The Painter's Studio

The Painter's Studio, in full The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, is an 1855 oil on canvas painting by the French Realist artist Gustave Courbet, held in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Courbet painted it in Ornans, France, and said the work showed the world coming to be painted at his studio: the figures are allegorical representations of the influences on his artistic life, with people from all levels of society on the left, Courbet himself painting a landscape in the center while turned away from a nude model who symbolizes academic art, and friends and associates including Charles Baudelaire, Champfleury, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his patron Alfred Bruyas on the right. Rejected by the jury of the 1855 Paris World's Fair, Courbet exhibited it himself nearby in his own Pavilion of Realism, a forerunner of the later Salon des Refuses; of the painting he said it represented society at its best, its worst and its average.