\paperw5190 \margr0\margl0 \plain \f1 French painter. \par
Born to a family of well-to-do farmers at Ornans, a town in Franche-ComtΘ, he moved to Paris in 1839 to devote himself
to painting. In keeping with his revolutionary ideas, Courbet participated in the Paris Commune (1870) and was elected delegate for the Fine Arts. Arrested after the fall of the Commune and falsely accused of having taken part in the demolition of the V
end⌠me Column, he was sentenced to pay over 300,000 francs for its restoration. Faced with ruin, he fled to Switzerland in 1873, settling at La Tour de Seilz near Vevey. He died there in 1877, a month after all his works had been auctioned off by the Fre
nch government. Rather than his attendance at the AcadΘmie Suisse in Paris as a young man, the crucial influence on his development as an artist came from his careful study of the masterpieces of the Flemish, Venetian, and Dutch painting of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, which he copied at the Louvre. In 1847 a journey to the Low Countries reinforced his admiration for the great seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Rembrandt and Frans Hals. After his first controversial appearances at the Salons
around 1845 with works of Romantic inspiration (\i Self-portrait with Black Dog\i0 , 1842, Paris, Petit Palais), the decisive moment for his adherence to Realism came between 1848 and 1857. One of the factors that contributed to this choice was the revo
lution of February 1848, without which, as the artist himself later declared, ôperhaps my painting would never have been seen.ö The first works in which the artist gave expression to his new realistic vision (\i After Dinner at Ornans\i0 , Lille Museum,
and \i Burial at Ornans\i0 , Paris, Louvre, painted between 1848 and 1850) are on such a huge scale that the figures are life size, giving them the same suggestive power as the ones in RembrandtÆs \i Nightwatch\i0 . In these pictures, Courbet represented
peasants and burghers of his hometown in a manner that transformed what then would have been considered a genre scene into a historical painting, scandalizing his contemporaries. Another characteristic of these works, distinguishing them from the artist
Æs later style of painting, is the sharp-edged clarity of the figures, free of any hint of romanticism or academicism. The \i Painter in his Studio\i0 , (1855, Paris, MusΘe dÆOrsay), is an example of this. The same realistic clarity characterized the \i
Stonebreakers\i0 (1849, formerly in the Dresden Museum, now destroyed), in which he depicted the grueling labor of two stonebreakers without the sentimental intonation of Jean-Franτois Millet. This realistic intent is also to be found in his numerous po
rtraits of women, which have a sensual and exuberant physicality. An example of this is the painting \i Young Women by the Seine\i0 (Paris, Petit Palais), which caused a scandal at the Paris Salon of 1857 and foreshadowed the painting \i en plein air
