The Modern “Erostrate” Courbet. In progress of removal. June 1871.
The artists have done still better than we should; they have not answered at all, for one cannot call the “General Assembly of all the Artists in Design,” presided over by Monsieur Gustave Courbet, and held on the 13th of April, 1871, in the great amphitheatre of the Ecole de Médecine, a real meeting of French artists. We know several celebrated painters, and we saw none of them there. The citizens Potier and Boulaix had been named secretaries. We congratulate them; for this high distinction may, perhaps, aid in founding their reputation, which was in great want of a basis of some kind. But there were some sculptors there, perhaps? We saw some long beards, beards that were quite unknown to us, and their owners may have been sculptors, perhaps. For Paris is a city of sculptors. But if artists were wanting, there were talkers enough. Have you ever remarked that there are no orators so indefatigable as those who have nothing to say? And the interruptions, the clamour, the apostrophising, more highly coloured than courteous! Such an overwhelming tumult was never heard:—
“No more jury!”
“Yes! yes! a jury! a jury!”
“Out with the reactionist!”
“Down with Cabanel!”
“And the women? Are the women to be on the jury?”
“Neither the women, nor the infirm.”
And all the time there is Monsieur Gustave Courbet, the chairman, desperately ringing his bell for order, and launching some expressive exclamation from time to time. And the result of all this? Absolutely nothing at all! No! stop! There were a few statutes proposed—and every one amused himself immensely. “Well! so much the better,” said one. “Every one laughed, and no harm was done to anybody.”
We beg your pardon! There was a great deal of harm done—to Monsieur Courbet.
NOTES:
[57] Gaillard Senior (a sort of Odger), cobbler of Belleville and democratic stump orator. Appointed, April 8, to the Presidency of the Commission of Barricades.
[58] As a painter Courbet has been very diversely judged. He was the chief of the ultra-realistic school, and therefore a natural subject for the contempt and abuse of the admirers of “legitimate art.” But his later use of the political power entrusted to him has drawn down upon him the wrath of an immense majority of the French public, which his artistic misdemeanours had scarcely touched. On the sixteenth of April he was elected a member of the Commune by the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and forthwith appointed Director of the Beaux Arts. Until this time his life had been purely professional, and consequently of mediocre interest for the general public. He was born at Ornans, department of the Doubs, in 1819, and received his primary instructions from the Abbé Gousset, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims. He first applied himself to the study of mathematics, painting the while, and apparently aiming at a fusion of both pursuits. He subsequently read for the bar for a short time, and, finally, adopting art as his sole profession, threw himself heart and soul into a Rénaissance movement as the apostle of a new style. The peculiarities of his manner soon brought him into notoriety, and a school of imitators grouped itself around him. His pride became a proverb. In 1870 he was offered the cross of the Legion of Honour, and refused it, arrogantly declaring that he would have none of a distinction given to tradesmen and ministers. The part he took in the destruction of the Colonne Vendôme is familiar to all readers of the English press. Three weeks after the fall of the Commune he was denounced by a Federal officer, and discovered at the house of a friend hiding in a wardrobe, and in September was condemned by the tribunal at Versailles to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 600 francs—a slight penalty that astonished everyone.