COURBET.MY STUDIO AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC LIFE.

Courbet met with a similar fate.

If one approaches him after reading the criticisms of his pictures already cited, a great disillusionment is inevitable. Having imagined a grotesque monster, one finds to one’s astonishment that there is not the slightest occasion either for indignation or laughter in the presence of these powerful, sincere, and energetic pictures. One has expected caricatures and a repulsive hideousness, and one finds a broad and masterly style of painting. The heads are real without being vulgar, and the flesh firm and soft and throbbing with powerful life. Courbet is a personality. He began by imitating the Flemish painters and the Neapolitans. But far more did he feel himself attracted by the actual world, by massive women and strong men, and wide fertile fields smelling of rich, rank earth. As a healthy and sensuously vigorous man he felt a voluptuous satisfaction in clasping actual nature in his herculean arms. Of course, by the side of his admirable pictures there are others which are heavy and uncouth. But if one is honest one paints according to one’s inherent nature, as old Navez, the pupil of David, was in the habit of saying. Courbet was honest, and he was also a somewhat unwieldy being, and therefore his painting too has something bluff and cumbrous. But where in all French art is there such a sound painter, so sure of his effects and with such a large bravura, a maître peintre who was so many-sided, extending his dominion as much over figure-painting as landscape, over the nude as over nature morte? There is no artist so many of whose pictures may be seen together without surfeit, for he is novel in almost every work. He has painted not a few pictures of which it may be said that each one is sui generis, and on the variations of which elsewhere entire reputations might have been founded. With the exception of Millet, no one had observed man and nature with such sincere and open eyes. With the great realists of the past Courbet shares the characteristic of being everywhere and exclusively a portrait painter. A pair of stone-breakers, kneeling as they do in his picture, with their faces protected by wire-masks, were figures which every one saw working at the street corner, and Courbet represented the scene as faithfully as he could, as sincerely and positively as was at all possible. “Afternoon in Ornans” is a pleasant picture, in which he took up again the good tradition of Lenain. And in “The Funeral at Ornans” he has painted exactly the manner in which such ceremonies take place in the country. The peasants and dignitaries of a little country town—portrait figures such as the masters of the fifteenth century brought into their religious pictures—have followed the funeral train, and behave themselves at the grave just as peasants would. They make no impassioned gesticulations, and form themselves into no fine groups, but stand there like true rustics, sturdy and indifferent. They are men of flesh and blood, they are like the people of real life, and they have been subjected to no alteration: on the one side are the women tearfully affected by the words of the preacher, on the other are the men bored by the ceremony or discussing their own affairs. In the “Demoiselles de Village” he gives a portrait of his own sisters, as they went to a dance of a Sunday afternoon. The “Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine” are grisettes of 1850, such as Gavarni often drew; they are both dressed in doubtful taste, one asleep, the other lost in a vacant reverie. His naked women make a very tame effect compared with the colossal masses of human flesh in that cascade of nude women of the plumpest description who in Rubens’ “Last Judgment” plunge in confusion into hell, like fish poured out from a bucket. But they are amongst the best nude female figures which have been created in the nineteenth century. Courbet was a painter of the family of Rubens and Jordaens. He had the preference shown by the old Flemish artists for healthy, plump, soft flesh, for fair, fat, and forty, the three F’s of feminine beauty, and in his works he gave the academicians a lesson well worth taking to heart; he showed them that it was possible to attain a powerful effect, and even grace itself, by strict fidelity to the forms of reality.

Neuerdein, photo.
COURBET.THE WAVE.

His portraits—and he had the advantage of painting Berlioz and Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon—are possibly not of conspicuous eminence as likenesses. As Caravaggio, according to Bellori, “had only spirit, eyes and diligence for flesh-tints, skin, blood, and the natural surface of objects,” a head was merely a morceau like anything else for Courbet too, and not the central point of a thinking and sensitive being. The physical man, Taine’s human animal, was more important in his eyes than the psychical. He painted the epidermis without giving much suggestion of what was beneath. But he painted this surface in such a broad and impressive manner that the pictures are interesting as pictorial masterpieces if not as analyses of character.

L’Art.L’Art.
STEVENS.THE LADY IN PINK.STEVENS.LA BÊTE À BON DIEU.
L’Art.
STEVENS.   THE JAPANESE MASK.