Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbetwas a French painter who led the Realist 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. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth10 June 1819
CityOrnans, France
CountryFrance
Gustave Courbet quotes about
Painting is the representation of visible forms. . . The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).