Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet

Born in the Franche Compté to a family of landowners, Gustave Courbet was brought up on the principles of Voltaire and the Republic. In 1839 he moved to Paris to read law, but soon changed his mind and pursued a career in art instead. In the French capital he studied the works of the Great Masters in the Louvre and frequented the intellectual bohemia. The three works he showed at the Salon of 1851, Stonebreakers, 1849 (destroyed in 1945 in Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister), Burial at Ornans, 1849–50 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and Peasants of Flagey, 1850 (Besançon, Musée des Beaux Arts et d’Archéologie), attested to the consolidation of his realistic style and caused a powerful impact on the public, as it was the first time that common folk had been raised to the category of art. Courbet believed that art should spring from the objective observation of life and advocated an anti-classical, anti-romantic, anti-academic, progressive and social brand of Realism. Halfway through the 1850s, Courbet paid less attention to social themes and embarked on a period in which he mainly depicted landscapes and hunt scenes, as well as painting many portraits and nudes. His native region of Franche Compté became his chief source of inspiration. The artist moved to Switzerland, where he spent the last years of his life in exile.

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