Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet, born in 1819, was the son of Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet; his home was Ornans, in the Doubs. He moved to Paris to paint, but he kept going home to hunt and fish and find his subjects, and it was Ornans, not the capital, that made him: its people, its rocks, its woods and its funerals.

His first success at the Salon came in 1849 with After Dinner at Ornans, and the following winter he painted The Stone Breakers, two labourers at the roadside, a picture admired by Proudhon as an icon of peasant life and often called the first of his great works. The canvas was lost when Allied bombs fell on Dresden in 1945, but its lesson stayed: ordinary men and ordinary work, painted on the scale the academy reserved for heroes.

In 1855 he sent fourteen paintings to the Salon of the Exposition Universelle, and when the jury would not hang The Painter's Studio as he felt it deserved, he built a temporary gallery of his own beside the official show, the Pavilion of Realism, and hung forty paintings there under his own name, prefaced by a manifesto. Of the label he wrote: "The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830."

He served six months in prison in 1871 for his part in the Paris Commune, above all for the letter in which he proposed taking down the column of the Place Vendôme. When the Commune fell, its cost of re-erection was laid on him; rather than face a debt he could not meet, he fled into exile in Switzerland, where he lived from 1873.

In his last years he painted landscapes, among them scenes of water welling up from deep in the earth among the Jura mountains on the border between France and Switzerland. He died at La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December 1877, aged 58, of a liver disease aggravated by drink, on the eve of the first installment of the column debt.