Courbet.(Report from Europe)(Gustave Courbet )

Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in Ornans, in eastern France, and arrived in Paris to study painting in 1839. He avoided the official schools and learned by copying the works of seventeenth-century naturalists such as Caravaggio, Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velazquez. Initially he worked in the romantic style but by the age of twenty-three he had found his true means of expression--realism--which became both his subject matter and his way of depicting it. Courbet selected scenes of contemporary life and did not exclude those that might be considered ugly or vulgar. He took his devotion to realism seriously and felt that if he could not see it, he should not paint it. When asked to include angels in a painting for a church, he responded that he had "never seen angels. Show me an angel and I will paint one."

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Courbet had an awkward streak to his character. In 1855 he was angered by the rejection of three paintings for the Exposition Uni-verselle, so he organized a separate pavilion for himself nearby, in which he showed forty canvases. In his later years he took political action during the siege of Paris and ...