Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans on 15th June 1819 and spent most of his youth in the provence of Franche-Comté, a region renowned for its natural, rugged beauty. The region itself was a major influence on Courbet's approach to life and art; one of the eastern-most provinces of France, it continued to exude an independence enduring from the days prior to its formal inclusion in the French nation in 1678. Courbet set himself against his peers by preferring to paint contemporary scenes from local life rather than traditional academic subjects and he enjoyed his first success at the Paris Salon with The After-Dinner at Ornans (1848-49) which presented an intimate view of life in his native region. The revolution of 1848 inspired Courbet to present France with a new, more 'democratic' aesthetic in painting. The Burial at Ornans (1849-50) was the first step towards this new aesthetic and as intended, the public were bewildered and ultimately provoked by a scene which neither depicted a known historical event nor idealized its characters. Courbet continued to establish himself as an artist with strong political associations by interacting artistically with salon criticism of his realist aesthetic. In 1855 Courbet established his own exhibition independent of the combined Salon and International Exhibition being held in Paris that year and showed The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory of Seven Years of my Artistic Life in which Courbet portrays himself as artist standing between two groups, one comprised of supportive patrons and the other a diverse assemblage of characters and types. This was also the year that Courbet innovatively began to demonstrate a 'serial approach' to his art which involved incorporating previous works with future projects with the aim of comparing and contrasting different aspects of society. As a result of his political motivations, the reaction to Courbet's work was mixed during his lifetime. He left France in 1873 and lived in exile in Switzerland until his death in 1877.
