L’Art.
COURBET.THE RETURN FROM MARKET.

The exhibition was, at all events, a success with young painters, and Courbet set up a teaching studio, at the opening of which he again issued a kind of manifesto in the Courrier du Dimanche. “Beauty,” he wrote, “lies in nature, and it is to be met with under the most various forms. As soon as it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it. But the painter has no right to add to this expression of nature, to alter the form of it and thereby weaken it. The beauty offered by nature stands high above all artistic convention. That is the basis of my views of art.” It is said that his first model was an ox. When his pupils wanted another, Courbet said: “Very well, gentlemen, next time let us study a courtier.” The break-up of the school is supposed to have taken place when one day the ox ran away and was not to be recaptured.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.THE BATTLE OF THE STAGS.
Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.   A WOMAN BATHING.
(By permission of M. Sainctelette, of Brussels, the owner of the picture.)

Courbet did not trouble himself over such ridicule, but painted quietly on, the many-sidedness of his talent soon giving him a firm seat in every saddle. After the scandal of the separate exhibition of 1855 he was excluded from the Salon until 1861, and during this time exhibited in Paris and Besançon upon his own account. “The Funeral at Ornans” was followed by “The Return from Market,” a party of peasants on the high-road, and in 1860 by “The Return from the Conference,” in which a number of French country priests have celebrated their meeting with a hearty lunch and set out on the way back in a condition which is far too jovial. In 1861, when the gates of the Champs Elysées were thrown open to him once more, he received the medal for his “Battle of the Stags,” and regularly contributed to the Salon until 1870. In these years he attempted pictures with many figures less frequently, and painted by preference hunting and animal pieces, landscapes, and the nude figures of women. “The Woman with the Parrot,” a female figure mantled with long hair, lying undressed amid the cushions of a couch playing with her gaudily feathered favourite, “The Fox Hunt,” a coast scene in Provence, the portrait of Proudhon and his family, “The Valley of the Puits-Noir,” “Roche Pagnan,” “The Roe Hunt,” “The Charity of a Beggar,” the picture of women bathing in the gloom of the forest, and “The Wave,” afterwards acquired by the Luxembourg, belong to his principal works in the sixties.

These works gradually made him so well known that after 1866 his pictures came to have a considerable sale. The critics began to take him seriously. Castagnary made his début in the Siècle with a study of Courbet; Champfleury, the apostle of literary realism, devoted to him a whole series of feuilletons in the Messager de l’Assemblée, and from his intercourse with him Proudhon derived the fundamental principles of his book on Realism. The son of Franche-Comté triumphed, and there was a beam in his laughing eyes, always like those of a deer. His talent began more and more to unfold its wings in the sun of success, and his power of production seemed inexhaustible. When the custom arose of publishing in the Parisian papers accounts of the budget of painters, he took care to communicate that in six months he had made a hundred and twenty-three thousand francs. Incessantly busy, he had in his hand at one moment the brush and at another the chisel. And when he gave another special exhibition of his works in 1867, at the time of the great World Exhibition—he had a mania for wooden booths—he was able to put on view no less than a hundred and thirty-two pictures in addition to numerous pieces of sculpture. In 1869 the committee of the Munich Exhibition set apart a whole room for his works. With a self-satisfied smile he put on the Order of Michael, and was the hero of the day whom all eyes followed upon the boulevards.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.DEER IN COVERT.

The nature of the bullfighter was developed in him more strongly than before, and he stretched his powerful limbs, prepared to do battle against all existing opinions. Naturally the events of the following years found no idle spectator in such a firebrand as Courbet; and accordingly he rushed into those follies which embittered the evening of his life. The maître peintre d’Ornans became Courbet le colonnard. First came the sensational protest with which he returned to the Emperor Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. Four weeks after Courbet had plunged into this affair the war broke out. Eight weeks later came Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic, and shortly afterwards the siege of Paris and the insurrection. On 4th September 1870 the Provisional Government appointed him Director of the Fine Arts. Afterwards he became a member of the Commune, and dominated everywhere, with the brûle-gueule in his mouth, by the power of his voice; and France has to thank him for the rescue of a large number of her most famous treasures of art. He had the rich collections of Thiers placed in the Louvre, to protect them from the rough and ready violence of the populace. But to save the Luxembourg he sacrificed the column of the Vendôme. When the Commune fell, however, Courbet alone was held responsible for the destruction of the column. He was brought before the court-martial of Versailles, and, although Thiers undertook his defence, he was condemned to six months’ imprisonment. Having undergone this punishment he received his freedom once more, but the artist had still to suffer a mortal blow. The pictures which he had destined for the Salon of 1873 were rejected by the committee, because Courbet was held morally unworthy to take part in the exhibition.

Baschet.
COURBET.GIRLS LYING ON THE BANK OF THE SEINE.