Gustave Courbet
A 19th-century French Realist painter. Rather than myth or history, he sought to paint the people and nature before his eyes just as they were. The National Museum of Western Art holds his "Waves," a picture of a stormy sea.
Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 into a wealthy farming family in Ornans, a town in eastern France near the Swiss border. Around the age of 20 he went to Paris and learned to paint by copying old masters at the Louvre. "A Burial at Ornans," which shows a funeral in his hometown with life-size figures, caused great controversy for putting ordinary villagers on a huge canvas. It dates from 1849-50 and is now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
When his large works were refused at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he built a shed of his own near the fairgrounds and held a solo exhibition under the banner of "Realism." His stance of painting nothing he could not see influenced later painters such as Manet and the Impressionists. In 1869 he stayed at Etretat in Normandy and painted many works whose only subject was breaking waves. "Waves" (around 1870) at the National Museum of Western Art is another picture that conveys the weight and force of the sea in thickly laid paint.
He joined the Paris Commune of 1871 (the self-governing government of the citizens of Paris) and was held responsible for the toppling of the column in the Place Vendome. Ordered to pay for its reconstruction, he fled to Switzerland and died in 1877 at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva. He also left many landscapes of his home region, hunting scenes, and figures of women.
