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Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans (department of Doubs). Anti-monarchical feelings prevailed in the household. (His maternal grandfather fought in the French Revolution.) Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie, and Juliette were his first models for drawing and painting.
Gustave Courbet was central to the emergence of Realism in the mid-19 th century. Rejecting the classical and theatrical styles of the French Academy, his art insisted on the physical reality of the objects he observed - even if that reality was plain and blemished.
The self-proclaimed “proudest and most arrogant man in France,” Gustave Courbet created a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1850–51 when he exhibited a group of paintings set in his native Ornans, a village in the Franche-Comté in eastern France.
Until it joined the collections of the Musée d'Orsay in 1995 – by which time it belonged to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – The Origin of the World epitomised the paradox of a famous painting that is seldom actually seen. Courbet regularly painted female nudes, sometimes in a frankly libertine vein.
Gustave Courbet arrived in Paris in 1839 to study law, in line with his father’s wishes. However, he quickly rejected this future career path. Like many budding artists, he regularly visited the Louvre to make copies of great works such as for example The Vision of Saint Jerome by Guercino (Ornans, musée Courbet).
Courbet was the main exponent of Realism in 19th-century French painting. His work contrasts with the Classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix.
Gustave Courbet was a French artist and founder of the Realist movement in 19th-century France. View Gustave Courbet’s 1,098 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices.
