Courbet, Gustave

French artist. He was a portrait, genre, and landscape painter. Reacting against academic trends, both classicist and Romantic, he became a major exponent of realism, depicting contemporary life with an unflattering frankness. His Burial at Ornans (1850; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), showing ordinary working people gathered around a village grave, shocked the public and the critics with its ‘vulgarity’.

His powerful genius found expression in portraiture, figure composition, landscape (the gorges and forests of his native Franche-Comte, and superb paintings of the Normandy coast, The Wave being famous in several versions), sensuous paintings of the nude, animal studies, and still life. He went to Paris 1841, his training mainly consisting in the study and imitation of old masters in the Louvre, especially Velázquez and Rembrandt. In defiance of both Romanticism and classicism he evolved the idea of realism, asserting, that is, that painting should consist in ‘the representation of real and existing things’, his aim therefore being, in his own words, to ‘interpret the manners, ideas and aspect of our own time’. In this there were some social and proletarian implications, as might be gathered from his Stonebreakers (1849; Dresden, destroyed 1945), and the Burial at Ornans (Louvre), with its sombre group of peasants, which caused an uproar when exhibited at the Salon of 1850.