It is strange how Courbet, so far removed from the French temperament, should, at the crucial period of his life, have reverted to a French gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion of Honor. But in that famous letter of rejection, written in a café and mailed with a grandiloquent toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed up aptly the man of genius who, though avid for honour, throws it away at the moment of attainment. Not even Napoleon was more concerned with the thoughts of posterity than Courbet, and some of the artist’s letters are not dissimilar in tone to the bombastic manifestos of certain ultra-modern schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: “I stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysées does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I have thrown consternation into the world of art.” This spirit of monumental self-confidence, so startling to a generation whose taste was measured by the decadent poetry of Beaudelaire, brought frantic sarcasm hurtling about his head. This troubled Courbet little. He valued friendships only in so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who said in a Paris salon, when standing before the famous Femme de Munich which Courbet had painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: “It is no longer a question of art, but of dignity. From now on Courbet must be as one dead to us.”
Charles Beaudelaire, who helped fight the battle for Wagner, Poe, Delacroix, Manet and Monet, tentatively praised him at first, but later allied himself with the public and became his bitterest assailant. It was not surprising. A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix “a haunted lake of blood” could not be expected to appreciate the terre à terre qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little French that he was incomprehensible to his national contemporaries. He disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no forerunners, and struck blindly into the unknown. For a man without genius this would have been fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt such things.
Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and romance of his time. His nature cried aloud for a pose that was natural, for a landscape that resembled the out-of-doors, for objects in which life was discernible. Consequently the critics and painters of his day put him aside either indifferently or insolently. They could not understand a work of art which did not delineate a literary episode or in which the postures were not taken direct from the theatre. Courbet needed no literature to paint great pictures. He went straight to nature, and his compositions grew out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically—Dieu m’en garde! With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a sacred theme, peasants’ faces and peasants’ shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as something ethereal and evanescent, L’Enterrement à Ornans was more than blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism. It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. The mere picture was sensation enough, but Courbet was not content to let the matter rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855, held in a barrack of his own building on the Rond Point de l’Alma, he wrote a defensive and provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he proclaimed himself not only the first realist, but realism itself.
L’ENTERREMENT À ORNANS COURBET
Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse and Delacroix’s Dante et Virgile aux Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic interest, the other because of its literature. But L’Enterrement à Ornans entirely lacked the popular qualities of these two other pictures. It was full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent ugliness of subject-matter and its implied indifference to all tradition, seemed to express the quintessence of artistic degradation and sordidness. At first view the picture appears to have been inspired by El Greco’s Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Géricault, rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their canvases. Meier-Graefe states that this funeral picture, like most of the representative pictures of the nineteenth century, is not representative of the artist himself. But did Meier-Graefe understand more profoundly the synthesis of composition found in individual painters, he would have seen that here was the famous S composition which was used throughout the painter’s life. Instead of being set on end, as was the practice of the Italians, it is used laterally and extends from left to right in depth.
In colour also this picture is representative of Courbet, for it shows his limitations in that medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to painting, but could not use it. Courbet contented himself with a palette as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black canvas, when placed beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or a Gérard, appears less flat and inconsequential than the latter. The form is even suggestive of Rembrandt, Giotto, Cézanne and Renoir.
Champfleury was the only friend of Courbet who dared defend him. Delacroix was set against him, and the critics, without understanding him, obscured the true importance of his art by talking of his want of transcendentalism and sentiment. Especially were his landscapes the butt of their ridicule, for painters up to that time had made use of conventional arrangements of dainty trees copied for their drawing and tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant, the trees are superb. In La Grotte he went further, for here the figure was part of the whole. His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a movement which gave off a sensation of weight entirely new in painting. In Les Grands Châtaigniers he reached his apogee in landscape painting. This picture is greater than those of any of the Englishmen.
Though many critics have written that Millet influenced Courbet, the reverse is the truth. The former’s life work was largely a repetition of the lights and darks found in Courbet’s earlier pictures. Les Casseurs de Pierres is far greater than anything Millet has ever done, despite the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other’s work. In Millet’s best canvases one finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in his lesser pictures even this amateurish attempt at organisation is lacking. But in Les Casseurs de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls the competency of linear balance and development in Tintoretto’s Minerva Expelling Mars.
When Courbet entered painting, he had neither prejudices nor a parti pris. He tested his ability before engaging his full complement of resources. Though untutored, he had that cast of intelligence which no amount of study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly cultured