¶ … painting "The Artist's Studio" by the famous 19th century French painter Gustave Courbet. The artist's legacy and influence in the world of painting has also been explored.
Gustave Courbet:
The Artist's Studio
The Artist's Studio is a huge, monumental painting (11? 10? x 19? 9?) completed by Gustave Courbet in six weeks in 1854-55.
The artist sub-titled the painting as "A True Allegory Concerning Seven Years of My Artistic Life." The painting contains over twenty life-size figures in the artist's studio with Courbet himself occupying center-stage. He is shown painting a landscape attended by a dog, a small boy and a nude female figure looking over the artist's shoulder at the painting. "The world comes to be painted at my studio,"
the artist had remarked at the time. This is perhaps depicted in the seemingly lively, spirited group of people on the right side of the painting. The group supposedly consists of his friends some of whom have been identified as Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon.
The left side of the painting features another group of bored listless people, ignoring the artist. The identity of these people is not certain but appear to be beggars and working class people. Different interpretations have been given to the painting over the years, but most critics agree that it is an allegory of all the influences on Courbet's artistic life, which are portrayed as human figures from all levels of society.
Even the portrayal of Courbet himself shown in the painting with back to a nude model has been called "a symbolic representation of academic tradition."
Other critics have termed the painting to be a critique of the French economic system of the time, as it seems to criticize the widening gap between the rich and the poor classes -- the poor depicted by the beggars and working class people on the left side of the painting contrasted by the rich on the right.
The Artist's Legacy
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was born and grew up at a time when painting was highly stylized and elitist, steeped in the "Neoclassical" and "Romantic" schools of paintings. Courbett rebelled against the rigid rules of the time and passionately believed "painting is an essentially concrete art, and can consist only of representation of real and existing things."
When Coubett started to depict stark realism in his paintings by painting everyday subjects and improvished peasants, he shocked many people and was harshly criticized by the establishment. This hostile mood of the establishment was reflected in the rejection of his The Artist's Studio by the jury for the 1855 Universal Exposition that forced the artist to set up his own exhibition, Le Realisme, in a tent alongside the "official" exhibition. Courbett thus became a rallying point for the movement for realism in painting.
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