REALISM IN FRANCE

To continue in Paris what Millet had begun in the solitude of the forest of Fontainebleau there was need of a man of the unscrupulous animal power of Gustave Courbet. The task assigned to him was similar to that which fell to Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. In that age, when the eclectic imitation of the Cinquecento had reached the acme of mannerism, when Carlo Dolci and Sassoferato devoted themselves in mythological pictures to watering down the types of Raphael by idealising, Caravaggio painted scenes amongst dregs of the people and the unbridled soldiery of his age. At a period when these artists indulged in false, artificial, and doctrinaire compositions, which, on a barren system, merely traced the performances of classic masters back to certain rules of art, Caravaggio created works which may have been coarse, but which had an earnest and fruitful veracity, and gave the entire art of the seventeenth century another direction by their healthy and powerful naturalism.

When Courbet appeared the situation was similar: Ingres, in whose frigid works the whole Cinquecento had been crystallised, was at the zenith of his fame. Couture had painted his “Decadent Romans” and Cabanel had recorded his first successes. Beside these stood that little Neo-Grecian school with Louis Hamon at its head—a school whose prim style of china painting had the peculiar admiration of the public. Courbet, with all his brutal weight, pushed between the large symmetrical figures of the thoroughbred Classicists and the pretty confectionery of the Neo-Grecian painters of beauty. But the old panacea is never without effect: in all periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood. In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken the dead, and give life once more to history. The time had come for accentuating the claims of the present more sharply than before, and for setting art amid the seething life of modern cities: it was a development naturally and logically following that of political life; it is historically united with the unintermittent struggle for universal suffrage. Courbet merely fought the decisive battle in the great fight which Jeanron, Leleux, Octave Tassaert, and others had begun as skirmishing outposts. As a painter he towered over these elder artists, whose sentimental pictures had not been taken seriously as works of art, and challenged attention all the more by painting life-size. In this manner the last obstacle was removed which had stood in the way of the treatment of modern subjects. Scanty notice had been taken of Millet’s little peasant figures, which were merely reckoned as accessories to the landscape. But Courbet’s pictures first taught the Academy that the “picture of manners,” which had seemed so harmless, had begun to usurp the place of historical painting in all its pride.

At the same time—and this made Courbet’s appearance of still more consequence than that of his predecessors—a most effective literary propaganda went hand in hand with that which was artistic. Millet had been silent and was known only by his friends. He had never arranged for an exhibition of his works, and quietly suffered the rejections of the hanging committee and the derision of the public. Courbet blustered, beat the big drum, threw himself into forcible postures like a strong man juggling with cannon-balls, and announced in the press that he was the only serious artist of the century. No one could ever embêter le bourgeois with such success, no one has called forth such a howl of passion, no one so complacently surrendered his private life to the curiosity of the great public, with the swaggering attitude of an athlete displaying his muscles in the circus. As regards this method of making an appearance—a method by which he became at times almost grotesque—one may take whatever view one pleases; but when he came he was necessary. In art revolutions are made with the same brutality as in life. People shout and sing, and break the windows of those who have windows to break. For every revolution has a character of inflexible harshness. Wisdom and reason have no part in the passions necessary for the work of destruction and rebuilding. Caravaggio was obliged to take to his weapons, and make sanguinary onslaughts. In our civilised nineteenth century everything was accomplished according to law, but not with less passion. One has to make great demands to receive even a little; this has been true in all times, and this is precisely what Courbet did. He was a remarkable character striving for high aims, an eccentric man of genius, a modern Narcissus for ever contemplating himself in his vanity, and yet he was the truest friend, the readiest to sacrifice himself; for the crowd a cynic and a reckless talker; at home an earnest and mighty toiler, bursting out like a child and appeased the very next moment; outwardly as brutal as he was inwardly sensitive, as egotistic as he was proud and independent; and being what he was, he formulated his purposes as incisively by his words as in his works. Full of fire and enthusiasm, destroying and inciting to fresh creation—a nature like Lorenz Gedon, whom he also resembled in appearance—he became the soul and motive power of the great realistic movement which flooded Europe from the beginning of the fifties. Altogether he was the man of whom art had need at that time: a doctor who brought health with him, shed it abroad, and poured blood into the veins of art. Both as man and artist his entry upon the arena is in some degree like the breaking in of an elemental force of nature. He comes from the country in wooden shoes, with the self-reliance of a peasant who is afraid of nothing. He is a great and powerful man, as sound and natural as the oxen of his birthplace. He had broad shoulders, with which he pushed aside everything standing in his way. His was an instinct rather than a reflecting brain, a peintre-animal, as he was called by a Frenchman. And such a plebeian was wanted to beat down the academic Olympus. In making him great and strong, nature had herself predestined him for the part he had to play: a man makes a breach the more easily for having big muscles. Furnished with the strength of a Samson wrecking the temple of the Philistines, he was himself “The Stone-breaker” of his art, and, like the men he painted, he has done a serviceable day’s work.

L’Art.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
GUSTAVE COURBET.COURBET.THE MAN WITH A LEATHER BELT.
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.

Gustave Courbet, the strong son of Franche-Comté, was born in 1819, in Ornans, a little town near Besançon. Like his friend and fellow-countryman Proudhon, the socialist, he had a strain of German blood in his veins, and in their outward appearance it gave them both something Teutonic, rugged, and heavy, contrasting with French ease and elegance. On his massive frame was set a thick, athletic neck, and a broad countenance with black hair, and big, strong eyes like those of a lion-tamer, which sparkled like black diamonds. A strong man, who had never been stinted, he was of medium height, broad-shouldered, bluff, ruddy like a slaughterman, and, as the years passed, disposed to acquire a more liberal circumference of body. He went about working like Sisyphus, and never without a short pipe in his mouth, the classic brûle-gueule, loaded with strong caporal. His movements were broad and heavy, and, being a little short in his breathing, he wheezed when he was excited, and perspired over his painting. His dress was comfortable, but not elegant; and his head was formed for a cap rather than the official tall hat. In speech he was cynical, and often broke into a contemptuous laugh. Both in his studio and at his tavern he moved more freely in his shirt-sleeves, and at the Munich Exhibition of 1869 he seemed to the German painters like a thorough old Bavarian, when he sat down to drink with them at the Deutsches Haus in his jovial way, and, by a rather Teutonic than Latin capacity for disposing of beer, threw the most inveterate of the men of Munich into the shade.

Originally destined for the law, he determined in 1837 to become a painter, and began his artistic studies under Flageoulot, a mediocre artist of the school of David, who had drifted into the provinces, and boastfully called himself le roi du dessin. In 1839 he came to Paris, already full of self-reliance, fire and strength. On his first turn through the Luxembourg Gallery he paused before Delacroix’s “Massacre of Chios,” glowing as it is in colour, and said it was not bad, but that he could do that style of thing whenever he liked. After a short time he acquired a power of execution full of bravura by studying the old masters in the Louvre. Self-taught in art, he was in life a democrat and in politics a republican. In 1848, during a battle in June, he had a fair prospect of being shot with a party of insurgents whom he had joined, if certain “right-minded” citizens had not interceded for their neighbour, who was popular as a man and already much talked about as a painter. In the beginning of the fifties he was to be found every evening at a brasserie much frequented by artists and students in the Rue Hautefeuille in the Quartier Latin, in the society of young authors of the school of Balzac. He had his studio at the end of the street, and is said to have been at the time a strong, fine, spirited young man, who made free use of the drastic slang of the studios.

“His notable features,” writes Théophile Silvestre of Courbet at this time,—“his notable features seem as though they had been modelled from an Assyrian bas-relief. His well-shaped and brilliant dark eyes, shadowed by long silken lashes, have the soft quiet light of an antelope’s. The moustache, scarcely traceable beneath his slightly curved aquiline nose, is joined by a fan-shaped beard, and borders his thick, sensuous lips; his complexion is olive-brown, but of a changing, sensitive tone. The round, curiously shaped head and prominent cheek-bones denote stubbornness, and the flexible nostrils passion.”

A great dispute over realism usually took the place of dessert at meal-times. Courbet never allowed himself to be drawn into controversy. He threw his opinion bluntly out, and when he was opposed cut the conversation short in an exceedingly forcible manner. It was another murder of the innocents when he spoke of the celebrities of his time. He designated historical painting as nonsense, style as humbug, and blew away all ideals, declaring that it was the greatest impudence to wish to paint things which one has never seen, and of the appearance of which one cannot have the faintest conception. Fancy was rubbish, and reality the one true muse.