Gustave Courbet - The Source [1862]

Gustave Courbet - The Source [1862], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Courbet's The Source, painted in a naturalistic style and devoid of the trappings of academic allegory, may have been a response to Ingres's La Source (1856, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which was exhibited at the Galerie Martinet in 1861. Courbet's version is thought to date to 1862.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 120 x 74.3 cm]

Gustave Courbet - The Waterspout [1866]

Gustave Courbet - The Waterspout [1866], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas on gypsum board, 43.2 x 65.7 cm]

Gustave Courbet - The Young Bather [1866]

Gustave Courbet - The Young Bather [1866], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1853, Courbet created a scandal when he exhibited Bathers (Musée Fabre, Montpellier), one of his earliest paintings of nudes in a landscape. The realism of his figures shocked his contemporaries, who were accustomed to the idealised nudes of academic art. Here, the highly finished figure contrasts with the more loosely painted landscape background, which was possibly executed with a palette knife rather than a brush. This painting and five others by Courbet once belonged to the nineteenth-century Turkish collector Khalil Bey.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 130.2 x 97.2 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Girls on the Banks of the Seine [1857]

Gustave Courbet - Girls on the Banks of the Seine [1857], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 174 x 206 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Sleep [1866]

Guatave Courbet - Sleep [1866], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 135 x 200 cm]

Gustave Courbet - The Wave [1869]

Gustave Courbet - The Wave [1869], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

During the summer of 1869, Courbet stayed at Etretat, the small Norman town where Delacroix, Boudin and Jongkind had already spent time painting the sea. The chalk cliffs, the subtle light, along with both the violent storms and the calm of the waves in this region of changing skies, offered Courbet new subjects.

Here, the artist offers an intense vision of the stormy sea, tormented and disturbing, with all the savage power of natural forces at work. Applying thick paint with a kitchen knife, Courbet succeeded in conveying an impression of eternity. He composed his picture in three horizontal bands: the shore, where two fishing boats lie, the waves, painted in a range of dark greens highlighted with the white of the foam, and the lowering sky.

[Oil on canvas, 112 x 144 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Woman in the Waves [1868]

Gustave Courbet - Woman in the Waves [1868], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Between 1864 and 1868, Courbet produced a series of paintings of female nudes, including this one. In Woman in the Waves, Courbet simultaneously evokes the myth of Venus born of the sea, but slyly subverts the figure's pose, which derived from academic convention, by depicting the model's underarm hair - an element of realism underscored by the almost palpable quality of her flesh.

[Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 54 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Young Ladies of the Village [1851-52]

Gustave Courbet - Young Ladies of the Village [1851-52], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This painting, which initiated a series of pictures devoted to the lives of women, shows Courbet's three sisters out for a walk in the Communal, a small valley near his native village of Ornans. Painted during the winter of 1851–52, Young Ladies of the Village was preceded by several studies including an oil sketch in which Courbet established the leading features of this picture. In this, the final work, he gave the figures a more prominent role and altered the landscape, omitting the two large trees that in the study are silhouetted against the sky. He also repainted and enlarged the cattle.

When the work was exhibited in the Salon of 1852, critics bitterly attacked it, finding it tasteless and clumsy and berating the common features and countrified costumes of the three girls, the ridiculous little dog and cattle, and the painting's overall lack of unity, including traditional perspective and scale. Ironically, the very effects that Courbet worked hardest to achieve were the ones that proved most troublesome.

[Oil on canvas, 194.9 x 261 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Woman with a Parrot [1866]

Gustave Courbet - Woman with a Parrot [1866], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Galvanized by the success of Cabanel's ‘Birth of Venus’ at the Salon of 1863, Courbet sought to challenge the French Academy on its own terms with a painting of a nude that would be accepted by the increasingly rigid, and arbitrary, Salon jury. His first attempt, in 1864, was rejected on the grounds of indecency; however two years later, his ‘Woman with a Parrot’ was accepted for the Salon of 1866. While aspects of this painting, notably, the figure's pose and subtly modeled flesh tones, aligned it with academic art, viewers were shocked by the presence of the model's discarded clothing and disheveled hair. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Courbet's great defender, however, praised the artist for representing a "woman of our time."

[Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 195.6 cm]

Gustave Courbet - Falaise d’Étretat aprés, la Porte d’Aval

For information about this artist please click label.

[Oil on canvas 79.8 × 99.6 cm]