Gustave Courbet

Artist Biography

"I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor. For each artist, art is nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition,' wrote Gustave Courbet. Emphatic in his opinions and constantly defying authority, Courbet believed that painters should paint art, prints and posters of only their own time and that "painting is an essentially concrete art, and can consist only of representation of real and existing things.'

After leaving rural Ornans for Paris, he was most influenced by the seventeenth-century Spanish paintings and Dutch canvases that he saw in the Louvre and on a trip to Holland in 1847. By 1850, he was shocking the public with the Realism and scale of his art, prints and posters. In December of that year, he exhibited three huge canvases of contemporary peasant life at the Salon; their enormous size was traditionally reserved for history paintings of more "important” subjects.

Five years later, when his painting The Artist's Studio was refused by the Universal Exhibition of 1855, Courbet erected his own art, prints and posters exhibition, Le Realisme , in a tent and charged admission. The accompanying "Realist Manifesto” in his exhibition brochure articulated his credo of painting. With that, he became the rallying point of a new generation, including Edouard Manet.

Gustave Courbet Art, Prints and Posters Collection