Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet was a French painter, born June 10, 1819, in Ornans, France, and died December 31, 1877, in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland. The son of a prosperous farmer, he studied at the college of fine arts at Besancon before moving to Paris in 1841 to study the Old Masters at the Louvre. Courbet is the central figure and effective founder of the Realism movement, rejecting the idealization of Neoclassicism and the drama of Romanticism in favor of unembellished depictions of contemporary, often working class life. His large scale paintings The Stone Breakers and A Burial at Ornans, shown at the 1850 to 1851 Paris Salon, scandalized critics by rendering ordinary laborers and a provincial funeral at the grand scale traditionally reserved for history painting. His political radicalism, tied to the Paris Commune, later led to his imprisonment and exile to Switzerland, where he died.