998), 131.
6 Ibid., 64, 65, 68, 81, 85, 88; Ee Nouene, Boime, and Ea Salle, Exigences de realisme, 68.
7 ‘“Give me what you will,’ he exclaimed, ‘the most poorly-paid, ingrateful work. It doesn’t matter, but at least I can satisfy my basic needs. Without resources and without credit, the idea of throwing myself into the water is unpleasant to one with pride.’” The painter Philippe Auguste Jeanron (1809-77), at that time director of the national museums, wanting to see with his own eyes what Tassaert’s true state was, found the painter “in a miserable shed, deprived of the necessities in life and exploited by merchants who buy the charming drawings that he is forced to give up for shameful prices if he does not want to die of hunger” (Georgel, La Republique et I’art vivant, 67, 108n9).
8 David Stark, “Belgische Bilder aus dem Jahr 1848,” in Arbeit und Alltag: Soziale Wirklichkeit in der Belgischen Kunst, 1830—1914, exh. cat. (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft fiir Bildende Kunst, 1979), 196.
9 Ee Nouene, Boime, and Ea Salle, Exigences de realisme, 60-6 1 .
1 0 This, as will be seen later, is in opposition to realism — in short — Courbet.
1 1 Historian, novelist, and critic Jules Husson, known as Champfleury, is the author of the article “Du realisme, Eettre a Madame Sand,” L’Artiste 16 (Sept. 2, 1855): 1-5, reprinted in Le realisme (Paris: Michel Eevy, 1857), 270-85.
12 Max Buchon published his Recueil de dissertations sur le realisme in Neufcha- tel in 1856.
13 Georgel, La Republique et I’art vivant, 143.
14 Gustave Courbet, “Realist Manifesto,” 7 (in this volume).
15 Ibid.
1 6 Prom left to right, Regis Courbet, the father of the painter; Urbain Cuenot who is the host of the scene; Marlet seen from the back lighting his pipe; and Alphonse Promayet playing the violin.
17 To cite Helene Toussaint, “ Une apres-dinee a Ornansl’ in Gustave Courbet, 1819—1877, ed. Alan Bowness et ah, exh. cat. (Paris: Editions des musees nationaux, 1977), 96.
1 8 Eetter from Courbet to the editor in chief of the Messager de I’Assemblee, Ornans, Nov. 19, 1851; Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Correspondance de Cour- bet Elammarion, 1996), 51-2/96.
19 “Profession de foi,” manuscript of Gustave Courbet addressed to Auguste
Vacquerie, editor in chief of Rappel (Apr. 15, 1871); Bruyeron, Courbet: Ecrits, propos, lettres et temoignages, 97-99.
20 Camille Eemonnier, L’ecole beige de peinture, 1830—1905, rev. ed. (1906; Brussels: Editions labor, 1991), 58.
21 Les Cosaques: Invasion au salon de 1854 (Brussels: Chez les principaux libraires, 1854), 9, cat. 106 C. Felicien Rops is the author of the thirty-seven lithogra- phic cartoons.
22 Philippe Roberts-Jones, Du realisme au surrealism: La peinture en Belgique de Joseph Stevens a Paul Delvaux (Brussels: Universite fibre de Bruxelles, 1994), particularly 11-21.
23 Album illustre du salon de 1848 publie par une societe d’artiste et de gens de lettres (Brussels: Imprimerie et lithographie des Beaux-Arts, 1848), 45.
24 Term used by Max Sulzberger, “Ea dynastie des Stevens,” Revue de Belgique 31 (1885): 9.
25 Extract from a letter by Alfred Stevens to Joseph Stevens, in Camille Eemon- nier, “Ees artistes beiges: Joseph Stevens,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 22 (1880): 360-61.
26 Paul Eierens, Joseph Stevens (Brussels: Editions des cahiers de Belgique, 1931), 9.
27 Eemonnier, L’ecole beige de peinture, 365.
28 Claude Vignon, Exposition universelle de 1855: Beaux-Arts (Paris: Auguste Eontaine, 1855), 80.
29 Edmond About, Voyage a travers I’Exposition des Beaux-Arts (peinture et sculp- ture) (Paris: E. Hachette, 1855), 112.
30 “Exposition universelle des Beaux-Arts,” L’Echo de Bruxelles 14, no. 188 aufy7, 1855): 2.
31 The painting was exhibited in 1853 at one of the Societe d’harmonie d’lxelles’s exhibitions and purchased by the animal painter Eouis Robbe, who was seduced by the force of its originality.
32 Emile Eeclercq, “Charles de Groux,” in L’art & les artistes: Critique, esthe- tique, rev. ed. (1871; Brussels: C. Muquardt, 1877), 207.
33 Max Sulzberger, “Ee realisme en Erance et en Belgique: Courbet et De Groux,” Revue de Belgique 16 (1874): 384-97.
34 Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts 1854: Catalogue explicative (Brussels: G. Stapleaux, 1854), 40, cat. 209.
35 Catalogue de I’ exposition de tableaux de P.-L. Everard & Cie, de Londres (Brus- sels: E. Guyot, 1874), cat. 211.
36 Catalogue de tableaux modernes provenant de la collection du Docteur Jules Lequime mise en vente. . . 4—5 avril, 1 892, lot 3 1 . This collection had no less than seven paintings by Gustave Courbet.
37 Grimm, “Ea collection du Dr. Jules Eequime,” La Eederation Artistique (Mar. 13, 1892): 249.
38 “Ea collection du Docteur Eequime,” L’Art Moderne 12, no. 13 (Mar. 27, 1892): 101.
39 With “Part viril, violent, apre, triste, fortement senti et fortement pense, fait de larmes et de souffrances, d’angoisses et de desespoirs, de Charles de Groux.” Georges de Mons, “Ea galerie Eequime,” Le National Beige 3, no. 4 Qan. 4, 1882): 2.
40 “Une diversite de caracteres profondement meditees et heureusement reproduits.” “Salon de 1854,” Sancho 9, no. 409 (Sept. 10, 1854): 2.
41 Camille Berru and De Cauwer, L’Exposition des Beaux-Arts de 1854 (Brus- sels: Detrie-Tomson, 1854), 69.
42 R., “Salon de Bruxelles,” L’Etoile Beige 5, no. 277 (Oct. 1, 1854): 1.
43 “Salon de 1854,” 3.
44 Emile Eeclercq, “De la sincerite dans les arts: Reflexion a propos de I’exposition de I860,” Revue Trimestrielle 8, no. 29 (Jan. 1, 1861): 161-73. Arthur Stevens, De la modernite dans I’art: Lettre a M. Jean Rousseau (Brus- sels: Office de publicite, 1868).
45 “Proclamation de Eeon Dommartin,” L’Art Libre 1 (Dec. 15, 1871).
26
Jean-Philippe Huys and Dominique Marechal
46 Paul Colin, La peinture beige depuis 1 830 (Brussels: Editions des cahiers de Belgique, 1930), 168.
47 Liste des membres fondateurs, ejfectifs adherents, d’honneur et correspondants de la SociHe libre des Beaux-Arts, Archives de Fart contemporaine en Belgique, inv. 1 12200/3. Among the honorary members were artists Corot, Daumier, Millet, and Alfred Stevens as well as the writer William Burger (pseudonym of Theophile Thore) and composer Richard Wagner.
48 H. H., in Journal des Beaux-Arts et de la Litterature 11, no. 2 (Jan. 31, 1869): 9, presents the goals of the Societe lihre des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.
49 Henri Liesse, “A propos des tableaux modernes de I’hotel d’Assche,” LArt Libre! iJA2X. 15, 1872): 101.
50 Lemonnier, L’ecole beige de peinture, 124.
27
Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes OF Courbet
Dominique Marechal
Holland and Belgium are charming countries, especially for an artist.
— Gustave Courbet^
Courbet’s Introduction to the Old Masters
Shortly after arriving in Paris from his native region in late 1839, Gustave Gourbet met the painter Francois Bonvin (1817-87) who encouraged him to visit the Louvre. Like all young artists of the time, they made copies there together, although what exactly they copied is not known. ^ Gourbet was twenty-one years old, Bonvin two years older. According to the memoirs of the art critic Francis Wey (1812-82), Gour- bet initially had little interest in the old masters until Bonvin changed his mind.'’ Wey described their museum visits in detail, even if he was not a direct witness:
Courbet’s Study Trips and the Influence of Northern Art
From early on, the French painter Gustave Gourbet was attracted to Northern art, and his trips to Belgium and the Netherlands prove to have been essential for his later development.
In a letter written to his parents from Amsterdam in August 1846, he reported that “my style pleases them,”^ which sums up per- fectly the artist’s feeling during one of his first trips to the North. He had just arrived in the Netherlands via a stopover in Belgium. After an excellent welcome in both countries, Gourbet felt that he had been understood. His style was appreciated, and he was at ease. Much later, in a letter from 1 866, he stated that he regarded Bel- gium as his home country.^
But what exactly was the nature of that bond Gourbet felt with Belgium and the Nether- lands, the region with which he clicked from the start, and where he apparently found a rich soil for putting down deep roots In order to formu- late an answer to this question, we will try to find out exactly where and when he traveled, what he saw, and what influence this had on the development of his own art.
After a first encounter at the Louvre with earlier Northern art, Gour- bet journeyed to this region three times between 1844 and 1847, trav- eling twice to Belgium (1844 and 1847) and once to the Netherlands (1846). There he deepened his knowledge of the masters of the golden age, found clients for portraits, and built an informal circle of acquain- tances.
As a mature artist he made four or five additional trips to Belgium between 1851 and 1861. He exhibited his major works there, and they resonated powerfully with local artists. In Belgium, he again painted por- traits, and to a much lesser extent, landscapes. His participation in the International Gongress of Art in Antwerp in 1861 completed his break- through. We have also discovered a rare and unexpected source of inspira- tion for Gourbet in his Belgian contemporary Alfred Stevens.
After first having shown contempt for the great Italian school, and even the Flem- ish, but especially for the French, Gour- bet showed signs of life when his guide gently showed him Rembrandt; Bonvin left his comrade to get acquainted with Rembrandt, having him do some copy work without assimilating his methods...! have privately viewed some of his sketches, imitative at first, then stripping away the Dutch patina and keeping only the somber technique of contrasting light.^
During another visit, this time with Wey, the painter remained true to his love of realism: in his eyes only the Spaniards Velazquez and Ribera and the Fleming Jordaens valued truth. ^
Apparently, Gourbet focused on the work of Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyck, and Velazquez, even though almost none of his copies after them is known. ^ It may be in the context of this visit to the Louvre that the unidentified and undated youthful work Imaginary Landscape Imitating the Flemish should be situated.^”
In his own words, the study of the old masters — including those of the North — helped him discover his own deeper personality. As he clarified in 1855 in his “Realist Manifesto,” “I have studied, independent of any system or partisan spirit, the art of the ancients and moderns. [...] I simply sought to mine from a thorough knowledge of tradition a rational and independent feeling of my own individuality.”"
Travels in Northern Europe: Courbet’s Formative Years (1840-50)
In a letter of March 22, 1 866 addressed to Arthur Stevens, Gourbet wrote that he had been visiting Belgium for twenty-six years." If we are to believe this statement, then his first visit was in 1840. Unfortunately there is no corroborating source for this early — and perhaps all too imagi- nary— ^visit. In an earlier letter to his grandparents written from Paris in March 1844, he reports that he has recently painted, among other things, a portrait of a Belgian baron who was a cavalry major, and one of the baron’s father. Both were “relatives of Mrs. Blavet, who has been really
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1 . Oscar de Haes, Portrait of Louis Papeians de Mor- choven, 1849. Lithograph on paper, 47.7 x 31 cm, Ghent University Library Manuscript Collection.
29
Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet
good to him.” He does not specify, however, whether he created these portraits in Paris or elsewhere. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu suspects that this nobleman was the Baron Papeians de Morcho- ven, with whom Courbet would stay two years later in Ghent. This hypothesis is confirmed as we know that Baroness Louis Papeians de Morchoven, born Adele Damiens, was a daughter of Marie Blavet.'"^ There was an earlier attempt to identify the portrait mentioned in the letter with a male portrait in the museum of Vevey.'^ However, if we compare a lithographic por- trait of Louis Papeians de Morchoven (fig. 1) that is firmly identified with both an inscription and the fam- ily coat of arms to the portrait in Vevey (fig. 2), we find that these are unquestionably two different people.
However, it is impossible that Courbet could have painted the portrait of Jacques Papeians de Morchoven (1753-1804), the father of Louis, because he had died long before 1844. Perhaps the artist confused Louis’s father with one of his older brothers, Theodore (1792- 1846) or Charles (1799-1848) in this letter of May 1844? Be that as it may, an inquiry to the family about these two portraits turned up nothing.
Very likely the baron and his father (?) who sat for portraits by Courbet urged him to visit Belgium during their sittings and may have even invited him to come to their home in Ghent (see below) .
Coincidence or not, it was exactly in the same year of 1 844 that the first solid evidence of a visit to Belgium is firmly docu- mented.'^ In September 1844 Courbet signed the museum’s guest book at St. John’s Hos- pital in Bruges, registering to draw on the same sheet as the painter Joseph Robert-Fleury (1797-1890) and art historian Alfred Michiels (1813- 92). He was the 2076'^'' visitor recorded in the registry since September 1843 (fig. 3).
During this first visit he must have sketched The Rest on the Flight into Egypt which then was still considered an authentic painting by Anthony van Dyck (1599—1641) (fig. 4).'^
At this time, interest in the Flemish primitives was just beginning to grow, and most tourists visited the museum at St.
John’s Hospital to see the paintings by Hans Memling (d. 1494). In Courbet’s notes there is no mention of his visit, nor any record of a visit to the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts (now the Groeningemuseum), nor did he sketch any other monument in Bru- ges. The “realism” of the Flemish primitives apparently left him indifferent; his interest in a baroque painting after Van Dyck is there- fore all the more remarkable. One wonders whether he met the aforementioned Robert- Fleury and Michiels in the museum and if they might have played a role in this unusual choice for him.'^
If all the sketches in Courbet’s notebook were drawn in the same period — ^which is probably but not necessarily so — then it seems that the artist also visited Ostend and Spa on the same trip, as there are drawings of a view of Ostend and a square in Spa.
Courbet’s “taste” for the North was further encouraged in 1 845 by the Dutch art dealer Hendrik Jan van Wisselingh (1816-84), who visited Courbet in his studio after the artist returned to Paris. Van Wisselingh predicted that Courbet would have a good reception in his homeland, and bought two paintings from him and ordered a third.^°
In August 1 846 Courbet made an important trip to the Netherlands, with a short stopover in Belgium. This journey, undeniably a key event in his career, is likely the result of Van Wisselingh’s visit the year before. Courbet’s readings of certain texts may also have played a role.^' Traveling to Ghent, Courbet stayed three or four days with his acquaintances, the Papeians de Morchoven family, who lived then at Rue de la Station 1 7, the street now known as Zuidstation- straat 25, in Ghent (fig. 5).
While there, they gave him three letters of recom- mendation intended for Dutch contacts, including one for a court dignitary and for an “an tiquaire” (curator?) at the Rijksmuseum. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, he
sent an enthusiastic letter to his parents on about August 15, telling them that he had met two or three artists (he does not mention their names), and visited the museum. He does not say exactly what paintings he saw, but the masterpieces of Frans Hals (1582-1666), Rem- brandt (1606-69), and Bartholomeus van der Heist (1630-70) were always on view, as well as landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-82). He was enchanted by all that he saw in Holland because “a trip like this teaches you more than three years of work.” He found The Hague charming, and he vis- ited the most beautiful collections. “I do not yet know when I will leave” he writes, “because I might well make a portrait here. I am assured that if I were to stay here two or three months and acquire a reputation, I would be able to earn money. They like my style of painting. I have only a small land- scape with me, the style of which pleases them greatly No one paints that way here.”^^ A few days later, Courbet wrote a cor- dial thank you letter to Mrs. Papeians de Morchoven. He had painted a portrait in Amsterdam that had a great effect and was met with “an enthusiasm that I did not expect.” He was ecstatic about his jour- ney pleased by both his warm reception and by the knowledge that he imparted. He concluded: “Holland and Belgium are charming countries.
2. Gustave Courbet, Portrait of a Man, c. 1843. Oil on canvas, 194 x 111 cm, Musee Jenisch, Vevey
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3. Guest book at St. John’s Hospital in Bruges with Gustave Courbet’s signature. Sept. 1844. OCMW Archive, Bruges.
4. After Anthony van Dyck, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1630. Oil on canvas, 101 x 126.5 cm, chimney piece of the old chapter house, St. John’s Hospital, Bruges.
30
Dominique Marechal
especially for an artist.”^^ Courbet did not mention that he took part in the Exhibi- tion of Living Masters, showing a Portrait of a Man, most probably his 1 846 portrait of Hendrik Jan van Wisselingh noted above (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) .
His trips to the North unquestion- ably had a lasting impact on Courbet. The large-scale format of paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt, among others, left a deep and lasting impression on him. His inter- est in Rembrandt, “the Luther of painting,” would be stressed by Pierre-Joseph Proud- hon in his Du principe de Part et de sa desti- nation social?^ Courbet was clearly looking to the traditional realism of the North more than to the art of the idealizing South. His monumental night scene Firemen Racing to a Fire (1850-51, Petit Palais, Paris) is an early example that clearly illustrates the influence of Rembrandt’s Night Watch (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), although it also refers to the style of Frans Hals.^'^-
From an August 1 847 letter to his parents we learn that Courbet intended to return to his home village of Ornans soon but first would make a detour through Belgium to stay in Ghent “with friends” and paint a portrait there. He must be referring to the Papeians de Morchoven family, his regular “base,” though they are not mentioned. Nor is it clear whether the portrait is intended for them. He notes that the trip is also a wonderful opportunity for him to study paintings by the great Dutch masters in Belgian collections. It is interesting that Courbet speaks only of Dutch masters, and not of Flemish paint- ers. We can only guess about exactly which works of art he is referring to here.
On September 6 Courbet wrote to his par- ents from Ghent to say that he would stay in Belgium for eight to ten days, this “very agree- able country... a veritable Cockaigne” where he is received “like a Prince.” Despite the distraction of frequent and copious dinners with numerous aristocrats, he managed to paint two more por- traits. Unfortunately, both are unidentified and lost. He had already been in Brussels, Malines, Antwerp, Termonde, and Ghent and would be going to Bruges and Ostend, before stopping at Louvain and Liege and then returning to Ornans via Cologne.
He spent at least part of the trip with his friend Champfleury (1821-89). The latter described his memories on March 28, 1858: “I am almost cer- tain that Courbet has drowned in a barrel of Faro [ale] . Ten years ago Courbet treated me to a simi- lar trip to Brussels where we were to stay for three days: a month later he still hadn’t left the brasse- ries. A little too much beer and those discussions
will spoil his work if he doesn’t take care.” This might be only malicious gossip, for if we believe the itinerary that the twenty- eight-year-old Courbet described to his parents, he would never have been able to boast of such a “performance” to Champ- fleury! Or perhaps the parents received only a “sanitized” version of his travels In any case, Courbet was certainly a “bon vivant” and immersed himself in Belgium.
Some authors have speculated on the existence of a trip to Belgium in 1849— 50, based on the existence of some travel sketches that have been attributed to Cour- bet and dated to that time. Indeed, a large number of drawings from the foundation of Paul Reverdy, a grandson of Zoe Courbet, the artist’s sister, were initially attributed to the artist and led to the suggestion that Courbet had made a trip to Belgium at that time. There are scenes from the region of Spa and sketches of Bruges in this series, including city views and sketches of some paintings in St. John’s Hospi- tal where his visit had been recorded in 1844.^° None of these drawings are signed or mono- grammed, however, and stylistically they do not match the oeuvre of the artist.^' Given that this travel is not documented anywhere in the literature on Courbet, the suspicion is rightly raised that these sketches are more likely by the husband of Zoe Courbet, the artist Jean Baptiste Reverdy (1822-87).
That this alleged trip was never taken is confirmed by his letter of March 19, 1850 to Edouard Reynart of the museum in Lille in which he wrote that he has traveled twice in Bel- gium and once in Holland for his “education.”^^
Courbet’s Trips to Belgium as a Mature Artist (1851-61)
Starting in 1851, at the age of thirty-two, Gustave Courbet began to exhibit in Belgium and to take part in important initiatives there.
He participated in the Salon of Brussels in 1851 and showed his groundbreaking Stonebreak- ers (1849, destroyed during the Second World War), the landmark par excellence of realism, which he had exhibited for the first time only the year before in Paris. In the same Salon he also showed the less familiar Cellist (1847, National- museum, Stockholm) . This work was painted four years earlier in a style strongly inspired by Rem- brandt, revealing immediately the influence of his trips to the North. He received some rave reviews for his entries, but was also panned by the more conservative art critics. His realism was unfavor- ably compared to, among others, the old Flemish masters Van Eyck and Memling: “Where did Mr.
6. Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Monsieur Van La- ethem, c. 1856. Oil on canvas, 53 x 49 cm, private collection.
7. Gustave Courbet, The Rock of Bayard, Dinant, c. 1855-56. Oil on canvas, 56 x 47 cm, Fitzwil- liam Museum, Cambridge.
5. Zuidstationstraat 25 in Ghent, the Papeians de Morcho- ven family home where Gustave Courbet stayed several times (photo by author) .
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Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet
Courbet unearth this rotting nature and living corpses? He has not found but invented them. He tells me nothing but lies. The truth has had its painters, and they studied patiently in conscience, with a scrupulous and loving exact- ness, to give back their understanding:
Jan van Eyck, Memling, Cranach, Hol- bein, Fra Angelico, Perugino, all those geniuses whose modest body of work hides an immense preparation. Their paintings are amazing in their naive sincerity. Need one say why those of Mr. Courbet only instill a feeling of repulsion? That’s because he has neither considered nor understood anything.”^'*
According to this art critic, Courbet understood nothing of the Flemish tra- dition. However, nothing could be fur- ther from the truth.
It is known for certain that Courbet came to Brussels on September 5, 1851 at the invitation of the Cercle artistique et litteraire.^^ For this cultural associa- tion he painted Signora Adela Guerrero,
Spanish Dancer (plate 3), a work created for the celebration for King Feopold I to commemorate the twentieth anni- versary of his accession to the throne.
Why Courbet was chosen for this offer- ing, and by whom, remains a mystery.
During this visit the artist definitely visited the Royal Museum in Brussels (now the Royal Museums of Fine Arts 9. Postcard with a view of the Meuse River and the Rock of Moniat at
of Belgium) and apparently analyzed Anseremme, early twentieth century
8. Gustave Courbet, The Rock of Moniat opposite Anseremme, Oil on canvas, 58 x 82 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
Meuse River in the autumn of 1856 before returning along the Rhine to his birthplace, although there is no firm evidence of this.'^'* However it is widely believed that two rare undated Meuse landscapes were painted in that period, namely The Rock of Bayard, Dinant (fig. 7)'*' and The Rock of Moniat oppo- site Anseremme (fig. 8) . Until now, the exact site of this second view along the Meuse near Freyr had not been identi- fied, but thanks to the discovery of a postcard (fig. 9) we now know that it is the Rock of Moniat, which is opposite the old priory of Anseremme, four kilo- meters upstream of Dinant and slightly closer to Dinant than Freyr. There is no doubt that the painter took advan- tage of the ever increasing popularity of tourism in the nineteenth century exploiting an important commercial market for scenic views like this.'*^
In the fall of 1857, Courbet reported in a letter to Pierre Fajon that his paintings at the Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels have had a great deal of success and that he will be returning ten days later to the Belgian capital.'^'* It has not been established whether this was a short trip, with him returning to Paris before coming back to Brussels for a longer period in late 1857 or 1858, or if, as is often thought, that Courbet spent one long period in Brussels. In any case, during this visit
the Allegory of Fertility by Jacob Jor- daens with great interest.^'’ The naked woman in Jordaens’s painting is explicitly echoed in the water nymph of Courbet’s The Source (1868, Musee d’Orsay Paris).
Courbet was in Belgium again in 1856, and presumably painted the Portrait of Mon- sieur Van Laethem (fig. 6) at that time. The date is not certain, although it is known that Courbet painted this portrait as a thank you gift for the sitter, an amateur painter who made his studio available to him.^® Perhaps the man can be identified as J. A. (Jean Alex- andre?) Vanlaethem who is mentioned in the Almanach Royal Officiel in the years 1855-59 as “receiver of direct contributions and excise taxes for Anderlecht (Anderlecht, Dilbeek and Itterbeek) [suburbs of Brussels] .” In the Alma- nach du Commerce de Bruxelles of 1862 the residence of a certain J. Vanlaethem was listed as Boulevard ext. Anderlecht 33; and he turns out to have been an elector for the legislative
he seems to have painted some interest- ing portraits of Belgians. First, we may note the portrait of a Mile. Jacquet (dated 1857) about whom we have no further biographical details, but we know that it was from the outset in the Brussels collection of a Mr. J. (fig. lO)."^*" Also traditionally dated to 1856-57 is the Portrait of Madame Leon Fontaine, nee Laure fanne (plate 4). Despite the stylistic differences with his earlier work, the dark tones and the striking chiaroscuro are particularly interesting features that derive from the Dutch school of painters of the seventeenth century
In the summer of 1858 Courbet is again reported to have spent several months in Brus- sels. Perhaps in June or July he wrote to his father that he is staying in Belgium to keep his options open. “I am working here and carving out a niche for myself for the future when I may want or need it. The way things are going now in France this is useful, especially for me.
I have two more portraits to do here and then
chambers.
Courbet may have traveled along the
10. Gustave Gourbet, Portrait of Mile. Jacquet, 1857. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.5 cm, private collection.
I leave for Frankfurt, where my paintings are exhibited.”"^^ In this relatively long period he
32
Dominique Marechal
was not very active, except for a few portraits. In a letter to Amand Gautier he says that he is even bored in Brussels, since “everything here is por- traits and lawsuits.” He wants to say “to hell with it all” and leave for Frankfurt."^® Interestingly, his post address is in care of the photographer G. Radoux, Montagne de la Gour 73 in Brussels.
One of these portraits is that of Madame de Brayer (fig. 11). This sitter was a Polish woman married to a Belgian doctor. When the portrait was exhibited in Antwerp in 1858, it was already listed as being from the collection of Af. leDocteur Breyer \sic\ a Bruxelles.
In 1861 Gourbet traveled to Antwerp to participate in the International Gongress of Art on August 19 and 20. The participants in this Gongress were divided into several groups where different issues were debated. In group three, the topic for discussion was the influence of the Zeit- geist on contemporary art. Of course this led to different responses. Gourbet gave an improvised but important speech that is regarded as another manifesto of realism, in which he states that “the basis of realism is the negation of the ideal.”^® At the banquet where he also estab- lished solid ties with Belgian artists, he made a toast that illustrates his philosophy in a nutshell: “to liberty in art and all things.”^^
Courbet and the Stevens Brothers: Unex- pected Inspiration
A last important link between Gustave Gourbet and Belgium comes from his rela- tions with the Stevens brothers — Joseph (1816-92) (plate 10), Alfred (1823-1906, plates 7, 8), and Arthur (1825-90) — in Paris and Brussels. The two oldest were painters, the youngest an art dealer.^^
A first record of any contact — and they are unfortunately meager — is in a letter from June-July 1853 by Gourbet to Jules Ghampfleury in which he mentions an unspecified portrait and notes he has had no news from Arthur Stevens. A second letter, this time addressed to Arthur, dates from March 22, 1866. In this often-cited letter, Gourbet writes that he regards Bel- gium as his home country, and asks if Ste- vens has a client in Brussels who might purchase A Burial at Ornans (1849-50,
Musee d’Orsay, Paris). Gourbet reflects that “The painting is too important for me” and he hopes it would get a perma- nent home in “his” Belgium. This paint- ing with its large format and fifty-two life size figures represents a key statement of the principles of realism. In the letter, the painter also mentions the ovations and the
1 1 . Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Madame de Bray- er (The Polish Exile), 1858. Oil on canvas, 91.4 X 72.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
sympathy that he always received in Belgium. He would be happy to see his canvas Burial at Ornans end up there, in “the country of painting and lit- erature.”^^
There are no other known letters from Gour- bet in which the Stevens family is mentioned. It is therefore unclear when and in what circum- stances the first meeting between Alfred Stevens and Gourbet took place and also when exactly the Frenchman painted the portrait of the Belgian (plate 6) . According to some authors, the undated work was made in 1861, but it is not at all clear on what this date is based. Stevens was living in Paris in 1861, and it seems unlikely that Gourbet would have made the portrait in Belgium that year. Stylistically the portrait seems more likely to date from about 1855.
However, Alfred Stevens also in turn painted a portrait of Gourbet as a posthumous homage. A recognizable image of Gourbet is included in the Panorama of the History of the Nineteenth Century that he painted in 1889 for the World’s Fair in Paris. More precisely, Gourbet is at the far right of the section with the most important painters of the Second Empire (Petit Palais, Paris). On the preparatory pencil drawing (plate 7) we note next to the portrait a repetition of the same image of Gourbet, but looser and lighter. This “preliminary sketch” of the “prelimi- nary portrait drawing” illustrates the par- ticular importance that Stevens attached to Gourbet.
A hitherto unnoticed comparison allows us to conclude that the esteem was mutual. Indeed, we believe a direct bor- rowing from Stevens can be recognized in Gourbet’s sketch of a Group of Men and Women Escorted by Four Soldiers (fig. 12).^*’ This drawing is part of a sketch- book with seven scenes related to the suppression of the Gommune — the revolt of 1871 in Paris in which Gour- bet participated and was imprisoned for his conduct. On closer inspection, this sketch closely resembles Stevens’s first masterpiece What One Calls Vaga- bondage: or. The Hunters from Vin- cennes (fig. 13), which caused a great sensation at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.57
This socially engaged depiction of the oppression of the poor by the Erench State was a jab at the govern- ment, and was from the outset asso- ciated by some critics with the work of the “kindred spirit” Gourbet. The critic Maxime du Gamp wondered if “Mr. Alfred Stevens is not too much
12. Gustave Gourbet, Group of Men and Women Escorted by Eour Soldiers, c. 1871. Pencil, charcoal and black chalk on paper, c. 10 X 14 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris/conserved in the Louvre.
13. Alfred Stevens, What One Calls Vagabondage; or, The Hunters from Vincennes, 1854. Oil on canvas, 131 x 165 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
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Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet
impressed by the work of one painter from Franche-Comte [i.e., Gustave Courbet] who uses all possible means to make a bit of noise about his name? It is a bad master to follow, one who cannot lead himself Mr. Alfred Stevens should be careful, stronger men than he would lose their way on such a dangerous path.”^^
Gustave Courbet: At Home in the North
In conclusion, it can be stated that Gustave Courbet felt right at home immediately in the North. He traveled there several times, staying more often in Belgium than in the Netherlands. He visited numerous museums and studied the great masters of the North, especially those of the seventeenth century. He built an informal social network, met artists, held exhibitions there, made contact with the art trade, and was discussed and both hailed and reviled in the magazines and newspapers. The influence of Dutch painters, particularly Rembrandt, however, was stronger than Flemish. This impact is mainly observable during Courbet’s formative years, especially about 1850 when he paints his fundamental monumental canvases. Except for some copies, however, direct stylistic or compositional references to the old masters are rarely seen. The influence of the North appears on a deeper level. It was not the slick realism of the then relatively unknown Flemish primitives which made an impression on him, but rather the naturalism and sensual rendering of seventeenth- century Flemish masters such as Jordaens, primarily in his nudes.
The modernity of Courbet, which perplexed so many at the time, is in fact grounded in numerous aspects of Dutch painting from the golden age, including the use of monumental formats for mundane and contem- porary scenes and a neutral view of everyday life that avoided anecdote, moral stance, sentiment, and consolation while remaining objective and distant. The large scale enabled him to break with the all-too-picturesque, narrative, and sentimental images of the ''peinture de la realitf by the “official realists” of 1840-50 and to discover his own personal style in an uncompromising realism. One should also note the Rembrandtesque coloring and deep chiaroscuro in his portraits, as well as certain aspects of the Dutch landscape painters that recur in his landscapes.
Both Emile Zola and Vincent van Gogh tried to explain Courbet’s connection with the art of the North, each in their own way In a dis- cussion with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Zola concluded: “My Courbet is simply a personality. The painter began by imitating the Elemings and some masters of the Renaissance. But his nature rebelled and he felt car- ried away by his ‘flesh’ — by all his flesh, you understand — to the material world that surrounded him, the fat women and powerful men, the rich countryside, wide and fertile. Solid and strong, he felt a sharp desire to grasp the true nature in his arms. He wanted to paint full-blooded in the open land.”^^ Zola used all the cliches that were bestowed on Blem- ish painting to describe the fundamental characteristics of the style of Courbet.
Vincent van Gogh described it even more succinctly in 1888, even though he may have had earlier Dutch art from his own time in mind: “’Well, the Hollanders, we see them painting the things as they are,
seemingly without thinking, like Courbet painted his beautiful naked
”60
women. ^
Gustave Courbet and the North... an unexpected and exciting col- lusion!
Translated by Jeffery Howe
1 From Courbet to Mme. Papeians de Morchoven, c. Aug. 24, 1846. Petra
ten-Doesschate Chu, Correspondance de (Paris: Flammarion, 1996),
46-10/65. For the full citation see note 23.
2 Ibid., 46-9/64-65. See note 22.
3 Ibid., 66-6/246-47. See note 55.
4 Some aspects of this story have already been well studied, such as Cour- bet’s contribution to the Congress of Antwerp in 1861. See Paul B. Crapo, “Disjuncture on the Left: Proudhon, Courbet and the Antwerp Congress of \%6\ I' Art History 14, no. 1 (Mar. 1991): 67—91. For the Ghent Salon of 1868, see Robert Hoozee, “Gustave Courbet op her Gentse Salon van 1868,” in De Wagenmenner en andere verhalen: Album Discipulorum Prof. Dr. M. De Maeyer, ed. Claire van Damme and Paul van Calster (Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit, 1986), 82-89. More generally see Anne Pingeot and Rob- ert Hoozee, “Le Realisme: Courbet en Belgique,” in Paris— Bruxelles, Brux- elles—Paris: Les relations entre la France et la Belgique, 1848—1914, ed. Anne Pingeot and Robert Hoozee, exh. cat. (Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux; Anvers: Fonds Mercator, 1997), 152-56.
5 For one example, though after Titian, see Laurence des Cars, '‘L’homme a la ceinture de cuirl' in Gustave Courbet, ed. Dominique de Font-Reaulx et al., exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 100-101.
6 Wey met Courbet in late 1848 or early 1849; he wrote his memoirs at the end of his life. See Extrait des memoires de feu Francis Wey (Paris: Biblio- theque nationale de France) cited in Anne de Mondenard, “Entre roman- tisme et realisme: Francis Wey (1812-1882), critique d’art,” in Etudes photographiques, no. 8 (Nov. 2000): 16.
7 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, French Realism and the Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting between 1830 and 1870 (Utrecht: Haentjes Dekker and Gumbert, 1974), 39, 51: “Apres avoir salue de ses mepris la fleur des grandes ecoles d’ltalie, de Flandre meme, de la France surtout, devant Rembrandt que son guide lui menageait. Courbet donne signe de vie; Bonvin . . . demontra Rem- brandt a son camarade, il lui en fit copier quelques pages sans lui permettre de s’en assimiler les procedes. J’ai vu, dissimulees, certaines de ses ebauches, imitees d’abord puis se depouillant de la patine hollandaise et ne gardant plus que les procedes assombris des lumieres arrachees aux contrastes.”
8 According to Michele Haddad, “Courbet et Part du XVIIP siecle: sources, themes et series narratives,” in Courbet a neufl Actes du colloque international organise par le musee d’Orsay et le Centre allemande d’histoire de Tart a Paris, les 6 et 7 decembre 2007, ed. Mathilde Arnoux et al. (Paris: Maison des sciences de I’homme, 2010), 42.
9 Segolene Le Men, Courbet (Paris: Citadelles and Mazenod, 2007), 52-55. Courbet continued to show interest in the old masters as proved by the cop- ies after Hals, Rembrandt, and Velazquez that he painted in the Alte Pina- kothek in Munich in 1869 (see Robert Fernier, La vie et Tceuvre de Gustave Courbet: catalogue raisonne, 2 vols. [Geneva: Fondation Wildenstein; Laus- anne: Bibliotheque des arts, 1977-78], 2: no. 668, Portrait de Rembrandt) .
10 Chu, French Realism, 28, following Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre (Paris: H. Floury, 1906), 28.
11 Gustave Courbet, “Realist Manifesto,” 7 (in this volume). Original text: “J’ai etudie, en dehors de tout esprit de systeme et sans parti pris. Part des anciens et Part des modernes. Je n’ai pas plus voulu imiter les uns que copier les autres. [. . .] J’ai voulu tout simplement puiser dans Pentiere connaissance de la tradition le sentiment raisonne et independant de ma propre indivi- dualite.”
12 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 66-6/246-47, for full citation see note 55.
13 Ibid., 44-3/48-49, letter to his grandparents (Paris, Mar. 1844): “J’ai fait ces jours passes un ou deux portraits: celui d’un baron beige, major de cavalerie, ainsi que celui de son pere. Ce sont des parents de Mme Blavet qui est vrai-
34
Dominique Marechal
ment extrement bonne pour moi.”
14 Baron Louis Marie Ghislain Papeians de Morchoven (1801-63), called Van der Strepen, began his career as a cadet in 1818 at the war college in Delft and is listed as a second lieutenant in the Dutch army in 1 822 in the regiment of hussars. A lieutenant in 1830, he left the Dutch army to join the Belgian troops at the time of the war of independence. Captain-commandant of the second hunters on horseback in 1831, he was promoted to major in 1842 and retired in 1 847 as an honorary lieutenant-colonel. He remained, however, a colonel of the citizen guard of his hometown. In 1833 he married Adele Gabrielle Damiens, who was born in Saint Valery sur Somme (France) in Sep- tember 1799 and died childless in Ghent on November 26, 1859. She was the daughter of Jean-Baptiste and Marie Catherine Blavet. According to their death certificates, they lived at Rue de la Station 17 in Ghent. (With thanks to Mr. Werner Papeians de Morchoven for this genealogical information.)
15 Fernier, Courbet: catalogue raisonne, 1:22.
16 See Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 44-3/49; according to Le Men, Cour- bet, 163, it bears a convincing resemblance to Courbet’s good friend Max Buchon (1818-69).
17 In previous literature on Courbet his first trip to Belgium is listed as occur- ring in 1846.
18 The original is found in the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen in Munich. It was mentioned as early as 1842 in the first edition of St. John’s Hospital’s collection catalogue. Notice des tableaux, qui composent le Musee de I’Hopital Saint Jean a Bruges, ed. (Bruges: J. Fockenier, 1850), 51: “Van Dyck, Antoine. [...] On conserve d’apres ce maitre: n°29. La Ste Vierge et I’enfant Jesus, peint sur toile Dim. Im20 de large, sur 1 m 50 c. de haut.” Alexandre Couvez, Inventaires des objets d’art qui ornent les eglises et les eta- blissements publics de la Flandre Occidentale (Bruges: Alphonse Bogaert, 1852), 369: a “charmante copie d’apres Van Dyck et probablement par I’un des Van Oost.”
19 Alfred Michiels, L’histoire de la peinture Jlamande et hollandaise, 5 vols. (Brussels: A. Vandale, 1845-49).
20 Kathryn Galley Galitz, “ Portrait de H. J. Van WisselinghJ in Gustave Courbet, ed. Font-Reaulx et al., 144-45, cat. 32.
21 Chu, French Realism, see also Wessel Krul, “Realism, Renaissance and Nationalism,” in Farly Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research, ed. Bernhard Ridderbos, Anne van Buren, and Henk van Veen (Amsterdam: University Press, 2003), 252fF.
22 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 46-9/64-65, letter to his parents, Amster- dam, c. August 15, 1846: “Je suis depuis deux jours a Amsterdam. J’ai deja fait connaissance avec deux ou trois artistes chez qui j’irai aujourd’hui. J’irai voir aussi le musee qui sera ouvert. Je suis deja enchante de tout ce que j’ai vu en Hollande et c’est vraiment indispensable pour un artiste. Un voyage comme cela vous apprend davantage que trois ans de travail. A La Haye qui est une ville charmante j’ai vu les plus belles collections. C’est la residence du roi. Je ne sais pas encore le jour que je partirai d’ici car je pourrais bien y faire un portrait. On m’ assure que si j’y restais deux ou trois mois afin de me faire connaitre, je gagnerais de I’argent. Mon genre leur convient. Je n’ai avec moi qu’un petit paysage qui leur plait beaucoup comme fa9on. Id, personne ne fait ainsi. Je suis alle en Belgique chez M. Papeians ou j’ai passe 3 ou 4 jours. Ils m’ont offert des recommandations pour le chancelier du roi et pour I’antiquaire des musees du roi, encore un autre personnage, mais je ne sais comment me servir de ces gens-la pour le moment. J’aime mieux les conserver pour plus tard car ils peuvent m’etre de la plus grande utilite.”
23 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 46-10/65, letter to Mme. Papeians de Morchoven, Amsterdam, c. Aug. 24, 1846: “Ma chere dame, Je me rappelle toujours avec bonheur les jours que j’ai passes avec vous, votre amitie si franche, votre accueil gracieux, et votre compagnie si joyeuse. Aussi un de mes regrets les plus vifs c’est de ne pouvoir vous rendre au moins un peu
de ce que vous donnez si bien, c’est de ne pouvoir vous etre plus agreable. J’avais promis de vous ecrire aussitot arrive a Amsterdam, ce que je n’ai pu faire ne sachant pas encore a quoi m’en tenir. Mais aujourd’hui cela devient plus positif J’ai fait pendant mon sejour a Amsterdam un portrait qui a pro- duit le plus grand effet, un enthousiasme auquel je m’attendais fort peu. J’ai eu une ovation en Hollande si cela continue, car il va etre mis a I’exposition d’ Amsterdam qui aura lieu dans 15 jours et chacun m’ assure que cela fera le plus grand effet et que les journaux en parleront beaucoup. Si toutes ces previsions se realisent j’espere que cela ira bien. Ainsi done si j’osais encore abuser de votre bonte je vous prierais d’en parler aux personnes desquelles nous avons parle ensemble, car il ne me manque plus maintenant qu’une personne influente qui m’appelle pour faire un portrait et alors il n’y aura plus de raison pour que cela finisse. C’est ainsi que cela se fait en Hollande. Je pars demain mardi pour Cologne, enchante que je suis de mon voyage, tant pour les receptions charmantes que Ton m’a faites, que pour I’instruc- tion que j’en ai recueillie. Ensuite, la Hollande et la Belgique sont de char- mants pays surtout pour un artiste.
Je vous charge d’ exprimer ma plus sincere affection a M. Papeians.
Je vous embrasse tous les deux de coeur.
Gustave Courbet
Mes compliments a Fidele.
24 Christophe Salaiin, ed., Emile Zola — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Controverse sur Courbet et I’utilite sociale de I’art {V2.ns: Mille et une nuits, 2011), 79: “Rem- brandt, le Luther de la peinture, fut, au XVIL siecle, le reformateur de Part. Tandis que la France, Catholique et royaliste, se refaisait I’esprit, hdas!, dans la frequentation des Grecs et des Latins, la Hollande reformee, republicaine, inaugurait une nouvelle esthetique.”
25 Le Men, Courbet, 129.
26 Alan Bowness et al., eds., Gustave Courbet, 1819—1877, exh. cat. (Paris: Edi- tions des musees nationaux, 1977), 111-12, cat. 27.
27 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 47 -31 6S— 69, letter to his parents, Paris, Aug. 1847: “J’espere partir dans quelques jours mais je passe par la Belgique. Je debarque a Gand chez des personnes qui me forcent d’y aller tant par amitie que par un portrait que je dois y faire. Ce sera pour moi une superbe occasion de visiter la Belgique et d’y voir beaucoup de tableaux de grands maitres hollandais qui sont tres utiles a mon instruction.”
28 Ibid., 47-4/69, letter to his parents, Ghent, Sept. 6, 1847: “Vous avez du recevoir une lettre par Eapoire ou je vous disais que j’allais en Belgique, pays fort agreable ou je suis depuis huit ou drx jours. Imaginez-vous que c’est un veritable pays de cocagne. Je suis re9u comme un prince, ce qui n’est pas etonnant car je suis dans des comtes, des barons, des princes, etc. Nous sommes tantot en diner, tantot en caleche, ou a cheval dans les promenades de Gand. Pour les diners je n’ose pas en parler, je ne sais pas si on sort de table quatre heures par jour. Je crois que si j’y restais davantage je m’en retournerais comme une tour. Malgre cela j’ai deja fait deux portraits bien- tot. J’ai deja vu une partie de la Belgique: j’ai vu Bruxelles, Malines, Anvers, Termonde, Gand ou je suis. Je vais a Bruges et a Ostende et dans deux ou trois jours je vais m’en aller par Eouvain, Eiege, a Cologne. [. . .] Il serait trop long de vous mettre en lettres mes impressions, je vous menage cela pour mon retour.” In a March 19, 1850 letter to Edouard Reynart of the museum at Eille, Courbet writes that he went twice to Belgium and once to Holland for his education. Ibid., 50-3/89: “Toutes mes sympathies sont pour les pays du Nord. J’ai parcouru deux fois la Belgique et une fois la Hollande pour mon instruction, et j’espere y retourner.”
29 Bowness et al., Gustave Courbet, 26 and 33: “J’etais a peu pres certain que Courbet etait noye au fond d’un moos de faro. Il y a dix ans il m’a joue un pared tour dans le meme Bruxelles ou nous ne devions rester que trois jours: un mois apres il n’avait pas quitte les brasseries. Un peu trop de bierre [r/c] et de discussions gateront sa peinture, s’il n’y prend garde.” In a letter to Alfred
35
Belgium and the Netherlands through the Eyes of Courbet
Verwee Courbet wrote in 1864: “Je compte sur vous, mon cher Verwee, et sur VOS compatriotes que j’aime rant, qui me sont si sympathiques, et avec lesquels j’ai deja tant bu” (Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 64-12/218-19).
30 Klaus Herding and Katharina Schmidt, Les voyages secrets de Monsieur Cour- bet: Unbekannte Reiseskizzen aus Baden, Spa und Biarritz, exh. cat. (Baden- Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1984), 199-201; Dominique Marechal and Hilde Lobelle, “Hans Memling: Vijf eeuwen werkelijkheid en fictie,” in Memlingiana, exh. cat. (Bruges: Friends of the City Museums of Bruges, 1995-96), 54, illustrated (still incorrectly attributed to Gustave Courbet).
3 1 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, review of Les voyages secrets de Monsieur Courbet: Unbekannte Reiseskizzen aus Baden, Spa und Biarritz, by Klaus Herding and Katharina Schmidt, Master Drawings 22, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 455-61.
32 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 50-3/89: “Toutes mes sympathies sont pour les pays du Nord. J’ai parcouru deux fois la Belgique et une fois la Hollande pour mon instruction, et j’espere y retourner.” In short, Courbet was in Belgium in 1844 and 1847, in the Netherlands with a short stopover in Ghent in 1846, and thus not in 1849-50.
33 Exposition generale des Beaux-Arts, 1851: Catalogue explicatif, 3'^‘*ed. (Brus- sels: G. Stapleaux, 1851), 238. The Stonebreakersy^zs, catalogue number 238 and The Cellist 2'i^. The exhibition took place from August 15 to October 31, 1851.
34 J. B. Rousseau, “Revue du Salon: Correspondance particuliere du Messa- ger de Gand,” Le Messager de Gand, Sept. 1, 1851: “Ou M. Courbet a-t-il exhume cette nature en putrefaction et ces cadavres vivants? [...] Il ne les a pas trouvees, il les invente. Il ne medit pas, il calomnie. La verite a eu ses peintres, qui I’etudiaient patiemment pour la reproduire en conscience, qui la reproduisaient avec une scrupuleuse, avec une amoureuse exactitude qui la meditaient, qui la comprenaient, Jean van Eyck, Memling, Kranach, Perugin, Fra Angelico, Holbein, tons ces genies dont les oeuvres modestes cachent des travaux immenses. Leurs tableaux sont admirables dans leur sincerite naive. Est-il besoin de dire a present pourquoi ceux de M. Courbet n’inspirent qu’un sentiment de degout repulsif ? C’est qu’il n’a rien medite et rien compris.”
35 “Sciences et beaux- arts,” L’Observateur Beige, Sept. 7, 1851: “M. Courbet, I’auteur des Casseurs de pierres et du Joueur de contrebasse, est depuis deux jours a Bruxelles.”
36 Joost van der Auwera, “Jacques Jordaens, Allegorie op de vruchtbaarheid van het land,” in Jordaens en de antieken, ed. Joost van der Auwera, Irene Schaud- ies, and Justus Eange, exh. cat. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2012), 172-75, cat. 64.
37 Font-Reaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, 386-87, cat. 192. This canvas was most likely exhibited in Brussels in 1869.
38 New York, auction at William Doyle Galleries, Nov. 7, 2000, lot 35. Fernier, Courbet: catalogue raisonne, 1:122, cat. 20, dated this painting to 1856.
39 Grimm, “Fa collection du Dr. Jules Fequime,” La Federation Artistique (Mar. 13, 1892): 248-50; with special thanks to Jean-Philippe Huys for the bio- graphical data on J. (A.) Vanlaethem.
40 The confusion is mainly caused by the publication of Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre, 142 who read the dates of the letters of Courbet incorrectly, placing the tour of 1847 in 1856 (see note 28). In transcribing the letter, he added the name of the town of Dinan [sic\ even though it does not appear in the original (with thanks to Jean-Philippe Huys).
41 Michel Hilaire, 'Ee Rocher a Bayard, a DinantS in Gustave Courbet, ed. Font-Reaulx et al., 265, cat. 110.
42 My thanks to Jean-Philippe Huys for the identification of this site. Paysage rocheux environs de Dinant (New Orleans Museum of Art) mentioned by Fernier, Courbet: catalogue raisonne, 1:148, cat. 239, also seems based on the Meuse region.
43 Anne M. Wagner, “Courbet’s Fandscapes and Their Market,” Art History,
no. 4 (Dec. 1981): 410-31; Klaus Herding, “Equality and Authority in Courbet’s Fandscape Paintings,” chap. 4 in Courbet: To Venture Indepen- dence (New Haven: Yale kJniversity Press, 1991); 62-98. Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman, eds., Courbet and the Modern Landscape, exh. cat. (Eos Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006); Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, “Packag- ing and Marketing Nature,” chap. 6 in The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 138-69.
44 Pierre Borel, ed., Lettres de Gustave Courbet a Alfred Bruyas (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1951), 100-105, cited in Gustave Courbet, ed. Bowness et al., 33; also Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 57-4/143-44, letter to Auguste Fajon, Paris, Aug. 1857(?).
45 Dominique Fobstein, “Chronologie de Gustave Courbet,” in Gustave Cour- bet, ed. Font-Reaulx et al., 434.
46 New York, auction at Phillips Gallery, Nov. 5, 2000, lot 4.
47 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 58-1/145-46, letter to his father, Brus- sels, June-July (?) 1858: “Si je suis en Belgique, c’est pour richer de me retourner. J’y travaille et je m’y fais une position pour I’avenir quand je vou- drai ou quand j’en aurai besoin. Par le temps qui court en France c’est utile, pour moi surtout. J’ai encore deux portraits a faire.” Courbet must have just arrived in Brussels on July 11, 1858, judging by the date of a letter from Amand Gautier to Paul Cachet in which he listed the address of Courbet to Brussels.
48 Ibid., 58-2/146, 590: letter to Amand Gautier, Brussels, July (?) 1858: “S’il y a des lettres chez mon concierge, veuillez en faire un paquet et me les envoyer chez M. Radoux, photographe, Montagne de la Cour, 73, Bruxelles. [...] Je mene id une vie qui m’ennuie; Je suis dans les portraits, dans les proces. Je vais tout envoyer au diable et partir pour Francfort.” This is confir- med in an August 10, 1858 letter to Urbain: “I’engourdissement dans lequel celui-ci a vecu a Bruxelles; a Frankfort toute son energie lui est revenue” (Bowness et al., Gustave Courbet, 33).
49 Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et dessin, executes par des artistes vivants et exposes au Salon dAnvers (Anvers: J. P. van Dieren, 1858), 51, cat. 150. Kathryn Galley Galitz, “Mme de BrayerJ in Gustave Courbet, ed. Font-Reaulx et al., 306-7, cat. 141.
50 Antwerp, AMVC-Fetterenhuis, archive CC 394/B2; lecture publicized in the Precurseur dAnvers, Aug. 22, 1861. See Crapo, “Disjuncture on the Feft,” 67-91; Toos Streng, “Realisme” in de kunst- en literatuurbeschouwing in Nederland tot 1875 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). According to Dominique Fobstein, “Chronologie de Gustave Courbet,” 435, Courbet returned to France via Ostend, Bruges, and Brussels.
51 Streng, “Realisme” in de kunst- en literatuurbeschouwing, 123: “a la liberte dans Part et dans toutes les choses.”
52 See Dominique Marechal et al., Alfred Stevens (Brussels, 1823— Paris, 1906), exh. cat. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009).
53 The relationships between Courbet and other Belgian artists such as Fouis Dubois (1830-80), Fdicien Rops (1833-98), and Alfred Verwee (1838-95) are discussed in Gustave Courbet and Belgium, the catalogue of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium’s 2013 Courbet exhibition.
54 Chu, Correspondance de Courbet, 53-4/106, letter to Champfleury (Paris, June-July 1853).
55 Ibid., 66-6/246-47, letter to Arthur Stevens (Paris, March 22, 1866), “Ce tableau est trop important pour moi. [...] Je considere la Belgique comme mon pays. Il y a 26 ans que j’y vais et que je re9ois des ovations et des sym- pathies de toutes sortes. Je desirerais que mon Enterrementy soit. [. . .] C’est le pays de la peinture et des lettres [luttes?]. Ce tableau de 20 pieds de lon- gueur et 52 personnages grands comme nature, c’est I’expose des principes du realisme.” In another version of the letter, the word luttes (fight) appears instead of lettres (literature). There may have been some confusion.
36
Dominique Marechal
56 See Font-Reaulx et al., Gustave Courbet, 415, cat. 207.
57 Dominique Marechal, “Het vroege sociaal-realisme bij Joseph en Alfred Ste- vens (1845-1857),” \n Alfred Stevens, Marechal et ah, 119-21.
58 Maxime du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts a [’Exposition Universelle de 1855: Pein- ture-Sculpture, France— Angleterre— Belgique— Danemarck— Suede et Norwege- Suisse—Hollande—Allemagne— Italic (Paris; Librarie Nouvelle, 1855), 321-39, discusses the Belgian contribution in general; “M. Alfred Stevens ne se laisserait pas trop impressionner par les oeuvres d’un peintre franc-comtois [Gustave Courbet] qui essaye a faire, par tous les moyens possible, un peu de bruit autour de son nom? C’est un mauvais chef a suivre que celui qui ne sait pas se conduire lui-meme. Que M. Alfred Stevens y prenne garde, de plus forts que lui se perdraient dans cette voie funeste.” During the Exposition Universelle, Gustave Courbet indeed let himself be heard. In addition to his contribution to the official exhibition, he had erected his own private pavil- ion on the margin of the exhibition grounds for his first major individual exhibition. On a sign at the pavilion the words “Du Realisme” were painted. He exhibited forty works here, including his monumental and groundbreak- ing The Painter’s Studio (Musee d’Orsay, Paris).
59 The article by Emile Zola, “Proudhon et Courbet” appeared in the jour- nal Le Salut Public, Eyon, July 26-August 31, 1865 and was reprinted the following year in Mes haines, causeries litteraires et artistiques (Paris; Achille Eaure) and published again in Salaiin, Emile Zola, 141-42; “Mon Cour- bet, a moi, est simplement une personnalite. Ee peintre a commence par imiter les Elamands et certains maitres de la Renaissance. Mais sa nature se revoltait et il se sentait entraine par route sa chair — par route sa chair, entendez-vous — vers le monde materiel qui I’entourait, les femmes grasses et les hommes puissants, les campagnes plantureuses et largement fecondes. Trapu et vigoureux, il avait I’apre desir de setter entre ses bras la nature vraie; il voulait peindre en pleine viande et en plein terreau.”
60 Vincent van Gogh, “To Emile Bernard. Arles, on or about Sunday, 5 August 1888,” Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, http;//vangoghletters.org/vg/letters /let655/letter.html#translation; “Or les Hollandais, nous les voyons peindre des choses telles quelles, apparemment sans raisonner, comme Courbet pei- gnait ses belles femmes nues.”
37
The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet
Claude Cernuschi
I have done a good many self-portraits in my life as my atti- tude gradually changed. One could say that I have written my autobiography.
Behind the laughing mask that you are familiar with, I hide, deep down, grief, bitterness, and a sorrow that clings to the heart like a vampire.
— Gustave Courbet^’ ^
Courbet and the Problem of Realist Self- Portraiture
According to Segolene Le Men, Gustave Gourbet’s place in history rests primarily on his “major manifesto paintings, his defense of Realism in the 1850s, and his contribution to the dismantling of the academic system of genres.”^ On all counts, this assessment is sound. One might only add that these facets were as interdependent for the artist as they were critical. Implementing the ideology of realism required an honest and authentic replication of empirical experience, an ambition that, perforce, mandated the rejec- tion of literary or religious subject matter, which, in turn, meant the discarding of aesthetic precedent.
Only by conforming to this agenda,
Gourbet declared in 1851, could an artist become “a sincere friend of the real truth.”'^ The redundancy of the expression, “the real truth”
{la vraie verite), betrays Gourbet’s awareness that his truth-claims would trump those of his contemporaries only if a new, bolder aesthetic stratagem were put in place. Like three legs of a tripod, realist paintings, their underlying intellectual justification, and the abolition of convention were interdependent and — rhetorically, at least — mutually reinforcing; if one is removed, the whole structure becomes imperiled.
For scholars such as Michel Flilaire, Gourbet’s self-portraits easily align with this agenda. The artist, he writes, recreates his “experience as powerfully as possible for the viewer: his goal is to free himself from the conventions of the times and simply render reality in its most immedi- ate and sensual form.”^ No doubt, Gourbet would have relished any evi- dence that the triadic alliance he had marshaled persuaded his audience that realism’s ambitions were indeed realized in his work. Even so, many scholars see no comfortable fit between the self-portraits and his overall production. According to Laurence des Gars, the self-portraits strike a markedly discordant note. Plagued by “unwieldy narcissism,” she writes.
they are “difficult to reconcile” with the ethos of the realist project.'’ The artist, after all, appears in a multiplicity of (sometimes contradictory) guises, lending the self-portraits a decidedly theatrical rather than empiri- cal feel. Their reliance on a range of literary and artistic precedents also belies the image of the untrained, naive artist Gourbet was at pains to disseminate. For des Gars, Gourbet’s “successive disguises, from art stu- dent to wounded lover to tormented creator, owed a considerable debt to contemporary literary culture.” If anything, such “bohemian role-play- ing” exploits character types already formulated in the writings of Flenri Murger and Alfred de Musset.^ Petra Ghu concurs; in her view, Gourbet created these images for their “promotional value,” for the opportunity they provided to construct “an identity.”^
Insofar as Gourbet’s self-portraits are concerned, the scholarly litera- ture is thus sharply divided. The very terms des Gars uses — “pose,” “dis- guise,” “role playing” — are patently incompatible with Flilaire’s account of Gourbet rendering “reality in its most immediate form.” Of these two views, des Gars’s is admittedly the more persuasive. Art historians have been progressively documenting the extent of Gourbet’s careful study of art history and popular illustration,^ borrowings that allow a more nuanced view of the pictures to emerge, at least more nuanced than one of simple adherence to empirical experience. The self-portraits, then, if
one pardons the pun, cannot be taken at face value. Their connec- tion to visual precedent, their for- mal and psychological range, and their marked dramaturgical flavor invite the unexpected conclusion that, for all the artist’s protestations, his self-representations fall more comfortably within the compass of romanticism rather than real- ism. This conclusion is unexpected, because Gourbet defined the nar- rower ambitions of realism in direct opposition to romanticism’s broad embrace of the literary, the imaginary, and the subjective. Fie even considered his path-breaking Burial at Ornans to signal the “Burial of Romanticism.”
All the same, it cannot be denied, as Petra Ghu contends, that Gour- bet’s “interest in dressing up and striking a pose. . .parallels the histrionic behavior of Romantic authors.” “As a group,” the self-portraits “form a visual, partly fictional, autobiography.”^^ The theatrical tenor of Gourbet’s self-portraits may be due to their early date, when his work had yet to extricate itself from the grip of romantic formulae. Gourbet’s defenders — e.g., Theodore Duret — declared that anything that smacked of roman- ticism would soon be expunged in favor of “direct observation” and “contact with nature.”'^ Gourbet’s art, he continues, will eventually “have nothing that is artificial, nothing that is conventional.”'^ Such defensive spin was, of course, typical of Gourbefs admirers, but even after Gourbet embarked on his mature style and fully embraced the realist mode, it remains unclear whether the later self-portraits managed to shed all traces of romantic overtones. Might not the histrionic behavior Ghu mentions
1. Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life, 1855. Oil on canvas, 361 x 598 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
39
The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet
not surreptitiously contaminate, and create tensions within, the realist idiom itself?
Along similar lines, Linda Nochlin observed that, “despite its surface imme- diacy, and its apparent ease of availability,” Courbet’s work seems “to hide a secret, or produce [s] an... alluring mystery of with- held meaning rather than the clear legibility one might expect from a realist artist.” Des Cars agrees. Courbet, she states, had a clear propensity for “mystery” and for introducing “real characters under a fictitious guise.”
Even the artist’s contemporaries — his adver- saries in particular — relished the irony of a painter notorious for courting “ugliness”'*’ and rejecting the “ideal as false,”'^ nonethe- less “idealizing” and “embellishing” his own self-image. For Theophile Gautier, Courbet had “the coquetry, and we congratulate him for it, not to apply his method to himself”'^
All of which complicates any attempt to interpret the self-portraits. Widely recog- nized as a key component of Courbet’s artis- tic production, these images and that very same production seem to work at cross-pur- poses, so much so, that they may legitimately comprise a category apart — even more, perhaps, than the straightforward iconographi- cal designation of “self-portraits” allows. Still, pressing questions remain. Most notably, what is so idiomatic about this select group of images, or the very genre itself, that prompted Courbet to violate his own, most cherished principles? Was the issue one of simple vanity, as Gautier suggests, or, alternatively, is self-portraiture too emotionally charged an idiom for any artist to approach in a disinterested or impartial way? Is there, in other words, a fundamental incompat- ibility between the ethos of realism and the very genre of self-representation? And was Courbet even cognizant of this incompatibility? Was he even cognizant of having blatantly violated his own principles?
These are difficult questions to answer; not surprisingly, des Cars concludes that art histo- rians “are still struggling to elucidate this aspect of Courbet’s work.”'^ Endeavoring to contribute to this conversation, this essay will adhere, first and foremost, to the premise that, in some fun- damental sense, neither Courbet (nor any other artist, for that matter) could completely fulfill the purported aims of realism. Artists may profess, all in good faith, that they simply paint what they see. But it is patently self-evident that aesthetic media, as limited as they are, cannot replicate the richness and diversity of our empirical expe- rience. And even if they could, that experience itself comprises but an incomplete, fragmentary slice of the physical world. Revealingly, Courbet’s
2. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849. Oil on canvas, 165 X 257 cm, Gem^degalerie, Dresden (destroyed).
3. The Stonebreakers with superimposed pattern.
4. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreaker, 1849. Oil on canvas, 45 x 54.5 cm, private collection.
5. Gustave Courbet, The Meeting; or, Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, 1854. Oil on canvas, 132 x 150.5 cm, Musee Fabre, Montpellier.
work was often berated for its clumsiness and awkwardness, for being populated by static and wooden figures (as many of the caricatures of his paintings attest). “This is especially interesting,” George Boas inter- jected, because “the opponents of realism could oppose it on the ground that it was not realistic enough.”^'*
It is also inconceivable for artists — as Courbet’s own example testifies — to be entirely objective, to ignore precedents, or to look at the world without a host of preconceived ideas and biases. One way or another, to greater or lesser degrees, all art is artificial, all art is contrived. This is not, of course, to place all art on equal footing and discount all formal and philosophical differ- ences, or to claim that realism indulges an ideal no less than the literary romanticism it hoped to supplant. But it is to submit that, allowances for nuances notwithstand- ing, no art can fully replicate reality.^' What is of particular concern to this essay, rather, is the degree to which artists are at pains to _ hide or deny the artifice of their craft just as surely as they are exploiting and manipulat- ing it at every turn. Courbet, for example, counted The Painter’s Studio (fig. 1) as part of his realist project, although it depicts an impos- sible scene — as its “summary” of seven years of the artist’s life suggests — one whose individual portraits or details may be conceded as empiri- cal, but whose composition is nothing if not deliberately staged, and whose overall effect, to cite Alan Bowness, remains “additive and synthetic.”^^ Its very subtitle, A Real Allegory, was even dismissed as a blatant contradiction by Champfleury, one of the artist’s early admir- ers: “an allegory cannot be real, any more than reality can become allegoricalT^^ And, if Helene Toussaint’s interpretation of the painting is right, that the figures on the left side actually stand-in for specific historical figures, then the piece is not a transparent transcription of real- ity as much as the carefully-crafted product of a highly self-conscious artistic intelligence.
Even The Stonebreakers (fig. 2), another of Courbet’s signature images, despite recording an event the artist actually witnessed, was rear- ranged in the studio, where Courbet imposed, upon figures seemingly caught on the fly, a highly regular, predictable geometrical pattern (fig. 3).^^ This careful attention to compositional rhythm contravenes the view that realist art avoids for- mal structures of all kinds; the way some real- ist literature allegedly avoids central action and connected narrative. Courbet even reversed the composition from its first inception into its mir- ror opposite (fig. 4), although the reason for this
40
Claude Cernuschi
shift is not entirely clear. As for The Meeting (fig. 5) — where Courbet encounters his patron, Alfred Bruyas, on the road, as if by accident — Linda Nochlin insists that it is highly unlikely that the “incident actually took place.”^*’ In fact, Bruyas told an acquaintance that the painting rep- resented “a fictional encounter. . .an allegory that lacks a date.”^^
Whenever we look at a Courbet, we may be fooled into thinking that we are offered an unedited, transparent view into a natural scene; in actuality, this view is orchestrated at every turn by a person disavowing his role just as surely as he exercises it. Against this background, Cour- bet’s self-portraits, though they define a separate iconographical category, may not differ that markedly from the artist’s overall production. They are different, argu- ably, in that they may represent the facet of Courbet’s work where the axiom that all art is artificial and contrived is perhaps most con- spicuous. The difference, in others words, is not so much in kind as in degree, though the degree will always remain open to interpreta- tion.
Self-Portraiture and Self-Revelation
If we accept the artificiality and contriv- ance of art as a given — and treat the realist agenda as an epistemological impossibility —
Courbet’s self-portraits reveal a great deal about the genre in general, and about its place in the context of Courbet’s work as a whole. Dismayingly, even des Cars, who stressed the artifice of the artist’s “fictitious guises,”^^ nonetheless sees the self-representations as accurate renditions of the artist’s states of mind at given points in time. She construes The Desperate Man (fig. 6), for instance, as a truthful reflection of Courbet’s despair during times of professional disappointment. This romantic image, she writes, “coincided with a period of despon- dency in which Courbet, who had been painting for four years, still had no certitude regarding his par- ticipation in the Salon.” (Recalling the years without success and the jury’s attitude toward him, Courbet later said to Castagnary: “Am I to make others suffer the despair that I did during my youth?”^^) Implicit in des Cars’s position, then, is that Courbet’s self-rep- resentations transcribe, not some objective, external reality, but a subjective, internal one. Courbet’s goal is “to share the intensity of a moment” as he contem- plates “his imminent downfall.”^® Courbet, she con- tinues, creates an “emblem on a par with the trauma he experienced.”^^ Much the same, she argues, may be said of The Man Mad with Fear (fig. 7), a piece also exhibited under the title The Suicide.
On this account. The Desperate Man and The Man Mad with Fear record Courbet’s reactions to the rejections he experienced in his early professional career. Courbet was thus not faithful to some impossible task, e.g., an objective transcription of reality, but to his own subjec- tive self, to the mental states he endured at difficult moments in his life. Several of Courbet’s pronouncements reinforce this reading, as do ideas voiced in the “Realist Manifesto.” “I have done a good many self-portraits in my life,” he wrote to Alfred Bruyas, “as my attitude gradually changed. One could say that I have written my autobiography.”^^ In the mani-
festo, Courbet professed to translate “the mores, ideas, the look of my era, according to my own estimation {selon mon appreciation) In con- versations with Theophile Silvestre, he claimed to be both objective and subjective,^"' disavowing any ambition to translate reality in a dispassion- ate, scientific way, and propagating a more subtle, nuanced account of realism, one also proposed by critics such as Champfleury, Fernand Des- noyers, Edmond Duranty, and Jules-Antoine Castagnary. Champfleury, for one, contends that any “reproduction of nature will never become a reproduction or an imitation, but will always be an interpretation... no matter what man does to enslave himself to copying nature, he will
always be caused by his particular tempera- ment... to render nature according to the impression he receives.”^^
At first sight, this compromise offers a perfect resolution to the dilemma at hand; the point is not to judge the artist against an objective, independent standard, only against the subjective one he set himself Never so deluded as to believe in a faithful transcription of reality, Courbet only pro- vides information about his own inner life, his own “understanding” of reality, as it were. (“Beauty,” he declared, “like truth is relative to the times in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it.”^'’) But as convenient as this solution appears, it remains too facile. In some respects, the very phrase — “according to my own estima- tion”— inoculates Courbet from all criticism. If his interpretations of reality violate aesthetic norms or normative views, the artist could always rejoin: these interpretations simply conform to “my own estima- tion,” and no one would be in a position to con- tradict him. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have objected to this proposition. One can no more be faithful to one’s self, he would have argued, than one can invent a private language; the reason being that speaking a language is contingent on fol- lowing a predetermined set of codified rules, rules that are public and whose appropriate usage can be independently corroborated. Individuals speaking a private language have no such recourse; in other words, they cannot discern the difference between following a rule and only thinking they are following a rule. And the same, Wittgenstein would have pos- ited, applies to being faithful to one’s self: we simply cannot distinguish being faithful to ourselves from only thinking wc are being faithful to ourselves.
For Wittgenstein, human beings simply do not have enough criti- cal distance to judge themselves impartially, just as they have no appro- priate means to transcribe the external world objectively in art. Equally problematic is des Cars’s description of the “successive disguises” Cour- bet’s self-portraits employ: “art student,” “wounded lover,” “tormented creator,” etc. Do these actually transcribe the “real” self, as des Cars ini- tially suggests, or do they, conversely, simply repeat literary tropes that Courbet appropriated from contemporary culture? The artist’s donning window-pane checkered pants in Self-Portrait with Black Dog (fig. 8) and The Artist at His Fasel (fig. 9) references, as Segolene Le Men stressed, the male characters in Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie,
6. Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1841. Oil on can- vas, 45 x 55 cm, private collection.
7. Gustave Courbet, The Man Mad with Fear; or, The Suicide, c. 1844-45. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50.5 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.
41
The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet
a book Courbet apparently much enjoyed. Along such lines, the sen- sitive, suicidal soul in The Desperate Man or The Man Mad with Fear (figs. 6, 7) could easily have been modeled after Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. These literary references suggest that Courbet’s self-portraits were not direct, unmediated glimpses into his inner world as much as roles adapted from character-types populating the literature of the time. Admittedly, this tactic conferred certain advantages: primarily, it allowed Courbet to employ symbols he knew his audience would recognize and play, alternatively, the role of dandy, romantic hero, bohemian, or suicidal outcast.
If so, might Courbet not have visu- alized his real self, as invented a number of “fictive,” “imaginary” selves? Le Men pushed this line of attack even further;
Courbet, she writes, deliberately implanted “contradictory readings and fables in the structure of his works.”^® Le Men is clearly on to something. Many scholars, in fact, have persuasively expanded the range of Courbet’s self-representations beyond images readily recognizable as such; some claim, with good reason, that he projected his own self onto a number of landscape and animal paintings, and even, metonymically, onto the representation of a pipe. Not surprisingly, Le Men speaks about a “Courbet myth,” one that the artist carefully and opportunistically concocted himself
Thus, what appears to solve the interpre- tive conundrum of Courbet’s self-representations from one angle, presents, from another, an equally thorny set of problems. Among the most pressing is whether the remarkable diversity of these images provides legitimate insights into the artist’s biogra- phy, or a fictitious form of masquerade? From that question, others soon follow: Is the self a cohesive and consistent whole, or does it comprise as many diverse and potentially contradictory facets as Courbet exposes in his images? Can one even make general claims about the human self, claims that transcend specific historical conditions, or is the concept itself historical and pliable, time-bound and culture-specific?
These are not easy questions to answer, the more so as some scholars even dismiss the very idea of a self The art historian T. J. Clark, for example, declared the self to be a “bourgeois construction,” a fiction with little ontological reality. In the field of psychology, Bruce Flood articulated a similar position, even rejecting the idea of a coherent, autonomous self as nothing more than an illusion. The ontological status of the self, to be sure, is a thorny epistemological issue, too thorny, in fact, to be resolved in the following pages — a problem perhaps best left to philosophers, psychologists, or cognitians. That said, human beings do possess single brains contained in, and having agency over, single bod- ies; this undeniable condition awards the self, even if it represents noth- ing more than a fictive construction, with a powerful experiential, if not
ontological, reality. Flood himself concedes that, though the self is an illusion, that illusion appears reaho us. “It may be an illusion,” he asserts, “but it is real as far as the brain is concerned.”"^^ On these grounds, one might make the case that, no matter how tenuous it may be, a sense of self is indispensable to social life. As Mark Leary put it, “We could not consciously and deliberately try to affect others’ impressions of us if we
did not think about ourselves, specifically about how we were being regarded by other people.”'^^ In other words, given the consid- erable amounts of energy individuals spend fretting over and attempting to manipulate how they are perceived — i.e., their image, reputation, physical appearance, etc. — it stands to reason that calculating how to influence the perceptions of others, let alone implementing the appropriate means to do so, requires a tacit, working belief in the existence of a self-governing and auton- omous self
Self-Concept, Self-Presentation, and Self- Symbolization
Unmentioned in the art historical lit- erature on Courbet’s self-portraits, more- over, is the growing consensus among many present-day social psychologists that the self does indeed comprise multiple facets. Because of the growing body of experimental evidence adduced to support it, this hypothesis has been gaining increasing authority among students of the mind. It has been found, for instance, that individuals tend to react differently to personal insults than to insults aimed, say, at their race, nationality, gender, ethnic group, or profession,^^ prompting contemporary psychologists to posit, although they disagree as which is most dominant, that these facets should fall under different subhead- ings: the individual self, the relational self, and the collective self'*'^ The individual self crystal- lizes around the characteristics (or combination of characteristics) we consider unique to us as singu- lar persons — traits we feel markedly differentiate us from other human beings. The relational self, conversely, is established around parents, siblings, colleagues, and peers — individuals with whom we build working relationships and bonds of attach- ment. The collective self, finally, emerges from our identification with, or sense of belonging to, larger groups (professions, social classes, political par- ties, nationalities, religions, ethnic groups, etc.), or from our opposition to groups with which we do not identify or to which we do not belong.
All three levels co-exist, interrelate, and sometimes overlap within the same person, though to what degree and in what order of importance (depending on individual predilections and cultural biases) remains a point of contention. Such findings, as already insinuated, were deduced from laboratory experiments and conducted under the most rigorous standards available to contemporary social science. Even so, strong dis-
8. Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait with Black Dog, 1842. Oil on canvas, 44 x 54 cm. Petit Palais, Paris.
9. Gustave Courbet, The Artist at His Easel, c. 1847. Charcoal on paper, 45 x 34 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum.
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agreements remain as to the ontological coherence of the self, and as to which of its facets is most controlling. More recently, legitimate ques- tions have also been raised about the rather limited samples — social, eco- nomic, cultural, and demographic — from which these studies have been derived."'^ Still, as provisional as they may be, these findings suggest that underappreciated levels of complexity face any art historian attempting to evaluate whether the self-concept visualized in Courbet’s self-portrai- ture (or any form of portraiture, for that matter) is direct or oblique, truthful or performative. They also invite the art historian to foray in the discipline of social psychology. As E. H. Gombrich would have put it, “These are questions which concern the history of art. But their answers cannot be found by [art] historical methods alone.”"''’
This essay, then, is an attempt to address some of the issues bedeviling the art historical literature by injecting ideas from social psychology into the conversation on Courbet’s polymorphous form of self-portraiture. To this end, des Cars’s terms, “disguise” and “role playing,” will prove highly relevant, if not to say particularly apt. In his classic sociological study. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Coffman successfully employed dramaturgical metaphors to describe “image management” — the way individuals craft a self-image they hope others will both accept and commit to memory. This is not to say, with all due respect to Shake- speare, that life is simply a theatrical production any more than human beings merely actors on a stage. But it is to say that aspects of social interaction can be usefully compared, albeit by analogy, to dramaturgical presentation. “The issues dealt with by stagecraft and stage management,” Coffman writes, “...seem to occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension for formal sociological analysis.”"'^ A “performance,” then, need not involve an actor with make-up on a set decked with props; it involves any activity a participant uses to influence any of the other par- ticipants. In art, a portrait satisfies similar purposes: it reveals, to employ T. J. Clark’s words, a “sitter’s effort to determine the way he is seen.”"'^ A self-portrait is even less complicated; since the artist and sitter’s person- alities no longer compete, an artist’s performance proceeds unimpeded.
Assuming that (in our culture, at least) individuals think carefully about the impressions they make in social situations — especially when attempting to obtain favors from peers, or advantages over rivals — Coff- man’s formulation invites the inescapable conclusion that human beings are seldom sincere. No doubt, the images we project will differ depending on our shifting objectives, and on the context in which we find ourselves. They may stray from our every-day behavior and even from the views we have formed of our own selves. Still, this account does not mean that human beings are exclusively obsessed with their public personas, or pre- dominantly compelled by vain and duplicitous motives. Concern over one’s reputation also functions as a useful, salutary check on our conduct. If indifferent to the good opinion of others, and oblivious to how impor- tant that opinion proves to our ability to cooperate and build alliances, our own personal goals would seldom be met. Sensitivity to the feelings of others, therefore, is not entirely manipulative; it enhances mutual col- laboration and induces a host of wider social benefits; it also ensures that we carry on in ways that comply with what our culture deems appropriate and acceptable."'^
Equally relevant to the construction of identity evidenced in Cour- bet’s self-representations is the theory of symbolic self-completion devised by psychologists Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer. This theory, it will be claimed here, usefully pertains to Courbet, as well as to many art- ists who crafted a similar, polyvalent form of self-portraiture. It is Wick- lund and Gollwitzer’s position that human beings invest an inordinate amount of energy, not only on their self-image, but also in their self-def- inition. A self-definition can be construed as a kind of ideal self, a model
to which an individual aspires personally, or to which the individual is asked (or even pressured) to conform by others in the social group — not one that is impossible to realize. To complicate matters further, it is also conceivable that, for many individuals, approximating this ideal is not as important as persuading others of having achieved it, thus creating inter- connections between self-image and self-definition, and complicating, if not impeding, efforts to untangle the disparate and multiple facets of the self from one another.
As some of his letters attest, the self-definition to which Courbet was most committed was becoming an artist of the first rank: “This year,” he writes in 1845, “I must do a large painting that will definitely show what I am really worth, for I want all or nothing.”^® “Within five years I must have a reputation in Paris. There is no middle course and I am working towards that end.”^' Success, though not easily attained, was of inordi- nate importance to him. Eor those hoping to define themselves as artists, acting as if they were members of this profession, socializing with other artists, or even practicing the art of painting or sculpture, might help establish, yet would not suffice by themselves to cement the self-definition. Self-definitions do not emerge in a vacuum; they are conceptualized and forged within specific social contexts, not by individuals living in isola- tion— a fact of which Courbet was fully aware. “I am about to make it anytime now,” he writes in 1848, “for I am surrounded by people who are very influential in the newspapers and the arts and who are very excited about my painting. Indeed, we are about to form a new school, of which I will be the representative in the field of painting.” This statement, incidentally, provides a paradigmatic example of how the individual, relational, and collective selves overlap: Courbet was raised in a society that celebrated creativity for millennia, a cultural situation in which his personal self was molded, allowed expression, and acknowledged as com- munally significant. He must have reasoned that, once obtained, fame would confer (to put it in socio-psychological terms) collective recogni- tion upon the individual, and enhance the authority of his relational, self This attitude of wanting “all or nothing,” suggests, moreover, that, as individuals go, Courbet was more sensitive than most to his own image, or, as is sometimes said, that he had high public self-consciousness.^^ Writing about himself in the third person, he expressed a desire to spread “his name all over the world. He was talked about in China, Japan, Chile, California, America, etc.”^"' His decision to organize traveling shows of his work, including typographic posters announcing its display, clearly bespeaks his showmanship and proclivity for self-promotion.
But cultural situations are never unidimensional. In the nineteenth century, working in the arts frequently met with family disapproval, espe- cially among the middle and upper classes. Eike many painters, Courbet followed his vocation over parental objections, placing him, and many would-be artists, in a paradoxical position. The larger culture lionized creative individuals, but, because financial prospects were uncertain, and because artists traditionally came from lower social stations, even art patrons discouraged their kin from following careers in these fields. An ambivalent situation thus emerged wherein aesthetic activities were cul- turally prized so long as they were not confused with professional goals. To use present-day parlance, these tensions forced the relational and personal selves of aspiring artists into an adversarial relationship. What is more, as already insinuated, practicing a craft does not automatically confer the coveted status of professional artist; that status is contingent on recognition and acknowledgement by the wider community. Even if individuals seek to acquire the symbols of their self-definition on their own, it is the social group, not the individual, that confers them. To be acknowledged as an artist, Courbet had to expose his work to the artistic establishment of his time and receive some form of public recognition.
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The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet
Pondering his submissions to the 1844 Salon, he wrote: “If I am not accepted, it will be a misfortune.”^*’
In 1844, Courbet was accepted for a self-portrait (fig. 8) perhaps dated two years earlier,^^ and though an absolute priority, that admit- tance took repeated attempts to secure, postponing Courbet’s attempts to acquire the requisite symbols of success, and engendering a life-long antipathy toward the very establishment from which he sought accep- tance. Although he craved ''publicite” he became “scornful.”^^ Even after his first acceptances, the resounding success he coveted eluded him. The scandals caused by the Burial at Ornans (1849-50) or The Bathers (1853) are legendary, triggering the oft-repeated accusation that Courbet glori- fied vulgarity and ugliness. (Writing in 1849, a critic named Desbois wrote that Courbet “has seen ugliness and he has painted what he saw.” But Desbois insists that, in art, this is not enough: “in painting as in poetry it is necessary to discriminate.”^^)
For individuals who are highly publicly self-conscious, as Cour- bet apparently was, criticism is especially difficult to accept,*’*’ and any failure to obtain the markers of success registers as a serious setback. In consequence, failure can provoke what Wicklund and Gollwitzer call incompleteness, a condition, as its term indicates, accompanied by frus- tration and disappointment. This condition, in turn, triggers a need for compensation, the motivation, in other words, “to pursue further evi- dence of possessing the self-definitional quality,” a pursuit called “self- symbolization [that] appears in the form of positive self-description, attempted influence, and in the use of more permanent visible symbols of the sought-after self-definition.”*’’ Self-symbolization is obviously related to image-management, but perhaps more acute; a kind of image-man- agement on steroids, as it were. The concept is useful for our purposes because many of Courbet’s own contemporaries remarked on the dramat- ically performative aspects of the artist’s everyday behavior. Francis Wey, for example, remembered Courbet often acting as if he were a nai'f, simply for “effect.”*’^ T. J. Clark went so far as to describe him as a poseur, and Petra Chu argued that, among Courbet’s means of self-promotion was to strike a “pose,” to “invent and create a public persona for himself — both through his art, in a series of carefully staged self-portraits, and in real life, by playing up certain physical and psychological characteristics.”*’"’
The Artist as Martyr
Courbet’s frequent tendency to stress (and occasionally exaggerate) the hostility he received at the hands of the public may thus be explain- able in self-symbolic terms, and provides a way to interpret early self-por- traits such as The Desperate Man and The Man Mad with Fear (figs. 6, 7). At a certain level, of course, des Cars’s reading mentioned above is sound: namely, that these pieces reflect a four year “period of despondency” dur- ing which Courbet enjoyed no success at the Salon. By all accounts, this despondency was real and deeply felt. Even so, this essay is devoted to the proposition that these self-portraits reveal an agenda more subtle and complex than the simple cathartic release of pent-up frustration. The Man Mad with Fear, tellingly enough, was exhibited under the title The Sui- cide, which, according to des Cars, Courbet deemed significant enough to exhibit, incomplete as it was, without designating it as a “sketch.”*’^ His willingness to exhibit this piece at all implies that it was destined to play a public role — a role, in other words, from which Courbet thought he could press some kind of advantage since, for him, as T. J. Clark writes, “the public was very much present.”*’*’
But what kind of advantage? Though running afoul of artistic for- mula, both The Desperate Man and The Man Mad with Fear rely upon the famous trope, as Petra Chu observes, of the “mad genius.”*’^ As such.
they provide (or appear to provide) glimpses into the artist’s most private, intimate moments, moments one seldom shares even with one’s closest friends. This informality, however, is a ruse, and precisely calculated to be disarming. In many cultures, reciprocity governs most social or business relations. As the expression “one good turn deserves another” suggests, our communal interactions are expected to be fair. If we are generous with others, or others with us, those involved will feel obligated to return that generosity. These unwritten rules also extend to the private sphere. When individuals reveal something personal about themselves, Feary contends, we “feel a certain amount of pressure to reciprocate.”*’^
In many respects, Courbet’s self-representations play a similar role. Even if an intended audience is frequently implied in the majority of artistic or literary works, the audience, for the declamatory images Cour- bet is constructing, assumes the status of a necessary, even indispensable, ingredient — at least, for the overall purposes of symbolic self-completion. As T. J. Clark aptly puts it, “The public is a prescience or a phantasy within the work and within the process of its production. It is something the artist himself invents, in his solitude.”*’’’ Indeed, Courbet confessed to Theophile Silvestre that though he often fantasized about saving his lover from a fire in front of ten thousand astonished spectators, he would have derived little satisfaction from doing so unseen.^” By revealing private moments in his art, the artist is also playing to the audience: namely, by assuming the role of a friend sharing a confidence. Such revelations, in turn, are meant to engender the illusion that a close emotional connec- tion exists between him and the observer, primarily because the vulner- ability that accompanies any revelation of a private nature presupposes a relationship of trust, a trust, as Feary posits, we feel pressure to return. By providing (or pretending to provide) transparent views into his private life, Courbet ingratiates himself with his public, interacting (or pretend- ing to interact) with his implied audience on the level of intimate rela- tions. Given the personal nature of the confession with which we are entrusted, we will tend, if only subliminally, to consider Courbet honest and trustworthy, and our connection with him as inordinately intimate. We are led to think, in effect, that we are taken backstage, made privy to privileged information normally too confidential to be shared with strangers. “The human personality,” Emile Durkheim posited, “is a sacred thing; one does not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.”^’
When artists place the audience in the position of confidants,^^ the rigidity that governs many forms of social interaction relaxes. This sus- tains a feeling of familiarity, even closeness, encouraging the impression of barriers eroding between the observer and the observed. The audience is gradually coaxed into dropping its guard, tempering its disapproval, and trusting the individual represented. This tactic, arguably, is central to Courbet’s intent. If we assume that human beings engineer an image of themselves for the benefit of others, it is a given that the attitudes of these others — i.e., their predisposition to accept or reject the signals they are receiving — will be difficult to control. It is imperative that the person on display employ not only the most effective means to persuade the audience, but also appear genuine and honest. It must seem, in other words, as if the performance is, in fact, no performance at all, only an un-edited glimpse into how the individual acts naturally, without hidden agenda, as if no audience were present. This operation requires a delicate balance: one must appear genuine without wanting to appear genuine (if the performance seems too slick or polished, the performer’s integrity will be suspect) .
But if the artist successfully manipulates the audience into thinking that nothing is concealed, that secrets are made readily accessible, and, most importantly, that the individual exposed is sincere and straightfor-
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ward, then the artist’s signals will register as intended. In this context, The Man Mad with Fear is especially instructive. In art history, repre- sentations of suicide are conventionally restricted to historical figures (Socrates, Seneca, Lucretia, Dido, Sappho, Cleopatra), and, though romantic and realist artists expanded depictions of suicides beyond the confines of the literary or historical, self-portraits in the course of com- mitting such an act are rare. This makes Courbet’s image both singular and difficult to interpret. Per- haps examples from everyday behavior may pro- vide assistance. It is often said, for instance, that individuals frequently fantasize about attending their own funerals; most likely, because a certain degree of pleasure is derived from imagining others grieving for one’s memory. A case could be made that Courbet’s depiction of his own demise plays a similar role, permitting a cathartic release of nega- tive feelings as well as allowing the artist to indulge in such a fantasy.
Significantly, Elliot Aronson has argued that, in certain conditions, human beings appreci- ate situations for which they “suffer.”^^ This may sound counterintuitive, but, on the basis of several experiments, Aronson demonstrated that indi- viduals value membership in a group in propor- tion to the severity of its initiation process. The reason seems obvious; if we grow disillusioned with an association that proved easy to join, we can remind ourselves that little effort was spent in the process. We have more at stake if we expended greater energy, and strive to persuade ourselves that the task was yet worthwhile — if only to avoid the uncomfortable reminder of having wasted our time. Similarly, a challenging task is far more likely to gain admiration than an undemanding one.
This explains why we often praise actions in direct relation to the amount of effort they require, and provides a logical rationale for modern artists’ pro- clivity to stress, even relish, how acutely they are ostracized in modern culture. In 1855, for exam- ple, when some of his paintings were rejected from the Exposition Universelle, Courbet wrote to his faithful patron, Alfred Bruyas, that he had been “desperate” for a month. Soliciting his assistance,
Courbet reminds Bruyas that he will be “serving a holy and sacred cause, the cause of liberty and independence, a cause to which I, like you, have consecrated my entire life.”^"^ On this account, the prospect of suffering for high-minded principles such as “art,” “liberty,” or “truth” must have been intoxicating for Courbet. And showcasing such suffering openly in his early self-portraits helped demonstrate his strength of character, his resolve to be true to his per- sonal vision even in the face of public disapproval. By advertising how protracted and painful his struggle was, the more value he felt could be ascribed to his art. Erom the perspective of social psychology, the image of a suffering Courbet supplied a public confirmation of his determination to adhere to his self-definition, all the while enhancing the standing of his chosen vocation and mitigating any personal unease over the unpleasant realization that material comforts and public acknowledgement had been
relinquished for trivial pursuits.
Meant for public consumption, moreover, the image of Courbet’s own suicide was also intended, arguably, to make spectators grieve, and — perhaps more to the point — regret not having prevented the action depicted. The feeling of guilt, presumably, would be the stronger among those made to feel partly responsible for the tragedy unfolding before
them. Even if a number of Courbet’s self-portraits make direct eye-contact with the spectator, in The Desperate Man and The Man Mad with Fear, that contact, coupled with the most pained facial expressions Courbet managed to commit to can- vas, is pushed to the edge. The Desperate Man and The Man Mad with Fear, conceivably, are accu- sations camouflaged under a seemingly genuine cri de coeur. Eess interested in catharsis, Courbet is blaming his detractors for having treated him unjustly, and warning them as to what might hap- pen, and what would fall upon their conscience, were their own (ostensibly unfair) criticisms of him to continue unchecked.
By posing in the guise of a suffering individ- ual, then, Courbet is not simply fabricating a self- image for the consumption of his audience; he is, if not accusing that audience of injustice, at least coaxing it to act differently toward him. As Coff- man writes, “Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that oth- ers will value and treat him in an appropriate way. Connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly sig- nifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is. In consequence, when an individual projects a definition... and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging him to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect.”^^ Confronted with the image of a suffering Courbet, the audience is thus invited to recognize that image as accurate, as a transparent reflection of the “real” Courbet, and repent the error of its ways.
Pressure to obtain that repentance could also be exerted, if only partly, by the signals conveyed by Courbet’s other self-portraits. The Man with the Leather Belt (fig. 10), Self-Portrait with Black Dog (fig. 11), and The Cellist (fig. 12) all conjure an image of Courbet as an introspective, sensitive, and creative individual, a young man of rare gifts whose obvious talents need to be nurtured and allowed to bear fruit. The Man with the Leather Belt, for example, evokes how much premeditation and soul searching is necessary for genuine artistic creation. The attributes commonly found in an artist’s studio — pen, paper, and ecorche — are present but discarded, necessary but insuffi- cient by themselves to produce profound works of art. In the Self-Portrait with Black Dog, Courbet employs an animal as a kind of prop, a prop that helps entice a sympathetic response from the public, as animals often do, in the obvious hope that this same sympathetic response will transfer
10. Gustave Courbet, The Man with the Leather Belt, 1845-46. Oil on canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Musee d Orsay, Paris.
1 1 . Gustave Courbet, Self Portrait with Black Dog, 1842. Oil on canvas, 27 x 23 cm, Musee de Pontarlier.
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The Self-Portraits of Gustave Courbet
from the animal to its owner. (On this point, it is intriguing that psy- chologists have argued that our sense of self is not restricted to our own physical bodies, but can expand to objects we collect or admire and even to pets for which we have affection.^'’)
With respect to The Cellist, Courbet’s biographer, Gerstle Mack, wrote that the artist actually counted himself a musician and “with char- acteristic vanity regarded himself as a first-rate composer and accom- plished performer.”^^ Even so, the painting, as Petra Chu remarked, proves unpersuasive, primarily, because of the “absurdity” of the artist’s “left-handed approach to the instrument, which makes his already awk- ward grip of bow and cello look even less veracious. It is obvious that the artist is assuming a pose in which the cello is a mere prop, borrowed from a friend for the occasion.”^® Unpersuasive or not, Courbet’s image was meant to convey his sensitivity as an artist, perhaps buttressed by the assumption — current in literary circles — that the art form most conducive to induce emotive responses was music. More persuasive than the physical handling of the cello is Courbet’s facial expression; though easily confused with expressions of extreme pain or pleasure, it is an expression frequently made by musicians: con- centrated, intense, and evocative.
To be sure. The Man with the Leather Belt and The Cellist are consistent with pre-estab- lished formulas of romantic portraiture and self-portraiture and nowhere as extreme as The Desperate Man or The Man Mad with Fear. But they share that same sense of informality, and still endeavor to leave the impression that, as far as Courbet is concerned, perfect harmony exists between inside and outside, style and substance, reality and appearance. As such, they establish a broader frame of reference against which self-portraits such as The Desper- ate Man and The Man Mad with Fear will be interpreted —