Return to Gustave Courbet
Courbet himself never mentioned this enigmatic work, which remained with him until his death. The painting has been read as an "expressive head"—an academic exercise in the tradition of Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), an image of the artist as mad genius, and an autobiographical work depicting the artist in a moment of personal and artistic crisis. It probably was painted about 1844–45, after Courbet had been rejected several times by the Salon jury and was becoming disillusioned with his youthful Romantic ideals. Looking back on his early struggles, Courbet would comment, "How I was made to suffer despair in my youth!"
Begun in the mid-1840s, this self-portrait underwent a series of transformations. An X-radiograph of the painting reveals that it was painted over an image of Courbet and a lover, asleep in a sylvan setting, which closely resembles a drawing of the same subject—Country Siesta (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie, Besançon). Following his separation from Virginie Binet in 1852, Courbet painted over the figure of the woman in this work, obliterating her body with a dark brown blanket, and reinvented his own portrayal as well. No longer a lover lost in the sensual abandon of sleep, he appears as a wounded duelist "in his death throes," as he described this image.
The exhibition of this painting at the Salon of 1852 unleashed what the critic Champfleury later identified as the artist's "second scandal," succeeding that of A Burial at Ornans (1849–50; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) at the previous Salon. Critics were appalled by the work's unvarnished realism and disparities in scale: they were nearly unanimous in reproaching Courbet for the "ugliness" of the three young women, for whom the artist's sisters served as models, as well as for the disproportionately small scale of the cattle, "fit for a park in Lilliput." Courbet's suggestive use of the term demoiselles (young ladies) to denote the trio of young women from the village also provoked his critics, who took issue with the blurring of class boundaries that the term implied: "In the past, there were village girls and the demoiselles of the city, and the world was no worse off for it. ... Dressed this way, the village girls take on the status of demoiselles."
This landscape depicts, from a lower vantage point, the same panoramic view captured in the Château d'Ornans, a work of about the same date on view in this gallery. While borrowing from the conventions of classical landscape painting, notably in his use of the group of trees on the right as a framing device, Courbet faithfully renders the landscape of his native Franche-Comté, embodied in the limestone cliffs, whose brilliant whiteness Courbet emphasizes. The looming storm clouds and the dramatic contrasts of light and dark lend the work a Romantic quality.
Traditionally seen as representing Courbet's arrival in Montpellier, greeted by his patron Bruyas, who is accompanied by his manservant Calas and his dog Breton, the painting depicts an imaginary roadside encounter between artist and patron. In fact, Courbet traveled to Montpellier via railway rather than the stagecoach departing in the distance. Courbet modeled the composition on popular printed images of the Wandering Jew, conflating his identity as a wandering artist with that of the legendary shoemaker, condemned to wander for eternity.
Courbet exhibited this work in Paris at the Exhibition Universelle of 1855, where, despite his claims of its success to his patron, the painting was widely caricatured in the popular press and mockingly nicknamed "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet." Behind the ridicule lay the critics' recognition that Courbet was its central focus, with Bruyas reduced to the role of "the onlooker ... the man in the painting of the Meeting." Bruyas did not exhibit The Meeting again until 1868, when he donated it to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.
At the Salon of 1850–51, Courbet exhibited The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair along with The Stonebreakers (destroyed) and the Burial at Ornans (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). All three works present scenes of rural life in Courbet's native Ornans on the heroic, large scale previously reserved for history painting. Critics were shocked by both their scale as well as Courbet's handling of the subjects, deriding the ugliness of his "rude and broad style."
This image of peasants returning home to the small village of Flagey was part of what Courbet called his "highway" series, which also included The Stonebreakers. The figure astride the horse in the center has traditionally been identified as Courbet's father, Régis Courbet, who was mayor of Flagey. "This is the Franche-Comté peasant in all his natural sincerity," wrote the philosopher Proudhon.
This painting, executed in 1855, is a replica of the original. Courbet, dissatisfied with the perspective, repainted the work and enlarged the canvas by some twelve inches along the right side. He also reworked the present canvas, as evidenced by his shift of the woman with the basket on her head from the right side of the composition (where traces of the basket are visible) toward the center.
Courbet's portrayal of fashionably dressed Parisian women lounging during a sultry summer day generated yet another scandal at the Salon of 1857. Courbet's title alone was provocative, as it was clear that these women were not young ladies. The painting is laden with sexual innuendo—from the lushness of the vegetation and the women's languor to the semi-undressed state of the foreground figure and the man's hat suggestively placed in the boat. There is also the possibility of a liaison between the two women, prefiguring the explicit eroticism of Sleep, painted a decade later.
As an image of contemporary leisure, the painting anticipates the work of Manet and the Impressionists from the 1860s and 1870s; the picnickers of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) have their antecedent in Courbet's provocative "young ladies." The artist Henri Matisse owned two sketches related to this painting.
Near the end of his life, Courbet nostalgically recalled this image of Joanna Hiffernan, a souvenir of his 1865 sojourn in Trouville, in a letter to James McNeill Whistler: "I still have the portrait of Jo, which I will never sell. Everyone admires it." This work has been convincingly identified as "the portrait of Jo" that Courbet kept for himself, a replica with minor variations of the original. It likely was made in response to an offer to purchase the original, and it subsequently served as the prototype for two additional iterations. It was not unusual for Courbet to execute multiple copies of his popular subjects in response to market demand.
In 1852, Courbet announced his desire to take on the nude, a genre prized by the Academy. He executed a painting of male nudes, The Wrestlers (Szepmuvezeti Museum, Budapest) as well as this painting, its pendant. He exhibited both in the Salon of 1853, where The Bathers occasioned a critical uproar. The painter Eugène Delacroix, a member of the Salon jury, deplored "the vulgarity of the forms," which did not conform to the idealized nudes of Academic art. Critics expressed their disgust at the dirty feet of the models as well as the fallen stocking of the seated model, seen as emblematic of physical as well as moral squalor. When Napoleon III saw the painting at the Salon, he allegedly feigned whipping the buttocks of the standing nude with his riding crop.
The model for the standing bather has been identified as Henriette Bonnion, who, according to a nineteenth-century source, posed "in naturabilis " in Courbet's Paris studio in the winter of 1853. Bonnion also modeled for the photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, assuming a nearly identical pose in a photograph of the same date. It is not known if the photograph was made before Courbet's painting.
The Turkish diplomat Khalil-Bey commissioned this work in 1866. Like The Origin of the World , which he also owned, Sleep was not intended for public exhibition. The private nature of the commission gave Courbet greater freedom to exploit the work's erotic content, rendering a subject previously reserved for prints on an unprecedented scale. Courbet drew upon a range of sources for this image—from eighteenth-century Rococo art to popular printed imagery and conventions of contemporary Sapphic literature.
Courbet emphasizes the sensuality of his subject, setting his voluptuous nudes in a neo-Rococo interior, with such details as the loose string of pearls, gold hair comb and enameled vase suggestive of a certain luxury, perhaps that of a high-end brothel. The work's lesbianism must be considered in relation to the work's intended male audience. By 1872, the painting was part of the artist's police dossier, its explicitly erotic subject seen by his contemporaries as indicative of Courbet's moral depravity.
Courbet referred to his seascapes as "landscapes of the sea," a term that especially resonates in the context of his wave paintings. Here, Courbet sculpted the water with his palette knife, just as he rendered the limestone cliffs and rocky grottoes in his Ornans landscapes. Cézanne later recalled his impressions of this painting: "The one in Berlin is marvelous, one of the important creations of the century. ... It hits you right in the stomach. You have to step back. The entire room feels the spray."
Le Gray's seascapes, photographed on the Mediterranean coast, brought him international acclaim and recognition almost from the moment that they were created. Le Gray achieved the works' dramatic visual effects through an innovative process of printing two negatives—one for the sea, the other for the sky, each exposed separately—on a single sheet. His photographs were thus composed, not unlike a painting, their reality mitigated through his subsequent intervention in the studio.
Whether or not Courbet met Le Gray—both men were in Sète in 1857, possibly at the same time—he quite likely knew his works, as certain paintings, including his Waves , directly evoke Le Gray's precedent.
This painting, exhibited at the Salon of 1861, marks the first appearance of the fox as a motif in Courbet's oeuvre, while the wintry landscape background prefigures his "paysages de neige" of 1866–67. Here the fox appears as hunter rather than prey, its predatory pose recalling Courbet's portrayal of its domestic counterpart, the white cat playing with a ball of yarn in The Painter's Studio of 1855. This painting was purchased by Khalil-Bey, the Turkish collector who commissioned both The Origin of the World and Sleep.
With this self-portrait—his last, Courbet returned to the autobiographical enterprise of his youth. This work is unique in its explicit acknowledgment of his political engagement during the Commune, for which he was sentenced to six months in prison. Courbet depicts himself in his private cell at Sainte-Pélagie in the familiar act of smoking a pipe. Significantly, his self-presentation is at odds with contemporary descriptions of the aging Communard whose beard and hair had turned completely gray