Gustave Courbet. Georges Riat

thick, grey paper, sized with oil and stretched on frames three times the usual size. He was therefore obliged to stay in the back row, so as not to block the view of the others. The box he used was also oversized; it held huge bladders filled with the most ordinary colours, which are sold by the kilogram, such as white, yellow ochre, vermillion, and black… Here is how he mixed his colours, after he carefully studied his model; he prepared basics for light, half-tones, and shadow. Then he arranged the primary colours in a fan on the top of his palette. Having done that, he painted with a stiff brush, a knife, a rag, even his thumb. He used anything and everything. But he was more interested in the harmony than the richness of the colours, a quality, in fact, which stayed with him until the end of his career. Never, at Père Lapin’s place, did we see him do a whole figure; he studied only parts.”

      Schanne was one of the regulars at Courbet’s studio, of which he has left a quick sketch. The room was large, lit from above and by a small window which looked out on the rue de l’École de Médecine.

      One of Courbet’s obsessions was music. He claimed that he was an expert and sometimes tried to give lessons to his friend Promayet, the son of the organist in Ornans, and who was a violinist in the orchestra of the Hippodrome. Bonvin, who was sometimes present at these recitals, used to say that as soon as anyone mentioned music, Courbet’s antelope-like eye lit up. Like Ingres, who liked to pass himself off as an expert violinist, the artist sometimes painted himself as a guitar or cello player. Nor was his studio the only place where he liked to sing his songs; the walls of the Andler beer hall trembled with them every evening and well into the night.

      Courbet did a fine portrait of Madame Andler (Mère Grégoire), a large Swiss woman, behind her bar, between a pot of flowers and the waiters’ tip box. At the time the bar was at the height of its popularity. Champfleury observed that the number of Parisians flocking to this “temple of Realism” was considerable. There were famous painters, he said, who wanted to see this “bull in a china shop” first hand; critics, “divining rod in hand to gauge the depth of the doctrine”; cynics looking for something to believe in, if only briefly; opportunists looking for a way to benefit from the new school; newcomers to the artistic and literary milieu; idlers and curiosity seekers and also a good many merrymakers all mixed together. Some were just passing through, such as Corot, Decamps, Daumier, Barye and Préault. Regulars were the critic Théophile Sylvestre, whose admiration for the master of Ornans was not without a touch of perfidiousness; Bonvin, Courbet’s first friend, and guide, in Paris; Alfred Bruyas, from Montpellier, who gave Courbet such valuable encouragement; the painter from Besançon, Jean Gigoux, and the two Realism enthusiasts from Saintonge, Etienne Baudry and Castagnary. Baudelaire should be considered somewhat differently; his relationship with Courbet was the subject of some surprise, yet they saw each other on a regular basis for a number of years, since the poet lived with the painter in his times of extreme need. He even asked Courbet one night to take notes on his dreams – Courbet was horrified.

      14. Woman Sleeping by a Stream, 1844.

      Oil on canvas, 88 × 68.5 cm.

      Collection Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur.

      15. The Source, 1868.

      Oil on canvas, 128 × 97 cm.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      16. The Bacchante, c. 1844–1847.

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm.

      Fondation Rau, Cologne.

      Although the influence of all these persons was not enormous, the same cannot be said for the authority exerted on Courbet by Champfleury and Proudhon.

      It is easy to imagine how pleased the writer was to ally himself with Courbet, whom he immediately recognised as having the stature necessary to introduce the realist doctrine into art. Although Realism in art had an eventful history, it never amounted to a unified whole; its proponents themselves never agreed on its definition, nor the direction it should take. Nevertheless, its first collective manifestation occurred at the Salon of 1855. Champfleury claimed in his 1877 biographical note on Max Buchon that “Realism was a democratic, spontaneous and unthinking aspiration in certain minds; for, around 1848, we were buffeted by a special wind that pushed us into action without apparent reason.” The definition is vague, as we see, and it would be useless to look for a more precise one in another book by the same author, nevertheless entitled Realism. If it is vague, however, it is because the realist movement itself had no precise beginnings either.

      Fundamentally, what all these young rebels wanted and put forth haphazardly in their speeches at the Andler brasserie, was a reaction against the double current, which seemed to them to be pulling French art into decadence, with the Academicism of Ingres on the one hand, and the Romanticism of Delacroix on the other. Neither corresponded in the least to their positivist leanings; the first with its taste for allegory and antiquity, its abhorrence of the ugly and the trivial, which led to its not depicting real life, and its idealistic intentions, admitted or implied; the second with its wilful refutation of the present time and its exclusive quest for colour, the picturesque, historical drama and exoticism. Eager for glory of their own, the newcomers raised the flag of Realism against these two enemies, believing that they themselves had invented the movement.

      Does this mean that the realists didn’t follow in the footsteps of their predecessors? To claim that, it would be necessary to deny the constant evolution of humanity and things, in which nothing is ever created without a cause linked closely to the past. Without dwelling on the Flemish, Spanish, even Italian, and French realists of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who would be too numerous to list, and who are also linked to their elders, one can trace the path of this tradition back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the height of the school of David. A foreshadowing of Realism then was the fascination with contemporary life, which moved David to paint The Coronation of Napoleon, or The Oath of the Army after the Awarding of Medals, and Gros his Bonaparte at Arcole and Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa. But the most significant event was the The Raft of the “Medusa” by Géricault at the Salon of 1819, about which Proudhon said, “a single painting like the Naufrage de la Méduse… suffices to point the way for art across the generations, and makes the wait worthwhile.”

      Géricault, who died prematurely in 1824 at the age of thirty-three, was in fact claimed erroneously by the Romantics. If he had lived, he would have founded Realism, which was present in the embryonic state in his work. It is well known that he was fascinated with reality. At the Louvre, his preferences went to the realist masters such as Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa, whom he copied ardently, and from whom he borrowed those dark backgrounds that have been called “Bolognese cooking.” Courbet moreover always claimed him as one of his masters. The many paintings of the hunt and of races and the “portraits” of horses made by Courbet show just how much he learned from this teacher, and to what extent their tastes were similar.

      17. Woman in White Stockings, c. 1861.

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm.

      The Barnes Foundation, Merion.

      18. Portrait of Juliette Courbet, 1844.

      Oil on canvas, 77.5 × 62 cm.

      Petit Palais – Musée des beaux-arts de la ville de Paris, Paris.

      Finally, it should not be forgotten that the landscape artists of the school of 1830, even Corot, began almost unanimously to turn in the direction of Realism. Just when Courbet was starting his ascension, however, their early successes were waning. It took a good deal of pressure when the attempt was made to enlist these painters among the Romantics. During this time which led up to the Revolution of 1848, they were still under the realist influence of the English and Dutch landscape artists, however the time was not far off when they would evolve towards subjectivism, which was a form of Romanticism.

      In spite of his yearly trips back to Franche-Comté,