Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet

Gustav Courbet is the painter that started and ruled the French movement toward Realism. Everyone was getting used to pictures that made life look better than it was. However, Courbet, truthfully portrait ordinary places and people.

Courbet was born on June 10, 1819, to a farming family in Ornans, France. In 1841, he went to Paris to study law but instead, he studied painting and learned by copying pictures of other artists. In 1844, his self-portrait ‘Courbet with a Black Dog’, was accepted by an annual public exhibition of art.

In 1849 Courbet visited his family in the countryside and produced “The Stone-Breakers” followed by ‘Burial in Ornans’. Both paintings were unlike romantic pictures of the day because they showed peasants in realistic settings “instead of the rich in glamourized situations”. Gustav Courbet his work himself near the exhibition hall when one of his huge canvases was refused for an important exhibition.

By 1859, he was the leader of the new generation of the French realist movement. The artist painted all varieties of subjects such as portraits, nudes and also scenes of nature.

                                 "Self Portrait"



Gustave Courbet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013. Gustave Courbet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism. [Accessed 02 March 2013].