Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet was a French painter whose work helped define nineteenth-century Realism through the scale and treatment of familiar subjects. Scenes from his native Ornans and portraits of people around him challenged the separation between everyday experience and formal exhibition painting. A Burial at Ornans gives a local funeral the dimensions associated with history painting, making the assembled community the principal subject. His landscapes give limestone cliffs, trees, and water a substantial physical presence through visible paint and the use of a palette knife. The Artist's Studio places Courbet at work within a large gathering of figures, turning artistic practice itself into a subject. After the painting was rejected by the Exposition Universelle in 1855, he included it in his own independent exhibition. Portraits, hunting scenes, and seascapes broaden this practice beyond the large figure compositions associated with his public Realist identity.