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Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (UK: / ˈ k ʊər b eɪ / KOOR-bay, [1] US: / k ʊər ˈ b eɪ / koor-BAY, [2] French: [ɡystav kuʁbɛ]; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) [3] was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting.
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (French: [ɡystav kuʁbɛ]; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists.
Gustave Courbet was a French painter and leader of the Realist movement. Courbet rebelled against the Romantic painting of his day, turning to everyday events for his subject matter. His notable works include A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers.
The self-proclaimed “proudest and most arrogant man in France,” Gustave Courbet created a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1850–51 when he exhibited a group of paintings set in his native Ornans, a village in the Franche-Comté in eastern France.
Gustave Courbet's democratic eye revolutionized Western Art. His new form of Realism paved the way for other Modern movements, such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Manet, Monet, Renoir, and others had direct contact with Courbet and were profoundly affected by the man and his paintings.
Biography. Gustave Courbet was born in in 1819 in Ornans, a farming town in eastern France, into a closeknit family of the rural middle class. His happy childhood, spent in the woods and fields around Ornans, gave him a taste for the hunt and sport, a dislike for school, and a lifelong love of his native region.
1819 - 1877. Image: Etienne Carjat, ‘Portrait of Courbet’, 1861, Musée d'Orsay, Paris © RMN, Paris (musée d'Orsay) Courbet was the main exponent of Realism in 19th-century French painting. His work contrasts with the Classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix.