• Describe what you see in this landscape.
• Compare this landscape to Landscape with a Calm by Nicolas Poussin. In what ways are the two works similar?
How are they different? (Unlike Poussin's classical composition, Courbet replaced the trees in the foreground
with the rocky cliffs that frame the background.
While you can identify the foreground, middle ground, and
background, Courbet did not use atmospheric perspective in this work.)
• How did the artist create the illusion of depth in this painting? (The overlapping of objects, such as the small hill
on the lower right of the painting and the two hills that frame the background, lends a sense of depth to the painting.
The curved line of the path also leads our eye deeper into the space of the picture. However, with no atmospheric perspective
in the work and no significant use of relative size or scale, the space seems flattened and not very deep.)
• What other elements of art did Courbet seem to focus on?
What do you see that makes you think this? (Courbet focused on the texture of the rocks in the cliffs and of the leaves on
the trees. He also seems concerned with rendering space; in this case he flattened the space in the foreground. Courbet also
used contrasting colors to lead our eyes into the painting. The dark areas emphasize the bright, textural features of the rocks
in the compressed middle ground.)
• Where does the foreground stop and the middle ground begin in this painting? How can you tell? (In this work the transition
from foreground to background is difficult to see clearly. The shadowed area in the lower right of the painting marks the boundary
from foreground to middle ground. The path sharply curves away in the middle ground where the rock outcroppings are also found.) |
Courbet's native region, the Franche-Comté in southeastern France near Switzerland, was associated with an independent,
savage spirit, and a rugged, primal energy. Critics of his work attributed these same characteristics to Courbet's
personality and his art. Some suggested that the dramatic nature of the region's topography, its steep valleys and
stony protrusions, determined the originality of Courbet's painting. Courbet painted in and around his hometown of
Ornans, creating dynamic views of the landscape that were both observed and imagined, and painted in nature as well
as in his studio. The provincial painter typically exhibited these scenes of his rugged, native terrain to Parisian
audiences who found them unconventional and shockingly original.
This landscape is thought to be a composite view of the river Loue and the Roche du Mont, a cliff high above Ornans.
Courbet is not interested in peopled nature, but in capturing the scene in bands of light and dark. The pathway and
shadow in the foreground of the painting are very flat, but the viewer is allowed to enter the space of the picture
as the path curves through the middle ground. The background space is diminished—a hill and sky. Courbet avoids
detail, instead using his palette knife to create textured surfaces on the rock faces at the lower right and upper
left of the painting.
About the Artist
"I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor....[F]or
each artist, [art is] nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition."
—Gustave Courbet.
Emphatic in his opinions and constantly defying authority, Gustave Courbet believed that "painting is an essentially concrete art,
and can consist only of representation of real and existing things." After leaving rural Ornans for Paris, he was most influenced
by the 17th-century Spanish and Dutch paintings he saw in the Louvre and on his trip to Holland in 1847. By 1850 he
was shocking the public with the Realism and scale of his paintings. In December of that year, he exhibited three huge
canvases of contemporary peasant life at the Salon; their enormous size was traditionally reserved for history
paintings of more "important" subjects.
Five years later, when his painting, The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic Life, was refused
by the Salon's Universal Exhibition of 1855, Courbet erected his own exhibition, Le Réalisme, in a tent and charged admission.
The enormous Studio was unique not only because of its scale, but also because within the scene, Courbet chose to define himself
as a landscape painter at a time when landscape painting was still perceived as a subject inferior to figural painting. Courbet
accompanied his Réalisme exhibition with a "Realist Manifesto," a brochure that articulated his credo of painting—"to create
a living art." The exhibition put him on the artistic map, and the ambitious artist gained attention, if not commercial success,
by mounting the show in proximity to the Salon's Universal Exhibition.
From the beginning of his artistic career, Courbet promoted himself as the opposite of the urban, sophisticated, modern Parisian.
He claimed to be an outsider, a mountain man, physically robust, dynamic, and above all, independent. He exaggerated his provincial
accent and behavioral traits and fashioned himself into a somewhat brutish, naive bohemian, and a populist. His political leanings
would lead to his demise. Courbet spent most of the 1870s in a state of political persecution, and he spent the last four years of
his life in exile in Switzerland escaping a French government determined to make him pay for his role in the destructive civil war
known as the Commune (1871). Despite the difficult circumstances, in Switzerland he painted a number of accomplished landscapes
with melancholic tones.
As a landscape painter, the modernity of Courbet's work resides in his radically innovative painting techniques
(particularly, his use the palette knife) and his dramatic compositions. Drawing inspiration from natural motifs
and reacting against the classical tradition, he reset the course of French landscape painting to embrace immediacy,
vitality, and painterly self-expression. For Courbet, landscape was something he knew because he had experienced it.
As a boy, Courbet had hiked, fished and hunted in the valleys around Ornans, learning the land with more than just his eyes,
but with his feet and hands. His sensory style of painting and independent spirit would inspire future generations of French
artists, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne. |
