Gustave Courbet "La foret neigee"
Gustave Courbet was born into a family of farmers in the village of Ornans , among the Jura mountains in the Franche-Comte region of France. In 1840, he moved to Paris to study law, but he soon sensed his true vocation and enrolled at an art school. He also copied and studied works by past and contemporary Flemish and Spanish masters in the Louvre, while he found inspiration of a different kind by making the acquaintance of Corot, Honore Daumier, Baudelaire, and Champfleury, among others.
He is generally counted among the members of the Barbizon school, as he frequented Fontainebleau and maintained contact with other members of the group.
The Salon first hung one of his paintings in 1844. He attracted controversy in 1850 with both his subject matter and its treatment when he exhibited L 'enterrement a Ornans, which was widely interpreted as an affront to the academicism of the day. More trouble ensued five years later, when he submitted L'atelier for the Paris Universal Exposition, only to have it rejected. Nail ing his realist colors to the mast, Courbet mounted his own exhibition, from which all traces of fantasy and idealization were expunged. Realism meant pa inting only what was in front of the artist, and from then on Courbet was the acknowledged leader of the realist movement. In the turbulent days of the Paris Commune in 1871, he was imprisoned for his part in the demolition of the Vendome Column, and his assets were confiscated. On his release, he retreated to Switzerland, where he died at la Tour de Peilz.
When Courbet moved to Paris, the artists' world in Paris was divided into two camps: the classicist followers of Ingres and the romanticist champions of Delacroix.
Being incorrigibly arrogant and provocative, Courbet had thrown down his personal gauntlet in front of both these masters. "If you want me to paint a goddess, you must first show me a goddess. To paint a landscape, you must be come familiar with it. I paint scenes from my home town, because I know it. The rivers in my paintings-they really exist. So do the rocks at Ornans and the Puits Noir. You should go there."
Early signs of realism-of depicting life in the raw, without beautifying what is inherently unsightly-had already appeared in the works of the eighteenth-century Spanish master, Goya. Modern painting can be traced back to this movement, and Courbet played a pivotal role in influencing those artists who came after him. Behind the artistic ideals, too, lay those of socialist philosophy, expounded, for example, by Perre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65).
In his declining years, however, Courbet felt disgust at the misunderstanding and scorn that his artistic and political conduct aroused in his fellows . Seeking comfort in the natural world, he began to paint forests, seas and other landscapes in which the only signs of human activity were occasional children, hikers of scattered dwellings. The painting in our collection is one of the works of this period.
The reason that Courbet's pictures are darker than those of the Impressionists and later artists in his belief that where there is no sunlight, nature is pitch-black, and that his brushes brought light to illuminate this primordial darkness. Acting on this belief, he first covered his canvas with black paint, then put other colors on top. Courbet, however, was no substitute for the sun.
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Gustave Courbet
(1819-1877)
La foret neigee
around 1862
Oil on canvas
63×53cm
