Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet's paintings range from portraits and large figure scenes to woods, limestone cliffs, streams, and the sea. Thick and thin passages of paint distinguish rock, foliage, flesh, and moving water, with brush and palette knife producing different kinds of surface. In The Artist's Studio, the painter works on a landscape while surrounding figures bring artistic labor and human society into the same composition. The Source of the Loue turns toward the physical setting of his native Franche-Comté, where water emerges from a dark opening beneath a mass of rock. Courbet painted several versions of this subject, changing the relation between the cave, rushing stream, and surrounding terrain. Seascapes extend his interest in material weight and movement into waves and open horizons. Across these works, the density and handling of paint remain active parts of how each place or figure is described.