L’Art.
COURBET.A FUNERAL AT ORNANS.

“Our century,” he says, “will not recover from the fever of imitation by which it has been laid low. Phidias and Raphael have hooked themselves on to us. The galleries should remain closed for twenty years, so that the moderns might at last begin to see with their own eyes. For what can the old masters offer us? It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein, I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him. And the artistic kin, the heirs, or more properly the slaves of this great man, are really preceptors of the lowest art. What do they teach us? Nothing. A good picture will never come from their École des Beaux-Arts. The most precious thing is the originality, the independence of an artist. Schools have no right to exist; there are only painters. Independently of system and without attaching myself to any party, I have studied the art of the old masters and of the more modern. I have tried to imitate the one as little as I have tried to copy the other, but out of the total knowledge of tradition I have wished to draw a firm and independent sense of my own individuality. My object was by gaining knowledge to gain in ability; to have the power of expressing the ideas, the manners, and the aspect of our epoch according to an appreciation of my own, not merely to be a painter, but a man also—in a word, to practise living art is the compass of my design. I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a republican—that is to say, a supporter of every revolution; and moreover, a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the vérité vraie. But the principle of realism is the negation of the ideal. And following all that comes from this negation of the ideal, I shall arrive at the emancipation of the individual, and, finally, at democracy. Realism, in its essence, is democratic art. It can only exist by the representation of things which the artist can see and handle. For painting is an entirely physical language, and an abstract, invisible, non-existent object does not come within its province. The grand painting which we have stands in contradiction with our social conditions, and ecclesiastical painting in contradiction with the spirit of the century. It is nonsensical for painters of more or less talent to dish up themes in which they have no belief, themes which could only have flourished in some epoch other than our own. Better paint railway stations with views of the places through which one travels, with likenesses of great men through whose birthplace one passes, with engine-houses, mines, and manufactories; for these are the saints and miracles of the nineteenth century.”

These doctrines fundamentally tallied with those which the Neapolitan and Spanish naturalists vindicated in the seventeenth century against the eclectics. For men like Poussin, Leseur, and Sassoferato, Raphael was “an angel and not a man,” and the Vatican “the academy of painters.” But Velasquez when he came to Rome found it wearisome. “What do you say of our Raphael? Do you not think him best of all, now that you have seen everything that is fair and beautiful in Italy?” Don Diego inclined his head ceremoniously, and observed: “To confess the truth, for I like to be candid and open, I must acknowledge that I do not care about Raphael at all.” There are reported utterances of Caravaggio which correspond almost word for word with those of Courbet. He, too, declaimed against the antique and Raphael, in whose shadow he saw so many shallow imitators sitting at their ease, and he declared, in a spirit of sharp opposition, that the objects of daily life were the only true teachers. He would owe all to nature and nothing to art. He held painting without the model to be absurd. So long as the model was out of sight, his hands and his spirit were idle. Moreover, he called himself a democratic painter, who brought the fourth estate into honour; he “would rather be the first of vulgar painters than second amongst the superfine.” And just as these naturalists in the seventeenth century were treated by the academical artists as rhyparographists, Courbet’s programme did not on the whole facilitate his acceptance in formal exhibitions as he desired that it should. A play must be acted, a manuscript printed, and a picture viewed. So Courbet had no desire to remain an outsider. When the picture committee of the World Exhibition of 1855 gave his pictures an unfavourable position, he withdrew them and offered them to public inspection separately in a wooden hut in the vicinity of the Pont de Jena, just at the entry of the exhibition. Upon the hut was written in big letters: REALISM—G. COURBET. And in the interior the theories which he had urged hitherto by his tongue and his pen, at the tavern and in his pamphlets, were demonstrated by thirty-eight large pictures, which elucidate his whole artistic development.

Baschet.
COURBET.THE STONE-BREAKERS.

“Lot’s Daughters” and “Love in the Country” were followed in 1844 by the portrait of himself and the picture of his dog, in 1845 by “A Guitarrero,” in 1846 by the “Portrait of M. M——,” and in 1847 by “The Walpurgisnacht”; all works in which he was still groping his way. “The Sleeping Bathers,” “The Violoncello Player,” and a landscape from his native province, belonging to the year 1848, made a nearer approach to his realistic aim, and with the date 1849 there are seven portraits, landscapes, and pictures from popular national life: “The Painter,” “M. H. T—— looking over Engravings,” “The Vintage in Ornans below the Roche du Mont,” “The Valley of the Bue seen from the Roche du Mont,” “View of the Château of Saint-Denis,” “Evening in the Village of Scey-en-Varay,” and “Peasants returning from Mass near Flagey.” All these works had passed the doors of the Salon without demur.

The first picture which brought about a collision of opinion was “A Fire in Paris,” and, according to the account given by contemporaries, it must have been one of his finest works. Firemen, soldiers, artisans in jacket and blouse, were exerting themselves, according to Paul d’Abrest who describes the picture, around a burning house; even women helped in the work of rescue, and formed part of the chain handing buckets from the pump. Opposite stood a group of young dandies with girls upon their arms looking inactively upon the scene. An artillery captain, who was amongst Courbet’s acquaintances, had through several nights sounded the alarm for his men and exercised them on the scaffolding of a wall, so that the painter could make his studies. Courbet transferred his studio to the barracks and made sketches by torch-light. But he had reckoned without the police; scarcely was the picture finished before it was seized, as the Government recognised in it, for reasons which did not appear, “an incitement to the people of the town.” This was after the coup d’état of 1851.

So Courbet’s manifesto was not “The Fire in Paris.” “The Stone-breakers,” two men in the dress of artisans, in a plain evening landscape, occupied once more the first place in the exhibition of 1855, having already made the effect, amongst its classical surroundings in the Salon of 1851, of a rough, true, and honest word, spoken amid elaborate society phrases. There was also to be seen “Afternoon at Ornans,”—a gathering of humble folk sitting after meal-time at a table laid out in a rustic kitchen. A picture which became celebrated under the title of “Bonjour, M. Courbet” dealt with a scene from Courbet’s native town. Courbet, just arrived, is alighting from a carriage in his travelling costume, looking composedly about him with a pipe in his mouth. A respectable prosperous gentleman, accompanied by a servant in livery, who is carrying his overcoat, is stretching out his hand to him. This gentleman is M. Bryas, the Mæcenas of Ornans, who for long was Courbet’s only patron, and who had a whim for having his portrait taken by forty Parisian painters in order to learn the “manners” of the various artists. And there was further to be seen the “Demoiselles de Village” of 1852, three country beauties giving a piece of cake to a peasant-girl. Finally, as masterpieces, there were “The Funeral at Ornans,” which now hangs in the Louvre, and that great canvas, designated in the catalogue as “a true allegory,” “My Studio after Seven Years of Artistic Life,” the master himself painting a landscape. Behind him is a nude model, and in front of him a beggar-woman with her child. Around are portrait figures of his friends, and the heroes of his pictures, a poacher, a parson, a sexton, labourers, and artisans.