Le Château de Chillon (1874-77)

Gustave Courbet: Le Château de Chillon

Lord Byron retells the lament of François Bonnivard, the legendary Prisoner of Chillon (1819), who was incarcerated in the dungeons of the medieval fortress from 1532 to 1536. The notorious harshness of Bonnivard’s punishment gains greater absurdity when the splendours of the castle’s natural setting are considered, and the visitor cannot but ponder upon the strange nature of the human kind. Such extremes certainly entertained the great Romantic imaginations of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rousseau (La nouvelle Heloise, 1761), Shelley (1816), Alexandre Dumas (1832) and Victor Hugo (1839) sourced their prose and poetry from the castle’s idyllic surroundings and terrible history. Artists were equally mesmerised by Chillon and Turner (1802), Delacroix (Prisonnier de Chillon, 1835) and Courbet are the most distinguished painters to have made significant contributions to the visual heritage of the castle and its history.

As a landmark of the Romantic Spirit, Chillon was to attract Gustave Courbet towards the end of his life. Fleeing a court case in France against the partisans of the Paris Commune - with whom he was accused of calling for the pulling down of the Vendôme Column, Courbet settled in the small town of la-Tour-de-Peilz, on the shores of Lake Geneva, between Vevey and Montreux. He stayed there until his death, on 31 December 1877.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Chillon had become an important station on the Grand Tour passage from Switzerland and into Italy. The familiarity of Chillon with Courbet’s contemporaries would have been an important element in the artist’s choice of subject. With precarious finances to manage, Courbet must have felt inclined to depict variations on this popular theme. The provenance of the present view of the Chateau de Chillon appears to confirm this suggestion as Jules Budry, the painting’s first owner and keeper of the town’s  Café du Centre, was someone with whom Courbet had a set table arrangement. It would appear that, at the artist’s death, outstanding debts from his meals at the Café were cancelled in exchange for certain paintings. These would have originated from the artist’s studio, where his close collaborator, Cherubino Pata (1827-1899), dealt with posthumous completions.

Courbet’s view of the Chateau de Chillon presents the castle at its most dramatic vantage point, entering the calm waters of Lake Geneva from the very end of a rocky promontory. The solid structure appears at once to float upon the water surface and to dominate the surrounding environs. The overall stillness conveyed in this particular work by the elements of stone/matter, water and air contribute to a vision of space and history transcending all times. [Bonhams]

Gustave Courbet (1876)

 Gustave Courbet: Deer in the Snow

  

Gustave Courbet: Swiss Landscape with Flowering Apple Tree

Gustave Courbet (1875)

  Gustave Courbet: Boats on a Beach, Etretat

  

 Gustave Courbet: Cháteau of Chillon

  

 Gustave Courbet: The Shore of Lac Leman

  

Gustave Courbet: Woods in the Snow

Beach in Normandy (ca. 1872-75)

Gustave Courbet: Beach in Normandy

During 1869 Courbet had worked along the beaches in Normandy, painting sketches that he later used to produce a number of finished paintings in the studio: "Did I ever earn my bread and butter," he wrote a friend, "I painted twenty seascapes...." Years later, while in exile in Switzerland, he painted more beach scenes, perhaps returning to the same sketches or recalling the landscape from memory.

Recent scholarship suggests that this painting is probably one of the later group. The light and air lack the kind of vivid freshness of Courbet's work done while he was still under his immediate impression of a place. The rocky cliff seems generalized rather than defined by its strong highlights. Still, its bulk attracts our attention; our eyes are drawn by the sheer tactile mass of the pigments there. In many places Courbet painted not with a brush, but with a palette knife. His rough technique, like the unsentimentalized peasant subjects he pioneered, scandalized the art establishment - and helped galvanize the bold style being adopted by younger painters like Manet. Fiercely proud of his rural roots and his country-bred vigor, Courbet retained a forthright and physical connection to the world. He painted the concrete, he said, and he gave what he saw actual physical dimension on his canvas. [National Gallery of Art]

Gustave Courbet (1874)

 Gustave Courbet: Lake Leman

  

 Gustave Courbet: Seascape

  

Gustave Courbet: Sunset on Lake Leman

A Mill in a Rocky Landscape (1873)

Gustave Courbet: A Mill in a Rocky Landscape

The White Calf (1873)

Gustave Courbet: The White Calf

Painted in 1873, Le Veau blanc is one of the last paintings that Gustave Courbet created in his much-loved Ornans as he prepared to flee across the border into Switzerland in self-imposed exile. The distant limestone cliffs, the trickling stream at which the bull pauses, and the lush, olive-tinged foliage of the rising hillside all refer to the mountainous Jura region that Courbet had celebrated in so many paintings over thirty years. Courbet had always deeply entwined his own life in his art and it is quite probable that in Le Veau Blanc he wished to recreate something of his younger self in this powerful bull calf, holding its ground so forcefully, locking the viewer in its knowing gaze.

Le Veau blanc has frequently been compared to the most famous old master animal picture, Paulus Potter's life-size Young Bull, painted in 1647 and carried off to Paris by Napoléon's conquering armies in 1795. "Potter's Bull" was frequently reproduced during the nineteenth-century and the painting was consistently upheld as the measure of animal realism by numerous critics appraising pictures of Courbet's most prominent animalier rivals, Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon. Courbet had frequently painted animals as important elements of larger compositions, whether the hunt scenes for which he first won popular success during the 1850s, or more complex views of life in Ornans, such as Young Ladies of the Village. But the concentrated focus on the young bull in Le Veau blanc is unusual in Courbet's art, as is the animal's direct engagement with the viewer, suggested by animal's alert stance and steady gaze toward the center of the picture's audience. Le Veau blanc is the 1873 equivalent of Courbet's 1864 masterpiece, The Oak of Flagey, a painting in which Courbet wrapped his provincial origins and immense ambitions into a ground-breaking depiction of a massive tree. In the uproar of 1873, Courbet chose to identify with a young bull.

Courbet was quite proud of Le Veau blanc and attempted several times during his years in exile to enter the picture in international exhibitions in England and America. His compromised position made the effort futile and Le Veau blanc was not seen for the first time until the extraordinary posthumous celebration of Courbet's work mounted at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1882. A sumptuous photo album, recording every wall and screen display of that exhibition, provides important documentation for Le Veau blanc and demonstrates how easily this unexpected white bull holds his own among Courbet's most powerful portraits and figure compositions. [Sotheby’s]

Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie (1872-73)

Gustave Courbet: Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie

In 1871 Courbet’s involvement in politics reached its zenith with his participation in the Paris Commune–a series of events that barely register in his art, for the simple reason that he had more urgent things to do than paint during those dramatic months. But the fall of the commune led to a brief imprisonment (retrospectively depicted in Portrait de l’artiste à Sainte-Pélagie, in which his wistful gaze out the barred window oddly echoes his expression in La Curée, fifteen years earlier) and in 1873 to an unhappy, mostly unproductive exile in Switzerland that lasted until his death in 1877. [The Nation]

Gustave Courbet (1872)

 Gustave Courbet: La manche, near Étretat

  

Gustave Courbet: Stream in the Jura Mountains (The Torrent)

Still Life with Fruit (1871-72)

Gustave Courbet: Still Life with Fruit

The Source among the Rocks of the Doubs (1871)

Gustave Courbet: Landscape - The Source among the Rocks of the Doubs

Cliffs at Etretat (1870)

Gustave Courbet: Cliffs at Etretat

The Wave (1870)

Gustave Courbet: The Wave

During the summer of 1869, Courbet stayed at Etretat, the small Norman town where Delacroix, Boudin and Jongkind had already spent time painting the sea. The chalk cliffs, the subtle light, along with both the violent storms and the calm of the waves in this region of changing skies, offered Courbet new subjects.

Here, the artist offers an intense vision of the stormy sea, tormented and disturbing, with all the savage power of natural forces at work. "His tide comes from the depth of ages," Paul Cézanne would later comment. Applying thick paint with a kitchen knife, Courbet succeeded in conveying an impression of eternity. He composed his picture in three horizontal bands: the shore, where two fishing boats lie, the waves, painted in a range of dark greens highlighted with the white of the foam, and the lowering sky.

In Gil Blas on 28th September 1886, Guy de Maupassant recounts a visit he made to Courbet during his stay at Etretat: "In a huge, empty room, a fat, dirty, greasy man was slapping white paint on a blank canvas with a kitchen knife. From time to time he would press his face against the window and look out at the storm. The sea came so close that it seemed to batter the house and completely envelope it in its foam and roar. The salty water beat against the windowpanes like hail, and ran down the walls. On his mantelpiece was a bottle of cider next to a half-filled glass. Now and then, Courbet would take a few swigs, and then return to his work. This work became The Wave, and caused quite a sensation around the world". [Gustave-Courbet.com]

Marine, The Waterspout (1870)

Gustave Courbet: Marine, The Waterspout

Courbet first witnessed a waterspout at Trouville, a village on the Channel Coast, in 1865 or 1866. This dramatic phenomenon, a tornado at sea, occurs when temperature differences in the air create a whirling spiral of wind and water. Courbet first painted the subject in 1866 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). The present picture features the cliffs of Étretat, as does a second, undated version of the composition. [ Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Gustave Courbet (1869)

 Gustave Courbet: Falaise d’Étretat aprés, la Porte d’Aval

  

Gustave Courbet: Waves

A Bay with Cliffs (ca. 1869)

Gustave Courbet: A Bay with Cliffs

In 1869, Gustave Courbet painted A Bay with Cliffs. Five years earlier, the photographer Louis- Alphonse Davanne photographed cliffs and a nearby bay in Étretat, the Manneporte. Though the differences between their respective representations of the awe-inspiring coastal landscape in Normandy were vast, the painter and the photographer found that this small stretch of France’s northern coast offered a rich set of possibilities for the production of a new form of picture making, which would transform the visual arts over the latter part of the nineteenth century. Courbet’s painting was part of an evolving project shared by many nineteenth-century French painters that sought to challenge the traditions of art making with a new visual vocabulary based on subjective experience.

In A Bay with Cliffs, the rules of perspective and symmetry are thrown out in favor of a landscape that cuts off the traditional horizon line with a bold, rocky cliff rendered with a thick layer of paint. Courbet eschewed traditional landscape painting in favor of conveying the material immediacy of his natural surroundings. Normandy, with its dramatic coastline and soaring cliffs, provided the painter with an ideal location to explore new possibilities of landscape painting. [Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874. University of Michigan Museum of Art (pdf)]

Young Woman Reading (1866-68)

Gustave Courbet: Young Woman Reading

The Source (1868)

Gustave Courbet: The Source

Courbet escaped from the traditional norms of painting by subordinating the description of nature to an eminently personal experience. His reasons were mainly those of his native region, Franche-Comté. The valley of the Loue, caves and woods, and were tirelessly visited as many benchmarks necessary for the balance of his painting. The harmony of the natural and animal was celebrated with lyricism, as the merger of women with nature. The Source ignores the allegorical academicism usually reserved to the subject and is part of the series of paintings that Courbet devoted to the most noble and most unequivocal theme of the painting, the nude. By unveiling the truth of a body marked by wearing the corset, and by including it in the context of an identity landscape, the canvas daringly symbolizes as much a taste of the real, the imaginary painter. [Musée d'Orsay]

Gustave Courbet (1868)

 Gustave Courbet: Nap During Haying Season, Doubs Mountains

  

Gustave Courbet: Winter

Gustave Courbet (1867)

 Gustave Courbet: Deer in a Snowy Landscape

  

Gustave Courbet: Poachers in the Snow