COURBET
Equally far removed from, and hostile to, Classicism and Romanticism was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who as head and founder of the Realistic school exercised a prodigious influence upon nineteenth-century art. He was essentially a fighting spirit, determined to overcome official hostility to his revolutionary principles. Excluded from public exhibitions, he held a private show of his own works, and defended his theories by spoken and written arguments. His just claim was that it did not matter what you paint, but how you paint what you actually see; and in conformity with his loudly proclaimed principles he often chose subjects that were offensive to the taste of his day. At the same time we can see now that he was endowed with a keen instinctive feeling for pictorial fitness, and that most of his pictures are far from being haphazard snapshots of actuality. In his student years he had copied many masterpieces by Rembrandt, Velazquez, Hals, and Van Dyck. How much he benefited from the example of the old masters is to be judged from his portrait of himself, known as The Man with the Leather-belt (No. 147).
PLATE LII.—JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
(1814–1875)
No. 644.—WOMEN GLEANING
(Les Glaneuses)
In a harvest-field three female gleaners, seen in profile to the left, are occupied with picking up blades of corn. Two of them are bending right down, with their right hands touching the ground; the third woman is half erect. In the background some ricks, a cart and horses, harvesters, a farm building, and a horseman.
Signed on right:—“j. f. millet.”
Painted in oil on canvas.
2 ft. 8¾ in. × 3 ft. 8¼ in. (0·82 × 1·12.)
By far his most famous picture is the gigantic Funeral at Ornans (No. 143), which, as a study of the life and types in a small French provincial town, has aptly been compared with Flaubert’s great novel Madame Bovary. Each individual head in this vast composition is a marvellous study of facial expression. In his landscapes, again, he was by no means photographic, and he never failed to consider the decorative effectiveness of his pictures. His influence upon Whistler’s early work is to be judged from The Wave (No. 147a). If his landscapes retain to a certain extent the atmosphere of the studio, such pieces as La Remise des Chevreuils (No. 145a) and Le Ruisseau du Puits noir (No. 146a) clearly show that he possessed a sound understanding of the way in which colours react upon, and modify, each other. Courbet’s revolutionary tendencies made him take part in the political movement of the Commune, and forced him to leave his native country. He died in Switzerland in 1877.