In the democratization of French society that took place in the mid-nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) led the assault on elitist aesthetics. As Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) had displaced the sentimental and decadent pomp of the Rococo court with a robust, high-minded republican style, so Courbet, sixty years later, invaded the state-run art establishment, opposing its artificiality with his coarse brand of Realism.
Raised in Ornans, a village near Switzerland, Courbet came from a wealthy bourgeois family. After brief artistic training with former students of Baron Gros and David, the twenty-year-old arrived in Paris in 1839. Instead of enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he would have continued his Neo-Classical education, he copied Dutch, Flemish, Venetian, and Spanish pictures in the museums. The freely brushed, earthy realism of these schools set the tone for his own mature style.
Courbet's career falls mainly between the ephemeral revolutions of 1848 and 1871. In the intervening Second Empire, he was one of the most controversial figures in the Paris art world. Courbet was not merely an artist; he was a formidable political force for Republicanism, and his subject matter and the style of its depiction made an all-out assault on the conservative standards of the imperial regime and its state-run Academy.
The Academy controlled both the instruction and exhibition of art in France. It sanctioned only mythological, biblical, or French history painting and approved of highly finished, classicizing compositions. The Academy's Neo-Classicism linked the imperial government with the great monarchic civilizations of the past. Naturally, some critics disdained this program and its aesthetic canon. As early as 1824, Stendhal had complained, "What do I care about antique basrelief! Let us try to do good modern painting." In 1851, Francois Sabatier remarked: "The grand style is wrong, not that it is not very grand, but because it is Greek, and in France, in the nineteenth century, Frenchmen are alive and the Greeks are dead."
Heroic Narrative
By the 1830s, artists such as Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), Camille Corot (1796-1875) and Francois Millet (1814-1875) of the Barbizon school, and Honore Daumier (1808-1879) had tentatively established an alternative to heroic narrative themes. They painted ordinary people and landscapes--genre subjects. Corot, for example, had resolved "to reproduce as conscientiously as possible what I see before me"; Millet had devoted himself to imparting the dignity of French peasantry within a society transformed by industrialization.
Courbet chose to paint the provincial villagers and the rugged landscape of his native Franche-Comte region. Unlike his predecessors, however, Courbet painted these commonplace subjects on a scale appropriate to history paintings, indicating his belief that the people, not archaic gods, were the true subject of modern art. As he stated in 1849, "My sympathies are with the people, I must speak to them directly, take my science from them, and they must provide me with a living."
Discarding the outworn Neo-Classical language in favor of a contemporary one, Courbet challenged the Academy's symbolic affirmation of imperial authority. His aggrandized
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